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“I know a guy,” Nick says.
This is his first mistake.
Well, if he’s being honest, his first mistake is back in 1933, when he sits down next to the jazz band’s newly minted third trombonist and tells him that his licks are obscene.
The guy’s a junior – just transferred in from some town in middle-of-nowhere Iowa – but he looks like a freshman when he stares back at Nick, all wide eyes and over-gelled blonde hair. He’s got the face of a cherub in an old Italian painting, and Nick wonders, somewhere in the back of his mind, what the guy will look like when he really hits puberty.
“Thank you,” he finally says. His voice is quiet, but as precise as his playing.
“How come you didn’t try improv when we went through the twelve bar blues?” Nick asks. “All the other trombones did it.”
Third trombone shrugs. “I never learned. My old school didn’t have a jazz band, just a marching band, and it only had eight kids in it. Wasn't much opportunity for improv."
“Want to learn?”
And there’s that stare again – wide and curious and just shy of lonely. “Okay.”
Nick grins. “Meet me here before school tomorrow morning.” He gets up and goes to grab his trumpet – he’s probably going to be late to work again – but then remembers to turn and offer a slightly sweaty right hand.
“I’m Nick, by the way.”
Third trombone takes his hand. Shakes it once. His hand is sweaty, too, a fact that Nick probably should not find as comforting as he does.
“I’m Wayne.”
The war has changed Wayne Wright.
Nick knows this, the same way he knows that a C is open and an E is first and second. No man who shipped off to defend the stars and stripes came home without every cell regenerated, every memory rewritten, every heartstring restrung. He knows this. But still, some part of him expected walking into this mid-rate club on a Tuesday night and finding Wayne practicing lip-slurs to feel just like sophomore year of high school – to feel the same tug in his spine, lifting him to stand ever so slightly taller, walk ever so slightly faster.
This is nothing like high school. This is just like high school.
“Hey,” Nick says. His voice does not squeak, as he half-expected it to.
Wayne finishes his last slur – a low A up to a C, range that any professional worth his shirt would kill for. He finishes his slur, lowers his trombone carefully to rest on the hardwood chair, and takes one step forward. Two steps. Three.
He’s not taller. That’s not what it is. No, he’s thinner – bonier, hollowed out, as though he’s taken one step backwards into his shadow and is debating the merits of retreating completely. His eyes are a shade darker, as he stands on steady feet and stares at Nick. Nick feels as though he’s being measured – feels a tape measure held up to his forehead, around his waist, down his arm, through his soul.
They look at each other for one breath. Two breaths. Three.
And then Wayne takes one step more and wraps Nick in an embrace. He’s warm, and his shirt is smooth where Nick grips the back of it – he’s ironing his fucking shirts the bastard – and he smells just like he did in high school, valve oil and cheap aftershave.
Any moment now, the rest of the band – their band – will arrive, and they’ll have to pretend they’re just friends from before the war. Just a couple of guys who played together once. Just a guy I know.
Any moment now. But before that moment comes, Nick closes his eyes and pretends he’s still in high school. Pretends he’s still the person he was twelve years ago.
Wayne likes rules.
He likes chord changes, time-honored rhythms, counterpoint set in place by Johann Sebastian Bach and left unchallenged ever since. He likes music with an excess of notation, pencil markings demarcating the optimal fingerings for every measure, Grainger and Vaughn Williams and Sousa. He pays homage to the mathematics of music the way that some people go to church on Sundays.
Teaching him to improvise is like teaching an opera singer to swing. But then, Nick has always welcomed a challenge.
“You have to feel it,” he says, sometime around week four of their before-school meetings in the band room. The room is quiet, the cages seem to applaud with metallic palms whenever Nick successfully pulls off a witty remark.
“You’ve said that twenty-four times and it still doesn’t make sense,” Wayne complains. His brow is furrowed, and his trombone almost seems to sag with the weight of his confusion.
“It’s like…” Nick pauses, tries to imagine how he feels when he improvises a solo. “You start with the chords. You start with a basic rhythm. Maybe you start with a piece of a standard. And then you put something of yourself into it – like, being nervous about a math test, or being excited about a ball game later, or really wanting to impress your dad in the second row – and you let the music come to you. You soar with it.”
“That’s not what playing is, though,” Wayne replies. “Playing is hitting the right notes at the right times. You can’t just invent that based on a feeling.”
Nick shakes his head. Stares at Wayne as though he’s staring at a new chart that he knows he can play if he just practices enough. And then, he stands up out of his chair, goes down to the front of the band room, and opens up the old Yamaha upright leaned against the bulletin board. He plays a B-flat chord – or, well, he plays a B-flat and an F, but a fifth is enough to match pitch to, and he’s no pianist but he’s pretty sure he can manage the outline of a B-flat blues.
“Try it,” he says. “Don’t think about the rules. Just play what you’re feeling.”
And Wayne plays twelve whole notes in a row. But when Nick teases him for it, he says it’s a reflection of how tired he’s feeling, and Nick can’t help grinning. It’s a start.
“Where were you?” Wayne asks.
Nick takes a swig of beer and closes his eyes against the memories before he answers. “Italy.”
Wayne nods. His fingers are tapping too-quick rhythms on his glass – Nick recognizes the fingerings for a scale. Sticking to patterns when he’s nervous, just like he had before. The bar is quiet, a few shadows ordering one last round and some record playing scratchily behind the almost-whispers of strangers releasing their worst fears into the night. The whole band had stayed after their set for a get-to-know-you drink – Donny’s idea, and also Donny’s tab, and Nick won’t say it aloud but he likes the way that guy knocks back a shot of whiskey even more than he likes his knack for imaginative seventh chords – but now it’s just Nick and Wayne, not quite ready to go home.
“I was in the Pacific,” Wayne says. “Fought at Okinawa.”
Nick remembers reading something about that in the papers, sitting in a hospital with his chest swaddled in bandages. Eighty-two days with eighty-two thousand casualties. If he were more poetically gifted, he might find some kind of metaphor in that. But right now, he doesn’t have the strength for metaphors. He only leans in, reaches his right hand out to Wayne’s left one.
You aren’t supposed to talk about this. You aren’t supposed to remember eighty-two thousand casualties, aren’t supposed to see your friend’s face illuminated in soft fluorescent light and remember the letter he sent you just before he was shipped out. You aren’t supposed to be scared of a war that’s already over.
But Nick reaches his right hand to Wayne’s left one, and holds on like this is the end of the world and they’re the only two people left to rebuild America.
“I’m glad you made it back,” Nick says.
“Yeah,” Wayne replies. “Me, too.”
“What was it like?” Nick asks.
“What was what like?” Wayne passes the bottle – a handle of cheap whiskey he stole from his mother’s bedside table, and Nick is never calling him a pussy with no imagination ever again. They’re perched on the roof of the high school, just above the band room. The wind blusters and burns with threats to knock them off, the night air is crisp and cold, but the stars are spread above them in a symphonic pantheon and Nick thinks if he were to jump off this roof, he would sprout wings.
“Graduation,” he says. “Walking across the aisle. Getting your diploma. All that shit.”
“Honestly, it was awful,” Wayne replies. “Twelve years of my life are just gone, with one slip of paper. And now what?”
Nick takes a swig from the bottle. The whiskey lights something in the back of his throat, like a match finding a long-buried bomb. “You get a job, right?” he says.
“Doing what? Playing trombone?” Nick can’t quite see him in the moonlight, but he knows Wayne is shaking his head, that incredulous expression on his face he wears far more often than Nick would like. “You can’t make a living playing trombone.”
“Most people can’t,” Nick agrees. “But you can. You can do anything.”
Wayne looks at him, in the faint moonlight. He looks like a shadow, to Nick – but he’s not just any shadow. He’s rounder, he’s fuller, he’s more present, as though if he tried hard enough he could illuminate himself in full technicolor. If Nick concentrates, he can make out Wayne’s eyes, glittering like dark stars.
And then he moves – some combination of the whiskey and graduation and you can do anything – one hand off the roof one hand on Wayne’s cheek two mouths meeting like a pair of melodies in perfect counterpoint.
Nick lingers for one breath, two breaths, three, then draws back. Wayne does not move.
“I’m sorry,” Nick says.
Wayne considers him, the way he might consider a new chart that he knows he can master if he practices hard enough.
“Don’t be.”
And he leans back in.
They win the state preliminaries, because they have to.
Nick told Donny he’d play with the band that had the best song. What he didn’t tell Donny is how hard it’s becoming – how hard it’s been since that first night, if he’s being honest – to match Wayne’s bold tone and soaring melody in perfect counterpoint, and then watch Wayne go home to his beautiful (he imagines) wife and his adoring (he's certain) kids as though they’re the most important thing in his life, while Nick goes home to a lesson schedule and a six-pack of beer. What he didn’t tell Donny is that his solos always run too high because he needs to pretend his life isn’t stuck in a ditch off the interstate.
Funny, how his plea to leave is the push Donny needs to find the song that convinces him to stay. Love will come and find me again, Julia wails, and Nick takes the stage with her not because the arrangement is flawless or because the lyrics are moving but because he wants that for her – someone might as well get to find love again, because he sure as hell won’t.
They win because they have to. And they win because nobody else needs it more. No other band is muddling through the same fugue of memories, no other band is hearing quite the same rhythm of canon fire echoing behind the beat of Johnny’s drum. They'll keep winning to drown out that noise, or at least to transform it. If they need to pay their own way to New York City, they’ll pay it in style.
I think we’re entitled to travel first-class, Donny says, and something in the half-hidden sob behind his words makes Nick believe him.
It’s a shift – a key change, from a blind stumble forward to a march. A half-assed melody to a fully orchestrated tune. A dream to a reality. Somewhere in between the injustice of we need to pay our own way and the comradery of and busting my ass, Nick stops thinking of this band as a group of guys gathered in the hopes of fame and fortune and starts thinking of it as a team.
The key changes, and he looks at Wayne. For a moment, he forgets wife and kids and twelve years and two separate fronts and sees this kid he knew in high school, so scared of opening his melodies. But then, Wayne smiles at him – a real smile, a hit this high note without cracking smile – and it’s not at all like high school. It’s been twelve years, and it’s been one war, and it’s been nothing at all, because he knows they’re playing the same melody, Johnny’s drumbeat low and purposeful beneath them.
All of the wrongs will be made right this way, Donny says. For a moment, Nick believes him.
Nick writes letters, his last year of high school.
Hey, Wayne. Hope you’re doing well, Wayne. Don’t let that trombone get stuck too far up your ass, Wayne. (Jazz band’s not the same without you, Wayne.)
Wayne makes a living with his music, as Nick knew he could – playing in nightclubs and community theater pits and veteran’s homes. Soon, his name will be tossed around as the best trombonist in Cleveland. This is what Nick tells him, every time he sneaks backstage after one of Wayne’s shows – every time he presses Wayne up against some rusty mirror and tastes lips blown out from an hour of buzzing – every time he slides a hand down Wayne’s dress pants to hook him like the first four bars of a Sousa march.
Classes fall away to daydreams of Wayne’s eyes, Wayne’s tousled hair, Wayne’s lips around a mouthpiece. Nick is definitely failing French, but he can’t bring himself to care. He can only imagine life once he graduates – the best duets Cleveland’s jazz scene has ever heard, and sold-out clubs for weeks, and a tiny apartment with flowers in the windows and a faint scent of cinnamon.
And then, one night, when Nick sneaks backstage, Wayne is already putting on his coat.
“I met this girl, last night,” he says. “She’s a waitress at Oliver’s Place. She’s read every Russian novel over five hundred pages, and she likes jazz.”
Nick freezes, one hand on the doorknob one hand on his hat. Half in, half out. Nowhere to run.
“I thought,” he says. “We were,” he says.
Wayne shakes his head – one crisp staccato motion.
“We were temporary,” he tells Nick. “You can’t build a life on this.”
He brushes past Nick and out the back door, and Nick pretends he can’t see how Wayne’s hand is shaking around his trombone case.
“You’re moving in with me,” Nick says.
This is his second mistake. Or his seventh. Or his twenty-ninth. To be honest, he lost count somewhere in a high school band room in 1933.
Nick doesn’t go to the wedding.
He should, he knows. Half of their high school was invited. Hell, half of Cleveland was probably invited. But if the ribbon-framed off-white perfect-type invitation almost made him puke, what’ll happen to him during the vows? The kiss? The cutting of the cake?
He considers going, only to throw a bomb in the whole thing, start wailing in the middle of a flute solo. Does anyone object to this union? Hell yeah, I object. I object so fucking hard, I –
But what would that do? Ruin a man’s chance at a normal life? A marriage? A family? And Nick doesn’t even know this woman, other than that she’s a former waitress who has read every Russian novel over five hundred pages. Maybe Wayne even loves her.
Nick doesn’t go to the wedding. Instead, he goes to an underground bar some sympathetic bass player told him about a few months ago when he confessed he’d never kissed a girl. He downs five shots in ten minutes and takes home the first guy who will let him. He blows like this is a thirty-two-bar solo and he’s Dizzy Gillepsie on a power kick.
After that, Nick picks up teaching because he can’t keep tracing the club circuit, can’t keep worrying he’s going to run into someone who never told him a proper goodbye. But every time some snot-nosed kid asks him how to do an improv solo, he’s back in that band room at seven o’clock in the morning, staring at the wide eyes of a kid afraid he didn’t have enough self to put in the music.
(He had enough. He had so much more than enough. He probably still does.)
Living with Wayne is not as bad as Nick thought it would be – it’s worse.
It’s all of his books in the wrong spots on his shelf (alphabetized, Wayne says), and all of his laundry neatly folded without sitting in the hamper for three days (it’ll get wrinkled, Wayne says), and his refrigerator fully stocked with ingredients for meals instead of leftover takeout (this is cheaper, Wayne says). And it’s Wayne hazy-eyed and messy-haired in the mornings before he’s had three cups of coffee, and Wayne picking his shirt up to wipe his face after practicing licks until one in the morning, and Wayne slicking his hair back after a shower. And it’s a thousand other little things that Nick feels disgusting to notice but can’t help noticing, again and again and again.
He can understand how Wayne’s wife kicked him out, honestly. This is too much to deal with in close quarters. Any hope he had of extinguishing this fucking candle he’s been burning went out the window on day one, when Wayne asked him if he could re-organize the kitchen cabinets.
And then, one night, Nick wakes up gasping to the sound of someone shouting in the other room. He slips out of bed, goes to investigate, and – it’s Wayne. Tossing and turning on the couch as though it’s shaking with canon fire. Shouting something about a ship taking on water, and emergency lifeboats, and no you’re not going to die here you just need to remember protocol and move. His face is shiny with sweat, and he’s so pale – like a solo with no backing chords behind it.
Nick doesn’t even really think about it. He just takes one step in and lies down on the couch next to Wayne.
It’s close quarters, close enough that Nick’s head is resting on Wayne’s chest and their legs are twined together for necessity’s sake – and Nick hates the rush of blood that goes through him at this realization – but the extra presence and body heat seems to be enough for Wayne to go still. For a moment, all Nick can hear is the sound of his own heartbeat. He considers getting up, considers returning to his own bed – but then Wayne’s left hand grabs his right hand, and Nick knows it’s suddenly against the rules for him to sleep anywhere else.
They end up sleeping in the same place almost every night, after that. They never talk about it, and they always start with Nick in his bed and Wayne on the couch, but within a couple of hours, they’re together – two cold bodies pressed together to create warmth.
(Nick sleeps much easier, after that.)
He hasn’t heard from Wayne in six years, when the U.S. declares war.
Nick is drafted a few months in, because that’s just about the luck he’s expecting at this point. He’s never been the most patriotic guy, but there is something exciting about it – risking his life for freedom and the American way, or whatever.
And there’s the fact that part of him has been stuck in one place ever since high school – stuck in a high school band room or an underground club or a secret – and he’s hoping some glory will knock him onto a better path. He’s not entirely capable of glory, maybe, but he can try. It can’t be that much different from wailing up to high C on a solo.
The day before he’s assigned to report to boot camp, he gets a letter.
Nick –
It’s been a while. Hope you’re doing well. Still playing and all that. I heard you were teaching now, that’s good. It seems like something you’d be good at.
I’m writing because I decided to join up. Serve our country. Protect our laws. All that bullshit. I’m a Marine now – I ship out to the Pacific tomorrow.
I just wanted to let you know, in case I don’t make it back, that I’m sorry about what happened between us. About how things ended, I mean. You were my best friend, you taught me so much, and I love my family and the life I’ve built but I wish you could be a part of it. I wish we could have –
I shouldn’t say any more. But know I’ll be thinking of you, wherever I end up.
– Wayne
Nick carries the letter with him. He loses it in a trench his first month in action, but that’s alright – by then, he has the contents memorized.
“You leave your clothes on the floor,” Wayne says.
They’re on the balcony of their room at the Astor, the lights of New York City spread beneath them like a symphony of stars. The wind burns and blusters and tries to push them off, but they stay put. It feels like they’ve been on this balcony for twelve years, and it feels like they’ve been fighting to get here for twelve thousand.
There’s something burning in Nick’s bloodstream, and it tastes like valve oil and cheap aftershave. He’s had enough alcohol to be drunk twice over, but as he stares at Wayne the world feels as clear as a ringing church bell.
“Yeah, and you pick them up and put them where they shouldn’t be,” Nick says.
Wayne sighs – and Nick remembers twelve whole notes, it’s a reflection of how tired I am.
“I’m sorry,” Wayne tells him.
Nick takes one step closer. Two steps. Three. The stars of the city sparkle and gleam, as though egging him on. It’s New York City, and we’re gonna win tomorrow, and he’s been divorced for two months, and –
“Don’t be,” Nick says.
Here is what gets Nick through Italy: a high school band room, shaded in gold, and the sound of scales as measured as any metronome.
Here is what gets Nick through the Donny Nova Band’s debut performance in New York City: the tight articulation and strong tone of a twelve-bar improv solo that says more than a thousand words.
“We should tell them, right?” Nick asks.
They’re squished together on their bed – their bed – the covers thrown off and sunlight pouring in. Nick wanted to open a window to let in some air, but Wayne reminded him today is garbage day in this neighborhood, so they’re stinking in their own sweat, yet stubbornly refusing to actually claim individual sides of the bed.
“It’s only fair,” Wayne says. “Everyone’s known about Donny and Julia since the night she first sang with us.”
“Donny and Julia’s relationship doesn’t put anyone in danger of social ostracism and possibly even legal action, though,” Nick replies – more for the sake of arguing than anything else.
Wayne gives him this glare that perfectly conveys, don’t be ridiculous, the band would never find another trombone and trumpet as good as we are.
And so Nick turns and leans up to kiss him, because there’s really no other sane response to that shit.
Funny thing is, when they officially tell the rest of the band, nobody is surprised in the slightest.