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Mozart at Home
by St. Clair Carr
Colin Mozart sat on the couch. All he had to do was get up and wash the dishes. First, though, he would review the choices being offered by the giant corporations who provided him with television programs. He picked up the remote control, turned on the set, and worked his way through the channels.
Important people were saying things sternly. Pretty people were grinning. Rich men were trying to hit balls with sticks. Pretty people were enacting familiar dramas: one of them was pointing a gun at another one; two of them seemed to be naked and to be performing sexual intercourse; several of them were costumed as physicians. A car was driving along a road. Pretty people were introducing filmed expositions of important topics. A bearded man was cooking. Ugly people were weeping in front of a burning house. Animals roamed free. People sat in armchairs on a stage. A pretty woman pulled a tube of toothpaste from her purse. A spaceship flew through the void. Two pretty women were grinning at a set of what he knew they would be calling cookware. An airplane plunged from the sky and exploded when it hit the ground. Pretty people held beer bottles.
He turned off the television. All he had to do was get up and wash the dishes. First, though, he would find a book to read later. He got up and walked over to his bookshelves. He had a book that told you how to overcome fear and achieve your potential. He had a book that described how a middle-aged woman determined who had murdered one of her dinner guests with a poisoned lobster patty. He had the Nicholson London Street Atlas. He had Felix Holt, the silliest book he knew of by a great writer. He had a guide to the museums of Switzerland, written in German, a language he did not speak. He had a book that described how an alcoholic ended up driving in circles around Quebec. He had a King James Bible, a New English Bible, a Revised Standard Version, a book of Mormon, and Cruden's Concordance. He had a book that described how an Englishman was reunited with his first love when he went on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. He had a book that told you how to speak colloquial Turkish. He had a book about the influence of extralegal organizations in Hamilton, Ontario. He had books which he had read intently and enjoyed but could remember nothing about, so that he could read them again and still get most of the enjoyment out of them that he had got the first time, if he felt like it. He had a book he had bought in England twenty-eight years before and never read a word of from that day to this. He had a book that described how an American travelled around the world and everywhere found opportunities for cheap and entertaining humour.
He took nothing from the bookshelves. All he had to do was go and wash the dishes. The phone rang and rather than let the machine answer he picked it up. He said hello. Kathy said hello and identified herself. He inquired about her welfare, and she about his. She provided him with new examples of unreasonable demands made by her ruthlessly ungrateful boss. He provided her with new examples of the stunning incompetence of his relentlessly malicious boss. She told him how hard she worked. He told her how hard he worked. She told him how some of her colleagues got more recognition from management than she did even though their work was not as good as hers or as valuable to the company. He told her again how he had been denied a promotion for which he was the only qualified applicant. She told him how one of her friends was acting more distant now that she had been promoted into management. He told her how one of his coffee buddies had stopped taking coffee with his group after she was promoted into management. She told him how she had made money in the stock market. He told her how he had made money in the stock market. She realized what the time was. They wished each other a good evening and hung up.
He was sitting on the couch. All he had to do was get up and wash the dishes. First, though, he would play guitar. He picked up his guitar and played it while he sang about a man who killed a woman on a riverbank. He sang about a whaling ship that sailed from Dundee. He sang about a man and a woman racing their cars on the highway. He sang a song that ended with the assertion that Daddy was not a thousand miles away. He sang a song reputed to have been written by Louis Riel on the night before he was hanged. He sang a farewell to Nova Scotia. He sang a song, about working on the Manicouagan power project, made famous by the prominent Irish-Canadian Georges Dor. He sang the original version of "Shake, Rattle, and Roll." He sang a parody he had written of "Ain't Nobody's Business":
Once upon a time, I had ham and bacon
Now I live on oat bran and still can't get nothing shaking
Couldn't nobody care less if I doMe and my baby used to fuss and fight
Now a hot water bottle's the only thing going to bed with me at night
And couldn't nobody care less what I doI used to party from Thursday till Sunday
Now I lie awake at night worrying about work on Monday
And couldn't nobody care less if I doIf I should take a notion
To go and jump right into the ocean
Couldn't nobody care less if I doI'm seven times seven
I'll turn fifty soon
And couldn't nobody care less if I doThen he sang a popular parody, called "Life Presents a Dismal Picture", of "What a Friend We Have in Jesus." He sang about robbing a captain and then being captured when a duplicitous woman filled his charges with water.
In the kitchen the dishes waited. Well, they didn't actually wait. As inanimate objects they were, as far as the science of the day knew, incapable of forming the conception of the future implied by the idea of waiting. But they were in the kitchen.
As he washed them, he thought about important issues. He thought about the validity of the Pirenne thesis in light of recent archeological discoveries. He thought about the myth of purity, a relic of ultramontanism, underlying Quebec nationalism. He thought about how J. M. W. Turner's paintings were fundamentally reactionary. He thought about how contemporary democratic politics was not the art of the possible but rather the art of avoiding the possible. He thought about the Real Presence and decided that it was unlikely that at the Last Supper Jesus would say something else was his body when he was still in the body he was born with. He thought about how to Americans life is one long examination in Americanism.
I can assure you that he really did think about each one of these important issues. Furthermore, he thought about how men's magazines say it's a man's world, and so do women's magazines. He thought about how in the last twenty years a new political type had emerged: the bleeding-heart conservative. He thought about how a great city was one in which great people had done great things, while Toronto was a city in which comfortable people had done comfortable things. He thought about how you can, too, legislate morality, but usually you just legislate stupidity. He thought about how Jesus, observing that the good were poor, assumed that they were good because they were poor, when in fact they were poor because they were good. He finished the dishes.
Mozart at Home © John FitzGerald, 1999
The characters in this fictional work are not modelled on or intended to represent any actual person, living or dead. Any resemblance between these characters and any actual person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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