Traveling Sprinkler

Twenty-three

OH, ME. That good, good woman. I spent all morning reading the message boards in hysterectomy support groups. A lot of women said that having a hysterectomy was the best decision they’d ever made. Others were unhappy because they’d wanted to have a second child, or a third child. Or just a child.

Once on a hot night when Roz and I were watching a documentary called Dark Days, I got the big square fan and plugged it in and said we could cool our loins with it. Then I asked her whether women had loins, as men did. Was it a gender-neutral term? She said, “I think so, technically. It’s anything in the upper thigh area and anything that is carried or tucked away between the thighs.” Then she said, “When I was little I always misread ‘loin cloth’ as ‘lion cloth.’ I thought Hercules killed the lion and then wore the fur over his privates. The dyslexic mistake is part of the meaning.”

“He girded his lion,” I said. I turned on the fan. The documentary was about people living in shacks in an underground rail tunnel in New York City. It was a very good movie, but it made Roz sad. Here is a world with so much disparity and so much striving and suffering, she thought, and what am I doing with my life? I think that movie was part of what got her to apply for the producer job at the radio show.

• • •

I WORKED for several hours today on a new song called “Honk for Assistance.” I saw the sign at a convenience store, near the ice machine, and I thought, Now, that is a dance song, in the tradition of Midnight Star. I sampled a few honks from my Kia’s horn and set up a beat and fingered up some harmony using an instrument I hadn’t tried before, the Gospel Organ, which has a slight percussive sound in the attack phase of each note. I added more chords on a Mark II keyboard and some homegrown handclaps and some rhythms made with the Funk Boogie Kit. And then I wondered idly whether somebody had already made a song out of “Honk for Assistance.” Yes, they had. The composer’s name was Tom Clark and it was on an EP called Nervous. It’s pretty good. No words. Foolish me: You must never look anything up on iTunes while you’re working on a song. Otherwise you’ll stop and you’ll say it’s all been done.

I need money. Money always helps. I called Gene and told him that my book of poems, formerly called Misery Hat, was turning out to be something different. It was now a book about music.

“Ah, okay.”

“It seems to be about trying to write dance songs. Also protest songs and love songs. Pop songs in general.”

“Maybe we could do an enhanced ebook and include the songs.”

That depended, I said, on whether the songs were any good or not.

“Whether they’re good doesn’t matter,” Gene said. “Process not product, as they say about schoolchildren. Just give it the Chowder spin. And stay away from the misery hat.”

When that check comes from Allstate I’m going to buy Roz a new canoe. That’s the least I can do.

• • •

WHEN DEBUSSY WAS YOUNG he wanted to write music for women to sing. He wrote love songs and he wrote erotic songs. He set some of Pierre Louÿs’s Chansons de Bilitis to music, Louÿs who late in life wrote a poem called “The Trophy of Legendary Vulvas”—what a title! When I was young and wanted to be a composer like Debussy, I paid no attention to any of his songs. I couldn’t listen to them. I listened only to his piano and orchestral music. The only vocals of his that I could stand were the wordless vowels that the sirens sing in the Nocturnes, and even those I wasn’t sure about. I still can’t listen to his songs with any pleasure. The words seem pushed and pulled and crowded by the music. But that’s my loss.

Everything for Debussy was really about sex and smoking. Sex, smoking, the grand piano, and the English Channel. Those were his mainstays. He fell in love with his singers all through his life. One of his earliest songs repeats the line “The sea is deep” several times — it’s dedicated to Madame Vasnier, a singer. He may or may not have had an affair with Mary Garden, the woman who sang in his opera Pelléas and Mélisande. In her memoir, Mary Garden says nothing happened between them, but she’s not convincing. Debussy liked Scottish women with gentle voices who hung around wells, and he liked women who had flaxen hair — he wrote a lovely piano prelude called “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair,” which was inspired by his first wife, Lilly, who wounded herself with a handgun after Debussy took up with the brown-haired woman who became his second wife. He liked brown-haired women, too. He just plain liked women. Women and moonlight and vers libre and smoking strong French cigarettes. And then he died broke and miserable. His new wife’s father had disinherited her.

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.”