Whale Music (5 page)

Mother looks up dreamily. She names the dish. We are baffled.

“It is good,” I say. “I’m having seconds.”

“Hey, Dezzy-do,” says the father. “You’re turning into a real porker.”

“He’s big-boned,” says my mother quietly.

“ ’Sides,” offers Dan, turning towards the father, “he’s not as fat as you.”

“Put a lock on it.”

“Henry,” says my mother, and that single word snaps the
father’s head up. “What’s happening with Jimmy Cohn?”

Cohn being one of many weasel-like men that my father had music-related business with.

“That guy,” snarls the father. “He wouldn’t know a smash hit number one socko boff if it came up and kissed his ass.”

“Please.
Les enfants.”

“I’m just saying.”

“I think you should talk to this Maurice Mantle,” says my mother.

“Maurice Mantle is chicken-shit. I want someone with know-how and savvy, baby, because when I hit, I’m hitting
big.”

“Perhaps,” suggests my mother, who has yet to see any evidence of the father hitting in any manner at all, “you should talk to Maurice.”

“Maurice
,” mocks the father. “I don’t need him. When I hit, baby …”

“I’m hitting big,” says Danny. Danny scrunches up his face. “So we hoid.”

The father bristles, but finally allows a chuckle for his cocky son. My mother laughs gently, rubs his hair. I laugh, too, overjoyed.

It was hard when Danny went away to reform school.

Mother cried so much that I thought she might dry up and blow away like dust. The father sat in his study, the door closed, everything silent within. The one thing I remember him saying was—and wait, let’s set the scene, because it’s important to realize that the father had no logical reason to make this pronouncement, it wasn’t a response to anything, he merely opened the door to his study one day and proclaimed—“My sons. What disappointments.”

I decided to become one. That is, I did this to the best of my ability, but as things turned out, I was a failure even at becoming a major disappointment. I took my accordion, my trumpet, my English horn and my violin to a pawnshop and
traded them in for an electric organ, one of those whiny little Farfisas that sound like a systematic arrangement of bee farts. I also purchased a small amplifier, one with a cracked speaker (so that squawking and howling was the best one could hope for), and I set up in the basement and began the most ungodly sort of racket.

The father was down in the basement within minutes, his face ashen. The composer of “Vivian in Velvet” was aghast. “Where’s the schnooze?” he demanded.

“There is no schnooze!” I hollered above the music.

“You’ll break your mother’s heart!”

“Not likely!”

“You’ll break my heart!”

“Now we’re getting somewhere!”

“I got one son who’s a criminal and another who’s a musical maniac!”

I liked the description. I laughed ghoulishly, stabbed at an eleventh chord that I knew would sting the father right between the ears, make him feel like throwing up. “Stop!” he screamed.

“Do you want to hear the lyrics, Daddy?”

“Lyrics?” His hair was standing on end.

“Absolutely!”

“How could such a thing have lyrics?”

“Bam-diddle-oom-pow, she’s my little pom-pom girl!”

“Aaagh!” The father covered his ears, doubled over.

“She’s got big pom-poms, she knows how to bam-diddle-oom-pow!”

“Desmond, stop this!”

“I’m going to take her pom-poms, throw them all over this football field!”

Unnecessary cruelty? Perhaps. The father fled the basement, locked himself in his study. I didn’t keep up the music for much longer, because I didn’t care for it myself. I turned the volume down low, so that the father couldn’t hear it upstairs, and began to play some soothing major seventh chords.

The father, the father, the great unruly man. He should have existed in a rainforest, before the recording of time. He could have gobbled up lizards, spilled his seed willy-nilly, covered the earth with dull-witted progeny. And they would have ruled the world, kings and queens all.

Danny came home after a year in reform school, and it made me sad because we had grown very far apart. He had taken to wearing T-shirts and bluejeans, his feet decked out in shiny pointed shoes. In a desperate attempt to make friends at high school I was wearing Pendletons, clam diggers and Hush Puppies. I was working hard at my music—at least, that’s all I ever did. Danny was still obsessed with speed and machines,
cars
to put it simply, and his hobby was rebuilding old wrecks even though he wasn’t old enough to legally drive them. He’d spend hours on their engines and bodies, and then he’d cruise them stealthily onto an old dirt track near our house, and he’d bomb around until the cars either gave up the ghost or were driven into trees.

One day when I came home from school I saw Danny out in the driveway underneath one of his old coupés. Danny was always preceding me home from school, which leads me to believe that he was not in fact attending. Anyway, he couldn’t see me as he worked on the chassis, and I was surprised to hear him singing. He was singing a popular song of the time, I think it was “Teen Angel,” and his recently changed voice was a very sweet and pretty one. Without thinking I joined in, adding a high harmony, and Danny scooted out from underneath the car with a big grin on his face. We finished the song, even locked our arms around each other’s shoulders to add pathos. Then Danny laughed, gave me a little punch to the belly.

“Do you want to come down into the basement?” I asked. “We could sing some more songs.”

Danny thought about it, but finally he shook his grease-spotted head, waved a monkey wrench in the air. “Nope. I got to work on this beast. It needs more torque.”

“Torque?”

“Torque.”

The strange-sounding word started bouncing inside my head. “Go like this,” I said urgently.
“Torque torque. Torque torque.”
I gave Danny a note, jabbed in the air to set him on a rhythm. Danny made a rude sound, but I was insistent, and my brother finally started doing it, quietly at first and then with more power. “
Torque torque. Torque torque.”

I falsettoed away up high, the better to swoop down on the melody like an eagle.
“The beast needs more torque!”
I sang.
“The beast needs more torque.”
I waved my brother up to another note, and he adjusted.
“I gotta uncork the cork, because the beast needs more torque!”
Up to the fifth, an idiot could see it coming.
“The pig needs more pork,”
I shouted,
“and the beast needs more torque!”
We laughed, Danny and I, and then we flew down to the basement. The Farfisa spat out the raunchy chords like that was what it had been waiting to do. Danny grabbed a tambourine, and without thinking he began to sing the melody, and I took over the undercurrent,
“Torque torque. Torque torque.”
The song was written in seven minutes, but we spent about four hours singing it over and over again.

We were finally summoned up to dinner. The father scowled at us and picked away at his
poule grappé
. He looked sad and distant, lonely in a strange world. My mother was very animated, though, and as she served us our food she sang softly under her breath,
“The beast needs more torque …”

I have decided that I must go to bed. Not a radical bed-going, mind you, just a simple clocking of zee-time in order to rise refreshed and rosy-cheeked. This is a real step forward for me, mental-health-wise, and I
should
call Dr. Tockette and make him aware of this achievement. No way in hell I’d do such a thing, but it’s a positive sign that for a fleeting moment I considered initiating discourse with the quack.

I have finished recording the song “Claire”. I don’t know how long it took, but I do know that my belly has lost some of its size and toning. My eyes are screaming eaglet arseholes, I have developed a pungency that only a long period without dips in the pool can produce. Speaking of which, I think I’ll go for one now. Let me see how big a splash I can make.

Ah, here is Claire herself, sunbathing beside the pool. She is asleep. Talk about your restful slumber, this is napping in Connecticut, dozing by the fire while Aunt Dorothy makes plum pudding. This girl makes the oddest sounds when she sleeps, it’s like her nose, mouth and throat decide to party down while she’s flaked out, they sputter and whistle and make noises like tiny pink engines. Needless to say, Claire is currently naked. They have scant truck with clothes up on chilly Toronto, which is a bit surprising. Claire is lying on her stomach. I wonder if she realizes that her bottom is turning red as a lobster. This is going to be very painful for the creature. Beside her lies a tube of ointment, and I decide that I will add some to this sensitive area. I make a dab in one palm, rub my fleshy hams together and then gingerly press down on Claire’s body.

“Aaeeyah!”
There is a sudden bolt of awful electricity, and Claire is on her feet, staring at me, her hands twisted and clawlike. “What the fuck are you doing?”

I show her my greasy palms. You have to careful when you have an interplanetary house guest, you never know when you’re going to offend some ethnocentricity. “Your bottom was getting burned, number twenty-one. I thought it would hurt you.” I clamber to my feet, not feeling particularly well. “I
have decided to go to bed. A great leap for mankind. I’m sorry I scared you.”

“Where I come from you don’t just go around latching on to someone’s arse-end.”

There, you see? How was I to know? I turn and lumber away. I wander down to the barbed-wire fence, I press my forehead against the metal, dig it into my fat face. Below me is the ocean. I hope I will see some whales. Baleen, humpbacked or sperm, it makes no difference. I am composing music for them, you know. When I finish the music, I will set up speakers, hundreds of them, I will play the music for the whales. They will gather beneath my house, they will nestle comfortably in the sea and smile upwards.

Claire is beside me. She has put on a terry-cloth robe. We watch the water. It is rough, tempestuous. Men will be lost at sea today, their widows will evermore wear weeds.

“I don’t like being touched,” Claire tells me. “I was touched a lot, for a long time, and now I don’t like it.”

“I don’t like touching.”

“I didn’t mean to scream at you.”

“Oh, think nothing of it. I’ve been screamed at many times. Fay was a great one for screaming at me.”

“That your wife?”

“My used-to-be wife.”

“Your ex.”

“Ex, why and zee.”

“How long were you married?”

“Many, many years. More than I care to remember. Or am capable of, for all that.”

“Why’d you bust up?”

Now, to make matters truly nauseating, we have the daily Memory Matinee. See Desmond come home unexpectedly. See him mount the stairs, eager for the embrace of his life-mate. See him open the bedroom door. See … 
agh
.

Fay, you know, was born too late. As are we all. Fay should have existed during the French Revolution. She would not have been bored. She could have led small peasant insurrections. She’d cheer dizzily as the heads rolled off the aristocrats, her ample bosom heaving. In that time of mayhem, there would have been wanton copulation.

“So what have you been up to, dude?” Claire is trying to be cheery, she even taps my flabby arm with a small set of freckled knuckles. “You been working away?”

“I’ve been working.”

“On the
Whale Music?”

“No. No, I’ve neglected the
Whale Music
. I’m going to go work on that now.”

“Don’t you think you maybe ought to go to bed?”

“If you have any questions on human behaviour—although I myself am stymied much of the time—feel free to ask.”

“Huh?”

I wander into the living room. Wait. My fairy godmother has been here. Look on the table, what do you see? A bottle of whiskey. When brain cells fall out, you leave them under your pillow, and in the morning there will be a bottle of booze there. I unscrew the top, look around cannily (force of habit, I instinctively search for the despicable ex-footballer Farley O’Keefe), and send a shot downwards.

I blast back into the music room, retro-rocket into the control booth, power-on all my computers and machines. “Desmond to Earth, Desmond to Earth,” I mutter into a squalling microphone. Apparently there is something evil up on the planet Toronto in the Alpha Centauri galaxy. I drink more whiskey. And now, the
Whale Music
. Yes! I must dance to the
Whale Music
. I must leap into the vocal booth and sing along, the “Song of Flight” and of “Danger”. You know what this needs, don’t you? A sax, absolutely, a sax to crackle like dolphins in the never-ending sun, a sax to rip life through the heavy water.

If Dan-Dan were here, he could play the sax. That was a
musical machine that he learnt to work, maybe not particularly well, but Danny could certainly play the dolphins.

It is not a good idea to reflect on my brother and consume whiskey.