Emily had gotten free tickets through her work to a weekend jazz club in some dinky little tourist town. I got out of work at the hospital early, changed out of my nursing uniform, and still had time to buy her some flowers. She seemed excited about them, and gave me a kiss when she picked me up. I smiled. We’d kissed for the first time a week ago.
   We drove half an hour into the country, comparing notes on our favorite sunsets ever, and watching today’s sunset quietly. I said it was our first together, we laughed at the corniness of it all, and I tried to kiss her while she drove. The club couldn’t have seated more than 90, two chairs behind every table, one waitress weaving between the patrons. Two trumpets, a stand up bass, a trap set and a black baby grand sat on the stage, the spotlight hitting them and reflecting back into the room.
    The room was filled, mostly, by people of that weird generation, not quite boomers, not quite “greatest.” They’d probably been the kid brothers and sisters of World War II fighter pilots and tank drivers. When their brothers had taken Normandy, they were at the pool, eating ice cream and listening to Glen Miller. Now they were 65 and gray, and patrons of jazz. Their baby boomer kids weren’t here, unless they had a kid who had taken up jazz trombone in the high school band.
    I was not surprised when the club owner was bald and aging. He thanked the members and the sponsors. “Couldn’t run the place without ‘em. Tonight’s sponsor is Johnson Life Insurance, over on East Lake.” As the owner continued speaking, a fat and grey man almost put his cane on my foot as he limped past, a wrinkled cocktail waitress bumped my shoulder as she emerged from behind a curtain, and the sound of a trumpet wailed forth from hidden speakers.
    This wasn’t Kerouac’s scene. Wasn’t Ginsberg’s scene. Couldn’t have been. It tried for hip and swank and established. Neckties and bifocals dotted the room. We were possibly the youngest couple at twenty-five and twenty-six.
    “We’re the youngest people here,” I whispered to Emily.
    “So what?” she said, scanning the room.
    “Why don’t any other people go to this? I mean people our age?”
    “There’s someone younger,” she nodded towards the high school jazz trombonist.
    “Yeah but he’s a nerdy high schooler.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Just look at him.” He stood and turned around, heading towards the bathroom. His coarse blond hair swayed past his cheeks as his skeleton frame shook forward. His glasses fell off his face and he stooped to pick them up. Emily laughed.
    “See?”
    She kept laughing. “You’re such an asshole.”
    I smiled at her and ordered us a couple of beers as the waitress tried to ignore us.
    “That always happens to me,” she said.
    “You date assholes who make fun of high school tromboners?”
    She smiled. “No. Bad service. They think that just because we’re young we’re going to tip shitty.”
    “Well, aren’t you?”
    “Only because the service was crap.” The waitress came back and opened our beers without a word.
“What are you talking about? I’m floored.”
    The lights dimmed, the recorded trumpet stopped, and Emily stifled her laughter as the musicians were introduced. The fat guy with a cane hobbled onto the stage and picked up a trumpet.
    “There’s one thing I learned from Kurt Vonnegut, and that’s ‘be kind to your knees.’” Patronizing laughter shuffled around the room. He picked up the trumpet and began to play.
    He played slow and clear and powerful. The notes overwhelmed the room. The trumpeter’s face ballooned with air and turned red as the tones climbed higher and louder. His top hand moved precisely, rhythmically, while his bottom hand languished.
    Then, for a while, I watched only the bass player. His thick and skillful fingers pirouetted through the strings, through trumpet and piano and trap solos.
    His solo came up. He started fast and low, and grew, and halted, sporadically hitting strings, resonating too quietly, along with the pianist’s legato and marcato tones, sometimes pausing like he forgot the way, or had choked in his improvisational melody. It was terrible, but the crowd loved it and applauded as raucously as they had for every other solo, while the trumpeter leaned hard to his left during a sustained high note.
    The song was finished. The trumpeter caught his breath. He drank some water. “Did I get lucky with a rhythm section. I’m going to move here.” The crowd applauded as the trumpeter snapped into the next tune with a gusto absent from his words. His fingers hardly moved through animated flurries of notes. His face turned red.
    Emily was really into the music. I was really into watching the crowd. The trumpeter was great. He was doing things on that trumpet I’d never seen live. It was just a bit predictable. And two men nodding to each other and smiling had my attention. They both sat next to wives that had been pretty once—not knockouts or anything, but pretty—and they both wore khakis and Hawaiian shirts. As the trumpet went higher and higher, I thought about Baby-Boomer homosexuality, Ginsberg’s racier poems, and Whitman’s, and this scene again. What would they have made of it? The people were having a good time, the music was excellent, for the most part, but it just felt strange.
    The trumpet player said something to the band, and started into a ballad. Smells of coffee invaded the room as the bassist pulled out a bow. He looked almost sad, almost pained through his smooth and moving solo, deep and rich as his sport coat. He was much better with a bow, and nodded once after the applause.
    The pianist started into his solo and Emily started looking at me. It was a ballad after all, and she'd finished her third beer. I looked back, feigning disinterest. She reached for me underneath the table. I reached back. The song ended slow and smooth. Her thumbs rubbed my palms, and I smiled.
    The trumpet player wheezed. “Too many pall malls as a kid.” The same damp and polite laughter filled the room. He said something to the pianist, snapped his fingers and started to play. The song started furiously, the band gyrating along in tune.
    The trumpeter was almost still, only the fingers on his right hand moved at all. His solo began and the notes went higher and faster, higher and faster, higher and faster, until I thought his cheeks would pop. He let the next note out slowly, piercing at first, then holding it, a controlled retraction of his lips. The trumpet went on the floor and the man wheezed under the cover of the bass and drums. He clutched his left arm.
    He was having a heart attack. I sat, mouth agape. Nobody else seemed to notice. The trumpeter caught his breath and sat up, hitting the last two short notes in tune with the piano. “Did you see that?” I whispered.
    Emily looked at me. “Yeah. That bass solo was amazing.” The crowd clapped, and the piano started up.
    “No. I swore he was having a heart attack.”
    “The bass player?”
    “The trumpeter!”
    She glared at me. I said it too loud.
    “He put his trumpet down and clutched his arm. His left arm.“
    “What difference does it make?”
    “Are you kidding? Don’t you know the left arm means heart attack?” She pulled her hand away from me and crossed her arms.
    She shushed me and turned back to the stage.
    “Emily, I’m serious, this could be bad. I’ve seen guys that looked way better than him come in to the hospital with heart attacks.”
    “Shhh!”
    I was fucking it up. This was the first girl I’d liked for a while, the first girl with an interest in literature and art and good music I’d met since I don’t know how long, and I was fucking it up. All for the sake of some old trumpeter.
    The trumpeter still labored to hit his notes. I envisioned getting up and screaming, “Is there a doctor in the house!” at the end of this song, or just dialing 911, or, worst of all, performing CPR on his dead and bloated corpse.
    As I weighed the merits of his life against the certain embarrassment I’d face if I was wrong, he started to speak. The song had ended.
    “Hey, I can see the pistachios I ate!” He held up a plastic mouthpiece. The crowd laughed. “These are really great. When I was a kid they were terrible. Had ‘em for marching band so our lips wouldn’t freeze to the mouthpieces. Anyway, this next one is just timeless. And jazz is so timeless. I mean, Proud Mary? When’s the last time you heard that?” I didn’t get it, but it was apparently funny. “Or songs I played for the country club when I was fifteen, like Don’t Blame Me. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll work some of that into the melody of a solo sometime, kind of a tribute to my youth.” More laughter. “Anyway, this one’s Night in Tunisia.” A collective gasp came from the crowd as he started playing. I swore he had another heart attack. The crowd raptly watched the old trumpeter. I decided to let him die.
    An old woman in an electric wheelchair tried to squeeze between our table and one of the Hawaiian shirts next to us. Instead of get up, walk out of her way, and walk back, I went to the bathroom, and let Emily deal with the woman herself.
    The bathroom walls had posters of thin black men in suits. Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie and etcetera. No fat men in grey polo shirts carrying canes. I heard the song end. Laughter erupted as I entered the room.
    “Those were the days I went ten days without sleep. Course I was on some really good drugs in those days.” A few laughs. “Had to give that up forty years ago. Anyway, this one’s my last one. Take me out Gene.” The bass player started a boisterous rhythm and the trumpet matched it.
    This time I knew he’d have a heart attack. How could he not? All the indications were there. He clutched his left arm, he was a prolific drug and tobacco and probably alcohol user, he didn’t brush his teeth well enough to get the nuts out of them and he probably had terrible blood pressure. All these added up to heart attack. But I didn’t care. Everybody else just smiled and listened to the nice smooth tune, and when it was over all the old folks hugged one another and the band walked off the stage, and Emily had too much to drink, so I had to drive home.
    “Do you think we could ever be like that? Old and weird?”
    “What?”
    “You know like the people in that club? It was strange.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    The rest of the ride was quiet, and not the good quiet like on the way there. She stared out the right window at the dark fields and I watched the bugs splatter on her windshield. We got back into town and I asked her if she wanted to stop off for another drink somewhere, but she said she was tired and could I please just take her home. I parked the car at her house, and walked the half-mile to my house alone.