The Metaphysical Ukulele

by Sean Carswell

  “Suit yourself.” The maid turned and headed back into whatever kept her busy in this two-bedroom house on Drexel Avenue. I lingered in the foyer. The secretaries kept their eyes on the fashion magazines. Two typewriters sat on the kitchen table behind them. Small, neat stacks of paper lay beside the typewriters. Chandler rolled onto his side. Both secretaries set down their magazines and picked up pads covered in scratchy shorthand. Chandler eased back into a snore. The secretaries returned to their magazines. The pillow under Chandler’s head collected puddles of drool. I set off for the bedrooms.

  One step into the hallway, I heard a cheerful, “Yoohoo.” I sought the source of the sound and found an elderly woman in a four poster bed. One of her legs was in a cast and propped up on pillows. She wore an elegant nightgown. A matching down comforter covered her. Her short white hair wasn’t perfect, but it seemed tussled intentionally. She waved me closer. I took a step and leaned against the door frame. “Who are you?” she asked.

  “The studio hired me to find Chandler’s ukulele. The most logical place seemed to be his bedroom.”

  “Well, you found his bedroom. Come in and take a look around.”

  I knew Chandler had a wife who was almost twenty years older than he. That seemed to be the nugget of wisdom most of Chandler’s friends gave me first. So her presence in the bedroom made sense. The lack of any sign of Chandler inside the bedroom made less sense. The dresser was covered in small bottles and scents, the wardrobe full of silks and frills. I couldn’t find as much as a watch or pair of slippers that belonged to a man. “You must be Cissy,” I said.

  “Who else would I be? I’m too damn old to be one of those floozies Ray chases after.”

  “He’s not running too hard after any floozies right now.”

  “Wait till this script is done. He’ll be back in one of those writer’s rooms on the Paramount lot, drinking his morning champagne with some broad making moon eyes at his paycheck.”

  “A broad? Making moon eyes at his paycheck? Lady, you talk like someone out of one of his books.”

  Cissy patted the edges of her hair, not to move any hairs but to make sure none had moved. “He gets it from somewhere.”

  I walked around to the empty side of the bed. A couple of paperbacks lay on the night stand there. I picked one up. A Miss Marple Mystery. “You put this here to torment your husband?”

  Cissy shook her head. “I won’t be blamed. Ray reads those himself. For inspiration.”

  “What do they inspire him to do?”

  “Grind his teeth to the gums. Pick a fight with a world too cruel to even fight back.”

  I ran my thumb over the illustration of a dowager in a housecoat on the cover of the book.

  “There’s a peculiar thing about writers,” Cissy said. “They seemed destined to scream into a din that swallows their sound. Don’t they?”

  “I seem to hear enough of them coming through loud and clear. Maybe too many of them.”

  “There’s a difference between hearing something and listening to something. Do you know the myth of Sisyphus.”

  “Sure. The fellow who kept pushing a rock up a hill. Same rock every time, as far as I can tell.”

  “There’s an element of Sisyphus to writers’ lives. Not that they’re always pushing a rock up a hill that’s destined to roll back down. Hell, we’re all doing that, aren’t we?”

  “To some extent.”

  “For writers, though, it’s more a matter of being forever doomed to speak to someone who refuses to listen. They’ll hear you. Sometimes they’ll pay you for your sound. Take Ray out there. Pretty soon, he’ll wake up and take another shot and start making noise in the living room. Those two dames will type it up and he’ll pass out again and wake up and read what they typed and wonder who made that horrible noise. But he’ll get through the script and Paramount will find their killer and Alan Ladd will get away with everything in the end. Don’t you worry. But even if everyone sees the picture and the Academy awards him some honor, he’ll still feel like no one who heard his words listened. He’ll feel like he’s back at the bottom of the hill, putting his shoulder to the stone once again.”

  I thought about it. At least I’d solved the mystery of where Chandler got his mixed metaphors from. This Cissy was something. Typically, my business entailed asking every question except the question I wanted the answer to. It was a way of keeping people honest. Or as honest as people can be. Cissy didn’t seem to be a broad whom I needed to circle around. I asked her straight, “What is it he’s trying to get us to listen to? What’s his message?”

  “Writers don’t write with messages. Not the good ones, at least. The profitable writers write their messages on ransom notes. The ones like Ray who fancy themselves artists, why, they don’t have a message, do they?”

  “What do they have?”

  “Look under the bed.”

  I paused for a second. A shot rang out on Drexel Avenue. I ducked and listened to the subsequent silence. Instead of gunplay, I heard the rumble of a car engine coughing up its last breaths. A backfire striking the unmusical obbligato to the desert town outside. Since I’d already dropped to my knees on the woven area rug around the bed, I lifted the bed skirt and saw a black case that could’ve held a tommy gun. I slid it out, stood, and placed the case on the bed.

  “Open it,” Cissy said.

  The latches were unlocked. I lifted them. Inside was that hidden ukulele. The studio ponying up five large for me to find something sleeping beneath the writer every night.

  There’s Hollywood for you.

  Cissy lifted the banjo ukulele out of its case. She plucked one string at a time from top to bottom, singing one word per string. “My dog has fleas.” She did this a few times, adjusting the tuners to the words. “My, my, my, my,” until the “my” string sang in tune, then on to the dog, dog, dog, dog. When all the strings sang in key, she said, “It has a false bottom.”

  I sat on the bed next to Cissy. She started in on an old jazz number. The “Twelfth Street Rag,” if my ear wasn’t fooling me. I checked under the false bottom of the case. It was carpeted in photographs as old as the ragtime tune Cissy played. All of the photos captured the same woman in various states of undress. She was nude in a couple of the photographs. Nothing dirty. She was nude the way the Venus de Milo is nude, not naked like the pictures degenerates pick up in the back of a bookstore on Cahuenga. There was something unmistakable about the model’s eyes, something unapologetic, something that seemed to look right through me even when they were looking away. These same eyes watched Cissy’s fingers dance a Twelfth Street Rag on the neck of a banjo ukulele.

  I set the photos down and listened. It was a sort of respite in the dirty, sundrenched cesspool that calls itself Hollywood.

  The Wide Empty Sky

  The orange moon hangs over the eastbound 40 like an antidepressant trapped in a spider web underneath the bed, the kind you discover when you’re searching for sandal on a day when the web around the pill isn’t necessarily a deterrent. At least that’s what I imagine. I have no firsthand experience with antidepressants. All of my life’s pills have been recreational; all of my life’s psychiatric medications have been self-prescribed.

  The moon and the metaphoric antidepressants seem to match my mood as I hurtle into East Flag toward the country club. I’m going to an authors’ dinner where the presence of me as an author will elicit a wall of apathy. The most important thing about me at this moment is the woman riding shotgun in my wife’s Honda Civic: Pam Houston. We met less than an hour ago. I can’t get over the feeling that can she see right through me. A moment of silence smatters between us in the front seat. Her silence says, I know your kind. If we had met in our twenties, you would’ve been my next big regret.

  My silence shrugs.

  I miss my exit and backtrack through a frontage road just far enough off the freeway to feel right.

  Pam uses her voice the next time she speaks. She says, “If feels so good to see t
he right kind of trees the right distance apart.”

  My wife and I share a glance in the rearview mirror. We’re ocean people, not mountain people. It’s no great divide. My wife says, “Flagstaff really is beautiful.”

  Somehow, a ukulele emerges from Pam’s oversized purse. She slides into a song so naturally it feels like the song was always there. Pam has been on a Wilco kick lately. She plays “Ashes of American Flags.” The ukulele is so cheery against such a sad song that when she sings, “All my lies are only wishes,” it sounds like an inside joke I’m on the outside of.

  If Pam were to make a list of her five greatest weaknesses, it might include (1) soft promises from new age healers, (3) specters that haunt her femur, and (5) ukuleles.

  Eighteen percent of every Pam Houston short story is a ukulele.

  Ukulele memories surface like sunglasses and bucket hats in the calm pools that follow whitewater. There was the plastic Maccaferri Islander she carried with her as a river guide. A rugged little instrument that could get soaked on a class five in the afternoon and hum through a Wanda Jackson tune that same night. It was forever adaptable. She could replace broken strings with fluorocarbon line bartered off riverside fisherman.

  When Cowboys struck, well maybe not gold, but silver and turquoise certainly, Pam began experimenting with the higher end, solid-wood ukuleles. She went first for the Martin tenor—the legend among legends in the ukulele world. The Martin was a dubious lover. Sure, he’d sound beautiful in her arms. He could make her feel like a world-class ukulelist, like a Chopin nocturne might not be beyond her skill level.

  The Martin sounded even better in the arms of another woman. Therein lay the rub. She tried to tell herself that a ukulele need not be faithful. As long as the Martin made her feel whole, who could complain when another woman strummed him?

  Pam could. She finally allowed herself that.

  She returned to the river and the Maccaferri until it was swept away on the Tatshenshini River in Alaska. More than mourn its loss, Pam had to forgive herself for bringing plastic to such a pure place and leaving it at the bottom of the river. Her crime was no Valdez or pipeline running through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but it was something.

  From there, she experimented with a handmade Colorado ukulele from Beansprout, decked out in rope binding. Her fingers grazed the dark grains of mahogany reclaimed from the front door of an old Denver Victorian. It matched her barn in Creede perfectly. In her mind, its songs sung all the way to the mountains that cuddled her ranch in three of the four possible directions. Outside of Creede, it was a fickle instrument. On a foggy day in coastal Northern California, it played with too much twang. It’s country-western roots sounded almost hateful in Tunisia. A dark spirit emerged from it in Lubbock. She wasn’t at all sure she should bring it home.

  When she met Vivian and me, learned that we’d been married for more than ten years, together for more than eighteen and Vivian not yet even forty, she shot me another knowing look. Of course you’d be a Kamaka man. And I am. I know Kamaka ukuleles seem hopelessly traditional. I don’t want to emphasize that. Tradition or not, when I find the sound that speaks to me, I keep singing along.

  On the morning before the book fest, Pam sips her Late for the Train coffee alone in her motel room. She saw the guests in the room to her right loading up at dawn. The guests to her left leave loudly on the way to breakfast. She feels free, thinks to herself, So free, and plays her ukulele rendition of the Dixie Chicks song “There’s Your Trouble” twelve consecutive times.

  With each repetition, the song comes to mean more and less simultaneously.

  Horse carts and turn-of-the-century plows rust under the springtime sun outside the Coconino Center for the Arts. Needles from the ponderosa pines settle into the old wooden carriage sets, seeping moisture, reclaiming the elements. I’m inside, answering a litany of questions that follow the reading from my newest novel. The questions I’m answering could be described a number of ways. Well-informed and thoughtful would not always be among that number of ways.

  Afterward, Pam details the questions she found least compelling and the answers she wishes I had given:

  Real Question: I noticed that you used very active verbs in your narrative. You said your characters “moseyed” out of the hall. Did you do that on purpose?

  Pam’s Imagined Answer: No. I’m a writer who doesn’t put any conscious thought into the words I use.

  Real Question: When you write a story, how difficult is it for you to cut stuff out in the revision process? For me, cutting out lines that I have written is a bloody affair.

  Pam’s Imagined Answer: Lady, your stories could use more blood.

  Real Question: I came in late. Who are you and what are you doing here?

  Pam’s Imagined Answer: Get the fuck out.

  I’m a writer who has written almost exclusively for punk rockers and working class males. This has resulted in tremendous numbers of books shoplifted, but relatively few books sold. This has upset my publishers as much as I should expect it to. I’m therefore trying to transition into writing for people who will actually pay for books, who will not erupt in barroom brawls during my readings, who will not call me a poseur because I won’t go to strip club with them. I enjoy every question I’m asked during the Q&A session because the question I hear is, “Will you be nice enough to give me a reason to purchase and read your book?”

  All I want to say is, “Yes. Yes I will.”

  Only one question genuinely upsets me. It’s this: “Do you think the short story is a dead format?”

  Good Christ! I think. Pam Houston is in the room. Show some respect.

  Three people during Pam’s Q&A later that night ask her what the message is behind her writing. The messages I get from her books are varied and complex. They tend to change with every reading, just as mountains viewed from the north may look very different when approached from the west.

  The simple message I can get is the one written on Pam’s face. It says, If life were that simple, I wouldn’t write books. I would write bumper stickers.

  Pam’s least favorite tonewood is sapele. It’s a cousin to mahogany, harvested off the coast of west Africa with all the abandon embraced by multinational corporations bathed in lax environmental regulations. The fact that most sapele is sent to sweatshops in China for mass produced, trinket ukuleles bothers Pam all the more.

  Koa is too traditional, too rooted in Hawaii for Pam.

  Mahogany is good if it’s on an antique. She could get down with a mahogany Favilla or Regal from the ‘30s or ‘40s. Pam doesn’t like it on new instruments. She tries to stay away from anything made of an endangered species.

  Spruce is okay. She enjoys the bright sound. She’d go with spruce if she hadn’t stumbled across Western Red Cedar. It’s flawed just enough to keep her interested. It sounds like home wherever she is.

  The same moon that began as an antidepressant now nestles Lake Mary Road in its reflective glow. Stars hang above our heads like glowworms in an underground cave, tiny globes of light dangling on invisible strings. Pam and Vivian talk away. The Civic is vibrating in a shared validation of the choice to remain childless. “Childfree,” as Vivian is quick to correct.

  I’ve spent most of the past thirty-six hours with Pam. I’ve been at that perfect balance of proximity and distance to notice a recurring theme. It is this: everyone wants something from Pam Houston. Dealing with this cavalcade of desires seems to be her primary activity while at book junkets.

  She has already satisfied my lone desire, which is that people at book events treat my wife as the full, complex, accomplished human she is rather than as my plus-one. Pam and Vivian fill the night with their jokes about childfreedom. Vivian plots out her own not-a-mommy blog. Pam says, “I hate it when environmentalists get on my case about not printing double-sided drafts. Give me a break. I haven’t contributed one diaper to a landfill. Not one fucking diaper.”

  If Vivian and Pam laugh much harder, they
’ll have one of those laugh-till-we-peed moments Pam writes about. I don’t want to know where she draws the line between fact and metaphor.

  I pull the car over at the parking lot on the western edge of Upper Lake Mary. A couple of cars are already parked there, windows steaming from the inside. I find a spot far away from the lovers.

  Pam’s acupuncturist, Janine, found a Native American ghost hitching a ride in Pam. “He only wants a lift to the Grand Canyon,” Janine had said. Pam intended to drop off the hitchhiker at Mormon Lake and point him north to the Canyon, but when we got to the Mormon Lake Lodge, some kind of event was occurring that included large numbers of white men with big trucks and American flags. The crowd was not completely absent of guns hanging off hip holsters. “Way too much camouflage around here,” Vivian said. Pam and I shared a nod.

  It’s an American West we all know well enough from experience. We also know it’s not a hospitable place to leave a Native American ghost.

  The gravel parking lot at Upper Lake Mary is hospitable. I know of it because of a nearby trailhead. I point out north and the direction of the Canyon for Pam. She climbs out of the car, holding only her ukulele with its Western Red Cedar top. Vivian and I give her a moment alone.

  Pam heads over toward the tiny dam that holds Upper Lake Mary in place. Damp marshland prevents her making it all the way to the dam for a seat. The cold, mid-May Flagstaff night means that the ceremony will have to be short. One song, at most, before her fingers will lose their dexterity on the fretboard. She drifts her thumb across the strings, just to make sure the song she sings for her Native American friend will be in tune. It’s still solid from her morning’s strumming.

  More than once, Pam has entertained the thought of penning a country song called, “Cowboys Are My Weakness.” The chorus alone, which could be nothing more than a repetition of the title, would make her enough money to finally retire, to leave universities behind, to just write her short stories.