As soon as he came in the front door, Rodney went straight to the music room. That was what he called it, wryly but not without some hope: the music room. It was a small, dogleg-shaped fourth bedroom that had been created when the building was cut up into apartments. It qualified as a music room because it contained his clavichord.
There it stood on the unswept floor: Rodney’s clavichord. It was apple green with gold trim and bore a scene of geometric gardens on the inside of its lifted lid. Modeled on the Bodechtel clavichords built in the 1790s, Rodney’s had come from the Early Music Shop, in Edinburgh, three years ago. Still, resting there majestically in the dim light—it was winter in Chicago—the clavichord looked as though it had been waiting for Rodney to play it not only for the nine and a half hours since he’d left for work but for a couple of centuries at least.
You didn’t need that big a room for a clavichord. A clavichord wasn’t a piano. Spinets, virginals, fortepianos, clavichords, and even harpsichords were relatively small instruments. The eighteenth-century musicians who’d played them were small. Rodney was big, however—six feet three. He sat down gently on the narrow bench. Carefully he slid his knees under the keyboard. With closed eyes he began to play from memory a Sweelinck prelude.
Early music is rational, mathematical, a little bit stiff, and so was Rodney. He’d been that way long before he’d ever seen a clavichord or written a doctoral dissertation (unfinished) on temperament systems during the German Reformation. But Rodney’s immersion in the work of Bach père et fils had only fortified his native inclinations. The other piece of furniture in the music room was a small teak desk. In its drawers and pigeonholes were the super-organized files Rodney kept: health-insurance records; alphabetized appliance manuals along with warranties; the twins’ immunization histories, birth certificates, and Social Security cards; plus three years’ worth of monthly budgets stipulating household expenses down to the maximum allowed for heating (Rodney kept the apartment a bracing 58 degrees). A little cold weather was good for you. Cold weather was like Bach: it sorted the mind. On top of the desk was this month’s folder, marked “FEB ’05.” It contained three credit-card statements with horrendous running balances and the ongoing correspondence from the collection agency that was dunning Rodney for defaulting on his monthly payments to the Early Music Shop.
His back was straight as he played; his face twitched. Behind closed eyelids, his eyeballs fluttered in time with the quick notes.
And then the door swung open and Imogene, who was six, shouted in her longshoreman’s voice:
“Daddy! Dinner!”
Having completed this task, she slammed the door shut again. Rodney stopped. Looking at his watch, he saw that he’d been playing—practicing—for exactly four minutes.
*
The house Rodney grew up in had been neat and tidy. They used to do that in those days. They used to house-clean. They, of course, meant she: a mother. All those years of vacuumed carpets and spick-and-span kitchens, of shirts that miraculously picked themselves up off the floor only to reappear freshly laundered in the dresser drawer—the whole functioning efficiency that used to be a house was no more. Women had given all that up when they went to work.
Or even when they didn’t. Rebecca, Rodney’s wife, didn’t work outside the home. She worked in the apartment, in a back bedroom. She didn’t call it a bedroom. She called it an office. Rodney had a music room in which he played little music. Rebecca had an office in which she did little business. But she was there a lot, all day, while Rodney was at work at a real office in the city.
As he came out of the sanctuary of the music room, Rodney stepped around the cardboard boxes and rolls of bubble wrap and stray toys crowding the hall. He turned sideways to squeeze by the squad of winter coats hanging on the wall above crusty boots and single mittens. Moving into the living room, he stepped on something that felt like a mitten. But it wasn’t. It was a stuffed mouse. Sighing, Rodney picked it up. A little bigger than a real mouse, this particular mouse was baby blue in color and wore a black beret. It appeared to have a cleft palate.
“You’re supposed to be cute,” Rodney said to the mouse. “Exert yourself.”
The mice were what Rebecca did. They were part of a line called Mice ’n’ Warm?, which included, at present, four “characters”: Modernist Mouse, Boho Mouse, Surfer-Realist Mouse, and Flower-Power Mouse. Each artistic rodent was filled with aromatic pellets and was irresistibly squeezable. The selling point (still mainly theoretical) was that you could put these mice in the microwave and they would come out muffin-warm and smelling like potpourri.
Rodney carried the mouse in cupped hands, like an injured thing, into the kitchen.
“Escapee,” he said, by way of greeting.
Rebecca looked up from the sink, where she was straining pasta, and frowned. “Throw that in the trash,” she said. “It’s a reject.”
From the twins at the table came a cry of alarm. They didn’t like the mice to meet untimely ends. Springing up, they rushed their father with clutching hands.
Rodney held Boho Mouse higher.
Immy, who had Rebecca’s sharp chin along with her clear-eyed determination, climbed up on a chair. Tallulah, always the more instinctive and feral of the two, just grabbed Rodney’s arm and started walking up his leg.
While this assault was under way, Rodney said to Rebecca, “Let me guess. It’s the mouth.”
“It’s the mouth,” Rebecca said. “And the smell. Smell it.”
In order to do so, Rodney had to turn and pop the mouse into the microwave, hitting the warm-up button.
After twenty seconds, he took the warm mouse out and held it to his nose.
“It’s not that bad,” he said. “But I see what you mean. A little more armpit than would be ideal.”
“It’s supposed to be musk.”
“On the other hand,” said Rodney, “B.O. is perfect for a bohemian.”
“I’ve got five kilos of musk-scented pellets,” moaned Rebecca, “which are now useless.”
Rodney crossed the kitchen and stepped on the trash-can pedal, raising the lid. He tossed the mouse in and let the trash can close. It felt good to toss the mouse. He wanted to do it again.