Smoke (32 page)

Doc John sits on the edge of his bed in his robe and black knee socks. The double box spring and mattress is firm beneath him. He holds his arms in proper concert formation, back erect, feet flat on the hardwood floor. He supports the weight of the clarinet with his right thumb, and all seventeen keys, which he's finished polishing with a cottony cloth, feel smooth to the touch. The cloth lies beside him on the bedspread. Only a small lamp illuminates the room, though his eyes are closed. He is inspired to practise.

His bottom lip is rolled over his bottom row of teeth and the mouthpiece of the clarinet rests there, his lips sealed around it so that no air can escape—a good embouchure reserves all precious breath for the instrument. His lip is raw from much practising lately, as if a fine piece of sandpaper has been pulled tightly over top of a balloon. On the outside of his lip, in the shallow valley above his chin, there is a sensitive red patch. Playing is all about breath control, moisture and vibration. There are holes to release his breath, pads to hold it in and shape it. But it is a tremor which makes the music come to life. Alice enters the room and he stops to acknowledge her, holds his posture and opens his eyes.

“No, go on,” she says. “I like to hear you.” She watches his hands, and even in their arthritic, gnarled state finds them to be agreeable. His healing hands. Soft and capable and almost feminine. Yes, she loves him for his hands and his good Christian heart, always helpful in a pinch.

Doc John shifts position to face her now, one wiry leg dangling over the side of the bed. He flexes his diaphragm as Alice slips from her blue housecoat, spreads it across the back of a chair and sits on her side of the bed in her old nightgown. She kicks off her slippers, right foot and left, stretches across the bed to find John's pillow, and props both it and hers behind her back. When she reaches into the small drawer of her bedside stand for an emery board he notices how her small breasts fall together to one side, and how her pouch of a belly slopes, pressing through the worn material of her nightgown like a soft blue moon. Her salt-and-pepper hair hangs shoulder length and sweeps partway across her face as though a net has been cast out to catch him. He licks the clarinet reed without thinking. Doesn't feel tired any more. “This one's just for you,” he says, the mouthpiece between his teeth. Alice fluffs the pillows, settles herself comfortably with her legs stretched out so that her feet are down at the bottom of the bed beside her husband. She begins to file her fingernails. “I think you'll know it,” the doctor adds. He gives her feet a squeeze. Her toes are freezing and he covers them with the polishing cloth and resumes the song from the beginning. Pain pools in his knuckles while he plays. His fingers are stiff. Inflamed. He is aware of how quickly his playing has deteriorated over the past months.

When he joined the Smoke Brass and Woodwind Pipe Band, years ago, he thought he'd prefer the trombone or the trumpet, but Walter had given him a quick introduction to the woodwinds and he soon came to realize that it was clarinet that spoke to him especially. This instrument is not boastful or showy—indeed there are few good solos written for clarinet. No, it's an instrument that sounds best when accompanied—bassoon, flute, strings—though they haven't any strings in the local band. He enjoys the way it makes him feel to hold its heavy, twenty-six-inch-long rosewood body in both hands, and let loose his fingers and everything he cannot otherwise express. He loves the taste of the reed on his tongue, especially a new reed, and speaking foreign words like
crescendo
and
staccato
reminds him of medicine, of the Latin terms his father had once forced him to memorize. Clarinet suits his hands—any larger and he'd have trouble with the cramped positioning. Even with arthritis he can manage regular rehearsals and with enough effort his clarinet can be made to sound sad, joyful, mysterious all in one breath.

Every instrument, Walter has told the band on more than one occasion, reflects its player. And John has thought about what of him comes through the long body of his clarinet. Tact. Practised and controlled formality. It's a humbling sound, but the best thing about playing it is belonging, having a defined and valued place in the band, with every player working towards the same goal. Tonight he wants to release all his pent-up anxiety, to arc and bow, negotiate with the past and calm his implacable stomach. And yet when he blows hard the instrument squeaks in protest and reminds him of his place and of how music, like life itself, responds best to a powerful but gentle touch. His wife's emery board scrapes accompaniment as he finishes up the composition with a dramatic trill, blowing gradually stronger and making the final notes more potent.

“That was lovely John.” Alice sets aside what she is doing. “It gave me gooseflesh.”

He carefully places his clarinet on the chair and moves to lie beside her, his head resting on her abdomen. Her stomach grumbles and he feels her cool flesh beneath the thin material. “You know what I do with my clarinet when
she's
cold?”

Alice makes a motion to rise, to scuttle under the covers, but he presses his fingers into the plump flesh of her hips to hold her still. He thinks of the way the pads of his fingers feel when he presses them into the silver rings on his clarinet, how the metal leaves round circles imprinted, like octopus tentacles. Alice runs her hand through his hair. “I can't imagine.”

He lifts his face, regards his wife in a way that he hasn't in months. She has so few wrinkles, even for a woman ten years her junior. He reaches up and removes his glasses, sets them on the bedside stand. Before she knows what he's doing, he's eased her nightgown up and over her hips and is rubbing his head into her belly, blowing on her bare skin and making a rude, flatulent sound. She laughs artlessly and tries to push him away but his lips tickle and she only laughs harder.

He's always taken great pride in offering Alice pleasure—never demanding it. He's learned to touch her radiant and red. Learned to give her what she wants under covers, in the dark, and the secret to feeling good about it is to never ask anything in return. You can live a long time, a beautifully long time, being as singular in purpose as a stone.

Early on in their marriage Alice modestly questioned the onesidedness of their intimate relationship, but over time even an interrogation that goes unanswered eventually ceases to exist. Now he crawls on top of her, pressing his weight into her body, and she receives him. He smiles and kisses her on the neck. She turns her face, feels the emery board digging into her side and her husband's warm, wet mouth tracing all the way from below one earlobe to the crevice of her collarbone. She shivers when she hears him whisper
“Tremolo.”
He reaches over to pull the chain on the small lamp, folding the two of them into darkness.

In the moonlight Alice sees only the bright white nickel silver of the clarinet keys as they gleam like stars beside the bed. Every surface of the room is cast in a silver glow and she can't help but think of their twenty-fifth anniversary, only a few months off now. She sighs and conjures the melody as her husband's twisted but agile fingers play along her body, circling her shoulders, down her rib cage and across her stomach. She bites her lip. His hands have always been her undoing, her Judas, for they betray her weakness every time. His hands are able to heal and to play as if they belong to a charmed soul and sometimes, like now, they fly across her skin convincing her that she and John are as endless as the great good sky itself.

The song he played for her was slow and sultry. Despairing. Broken-hearted, Alice thinks, the way she would feel being severed from him. But mercifully he changed the pitch and the tempo and it became lighter, fast, like his speech pattern when he's telling one of his silly stories. Yes, that song sounded like one of John's yarns and knowing that he can communicate as effectively
without
words strikes Alice as precious and ironic, and above all, divine. She feels desire inside like a buttery thickness. Her breath catches in the back of her throat when his arm reaches under and around her waist, holding her in place. His body cleaves to her softer form, begging entrance. He parts her legs. The silver, shadowy room spins into wider and wider concentric circles until Alice's stomach drops and her mouth waters and she feels John above her, coaxing. Then he is undressing as he's always done, throwing off his housecoat and falling onto her again, the straps of his jockstrap on his backside familiar. When she reaches around to grab them, the tensor bandages beneath his cotton undershirt rub up against her nakedness. His socks scratch her feet. The spicy smell of his aftershave fills her senses. Her own wispy breath rises and falls, then falls and falls and falls.…

John's tongue circles her nipples as if he is tonguing the reed of his clarinet. Then he kisses her on the lips as though for the first time. Or the last. Alice tastes the woody reed and her blood quickens. She won't admit it by daylight or lamplight, not even by the sterling glow of the moon, for it surely is blasphemous, but lying with him in this way she is certain, every time, it's the closest she's ever come to knowing God.

He grips her tightly, one hand down between her legs, fingers blustery with promise. Slowly, he guides himself inside.
“Forte,”
she hears him say while he rocks them both. Then
“Piano. Pianissimo.
”

Soft, soft soft.

A
FTER, THE DOCTOR TRIES
to sleep but finds himself rattled and fretting. He lies in bed listening to the radio tucked under his pillow, to the muffled voice playing like a contained and frantic whisper.
Midnight. One more night without sleepin'. Watchin' till mornin' comes creepin'. Green door, what's that secret you're keeping?
He flips over, switches on the bedside lamp and thinks about medical discoveries made year after year to revolutionize the way the world understands and functions. Insulin. Vaccines for polio, measles, mumps. The average human lifespan seems to be increasing. Will there come a time when death can be delayed indefinitely? Averted? When a man can sidestep his own ending? Doc John wants to be reborn like those believers the televangelists baptize, or roll away like the tide and slip seamlessly from rivers to lakes to oceans and farther, to be the first line of a new story, a different story. Begin again. Science teaches that there is variety in nature. Anomalies, mutations. Sometimes it's these exceptions to the rules, he knows, that lead to a whole new discovery, or a cure. He believes in endless possibility and surprise discovery for he's practically invented the very ground that has carried him forward.

Even after all these years he looks to what he knows of research and the newest experiments for comfort, not Alice's big black book or even her diminutive frame laying next to him in bed. She is goodness and faith and superstition. He is a man of science. Should he once more broach the subject of all that is coiled up inside him like a spring?

“Settle down,” Alice whispers. “It's been a long day, John. I'm bushed.”

“I can't. I'm not ready.”

“Pardon?”

“I'm not ready to go.”

“But I thought we agreed. You need to start holding office for half days.”

“I don't mean work.”

Alice rolls over, faces him in the thick moonlight. “What then?”

“I'm not feeling any better,” he admits.

“You're just run down. Doing too much. I've been saying it for months. For one thing, you shouldn't be on the road any more. Your eyes aren't good enough.” She reaches for his hand under the bedspread and accidentally touches the spot where the lining of his stomach, and the tissue beneath, have deteriorated. He flinches. He's seen inside many bodies, inside where blood and tissue and bone erode, and it makes faith harder to hold on to in the face of his own mortality. He clutches his abdomen. We all begin inside, he thinks, and then it's alone the rest of the way. And alone after we're dried up completely, shut down, cold, immaterial once more. We rot and cave, we stink with the foulness of life long gone. That's all. Despite himself he is sick with the flavour of a frightful ending; punctuated time. Death, sick, sick death.

“It's coming soon,” he whispers into the night. “It's coming fast.” He searches Alice's face through the waning darkness and finds the gentle curve of its silhouette. A reverse cameo, the outline of his life. He imagines her body beneath him as it was only moments before, pressing and straining. He sees them dancing in the kitchen by the dim yellow of the stove light as they have on many nights, and he gives her a reassuring cuddle under the sheets. Alice, younger and more optimistic, doesn't yet understand that aging is a magnifying glass held up against time, reminding him that he is not infinite. He can change, effect much change, but transformation is only as good as his last breath. Yes, Alice has always denied what she hasn't wanted to admit out loud and he understands this; her refusal to talk about their situation is sacrosanct. Her panacea his permission. He's relied on the generosity of her spirit to smooth suspicions and mask evidence and she has always delivered but now he must be even more certain, vigilant. “When it's my time I want you to take me away from here,” he says. “I want to be cremated.”