Fresh Complaint

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Now she had gone away.

  “A man?” Rodney said.

  Rebecca nodded. “A not very nice man.”

  Immy brandished her fork. “You said nobody called. How can a man be nobody?”

  “I meant nobody you know, honey. Nobody you have to worry about.”

  Just then the cordless phone rang and Rebecca said, “Don’t answer it.”

  Rodney took his napkin (which was in fact a paper towel) and folded it in his lap. In an elevated tone, he said for the girls’ benefit, “People shouldn’t call during dinner. It’s impolite.”

  For the first two years, Rodney had kept up with the payments. But then he’d quit teaching at the Old Town School of Folk Music and had tried to go out on his own. Students came directly to his apartment, where he taught them on the clavichord (it was perfect preparation for the piano, he told their parents). For a while, Rodney made about twice as much as he’d been making before, but then the students began to drop out. No one liked the clavichord. It sounded weird, the kids said. Only a girl would play it, one boy said. In a panic, Rodney started renting a rehearsal room with a piano and holding lessons there, but soon he was making less than he’d made at Old Town. That was when he’d quit being a music teacher and taken his present job as a patients’ records associate at an HMO.

  By then, however, he’d defaulted on his payments to the Early Music Shop. The interest rate rose and then (fine print in the loan agreement) skyrocketed. After that, he could never catch up.

  Darlene had threatened him with repossession, but so far it hadn’t happened. And so Rodney continued to play the clavichord fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes at night.

  “Some good news, though,” Rebecca said, after the phone had stopped ringing. “I got a new client today.”

  “Great. Who?”

  “Stationery store out in Des Plaines.”

  “How many mice they want?”

  “Twenty. To start.”

  Rodney, who was capable of keeping straight the 1/6 comma fifths of Bach’s keyboard bearing (F-C-G-D-A-E) from the pure fifths (E-B-F#-C#) and the devilish 1/12 comma fifths (C#-G#-D#-A#), had no trouble performing the following calculations in his head: Each Mice ’n’ Warm mouse sold for $15. Rebecca’s take was 40 percent. That came to $6 per mouse. Since each mouse cost roughly $3.50 to make, the profit on one mouse was $2.50. Times twenty came to fifty bucks.

  He did another calculation: $27,000 divided by $2.50 came to 10,800. The stationery store wanted twenty mice to start. Rebecca would have to sell more than ten thousand to pay off the clavichord.

  With lusterless eyes Rodney looked across the table at his wife.

  There were lots of women with actual jobs around. Rebecca just didn’t happen to be one of them. But whatever a woman did nowadays was called a job. A man sewing together stuffed mice was considered, at best, a poor provider, at worst, a loser. Whereas a woman with a master’s and a near-Ph.D. in musicology who hand-stitched microwavable, sweet-smelling rodents was now considered (especially by her married female friends) an entrepreneur.

  Of course, because of Rebecca’s “job,” she couldn’t take care of the twins full-time. They were forced to hire a babysitter, whose weekly salary came to more than Rebecca brought in by selling the Mice ’n’ Warm mice (which was why they could pay only the minimum amount on their credit cards, driving them even further into debt). Rebecca had offered many times to give up the mice and get a job that paid a steady salary. But Rodney, who knew what it was to love a useless thing, always said, “Give it another few years.”

  Why was what Rodney did a job and what Rebecca did not a job? First of all, Rodney made money. Second, he had to warp his personality to suit his employer. Third, he disliked it. That was a sure sign that it was a job.

  “Fifty dollars,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That’s the profit on twenty mice. Before taxes.”

  “Fifty dollars!” cried Tallulah. “That’s a lot!”

  “It’s just one account,” Rebecca said.

  Rodney felt like asking how many accounts she had total. He felt like asking for a monthly report showing liabilities and receivables. He was sure Rebecca had detailed financial information scrawled on the back of an envelope somewhere. But he didn’t say anything, because the girls were there. He just got up and started to clear the table. “I’ve got to do the dishes,” he said, as though it were news.

  Rebecca herded the girls into the living room and sat them down before a rented DVD. Typically she used the half hour after dinner to phone her suppliers in China, where it was now tomorrow morning, or to call her mother, a sciatica sufferer. Alone at the kitchen sink, Rodney scraped plates and rinsed kefir-coated glasses. He fed the dragonlike disposal in its lair. A real musician would have had his hands insured. But what would it matter if Rodney stuck his fingers straight down the drain into the churning blades?

  The smart thing to do would be to take out insurance first and then stick his hand down the disposal. That way he could pay off the clavichord and sit at it every night playing with his bandaged stump.

  Maybe if he’d stayed in Berlin, if he’d gone to the Royal Academy, if he hadn’t got married and had kids, maybe Rodney would still be playing music. He might be an internationally known performer, like Menno van Delft or Pierre Goy.

  Opening the dishwasher, Rodney saw that it was full of standing water. The outflow tube had been improperly installed; the landlord had promised to fix it but never did. Rodney stared at the rust-colored tide for a while, as though he were a plumber and knew what to do, but in the end he filled the soap container, shut the door, and turned the dishwasher on.

  The living room was empty by the time he came out. The DVD control screen played on the television, the loop of theme music repeating itself over and over. Rodney switched it off. He went down the hallway toward the bedrooms. The water was running in the bathtub and he could hear Rebecca’s voice coaxing the twins in. He listened for his daughters’ voices. This was the new music and he wanted to hear it, just for a minute, but the water was too loud.

  On nights when Rebecca gave the girls a bath, it fell to Rodney to read them their bedtime story. He was on his way down the hallway to their room when he reached Rebecca’s office. And here he did something he didn’t normally do: he stopped. In general, when passing by Rebecca’s office, Rodney made a habit of staring at the floor. It was better for his emotional equilibrium to let whatever went on in there go on without his seeing it. But tonight he turned and stared at the door. And then, raising his uninsured right hand, he pushed the door open.

  From the back wall, massing around the long worktables and bumping up against the sewing machine, a huge raft of fabric bolts in pastel hues was making its way downstream across the floor. The logjam carried with it ribbon spools, leaking bags of perfumed pellets, stickpins, buttons. Balancing on the logs, some with the jaunty stance of lumberjacks, others terrified and clingy like flood victims, the four varieties of Mice ’n’ Warm mice rode toward the falls of the marketplace.

  Rodney stared at their little faces looking up with pitiful appeal or savoir-faire. He stared for as long as he could bear it, which was about ten seconds. Then he turned and walked in hard shoes back down the hallway. He passed the bathroom without stopping to listen for Immy’s and Lula’s voices and he continued into the music room, where he shut the door behind him. After seating himself at the clavichord, he took a deep breath and began to play one part of a keyboard duet in E-flat by Müthel.

  It was a difficult piece. Johann Gottfried Müthel, Bach’s last pupil, was a difficult composer. He’d studied with Bach for only three months. And then he’d gone off to Riga to disappear into the Baltic twilight of his genius. Hardly anybody knew who Müthel was anymore. Except for clavichordists. For clavichordists, playing Müthel was a supreme achievement.

  Rodney got off to a good start.

  Ten minutes into the duet, Rebecca stuck her head in the do
or.

  “The girls are ready for their story,” she said.

  Rodney kept playing.

  Rebecca said it louder and Rodney stopped.

  “You do it,” he said.

  “I have to make some calls.”

  With his right hand, Rodney played an E-flat scale. “I’m practicing,” he said. He stared at his hand, as though he were a student learning to play scales for the first time, and he didn’t stop staring until Rebecca had withdrawn her head from the doorway. Then Rodney got up and shut the door semi-violently. He came back to the clavichord and started the piece from the beginning.

  Müthel hadn’t written much. He composed only when the spirit moved him. That was like Rodney. Rodney played only when the spirit moved him.

  It moved him now, tonight. For the next two hours, Rodney played the Müthel piece over and over.

  He was playing well, with a lot of feeling. But he was also making mistakes. He soldiered on. Then, to make himself feel better, he finished off with Bach’s French Suite in D minor, a piece he’d been playing for years and knew by heart.

  Before long he was flushed and sweating. It felt good to play with such concentration and vigor again, and when he finally stopped, with the bell-like notes still ringing in his ears and off the low ceiling of the room, Rodney lowered his head and closed his eyes. He was remembering that month and a half, at twenty-six, when he’d played ecstatically and invisibly in empty West German concert halls. Behind him on the desk the phone rang, and Rodney swiveled and picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Good evening, am I speaking with Rodney Webber?”

  Rodney realized his mistake. But he said, “This is he.”

  “My name is James Norris and I’m with Reeves Collection. I know you’re familiar with our organization.”

  If you hung up, they called again. If you changed your phone number, they got the new one. The only hope was to make a deal, to stall, to make promises and buy some time.

  “I’m afraid I’m well acquainted with your organization.” Rodney was trying for the right tone, light but not insouciant or disrespectful.

  “Formerly I believe you’ve been dealing with Ms. Darlene Jackson. She’s been the person assigned to your case. Up until now. Now I’m in charge and I hope we can work something out.”

  “I hope so, too,” said Rodney.

  “Mr. Webber, I come in when things get complicated and I try to make them simple. Ms. Jackson offered you various payment plans, I see.”

  “I sent a thousand dollars in December.”

  “Yes, you did. And that was a start. But, according to our records, you had agreed to send two thousand.”

  “I couldn’t get that much. It was Christmas.”

  “Mr. Webber, let’s keep things simple. You stopped meeting your payments to our client, the Early Music Shop, over a year ago. So Christmas doesn’t really have a whole lot to do with it, does it?”

  Rodney hadn’t enjoyed his conversations with Darlene. But now he saw that Darlene had been reasonable, pliable, in a way that this guy James wasn’t. There was a quality in James’s voice that wasn’t so much menacing as obdurate: a stone wall of a voice.

  “Your account is in arrears over payments for a musical instrument, is that right? What kind of instrument is it?”

  “A clavichord.”

  “I’m not familiar with that instrument.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to be.”

  The man chuckled, taking no offense.

  “Lucky for me, that’s not my job, knowing about ancient instruments.”

  “A clavichord is a precursor to the piano,” Rodney said. “Except it’s played by tangents instead of hammers. My clavichord—”

  “You see that right there, Mr. Webber? That’s incorrect. It’s not yours. The instrument still belongs to the Early Music Shop out of Edinburgh. You only have it on loan from them. Until you pay off that loan.”

  “I thought you might like to know the provenance,” said Rodney. How had his diction got way up here, to these heights? Nothing complex: he just wanted to put James Norris of Reeves Collection in his place. Next Rodney heard himself say, “It’s a copy, by Verwolf, of a style of clavichord made by a man named Bodechtel in 1790.”

  James said, “Let me get to my point.”

  But Rodney didn’t let him. “This is what I do,” Rodney said, and his voice sounded tight and strained, overtuned. “This is what I do. I’m a clavichordist. I need the instrument to make my living. If you take it back, I’ll never be able to pay you back. Or pay the Early Music Shop.”

  “You can keep your clavichord. I’d be happy to let you keep it. All you have to do is pay for it, in full, by five p.m. tomorrow, with a certified check or wire transfer from your bank, and you can go on playing your clavichord for as long as you like.”

  Rodney’s laugh was bitter. “Obviously I can’t do that.”

  “Then by five p.m. tomorrow we’re going to unfortunately have to come out and repossess the instrument.”

  “I can’t get that much by tomorrow.”

  “This is the end of the line, Rodney.”

  “There’s got to be some way—”

  “Only one way, Rodney. Payment in full.”

  Clumsily, furiously, his hand like a brick trying to throw a brick, Rodney slammed down the phone.

  For a moment he didn’t move. Then he swiveled back around and placed his hands on the clavichord.

  He might have been feeling for a heartbeat. He ran his fingers over the gold ornamentation and the tops of the frigid keys. It wasn’t the most beautiful or distinguished clavichord he’d ever played. It couldn’t compare to the Hass, but it was his, or it had been, and it was lovely and rapturous-sounding enough. Rodney would never have got it if Rebecca hadn’t sent him to Edinburgh. He would never have known how deeply depressed he’d been or how happy the clavichord, for a time, would make him.

  His right hand was playing the Müthel again.

  Rodney knew he’d never been a first-rate musicologist. At best, he was a mediocre, if sincere, performer. With fifteen minutes’ practice in the morning and fifteen minutes in the evening, he wasn’t going to get any better.

  There’d always been something a little pathetic about being a clavichordist. Rodney knew that. The Müthel he was playing, however, mistakes and all, still seemed beautiful, maybe more so for its obsolescence. He played for another minute. Then he placed his hands on the warm wood of the clavichord and, leaning forward, stared at the painted garden inside the lid.

  It was after ten when he came out of the music room. The apartment was quiet and dark. Entering the bedroom, Rodney didn’t turn on the light, so as not to wake Rebecca. He undressed in the dark, feeling in the closet for a hanger.

  In his underwear he shuffled to his side of the bed and crawled in. On one elbow he leaned over to see if Rebecca was awake. But then he realized that her side of the bed was empty. She was still in her office, working.

  Rodney collapsed onto his back. He lay immobile. There was a pillow underneath him, in the wrong spot, but he didn’t have the energy to roll over and tug it out.

  His situation wasn’t really so different from anybody else’s. He’d only got to the end of the road a little earlier. But it was the same for the rock stars and for the jazz musicians, for the novelists and the poets (definitely for the poets); it was the same for the business executives, the biologists, the computer programmers, the accountants, the flower arrangers. Artist or nonartist, academic or nonacademic, Menno van Delft or Rodney Webber, even for Darlene and James of the Reeves Collection Agency: it didn’t matter. No one knew what the original music sounded like. You had to make an educated guess and do the best you could. For whatever you played there was no indisputable tuning or handwritten schematic, and the visa you needed in order to see the Master’s keyboard was always denied. Sometimes you thought you heard the music, especially when you were young, and then you spent the rest of your life trying to re
produce the sound.

  Everybody’s life was early music.

  He was still awake a half hour later, when Rebecca came in.

  “Can I turn on the light?” she asked.

  “No,” said Rodney.

  She paused and said, “You practiced a long time.”

  “Practice makes perfect.”

  “Who called? Someone called.”

  Rodney said nothing.

  “You didn’t answer, did you? They’ve been calling later and later.”

  “I was practicing. I didn’t answer.”

  Rebecca sat on the edge of the bed. She tossed something in Rodney’s direction. He picked it up and squinted at it. The beret, the cleft palate. Boho Mouse.

  “I’m going to quit,” Rebecca said.

  “What?”

  “The mice. I’m giving up.” She stood and began to undress, dropping clothes on the floor. “I should have finished my dissertation. I could have been a musicology professor. Now all I am is Mommy. Mommy, Mommy, Mommy. A mommy who makes stuffed animals.” She went into the bathroom. Rodney heard her brushing her teeth, washing her face. She came out again and got into bed.

  After a long silence, Rodney said, “You can’t give up.”

  “Why not? You’ve always wanted me to.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “Why?”

  Rodney swallowed. “These mice are our only hope.”

  “You know what I did tonight?” Rebecca said. “First I took the mouse out of the trash. Then I unpicked the stitches and took out the musk pellets. And then I filled it with cinnamon pellets and stitched it back up. That’s how I spent my evening.”

  Rodney held the mouse to his nose.

  “Smells good,” he said. “These mice are destined for greatness. You’re going to make us a million bucks.”

  “If I make a million bucks,” Rebecca said, “I’ll pay off your clavichord.”

  “Deal,” said Rodney.