Louise

Pat and I walked into the Melbourne Bar filled with the confidence of inexperience. The place was known among those of us in college as the bar near the nursing school. The fact that our expectations always exceeded our realities never deterred us. It was like so many of its kind: slightly seedy, significantly smoky, a blue-collar beer place; it was high on hopes but always short on delivery. The lighting was low, of course, to add mystery and romance to blandness. It was everything we had hoped. 

The background blur of conversation undulated, as people looked us over and then returned to their drinks. We were clearly cool, and they were not. Earlier that day we had been studying philosophy and science; however, tonight we were rubbing elbows and getting down and dirty. Sartre never had it so good. We ordered beer and settled onto the stools to reconnoiter. 

Neither of us saw her sit down at the piano but out of the corner, which was built as a small alcove, came a slow melody. It built into a regular rhythm in the left hand and then little by little the right hand began a syncopated superstructure that made you want to move over there. The treble notes wound around you and kneaded steadily. The left hand made you throb inside, and its sullen drive punched steadily into the stomach. 

She was clearly an older woman, whatever that means when one is nineteen, with black short cut hair that waved its way toward the back of her head. Her dress was low cut and the full body filled it wonderfully. The overhead spot gave just enough light to cast shadows as she moved along the keyboard. She was lost in the music and we were lost in her and the melody she was making. She slid into a moody blues that cast its own shadows on your soul. The bar talk never slowed but the music rubbed against us and we stopped drinking beer and watched and listened. Then there was a short segue and the left hand picked up a heavier beat as the right hand began to run a little faster. And what was then known as be-bop leapt out of that box and into the smoky air. She kept the volume low, but she drove the rhythm hard and forced us all to get on the train and ride. We did ride and made the transfer to another as she switched gears and routes back into a coda and the blues train began to roll again. 

The nurses started to filter in, one after another and soon we were surrounded by women buying their own beer – can you imagine! No shortage of glances in our direction and enough tentative smiles to be certain that this was heaven and we were inside. But Louise was now our archangel and she never even looked up. She just slid into a slow bit of improvisation that was a piece of what was then starting to be known as West Coast Jazz. It was laidback and smooth in Cincinnati and if that is not a conundrum there never was one. She made notes that whirled and sidled, and undulated, and vamped, and ran, and turned abruptly to do it all again like a woman working through her varied moods and then it was break time. 

The two of us had musical backgrounds and by this time had moved near the piano. Behind it and to her right were a string bass and a set of drums. Clearly God had called, and we had blundered in to answer. He played bass and I the drums. If it had been a clarinet and trumpet sitting there, nothing would have come of it. But it wasn’t, it was our entrée into the alcove and out of the bar. We could move away from Friday night pickups and into the world of Louise and the magic that she made.

She returned and we began to talk. We liked her music. That was nice. We each played one of the two idle instruments and perhaps we could sit in. Maybe. Tell me about yourselves. We did that. She checked with the bartender and he thought it was fine – little did he care since we were free entertainment and he didn’t know an eighth note from an arpeggio. So, it began. Pat tuned the bass and I tightened the skins, adjusted a few things and we nodded to her. There was no written music, only the rhythm in the lead she gave and the improvisation that followed. But the songs were familiar and Pat, with some hesitation, slowly insinuated a backdrop of a following and then a walking bass. This was the music of brushes, so I laid down a whisper with the left hand and inserted the beat with the right. Soon the two of us had made a platform for the piano. She looked back and smiled slightly and we started to move together. Pat began to make the bass strut and Louise responded by banging away with the right hand to weave a melody up and down along the path of the bass. I made the snare more insistent and began to push and we were rocking. The bar slowed and the conversation relented. We were into it now and Louise and Pat began to trade the lead back and forth again and again. Then she took it all back and dropped into the refrain that told us it was over, and we brought it together in a quiet coda. 

Our small area had become Carnegie Hall and we just looked at each other with the quiet satisfaction of recognition. Then she turned and coaxed a slow blues out of the left hand, and we were on the river looking for the Saint James Infirmary. It did not stop after that; it was one mood after another, and we worked with whatever she served up. Commercial recognition came in the form of free beer from the bartender and fame in the form of applause and come hither looks from the women we had come hither to go hither to. However, at the end of that night, we chose to walk back to the dormitory along our Great White Way of shadowy downtown back streets and then suburban streets, as happy as if we had hit the big time.

After that evening, it was every weekend at the Melbourne Bar with Louise. The ease and freedom of making music was a doorway into another life. Sunshine was everywhere in the smoke; the beer-stained floor was covered with flowers; the Friday night work-weary patrons were a sophisticated and discriminating audience; the free beers were cold martinis.

And then life ended. One night Louise was not there and the bartender told us she had left and that was that. When you are in college and learning of the eternal verities, people did not just disappear and “that was that”. They did not go away without farewells and promises of remembrance. They did not leave you with a beer-stained floor and smoky room and a bartender who was telling us that it was over – just the way in which so many future things would be over that we did not yet know. But it was that way and even though we went back several weekends, no one came to play the piano and we bought our own beer and then we did not go anymore. And final exams came and went and then the summer came, and we went.

It was about a year later, on a fine spring day, when I was a preparing to graduate, had been accepted into medical school and was, therefore, elaborately nonchalant when I walked into a bar in another part of town. It was late afternoon. I was not accustomed to drinking beer in the afternoon, but this was somehow a special day for reasons I don’t remember except that the rigors of winter had been quieted in the cloak of flowers and green that is spring in the Midwest. My life was open and only good things lay ahead. So, I sat at the bar and ordered an illegal beer and was drinking it slowly while thinking about a future that I presumed would be good but for reasons I could not really discern. Then came a touch on the piano that was familiar and I turned and she was there again. The afternoon light was cold, and it struck an old piano that stood against an insipid green wall. Louise was in a nice dress with some jewelry, but the image did not project. It fell short because the clack of pool balls and the radio behind the bar that pushed the music around and made it seek out the reaches of the room away from people. There was no joy in the notes, only hollow sound. I walked over and she smiled and nodded as I sat down at a table nearby. At her break we talked, and I learned that she had to leave the other place because the receipts could not support the music. She had played at one or two places since and was now here. Her hair was the same, but the daylight was not kind. Smooth skin in the soft light of a smoky bar became something else in the afternoon. A full body was now just fleshy, and the smoldering eyes were only sad and hardened. Her kindness had not changed nor her love for the music that now held her captive to a way of life. And then the break was over, and she went back to the instrument, sat down, and prepared to pull at the oars. We shook hands and I left the beer on the table and looked back once from the door. She looked over at me, nodded, and turned to play the first notes of an uncertain future. So I learned the importance of magic and its transitory nature, and of the vagaries of a life that gives to us all and then takes our joy and replaces it with experience. 

I don’t know what happened to Louise, but I prefer the memory to be selective. For a short time, we lived in dreamland once a week. We made rhythms that could push and shove; and others that would lay back and glide. She wove syncopated elegance into those, and we drove that vehicle through the looking glass every Friday night. And there was magic in all our lives one spring.