A BEAUTIFUL WORLD
3
A BEAUTIFUL WORLD
During the first few weeks, Truman learned the ropes at the Cedars Resort. Business picked up gradually, not slamming them all at once, and he learned the fine nuances of customer service, not once losing his cool and taking it out on the guests. Jacob called it impressive.
He found he liked the work. He was even good at it. They’d get a little rush, sometimes when Andrea had taken a break, and he’d make do.
“Truman!”
He had zoned out. Andrea’s cash register was going a mile a minute on the grocery store side.
“Take over here,” she said. “I’ve got to check in a guest.” She rushed over to the front desk side of things, and he rang up a new customer’s stack of junk food, chips, and beer.
Both registers worked nonstop for half an hour.
After the rush, Andrea laughed and said, “You wait. That’s nothing. Once July rolls round, and it gets warm, you’ll be begging me to let you stock the beer cooler.”
Later that evening, he ate a store burrito and chips for dinner, then locked up and headed upstairs. He was physically tired, but he needed to pop into writing mode and lock himself in the piano room. Face the music.
Write a symphony. Not an easy thing for even the most seasoned composer, but he relished the inevitability of it, the pre-printed empty staves and clefs daring him to continue. Like a novel writer who wrote everything longhand, he liked composing music on paper, not on the fancy computer composition programs. He didn’t have a computer, and he preferred the visceral connection from head to heart to hand to paper. It took more effort and forced him to concentrate more closely on the music. He found he could keep the sometimes debilitating loneliness at bay.
The previous week, during a heavy rainstorm, he’d heard his muse yet again. She called for his music in the darkness. That’s what it seemed like to Truman. She sang words Truman could wrap his mind around. Moon and key. Circle and lake. He searched his phone for a Circle Lake on the Olympic Peninsula, but found nothing. He kept reminding himself to ask Jacob about it.
This time, a few other words seeped through the rain. Magic, spirit and love.
He liked the almost palpable sexual tension of spirit and love.
The beautiful melody belonged to his muse, but he called it his own as he wrote it down on staff paper. After that, the symphony’s first movement took shape in a whirlwind of activity as he found a perfect counter melody to accompany it (a blend of muted trumpet and oboe), then discovered he could play it backwards, transposed, and make another melody. He was using the classical sonata form, and he already had his exposition: the seven notes of the melody, which he’d base his whole symphony on, had the tonal key of B minor. He’d milk the main melody throughout the first part of the movement, modulate to the dominant key before heading to the development and any number of variations. Reach a pivotal chordal moment with the entire orchestra kicking ass on it, then suddenly cut them out, leave the oboe playing alone on the exact note that started the backwards melody. Work that over, then get both melodies in together somehow, relegate the counter melody to the cellar, a half time bass line.
Potential. Lots of potential. He’d wished, not for the first time, he’d brought a metronome, so that he could click out some tempos to work with. He could parse it all in his head, but he liked the rhythmic tick of a metronome. He thought about running into Aberdeen to look for one.
June ended. The resort was busy, and the weather drier now. Almost no rain had fallen the last week, and it was hot—temperatures into the 90s—and dry. Park rangers had already upgraded the fire danger status from moderate to high. It was way too early to have that happen, late June.
No rain.
No muse.
No music.
During his short time in Quinault, he’d begun to rely on the rain as a crutch. He couldn’t compose without it. How had that happened so fast? He’d lacked commitment to Melissa in all aspects of their relationship, but now, less than a month in his new surroundings, he had lost his will to compose.
That had to be some kind of record.
He shouldn’t have assigned so much importance to the rain. Hadn’t it scared him to death that first day? Yes, but hadn’t the rain, in the voice of his muse, given him the melody of his life?
Shit. It was summer. It didn’t rain every day.
Maybe he should try sitting at the piano bench and force himself to compose. He had the melody. He had the counter melody. But coming up with something meaningful to weave the threads together eluded him. He could not cut through the tension he had built with his initial variations.
On a cooler evening on the first day of July, a light rain fell, barely more than a mist. Truman rushed up to his second story room after his shift and opened the window, hoping to catch a hint of her song in the rain. Funny how he now thought of the music and the rain as inseparable. The presence of ghostly music emanating from the rain seemed a reality, not a figment of his imagination, even though he still kept this from Jacob.
Maybe he was crazy, but it was his crazy, and it had helped him so far.
Then: Something made him jump.
He had no idea what. Right afterward, it felt like he was being watched, but no one could possibly be there. Not up in his room. Not down below on the street. Not anywhere but in the rain.
The hairs raised on the back of Truman’s neck. He turned away from the window just as a gust of wind blew through, ruffling the curtains.
He faced the full-length mirror. For an instant. For a breath. He thought . . . No. The mirror was a mirror. Still, he had a strong urge to come up close to it and look within the reflection, or maybe look behind it. His breathing quickened, and his pulse raced.
Truman closed his eyes, waited a couple heartbeats, and looked again. Nothing. Only Truman’s reflection. But in his head, he had a thought. It came to him in a whisper, and he wasn’t certain if it was his own or not.
It’s a beautiful world we live in, Kachina.
What the hell? Kachina?
Just then, the lights winked and dimmed, and an instant later they went out, leaving Truman in a darkness as impenetrable as a cloudy, starless night.
He called Jacob. He couldn’t find a flashlight, so he had to feel his way downstairs to the registration area.
Truman waited in the chair downstairs behind the front desk, silent and unmoving, trying to calm his breathing. After ten minutes, the lights on the pop and beer coolers came on, and the motors started humming in their own voices, harsh and out of tune.
“Tripped the main breaker,” Jacob said when he entered the store through the front door a few minutes later, flashlight glowing.
“Tripped how?” Truman asked.
Jacob shrugged. “No idea. Just some kind of surge, I suppose.”
“That happen a lot?”
“Not a lot.” Jacob headed for the front door. “Night’s cleared up. Drizzle’s stopped.”
Great, Truman thought.
“Get some sleep,” Jacob said. “Resort’s full tomorrow.”
“Like every night this summer.”
Jacob waved and closed the door behind him, disappearing into the night. Truman saw Jacob’s flashlight on the counter. He snatched it and made his way to the door, but when he stood outside, he couldn’t see his friend at all, and no reply came back when Truman called for him.
He looked above, blinking at the stars that shone through the gaps in the dusty clouds, and with the memory of that phrase—it’s a beautiful world we live in, Kachina—burning in his head, he pleaded with whatever force was out there to make it rain soon. If it didn’t, he believed he might take it upon himself to force the issue: run out into the street one night and dance his heart out.