by Darren Greer
“Then it’s better you don’t know. Any problems with that?”
It was a risk for her. I could see that. And she wasn’t planning to kill him, whoever he was. She was just keeping tabs. I could tell at a glance she was that type of person. A tab-keeper. A control freak. If she had kids, they would grow up hating her guts and checking call display for her number every time the phone rang. I hoped for her sake, and for theirs, that she didn’t have kids.
What concerned me more was the money. A hundred dollars a week was a lot for an unrecognized literary genius like me. I said I’d do it.
“Good,” she said. She handed me a piece of paper. It had been in her hand all along. When I looked at the paper it became clear why she chose me. She must have planned it, though the matters of why and how would only to occur to me later. Coincidences happen only when writers make them happen. In real life they hardly ever do, and are never so neat and complete. I thought it was a joke at first, that she was being a vengeful bitch after all. The address written in blue pen in Dagnia’s graceful right-slanted script was my own.
“Not your own,” said Dagnia. “Check the apartment number.”
She was right. The apartment number was different. Two instead of one. Dagnia wanted me to spy on the penis named Dan or Dean.
Whatever.
I looked up and the Black Widow was smiling.
LIII
This is how it happened.
Dean and Dagnia (don’t you just love an alliterative relationship?) had been living together for two years. He was a pianist and she was a novelist, so they got invited to all the best parties. They met at Dean’s recital at the university, because one of Dagnia’s friends had a friend who was graduating and had dragged her along. Dagnia didn’t remember what the friend-ofa-friend looked like or even what she played that night. What she did remember was the last recitalist, Dean, who stopped the evening cold with a rendition of Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit.” He’d gone on to play several Chopin études, and finished off the evening with a song by Nina Simone — “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” — which he even sang, though recital rules required him to stick to baroque, classical, romantic and early modern and not say a word. In the middle of the Simone he managed to seamlessly insert a single-note version of “Happy Birthday to Me.” He had already told the audience he turned thirty that day (so much for my sixty-year-old-man theory). Dagnia fell in love with him on the spot. So did everyone else. He got a standing ovation from the audience, a unified perfect score from the judges, and, as a bonus, a date from the Black Widow.
She marched up to him almost as soon as he got down off the stage, and my guess is he had no choice.
That’s all Dagnia would tell me about the good parts of their relationship. I can imagine the rest. He was poor. She was medium well-off. He had his clothes, his upright precision-tuned Steinway (strike two: ixnay on the Kohler and amplellcay) and a run-down bachelor in the east end. She had a two-bedroom loft with window seats, polished hardwood floors, lots of light, and an Intel Pentium III with unlimited Internet access and the seductive promise that he could open his own Hotmail account.
Ah, the joys of modern courtship.
LIV
Then the whole program crashed.
LV
I was not allowed to ask Dagnia any questions, but I refused to do it until she at least told me why he was now living in the run-down apartment again. (A different street mind you, but all these places have a way of all looking the same.)
“He felt I was smothering him,” she said.
“And are you?”
“What do you think?” Dagnia said. “I’m hiring you to spy on him. But it’s for his own good. His talent is precious. I think he’ll waste it unless he’s with me. He’ll definitely waste it if he starts seeing those bimbos he’s so fond of.”
“Do you love him?”
Dagnia took offence at this. “Typewritten reports,” she said. “One hundred dollars in return. You don’t need to know anything.”
As a bonus, Dagnia said I could write a preliminary report, seeing as he had been above me for two weeks now already. I told her I didn’t have much to write. I hadn’t even seen what he looks like yet.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Just describe the general situation.”
So the next morning, instead of pulling one of the Christmas losers from my file drawer, I began Dagnia’s report. The next Thursday at writers’ group I handed her this:
Instalment Number One
Dagnia’s Love Interest:
A Penis in Voluntary Confinement
by Cameron Dodds
Dagnia grimaced when she saw the subtitle. “Quit the commentary. Straight reporting, and nothing cute.”
“Fuck you,” I told her. “You just told me to write the reports. You didn’t say how I was to write them. You want me to write, you get bombast and sleaze. That’s my style, baby.”
She wasn’t happy about it, but she gave in. “Just try to stick to the facts,” she said.
Ahem. Let me begin again.
Instalment Number One
Dagnia’s Love Interest:
A Penis in Voluntary Confinement
by Cameron Dodds
For you who are unaware, a penis is my appellation for a pianist. Besides the obvious alliterative similarities, they have other things in common. Despite the mythology built up around them, they both are more than usually short and ineffectual. Both are adored by both sexes. Both are often erect — though admittedly one only at a piano bench and the other anywhere, anytime. And both have a habit of waking me up in the morning.
I have yet to see Penis Boy, but by Christ I hear him. I’m not, by and large, a fan of classical music (though I do wish he’d play that Nina Simone song you told me about). Still, the first couple of days that I awoke to the gentle sprinkle of notes sifting down from his apartment, I was charmed despite myself. Lime Street could never be mistaken for Bohemia Avenue. It’s strictly working class — sewage guys and donut shops and the occasional Hasidic Jew to add ethnic spice. Street musicians are limited to toothless old hags who’ve found a ukelele in a garbage heap and haven’t yet learned how to play it. Lime Street’s idea of art is soft porn. Despite my choosing to live in this cultural desert because the rent is cheap and my landlady is pretty cool, it was heartening to know that I had above me, living in similar disgrace and poverty, another struggling artist.
The first morning I heard him play I didn’t fight it. I made coffee and sat down cross-legged in the middle of my living room floor and listened. I don’t know classical music at all, and I have no idea what he was playing, but it sounded very serious and pretty. A fast run, or trill of notes, then a slow walk across a thick interwoven carpet of minor chords. After about a half-hour of this I got up, went to my computer, and began writing. I was writing a story about a gay man who feels compelled to start a commune of hustlers and gets the shit beat out of him for his efforts. It is a melancholy tale, and I found the music of my mysterious upstairs neighbour suited the mood of my story perfectly. I wrote more that day than I had in a while, because I couldn’t stop while the penis was playing. Every time he stopped, I would stop and, thinking I was done for the day, would go to shut down my computer. But every time I made a move he would start up again and with a nod to his industry and dedication, I would belly up to my desk, not to be outdone by any amateur penis.
Here Dagnia, who was standing by the coffee machine skimming my report, looked up. “This is about you,” she said. “Not about him. I’m paying you to write about him.”
“You’re not paying me by the word,” I told her. “So what does it matter? It’s about both me and him. Keep reading.”
Dagnia shook her head. “Fucking writers,” she said, and went back to the report.
For the first few days everything was fine. I was getting up earlier and earlier each morning, even though I don’t get home until three from my job, and I was getting tired. But I w
as getting more writing done than usual. The penis’s habit is to start at nine and play through until twelve. Then he will take a break for an hour or two and sit down again for another three hours. By then, it is time for me to go to work. On Thursdays I have to quit before he does to go to my “pass” group. The first Thursday I regretted abandoning our little one-sided competition — keyboard to keyboard. By the second I was relieved, and this Thursday I couldn’t wait to get out of there. The problem with the penis is the lack of variation in his soul. He has chosen perfection over experimentation. That piece of music that seemed so pretty the first time I heard it? Drivel. Endlessly repeated drivel that worms its way into my sleep in the middle of the night and hangs there — a three-hundred-year-old advertising jingle that won’t go away. He works on it from beginning to end first thing in the morning. At ten he starts all over again. Every hour, every day for a week, the same fucking song. Last Tuesday I took my Sony walkman, which I keep in case any great thoughts or phrases hit me and I have no pencil or pen handy (none ever do), and held it up to the ceiling with the record button on. I taped ten minutes of his private performance, took it down to BIG BAD RECORDS on Philmore Avenue, and played it for one of the clerks in the classical music section. The kid couldn’t have been more than twenty, but he knew exactly what Dean was playing.
“Chopin,” he told me. “Sonata Number 2 in B-flat Minor — Opus 35. It’s the scherzo movement. Where did you get this? You go to a concert or something?”
“No,” I told him wearily. “The concerts come to me.”
I bought the sonata on cd and listened to the whole thing, just so I’d know where I was in this week’s program. Turns out Dean practises one movement per week from the sonata. The first week it was the introduction. Last week it was the scherzo. Guess what it is this week?
Dagnia, as if I was speaking to her instead of writing all of this down in a hundred-dollar report, looked up at me, smiling her Black Window smile. “The Funeral March,” she said. I nodded, and repeated it back to her.
The Funeral March.
For reasons I won’t bore you with the Funeral March is not a song I want to hear. It is especially not a song I want to hear over and over every morning when I wake up. My cat, Juxta, is going crazy. Even when Dean is not playing I hear it — those sonorous, doleful, now-familiar notes clanging like doomsday in my brain when I walk to work or go to bed at night. No amount of silence, no amount of street noise, can drown them out. Now I wake up before he starts, my teeth on edge, waiting for the first opening crash of sustained chords, the slow musical crawl towards death, and the final muffled finale as he tosses shovelful after shovelful of depressing notes down upon my head. When you found me searching through the self-improvement section I was looking for a way to block him out. A way to find some inner centre of peace, a core of silence, where nothing on earth can disturb me. Zen Buddhism for Dummies.
LVII
Dagnia looked confused, then angry, as she finished up my report. “What is this?” she said. “I’m not paying you to wax poetic here. I’m paying you to spy on my boyfriend. I don’t understand any of this last paragraph.”
“You wouldn’t,” I said.
She softened, as quickly as that. One minute she was going to clout me, and the next she realized she still needed me. I bet the praying mantis whispers sweet nothings to her guy just before she twists his head off like a pop-top. The Black Widow washes your socks and underwear just before she injects you in the neck with a sackful of deadly venom. Dagnia folded the two pages and slipped them into the back pocket of her jeans.
“Next time,” she said, “find out a little bit more about him. What he’s doing. Where he’s going. Be a spy, for Christ’s sake. Not a gutless downstairs wonder with an axe to grind.”
I promised, sleepily, that I would do better, and Dagnia gave me the money — five crisp new twenty-dollar bills that she must have just withdrawn from the Women’s Bank of North America automated teller machine. She left me standing by the coffee machine and returned to her adoring cows in the writers’ circle. I didn’t have the strength to pass that afternoon, so I found a comfortable chair in the philosophy section of BIG BAD BOOKS, the least busy area of any bookstore, and fell asleep for two hours. I was almost late for work. I thought for sure someone would wake me up after only ten minutes and ask me what the hell I thought I was doing falling asleep in a bookstore. Didn’t I have a bed to go home to? But no one did. You could read for free, sleep for free. Hell, if they started serving Maxwell House and Kraft Dinner I’d move into BIG BAD BOOKS and say goodbye to Rose, Amy, and my upstairs penis for good. Oh yeah. Only if they allowed cats. Juxta could sharpen her claws on the spines of books on the lower shelves in the philosophy section.
Jean-Paul Sartre for Dummies.
LVIII
One evening, when no one was around, I photocopied Darrel’s file and took it back to my apartment. Another rule broken — the sacred cow about client confidentiality. Among the staff of the Sally Ann Treatment Centre, a disregard for rules we used to obey was called “getting burned out.”
I was as burned-out as a broken light bulb in a New York City power failure.
You are supposed to tell someone when you feel this way. At the Salvation Army Treatment Centre they don’t fire you for burning out. They give you a two-month vacation, which they called a sabbatical. They even give you sabbatical pay, which is slightly less than your regular salary but more than you can make on unemployment insurance and definitely more than welfare or strike pay.
But telling someone I was felt this way was one of those rules I no longer had any regard for.
LIX
In Darrel’s file I found his counsellor had noted that Darrel felt very guilty about his sister all of his life. He had grown up with her, and hated the fact that she was retarded and the other kids made fun of her. June was three years older than Darrel; she’d just turned thirty-three.
It wasn’t hard to find out which hospital she was in. I just called around to the kind of hospitals that kept severely retarded people penned up and asked for a thirty-three-year old Down’s syndrome patient with the last name Greene. When I finally found the right hospital, way the hell uptown on East 73rd, I simply told them I was June Greene’s brother.
“Darrel?” said the nurse on duty.
“Right,” I said. “How did you know?”
For a minute I thought Darrel might have lied to his counsellor. Perhaps he did visit his sister once in awhile, and this woman knew him. That would really screw up my plans. But she said that she had June’s file open in front of her and Darrel’s name was listed as the only living relative.
Fortunately for me, news travels slow.
“Well,” I said. “What time can I come see her?”
On the other end of the line I could hear papers being shuffled in the background. “June Greene has no registered visitors,” the nurse said finally. “Would you like to register, Darrel?”
“Of course, I would,” I said. “I’m her brother, aren’t I?”
“Yes. But in the seventeen years June has been here she has rarely had a visitor. I’m just surprised that after all this time you’re going to come and see her.”
She had a point. It could seem suspicious, so I made up the best excuse I could think of. “I was in prison,” I told her. “I’ve been there for a long while, and before that reform school, so I haven’t had a lot of time to visit anyone.”
If this fazed the nurse she didn’t give any indication. She asked me to come in and register any time between nine A.M. and four P.M.
“Visiting hours are in the afternoon,” she said. “If you come in after lunch you could register and someone could show you around the facilities. Someone will accompany you on your first several visits, in case June doesn’t recognize you or gets disturbed. I hope that’s all right.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Thank you.”
“And Darrel?” For a second I forgot that I had lied to h
er and wondered if she was talking to someone else on her end of the line.
“Yes,” I said cautiously.
“It’s good you’re coming to visit your sister. She’s not had a visitor in a long while, and I think she will be very glad to see you.”
I thanked the nurse again and hung up the phone, feeling a little guilty at the scam I’d just pulled. June’s baby brother was not going to visit her, though that might have happened if he had lived and got straight enough to see the rightness of it. But by God, someone — even if it was a total stranger — would be paying a visit to poor little June Greene.
I only hoped she was retarded enough not to know the difference.
LX
Instalment Number Two
The Unbearable Rightness of Banging
by Cameron Dodds
Dagnia my friend, you know better than anyone from the writers’ group that I am passive-aggressive by nature. I have little or no tolerance for anyone, and little or no will to cause conflict by making my intolerance known. But I, like everyone else, have my methods.
These are my methods.
1. I have taken to banging on the ceiling with the business end of a Wonder Mop (foam strip removed) when the piece my upstairs neighbour is playing is not to my liking. Not that this makes a difference to your ex-boyfriend. He keeps playing, but my banging does sometimes give him pause and I feel a small glow of triumph at my halting the wheels of musical culture even for just a few minutes. I am becoming quite the aficionado of classical music. I’ve become such an expert that I know now using the term “Classical” to describe anything written before 1900 is a misnomer. A common one, but a misnomer just the same. The cute little clerk at BIG BAD RECORDS taught me this. In fact, he and I are going out for a drink this Friday after he finishes his shift. I don’t think he’s my type (by “my type” I’m assuming you know what I’m referring to, which is why I, unlike my big-mouth editor, don’t want your tits as a souvenir.) But you never can tell. So what if he’s ten years younger? Juliet was twenty years younger than Romeo. According to the silly piece of bombast we refer to as the Bible, Samson was several hundred years older than Delilah when she betrayed him to the Philistines.