Whale Music (2 page)

The girl suddenly sputters and twists her arms into the air. She makes an odd sound—
eeaagh!—
and her legs begin to kick in a petulant way. Then she opens her eyes—one of them, at any rate, the right—and sees me with the blanket held out in front. She is in the middle of another odd sound—
oooopphh
—but she breaks it off in order to smile at me. How lovely of her. She smiles at me, digs her tiny fists into eye sockets. She says, “Good morning.”

“Attire,” say I, “is one of the hallmarks of civilization.”

She is yawning. “You should talk,” she mentions in the middle of her yawn.

I am without bathrobe. I wonder where it might be. It is no doubt in the last room I was in, a conclusion that should (you’d think) simplify matters. No such luck. The short-term memory is not all it might be. I cast a glance down upon my nakedness and, judging from the spectacular belly, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that I’ve just been in the kitchen. Doughnuts. Follow me, we’ll have some doughnuts and milk.

You see the hallway with all the gold records on the wall? Platinum records as well, which means sales of multi mega-units. Platinum means shipping crates to the Dogons. There used to be more of these gold and platinum records, but one night Danny got especially drunk and frisbeed many of them into the ocean. Anyway, if we follow this hallway, we get to the kitchen. I think. Sometimes I voyage throughout the manse equipped with chart and sextant, but I’m pretty sure that this passage leads kitchenward. And here we are! You get the milk, I’ll get the doughnuts. I hope you like jelly-filled. I hope you like rock-hard jelly-filled with one or two bites taken out of them.

“Hey, man, is this any better?”

The formerly sleeping girl has put on a pair of panties. They are almost invisible, I can see little curls of hair pressed like flowers in a high-school yearbook. Her small breasts are bouncing, because this formerly sleeping girl has become very animated.

“So,” she asks, “do you have any coffee or what?”

Do I have coffee. I support the country of Colombia almost single-handedly. “Look in that cupboard,” I say through a mouthful of doughnut.

She opens it, whistles through her teeth and announces,
“Coffee.” The girl sets about preparing it.

“Make lots,” I tell her. “I’m not supposed to have any.”

“Okee-dokee.”

Do you think she might be some sort of housekeeper? I’ve had them before, although they have tended to be much older and stouter creatures, Teutonic, more given to the wearing of clothing. The girl has freckles all over her body, little bits of sunlight.

“Where do you come from?” I ask.

“Toronto,” is her curious response. “I told you that before.”

“Toronto.” I believe it’s a planet in the Alpha Centauri galaxy. This makes sense, this seems to me the most logical explanation for her presence. She is not a house guest, she is a scientist from beyond the sun, conducting some sort of interplanetary survey. “Pretty cold up there,” I add conversationally.

“You speak truth.”

“Care for a doughnut, a staple of the Earth diet?”

“Ugh.”

What terrible manners they have up on Toronto. All the more for me.

She has managed to get a percolator merrily bubbling on top of the stove. It is producing lovely polyrhythms. I never noticed that household appliances were so funky. I rush to the music room to grab a little tape recorder. While there, I decide to have a quick listen to the Whale Music. Listen, in the background, do you know what that is? It’s the anguished bellow of a bull whose mate has been harpooned. The cow has been chopped up and stuffed into little perfume bottles. I wipe tears from my fat face. It is some time before I get back. The brewing machine has stopped, the girl is peacefully sipping coffee from a large mug.

“Do you know Mooky Saunders?” I demand.

She shrugs. “Sure. He plays on a lot of albums.”

“Is he dead?”

“Why would he be dead?”

“It seems to me,” I tell her, “that if you don’t keep track of people, they die.”

“He’s not dead.”

“I’m going to call him on the telephone. He must play the dolphins.”

The girl nods, shrugs. “Coffee?”

“Yes, certainly, please. Sometimes, though, coffee makes me behave a tad oddly.”

She fills up another mug. Her golden hair hangs down all the way to her tiny waist. “I just want to say, it was wonderful last night.”

“Well, this is certainly good news,” I tell her. “For the longest time I’ve been unable to …” Various phrases fill my mind, all of them spoken in Danny’s voice (actually, the voice of his alter ego, Stud E. Baker, High Prince of the Greasy Geeks), things like
charm the one-eyed snake
. They all sound too strange, and I am at a loss for words until I remember a phrase from the divorce proceedings. “For the longest time,” I begin again, “I’ve been unable to have intimate relations.”

“Oh.” The girl seems embarrassed, her entire body reddens slightly. “That’s not what I meant. We … we didn’t. I meant, it was wonderful when you played me the Whale Music.”

“You liked the Whale Music?”

“It was fantastic. It was the best thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Do you have whales on Toronto?”

“Er, no. I saw whales before, though, when I used to live on Galiano.”

She gives me a cup of coffee. It is hot and sweet and I drain the mug in a few short moments. “May I please have more?”

“For sure.”

“I’m glad you liked the music, because you are the farthest thing from a whale I could imagine. I was a little worried that it would appeal only to whales.”

She giggles and has to sweep golden hair out of her face. “You say some pretty strange stuff.”

The coffee has gotten me all jumpy, it has attached itself to
some residual pharmaceutical mother lode. I leap about, I must do something. I must work on the Whale Music, which this strange creature from Toronto thinks is wonderful. “Do me a favour,” I tell her. “See if I have a telephone. If I do, find Mooky Saunders. See if he does dolphins. Tell him he gets quadruple scale. I’m going to the music room. Can you do that for me—Um, what’s your name?”

“Claire.”

Ouch
. I’m forced to drive my forefingers into my ears. I suffer from tinnitus, to put it mildly. Some clown with crash cymbals is stuck inside my head. I wait for the noise to go away, and remove my fingers with an audible pop. “Claire,” I add conversationally, “is my mother’s name.”

“So you mentioned.”

“Claire” was also the name of a song the father, Henry Howell, wrote. There’s a recording of this, the artist a man named Beany Poacher. To call this tune bouncy would be like calling me fat, or my brother Danny dead.

Mind you, song-writing wasn’t the father’s only job. He was also a sales representative for a company called Universal Party Favors. They carried such standard items as plastic ice
cubes with flies inside and whoopee cushions. They also had some rather inventive stock, for example an automatic card shuffler. I still have three or four of these devices, and it really is amazing how well they shuffle the deck, although about every five or six times they chew it up and spit out little pieces of cardboard. Henry Howell had a reputation as a hard seller, not that it did him much good. When the big item is rubberized doggy-do, the last thing you want to be is an obnoxious, pushy salesman, but this was the father’s style. “You think this won’t go?” he’d scream. “You think this won’t be the single most
numero-uno
party joke throughout the nation? You, my friend, are sadly mistaken, you are living in a fantasy world!”

The father Henry Howell was a large man, stocky in his twenties and flat-out fat from then on. He had bland features that, given the right lighting, could pass as a kind of handsomeness. This I inherited from him. Danny got my mother’s looks, hard and chiselled, dark and deep-set eyes, lips a bit oversized. My mother is, and my brother was, beautiful in an odd and unsettling way.

My mother’s beauty was such that when Claire Graham was seventeen she found employment as a Kirby Sweater Gal. What she did was, she’d go to various department stores and model Kirby sweaters. My mother would stand among the mannequins. She’d push her small perfect breasts forward, a miler trying to break the ribbon. She’d lift her hands awkwardly, her fingers splayed in what she hoped was an elegant manner. And then my mother would freeze. Four hours on, half an hour for lunch, back to the stand until four-thirty in the afternoon.

One day the much older (thirty-four years to her seventeen) Hank Howell came blustering through the doorway of the department store she was working. The father no doubt had some hot item he wanted to pitch, for example gum that turned your mouth black. The father thought that mouth-blackening gum was the greatest thing since sliced bread—
and it is a good indication of the limits to his intelligence that he never thought to invent mouth-blackening bread, which has just occurred to me now. At any rate, the father went into the department store, took his place in the centre of the floor and cast his little eyes about for the mouth-blackening-gum purchaser. As the father did this, some portion of his mind noted the mannequin he was planted next to, and he reached out with his thick, horny hand and patted its bottom.

My mother loved to tell this story, she’d hoot or gurgle. (The hoot was her natural laugh, the gurgle a sophisticated little chuckle she’s worked on over the years.) The father would come close to blushing and deny it. “I was just,” he’d explain, “tapping the ashes of my cigarette.” He never came up with the same lame story twice. “I was just,” he might say, “feeling the material in that skirt.”

Danny was always bewildered by the story of how our parents met. “I don’t see why you’d pat the fanny of a dummy,” he’d say to the father.

“Aw, I wasn’t patting her fanny, Dan-Dan. My hand had gone numb and I was trying to beat the blood back into my fingertips.”

The father got the blood beat back into his face, that’s for sure, because the young Claire Graham produced an uppercut from somewhere near the floor and collapsed Hank Howell’s nose. Blood spilled forth in biblical quantities. (I inherited the Howell beak, a snivelling little creature it is, any sign of danger and it starts bleeding profusely.) Claire Graham was instantly remorseful. She leapt off her pedestal and took the father’s chubby face in her hands. “Tilt your head back,” she told him, “and lie down.” The father was too shaken to do anything but obey. After all, only a few seconds had elapsed since he’d absent-mindedly reached over and tapped the bottom of a department store dummy. Claire Graham wanted to keep a close eye on the damage she’d done, and the most expeditious way was by hiking her skirt and straddling the father’s wide
chest. And then Claire began cooing. “There, there,” she whispered, “don’t be such a big baby.” She was a great cooer.

The upshot of all this was, Claire Graham lost her job, Hank Howell unloaded his entire spring line and, more importantly, was inspired to one of his greatest near-misses.

You get the idea.

Sometimes I suspect that the father fell in love with my mother because it was easy to find rhymes for
Claire
.

The question is, why did Claire Graham fall in love with Hank Howell? My mother claims, after one or two lemon gins, that it was this very song that did the trick. I doubt it. I’ve tried the Routine countless times—indeed, it accounts for some of my biggest hits, “Sandra”, “Mary Mary”, “Kiss Me, Karen”—and not once has the subject ever fallen in love with me. The one woman who did love me—came close to loving me, at any rate closer than you might have thought possible—was always a little insulted by my inability to address a song to her, but to me the word
Fay
always sounded a touch whiny.

My mother was born too late, or perhaps it was her misfortune to have been born at all. Claire Graham should have existed in a fairy tale, one where frogs are princes. She was born into a world where frogs are frogs, this is perhaps why she fell in love with the father.

There is more to it. I have a theory that my mother fell victim to the father’s virulent hucksterism. He spun lies of elaborate fancy, all of which had to do with money. Awesome amounts of the slime, great deserts full of greenbacks. “When a song
hits big,” was something my father said often—even now I hear it spoken in his voice, a sound like a rusty saw going through a wombat—“When a song hits big, you’ll be sitting on Easy Street.”

My mother wanted to sit on Easy Street. It has been suggested by these fraudulent doctors, by these wormy lawyers, by my ex-wife,
ha-ha, she should talk
, that my mother is a greedy, avaricious woman. They don’t know her, they don’t love her. My mother only ever wanted to sit her perfect bottom on Easy Street.