He Could Give Insomnia To Rip Van Winkle

Fairfield-ish-

Plink.  Plonk. rumble, rumble.  He awoke to his least favorite sound.  Her practicing piano.  Or worse, she was just plunking away.  She had no sense of rhythm.  Terrible at sight reading.  And he could never figure out how to get her to sing the right notes instead of the wrong notes.  

6:15 AM, said the clock radio by the bed.

She begged him to teach her piano.  She wanted to play Chopin, while he could barely get her to plunk out “Twinkle, Twinkle”.  Plus, she never practiced.  Except early in the mornings, like now.

Now, here she was.  One note at a time.  Then, worse, 3 in some repeated sequence.  Starting over and over again, the fourth going up or down-completely lost.  A driver who can’t make a three point turn and has to go back and forth endlessly.  A thirteen . . . 40 point turn.  Every time they woke up in each others' arms, she would be singing in her sleep. Then when she awoke, she'd tell him some rambling stories about music in her head and desperately wanting a way to transcribe it.  How it was in her brain right before she woke up. All the world needed was more terrible music, but still, he’d give as many lessons as her tolerance could take, which wasn’t much.

The empty house they were in belonged to some friends who were in process of moving.  Plenty of bare space in the house, but all the artwork was still up.  Abstract fingerpaints of their three year old and a curious pencil drawing of a mother and baby.  Head at her breast, the crucial element of nursing lost to a lack of courage.  The curve of breast and nipple he kept looking for was obscured in a eager act of shading.  The woman’s fingers were repeated, practiced in different sizes.  Floating detached, by her head, and somehow enlarged among the folds of the baby blanket.  The hand holding the actual baby was better for this practice, and looked strangely familiar to him.  Elongated and slightly rectangular, he remembered holding them and maybe them holding him.  Maybe being tickled by them.  Haunting,ghost fingers.  The face held nothing for him, a focused stare at the child, maybe even a frown.  He should try to ask about the sketch before he left, or maybe in a quick note he’d leave with the keys.  In the mailbox or under the mat, or under the first rock to the left of the walkway.  Damn, he could never remember which. He was happy to have earned enough trust to borrow friends’ empty houses, where all he had to do was to make sure they weren’t locked out.  Why were those little things so awful for him to keep track of? Why was everything getting to be too hard for him to remember?

8:45AM  He rolled over and fell out of bed, into an empty house.  The cupboards were empty, but he found some yogurt and stale cereal, that he ate with a fork because the only two spoons he could find were in the sink.  He wandered over to the piano and played the three bars that were scribbled on some note paper.  The staff was hand drawn and the lines weren’t exactly parallel.  “Marching band, drums, flutes and saxophone” was the only title.  He added a chord or two and began fiddling around with it.

She walked in through the screen door in the back with a handful of wildflowers.  She wandered over and began talking.  

“Meadows,” he heard.

“A deer running,” he heard.

“Get packing before noon,” he heard.  Finally, he couldn’t deal with her interruptions anymore.

“Look, I'm working. I found this thing.  Melvin must’ve been scribbled before he left . . .”

“That’s me.  I woke up this morning with this tune stuck in my head and . . .”

“YOU did this?”  It suddenly hit him that these repeated notes had disturbed his dreams just a few hours before.  He played the first notes slowly.  Did it strike him because he had just heard it?   Or because it was the beginning of a new song that was instantly familiar to him.  The few hits he had worked on (and admittedly some other bombs) all appeared to him as something instantly recognizable.  As if his soul was listening to its future.

He believed in Buddhism, sometimes genuinely and deeply and sometimes only superficially.  Because he was always feeling some form of dejavu, he had always naturally assumed that he had been reincarnated.  As himself!  Maybe others started as animals, but he was gifted & doomed to repeat this exact life over and over again, until he got it right.  

She kept talking, and he kept not listening.  Until one word got through to him.  

“Coffee?”

“Yes. Coffee.”  He was going to be there until the song was finished.  And he was already almost done.

8:49PM

"Now, I’d like to introduce a song I just wrote.  Um, we just wrote. You don’t mind sitting this one out, do you? Nothing like an audience to test out new material!"

She was a little startled.  They didn’t rehearse this.  He didn’t rehearse this, she had no idea what to expect.  The front row was empty, as were most of the rows, so she just shrugged and sat down.  The more he described how easily the song flowed, the more she became uneasy.  It was gonna be HER song.  And then, right before she was ready to storm out (especially if it was good, and she was afraid it was going to be heartachingly beautiful) he stopped and pointed to her.  “It’s her song, I’m just here to deliver it.  It’s called ‘The Dutchess’”

He then broke into an unfamiliar intro.  She kept listening for her notes, the song that she had dreamt of. He had woven it into something else. Some romantic story which sounded too familiar to her.  A man with eyes as blue as the sky.  Or broken blue bottles held up to the light.  How he was from the Netherlands, which was wide open for a pun about both Hades and sexual nether regions.   The girl who loved him didn’t want to be a queen or have riches.  She only wanted him.  And thus, by marrying a Dutch man, would naturally be granted the title of “Dutchess”.   The song was conscious of its self-consciousness.  Childhood dreams and their funny echoes in adult life.  A story she had told them when they were crossing the plains of Iowa.

Plus it was catchy. The piece that she had dreamt was the intro came in as the refrain, which surprised her. Catchier than she had suspected. And easy on his throat; he could mostly whisper-sing the whole thing, except a few places which were still in his comfortable range.  

It absolutely made her cry.

In their regular set of songs, it gradually displaced another favorite of his, not a hit, but something he had labored over endlessly in the studio in 1973.  The one that she had tried to discourage him from.  He left both songs in their act for a while, until his voiced cracked on the old one.  He never sang it again.

Her song became their best number. The first single off their album (the only one to make any traction). Even the reviewers stopped complaining about his "ruined" voice and began using words like "mellow genius" to describe him.

Rumble by Betty Hutton (written by Frank Loesser)