Mimi (27 page)

OVERTURE

Every sound magnified.

Bikes rattle by.

Lawnmower moans.

Trees sizzle.

Birdsong.

Airplane.

ACT ONE

Soprano raindrops on water.

People start to walk faster, crouching over, adjusting clothing to form makeshift hats.

Tenor (a cop) strikes nonchalant pose, as if ready for worse threats than rain.

Alto and contralto chorus of umbrellas blossoms.

Amusing variety, no two the same.

Black common, polka dots popular.

But shapes differ, and the number of spokes.

Some are classical, with spikes on the end.

Others fold; these are never fully erect.

Like dogs meeting, a small black-and-white umbrella encounters a big yellow one: they circle around each other.

Renoir poppy-field umbrella arrives, unfurling.

Coloratura star of the show: red umbrella, under which shelters a woman in a pale pink dress and dusty-brown short jacket (unexpectedly good color combo).

People calling out, “We’re almost there!”

ACT TWO

Children fill the stage (nothing better in an opera, unless you’ve got a donkey).

Kids don’t carry umbrellas—that would impede play and eating ice cream.

They don’t mind the rain, don’t cease to function when they get wet.

They stamp in puddles.

They slip and slide.

They sail trash in the gutter.

Scene ends with bass baritone rain, now falling fast and noisily on boats in the harbor.

ACT THREE

Driving home, I stop at a flower-stand on the highway that I disdained earlier, coldly depriving myself of lilies of the valley (my mother’s favorite flower).

Now I buy bundle after bundle of them: I keep wanting more than I picked up already.

Chorus of wide dark-green leaves and tiny cupped white flowers.

My duck liked the fancy duck pellets, as did her husband (though he tended to eat too many at once and then choke). I continued to row out and feed her several times a day. I loved that duck! Her dark head, encircled by that black band that ran right across the eyes and all the way around the back of the head—her wild streak. I’d never noticed before how beautiful female ducks are. Her face was a perfect Serpentine Line, that matched the intertwining reeds around her. Her tawny breast gleamed in the sun when she took a nap.

What I really wanted to do was capture her, fix the wing, and keep her safe and cozy in my yard. Maybe get her a big washtub to swim in. Returning her later to the wild in some complicated, disinterested way. But it was not to be. Any extreme efforts to help her would only freak her out. So I contented myself with feeding her, and foiling the plans of some of her stalkers when I could, by crumpling Coke cans.

FINALE

Bubbles and me in a boat.

Sample bag of duck pellets.

Five empty Coke cans.

Five-pound note.

MIMI DREAM: Long Island. Twilight. I’m running through shallow water, trying to catch up with Mimi, who’s a bit ahead of me. The sky is turquoise. We’re about to board a boat lying further out to sea but I’m dawdling on this sandbar, because there are some little silver fish wriggling there, caught by the outgoing tide, and I want to show them to Mimi. Lights sparkle all around us from small boats and houses near the shore, sending wavy snakes of light towards me across the water, and I feel utterly happy, following in Mimi’s wake.

Oh, Mimi, come! We will step nimbly through the sedge grass and never grow old!

“For those of you having trouble waking up this morning, here’s some Brahms for you,” says the radio announcer. brahms? Brahms was a sweetheart, but he had trouble tying his own shoelaces! Next, some Wolfgang They-Can’t-All-Be-Gems Mozart (would he get outta here with that glass armonica of his?). I usually seemed to tune in just in time for a big dose of Berlioz or Mahler, or
Wagner
for godsake, “Now that your ears are attuned to the key of C major.” My ears aren’t attuned to anything but
Bach
, you idiot!

Then the piquant biographical details would start to flow, all that fake poignancy of chronology. Before I can reach the radio, I know all about César Franck’s love affair with some chick in his fifties, that pissed off his wife and Saint-Saëns. How is this my business? The news grates throughout Franck’s
Reflections on Love
, ruining any romance and eroticism the announcer had promised.

How about Satie? Satie was a saddo. Thanks. Finally they play some more Mozart—it’s
fantastic
—and they interrupt it! “Well, we’ve had about as much Mozart as time will allow,” says the announcer—so
slowly
he could have fit a few more bars of Mozart in if he’d just shut up! Any classical station worth its interminable fund-raising drives would have
allowed
time for Mozart. But even when they do, they wreck it by talking about his debts and his early demise—until you’re too upset to listen to the music! Mozart’s “debts” indeed. What about what we owe
him
?

I turn the radio off and go downstairs to play some Bach for
myself
: his second
French Suite
in C minor is like watching the planes of a landscape unfurl as you walk. An avenue opens up, a valley, the ridge of a hill, something always emerging before you.

Later, I go for a walk in the dunes, where more paths unfurl, winds whirl, clouds form and deform, and sunlight lands on the earth like a bomb. Gulls sleepily patrol the shoreline. Life and death are allowed to pursue their modest course in the country. In cities you’re at the mercy of everybody’s ego, and that gets
tiring
. We create criminality wherever we go. Birds just do their job, uncomplaining, content merely to survive (ducks excepted).

But I am not a bird.

I go feed my duck but she isn’t there. Drowned by rapist ducks while I was off duty? Or just eaten by some predator? Nature ain’t pretty, it’s just the only game in town. I watch some ducklings instead. They’re trying to catch bugs by parachuting off rocks. “Ee-ee-ee-ee!” they cry. A mother duck is trying to organize her brood to sleep under her, enclosing them in her wings. How cosy they must be! But one of the ducklings doesn’t want a nap and won’t stay put. All he wants to do is nuzzle his mother’s soft brown neck. So do I. I thought of Bee’s theory that pleasure is the purpose of existence. She was right. Animals aren’t in pain all the time. Pain is an
aberration
, a sign of trouble. There’s nothing irresponsible or dishonorable about seeking pleasure. It’s what we’re
here
for! Even bees look like they’re having a ball.

Later, I searched for my absent duck again. I kept thinking I saw her lifeless carcass just beneath the surface of the pond, but it turned out to be water weeds. I would never know if she survived and escaped or, more likely, got eaten by some creature because she couldn’t fly away. Had she hoped I might come help her? The recurrent idea chilled me.

I headed home, luckless and duckless, climbed the porch steps and there was a letter from Chevron High, forwarded by Deedee. A fearful woman with the letters, that Deedee. Chevron wanted confirmation that I was doing the speech on June 15th, now only a few weeks away—but I wanted confirmation from Mimi that she was going to help me!

Speech panic descends, excuses form—excuses I’m pretty sure I already used in high school:

sunburn

spontaneous combustion

anaphylactic shock

TB

cholera

stubbed my toe

under arrest

Pavarotti’s final concert

busy making bouillabaisse

jury duty

tomato harvest time

dry cleaning mix-up

volcanic ash problem

under-reported military skirmish in my area

just lazy

deer tick

enslavement to dominatrix

got a duck to take care of

Foreign Accent syndrome

so depressed about Mimi I can’t eat or think. . .

Oh, for godsake, I’d do it. I’d already bought the tickets. Bee’s memorial party at the gallery was the day before the speech, so I’d have to go back to New York by then anyway. I could pick up my notes (for various half-begun speeches) at my apartment, and go straight to the airport from the memorial. What the hell, I’d give them a speech if it killed me. I owed it to Mimi.

That night I dreamed my duck got very big and vanquished all her assailants. She was about the size of an elephant! But when she still hadn’t appeared the next day, I called the Sag Harbor store to cancel my order for more duck pellets. They didn’t seem to care—they hadn’t been impressed with my order in the first place—and their indifference hurt.

When I got home, I took Bee’s book on Matisse out onto the porch, the only thing I’d brought back with me from England (besides Bee’s ashes and the bird’s nest). I’d intended to read it on the plane but some kid behind me kept saying “Ronaldo” and I couldn’t concentrate. But that was no place to think about Matisse anyway. It wasn’t a
metaphysical
plane.

Bubbles immediately claimed my lap and started licking herself, and then my hand, in an overspill of affection. She had a way of looking at me with such love it made me want to laugh—or cry. Bubbles was
good
at love, good at being happy; these are creditable skills.

As for Matisse—now there’s a guy who liked his pajamas!
He’s
in his pj’s, the models are in pantaloons, and he tries to share in their
joie de vivre
by painting them. These women aren’t overly concerned about how they look to him—they’re in their own world, a zone of pleasure that Matisse envies. The perpetually anxious, heat-seeking, peace-loving Matisse longed to please with those odalisques of his, to please himself and us. Like Puccini, Matisse really came to terms with the fact that women EXIST. Matisse looks at women the way a lover does, not like a dad. Fathers only disapprove of their wives and daughters. The role of the lover is to approve and applaud them, appease them,
please
them. Even idealize them a bit, what the hell?

What have most men done for women’s
joie de vivre
? All we’ve done is
bore
women to death,
bore
them into compliance with our idiocies. When we aren’t beating them up, or burning them as witches, we deafen them with our noise—VROOM VROOM, BANG BANG, POW-WOW, RAT-A-TAT-TAT! We’ve filled the earth with radioactive waste. And all our kvetching, our pontificating, the prevaricating, the listless, unimaginative fornicating. No wonder women always seem on the verge of insanity!

I thought of what Bee went through, yelled at by our imperious (murderous) dad, battered by that lawman of a husband, and finally extinguished, brutally and for no reason, by a dope with a gripe against women. I lay on that porch and thought of the whole world of women wronged, burned, beaten, badgered, and bereft; ignored from birth. They trailed past me in a half-sleep. Was there a single woman alive who hadn’t been mistreated by some maniac, simply because he knew he could get away with it? Was there a single woman who hadn’t suffered injustices because she was a woman,
a single one
? For many it was worse than that: stoned to death in the street, beheaded in a grocery store, thrown overboard off a yacht. We all look the other way, we’ve seen it all before, yeah, yeah, you can’t change human nature. . .

Half the women I knew were scared to walk through the countryside alone (and the other half probably should have been). Half the women I knew had been bashed up by some worthless guy. They’d all had to watch a million disrespectful movies about blonde bombshells, and then there was all the porn; and the News, the daily briefings on the ways in which women’s lives can be scuppered by rapists, serial killers, or guys like Tiger Woods who can’t keep his putz in his pants. They’d all watched a million male maestri conduct a million all-male orchestras, playing pieces only by men (okay, there’s a little Clara Schumann once in a while—big deal). And all the women I knew (and
treate
d
) tried too hard to be good, to look good, be nice, be sweet, be patient—tried so hard, when they were all fine in the first place!

I looked down at the sage plant I’d saved. I’d bought it in Sag Harbor, outside the animal feed store, bought it because it was dying, and planted it at the bottom of the porch steps, and now it was thriving, twice the size. The unvoiced sufferings of plants could make you a nervous wreck! I looked at that sage I’d saved with the contentment that comes from freeing something that needs freeing.