“Museum,” he explained. “Front desk. She drew the Sunday trick this week.”
I sat down beside him and said, with maybe a little creak in my voice, “What happened, Kaberrian? What happened to you?”
So he told me he got married. He told me they had an apartment, even. He told me he had a job. In a store. Selling high-fidelity schlock. Tape recorders certainly. Those years crazy Kaberrian spent trying to use tape recording to make accidental plays the way painters get accidental paintings, he learned enough he could tell Ampex which way to go.
It hurt me. So I explained how everybody has this terrible tendency to give up the fight, man. Square it out, and fink off, and start dying of conformity and plastic coffee. But when he started yawning I had the idea I wasn’t getting to him.
“So I know what happened, Kaberrian. So now tell me how.”
So he yawned again, looking sleepy, happy, and sold out in the park in the sunshine, and he talked about months and months ago in that walk-up pad he had on Twelfth Street, a room ten by twelve maybe, and so full of electronics one guest at a time was absolute tops, and then it had to be a very friendly guest. An empty room on each side of him.
“On the same day, Noonan, into one moves this Ellie bird, and into the other moves her buddy, this Geoffrey Freeman, playwright. It is always Geoffrey the whole name, and he has never got past a second act on anything but calls himself a playwright, by God.”
“The inner reality is the truth by which we—”
“Shut up, Noonan. What it is, I find out as soon as I breadboard me a rig with some sensitive induction mikes, is love. She will not exactly live in the same room with him, but she is the only one earning bread, and she pays both rents, cooks, cleans, everything. I think finally I got the play I’ve been looking for, on account of it is a comment on everything. You cannot believe how square is that little bird. She has such a deep belief in all the old-timey values, it could make you lie down and cry your eyes out for the pity of it all, or make you laugh yourself to sick. They do not get along so great. The playwright is using the little bird. If he finishes a play it will be crud, so the safest way is never finish one.
“I think that the fights are going to give me a stack of half-mil four-track thirty-six hundred feet tapes, I’ll have to scrounge the whole village to keep up, and I think that sooner or later they are going to say everything anybody can say about the lousy man-woman relationship. I am going to call the play Quarrel. I am going to edit so they are always answering each other on different levels. Nice resonance, Noonan, baby. The shape of it is he fakes up this hurt pride on account of being supported, and then she gets all humble, and then he calls her a peasant who can’t understand like the delicate fiber of his creative soul, and so on and so on. So I get me five ugly sessions, I think three in her pad and two in his. You know what? Halfway through number six I kill the tape. It is the same quarrel! Every time the same. A couple of little switches here and there. Not enough to matter. I tape onto tape and try editing and keep coming up with nothing. Speed changes, echo effects, nothing.
“One time I am just listening, trying to figure out a route, and I get a burr in the pickup, he sounds like a rusty baritone sax. So all of a sudden I’ve got it! A new approach to the whole schmear. I am going to call it Duet. Remember Snake? What he can do with that clarinet when he’s on just the right amount of pot? I put together the best hunks of all the quarrels, made forty minutes of it, then got Snake up to listen. He dug it twice through, and then the third time around he got the idea of how to do it, and I had him play right with her each time she talked, and recorded it on an empty track. Man, he did that crying part at the end just perfect! Snake dug up a type named Walker, who needed gin instead of pot to warm up, and Walker did the playwright lines on an English horn.
“Noonan, it took me three weeks of work to get that thing mixed and retaped and edited and smoothed out just the way I wanted it. Duet, a tone poem for voice, clarinet, and English horn in three movements. First movement I started with straight voice, Ellie and Geoffrey chewing on each other, and I faded him out and brought up the horn to take over for him. Walker made that horn bleat and moan and grumble just like the playwright. Second movement, voices again, but with her fading out and the clarinet coming up to take over for her. The third and last was the great one. I faded both voices out and it turned into an instrumental duet, and in the last five minutes I’d bring in him instead of the horn, and then her instead of the clarinet, and I found a way to wind it up just right. I had one place where she said, close to tears, ‘Why do you hate me so?’ So I put that on repeat, and when she said it the third time I mixed in the clarinet for that same phrase. Three together, and I faded them just a little bit and brought him up, saying, ‘You’ve never understood me.’ I had that on repeat, and they took exactly the same time, so I overlapped for a counterpoint effect, brought up the horn to go along with him and then — get this — I mixed the clarinet with his line, and the horn with hers, and brought up the gain to all the tape would take, and suddenly chopped it off into dead silence, and, man, it would make for the blood to run cold indeed.
“Noonan, everybody was nuts about it. But you know what the real test had to be. Sure. So one night I nailed them in the playwright’s pad and said I had something they should hear on tape, and when they were trying to brush me, I said they were on the tape, so she turned pale and he tinned red and they let me set up my good portable I built most of and bring in two of the speakers Marty built for me that time, and I set it up and kicked off. They were on the couch. The first couple of minutes he kept trying to jump up, yelling about suing and invasion and degenerates, but she’d hush him and yank him back and listen with her head sideways and her eyes narrow and her lips sucked white.
“They got real still, and all of a sudden after about the first two minutes of the straight instrumental duet, the little bird threw her head back and she started roaring with laughter. It was the biggest, gutsiest, happiest laugh you ever heard come out of a little bird like Ellie. Then he was trying to shush her, and he couldn’t and he missed the end because he went running out and banged the door behind him. The end broke her up the rest of the way. She laughed so hard she cried. Not hysteria. The other kind of laugh-cry. Me too. Laughed until we hurt. She doesn’t call it the time we laughed. She calls it The Cure. Once you laugh that hard with a bird, Noonan, all you can do is marry it. Which I did.”
“What, what, what?” I said.
“The beard got smaller the more she kept putting on buttons instead of string, so it’s gone all the way. Man, we laugh a lot. Ellie and me, it’s all a swinging place for us. We start to fuss some, and either she says, ‘Why do you hate me so?’ or I say, ‘You’ve never understood me,’ and then we both say ‘Poor Geoffrey,’ and we laugh.”
We stood up, and I had given up on him. Crazy Kaberrian was no more. This was a happy, laughing sales-talk clerk, buttoned up and bird-happy, like nobody could have guessed would be his future. He asked me how things were at Columbia, and I said I was auditing the Oriental Religions thing again, the same course Kaberrian and I had audited maybe seven years ago together, which is how we met. I said they had changed it a little, but it was still stimulating.