Rick Moody: Right Livelihoods

“Dr. Van Deusen,” the woman began, and again I could hear a hectoring tone creeping into her pleasantries, as when she next said something about the constable. Frankly, I didn’t appreciate her point of view. I’ve spoken with the constable on any number of occasions; for example, about the need for better policing at the ferry dock, about the unfortunate tendency of joyriders to speed down the main road to the country club. I’ve even advised him to detain certain young people who were frolicking dangerously in their convertibles. I also knew that the constable, whose position was largely honorary, had fiscal problems of his own and would not be drawn into any controversy having to do with this unhappy woman’s loggia, nor with my ongoing desire to do reconnaissance on the loggias of my town.

Since I would not be talked down to, there was nothing to do but seize the copy of Omega Force: Code White and say farewell to the loggia and its commodious chaise longue. I pulled my polo shirt over my head, briefly getting this shirt caught on my spectacles, and I headed down the winding path to beachside. Did the woman call to me about whether I needed a towel? I believe she did. She asked if I needed a towel, and I believe that I specified that I liked plush towels. If there is one thing I cannot stand it is the thin white towel. I called behind me that I would accept a towel as long as it was large, plush, preferably navy blue, and if she could also bring a beverage, that would be welcome, maybe a screwdriver with a twist; I would be grateful for these additional gifts, and if it suited her, she could meet me on the beach, where the waves were rather disappointing for the commencement of autumn, which is, after all, hurricane season. In autumn, you expect some of the finest waves of the year.

Did I overlook to mention what kind of doctor I am? I am a doctor of public policy. I received my doctorate from Georgetown in the early sixties, and in this way it was not required that I serve in a certain Asian police action, though I would gladly have served, because I believe in making sacrifices for noble ideals. There were other impediments that might have made military service impossible, however. I was married, of course, and my wife, who, as I say, prefers that I not use her real name in this account, was in social work and could not be counted on to be a wage earner. Furthermore, our son, Skip, of whom I am enormously fond, had some developmental problems. Skip has spent most of his life living at home with us. So I earned my doctorate, and in the sixties I went on to become an American civil servant. This was my way of giving back to the community, working my way up the ranks in the cabinet-level department known as Health, Education and Welfare. It’s fair to say that this was not considered a proper job among the men of my family, most of whom went into business. I was good at Latin, I could do a geometry proof like I was born to it, but I was less gifted when it came to reading an earnings statement.

And now what I mean to discuss is the current national security climate.

2. The Dance of the Stick

Well, first, let me just add that though I am the last son of an estimable family, one ought not conclude that I am the least of the scions of the Van Deusen mattress fortune. Someone has to be from a mattress family, and so I am, as are my brothers, most of them now passed on to some eternal Van Deusen repose. Though I am the last son and didn’t go into the family business, I loved my brothers, and I loved the business. I inherited my share when we sold out to a larger competitor, and this inheritance enabled me and my wife to care properly for our son, Skip, and to live in the style to which we were accustomed. The inheritance also enabled me to retire from my deputy directorate in the cabinet-level agency to which I gave thirty-five years of agreeable service. My wife has had a lot of trouble with her feet in the last few years, but she can still swing a mean forehand when she needs to. She makes her shots.

We have a problem with the beaches on the island, occasionally, and that problem is that when the tide is low in late summer or early autumn, there is a sudden influx of the weedy vegetables of the sea. The day I’m describing was no exception. You could see the effluvia cresting in the anemic waves lapping at the shore. A distant retriever, however, was not deterred from chasing after a bleached stick on South Beach. I was a little uncertain about whether or not I would be plunging in, as I’d foolishly boasted I would to the woman on whose loggia I had just passed a few hours.

However, the retriever reminded me of a pastime that sometimes overcomes me when I am full of the enthusiasms of my dotage. This report will indicate that occasionally I do need to conduct the entire world. That is correct. Like most men of taste and discernment, especially those who were born before the ascendance of the idiocy known as popular music, I love the classics, and what I especially like is orchestral music. I love when the winds and the brass soar above the heartrending pathos of the strings. I love the éclat of the percussion section. When I hear such things I cannot but begin to conduct the music, and my phonographic recall is such that in my ears, when the wind is right and the elements are sweet and beguiling, I can feel the music, I can feel the 1812 Overture of Tchaikovsky, I can feel “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” I can feel the symphonies of Mahler and Beethoven. Yes, Beethoven. How is it that the music of this deaf syphilitic was so perfectly calibrated to elevate the heart of a tired former civil servant? I do not know. I know only that sometimes I am made to dance the Dance of the Stick, and no stick is better than the parched, whitewashed sticks that wash up on our beaches. On the day in question, I saw the sticks, as in the case of the stick that the aforementioned retriever chased, and I fetched up one of the sticks myself, and immediately I was indicating the accents that began the Tchaikovsky piece mentioned above. I had shed every garment now but my shorts, my socks, and my shoes. I had displaced even my spectacles, I’d tossed them all into the sea, and I had begun my Dance of the Stick as the strings began to swell, and the French troops began to advance on Saint Petersburg, or wherever it was they were advancing. What a day!

Occasionally, I like to lick the stick before I begin to use it. It is important to sample its salty surface, just as I imagine the great scribes of the past, the epic poets, needed to lick their quills or their pencil leads before beginning to compose. I lick the stick before I perform, and if the taste does not meet with my favor, I select another, though I do not throw away the first, I set the first aside in preparation for the Dance of the Stick, because it may happen that this first stick is actually the perfect stick, and I do not know yet because I have not taste-tested my new stick against the other. The sticks, on any given day, form a community of sticks, and it is important to understand them as part of a great forest of potential batons for my stick dance. Did Toscanini not select the baton of his craft with equal care? I believe he did. He kept it in a mahogany case. And so, on this morning, I gathered up the rejected sticks, and I stacked them in a sort of a tepee shape, as if I were going to have a bonfire with them, as indeed I might well have done, because if it was necessary that I stay out there on the beach for a few hours, then survival might require that I kindle up a roaring good fire to warm myself. I was not yet to that point. I was at the beginning of the stick dance. I was feeling in myself the skewering motion that indicates the entrance of the woodwinds. The happy lives of the Russian serfs are suggested in the passage, but then the skewering motion makes undeniable the gravity of martial conflict, in this initial phase of the stick dance. That is, even though those familiar with the score will recognize my Terpsichore as indicative of an adagio passage, I skipped ahead through some of the pastoral measures, the better to reach the section of the overture in which the cannons begin their fusillade.