Authors: Lynne Tillman
—Okay.
—What about the right to privacy?
—Maybe some rights kill others.
If Clay turned violent, deranged, on the street, the cops would subdue and cuff him, take him in, interrogate him, or they might just shoot him on the spot, if he charged them menacingly, resisted them, or appeared to be carrying. The cops waited to arrest him and others from doing things they didn’t know they could do or felt they had to do or did because inside them lurked instinctual monsters. He didn’t know what he had in him, but he knew restraint, and he recognized, as Max Weber wrote early in the twentieth century, that only the state had the right to kill, no one else, and that fact alone defined the state. But where he lived everyone had the right to bear arms, to answer and resist the state’s monopoly on power. That was the original idea, anyway, but if Clay carried a gun, he might use it, because he didn’t know what he had in him.
Better to be dead and buried than frank and honest, his mother had said. His father ghosted their dining room table, his tales gone to the grave with him and now to his wife’s grave also. One night his father hadn’t come home from work the way he always did, Clay was seven, and his mother’s face never regained its usual smile. She smiled, but not the way she once had. When little Clay walked into the butcher shop or the bakery, he felt the white-clothed men looking sympathetically at him, prying into him for feelings he hadn’t yet experienced. The fatherly baker gave him an extra cookie or two, and in school, even on the baseball field, Joey the baker’s son didn’t call him names anymore, even when he struck out. But his mother clutched his little hand more tightly on the streets, and he learned there was something to fear about just being alive. He learned his father was dead, but it didn’t mean much to him, death didn’t then, and soon it became everything.
—It’s why you’re a depressive, Cornelia said. Losing a parent at that age.
—I guess, he said.
—It’s why you hold on to everything.
Clay didn’t throw out much, like matchbooks and coasters from old restaurants and bars that had closed, outdated business cards, and with this ephemera he first kept his father with him. There was dust at the back of his father’s big desk that he let stay there. There was hair in his father’s comb, which had been pushed to the back of the bathroom cabinet, so Clay collected the evidence in an envelope, and wondered later if he should have the DNA tested. What if his father wasn’t his father? Maybe there was someone alive out there for him, a father, but his mother disabused him of the possibility, and played the violin so consolingly that Morpheus himself bothered to carry him off to a better life. Now, scratches on a mahogany table that once nestled close to his father’s side of the bed and his mother’s yellowing music books, her sewing cushion with its needles tidily stuck where she’d pushed them last, marked matter-of-fact episodes and incidents in their lives, when accidents occurred or things happened haphazardly, causing nicks and dents, before death recast them as shrines.
How long has this scrap been in the corner of a bureau drawer, he might ask himself, did it have a history. He could read clues incorrectly, though it didn’t matter to him if his interpretations were wrong, because there was no way to know, and it wasn’t a crime, he wasn’t killing anyone. Cornelia’s habits were different, heuristically trained and developed in the editing room, where she let go of dialogue and images, thousands of words and pictures every day, where she abandoned, shaped, or controlled objects more than he felt he could, ever.
At last. To last. Last remains. What lasts
remains. What, last. Shroud of Turin, Torino
mio, home to Primo, Levi knew the shroud.
In Clay’s sophomore English classes, in which the students read George Eliot’s
The Mill on the Floss
and Edith Wharton’s
Ethan Frome
, his charges contested the rules for punctuation and grammar and argued for spellings and neologisms they used on the Internet and in text messaging. They preferred shorthand, acronyms, to regular English, they wanted speed. He argued for communication, commonality, and clarity, the three C’s, for knowing rules and then breaking them consciously, even conscientiously. He attempted to engage them, as he was engaged, in the beauties and mysteries of the history that lives in all languages. It’s present, it’s still available, he’d say. And, by tracing the root of a word to its origin in Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit, and then by delving into its etymology, they could find how meanings had shifted over the years through usage. A few students caught his fervor, he thought, and who knew what would happen to them as they grew up, maybe they’d discover that love, that attachment. Curiously, there were many more new words each year, an explosion added to recent editions of dictionaries, more proportionately than had previously entered editions of the tomes he revered, and yet he remembered, always, what the words once meant, their first meanings. Cornelia told him it was another way he hung on to the past, and grammar countered his internal mess.
The problem is proportion, Clay thought, how to live proportionately. He passed the bakery on his way home, maybe he’d buy cinnamon buns for him and Cornelia for breakfast, and with an image of the pastries and her at the table, so that he could already taste morning in his mouth, he entered the store. It was busy as usual, and Clay waited on line, listening for the casual banter of the bakers, and when he drew nearer to the long counter, he overheard Joey the baker’s son.
—I’d kill all of them, nuke ’em, torture’s too good for them.
Clay continued to wait, suspended in place, breathing in the bakery’s perfume, when finally he reached the front of the line, where the baker’s son smiled warmly, the way he always did.
—I got you the recipe, you pasty-faced poet, Joey said.
He always teased him, ever since they were kids. Clay thanked him, smiled, and asked for two cinnamon buns, and then Joey handed him the famous recipe for sourdough bread, which in their family’s version was littered with salty olive pieces. The cinnamon buns were still hot, fragrant. Fresh, Clay thought, fresh is a hard word to use, fresh or refreshed. There were suggestions, associations, and connotations always to words, he should stress this more to his students, because the connotations of a word often meant as much as its denotation, sometimes more, and there was ambiguity, ambiguity thrives, because words were the same as life.
Traces, stains, call it noir, in the shadows,
torture for us. And the child, the hooded
childhood. Fresh ambiguity to contradict
contradictions, refresh
what remains somewhere else.
The beat cops stationed themselves on the same corner, at the same time, so in a way they made themselves targets or spectacles, Clay thought, or even, by their presence, drew enraged, desperate civilians to them, like a recipe for disaster.
Walking home, mostly oblivious to the familiar streets, Clay looked over the ingredients. A teaspoon of balsamic vinegar, that may have been the secret the baker’s family treasured for generations. Or the molasses and tablespoon of rum, that might have been their innovation. Cornelia wasn’t in the apartment when he arrived home, she was the one who wanted the recipe, and the rooms felt emptier than usual.
He boiled water, brewed tea, opened the newspaper, couldn’t look at the pictures or read the words, stared at the cabinets, they needed fresh paint. He’d cook tonight, a beef stew, because at the end of the day, he remembered the woman saying, everyone wants someone to cook for them. He stood up and, without really thinking, opened a kitchen drawer and tossed the recipe in the back.
Later
Marvin paused at the entrance of the Dakota. He scanned it and willed himself on. A stout, white doorman saluted, Good afternoon, Mr. Gaye, go right in, Mr. Lennon is expecting you, and Marvin faded into the recesses of the legendary building. “Mama, there’s too many of you crying,” the doorman awkwardly sang.
In a plush elevator, sort of a confessional, Marvin sank onto a banquette.
Rosemary’s Baby
was heavy, he thought. The legs that appeared to start at his waist felt useless. He stroked the velvet cushion beneath him. Sweet.
John jumped up from the grand, making a picture with those wire shades and babydoll smile. “Hey, Marvin, what’s going on?” Ironic but it’s cool. John has dug Marvin forever, before “Let’s Get It On,” maybe after hearing “Can I Get A Witness?”
I love too hard, my friends sometime say, but I believe, I believe, that a woman should be loved that way, Can I get a witness.
Marvin Gaye was out of John’s reach in 1963.
Witness, witness.
Then the Fab Four arrived in New York for the
Ed Sullivan Show.
John phoned into Murray the K’s radio show. “Hey, Marvin, did you know—I asked him to play ‘Pride and Joy.’” John sings, “Pride and joy, baby boy, pride and joy, telling the world, you’re my pride and joy.” Marvin’s embarrassed.
It’s 1979, and Marvin has tumbled into his dark ages, spiritually, he’d say; psychologically, John’d say. Marvin tells John: “I’m splitting to London, I’m all played out, this business is killing me.” He also hears himself admit: “I don’t know about the duets, John. I’m fucked up.” Marvin can usually open up some to John, something about their backgrounds, even the primal scream thing. We all have our demons.
Mother, you had me, but I never had you. Mama don’t go.
Marvin’s talking but can’t get Jackie Wilson to leave his head. You never know, you’re on top, and then zero. Last week Marvin visited a hole in the ground, the rest home where Jackie, Mr. Excitement, lay in a vegetative state. Withering, shrinking, ugly. Jackie shouldn’t be ugly. The listless attendant told Marvin that Jackie couldn’t hear anything, but Marvin sang to him, anyway.
John’s hippie-dippy male secretary hands Marvin a mug of tea, sweet and dark. Ain’t this the life, white grand, white couch. Marvin kicks back, the weed relaxing him. Jackie was singing his hit “Lonely Teardrops” when he collapsed, Dick Clark saw Jackie drop, and hit his head real hard on the stage, and that was it—over, man—in a coma almost five years. Jackie danced like a boxer, like Joe Louis, man, he could move. “In the place I was after Tammi died. I didn’t want to sing, I couldn’t.”
“You and she weren’t.…” John says.
“It wasn’t like that.” Marvin watches something behind John. “She was young and good, so good.”
“I’m no Tammi Terrell,” John says.
“Man, you’re so right, ‘woman is the maker of the world.’” John laughs and tells Marvin he wants to find a groove, a straight-ahead sound, round up the best sideman, a top rhythm section, with a bass player like James Jamerson (Marvin knows there’s no-one like him around, either), and turn a lyric like “Love is wanting to be loved” funky. Real, on the money, no bullshit. John’s tired of the bullshit. His cover of Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” was pathetic, but Marvin doesn’t say it. He doesn’t say he’s dying for the kind of respect John gets. Marvin starts to croon, “Lonely teardrops, lonely teardrops,” and his palms tap his thighs. He stands, John walks to the piano, Marvin follows, swaying a little. “Come home, come home, just say you will, my heart is fine, just give me another chance for our romance, every day you’ve been away you know my heart does nothing but burn.” John reaches for the lines, Marvin’s already there.
Collaborating puts you through a lot of intense shit. They both know that. Marvin was once married to Berry Gordy’s sister. He thinks Yoko and she could be twins. “That was heavy, my boss’s sister is my wife for seventeen years, it’s like you with Paul, it didn’t go down great around Motown,” Marvin says.
“Imagine” was soulful, Marvin tells him, not funky but soulful. John shoots him a familiar half-smile, half-frown, and Marvin sits beside him at the piano. John slides over. Marvin looks at the keys and begins noodling “Imagine,” but his left hand belongs to Ray Charles. John returns to his mother Julia, the familiar refrain. “Yoko is actually more like my mum, don’t laugh, she’s no nonsense, like Julia. Yoko took me back after I’d been a foolish lad. I really hurt her. Julia would’ve always been there if she could.”
Marvin shakes his head affirmatively and sings, “Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try, imagine all the people living for today, imagine there’s no country, it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too, imagine all the people living life in peace…”
John could never have written it without Yoko. He cocks his head and, like a chorus of one, talk-sings: “Father, father, we don’t need to escalate, war is not the answer… You know, we’ve got to find a way to bring some loving here today… Don’t punish me with brutality, talk to me, so you can see, what’s going on.” They’re trading lines, then blending them contrapuntally.
What’s going on. Marvin can’t go home, shouldn’t, he’s escaping to London, but his mother needs him here, his children, too, and he can’t make it, he has to save himself from the madness, his madness. He doesn’t know what else to do. He’s weirdly determined to give something to John, their bond is new, maybe peculiar, ain’t that peculiar, but he wants to leave him with promise, a song they can do. It’ll be about hope and home, motherless and fatherless children. It’s more for him than for John, probably. John stands, singing the line “Don’t punish me with brutality” over and over. “Imagine” and “What’s Going On” are talking to each other. Marvin pumps the pedals, his left hand striding, his right bridging more than songs now, and he looks up at John. That intent face has crumpled, sort of, but he’s content, maybe. Marvin intones, “Nothing to kill or die for,” while John chants, “Don’t punish me, don’t punish me.” That’s it, Marvin thinks. It’s a beginning.