Last Notes

by Tamas Dobozy

  And, I have to hand it to her, Smolinka was the only one who stood up for us the day the cops showed up to check our “business licence.” It turns out we were missing some trumped-up insurance papers, which our lawyers later informed us were completely unnecessary, but by then the raid had scared away all our customers and friends. I could see them filing out the door, heads bowed, shoulders slumped, not like fighters at all, with their stuffed duffle bags, their gloves roped together and dangling around their necks—hung up for good—while Smolinka raged at the police, dared them to get into the ring, threatened them with her fists, and finally refused to move from in front of our filing cabinets until four cops managed to grapple her to the floor and drag her out by the heels.

  That was when I jumped in. I was worried, you see, because by then she was pregnant. That’s right, somewhere along the line, between the sweating and punching and running and general happiness, Smolinka and I, or so she keeps assuring me, managed to get that egg fertilized. As a result, we took it easy the first three months—when things are precarious as far as fetal development is concerned—tapering down from full-contact matches to light sparring, wearing headgear, lightening up on the weights and cardio while upping the carbs and vegetables in our diet. But that night, once the cops had left and we were alone in the empty basement, surrounded by scattered files, the chaotic mess of weights and machines, the smell of concrete mould and the lingering echo of grunts and body blows, Smolinka turned to me and nodded toward the ring.

  It was not our usual fight, full of the preening and cursing, the ringside cheers and laughter of friends—my quiet determination, Smolinka’s showmanship. This one was grim. And it took place in grainy darkness, without the lights that were usually glaring down from overhead, as if there was nothing between us at all—no friendship, no marriage, no business—nothing but the bond that brings opponents together. Or so it seemed at first, as I bounced up and down on my toes, moving against Smolinka, who became uncharacteristically silent after the bell went off.

  We went one round, two, three, four. By the sixth we were covered in sweat, and I was starting to get worried for the baby, aiming my shots high, at her nose and chest. I tried raising my eyebrows at her a few times but she just shook her head and continued zeroing in, wide-shouldered, like a walking block of cement. We continued through rounds seven, eight, nine, ten, up against the limits of exhaustion, both of us staggering around the ring, skimming hits off shoulders and foreheads, coming together in clinches that lasted longer and longer. I was drinking masses of water between rounds just to keep my mouth unstuck, and it was slowing me down, forcing me to concentrate more than ever on predicting where her next blow would come from, and where she wanted it to land. Smolinka, meanwhile, had turned into a tank, dispensing with finesse and strategy to rely on her size and intensity to wear me down, wiring her shots along direct, economical lines—like the signatures of a man in a blindfold.

  It wasn’t until the twelfth round that I decided I didn’t want the fight to end, that I was happy to keep dancing like this until my lungs gave way, or my heart, or my bones, because it seemed—in complete contradiction of how I’d felt at the start of the bout— that by fighting each other Smolinka and I were actually fighting together—against despair, foreclosure, impossibility—as if the blows we landed were accumulating somewhere else, raining down on some distant, invisible enemy whose body was hers and mine combined.

  But Smolinka, as usual, was on another wavelength. In the fifteenth round, as we clinched for maybe the thirtieth time, she said something she’d never said before, despite all the accusations aimed at me over the years. She whispered in my ear, “It’s not your baby.” She might as well have pulled a Tyson and ripped my ear off with her teeth, because I was so stunned (though my subconscious must have suspected this all along) that I stepped back, letting down my guard for the second it took her to drop me with a hard jab to the teeth.

  That was my second concussion.

  I woke to tears—not just my own. Smolinka was kneeling above me, her gloved hands cradling the back of my head, sobbing as she said over and over, “It’s a lie, it’s a lie, it’s a lie.”

  I never came back over to believing it was my kid. Smolinka tried everything to win me over, even going to a doctor for DNA testing. But I was skeptical because the sheet she brought home seemed to have been altered, in that careful, exacting hand I’d seen her use on report cards back in high school.

  Yes, we’ve been together since high school. I know that would seem impossible to anyone watching us now—two high school sweethearts, one of them eight months pregnant, duking it out with prize-fighting ferocity—but that’s how it was when we got together: the girl who was taller and stronger than most of the neighbourhood boys and the guy who was maybe the most unobtrusive person in the history of grade twelve. She wasn’t so much popular as dreaded, especially by the other girls, but nobody realized that her anger and violence were a result of what she’d always encountered—the kid with the funny Russian name, the funny Russian parents, who didn’t know what to do when the other kids backed away until she had no choice but to give them exactly what they feared. My willingness to get into the ring, to go all the way without backing out, has kept us together for years.

  Even now, in round eight, I’m thinking of how she was back then as I circle away from her jabs and try to avoid being KO’d for the twenty-first time. I’m moving in and moving out. Getting nowhere.

  And then it occurs to me that hitting her in the stomach might kill all kinds of birds, get rid of the baby and possibly give me a much-needed knockout. I’m not sure where this thought comes from, and am not even sure it comes from me (though where else would it have come from?) but there it is: rising out of my subconscious like a twisted little directive, when I thought I’d long ago put Smolinka’s betrayal behind me, when I’d already decided I didn’t care whether she was lying about my paternity.

  And I step toward her, not sure whether I’ve decided to do it, but just to see if she’s left that kind of opening in her defence—to see whether it would be possible for me to KO the baby. But I make two mistakes: having succeeded in threading her defence I hesitate at the critical moment, drawing back from the blow I should have landed, and, in my hesitation, leaving myself open to Smolinka, who, intensely maternal and willing to credit everyone else with her own underhandedness, steps quickly to the side and brings her killer left up onto the point of my chin.

  And from there on in it’s stars. I’m aware of being down, of struggling to get onto all fours while Smolinka stands looking down at me (why isn’t she bouncing around—I wonder dimly— readying herself to deliver that final, crushing blow?). And I’m gazing into the glimmering distance, into the spaces between each pinprick of light swirling round my cranium, thinking how terrible it is that most of the universe is just darkness, all that room and only a star here or there to break the monotony. But the realization is too easy, and I rise away from it, angling my body as I get up to avoid a possible roundhouse (Smolinka’s favourite blow).

  And she’s just standing there, back straight, arms limp, her eyes following mine as I bounce around, my fists up, wondering what new, hellish tactic of hers this is.

  “Go ahead,” she says, rubbing her fists ineffectually against her thighs.

  “What?”

  “Just do it!”

  My bouncing decreases until I, too, come to a stop, all energy gone, as the dark light of the ring washes over us, and I sense, suddenly, that this is the final attack, in a fight whose relevance far exceeds the ring, that will be fought only once, and allow neither encore nor rematch. It is a fight Smolinka intends to win.

  She murmurs, “If it’s not your baby, then you might as well.”

  I pull my fist back, staring at her, who’s staring at me, sweat now pouring off her face, almost trickling into the front of her shirt— as if her whole body were convulsing, every pore squeezing out its tears—while I pull my right fist back a
nd take a small step toward her, my left fist raised as a shield in case she tries anything. Smolinka winces, expecting a blow, but her guard remains down.

  We stand like that for a full minute, neither of us wavering, and then I strike out with both fists, hitting her on either shoulder, forcing her to resume the boxing stance. And I’m so relieved to see the sudden smile in her eyes, and to know that the baby is mine and that I wasn’t capable of hurting it either way, that I can’t help but feel a surge of confidence, which translates into a nervous energy as we bounce around the ring, both of us grinning through our mouthpieces and looking for the openings that will let us score just a few more points.

  Philip’s Killer Hat

  BEFORE I GET INTO THIS BUSINESS about my brother, Philip, I should probably say a word or two about the fez. Not the historical fez, mind you—the hat invented in the Moroccan city of the same name in the ninth century; the one Mahmut II made the official headgear of the Ottoman Empire from 1826 until i925,when Atatürk, “the great reformer,” outlawed it in favour of the Panama hat—but rather the one worn by Thelonious Monk in the CD booklet of the recording, Monk Alone.

  Philip was certain that a careful examination of the pictures in which Monk is wearing the fez revealed the tightness of its fit. He’d draw my attention to the picture in which the hat seems to be pulling the meat of Monk’s face upward, distending the pianist’s mouth in a painful sneer. Might it not be possible, Philip wanted to know, that Monk’s hats were all too small for him, and had maybe, through the action of “squeezing the plates of his skull,” contributed to the madness that overtook the jazz musician and possibly resulted in his early retirement and death?

  Philip had drafted several letters on this theme, all addressed to the beneficiaries of Monk’s estate. Luckily, he always needed my editing skills, and so I found myself, every other week, trying to dissuade him from sending them. “Think of the conclusions they might draw,” I said, getting him to imagine how outraged they’d be to hear Monk’s struggles explained as nothing more than the result of ill-fitting hats. “Or think,” I said, “how their own imaginations might get carried away.” I told him they might attribute Monk’s taste for too-tight hats to some kind of death wish, the pianist’s desire to slowly drive himself insane. “Or even worse,” I said, “what if they think the hats were made too small after the fact?” And I could see Philip tremble at the thought of Monk’s relatives looking with suspicion at one another, at the staff, at the musicians who’d kept Monk company, wondering who had shrunk the hats that had destroyed the pianist’s mind. Our meetings always ended with him ripping up the letter and promising to redraft it to prevent any possible offence. “Good idea,” I would say, letting out a sigh of relief, and watching him walk back down the stairs into the basement. But even when my objections seemed to anger him, even when I could see him struggling to contain his disappointment, there was always a touch of gratitude to Philip’s response, as if my words had given him a blissful reprieve from the obsession that would, within a few hours, overtake him once again.

  It wasn’t long before Philip was coming home from the library with stacks and stacks of books—all of them about hats. By this point he’d had the pictures of Monk blown up so that he could tack them on his wall and cover them with notations and measurements and various mathematical formulas, all in his cramped shorthand. I’d be down there changing the sheets on the bed or cleaning out the cupboards or vacuuming, and would have to constantly run back from what I was really doing—trying to decipher what he’d written—to what I was supposed to be doing, whenever I thought I heard the doorknob turn, or Philip returning up the driveway with another armful of books.

  Eventually, he brought to me the report he’d written. There was a long preface, filled with innumerable citations, in which he elaborated upon what he called the “killer hats of history.” Included was the infamous “Harley-Davidson Cap,” identified by numerous coroners as the primary cause of a dozen or more fatal vehicle accidents, having been inherited by a series of motorcyclists (all related by blood), whose eyes it had fallen over (or so went the coroners’ reports) just at those moments when they should have been paying attention. Included was the picture of an iron hat shaped like a colander that the “Mesopotamians” (according to Philip) would heat until it was red hot, then force down upon the skull of the victim, the tiny holes permitting the escape of the steam and smoke of burning scalp. He also wrote of something dubbed “Lincoln’s Top Hat,” that had been worn first by two innocents and then a succession of twelve foolhardy men, all of whom believed they could prove themselves the favoured sons of fate by not being shot, while wearing it, outside a theatre. Finally, there was the anecdote about the ten-gallon hat owned by the famous football coach, Lefty Franzen, in which he was found dead one night outside a notorious Detroit gay bar, the hat having been forced down on his head until he suffocated. As a result of his horrific murder, Lefty’s wife, Abigail, decided to ignore the explicit instructions left in her husband’s will, and left the hat out of his coffin. But this proved a grievous mistake, since three years later Abigail was found dead in her apartment, the result of a violent burglary where the only thing stolen was the cowboy hat. “It is said,”wrote Philip in his preface,”that Lefty’s murderer, frightened by the DNA testing recently introduced into police procedure, wanted to ensure that traces of his skin and hair could not be recovered from the hat.”

  The bulk of Philip’s manuscript, however, was taken up with a laboured discussion of Thelonious Monk’s skull: extrapolations taken from photos blown up to scale, projections of yearly shrinkage rates for the fabrics out of which were made the pork-pies, fezzes, bowlers, berets, toques, cavalry caps, and other hats Monk had worn (or at least those available from photographs). The report ended with a request to be given access to the various measurements of Monk’s head, from adolescence to death, and to his remaining hats.

  I read the entire manuscript two or three times over, asking Philip to give me several days with it, and went through the mistakes in spelling and punctuation and pronoun agreement and modal verbs, and then gave it back to him for corrections, saying there was no way Monk’s estate would take him seriously if it wasn’t 100 percent grammatically perfect. I thought it would take him two weeks, if not three, to make the changes, but there he was the following afternoon with “the final draft.” A few days later, when he asked what I thought, I replied that it was clean and perfect and that under normal circumstances I would recommend he send it, except I wondered whether it might tip off the family to the importance of the hats, and whether they wouldn’t be inclined, in that case, to investigate the matter with their own scholars and doctors, or, worse, in the event that it implicated them in Monk’s “murder,” destroy the hats altogether. Philip held the manuscript for a while and then his shoulders slumped and he turned and went down the stairs, closing the door softly behind himself. I swore I heard a whispered “Thank you” as he went.

  And when our sister, Lucia, asked how Philip was doing I would tell her how tiring it was to disappoint him all the time, and that I was beginning to understand how people with mental disorders eventually grow to hate their keepers, and that it would have been completely justified, under the circumstances, for Philip to believe I was an agent sent for no purpose other than to thwart and torment him. But whenever I asked Lucia about her two sons—aged nineteen and twenty-two—about whether either of them had mentioned anything about moving out of her basement so that she could keep her promise to take Philip for a while, she would cough and mutter about GMATs or LSATs, or GPAs not being high enough, or about the boys “keeping their expenses down to save up for a mortgage.” And when I tried to fix a date for her to visit, she’d say, “Maybe Saturday. I’ll check with Bruce and call you back.” Then I’d remind her of how much she was owing on the amount needed to keep Philip in food and clothes, how tired I was of looking after him, how, when Mother passed away, we’d agreed to share the burden instead of return
ing him to that home where Philip had tried to kill himself.

  Sometimes I wouldn’t have noticed that Philip was listening to our phone conversations, and I’d hang up to find he’d wriggled into the crevice between the refrigerator and the wall of its alcove, where I kept the broom and dustpan and garbage bags and extra dishrags, his face looking out at me as if I were responsible, as if it was my fatigue that kept Lucia from visiting him. And even though he hadn’t said this (hadn’t, in fact, said anything) I would have to agree, peering into the dark space from which he stared out, teeth bared, too deep for me to reach, his eyes piercing me to the bone. Speaking gently to him, I would promise to try harder next time, to sound less sombre, more inviting, though what Philip really wanted was not so much to hear our sister’s voice, much less to enjoy her company, but to have me say something positive about him being there, in my kitchen, my basement, my life, something to the effect that our relationship wasn’t—on my part—just so much responsibility. He wanted to hear that his friendship brought me, at the very least, the sad pleasure of sympathy. But it was exactly this that I could never bring myself to say, the two of us standing there, Philip backed as far as possible into his corner and me making up excuses about how I’d forgotten to tell Lucia about Straight, No Chaser, the Thelonious Monk documentary we’d watched, or the fascinating research Philip was doing at the library, or the many letters we’d worked on.