By
Joan Frank

Those were bittersweet days, when I ran around alone and got up all manner of strange fantasies. I lived then in Marin County and on occasion gathered nerve to venture into San Francisco, which involved chugging the old red Volkswagen (with its bald patches) up a grade and through a tunnel and popping out into districts where you had to move quickly, park smartly, and walk like you meant it. I was thirty-three, but somehow still a rube. Much later the city would mean a kind of soft companionability to me; too easy a fit to threaten anything. But when I first lived there it made me breathless with its crazyquilt of neighborhoods, smoothing over hills and tucked in neatly at the waterfront.

I loved jazz, and in the city you could find it. At very least you could find it for free on the airwaves. Sealed in my tiny rented bedroom, in an old eucalyptus-sheltered house halfway up Mount Tamalpais, I'd listen to the radio late at night and hear the famous Oliver Nelson rendition of "Stolen Moments" in which soft trumpets soared through the offhand theme in perfect tandem, like lazy jets. The song's theme seemed to stretch out a languid hand, announcing a foggy edge of knowledge just across the bay below me, where the fist of the city opened at night, once you broke through the curtain of fog: a jeweled hand opening out onto black water. It's a Christmasy sight from across the water just after you pop out the tunnel, the cluster of colored lights enough to convince you you are beholding a kingdom that just that very second came into being-singular, modern, just beyond grasping. What Georgia O'Keefe called what she painted: The Great Far Away.

I had long held a kind of crush on the singer Joe Williams, based almost exclusively on my having seen him once on television. His big body walked toward the camera, loose and natural, great arms easily shaping the air, one hand snapping time, enormous grin seeming to own a realm of love I hardly dared imagine-as he swung with easy wit through "Well Alright:" Well alright. Well okay. Uh you win. I'm in love with you! If I'm gonna be your man, pretty mama won't you take me by the hand. And that voice, deeper and richer than anybody's with a kind of wicked wry mockery-all the possibilities of an earlier era flushed at once into your bloodstream: men in loose suits, women in crisp pastel summer dresses that fit closely at the waist, with billowy skirts. Dark gleaming bars, smoke haze, buttery sax solos pumping doleful regret into the room, songs like "I'll Never Be the Same" and "What's New." Tinkling ice and shot glasses; gelid martinis, faces glancing. Murmurs, low laughter, and after the liquor began to throb slowly up your veins from the wrist a warmth ,so that you felt you understood your fellows in the fondest possible way-and they you, of course; everyone understanding a very great deal indeed.

Those dreams went on all night. And enough nights of them finally prodded me to drive my little red vehicle through the tunnel and up through the avenues into the part of town where the wealthy lived, but where there were other strange arrangements as well, so that extremely tailored people mixed with cruisers of every caste, all pacing the streets en route to something imperative. I managed to squeeze the car into some odd space-it helped not to know how difficult this was-and went toward the famous hotel where the shows are given. By myself I bought a ticket and sat down at a table near the stage and fished up yet more money for the numbingly expensive drink.

And watched Joe Williams sing.

There he was, bigger and bolder at the spotlighted edge of the stage (was it possible?) than on television. Dark, burnished like pipewood, a charmer in a sharply-cut suit. Yet there was something more diminutive about him than my imagination had lent, a certain fragile elegance like a statesman's. His hair was peppering silver. I can't remember now the songs he did; don't even remember whether "Well All Right" was one of them. But the voice was unmistakeable, the rumbling rich horn of it. And that broad, glittering smile seemed to command all there was to know-or all that was worth knowing.

At intermission I asked the waiter if I might meet the great singer backstage. The waiter said he did not know; he would try to find out. Innocent fool that I was-he probably expected me to slip him some cash, and his indicating uncertainty was my cue. I was fresh from twelve years in a rural town; would no more have thought to give the man money than to jump out a window. Yet my face must have telegraphed its complete naiveté, since at the end of the show, amid the hard applause and brassy orchestra reprise, the waiter paused before my table. "You can go back there now," he said, nodding.

I felt hot and culpable mounting the stairs and making my way past the heavy curtain, certain that every human in the place was staring at me, at this unconscionable trespass. But once the curtain dropped closed behind me, the others no longer existed. A great swallowing darkness blinded me at first. Then my eyes made out the form of the man Joe Williams standing close, facing me, and he wasn't so large after all. A head taller than me? Perhaps.

We talked about inconsequentials as stage hands darted in the background. I told him I was a journalist (only beginning, but didn't say that), that I'd grown up with mainstream jazz, thanks to my father who'd holed up in an air-conditioned den with hundreds of long-playing albums and a state-of-the-art stereo system and wine coolers. Joe Williams smiled and said encouraging things. In the high trance of the acolyte, I must have given a good impersonation of rational conversation. I asked him how it felt to perform the same songs on stages all over the nation and the world, and such was my shock-state that all his literal replies elude me now. They were comfortable words, humane. He was agreeable, neither fatherly nor leering, but calm, mannerly, and also as if-I seem to recall-there were something he had in mind to say, but could not. He looked off into the invisible distance as he spoke. He said he had made his peace, after a lifetime of it, with the rigors of touring. What a simple statement to cover the long sweep of years, I remember thinking-as if I were interviewing a passenger from a time machine, which in some ways, he surely was: And what do you think of our portion of the century? It seemed natural to exchange addresses and phones-his in care of his agent, I noticed. Perhaps I'd write him, he said kindly.

This I did; a short note expressing my awe. And then I forgot about it, and went on to try to make a little life. I became an editor in Sausalito; I drove the red beetle down to the valley floor to take long runs beside a salt-water marsh that smelled of raisins; the tall reeds along the water quick with red-winged blackbirds. The birds caroled versions of the same sweet tune to each other, liquid scales. It wasn't a bad time. Following years would be hard, very hard- a grisly affair, grief I'd fear I couldn't survive. Yet in the period I speak of, listening to jazz in my little room late at night, doing my editing job and running along by the estuary next to the reeds and birdsong, I was happy, full of brinkful promise.

Then one night-in fact it was morning, about 3 a.m.: I remember memorizing the hour-the little smudged white Princess phone trilled besides my bed. A deep voice, but a very soft deep, spoke to me.

And at this point memory slams shut the ticket window, refusing to yield even a paraphrase of the rest of the conversation. Only the sense of it remains: that I was miserably awkward, rattled. It was certainly the man himself, but what did he want? What did it mean? What could I possibly tell such a man, from the quiet little toy-train track of my life? I must have tried to be cheerful, to ask questions, offer news. I believe I recited to him what famous names were performing in the city. From that tiny dark room!-the wood walls, thin carpeting-a single mattress, a few candles, milk-crates for bookshelves. I had no self to bring to the engagement. Not yet. Nor did I think myself beautiful, and anyway, surely there were scores of women routinely offering themselves to him.

His voice never gained urgency, never spoke an untoward word. The words he used were mild, the voice soft. As soon as I could, I made the vocal modulations of bringing a conversation to its close, of needing to go back to sleep, and he, most genially, most kindly, bade me goodnight.

Looking back, I see he must have been in his hotel room, bored and keyed up, flipping idly through his book of names and numbers. Perhaps-perhaps-longing for sex. Likely he turned on the television, or went out and found companionship. And continued his life, beloved in the music community, a giant of his time. I had never asked him a bout a family, in person or on the phone. Nor had he mentioned one.

I never heard from him again.

Did Joe Williams want telephone sex? (In those days it was not yet called that.) Did he hope for words that edged toward desire, slowly turning graphic? Or did he really, simply, as he claimed, wish to locate the voice and ear of a sympathetic listener? Kindred spirit. The words struck me then and now as a semi-embarrassment, anachronistic flourish, shellgame innuendo; words of a showman or an old-fashioned nostalgist. And yet, a certain actual gallantry about them has also struck me. There was an energy behind them, the energy to pursue life at all costs, and in our time such energy flags, becomes sublimated and guarded; a rationed-out, embattled thing.

I'll never know his purpose. Perhaps the question's an absurd extenuation of naiveté-most, I suppose, would assume the salacious version. Yet if I allowed it to puzzle me once, the answer matters less to me now. What does matter, what it's taken me all this time to see and be astonished by, is that I was happy then. That alongside all that yearning to find The Great Far Away, for a time, in fact, The Great Far Away had found me. For a while, without knowing it, I was living there.

Joan Frank, a MacDowell Colony Fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee, is a writer of short stories, essays and reviews. Her book of collected essays, Desperate Women Need to Talk to You, was published in 1994 by Conari Press of Berkeley. Her essays appear in The Iowa Review, American Literary Review, Confrontations, and the Associated Writing Programs' Writers' Chronicle. Currently she is marketing a collection of short fiction and a book about the writing life. She lives in Santa Rosa, CA with playwright Bob Duxbury.

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