The Big Door Prize

by M. O. Walsh

  So, Douglas took a deep breath, turned off the motor, and got out of his wife’s car. He pulled his trombone case out of the back seat and felt so exhausted by his day that if this were any other obligation in the world, he might have just canceled it. But this new ­forty-­year-­old version of Douglas would never cancel a trombone lesson, not only because of what it might mean to his future career, what it might metaphorically suggest about his commitment to the art form if he was already making excuses not to practice, but also because, even though he had a lot on his mind, he actually did want to practice. He did want to learn and get better. All of that was true. Yet the real reason Douglas would never cancel this lesson was that it gave him a chance to hang out with Geoffrey Mallow.

  In the way that aspiring novelists might like to imagine their work someday being discussed in a sophomore literature class, the teacher enthusiastically tracing their literary influences back through the canon, or the way philosophers like to chart the evolution of thought from Socrates to Plato to Jay-­Z, or even to the way athletes like to thank God for helping them sack a quarterback or run a quick ­forty-­yard dash, Douglas also liked to imagine himself one day becoming part of some traceable lineage. He could picture his story inserted on the margin of a textbook he used in his own History classes or maybe spread across a Wikipedia page made by one of his fans. If it was a quick sketch, Douglas imagined, the bio might say something simple like “Musical Influences: Miles Davis and Geoffrey Mallow.” Or, if it was an interview, Douglas might take the time to thank the ­little-­known musician from Louisiana named Geoffrey Mallow, who taught him all he knew. Or, if it was a full-­on biography, that sort of Pulitzer ­Prize–­worthy investigation into his life, the author might write something like “Douglas Hubbard, when it was all said and done, idolized Geoffrey Mallow.”

  This would be true.

  Geoffrey Mallow was, in Douglas’s estimation, the coolest man walking the planet. Tall and graceful, about 6’4”, with long fingers, short graying hair, and a meticulously trimmed goatee, Geoffrey Mallow was everything Douglas wanted to be. Descended from a family of New Orleans musicians, Geoffrey could make any instrument sound as if it were made for him. Douglas had seen this at the variety of talks Geoffrey had given at Deerfield Catholic since he’d moved there the previous year, where he also gave private lessons and solo performances at various school assemblies. For most people, it may have been the simple fact that a talent like his was so rare in Deerfield that made Geoffrey stand out but, for Douglas, it was something deeper. It was Geoffrey’s polished confidence he most admired, the way he walked around town in any type of ­hat—­porkpies, ball caps, a ­fedora—­dressed in whatever attitude the day suggested to him, talking to people in the easiest and most ­self-­assured manner. It was the way you might see him playing chess at one of the outside tables of the Butter-­It-­Better Café, sometimes against himself, at other times with whoever had stopped by for a game. It was the way he would take off for a week or two to gig around New Orleans, show back up at a high school football game and nonchalantly read the paper as if he hadn’t just done the coolest thing Douglas could imagine. And it was also, of course, the reason Geoffrey had moved to Deerfield in the first place that Douglas admired.

  Upon their first conversation at school, after Geoffrey had performed a ­one-­man show in which he played a medley of spirituals and gospel songs on no less than five different instruments (saxophone, coronet, clarinet, oboe, violin!), Douglas asked him why anyone with that sort of talent would move to a place without even one decent nightclub. Geoffrey told him that he had been gigging all his life, made enough money through studio sessions and sporadic touring that he could retire or, at least, begin to live life on his own terms. “I don’t need much,” he’d said. “All my ­instruments are paid for. Now it’s just me and my breath. Me and my hands.” The sentiment was charming and lovely but also confusing to Douglas, who, like many people on the planet, understood New Orleans to be the epicenter of everything brass. “Won’t you miss the scene, though?” Douglas asked him. “I mean, nothing happens in Deerfield.” Geoffrey smiled in the kind and gentle manner a person does when they have absolutely nothing to prove and said, “I can always find some noise if I want it. What I’m looking for is quiet when I need it.”

  Douglas felt a grand and benign jealousy upon hearing this, not dissimilar to the way an attorney may feel a college professor lives the good life, with their summers off, their leisurely strolls around campus, when viewed in comparison to the attorney’s world of endless briefs and soulless schmoozing. Or perhaps the way a college professor may feel an attorney lives the good life, with their stacks of money and cruise vacations, in comparison to grading essays on the weekends and navigating the cesspool of departmental politics. It was, in other words, the way that people are so quick to think without knowing, to assume without understanding, and it felt natural.

  So, when Geoffrey asked Douglas if he played any instruments, Douglas answered honestly that he’d always felt a certain kinship with the trombone but didn’t play it. “If you ever want to learn,” Geoffrey said, “I can teach you. It’s just like everything else. All it takes is endless practice and frustration and then, if you are open to it, joy.”

  “To be honest,” Douglas said, “I can whistle a bit, but I don’t suppose that counts as an instrument.”

  “Everything is an instrument,” Geoffrey said. “Lay it on me.”

  And so Douglas, who, for the first time in his life, felt nervous about his whistling, puckered up and went for the Charlie Parker sax lead on “Summertime” from his complete Master Takes album circa 1949 right there in the middle of the school cafeteria. Geoffrey stood wordless until he finished, then put his hand on Douglas’s shoulder. He looked as if, during some point of the song, they had become old friends. “You told me nothing happened in this town,” he said. “That’s not true. You’re happening, man. That was beautiful.”

  Douglas felt both deeply pleased and embarrassed by the compliment. His heart beat in an unfamiliar way. “It’s Charlie Parker,” he said. “I’ve got the record at home, on vinyl.”

  “Nope,” Geoffrey said, and pressed his hand to Douglas’s chest. “You’ve got that record right here.”

  This simple gesture made Douglas fall into a version of love with this man, or at least the idea of him, and now here he was, almost a year later, finally taking Geoffrey up on his offer. He walked to the corner of the apartment complex and climbed the metal stairs with his trombone at his side. When he got there, he saw Geoffrey standing on the breezeway in front of his apartment door. He was dressed, unexpectedly, in a tuxedo and top hat. He looked handsome, intriguing, and sharp, like a figure cut from an ­old-­time magazine.

  “Whoa,” Douglas said. “Look at you.”

  Geoffrey grinned. “That’s right,” he said, loud enough to project past Douglas and into the parking lot. “Look at me closely.” He held out his hands to show his empty palms. “And then ask yourself this question: Can you really believe your own eyes?”

  At this, Geoffrey threw something onto the ground in front of him. It sparked and popped on the pavement, emitting a cloud of blue smoke so thick that it made Douglas take a step back and cover his mouth. When he finally waved the smoke away and opened his eyes, Geoffrey was gone.

  “Okay,” Douglas said. “That was unexpected.”

  Although he was certain Geoffrey had just walked back inside his apartment, which he’d been standing right in front of, Douglas had to admit he hadn’t heard the door open. He also hadn’t seen the smoke become disturbed by the draft of air that his rushing back inside would cause, and so he slapped the side of his leg in a makeshift applause. “Not too bad,” he said, and walked to Geoffrey’s door.

  When he opened it, Geoffrey was sitting in an armchair and reading a magazine, dressed in khaki pants and a black Zildjian drums T-­shirt. He looked up as if nothing at all wa
s abnormal.

  “Hey, Hubbs,” he said, and checked his watch. “You know, if there’s something else to admire besides your whistling and extensive knowledge of history, I’d say it is your punctuality. You’re right on time. That’s rare in the jazz game.” He stood and approached him. “As the saying goes, most of us operate on ­six-­eight time, meaning if you want us there by six, we show up at eight. But this is good. I’m glad you’re here.”

  Douglas stared at him. “Okay,” he said, and pointed to his new outfit. “I’m impressed.” He then looked around the room for the tuxedo, which he imagined Geoffrey had peeled off and thrown in a corner, but it was nowhere in sight. “I’m also confused.”

  As far as Douglas knew, Geoffrey Mallow was not one for tricks. Yet as he shook his hand and scanned the small apartment, Douglas began to experience a rather unfortunate feeling of déjà vu. On the coffee table, he saw three small cups set beside a red rubber ball. Stacked on the sofa, where last night there were milk crates full of jazz records, there now sat several old boxes of magic tricks, a series of manuals, and a small plastic wand with white tips.

  “What’s going on in here?” Douglas asked.

  “Wait,” Geoffrey said. “Don’t move.”

  He looked over Douglas’s shoulder as if there might be a spider or flying insect about to land and then reached behind Douglas’s ear. When he brought back his hand, as if it had been sitting there the whole time, he held a small slip of blue paper.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Douglas said.

  “I have had,” Geoffrey told him, “the most extraordinary day. Set down your horn and make yourself a drink in the kitchen. Let me tell you.”

  The story went, of course, that last night, after Douglas’s first lesson, Geoffrey had gone over to Johnson’s Grocery. “Have you seen that thing?” Geoffrey asked him. “I’m telling you, man, it’s like a miracle. I haven’t even slept since then. I don’t feel like I need to.”

  Douglas dragged himself over to the kitchen, poured an iced tea, and felt himself toggling miserably between anger and outright depression as yet another person spilled their imaginary guts to him, for which, Douglas presumed, he was supposed to be happy.

  “A magician!” Geoffrey said, and plucked a stack of cards off the coffee table. He shuffled them around in his hand, scissored them expertly between his fingers. “You have to understand. Out of all the things that machine could have said, that’s the one that got me. I mean, got me. I cried in the middle of the produce section. I forgot why I was even there. Speaking of, did you know Johnson’s set up a box of tissues by the checkout now? He said so many people been crying in there after getting those readouts, he figured why not. People are just crying from joy, he says. Joy, my man! The good stuff! Well, most of them, anyway.”

  Douglas said nothing in reply, simply chugged the glass of tea and poured himself another. He then put the pitcher back on the counter and returned to the living room, where Geoffrey was now running a long red scarf along his palm. He gestured over to the couch.

  “The thing is,” Geoffrey told him, “you see all those boxes? All those magic books? I’ve had them since I was a kid.”

  He leaned over and picked one up, handed it to Douglas. It smelled of attics and footlockers, that old library smell, and had a picture of a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat on the front. It was made by Mattel, copyright 1974. “These were gifts from Santa, man. That’s how old they are. My folks only wanted me to practice sax and piano, and I dug that, too, but as a kid, I always wanted to be a magician.”

  “Is that so,” Douglas said, and sank down into the chair.

  “And I just popped into that DNA machine for kicks, you know? It’s only two bucks. I figured I’d try it out for a laugh.” Geoffrey pulled the scarf between his hands, balled it up in a fist, and, with a shake, promptly made it disappear. He then leaned closer to Douglas, lowered his voice to almost a whisper, and said, “But when I got my readout, I was like, how could it know? It’s like that old joke about a thermos. You remember that?” He looked at Douglas, who sat without expression.

  “Humor me,” Douglas said.

  “You know the one,” Geoffrey said. “A kid asks a scientist, ‘What’s the greatest invention in the world?’ And the scientist says, ‘The thermos bottle, because it keeps things hot in the winter and cold in the summer.’ And the kid says, ‘Wow,’ then sits and thinks for a minute. Then the kid raises his hand again and says, ‘But, but, teacher. How do it know?’”

  “Is that the whole joke?” Douglas asked.

  “Yes. It’s a classic. But, anyway, that’s my question, too, Hubs. How the hell do it know?”

  Douglas set the box back down on the couch, took a deep breath, and pressed his palms against his eyes. He felt himself sliding into teacher mode here, which he recognized as a mistake, as it was the worst and most pitiful part of his personality. This was a mode all teachers have access to, where nothing more than rampant depression and boredom made them want to destroy any argument volleyed forth, even if by a child. This was an aspect of his character Douglas usually forbade himself to unleash around other adults, but there was a part of him, on this day, that felt he might be losing his grip.

  “Geoffrey,” Douglas said. “Not to be a wet blanket, but isn’t that a pretty typical desire for a kid?”

  “What do you mean?” Geoffrey asked.

  “I mean, for example, if there were to be a poll that asked kids what totally romanticized occupation they might like to have when they grow up, regardless of whether the child has any actual knowledge about what that job might entail, wouldn’t ‘magician’ rank right behind, oh, I don’t know, ‘­Spider-­Man,’ ‘police officer,’ and ‘firefighter’?”

  Geoffrey smiled. “I will ignore your condescension,” he said, “for a more illuminating anecdote.”

  “I’m not trying to be condescending,” Douglas began, but Geoffrey quickly waved his hand to the side, as if making that whole line of conversation disappear.

  “Do you know how many times I’ve moved in my life?” Geoffrey asked him. “I mean, from one little shithole apartment to another, living with folks in whatever band I was in, sleeping five people to a room? I’ve lived with drummers, man! Drummers! I’ve seen some shit. Anyway, my point is: I’ve left stands behind, sheet music, amps, all sorts of truly valuable stuff, just because I didn’t have the energy to move it. But I never left these behind. That’s what I’m saying. I couldn’t tell you why, but I always kept these magic tricks. All my life, I felt like they were important. And now, here we are. It all makes sense.”

  “It’s simple nostalgia,” Douglas said. “I still have the complete set of 1988 Topps baseball cards my uncle gave me when I was a kid. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t,” Geoffrey said. “Maybe it does.”

  “But Geoffrey,” Douglas said. “You’re what, fifty years old? You’re a ­world-­class musician. You’re a genius. Don’t you think you’ve pretty much met your calling?”

  “I hear you,” Geoffrey said. “And I appreciate it. But I’m really good at this, too, Hubs. It feels natural to me. And what I’m thinking is, maybe music is a type of magic. And maybe that’s what’s carried me through. Maybe that’s why I’ve always been happy enough, because I’ve always been close to my calling without even knowing it.”

  Now, here was something Douglas couldn’t argue with. Music was a type of magic. This was undeniable even in teacher mode. It was something Douglas felt every time he put on an old record, closed his eyes, and let himself be transported out of Deerfield and into the horns of strangers he would never know, but who somehow felt like brothers and sisters to his own soul when they played. And this recognition, along with the light in Geoffrey’s eyes as he sat across from him, made Douglas think about Cherilyn, how she was obviously taking this readout as seriously as Geoffrey was, as Pat was, as
seemingly everyone was, and the culmination of all these faces made Douglas feel a strange and rare sensation.

  Maybe he was wrong.

  This was not an easy thing to consider. Countless geniuses throughout the history of human thought have sabotaged themselves in their unwillingness to be wrong. Politicians. Parents. Husbands. Men. They’ve gone down on ships strewn with holes of their own making since before the word stubborn existed. And here was Douglas. Maybe he was wrong about this machine? Maybe he was wrong about a lot of things. Maybe the odd distance he’d felt between he and Cherilyn was not because of her and her readout at all, but because of him: his own stubbornness, his ­closed-­mindedness, his predictability. Maybe there was something to this science, regardless of how outlandish it seemed, how out of reach some of these readouts may be for people. Maybe there was something deeply true about DNA, something exciting and heretofore unknown that Douglas had just not afforded himself the chance to consider.

  This idea made Douglas feel an immense and ­corkscrew-­shaped guilt about his conversation with Cherilyn the night before, the way he had attempted to assuage his wife’s mysterious longings with grunts about her ­skillet-­fried burgers. The way he had not truly engaged her at all as she leaned across the table and asked him what he believed possible in the world.

  Weren’t these the real conversations of love, after all? Conversations about possibility? Talks about maybes? And isn’t closing oneself off to possibility, even in its most simple and generic form, whether due to familiarity or expectation, the true danger of something like a marriage? That was not the kind of husband Douglas wanted to be, a sort of stone wall to his wife’s potential, nor was it the kind of husband he felt he had ever been. And so, above all things, Douglas suddenly longed to be with Cherilyn. He wanted to apologize to her, to speak with her or, rather, to listen to her speak to him about what was now taking life in her heart. He thought about the way he’d stood before her with his trombone that night before, her sweetly offering up “­Seventy-­six Trombones” as a tune she might like to hear on his perfect day, and he had an idea. He stood up, walked back to the door where he had set down his case, and brought it to the table.