On Monday, author Gerald Elias confessed. He is, indeed, a mystery writer. Today, he generously shares the opening chapter of his latest book. Enjoy! ~ Sheila
Death and Transfiguration
Chapter 1
It had even felt like a
Thursday. Days of the week, mused
Jacobus, are like keys in music, each possessing its own personality. Thursday.
Thursday, he considered, that would be B-flat Major. Not brilliant like A Major, not friendly like
G Major, not even the nestled warmth of F Major. Certainly not morbid, like G Minor, the key
of the “Devil’s Trill Sonata,” “Danse Macabre,” and the slow movement of “Death
and the Maiden.” What day would G Minor
be? Not Thursday. Thursday didn’t feel like death; at least,
not any more than usual. Jacobus didn’t
know it for a fact, but he would have bet the Spanish Inquisition did not start
on a Thursday. Thursday. Just…B-flat.
It didn’t matter whether the summer heat was melting the tar on Route 41
or whether you were freezing your ass off going outside for firewood on a
frigid February night, you can always tell when it’s a Thursday. Today’s steamy, mildew-inducing drizzle had
been no exception. At least until the
phone call.
The
summer morning had started out like most others. Jacobus, sweat dripping down his back,
twiddled the pawn between his thumb and fingers. It was the one piece on the board that hadn’t
started to gather dust because everyday since Nathaniel had left for Europe
Jacobus had been twiddling that insignificant chunk of wood between his
fingers, as if that action alone might somehow divulge how it was he had
managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory when, earlier in the contest,
he had been certain triumph was his for the taking.
To
be brought down by a lowly pawn! Once
again Jacobus felt its pedestrian curves and grooves, no different from any
other pawn. To have allowed Nathaniel to
queen a pawn, exposing his own king, rendering it helpless and
defenseless! In a breathtaking turn of
events he had resigned in ignominy.
“Yeah,” he thought, “I could have taken the pawn with my queen, but then
she would have been captured by his knight, and the game would be over in three
more moves. Four at the most.” It wasn’t that Jacobus minded
losing—actually, he did mind, terribly; it was the humiliation of losing in so
precipitous a demise that Nathaniel had even refrained from gloating—at least
externally—no easy task for someone who had oft been the object of Jacobus’s
unrestrained victory celebrations.
Jacobus
refused to use his blindness as an excuse for not “seeing” the impending
disaster. Though they used black and
white pieces for Nathaniel’s benefit, they used pieces from separate sets of
different size so that Jacobus could always tell which were his when feeling
the board. They never bothered with the
chess player’s rarified vocabulary, “black Q4 to white K5,” or whatever
terminology it was they used. Rather,
Nathaniel would say, “Just moved my bishop three spaces toward the kitchen,”
which was a lot easier for Jacobus to remember.
Nevertheless, Nathaniel’s miniscule white pawn had leveled his oversized
black king. An ironic twist here,
thought Jacobus, considering their respective skin colors and sizes.
As
he had done every morning upon waking for more than a week, he mentally
reenacted every move, trying to ascertain what he could have done
differently. Every one of his moves had
seemed so well-reasoned, so well-calculated, taking into account his overall
strategy amid the local skirmishes, the majority of which he had won. Yet somehow, unbelievably, Nathaniel had
managed to navigate his pawn all the way through to his end of the board. Though consumed with self-loathing for his
failure, Jacobus mused upon the miraculous metamorphosis of the pawn: a
dispensable, almost worthless foot soldier, finding itself in the right spot at
the right time, becomes, by some mysterious alchemy, a queen, the ultimate
power broker. It made no sense. What anonymous medieval chess master had come
up with that rule? It was stupid, Jacobus concluded, because it simply never
happens in reality. GIs don’t become
Jackie Kennedy, and she wasn’t even a real queen. It was the only rule in chess he could think
of, in fact, that didn’t have its reflection in the real world.
Then
the brittle ring of Jacobus’s ancient black rotary-dial phone had shocked him
out of his petulant musings. He hadn’t
gotten a call in days, and that one was a wrong number asking for the
Williamsville Inn. When Nathaniel had
left for Europe, Jacobus had pulled the plug on the answering machine that his
friend had imposed upon him. He had told
Nathaniel that an answering machine was worthless because even if he got any
messages he wouldn’t answer them, but just to humor him he let Nathaniel
install it. Now it was uninstalled.
Jacobus
reached for the phone.
“Yeah?”
he said, annoyed at being disturbed in the middle of self-flagellation.
“Dr.
Jacobus?”
“There’s
no Dr. Jacobus here,” he said, and hung up.
Bored
with flogging himself over the pawn cum queen, with his right foot he located
his cane on the floor beside his chair, retrieved it, and poked his way into
the kitchen. The path was so familiar
from the pattern of audible creaks in the wide pine floorboards that he could
easily have navigated with his ears alone, without the cane. Jacobus needed the cane, however, for other
purposes.
The
single-burner electric hot plate sat on the kitchen counter next to his empty
mug—the twenty-four ounce one with the Caffiends logo that Yumi had given
him. He turned the dial, listening for
the click to know it was on, until he could feel the little pointer positioned
at two o’clock. If he turned it to three
o’clock it would boil the water faster, but it would short out his antediluvian
fuse in the basement, and that was a pain in the ass to replace. Next he turned on the faucet and filled the
mug, sticking his finger in it to know when the water had reached the top. Then he poured the water into the teakettle
that that he had owned longer than he could remember that was next to the mug,
and set it on the hot plate. He opened
the cupboard above the counter, and using the point of his cane, felt for the
two pound can of Folger’s instant coffee among the other cans, all of which he
could identify by their shape and/or size.
He would have preferred to keep the cans on the counter so he wouldn’t
have to reach for them, but they attracted the mice, even with their lids on. The mice scared his gargantuan bulldog,
Trotsky, which Jacobus couldn’t care less about, but he did care that they
would shit all over his kitchen, so he kept the cans in the cupboards. He used to keep peanut butter baited traps on
the floor, but after he got Trotsky, the dog had found the treat irresistible,
and, with a brain capacity inversely proportional to his stomach’s, was unable
to make the cause-and-effect connection of licking the peanut butter and the
intense pain on his tongue that inevitably followed immediately thereafter. So now Jacobus kept the cans in the
cupboards.
He
maneuvered the can with his cane, and when it was an inch over the edge of the
shelf, deftly flicked it off and caught it in his left hand. He did the same exercise with a plastic jar
of sugar. By the time he had emptied two
teaspoons of coffee and one of sugar in his mug with the spoon he kept in the
can, the water was boiling, which he could tell from the foghorn-like moan the
kettle gave off. He touched the spout of
the kettle to the lip of the mug so it wouldn’t spill, and poured.
While
the coffee cooled enough so he wouldn’t burn his lips off, he yanked open the
recalcitrant door of the refrigerator—perhaps of the last of its species, that
needed defrosting, though he never bothered—and inhaled deeply. As soon as he opened the door he heard the
predictable clattering of Trotsky’s claws as he skidded around the corner into
the kitchen.
Slim
pickings. He fondled a half-empty bag of
L’il Smokies smoked sausages and put that back.
He felt an onion whose soft spot had grown alarmingly since yesterday,
and backed away from an open can of sardines.
He took one sniff of a prehistoric chunk of liverwurst that had an
unnaturally mossy coating and with heavy ambivalence let it drop from his hand,
assured that before it hit the ground Trotsky would catch it in his gaping maw,
swallow it, and be beg for more. All
that remained were condiments of an undefined nature and an open bottle of
Rolling Rock. Unbidden came Jacobus’s
recollection of the few days he had spent at the home of Yumi’s grandmother,
Cato Hashimoto, aka Kate Padgett, in their mountain home in Japan, and of the
profusion of delicacies that had been assembled before him, one after another,
for his alimentary consideration.
Jacobus
bruskly banished that thought from his mind, and, supplanting it with serious
consideration to the Rolling Rock, calculated whether it was the appropriate
time of day for a beer.
The
phone rang again. He pulled his
handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped the sweat off his head. After the fifteenth ring he decided that his
sanity was worth more than his privacy.
“Yeah?”
“Mister Jacobus?”
“Yeah.”
“This
is Sherry O’Brien.”
“So?”
“I’m
the acting concertmaster of Harmonium.”
“As
opposed to the juggling concertmaster?”
“I
was wondering if I could come play for you.”
“Why?”
“I’m
auditioning for the permanent concertmaster position in a few days, and you’ve
come highly recommended. The orchestra’s
here at Tanglewood for the week and since you’re nearby I thought, well, I
thought I’d give you a try. I’m happy to
pay whatever your fee is.”
Jacobus
considered his schedule. In the
afternoon, his former student and surrogate daughter, Yumi Shinagawa, was going
to play for him in preparation for the same audition. When was the last time he had seen Yumi? He couldn’t remember. Almost a year? Tomorrow he had nothing. The day after that he had nothing. The day after that…Actually, his calendar was
clear for the rest of his life, however long or short that would last.
“I’m
very busy,” he said.
“I’m
sure you are,” she pursued, “but I was really hoping…”
He
didn’t hang up but let the silence linger.
“Maybe
tomorrow afternoon?” she continued, picking up her own thread.
“When?”
he asked.
“Today
and tomorrow we have morning rehearsals at 10:00. Would one o’clock be okay?”
“You
know how to get here?”
“I’ve
got GPS.”
“Then
maybe you should have that treated first.”
“And
your fee?”
“Incalculable.”
Jacobus
hung up.
From
what O’Brien said, Jacobus figured it must now be about 9:30 AM. He removed the Rolling Rock from the fridge,
chugged it, and took his coffee to the rusty iron lawn chair that had once been
painted green that sat in front of his house, wondering along the way why the
acting concertmaster of the world’s most famous orchestra would ask for a
lesson from a total stranger three days before an audition. And why Thursday suddenly felt like G Minor.
~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~
Come back Friday - author Richard Brawer discusses how news sometimes follows fiction. Here's a review of his book Keiretsu at Buried Under Books.
I've been teaching a six-week "Write Your Memoir" class through the Cameron Art Museum here in Wilmington, NC. I love teaching through the Museum School - we get terrific students. (I'll be teaching "Nature Writing" in the fall - details to follow!)
For instance, suppose you work through the months, beginning with the month of your birth or of some other significant event. I'll pick June, the month in which I made my first overseas trip. Now I would use a variety of creative tools - freewriting, brainstorming, mind mapping, "photo diving," and more - to explore what June has meant to me at different ages. For starters....
