Entering a room, he seemed surprised that this is what a door existed for. He ate food as if he was astonished by it, as if a roll or sandwich was infinitely mysterious, like he had no recollection of the taste from last time. Once he sat through dinner, peeled an orange like he’d never seen one before, silent all the while until, looking down at the long curl of peel, he said:
—Shapes, a huge grin breaking over his face.
Other times, when he felt the world encroaching, he became very still, retreated right down inside himself. He’d sit still as an armchair, so calm he looked asleep even with his eyes open, breath moving the hairs of his beard slightly. There is footage of him sitting so still that only the drifting smoke tells you it’s not a photograph. Talking to Monk anyway was like talking transatlantic, a delay in things getting through – not a split second but ten seconds sometimes, so long you had to ask a question three or four times over. If he got tense the delays in responding to stimuli of any kind got longer and longer until there was no response at all, his eyes coating over like ice on a pond. Most of the times he got into difficulties were when he was apart from Nellie or in unfamiliar surroundings. If something went wrong and he felt threatened he’d disconnect very suddenly, shut himself off like a light.
If Nellie was around when he got lost in himself like that she made sure everything was OK and waited for him to find his way out. Even then she felt good being with him as he went maybe four or five days without saying a word until he broke his speech-fast and called out:
—Nellie! Ice cream!
—Whatever it was inside him was very delicate, he had to keep it very still, slow himself right down so that nothing affected it. Even his pacing was a way of retaining his stillness, like a waiter on a ship at sea juggling a glass of water through all sorts of angles just to keep it upright. He’d keep pacing until what was inside him became so tired of twitching around that he could collapse exhausted. These are only guesses, it was impossible to know what was going on in his head. He looked through his glasses sometimes like an animal that’s been hibernating, checking to see if it is warm enough to emerge again. He was surrounded by his home, by his eccentricities, then by his silence. One time when we’d been sitting together a couple of hours and he hadn’t said anything I asked him:
—What’s it like in that head of yours, Monk?
Took his glasses off, held them up to his eyes, and turned them around as if they framed the face of an optician peering into his eyes.
—Take a look. I stepped forward, put my head into the glasses, studied his eyes. Sadness, lively flecks of something.
—See anythin?
—Nope.
—Shit. Haha. Reached up and put the glasses back on his head. Lit a cigarette.
I used to ask Nellie similiar things. She knew him better than anybody, so well that whatever I asked her, no matter how weird Monk was acting, she’d say,
—Oh, that’s just Thelonious.
If he had been a janitor in an office or someone in charge of supplies at a factory, waking in the morning and coming home to eat his dinner, she would have looked after him just the same as she did when they were jetting first-class all over the world. Monk was helpless without her. She told him what to wear, helped him into his clothes on the days when he seemed too bewildered even to dress himself, when he got straitjacketed in the sleeves of his suit or lost in the intricacies of knotting his tie. Her pride and fulfillment came from making it possible for him to create his music. She was so integral to his creative well-being that she may as well be credited as co-composer for most of his pieces.
She did everything for him: checking in bags at airports, looking after his passport while he stood still as a column or whirled and shambled around, people looking at him, passing around him wondering what he was doing there, shuffling around like a down-and-out, tossing his arms out like he’s throwing confetti at a wedding, wearing one of his crazy hats from some part of the world he’d just come back from. And when he was on the plane and Nellie buckled his seat belt over his overcoat, people would still be wondering who he was, the head of some African state lurching toward independence or something. There were times when Nellie looked at him and wanted to cry, not because she pitied him, but because she knew one day he would die and there was no one else like him in the world.
When Nellie was in the hospital he sat and smoked, watched a dusty sunset peer in through the raingrimed windows. He glanced up at the clock hanging from the wall at a surrealist tilt. Nellie had this thing about stuff being straight; Monk preferred things crooked and to get her used to the idea he’d nailed the clock to the wall like that. Every time she looked at it it made her laugh.
He walked from room to room, stood in the places she stood, sat in her chair, looked at her lipstick and makeup, her glasses case and other stuff. Before going to the hospital she had tidied everything away. He touched the fabric of her dresses hanging neat and empty in the closet, looked at the shoes waiting for her in rows.
She did so many things for him that most objects in the apartment were a mystery to him and he saw them for the first time: the casserole dish, stained from years of use, the steam iron. He picked up her pots and pans, missing the familiar noise of their clanking together. He sat at the piano, building a tune out of all the sounds he missed as she moved around the apartment: the rustle of her clothes as she got dressed, water running in the sink, the clatter of plates. She called him Melodious Thunk and he wanted to write a song for her that sounded just like that. Every five minutes he got up and peered out of the window, checking in case she was heading up the street.
Each day when he visited her she was more worried about him than herself. He sat by the side of her bed, not speaking, smiling when the nurses asked if everything was OK. He stayed for the full duration of visiting time because there was nothing else he wanted to do.
Reluctant to return to the apartment, he walked over to the Hudson to watch the sun set over the freeway expanse of water. A famished wind snatched the smoke from his cigarette. He thought about Nellie and the song he was writing for her, a private thing for piano that no one else would touch. Once he’d written it it would be finished – he’d play it just as it was, unaccompanied with no improvising. He didn’t want Nellie to change and he didn’t want his song about her to change either. As he looked out across the river a smear of yellow-brown light welled up over the skyline like paint squeezed from a tube. For a few minutes the sky was a blaze of dirty yellow until the light faded and oil-spill clouds sagged again over New Jersey. He thought about heading back to the apartment but stayed on in the sad twilight and watched dark boats crawl over the water, the grief of gulls breaking over them.
Driving to a gig at the Comedy Store, Baltimore. With him Nica and Charlie Rouse, friends for life. Virtually everything Monk did he did for life. Pulled into a motel in Delaware. Monk was thirsty, which meant he had to have a drink. Everything was like that with him. He’d stay up three or four days straight because he didn’t feel like sleep and then he’d sleep solidly for two days, anywhere. If he wanted something he had to have it. He walked into the lobby, filling the doorframe, looking dark as a shadow to the desk clerk who jumped slightly when he saw him. Unnerved not just by his blackness, his size, but by the way he ambled in there like an astronaut. Something about him, not just the eyes either, his whole bearing, looking like a statue that might fall over at any moment. And something else too. That morning the booking clerk had scouted around his apartment for clean underwear. Unable to find any, he’d put on a pair of shorts he’d already worn for three long days, blemished yellow and giving off a vague smell, he kept wondering if other people noticed. Monk happened to sniff as he came into the room and that did it, that was one of the things that did it. Maybe nothing would have happened if he’d had clean shorts, but as it was, the slight
