Quiver (6 page)

He had the weirdest record collection I’d ever seen, as well as this ancient system with
valves
, for Christ’s sake! But his speakers were strawberry and cream. The edges of the acoustic space were razor sharp, especially on classical recordings: you knew where the bassoonist was sitting; it picked up the fourth violinist scratching his four o’clock beard. I’m telling you, you could hear the conductor draw breath just before his baton swished through the air.

I used to love sitting there, beer in one hand, joint in the other, just listening with the man. No women, no babies, no barking dogs, just Quin and his moldy furniture—the ultimate bachelor.

Q
UIN

I always leave work around five a.m., that way I avoid the white noise of this city. Discordant, man-made, eating up nature, swallowing birdsong, the wind, the percussion of rain.

I’ve fitted the car with mufflers and sealed the windows; it’s my time capsule of tranquility. My silence. Mornings. Me and my car, we’re black against the dawn. I drive over the bridge at Rozelle, past the new museum of fire towering like a huge red ghost. Every time my car accelerates over that bridge, I’m flying.

There’s a moment just before sunrise when the birds stop singing, just for a second. Peace, like before the Word. I, Quin, name this moment the blue note. It’s a B flat, played gently on a clarinet. I know it, I can feel it resonate in the cells of my being.

So, we’re talking about the winter before last. I’d been working my guts out, sixteen hours a day for two weeks, with Taunting Tongues, an a cappella group: two bass, three tenor and ten sopranos. I’m just putting down the bass when the studio phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Adrian?”

The voice rises and quivers on the last syllable, a middle C caught between the diaphragm and the chest. Alto? Mezzo-soprano? She’s treacle down the throat and I have to hear more.

“No, but keep talking.”

“Who is this?” I’m holding my breath, I’m holding myself. This is the most perfect alto I’ve ever heard. Don’t hang up, don’t hang up. I want to see your mouth, your lips, your palate,
the cleft under your tongue. My cock’s quivering with each tonal nuance. Baby, please.

“You have a beautiful voice.”

“Adrian? Is that you, you louse?”

“You have the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard.”

“OK, I’m hanging up.”

“No you don’t, not before you say something else. C’mon, baby, say something.”

“What’s your name?”

“Quin.”

“Qu-in.”

“What’s yours?”

“Felicity.”

“Fe-li-city—as in
felicitas
, as in happiness.”

She’s like fingers, lubricated, tight, moving. Hitting the note with every vowel.

“Quin, are you still there?”

It’s too late, I’m throbbing in rhythm with her consonants.

“Yes,” I whispered, scared my breath will give me away.

“I’d like to meet you, Quin.”

M
ACK

Yeah, July, what a shit of a month. I mean, we actually had a winter that year. Even the Japanese tourists were whining. I remember that day vividly. I was sitting there in the conference room, rolling a few numbers with what’s-his-name from Virgin, when Quin comes rushing in. This in itself was enough to make me swivel round. Quin never rushes, he glides, like a bat, with those huge red ears pulsating.

“Mack,” he says, “I’ve met this woman.” I glance across at the
record executive sitting opposite, his London pallor and Oxford accent sabotaging his snakeskin boots. I could see from his expression he thought Quin was crazy, maybe even homicidal. Then again, it was good dope.

“Quin, can’t you see we’re doing business here?”

“Yeah.”

Quin throws himself onto the fun-fur couch. He takes a deep drag of the joint and exhales into the Englishman’s face. Forty thousand dollars worth of studio time just went up in smoke, I’m thinking.

“So is she soprano, mezzo-soprano or alto?” As if I cared, but Quin looks dangerous, like really inspired. Always humor an obsessive, you learn that in this industry.

“Mezzo-soprano slipping into contralto on every syllable beginning with F. Hot, very hot.”

I should have known then.

Q
UIN

The next morning I’m up at ten for the first time in four years. Hair runs in the family on both sides. I need a shave. Normally I wouldn’t bother, but today I want to feel smooth, just in case. I shake a razor blade clean of foam and slowly begin.

A beam of sunlight travels across the sink and my hands, bouncing off the water. It gets me thinking about God, the cosmos and the harmonics between C and C sharp. A high electronic frequency makes me shake my head. Perhaps it’s a new frequency, one of limbo, of all those souls caught between material and spiritual worlds. Even the very name of the shaving foam seems mystical. I forget what I’m doing and cut myself. The thick welling of blood reminds me of my
mortality. Not that I’m religious. What hope do I have with a Catholic father and a Jewish mother? I only believe in impulse. The power, the flesh. The only part of the Bible I remember is: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

It’s my personal philosophy: Being only came into existence once it had been given a tone. Naming was important, but already it had the constructs of culture imposed.
I am heard, therefore I exist
.

M
ACK

He told me they had their first meeting in the State Library. Sick. I mean what are you going to get up to in a large stone mausoleum? But then it is kind of kinky. All that whispering and toes under the table. I mean, hey, whatever turns you on. I know someone who even had a orgy in a deep freeze. Now that’s perverse.

Q
UIN

I like it in here, especially in summer when the cold air off the stone hits you as you walk in from the sun. But now it’s winter.

I’m waiting at a table, newspapers scattered in front of me. I am sick with nerves, like my cool has evaporated. For the first time in my life I feel, well, vulnerable. I have asked her to say my name out loud. I’d recognize that voice anywhere.

When I close my eyes now and visualize that moment, I see myself sitting there in my good blue shirt and black jeans. I’m little, like I’ve shrunk under the skin. Fear did this. I am frightened
of rejection. All around me half-caught whispered phrases like “Sarah’s graduating next year. She’s pregnant, haven’t you heard?” “We’ve got the mortgage to pay off and Tom still hasn’t got a job” bounce off the walls and fall into my lap. Insidious, empty sounds.

I’m drumming my fingers, a little march of wood. A woman walks past in a tailored suit. This babe is on a mission. Tall, brunette, breasts visible under the blazer. Her high heels ricochet from wall to wall; “speak to me,” taps the refrain from my fingers. She moves closer, trailing her fingers across a shelf of encyclopedias.

I can smell her perfume, fruity with an edge of spice. Speak to me, speak to me. She walks right past, oblivious. I shrink further into myself. I am a shadowy ghost-man, hazy around the edges.

“Quin?”

Music. The beating of angel wings, the sound of a fountain, heat across the throat. I swing around. A woman stands just behind me. Solid, middle-aged with a body that has made a comfortable pact with gravity. White skin, a nest of jet-black hair piled on top of her head. Everything is buried except her eyes, which are undeniably beautiful.

“Quin?”

The voice has me nodding like a somnambulist. She steps forward. Her hands, I notice, are remnants of a past glory.

“I’m Felicity.”

Drowning in the last tone, I clasp her wrist with all the wisdom of a dead man.

F
ELICITY

He drove me back to his house. I remember pulling up outside and trying not to be disappointed. The house was a decrepit terrace with faded curtains drawn across the windows. We didn’t say anything, we didn’t need to. There are those rare moments when one just knows.

Suddenly I’m frightened. Here I am, standing in this dingy room with its leather couch and second-hand rug, in front of this tall, dark, young man. A total stranger. Maybe it’s menopause, a flash of hormonal madness. In an instant my survival instinct shakes itself awake. I turn to leave, but then he moves, and nothing else matters.

He puts on a Shirley Bassey record and asks me to sing. I’m so nervous I think I’m going to throw up.

I haven’t sung in years. I used to sing when I was in my early twenties, in a jazz club. That’s when I met Adrian, my husband. Safe, secure, predictable. He’s so—dry. He just doesn’t excite me anymore. Actually I wonder whether he ever excited me.

Sing, Quin keeps telling me. What have I got to lose? My marriage? My dignity? Adrian would kill me if he could see me now.

I open my mouth and surprise myself with a perfect C. It fills the room like light. He closes his eyes. There’s an ecstasy about him as he breathes the music through his skin, his very cells.

Q
UIN

She’s singing my life, in tempo, underscoring it with the sadness, the loneliness, the great unspoken epic. I can’t stop my body from moving. I am transported beyond the mundane. She is singing up all my dreams. All my forgotten memories. Even
with my eyes closed, I can see the color of each tone: red shooting through yellow, black clashing into purple. I don’t need to touch her, I could come now, just from the pitch of her voice sliding up and down the octaves.

“Keep singing,” I whisper, “keep singing.” I move behind her. My hands creep around her and begin to undo her high-collared blouse, button by button. Her breasts spill forward, pushed up by the bra, femininity under wraps. My long fingers reach for her nipples. Her breath falls short, but she keeps on singing.

I kneel before her, her breasts open to the air, the rest of her body covered by her long velvet dress. I cup her breasts and squeeze them together. I am a maestro. There is nothing hesitant as I take a nipple into my mouth, sucking hard, biting the blood to the surface.

We topple to the ground. She keeps her face averted, her eyes staring upward as she thrills along with the bass line. My mouth caresses her entire body. She will not look at me. She seems far away, her focus carried away by her magnificent voice. To me it feels as if the range and resonance of her voice is fusing with the extraordinary breasts that tumble to either side of her belly. I can feel her voice vibrating through her skin. The scale of her is operatic, her taste salty and Wagnerian, her smell, her sweat, the texture of her skin, an immeasurable wealth of orchestration.

“Quin, take me, take me…”

I lift my hand from between her thighs, her profile barely visible through her thick black bush.

“Keep singing.”

I feel her welling up under my tongue, as she thrusts, out of control, like a bird flapping madly in a cage. I keep her pinned by my mouth, playing her like an instrument. She crouches,
her skin shiny, lit by the valves, her lips pulled back like some majestic creature, a sphinx, an olive-skinned Madonna. She is singing the scales of an octave. She is close to screaming, but her breath comes in perfect pitch—middle C, D, E, F sharp. The carpet grates under her knees as, oblivious, she arches in a final climactic spasm. She traverses two full octaves in one glorious shriek.

The sound of her coming rips through the back of my head in streams of pure color as I ejaculate all over the rug. It is like John Cage in a thunderstorm, like wind through a forest. I’ve never heard an orgasm like it. All my fears, all my doubts evaporate for three glorious minutes. And I, Quin, know then why I had been put on earth.

That night I made love to her four times. By the third time, I knew I had to get those notes down before they evaporated forever. I keep a tape recorder behind the couch, ready to record the odd inspired moment.

I’ll always remember it. Felicity was on her front, lips pressed against the carpet, pouting, pushed forward. She was breathing in short gasps. There was a pillow under her belly so her ass jutted up, the two pale orbs spread, her pussy glistening under the hair. Both of us were animal now. We existed beyond skin. No album notes, nothing to drag us into identity, just the heat and the smell and the sex.

I looked back over my shoulder and pressed the record button with my left toe. She never noticed a thing.

M
ACK

I still can’t believe it. Like this chick, this housewife, spends one night with the Wolf, and that’s it, bang! Her whole universe,
microscopic though it may be, is upended. She goes home, packs two suitcases and a trunk full of stuffed toys, hires a taxi and leaves a note scrawled in crayon for her husband of ten years. She was on a mission, I tell you. I know these women. A man’s persona is ultimately his most private territory. So what does this witch go and do? She treads all over Quin, invading his very soul.

First it was the shoes. For ten years Quin had been wearing the same pair of tennis shoes. Footwear, he believed, should remain utilitarian, not decorative. An admirable sentiment, if not a bit dated, but I respected it anyway.

Two months after moving in, that bitch had him wearing brogues, for Christ’s sake. I caught him tiptoeing down the corridor, shoes in hand, blisters all over his feet. I figured she must be some chick, I mean this guy had had the best of them, you know, models, dancers, the usual band molls. For Quin to take up shoes she had to have something special.

“Quin, what’s this chick got on you?”

He nods slowly in that reptilian way of his and says, “Music.”

That’s all, like a guru or some enlightened mystic. He had us all fooled. Speaking as an old fool, I know.

Next thing he’s coming to work in a suit, as if this is the eighties or something. Listen, I’ve got nothing against the corporate, especially corporate money—it keeps the drugs rolling in. But I like to keep suits in the conference room, not the studios. A tie at two a.m. makes the bands nervous.

Besides, it made Quin look like an exotic spider of the toxic variety—not a great look. So I ask him to leave the suit at home. He agrees but tells me that he’s got no control, the needle runs haywire when she opens her mouth. Pure sound, he
tells me—like he doesn’t even hear the words, just the tone of her voice.