Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 31

Sweet Desolation and Seduction 27 sound with “Trombone Blues,” won’t you? Turn Duke to full wail, crank the Victrola, send Okeh Records twenty-five cents, a small price to pay for the means to drown out the City’s unceasing call for pain. Violet’s desire for a child, of her own, leads her to steal a baby on the street. Rememories of a mother, a “wild black girl” (160), who sequesters herself deep in the woods, far from the City’s crowds. What is it that Joe and Violet long for in the City’s impersonal space? Is it anything like Golden Gray’s search for his father? “Violet started sleeping with a doll in her arms” (129) and Joe fell for “little half moons clustered underneath cheekbones, like faint hoofmarks” (130). The pair from the woods seeks love in the City. They seek beyond themselves and each other: “In this world the best thing, the only thing, is to find the trail and stick to it” (130). They find the trail, yes, but it leads them away from that which they seek: Knowledge and love in the “blocks and lots and sidestreets” (9) of the Promised Land. They both seek, and find, Dorcas. She is Violet’s child and Joe’s lost love (even mother love) simultaneously, and, for both, that which is created for them to destroy. They cannot destroy the dirty City, so they destroy the product of the City, a child whose parents are consumed in the City’s fire, whose love is wanton, flighty, deadly. Joe shoots the child and Violet tries to ruin the corpse. Joe takes his hunter’s instinct, seeks his prey, “rambling, just rambling all though the City” (130), and he catches it, shoots it, shoots the girl who gave him her “first time”—“And mine,” says the City’s hunter, “in a manner of speaking” (134)—shoots her to the sound of tenor saxophones and rent parties and empty whisky bottles. And Violet picks up the violent thread and follows it back though the streets, to the corpse, and pulls out her flashing knife. But neither member of this pair, not Joe with his gun, not Violet with her knife, can kill off the City’s pain. It’s there in the parades of veterans and in between the slices of bread in White House sandwiches, waiting, crouching, behind walls and trash cans, to pounce: I was sure one would kill the other. I waited for it so I could describe it. I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on the earth could lift the arm that held the needle. I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me ( 220 ). Jazz also serves to restore the love within the marriage it once contrived to destroy. Yes, Violet remained married to Joe, even after his adulterous affair with Dorcas and his eventual murder of the girl, but the underlying relational threads of the marriage had long-since dissipated. Couple conversation prior to and during Joe’s affair, had emaciated to a language of transaction, mere grunts of acknowledgement and silence. Part of this waning in