The cop offered me a seat on his front bumper, where there was a little black ledge, and he spent a while checking my license and registration. Then he came out holding a ballpoint pen. He pointed his flashlight at my face and moved the ballpoint pen back and forth. “I’m going to ask you to keep your head still and follow the tip of the pen with your eyes,” he said.
I watched the ballpoint go back and forth, sometimes eclipsing the flashlight. It was a Pilot G-2 fine-point pen. I felt shifty, like the corner-glancing cherub in the Christmas card.
“That’s the kind of pen I use,” I said.
“Hm,” he said.
He moved the pen way over to the left and I strained to follow it. My eyeballs wobbled. “You’re exceeding the limits of my vision,” I said. “I feel like Richard Nixon at the optometrist.”
“I know, that’s how it works,” he said. “Are you sure you haven’t been drinking?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I would remember. I spent most of today at the hospital. A friend of mine just had a hysterectomy.”
“Is she all right?”
“Yes, she is.” He passed the pen back and forth again, and then he gave me a long look. “You can go back to your car now.” I got up and he walked with me. He said, “Can you please tell me why you have a bottle of beer near your seat?”
“What bottle of beer?” I said, puzzled. I opened the door and saw what he’d seen. “It’s Pellegrino,” I said, pulling it out. “Sparkling water. I drink it after I go to Planet Fitness.”
“All right,” he said, shining his flashlight on it. He handed me a ticket. “I’m giving you a warning for making a left turn without signaling.”
“Okay, thanks, sorry.”
“Have a good evening, and remember your turn signals. People need to know where you’re going.”
“I will. Thanks again.”
I drove away. I lit a Fausto, puffed it, and cackled.
Twenty-nine
I’VE TALKED TO LUCY — who has, by the way, red hair and a faint midwestern accent. Roz is home from the hospital and she’s sleeping a lot. I’m going to call her tomorrow to say hello.
I spent all afternoon playing Logic’s Steinway Hall Piano. I didn’t use any other instruments. By playing slowly and then speeding it up, and by adding one line over another, I could sound a little like Glenn Gould, which is a powerful feeling. After that I experimented with some slow ninth chords, and I got something going that I liked, and I put some words to the chords: “I saw you / I heard your voice / And then one day I knew / I loved you.” Another love song. At around noon, the Axiom keyboard developed a problem: Middle C wouldn’t play. I looked up “Axiom silent key” on some discussion forums. Apparently it’s a known problem. There’s a loose connection somewhere, and a key, often middle C, will just stop speaking. This is frustrating if you’re trying to compose a piece of music with a middle C. I thought I was going to have to drive back to Best Buy and return the keyboard. Then I found a video in which someone posted a solution: You squeeze hard on the two sides of the plastic near the mod wheel. I tried it and it worked perfectly. I’m overjoyed, because I really like this keyboard. Just give it a squeeze.
Glenn Gould, you know, used to sing along while he played Bach. He was a hero of mine when I was in high school. I liked his clean staccato playing style. Later, when I got into Debussy’s Preludes and Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, I was less sure about him. He wrote a fugue called “So You Want to Write a Fugue.” It’s got a funny title and good lyrics, but it isn’t all that original a piece of music. Gould was a performer, not a creator. He was cold all the time. He took pills and he wore scarves and hats and coats indoors. The film about him, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, begins with him standing on a windswept ice field. What was missing from Gould’s art was very simple: love. His jumpy playing style showed that — or no, that’s a cheap shot. He sat very low in front of the piano and did beautiful things to it.
Nowadays for Bach’s keyboard music I like a pianist named András Schiff. He’s also a bit of an eccentric, but he has a much more legato playing style—“legato” means “tied together.” One note hands things off in a bucket brigade to the next. Schiff doesn’t believe in scales and Czerny études. He practices every day by playing the music he actually likes, for instance Bach’s two-part inventions. He’s a believer in silences. He said in an interview that when he gives a concert, he sometimes wishes that nobody would applaud. Play it, finish it, and let the music’s close contrapuntal reasoning live on for a while in the audience’s mind. Some of his Bach recordings begin with an unusually long silence.
You never applaud or say “Amen” after someone’s spoken in Quaker meeting. You’re not supposed to compliment someone after meeting is over, either. You’re not supposed to say, “I liked your message,” although it’s a very human urge and people do it. I did it myself after a woman talked about seeing two sparrows frolicking in her birdbath. She said she looked away and then looked back and there in place of the sparrows was a huge wild turkey. She talked about surprise and wild turkeys. Afterward, I said to her, “I liked your message.”
And now I want to show you a book. Here it is. It’s a novel by Theodore Dreiser called The Genius. I have not read it. It’s Roz’s book. I saw her — I heard her voice — and then one day I knew I loved her. I’ve never been able to read novels the way she does, though. I get about three pages in and I say, Where’s my Merwin? Where’s my Kunitz? Where’s my Debussy? I can happily read memoirs or diaries or collections of letters, but not novels. Roz has read hundreds of novels. It didn’t bother her that I didn’t read them, but maybe I should have tried.
I’m going to open this book. I’m going to pick a page at random, and I’m going to read a sentence. Here we go: “He wore an old hat which he had found in a closet at Mrs. Hibberdell’s, a faded, crumpled memory of a soft tan-colored sombrero which he punched jauntily to a peak and wore over one ear.” Page 330. Of The Genius by Theodore Dreiser. Thank you. That is all.
• • •
“HI, SWEETIE,” said Roz, when I called. Her voice was soft and perfect — one hundred percent Roz. I could hear her smiling. She said she was doing better. “They sent me home with Vicodin and it gave me some very lurid dreams and made me forget to breathe, so I’m not taking it anymore. The pain came back, but it’s bearable and better than the not breathing. Lucy’s taking very good care of me.”
“Good. When can I come see you?”
“Give me a few days. I need the fog to clear.”
“Take it very easy,” I said.
“I am,” she said. “It’s so nice not to think about the show. They’ve got a new person who’s covering for me.”
“That’s good.”
“I’m going to sleep now.”
“Okay.”
It’s been hot and dry this week, and I thought it was time to set up the traveling sprinkler and water Nan’s tomatoes. I stood watching it chuff in its slow and steady tractorish way around her tomatoes as the chickens pecked under some rhubarb leaves, unconcerned about the strange Sears machine in their garden. I’d bought an extra hose at a garage sale — better that than anger the yellowjackets. The sprinkler sprays in steady sixteenth notes. You can whistle Rossini to it if you want. Maybe I should tell you more about it.
The traveling sprinkler is a heavy metal slow-motion techno-dance-trance device with two white cast-iron toothed rear wheels that dig into the turf, and a sort of baton or helicopter blade on top that spins. The hose screws in at the back. The hose water flows at full pressure into the tractor’s anus, or rectum. Up through the tractor the water goes and out the little holes at the end of the spinning whirlies, flying in a glittering bagel of sinusoidal shapes out over the garden. From certain angles it makes a close-range rainbow, and that’s all very nice. But here’s where the wizard mind of the innovator comes in: The spinning rotates a central post fitted with a helical thread, or worm gear, that engages with the sprockets of a driving gear that pulls two floppy hooking levers forward against the teeth on the rear wheels. First one lever pulls the right wheel forward an inch, and then the other lever pulls the left wheel forward an inch, and in that way the tractor alternatingly propels itself slowly forward, like some sort of very deliberate water clock — or like Stanley Kunitz’s tortoise, “ancient and crusty, more lonely than Bonaparte.”