Lynn Hoffman
All rights reserved
The video is grainy and the human figures in the
centre of a dark stage have grown fuzzy blue-white edges. They seem
incandescent, white hot filaments. They are singing, some dozen of
them: boys and girls in white shirts and black slacks. Their song
claws its way roughly out of the speakers-- a windy roar, like a
seashell held up to an ear.
Fiddling with the knobs on the monitor, we clean up the sound
and lower the contrast. We can now read the banner on the curtain
behind the people. It says "ALL STATE CHORUS". The stage and its
surround may be Carnegie Hall. The song, strained of some of its
life, like one of those old-fashioned phonograph recordings, is still
astonishingly bright. No raggy imprecision rounds over the edges of
their words. Their consonants pop together, all their vowels end with
one stoppered breath. The music is Donoff's American Requiem, the old
choral standby.
For the solo, Agnus Dei, a girl, eleven or twelve years old,
steps forward to a mark on the stage. She looks down, checks her
place, her red hair sweeping forward and back as she does. There is
humility in the gesture, a tiny bow, a plea for mercy. Then she looks
up with wide stallion eyes, quickly sweeps the room, finds the little
video camera that made our tape. and in looking at it, sings to us.
Her voice has layers to it, youth and age, a discernable
caressable depth. When she sings the words 'I will take you to my
Holy City and I will give you peace' we believe her.
Her part ends, the camera jiggles, there is another roar:
applause this time. The girl doesn't acknowledge it. She steps back
in line, head turning quickly to dress right dress with the other
boys and girls.
The song is over and the applause overwhelms the little
microphone in the video camera. They bow. Looking to an off-stage
mentor, they bow again. From our left, stage right, a man in a tuxedo
walks onstage carrying roses. To the florally hip observer it seems a
diva-sized bouquet. He hands them to the girl who just sang for us.
She seems surprised, discomfited by the gift. Her stage smile
vanishes, replaced by the slightest hint of worry . She looks around
to her fellows. They are applauding too now, pointing their slapping
hands at her and smiling.
The red headed girl looks to the camera, then down at the
roses. She reaches inside the paper, jiggles, pulls, removes a rose and hands it to a boy beside her in the front row. He head shakes a refusal, she shoves an insistance. He takes the rose and she goes down the line, dividing her trophy
among the singers.
When all the flowers are gone, she turns her back to the
camera and begins to applaud. We don't see much of this since she is
quickly lost to us in a sea of hugging arms and laid-on hands.
1. Paula, 24 years old, looks in a full-length mirror on the wall of a restaurant's cramped changing room. Shoulder-length red
hair, freckles, black bow tie, white shirt, black skirt, workaday
stockings and flat black shoes. She tickles her red hair out away from her face.
Paula is singing. Her voice is soft and wonderfully pure.
The melody is academic: motet, not mo'town. A song that a person
sings just because she can. The voice is an enviable, make a deal
with the devil to have it voice and there is something sad about it.
A disquieting note, if you will. Her styling, her shaping of the
words has a slightly pained edge to it, not the utter tragedy of a
doomed operatic character, not the mocking self-knowledge of a blues
singer, but the dangerously sharp, jaggedy edge of a well nourished
disappointment. The words are in a foreign language and no one in the
back room of the restaurant recognizes the tune.
She has a little more flesh than usual for a woman her age,
not fat, just thick; no sharp curves, just solid gentle undulations.
Widest, she reflects, at the hips.
The face looking back at Paula is more delicate than her
body. It is a sun-shy, near-pretty face. Freckles and green eyes. An
unbudgeably friendly face. The face of a woman who keeps a book of
people's birthdays, sends cards, is sad when her envelopes come back
stamped ‘address unknown’.
The muscles around her mouth seem to have lost something, some range of motion, the strength to reach out to hilarity or down to tears. There are the first puffy traces of emotional flabbiness, the beginnings of a permanent cringe.
** Whatever song she's singing, what she feels are her feet,
stinging, expanding and shrinking from a night's pile driving into an
uncushioned restaurant carpet. Each step fishing for tips, $84.75 in
her creel. She thinks it's a lot because she thinks it's hers.
There's a hollow banging on the door behind her. Paula turns
and her hair follows her like the swirl of a skirt. We hear a lightly
nasal, breathy but not unpleasant voice..
"C'mon for God's sake, I'm ready to party."
Paula accepts 'to party' as an intransitive verb-one that
takes no, needs no object. She even knows what it means. It means for
her 'to be part of', to be sucked up, absorbed: to merge into the
fibers of something: to put salve on the sunburn of separateness
that scratches her like a wool sweater on bare skin. That it might
mean 'to part from' is something she doesn't think about now.
The voice belongs to Tom, square-jawed but oddly delicate,
pale, blue-gray eyes showing violet behind the tinted contact lenses.
He is Paula's best girlfriend and he makes her laugh.
"Okayokayokay" and she flicks the hook that holds the door.
Paula wants to party too.
Paula and Tom on the eleven PM October street. The smells are
leaves, wet pavement and motor oil. The rain has stopped, granting
Paula permission to leave her folding rubber boots behind. Through
thin-soled flat shoes, the cool wet of the pavement soothes her feet.
Paula rolls as she walks, Tom bounces. Paula's black trench
coat brushes Tom's brown leather jacket. She stays well stuck to the
earth, he disdains it. Lightly. After a few steps they are in rhythm.
Urban army Hup-two. They are talking softly, the brumble-sounds of
their voices have a cuddly, intimate tone. Tom is telling Paula a
funny story about last weekend, about how he took his little sister
to the mall and how she begged him to buy her a bra' because mom says
she doesn't believe in breasts'. Paula tells him about tomorrow's
audition for a commercial for a car dealer. The producer is going to
put a muscle car on the foredeck of a tugboat and he wants someone to
sing 'Cruising Down the River'with Ella Fitzgerald styling. Tom pats
her shoulder as they walk and he half sings, half talks 'There's no
business like show business.'
Paula and Tom think they tell each other anything. They have
permission to call in the sleeping hours, the intrusion being not so
much a prerogative of friendship as its test. Look, I wake you up,
you must love me. Tom is impatient with Paula's loneliness, but he
helps it go away. He brings her close to sequins and fancy dancing.
Paula reminds Tom of home; mashed potatoes and meat loaf. It's a deal.
Ahead of them, the edge of a neon sign in the middle of the
block pokes finger-thick lines of red, blue and green. The three
colors add up to a cone of light that is almost white. Paula thinks
of a stage. In the light she sees three men and a woman. Paula knows
them. They have common restaurants, lovers, roommates. As Paula and
Tom approach, hands raise, faces smile, shoulders are patted.
Everybody has tip money, everybody has fun.
Paula likes these people; the ones on the street and the ones
in the bar. She inflates their virtues and prays for their hopes.
She's diluted her affections and washed them over the whole tribe.
She saves up the warmth that she can't give herself, gives it to them.
Tom turns sharply to the left, urgent words for the tall man
at the edge of the group. They whisper, they laugh. Paula turns her
back to them, says hellos again, folds her arms and smiles at the
brown-haired woman.
Past the group on the sidewalk, down the street, at the corner, there's a traffic light on a pole. A man is standing hunched and jerking. He
zips up a green satin team jacket, pulls at a soft black cap.
"Hi Paulie, sure is cold out here" the brunette bobs her head
and turns toward a wooden door with four glass panes at eye height.
Paula turns her face to the neon; it says Skipper's. The brunette
flips her head at the two other men and they follow her. One of them
pulls the brass stirrup door handle and the door opens and Paula
hears the lonely sounds of bar music, glass crackles and well-mixed
conversations. A few seconds later, she smells the warm-air beery
smell of close bodies.
The man in the green jacket has left the safety of the
traffic light. He's crossed the street, walking towards Paula, Tom
and the tall man. His head is down, hands in his pockets, walking
faster.
Paula turns back toward Tom. She takes a step, clumsy inside,
closer to Tom. The tall man winks at Tom, smiles at Paula, two steps,
opens the door. Bar sounds leak out again. Tom moves to follow him,
his arm out to Paula, wrapping her up and moving her with him.
"Hey, um" Paula slows, stops him. Eyes signaling a wait
a minute. Tom fingerwiggles see-you-in-a-minute to the tall man, the
door closes. She pulls Tom out of the light. She recognizes the flirting, the crotchy attraction between the two men. She’s a little bit jealous-not of the tall man but of the ease with which they seem to have sealed a deal that she’s always bumbled.
She doesn’t want to stop him, and she hates to let him go, so she settles for one more minute. Over the zipping of tires on wet pavement, she says "Who was that?".
The green jacketed man is now fifteen yards away. His knitted
black cap has unrolled to a ski mask over his face.
Paula, smiling, teasing, wanting some dish, wanting to hang
on to Tom for a minute more. The man with the ski cap is a step away.
If Paula were listening, she could hear the sucky smack of his
sneakers on the concrete, hear the rhythm of his steps accelerate.
"Oh you know him, that's.... Then there's a grunt, a blow, the slap
of clothes and the woof of Tom hitting the concrete.
Paula's face goes blank, then she opens her mouth to scream,
but there's a gun hard against her face and no sound comes out. A
stained beige leather glove holds her hair, pressing her face into
the side of the gun. The gun is pointed up, its muzzle half under
her left eyebrow. Her upper lip is pressed back, there's a spot of
blood. The metal feels warm on her face and she thinks she tastes
sweat. Tom is on the ground, face down, right leg pulled up, toes
curled under like a sprinter ready to push off. A patch of bloody red
and pink has grown on the back of his head.
The voice is tight, strangled, but the loudest human thing
Paula has ever heard "Give me your wallet you little cocksucker or I
blow her away."
She can smell his breath, feel the tooth of the gun against
her cheek. "Please, I'm pregnant". She flicks her eyes toward Tom.
She doesn't know, as she says it, where this came from, this wish-filled plea for mercy.
He pulls the gun away from her face, points it to her belly. She
can see the gunman smiling through the slit in his ski mask. Tom is
on his right side looking up toward Paula, his left hand is fumbling
in his pocket for something. Paula's confused, expectant. In the
movies, this where Tom pulls out his own pistol and surgically
finishes the gunman with a bullet to the right eye.
The bar door opens and Paula sees side-lit the face of the
tall man, sees him open his mouth. His eyes go from languid to
scared. Music and bar sounds burst out on the street from behind him.
Then there's a scream, the sounds of tavern panic, glasses
dropping, the dull ring of falling barstools.
A bright blue-white beacon over the door turns on, bleaching
the gunman's figure in the light. Paula hears electronic yodeling
from the bar behind her: an amateur siren, a call for help, not an
arrival sign of the help itself.
The people in the bar hear the shot. The brown-haired girl is
screaming in siren rhythm. One of the boys with her is lying on the
floor, a dark circle already visible in the crotch of his tan pants.
It is not a polite movie pop. It crashes into them, bores into their
ears. they hear it in their teeth and neck bones. It probes them,
discovers things, makes unpopular diagnosis, disappears.
Lynn Hoffman
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