by Tim Wynveen
She sat on the corner of her desk and picked up the framed photograph she kept there. It showed Izzy and her parents and brothers posing in front of the house on a summer day. In the background were the barn and the fields and, beyond that, the old chicken coop. Riley and Catherine had their arms around each other. Hank was flexing his muscles like Charles Atlas. Cyrus, a mere infant, was nestled in Izzy’s arms, trying to grab one of her pigtails. Everyone was smiling, Izzy most of all.
HANK INSISTED ON FINDING his own way home from the rec centre, and Ruby wasn’t ready to go back to Orchard Knoll just yet (she had imagined these outings as a chance to unwind a bit), so she drove out to the dock and bought herself a cup of butterscotch ripple from the concession stand. She sat at a picnic table and watched sailboats skate along the horizon. But after a few minutes she started to feel self-conscious, as though she were only pretending to relax. Clucking her tongue at her own foolishness, she got in the car and headed to the farm.
Five minutes later she was back at the house. As she hung her jacket in the front closet, she saw Clarence limp out of the bathroom, wincing with each step. He was struggling to catch his breath and was so unsteady that he had to lean against the wall. She hurried to his side and helped him into his favourite chair in the living room. She knelt beside him, and he placed a trembling hand on hers and said, “Better get me to the hospital.”
IT WASN’T LOST ON RUBY that churches these days were empty while hospitals were overcrowded. Those who live by the flesh, die by the flesh, she figured. For that reason she generally kept her distance from doctors and hospitals. She didn’t believe in annual checkups or running for help at the first sign of a cold or ache. She trusted in the Lord and common sense.
Fortunately, with Clarence’s first two bouts of cancer she’d been able to get him home quickly and on the mend. But this time was different. Right away the doctors had him plugged into monitors and had tubes running down his throat and into his arm and even hooked up to his you-know-what. She wished she could take him back to the farm and nurse him in private. That’s what he needed, what he would have demanded if he were even half himself. Always such a proud man, so proper, he never went anywhere without looking his best, wouldn’t even go to Farm Supply without cleaning his fingernails. It was agony for her to watch him lying in that hospital bed with his disease right out in the open for all to see.
That night she didn’t leave his side to make so much as a single phone call. But someone spread the word, and first thing in the morning Isabel arrived, looking stern and businesslike. Ruby figured she was about to get a scolding.
“It’s like pulling teeth to get answers around here,” Isabel said with some heat. “I had to chase doctors and nurses for half an hour before I got someone to tell me what’s going on.” Then she stopped talking and hugged her aunt. “Poor Ruby,” she murmured.
Isabel had never hugged her aunt, and on some level they both registered that fact. She didn’t regret the show of affection. On the contrary, it seemed to be part of a general trend in her life. With Hank’s return to Wilbury, she was rediscovering her natural sympathies, her need to ache for others, to comfort them beyond the level of friendship. Now, in that grim medicinal space, she felt a sudden and irresistible urge to take care of her aunt and uncle, the closest thing she had to aging parents.
She turned to Clarence then and cupped her hand over her mouth, the message in front of her unmistakably clear. Each of us contained the same terrible truth, and in her uncle, it was rising quietly to the surface.
EIGHT
Jim isn’t exactly thrilled with the way things have worked out. He’s been in New Mexico for a year now and it hasn’t been the sanctuary he anticipated.
At first he’d found reasons to be hopeful. His wife, Elysse, by her own account, had remained faithful, and father and son appeared to have interests in common. Daniel worked at the local radio station as their all-night DJ and resident jingle writer. He played the piano in his spare time and expressed an admiration for Fats Waller. Even so, Jim’s return to the family fold was, in most respects, too late. Elysse and Daniel had no room in their lives for such a complicated shape. They had other plans he was unaware of, and wanted nothing more from him than his name and his shine.
He tried hard to make up for lost time. Every night he went to the radio station with his son. They talked about music but also about family. Daniel had the idea that they should get it all down on tape, father-and-son dialogues. At first Jim was reluctant to do so (he had come to hate microphones and tape machines and mixing consoles), but he agreed for the sake of his son. Each night for weeks he sat in the voice-over booth, with Daniel in the control room, and talked into an ancient Sennheiser until he was hoarse, talked about everything really, about Erie and New York and life on the road, and a million other things, too, from the price of gas to the probability of life on other planets.
Eventually Daniel lost interest in what Jim had to say. When he wasn’t introducing a song or voicing a commercial break, he was splicing tape in a world of his own. Eventually Jim got the feeling his presence was no longer welcome and that, on some level, he’d given his son everything he required.
It was much the same with Elysse. When she opened the door to him that first day, it was like her prayers had been answered. She hugged him and kissed his cheek, ushered him excitedly into the house. She fixed him his favourite meal. She touched his face and hair and, that very first night, even held him in her arms and let him snuggle with her. But soon the bed was off-limits, and anything more than a good-morning peck on the cheek was out of the question. Food started to come from a can. He was relegated to a cot in the drafty bedroom off the back of the house. When he complained, she told him, “This is all the family you deserve.” And those words hurt him terribly because they seemed so true. He deserved little. He had made a mess of everything and knew he was just like his daddy, a dreamer with a madness for leaving.
He had hoped the reunion might turn out differently. He had first come to this place in the desert seeking primary satisfactions—family, love, silence, stillness—but they were not to be. Within weeks of his disappearance, reporters showed up asking questions. They said people wanted to know why he’d abandoned them. And because he was a good man at heart, because he felt responsible, he tried his best to describe what he did not understand. He told them he’d given everything he had, that he no longer possessed words or music. The only thing left was the silence. Yet such was their hunger that they wanted even this, they wanted his silence to be theirs.
He shouldn’t have been surprised. He had always been their tool. When his feelings were raw and hurtful, he gave them The Solo; and sure enough, there were those who created worlds with it, carved paths out of the wilderness. When his ideas were feverish and muddled, he gave them The Door; and lo and behold, empires rose and fell. Now he is an empty shell, with nothing more to give; and his own son, his own wife, wield that emptiness to conjure Heaven. It has been months since he has spoken a word to anyone. The father-son dialogues are a distant memory, and yet his voice goes out each week across the nation. More surprising still, people respond. His son and wife have taken him to see the bonfires, the towering black columns of smoke, crowds of people gathering with vinyl and tape and even book, building mounds of hand-held radios and turntables, speakers and components. He is afraid to ask what these people believe.
And so he has risen in the middle of the night. He has packed his bag, his provisions and tent. Turning his back on the house and trailer, he weaves his way west by the light of the moon. The only sound is that of his own scuffling feet, his own laboured breathing. He feels no wind. He senses no water. He follows no tracks or signs, guided by the unseen, the unfelt, the insubstantial, along a ridge and then down a wide, rocky arroyo as it slopes toward the west. A few miles farther on, the gully widens and forms a desolate plain dotted with coarse grass and weed. There is a profound stillness here, away from the hum and thrum of the family c
ompound, an almost frightening hush. He stops to rest and thinks that this might be what he has been searching for, the kind of emptiness from which all things are possible. He sets up camp. He sits in his tent and sips his water, nibbles his food. The silence around him rivals his own.
When the sun is up the next morning, he peers out at the heat, watching as the desert sends its many inhabitants to pay their respects—lizards and scorpions, small dusty birds and, around sunset, a female coyote. He tosses her bits of cheese and salami and crusts of bread but only succeeds in driving her away. Later he is visited by a small owl. Above him he senses, but does not see, bats fluttering. As he grows accustomed to the surroundings, he notices, too, that the silence is not nearly so complete as he had imagined. No human sounds, of course, no household sounds, no sounds of modern life, but as he settles into this new place, he hears something very old and very much like music, the soft lament of sand and wind and empty spaces.
The next day unfolds in much the same way, a similar progression of creatures from day to night. The female coyote shows up again but keeps her distance, skulking off when it is clear he means to stay put. As darkness falls, the night grows cool, and the desert score swells with importance. The wind sounds different here, with scant greenery to soften its tone. The sky seems to hum with static. The soil is alive with the ticks and clicks of insects and reptiles. And what binds it all together, gives it sense, is the silent flow of time. The rise and fall of the sun and moon, the passing of clouds across the sky—these are the gods of this secret world, their key and signature.
He wakes occasionally to listen to the night, to breathe deeply the desert wind. Long before dawn, he crawls out of his tent to lie directly on the ground. There is a hint of dew, or maybe just the longing for it. The air is cool and clean. He feels intimately connected to this desert world of drab-looking creatures and coarse vegetation, to the heat of the day and the cool of the night. And as he lies there, he feels something stir inside him. He touches his stomach. He brings his hand to his chest. He holds his head in both hands. Finally he closes his eyes and sees it shimmering before him, a picture, or rather a series of moving pictures like a grainy Super 8, moving forward from start to finish, beginning at the beginning with a shot of the house in Erie—junky tarpaper shack, screen door bangin’ something awful in the wind. And as the jerky handheld camera moves in on a close-up of the front door, the credits roll, and then the title, The Ages of Jim.
The camera catches it all: The Fall, the tumble down the stairs into chaos and not knowing, his father there in shadows and high contrast, pushing into the darkness with a radio in his arms, knocking his poor wife to the floor. Jim rises without a whimper and touches the mark on the wall, The Door.
Cut to a tidy little house in Little Rock where he lives with his Aunt Corina Phillips, sweet Corina, who teaches him about the piano and then some, while his mother works her fingers to the bone down at Anderson’s Dry Goods. A year is all, a year of lessons and illness and books before his father sends word he’s got his life back together and wants them to come home. Has himself a job as the manager of a motel down in Port Swaggart. The Waters Inn, he says. An omen, he says. Which means they have an apartment overlooking Lake Erie. Jim’s mother isn’t happy with the arrangement, all those strangers around, no front porch, no back garden. But to Jim it’s pretty darn good, living there by the lake. He helps out in the office. He has his own rowboat, and most days of the summer he goes out early and catches his fill of perch and silver bass. The sun shines every day.
Fade to black. Cue the music, party sounds. Lights rise on his fourteenth birthday, a simple celebration with just the three of them. His father’s present is a big old Seabreeze he’d taken from a lady who couldn’t pay her bill, and a stack of 78s—Sarah Vaughan and Mahalia Jackson, those voices, those rhythms, as silky and seductive as Aunt Corina’s swelling bosom. They dance together, the three of them. They laugh. It feels brand new but nothing has changed. His father is still the same man. A couple of years after he gives Jim the Seabreeze, he leaves on a breeze of his own. The camera watches him walk away. They never see him again.
Reaction shots, mother and son talking, arguing, crying, packing suitcases. His mother catches a bus back to Little Rock and her sister. Jim hitches a ride to New York with the idea he will join the navy and see the world. He’s just a kid with a few ideas and no prospects, but he believes things will work out. They always do.
Scenes of the city. The Statue of Liberty. The Empire State Building. The crowds on Fifth Avenue. Scenes of a working life. Lifting crates. Filling shelves. Pushing brooms. And look, a shot of the Glebemount Hotel, where he lived on cigarettes and bruised fruit. And there’s a close-up of Elysse, who worked at Gimbel’s and thought Jim was the bee’s knees. A whirlwind romance, dizzy and breathless. Weeks of dance and chat. Sex in unlikely places. One night they’re out on the town and run into Gil Gannon, a buddy of Jim’s from way back. Gil says he’s putting together a band and needs a piano player. The camera rises to treetop level as the three walk arm-in-arm down the street. In the distance, tugboats work the East River.
Publicity photos, hundreds of them, of Gil Gannon and the Cannons. The suits. The greasy hair. The white socks. The look of pure joy that spills from those glossy black-and-whites.
The good times: the travel, the appearances, the red carpet everywhere, what it’s like to be in a band and making records the whole world loves to sing, and not a blessed thing in your head but making music and seeing the world and doing whatever you please. And the bad times, too: the way some get stupid and throw it away, abusing themselves, abusing others.
Scene in Chicago, lobby of the Drake Hotel.
Jim: I feel real grateful is what it is. For everythin’. And The Solo I guess is a kind of reward. There are a thousand musicians who can bust my chops. So why me?
Reporter (nodding): A reward …
Jim: I’ll tell you what I think. I think the Solo was lookin’ for me, the way lightnin’ looks for somethin’ to strike. And I was there. It passed through me like a current, and that’s all I know about it.
Flashback to that poky little recording studio just off Woodward Avenue in Detroit. There’s Morton DePew, Gil’s producer—sour breath from sucking on a pipe all day, but a classy guy. Then Gil bursts into the control room, pumping his arm like a piston. “A fucking hit. A fucking hit. A fucking hit.”
Jim doesn’t say it, but he figures the song is not one of Gil’s best. It’s all there on paper, kind of cute and catchy but missing something, he thinks. Can’t all be gems. So he settles down at his keyboard and slips on his headphones, all set to overdub his solo, not really thinking or excited, just letting it happen. At the end of the second chorus, he sits up straighter, takes a deep breath and exhales. And that’s it. Like breathing. He just exhales and the music comes out in a perfect shape, the thing that was missing. The missing link. And all he did was exhale and his fingers did the rest. It passed through him. The Solo passed through him like a charge.
The reaction shots, the confusion. Gil gets on the intercom and says, “What the fuck you been smoking, you play a solo like that?” So Jim records a few more tracks for the hell of it, but nothing else feels as good. And each time they go back to the original it sounds a bit better. Still pretty weird, but better. They decide to sleep on it. Next morning it’s like a veil has lifted. Everyone nods yeahyeahyeah. Took some getting used to, they all agreed.
But the fans, they’re crazy about the record the minute it’s released. Number one in its first week. Stays there most of the summer. Tune into any station that year and you hear it, and you hear DJs talking up The Solo. There’s Chick Camino at WNBC in New York playing “Don’t Look Back” forty-eight hours straight. Camera pans the kids lined up around the corner for the Ed Sullivan Show.
People call Jim a genius. He’s voted the best keyboard player in America that year when even he doesn’t know what he’s done. Not that he’s going to argue. He’s h
aving a ball. Womenfolk, in particular, are terribly kind, and none kinder than the lovely Elysse, from Taos, New Mexico, who works at the fragrance counter at Gimbel’s and loves him, who stays with him longer than he ever expected she would, and who bears him a son, a little angel they call Daniel.
The family snapshots: Jim in scrubs, Jim with cigar, Jim leaving the hospital with bundle of joy in his arms. Changing the diapers. Feeding the Pablum. Playing the lullaby. But there’s a growing concern on his face. The words are coming, those five painful words that tear worlds apart: The show must go on.
No surprise, the years become a line of days—buses, planes, trains, cars, spotlights, flashbulbs, autographs, screaming fans. And then a funny thing happens, but not so funny when you think about it. Every day is another town, every night another concert, and even though Gil has a pretty long string of hits by then, you can’t help but feel the audience has come to hear one song, and in fact one part of one song: The Solo. Jim isn’t about to disappoint. He’s a professional; he’s grateful. But after a while he gets a little antsy about the whole thing, the way you might if someone holds you down too long. He starts messing around in rehearsals and sound checks, looking for a way he can change that solo, liven it up. But nothing he tries is ever as good, and that makes him more determined. Yet here’s the thing: The Solo is too perfect to change, like gospel or something. Soon he’s fiddling with his other solos, trying to nudge them closer to perfection. In the end, it’s like he isn’t expressing himself anymore, he’s expressing The Solo. Like a millstone, a dead weight, it’s starting to make him nutty, until that day on American-Bandstand something snaps, talking there with Dick Clark and trying to keep it together, when something snaps and he pushes through the curtains and disappears into thin air. Elysse and the kid, tired of waiting, had already gone to New Mexico without him, so he heads for the only true home he’s ever known: Port Swaggart.