Chapter Title: The Summer of Unfinished Melodies

Against the sweltering backdrop of a New York summer, Judith and Corporeal find themselves navigating a season of unexpected setbacks, financial uncertainty, and personal revelations. As Judith struggles to reconcile the emotional consequences of her parents’ divorce, she begins questioning the fragile nature of family, love, and the expectations that have shaped her understanding of adulthood.

Meanwhile, Corporeal, a devoted jazz musician, divides his evenings between two nightclub engagements, performing long into the early morning hours to earn enough money to pay the rent on their modest tenement apartment. Beneath the smoky lights of the bandstand, his saxophone becomes both an instrument of livelihood and a refuge from the burdens of everyday existence.

I felt as  disconnected, to my own identity in the year, I’d been away from my parents, and they divorced in 1960, and, we decided that we would deal with the summer’s heat, by taking up art, and buying one  Sue Collier, and then corporeal would often go rehearsing in the sitting room, during endless days, and nights, he had  spent, with his saxophone, and while playing it in that after a few, afternoons, and that, I watched and seen where  he had gotten  much  fathomable better after a few runs.

And that by the likes of a sedulous musician,  whose diligence  came in by, whose name was, Holzer, seemed ever more, circumspect, and used to call me, Jude Belle, and was more like that of, a velvet soul beneath a coat of burlap — and  that I remember when him and Holzer used to work, and play sometimes in the makeshift rehearsal room study. 

When I kept to myself in the living room, and that, with each time they spent alone, going over lead sheets  and a few manuscripts, both Corporeal and Holzer, used to spend, their breaks, Smoking a  lit cigarette, from a brand of Lucky Strike and leaving them on the astray every time. And that he read each  note from his lead sheets, and Corporeal would follow him and read along, and that his face, had turned sunburnt, and from the light in the makeshift room study, you could see his olive white, skin through the resplendent light shining, from my part in the parlor room. And that Holzer used to stand near the wipe the sweat off nape of his forehead with a handkerchief. And that it was, where the n the television began playing and it been The Ed Sullivan Show.,.

And, so, where we thought out of,  of skimming, that of  Dizzy Gissapelleis’ greatest albums, that of the phone ringing, had began to, stop them,  and when Corporeal picked up the telephone and began speaking to his father on the telephone, “You fucking thought, I’d couldn’t play anymore. “ I just, thought you had to pay the rent to the Landlady   by working at two clubs,  the,  Lenox, Lounge and, club  Hurrah, and how you  were making had money  as little, and very gradually as you did, so that of how the sounds of the door closing. And corporeal continuing to speak to his father through the receiver while, Holzer stayed in the rehearsal study music room.

‘As Corporeal,  began speaking to Holzer, where that of what had been the emotional echoes of their last conversation. and that he began to say to him with ire, , “Oh you know it been where I used to come home from rehearsal, when I lived in Somerville. And with my father, and how’d he used to tell me that I didn’t  have the smarts, and that I wasn’t a grown boy.  I wasn’t a grown boy, and that I needed to keep playing so people won’t think that I wasn’t anything but a little child,.

And as their converse, had seemed to stray from the unusualness of Corporeal conversations with his father to the, peculiarity, and feeling of, Solitude that came in moments after. And where their rehearsals had started to become more ambiguous, and that where, Holzer, and Corporeal would inevitably find, a lack of knowing when their next, big, Sideman work would come once, Ed Sullivan Show had seemed to finish their musical number on Sundays.

You mean you’ll have to stay late for rehearsal again?” I asked Corporeal, watching as he carefully placed his saxophone beside the armchair.

“Afraid so,” he replied. “Between rehearsals and the nightclub engagements, there isn’t much time left for anything else. But playing the saxophone gives me something I can’t quite explain. It’s a kind of release, you know—a way of expressing everything I haven’t the words to say.”

I regarded him thoughtfully, recognizing the peculiar emotional endowment he possessed through his musicianship. His playing revealed a sophisticated understanding of melody and feeling, an almost pansophic appreciation of the many experiences that shaped his artistic expression.

“Speaking of art,” he continued, “I’ve been thinking about buying one of Sue Collier’s paintings.”

I smiled, unable to conceal my amusement.

“Then you’ll be pleased to know I’ve already bought one.”

“You have?” he asked, his expression brightening with curiosity.

“It’s called The Velvet Reverie. I thought it would be perfect for the apartment.”

The painting portrayed a solitary woman seated beside a tall, lace-curtained window, her contemplative figure enveloped in the delicate interplay of light and shadow. I had hung it in the front room, although the upper portion of the canvas was partially obscured by the room’s awkward arrangement.

There was something profoundly evocative about the artwork, as though its quiet elegance reflected the unspoken sentiments that lingered between us. Against the modest furnishings and weathered walls of our tenement apartment, The Velvet Reverie possessed an unexpected grandeur—a delicate reminder that beauty could flourish even amid the ordinary hardships of everyday life.

would mean I would have to stay at rehearsal late working on a few, few manuscripts, that I had been trying to, work on a composition and getting it into the nightclub for a few months now. You see dad, you kept telling me, my playing wasn’t worth nothing. Now I got another shot, and second chance you see, why don’t you support me. …. For , .  stay at rehearsal, and, And, And for  you started what came out had been,  so ventilating  and how’d he gotten to give through his saxophone playing the kind of   endowment and that it had been one I would I had to take in, with the,  sophisticated, discernments, of pansophy, of saying, he been interested in buying,   Sue Collier, how that I told Corporeal I bought one, and that it been this one Sue Collier artwork called, The Velvet Reverie (portrays a solitary woman seated beside a tall, lace-curtained window and hung it in the front parlor)

And you had bought one, and, a few months, he got back to playing on the  instrument, with having as little good, to being able to play as good as any way they could afford the rent, and  and thaet we’d have to, with,  dealing what  that Judith’s mother, Francis, and a while, she’d seemed most ambivalent. And that they had been ventilating to me over the phone saying she had been speaking to Serge and how she would begun to,  taken up art collecting after going to the library, and thought, she heard, through that of, such, lambasting by, Mary, who worked at the Library., and where she would be, one that unto it, who stayed at the Marigold Hotel, and also, that he known about Hannah Illyich Williams and her fiance, from Francis, Judith’s mother.