Читать книгу But Beautiful - Geoff Dyer - Страница 13

Duke woke as they crossed the state line. He blinked, ran his hand through his hair, and looked out at the unchanged darkness of the landscape. The remains of a dream were melting in his head, filling him with a vague sadness. He eased himself in his seat, groaning at the slight ache in his back.

—Lights, he said, groping in his back pocket for something to write on. Harry reached forward and clicked on the interior light, filling the car with a pale glow that made the night and road seem even darker than before. Duke hunted along the dashboard for a pen and jotted a few things in the borders of a curling menu. He had written more hours of music than any other American and most of it began like this, scrawled on anything that came to hand: serviettes, envelopes, postcards, cardboard ripped from cereal packets. His sheet music started out like that and that was also how it ended up: original scores wound up in the bin as mayo-and-tomato-smeared sandwich wrappers after a couple of rehearsals, the essentials of the music handed over to the safekeeping of the band’s collective memory.

As his pen hovered over the menu his concentration intensified as if he was remembering something from the dream and was trying to focus the memory a little clearer. He’d been dreaming of Pres, his last years, when he was staying in the Alvin, no longer interested in remaining alive. Instead of Broadway the hotel in the dream was surrounded by a winter countryside, snow. He noted down what he could remember of the dream, nursing a semi-hunch that there was something in it he could use in a piece he’d been thinking about recently, a suite covering the history of the music. He’d done something like it before – Black, Brown and Beige – but this was going to be something specifically about jazz. Not a chronicle and not even history really, something else. He worked from small pieces, things that came to him quickly. His big works were patchworks of smaller ones and what he had in mind now was a series of portraits, not of people he’d known necessarily . . . He didn’t know exactly what he was trying to get at but he could feel the idea fidgeting around inside him like a mother feels the first kick of the child in her womb. He had plenty of time – he always had plenty of time until he was about to run out of time, until a week before the premiere of whatever it was he’d been trying to write. A deadline was his inspiration, never having enough time was his muse. Some of his best pieces had been written when he was hurtling toward a deadline like someone rushing to catch a plane. ‘Mood Indigo’ took fifteen minutes while his mother finished cooking dinner; ‘Black and Tan Fantasy’ had come to him in a couple of minutes in the back of a taxi on his way to the studio after an all-night drinking session. ‘Solitude’ took all of twenty minutes, scribbled standing up at the studio when he found he was a song short . . . Yeah, there was nothing to worry about, he had plenty of time.

He made notes until there was no room left on the menu, then squeezed a few lines between Appetizers and Entrées before tossing everything back onto the dashboard.

—OK, Harry.

Carney clicked off the light and their faces were lit once again only by the faint flicker of the dials: the speedometer constant at fifty, the fuel gauge half full.