Rodney collapsed onto his back. He lay immobile. There was a pillow underneath him, in the wrong spot, but he didn’t have the energy to roll over and tug it out.
His situation wasn’t really so different from anybody else’s. He’d only got to the end of the road a little earlier. But it was the same for the rock stars and for the jazz musicians, for the novelists and the poets (definitely for the poets); it was the same for the business executives, the biologists, the computer programmers, the accountants, the flower arrangers. Artist or nonartist, academic or nonacademic, Menno van Delft or Rodney Webber, even for Darlene and James of the Reeves Collection Agency: it didn’t matter. No one knew what the original music sounded like. You had to make an educated guess and do the best you could. For whatever you played there was no indisputable tuning or handwritten schematic, and the visa you needed in order to see the Master’s keyboard was always denied. Sometimes you thought you heard the music, especially when you were young, and then you spent the rest of your life trying to reproduce the sound.
Everybody’s life was early music.
He was still awake a half hour later, when Rebecca came in.
“Can I turn on the light?” she asked.
“No,” said Rodney.
She paused and said, “You practiced a long time.”
“Practice makes perfect.”
“Who called? Someone called.”
Rodney said nothing.
“You didn’t answer, did you? They’ve been calling later and later.”
“I was practicing. I didn’t answer.”
Rebecca sat on the edge of the bed. She tossed something in Rodney’s direction. He picked it up and squinted at it. The beret, the cleft palate. Boho Mouse.
“I’m going to quit,” Rebecca said.
“What?”
“The mice. I’m giving up.” She stood and began to undress, dropping clothes on the floor. “I should have finished my dissertation. I could have been a musicology professor. Now all I am is Mommy. Mommy, Mommy, Mommy. A mommy who makes stuffed animals.” She went into the bathroom. Rodney heard her brushing her teeth, washing her face. She came out again and got into bed.
After a long silence, Rodney said, “You can’t give up.”
“Why not? You’ve always wanted me to.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Why?”
Rodney swallowed. “These mice are our only hope.”
“You know what I did tonight?” Rebecca said. “First I took the mouse out of the trash. Then I unpicked the stitches and took out the musk pellets. And then I filled it with cinnamon pellets and stitched it back up. That’s how I spent my evening.”
Rodney held the mouse to his nose.
“Smells good,” he said. “These mice are destined for greatness. You’re going to make us a million bucks.”
“If I make a million bucks,” Rebecca said, “I’ll pay off your clavichord.”
“Deal,” said Rodney.
“And you can quit your job and get back to playing music full-time.” She rolled over and kissed his cheek, then rolled back and adjusted her pillows and blankets.
Rodney kept the stuffed mouse against his nose, inhaling its spicy aroma. He kept smelling the mouse even after Rebecca had fallen asleep. If the microwave had been nearby, Rodney would have fired up Boho Mouse to reconstitute its bouquet. But the microwave was down the hall, in the shabby kitchen, and so he just lay there, smelling the mouse, which by now was cold and almost scentless.
2005
TIMESHARE
My father is showing me around his new motel. I shouldn’t call it a motel after everything he’s explained to me but I still do. What it is, what it’s going to be, my father says, is a timeshare resort. As he, my mother, and I walk down the dim hallway (some of the bulbs have burned out), my father informs me of the recent improvements. “We put in a new oceanfront patio,” he says. “I had a landscape architect come in, but he wanted to charge me an arm and a leg. So I designed it myself.”
Most of the units haven’t been renovated yet. The place was a wreck when my father borrowed the money to buy it, and from what my mother tells me, it looks a lot better now. They’ve repainted, for one thing, and put on a new roof. Each room will have a kitchen installed. At present, however, only a few rooms are occupied. Some units don’t even have doors. Walking by, I can see painting tarps and broken air conditioners lying on the floors. Water-stained carpeting curls back from the edges of the rooms. Some walls have holes in them the size of a fist, evidence of the college kids who used to stay here during spring break. My father plans to install new carpeting, and to refuse to rent to students. “Or if I do,” he says, “I’ll charge a big deposit, like three hundred bucks. And I’ll hire a security guard for a couple of weeks. But the idea is to make this place a more upscale kind of place. As far as the college kids go, piss on ’em.”
The foreman of this renewal is Buddy. My father found him out on the highway, where day workers line up in the morning. He’s a little guy with a red face and makes, for his labor, five dollars an hour. “Wages are a lot lower down here in Florida,” my father explains to me. My mother is surprised at how strong Buddy is for his size. Just yesterday, she saw him carrying a stack of cinder blocks to the Dumpster. “He’s like a little Hercules,” she says. We come to the end of the hallway and enter the stairwell. When I take hold of the aluminum banister, it nearly rips out of the wall. Every place in Florida has these same walls.
“What’s that smell?” I ask.
Above me, hunched over, my father says nothing, climbing.
“Did you check the land before you bought this place?” I ask. “Maybe it’s built over a toxic dump.”
“That’s Florida,” says my mother. “It smells that way down here.”
At the top of the stairs, a thin green runner extends down another darkened hallway. As my father leads the way, my mother nudges me, and I see what she’s been talking about: he’s walking lopsided, compensating for his bad back. She’s been after him to see a doctor but he never does. Every so often, his back goes out and he spends a day soaking in the bathtub (the tub in room 308, where my parents are staying temporarily). We pass a maid’s cart, loaded with cleaning fluids, mops, and wet rags. In an open doorway, the maid stands, looking out, a big black woman in blue jeans and a smock. My father doesn’t say anything to her. My mother says hello brightly and the maid nods.
At its middle, the hallway gives onto a small balcony. As soon as we step out, my father announces, “There it is!” I think he means the ocean, which I see for the first time, storm-colored and uplifting, but then it hits me that my father never points out scenery. He’s referring to the patio. Red-tiled, with a blue swimming pool, white deck chairs, and two palm trees, the patio looks as though it belongs to an actual seaside resort. It’s empty but, for the moment, I begin to see the place through my father’s eyes—peopled and restored, a going concern. Buddy appears down below, holding a paint can. “Hey, Buddy,” my father calls down, “that tree still looks brown. Have you had it checked?”
“I had the guy out.”