Roger, Recapitulated
W.T. Laverack
When Peggy retired from The Winthrop Agency, she put her iPhone in the catchall by the front door and vowed to use the landline whenever she was home. She had Marty from DGA Records on it now.
“Anyway, listen Peg,” Marty was saying. “About these songs. I don’t know if there’s anything we can do with these. I mean, he’s really reaching here.”
“And you listened to them twice?” Peggy said, slowly spinning free of the phone cord. She had been pacing the kitchen, rearranging the countertop, and had unwittingly wrapped herself.
“I did,” Marty said. “I hate to say it, but I think they were worse the second time.”
“I know,” Peggy said with a sigh.
“Has he written any more?”
“Just more of the same.”
“Yeah. Well, listen Peg. I can get you another month, but if we don’t get something viable, we’ll have to cut you loose.”
“Yes, I know.” Peggy slid a chair out from the breakfast table and sat down. Before her, assorted pamphlets, packets, and printed web pages lay fanned in disarray. She put her head in her hand.
“Of course,” Marty said, “if you don’t think he’ll be able to deliver by then, there might be another option.”
“What’s that?” Peggy said.
“A greatest hits,” Marty said.
“A greatest hits?” Peggy said. “For a one hit wonder?”
“Sure! A best-of. You own his sixty-five-to-seventy catalogue still, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s his best stuff. We’ll put ‘Let Saigons be Saigons’ out front, pad out the rest with ten or eleven more of his hippie ditties. Woodstock’s fiftieth is coming up; the timing couldn’t be better.”
“Roger will never go for it,” Peggy said.
“Well, Struckman will never go for any of…this.”
“Junebug,” a voice drifted into the kitchen, just loud enough for Marty to hear.
“I thought you said he was sleeping,” Marty said.
“He was,” Peggy said.
“Hey, let’s get his opinion!”
“I have to go.”
“Wait, let’s just…”
“Another time, Marty.” Peggy got up from the table and carried the murmuring handset back to its base on the wall and hung it up. She took a breakfast shake from the fridge and dropped it into her apron pocket, then started for the music room.
Like most things, the music room had become what it was gradually. First it was a Florida room, but it didn’t get much use. So, during a vacation to Greece for Peggy’s sixtieth birthday, around the time she’d gotten back into Ashtanga Yoga, Roger had it secretly converted into a private yoga studio. But his cover was blown when Peggy intercepted a text from the head contractor, and when they got home she’d had to pretend to be surprised.
Roger never found out. But Peggy’s yoga renaissance was nonetheless short-lived, and over the next two years she slowly transformed the studio into a home office. Roger, noting that the wood floors and irregular shape of the room were good for acoustics, began using it as well, as a practice space, so that for a while it served as an office and music room simultaneously. Finally, after Peggy left Winthrop and all her clients except Roger, Roger put up acoustic panels and filled the room with instruments and recording equipment.
Peggy straightened her back as she went in. It was an act she’d been perfecting for two weeks now—a sort of breezy, stolid bearing, modeled not unconsciously on Mary Poppins. Without looking at Roger, she made her way to the window and threw open the curtains, morning light catching around the room in the varnish of nine wall-mounted guitars.
She never could remember their makes or models. Nor could she read them, they being written on the headstocks, which the wall hangers hoisted nearly to the ceiling. But that didn’t matter. She and the girls were on a first-name basis. There was Maybelline from fifty-eight or fifty-nine; Poppy, Moonflower, and Égalité, from the decade of love; Ladies Jessica and Irulan, from Roger’s Dune-themed experiments in prog; androgynous Bobbi and Sam; and from twenty years ago when Roger went back to the blues, Maybelline Two.
Roger’s return to his blues roots had marked a melancholic time for Peggy. She had booked him a small county fair tour, and as always, accompanied him on the road. Each county turned out its best blues band to open for Roger—late middle-aged, blue-collar guys whose wives danced barefooted in front of the stage, waltzing clear plastic cups of beer. By the end of the tour, these opening acts’ sets had become indistinguishable in Peggy’s memory. That was no surprise. But to her dismay and astonishment, Roger’s sets had become indistinguishable from theirs. It was the first time she had seen him as actually old, and the point at which she first believed he was creatively spent. Gradually, she would come to see it as a natural part of his artistic arc. A kind of coming full circle, to which any sexagenarian musician might be subject. But, as with any piece of wisdom, gaining this one had been painful.
Peggy rounded the bed where Roger lay sleeping, an open spiral notebook rising and falling on his chest, to the side by the French-door closet where a kitchen chair had been for the last three weeks. She slid the notebook off Roger’s chest and laid it to one side of the bed’s swivel tray, then took three pill bottles and the shake from her apron pocket and placed them one at a time on the other side. She sat down. Finally, she reeled up the dangling hand control and held the “incline” button.
“Uuuggghhh,” Roger groaned as the bed folded him upright.
“I know, darling,” Peggy said, patting the back of his hand. She opened a pill bottle and tapped out a tiny tablet into her palm. She worked it in under his tongue and waited for it to dissolve, then opened the shake and put the bottle to his lips, cupping her hand beneath his chin. He drank and dribbled into her hand, and she wiped her hand on her apron, took a tissue from a box on the tray, and dabbed his chin. She repeated the process for pills two, three, and the rest of the shake, then pocketed the pill bottles.
Next, she checked his urine bag to see if it needed draining; it didn’t. She rolled him onto his side and checked his bed pad. It was clean.
Roger was still half-asleep, so Peggy decided to tidy up. At her feet were a plastic wastebasket and several paper balls—discarded song ideas—which hadn’t made the basket. She bent and picked up the balls and trashed them, took up the basket and dropped the empty shake bottle in onto the nest of notebook paper and tissues. She rounded the bed to a nightstand. Setting the wastebasket on the floor, she took a pair of scissors from the nightstand’s drawer and began pruning the wilted flower heads from a bouquet by the clock radio, dropping these into the basket as well.
“Junebug,” Roger groaned.
“The grandkids won’t be here till tomorrow, Roger,” Peggy said, keeping at the pruning. The literature had told her he might see loved ones who weren’t there. It hadn’t told her she would feel jealous of them.
“You goddamned whore,” Roger said.
Peggy paused mid-snip, but only briefly, then lopped off the dying flower. The literature had said this might happen, too. And it wasn’t the first time it had.
“Now, Roger, you know that’s perfectly inappropriate,” she said, doing her Americanized Mary Poppins. But inside she couldn’t help but think of how the actor who played Michael Banks had died very young, Roger’s circumstances spreading black and crab-shaped through her memory of the movie, mutating its charm into nothingness. A minute of silence passed as she searched her mind for happy memories, finding the present metastasized to each. Then Roger spoke again.
“Peg?”
The insouciant act melted away. Peggy looked at Roger, who was looking back at her with recognizing eyes. “Roger,” she said. She put the scissors back in the drawer, picked up the wastebasket and hurried around the bed to her chair on the other side. She sat down and took his hand in her own, stroking his hair with her free one.
“Hi, darling,” she said.
“Hi,” Roger said, smiling.
“Did you sleep well?” she said.
Roger nodded.
“Good.” She tucked a silver wisp behind his ear.
“You talked to Marty?” Roger said.
“Yes,” she said.
“What did he say?”
“Well, he said it took him a couple of listens, but once he got them, he really dug them.”
Roger nodded and turned pensively toward the ceiling. “I knew it would take a couple listens,” he said. He looked back at Peggy. “You haven’t told him?”
Roger had asked her not to tell, saying he didn’t want the press to show up. Deep down, Peggy knew it was because he didn’t want them not to.
“Not a word,” she said.
“I’ve got another idea,” Roger said, grinning slyly.
“Oh?”
“I think I can distill the human experience into a single song.”
“Oh,” Peggy said. “Roger, maybe we…”
“I made an outline,” Roger said, nodding toward the notebook on the tray.
Peggy hesitatingly took the notebook and opened to where a pen was clipped to the spiral binding. The right-hand page was blank. On the left was Roger’s outline. Peggy put on her glasses.
A: The Chaos of Birth—a short atonal movement, with Babbitt Square as compositional determinant; B: Language Acquisition—a simple children’s song made up of passages from A, transposed into a unifying key; C: Ideological Possession—a march, based on the children’s theme; D: Transcending Ideology—variations on the theme, incorporating chaos, rudiments, and structure, in various modes and keys; E: The Apparition of the Chaos of Death—atonal, Babbitt
Square; F: The Revalation of the Meaning of Life—a simple love song, made up of passages from E, transposed into a unifying key.
Peggy put her glasses back in her apron pocket and looked up at Roger.
“Roger, maybe we should try something a little simpler today,” she said.
“You don’t like it?” Roger said.
“No, I do. I just don’t want you to overexert yourself, that’s all.”
“Like that matters,” Roger said.
“I want you to be comfortable, hon,” Peggy said.
“I’ll be comfortable soon enough,” Roger said.
“Now Roger, you know I don’t like when you talk like that.”
“Did Marty not like the recordings?” Roger said abruptly.
Peggy faltered. “Yes, I told you he did,” she said. “He said they were challenging, but they had a lot of, you know, artistic integrity.” She looked down.
“Marty doesn’t care about integrity,” Roger said.
Peggy raised her head and one eyebrow. “Well, I’d rather sit through another…ambitious…songwriting session than sit through an interrogation,” she said. “If you’re up for a big pain in the ass, then so am I.”
Roger smiled.
“So, what’s a Babbitt Square?” Peggy said.
“In back of my Dune book,” Roger said.
“In the study?”
“No, the Maker Hooks and Hook Makers sessions.”
“Oh, right.” Peggy dragged her chair to the closet and folded open the doors. She stepped up onto the chair and reached for the stack of manila spiral notebooks on the shelf. The chair began to tip backwards.
“Peg!” Roger said.
“I know,” Peggy said, righting the chair. She started dismantling the stack. “How far down is it?”
“Oh, a ways,” Roger said.
Peggy set six notebooks aside and pulled out the seventh. She read the cover. Not Maker Hooks and Hook Makers, but an interesting find. She held onto it. She pulled out number eight and inspected it.
“Got it,” she said.
“In the back pocket,” Roger said.
Peggy opened the rear cover and pulled out a folded sheet of yellow graph paper. Then she shelved the notebook and brought the chair, the interesting find, and the mysterious Babbitt Square back to the bedside.
She laid the Babbitt Square atop Roger’s current sessions book, Coda Pendants. Then, leaning against the bed, she showed him the interesting find.
“Remember this?” she said.
Roger squinted at the faded title. “Overtures Toward Peggy,” he said, and looked at her bemusedly.
“The folk songs you wrote me, back when I was just your manager,” Peggy said. “Remember? You used to tell me at the end of our meetings that you had a new song to show me, and that you promised it wasn’t another one of your Overtures Toward Peggy. I never believed you, but I let you play them anyway.”
Roger looked back at the notebook.
“Took six songs to get me on a date,” Peggy said.
Roger nodded slowly. “That’s right,” he said. “That number six, that was a good one.”
“Let’s see,” Peggy said, and started to leaf through the pages.
“Only took thirty minutes to write,” Roger said.
“Thirty minutes? Is that so?” Peggy said.
“You’re a good muse,” Roger said.
Peggy reached the last overture and held it out to Roger. “Do you remember how it goes?” she said.
Roger took the notebook and held it close to his face, mumbling the lyrics and melody to himself. Then he cleared his throat and sang at full volume, “This is just a song about a groovy talent manager, but don’t go thinkin’ I wrote it for you; And even though you’re smart and sweet and fun and foxy just like her, don’t go thinkin’ Ahkhuhuh! Ahhhkhuhuhuh!”
Roger erupted into a violent bout of coughing.
“Oh, hon,” Peggy said. She pulled a tissue from the box on the swivel tray and held it to his mouth. He hocked and spat.
“That’s okay,” she said. “That was lovely.”
And it had been lovely, or touching, at least. All the same, she was glad he’d stopped. His singing voice wasn’t his own anymore. The once powdery baritone had given way to a wispy tenor that made Peggy think of bluegrass. Roger was becoming less substantial, less well-defined. Peggy wasn’t sure how much of him was left, but she knew that however much it was, it didn’t exactly add up to Roger.
Sometimes it felt like she’d lost him several times already, and that she’d gotten back several copies, each one coming out a little less like the original. One of the earliest copies came back with the high bluegrass voice built in. Peggy’d mourned, not just for Roger’s singing voice, but for the Roger who, as a complete entity, had owned that particular singing voice.
And so, with the loss of each trait—next his purposeful gait, next his potency, next his memory for names—Peggy mourned the loss of a complete Roger. Or maybe just a copy of him. She tried to be positive. She hoped that with all this practice, the final loss—of the Roger who owned Roger’s soul—would be a little easier.
Plus, she’d lived through the 60’s. She’d followed the swami Kriyananda. She could still convince herself, when she needed to, that there was never any such thing as an “original” Roger, anyway. That any perceived permanence was just very slow change, and that, while everything is in constant flux, nothing gets lost. Death, then, was not loss, but just another change. The big question was, a change to what?
She called on this faith in conservation now as she pulled the tissue away from Roger’s lips, leaving a long parabola of mucous drooping toward the linens. She snatched it up with the tissue, wadded it up and dropped it into the wastebasket. Then she took the Overtures notebook from Roger and handed him the Coda Pendants with the folded yellow graph paper on top, laying the Overtures on the tray.
“Let’s write this masterpiece of yours,” she said.
Roger held them back at her.
“You write,” he said. “I’ll play.”
“Okay. Which guitar?” Peggy said.
“The J-50,” Roger said.
“Who’s that again?”
“Jessica.”
Peggy laid the notebook on her chair and walked to the wall opposite the bed. She took Jessica’s hollow, tawny body in both hands and lifted her out of the mount, carried her to Roger and laid her lightly in his arms. She sat back down and opened the notebook to Roger’s outline, spreading out the Babbitt Square on the opposite page.
“So, what is this thing?” she said.
Roger looked at her like he was about to tell her a dirty secret. “It’s a musical chaos generator,” he said.
Peggy put her glasses back on and studied the paper. Slightly off-center, a twelve-by-twelve grid had been outlined in pencil and filled in with the letter names of notes.
Roger slipped a pick out from a holder adhered to the guitar and started tuning the strings. He turned his scheming eyes toward the ceiling. “Now, pick any sequence of six notes, horizontal or vertical, and read them to me.”
“Okay, let’s see.” Peggy scanned the rows with her index finger until she felt she’d gone a suitably random number of squares. She read the next six notes aloud. “B, F-sharp, E, F, C-sharp, A.”
Roger had her repeat them slowly, placing one finger at a time where the corresponding string met the corresponding fret, stretching and contorting his left hand into the grotesque shape of the dissonant chord. His fingers finally in place, and with his pick hand trembling above the bridge, he looked once more at Peggy.
“Let’s hear what she sounds like,” he said.
“Let’s hope she sounds better than she looks,” Peggy said.
Roger looked back down at the guitar and strummed. But he hadn’t applied enough pressure with his left hand.
Kachink, the chord buzzed and died.
“Yaaagh!” Roger screamed, dropping the pick with a round knock against the mahogany. He reached for his left hand and began to pry his fingers off the fretboard.
“Oh no, Roger. Cramp?”
Roger silently started on the second finger.
“I’ll help you,” Peggy said. She laid the notebook on the tray and started to get up.
“Don’t!” Roger said, swatting at her. She fell back into the chair.
Roger pried his fourth finger from the neck and let the guitar slide into the space between him and the safety rail, pulling his palsied hand to his chest with his right hand curled around it.
There was a long silence. Then Peggy said, “Maybe we should start with one of the more conventional sections.”
“We can’t,” Roger said. “It all grows out of the Babbitt Square.”
“Well, maybe we could try a different chord,” Peggy said, looking back down at the grid. “Let’s see, D-Sharp, G-Sharp…”
“It doesn’t matter,” Roger said.
Peggy looked back up. “What doesn’t matter?” she said.
There was another prolonged silence. Then Roger said, “Remember when we went to Greece?”
“Yes,” Peggy said.
“And the Acropolis?”
“Yes, of course.”
“We said it felt like we had gone back in time.”
“I remember,” Peggy said.
Roger paused again. “I wonder what I’m leaving behind sometimes,” he said.
Peggy reached through the bars of the railing and touched his arm. “You’ve built a wonderful legacy, Roger,” she said. “You know that.”
“No, I mean substantively. What’s a song?”
Peggy didn’t answer.
“I’ll tell you what a song is,” Roger said. “Air vibrations. That’s what.” He laughed. “My medium was air, haha.”
Peggy almost wanted to tease him for being melodramatic; normally, she would have. Instead, she found herself trying to remember the words of their yogi, feeling a certain amount of dignity in her and Roger’s both letting their guard down.
“Sometimes it helps me to remember what the swami said about permanence,” she said, “about how it’s just slow change. How, if you could speed up time, even the mountains would move like waves. Remember that?”
Roger stared ahead at the wall of guitars.
“And, well, if that’s true,” Peggy said, “then I think it makes a song one of the most permanent things you can make. Waves, vibrations. Whatever you want to call it. One whole made up of many changes.”
Roger looked at her. “What about when the song ends?” he said, smiling sheepishly.
Peggy thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it goes back to where it came from.”
“Where’s that?” Roger said.
“The Song of Songs,” Peggy said. “Kriyananda talked about music one time. He said that every song was just a movement in the infinite song, the Song of Songs, and that a musician was like a medium between the infinite song and the temporal world. He said that, because every song already exists in the Song of Songs, writing music is more an act of discovery than…”
Roger’s interruption was almost polite. His face puckered as the pitch began to curl higher, sounding like a timid question. It barely stank—surprising, since, as Roger started to cry, Peggy knew he’d done more than just fart.
“Oh, Roger,” she said. “You know that’s okay.” She got up and got a fresh bed pad and wipes from the closet. The first few times had been a struggle, but now she had an efficient system. She also had Mary Poppins, who was great for handling situations like these. Still, after she’d hung up the guitar, lowered the bed, rolled Roger over, cleaned him, replaced the pad, rolled him back, raised the bed, and brought back the guitar, it was she, not Mary Poppins, who was suddenly tired. She sank into her chair.
Roger sat teary-eyed, strumming soft, familiar folk chords. Finally, he said, “Why don’t we pick this up later?”
“I’m fine,” Peggy said.
“You look tired,” he said.
“I just need a minute to rest.”
Roger looked at the clock radio.
“Take thirty,” he said. “You can catch the last half of the roadshow.”
She glanced at the clock, then back at Roger.
“I want to work alone for a little bit, anyway,” Roger said.
“Well, in that case,” Peggy said, surpressing a knowing smile, “anything before I go?”
“Oh, a kiss’ll do,” Roger said.
Peggy rose, stooped, and kissed Roger on the lips. She righted herself and stood smoothing his silver hair.
“I’m excited for your song,” she said. “I think it could be your magnum opus.”
“Me, too,” Roger said.
Peggy kissed him one more time, on the forehead, and headed for the door.
“I love you, Roger,” she said as she left.
“I love you too, Peg.”
She shuffled down the hall to the living room, sat upright on the edge of the sofa and turned on the TV. It was already tuned to PBS. The owner of a rolltop desk was asking her appraiser if replacing the missing pulls would bring down the value. The appraiser was explaining that, with furniture, a good restoration could do just the opposite.
Peggy settled back into the sofa, closed her eyes, and smiled. She tried to picture herself looking surprised.
W.T. Laverack
When Peggy retired from The Winthrop Agency, she put her iPhone in the catchall by the front door and vowed to use the landline whenever she was home. She had Marty from DGA Records on it now.
“Anyway, listen Peg,” Marty was saying. “About these songs. I don’t know if there’s anything we can do with these. I mean, he’s really reaching here.”
“And you listened to them twice?” Peggy said, slowly spinning free of the phone cord. She had been pacing the kitchen, rearranging the countertop, and had unwittingly wrapped herself.
“I did,” Marty said. “I hate to say it, but I think they were worse the second time.”
“I know,” Peggy said with a sigh.
“Has he written any more?”
“Just more of the same.”
“Yeah. Well, listen Peg. I can get you another month, but if we don’t get something viable, we’ll have to cut you loose.”
“Yes, I know.” Peggy slid a chair out from the breakfast table and sat down. Before her, assorted pamphlets, packets, and printed web pages lay fanned in disarray. She put her head in her hand.
“Of course,” Marty said, “if you don’t think he’ll be able to deliver by then, there might be another option.”
“What’s that?” Peggy said.
“A greatest hits,” Marty said.
“A greatest hits?” Peggy said. “For a one hit wonder?”
“Sure! A best-of. You own his sixty-five-to-seventy catalogue still, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s his best stuff. We’ll put ‘Let Saigons be Saigons’ out front, pad out the rest with ten or eleven more of his hippie ditties. Woodstock’s fiftieth is coming up; the timing couldn’t be better.”
“Roger will never go for it,” Peggy said.
“Well, Struckman will never go for any of…this.”
“Junebug,” a voice drifted into the kitchen, just loud enough for Marty to hear.
“I thought you said he was sleeping,” Marty said.
“He was,” Peggy said.
“Hey, let’s get his opinion!”
“I have to go.”
“Wait, let’s just…”
“Another time, Marty.” Peggy got up from the table and carried the murmuring handset back to its base on the wall and hung it up. She took a breakfast shake from the fridge and dropped it into her apron pocket, then started for the music room.
Like most things, the music room had become what it was gradually. First it was a Florida room, but it didn’t get much use. So, during a vacation to Greece for Peggy’s sixtieth birthday, around the time she’d gotten back into Ashtanga Yoga, Roger had it secretly converted into a private yoga studio. But his cover was blown when Peggy intercepted a text from the head contractor, and when they got home she’d had to pretend to be surprised.
Roger never found out. But Peggy’s yoga renaissance was nonetheless short-lived, and over the next two years she slowly transformed the studio into a home office. Roger, noting that the wood floors and irregular shape of the room were good for acoustics, began using it as well, as a practice space, so that for a while it served as an office and music room simultaneously. Finally, after Peggy left Winthrop and all her clients except Roger, Roger put up acoustic panels and filled the room with instruments and recording equipment.
Peggy straightened her back as she went in. It was an act she’d been perfecting for two weeks now—a sort of breezy, stolid bearing, modeled not unconsciously on Mary Poppins. Without looking at Roger, she made her way to the window and threw open the curtains, morning light catching around the room in the varnish of nine wall-mounted guitars.
She never could remember their makes or models. Nor could she read them, they being written on the headstocks, which the wall hangers hoisted nearly to the ceiling. But that didn’t matter. She and the girls were on a first-name basis. There was Maybelline from fifty-eight or fifty-nine; Poppy, Moonflower, and Égalité, from the decade of love; Ladies Jessica and Irulan, from Roger’s Dune-themed experiments in prog; androgynous Bobbi and Sam; and from twenty years ago when Roger went back to the blues, Maybelline Two.
Roger’s return to his blues roots had marked a melancholic time for Peggy. She had booked him a small county fair tour, and as always, accompanied him on the road. Each county turned out its best blues band to open for Roger—late middle-aged, blue-collar guys whose wives danced barefooted in front of the stage, waltzing clear plastic cups of beer. By the end of the tour, these opening acts’ sets had become indistinguishable in Peggy’s memory. That was no surprise. But to her dismay and astonishment, Roger’s sets had become indistinguishable from theirs. It was the first time she had seen him as actually old, and the point at which she first believed he was creatively spent. Gradually, she would come to see it as a natural part of his artistic arc. A kind of coming full circle, to which any sexagenarian musician might be subject. But, as with any piece of wisdom, gaining this one had been painful.
Peggy rounded the bed where Roger lay sleeping, an open spiral notebook rising and falling on his chest, to the side by the French-door closet where a kitchen chair had been for the last three weeks. She slid the notebook off Roger’s chest and laid it to one side of the bed’s swivel tray, then took three pill bottles and the shake from her apron pocket and placed them one at a time on the other side. She sat down. Finally, she reeled up the dangling hand control and held the “incline” button.
“Uuuggghhh,” Roger groaned as the bed folded him upright.
“I know, darling,” Peggy said, patting the back of his hand. She opened a pill bottle and tapped out a tiny tablet into her palm. She worked it in under his tongue and waited for it to dissolve, then opened the shake and put the bottle to his lips, cupping her hand beneath his chin. He drank and dribbled into her hand, and she wiped her hand on her apron, took a tissue from a box on the tray, and dabbed his chin. She repeated the process for pills two, three, and the rest of the shake, then pocketed the pill bottles.
Next, she checked his urine bag to see if it needed draining; it didn’t. She rolled him onto his side and checked his bed pad. It was clean.
Roger was still half-asleep, so Peggy decided to tidy up. At her feet were a plastic wastebasket and several paper balls—discarded song ideas—which hadn’t made the basket. She bent and picked up the balls and trashed them, took up the basket and dropped the empty shake bottle in onto the nest of notebook paper and tissues. She rounded the bed to a nightstand. Setting the wastebasket on the floor, she took a pair of scissors from the nightstand’s drawer and began pruning the wilted flower heads from a bouquet by the clock radio, dropping these into the basket as well.
“Junebug,” Roger groaned.
“The grandkids won’t be here till tomorrow, Roger,” Peggy said, keeping at the pruning. The literature had told her he might see loved ones who weren’t there. It hadn’t told her she would feel jealous of them.
“You goddamned whore,” Roger said.
Peggy paused mid-snip, but only briefly, then lopped off the dying flower. The literature had said this might happen, too. And it wasn’t the first time it had.
“Now, Roger, you know that’s perfectly inappropriate,” she said, doing her Americanized Mary Poppins. But inside she couldn’t help but think of how the actor who played Michael Banks had died very young, Roger’s circumstances spreading black and crab-shaped through her memory of the movie, mutating its charm into nothingness. A minute of silence passed as she searched her mind for happy memories, finding the present metastasized to each. Then Roger spoke again.
“Peg?”
The insouciant act melted away. Peggy looked at Roger, who was looking back at her with recognizing eyes. “Roger,” she said. She put the scissors back in the drawer, picked up the wastebasket and hurried around the bed to her chair on the other side. She sat down and took his hand in her own, stroking his hair with her free one.
“Hi, darling,” she said.
“Hi,” Roger said, smiling.
“Did you sleep well?” she said.
Roger nodded.
“Good.” She tucked a silver wisp behind his ear.
“You talked to Marty?” Roger said.
“Yes,” she said.
“What did he say?”
“Well, he said it took him a couple of listens, but once he got them, he really dug them.”
Roger nodded and turned pensively toward the ceiling. “I knew it would take a couple listens,” he said. He looked back at Peggy. “You haven’t told him?”
Roger had asked her not to tell, saying he didn’t want the press to show up. Deep down, Peggy knew it was because he didn’t want them not to.
“Not a word,” she said.
“I’ve got another idea,” Roger said, grinning slyly.
“Oh?”
“I think I can distill the human experience into a single song.”
“Oh,” Peggy said. “Roger, maybe we…”
“I made an outline,” Roger said, nodding toward the notebook on the tray.
Peggy hesitatingly took the notebook and opened to where a pen was clipped to the spiral binding. The right-hand page was blank. On the left was Roger’s outline. Peggy put on her glasses.
A: The Chaos of Birth—a short atonal movement, with Babbitt Square as compositional determinant; B: Language Acquisition—a simple children’s song made up of passages from A, transposed into a unifying key; C: Ideological Possession—a march, based on the children’s theme; D: Transcending Ideology—variations on the theme, incorporating chaos, rudiments, and structure, in various modes and keys; E: The Apparition of the Chaos of Death—atonal, Babbitt
Square; F: The Revalation of the Meaning of Life—a simple love song, made up of passages from E, transposed into a unifying key.
Peggy put her glasses back in her apron pocket and looked up at Roger.
“Roger, maybe we should try something a little simpler today,” she said.
“You don’t like it?” Roger said.
“No, I do. I just don’t want you to overexert yourself, that’s all.”
“Like that matters,” Roger said.
“I want you to be comfortable, hon,” Peggy said.
“I’ll be comfortable soon enough,” Roger said.
“Now Roger, you know I don’t like when you talk like that.”
“Did Marty not like the recordings?” Roger said abruptly.
Peggy faltered. “Yes, I told you he did,” she said. “He said they were challenging, but they had a lot of, you know, artistic integrity.” She looked down.
“Marty doesn’t care about integrity,” Roger said.
Peggy raised her head and one eyebrow. “Well, I’d rather sit through another…ambitious…songwriting session than sit through an interrogation,” she said. “If you’re up for a big pain in the ass, then so am I.”
Roger smiled.
“So, what’s a Babbitt Square?” Peggy said.
“In back of my Dune book,” Roger said.
“In the study?”
“No, the Maker Hooks and Hook Makers sessions.”
“Oh, right.” Peggy dragged her chair to the closet and folded open the doors. She stepped up onto the chair and reached for the stack of manila spiral notebooks on the shelf. The chair began to tip backwards.
“Peg!” Roger said.
“I know,” Peggy said, righting the chair. She started dismantling the stack. “How far down is it?”
“Oh, a ways,” Roger said.
Peggy set six notebooks aside and pulled out the seventh. She read the cover. Not Maker Hooks and Hook Makers, but an interesting find. She held onto it. She pulled out number eight and inspected it.
“Got it,” she said.
“In the back pocket,” Roger said.
Peggy opened the rear cover and pulled out a folded sheet of yellow graph paper. Then she shelved the notebook and brought the chair, the interesting find, and the mysterious Babbitt Square back to the bedside.
She laid the Babbitt Square atop Roger’s current sessions book, Coda Pendants. Then, leaning against the bed, she showed him the interesting find.
“Remember this?” she said.
Roger squinted at the faded title. “Overtures Toward Peggy,” he said, and looked at her bemusedly.
“The folk songs you wrote me, back when I was just your manager,” Peggy said. “Remember? You used to tell me at the end of our meetings that you had a new song to show me, and that you promised it wasn’t another one of your Overtures Toward Peggy. I never believed you, but I let you play them anyway.”
Roger looked back at the notebook.
“Took six songs to get me on a date,” Peggy said.
Roger nodded slowly. “That’s right,” he said. “That number six, that was a good one.”
“Let’s see,” Peggy said, and started to leaf through the pages.
“Only took thirty minutes to write,” Roger said.
“Thirty minutes? Is that so?” Peggy said.
“You’re a good muse,” Roger said.
Peggy reached the last overture and held it out to Roger. “Do you remember how it goes?” she said.
Roger took the notebook and held it close to his face, mumbling the lyrics and melody to himself. Then he cleared his throat and sang at full volume, “This is just a song about a groovy talent manager, but don’t go thinkin’ I wrote it for you; And even though you’re smart and sweet and fun and foxy just like her, don’t go thinkin’ Ahkhuhuh! Ahhhkhuhuhuh!”
Roger erupted into a violent bout of coughing.
“Oh, hon,” Peggy said. She pulled a tissue from the box on the swivel tray and held it to his mouth. He hocked and spat.
“That’s okay,” she said. “That was lovely.”
And it had been lovely, or touching, at least. All the same, she was glad he’d stopped. His singing voice wasn’t his own anymore. The once powdery baritone had given way to a wispy tenor that made Peggy think of bluegrass. Roger was becoming less substantial, less well-defined. Peggy wasn’t sure how much of him was left, but she knew that however much it was, it didn’t exactly add up to Roger.
Sometimes it felt like she’d lost him several times already, and that she’d gotten back several copies, each one coming out a little less like the original. One of the earliest copies came back with the high bluegrass voice built in. Peggy’d mourned, not just for Roger’s singing voice, but for the Roger who, as a complete entity, had owned that particular singing voice.
And so, with the loss of each trait—next his purposeful gait, next his potency, next his memory for names—Peggy mourned the loss of a complete Roger. Or maybe just a copy of him. She tried to be positive. She hoped that with all this practice, the final loss—of the Roger who owned Roger’s soul—would be a little easier.
Plus, she’d lived through the 60’s. She’d followed the swami Kriyananda. She could still convince herself, when she needed to, that there was never any such thing as an “original” Roger, anyway. That any perceived permanence was just very slow change, and that, while everything is in constant flux, nothing gets lost. Death, then, was not loss, but just another change. The big question was, a change to what?
She called on this faith in conservation now as she pulled the tissue away from Roger’s lips, leaving a long parabola of mucous drooping toward the linens. She snatched it up with the tissue, wadded it up and dropped it into the wastebasket. Then she took the Overtures notebook from Roger and handed him the Coda Pendants with the folded yellow graph paper on top, laying the Overtures on the tray.
“Let’s write this masterpiece of yours,” she said.
Roger held them back at her.
“You write,” he said. “I’ll play.”
“Okay. Which guitar?” Peggy said.
“The J-50,” Roger said.
“Who’s that again?”
“Jessica.”
Peggy laid the notebook on her chair and walked to the wall opposite the bed. She took Jessica’s hollow, tawny body in both hands and lifted her out of the mount, carried her to Roger and laid her lightly in his arms. She sat back down and opened the notebook to Roger’s outline, spreading out the Babbitt Square on the opposite page.
“So, what is this thing?” she said.
Roger looked at her like he was about to tell her a dirty secret. “It’s a musical chaos generator,” he said.
Peggy put her glasses back on and studied the paper. Slightly off-center, a twelve-by-twelve grid had been outlined in pencil and filled in with the letter names of notes.
Roger slipped a pick out from a holder adhered to the guitar and started tuning the strings. He turned his scheming eyes toward the ceiling. “Now, pick any sequence of six notes, horizontal or vertical, and read them to me.”
“Okay, let’s see.” Peggy scanned the rows with her index finger until she felt she’d gone a suitably random number of squares. She read the next six notes aloud. “B, F-sharp, E, F, C-sharp, A.”
Roger had her repeat them slowly, placing one finger at a time where the corresponding string met the corresponding fret, stretching and contorting his left hand into the grotesque shape of the dissonant chord. His fingers finally in place, and with his pick hand trembling above the bridge, he looked once more at Peggy.
“Let’s hear what she sounds like,” he said.
“Let’s hope she sounds better than she looks,” Peggy said.
Roger looked back down at the guitar and strummed. But he hadn’t applied enough pressure with his left hand.
Kachink, the chord buzzed and died.
“Yaaagh!” Roger screamed, dropping the pick with a round knock against the mahogany. He reached for his left hand and began to pry his fingers off the fretboard.
“Oh no, Roger. Cramp?”
Roger silently started on the second finger.
“I’ll help you,” Peggy said. She laid the notebook on the tray and started to get up.
“Don’t!” Roger said, swatting at her. She fell back into the chair.
Roger pried his fourth finger from the neck and let the guitar slide into the space between him and the safety rail, pulling his palsied hand to his chest with his right hand curled around it.
There was a long silence. Then Peggy said, “Maybe we should start with one of the more conventional sections.”
“We can’t,” Roger said. “It all grows out of the Babbitt Square.”
“Well, maybe we could try a different chord,” Peggy said, looking back down at the grid. “Let’s see, D-Sharp, G-Sharp…”
“It doesn’t matter,” Roger said.
Peggy looked back up. “What doesn’t matter?” she said.
There was another prolonged silence. Then Roger said, “Remember when we went to Greece?”
“Yes,” Peggy said.
“And the Acropolis?”
“Yes, of course.”
“We said it felt like we had gone back in time.”
“I remember,” Peggy said.
Roger paused again. “I wonder what I’m leaving behind sometimes,” he said.
Peggy reached through the bars of the railing and touched his arm. “You’ve built a wonderful legacy, Roger,” she said. “You know that.”
“No, I mean substantively. What’s a song?”
Peggy didn’t answer.
“I’ll tell you what a song is,” Roger said. “Air vibrations. That’s what.” He laughed. “My medium was air, haha.”
Peggy almost wanted to tease him for being melodramatic; normally, she would have. Instead, she found herself trying to remember the words of their yogi, feeling a certain amount of dignity in her and Roger’s both letting their guard down.
“Sometimes it helps me to remember what the swami said about permanence,” she said, “about how it’s just slow change. How, if you could speed up time, even the mountains would move like waves. Remember that?”
Roger stared ahead at the wall of guitars.
“And, well, if that’s true,” Peggy said, “then I think it makes a song one of the most permanent things you can make. Waves, vibrations. Whatever you want to call it. One whole made up of many changes.”
Roger looked at her. “What about when the song ends?” he said, smiling sheepishly.
Peggy thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it goes back to where it came from.”
“Where’s that?” Roger said.
“The Song of Songs,” Peggy said. “Kriyananda talked about music one time. He said that every song was just a movement in the infinite song, the Song of Songs, and that a musician was like a medium between the infinite song and the temporal world. He said that, because every song already exists in the Song of Songs, writing music is more an act of discovery than…”
Roger’s interruption was almost polite. His face puckered as the pitch began to curl higher, sounding like a timid question. It barely stank—surprising, since, as Roger started to cry, Peggy knew he’d done more than just fart.
“Oh, Roger,” she said. “You know that’s okay.” She got up and got a fresh bed pad and wipes from the closet. The first few times had been a struggle, but now she had an efficient system. She also had Mary Poppins, who was great for handling situations like these. Still, after she’d hung up the guitar, lowered the bed, rolled Roger over, cleaned him, replaced the pad, rolled him back, raised the bed, and brought back the guitar, it was she, not Mary Poppins, who was suddenly tired. She sank into her chair.
Roger sat teary-eyed, strumming soft, familiar folk chords. Finally, he said, “Why don’t we pick this up later?”
“I’m fine,” Peggy said.
“You look tired,” he said.
“I just need a minute to rest.”
Roger looked at the clock radio.
“Take thirty,” he said. “You can catch the last half of the roadshow.”
She glanced at the clock, then back at Roger.
“I want to work alone for a little bit, anyway,” Roger said.
“Well, in that case,” Peggy said, surpressing a knowing smile, “anything before I go?”
“Oh, a kiss’ll do,” Roger said.
Peggy rose, stooped, and kissed Roger on the lips. She righted herself and stood smoothing his silver hair.
“I’m excited for your song,” she said. “I think it could be your magnum opus.”
“Me, too,” Roger said.
Peggy kissed him one more time, on the forehead, and headed for the door.
“I love you, Roger,” she said as she left.
“I love you too, Peg.”
She shuffled down the hall to the living room, sat upright on the edge of the sofa and turned on the TV. It was already tuned to PBS. The owner of a rolltop desk was asking her appraiser if replacing the missing pulls would bring down the value. The appraiser was explaining that, with furniture, a good restoration could do just the opposite.
Peggy settled back into the sofa, closed her eyes, and smiled. She tried to picture herself looking surprised.
