You see? I always let them have the last word.
It was the third week in August, still hot, though while driving to the church I noticed a red leaf on a maple tree. I took a seat in the back, next to Deborah—how could one not? She gave my hand a quick squeeze. Could it possibly be? Might I possibly want it? I spotted the granddaughter in the front row, sitting with a white-haired couple and an old lady with a walker. Jessamyn (I remembered the name) had to be forty now, though she still had that chopped-off hair, with a new tinge of maroon. I saw that her cheeks had gotten pudgy, suggesting she might be both appetitive and attainable—ah, this was just one of those reflexive thoughts that still intrude, as a corpse’s hair and fingernails are said to keep growing. I’d given up pursuing students, belatedly you’ll say, after a collegial talking-to from my department chairman, and—since I have no secrets from you—after taking a young woman to bed and being unable to follow through. Still, back in May, at the end-of-the-semester party, I drank too much—that is, I drank—and kissed one of my students good night, on the mouth, though I knew she’d been aiming for my cheek. The next day, to try to head off another complaint, I emailed her an apology for what I called “an excess of good cheer,” and she wrote back that she’d been “amused”: the midpoint, I took it, between “offended” and “saddened.”
After the service, I walked out with Deborah and touched a hand to the back of her arm as we went down the steps. “There’s Marcia and Walter,” she said. This was the couple I was telling you about. “I should go say hello.”
But Jessamyn was walking up to us, patting sweat from her forehead with a bandanna handkerchief that looked out of keeping with her black dress. “I don’t know if you remember me,” she said. I saw she wasn’t wearing a ring.
“Of course,” Deborah said. “How are you holding up?”
“Well,” she said, “it’s not like I wasn’t expecting it. Actually, I have a favor to ask? I wonder if I could come out this afternoon and see the house one more time.”
“I’m probably not the one to ask anymore,” Deborah said.
Jessamyn looked at her, then at me. “Oh. I guess I stepped in something.” I remembered her fetchingly harsh little voice.
“That would be fine,” I said. “We were going to grab some lunch, but maybe three, three thirty?”
“That works. I’ve still got all this to deal with.” She looked over her shoulder at the white-haired couple getting the walker lady into the front seat of a minivan. “Thanks.” I took care not to eye her as she walked away.
Deborah said, “Aren’t we amicable.”
“Would you like some lunch?” I said. “Let’s say hello to Walter and Marcia, and then we can go over to the Pine Grove.”
“I think I’m just going to run along,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll have your hands full.” False ending. “Anyhow, I don’t want to weigh down your afternoon with any more nostalgia.”
—
Sooner or later I’d been bound to get a DWI; I suppose I was lucky it happened while Deborah was still in the picture. After teaching a theory class one evening—this would have been February of last year—I went to a bar in the South End with my students, then headed up 93 listening to Hope in the Night, where gentle June Hunt gets callers to invite Jesus Christ into their hearts. Somehow I made it as far as Manchester before getting pulled over. For the rest of the term, Deborah drove me down to Concord once a week to catch the bus to Boston; only when they reinstated my license did she announce she was leaving. After she moved I had to unplug the phone at night, since the sainted Deborah—and I’m not saying she didn’t deserve Walter and Marcia’s sympathy—had developed a little problem herself. One night I forgot; I let the machine pick up and I heard her say, “You’re just up there waiting to die.” One of these days I need to set that shit, don’t you think? Just mezzo and snare drum—you hear the six-eight rhythm? “March from an Unwritten Opera” we could call it. Might end up becoming my little out-of-context keeper, my “Treulich gëfuhrt”—“Here Comes the Bride,” to you—or my Ride of the Valkyries. Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit!
For my community service, I chose to go over to Merrivale one afternoon a week and play for—I almost said pray for—the moribunds. Mrs. Gartner was now in her nineties, and she’d had a stroke on top of everything else, but the nurses thought she still responded to music, so they rolled her out, hands strapped to the arms of her wheelchair, like the statue of the Great Emancipator. The first afternoon, I tried them on the usual American songbook shit, but Deborah was in no mood to come in and sing with me, and who knows the words anymore to “Mountain Greenery” or “A Fine Romance”? Finally a lady in a flowered top and a white neck brace asked for “Sweet Caroline.” It’s one of those songs you’ve heard a million times, and I managed to get through it by ear. I didn’t know anything beyond “Where it began,” but the lady had the “Warm, touching warm” part, and a few of them came in on the dum dum dum: apparently this was a phenomenon at Fenway. So when I got home, I went online and ordered something called the Wedding and Love Fake Book—somebody else had a sense of humor, no?—with 450 songs: “My Cherie Amour,” “Baby I’m-a Want You,” “Danny’s Song” (that’s the one that goes “Even though we ain’t got money”), “Time in a Bottle.” And I paid the guy who tunes my piano to come from Hanover and try to get the one at Merrivale halfway playable. I’ve got my license back now, but I keep going there, partly to give my weeks more of a shape, partly to bring myself low. The nurses tell me I’m the favorite of all the people who come in, except for a woman who brings her Labrador retriever around.
During the school year I still drive down to teach, though now I put up at a motel and go back the next day. Otherwise, I’m here. I get up, drink coffee and—in order to irritate myself, I suppose—put on New Hampshire Public Radio and listen to the Morning Diddle Diddle Dum. (Did all those Baroque composers have Asperger’s?) Then I go to the piano and work at working, until disgust tolls fancy’s knell. In the afternoon, the obligatory walk in the woods, or perhaps a trip to town for pie and coffee at the Pine Grove, where I’m known for my geniality. Every Tuesday I drive to Hanover to give a piano lesson to a no-hoper high-school boy, and on the way back I stop by the state liquor store in West Lebanon for a couple of handles of Tanqueray. After sunset, of course, I’m immobilized, as the undead are by day: this is when I drink, and the town cops know my car. Picture the door to the freezer inching open, the hand creeping in. So I sip the hours away, playing computer solitaire and listening to the radio. In the p.m., I switch to AM—my little way of bidding defiance to Time—crossing over into the wonder world of Jesus: Hope in the Night; Brother Stair, “The Last-Day Prophet” who sometimes bellows in the voice of God; and Open Forum with Harold Camping, who mikes his Bible so you can hear the pages turn, and who’s calculated the Rapture for May of next year, and the end of time for October 21. I’d find this fixation hard to explain if there were anyone to whom I had to explain it. You don’t suppose He’s calling me, or that I’m seeking Him? And of course I worry about my work. When you lose a game of solitaire, a box pops up: There are no more possible moves. What do you want to do now? It’s one of those ironies so obviously pointed at you that you can’t take it seriously. As I tell my students, if you’re not at a creative impasse, you’re not paying attention.