Whale Music Read Free Page A

After all, only a few seconds had elapsed since he’d absent-mindedly reached over and tapped the bottom of a department store dummy. Claire Graham wanted to keep a close eye on the damage she’d done, and the most expeditious way was by hiking her skirt and straddling the father’s widechest. And then Claire began cooing. “There, there,” she whispered, “don’t be such a big baby.” She was a great cooer.
    The upshot of all this was, Claire Graham lost her job, Hank Howell unloaded his entire spring line and, more importantly, was inspired to one of his greatest near-misses.
    Claire, missing you is more than I can hear
.
When you’re not with me I go on a tear

And everywhere that you’re not there

Cannot compare to the lair of Claire!
    You get the idea.
    Sometimes I suspect that the father fell in love with my mother because it was easy to find rhymes for
Claire
.
    The question is, why did Claire Graham fall in love with Hank Howell? My mother claims, after one or two lemon gins, that it was this very song that did the trick. I doubt it. I’ve tried the Routine countless times—indeed, it accounts for some of my biggest hits, “Sandra”, “Mary Mary”, “Kiss Me, Karen”—and not once has the subject ever fallen in love with me. The one woman who did love me—came close to loving me, at any rate closer than you might have thought possible—was always a little insulted by my inability to address a song to her, but to me the word
Fay
always sounded a touch whiny.
    My mother was born too late, or perhaps it was her misfortune to have been born at all. Claire Graham should have existed in a fairy tale, one where frogs are princes. She was born into a world where frogs are frogs, this is perhaps why she fell in love with the father.
    There is more to it. I have a theory that my mother fell victim to the father’s virulent hucksterism. He spun lies of elaborate fancy, all of which had to do with money. Awesome amounts of the slime, great deserts full of greenbacks. “When a songhits big,” was something my father said often—even now I hear it spoken in his voice, a sound like a rusty saw going through a wombat—“When a song hits big, you’ll be sitting on Easy Street.”
    My mother wanted to sit on Easy Street. It has been suggested by these fraudulent doctors, by these wormy lawyers, by my ex-wife,
ha-ha, she should talk
, that my mother is a greedy, avaricious woman. They don’t know her, they don’t love her. My mother only ever wanted to sit her perfect bottom on Easy Street.
    So the long and the short of it is, Claire forced herself to fall in love with the father. They married, and in a year I was born—six pounds, six ounces, about the same as my thumb weighs now—and a year after that came Danny.
    Do you like earliest memories? Considering the state of my short-term retention, I find it amazing that I still possess an earliest memory, but here it is. We lived in a two-storey house on Whitman Avenue, in a town named Palomountain, California. Danny and I shared a room on the second floor (we shared this room until we were seventeen and sixteen, at which point we went
on the road
) and this one day my mother was dressing us up. It seems to me that as she did this my mother’s eyes were filled with tears, but I can’t be certain that this is part of the memory. My mother stood me on a chest of drawers and put me in a little blue suit, complete with jacket, vest and short pants. Then she set me on the ground and started working on Daniel. I was three years old, and it was certainly the first time in my life I had ever been well dressed. I immediately began to strut up and down the hallway outside our room. I was concentrating more on my style than my course, and what happened was, I tumbled down the stairs and crashed my head into the wall at the bottom. This split my head open—I still have a misshapen, rather lumpy brow—and also did something to my hearing. I suffer from tinnitus, a