Traveling Sprinkler

by Nicholson Baker

  “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.”

  • • •

  AND 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.

  Twenty-eight

  I SANG MYSELF HOARSE THIS MORNING, working for two hours on the harmonies in “Marry Me.” I had that strange mental clarity you get sometimes when you haven’t had a shower and you haven’t had enough sleep. Right now it’s noon and very hot and I’m parked in a bit of shade at the edge of the hospital parking lot. Roz is probably in surgery at this moment. This is awful. The only thing I can compare this to is scenes in old movies where men are waiting to hear that their wife has had a baby. But we’re not having a baby. That’s just the way it is.

  You hear a lot about the poet’s voice. Swinburne’s voice as opposed to Wallace Stevens’s voice, as opposed to Hopkins’s voice, as opposed to, say, Tony Hoagland’s voice. There’s an anthology called The Voice of the Sea, filled with sea poems. But what does it mean to say you have a voice when you’re a poet? When you have deliberately melted away your voice, and you’re left with nothing but the wire armature? All the wax, all the bones and muscle of the sound, are gone. There’s a moment in The Fly, David Cronenberg’s movie, toward the end, where the big humanoid fly squirts some acid on a man’s arm. It burns away the man’s arm down to the bone.

  That’s what happens when you write down a sentence, or a stanza. When you think of it, you imagine it in all its fleshed-out, full-voiced spoken plenitude. It’s a fat, healthy living thing that comes out of a throat, made up of movements of tongue and mouth and jaw. And tiny meetings of flesh. The little vagina in the throat clenches, and air comes pushing up through it, and oooh! There it goes, up into the mouth, where it’s manipulated by the lips and tongue, the way a balloon is twisted into funny shapes by a clown at a children’s birthday party.

  So it comes into being as an audible phrase, as a living heavy healthy plump fleshy thing. For instance, Yeats: “Oh cruel death, give three things back / Sang a bone upon the shore.” And then a strange thing happens that the poet does, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing. The poet says, No, thanks, I don’t want the flesh, I want the bones. I want only the words. Because there’s this nifty notation system that we’ve developed, and it’s quite sophisticated. It uses twenty-six symbols, and those symbols are able to record each word that I’m speaking, and even to record, in a crude way, with the help of commas and semicolons and periods, some of the nuances of the pauses between
my words. So I’m going to roll it all out as bones. I’m going to take this living thing and I’m going to render it, boil it down. Once there was sound, and now there are words on a page.

  So then you publish your poem, all boiled down, all white bones. And readers come along years later and say that the interesting thing about so-and-so’s “voice” is X. Even though they may never have heard the poet’s voice. What they’ve done is they have extrapolated. They’ve supplied their own guesses about how a person like this poet would speak, and they have managed to reclothe, or reincarnate, that printed skeleton in flesh. And of course I’m fine with that. It has to happen, and there are good things about it because the eye is a bullet train and can read quickly. It’s easier to read with the eye than to listen to somebody speak. But there are also losses, because your reconstruction of the poet’s voice may be all wrong.

  An anthropologist will take a few surviving pieces of a Neanderthal’s skull—a cheekbone and a bit of jawbone—and he’ll build out a whole skull from that, and he’ll use modeling clay to flesh out the extrapolated skull with sinews and muscles and cheeks, and when he’s done he thinks he is looking at the face of a Neanderthal. He doesn’t know if he’s right. He thinks he is. We want to believe him. But he’s never seen a Neanderthal.

  He could be completely wrong. If you go to Planet Fitness and study the differences in the way flesh hangs off people’s bodies, you know that he is almost certainly somewhat wrong. Was it a fat Neanderthal? Or “Neandertal,” with a hard t? There’s no way to know. Presumably there were a few overweight Neanderthals. All it takes is some dead mammoths at the foot of a cliff and an interest in eating.

  So there are losses incurred when you go from the spoken universe of sound envelopes that start and stop and die away, that can be looked at on an oscilloscope, to this whole other universe, which is hooks and eyes of code on some sort of page or screen. The page or screen is white, and the shapes on it are black—or vice versa, if you invert the colors for night reading, as I do. We learned to read the code sometime around the age of six, and we’re pretty good at it, and eventually we stop moving our lips. We think of the denatured words as the distillation of everything essential. We embrace the denaturing, and we develop prose styles that are so conventionalized, so depersonalized, that they fit well with the fact that all the sound flesh has been melted off.

  Take the journalistic style of The New York Times, on its front page. It uses stock phrases like “said yesterday,” and you really can’t tell one writer from another. If you talked to each of the reporters who wrote articles for the front page, you’d realize immediately that they are very different, intelligent people. Some of them you’d like quite a lot, and some of them you might like less. You would know a great deal about them, if you talked to each of them for a minute, or if you heard them explaining what they were writing about in their articles. All that voicedness is gone—each of their “today”s is exactly the same. Everyone says “today” or “yesterday” the same on the page, because it is the same number of letters, the same typestyle. And yet each of those reporters says “yesterday,” and understands yesterday, differently. There are a thousand different ways to say “hello,” but there’s only one way to say it in print. That’s what we’re losing.

  And that’s what music is all about. Music is about the idea that one cellist’s A is going to sound slightly different from another cellist’s A, and if you have six or seven or twelve cellos in a row, they’re going to sound different from six trombones in a row. Donald Sutherland used to do the voiceovers for Volvo commercials. We never saw his face, but we knew it was Sutherland—he said “airbags” differently from anyone else. Marvin Gaye sings “ooh” differently from the way Keri Noble sings “ooh.” Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” is very different from Boyz II Men’s “Yesterday.” My “Marry me” is different from Cary Grant’s “Marry me.”

  • • •

  AT FOUR I SAW LUCY leave from the main exit with Harris—I was certain it was Harris because I’d studied his picture on the Medicine Ball website. He was smiling. The two of them shook hands and drove away in separate cars. My cellphone plinked. It was Lucy. “Everything went well,” she said. “She’s very groggy but she’s doing fine. She’s sleeping now.”

  “Oh good, that’s good, that’s good,” I said. I took a deep breath and drove to RiverRun Books—they’ve relocated to a smaller space—and bought a copy of Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Volume Two to give to Roz when she got home. A woman who works there runs a blog called Write Place, Write Time where writers send in photographs of their work areas and describe them. I keep hoping she’ll ask me to contribute so that I can take a picture of my car, but she hasn’t yet.

  I ordered the Enchiladas Banderas at Margarita’s—no meat in honor of Roz—and then I went to Planet Fitness. On the way home I was stopped by a cop because I didn’t use my left-turn signal at a deserted intersection. His siren yipped once and I saw the flashing. I whispered, “What the fuck did I do? What, you dick-fucking shitasser?”

  I heard a door thump closed. I put on my hazard lights and unrolled the window all the way. I considered hurriedly wiping my face, so I wouldn’t look sweaty, but thought it might seem suspicious.

  “Do you know why I stopped you?” the cop said, shining a flashlight.

  “No,” I said. The cop was about twenty-three, trying to be authoritative and professional. Newly trained.

  He said, “You didn’t signal when you turned left. Also you were driving slowly.”

  “Oh gee, I’m sorry, Officer.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “No, not recently.”

  “Please get out of the car.”

  The cop offered me a seat on his front bumper, where there was a little black ledge, and he spent a while checking my license and registration. Then he came out holding a ballpoint pen. He pointed his flashlight at my face and moved the ballpoint pen back and forth. “I’m going to ask you to keep your head still and follow the tip of the pen with your eyes,” he said.

  I watched the ballpoint go back and forth, sometimes eclipsing the flashlight. It was a Pilot G-2 fine-point pen. I felt shifty, like the corner-glancing cherub in the Christmas card.

  “That’s the kind of pen I use,” I said.

  “Hm,” he said.

  He moved the pen way over to the left and I strained to follow it. My eyeballs wobbled. “You’re exceeding the limits of my vision,” I said. “I feel like Richard Nixon at the optometrist.”

  “I know, that’s how it works,” he said. “Are you sure you haven’t been drinking?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I would remember. I spent most of today at the hospital. A friend of mine just had a hysterectomy.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “Yes, she is.” He passed the pen back and forth again, and then he gave me a long look. “You can go back to your car now.” I got up and he walked with me. He said, “Can you please tell me why you have a bottle of beer near your seat?”

  “What bottle of beer?” I said, puzzled. I opened the door and saw what he’d seen. “It’s Pellegrino,” I said, pulling it out. “Sparkling water. I drink it after I go to Planet Fitness.”

  “All right,” he said, shining his flashlight on it. He handed me a ticket. “I’m giving you a warning for making a left turn without signaling.”

  “Okay, thanks, sorry.”

  “Have a good evening, and remember your turn signals. People need to know where you’re going.”

  “I will. Thanks again.”

  I drove away. I lit a Fausto, puffed it, and cackled.

  Twenty-nine

  I’VE TALKED TO LUCY—who has, by the way, red hair and a faint midwestern accent. Roz is home from the hospital and she’s sleeping a lot. I’m going to call her tomorrow to say hello.

  I spent all afternoon playing Logic’s Steinw
ay Hall Piano. I didn’t use any other instruments. By playing slowly and then speeding it up, and by adding one line over another, I could sound a little like Glenn Gould, which is a powerful feeling. After that I experimented with some slow ninth chords, and I got something going that I liked, and I put some words to the chords: “I saw you / I heard your voice / And then one day I knew / I loved you.” Another love song. At around noon, the Axiom keyboard developed a problem: Middle C wouldn’t play. I looked up “Axiom silent key” on some discussion forums. Apparently it’s a known problem. There’s a loose connection somewhere, and a key, often middle C, will just stop speaking. This is frustrating if you’re trying to compose a piece of music with a middle C. I thought I was going to have to drive back to Best Buy and return the keyboard. Then I found a video in which someone posted a solution: You squeeze hard on the two sides of the plastic near the mod wheel. I tried it and it worked perfectly. I’m overjoyed, because I really like this keyboard. Just give it a squeeze.

  Glenn Gould, you know, used to sing along while he played Bach. He was a hero of mine when I was in high school. I liked his clean staccato playing style. Later, when I got into Debussy’s Preludes and Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, I was less sure about him. He wrote a fugue called “So You Want to Write a Fugue.” It’s got a funny title and good lyrics, but it isn’t all that original a piece of music. Gould was a performer, not a creator. He was cold all the time. He took pills and he wore scarves and hats and coats indoors. The film about him, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, begins with him standing on a windswept ice field. What was missing from Gould’s art was very simple: love. His jumpy playing style showed that—or no, that’s a cheap shot. He sat very low in front of the piano and did beautiful things to it.

  Nowadays for Bach’s keyboard music I like a pianist named András Schiff. He’s also a bit of an eccentric, but he has a much more legato playing style—“legato” means “tied together.” One note hands things off in a bucket brigade to the next. Schiff doesn’t believe in scales and Czerny études. He practices every day by playing the music he actually likes, for instance Bach’s two-part inventions. He’s a believer in silences. He said in an interview that when he gives a concert, he sometimes wishes that nobody would applaud. Play it, finish it, and let the music’s close contrapuntal reasoning live on for a while in the audience’s mind. Some of his Bach recordings begin with an unusually long silence.