stand.
As Gwen worked her way into the crowd like an icebreaker shouldering the floes, Aviva picked up her purse, which she had been using to save the seat for Gwen.
“Who is this guy?” Gwen whispered into Aviva’s ear when she sat down. Aviva’s hair had a bay leaf smell.
“He’s from, I guess a Marxist library down the street.”
Gwen had been unaware, as well, that Telegraph Avenue featured a Marxist library. She tried to imagine it as a place that would feel congenial to a man who not only dressed the way Mr. Jones dressed but also understood, according to the fluty-voiced old Marxist librarian, the interactions of base and superstructure, the way ultimately, class struggle underpinned all the racism in America.
“That the Aztec number?” Gwen whispered, grasping for the first time the splendor of the corpse.
Aviva nodded.
“Shh,” said the woman on the other side of Gwen. She was a freaky-looking old Cruella with a brindle shih tzu perched on her lap.
“Sorry,” Gwen said to the scary old lady.
“Me, too,” Aviva said to Gwen immediately, as if she had been holding that for Gwen’s arrival as well.
Gwen considered correcting Aviva’s misapprehension that she had apologized for what Aviva had called her “performance” in the hearing at Chimes. But some impulse restrained her. It was not a qualm—far from it. Maybe it was the soft, snowy mantle of sleep under which she had passed the previous night, but she felt more justified than ever in taking on those tools of the insurance companies, more justified at having thrown Archy out of the house so that she could at last get some rest. It was not the possibility that she might have been wrong, excessive, manipulative, over the top yesterday afternoon, which led Gwen to let stand the misapprehended apology. It was pure calculation, albeit buried deep: Let Aviva think she had been apologized to; it would make things easier later.
After the man from the Marxist library, there was a gap-toothed drummer who looked older than he probably was, a hundred and ten in dope years, and then Moby got up and told a story about how the first time he came into Brokeland Records, Mr. Jones had been sitting at the counter in his usual spot, rewarding his parrot, Fifty-Eight, with sunflower seeds from his jacket pocket, trying to teach him, with a deck of playing cards, to recognize the difference between the red and black suits. “‘This bird smarter than anybody you know,’” said Moby, quoting Mr. Jones too faithfully, maybe, laying on as usual with the Ebonics. “‘He don’t learn how to play poker, just mean I didn’t give him a adequate schooling.’”
Most of the room broke up into laughter. Gwen looked over at the organ to see how Nat was taking the lawyer’s routine. She knew how much he detested the way Moby slipped into his wannabe shtick. And he was really ill equipped for it, there was no denying that. If he were not so sweet and fat with that preposterous swoop-back haircut, Gwen might have taken a measure of offense at the way Moby talked, the style cobbled (with unquestionably sincere intentions of tribute) from the discarded materials of rap records, Grady Tate on
Having concluded his remarks, Moby worked his way back to his seat, free throws made, pounding and dapping folks right and left.
“Thank you, Moby,” Nat said from the back. Everybody craned around to look at him. “You would not be so fond of that bird if you owed him as much money as I do.”
He meant it as a joke, and Aviva laughed, but it came out sounding angry, and if Gwen were a detective investigating the bird’s disappearance, she definitely would have brought Nat in for questioning.
“I’m going to play a little now,” Nat announced, as if it were a procedure and he a periodontist. Making it sound like it was not going to be any fun for anyone. “And then Mr. Stallings is going to offer the eulogy.”
Gwen tried to remember the last time she had heard Nat call Archy “Mr. Stallings.” She turned to Aviva to see if she might have picked up on something amiss between their men, but Aviva had eyes only for Nat. She was sitting up and watching him as carefully as Flowers was watching the body in the casket: wanting him to be perfect.
Nat turned to the Leslie amplifier and honored it with a bow, snapped it on. It rose throbbing to life. A wind flowed through its mysterious antique machinery. Nat sat down at the Hammond that had taken, in every sense, Mr. Jones’s life. It was not Nat’s instrument, but he had a gift, could pick up pretty much any instrument and quickly figure it out well enough to fake it. He played piano, and Gwen assumed that his organ playing would resemble that: modernistic, angular, Monk-style stuff, hard to listen to.
Nat loosened his tie. He mediated a dispute among his shirttails, his waistband, his belt, and his ass. He fiddled with the drawbars and switches of the Hammond, more for the sake of ritual than precision. With a count and a duck of his head on four, he began to play. She recognized the song as the old Carole King number “It’s Too Late.” The organ had a reedy, bluesy sound, smoke in its throat. Nat did not fool around with angles and flatted notes. His feet stoked the pedals. She did not remember any of the lyrics apart from those of the chorus, though those were enough to convey the melancholy of the song. She wanted to look for Archy, but she was afraid that if their eyes met while this song was being played, he would think she intended to send the message that Carole King had been sending to the man in her song.
Part of her, call it most of her, knew that to some extent she had been playacting, licensed by her hormones to express through the theater of her departure and her return all the humiliation that Archy had forced her to endure. As Nat played, she avoided meeting Archy’s gaze and wondered if the sadness she had seen on his face was for her and him. Archy had decided to leave right after the funeral, she decided, his duffel bag and ten crates of records loaded into the back of his El Camino. She had thrown him out in pique, but now he would be leaving in earnest, just as she had always known and feared he would do. The certainty of his imminent departure came over her so strongly that she was confused by it and wondered if Nat had selected the music on purpose as a comment on her relationship with Archy.
Aviva leaned over and whispered into Gwen’s ear without taking her eyes off her husband. “This was Mr. Jones’s theme song,” she said. “According to Nat.”
Gwen understood then that whatever its ostensible subject or situation, “It’s Too Late” was about Cochise Jones. Lying useless in his casket. Sitting at the bedside of his wife when she had lain dying. The song was about the people gathered here who might never have had the chance to meet Mr. Jones, and those who might have spoken differently, said more, the last time they saw him, had they known. It was about Titus growing up with no father, and Aviva trying to hold on to her one and only baby, and the dream of Brokeland Records. It was about some large percentage of the aggregate wishes, plans, and ambitions espoused by the people gathered here today. Nat had not needed to choose “It’s Too Late” in order to comment directly on her situation with Archy. It was Mr. Jones’s theme song, and its sentiment was always appropriate.
“Perfect,” Gwen said.
“My name is Archy Stallings. All right, now. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Those of you, some of you who don’t know me, I am one of the co-proprietors of these premises, Brokeland Records, thank you, a neighborhood institution since, count it one way, twelve years, but really, you have to count back a lot further than that. For real. Back, like, before they had vinyl records, back before they even had Mr. Jones, and Mr. Jones was here a good long time. And I mean he was right
“Now, if you talked to Mr. Jones for any length of time, and it took a long time to get anything out of Mr.
