Read Online That Said by Jane Shore - Free Book Online Page A

orbit.
My father gave it all up when he married her.
Abdicated, like the Duke of Windsor.
Music was no life for a family man.
During the War, he had led the band
in the Marine Corps, in the South Pacific.
In the photo, each man poses with his instrument
except my father, holding a baton;
clarinets and saxophones leaning against their chests,
like rifles at port arms.
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It was my job to start the record over.
The sheet music, stapled to the album cover,
was propped on the music stand.
The needle skated its single blade
in smaller and smaller circles on black ice.
The needle skipped. He was a little rusty.
When he lost his place, it left a hole in the music,
like silence in a conversation.
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You had to imagine his life before the War.
At fifteen, on the Lower East Side, he played
weddings and bar mitzvahs;
at sixteen, he toured with the Big Bands.
You had to imagine him before
he changed his name from Joseph Sharfglass
to George Shore; you had to imagine him
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handsome in his baby-blue tuxedo
when he played with Clyde McCoy’s orchestra,
lighting up hotel ballrooms from New York to California
and all the road stops in between.
One enchanted evening in Connecticut,
he saw my mother.
A week later, he shipped off to the War.
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You had to imagine his life before the War—
the one-night stands, the boys on the bus,
and in its wake the girls
with plucked eyebrows and strapless dresses
surrounding him like the mannequins
as he stood behind the counter
of his store, waiting for customers,
in New Jersey on the Palisades.
You had to imagine him occupying the uniform
now folded neatly in his footlocker
under the telescope pocked with rust—or bloodstains—
a souvenir from the War.
The record spun. He caught his breath.
The music raced on without him.

Meat
The year I had the affair with X,
he lived downtown on Gansevoort Street
in a sublet apartment over a warehouse.
It was considered a chic place to live.
He was wavering over whether to divorce
his wife, and I’d fly down
every other week to help him decide.
Most nights, we’d drop in for cocktails
on the Upper East Side and hobnob
with his journalist friends, then taxi
down to SoHo for an opening and eat
late dinner in restaurants whose diners
wore leather and basic black.
We’d come home at four in the morning,
just as it was starting to get light
and huge refrigerator trucks were backing up
to the loading docks and delivering
every kind of fresh and frozen meat.
Through locked window grates I could see
them carrying stiff carcasses, dripping crates
of iced chickens. We’d try to sleep
through the racket of engines and men
shouting and heavy doors being slammed.
By three in the afternoon the street would be
completely deserted, locked up tight;
at twilight they’d start their rounds again.
The street always smelled of meat.
The smell drifted past the gay bars
and parked motorcycles; it smelled
like meat all the way to the Hudson.
And though they hosed it down as best
they could, it still smelled as though
a massacre had occurred earlier that day,
day after day. We saw odd things
in the gutter—lengths of chain, torn
undershirts, a single shoe, and sometimes
even pieces of flesh—human or animal,
you couldn’t tell—and blood puddling
around the cobbles and broken curbstones.
On weekends, we’d ask the taxi
to drop us off at the door
so that no one could follow and rob us.
We’d climb to our love nest
and drape a sheet over the bedroom window—
the barred window to the fire escape—
which faced across the airshaft the window
of a warehouse—empty, we assumed,
because we’d never seen lights on
behind the cracked and painted panes.
In the morning, we’d sleep late,
we’d take the sheet down and walk
around the apartment naked,
and eat breakfast in bed, and read,
and get back to our great reunions . . .
One Sunday, we felt something creepy—
a shadow, a flicker—move behind a