But Beautiful. Geoff Dyer

      The coloured sitting there, big shoulders, still wearing the crazy pope hat.

      —OK, you have it your way. Instantly grabbed him by the shoulders, pulling him half out of the car, but his hands were still clinging to the steering wheel like he was handcuffed to it.

      —Goddam. The cop started pulling at his wrists, which were thick, corded with muscle, immovable. The English bitch yelling, the cops yelling too.

      —Lemme get at this dumb-fuck . . . Getting in each other’s way, one of them drawing his nightstick and pounding it down on Monk’s hands, hard and fast as he could in the confines of the car, hard enough to draw blood, making the knuckles puff up and the English woman screaming about he’s a pianist, his hands, his hands . . .

      —At the Vanguard it was packed, Monk playing solo. A couple of college students bartered with the doorman, trying to get a table right up close by the piano.

      —You kidding? You get here halfway through the set and expect a table at the front. People want to see his hands, man . . .

      At a hotel in Boston he walked around the lobby for an hour and a half, inspecting the walls, peering at them like they were pictures, running his hands over them, orbiting the room, alarming guests. Asked for a room and was told to get out before there was any trouble. Leaving the hotel, he walked the revolving doors for ten minutes, pushing patiently like a pit pony. At that night’s gig he played two numbers and left the stage. An hour later he came back, played the same two songs again and then sat staring at the piano for half an hour until the band left the stage and the manager played ‘Who Knows’ over the PA. People got up to leave, wondering if they’d seen him crack up before their eyes. No one jeered or complained, a couple of people spoke to him, touched his shoulder, but he made no response. It was as if everyone had stepped thirty years into the future into an installation entitled ‘Thelonious Monk at the Piano’, a museum exhibit simulating the atmosphere of jazz clubs of old.

      Later, in a panic dash to find Nellie and head for the airport, he was stopped by a state trooper. Frazzled by tiredness, he refused to say a word, not even his name. He slept for a long time, dreamed he was in the hospital and when he woke he found he was eating food spooned to him in bed, looking up at nurses like a man trapped beneath the rubble of a collapsed building. Lights peered into his eyes like he was an animal. Held himself close, in possession of a secret so precious he had forgotten what it was. People had been saying he was crazy for so long that he shuffled along in Lowell pajamas like someone who had been there a long time. Played a few chords on the piano and the doctors thought they noticed some untutored musical instinct twitching from his hands, hitting notes that had a kind of ugly beauty. Tinkly, thunking things. Other patients liked his playing, one howling along, another joining in with a song about a man and a faithful horse that died, a couple of others just crying or laughing.

      Silence settled on him like dust. He went deep inside himself and never came out.

      —What do you think the purpose of life is?

      —To die.

      He spent the last ten years of his life at Nica’s place just across the river in New Jersey, a view of Manhattan filling the tall windows, lived there with Nellie and the kids too. He didn’t touch the piano because he didn’t feel like it. Saw no one, rarely talked or got out of bed, enjoyed simple sensations like smelling a bowl of flowers, seeing the leaves spongy with dust.

      —I’m not sure what happened to him. It was like he was in the grip of a prolonged flinch – like something had grazed him, as if he had stepped out into traffic and a car had just missed him. He got lost inside the labyrinth of himself and puttered around there, never found a way out.

      Maybe nothing happened to him externally. Only the weather in his own head was important and suddenly everything clouded over as it had many times before – but this time for ten years. It wasn’t despair, almost the opposite: a form of contentment so extreme that it was almost torpor, like when you stay in bed for a whole day, not because you can’t bear to face the horror of the day, but because you don’t feel like it, because it’s nice lying there. Everyone has that impulse to do nothing but it rarely takes root. Monk was used to always doing what he felt like and if he felt like staying in bed for ten years he’d do that, regretting nothing, wanting nothing. He was at the mercy of himself. He had no self-discipline because he’d never needed any. He’d worked when he felt like it and now he no longer felt like it, no longer felt like anything.

      —Yes, I would say there was a lot of sadness in him. The things that happened to him, most of it stayed in him. He let a little of that out in music, not as anger, just a bit of sadness here and there. ‘Round Midnight’, that’s a sad song.

      Autumn in New York, a brown sludge of leaves underfoot, a light rain barely falling. Halos of mist around trees, a clock waiting to strike twelve. Almost your birthday, Monk.

      The city quiet as a beach, the noise of traffic like a tide. Neon sleeping in puddles. Places shutting and staying open. People saying goodbye outside bars, walking home alone. Work still going on, the city repairing itself.

      At some time all cities have this feel: in London it’s at five or six on a winter evening. Paris has it too, late, when the cafés are closing up. In New York it can happen anytime: early in the morning as the light climbs over the canyon streets and the avenues stretch so far into the distance that it seems the whole world is city; or now, as the chimes of midnight hang in the rain and all the city’s longings acquire the clarity and certainty of sudden understanding. The day coming to an end and people unable to evade any longer the nagging sense of futility that has been growing stronger through the day, knowing that they will feel better when they wake up and it is daylight again but knowing also that each day leads to this sense of quiet isolation. Whether the plates have been stacked neatly away or the sink is cluttered with unwashed dishes makes no difference because all these details – the clothes hanging in the closet, the sheets on the bed – tell the same story – a story in which they walk to the window and look out at the rain-lit streets, wondering how many other people are looking out like this, people who look forward to Monday because the weekdays have a purpose which vanishes at the weekend when there is only the laundry and the papers. And knowing also that these thoughts do not represent any kind of revelation because by now they have themselves become part of the same routine of bearable despair, a summing up that is all the time dissolving into the everyday. A time of the day when it is possible to regret everything and nothing in the same breath, when the only wish of all bachelors is that there was someone who loved them, who was thinking of them even if she was on the other side of the world. When a woman, feeling the city falling damp around her, hearing music from a radio somewhere, looks up and imagines the lives being led behind the yellow-lighted windows: a man at his sink, a family crowded together around a television, lovers drawing curtains, someone at his desk, hearing the same tune on the radio, writing these words.