First Meeting Fic

[triedunture]

Title: Detroit Ragtime
Author: triedunture
Words: 1200
Rating: gen
Summary: A response to savemoony's Odd Couple Challenge, a different take on how House and Wilson met.

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It's a rainy night in Detroit, a sad and gray city, covered in oil and sleek with smoke from smokestacks. The rain doesn't improve anything at all. Graffiti glitters under overpasses and in tunnels and alleyways. It's late. It's cold for the springtime.

Wilson briefly contemplates offing himself: just find an overpass high enough, an alleyway dark enough, and step off of the edge. Wouldn't that just solve all his problems? But the thoughts are more ironic than suicidal. He can't kill himself; he's still paying off his student loans. He laughs to himself, a head-shake chuckle, and wraps his overcoat tighter around his frame.

The rain is a mere drizzle, but it's cold. He walks faster. The lights are just ahead, blinking pink and neon green on the dark street. Jazz clubs. The smoky crooning of a singer, an instrument, a song that's sadder than his own. Misery loves James Wilson.

He's in Detroit for the simple reason that he hasn't made it to Chicago. It was going to be his very first oncology conference; his mentor had secured him a spot in the program. A paper that had taken two years to write was supposed to be read in room R12 of the Marriott's meeting facilities. A springboard into his blossoming, promising career. Chicago: a city of gleaming white, circled clearly on the map.

The problem is that he'd followed directions. Lucy had told him to call her from the road, to find a pay phone at a diner or gas station, and let his wife know that he wasn't roadkill, for the love of Christ. (Lucy was under the impression that Wilson wasn't a capable long-distance driver; Wilson, who'd never had a ticket or accident in his life, didn't know where she got that idea. She'd only say: You're due.) So he'd stopped somewhere outside Cleveland, a real hole of a town, and phoned his young, pretty wife.

You don't sound right, she'd said. What's wrong? What's going on?

These questions had been asked in different permutations for the past month. Wilson had begged off as tired, stressed, a product of Lucy's overwrought imagination. The truth is he'd been sleeping with other women behind her back. One, another resident at Penn, is small and quiet with big glasses that, when removed, make her seem like a superhero. Another, the woman in charge of transcripts in the front office. There is no reason for this betrayal. It's senseless, and it's awful and Wilson doesn't care, and that makes it worse.

He'd dodged Lucy yet again, over the phone, with less swiftness than before. Maybe he is tired. Maybe he wants everything to self-destruct.

Lucy presses. Wilson shouts the truth into the receiver of a pay phone in the back of The Red Onion Diner, which serves the biggest slab of prime rib on I-90. Six hours from home, and his marriage dissolves over a crackling phone line. And he does nothing to stop it.

He decides: fuck Chicago. Hello, Detroit.

Wilson's loved jazz since he was a kid. His grandfather, balancing him on an arthritic knee, flipping through his faded vinyls. Charlie Parker, Wild Bill Davison, Ellington, Coltrane, and Wilson's first love, Billie Holiday.

"You wanna know about life, Jim?" his grandfather would say with a sly wink. "You listen to the masters here. Ups, downs, love, hate, screaming with joy and sobbing with sadness: jazz can say it better than any words can."

Sure, there are jazz clubs in Chicago, but here in Detroit, America's broken city, the music seems to have found its true home. Wilson imagines the clean and sparkling renovated music halls of Chicago: a place where white people can feel comfortable listening to a poor impersonation of Billie. Tonight, he wants to listen to jazz with sticky puddles of whiskey under his feet, with hushed deals being brokered in the back room, with other people who've made a mess of things. Life isn't clean and sparkling, and jazz shouldn't be either.

Wilson ducks into the first open door that has bold, rolling musical notes falling out of it. The club is dark, the ceiling is low, and the tables hold only a smattering of people. One man is facedown on the wood, his glass knocked over. Two older women sit in one corner, their heads bobbing lazily to the tune, their long cigarettes casting hazy smoke into the air. Three young black guys share a table, whispering to each other and gesturing to the performer on stage.

The song isn't one of the old ones. It could be an original; Wilson sure hasn't ever heard it before. It starts off in a smooth flow of chords, a sweet little melody floating up and down and up again. Now that melody descends, and the piano player's head wags downward as if following it, and the song coasts into something resembling a lament.

This is perfect. Wilson takes a seat at an empty table and signals the lone, bored waitress for a drink. He sheds his coat from his shoulders and onto the frame on his chair back.

There's a drummer on stage as well, and a few horn players, but they are standing at the ready, silent. The pianist is working up to a solo, then. The song swells into an improvised syncopation, a riot of highs and lows, up then so down, then higher and higher. Fingers fly across the black and whites. It's really good, a smattering of the old bebop, popping in and out of more modern arrangements, then seamlessly recalling something that, to Wilson's ears, could be from a century earlier.

The pianist finishes the ditty with a loud pounding of the keys, and the three young men in the crowd shout their approval. The horns join in, and the drums start up, and only then does the piano player open his eyes and look up at the small crowd. It's as if he hadn't even realized people had been watching, his eyes are so wide at the applause. He juts his chin in thanks to the table of three, and he continues playing the accompaniment to the end of the tune.

Wilson claps and wishes there was a healthier crowd to cheer this band, which is better than any he's ever heard in a small club like this. The waitress comes bearing a draft that Wilson had pointed to, and another song starts. This one doesn't require much from the piano, and the player looks around the smoky room as he does his part. His gaze alights on Wilson briefly, and while it's usually embarrassing or uncomfortable to make eye contact with a performer at such an ill-attended event, Wilson doesn't look away. He sips his drink and returns the bright blue stare.

The guy's playing mirrors the thing that's going on inside his ribcage, Wilson thinks. It echoes in his lungs and blood and pounding pulse, and man, does it feel good to be in a room where other people feel the same way, if only for a moment, if only superficially.

When the band's set is over, Wilson resolves, he'll have to buy the guy a beer.


fin.


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