by John Rowell
In November, a visiting music professor from the local college explains symphonic orchestration to the collective fourth and fifth grades in a special assembly in the Linden Hills Elementary cafetorium. You note that the man refers to himself as “Maestro” several times during his speech. He explains how instruments “come in” at a certain time during a given orchestral work; you think of Perky cueing you to sing after she’s played her song one time through. The music man explains “vamping,” how a certain musical phrase will repeat over and over until it is time for a more significant passage of the music to begin.
And this is how you feel: that you have been vamping for almost ten years, repeating the same phrases (“I hate math.” “Can I stay up half an hour later?” “But I don’t want to go to bed now …”), writing the same shopworn sentences (“My name is _________; Today is _________; Our president is _________”), living in your dull, non-Hollywoodish town, with its one tall structure, a fifteen-floor combination bank and insurance building commonly referred to by citizens as “our skyscraper.” Eagerly, you have looked up New York City in the World Book Encyclopedia, you have looked up Hollywood, you have memorized the photos and imagined yourself into them. You see yourself thriving in the middle of a bustling crowd on Fifth Avenue, well-dressed and strolling with adult chaperones; you see yourself taking bus tours of the movie stars’ homes, saying to the tourists on the bus, “That was where Doris Day lived before she became penniless,” things like that, juicy tidbits the official tour guides would be too ashamed to reveal. You actually begin to pepper your conversations at home and school with references to Bonwit Teller and the Chrysler Building. You pretend your school cafetorium is the Automat, or the Brown Derby. You instruct your mother and Perky to pick you up “at the corner of Sunset and Vine.” The other schoolchildren treat you, when they treat you at all, like a weird, exotic animal in the zoo. Sometimes, they seem to decide that the animal you are should be made extinct.
“You’re a faggot, you faggot!” hisses Bully Number One on the playground.
“I’m gonna kick your ass someday, you little pussy,” growls Bully Number Two.
If other bullies are around, bullies numbered three through thirty-two, they laugh and jeer derisively, conspiratorially; they are one.
You rationalize: Perhaps they hate you because you’re not only talented, but because you’re a good student too. Also: good in music, expert at spelling, accomplished and meticulous with arts and crafts. The teachers constantly praise you … And these are things that make the other children bristle in your presence. You feel their mistrust, their jealousy; you can practically see the venom rising out of their little fifth-grade bodies, rising like vapor, like unleashed, unsettled spirits belonging neither to this world nor the next: swirling in the air, hissing, monstrous, looking to attack. But they can’t attack you in the classroom, because you rule the classroom, you deliver the academic goods, you have every teacher—language arts, visual arts, music, all librarians—in the palm of your hand. You sing, you draw, you spell, you write, you are a good ambassador for new children from other places.
But then there’s the playground.
And this is where they get you. Other children thrive on the playground, they know how to navigate its terrain and use it to their advantage, but to you, the playground is a cruel, barren wilderness for which you have never had a map or guide. It’s a desert where no one has thought to build a Holiday Inn. This is where your precious knowledge of Doris Day, arts and crafts, and all things Californian (Californian!) carry no weight. And just by running out so far into right field that you’ve practically exited the schoolyard won’t protect you from their vociferous evil.
But it helps.
You can even sing out there, though not too loudly, you with your stiff, new, still un-broken-in baseball glove, a glove that covers your hand so unnaturally it’s as if some monstrous, extremity-enlarging cancerous growth had formed there. You wait for a bell to ring, and you daydream and sing, all your favorite songs about lazy rivers, about red red robins, about getting misty …
“You’re a big music fan, aren’t you?” asks Miss Kenan one afternoon, after school, as you assist her with the daily eraser dusting against the side of the Dempster Dumpster. She is dressed in beige pedal pushers and a white peasant blouse, the kind of outfit you imagine a Hollywood starlet might wear on her day off from the set. You think Miss Kenan is like Barbara Gordon on Batman: dressed by day in casual, unassuming clothes, then one spin-around of that closet and: Instant Kinky Wardrobe. You feel you know exactly what Miss Kenan’s closet must be filled with at home: go-go boots, discarded trapeze artist costumes (tattered but still spangly), real human-hair wigs, lacy bras from Frederick’s of Hollywood like you’ve seen advertised in the back of Photoplay. You imagine she has a boyfriend named Dale or Travis who lies around on the bed late at night in nothing but cutoffs, sweaty and horny, smoking a marijuana cigarette, and saying things to Miss Kenan like, “Swing upside down for me, baby. Let me see what you got.”
“Yes, ma’am, I love music,” you say.
“I know. You did a great job with your solo. And you like grown-up music, too, like ‘Moon River,’ things like that. I’ve heard you singing by yourself out on the playground.”
You feel your face go red-hot. You never meant for anyone to hear you; when did she hear you? Did you get carried away and sing too loudly, forgetting for a moment that you were on the playground and not the Lawrence Welk program? You suddenly feel like diving into the Dempster Dumpster and never, ever coming out, a crazy, misguided child who died in the discarded remains of the lunch food from the Linden Hills Elementary cafetorium, food that went unchosen and unconsumed by other children, a perfect metaphor.
“Yes ma’am. My grandmother and … uh … my parents … and I watch the Lawrence Welk program.”
“Well, I think it’s wonderful,” she says, and puts her hand on your shoulder, setting off instant shooting firecrackers in your chest. “I bet I know something you’d like. Have you ever listened to the Music of Your Life station on the radio? The one that plays the Saturday Night Ballroom?”
“No ma’am.”
“Oh, it’s great, you’d love it. It’s broadcast out of New York City every Saturday night. They play all the wonderful old songs … it’s so romantic …” Miss Kenan suddenly touches her hand to her cheek, averting her eyes from yours and gazing off into the distance, and instantly you know—because you understand her—that she’s recalling a lost love, enjoying a brief reverie about a man that got away. Of course. You were right all along: Miss Kenan has been damaged by love, victimized by romance. Someone from her circus days, no doubt. A heartless ringmaster? An indifferent elephant trainer?
On a sheet of your tablet paper, she writes down the radio dial number for The Music of Your Life, and you place it between the pages of your MacMillan level-five reader, keeping it crisp, pristine. You hurry home, full of anticipation and purpose, brimming with the thrill of a new discovery, the reader in one hand, and the hopelessly uncreased baseball glove in the other.
Imagine for a moment that you’re not you, that who you are is Ray. Ray: a good-looking, strong-jawed man nearing forty, with a pretty, attentive wife—your college sweetheart no less!—an excellent job as an insurance executive in a warm, friendly, big-enough town in the home state you love, and have always loved. You’ve got good friends and golfing buddies, all of whom remember you in your college days, when you reigned on campus in your flashy four-year career as an All-American baseball player, and you’ve just, as of this week, been named chairman of the North Carolina chapter of the UNC Alumni Association, a prestigious honor, and an opportunity for statewide social advancement so vast and far-reaching it’s practically obscene. You have a lovely, well-kept home, the trim of which you must now paint Carolina Blue and white in keeping with the tradition of becoming alumni chairman.
And you have a recently divorced mother, a loving but irresponsible woman who, a
t last, has finally given the whisky bottle a rest, despite your suspicions that she has a lapse every now and then. And, of course, you have a child, an earnest and intelligent little boy who you know loves you, a fact you try to brush off, not dwell on, because you’d rather not be loved by a child you don’t understand. Or: maybe you do understand him, and wish perhaps you didn’t. Which makes you not want to deal with him at all, even though you recognize that he is what teachers and other parents have labeled as special, bright, social, a little grown-up. You grudgingly acknowledge that he possesses unique talents other children probably can’t even begin to comprehend; you think perhaps he may even do something on a grand scale someday, find some degree of fame, some kind of acclaim. And you know these are things that you, as his father, should be proud of. But you usually manage to seem busy and preoccupied when he tries to talk to you, even if you’re not, and you make only the most cursory, duty-bound attempts to share activities and time with him.
But then: you buy him a baseball glove which he seems completely indifferent to, so … well, you do try, don’t you? You even went to the store alone to buy it, rather than asking him to go with you, because you knew—somehow you knew—how much he’d hate being forced to go to a sporting goods store. So you stood in the store and watched other fathers and sons there together—and together they were picking out gloves, baseballs, footballs, everything. Alone, you bought him the best baseball glove you could buy, the one that reminded you of the one your father bought you when you were ten years old. God, how you loved that glove. How you loved him for buying it for you. And, well … well, you failed again, didn’t you?
You sometimes think: How can he be mine? How can he be my child? Because your child—yes, Ray, your child—does and says things in a way that you despise in boys, in any male of any age; he hints at behavior you want no part of, nor want to see exhibited. He keeps you awake at night, this problem son, and you bite your lip and shut your eyes and regret bitterly that you even feel this way, because you see that other people, other relatives, strangers even, appreciate things about him that you can’t/ won’t/don’t. And you’re aware that this makes you a villain, perhaps, because what you want to do is to slap the specialness out of him, get rid of this … otherness, knock it out of his little body, by force if you could, knowing still—and this is the worst—that he would keep loving you even if you did. You wonder: Does he know you have these thoughts? Does he sense it? Is that knowledge the thing you see reflected back at you in his little blue eyes that stare intensely at you from across the dinner table, and then dart away? Or, while watching television, when he tries to catch quick looks at you when he thinks your head is turned? What about when he says good night to you, when he tries to hug you—God, that’s always so awkward! Why does he wrap his arms around your waist like that and hold on? What does he want? A dance?
Maybe that’s just your imagination, though.
But the eyes … God, the eyes. Those eyes that everyone says he got from you—“He has your eyes, Ray,” people say. “Have you ever seen a little boy look more like his daddy?”
And his eyes carry your secret, don’t they, Ray?
Because what he sees is that you don’t love him. And that’s like a refrain from some sad old standard, a duet, maybe, playing over and over on an ancient, broken turntable that only the two of you can hear:
You don’t love him.
You don’t love him.
You don’t love him.
And you, Ray, are haunted. You are haunted in the way someone who has gotten away with a crime is haunted, haunted like someone who fears a certain diagnosis is haunted. Daily, hourly. It chases you. It hunts you down. You are haunted.
And so you should be …
That seems fair, doesn’t it?
You, being you, have resigned yourself to the fact that on Saturday night you are the only one interested in listening to the Music of Your Life station. Oh, Connie and Ray might have listened, but today is Ray’s big alumni association day, and officials from Chapel Hill have come to visit your house, to photograph Ray and Connie and even you for the newsletter (putting you in a “Carolina Baseball” sweatshirt and making you hold your glove up high, as if to catch an oncoming ball) and bestowing gifts upon your home and family. Cans of light blue paint sit in the carport; Ray looks so proud and, you must admit, handsome, in his Carolina Blue blazer with a navy pocket patch bearing the university insignia and the lettering: N. C. ALUMNI CHAIRMAN. Connie has proudly placed in the middle of the kitchen table one of the alumni association’s gifts, a new lazy Susan in the shape of a large foot—the Tar Heel symbol of the university—in which the indentations for the toes and heel are designed to hold condiments like relish and ketchup.
Perky is out on a date (Ray: “Just hope she doesn’t get knocked up.” Connie: “Ray!” ). So while Connie and Ray busy themselves with the alumni people, you actually get the chance to watch Batman by yourself on the small new TV in the family room, another gift of the alumni association. Nothing much has changed since the last episode: the Caped Crusaders triumph, as always, over evil, flattening the villains and knocking their henchmen out cold. THWACKKKK! POW! BAMMMMM! At the end of tonight’s episode, Batman and Robin aren’t tied to a plank or anything like it. They have landed the villain behind bars; they have won; they are free. Free to go. Free to go back and live together as best friends in their beautiful, well-appointed manor house.
But soon it’s time for you to head into the living room and turn your attention to the stereo console. You’re so excited about the Music of Your Life that you don’t even mind that you’ll be listening to it by yourself. You like being alone in the room of the house most often used for parties and entertaining, a formal, hushed, and quiet place now, isolated from the everyday activity of the other rooms. And you do so admire the way Connie has decorated: plush couches, deep-pile blue-and-green wool carpeting, flattering, low-level lamp lighting. You, in striped flannel pajamas, roll the red and yellow light dial on the radio console until you find what you’re looking for. A man’s sexy baritone voice says:
“You’re tuned to the Saturday Night Ballroom and The Music of Your Life. Yesterday’s standards by the great singers of today and yesterday, coming to you live from the King and Queen Room of the beautiful Hotel Astor in midtown Manhattan. Tonight’s sponsor is Consolidated Edison, and the good folks over there want us to remind you that they’re the ones who ‘keep the lights on in the city that never sleeps.’ And we do thank them for that. I’m your host, Eddie Edwards, you’re in the Saturday Night Ballroom and this is … the music of your life.”
You lean your small head against the console and close your eyes, and imagine the ballroom in all its splendor. Just the thought of such a place makes you happy, and not just happy, but relieved, relieved that it actually exists. That is where you want to be, in the King and Queen Room of the Hotel Astor, in the center of Manhattan, and, thanks to the lavish illustrations of the World Book Encyclopedia, volume N, you know exactly what the center of Manhattan looks like. You wish only that you were decked out in a child’s-size tuxedo, instead of new flannel North Carolina Tar Heel blue-and-white-striped pajamas. You picture in your head the photographs of New York City that you’ve so lovingly memorized from World Book. Beside you on the floor sits one of Connie’s silver serving trays on which you have placed canapés: Ritz crackers with little dots of peanut butter on top, and the magic champagne flute filled to the top with fizzy ginger ale. How you wish someone, your grandmother, perhaps Miss Kenan in a glittery evening gown, or—yes—Doris Day, were sitting beside you, whispering throatily: “Darling, will you pass me one of those divine hors d’oeuvres?”
The host says: “Tonight we begin with the wonderful sounds of the great Miss Peggy Lee. But first, I just have to tell you … the King and Queen Room looks particularly soignée tonight, folks. Mr. and Mrs. Astor have stopped by this evening, some of the Rockefellers, Mr. Sinatra … Just another Saturday night in New York
City, and isn’t that a grand place to be? And believe me when I tell you that Mr. Sinatra personally gave me special permission to play anything of his I wanted to this evening. Oh, folks, I gotta tell you … what a nice guy, and what a great artist, the one and only Frank Sinatra. A living legend, folks, a real living legend. But now here’s another one of our great treasured artists, Miss Peggy Lee, singing the Rodgers and Hart classic “The Lady Is a Tramp.” You’re in the Saturday Night Ballroom, I’m Eddie Edwards, and this is the music of your life. Miss Peggy Lee!”
There is nothing for you to do but listen as Miss Peggy Lee, after a great, lush symphonic fanfare (no vamping) sings about some kind of stew, something about dining on turkey, something about traveling around by hitchhiking. Then she sings:
“Alas, I missed the Beaux Arts Ball,
And what is twice as sad,
I was never at a party
Where they honored Noël Ca’ad.”
You open your eyes. “Noël Ca’ad” you recognize as Noël Coward, whom you recently saw being interviewed on the Mike Douglas program. He smoked from a cigarette holder, and said things like “Simply dashing!” and “Can you imagine?” and kept Mike in stitches. You were fascinated, but Ray didn’t seem to care for him, so you didn’t say anything. You wish you knew what the “Bo Zarts Ball” was, because you’re sure it sounds like something you’d enjoy being invited to.
Peggy Lee starts to really swing her big number, and, knowing you’re alone in the living room, alone in your own Saturday Night Ballroom, you get up and start to dance around the furniture, champagne glass held as high aloft as your little arm can hold it. You swipe a candle from the candelabra on the piano and pretend to smoke from a cigarette holder. Everyone around you in your Saturday Night Ballroom is simply dashing and clearly having a wonderful time. Even Connie and Ray are there, waving to you, happy, dancing, Ray looking Arrow-shirt handsome in his college white dinner jacket, and Connie resplendent in a blue-green taffeta party dress and matching high-heel peau de soie pumps. Satisfied that your guests are enjoying themselves, you wander over to the window of the King and Queen Room of the Hotel Astor and peer out on to the twinkly, glittery lights of New York that have been brought to you tonight by the good folks at Consolidated Edison, whatever that is, and from the console Peggy Lee belts out the line: “I’m all alone when I lower my lamp. That’s why the lady is a tramp!” It doesn’t matter that it’s only Connie’s gauzy, silky sheer curtains hanging in the window; in the absence of a tuxedo, the sheers turn into something even better, they make a decidedly stunning evening gown for you, as you twist your little body a couple of times so the material wraps around you and drapes, hanging, leaving your shoulders exposed, a fashionable gown, strapless and backless. You hold the curtain/evening gown in place, feeling very sophisticated, feeling like both Cinderella and the prince, and Miss Peggy Lee repeats one more time: “That’s why the lady is a tramp!”
