Traveling Sprinkler

by Nicholson Baker

  Twenty-three

  OH, ME. That good, good woman. I spent all morning reading the message boards in hysterectomy support groups. A lot of women said that having a hysterectomy was the best decision they’d ever made. Others were unhappy because they’d wanted to have a second child, or a third child. Or just a child.

  Once on a hot night when Roz and I were watching a documentary called Dark Days, I got the big square fan and plugged it in and said we could cool our loins with it. Then I asked her whether women had loins, as men did. Was it a gender-neutral term? She said, “I think so, technically. It’s anything in the upper thigh area and anything that is carried or tucked away between the thighs.” Then she said, “When I was little I always misread ‘loin cloth’ as ‘lion cloth.’ I thought Hercules killed the lion and then wore the fur over his privates. The dyslexic mistake is part of the meaning.”

  “He girded his lion,” I said. I turned on the fan. The documentary was about people living in shacks in an underground rail tunnel in New York City. It was a very good movie, but it made Roz sad. Here is a world with so much disparity and so much striving and suffering, she thought, and what am I doing with my life? I think that movie was part of what got her to apply for the producer job at the radio show.

  • • •

  I WORKED for several hours today on a new song called “Honk for Assistance.” I saw the sign at a convenience store, near the ice machine, and I thought, Now, that is a dance song, in the tradition of Midnight Star. I sampled a few honks from my Kia’s horn and set up a beat and fingered up some harmony using an instrument I hadn’t tried before, the Gospel Organ, which has a slight percussive sound in the attack phase of each note. I added more chords on a Mark II keyboard and some homegrown handclaps and some rhythms made with the Funk Boogie Kit. And then I wondered idly whether somebody had already made a song out of “Honk for Assistance.” Yes, they had. The composer’s name was Tom Clark and it was on an EP called Nervous. It’s pretty good. No words. Foolish me: You must never look anything up on iTunes while you’re working on a song. Otherwise you’ll stop and you’ll say it’s all been done.

  I need money. Money always helps. I called Gene and told him that my book of poems, formerly called Misery Hat, was turning out to be something different. It was now a book about music.

  “Ah, okay.”

  “It seems to be about trying to write dance songs. Also protest songs and love songs. Pop songs in general.”

  “Maybe we could do an enhanced ebook and include the songs.”

  That depended, I said, on whether the songs were any good or not.

  “Whether they’re good doesn’t matter,” Gene said. “Process not product, as they say about schoolchildren. Just give it the Chowder spin. And stay away from the misery hat.”

  When that check comes from Allstate I’m going to buy Roz a new canoe. That’s the least I can do.

  • • •

  WHEN DEBUSSY WAS YOUNG he wanted to write music for women to sing. He wrote love songs and he wrote erotic songs. He set some of Pierre Louÿs’s Chansons de Bilitis to music, Louÿs who late in life wrote a poem called “The Trophy of Legendary Vulvas”—what a title! When I was young and wanted to be a composer like Debussy, I paid no attention to any of his songs. I couldn’t listen to them. I listened only to his piano and orchestral music. The only vocals of his that I could stand were the wordless vowels that the sirens sing in the Nocturnes, and even those I wasn’t sure about. I still can’t listen to his songs with any pleasure. The words seem pushed and pulled and crowded by the music. But that’s my loss.

  Everything for Debussy was really about sex and smoking. Sex, smoking, the grand piano, and the English Channel. Those were his mainstays. He fell in love with his singers all through his life. One of his earliest songs repeats the line “The sea is deep” several times—it’s dedicated to Madame Vasnier, a singer. He may or may not have had an affair with Mary Garden, the woman who sang in his opera Pelléas and Mélisande. In her memoir, Mary Garden says nothing happened between them, but she’s not convincing. Debussy liked Scottish women with gentle voices who hung around wells, and he liked women who had flaxen hair—he wrote a lovely piano prelude called “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair,” which was inspired by his first wife, Lilly, who wounded herself with a handgun after Debussy took up with the brown-haired woman who became his second wife. He liked brown-haired women, too. He just plain liked women. Women and moonlight and vers libre and smoking strong French cigarettes. And then he died broke and miserable. His new wife’s father had disinherited her.

  You never want to have cancer down there, where Debussy had it. Cancer of the rectum. Cancer of the anus. I guess we would now call it colon cancer.

  But thank heaven Debussy was poor, because the poverty forced him to finish twelve preludes in 1910. I remember the first time I heard the sixth prelude, “Footsteps in the Snow.” I immediately wanted to understand how he did it, and I couldn’t. He was using a different scale, the so-called whole-tone scale—that was part of it. Instead of a normal scale, which has a few half tones thrown in here and there, he used a scale composed entirely of whole tones. But anyone can do that. He made it sound cold and bleak, with wind-eroded oval footprints. I remember dropping the needle down and hearing, along with the scratched vinyl, the empty world of whiteness and snow and almost effaced footprints that he created.

  Maurice Ravel knew immediately how good Debussy’s Preludes were. Ravel was an inspired pianist, and he played them for himself in May 1910, just when they were published. He was struggling at the time with the orchestration of a piece of his own that was going slowly, and he hadn’t always gotten along with Debussy, but he put all that aside. “I will console myself by playing Debussy’s Preludes once again,” he wrote to a friend. “They are wonderful masterpieces. Do you know them? Thank you, and cordially in haste, Maurice Ravel.”

  Twenty-four

  HELLO, HELLO. I’m sitting by the side of the Piscataqua River admiring the power station across the way, with its beautiful white plumes of steam or smoke that warm the earth. The beach that I’m sitting at is called Dead Duck Beach. It’s misty again today, with a determined but thwarted sun leaving a splotch of brightness on the water, which is salty, because the Piscataqua is a tidal river. About a hundred yards from me a little boy wearing a bright red vest is throwing handfuls of sand into the water and calling out things I can’t hear.

  I had one of the worst nights of my life last night. I went to dinner at my sister’s house and was amazed all over again by her two tall grown children. I looked at them and thought, I should have been a better uncle to these two extraordinary children. My sister never asks me about the money that I owe her. I owe her money from when I was working on the anthology. I’ve got to pay her back.

  Fortunately she’s got a new husband who has lots of money because he was a patent lawyer in Washington for many years. He said he stopped patent lawyering because the system had become hopelessly corrupt—the patent office was interested in making billions in fees by issuing as many patents as possible, and the lawyers wanted ambiguities and mistakes in the patents granted so that they could bring infringement suits against one another. Also his eyes were bad and he didn’t want to stare at the computer screen all day looking at scanned versions of old patents.

  I was sad to learn that the patent office was corrupt, and I ate too much of the eggplant tapenade I brought as a present and was poisoned by the garlic, and when I got home to bed five thousand unrelated thoughts traipsed through my brain and I worried about Roz and grieved over not having a child and got almost no sleep. Finally I went down to the kitchen and smoked a Fausto and made a dance loop and a serviceable chorus that went, in a ZZ Top sort of accent, “Take a ride in my boat.” I went to bed at five a.m. and I woke up and coughed a lot. I decided that I would go to the convenience store to get some cough drops. Honk for assistance. While I was unwrappi
ng a cough drop I remembered something Roz always used to say before she went out for a shop at the supermarket. She’d say, in a hopeful, cheery, loving voice, “Anything you need at the store that I don’t know about?” The memory of her voice skewered clean through me and I thought, This is ridiculous. I know Roz. I know that woman. I know everything about her. She knows everything about me. We’ve lived together. We’ve been canoeing together. We’ve watched large basking toads jump off a sunlit branch on the river as we floated by. This doctor she’s dating now hardly knows her. He hasn’t been canoeing with her. He’s no good for her. It’s as simple as that. Tony Hoagland indeed.

  I’ve filmed some boats with my video camera, thinking that I could make a YouTube video of “Take a Ride in My Boat” if I had some verses. I used some of the three-syllable phrases Roz had sent me, adjusting them here and there:

  hear the word

  get up soon

  kiss the lips

  bite the moon

  feel the fruit

  find your way

  sail the boat

  dream of me

  Take a ride in my boat

  Take a ride

  Take a ride in my boat

  fix the text

  take the stick

  crack the nut

  make it slick

  chomp the bit

  drink the beer

  wipe the spit

  check the gear

  crack the nut and drop the pants

  milk the meat and learn to dance

  Take a ride in my boat

  Take a ride

  Take a ride in my boat

  Take a ride in my boat

  Take a ride in my boat

  Take a ride in my boat

  • • •

  I TOOK THE CAR in to a repair place to be inspected. They looked at it for an hour and the man said it needed new calipers and pads and several other expensive things. The total cost would be about twenty-five hundred dollars. “For that car, I don’t think it’s worth it,” he said.

  “I see, okay,” I said.

  “Just call me Dr. Carvorkian,” he said.

  I took it to another repair place farther away. When I got there the head of service was in the glass-walled waiting room sitting next to an elderly woman. I waited for about five minutes at the service counter, and I saw the man nodding sympathetically, listening to a long story that the woman was telling him. Finally he came out and said, “Sorry, I was talking to that lady.” I told him my problem with the brakes. He was a young-faced, perky, smiley man, and he said they’d take a look.

  I went into the waiting room. The old woman was still there waiting. “It’s nice and cool in here,” I said.

  “Yes, it is, almost too cool,” she said. She asked me what kind of car I had, and I told her. “We’ve always had American cars,” she said. “But my husband passed away in 2006 and last year a woman backed into the trunk of my old Lincoln. The damage wasn’t too bad, but when I got home the car caught fire in the garage and it was totaled. I bought a new Lincoln but I don’t like it as much.”

  Then she went away and I waited an hour. The perky man came in and said, “Looks good, there was almost nothing. Your brake fluid was a little low and the brake lines are rusty, so we’re going to need to keep an eye on that. But the calipers are almost new, so that’s good.” He passed me a sheet of paper. The total for labor was $77.90 and the total for parts was $14.35. So my car has passed inspection and it’s good for another year. Another year of life in my car! You just need to find the right serviceman.

  • • •

  I INVITED Nan and Raymond over for a second round of sushi, hoping that Raymond might teach me some tricks with pitch bending, but Nan said no. Raymond was in Boston seeing his girlfriend at Emerson College. I asked Nan how life was treating her.

  “Oh, my mother died,” she said softly.

  I said how sorry I was.

  “I’m going to miss her. She was a real fighter. She just had too many different things going wrong at the same time. My sister was there. She said it was peaceful.” Nan was going back to Toronto briefly, she said, to help sort things out and sign forms, but the memorial service wouldn’t be for several weeks. “Fortunately Chuck has lots of frequent flyer miles.”

  “You were a good daughter to her.”

  I heard her sigh. After a while, she said, “I hope so. I guess I’ll be needing some help with the chickens, if you could.”

  “Absolutely, glad to do it. The rooster seems to like me. And I’m serious about watering the tomatoes.”

  “That would be nice, thank you. And ask Raymond about his songs, if you get a chance.”

  Twenty-five

  HELLO AND WELCOME to Chowder’s Poetry Hopalong. I’m your host and in-home chiropodist, Paul Chowder. We’re in my kitchen, and I’m talking into a seven-hundred-dollar microphone. My ex-girlfriend is probably going to have a major operation, and my neighbor’s mother has died. So that’s what’s happening, and it’s serious business.

  Out of worry or trouble or despair must come some enlightenment. Maybe that’s what a chord progression can teach us. Out of the shuffling mess of dissonance comes a return to pax, to the three-note triad of something basic and pure and unable to be argued with. Chong: the chord. E flat major. A flat major. C sharp minor. Chords where only the middle finger is down on the flat ground of the white keys, while up on top the pinky maybe can’t resist adding an impish hint of misdirection—an added seventh or ninth. These are just fancy terms for willful blurring—they’re like the times when the attractive magician’s helper in the leotard disappears into the box and the magician plunges all his sharp swords in, and then she reappears with outstretched arms, smiling her E flat major smile, unscathed after her chordal perils. Debussy’s preludes go all over the place, but they’re tonal—they always come back home.

  Music notation relies on things called sharps and things called flats. A sharp looks sharp and spiky—it’s the pound sign on the typewriter, the one above the number 3. A flat looks melted, like a droopy wasp’s abdomen with a line sticking up from it. The round side of the flat symbol points to the right on the stave, whereas the water-balloon notes all point to the left, looking back at where they’ve been. If you see a sharp printed in front of a note, you know to look sharp and shift that note’s pitch up by a half step, whereas if you see a flat in front of a note, you know to droop down flat a half step. So if you see a good-boy G on the stave with a wasp in front of it, that’s a G flat. That’s chess notation. It works, and we can thank the monks and the madrigalists for it. But when you’re making up a melody, you don’t think about sharps and flats. You wave them away. You don’t even necessarily think about chord progressions.

  There’s a famous chord progression that goes, in Roman numerals, I, V, vi, IV, I. Meaning that if you’re in C major it begins with a major chord based on the first note of the scale, C, then goes to a major chord built on the fifth note of the scale, G, then to a minor chord on the sixth note, A, then to a major chord on the fourth note, F, then back to a C chord. Schumann used this chord progression, Brahms used it, Elton John used it, the Beatles used it in “Let It Be,” Jason Mraz used it in “I’m Yours,” and Alphaville and Mr. Hudson and Jay-Z used it in “Forever Young,” and on and on. A group called the Axis of Awesome made a medley of many songs based on these chords—fifty million people have watched versions of the Axis of Awesome medley on YouTube. It’s worth watching.

  You may think you have something extremely useful when you know how to play these four chords, and you do. But when you’re at the point of making up a tune that’s never been heard before, and finding words for it to shoulder, then knowing the chords doesn’t help that much. You still have to feel your way singingly through.

  • • •

  ROZ’S CELLPHONE WENT right to vo
icemail, so I called her home number. Her doctor friend Harris answered. I recognized his voice from the radio. I said, “Hello, this is Paul Chowder. Is that—Harris?”

  “Yes,” said Harris.

  “Hi, Harris. I admire the work you do.”

  “Thanks. I’ve read your poems. Roz gave me one of your collections.”

  “Really?” I said. “Which one?”

  “I think it had a blue cover. Or maybe it was orange. Or green. Was it green?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “Roz is at a medical appointment right now—can I give her a message?”

  “I just wanted to say hello.”

  “I’ll tell her you called.”

  “Is she doing all right?”

  “Yes, I think she is,” said Harris.

  Early the next morning it was misty and humid. I went to Planet Fitness and parked next to an empty beer bottle. Inside I listened to another Sodajerker podcast on my headphones. The two hosts, both songwriters with strong Liverpool accents, interviewed a fast-talking writer-producer named Narada Michael Walden. I’d never heard of him, but it turned out that he’d been part of big hits for Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin, after drumming in exotic time-signatures for the Mahavishnu Orchestra. He cowrote Jermaine Stewart’s “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off.” He came up with Aretha Franklin’s “Who’s Zoomin’ Who” by interviewing her on the phone. Aretha said that when she goes to a club and she sees an attractive man in the corner, she checks him out while he checks her out and she’s like, “Who’s zoomin’ who?” That became the song.

  The Sodajerkers asked Narada Michael Walden if he liked working with women. He said yes, because they’re beautiful, with beautiful smiles and nice smells—but because they’re divas, with precious living hearts, sometimes they call for special treatment. For instance Whitney Houston. Once Walden was working with Whitney after she and Eddie Murphy split up. He’d also produced a song with Eddie Murphy, “Put Your Mouth on Me.” So he knew Eddie. He said to Whitney Houston: “Do you want me to go beat up Eddie?” After that, he said, Whitney knew Narada really cared about her, and she sang her loving life out for him in the studio and produced jewels and diamonds of melodic elaboration.