Ivories (Excerpt)

[copyright and so on, and so on, by John E. Simpson]

If his wife, Dr. Janet Margulies Brown-Winder the Late-Night Loneliness Doctor, had simply said, “I need a change, Larry, bad,” then Larry would have listened, maybe even provided her the change she wanted. If she had only, say, brought home from the Animal Shelter a wheezing, ailing chihuahua, then Larry might have recognized the signs. If she’d taken to renting movies about beautiful women in unappealing circumstances; if she’d staggered into bed reeking of cigar smoke and gasoline, her cheeks rubbed raw by friction against another more manly man’s overalls; if she’d redecorated the guest room on the sly, tearing down the paneling and covering the walls with primary-colored dancing-clown wallpaper… well, Larry wouldn’t have understood, exactly. But he’d have worked it out with her.

She hadn’t done any of that, though. Instead, she’d bought the piano. Now he would have to kill her.

—-

That Friday, an eternity-seeming three weeks ago, he had expected nothing out of the ordinary.

Janet had come to bed at her usual 4:30 to 5:00 a.m., having just gotten home from her one-hour weeknightly broadcast — some such godforsaken time, hours after Larry himself had conked out after reading in bed the latest draft of the most recent chapter of his current (and seventh) mystery-novel-in-progress.

He considered them all current and all in progress, since he hadn’t finished any of them to his satisfaction. (It was true that six had been published and sold reasonably well, the royalties having grown to a point where he’d been able to quit that dreadful job teaching mathematics to unappreciative seventh- and eighth-graders at a local private school. Nonetheless, none of the books ever seemed quite done to him; for the last, he’d flown out the door as the postman was driving away from the mailbox with the galleys and run down the long, winding tree-lined road yelling, “Wait! Stop!” until the unobservant and/or uncaring idiot at the wheel had accelerated well out of reach of Larry’s 44-year-old stamina.) The chapter he was working on then — number 12 of a projected 30 — was particularly problematical, because Elias Root, the suave nineteenth-century investigator who figured in all of Larry’s books and from whose first-person point-of-view they were all narrated, had in this draft suddenly (to Larry’s great astonishment) stepped into the path of a runaway cabriolet in Saratoga Springs and died of the resulting injuries. It was a finely-crafted chapter, with some of the best writing Larry had ever done — the moment in which Marnie, the simpering potential love interest, had dismounted the carriage, all a-tremble, and stood weeping over Root’s immaculately-dressed but wheel-grooved body, was particularly moving — but it was wrong, not least because there was simply no way that a dead Root could possibly be describing Marnie’s reaction. And he couldn’t lose Root now. Maybe in five or ten years’ time, when he and Root had come heartily to loathe each others’ idiosyncrasies and work habits. But not now. Root hadn’t even met the killer yet, although Larry had finally gotten the detective to Philadelphia.

So he’d conked out that night, tumbled into a sleep troubled by the prospect of eighteen chapters to go sans protagonist. In his dream he was lost in a bookstore whose wares were missing every other page. Then Janet had slipped into bed beside him.

In the last few months Larry had grown morbidly phobic at thought of Janet’s — or anyone’s — standing over him while he slept. Maybe he’d been writing for too long of nocturnal homicide. He had even toyed with the idea that one of Root’s adventures should take place in Alaska, during the season when the sun didn’t go down at all.

But on this night, exhausted with worry about the sudden evaporation of sixty per cent of the plot of Root to All Evil (the working title), he was soundly, profoundly, non-phobically asleep when Janet got into bed, turned out her dim headboard light, rolled over to face him, murmured, “‘Night Larry,” and draped one arm across his chest.

Startled, bloodstream suddenly a-jump with adrenaline, he came at once to a full (albeit confused) awakeness. His eyes flew open, and he half-sat up. “What? What?” he said, too loudly, and added more softly, self-control returning, “What is it? Is everything all right?” He switched on the lamp on his bedside table. The lamp had been a gift from his publisher (the occasion: a mostly favorable notice, in the Times Book Review, of book number five — Root Root Root for the Home Team, in which Abner Doubleday played a walk-on role); its base was a bust of what his editor imagined to be Elias Root, but the representation was almost completely wrong, to Larry’s way of thinking — Root’s face was angular and craggy, that was true, but the lamp’s forehead bulged hydrocephalically and its moustache, drooping in a roguish, un-Rootlike manner, would have certainly interfered with the characteristic now-left-now-right twitching of Root’s characteristic unlit cigarillo. The switch was a six-inch length of chain suspended from the bust’s left earlobe, and made Root resemble a gypsy more than an urbane man-about-Boston. And of course the shade, those tassels—-

“Shh,” Janet said. “Shh. Everything’s all right, yes. Go back to sleep. Turn out the light.” Her black hair, streaked with what she had once called (to Larry’s great envy) “the early hoarfrost of middle age,” was arrayed on the white pillow around her head. She was frowning, her eyes squeezed shut against the light, and Larry thought of Elsa Lanchester as the bride of Frankenstein. Unfair, of course. Actually Janet was a ravishingly handsome woman, the same age as Larry himself but in much better physical condition, with heroic cheekbones and a long neck that made Larry practically swoon when stretched to its full length, as it was now.

Admiring the neck, he didn’t turn out the lamp right away, but propped himself up on one elbow. “How’d the show go tonight?”

Her frown deepened. “Went fine. Turn out the light please.”

“No nuts call in tonight?”

She opened one eye, augering a gaze through Larry’s forehead. “No nuts. Just the usual. Teenagers with broken hearts whispering into the living-room phone. A barfly wondering if I’d like to join him at Eddie’s Place. Well, there was one woman—-”

“Aha. A nut, right?”

“No, not really a nut. She was just afraid—-”

“Aha. Afraid. A stalking boyfriend.”

“No. A husband who wouldn’t turn out his bedroom light and she was afraid she would have to kill him.”

Grunting, Larry dropped to the pillow, reached over his shoulder and yanked on Elias Root’s pendant earring. “All right, all right, I gotcha. Good night. Love you.”

“Love you too, Lar. Thank you for turning out the light. I really didn’t want to kill you.”

He grunted again and shut his eyes, falling almost immediately back into tumbling dreams of worriment and futility: mountains of glass beads beneath his feet, pursuit by faceless assailants, a weird skritch-skritch-skratching of something going around and around and around, at first bothering the hell out of his dreamself, then frightening him a little with its mindless persistence, and finally numbing him, numbing him, numbing him….

—-

The piano arrived at about ten that morning, Friday, just as Larry was finishing his third cup of coffee and trying to talk himself into his study-slash-office, where Elias Root’s corpse (to say nothing of Root to All Evil‘s) would start to decompose if Larry didn’t do something fast. The last time he had checked on her, Janet was still asleep, of course — Larry himself would still be asleep if he’d had to live with her schedule — the pillow clutched with both arms over her face.

Maybe Root’s not really dead, Larry was thinking, without much conviction. For how could he not be dead? The man had no pulse; the man’s torso had been practically cut in half; the quizzical arch of the man’s eyebrows was neatly keystoned by a hoofprint. Larry had already considered several desperate, implausible alternatives (such as that Root only dies a near-death, he comes back to life in the morgue and after a harrowing life-after-life encounter with his own body suddenly sits up and announces that he knows what has happened to Jessica Montcalme, the presumed fourth victim although her body has yet to be found; such as that Root dies but is revived by a dolefully slobbering kiss from the beauteous Marnie, who then nurses him back to full health over a period of weeks during which she does all his investigative legwork for him; or such as that Root revives himself yogically, his wounds sealing shut before the wondering eyes of a crowd of bystanders, several of whom to Root’s great cynical amusement are seen crossing themselves) — but they were all almost as unwieldy and inconvenient as Root’s dying in the first place, requiring the introduction of too many new loose and perhaps fatal ends.

Wait, he thought, suddenly inspired: Marnie. She had already been characterized in earlier chapters as something of a free-thinker, a spiritualist and follower of Madame Blavatsky’s kooky mentor Jakob Eisenfreud. Perhaps the whole scene was imagined, a hallucinatory by-product of her experiments with absinthe and certain opiate products which—-

The knock at the door coincided with Larry’s leaping from the table, bound for the office. He considered ignoring it but there was only the one route to the office from the breakfast nook: past the large picture window through which anyone on the front porch would be certain to see him sneaking by. The hell with it. Probably just a door-to-door solicitor, Jehovah’s Witness, paperboy. Dispense with the interruption with a snarl and get to work, won’t waste any more than five minutes….

It wasn’t a door-to-door solicitor but a stout, swarthy workman whose unlikely name, appliquéd on the pocket of his sweat-tanned white shirt, was Skipper.

“Mr. Brown-Winder?” Skipper asked.

“Er, yes,” Larry replied, looking in puzzlement over Skipper’s shoulder at the enormous white moving van in the driveway. “Actually I’m only Mr. Winder, my wife is, she can’t come to the door at the moment….”

“No problem, you’ll do. Got your piano.”

“Piano?”

But Skipper had already turned and hurried to the van, where he was met by a short muscular guy with a receding hairline and Bluto-like arms who had nearly succeeded in wrestling the enormous instrument from the truck on his own. As they wheeled it up the walk Larry, his mind popping and hissing with consternation, saw that it was an upright. Used, from the look of the battered wood finish….

But they hadn’t ordered a piano! — and Larry said as much to Skipper.

“Sorry Mr. Brown-Winder,” the delivery man replied unapologetically as he handed Larry the bill of lading to sign. “Got your wife’s name and address right there. You want to have it out with her, fine, but we got a job to do.”

As the van backed from the driveway fifteen minutes later, its dyspeptic innards roaring thunderously, the piano sat in the center of the living-room floor where Skipper and the balding, anonymous primate had left it, the dhurrie rug furrowed (like a bemused brow) beneath its ebon weight. The long hinged lid over the keyboard was missing a foot-long strip down at the right end; through the hole, Larry could see the jaundice of aged ivory. He circled the thing warily, nervously patting his thinning hair, putting his hands into and removing them from his pockets, pulling first at one earlobe and then the other.

Had they ordered a piano? Had Janet proposed it over dinner one night when Larry was preoccupied with some warp in the fabric of Root to All Evil? He could readily, and guiltily, imagine such a conversation, buried deep and invisible in a tomb of semi-commiserative grumblings about the unpleasant rigors of their respective workdays. He could imagine Janet off on yet another tight-lipped discourse about Wayne, the station manager, her temples going almost audibly boom-ba-boom-ba-boom as Larry’s mind wandered but he offered unthinking sympathy, Mmm-hmm, oh no, not again? What is it with that guy? and then after a pause Janet would have suddenly announced her intention of taking piano lessons, to which he would have replied, Hmm? oh a great idea, yes, absolutely, nodding his head vigorously to emphasize the depth of his concurrence but all the while thinking, say, Now Marnie and Root: is it too soon to introduce anything between them? Is there anything between them?

Yes, such a scenario was possible. He looked down at the combination invoice and bill of lading. Janet had forked over to one Lionel Hyppolite (the instrument’s presumptive former owner) by check, #1066, the sum of $497 and 00 cents. Three days ago, Tuesday.

But how could she? They’d only known each other for a few years, been married for two, but surely she knew (Larry had told her, hadn’t he? or had he?) that he hated pianos–

No, “hated” wasn’t nearly strong enough. Hated, and feared. His ears were in fact almost pathologically sensitive to the dinks and bonks of the black-and-white keys. They felt agonizingly like pinpricks of his eardrums; honky-tonk, jazz, New Age or classical, the music itself made no difference: it was the sound that hurt. When he was in first grade, driven wailing from the classroom by his music teacher’s pounding on the keyboard, the school nurse and, later that day, his family doctor didn’t get it. Old Doc Smallwood had referred little Larry to an ENT specialist, a woman with the unpromising name Doctor F. (for Francine) Clef. She’d blown compressed air into his ear canals, scanned his brain, checked for allergies, tested his responses to a frighteningly comprehensive array of tuning forks that could have passed for surplus from Nazi medical experiments, taken X-rays of his sinus cavities, sat him in a soundproof booth for a half-hour’s headphoned exposure to hums, squeaks, and boops. None of which had yielded any intelligence more riveting than that he had an unexplained problem specifically with piano music, which was what they’d all known when he walked in. (Not coincidentally, Elias Root shared his creator’s odd malady — a fact ruthlessly exploited three books ago, in Rooted Out, by the detective’s brilliant nemesis Dr. Alfred Wetherington, who had bound Root to a chair and locked him in a room immediately above a roadhouse saloon. Thank God the Chinaman had shown up when he had.)

Fretfully, Larry placed the bill of lading neatly on the shelf where the sheet music was to stand. That was when he noticed behind the shelf the double sliding doors in the face of the piano. He slid open first one door, then the other.

A player piano. Well, that torpedoed the Janet-wants-to-take-lessons scenario; if she wanted to learn how to play the piano, why get one that plays itself?

He folded up the piece of paper on which his wife was united with Lionel Hyppolite forever, or at least until Larry could talk her into unloading the piano on the next luckless link in the Great Chain of Being. On an inspiration, he put the invoice behind the doors, spooled it a little way onto the rollers of the playing mechanism, closed the doors over his handiwork, and moved on into the office to administer the requisite repairs to his mystery and, especially, to await the noon-ish arising of his suddenly musical spouse.

—-

An hour and change later, Janet was still not up and Larry himself had gotten no further than some dithering quote-unquote research into the nature of laudanum’s effects on the imagination. More precisely, he had begun the research but so far cracked open only a single lightweight reference, the Oxford Companion to the Mind. He’d started with a middling-length article on opium, progressed from that to “addiction,” trolled back and forth before, en route to “hallucination,” being brought up short by nearly four columns of text headed HANDEDNESS. That worried him. Root was left-handed, wasn’t he? Surely Larry had explicitly mentioned it somewhere (most likely in Number Two, Square Root, in which he had drawn on several of his old graduate textbooks on topology to devise a maze of fiendishly complex geometry whose solution depended entirely on one’s handedness — but he couldn’t be sure, since Root himself had not solved the maze but instead entrusted it to whatzisname, Arno Something, the alcoholic bookseller whose passion for champagne was matched only by his love of Lewis Carroll-style logic puzzles). Of course he didn’t really need to know the answer at this very minute but he was nonetheless just getting up from his writing table to rummage through the entire Root series to date, if need be, when a dry voice spoke behind him.

“Left,” the voice said, snapping like a twig. “Left-handed.”

Larry whirled in the direction of the voice but there was no one there, in fact no thing except the closet. Someone was in the closet? But the closet had no room for a person, no room for anything at all except the binders in which Larry had scrupulously filed all his first drafts and final manuscripts (having shredded all the rococo variations in between, let scholars of the future moan how they may) when returned by the publisher. Not really a closet at all for that matter, just an enclosed bookshelf—-

“As I said, ‘left.’ Does that help?”

Yes, no mistaking it. The voice was coming from inside the closet. His mind awash with nightmare visions of gremlins, of elfin burglars, of talking rats who’d nested in the walls of the closet and somehow, crazily, absorbed from the pages the power of human language, Larry reached behind him to the writing table, groped about for the pair of scissors that lay there, and reached for the closet’s doorknob.

As he did so, the surface of the closet door seemed to bulge briefly outward, shimmered like a mirage, and suddenly there stood before him an aqueous figure which Larry could describe to himself only as that of Elias Root.

It was hard to tell for sure because the figure was after all transparent; Larry doubted that he could have seen it at all had he not already been looking in that direction, and its “visibility” consisted entirely of random glints and sparkles of reflected light playing across its surface as it moved. The figure placed its hands disgustedly on its hips — how often Larry had described just such a pose! — and a faint, horizontal line crossed from the left half of its mouth to the right. Something about the mouth wasn’t quite right, actually indeed rather wrong, but it was probably just a trick of the figure’s spectral flickering—-

“Sir,” it said, “does the cat have your tongue?”

Larry gasped, staggered backwards, dropped the scissors.

The Root-figure chuckled, the rasping of dry leaves. “I’d pick them up for you but given my manner of entrance through the door, logic dictates that I shan’t be able to interact with the physical reality of your world at all, doesn’t it? On the other hand I am standing upon your carpet, am I not? What is one to make of this paradox?”

“Root?” Larry was finally able to get out. “Elias Root? Is it you, but you– ?”

With another twitch of the cigarillo, Root shimmered over to the leather armchair by the window and sat down, crossing his legs. The leather of the chair’s seat did not yield at all beneath him. He removed the cigarillo from his mouth, stabbed it first in Larry’s direction and then at the chair by the writing table. “Off the top of my head, Lawrence, I rather think it would be best for us both if you’d just have a seat.”

Larry sat as instructed, numbly, his thoughts like a mob in a smoky auditorium, groping for the exits and stepping on and over one another in their panic. This can’t be Root, one thought insisted, Root is a fictional character and at that, not a ghost! But another thought, a couple of rows over, shouted the reply Banquo! Think of Banquo! over and over until yet a third thought tired of having the name yelled pretentiously into its ear and clubbed the offender into silence. But see here, said another thought, trying without much success to inject a calm note into the fracas, this “ghost” isn’t injured in the slightest! Where are the carriage tracks, the hoofprint—

He must have spoken aloud, for Root sighed, replaced the cheroot in his mouth, and said, “Yaaas, you know I’m not sure I understand that quite myself at this juncture.” He chuckled again. “Rather a nasty way for you to have disposed of me, Lawrence.”

“I didn’t, that is I didn’t mean, in fact I was trying to undo–”

“Yaaas,” said Root again, drawing out the affirmative just the way Larry had always heard it in his own thoughts, “I know. Trying to undo that which has been done. Life isn’t always quite so neat though, is it? The thug — interesting word, isn’t it? comes from the Hindoo I’m reliably told — the thug has second thoughts, tries to extract the blade from between the victim’s ribs but that only makes it worse, blood everywhere now, blood spouting all over the scene, blood impossible to clean up, everywhere the evidence of his evil handiwork. So yaaas, Lawrence, I understand. But here I am, aren’t I? The admittedly transparent but nevertheless dark sanguinary evidence of your passing, the blood you cannot erase.”

Good Lord, the man actually spoke that way! Larry didn’t know whether to feel appalled or thrillingly vindicated, Root’s “ponderous monologues” (Kirkus Reviews, writing of Rooted Out) having been the object of many a critic’s uncalled-for (and largely, mercifully unheard) carping.

The cigarillo was churning back and forth, like a magician’s glass wand in mid-air. “And so now,” said Root, “what are you planning to do with me now? With the rest of my series, for that matter — our series? I really don’t see, you know, quite dead, so on and so forth. Eh Lawrence?”

Larry’s hands were twisting together in his lap; he shoved them beneath his armpits to calm them; they continued to writhe there, uncomfortably, like giant armored crustaceans. He was about to tell Root of his plan for Marnie’s narcotized delusions, when from the other room came an unmistakable, horribly horribly unmistakable, plonk! “Janet!” he cried, his hands now over his ears, eyes a-squint. He sneaked a peek at Root’s shade; if anything, it looked even more uncomfortable than Larry himself, having dropped to a folded-over posture there in the chair, arms wrapped about its head. Root must not have gotten over the incident over the saloon; interesting, Larry hadn’t even considered that—-

The louvered door to the office swung open and Janet swept in, her ivory-colored dressing gown swirling behind her. Loretta Young swooping onto the stage. “Oh Larry,” Larry could see her lips exulting, “it’s beautiful, I can’t wait….” Then she skidded to a halt, having finally, suddenly absorbed the information that her husband could not possibly hear her happiness, not sitting as he was with a thumb occupying each ear canal. Daylight began to peek through the shadowy bowers of her self-absorption, and she placed a hand over her mouth.

Having made his point, and since she was clearly not going to be playing the piano as long as she was standing there, Larry theatrically removed his thumbs from his ears.

“I’m so sorry, I forgot, oh Larry I’m so sorry baby,” she was saying. “How stupid of me–”

“Well, you know, I did kind of wonder what you were thinking.”

“I told you weeks ago, don’t you remember? We were sitting on the patio that Friday afternoon, you know the one I mean, yes that Friday afternoon” — winking lasciviously — “and I told you I’d seen a piano for sale in the paper, and I said I’d always wanted a piano, even a cheap one, and I asked if we might be able to work around your, you know, your problem, like maybe I could just play it when you were out of the house….”

Larry waved her into silence. So he was right then; she’d brought it up, and he’d agreed to it without the slightest idea what he was agreeing to. He looked out of the corner of his eyes at Root; the figure was still there in the chair, arms folded across his chest and stogie going switch, switch, switch in the oddly flickering mouth, otherwise immobile except for a slight quivering that made him appear to be some kind of overly-diluted Jell-O.

“So now,” Larry began, “what now?”, thinking of Root’s nearly identical words just a moment or two ago. But then from the other room came a skritch-skritch-skratch, as of something going around and around and around, interminably….

“Oh no!” cried Janet, turning on her heels and flying back through the door, “I forgot, I pumped the pedals! Oh no…!”

Skritch, went the bill of lading one last time, and then the scratching noise was succeeded by a horrendous prolonged doooong as the compressed air finally found an escape, then a dooong dong dinka dinka, and finally a series of nervous crazy dunka dinkas as Janet fought somehow to bring the machinery of Hell to a stop.

Larry had fallen from his chair by this point, knelt fetally on the carpet, his hands over his ears, whimpering. He peeked at Root, who was in similarly desperate condition, leaning against the wall, his hands over his ears, panting, panting; finally his glinting transparent eyes flicked to Larry, motioned for him to remove his hands from his ears, and said — his dry dry voice biting off the words and spitting them like flakes of tobacco– “That woman. That woman must definitely go.”