Traveling Sprinkler (15 page)

M
Y JAW ACHES,
and a drowsy numbness pains my sense. The cigar smoking is not good for it. It's not the jaw it once was, and I'll tell you what happened. In freshman year of high school, when I played basketball, I knew this kid named Ronnie who was a master dribbler. He had many tricky dribbles, but there was a certain move that worked every time—a low double-bounce feint, performed inches above the floor, that threw you off when you were trying to block his shot. I admired him very much even before we played basketball together, because of how well he drummed on his algebra textbook.

And the interesting thing about him, which I found out in gym class, was that he was missing a pectoral muscle. I don't know if he'd been born without it, or if he'd had it removed, but it wasn't there. He could drum in patterns I'd never heard before, and he could turn in the air and make a basket from half a mile away, and he did all this with only one pectoral muscle. Once he said, matter-of-factly, “Black people are just better than white people. They're better at all sports, they sing better, they climb the rope higher, they run the hurdles faster, they win at the Olympics. They're just better at everything.” And I thought, He's absolutely right about that. Even so, I wanted to learn how to do his double-bounce trick.

I watched his moves carefully at practice, and then I went off to a far corner of the gym to try the double dribble. I thought I had it, or a close approximation of it, but a few days later, when I tried it in a game, I did something wrong. I bent low, feinted, double-dribbled, and the basketball came up fast and hit me in the jaw. I felt something go pop. It was extremely painful. Tears obscured my vision. Somebody grabbed the ball and I backed away from the action to recover. The pain was all over the right side of my head.

It didn't go away. At inter-high band practice on Saturday morning we were playing a piece by Vincent Persichetti and an arrangement of Santana's “Black Magic Woman.” My jaw hurt too much to play, but I pretended by frowning and putting my lips loosely on the reed. It didn't matter that I wasn't making any sound—the bassoon part was doubled by the bass clarinets and the baritone saxes. At Youth Orchestra on Sunday we spent an hour on
The Pines of Rome
, by Respighi, and I faked playing there, too, saving myself for the exposed passage near the beginning of
Afternoon of a Faun
. I had trouble eating a Ry-Krisp when I got home. I gave my jaw two days of rest, but then I had to practice a Milde étude for my lesson on Thursday.

I found out that the only way I could play the bassoon with a bearable level of pain was with my jaw positioned in a slight state of dislocation. Every day I popped my jaw gently out of alignment and practiced. I didn't tell my teacher, Bill, for a few months, and the pain gradually diminished. But there was something clearly not right in what I was doing. When I finally told him about the basketball incident, he laughed a sad, kindly laugh. “I guess that's dedication,” he said. He had a flaxen-haired girlfriend who was also a flutist. I had kind of a crush on her. I think Billy knew. They played the Villa-Lobos “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 6” together—a winsome, wide-wandering duet for flute and bassoon. Once the two of them taught me how to smoke a joint. It did nothing for me.

And that's how I wrecked my jaw.

•   •   •

I
'VE BEEN WORKING
on a love song that goes, “I want to go to the beach, I want to take the dog off the leash, I want to stare out to the east, I want to see a new shade of blue, I want to smell the seaweed with you.” The first melody I tried was too close to Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah,” so I rethought it. At one point I stopped singing and said, with amazement, “I'm actually writing a frigging love song.”

I wish I could sing “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5” for you. It's the famous one. “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 6” is for flute and bassoon, and only bassoonists and flutists know about it, but “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5” was an international hit. Heitor Villa-Lobos put on his hit hat that week and produced a masterpiece that everyone should listen to when they are seeking comfort.

Just saying the composer's name is a musical experience. You need that
sh
in there: Villa-Lobosh. He was a prolific composer from where—Buenos Aires? Somewhere like that. São Paulo? Oh,
Bachianas Brasileiras
, right. He was a Brazilian composer. In nine separate short pieces, he took the example of Bach and gave it his own Brazilian bean-salad sexual curvature. And for No. 5, he used eight cellos—I think it's eight, or twelve, or fifteen, an incredible number of cellos—and one human voice.

You can think of Villa-Lobos sitting there thinking, No, I'm not going to have one cello, or two, or three, I'm going to have a whole lot of cellos. All played by beautiful dark-haired women in loose flowing skirts. And they'll all be doing pizzicato, plucking their long strings with their heads cocked to one side,
bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung
—a pizzicato obbligato. Obliged to pluck. Pluck on, beautiful cello women! And then coming in over the mandatory pluckage is a melodic line that's like Bach but it's been run through the South American flan factory, sung by a singer named Victoria de los Angeles. My father had her record. She's some kind of full-chested contralto, or maybe she's a soprano, and she can belt it out. She goes, “Laaaaaaaaaah, daaaah daaaah daah daah dah dah daaaaaaaaah!”

Well, I can't get that high. Anyway, she sings like a mad tropical bird, and it's just a fondue of molten wanting and grieving and everything that you wish you could remember and feel and know. “Noh ooh, doo dooodoo dooooo deedoodie dooooooooooo! Dooooooo dah deee da doodie dooooooh!”

Sorry. I don't even come close. But today I looked up Victoria de los Angeles on iTunes and listened to her sing the
Bachianas
again, for the first time since I sold my bassoon. It's an old recording, all mono. I heard the same hiss, the same cellos. I could see my dear father standing between the Bose speakers, listening and moving his arms. All those cello players are dead and gone now, probably. And my father is gone, and Victoria de los Angeles is gone, and Heitor Villa-Lobos is gone now, too. He died when I was two. He wrote too much and most of his compositions are forgotten. But he did dream up this big, bad moonload of greatness for a loving voice and a bunch of cellos. When Victoria of the Angels started singing, I just lost it. It's spontaneous. It's the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, is what it is. All carefully written down as notes.

•   •   •

I
ANSWERED THE PHONE.
“Hi,” said Roz.

“Hi! Just a sec, let me turn this down.” I was listening to “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” at high volume. “How are you making out?”

“Well, so I'm having it done tomorrow.”

“You're kidding. That's so soon.”

“I know. They had an opening at the hospital and the doctor says one of my ovaries is at risk, and I kind of like my ovaries.”

“Me, too.”

“So, it's tomorrow.”

“Can I be there—or—”

“Lucy's driving to the hospital with me, and Harris says he's going to try to be there as well—so it might be difficult.”

“Oh. Hm. Well, what are you doing right now?”

“Nothing,” Roz said. “I'm not supposed to eat anything, so I'm just sitting here staring at a tub of sesame seeds.”

“That doesn't sound like much fun.”

“No, and the idea of them feeling around in my innards tomorrow disgusts me. Those gloved groping hands, ugh. I hate surgery.”

“Should I come over and fluff you up?”

“I'm in my pajamas and I'm not going to be much fun. On the other hand, tomorrow's really impossible, and I don't want you to think that you're not part of it, because you are. You really are.”

“Then why don't I drive over and see you right now? We can watch a movie. I rented the Talking Heads movie,
Stop Making Sense
. I've never seen it. I don't believe you've seen it, have you?”

“No, I haven't.”

“Well then, what do you think? We can have a pre-op viewing of the Talking Heads. I think they wear enormous suits with huge shoulders. It's directed by Jonathan Demme. It's supposed to be good. We can watch people in huge business suits singing ‘Take Me to the River' and forget about our troubles.”

Roz chuckled. “That sounds kind of good. Bring your pajamas and we can have a pajama party. And can you bring the dear dog?”

“He'd love to see you.”

“Good, then come over.”

I
SHOWERED OFF
the day's cigar smell and found a fairly clean pair of pajama bottoms, and Smacko and I drove at a good clip to Roz's condo in Concord, which is easy to spot because on the steps up to her door are many small mossy pots. Roz offered both of us seats on the couch—idly I tweaked the piping on the armrest while she smelled the dog's paws, as she liked to do. She was wearing a light bathrobe and pajamas and fluffy slippers. She asked me how my music was going.

“Going fine, going well,” I said.

“Can I hear some songs?”

“I'm still fiddling with them. I put some marimba trills in one of the songs. It's for you. Actually, several of them are for you. I'll burn you a CD when they're done.”

“Marimba trills. How nice.”

Roz had popped some popcorn, but she said she couldn't have any. Then she relented. “Oh, heck, I'll have two pieces. They won't kill me, and I'm starving.” She crunched defiantly.

We started the DVD. It was a concert movie and David Byrne looked completely insane. He had no stage patter. He began singing “Psycho Killer” on a bare stage, with his guitar and a drum loop. I didn't like it much. I glanced at Roz. She looked doubtful.

“Hm,” I said, “shall we skip ahead?”

“Maybe.”

We skipped through several songs. “Slippery People” was a bit of a disappointment—more of the musicians were on the stage, including two backup singers who helped a lot, but it didn't sound as good as the recorded version, with Tina Weymouth playing her clean thumpity-funk bass. There wasn't much humanity in what David Byrne was doing. It was all too arty, too knowingly ironic. Maybe at a different time I would have liked it, but it definitely wasn't the sort of thing to watch if you were with a person who was having a hysterectomy the next morning.

“I really don't know what to say,” I said. “Let me see if I can find ‘Take Me to the River.'”

“Okay.”

I skipped to the end, where they all did an extended version of “Take Me to the River.” It was good. They were sweating now, and the beat was phenomenal, and a percussionist named Steve Scales was malleting away on an array of gourds, and the audience helped them with the chorus. I looked over at Roz, who was rocking, to my immense relief. The Talking Heads had come alive, and it was pure river-bathing genius. Even David Byrne was smiling, finally.

When it was over the audience went wild and the Talking Heads did an encore, which we fast-forwarded through. The stage crew, in black, filed across the stage, and he thanked them. The credits came on. Fifteen minutes had elapsed for Roz and me.

“Well, well, well,” said Roz. “All you need is one great song.”

“It's true,” I said.

We were a little at a loss. “This was fun,” said Roz.

I flung a piece of popcorn to Smack, who caught it in his mouth. “No, it wasn't,” I said. “Shit. I wanted to make you feel better. I don't want to be a person who plays ‘Psycho Killer' to his lifelong friend before her operation.”

“That's okay.”

“What kind of movie would you really like to see right now? What's your very favorite movie these days?”

Roz said that honestly her favorite film of all time was
The Philadelphia Story
. “But I know you have a prejudice against black-and-white movies.”

“No, I'm different now. I'm broadening my horizons. I've never seen it.”

“It's a marvelous comedy. Katharine Hepburn is tremendous.”

“If it's your favorite movie, then we should watch it right now.”

•   •   •

A
ND THAT'S
what we did. We watched
The Philadelphia Story.
Roz found it on Netflix. We were transfixed. We laughed and we cried. It was two hours of total delight. Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant were all brilliant, and so was the younger sister in her ballet slippers. Halfway through, Roz put her head on my shoulder like the old days.

“Now that's a movie,” I said.

“It is,” said Roz. “Thank you for watching it with me. Phew! I feel better.”

“I'm glad. I—” I trailed off. “I don't want to overload you with gobs of raw emotion.”

“Oh, don't worry about that. I could use some raw emotion. Harris's bedside manner has been a little lacking. He's being chilly about all this.”

“He is, is he? Why are you dating this awful man?”

Roz thought about this for a moment. “Because I admire his courage. He says things that make his colleagues very angry at him, but I think he's right a lot of the time. And he's funny and smart, and attractive.”

I grunted.

“And he courted me and fussed over me, and that felt really good,” Roz said. “But he's being strange about the surgery. I think he's disappointed in me for needing a hysterectomy. There were so many hysterectomies done in the past, unnecessarily—it's a real scandal—and he's been such an opponent of that. And now here I am going under the knife.”

“But that's life,” I said. “That's the way life is.”

“I guess so. Maybe we shouldn't talk about Harris.”

“Okay, well—I just want to say I love you very much, whatever my legal status is, ex-boyfriend, jilted lover, picnic partner, future husband, whatever.”

“Husband, whoa, whoa.
Philadelphia Story
really did a job on you. But I love you, too, Pauly. I'm scared. I don't like anesthesia. I'm really scared.”

“I know you are, but it's going to be okay,” I said. “You're doing what you need to do, and you're going to be fine.” Roz looked like she was beginning to droop. I said, “Should I go back now so you can get some rest, or should I sleep on the couch?”

“Cary Grant would probably sleep on the couch,” she said. “Lucy's picking me up at six a.m.”

“Boy, they start early at hospitals.”

Roz went off to get a pillow and a blanket. When she handed them to me, she said, shyly, “Do you still want to feel my fibroid?”

“Yes, if you want me to.”

She sat back down next to me. “I think I do. Anyway, this is your last chance. It won't be there tomorrow.” She took my hand and placed it on her stomach.

“Hm,” I said. “I definitely feel something hard and knotted, but I think it's your bathrobe. You know, the sash.”

“Oh, it's lower down than that.” She undid her bathrobe. Her pajamas had narrow light blue stripes.

I touched her warm, soft, private pajamas and now I could definitely feel it. I held my hand there for a moment. “I feel it,” I said. I felt a sadness and took my hand away. “So that's it.”

“That's what's causing all the trouble,” she said. “What a word, ‘fibroid.'”

“Sounds like a new kind of cellphone.”

“The Verizon Fibroid,” she said. “With an unlimited monthly data plan.”

I laughed. “I sure wish this didn't have to happen to you.”

“But it does,” Roz said. “It's bleeding me white. It's got to go. Thanks for the molasses, by the way—it helped.”

“I'd like to be at the hospital tomorrow,” I said.

“No, please, it's just too complicated. Lucy will be with me. I'll be very out of it, anyway. We'll talk afterward. Thank you for coming over. It was very nice of you.”

“I'm going to buy you a canoe,” I said. “I really am.” I cleared my throat. “Can I, uh, ask a rude question? What does your doctor say about marital relations afterward—is it all, you know, Tyrconnell and pussy licking and hand jobs?”

“My doctor assures me that everything will work fine afterward. In fact, she claims that sex will be better. My cervix will still be in place.”

I threw my hands up. “Ah, your cervix will be in place!”

“You wicked man.” Roz smiled at me. “Good night, sweetie.”

Smack trotted behind Roz into her bedroom and I slept on the couch. I left at five-thirty the next morning—Roz was nervous and hungry and seemed to want to avoid having to explain my presence to Lucy, which I understood. I drove home and sprinkled some cracked corn for Nan's chickens.