By
Jack Ketchum
In the dream he was lying on what could only have been a pebbled goat-path high above a whitewater sea pounding the rocks below, lying in the embrace of a beautiful young woman naked as he was, the path so narrow and so dangerous that the slightest move beneath her could send them both tumbling over the edge. He asked her to please let go and she said no, not this time, I don’t think so and they began to fall.
He startled gasping up off the couch thinking what the hell was that all about? and in the flickering light reached first for the dregs of his scotch and then for a cigarette. On the flat screen in front of him a hard-faced cop stood by while his partner squatted in front of a distraught woman in a chair, her arm on the woman’s shoulder.
He threw back the scotch and lit the smoke.
Right away he started coughing.
The cough took its usual course. Dry at first and insistent and repetitive as a single staccato note played over and over on the piano. Until finally it modulated into a wet cough and the ball of phlegm that released him from its grip.
Everybody knows they’re going to die, he thought. It’s another thing to have a schedule.
It was interesting.
His father had died of emphysema so he knew the drill. The progress of the thing.
He knew how it ended.
It was a nasty way to go, struggling for each breath. Until eventually your heart just threw in the towel. He gave himself a few more years. Maybe ten if he was lucky. But a simple head-cold could kill him too.
When the wet cough stopped happening he was in very deep shit.
His piss-hard-on was insistent too.
He took another drag on the Winston and stubbed it out. He shouldn’t be smoking at all. But then there were a lot of things he shouldn’t be doing.
The woman on the flat screen was quietly sobbing now. He muted her and hauled himself off the couch.
Maddie had left the light on for him in the hallway. That was good because the scotch was still working its dull magic.
It wouldn’t be the first time he’d walked into a wall.
A dozen barefoot steps to the bathroom. A dozen more to their closed bedroom door and his daughter’s open one, opposite. The usual. Lights off in both rooms.
In the bathroom he could hear himself wheezing.
The wheeze was roughly B flat. His piss in the bowl a clear A sharp.
He coughed again and the wheezing stopped.
He shook himself and zipped his jeans.
In the living room the cops were roaring silently toward a New York City brownstone. He tried for a moment to place the neighborhood. Couldn’t. They shot the thing here — he’d see the crews on the street every now and then — and sometimes he could make out a landmark, a Grey’s Papaya or a Love Cosmetics or, often, the Chrysler Building. But to him most all brownstones looked the same.
He lived on the eighteen floor of a decades-old high-rise. You couldn’t miss it. He kept waiting for them to shoot there but it had never happened.
He reached for the bottle of MacPhail's and poured himself a short one. He’d need a clear head in the morning but he needed sleep too. You weighed one against the other and decided. Tonight it was sleep.
But an hour and two pours later he found himself grinding yet another Winston into the ashtray while the same cops in another episode grilled a wealthy matron about the supposed suicide of her husband and he was no closer to sleep than he was to Yellowstone National Park.
The sessions were eating at him. He knew they weren’t right.
He, Lambert, Georgie and Kovelant were halfway through their fourth CD and the heads were fine, they caught the melodies nice and tight, the segues out of two-four and the ensemble turns were all fine, but his piano breaks just weren’t making it. They were wooden, lacked the mix of fire and subtlety he was known for. They were competent. But they fucking bored him.
Nobody in the band was saying so but he’d been playing with them long enough to know what they were feeling. What’s wrong with Fahner? And what the hell are we doing playing jazz takes on Appalachian folk ballads in the fucking first place?
It was his idea. Seemed like a good one at the time.
Still did. It was different. Dark, moody.
Maybe, he thought, it’s the COPD. Maybe it’s that good old death-sentence telling me I’m as good as croaked and might as well just lie down, already.
His first three CDs were solid hits. By jazz standards nowadays, big ones. At the moment he was the critics’ darling. There was something to be said for quitting while you were ahead, he knew that. But he had bills to pay. And he wasn’t quite ready for the piano-bar circuit, not yet.
He wasn’t ready for that kind of applause.
Probably he should talk to somebody. Anybody. He hadn’t. Not a soul.
Nobody in the band knew. During the sessions his Advair and Ventolin inhalers had the cough under control. Hell, they were all smokers. They all coughed, he no more than the rest of them. His producer didn’t know. His agent didn’t know. He’d hidden away the inhalers from Maddie well enough so far, usually in the piano stool, where neither she nor his daughter Leslie were likely to go.
The thought of his thirteen-year-old daughter digging around in his sheet music made him smile.
That would happen on the day that bears started reciting iambic pentameter and the menu at Le Bernardin offered up a side dish of Cheese Doodles.
Leslie used to love to listen to him play. She’d sit on the bench beside him. He taught her Chopsticks. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. For Christmas, Deck the Halls. But that was years ago. She was hitting her teens now. And he was not Beyonce or Justin Bieber and certainly no Lady Gaga.
His little girl was growing up.
Last month she’d wanted a tattoo. Maddie was furious at the very thought. Actually screamed at her. He asked her what kind of tattoo. She said a rose. A red one. With thorns. She pointed to the back of her left shoulder. Right here, she said.
Well, he said to Maddie, at least she’s not asking us permission to pierce her tongue.
He thought he was being funny. Maddie missed the joke.
But basically he agreed. He was not about to let her deface her body.
No way.
When he considered it now though, he thought that her choice of said adornment had been appropriate, at least. A rose. A blossomed rose.
Because she was blossoming too, wasn’t she? From skinny little kid to young woman. Her hips had begun defining themselves in graceful waves depending from her waist. Her breasts slowly building beneath her skin.
Another coughing fit set his nose to running and sent him headed back into the bathroom. Respiratory disease invaded not only the chest but the throat and nasal passages as well. He wondered if Maddie had noticed that they were going through a whole lot more toilet paper lately.
Maybe I should talk to somebody, he thought. A shrink. I’m pretty certain all this is depressing me.
He sat down on the toilet and blew his nose, wadded up the paper and tossed it into the tank. Blew it again. He was quiet about it. He didn’t want to wake Maddie. He sure wasn’t ready to talk to her yet. He didn’t know if he’d ever be.
There were problems with the marriage.
That’s what Lambert and Georgie called them. Problems. Because they’d been having them too. Of the four of them only Kovelant seemed to have escaped the grim net of marital woes. But then Kovelant didn’t fool around on the road or after sessions either.
Fahner wondered how he managed it. Jazz, when it was good, left you horny as a goddamn rabbit. It went with the territory. Jazz just…jazzed you up. The operative word being up.
But twice now Maddie had found out about it. Twice wasn’t too many times, all things considered. But he guessed it was sufficient. A good day for them now was a day in which they were cordial to one another. Not openly hostile or aggressive.
But not exactly friendly either.
He didn’t want a divorce. A divorce would devastate Leslie.
And he loved his daughter with all his heart. All his body and soul. He loved her as much as he loved his music and maybe even more.
He couldn’t hurt her. Not in a million years.
In the hallway he gazed at her open door.
Maybe he should see somebody.
She lay awake thinking about what she was about to do.
There was a grim satisfaction to it, almost a sense of pride, now that it was in motion. Doing it this way. So many times she’d thought about it. Only she always seemed to falter, her nerves seemed to fail her at the last minute. But over the past few weeks she’d heard him noodling that goddamn song often enough, pointing the way.
And the idea had simply harpooned her. The song had harpooned her. Her anger had harpooned her and now she was finally pulling taut on the line.
It was one thing to screw around behind her back. There was a reason that she’d always considered the word groupie a diminutive. She could live with that. Had for many years now.
But this was another thing.
This was a dull muted rage in her that had been with her for so long she could barely remember when it began. She never spoke of it. She simply accommodated it as the Christian thing to do. She had her faith. Even if he never had his own.
Phil Fahner was a pagan through and through.
She’d loved that about him once.
She thought back to their first days together. The thoughts should have been sweet ones but they weren’t. She’d been working as assistant to a painter, famous and prolific in the ’60s but quietly losing it now that he was well past seventy — and sometimes losing it not so quietly at all.
It was an appointment-book and go-fetch job. Far beneath her talents and abilities. Get him into the town car on time. Take his strange, worried, sometimes furious calls at two or six in the morning. Pick up his paints and supplies at Lee’s Paints on 57th Street. Deliver his paintings or sketches or lithographs.
Even shop for his wife for god sakes! Jesus! What she’d been through!
He was a rough, erratic taskmaker.
There were many, many times that she needed a drink after work and since she didn’t drink alone — her father had, and look what happened to him — there was a quiet little bar on 68th Street not far from her apartment which was like those bars in Greenwich Village where you walked a few steps down off the street into dim lighting and some good quiet jazz and could sit among well-mannered upper-middle-class New Yorkers, and a woman could have a glass or two of Chardonnay and talk with the other customers without feeling like some tramp looking for a pickup.
He and his bassist Lambert and drummer Georgie did get to chatting her up, though. And they were smart and fun to talk to, so when the three of them got off their barstools to have a cigarette outside and asked if she smoked too — she did in those days — they invited her to join them. It was a warm spring night, just getting on to dark. At some point Lambert and Georgie faded back down into the bar while she and Phil Fahner — the Phil Fahner — lit another smoke and talked further about her job and her own painting and she felt this attraction. This magnetism. So that when he asked her out for dinner the following night she accepted.
Drinks and dinner, that was all it was for a couple of weeks and then it was drinks and dinner and bed and he was a very good lover, very attentive to her.
And she thought, he was attentive all right. He played her like a full-sized upright. All the keys.
So that when he asked in bed one hot sweaty August night why she didn’t just dump the fucking job and marry him and do her own painting she said yes, and two months later they were at the City Clerk’s Office.
And about a year after that she was pregnant.
Thirteen years ago, that was. Thirteen years was a long time. The good and then the bad. Then the very bad.
Thirteen years, to this.
There were far too many more years ahead of them for this family.
It had to end.
She could almost cry but she had stopped crying. She had always hidden the crying well, she thought. She had her makeup. Or else she had a cold, just the sniffles. But it finally stopped entirely only weeks ago when she heard him practicing for the session, playing that song over and over, and she recognized the lyrics within the melody from a record she’d owned in college, the harpoon deep into the body of the whale.
Tonight she would set the whale free.
Her daughter Leslie had awakened to her touch slowly, as though drugged. She’d always been a deep sleeper, a bed-wetter in fact from the ages of seven through nine.
And that had been her first clue. The bed-wetting beginning so late.
She should have seen it years ago.
If she had, they wouldn’t have been here now. Here in this bed.
Her daughter rubbed her eyes as she woke and said whaaa? and she pressed two fingers to her lips. Lips warm with sleep.
I want you to go into our room, she whispered, and get into bed.
Huh? she said.
Don’t ask me any questions, she said, just do as I say. I love you. We’re trading places. You understand?
She watched as her daughter’s eyes went gradually wide. Then after what seemed a very long time she nodded. Just the smallest nod of comprehension, of something that had passed between them. But it was enough. She slipped off the bed and started across the room.
Be sure to close the door in there, she said. And turn off the light.
She waited until she heard the door click shut and then reached for the stainless steel kitchen knife she’d honed early this morning which lay beneath her scarf on the night table beside her, lay down and pulled the covers over her and turned her back to the hall and the open door.
The song ran ’round and ‘round in her head. An old Appalachian folk ballad. It was a comfort to her. She heard Joan Baez, her sweet thin soprano. She heard her girlhood.
“Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother.
She's sleeping here right by my side.
And in her right hand a silver dagger.
She says that I can't be your bride.”
She didn’t know exactly what she would do with the knife but breathed easily for the first time this long day and night and waited for him to come.