Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall

  “Listen, friend. I know we agreed on a set for this evening. But I’ve been thinking. Lindy loves that song, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix.’ I recorded it once a long time ago.”

  “Sure, Mr. Gardner. My mother always said your version was better than Sinatra’s. Or that famous one by Glen Campbell.”

  Mr. Gardner nodded, then I couldn’t see his face for a while. Vittorio sent his gondolier’s cry echoing around the walls before steering us round a corner.

  “I used to sing it to her a lot,” Mr. Gardner said. “You know, I think she’d like to hear it tonight. You’re familiar with the tune?”

  My guitar was out of the case by this time, so I played a few bars of the song.

  “Take it up,” he said. “Up to E-flat. That’s how I did it on the album.”

  So I played the chords in that key, and after maybe a whole verse had gone by, Mr. Gardner began to sing, very softly, under his breath, like he could only half remember the words. But his voice resonated well in that quiet canal. In fact, it sounded really beautiful. And for a moment it was like I was a boy again, back in that apartment, lying on the carpet while my mother sat on the sofa, exhausted, or maybe heartbroken, while Tony Gardner’s album spun in the corner of the room.

  Mr. Gardner broke off suddenly and said: “Okay. We’ll do ‘Phoenix’ in E-flat. Then maybe ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily,’ like we planned. And we’ll finish with ‘One for My Baby.’ That’ll be enough. She won’t listen to any more than that.”

  He seemed to sink back into his thoughts after that, and we drifted along through the darkness to the sound of Vittorio’s gentle splashes.

  “Mr. Gardner,” I said eventually, “I hope you don’t mind me asking. But is Mrs. Gardner expecting this recital? Or is this going to be a wonderful surprise?”

  He sighed heavily, then said: “I guess we’d have to put this in the wonderful surprise category.” Then he added: “Lord knows how she’ll react. We might not make it all the way to ‘One for My Baby.’”

  Vittorio steered us round another corner, and suddenly there was laughter and music, and we were drifting past a large, brightly lit restaurant. Every table seemed taken, the waiters were rushing about, the diners looked very happy, even though it couldn’t have been so warm next to the canal at that time of year. After the quiet and the darkness we’d been travelling through, the restaurant was kind of unsettling. It felt like we were the stationary ones, watching from the quay, as this glittering party boat slid by. I noticed a few faces look our way, but no one paid us much attention. Then the restaurant was behind us, and I said:

  “It’s funny. Can you imagine what those tourists would do if they realised a boat had just gone by containing the legendary Tony Gardner?”

  Vittorio, who doesn’t understand much English, got the gist of this and gave a little laugh. But Mr. Gardner didn’t respond for some time. We were back in the dark again, going along a narrow canal past dimly lit doorways, when he said:

  “My friend, you come from a communist country. That’s why you don’t realise how these things work.”

  “Mr. Gardner,” I said, “my country isn’t communist any more. We’re free people now.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to denigrate your nation. You’re a brave people. I hope you win peace and prosperity. But what I intended to say to you, friend, what I meant was that coming from where you do, quite naturally, there are many things you don’t understand yet. Just like there’d be many things I wouldn’t understand in your country.”

  “I guess that’s right, Mr. Gardner.”

  “Those people we passed just now. If you’d gone up to them and said, ‘Hey, do any of you remember Tony Gardner?’ then maybe some of them, most of them even, might have said yes. Who knows? But drifting by the way we just did, even if they’d recognised me, would they get excited? I don’t think so. They wouldn’t put down their forks, they wouldn’t interrupt their candlelit heart-to-hearts. Why should they? Just some crooner from a bygone era.”

  “I can’t believe that, Mr. Gardner. You’re a classic. You’re like Sinatra or Dean Martin. Some class acts, they never go out of fashion. Not like these pop stars.”

  “You’re very kind to say that, friend. I know you mean well. But tonight of all nights, it’s no time to be kidding me.”

  I was about to protest, but something in his manner told me to drop the whole subject. So we kept moving, no one speaking. To be honest, I was now beginning to wonder what I’d got myself into, what this whole serenade thing was about. And these were Americans, after all. For all I knew, when Mr. Gardner started singing, Mrs. Gardner would come to the window with a gun and fire down at us.

  Maybe Vittorio’s thoughts were moving along the same lines, because as we passed under a lantern on the side of a wall, he gave me a look as though to say: “We’ve got a strange one here, haven’t we, amico?” But I didn’t respond. I wasn’t going to side with the likes of him against Mr. Gardner. According to Vittorio, foreigners like me, we go around ripping off tourists, littering the canals, in general ruining the whole damn city. Some days, if he’s in a bad mood, he’ll claim we’re muggers-rapists, even. I asked him once to his face if it was true he was going around saying such things, and he swore it was all a pack of lies. How could he be a racist when he had a Jewish aunt he adored like a mother? But one afternoon I was killing time between sets, leaning over a bridge in Dorsoduro, and a gondola passed underneath. There were three tourists sitting in it, and Vittorio standing over them with his oar, holding forth for the world to hear, coming out with this very same rubbish. So he can meet my eye all he likes, he’ll get no camaraderie from me.

  “Let me tell you a little secret,” Mr. Gardner said suddenly. “A little secret about performance. One pro to another. It’s quite simple. You’ve got to know something, doesn’t matter what it is, you’ve got to know something about your audience. Something that for you, in your mind, distinguishes that audience from the one you sang to the night before. Let’s say you’re in Milwaukee. You’ve got to ask yourself, what’s different, what’s special about a Milwaukee audience? What makes it different from a Madison audience? Can’t think of anything, you just keep on trying till you do. Milwaukee, Milwaukee. They have good pork chops in Milwaukee. That’ll work, that’s what you use when you step out there. You don’t have to say a word about it to them, it’s what’s in your mind when you sing to them. These people in front of you, they’re the ones who eat good pork chops. They have high standards when it comes to pork chops. You understand what I’m saying? That way the audience becomes someone you know, someone you can perform to. There, that’s my secret. One pro to another.”

  “Well, thank you, Mr. Gardner. I’d never thought about it that way. A tip from someone like you, I won’t forget it.”

  “So tonight,” he went on, “we’re performing for Lindy. Lindy’s the audience. So I’m going to tell you something about Lindy. You want to hear about Lindy?”

  “Of course, Mr. Gardner,” I said. “I’d like to hear about her very much.”

  FOR THE NEXT TWENTY MINUTES OR SO, WE SAT IN that gondola, drifting round and round, while Mr. Gardner talked. Sometimes his voice went down to a murmur, like he was talking to himself. Other times, when a lamp or a passing window threw some light across our boat, he’d remember me, raise his voice, and say something like: “You understand what I’m saying, friend?”

  His wife, he told me, had come from a small town in Minnesota, in the middle of America, where her schoolteachers gave her a hard time because she was always looking at magazines of movie stars instead of studying.

  “What these ladies never realised was that Lindy had big plans. And look at her now. Rich, beautiful, travelled all over the world. And those schoolteachers, where are they today? What kind of lives have they had? If they’d looked at a few more movie magazines, had a few more dreams, they too might have a little of what Lindy has today.”

  At nineteen, she’d hitch-hiked to C
alifornia, wanting to get to Hollywood. Instead, she’d found herself in the outskirts of Los Angeles, working as a waitress in a roadside diner.

  “Surprising thing,” Mr. Gardner said. “This diner, this regular little place off the highway. It turned out to be the best place she could have wound up. Because this was where all the ambitious girls came in, morning till night. They used to meet there, seven, eight, a dozen of them, they’d order their coffees, their hot dogs, sit in there for hours and talk.”

  These girls, all a little older than Lindy, had come from every part of America and had been in the LA area for at least two or three years. They came into the diner to swap gossip and hard-luck stories, discuss tactics, keep a check on each other’s progress. But the main draw of the place was Meg, a woman in her forties, the waitress Lindy worked with.

  “To these girls Meg was their big sister, their fountain of wisdom. Because once upon a time, she’d been exactly like them. You’ve got to understand, these were serious girls, really ambitious, determined girls. Did they talk about clothes and shoes and make-up like other girls? Sure they did. But they only talked about which clothes and shoes and make-up would help them marry a star. Did they talk about movies? Did they talk about the music scene? You bet. But they talked about which movie stars and singers were single, which ones were unhappily married, which ones were getting divorced. And Meg, you see, she could tell them all this, and much, much more. Meg had been down that road before them. She knew all the rules, all the tricks, when it came to marrying a star. And Lindy sat with them and took everything in. That little hot-dog diner was her Harvard, her Yale. A nineteen-year-old from Minnesota? Makes me shudder now to think what could have happened to her. But she got lucky.”

  “Mr. Gardner,” I said, “excuse me for interrupting. But if this Meg was so wise about everything, how come she wasn’t married to a star herself? Why was she serving hot dogs in this diner?”

  “Good question, but you don’t quite see how these things work. Okay, this lady, Meg, she hadn’t made it. But the point is, she’d watched the ones who had. You understand, friend? She’d been just like those girls once, and she’d watched some succeed, others fail. She’d seen the pitfalls, she’d seen the golden stairways. She could tell them all the stories and those girls listened. And some of them learned. Lindy, for one. Like I say, that was her Harvard. It made her what she is. It gave her the strength she needed later on, and boy, did she need it. It took her six years before her first break came along. Can you imagine it? Six years of manoeuvring, planning, putting yourself on the line like that. Getting knocked back over and over again. But it’s just like in our business. You can’t roll over and give up after the first few knocks. The girls who do, you can see them any place, married to nobodies in nowhere towns. But just a few of them, the ones like Lindy, they learn from every knock, they come back stronger, tougher, they come back fighting and mad. You think Lindy didn’t suffer humiliation? Even with her beauty and charm? What people don’t realise is that beauty isn’t the half of it. Use it wrong, you get treated like a whore. Anyway, after six years, she finally got her break.”

  “That’s when she met you, Mr. Gardner?”

  “Me? No, no. I didn’t come on the scene for a while longer. She married Dino Hartman. You’ve never heard of Dino?” Mr. Gardner did a slightly unkind laugh here. “Poor Dino. I guess Dino’s records wouldn’t have made it to the communist countries. But Dino had quite a name for himself in those days. He sang in Vegas a lot, had a few gold records. Like I said, that was Lindy’s big break. When I first met her, she was Dino’s wife. Old Meg had explained that’s how it happens all the time. Sure, a girl can get lucky first time, go straight to the top, marry a Sinatra or a Brando. But it doesn’t usually happen like that. A girl’s got to be prepared to get out of the elevator at the second floor, walk around. She needs to get used to the air on that floor. Then maybe, one day, on that second floor, she’ll run into someone who’s come down from the penthouse for a few minutes, maybe to fetch something. And this guy says to her, hey, how about coming back up with me, up to the top floor. Lindy knew that’s how it usually played out. She wasn’t weakening when she married Dino, she wasn’t cutting her ambition down to size. And Dino was a decent guy. I always liked him. That’s why, even though I fell badly for Lindy the moment I first saw her, I didn’t make a move. I was the perfect gentleman. I found out later that was what made Lindy all the more determined. Man, you’ve got to admire a girl like that! I have to tell you, friend, I was a bright, bright star around this time. I guess this would be around when your mother was listening to me. Dino, though, his star was starting to go down fast. It was tough for a lot of singers just around then. Everything was changing. Kids were listening to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. Poor Dino, he sounded too much like Bing Crosby. He tried a bossa nova album folks just laughed at. Definitely time for Lindy to get out. No one could have accused us of anything in that situation. I don’t think even Dino really blamed us. So I made my move. That’s how she got up to the penthouse.

  “We got married in Vegas, we had the hotel fill the bathtub with champagne. That song we’re gonna do tonight, ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily.’ You know why I chose that one? You want to know? We were in London once, not long after we got married. We came up to our room after breakfast and the maid’s in there cleaning our suite. But Lindy and I are horny as rabbits. So we go in, and we can hear the maid vacuuming our lounge, but we can’t see her, she’s through the partition. So we sneak through on tip-toes, like we’re kids, you know? We sneak through to the bedroom, close the door. We can see the maid’s finished the bedroom already, so maybe she doesn’t need to come back, but we don’t know that for sure. Either way, we don’t care. We tear off our clothes, we make love on the bed, and all the time the maid’s on the other side, moving around our suite, no idea we’ve come in. I tell you, we were horny, but after a while, we found the whole thing so funny, we just kept laughing. Then we’d finished and we were lying there in each other’s arms, and the maid was still out there and you know what, she starts singing! She’s finished with the vacuum, so she starts singing at the top of her voice, and boy, did she have one lousy voice! We were laughing and laughing, but trying to keep it silent. Then what do you know, she stops singing and turns on the radio. And suddenly we hear Chet Baker. He’s singing ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily,’ nice and slow and mellow. And Lindy and me, we just lay there across the bed together, listening to Chet singing. And after a while, I’m singing along, really soft, singing along with Chet Baker on the radio, Lindy curled up in my arms. That’s how it was. That’s why we’re gonna do that song tonight. I don’t know if she’ll remember though. Who the hell knows?”

  Mr. Gardner stopped talking and I could see him wiping away tears. Vittorio brought us around another corner and I realised we were going past the restaurant a second time. It looked even more lively than before, and a pianist, this guy I know called Andrea, was now playing in the corner.

  As we drifted again into the dark, I said: “Mr. Gardner, it’s none of my business, I know. But I can see maybe things haven’t been so good between you and Mrs. Gardner lately. I want you to know I understand about things like that. My mother often used to get sad, maybe just the way you are now. She’d think she’d found someone, she’d be so happy and tell me this guy was going to be my new dad. The first couple of times I believed her. After that, I knew it wouldn’t work out. But my mother, she never stopped believing it. And every time she felt down, maybe like you are tonight, you know what she did? She put on your records and sang along. All those long winters, in that tiny apartment of ours, she’d sit there, knees tucked up under her, glass of something in her hand, and she’d sing along softly. And sometimes, I remember this, Mr. Gardner, our neighbours upstairs would bang on the ceiling, especially when you were doing those big up-tempo numbers, like ‘High Hopes’ or ‘They All Laughed.’ I used to watch my mother carefully, but it was like she hadn’t heard a thing, sh
e’d be listening to you, nodding her head to the beat, her lips moving with the lyrics. Mr. Gardner, I wanted to say to you. Your music helped my mother through those times, it must have helped millions of others. And it’s only right it should help you too.” I did a little laugh, which I meant to be encouraging, but it came out louder than I’d intended. “You can count on me tonight, Mr. Gardner. I’m going to put everything I’ve got into it. I’ll make it as good as any orchestra, you just see. And Mrs. Gardner will hear us and who knows? Maybe things will start going fine between you again. Every couple goes through difficult times.”

  Mr. Gardner smiled. “You’re a sweet guy. I appreciate you helping me out tonight. But we don’t have any more time to talk. Lindy’s in her room now. I can see the light on.”

  WE WERE GOING BY A PALAZZO we’d passed at least twice before, and I now realised why Vittorio had been taking us round in circles. Mr. Gardner had been watching for the light to come on in a particular window, and each time he’d found it still dark, we’d moved on to do another circle. This time, though, the third-storey window was lit, the shutters were open, and from down where we were, we could see a small part of the ceiling with its dark wooden beams. Mr. Gardner signalled to Vittorio, but he’d already stopped rowing and we drifted slowly till the gondola was directly beneath the window.

  Mr. Gardner stood up, making the boat rock alarmingly again, and Vittorio had to move quickly to steady us. Then Mr. Gardner called up, much too softly: “Lindy? Lindy?” Finally he called out much louder: “Lindy!”

  A hand pushed the shutters out wider, then a figure came onto the narrow balcony. A lantern was fixed to the palazzo wall not far above us, but the light wasn’t good, and Mrs. Gardner wasn’t much more than a silhouette. I could see though that she’d put up her hair since I’d met her in the piazza, maybe for their dinner earlier on.