I told her it was the Schwa introducing one of his songs, that it was a play on a Shakespeare quote: “For the rain it raineth everyday.” “We’re drinking these Negers, I heard the coin drop on the table. I don’t know, I thought maybe you’d recognize the voice.”
“So that was this Schwa man’s voice?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’ve never heard it before, and at the end of this niggereth stuff, the music, if that’s the Schwa too, you really need to find this man.”
I don’t know how many Negers I drank that night, but I had as much fun ordering the beer as drinking it. “Gimme two niggers!” I’d yell out to the waitress. “How much for two niggers? I’ll have a gin and tonic, the lady will have a large nigger.”
Eight hours later I awoke to Doris in the front room watching television with her eyes closed. She was swathed in a terry-cloth bathrobe I never wore and rewinding the chicken-fucking video. I turned up the radiator and I sat next to her. The VCR whirred and jolted to a clunky stop. She pressed play.
“How long you been up?”
“I don’t know, an hour maybe? You listen to this song and you get lost in time.”
Doris curled into the fetal position and put her head in my lap. After every phrase the Schwa played, she’d mutter something about the harmonics, coloration, and Stravinsky. Five minutes went by before she’d stopped shaking her head in disbelief and making faces whenever my stomach rumbled.
“I did it,” Doris said, speaking into my belly button.
“Did what?”
“On television I once heard an American homewife tell her UFO encounter. She spoke the usual bullshit—‘bright object in the sky,’ ‘incredible speed,’—but then she said the spaceship flashed a color she’d never seen before, and speeded off. Ever since then I’ve tried to imagine a color I’ve never seen before. And now I just did it. It was the music.”
She opened her eyes. They were a color I’d seen before.
“But if we find him, no one will purchase the music.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too good. Too much.”
“Come on, people are starving for this music.”
“Exactly, but when you have hungered for a long time, if you eat too much, you die.”
Doris sank her teeth into my nipple. I turned up the volume to a deafening loudness that no doubt violated the Berlin laws against Sunday-morning noise. No one complained.
CHAPTER 3
I PUT THE SEARCH for the Schwa on hold while Doris and I had a one-night stand that lasted the month and a half the owner of the Slumberland was on vacation. We never truly got to know each other. Past a weakness for screwball comedies, the only thing we really had in common was our appreciation of the Schwa.
At our most intimate we’d play lazy games of backgammon and listen to his records. As soon as the music ended we’d fight. My Calvinist tendencies and her gloomy German stoicism clashing like two kindergartners playing musical chairs and attempting to squeeze their behinds into the last remaining plastic seat. We’d argue bitterly over the frequency of my showers and her refusal to turn her thermostat above sixty degrees in the dead of winter.
Doris, of course, blames our breakup on the frequency and length of my showers. In her eyes I’m a religious fanatic who every morning takes a hot-water baptismal to the gods Proctor and Gamble. My “obsession” with cleanliness symbolizes two hundred and fifty years of American sanctimony. If my finger-nails are clean, my soul is pure and lemony fresh. I’m 100 percent Puritan. A squeaky-clean American.
Doris: You crazy, uptight Americans. Do you know what we call “skinny-dipping” in Germany?
Me: No.
Doris: Swimming!
On our last night as a couple Doris sat on the floor of her spacious, impeccably furnished, penthouse igloo, bundled up in three layers of thrift-shop sweaters, settling an argument we had earlier in the day about Chico Marx’s piano virtuosity by making a list of piano players in descending order of greatness, while I washed the dishes and stared at the plastic frog with a thermometer for a spine suctioned to the kitchen window.
I could never explain Doris’s thermal frugality. I knew it’d been passed down from her parents, who, having been raised in the moldy-potato austerity of postwar Germany, made sure that she had a healthy respect for creature comforts like heat, clothes, salt, and toothpaste. She wasn’t cheap. She’d often splurge on pricey nonessentials that she then treated like foster children. She put regular gas in her BMW 7 Series sedan and her silk blouses in the washing machine. She drank expensive wine out of paper cups. Used African artifacts as doorstops and had a state-of-the-art central heating system installed, one capable of warming the bathroom floor and the towel racks but whose thermostat was as off-limits as a North Korean nuclear plant.
“Doris, it’s eight degrees in here. Do you know what that is in Fahrenheit?”
“About fifty degrees.”
“Fifty-one-point-eight degrees to be exact, which is the temperature at which black men lose their fucking minds. In 1967 when my Uncle Billy turned down a scholarship to UCLA and volunteered to go to Vietnam, it was eight degrees Celsius. On that clear, blue, carry-me-back-to-Ol’-Virginny morning when Nat ‘Crazy Like a Fox’ Turner looked directly into a solar eclipse and decided there and then to kill every white person in the world — it was eight degrees Celsius. In Rocky II, when Apollo Creed agrees to give Rocky Balboa a rematch in Phila-fuckingdelphia, Rocky’s hometown, it was eight degrees Celsius, fiftytwo fucking degrees.”
Doris and the cackles of the chicken-fucking song snuck up on me from behind. She burrowed her head between my shoulder blades and ran her hands under my shirt. She hadn’t bathed in three days, but she was warm.
“And you, black man,” she asked, tweezing my nipples with her nails, “how will you lose your mind on this fifty-two-degree night? Perhaps you go so crazy and finally give me oral sex, yes?”
“I would, but you smell.”
She unbuttoned her sweaters and yanked her shirt over her head. An earthy, almost steamy pungency closed my throat.
“Do I smell bad?” she asked.
I cupped my hand and passed it through the air like a chef wafting the vapors of the soup du jour toward his nostrils.
“You smell, but you don’t smell bad. Sort of like a basket of rotten fruit.”
We both paused to listen to a jaunty movement in the chicken-fucking song. Doris took the first page of her list, wiped her hairy underarms with it, and handed it to me. I held it gingerly because a single strand of black underarm hair, long enough to bisect pianist number nine, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, like an editor’s strikethrough, was epoxied to the page with a natural adhesive of perspiration and grit.
“Smell it,” she commanded.
I pressed the tip of my nose to Mozart and inhaled. The page smelled of nutmeg and paraffin with a hint of fresh bacon grease. I searched the rest of the page for Chico Marx. He wasn’t on it. I had him just behind Fats Waller and ahead of Chopin. Doris removed her bra and slid page two along the sweaty folds of her breasts. The dampness smudged Debussy, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Dave Brubeck. It was a damn good compendium. It smelled like a mothballed down jacket on the first cold day of winter. And still no Chico Marx. It went on like that for five minutes. She’d peel off a page, lick it, rub it over her scalp, run it between her toes, her pubes, the backs of her knees. Each page smelled different. Each body part and erogenous zone imparting its own aroma, every piano player and keyboardist emanating his or her own unique, musty funk. Mary Williams, Nat King Cole, and Doris’s right elbow smelled like hijiki salad, Grandma’s immutably stuck-to-the-wrapper butterscotch candies, and boiled Kutteln. Ray Manzarek, Thelonious Monk, and her inner thigh were redolent of burning rubber and a flat diet soda. Stevie Wonder, Glenn Gould, and the back of her neck reeked of day-old pizza, a blue urinal cake, and Laurel Canyon eucalyptus trees. Doris slid the last sheet of paper down the crack of her ass, and there, at the bottom of the page, sandwiched between her twelve-year-old nephew Andreas and Schroeder, the piano-playing Beethoven fanatic from the Charlie Brown cartoons, was Chico Marx, smelling like ass and “un-scented” two-ply toilet paper; nevertheless I had a raging hard-on.