E Flat
Mark Jacobs
When Max Field parks at the overlook and gets out of his car he notices an old guy in a wheelchair. What’s strange is that the dude is alone. There’s nobody to push the chair, and no waiting vehicle. Also strange that he seems to be ignoring the view of the valley spreading below them. It’s a killer prospect, from nine hundred feet, of farms with barns and silos and cultivated fields that run up against patches of dark swallowing woods. In fact the guy in the wheelchair, which is the old-fashioned kind with no motor, gives Max the impression that he is pissed off. Sometimes you can tell.
The old guy’s name is William Penny. Will watches the young guy take a guitar case from the back seat of his pale green Prius, whose bumper is plastered with stickers. The stickers are too far away for Will to read, but they are colorful. Max’s insouciant stride with the guitar toward the picnic tables makes it clear he is not thinking about death and dying. Why should he be? He can’t be thirty.
Max nods at Will, going past him on his way to the cluster of seldom-used picnic tables. Will does not acknowledge the greeting although he follows him with his eyes.
Will is wishing he hadn’t said what he did to Lily. Lily is the woman he pays to haul him around, run errands, do things he now finds difficult. He can still walk, but it’s an effort. Anyway he told her she’s getting fat, which is the God’s honest truth; she eats nothing but junk food, and plenty of it. The back seat of her car is a dump, piled high with discarded bags and wrappers and those little squeeze packets of ketchup. Anyway it was not smart on his part to be so blunt. He’s hoping she’ll feel bad for abandoning him at the outlook. The odds of that, he judges, are fifty-fifty. He has a phone but is not sure whom he’ll call, if it comes to that.
Max comes up here just about every week. It’s a good place to work on songs. The view inspires, and there’s not much traffic on the road. Mostly it’s quiet. Sometimes there’s nobody else at the overlook. He has this place of good vibes entirely to himself.
He sits on one of the tables and tunes the guitar, which is a blonde wood acoustic he loves the way some people love their pets. He plays some scales to warm up his fingers. He’s brought a jug of iced tea and some sandwiches. He’s off work today and is in no hurry. Sometimes the songs come easily, some times they want to be coaxed.
It’s summer in Central New York State. The trees are fully leaved. He has noticed clumps of tiger lilies on either side of the road, driving up to the outlook. The sky is clear and appears to be vibrating to get his attention, which he willingly gives.
Will’s butt aches a little. After an hour of sitting, the wheelchair is uncomfortable. He tells himself he meant well, warning Lily about her weight. He wonders if that’s true, or was he being mean for meanness’ sake? Regardless, he has created a dilemma for himself the solution of which is not obvious.
Seeing the kid with the guitar brings back a memory. There is an anger associated with the memory that Will does not fully understand, or else it’s a frustration, and the anger comes out of the frustration.
Max wishes the old guy weren’t here. There is something unsettling about him. A buzzkill. Of course he has as much right to be up here enjoying the overlook as Max does. The trick is to tune him out. That, however, is easier said than done. Max is working on a new song. So far he has the opening notes of a melody line, and a chord progression in the key of A he kind of likes. He’s come up with a couple of rhyming lines that may turn into lyrics. But it’s one of the songs that want coaxing. He plays the melody line, he plays the chords, he hums, but it’s not quite right, and the old guy tells him it’s not right.
“You want to play that one in E flat,” he says.
“I’m writing it in A.”
“It ought to be in E flat.”
He has rolled his wheelchair closer, moving on the grass, so that he is now parked a scant ten yards from Max’s table. Max is offended by the suggestion. Probably he is looking for a reason to dislike the interloper.
“I’m the one writing the song.”
“You won’t get it the way you want it until you change the key.”
“You play?”
“I used to.”
Max stands up. He carries the guitar to the old guy, thrusting it out to him. “Go ahead, play.”
The old guy shakes his head. “Take it away.”
Max shrugs. “Suit yourself.”
He returns to the picnic table, sits down with his back to the man. It’s impossible to work on the song now, but he keeps at it mostly because of the antipathy he feels toward the man in the wheelchair.
Matala. That’s the memory the young guy with his guitar and his imperfect song has stirred in Will, although he has no clear idea why. Crete. 1972. The full moon party on the red beach. Here is where the frustration lies coiled. The night, the party, the wild, the place; it abides in his memory the way mountains abide. A specific value attaches to the memory. It is the value of his life; what he has seen and done, who he is. The memory wants to be communicated to human ears, human understanding, but Will has neither vocabulary nor audience.
“In nineteen sixty nine,” he tells the young guy, “I left America.”
Max stops playing. Obviously the old guy wants to talk. Fine, he’ll listen for a minute. The sun is climbing toward its zenith. The spreading warmth is a common good. It won’t cost him to humor a senior citizen.
“Where did you go?”
“Everywhere.”
Max nods. “How come?”
A pause, then, “I was angry. The country was really messed up. I spent four years hitchhiking around the world.”
Max wonders if this is a form of aggression. Is this oddball geezer putting him down, suggesting that he, Max, doesn’t have the balls to spend four years on the road seeing the world? Possibly, but also possibly not.
“The world was different, back then,” Will says and immediately regrets it. It’s a cliché. It gets in the way of what he wishes he could say.
“Peace, love, and rock and roll,” Max says.
He doesn’t mean for it to come out as a sneer, but that’s what happens.
“In nineteen seventy two,” Will goes on, ignoring the dig, “I think it was October, I was in a little village on the southwest coast of Crete. Matala, that was the name of the place. They had cheap red wine, basic food, and you could sleep in caves in the cliffs. Which saved you money, of course, although technically you weren’t supposed to, it was against the law. There were people from all over the world showing up. They’d hang for a while and then move on. On weekends Air Force guys from an air station in Iraklion drove down to party and score.”
The facts are accurate. The details are useful. But not a word he has spoken begins to convey what he very much wants to convey. How it was, how it really was.
“Never mind,” he says.
Max sees that telling the story, if story it is, has bummed the old dude out. The little impulse of sympathy that goes through him is a surprise.
“My name is Max. Max Fields.”
“Say what? Oh. William Penny.”
“So what happened?”
“What do you mean, what happened?”
“Something must have happened, or you wouldn’t be telling me about the place.”
“Matala.”
“All right, Matala.”
Will searches for a way in. In fact it’s not so much a story he is trying to formulate as a transference. He would like to transfer his particulate memory of the full moon party on the red beach to this young smirky stranger who has long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, elegant lank guitar-player hands, and a kind of inherent self-regard. If he does not succeed – this is an exaggeration, but it’s how it feels to the older man – the universe will have come into existence for naught.
“Freaks,” he says. “They called us freaks. And hippies. Every once in a while the Greek police would raid the village. They emptied out the caves, threw people’s sleeping bags down the cliffs into the sea, arrested the ones with the longest hair. That kind of thing. People thought we were dangerous. We weren’t, we were just trying to figure out…”
“Figure out what?”
“If we could live free. Free for real.”
“And did you?”
Will looks over at Max as if the question is not quite intelligible. His mouth hangs open a moment. He licks his lips. He feels tears smarting his eyes.
“Never mind.”
“What are you doing up here by yourself?”
“Long story.”
“Are they coming back for you?”
“Who?”
“Whoever brought you.”
It seems increasingly unlikely that Lily will come back. The crack about getting fat was not the first cruel thing he has said to the woman, who is no spring chicken and worries, he knows, that she is no longer attractive to men.
“I had a guitar.”
“In Matala.”
Will nods. “Somebody came up with the idea for a party. To celebrate the full moon. Not in the village, though. The idea was to have the party at a place we called the red beach. It was quite a haul, climbing over the rocks along the coast, to get there. A pilgrimage, that was what it felt like. Like going to a holy place. Must have been, I don’t know, two hundred of us. Freaks. Travelers. From everywhere. The waves were high that night, they were ferocious. They crashed on the beach like nothing I ever saw. Everybody got wasted. It felt… to me it felt like the first night of the new world.”
“And you played your guitar.”
Another nod. “Played the hell out of it. There was this German guy from Cologne. He played the flute. Really well. And an Italian from Bologna who went to India overland, hitchhiking, and brought back a tabla.”
“What’s that?”
“A drum. The three of us played together. There were ten people, maybe, singing and chanting with us. I had the hots for a woman from Chicago. Lynne something, she was part of our little group. She told fortunes and always smelled like cloves. Back in those days you could say a woman had nice tits. I know that’s changed. Today I wouldn’t say it. The Italian guy had a couple bottles of retsina. That’s wine. Tasted like resin, which is weird because you wouldn’t think it would taste good but it did. The German had a hefty stash of hash. Carried it in tinfoil and was very precise about doling out a pipe’s worth, but he was generous, he just wanted it to last as long as we needed it to last.”
How can something so accurate fail to capture anything worthwhile? If Will were hearing the story instead of telling it, he would already have lost interest.
Max feels some resentment at having to listen to the story. It’s obviously important to William Penny. A highwater moment in his life, and maybe there have not been many of those. But there is something appealing, something kind of exotic about the notion of a full moon party on a red beach on a Greek island, two hundred traveling freaks and a drum from India. He can picture the scene. It creates a kind of longing in him. Not for Matala, maybe, but for a moment he is not likely to experience.
“There were clouds that night,” William tells Max. “It was real windy, so the clouds kept blowing off, and then new batches of them showed up. At a certain point, I don’t remember when exactly, the clouds disappeared and all of a sudden there’s the full moon. It was… A bath of moonlight, that was what it was. We got drenched in it. An Australian was howling. He had one of those bush hats with the flap that snapped, and a voice like an opera singer. The sound of him howling at the moon was like a funeral and a party at the same time.”
Will stops. The more he says, the farther he gets from describing the reality he is struggling to transfer. He has to face the fact that it’s gone, it’s gone for good and forever, and the most that words can do is tell a pretty lie.
“Forget it,” he says to Max.
“Why should I forget it?”
“You gonna try that song in E flat or not?”
“I’m writing it in A.”
Will shakes his head. He drops his hands into his lap. He is suddenly thirsty. He’s tired, exhausted, really, and he wishes again that he hadn’t told Lily she’s fat. The kid with the guitar is a hard-head.
Max tries again to give Will the instrument. He won’t take it.
“I haven’t touched a guitar in thirty years.”
“Why not?”
The question feels loaded to both of them. In any event it is unanswerable.
Will asks him, “Do you think you can fit the wheelchair in your trunk?”
Max nods. He has already measured by eye and is sure he can make it work. If he has to he’ll fold down the back seat.
“You want to go now?” he asks the old man.
Will shakes his head. “Play that guitar of yours a while. I’m in no hurry. I might close my eyes and listen, if you don’t mind.”
Max doesn’t mind. He plays. Will listens. When he does close his eyes for a moment he discovers that the full moon party still exists. Matala and the red beach still exist. The German’s hash pipe, the Italian’s tabla, Lynne’s uncanny ability to suss out a person’s intimate fortune. They exist. So does something else. It’s the thing, it’s everything, he has been unable to capture and transfer. But it’s there. All of it is there. His eyes are still closed when Max begins playing his new song in E flat, which Will is pretty sure is the right key.
Mark Jacobs
When Max Field parks at the overlook and gets out of his car he notices an old guy in a wheelchair. What’s strange is that the dude is alone. There’s nobody to push the chair, and no waiting vehicle. Also strange that he seems to be ignoring the view of the valley spreading below them. It’s a killer prospect, from nine hundred feet, of farms with barns and silos and cultivated fields that run up against patches of dark swallowing woods. In fact the guy in the wheelchair, which is the old-fashioned kind with no motor, gives Max the impression that he is pissed off. Sometimes you can tell.
The old guy’s name is William Penny. Will watches the young guy take a guitar case from the back seat of his pale green Prius, whose bumper is plastered with stickers. The stickers are too far away for Will to read, but they are colorful. Max’s insouciant stride with the guitar toward the picnic tables makes it clear he is not thinking about death and dying. Why should he be? He can’t be thirty.
Max nods at Will, going past him on his way to the cluster of seldom-used picnic tables. Will does not acknowledge the greeting although he follows him with his eyes.
Will is wishing he hadn’t said what he did to Lily. Lily is the woman he pays to haul him around, run errands, do things he now finds difficult. He can still walk, but it’s an effort. Anyway he told her she’s getting fat, which is the God’s honest truth; she eats nothing but junk food, and plenty of it. The back seat of her car is a dump, piled high with discarded bags and wrappers and those little squeeze packets of ketchup. Anyway it was not smart on his part to be so blunt. He’s hoping she’ll feel bad for abandoning him at the outlook. The odds of that, he judges, are fifty-fifty. He has a phone but is not sure whom he’ll call, if it comes to that.
Max comes up here just about every week. It’s a good place to work on songs. The view inspires, and there’s not much traffic on the road. Mostly it’s quiet. Sometimes there’s nobody else at the overlook. He has this place of good vibes entirely to himself.
He sits on one of the tables and tunes the guitar, which is a blonde wood acoustic he loves the way some people love their pets. He plays some scales to warm up his fingers. He’s brought a jug of iced tea and some sandwiches. He’s off work today and is in no hurry. Sometimes the songs come easily, some times they want to be coaxed.
It’s summer in Central New York State. The trees are fully leaved. He has noticed clumps of tiger lilies on either side of the road, driving up to the outlook. The sky is clear and appears to be vibrating to get his attention, which he willingly gives.
Will’s butt aches a little. After an hour of sitting, the wheelchair is uncomfortable. He tells himself he meant well, warning Lily about her weight. He wonders if that’s true, or was he being mean for meanness’ sake? Regardless, he has created a dilemma for himself the solution of which is not obvious.
Seeing the kid with the guitar brings back a memory. There is an anger associated with the memory that Will does not fully understand, or else it’s a frustration, and the anger comes out of the frustration.
Max wishes the old guy weren’t here. There is something unsettling about him. A buzzkill. Of course he has as much right to be up here enjoying the overlook as Max does. The trick is to tune him out. That, however, is easier said than done. Max is working on a new song. So far he has the opening notes of a melody line, and a chord progression in the key of A he kind of likes. He’s come up with a couple of rhyming lines that may turn into lyrics. But it’s one of the songs that want coaxing. He plays the melody line, he plays the chords, he hums, but it’s not quite right, and the old guy tells him it’s not right.
“You want to play that one in E flat,” he says.
“I’m writing it in A.”
“It ought to be in E flat.”
He has rolled his wheelchair closer, moving on the grass, so that he is now parked a scant ten yards from Max’s table. Max is offended by the suggestion. Probably he is looking for a reason to dislike the interloper.
“I’m the one writing the song.”
“You won’t get it the way you want it until you change the key.”
“You play?”
“I used to.”
Max stands up. He carries the guitar to the old guy, thrusting it out to him. “Go ahead, play.”
The old guy shakes his head. “Take it away.”
Max shrugs. “Suit yourself.”
He returns to the picnic table, sits down with his back to the man. It’s impossible to work on the song now, but he keeps at it mostly because of the antipathy he feels toward the man in the wheelchair.
Matala. That’s the memory the young guy with his guitar and his imperfect song has stirred in Will, although he has no clear idea why. Crete. 1972. The full moon party on the red beach. Here is where the frustration lies coiled. The night, the party, the wild, the place; it abides in his memory the way mountains abide. A specific value attaches to the memory. It is the value of his life; what he has seen and done, who he is. The memory wants to be communicated to human ears, human understanding, but Will has neither vocabulary nor audience.
“In nineteen sixty nine,” he tells the young guy, “I left America.”
Max stops playing. Obviously the old guy wants to talk. Fine, he’ll listen for a minute. The sun is climbing toward its zenith. The spreading warmth is a common good. It won’t cost him to humor a senior citizen.
“Where did you go?”
“Everywhere.”
Max nods. “How come?”
A pause, then, “I was angry. The country was really messed up. I spent four years hitchhiking around the world.”
Max wonders if this is a form of aggression. Is this oddball geezer putting him down, suggesting that he, Max, doesn’t have the balls to spend four years on the road seeing the world? Possibly, but also possibly not.
“The world was different, back then,” Will says and immediately regrets it. It’s a cliché. It gets in the way of what he wishes he could say.
“Peace, love, and rock and roll,” Max says.
He doesn’t mean for it to come out as a sneer, but that’s what happens.
“In nineteen seventy two,” Will goes on, ignoring the dig, “I think it was October, I was in a little village on the southwest coast of Crete. Matala, that was the name of the place. They had cheap red wine, basic food, and you could sleep in caves in the cliffs. Which saved you money, of course, although technically you weren’t supposed to, it was against the law. There were people from all over the world showing up. They’d hang for a while and then move on. On weekends Air Force guys from an air station in Iraklion drove down to party and score.”
The facts are accurate. The details are useful. But not a word he has spoken begins to convey what he very much wants to convey. How it was, how it really was.
“Never mind,” he says.
Max sees that telling the story, if story it is, has bummed the old dude out. The little impulse of sympathy that goes through him is a surprise.
“My name is Max. Max Fields.”
“Say what? Oh. William Penny.”
“So what happened?”
“What do you mean, what happened?”
“Something must have happened, or you wouldn’t be telling me about the place.”
“Matala.”
“All right, Matala.”
Will searches for a way in. In fact it’s not so much a story he is trying to formulate as a transference. He would like to transfer his particulate memory of the full moon party on the red beach to this young smirky stranger who has long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, elegant lank guitar-player hands, and a kind of inherent self-regard. If he does not succeed – this is an exaggeration, but it’s how it feels to the older man – the universe will have come into existence for naught.
“Freaks,” he says. “They called us freaks. And hippies. Every once in a while the Greek police would raid the village. They emptied out the caves, threw people’s sleeping bags down the cliffs into the sea, arrested the ones with the longest hair. That kind of thing. People thought we were dangerous. We weren’t, we were just trying to figure out…”
“Figure out what?”
“If we could live free. Free for real.”
“And did you?”
Will looks over at Max as if the question is not quite intelligible. His mouth hangs open a moment. He licks his lips. He feels tears smarting his eyes.
“Never mind.”
“What are you doing up here by yourself?”
“Long story.”
“Are they coming back for you?”
“Who?”
“Whoever brought you.”
It seems increasingly unlikely that Lily will come back. The crack about getting fat was not the first cruel thing he has said to the woman, who is no spring chicken and worries, he knows, that she is no longer attractive to men.
“I had a guitar.”
“In Matala.”
Will nods. “Somebody came up with the idea for a party. To celebrate the full moon. Not in the village, though. The idea was to have the party at a place we called the red beach. It was quite a haul, climbing over the rocks along the coast, to get there. A pilgrimage, that was what it felt like. Like going to a holy place. Must have been, I don’t know, two hundred of us. Freaks. Travelers. From everywhere. The waves were high that night, they were ferocious. They crashed on the beach like nothing I ever saw. Everybody got wasted. It felt… to me it felt like the first night of the new world.”
“And you played your guitar.”
Another nod. “Played the hell out of it. There was this German guy from Cologne. He played the flute. Really well. And an Italian from Bologna who went to India overland, hitchhiking, and brought back a tabla.”
“What’s that?”
“A drum. The three of us played together. There were ten people, maybe, singing and chanting with us. I had the hots for a woman from Chicago. Lynne something, she was part of our little group. She told fortunes and always smelled like cloves. Back in those days you could say a woman had nice tits. I know that’s changed. Today I wouldn’t say it. The Italian guy had a couple bottles of retsina. That’s wine. Tasted like resin, which is weird because you wouldn’t think it would taste good but it did. The German had a hefty stash of hash. Carried it in tinfoil and was very precise about doling out a pipe’s worth, but he was generous, he just wanted it to last as long as we needed it to last.”
How can something so accurate fail to capture anything worthwhile? If Will were hearing the story instead of telling it, he would already have lost interest.
Max feels some resentment at having to listen to the story. It’s obviously important to William Penny. A highwater moment in his life, and maybe there have not been many of those. But there is something appealing, something kind of exotic about the notion of a full moon party on a red beach on a Greek island, two hundred traveling freaks and a drum from India. He can picture the scene. It creates a kind of longing in him. Not for Matala, maybe, but for a moment he is not likely to experience.
“There were clouds that night,” William tells Max. “It was real windy, so the clouds kept blowing off, and then new batches of them showed up. At a certain point, I don’t remember when exactly, the clouds disappeared and all of a sudden there’s the full moon. It was… A bath of moonlight, that was what it was. We got drenched in it. An Australian was howling. He had one of those bush hats with the flap that snapped, and a voice like an opera singer. The sound of him howling at the moon was like a funeral and a party at the same time.”
Will stops. The more he says, the farther he gets from describing the reality he is struggling to transfer. He has to face the fact that it’s gone, it’s gone for good and forever, and the most that words can do is tell a pretty lie.
“Forget it,” he says to Max.
“Why should I forget it?”
“You gonna try that song in E flat or not?”
“I’m writing it in A.”
Will shakes his head. He drops his hands into his lap. He is suddenly thirsty. He’s tired, exhausted, really, and he wishes again that he hadn’t told Lily she’s fat. The kid with the guitar is a hard-head.
Max tries again to give Will the instrument. He won’t take it.
“I haven’t touched a guitar in thirty years.”
“Why not?”
The question feels loaded to both of them. In any event it is unanswerable.
Will asks him, “Do you think you can fit the wheelchair in your trunk?”
Max nods. He has already measured by eye and is sure he can make it work. If he has to he’ll fold down the back seat.
“You want to go now?” he asks the old man.
Will shakes his head. “Play that guitar of yours a while. I’m in no hurry. I might close my eyes and listen, if you don’t mind.”
Max doesn’t mind. He plays. Will listens. When he does close his eyes for a moment he discovers that the full moon party still exists. Matala and the red beach still exist. The German’s hash pipe, the Italian’s tabla, Lynne’s uncanny ability to suss out a person’s intimate fortune. They exist. So does something else. It’s the thing, it’s everything, he has been unable to capture and transfer. But it’s there. All of it is there. His eyes are still closed when Max begins playing his new song in E flat, which Will is pretty sure is the right key.
