Traveling Sprinkler

by Nicholson Baker

  What is a note? A note is a sound represented by a black blob on the page. Notes can be long or short, and in real life they are always bending up and down like flexible claymation figures. I had a bad dream once in which I was a successful composer of scores for horror movies. I’d written a very frightening and suspenseful track for a chase scene where a man tries to protect a woman from a disfigured eyeless monster—or so I reconstruct the setting—but the movie that I’d scored so well was never released and the chase scene music had nowhere to go, and was condemned to wander the world pursuing people. In the dream I woke up, and in the dimness of the room I saw the chase scene music there hovering at the foot of my bed—a shadowy humanoid made of writhingly alive notes like long black water balloons. It had found me. I got up and tried to touch the notes and that made them angry. The chase scene music began chasing me, with terrible violin-harmonic screeching sounds and glissandi from the double basses. The music could find no peace. It was an awful dream. Fortunately I don’t have nightmares that often.

  So a note can be long or short. When Paul McCartney sings, “Blackbird singing in the dead of night,” the “of” is a slide upward. It could be written as two notes on the page, but it’s sung as a single upward-swooping sound. When Marvin Gaye sings “bay-eee-eee-bee-eee” in “Sexual Healing,” there are five distinctly audible notes, and yet nobody is counting them because numbers have nothing to do with sexual healing. Each of the “notes” has been healed by being annealed, that is, by being melted into the next note, and you can hear that Marvin Gaye knew that this song, cowritten with an admiring journalist, was going to be an enormous hit, bigger than anything else he’d done, even though his life was sliding downhill.

  Sung notes are always sliding uphill and downhill into each other because it’s not possible for a human voice to leap from one note to the next instantaneously. But why are they called notes? I don’t know. I guess a note is a little memorandum to self, a way of remembering a melody. A melody is a tune—something you can hum—like a move in chess. You can hum a tune but you can’t hum the harmony underneath a tune, and you can’t hum a clever sacrifice in a chess game, even though you can write Bxd6. If you look at old musical scores, from the fifteenth century, they write the notes as little diamond shapes on a stave. Meanwhile the itinerant jongleurs were singing and clapping and writing nothing down. Having assignations in the beer pantry.

  What’s a stave? Ah, the stave is the set of five lines onto which you hang the notes. There’s the E line, the G line, the B line, the D line, and the F train. I was taught a helpful mnemonic: Every Good Boy Does Fine. It’s not true, though. Some good boys do not do that well in school. Or in life. There’s also Elvis’s Guitar Broke Down Friday, and Earth Girls Blow Dairy Farmers—no, I made that last one up. You’re putting the notes out for display on the staves. You are in fact espaliering the notes like a pear tree on a wooden frame. If you put the note up here on Friday, it’s going to be higher in “pitch,” meaning higher up on the pitch of the slope. And if you pin the note on Elvis down here, it’s going to be lower in pitch, because up is vocal constriction and tension and upwardness and mountaintops, and lower is moon river and the bass singer in the Four Tops.

  So the stave, or staff, is simply five lines of wooden framing onto which you hang the notes for the sake of convenience. And the really confusing thing is that middle C is not located in the middle of the stave, it’s below the stave. Middle C is a key next to two black keys roughly in the middle of the piano keyboard. It’s the center of everything and yet perversely it’s represented as a note below the first line of the staff, or stave—a note with a little line through it to signal that there’s a virtual line below the five lines, so that it looks like a flying saucer.

  And then there are bar lines—vertical lines that neatly cross the stave every so often. They form measures, which are little aquariums of time in which the notes must forever swim. At first there were no bar lines, because the choristers figured that all you needed to know was the tune. If you’re singing a monkish chant you just need to be reminded of the tune. But then they began working out a code for longer notes and shorter notes—shorter notes were black blobs and longer notes were open blobs that weren’t colored in—and then they resorted to fiddling with the tail of the notes, so that some notes were so-called quarter notes, which were very important because they fell on every beat, and they had upsticking or downsticking single tails, while eighth notes had curvy spinnakers off their poles and if they joined up with other eighth notes they were united by angled bars between their poles as if they were going by too fast to stand on their own, and sixteenth notes had a second droopy thing, or a second connecting bar. The angled bars that connect notes are different from the vertical bar lines that separate measures—very confusing. I’m falling apart here.

  Another oddity of nomenclature: A piano key is a physical object that is different from the key, or “key signature,” that the music is in. A piece of music may be in the key of C major but the melody might begin on the D key or the E key or any key at all. Debussy called the piano a “box of hammers.” “The Sunken Cathedral” is in the key of C major, more or less.

  But the main thing to keep in mind is that the melody, or tune, the hummable essence of a song, is like a thread that is wrapped around various doorknobs in a large ornate eighteenth-century room of harmony designed by an architect named Rameau, and the knobs of harmony are made up of groups of constitutive notes called chords, and each chord has a little positive or negative ionic charge in it that moves things forward with colorn;;;;;”“’n

  I seem to have fallen asleep.

  • • •

  JEFF THE BARN MAN and two of his guys showed up first thing in the morning, and we set up a ladder and a bucket brigade and started rescuing the boxes and putting them in a back part of the first floor of the barn where the crossbeams had several upright supports. By the fiftieth book box Jeff said, “I think I’m getting a better sense of why the floor collapsed.” A carton of my family letters had broken open—postcards from uncles and aunts, and birthday wishes, and a “Dear Grandmother and Grandfather” thank-you from me, in blue felt-tip pen, for the Mediterranean cruise. “The Parthenon was ineffable,” I’d written. I remembered my mother suggesting the word to me when, sitting at the kitchen table, I’d asked her for something that meant “mysterious.”

  One of my three traveling sprinklers had its sprayer arms mangled, but my father’s original Sears model was in fine shape. And, miraculously, his collection of plastic packaging, egg cartons and foam clamshell boxes and appliance-cradling abstract shapes of Styrofoam, was completely untouched—stretch-wrapped in clear plastic sheeting on a pallet out of range of the avalanche. The canoe, however, was totally squashed. “Yep, I’d say you’re not going to get very far in that,” said Jeff. I dragged it out onto the grass and swore and took a picture of it to email to the Allstate man.

  One lucky thing: I found my silver and blue paperback copy of Howard Moss’s Selected Poems, which I’d been looking for for years. It had somehow found its way into a U-Haul box with some very old, very fat New Yorkers. The box burst, and there was the Howard Moss paperback. On the back of the book was a blurb from James Merrill: “Over the years Howard Moss has arrived, with next to no luggage, at mastery.” Inside was an ancient, faded dot-matrix-printed receipt on stiff paper from a cash machine operated by the Bank of New England: on June 7, 1980, I withdrew sixty dollars. Where are those dollars now? Gone to graveyards every one.

  Jeff said he would write up an estimate for the floor repair, but he said that five thousand from Allstate would certainly cover it. The three of them drove off, their pickup trucks filled with broken planking. I took Smack for a walk and gave him a liver snack, which made his morning, and then I went out for breakfast at the Friendly Toast. The box lifting had made me hungry and I ordered the Irish eggs Benedict, made with corned beef hash instead of a circular disk
of ham. Then, for the first time in more than thirty years, I read Howard Moss’s poem “Piano Practice.” I’d forgotten how observant it was. “The left hand’s library is dull,” Moss says, “the books / All read, though sometimes, going under velvet, / An old upholsterer will spit out tacks.” That’s very true about the low register of the piano. Partway through, Moss has an underwater stanza about Debussy, which unfortunately ends on a less good note about how the deep-sea mirrors “eat their hearts out.” Scratch that—I even like Moss’s mirror image now. It’s all done in a loose-seeming pentameter, with a great deal more enjambment than is healthy, but never mind the meter: you can practically hear the ice cubes in Moss’s scotch glass tinkle as he’s writing—writing and listening through layers of lath and plaster to his neighbor the industrious student musician.

  I remember how glum I was after reading “Piano Practice” for the first time all those years ago. I’d been working on and off for a year on a poem about piano playing, trying to describe the mingled sounds I heard coming from the practice rooms while I waited for my reed to soak, and Howard Moss’s poem made mine superfluous. Now, though, his poem only made me happy.

  Twenty-two

  RAYMOND’S GOT GENUINE MUSICAL TALENT—I’ve got his “beans in my jeans” song running through my head.

  I’m sitting on a wet beach towel in the car with raindrops popping away on the roof. The driver’s seat was soaked because last night I forgot to roll up the window all the way. That’s what a Fausto cigar will do to you. You crack the window to let some smoke out, then it rains all night long, and boom, your ass is wet. I think I should stop inhaling. I’ve got another beach towel draped down from the roof of the car so that more rain won’t come in the window. It’s the only thing I don’t like about this car—no gutters. Thank goodness the barn boxes are all up and safe.

  The textbook I’m currently reading is by Rick Snoman, a DJ and remixer, and it’s called Dance Music Manual. It’s got 522 pages and it’s arranged like a scholastic treatise on angels and is about as helpful to an amateur musician like me as Aquinas’s Summa Theologica would be. Here’s what I’ve learned so far. There are eight genres of dance music: House, Trance, UK Garage, Techno, Hip-hop, Trip-hop, Ambient, and Drum ’n Bass. Trip-hop? House music arose in the eighties as disco was dying, Snoman writes: “DJ Nicky Siano set up a New York club known as The Gallery, and hired Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan to prepare the club for the night by spiking the drinks with lysergic acid diethylamide.” Trance, on the other hand, started in the nineties with a song by DJ Dag and Jam El Mar called “We Came in Peace,” which repeats a single phrase from the Apollo 11 moon message several dozen times. It was intended to create a state of trance but it doesn’t seem to work—there’s such a thing as too much Neil Armstrong. The genre quickly evolved, according to Snoman: “The increased popularity of 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine (MDMA or ‘E’) amongst clubbers inevitably resulted in new forms of trance being developed.” Ambient music could be traced back, he says, to a moment in the mid-seventies “when Brian Eno was run over by a taxi.” In the hospital Eno listened to some harp music while rain beat gently on the windowpane, and he liked the intermixture, and there you go. In the index to Snoman’s book, Daft Punk appears as “Punk, Daft.” Prince doesn’t appear in the index at all.

  Here’s my one-week dance-music self-study boot-camp syllabus. From the seventies, we begin with a formal analysis of Donna Summer singing “I Feel Love.” Moving her bad-girl hips and looking up at the lord in that wicked, innocent way she has. Boom, done. We move on to the total sonar-echo funkosity of the Talking Heads doing “Take Me to the River.” Boom. We decide to turn up the volume slightly, because everything sounds better louder. From the eighties, we rediscover Chaka Khan doing “Ain’t Nobody,” with carbon-neutral keyboard sequences by Hawk Wolinski, and “Talking in Your Sleep” by the Romantics, boom, living in a spotlight, boom. Then the Fixx, very tight, doing “Saved by Zero.” Then Midnight Star, “No Parking on the Dance Floor” and “Operator,” boom, boom, “Operator, this is an emergency.” We begin to feel a powerful sense of obligation: we must dance. Then we study the inscrutable a cappella chord that begins “She’s Strange” by Cameo, and we try unsuccessfully to make harmonic sense of the meanderingly slow arousing siren wail that follows. Next we turn our attention to the Crystal Method doing “Vapor Trail,” which seems to be about smoking crack although there are no words and it’s just as good sober, boom diddly boom. We turn up the volume further and spend an hour worshipping the chorus of Underworld’s “Always Loved a Film,” and then we bring the noise with Benny Benassi’s remix of Public Enemy, boom. We sit cross-legged, devoting an afternoon to the greatness of Hol Baumann doing “Bénarès” and Mercan Dede doing “Ab-i Hayat”—boom, boom, dakka doom, doom sa, comme ça—and then we pound our delighted hippocampuses with Eric Prydz’s ode to the piano, “Pjanoo.” At the final reception cast party we all dance to George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” until we must chase the cat. Then we collapse in orgiastic confusion, knowing that we have a good solid foundation for getting down on it. Tuition: the cost of fifteen songs on iTunes.

  • • •

  ROZ JUST LEFT. I’m in shock. I said, “Before we look at the barn and get all sad, I want to try out a song on you.” I played her my Guantanamo song, which I’d fiddled with a bit. She dipped her knees to it here and there, which pleased me. After it was over, she said, “It’s got a great dance beat, but I’m honestly just not sure about the Guantanamo part, because it’s so upbeat and cheerful that it seems as if you’re almost making fun of Guantanamo, which is surely not what you mean. Guantanamo is a terrible prison where people are forced to waste their lives. Shouldn’t the song be something more like—I don’t know, ‘I saw you on the dance floor, / I never wanted anything more, / I bought a rubber at the corner store’?”

  “That’s it!” I said, writing her lyrics on a folded-up piece of paper. I also played her a fresh version of the doctor song. She liked that one.

  Then I showed her the missing barn floor and the squashed-flat canoe, which was still out on the grass. She surprised me by starting to cry.

  “It moved so smoothly over the water,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” I said, holding her. “I’m sorry the barn failed. I’m sorry about the canoe. I’m sorry things turned out this way. Come inside, let’s not look at this anymore. I’ve got a bottle of blackstrap molasses for you.”

  She looked up at me. Then she gave me the shock. It wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t about Harris the doctor.

  • • •

  “I HAVE SOMETHING TO TELL YOU,” she said. “It technically doesn’t affect you, but it does.”

  “What?” I steeled myself. If she was going to say she was engaged, I simply wasn’t going to accept it.

  She said, “I think I’m going to have a hysterectomy.”

  My mouth opened and closed. “You mean they’re going to—” I didn’t finish.

  “Remove it,” she said. “Not my ovaries, just the, ah, uterus. Just the center of it all.”

  I stared at her, horrified.

  “I told you it’s not cancer, it’s really not,” Roz said. “Sweetie, don’t look at me that way. It’s not malignant, and I’m not going to die. I have uterine growths called fibroids. Lots of women have them and they’re usually not a problem. But I’ve got, it turns out, a whole bunch of them, in a knot—like a baobob tree. You know that big tree in Avatar? That’s what it feels like I’ve got in me.”

  “How absolutely awful.” I clutched her arm. “And there’s no other way?”

  “We’ve tried several things, they were a waste of time. The gynecologist has been telling me I should have the hysterectomy right away, but I’ve resisted it. She says I’ll feel ten times better if we go ahead—the bloodletting will stop, the pain will stop, the anemia will go away. The fibroid is giving me the horrible per
iods, because it’s so big and gnarly. It means well, but it’s killing me.”

  “You poor dear thing.”

  “My last hope was that I’d hit menopause and it would disappear on its own. But no luck. It loves estrogen. It just keeps on growing. And it aches.”

  “Oh, baby,” I said. I put my arms around her. “Have you told Harris?”

  “Harris is a minimalist and he’s been telling me I should wait and exhaust every alternative—he’s been a bit rigid on the subject, actually. But now even he’s saying I should do it. I probably should have had it done a year ago.”

  “Come on inside,” I said. “Let me make some tea.”

  We walked into the house. “I know I’m really too old to have a baby,” she said, “but to lose your own womb—the place where little babies grow—” She held back her grief. “It’s just so final. Sorry.”

  “Sh, sh, it’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. As I stroked her arm I was seized by a paroxysm of remorse. This was my fault. I put some water on the stove, thinking furiously. “Can I feel it?” I said.

  “No, Paul. Please. It’s private.”

  “I know, forget it, I’m sorry. It’s just that we should have had a kid. We’d be together now if we’d had a kid, and you wouldn’t have this horrible feeling of finality. I’m so sorry.”

  Roz said, “I’d probably still be facing this whether or not we’d had a child. You didn’t want to have a child when I wanted to and so we didn’t. That’s just what happened.”

  I put a tea bag in a mug. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, probably nothing. I just have to face up to it, and I thought you should know.” She smiled at me through tears. “You could hold me.”

  I held her and stroked her back. I felt the wrinkles in her shirt and the slight thickness of her bra clasp.

  “And I’ll take that bottle of molasses,” she said.