Black House

welcomed into Henry’s life, he would not have known that his friend’s capacity for flawless wardrobe assemblage depended upon the profound organization of his enormous walk-in closet long ago established by Rhoda Gilbertson Leyden, Henry’s deceased wife: Rhoda had arranged every article of her husband’s clothing by season, style, and color. Item by item, Henry memorized the entire system. Although blind since birth, therefore incapable of distinguishing between matching and mismatching shades, Henry never errs.

Henry extracts from his shirt pocket a gold lighter and a yellow pack of American Spirits, fires up, exhales a radiant cloud brightened by sunlight to the color of milk, and continues his unwavering progress down the flagstones.

The pink, back-slanting capitals of TROY LUVS MARYANN! YES! sprayed across the sign on the bare lawn suggest that 1) Troy spends a lot of time listening to KDCU-AM, and 2) Maryann loves him back. Good for Troy, good for Maryann. Jack applauds love’s announcement, even in pink spray paint, and wishes the lovers happiness and good fortune. It occurs to him that if at this present stage of his existence he could be said to love anyone, that person would have to be Henry Leyden. Not in the sense that Troy luvs Maryann, or vice versa, but he luvs him all the same, a matter that has never been as clear as it is this moment.

Henry traverses the last of the flagstones and approaches the curb. A single stride brings him to the door of the pickup; his hand closes on the recessed metal bar; he opens the door, steps up, and slides in. His head tilts, cocking his right ear to the music. The dark lenses of his aviator glasses shine.

“How can you do that?” Jack asked. “This time, the music helped, but you don’t need music.”

“I can do that because I am totally, totally bitchrod,” Henry says. “I learned that lovely word from our pothead intern, Morris Rosen, who kindly applied it to me. Morris thinks I am God, but he must have something on the ball, because he figured out that George Rathbun and the Wisconsin Rat are one and the same. I hope the kid keeps his mouth shut.”

“I do, too,” Jack says, “but I’m not going to let you change the subject. How can you always open the door right away? How do you find the handle without groping for it?”

Henry sighs. “The handle tells me where it is. Obviously. All I have to do is listen to it.”

“The door handle makes a sound?”

“Not like your high-tech radio and The Goldberg Variations, no. More like a vibration. The sound of a sound. The sound inside a sound. Isn’t Daniel Barenboim a great piano player? Man, listen to that—every note, a different coloration. Makes you want to kiss the lid of his Steinway, baby. Imagine the muscles in his hands.”

“That’s Barenboim?”

“Well, who else could it be?” Slowly, Henry turns his head to Jack. An irritating smile raises the corners of his mouth. “Ah. I see, yes. Knowing you as I do, you poor schmuck, I see you imagined you were listening to Glenn Gould.”

“I did not,” Jack says.

“Please.”

“Maybe for a minute I wondered if it was Gould, but—”

“Don’t, don’t, don’t. Don’t even try. Your voice gives you away. There’s a little, whiny topspin on every word; it’s so pathetic. Are we going to drive back to Norway Valley, or would you like to sit here and keep lying to me? I want to tell you something on the way home.”

He holds up the CD. “Let’s put you out of your misery. The pothead gave this to me—Dirtysperm doing an old Supremes ditty. Me, I loathe that sort of thing, but it might be perfect for the Wisconsin Rat. Cue up track seven.”

The pianist no longer sounds anything like Glenn Gould, and the music seems to have slowed to half its former velocity. Jack puts himself out of his misery and inserts the CD into the opening beneath the radio. He pushes a button, then another. At an insanely fast tempo, the screeches of madmen subjected to unspeakable tortures come blasting out of the speakers. Jack rocks backward into the seat, jolted. “My God, Henry,” he says, and reaches for the volume control.

“Don’t dare touch that dial,” Henry says. “If this crap doesn’t make your ears bleed, it isn’t doing its job.”

“Ears,” Jack knows, is jazz-speak for the capacity to hear what is going on in music as it unfurls across the air. A musician with good ears soon memorizes the songs and arrangements he is asked to play, picks up or already knows the harmonic movement underlying the theme, and follows the transformations and substitutions to that pattern introduced by his fellow musicians. Whether or not he can accurately read notes written on a staff, a musician with great ears learns melodies and arrangements the first time he hears them, grasps harmonic intricacies through flawless intuition, and immediately identifies the notes and key signatures registered by taxi horns, elevator bells, and mewing cats. Such people inhabit a world defined by the particularities of individual sounds, and Henry Leyden is one of them. As far as Jack is concerned, Henry’s ears are Olympian, in a class by themselves.

It was Henry’s ears that gave him access to Jack’s great secret, the role his mother, Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer, “Lily Cavanaugh,” had occupied in life, and he is the only person ever to discover it. Shortly after Dale introduced them, Jack and Henry Leyden entered into an easy, companionable friendship surprising to both. Each the answer to the other’s loneliness, they spent two or three nights of every week having dinner together, listening to music, and talking about whatever came into their well-stocked minds. Either Jack drove down the road to Henry’s eccentric house, or he picked Henry up and drove him back to his place. After something like six or seven months, Jack wondered if his friend might enjoy spending an hour or so listening to him read aloud from books agreed upon by both parties. Henry replied, Ivey-divey, my man, what a beautiful idea. How about starting with some whacked-out crime novels? They began with Chester Himes and Charles Willeford, changed gear with a batch of contemporary novels, floated through S. J. Perelman and James Thurber, and ventured emboldened into fictional mansions erected by Ford Madox Ford and Vladimir Nabokov. (Marcel Proust lies somewhere ahead, they understand, but Proust can wait; at present they are to embark upon Bleak House.)

One night after Jack had finished the evening’s installment of Ford’s The Good Soldier, Henry cleared his throat and said, Dale said you told him your parents were in the entertainment industry. In show business.

—That’s right.

—I don’t want to pry, but would you mind if I asked you some questions? If you feel like answering, just say yes or no.