Whale Music (13 page)

“I thought it might be too hot.” I ram the spoon into my mouth. This is some sort of fish stew, the various nuances of fishiness are intermingled, it takes all my self-control not to vault this food all over the far wall. “Very good.”

Claire stares at me and slowly starts to grin. “You fucker,” she says. “You hate fish, don’t you?”

I nod meekly.

Claire laughs. “
Quelle flaque.”
She reaches forward, messes my hair. “I’m tired,” she announces. “I’m going to bed.”

“An excellent notion.”

“You know, Des, we could sleep in the same bed. I got no particular objection to that scenario.”

“Except for I, you know, am rather irregular in my habits.”

“That’s what I’m thinking. Like, if we slept together, then I could say, hey, it’s time for bed, and hey, it’s time to get up.”

“Do you think it would work?”

Claire shrugs. “It’s worth a try.”

We are trying. I have the whole of my carcass teetering on the left side, about a sixteenth of the mattress. The alien occupies the rest of the bed, all flayed limbs and waterfalling golden hair. Suddenly, though, with a small muffled cry, Claire scrunches up into a tiny ball. She draws her knees into her chest, she wraps her arms around herself. A kind of evil electricity affects her, she twitches and gnashes her teeth. I touch her shoulder with my fat fingers—the resulting scream is short but terrifying. Claire climbs out of the bed, she stands in the darkness and tries to remember where she is. She stares at me without tenderness. “Gotta piss,” she says, and disappears.

Seems to me it’s rise-and-shine time. I’ll just check the old bedside clock here—3:14 A.M. Perfect. I stretch, yawn, slap my gums contently. I certainly enjoy domestic life.

I was eighteen when I met Fay Ginzburg. She was seventeen, in the company of her best friend, Karen Hoffman, the pair of them standing directly beneath me during a concert in Sausalito. This was surprising. I looked and saw that there was a bit of space available beneath both Monty Mann and my brother, ample room under Dewey Moore, so why these two girls should be right there was baffling. I was so shocked I misplaced my hand on the organ keyboard. I made some clammy notes and threw them into the engine of “Torque Torque”.

Karen Hoffman was a tall girl, flat-chested, she closed her eyes and weaved back and forth, a creature in search of a Svengali. Her lips were thick and very red, and she always looked to be pouting (always was, in fact, pouting). I took one look at those lips and was covered with goosebumps. My hands tossed fishy black notes all over the music. Even Monty Mann noticed, that’s how rank my playing suddenly became. Beside this tall and amply lipped person was Fay Ginzburg. She danced like a prizefighter, a masculine bob-and-weave, left-hooks and uppercuts whistling through the air. The other patrons gave her a wide berth. Fay Ginzburg’s breasts were like a division of Panzer tanks crushing the border at dawn. And she was similarly endowed at the other end, a very serious keester indeed, a huge battering ball of flesh. Fay Ginzburg’s hair was red, when I first saw her it was a pile on top of her head like autumn leaves about to be torched. Her eyes were grey or
black, depending on her mood, and the most conspicuous thing about her was a large, birdlike nose. (Later a doctor whittled away at the beak until it was a button.)

Not that I was at the time fascinated by Fay Ginzburg. No, all my attention—all my heart, so I fancied—was given over to the tall, gorgeously lipped creature with dreamily vacant eyes. I felt nauseated, my throat got tight, I was suddenly made aware of my elephantine awkwardness. After the set I went backstage and had a sip from Dewey Moore’s flask, I filched two beers out of a sink and popped them back. Bolstered, I walked into the larger dressing room, found it to be full of people as it always was, and discovered the object of my love (and her shorter, frightening friend) in conversation with my brother Danny.

I fired up a cigarette, a scrawny, ill-made affair, a taste like medieval peatmoss.

“Desmond!” Danny hailed me. “Come here and meet these womens. This here is—”

“Fay,” said the same, even though Danny’s finger had been aimed at the taller girl. “Fay Ginzburg. And this is my friend Karen Hoffman. You know Hoffman’s Drugs?”

Already my field of expertise, but I could only shrug uncertainly.

“That’s her uncle,” said Fay.

“Ah,” said I. I tried to think of something to say to Karen, to tell her, for example, what a noble line of work I felt her uncle was in, but Fay was sticking her finger into my chest. “What are you doing after the show?”

Danny answered, “Probably going for something to eat.”

“You want to come back to my place?”

“Hey,” said Danny. He looked at Karen. “Are you going back there?”

Karen produced an elaborate shrug, one full of philosophy and world-weariness. She did this quite a bit, and the effect would have been striking except that she usually did it in response to simple yes/no questions.

“So—” The girl Fay Ginzburg was poking me in the stomach. Throughout our brief interview she prodded me constantly, checking for weak spots. “We’ll see you after the show.”

“Absolutely,” said Dan. “My brother and I are looking forward to it.”

The two girls walked away.

“Well, well,” marvelled Danny.

“Daniel,” I spoke quite earnestly, “I want Karen.”

“You do, do you?” Danny lit up a cigarette, pretended to be reflecting seriously, but as he did so he stuffed the butt up his nostril.

“Desmo,” asked Daniel, “did you dig the lips?”

“The lips,” I agreed.

“Think of the things you could do with those lips.”

I nodded lasciviously, although I could only think of kisses, and rather chaste ones at that. (A melody popped into my mind, an airy gossamer affair, a spider’s web.)

“But hey, you’re my bro’!” said Danny. “We are issue of the same flesh, the same loins.” He kissed me on the cheek. “Make her happy, Desmo. Go get your nuts cracked.”

So after the show Danny and I got into the back seat of a huge red Edsel and we screamed off (Fay behind the wheel, tires squealing, red lights treated as a Joe Gutts Brake Test). I was silent, sullen, having smoked too much peatmoss, ingested perhaps a beer or two in excess. Danny was quite talkative, he beat out rhythms on the shiny vinyl seats, he concentrated on Fay Ginzburg and left me to speak to she of the Lips, except that it was like we came from different planets, her and me, orbital paths that in a million or two years might come within a hundred yards of each other.

Suddenly a mansion appeared, a huge, oddly built thing sitting on top of a hill. “That your house?” demanded Danny.

“My parents’ house,” nodded Fay.

“It’s kind of,” said Dan, “Transylvanian.”

The Edsel doggedly climbed the hill. (By the way, I was
always fond of Edsels. I even wrote a song about them, it’s on the
Highway
album, which is not one of our better albums, I’ll grant you.) And then we went through the front door and were introduced to Fay’s parents, Professor and Mrs. Ginzburg.

Mrs. Ginzburg had something wrong with her back, she was always bent over as though searching for lost change on the sidewalk, but she was a cheery sort, full of jokes, usually of a practical nature. One of her favourites was, whenever she should catch her husband off-guard, to shove him into some piece of furniture. These would usually be soft pieces of furniture, sofas and so forth, but I saw the professor shoved into the credenza a time or two. If it should seem odd that a humpbacked woman should be able to do this shoving at will, I should tell you that Professor Ginzburg was the slightest man that ever walked the face of this planet. If he topped seventy-five pounds it was only soaking wet, the day after Thanksgiving. The professor and his good lady were both survivors of a Nazi death camp, they both had a furious need to enjoy life, and I guess that accounts for much of what Fay was.

Mrs. Ginzburg’s main concern in life was food. She liked me from the instant she saw me, for although I was then relatively slim, she detected star potential. “Eat!” shouted Mrs. Ginzburg.

Professor Ginzburg was anti-food. “Talk!” he protested. “You don’t bring guests into the house and drag them into the kitchen. You sit down and talk like civilized people.”

“Who can talk with an empty stomach? You want to listen to growling stomachs all night?”

“So who’s growling?”

“One bowl of soup couldn’t hurt!” screamed Mrs. Ginzburg. This was her credo.

“One bowl of soup,” conceded Professor Ginzburg. “Then I want to discuss music with the boys. Beethoven, Mozart, all them bubbies.”

Fay scowled. “Daddy, they don’t know about that stuff. They play rock ‘n’ roll.”

“Rock ‘n’ roll? What, you’re so busy you don’t have time to say
and?”

Danny said, “Desmond knows about those guys.”

Fay looked at me, very surprised by this news.

“Desmond!” shouted Professor Ginzburg. “Who’s your favourite?”

“Debussy,” I supposed.

“He’s good,” agreed the Professor. “No slouch.”

“Soup!” battled back Mrs. Ginzburg. “Feed the stomach, then the soul.”

“So go eat soup,” sighed Professor G. wearily.

“Then I thought we might go down to the basement and listen to records,” said Fay.

“Right,” said the professor. “Just don’t get pregnant.”

“Daddy,” said Fay, “you’re disgusting.”

“What’s disgusting? Sex is all of a sudden disgusting?”

“First feed the stomach, then the soul, then the …” This train of thought was getting Mrs. G. into a bit of trouble. “Soup!” she announced grandly, herding us into the kitchen.

We were given borscht, which I hadn’t had before and took a powerful liking to. Professor Ginzburg hovered in the doorway—it was as if he didn’t even want to set foot in the kitchen—and he and I discussed serious composers. His highest praise was that the artist in question was no slouch. Except for Mr. Mozart, who’s name Professor G. could not speak except as a kind of herald, hardening the
z
until it cut like a saw.

“I can play the fiddle,” Professor Ginzburg told us. “I should say the
violin
, but if you heard me, you’d know. The fiddle. I had a string quartet once. The Commandant—who, as monsters go, was all right—he liked music. So he gave us these instruments, allowed us half an hour a day for practice. Once a week we would play for him. While he ate meat and tickled the tootsies of this milkmaid.”

“Don’t,” cautioned his wife. “They’re eating.”

Professor Ginzburg, however, had disappeared.

After soup we went downstairs. Karen and Danny immediately fell onto a sofa and commenced kissing. I stood there with a hole in my heart until tackled by Fay Ginzburg. She mowed me down, propelled me into an easy chair and jumped on my lap. “Kiss me, Desmond,” she demanded. I did so, first with reluctance, eventually with eagerness. Her body, so frightening and energetic, was delightful to contain, warm bits of flesh surfacing at the oddest times. The kissing was fun, too. Fay’s tongue was an eager adventurer, it examined my mouth like a faculty of dentistry. We necked for quite a while—I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Karen and Danny did little more than neck as well—until Professor Ginzburg came racing downstairs, screaming, “Meteor shower! Meteor shower!”

“Daddy!” screamed Fay.

“Radiant points colliding in the empyrean!” The professor disappeared back up the stairs. My brother was quick to follow. “Come on,” said Fay wearily. She grabbed my hand and pulled me after her father.

We stood in the backyard, all of us bathed in starlight. Above us, the sky was streaking with silver.

Danny couldn’t help himself. He tilted his head back and howled.

“That’s it, Dan-Dan!” shouted the professor. “And put in a good word for me.”

I stood there flat-footed and slack-jawed, my head canted awkwardly. Professor Ginzburg elbowed me in the side. “Know what slays me?” he asked. “Some people see something like this, a celestial phenomenon, they say,
it makes me feel so small
. Putzes. It makes me feel so big. Like God did this just for me. So I watch, I give it a little, hmmmm.…” Professor G. reached out his hand and waggled it judgementally. “
Not too shabby.”