The last time I saw Jack he was sitting in his wonted corner of the coffee-shop with his guitar and his flamenco scores and his dreams of up-sticking to Spain to serenade the flounce-frocked senoritas. He always treated me as if I were visiting royalty (although this is not unusual in America: an English accent in the States is a near guarantee of getting one's puddles overlaid by cloaks). He would throw his arms meadow-wide, strain his eyes heavenward, intone beatific nothings in cassock-Latin, affect a gesture of thespianic supplication with one arm thrown back like a swan-wing and the other hooked under his waist, bowing a bow deep as the mid-Atlantic ridge, then he would take my hand and lay upon it a kiss which was the very definition of courtliness, and I would buy him coffee. Jack made his living odd-jobbing and music teaching and washing windows, but he couldn't bring himself to charge those who couldn't easily pay and so his income was half comprised of grateful sandwiches and indebted hugs, a fact which meant he was permanently penniless. He cycled everywhere even in the dead of winter, with two repurposed paint buckets on the handlebars to hold the soap supplies, and wore weeds just presentable enough to permit him to sit on the warm side of coffee-shop doors.
Jack had lived in a monastery before he wound up washing windows in Michigan. He was hobbit-high, with hair blanched as Dover-bluffs, teeth-numbers roughly comparable to those of the Graeae sisters, eyes pale as Spring puddles and just as watery, and skin softly manifold-folded as a closet full of towels. He was beautiful: Rembrandt should have immortalised him. It's not in my power to do so.
Jack would regale me with anecdotes about the great composers and, leafing through notes and scores he'd brought the cafe, desperately trying to locate this or that quote, explain to me in an understated yet overpowering earnestness the importance of becoming a master. One must become a master, he said, as that is the only way to do justice to the music, and music is one with prayer, and prayer is one with Love. One must therefore become a master as it is the only way to do justice to Love.
I wish I could do honour to Jack. I should try. I haven't the necessary stuffs to become a master, but I can at least work to approach the works and deeds of my hands with the reverence of prayer.
I remember Jack sitting opposite me at a wooden table, demonstrating a point about Rachmaninov's fingers. "Strong enough to break glass," he said.
The last time I saw Jack--that last time in the corner of the coffee shop on a winter evening where he sat playing Flamenco pieces and improvising ditties about myself and Tom, a college lad from South Wales who sat at his other side--I played for him. I never play in public; my fingers tense and jitter too much to allow it; but that evening I was able to play. I played "Look Over Your Shoulder," and when I was done Jack turned to me and said, beaming, "That's the 'Ethics of Elfland,' isn't it?" He knew! I could have cried. I should have hugged him.
We sat and talked and played and laughed for upwards of three hours that last evening, Jack and Tom and I. It was well I did not know it would be the last. I cannot conceive of a finer final memory. Jack died, suddenly, of a heart attack, two weeks later. I returned to England the following Spring.
I still imagine Jack is with me even now. Now and then I imagine this. Not in any material sense; only as a warm, benedictory presence, a faraway face re-presented to affect dramatic bows, and rumour-monger about Dvorak, and perfect his Flamenco pieces for the sake of the Spanish senoritas in the flounced-frocks and for the sake of prayer and of Love.
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