The Music of Your Life

by John Rowell

  “Excellent call.”

  I push the button on the remote, and after scattershot jump cuts of old relatives, church socials, Christmas gift giving, and various weddings and baptisms, we get to Toby’s twelfth birthday party.

  “Look at that,” I say, and he does; he’s instantly rapt. On the screen, younger Toby is opening up two packages, both record albums, one of them Company, the other one Follies. I am in the background; Starla Scott, who, of course, never got to Hollywood, and who by this time is permanently fat and sloppy, has to pull me forward to get to Toby. The expression on his twelve-year-old face is one of unmitigated joy, and he jumps up and hugs me, while everyone else looks bored, and more than a little confused.

  “God, look at my hair,” I say, wincing. “And what is that, an ascot? Ohhh …”

  He giggles. “And what’s that other thing, hanging around your neck?”

  “Unfortunately, that’s an ankh. They were very big then. Christ. So awful. Definitely my Paul Lynde phase.”

  “You’re not the only one who should be embarrassed. Look at the cousins! This is, like, torture.”

  But of course we can’t tear ourselves away from it—it’s our family, for God’s sake. Later, in the film, I’m balancing a drink and cigarette in one hand, and another gift in the other, which I hand to him: he tears it open, stares wide-eyed at the three glossy photographs, and clutches them to his little chest, making silly kissing sounds. Everyone laughs, except my brother, who I’m sure wished it had been a football.

  “Who were they?” I ask. “Do you remember?”

  He doesn’t miss a beat: “Of course. Patty Duke, Barbra Streisand, Ginger from Gilligan’s Island. I had a crush on her, but I realize now it was her evening gown I was in love with.”

  “Look at your dad disapproving,” I say. Aaron sits at the kitchen table, looking surly and drinking a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. He had already lost his looks by then.

  “What else is new?” Toby says. And then the video goes blank.

  “Wow. That’s wild,” he says, leaning his head against the cushion. “A Sondheim freak, even then. I’d forgotten all of that. What kind of uncle gives Company and Follies to a twelve-year-old?”

  “Sounds like a joke,” I say. “Let me guess. A gay one?”

  He laughs. “You’re responsible for all my damage, Uncle Will, and that video proves it.”

  “Well … homosexual rites of passage have always been my specialty.”

  And then we sit in the moonlight for a while, quiet, listening to the summer night sounds from outside, two generations of one family, lounging around in Connecticut and ruminating. Very Long Day’s Journey.

  “I read something interesting the other day,” Toby says, finally, exhaling. “Did you know I Love Lucy is always playing somewhere in the world? At every second of the day, it’s playing somewhere. So chances are, you’re walking down that staircase on somebody’s TV screen somewhere right at this very minute.”

  “Ah. Well, that’s a comforting thought, I suppose.”

  “I think so.”

  “Hey, Toby … it’s late. Don’t leave poor young Ethan in there to fend for himself. We Fords are gracious hosts, after all, aren’t we? I think we should all turn in.”

  He stands and forehead-kisses me good night, then heads down the hall to join his … what—boyfriend? lover? squeeze? Before I head to my own room, I remember to rewind the video and as I sit there, I’m lit by both the moon, shining in through the glass ceiling, and the flickering, yellowish light of my family rewinding itself on the screen, hurtling backwards, from 1978 to 1965, getting younger, bigger-haired, less fashionable with each spinningback frame.

  And it’s odd, but what comes to mind all of a sudden is Jimmy Durante’s phrase, “Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are”—his hallmark, and his exit line of every show. Arthur worked for a time as Mr. Durante’s floor manager, when Mr. Durante was the host of his own radio program in Hollywood, and it was in that tiny little recording studio off of Vine where I first met Arthur one night, through a mutual friend. When was it? Nineteen fifty-two? Fifty-three? The friend and I were picking Arthur up to go have drinks and to meet Mr. Durante.

  Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!

  What did that mean, anyway?

  Durante, wearing a hat and shirt and tie, was wrapping up the show, speaking into an old Philco microphone behind a glass booth. I watched from the outer area, as our friend brought Arthur forward to meet me.

  From the inside of another glass booth, Durante’s announcer said: “That concludes tonight’s broadcast of The Jimmy Durante Hour, live from the CBS Studios in Hollywood. Tonight’s program has been sponsored by Lustre-Creme Shampoo—‘It Never Dries, It Beautifies.’ Join us next week when Jimmy’s guests will be—”

  And at that moment Arthur and I shook hands, both of us in suits and ties and pocket handkerchiefs—menswear, like our fathers probably would have been wearing back home at exactly the same time—but the charge that passed between us was naked and hot and electric, giving the lie to the fuddy-duddy men’s clothing we sported: we were only boys.

  Our eyes locked as our hands clasped. (“Firmly, son, no fish hands,” Daddy always said.)

  “Arthur, this is Will Ford, he’s new to Hollywood …”

  And in the booth Jimmy Durante said: “Good night, Mrs. Calabash! Where-evah you are!”

  Mrs. Calabash. Mrs. Calabash. What an odd name. Who was she?

  “Arthur, Will … Will, Arthur …”

  Wherever you are. Whoever you are. Are. Was. Were …

  Good night.

  SAVIORS

  Burton punches in the numbers of Kent’s private line at the Colesville United Methodist Church almost without looking at the keypad; he has had the sequence memorized for years, though he wouldn’t necessarily want Kent to know that. Burton calls Kent once a week to commiserate and share Wait till you hear what they did this week stories about their respective church choirs: those well-meaning, good-hearted, mostly middle-aged and Social Security-eligible people who bring to choir practice “the joy of singing,” but nothing like the passion for Brahms, Ives, Vaughan Williams—secular, nonsecular, anything—that Kent and Burton have clung to since joining Junior Choir at age eleven or twelve. It’s the music they have spent all of their teenage and adult years studying, playing, practicing, and practicing again—a “calling” that goes far beyond the mere joy of singing. At least this is what Burton tells himself, and he is grateful that Kent agrees …

  Or says he does.

  Burton and Kent are friends from their conservatory days, from when they were both organ students at Kensington Choir College, but now they mostly just see each other at yearly statewide meetings of church organists and choir conventions—“sing-offs,” as Burton likes to say. Burton only calls Kent at the office, not wanting to bother him at home, where Kent lives with his wife and two children.

  “Kent Willis,” says the familiar voice on the other end of the line after two and a half rings. Burton is relieved that Kent has picked up—he knows three rings means voicemail, and voicemail always trips him up, makes him stutter, makes him sound, he thinks, too … too friendly? No: too eager.

  “Do you think God forgives church organists for hating Easter?” Burton says into the mouthpiece, skipping “hellos” and “how are yous”; he believes this makes their conversations more like those of close buddies who speak once or twice a day, friends so tight they don’t have to bother with formalities. Burton doesn’t so much ask the question as “lead off” with it, for he has thought about what he would say to Kent all morning. It is Wednesday, the day he always calls, because Wednesday is equidistant from Sunday on either end, the least pressured day, theoretically, for church workers.

  “You don’t hate Easter, Burton,” replies Kent. “You just hate all the work that comes with it. You resent having four choir rehearsals a week instead of two.”

  “Christ Almighty, that’s it,” Bu
rton says, though he’s aware of how unseemly it sounds for someone in his profession to take The Name in vain. Even, perhaps, to Kent. He continues anyway, barely bothering to breathe: “OK, well, how’s this? I hate the Messiah. I hate the ‘Alleluia Chorus.’ There, I said it. I voiced it. I almost even sang it.”

  Kent laughs on the other end, which gives Burton a small stab of pleasure.

  “I know,” Kent continues. “I hear you. But you know as well as I do if we didn’t give ’em the Messiah at Easter, they’d call us heathens and kick us right out of the choir loft.”

  Burton sighs. He is grateful Kent agrees with him about the Handel; he searches out commonality between them. He knows being snide about the Messiah at Easter is a popular sentiment among choirmasters, but still it feels as if Kent is siding with him specifically.

  “Please,” Burton says, taking pains to sound casual. “I get so tired of trying to please everyone. I mean, it’s really just the Lily and Poinsettia Christians who make a fuss about the Messiah.”

  There is a pause. Then Kent asks: “So how are your sopranos and altos this week?”

  “Oh … the same, of course. They’re always the same. I said to Louise Eller on the phone this morning, ‘How can you be in my hair all the time, Louise, when the fact is you’ve already caused me to pull most of it out?’”

  Burton has used this line before, but Kent laughs politely anyway, then tells Burton he has to get to a meeting.

  “Talk to you next week, Burt,” Kent says.

  “Yeah … sure … have a good one, buddy.” Burton tries not to let his disappointment translate to his voice.

  “Happy Easter, Kent,” he adds suddenly, then instantly wishes he hadn’t.

  “OK, you too.”

  Burton returns the phone to its cradle. On his desk blotter, he looks down at his calendar for April. On each successive Wednesday, he has written, though he hardly needs to remind himself: “Call Kent.”

  Jean Nimocks Sloop is a woman on a mission. Ever since she found out the news about her niece Bitsy Nimocks Evans, that Bitsy had just “up and walked out” on her seventeen-year marriage to Riley Evans, a prominent North Raleigh lawyer, she has been working round the clock to salvage Bitsy’s life. Jean believes—no, Jean knows—that the only thing to heal the loss of a man is to acquire a new one. Jean feels it is her duty as both aunt and empathetic fellow divorcée to find her niece a new man, and pronto.

  It was last week, on Thursday afternoon, when the proverbial lightbulb finally flashed over Jean’s head. She was driving herself and Norma Davenport to choir practice; Norma’s car was in the shop and Jean was only too happy to swing by in her Camry to give Norma a lift to First Church, since, as Jean said, “It’s no trouble a bit, Norma. Not one bit. I won’t even hit you up for the gas money, honey.” Jean is always happy to have someone to talk to, especially lately, as she has particularly enjoyed unloading the Ballad of Bitsy in full detailia to her friends. Jean was particularly happy to see Norma, in fact, for she was fairly certain that Norma, being both a homebody and a quiet type, wouldn’t have heard the story from other people. Jean relished the chance for a fresh telling.

  “To tell you the truth, Norma,” Jean said, as she drove them down Wilmot Avenue, “and I’ve never said this to anyone before, honestly I haven’t, but I never liked Riley Evans, despite all his good looks and money. I didn’t like him when he and Bitsy were dating, and I didn’t like him when they got married, and I sure don’t like him now. And, oh, I have tried to be Christian about him, I swear I have, Norma. But you know how that goes. I just don’t have the gift for faking my feelings! So now I can just come clean and say that I never liked the man, and not even feel guilty about saying it, because look what happened! I hate to say it, I hate to even put it out into the air, but I believe in this case, I was right all along. Poor Bitsy. You know, she’s wasted all her good years …” And then Jean breathed out a very large and dramatic sigh, a sigh Jean knew would be recognized by women the world over who had made a wrong turn in romance somewhere along the way. Jean is fond of saying that sighs, not smiles, are the real universal language.

  Norma did, in fact, recognize that sigh for what it was, and assumed it signaled the end of Jean’s discourse, whereupon she started to add something of her own—she felt she was entitled to join in a two-party conversation when she happened to be one of the two parties. Besides, she had her own opinions on the subject, and desired to air them, but Jean, a quicksilver talker, returned post-sigh with lightning speed to add: “Well, anyway, Norma, here is the one thing that I think is just clear as day: it is up to me to help that poor child out. Whatever I can do. I mean, whatever is in my power to do I have just got to do it. Oh, Norma, Bitsy is so pitiful, you have no idea.”

  “Is she?” asked Norma weakly, having given up on whatever it was she had planned to say mere moments before. In thirty years of knowing Jean Sloop, Norma has fought the good fight of trying to get a word in edgewise, and has mostly lost that sorry battle, since Jean talks almost as fast as she drives. Jean’s driving, in fact, constitutes a whole other issue for Norma, since her already problematic and pacemakered heart remains constantly in her throat every time Jean chauffeurs the two of them to choir practice.

  “Well, yes, she is pitiful,” Jean continued, “and I don’t believe that’s just my opinion, I believe that is cold, hard fact. I mean, look: she’s staring at seventeen years of a childless marriage down the drain. Wouldn’t you be pitiful? And, you know, getting older by the day. Oh, Lord, it is just so obvious: that girl has got to have a new man!”

  And that is when it hit Jean, right there at the Hawkins Street exit off the Beltline: Burton. Burton and Bitsy would be perfect for each other.

  So that afternoon at choir practice, as she sat there among the altos, warbling through the descant of the “Alleluia Chorus” (“We’d be sopranos, honey, but we smoked” is a line Jean tosses off to a crowd of new people every year at the state choir convention), she studied Burton as she never had before, in all the fifteen years that she’s known him. Burton and Bitsy, Bitsy and Burton … their names linked together like that just seemed right to her all of a sudden, and the combination kept repeating itself like a singsong rhyme in her head, Bitsy and Burton, Burton and Bitsy, which managed to put her off rhythm in the sheet music she was supposed to be paying attention to.

  “Concentrate please, altos!” Burton said from the piano, glaring right at her.

  But as Jean continued to study Burton, the names together began to form an image, which then created a Scenario, which morphed into a PLAN that, Jean realized, with a self-satisfied sigh, only she could see into fruition. Yes. Burton and Bitsy. Neither one is getting younger and neither one is winning beauty contests, either, per se, she thought, as she watched Burton conduct their little choir with one rapidly waving hand from his perch behind the old upright in the corner of the practice room, but they’re good Christian people, and single—and lonely …

  And Jean Sloop, one of the most glamorous women in her community and church, dressed in a Talbots pants suit of the color she calls “New York black,” her frosted blond-gray hair cut in a stylish bob, big diamonds on two fingers, and Pappagallo patent leather flats on her feet, Jean Sloop, a divorcée herself, a fortythree year member of First Church and a second alto for twenty-two, silently patted herself on the back for being such an amazing judge of people’s character, and more than that: a person who unites others in joy and in love.

  Bitsy stares in a mirror and wonders what became of the life that only six months ago she felt she had under control. What happened to my life? she asks herself over and over, and she hates the generic, TV talk-show blandness of that silly phrase, but that’s it, that’s the question, she can’t be more specific than that. Oh, she knows all the details, the reasons, the explanations, the whys and hows of leaving Riley—or did Riley leave her? She can’t really remember now. She shuffles those questions around in her mind like a shell game—he left me,
or I left him, or we both left each other, and no answer is correct, no answer is helpful, no answer wins any prizes. One day, Bitsy is sure, she will sort it all out, see the big picture, as well-intentioned people are so nauseatingly fond of saying. Finally, one day, she will be able to talk about it, to tell the story of it without becoming emotional, relay it as nothing but fact to those concerned and sympathetic faces she’s so desperately tired of seeing every time she opens her door. This is what she will strive for: a clean narrative with a chronological sequence of events resulting in a final outcome that will show them how—despite what happened—Bitsy has moved on, gotten it all together, picked up the pieces.

  But the pieces aren’t coming together yet; no, not yet. They’re still just fragments of explanation, hovering and disconnected in her mind, and Bitsy simply looks in a mirror and thinks it again: What happened?

  So when her Aunt Jean called and said she had a man she wanted Bitsy to meet, Bitsy couldn’t come up with any good reason to say no. It seemed like the thing to do, or: it just seemed like a thing to do.

  Today’s the day, for what it’s worth.

  Bitsy gets ready. She brushes her hair He’s your age, never been married then rubs on a new shade of foundation the cosmetics girl at Belk’s convinced her to buy and He’s so talented, and so nice she applies lipstick named “A Night in Havana” and a good Christian, to boot which she hates immediately but doesn’t bother to take off, A gentleman, you can rest assured about that then puts on a light blue oxford shirt dress she swore she’d never wear again after she resigned from the Junior League All the women just adore him, Bitsy, you’d be lucky to nab him, hon and she hates that too, but stays in it, what the hell He has nice blue eyes, though not much hair, but Riley had hair, and look what happened with that, so …

  and she’s out the door on her first blind date in nineteen years.

  Sometimes Burton thinks Dr. Lundy doesn’t listen to him, which is not, he feels, a commendable characteristic in a therapist. It’s bad enough that he has to drive the fifteen miles out of Colesville to get to the far side of North Raleigh, but then not to be listened to … Often, Burton has caught Dr. Lundy glancing out the window during a session, usually when Burton hit an embarrassing crying jag there on the couch. Once, as Burton was discussing one of his phone calls to Kent, Dr. Lundy even began to nod off. Burton keeps thinking he should change therapists, but it’s difficult to do that after fourteen years with the same one. He’s bad at breaking patterns, which is one of the topics he and Dr. Lundy have dealt with in their work together. But it has also occurred to him to find a second therapist simply for the sake of discussing the issues he has with Dr. Lundy. However, Blue Cross will not cover two therapists—he has checked.