Ben Wyder Sings the Blues, Angela Lam Turpin [my reading book .txt] 📗

BEN WYDER SINGS THE BLUES

By

Angela Lam Turpin

She lies on the Sealy mattress wearing a pink floral dress in the heat of a New Orleans summer. I explain the features. I show her how the remote raises the head, lowers the feet, lowers the head, raises the feet. Her body bends in half. I speak to her in soft low tones, using the voice of Joshua Norman, top-salesman, the same voice that transforms into Ben Wyder when I sing the blues. The woman gazes up at me and asks if the mattress can be delivered. “Yes,” I reply, “for a twenty-five dollar charge we’ll send someone to deliver the mattress and dispose of your old mattress, if you have one to be disposed of.” She laughs. Her smile is contagious. She thinks I care whether or not she buys the mattress, but I don’t care. I don’t have to. I’m Ben Wyder. I sing the blues.
When the woman leaves with her receipt for a new Sealy mattress which will be delivered next Tuesday between the hours of two and four, I stroll into the employees’ lounge and light a cigarette. I sit on the hard vinyl chair and cross my ankle over my knee and stare at the vending machine in the flickering fluorescent light. I hum a few bars of “You Broke My Heart” and forget about everything for a while.
Sammy Nickels, the strapping new salesman from California, saunters into the lounge, drops two quarters into the vending machine, pushes the red button for a meager package of Cheetos, and waits. When the Cheetos refuse to drop, he knees the plastic window and shouts, “Motherfucker!” The Cheetos teeter from side to side, caught in the silver ring, taunting him like a bully on the playground. Sammy raises his fists and lunges at the vending machine, pummeling the plastic window until the Cheetos shake free and tumble down. He shoves his hand into the receptacle and whisks his trophy away. He saunters out of the lounge, munching on a mouthful of crunchy orange cheese foam.
Becky Roberts, the accountant, slips inside and sniffs the coffee, which is four hours old. She wrinkles her nose, dumps the black slime into the sink, rinses the carafe and brews a new pot. While waiting, she rifles through the want ads, always scouting for a better job with better pay, better hours, better benefits, better work environment. I don’t blame her. If it weren’t for Ben Wyder, I’d be looking, too.
By the time my break ends, I have begun to compose a new song on the back of a greasy napkin with my black fine-tip ball-point pen. “Lowering the Sky” is darkly dangerous, rich and sensitive, just the type of song to open a new gig. I tuck the lyrics in my breast pocket along with the pen and stroll out of the lounge. Clarissa Mastopolis, the sales manager, waves and asks, “How’s it going, Josh?” I smile and shrug, not knowing how Joshua Norman feels about anything anymore. Clarissa, polite and noncommittal, walks away without noticing I never answered.

Later that night, in a smoky jazz club downtown, I sing, “The sky is dangerous. Full of diamonds from lost wedding rings. Stones as cold and vacant as the hole you left in me. The sky is lowering, coming down on me. Won’t somebody notice? The sky is lowering, please rescue me.”
I sing in a throaty contralto, working down into a tenor, until my voice goes underneath the skin of the woman sitting nearest the stage. She trembles. I am in her now, moving through her. I am the pulse in her wrist as she grabs her man’s hand and squeezes. I gaze into the liquid light of her eyes and feel the gravitational pull of desire tighten between us.
When the song ends, I shuffle back from the edge of the stage, bow, and release the woman from my hypnotic voice. The audience’s applause ripples over me. I nod my thanks. I’m Ben Wyder. I sing the blues.
After the first set, the band and I take a break. I walk over to the bar, order a gin and tonic, no ice, and lean my elbows against the rail while I wait. The woman from the table nearest the stage surprises me with her presence. She wants my autograph. She wants to know if I have an album. She wants to know if I’ll be her date tomorrow night, if I’m not singing.
I sign her napkin, tell her I’m looking for a record label, and ask her if her husband minds her cheating like this, so openly. She giggles, raising the napkin to her lips, hiding the teeth I imagine must be crooked. “He’s not my husband,” she whispers, and though the tone sounds true, the words are false.
My drink arrives. The bartender waives the fee, knowing I will split my earnings as I always do, down the middle, with him. The gin burns the back of my throat then dissolves swiftly, leaving my tongue alive and crisp. The woman waits, hoping I will say something, indicate some interest in her beauty, but I don’t say anything. I don’t care for her brown curls, her doe eyes, her too visible cleavage. I prefer women with short cropped blond hair, eyeglasses, and small, almost childish, breasts. Studious women. Serious women. Soulful women. I once dated a professor of cultural anthropology at the university where I studied music. I told her to leave her glasses on while we made love. “Glasses are lingerie for the eyes,” I said. She smiled and pressed kisses into the hairs of my chest. “Put that in a song,” she said. I did. “Undressed, But for Your Eyes,” I called it. I only sing it when there’s an attractive woman wearing eyeglasses in a nightclub. Otherwise, I stick to the favorites.
The woman’s husband enters the room, looking for her. I turn my back toward the woman and order another gin and tonic, no ice. The husband says, “Here you are,” with the relief of a lost child, not the strength of a confident man who can handle his wife’s enormous need for comfort from a man she adores. “Pity him almost as much as I pity her,” I hear someone say. I glance over my shoulder. No one is there. The voice came from inside; it’s Joshua Norman talking. A guy I haven’t heard from in five, maybe six, years.
I want to ask him what he’s doing here, in a dive like this, but I don’t have time. The drummer is waving to me. It’s time for the second set.
I sing the same repertoire I have sung for the last three nights at the same club. My voice is strong and my mind is sharp, but there is a draft somewhere between my throat and my stomach, a breezy ache in my heart. I gaze down at the woman near the stage and she is no longer smiling. Her husband holds her hand, but he does not have possession of her heart. She is trying to get him to leave early, take her home, erase her memory of this fruitless evening with a bout of uneventful lovemaking. But he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t have to. She’s his wife. She is the one who should understand him.
Something about the woman’s sorrowful gaze penetrates the smoky armor of the room. I want to leave. But I have three more songs. Two old, one new. I close my eyes, try to regain my balance, but already I feel my feet walking out the door, down the street, beneath the cold, dark sky.
I open my eyes. I am standing on stage, the center of attention, with nothing but a dull pain snaking through me. The woman near the stage is crying. Her husband is staring at his feet, not knowing what to do. From somewhere deep inside, I hear a somewhat familiar voice ask, “What would you like to hear, ma’am?”
She touches her chest with her hand, instantly flattered and ashamed. I nod sweetly to her, no longer Ben Wyder, but Joshua Norman, standing not on the stage but next to her, as if we’re in her living room. She leans forward when I put the microphone to her lips and says, “That first song you sung, about the sky. Sing it again, please.”
I nod and smile. And though I sing it with my eyes opened, my eyes closed, my voice never slithers underground like it did before. I don’t possess her. Instead, a slow burning flame flickers in my heart, and the man I once was, Joshua Norman, smiles.
Ben Wyder stands in the shadows, not quite here, not quite gone.
By the end of the second set, I’m ready to call it a night. But the audience wants an encore. The band hints at one more round of “Blue Jeans and Baby Dolls,” but I want to close with “More Desperate than Average.” We settle on an old favorite, “Every Sunset Is a Goodbye.” The crowd applauds, dreamy and listless, drunk on alcohol and my voice. The woman near the stage is smiling again. My knees tremble like her hands did, that first time, when my voice entered her soul. I sit down on the stool and place the microphone in the stand. Ben Wyder has left the room. Joshua Norman sits on stage, the center of attention. I want to leave, but I have no strength. The woman near the stage has taken it along with all of my goodbyes.

The sales figures are in. Joshua Norman is the top mattress salesman east of the Rockies. I’m going to Cancun. For seven days and six nights. First-class. Paid for by the company.
I don’t want to go. I don’t want to lounge around in tropical swim trunks wearing too much sunscreen on a cheerful beach surrounded by beautiful tanned women in bikinis. I want to hunch in the dark in front of a microphone in a smoky dive where ordinary men and women come in to escape the glare of their too bright dreams. I want to feel the rhythm of the jazz band reverberate in my spine, sending a message to my feet and head, via the channel of my heart.
I tell myself it’s only one week. One small, insignificant week out of my life. Clarissa congratulates me in the employees’ lounge, sharing stories of her last trip to Cancun, how the waters were turquoise blue, bluer than my eyes. “Just don’t drink the water,” she warns. “You’ll be sick for weeks. Drink diet Coke, instead.” She winks.
At the nightclub where I’ve been singing, I tell Lonnie, the manager, I will have to cancel six shows. He listens to me, bobbing his head to the invisible beat