I parked in the Starbucks parking lot and lit a Murciélago cigar with a black bat on the label—murciélago means “bat” in Spanish — and began reading about heroin overdosages in Kurt Cobain’s biography. Suddenly there was a crunch and the car lurched forward. My head was thrown back and my new Craftsman’s Bench cigar cutter flew into my coffee. I said, “What the fuck?” and got out, expecting to see damaged metal. A young woman with hoop earrings emerged from a big white sedan, her hand on her clavicle. She’d backed right into me. “I am so, so, so sorry,” she said. We studied our bumpers — no harm done. She apologized again. I said, “I’ve done it myself, it’s all good, no worries, bye.” She got in her car and drove off. A lot of life is like that.
• • •
IT’S AMAZING TO SEE the little kids in Quaker meeting, how they learn to sit quietly. They only have to sit for fifteen minutes, and then they go downstairs to paint peace signs on stones, but at first they can’t do it and they poke each other and laugh and twist in the pews and climb on their parents’ laps and whisper and tap their feet. Or they page through picture books. You can hear the long, slow turning of their wider-than-it-is-tall books. It’s like the pages are being cut with a paper cutter, schwoooof. Then eventually the silence begins to work on them. There’s a Swiss writer who wrote a book called God Is Silence.
The dumbest thing I ever did was not having children. Absolute dumbest thing. Even worse than selling my bassoon. I see the error now. My sister’s kids are turning out great. They were shockingly spoiled when they were little, but now their true personalities have taken over and they’re just nice calm tall young people with personalities. One is at Kenyon College studying something with lasers and the other is an intern at a dollhouse museum.
Nan’s son Raymond is another great kid. He has gotten deeply into music in the last few years. Nan seems to think that I might serve as a role model for him, which is completely wrong but flattering. He refused to do homework and he didn’t want to go to college, and instead he’s in his room making beats on a beat-making machine with square rubber pads. In the summer he works at Seacoast Nursery hauling around baby trees, and he spends his money on music equipment. A few years ago I heard him banging away on a drum set. Gradually he got better. He had a good rhythmic ear. Then I heard him playing the electric guitar — that was last year. Now I don’t hear him because he works with headphones on.
He reminds me a little of me in his single-mindedness, except that he’s doing pop music and I was doing classical music in high school. I barely passed Algebra II and I refused to write papers on King Lear, which I thought was an unbearable, false, vile jelly of a play with no beauty in it anywhere, and instead I read Aaron Copland’s book on music and Rimsky-Korsakov on orchestration. Rimsky-Korsakov really understood the bassoon — that’s why he gave it Scheherazade’s D minor solo. In minor keys, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote, the bassoon has a “sad, ailing quality,” while in major keys it creates an “atmosphere of senile mockery.”
I read some of Stravinsky’s books, too, all written with the help of the overly allusive Robert Craft, including the one where he says, “I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed.” And I read one of Paul Hindemith’s books. Hindemith, a composer, outraged me when he wrote that the bassoon, “with its clattering long levers and other obsolete features left in a somewhat fossil condition,” was due for a major overhaul. I had to admit, though, that the keys did make a lot of noise. There’s no way to play a fast passage without some extraneous clacking. Listen to Scheherazade—you’ll hear all kinds of precise metallic noises coming from the bassoonist.
I secretly wanted to be a composer, and when I wasn’t practicing bassoon I was at our old Chickering piano, plinking away, writing scraps of piano sonatas in a little stave-lined notebook that I still have. And then I read Keats’s sonnet and realized I wasn’t going to have any success as a composer. I went to Berkeley for a while, and then to France, where I discovered Rimbaud’s Illuminations—Rimbaud is a great sea poet — and while I was in Paris some Smith College students gave a party and I danced with two smiley girls, one in a skirt and one in sexy plaid pants, and I discovered that I enjoyed dancing with smiley Smith girls. When I got home to America, Saturday Night Fever was playing in movie theaters, and Elvis Costello was watching the detectives, and the Talking Heads were doing “Take Me to the River,” and I suddenly thought, I’ve missed the boat, I want to hear music I can dance to.
Eight
I’M IN THE PARKING LOT of Margarita’s, which is one strip mall over from Planet Fitness. I’ve been listening to a good songwriting podcast from England called Sodajerker while watching the latest developments in the Kardashian family saga on one of the Planet Fitness TVs. Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, the married couple who wrote “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” for the Animals, and many other hits, told the Sodajerker podcasters about how they sometimes wrote “slump songs” together — songs written just so they were writing something. And some of the slump songs became hits.
“You’re going to have to face it,” says Robert Palmer, “you’re addicted to love.” I’m debating whether I should go into Margarita’s and have dinner at the bar. You can order what’s called a Mexican Flag, which is three different enchiladas. I think I won’t, because when you eat at the bar you can’t read.
Here’s what happened at Quaker meeting. I listened to the clock, as I always do. Very few people spoke. A man I didn’t know stood almost at the end of meeting and said his wife had died. He was quite an old man, with strong cheekbones, thin, and he held his hands out for a moment before he spoke. He said, “My wife died in my arms last week. I was lucky enough to know her for almost ten years. We met in a drawing class and I remember being impressed by how intensely she concentrated while she was drawing. She drew a pear. We were all drawing pears, but her pear made sense. It sat on the plate. I told her how much I liked her drawing, and we became friends and it turned out we were both ready to love and we got married very soon after that. One of the last things she said to me before she stopped talking was—” And then he stopped. He said nothing for a long time. Then he said, “She said, ‘I’ll miss you.’”
This is the kind of thing that happens at meeting sometimes. In the silence that followed I thought of the man’s wife dying in his arms, and suddenly the long, complicated poem I’ve been struggling with, about how in 1951 Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who was a great Francophile, and his friend General de Lattre of France persuaded the American legislature to supply napalm and other arms to the French forces in Vietnam, seemed not worth doing. I don’t want to know about evil via poetry. I don’t want to spread the knowledge of evil. I just want to know about love. At the end of meeting, the clerk, Donna, said, “Do we have any visitors?” Someone from North Carolina said he was visiting from North Carolina. And then Donna said, “Okay, are there any almost messages?”
This is often my favorite part of meeting. An almost message is something somebody was on the verge of saying during silent meeting but for one reason or another didn’t say, but the pressure to say it is still there.