Jazz Funeral

standards.” She giggled. “Hell, I think I’ll get my hair frosted.”
    “So after all that, he did move in with Ti-Belle.”
    Ariel nodded.
    “And then what? Any more blondes in his life?”
    “Not that I know of, and, honey, I made it my business to keep tabs. I mean, who’s in a better position to know who calls? And what he’s got on his calendar.”
    “That’s why I thought we should have this little talk.”
    “Well, as far as I can see, he stuck close to the bitch.”
    “You don’t like Ti-Belle?”
    “I don’t like her cheating on Ham. He was too fine a person for that kind of shit.”
    Skip suppressed a smile, knowing Ariel would have found cheating on Ham’s part perfectly acceptable—with the right person, of course.
    “Basically,” said Ariel, “I think he was monogamous. Family man. The kind—you know—the kind you could really love.” A sob, half checked, came out of her throat with a noise like “Whmmmmf.” And tears poured, too many and too fast for the damp Coke napkin. Skip had to dig in her purse for a tissue.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    Suzuki-roshi wrote: “In the zazen posture, your mind and body have great power to accept things as they are, whether agreeable or disagreeable.”
    This was Nick Anglime’s goal, though Suzuki had a few things to say about goals as well. Which he would ignore for the moment. Today, Nick wanted to accept death, spend the day making peace with it. Death was here in his life, and not for the first time. He and his friends had done the usual things, things involving chemicals and strangers and fast-moving vehicles. Death happened.
    Janis and Jimi, Jim Morrison, Keith Moon, Mama Cass, Richard Manuel, John Lennon—they’d died so fast, so soon after he’d come to love them. And there had been others, closer still, including Feather Willis, a woman who’d died in his bed. He’d had to call his manager, and his manager had sent some men to roll her up in a rug and cart her away—back to her own apartment, of course, not to be dumped by a roadway or anything so revolting, but Nick had been shaken. Had written a song about it, “Knock Me Over with a Feather,” that had made him a million dollars, give or take. Yet he hadn’t done it to make money off of Feather’s death, he had done it because he had to; that was the song that had to be written then. If he had exploited her memory, as Rachel, his second wife, had insisted, then so be it—death was part of life, and that made it part of art.
    All those other times, he hadn’t known how to think about it, and he didn’t know now. He knew how to miss the person, that didn’t take figuring out, but he didn’t have a philosophy to cover the subject. He wanted to, though.
    For seven years now he had been pursuing spiritual studies. He would follow one path and then another—he wanted to sample them all, indeed believed in them all, couldn’t see a reason for pinning himself down.
    He was in a Zen phase now—his third; he kept coming back to it because sometimes when he meditated, he felt different, physically and spiritually. It made his mind different, his body different, the world different. The deeper he went, the simpler things got. That was one reason he did it. He was bemused that everything written on the subject seemed wildly complicated.
    “We die and we do not die,” wrote Suzuki-roshi. “This is the right understanding.”
    It bothered him how these people talked about “right”—right practice, right posture, right understanding, right livelihood. Half the stuff they wrote made it seem as if life and truth held a million options, but excuse him if this right business seemed a little on the dogmatic side.
    He came out of his reverie, realized he’d lost the thread. This was the sort of thing his mind was doing today, detouring obsessively—veering off, often toward Ti-Belle, the Crazy Cajun, as he’d come to call her ever since he found out she bleached her pubes. He’d fallen out of bed laughing at the time, and thinking about it now, he gave a loud hoot. It was his favorite thing about her. He’d known women with boob jobs and women with butt lifts and women who’d had every single one of their armpit hairs removed by electrolysis—even one who’d given up a rib or two to make her waist smaller. But he’d never in his life known a nut case who had black roots on her pussy. There was something just plain endearing about being so thorough—or maybe he was just so nuts