“Some good news, though,” Rebecca said, after the phone had stopped ringing. “I got a new client today.”
“Great. Who?”
“Stationery store out in Des Plaines.”
“How many mice they want?”
“Twenty. To start.”
Rodney, who was capable of keeping straight the 1/6 comma fifths of Bach’s keyboard bearing (F-C-G-D-A-E) from the pure fifths (E-B-F#-C#) and the devilish 1/12 comma fifths (C#-G#-D#-A#), had no trouble performing the following calculations in his head: Each Mice ’n’ Warm mouse sold for $15. Rebecca’s take was 40 percent. That came to $6 per mouse. Since each mouse cost roughly $3.50 to make, the profit on one mouse was $2.50. Times twenty came to fifty bucks.
He did another calculation: $27,000 divided by $2.50 came to 10,800. The stationery store wanted twenty mice to start. Rebecca would have to sell more than ten thousand to pay off the clavichord.
With lusterless eyes Rodney looked across the table at his wife.
There were lots of women with actual jobs around. Rebecca just didn’t happen to be one of them. But whatever a woman did nowadays was called a job. A man sewing together stuffed mice was considered, at best, a poor provider, at worst, a loser. Whereas a woman with a master’s and a near-Ph.D. in musicology who hand-stitched microwavable, sweet-smelling rodents was now considered (especially by her married female friends) an entrepreneur.
Of course, because of Rebecca’s “job,” she couldn’t take care of the twins full-time. They were forced to hire a babysitter, whose weekly salary came to more than Rebecca brought in by selling the Mice ’n’ Warm mice (which was why they could pay only the minimum amount on their credit cards, driving them even further into debt). Rebecca had offered many times to give up the mice and get a job that paid a steady salary. But Rodney, who knew what it was to love a useless thing, always said, “Give it another few years.”
Why was what Rodney did a job and what Rebecca did not a job? First of all, Rodney made money. Second, he had to warp his personality to suit his employer. Third, he disliked it. That was a sure sign that it was a job.
“Fifty dollars,” he said.
“What?”
“That’s the profit on twenty mice. Before taxes.”
“Fifty dollars!” cried Tallulah. “That’s a lot!”
“It’s just one account,” Rebecca said.
Rodney felt like asking how many accounts she had total. He felt like asking for a monthly report showing liabilities and receivables. He was sure Rebecca had detailed financial information scrawled on the back of an envelope somewhere. But he didn’t say anything, because the girls were there. He just got up and started to clear the table. “I’ve got to do the dishes,” he said, as though it were news.
Rebecca herded the girls into the living room and sat them down before a rented DVD. Typically she used the half hour after dinner to phone her suppliers in China, where it was now tomorrow morning, or to call her mother, a sciatica sufferer. Alone at the kitchen sink, Rodney scraped plates and rinsed kefir-coated glasses. He fed the dragonlike disposal in its lair. A real musician would have had his hands insured. But what would it matter if Rodney stuck his fingers straight down the drain into the churning blades?
The smart thing to do would be to take out insurance first and then stick his hand down the disposal. That way he could pay off the clavichord and sit at it every night playing with his bandaged stump.
Maybe if he’d stayed in Berlin, if he’d gone to the Royal Academy, if he hadn’t got married and had kids, maybe Rodney would still be playing music. He might be an internationally known performer, like Menno van Delft or Pierre Goy.
Opening the dishwasher, Rodney saw that it was full of standing water. The outflow tube had been improperly installed; the landlord had promised to fix it but never did. Rodney stared at the rust-colored tide for a while, as though he were a plumber and knew what to do, but in the end he filled the soap container, shut the door, and turned the dishwasher on.
The living room was empty by the time he came out. The DVD control screen played on the television, the loop of theme music repeating itself over and over. Rodney switched it off. He went down the hallway toward the bedrooms. The water was running in the bathtub and he could hear Rebecca’s voice coaxing the twins in. He listened for his daughters’ voices. This was the new music and he wanted to hear it, just for a minute, but the water was too loud.
On nights when Rebecca gave the girls a bath, it fell to Rodney to read them their bedtime story. He was on his way down the hallway to their room when he reached Rebecca’s office. And here he did something he didn’t normally do: he stopped. In general, when passing by Rebecca’s office, Rodney made a habit of staring at the floor. It was better for his emotional equilibrium to let whatever went on in there go on without his seeing it. But tonight he turned and stared at the door. And then, raising his uninsured right hand, he pushed the door open.
From the back wall, massing around the long worktables and bumping up against the sewing machine, a huge raft of fabric bolts in pastel hues was making its way downstream across the floor. The logjam carried with it ribbon spools, leaking bags of perfumed pellets, stickpins, buttons. Balancing on the logs, some with the jaunty stance of lumberjacks, others terrified and clingy like flood victims, the four varieties of Mice ’n’ Warm mice rode toward the falls of the marketplace.
Rodney stared at their little faces looking up with pitiful appeal or savoir-faire. He stared for as long as he could bear it, which was about ten seconds. Then he turned and walked in hard shoes back down the hallway. He passed the bathroom without stopping to listen for Immy’s and Lula’s voices and he continued into the music room, where he shut the door behind him. After seating himself at the clavichord, he took a deep breath and began to play one part of a keyboard duet in E-flat by Müthel.
It was a difficult piece. Johann Gottfried Müthel, Bach’s last pupil, was a difficult composer. He’d studied with Bach for only three months. And then he’d gone off to Riga to disappear into the Baltic twilight of his genius. Hardly anybody knew who Müthel was anymore. Except for clavichordists. For clavichordists, playing Müthel was a supreme achievement.
Rodney got off to a good start.
Ten minutes into the duet, Rebecca stuck her head in the door.
“The girls are ready for their story,” she said.
Rodney kept playing.
Rebecca said it louder and Rodney stopped.
“You do it,” he said.
“I have to make some calls.”