New Short Fiction Award
We value creative writing and wish to encourage writers of short fiction
to pursue their dream of being published. Jerry Jazz Musician would like
to provide another step in the career of an aspiring writer. Three times
a year, we award a writer who submits, in our opinion, the best original,
previously unpublished work.
Mary Burns of San Francisco, California is the ninth recipient of the
Jerry Jazz Musician New Short Fiction Award, announced and published for
the first time on July 1, 2005.
Mary Burns
*
Mary Burns' creative fiction writing began with a short story that won a prize
at the 2000 Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. She was an invited participant
at the 2004 Squaw Valley Community of Writers conference in Lake Tahoe,
California. In addition to a literary novel set in Mendocino (titled "Requiem"),
she is currently writing the second book in a cozy village mystery series,
The West Portal Mysteries, about a young woman amateur detective whose
two English bulldogs drag her into dangerous situations and then help her
solve the mystery. Ms. Burns is also working on a collection of interconnected
short stories titled "Talking Under the Influence."
Her varied writing experience includes more than twenty years
in corporate and agency public relations and communications, including video
scripts, radio commercials, annual reports, newsletters and executive speeches.
She managed the media coverage of the 1987 visit of Pope John Paul II to
San Francisco, and was the producer of a local television morning talk show,
Body and Soul. She has run her own consulting business twice, in between
corporate gigs, and is currently working as a consultant while pursuing her
writing projects.
Ms. Burns was born in Chicago, Illinois, grew up in the western suburb
of LaGrange, and attended Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, where she
earned both Bachelors and Masters degrees in English, along with a high school
teaching certificate. She escaped from Illinois in 1976 and headed straight
to San Francisco, where she now lives with her husband Stuart in the West
Portal neighborhood. Ms. Burns has a law degree from Golden Gate University,
is president of her neighborhood association and active in citywide issues.
"Word by Word," Mary
Burns's web site
Contact her at: maryburns@mindspring.com
___________________________________________________
photo by Mary Burns
The Sound of Dreaming
by
Mary F. Burns
_______________________________
(One)
She has begun to daydream about having an affair.
She imagines herself with the men she sits next to at
dinner parties, their wives across the table pulling down their mouths as
she engages their husbands intensely in conversation, as she lays her hand
on their arms and smiles over her wine glass. Then she looks away, smiles
at her own husband seated two or three or four people away from her, nods
and smiles, raises an eyebrow.
There was a man at one of these dinners a few weeks ago,
they had been seated across from each other after the cocktail hour blurred
into the dinner hour, the real food and the real wine. His eyes, blue,
unembarrassed, caught hers frequently, caught and stayed, caused hers to
stay on his as the rest of the company grew indistinct and disappeared for
seconds at a time. His wife and her husband were at the farther end of the
table, across from each other as well. At the end of the evening there was,
like a little gift, a warm embrace, pressing her body smoothly into his,
a kiss full on the lips.
She sighs as she turns in bed and, on the knife edge
of sleep, her body rebels against unconsciousness, grows restless with desire.
A sudden crackling and rustling startles her as her husband abruptly turns
the pages of his newspaper. It is 11:30 on a Wednesday night. Her eyes are
now wide open.
She throws off the covers and stands up, her back to
her husband.
"Sorry," he says, and he glances up, guilty and resentful.
"It's okay," she says. She pulls her pillow off the bed.
"I'll just go into my, the other room." She tries not to call it her
room, but the truth is, she sleeps there alone most nights. With an effort,
she might remember the last time they made love, but she doesn't try.
He is a man growing afraid of his life, pulling away
a little bit each day, retreating behind dark sad eyes and stacks of newspapers
and weekly journals, the TV always tuned to the news channel. He covers their
bed at night with papers, stays up late reading them until, tossing and weary
of the glare and the intermittent rustle of papers - a sound like a hamster
uneasy in its cage - she gets up and goes to sleep in the guest bedroom across
the hall. She has come to need complete darkness, complete silence in order
to sleep.
"You got a lot of stuff to do tomorrow?" he calls after
her.
She pauses a moment at the door, and thinks.
"Just my piano lesson," she says. She pauses again.
"He's coming here," she says. "To see my new piano."
"Ah," says her husband. "Good. Professional opinion.
Hope he likes it." He smiles as if cheerfully. "What kind of piano does he
have?"
She doesn't really want a conversation. She wants to
have sex.
"Yamaha," she says, turning to go. As she closes the
door behind her, she hears him continue, raising his voice a little so she
can hear.
"Yamaha. Oh yeah. Something about them in the paper,
yes, here, they've over-diversified, running into trouble with too many
subsidiaries."
She doesn't bother to reply. She lowers the blinds and
crawls into the cold bed. A tiny crack of light bursts around the edges of
the leftmost blind, but she can't stand the thought of getting up to fix
it, so she pulls a pillow next to her head to block it out. Her restlessness
is quieted in the cool sheets, the darkness settles on her forehead, and
she is soon asleep and dreaming.
The need for darkness while sleeping didn't, at least,
start with him, her present husband, but with the man she met in college.
They lived together, unmarried, for nearly twenty years - an eccentric life,
though calm enough to all eyes who cared to glance at them. Eyes that never
saw the early days of heroin and methadone, the late-night suicide-pact
discussions, the fights and the hysteria and the hopeless round of empty
days. A slight but very cold tremor passes through her heart when she thinks
about that time, even now, years later.
Despite all the madness they had stuck it out and gotten
through the worst of it, and they became recovering addicts, recovering human
beings, saved, they were saved. And then he died, his liver and kidney sucked
dry by those toxic years, his heart yearning for rest. She had tended him
to the very end, not bitter, but sweet, a final sighing away of breath and
life in a smile. He had just said, "This is beautiful, this is glorious,"
his eyes closed, his limp hand in hers not knowing, perhaps, whose hand he
held as he watched some final vision unfold. And all during that last year,
he had insisted on a bright light at night in their room, since he feared
waking up in darkness. He woke up often in the night, wanting to talk or
be read to. She had gotten very little sleep that year.
The night after he died, when she was alone in the house,
she turned off all the lights, shut the curtains so no light from moon or
star or street lamp could leak through, and slept in total darkness for twelve
hours.
(Two)
In the same town, about fifteen blocks away, the man
who is her piano teacher has not yet gone to bed. He sits at his instrument
as a clock ticks its way into the small numbers on its face. His wife is
out of town for a while, and he finds it easier to stay up and make music
all night when he knows there's no one else around. The music is loud, then
soft, fast then slow. Someone passing outside the house would hear him, but
this is a quiet neighborhood, and no one is out that late. Someone walking
by would see him through the living room window, seated at the piano, warm
golden light thrown out onto the dark sidewalk, jazz and rock and folk music
flung out into the night, accompanied by a voice scratchy with old smokes
and wine and singing like shouting from corner stages in small dance clubs.
No one is walking by.
He looks up suddenly, as if he hears something, a voice,
a ringing phone, a call. He turns, smiles, laughs, starts to play again,
wild gorgeous juicy music that's never been heard before. It goes on long
into the night.
In the morning, he wakes lying on the couch in the living
room, all the lights still on, sheets of hand-written music covering the
piano, scattered on the floor. His head aches a little, and he puts his hand
to his forehead, tentatively, as if searching for a mark or a wound that
might explain the sensation there. It is coming on seven o'clock, and he
remembers he's going to her house at eleven, her lesson will be there today,
because she has a new piano and has asked him to come try it out. The memory
of a feeling shivers through him, so fast he cannot name it.
He steps outside and decides to take a walk in the morning
fog to clear his head.
He thinks of his music as he walks. One of his occasional
cigarettes glows red through the mist. He thinks of her too, the way she
has easily learned, though older, to play the piano with a light touch, with
a feeling for how it should sound, with a laugh that rises quickly when she
makes a mistake. I'm not a musician, she says. I just want to play
the piano. Older? They're the same age, born and raised with rock and
roll, raised Catholic, each of them holding close inside the mysteries of
incense and mystic chanting they know someday will redeem them. They have
these confessional talks during her lessons. I wept the first time I saw
Van Gogh's Sunflowers, she tells him. Me too, he says. I couldn't
walk away from it. They both saw the painting for the first time in London
in the same week in the same month of the same year, some seven years before
they knew each other.
He stands at the edge of the town park, a green sweep
of tended lawn, live oaks and fragrant eucalyptus scattered it seems at random
until they form a solid wall at the far edge of the park which drops off,
he knows, steeply into a wild ravine, an old riverbed gone to weed. He played
there as a child, and the trees were taller then, the ravine wilder and more
menacing, especially at night. She, he knows, moved here only a few years
ago. She has been taking lessons from him for about a year now.
He crushes the cigarette into the sidewalk and stands
watching the pale disk of sun appear through swirls of fog. It is November,
and he feels it.
(Three)
She answers the door almost before he can knock, because
she has heard him come up the stairs and she hates the sound of their doorbell.
"Hey there," he says, scruffing his shoes on the mat,
though they are not dirty.
"Hey," she says, opening the door wide, and stepping
back to let him in. He is a tall man, over six feet, on the thin side, and
his hair is thick but gray. The sun is behind him as he steps through the
door, and it illuminates his hair from behind, throwing his face into shadow.
But when the door is closed, and he is standing right next to her, she can
see how blue his eyes are. She is tall for a woman, and doesn't have to look
up much to meet his eyes. How fierce he suddenly looks, and yet she
always thinks of him as gentle and easy-going. There is something about him
today that makes her feel ill at ease. Perhaps he minds coming here,
she thinks. Perhaps I shouldn't have asked him.
She can see he is taking in the style of the house, the
walls brightly painted, the black and white photographs hung gallery style
down the white hallway, the dark wood furniture nestling into Persian rugs.
One print in particular, hanging in the front hall, catches his eye, and
he walks over to look at it, a photograph printed in such high contrast that
it looks abstract.
"That's a photograph of the Anasazi ruins," she tells
him. "My husband took it a few years ago when we were on vacation there."
He nods, and turns toward the living room. The piano
sits decoratively near, but not too near, the bay window, small but impressive,
a shining black baby grand, its lid half-open and slanting into the high
ceiling of the large, comfortable room.
As soon as he sits down to play, nothing else matters
but the sound he creates, and the emotion he pours into it. She comes and
sits on the sofa, curled up with her arms languid on the curve of the back,
facing him, watching him. She's not had such an opportunity to look at him;
it's usually the other way around. And it's different, she thinks, knowing
there's no next student going to show up. The low-angle sun is filtering
in from the east, a thin gold light as it passes through the trees onto the
warm white walls. The only sound is the piano.
After a while, he begins to talk.
"Last night, I was playing late, alone," he says. He
lays his hands down on the keys, rippling a light sound on the higher register,
his left hand like water flowing to the bass notes. He shifts to a minor
chord just exactly as the sun goes behind a cloud. The light softens, and
the room gets cooler.
"I was up all night," he says, "My wife is out of town,
she's gone to San Diego for some conference."
He stops playing and looks at her.
"Sometimes, I wish I had never gotten married." He goes
back to playing.
"And it's nothing personal," he says. "Really. It's not
her at all, I love her." He shrugs. "It's just having that
responsibility, being that married so there's always the other person
to answer to or be with or do things with." He grimaces. "And all I want
to do is play my music." He underscores the words with pounding major
chords.
"So why did you get married?" she says when the notes
have quieted down.
"Why did you?" he says.
"Well, for one thing," she says, "I had never been married.
It seemed like the right thing to do." At the time, she wants to add.
"Is he very different from you?"
"Night and day." Then she laughs. "Truer even than it
sounds."
There is a long pause filled with sudden sound, bluesy,
smokey, dark.
"And you?" she says. "Are you two very different?"
"We have a lot of history," he says. "She was there when
I needed her, and I've always been grateful for that."
She knows him now, after a year, and she knows there's
something more on his mind.
"So what about last night?" she says. He looks over at
her, a flash of amusement in his eyes.
"What makes you think there was anything 'about' last
night?"
"Oh, I don't know," she says, smiling. "Something in
the way you move?"
"Attracts me like no other lover," he sings, playing
the familiar tune. "… I don't want to leave you now…." He trails
off and finishes the song very quietly and looks at her sideways.
"Well, you're right, so there I am playing, this piece
I'm working on," and notes dark as rubies and flashing sapphire rise from
the piano. "It was really late I guess, I lost track, and I hear this noise,
and just like that, Louis Armstrong is standing next to me while I'm playing."
He stops abruptly and sighs.
"I probably was asleep," he says. He plays again, the
motion so natural he doesn't even know he's touching the keys.
"I've never listened to Louis Armstrong much," he says
after a bit. "Ah, there's so much music. There was that TV program on him
a couple of weeks ago, did you see it?"
He glances at her, she nods, he goes on.
"I cried all the way through," he says. "I don't know
why, I just cried." His hands are still for a moment, resting on the keys.
"There was so much of his soul in his music, he did things that people didn't
even try for another twenty or thirty years. Like this."
Suddenly a burst of jazz leaps from the piano. He sings
along, rasping his voice like Louis, singing scat and throwing in the occasional
word to anchor the sounds in the language of everyday. He ends with a fine
flourish.
"I was playing just like that," he says, twisting on
the piano bench to face her, "when suddenly I hear this cornet riffing behind
me, and I turn and there he is."
"He laughs at me then," he says. "Big, hearty throaty
laugh, I just have to laugh with him. 'Try this!' he says to me, then he
plays this incredible, this unearthly music, I don't even know what to call
it. So I play along with him and man, it works, it works! We just play and
play and play."
He turns back to the piano and starts playing. His eyes
are closed, his face is lifted to catch the music like rain. The room barely
contains the sound he's making, it climbs the walls and bounces back down
to the hardwood floor, crashing through a crescendo that suddenly ends on
a single note held down til all sound ceases.
"It felt like we played all night," he finally says.
"And we talked about the music, about how it feels, about how you have
to have it, like food or air or love, more than all that, you must
have it or you'll die."
His passion breaks over her like waves, and she's having
trouble breathing after the music that almost cracked the walls just moments
ago. It feels like we've been making love, she thinks. She's careful
with her face as she looks at him. He has stopped playing, and is looking
at her.
"And then," he says, leaning toward her, "you know how
his upper lip had that callous on it, from playing so much?"
She nods.
"He's playing along with me, and his lip starts to bleed,
and he puts his finger to his lip, and sees the blood, and then he reaches
over to me."
She trembles slightly as he stretches out his hand and
touches his finger to her forehead.
"And he makes the sign of the cross on my forehead."
She feels a chill run through her whole body. She knows
her face is a mirror of his. He leans back again, settles on the piano bench.
"He baptized you," she says, almost a whisper. She cannot
tear her eyes away from his. She wants more than anything to make love with
him, wants him to stand up and walk over to her on the sofa and lay his full
weight on her, she wants to feel the weight and close her eyes and block
out the brilliant light that is blinding her as they look at each other.
They are silent together. The room grows darker now as
winter clouds cross over the sun, and she looks away.
(Four)
"So how was your lesson today?" her husband asks over
dinner that night. She has decided to set the table in the dining room, for
a change, and sit with him face to face over lamb chops and risotto, tiny
green beans and mushrooms, and a good red wine in fine crystal glasses. I
just felt like it, she said when he asked her what the occasion was.
"Good," she says. Her voice is neutral.
"He did most of the playing, though," she adds after
a minute.
"So he liked the piano?" he says, carefully trimming
a thin sliver of fat from a lamb chop.
"Oh, yes, he thought it had a fine sound," she says.
She looks at her husband as he bends his head toward his plate, intent on
carving his dinner. His eyelashes are thick, medium-length, and there is
about him a certain boyish vulnerability, to her mind, when his eyes are
downcast. Her gaze draws his own to her.
"You're not happy," he says, putting down his knife and
fork.
The suddenness of his remark, and its truth, unnerve
her, and her throat tightens.
"I …," she says. "I guess." She puts her hand on
the table as if reaching for his, and he covers it with his own.
They talk long into the night. And she remembers why
she married him.
(Five)
As the door of her house closed behind him, and he headed
down the stairs, he fetched a deep breath. As if he'd been holding it, barely
breathing, for the last hour.
It almost happened drummed in his head. It
almost happened.
The cool air swirled around him as he walked through
the park back to his own house. It was only noon, but it felt as if hours
had passed since he had walked that distance, the familiar path between the
trees and hedges, children playing, dogs running.
With a feeling of regret, and a feeling of escape, he
chose a note in his head - B-flat over middle C - a sound like young red
wine that promises well - and his fingers moved as he heard the song write
itself, as a dream is remembered in the first light of morning.
He would stay up all night again tonight, and the music
would come.
_______________________________
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