Of Song and Water (22 page)

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Authors: Joseph Coulson

BOOK: Of Song and Water

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“SOUNDS okay,” says Brian.

He shakes his head. “No. It's stiff. It sounds like a march.”

“You're right. But for two or three measures, I felt it swing. How's the pain?”

“Okay. The pills help.”

“You been stretching?”

“Sure. My right hand's better than the left.”

Brian raises his hand, palm out and fingers wide apart. “Here,” he says. “Push.”

As best he can, he tries to match the spread of Brian's fingers, but nothing quite lines up. He pushes and a wave of fire moves through his wrist and up his arm.

“C'mon, Cole. I don't feel it. You had more strength a couple of days ago.”

He puts some weight behind it but he's afraid of the pain. He shakes out his hand like a dust rag. He plays a G chord, then D and E-minor. He plays a B-minor and winces. Barre chords make him crazy.

He rubs his hand. “You hungry?” he says.

“You're on your own,” says Brian. “I got a gig.”

“You didn't mention it.”

“I'm sitting in for Bob Birch at the Showcase. You should come over and listen.”

“No,” he says. “Next time.”

“Sure,” says Brian. “Leftovers are in the fridge.”

Alone for the evening, he decides to straighten up the apartment â a contribution to the domestic effort, a ritual which gives him a small measure of self-respect.

When he was a boy, his mother had to stay after him to keep things organized and clean up his room. If she could see this, he thinks, she'd finally be happy. He pictures his old room, the books, papers, and dirty clothes littering
the floor, the unmade bed, and the bulging closet. He also sees the one immaculate corner reserved for his guitar, amplifier, wooden stool, and music stand â a clean, well-lighted space, orderly and uncluttered.

“It's hard coming in here,” says his mother. She makes her way across the room, her long legs stepping over obstacles both large and small. “Why can't you keep all of it lovely like this corner? Look. Even your sheet music is stacked perfectly.”

He shrugs.

“Over here, you've made a shrine. But the rest,” she says with a sweeping gesture, “looks like a bad accident.”

He laughs.

“Why cordon things off? Think bigger. You could make your entire kingdom a shrine.”

He hears the back door open. “Meredith,” says his father. “You home?”

“Well, Jason, maybe for Mother's Day you could make me a room that's immaculate.” On her way out, she straightens the framed black-and-white photo of Wes Montgomery, a gift from Otis, which hangs between the bookcase and the door.

He recalls now that a year or so later, for her birthday, he managed to put the whole place in order. He forced her to wear a blindfold and then led her into the room and spun her around two or three times just for fun. She pretended to be stunned and amazed when she uncovered her eyes. “You see,” she said. “Your life would be so much prettier if you did everything the way you do music.”

A LOUD wave of applause carries the valedictorian to her chair. Principal Trip finds his way to the podium. He seems wetter than before. He says, “Our next speaker â ”

His introduction gets cut off by a commotion in the audience. Four or five
people are up on their feet and looking down at a gasping man. “Someone call an ambulance! Call 911,” says an old woman. Her reedy voice cuts across the murmuring crowd.

Principal Trip confers with two or three teachers. Then, squinting up into the lights, he says into the microphone, “Can we have some music, please?”

“Pomp and Circumstance” begins again. It wavers and groans while the teachers try to help. They pull the stricken man out of his seat. With the football coach on one side and the basketball coach on the other, the man floats up the aisle and out into the lobby.

It takes a few minutes for the audience to quiet down.

Principal Trip foregoes the introduction and a young man walks to the podium.

“âThe Road Not Taken,'” he says, “by Robert Frost.”

“I THOUGHT you'd be asleep by now,” says Brian, short of breath, having climbed the stairs with his bass in tow.

“I couldn't sleep if I wanted to. Need a drink?”

“No thanks. I've had more than my share.”

“How'd it go?”

“Good. Almost a full house.” Brian takes off his sport coat. “My amp pissed me off.”

“Muddy?”

“No. Too much humming and buzzing.”

“Is that right?” he says. “I can't believe it.”

“Eat shit and die,” says Brian.

“I knew the noise would finally get to you.”

“Did you do any more practicing?” says Brian.

“About an hour.”

“What else you been up to?”

He picks up a thin book. “Poetry,” he says. He holds it up so that Brian can read the cover.

“Where'd you find that?” says Brian.

“Right here on the shelf. You recognize it, don't you? The name should ring a bell.”

Brian takes a second look. He shakes his head.

“It's the old poet we backed at the Francis Parker School.”

“That benefit?” says Brian. “That's ancient history. Jesus, was it '80 or '81?”

“I'm not sure.”

“It must've been February,” says Brian. “They covered the poster with hearts and cupids.”

“You're right,” he says. “It was Valentine's Day.”

He can still see the old poet standing in the wings, flirting with high-school girls, waiting for CBT to finish its set. Then he comes out and sits on a stool at the center of the stage. Brian begins a twelve-bar blues in A. They keep it slow, leaving plenty of space, and the old poet recites lines in time to the music.

“The guy was great,” says Brian. “But then he started that riff, âI'm gonna roll a rug and smoke it. I'm gonna roll a rug and smoke it.'”

“That's right. That's what the old poet said. And he really dug it. He loved it so much he couldn't let it go. He stayed with it â ”

Brian, laughing, cuts him off. “Until that horsey woman with the bulging eyes ran up and ripped the microphone out of his hand.”

“But the old poet kept going,” he says. “Even though the kids couldn't hear him. Then that guy in the tuxedo â he must've been an investment banker â came up and thanked the woman for saving the student body from corruption.”

“It was a good gig,” says Brian.

“Yes, it was.” He remembers that his fingers were straight and fast.

“How's the book?”

“It's okay.” He flips a few pages. “Listen to this one.”

I Looked Up

It was just last night when

John Barley climbed the steps
to my studio apartment and threw
his sax on my desk sayin'
he'd lost the use of his hands.
Not arthritis. Not rheumatism.
Just fingers can't find the keys.
I was busy writing at the time
and told him
take
your funky, old horn
off
the finished part of my manuscript.
John didn't apologize.
He just moved the case and said,
“Man, it's over. My lady
won't sound like she use' to.
Look at you typin' â
you know where everything is.
Typewriter's growin' off your hands!”
I think I smiled.
“But my lady's makin' noise
like she don't even know me.”
As I recall,
John Barley
cleared his throat,
left
his beat saxophone on my desk,
and, under the steps
to my studio apartment,
hanged himself
before I looked up
from my typewriter.

He doesn't say anything after the last line. Neither does Brian. They let the poem settle. They sit in silence for a long time.

Now, having heard himself read, he has second thoughts about the poem and wishes he could take it back. He doesn't want Brian to think he's feeling sorry for himself. He tosses the book aside. He worries that self-pity, like chronic pain, will always be with him; there was too much at the beginning, more than anyone could use.

When he left the hospital, he felt like a man whose hands had been amputated. He struggled with everything, particularly in the first months when his fingers were immobile, locked in concrete gloves, his arms like stone posts hanging at his sides.

He relied on Brian to pour his drinks, to set up his coffee, juice, or vodka with a plastic straw, and in the early days he depended on Brian to feed him his meals, slicing his roast beef, bringing forkfuls of meat and potatoes to his lips, and wiping his mouth with a napkin.

In time, he learned to hold silverware between his casts, but the effort to eat, twisting his forearms and dipping his head, remained an exhausting and often embarrassing routine.

Everyday items and activities â doors, telephones, remotes, appliances, driving â were impossible or nearly so. He gave up shaving and brushing his teeth. Blowing his nose meant going outside and leaning over a hedge of stout junipers to empty one nostril at a time.

He wore shirts without buttons and pants without zippers. He hated the fact that he couldn't tie his shoes.

Most of all, he hated the bathroom, the daily humiliation. A hired woman, a retired nurse, wiped him after defecating. She ran the water in the shower and soaped him and helped him dry. He stood like a passive child in the presence of this woman. He answered her questions but never made eye contact. He allowed no real conversation. He let Brian settle her fee and the extent of her duties.

During this time, peeking around corners or the edge of a door, the people in Brian's building kept watch. They made it their business to know everyone who came or went. Finally, someone complained to the landlord. Brian received a letter and a copy of the lease with the rules for subletting highlighted in yellow. He explained that he wasn't renting a room, that the man living in his apartment was a houseguest.

“How long does he plan on staying?” said the landlord.

“As long as he needs to,” said Brian.

“Houseguests stay for a week or two. They don't stay for a year.”

“Then call him a roommate,” said Brian. “The guy's down on his luck.”

“I don't care what you call him,” said the landlord. “I'm getting complaints.”

“What kind of complaints? We don't make any noise. We play a little music, but it's never loud and it's never late at night.”

“It's not the music.”

“What is it then?”

“It's not my place to say. But if you hear something, just remember that it wasn't me who said it.”

COLEMAN walks down the aisle. He passes Maureen's row and tries not to notice that she's flanked by two men, either of whom could be her escort.
Approaching the stage, he raises his camera. He wants a close-up of Heather before she stands and receives her diploma. He zooms in and starts to focus, but his eyes fill and the image blurs. I'm being foolish, he says to himself.

Heather looks down from the stage and the flash fires. He tries to step back and turn away, but he thinks only of the days when he was barely with her, the sporadic visits after the divorce, after losing his hands, the weekends when she came like a sprite to Brian's apartment, having arrived by train with her mother, and they ate pizza and played games, making up stories about a lovely and benevolent world, a place that someday they would go. Finally, at the end of those years, with his hands gaining strength, he could play a song without pain, a slow but happy tune that made his little girl smile.

Now his memories go unchecked, and he sees Heather in a high chair, his perfect fingers moving toward her and holding a plastic spoon filled with applesauce. Taking the sweetness between her lips, she slaps the tray in front of her and laughs.

Then he finds himself at Brian's apartment, at the kitchen table, his hands encased in plaster, and he watches the slow stirring and sees black fingers lifting toward his mouth a spoonful of yogurt. The movement is languid, mesmerizing â a kind of dance that fills him with comfort and shame.

IT WASN'T long after Brian spoke with the landlord that one of the neighbors left a message, black letters on white, taped to Brian's mailbox. It said: “Take your gay miscegenation elsewhere.”

He remembers now that Brian came in and slammed the door and pinned the note to the corkboard near the phone. “What's that?” he said, seeing the stiffness in Brian's shoulders.

“Mail,” said Brian.

He read the words and realized their brutality and suddenly felt slapped in the face. “What the fuck?”

“That's what they think,” said Brian.

He stayed in the kitchen after Brian stormed off and stared at the note and poured some vodka in a glass. He heard Brian running water and opening and closing drawers. Then the commotion died down. Finally, Brian came back and said, “That's some ugly shit.”

“Look, Brian, maybe I should leave. I've taken advantage of the situation. I've stayed longer than I should have.”

“Leave because you want to,” said Brian. “But don't leave because of that.”

“I should go. It'll be easier for you â ”

“Don't,” said Brian, cutting him off. He ripped the white paper off the board. “Don't you dare feel sorry for me. Not for this.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Sorry for what? What are you apologizing for?”

“I've made you angry.”

“You're damn right I'm angry. I'm always angry. But you hardly notice.”