You never want to have cancer down there, where Debussy had it. Cancer of the rectum. Cancer of the anus. I guess we would now call it colon cancer.
But thank heaven Debussy was poor, because the poverty forced him to finish twelve preludes in 1910. I remember the first time I heard the sixth prelude, “Footsteps in the Snow.” I immediately wanted to understand how he did it, and I couldn’t. He was using a different scale, the so-called whole-tone scale — that was part of it. Instead of a normal scale, which has a few half tones thrown in here and there, he used a scale composed entirely of whole tones. But anyone can do that. He made it sound cold and bleak, with wind-eroded oval footprints. I remember dropping the needle down and hearing, along with the scratched vinyl, the empty world of whiteness and snow and almost effaced footprints that he created.
Maurice Ravel knew immediately how good Debussy’s Preludes were. Ravel was an inspired pianist, and he played them for himself in May 1910, just when they were published. He was struggling at the time with the orchestration of a piece of his own that was going slowly, and he hadn’t always gotten along with Debussy, but he put all that aside. “I will console myself by playing Debussy’s Preludes once again,” he wrote to a friend. “They are wonderful masterpieces. Do you know them? Thank you, and cordially in haste, Maurice Ravel.”
Twenty-four
HELLO, HELLO. I’m sitting by the side of the Piscataqua River admiring the power station across the way, with its beautiful white plumes of steam or smoke that warm the earth. The beach that I’m sitting at is called Dead Duck Beach. It’s misty again today, with a determined but thwarted sun leaving a splotch of brightness on the water, which is salty, because the Piscataqua is a tidal river. About a hundred yards from me a little boy wearing a bright red vest is throwing handfuls of sand into the water and calling out things I can’t hear.
I had one of the worst nights of my life last night. I went to dinner at my sister’s house and was amazed all over again by her two tall grown children. I looked at them and thought, I should have been a better uncle to these two extraordinary children. My sister never asks me about the money that I owe her. I owe her money from when I was working on the anthology. I’ve got to pay her back.
Fortunately she’s got a new husband who has lots of money because he was a patent lawyer in Washington for many years. He said he stopped patent lawyering because the system had become hopelessly corrupt — the patent office was interested in making billions in fees by issuing as many patents as possible, and the lawyers wanted ambiguities and mistakes in the patents granted so that they could bring infringement suits against one another. Also his eyes were bad and he didn’t want to stare at the computer screen all day looking at scanned versions of old patents.
I was sad to learn that the patent office was corrupt, and I ate too much of the eggplant tapenade I brought as a present and was poisoned by the garlic, and when I got home to bed five thousand unrelated thoughts traipsed through my brain and I worried about Roz and grieved over not having a child and got almost no sleep. Finally I went down to the kitchen and smoked a Fausto and made a dance loop and a serviceable chorus that went, in a ZZ Top sort of accent, “Take a ride in my boat.” I went to bed at five a.m. and I woke up and coughed a lot. I decided that I would go to the convenience store to get some cough drops. Honk for assistance. While I was unwrapping a cough drop I remembered something Roz always used to say before she went out for a shop at the supermarket. She’d say, in a hopeful, cheery, loving voice, “Anything you need at the store that I don’t know about?” The memory of her voice skewered clean through me and I thought, This is ridiculous. I know Roz. I know that woman. I know everything about her. She knows everything about me. We’ve lived together. We’ve been canoeing together. We’ve watched large basking toads jump off a sunlit branch on the river as we floated by. This doctor she’s dating now hardly knows her. He hasn’t been canoeing with her. He’s no good for her. It’s as simple as that. Tony Hoagland indeed.
I’ve filmed some boats with my video camera, thinking that I could make a YouTube video of “Take a Ride in My Boat” if I had some verses. I used some of the three-syllable phrases Roz had sent me, adjusting them here and there:
hear the word
get up soon
kiss the lips
bite the moon
feel the fruit
find your way
sail the boat
dream of me
Take a ride in my boat
Take a ride
Take a ride in my boat
fix the text
take the stick
crack the nut
make it slick
chomp the bit
drink the beer
wipe the spit
check the gear
crack the nut and drop the pants
milk the meat and learn to dance
Take a ride in my boat
Take a ride
Take a ride in my boat
Take a ride in my boat
Take a ride in my boat
Take a ride in my boat
• • •
I TOOK THE CAR in to a repair place to be inspected. They looked at it for an hour and the man said it needed new calipers and pads and several other expensive things. The total cost would be about twenty-five hundred dollars. “For that car, I don’t think it’s worth it,” he said.
“I see, okay,” I said.
“Just call me Dr. Carvorkian,” he said.
I took it to another repair place farther away. When I got there the head of service was in the glass-walled waiting room sitting next to an elderly woman. I waited for about five minutes at the service counter, and I saw the man nodding sympathetically, listening to a long story that the woman was telling him. Finally he came out and said, “Sorry, I was talking to that lady.” I told him my problem with the brakes. He was a young-faced, perky, smiley man, and he said they’d take a look.
I went into the waiting room. The old woman was still there waiting. “It’s nice and cool in here,” I said.
“Yes, it is, almost too cool,” she said. She asked me what kind of car I had, and I told her. “We’ve always had American cars,” she said. “But my husband passed away in 2006 and last year a woman backed into the trunk of my old Lincoln. The damage wasn’t too bad, but when I got home the car caught fire in the garage and it was totaled. I bought a new Lincoln but I don’t like it as much.”
Then she went away and I waited an hour. The perky man came in and said, “Looks good, there was almost nothing. Your brake fluid was a little low and the brake lines are rusty, so we’re going to need to keep an eye on that. But the calipers are almost new, so that’s good.” He passed me a sheet of paper. The total for labor was $77.90 and the total for parts was $14.35. So my car has passed inspection and it’s good for another year. Another year of life in my car! You just need to find the right serviceman.