The City (The City 1)

At the open door, squinting and blinking blearily against a day fiercely bright by comparison to my dreamless sleep, I was reminded that the sun is a continuing nuclear holocaust, ninety-three million miles from our doorstep.

Assessing my appearance, Malcolm said, “Drinking this early in the day, you’ll be dead of liver failure before you’re famous.”

Without being quite so mean as to indicate that his belt line was just inches below his nipples, I said, “At least when I’m found dead, I’ll be dressed with style.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing. I was asleep on the sofa. I don’t know what I’m saying. Come in.”

He shuffled across the threshold, tripped on the throw rug in the foyer, and stumbled into the living room. Already, I found his lack of coordination endearing, as if it were his cross to bear just like Quasimodo’s deformity in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, only not so tragic and grotesque. Because he never excused himself or showed the least embarrassment when he careened through a room, you had to admire his determined pretense of grace; and considering how well he blew that sax, he would win the heart of the pretty Gypsy girl that Quasimodo had lost, assuming a pretty Gypsy found him one day.

“I hope I didn’t bring my axe for nothing.”

“That’s like fingernails on a blackboard to me. Please don’t call it an axe.”

“What do you want me to call it?”

“Sax, saxophone, brass-wind instrument, reed instrument, I don’t care.”

“So if you don’t care, I’ll call it my axe. You’ve got to loosen up a little, man. So why were you taking a nap at ten-thirty in the morning?”

“Because I didn’t sleep well,” I lied, but it was a little white lie to avoid being taken for a nut if I told him about the woman who was the city and what she had in her handbag.

“Hey, you know what’ll always put you sound asleep?”

“Listening to you?”

“A glass of milk before bed. Use it to chase a Benadryl.”

“I don’t do drugs, and I never will.”

“Benadryl isn’t a drug. It’s an allergy medication.”

“I don’t have any allergies.”

“Take a walk on the wild side, Jonah.”

“You want to play?”

“Did I bring my axe?”

So we played. Here it was 1967, when rock ’n’ roll already had a storied history, and we liked a lot of that music, we really did, and we played some. But in truth, we were throwbacks, born too late, and our hearts were in the swing era. Since we’d learned the previous day that we both knew the songwriter and arranger Sy Oliver, we took the sax and piano parts the way we heard them on vinyl, and tried to be faithful to them, first on his arrangement of “On the Beach at Bali Bali,” which he’d done for Jimmie Lunceford’s band, a great band back in the day, and then we swung into “Yes, Indeed!,” which Oliver worked up for Tommy Dorsey.

We had played fifteen minutes when the doorbell rang. Standing up at the piano, I could see a girl on the porch. She looked about seventeen, her blond hair in a ponytail.

Malcolm could see her, too. He said, “She’s my sister, Amalia,” and he went to open the door for her.

If you’re ten, you can recognize pretty women when you see them, but you appreciate them only when they’re at least a decade older than you—preferably more—so that you live in separate worlds. Girls any closer to your age are interlopers at best, annoyances at worst, and alien in any case, just getting in the way of what boys might want to do.

When I first laid eyes on Amalia Pomerantz, I was prepared to dislike her, and maybe I did for half an hour. She was pretty enough, but I didn’t think she was beautiful, not like my mom, except I had to admit that her eyes, the exact shade of lime-flavored Life Savers candy, were extraordinary. I didn’t like the way she dressed, which seemed to strain for the style that her brother would never achieve: blue-and-white vertical-stripe knitted-cotton top with short sleeves and a wide slashed neckline; white bell-bottom pants cut low on the hips, wide red-leather belt with a big buckle; white canvas shoes with blue-rubber soles and heels. It was like Gidget had been moved from the beach to a marina and updated to 1967.

I think I winced when I saw that she was carrying a clarinet, because it was my opinion, based on the makeup of all the classic swing bands, that girls had no place in the jazz world, except as singers behind a microphone.

She didn’t even wait to be introduced, but said, “Hey, Jonah, if you’re half as good as I hear, you’re going to be playing to a sold-out house in Carnegie Hall before I find a guy I want to date more than once, if I ever do. Can’t wait to hear you run those keys.” She also carried a small insulated picnic chest. “Brought lunch. I’ll put stuff in the fridge and be right back.” She breezed to the kitchen at the back of the house.

I braced Malcolm. “You didn’t tell me you had a sister.”

“Isn’t she great?”