“Oh, Jesus Christ, listen to that,” I said.
“Don’t curse,” Rhoda said, sobbing.
“Come on, get up,” Sandy said.
“No.”
“Get up, or I’ll pick you up,” Sandy said.
“Leave me alone.”
“Leave her alone,” David said, “she’s a creep.”
“You’re a creep,” Rhoda said, gasping and choking and rolling further away from Sandy, who seized her left hand, and yanked on it, getting her at last to a sitting position, and then putting one arm around her waist, and pulling her to her feet. Rhoda staggered about blindly, her eyes closed, shaking her head and hiding her face, trying to pull away from Sandy, who finally slapped her sharply, twice. The sobbing stopped at once. Gasping for breath, Rhoda stared fixedly at Sandy, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“You hit me,” she said.
“You’re damn right I did,” Sandy answered.
“Now she’ll go screaming to her mother,” David said.
“My mother is dead,” Rhoda said.
“Her mother is dead, you jackass,” Sandy said.
Rhoda was making short brave snuffling sounds now, as though wanting to break into tears again, but afraid Sandy would hit her if she did. “Do you have a handkerchief?” she asked.
“David?”
“My handkerchief?” David said, outraged.
“Oh, come on,” Sandy said.
“No,” David said. “Absolutely not.”
“She can have mine,” I said, and reached into my back pocket. “I haven’t got one,” I said.
“All right, damn it,” David said, “here’s mine.” He handed it to Rhoda and said, “Try not to gook it all up, will you?”
“Thank you,” Rhoda said, and noisily blew her nose.
“How do you feel?” Sandy said.
“Terrible.”
“Why?”
“They all laughed at me.”
“That’s because you’re a lousy singer,” David said. Rhoda stopped in the middle of blowing her nose, and gave him an injured look. I thought surely she would begin crying again.
“You are a lousy singer,” Sandy said.
“I’m better than Deuce.”
“He’s the worst singer in the world.”
“I’m also better than Phil.”
“You’re probably also better than Senator Dirksen,” I said, and David burst out laughing.
“Don’t laugh at me!” Rhoda said, and turned her head into Sandy’s shoulder.
“I wasn’t laughing at you.” David said. “My friend said something funny. If I want to laugh at something funny my friend says...”
“Oh, shut up, David,” Sandy said.
“Well, I can laugh if I want to.”
“But not at her.”
“The hell with her,” David said, “I wasn’t laughing at her.”
“I like to sing,” Rhoda said defensively, blowing her nose.
“Fine, honey,” Sandy said, “but do it in the shower from now on.”
“Do it on a boat sixty miles offshore,” I said.
Surprisingly, Rhoda began giggling.
“There,” Sandy said.
“Sixty miles offshore,” Rhoda repeated, and giggled again.
“She’s a manic-depressive,” David said.
“Isn’t anybody hungry?” I asked.
“I’m famished,” Sandy said.
“Then let’s all go over to The Captain’s for some hamburgers.”
Which is what we did.
It rained again on Monday morning, the last day of July.
David’s parents were still in New Jersey, so we all went over to his house to listen to records. Eudice had just finished vacuuming the living room. She was well aware that we would make a mess of the place all over again, but she didn’t say a word to us, because she was still feeling guilty about her role in having brought David to justice.
David asked us if we would like to hear a talk for which he had got an A in a theory course, and we said absolutely not, and he said Go to hell and gave the talk, anyway. Actually, it wasn’t too bad at all. What he did was trace the development from blues and jazz to country western to swing to bop to rock and roll to the new experimental electronic stuff, sounding very much like a college professor, but nonetheless adding new dimensions to something which, until then, we had enjoyed only because the sound appealed to us.
The most important factor in modern pop, he explained, was the development and widespread use of amplification. Volume was essential to the new sound, sheer loudness that assaulted not only the ears but the entire human sensory system. It was, in fact, possible to feel (as he turned up the volume control and caused Eudice to moan in the kitchen) the buffeting of sound waves against our bodies, causing an actual vibration that was something different from the simple audio experience. For that matter, even my eyes seemed to be straining forward in their sockets as the sound got louder and louder, as though they wanted to see what my ears and my skin told me I was experiencing.
This assault, David explained, was mostly harmonic, in contrast to earlier music where the melody line was clearly heard and usually carried by one or another of the instruments. Today, he said, the melody was overpowered by background chords. These chord progressions (I had difficulty following him here) were usually similar and sometimes identical, with the result that each song had a familiar and comfortable feel to it. In other words, the effect was one of having heard any given song many many times before, a repetition that was hypnotic, demanding from the listener a minimum amount of concentration or involvement.
The dances were elementary, too, a simple response to the pulsing harmonic background, requiring little or no concentration, little or no involvement with one’s partner. They were, in fact, onanistic, David said, which means expressive of nothing but an involvement with oneself. The new experimental electronic music was carrying this sense of uninvolvement a step further because it threw away even the usual chord progressions, substituting instead an erratic series of sounds. It would become impossible to dance to the music of the future, he said. It would also become impossible to listen to it, except in the way one might overhear a random and accidental arrangement of noises.
He explained all this while illustrating his premise with some really good 45s and LPs. It was fascinating, most of it, anyway. Even Rhoda seemed pretty impressed by his instruction, although she was a bit ill at ease that first day with us. There was a tight enclosed feeling to the afternoon, the round wood-paneled living room and the fire David had set in the fireplace, the teeming rain outside, the records spinning while he patiently and expertly explained the evolution. Sandy was stretched on the floor before the fireplace like a long tawny cat, wearing tan chinos and a bulky beige turtle-neck sweater, barefoot, her blond hair streaming, her jaw propped on one hand. Rhoda sat rather primly at first in the blue wingback chair to the left of the fireplace, only later relaxing enough to tuck her feet up under her.
The rain was relentless. It never varied in its rhythm or its intensity, seemed in fact to add natural conviction to everything David was saying about the sameness of pop music. Rhoda, as it turned out, was a quite bright person who asked intelligent questions, and who smiled in delight each time David satisfactorily answered them. Her smile was a radiant thing, despite the unflattering bands on her teeth. It transformed her entire face, imparting a warmth to it that was totally lacking when she wore her serious, older-party look. She was not an attractive girl, but there was an appealing softness to her, in perfect contrast to Sandy’s glittering fine-boned beauty. As the afternoon waned, I found myself liking her more and more, and when David ended his demonstration, I was delighted that Sandy turned the conversation to Rhoda, asking her to tell us all about herself. I thought of that rainy Monday when we had drunk the truth serum, and I wondered now what Rhoda would say. She was under no obligation to tell us anything, of course, except that she was there, and the fire was blazing, and the room was warm and cozy, and there was an atmosphere of relaxed permissiveness, the rain outside creating an island within an island, drilling its narrow gray prison bars against each melting window.