Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

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I WORKED for several hours today on a new song called “Honk for Assistance.” I saw the sign at a convenience store, near the ice machine, and I thought, Now, that is a dance song, in the tradition of Midnight Star. I sampled a few honks from my Kia’s horn and set up a beat and fingered up some harmony using an instrument I hadn’t tried before, the Gospel Organ, which has a slight percussive sound in the attack phase of each note. I added more chords on a Mark II keyboard and some homegrown handclaps and some rhythms made with the Funk Boogie Kit. And then I wondered idly whether somebody had already made a song out of “Honk for Assistance.” Yes, they had. The composer’s name was Tom Clark and it was on an EP called Nervous . It’s pretty good. No words. Foolish me: You must never look anything up on iTunes while you’re working on a song. Otherwise you’ll stop and you’ll say it’s all been done.

I need money. Money always helps. I called Gene and told him that my book of poems, formerly called Misery Hat , was turning out to be something different. It was now a book about music.

“Ah, okay.”

“It seems to be about trying to write dance songs. Also protest songs and love songs. Pop songs in general.”

“Maybe we could do an enhanced ebook and include the songs.”

That depended, I said, on whether the songs were any good or not.

“Whether they’re good doesn’t matter,” Gene said. “Process not product, as they say about schoolchildren. Just give it the Chowder spin. And stay away from the misery hat.”

When that check comes from Allstate I’m going to buy Roz a new canoe. That’s the least I can do.

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WHEN DEBUSSY WAS YOUNG he wanted to write music for women to sing. He wrote love songs and he wrote erotic songs. He set some of Pierre Louÿs’s Chansons de Bilitis to music, Louÿs who late in life wrote a poem called “The Trophy of Legendary Vulvas”—what a title! When I was young and wanted to be a composer like Debussy, I paid no attention to any of his songs. I couldn’t listen to them. I listened only to his piano and orchestral music. The only vocals of his that I could stand were the wordless vowels that the sirens sing in the Nocturnes , and even those I wasn’t sure about. I still can’t listen to his songs with any pleasure. The words seem pushed and pulled and crowded by the music. But that’s my loss.

Everything for Debussy was really about sex and smoking. Sex, smoking, the grand piano, and the English Channel. Those were his mainstays. He fell in love with his singers all through his life. One of his earliest songs repeats the line “The sea is deep” several times — it’s dedicated to Madame Vasnier, a singer. He may or may not have had an affair with Mary Garden, the woman who sang in his opera Pelléas and Mélisande . In her memoir, Mary Garden says nothing happened between them, but she’s not convincing. Debussy liked Scottish women with gentle voices who hung around wells, and he liked women who had flaxen hair — he wrote a lovely piano prelude called “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair,” which was inspired by his first wife, Lilly, who wounded herself with a handgun after Debussy took up with the brown-haired woman who became his second wife. He liked brown-haired women, too. He just plain liked women. Women and moonlight and vers libre and smoking strong French cigarettes. And then he died broke and miserable. His new wife’s father had disinherited her.

You never want to have cancer down there, where Debussy had it. Cancer of the rectum. Cancer of the anus. I guess we would now call it colon cancer.

But thank heaven Debussy was poor, because the poverty forced him to finish twelve preludes in 1910. I remember the first time I heard the sixth prelude, “Footsteps in the Snow.” I immediately wanted to understand how he did it, and I couldn’t. He was using a different scale, the so-called whole-tone scale — that was part of it. Instead of a normal scale, which has a few half tones thrown in here and there, he used a scale composed entirely of whole tones. But anyone can do that. He made it sound cold and bleak, with wind-eroded oval footprints. I remember dropping the needle down and hearing, along with the scratched vinyl, the empty world of whiteness and snow and almost effaced footprints that he created.

Maurice Ravel knew immediately how good Debussy’s Preludes were. Ravel was an inspired pianist, and he played them for himself in May 1910, just when they were published. He was struggling at the time with the orchestration of a piece of his own that was going slowly, and he hadn’t always gotten along with Debussy, but he put all that aside. “I will console myself by playing Debussy’s Preludes once again,” he wrote to a friend. “They are wonderful masterpieces. Do you know them? Thank you, and cordially in haste, Maurice Ravel.”

HELLO, HELLO. I’m sitting by the side of the Piscataqua River admiring the power station across the way, with its beautiful white plumes of steam or smoke that warm the earth. The beach that I’m sitting at is called Dead Duck Beach. It’s misty again today, with a determined but thwarted sun leaving a splotch of brightness on the water, which is salty, because the Piscataqua is a tidal river. About a hundred yards from me a little boy wearing a bright red vest is throwing handfuls of sand into the water and calling out things I can’t hear.

I had one of the worst nights of my life last night. I went to dinner at my sister’s house and was amazed all over again by her two tall grown children. I looked at them and thought, I should have been a better uncle to these two extraordinary children. My sister never asks me about the money that I owe her. I owe her money from when I was working on the anthology. I’ve got to pay her back.

Fortunately she’s got a new husband who has lots of money because he was a patent lawyer in Washington for many years. He said he stopped patent lawyering because the system had become hopelessly corrupt — the patent office was interested in making billions in fees by issuing as many patents as possible, and the lawyers wanted ambiguities and mistakes in the patents granted so that they could bring infringement suits against one another. Also his eyes were bad and he didn’t want to stare at the computer screen all day looking at scanned versions of old patents.

I was sad to learn that the patent office was corrupt, and I ate too much of the eggplant tapenade I brought as a present and was poisoned by the garlic, and when I got home to bed five thousand unrelated thoughts traipsed through my brain and I worried about Roz and grieved over not having a child and got almost no sleep. Finally I went down to the kitchen and smoked a Fausto and made a dance loop and a serviceable chorus that went, in a ZZ Top sort of accent, “Take a ride in my boat.” I went to bed at five a.m. and I woke up and coughed a lot. I decided that I would go to the convenience store to get some cough drops. Honk for assistance. While I was unwrapping a cough drop I remembered something Roz always used to say before she went out for a shop at the supermarket. She’d say, in a hopeful, cheery, loving voice, “Anything you need at the store that I don’t know about?” The memory of her voice skewered clean through me and I thought, This is ridiculous. I know Roz. I know that woman. I know everything about her. She knows everything about me. We’ve lived together. We’ve been canoeing together. We’ve watched large basking toads jump off a sunlit branch on the river as we floated by. This doctor she’s dating now hardly knows her. He hasn’t been canoeing with her. He’s no good for her. It’s as simple as that. Tony Hoagland indeed.