Читать книгу The Devil Likes to Sing - Thomas J. Davis - Страница 6

The devil likes to sing. That surprised me. And he’s funny. Not always a laugh-out-loud funny, but funny nonetheless, a “I know what you’re saying, man” kind of funny. The first time I heard him say “Honest to God,” I looked at him in shock. He gave a sly smile, almost self-deprecating, but not quite, and said, “Ooops.” Then in that angelic tenor voice (if I’d ever thought the devil might sing I’d have imagined him a low-register bass) he sang, “When a man is honest, he’s a liar; but what Satan says, it’s sure as fire; true as earth, strong as iron; the devil, man, he’s no liar.”

He had a million songs like that, but he didn’t really have a songwriter’s gift. He’s more of a cover man. On some of those, he could blow you away, especially on the sad songs. Or Germanic opera—his tenor could make your spine tingle. His favorite was Wagner because of the Ring cycle, especially Siegfried. The devil loves all things related to the Norse vision of the world: tragic, fatalistic, grim.

I never really figured out when he first started to shadow me. I’d felt a presence for a while, like someone stood looking over my shoulder all the time. Then one day he just appeared—and I wasn’t surprised. That was the kicker. It’s almost as if, before that day when he stood (sat, really) before me, I knew he was there. Looking back on it, I should have freaked out. But I didn’t. Even now it seems that that whole period was too normal, wrongfully normal—how can the devil be shadowing your every step and that seem normal? But that’s how it felt.

Our first talk—and the first time I really saw him—came as I had finished 101 Good Things about Labor Day. I know that because Jill had left me just before I completed the book—if you can call it a book—and one of the first things I talked to the devil about was Jill. When people asked how Jill and I split up, I always answered, “Happened over Labor Day.” A private joke.

I’d always wanted to be a serious writer. Friends would laugh and say they’d rather be like me—a rich writer. But what they meant was a rich hack.

I’d spent two years too many pursuing a doctorate in the history of theology. I’d done the course work, pulled through the five killer doctoral examinations, and I’d done all right. But I could never pull off the thesis.

I tried. I even got three chapters finished. But my committee crucified me, so to speak, at the oral examination. At the University of Chicago Divinity School, at least when I was there, the oral came half way through the dissertation to catch any real problems. Apparently my work was problematic. But I kept plugging away for another two years, trying to walk a tightrope for my committee—a rather old-fashioned church historian, a postmodernist (or maybe he was a post-postmodernist; I was never clear on this as I kept my intellectual head firmly buried in the sands of the fourth and fifth centuries), and a feminist theologian. What a committee, with me constantly teetering along on a tightrope, like I was in the middle of a Leon Russell song. What could I have been thinking? I should have known better. And writing on St. Augustine, of all people. God, I was naive!

So, I turned my part-time job into a full-time one: I wrote abstracts for an index to theological periodical literature. I’d grown to love Hyde Park, where the University of Chicago sits, so I stayed, just like so many poor bastards who never finished their PhDs but still loved the idea of being—in an almost mystical sense—an educated person in an educated environment. Or maybe they were just like me—too lazy to move, too ashamed to go back home with nothing to show for seven years of work and tens of thousands of dollars spent.

I met Jill where we worked; she was a librarian by training and a computer specialist by the necessities of employment, meaning that her two courses in computer applications made her the most qualified person in the office to keep the systems up and running. So, through trial and error and too few continuing education events at company cost, she struggled to manage the computer systems we used to put out our product.

We were an odd pair; me from Tennessee, a little town called Harriman, just off I-40. My family, for a couple of generations, worked at the Oak Ridge nuclear facility. I used to hear my grandfathers on both sides of the family joke about what they called the flashlight benefit—that is, they never need to buy flashlights because they all glowed in the dark. The joke lost its punch as one family member after another died of cancer.

Jill came from the Dells area in Wisconsin; her family had made its money catering to tourists. Her mom ran the miniature golf park and her dad ran a fleet of “ducks,” those odd amphibious military vehicles that looked like tanks but could navigate through water as well. Great for a quick survey of the scenery.

Besides being “duck” runners, Jill’s family was Catholic. Nothing wrong with that, but my family had embraced homespun Methodism for several generations, very revival come-to-Jesus oriented. And even though I thought I had moved beyond that type of parochial religion to something broader (I was studying Augustine, after all), I still couldn’t quite swallow the crazy-for-the-saints attitude of her family.

They lived on a hundred acres. I swear, there were more shrines per acre there than any place in Europe during the Middle Ages, that’d be my guess. The substantial money they made went to building little chapels all over their property. Each one was a work of quality, beautifully appointed inside and out, enough room for five or six adults to fit comfortably inside. Each chapel had a kneeler, a place to light candles, and quite good statuettes of the various saints. They had a fortune in shrines.

Jill’s mom, after she retired, held nun day on Mondays and Thursdays, when she’d bring out a cohort of sisters from the local convent and they’d do the chapels, praying the rosary, lighting the candles. That tells you how many of those things they had—it took two full days of hard praying to do all of them, and Jill’s mom thought it a shame to let such nice chapels go for more than a week without being used.

Which is to say, a boy who grew up thinking that all you needed was a heart strangely warmed, as that Methodist saint John Wesley preached, probably shouldn’t count on fitting into that type of religious world.

Jill no longer felt comfortable with her family’s take on true salvation either, and so we were not married in the Church; of course, that meant we were not married at all, in the eyes of Jill’s parents. I was the son of a bitch who caused their daughter to live in mortal sin, so I never made it too high on the “son-in-law’s we’re glad to have” list.

Of course, Jill may have been a bit of a lapsed Catholic, but that didn’t mean she’d put up with some Protestant parading around in a robe doing her wedding. She was still Catholic enough to think that, if it was going to be a religious service, it should be performed by someone ordained properly; that is, by a bishop who stood within the line of apostolic succession. So, my family got rubbed the wrong way as well, because I was the miracle child, the only one born to a couple who were never supposed to have children. “Are you going to deny your mother the opportunity to see her only child properly, reverently, and respectably married?” My mother did, in fact, talk like that. Few people in Harriman did, but she taught English at the high school, and sometimes her words came out sounding like a textbook.

Jill and I eloped and essentially created a situation where no one, on either side of the family, liked either of us very much, though they still loved us because their religion said they had to, no matter the terrible thing we had done to them. I know this to be the case because they told us.

Everyone should have a happy wedding, but because we carried the expectations of both our families on our shoulders the weight of guilt took the shine off the day a little. We were happy, but maybe not as joyful as we could have been. I tried to ease the tension with a joke. “Why was the boy melon sad?”

Her eyes rolled. “Not a down-home attempt at humor,” she muttered.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Why was the boy melon sad?”

She gave in. “Why?” she asked impatiently, expecting not to laugh. That’s always bad when you’re trying to tell a joke.

“Because his girlfriend said, ‘I can’t elope.’” I waited for a laugh; I thought, since it was our wedding day, she’d indulge me with a pity laugh at least. Nothing.

I tried too hard. “Get it? Can’t elope. Melons. Canteloupe.” I gave her a big grin. She returned a blank look.

I moved on with what I considered to be a better joke.

“What did the French chef say to his pretty assistant?” I asked, a bit too expectantly, given her previous reaction.

She simply arched an eyebrow.

“How about a little quiche, baby?”

With puppy dog eyes, I looked toward her, yearning for approval. The silence made me think perhaps she had not gotten the joke.

“Quiche. Kiss. Get it? They sound a little alike.”

She sighed and gave me a pity smile.

Seven years later we went our separate ways. Well, she went her separate way. I stayed pretty much where I was.

Of course, that’s because where I was meant a nice penthouse apartment overlooking Lake Michigan, just up from the Museum of Science and Industry on Lake Shore Drive. My books had made me a fairly well-to-do person; though I was an enigma in Hyde Park. Grey matter practically boiled out of the heads of all the professors, students, and ex-students associated with the University. I had been part of that world. But now I was a hanger on, and a bad one at that, because of my gift book writing. The intellectuals scorned me; others envied me. I should have moved, but I couldn’t. Jill said that was what was wrong—I was stuck, and it didn’t have to do just with physical location.

She left, letting me know that emotionally, mentally, artistically (though she said that with a bit of irony, I think), spiritually, and in every other way I was stunted. A scrub tree in the great forest of life. I wanted to be more; she said I was too comfortable to be more. Maybe she was right.

So there I sat, trying to put the final couple of pages together for my book, 101 Good Things about Labor Day. Six years before, I had a cute idea: 101 Good Things about Christmas. Even Jill thought it was cute. Though no graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, my drawing had a wispish quality to it that drew people’s attention to it for a few seconds before they moved on. But, turns out, that sort of time span makes for great commercial property. A few seconds is all most folks are willing to give to a drawing.

For fun, saying it’d make us rich, I’d thrown the first book together. Full of sweet little nothings, Christmas confections, for the Christmas consumer. Every page started the same: “One good thing about Christmas is . . .” The sayings were centered on the page, surrounded by a border that illustrated the words. “One good thing about Christmas is, if you decorate the old-fashioned way with popcorn and candy canes, you can eat the decorations.” Trees marched around the edges of the page, all done up in little candy canes and strings of popcorn. The book had 101 pages of that kind of stuff, each page devoted to one saying.

There are nine million copies in print now.

So the “101 industry,” as I started calling it, began. We did the major holidays—Thanksgiving, Easter, etc. Then we started in on the minor holidays. By the time I hit Labor Day, I thought I’d die from the saccharine sweetness. But there was no way out. My agent and publisher, realizing that the holidays were at an end, had come up with an idea (and a contract) for the next series: the days of the week. After Labor Day, I had to start almost immediately on 101 Good Things about Friday.

So I sat there at my computer, filing through the “suggestions” people had sent me via my website for Friday. After about the fourth “101” book, I told my agent the ideas had flown the coop. At his suggestion, my website invited “Good Thoughts about Good Days.” Not only had I become a hack; basically, I had turned into a plagiaristic hack who simply tweaked the least bad of the ideas that came in on my webpage. Of course, that meant I had to sit down and read through the material. Hell might have been hotter, but I was pretty sure it would at least have been more interesting. Maybe that’s when I became aware of the devil’s presence enough that I could see him. Or hear him, as it were.

I had my receiver tuned in to WFMT, the fine arts station in Chicago and required listening, especially if you were trying to overcome your hillbilly image and fit in with the UC intelligentsia. Turned out to be a lost cause for me, but I ended up actually liking much of what the station had to offer—Celtic music on occasion, symphonic and chamber music, some of the talk shows. But not opera. I hate opera. Those sopranos make me feel like I’m taking a beating at the hands of a spear-toting, horned-helmeted Viking woman.

Sunday, of all days. I loved listening to St. Paul Sundays. I had just heard the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra finish up a nice baroque piece. The host announced that Sir Neville Marriner and the St. Martin-in-the-Fields orchestra were next. I loved ol’ Neville. So I relaxed in my seat, waiting for some soothing music to carry me away from my troubles.

But then, singing started.

Zwangvolle Plage!

Müh’ ohne Zweck!

Two lines were enough for me to realize an opera had started. I grabbed my remote and turned in my chair to switch the receiver to another station. And there he sat, next to my stereo. Singing. The devil himself.