Джон Макдональд - S*E*V*E*N

“One time I am just listening, trying to figure out a route, and I get a burr in the pickup, he sounds like a rusty baritone sax. So all of a sudden I’ve got it! A new approach to the whole schmear. I am going to call it Duet. Remember Snake? What he can do with that clarinet when he’s on just the right amount of pot? I put together the best hunks of all the quarrels, made forty minutes of it, then got Snake up to listen. He dug it twice through, and then the third time around he got the idea of how to do it, and I had him play right with her each time she talked, and recorded it on an empty track. Man, he did that crying part at the end just perfect! Snake dug up a type named Walker, who needed gin instead of pot to warm up, and Walker did the playwright lines on an English horn.

“Noonan, it took me three weeks of work to get that thing mixed and retaped and edited and smoothed out just the way I wanted it. Duet, a tone poem for voice, clarinet, and English horn in three movements. First movement I started with straight voice, Ellie and Geoffrey chewing on each other, and I faded him out and brought up the horn to take over for him. Walker made that horn bleat and moan and grumble just like the playwright. Second movement, voices again, but with her fading out and the clarinet coming up to take over for her. The third and last was the great one. I faded both voices out and it turned into an instrumental duet, and in the last five minutes I’d bring in him instead of the horn, and then her instead of the clarinet, and I found a way to wind it up just right. I had one place where she said, close to tears, ‘Why do you hate me so?’ So I put that on repeat, and when she said it the third time I mixed in the clarinet for that same phrase. Three together, and I faded them just a little bit and brought him up, saying, ‘You’ve never understood me.’ I had that on repeat, and they took exactly the same time, so I overlapped for a counterpoint effect, brought up the horn to go along with him and then — get this — I mixed the clarinet with his line, and the horn with hers, and brought up the gain to all the tape would take, and suddenly chopped it off into dead silence, and, man, it would make for the blood to run cold indeed.

“Noonan, everybody was nuts about it. But you know what the real test had to be. Sure. So one night I nailed them in the playwright’s pad and said I had something they should hear on tape, and when they were trying to brush me, I said they were on the tape, so she turned pale and he tinned red and they let me set up my good portable I built most of and bring in two of the speakers Marty built for me that time, and I set it up and kicked off. They were on the couch. The first couple of minutes he kept trying to jump up, yelling about suing and invasion and degenerates, but she’d hush him and yank him back and listen with her head sideways and her eyes narrow and her lips sucked white.

“They got real still, and all of a sudden after about the first two minutes of the straight instrumental duet, the little bird threw her head back and she started roaring with laughter. It was the biggest, gutsiest, happiest laugh you ever heard come out of a little bird like Ellie. Then he was trying to shush her, and he couldn’t and he missed the end because he went running out and banged the door behind him. The end broke her up the rest of the way. She laughed so hard she cried. Not hysteria. The other kind of laugh-cry. Me too. Laughed until we hurt. She doesn’t call it the time we laughed. She calls it The Cure. Once you laugh that hard with a bird, Noonan, all you can do is marry it. Which I did.”

“What, what, what?” I said.

“The beard got smaller the more she kept putting on buttons instead of string, so it’s gone all the way. Man, we laugh a lot. Ellie and me, it’s all a swinging place for us. We start to fuss some, and either she says, ‘Why do you hate me so?’ or I say, ‘You’ve never understood me,’ and then we both say ‘Poor Geoffrey,’ and we laugh.”

We stood up, and I had given up on him. Crazy Kaberrian was no more. This was a happy, laughing sales-talk clerk, buttoned up and bird-happy, like nobody could have guessed would be his future. He asked me how things were at Columbia, and I said I was auditing the Oriental Religions thing again, the same course Kaberrian and I had audited maybe seven years ago together, which is how we met. I said they had changed it a little, but it was still stimulating.

So I asked him if I could maybe stop by his place if he’d give me the address, and I would like to hear that tape. The last masterwork of Kaberrian.

“Oh, one night a month ago I got up in the middle of the night and I dug it out and put it on the box and erased it clean.”

“Why, why, why?”

“In it my Ellie too many times is telling that clown how much she loves him, when she found out later love is something a lot different. We both found out, man.”

I sighed. Shook the head. Stuck my hand in the Buckley pocket and rubbed his head a little. “Maybe it could have made a fortune, you crazy Kaberrian.”

“A fortune!” he said. “Off Ellie, like that way?” His eyes looked like the Kaberrian of old, the one who expressed revolt one time by running onto the “Today Show” when it was live and holding up in front of Lescoulie a sign saying “Fink Capitalist Stoolie.” Kaberrian’s eyes had that old gleam. “Noonan, you fink off your way, and I’ll fink off my way.”

Off he went. That’s the last we’ll ever see of him. Who’s going to keep up the good old traditions if we keep on losing the Kaberrians one at a time? Who can laugh in a world like this one?

When the diffused brightness of direct sunlight no longer made a blue green glow through the closed draperies in front of the sliding glass that opened onto the beach-front bedroom terrace, Mr. Aldo Bellinger got up from the broad bed and padded naked across the thick tufted pile of the aqua rug and parted the draperies a few inches and looked out. The sun had slid below the Caribbean horizon, and the sea lay gentle against the broad beach of the island.

He thumbed the latch down, slid the door aside enough to step out onto the walled, second-story terrace, and closed the opening behind him, the draperies falling back into place.

A small wind came out of the west, not enough to raise surf, but enough to bring the sea scent, and the slap and sigh of the small waves, adrift on the thick moist tropic air. The darkening room behind him was all cool blue-and-green hush of ducted air from the faraway compressors and fans.

He leaned forearms on the broad top of the four-foot wall, big brown hands loosely clasped, and looked out at the coarse brown sand of the wide beach, at the shadings of the sea, green over the shallows, a deepening cobalt over the deeps. Far out, a pod of bait sparkled and thrashed, ripped from below by the savage rush of toothy predators, harassed from above by the circling, diving, squalling terns, their excited playground voices just audible over the soft sounds of small waves.

You put the package together, he thought, and it is never quite equal to the original vision. But this Club de Playa comes as close as any of them. Construction compromises, the result of haste, rising costs, availability, always degrade the concept. Such as the construction of the terrace wall on which he leaned. White pierced decorative block, a commercial pattern instead of the custom design that made the architectural rendering so handsome. And so, from now on, the Club de Playa would be graced by the tiresome vulgarity of the fleur de lis pattern in alternate blocks in all the walls of all the apartment terraces.