ON MONDAY NIGHTS, we don’t get much of a dinner-and-drinks crowd, and on this Monday night we didn’t get any dinner-and-drinks crowd at all. Elaine was off-island for a couple of days, so with Otto and Esther gone, I had only Albertine, Suki, Lou, Clark, Alice, Artie, Nancy, Louise, Miranda, Tony T, Cutie, and Ray Pedrera as audience for my reading of “Artificial Insinuation,” episode twenty-eight of Dead Air.
MRS. JERROLD was in the cellar, doing the wash. She had left me alone in her living room to obliterate a tape recording of an exchange between her and a bakery delivery man known as Mr. Yummy. It went like this:
MRS. JERROLD: We only have a minute before Junior comes looking for me.
MR. YUMMY: I gave the little fellow some of our new twisted crullers to keep him busy. They’re quite popular with the young folks. They’re twisted into the shape of a pretzel, and —
MRS. JERROLD: Twisted? I like my crullers straight, if you know what I mean.
MR. YUMMY: Why you little cream puff! How about this? Do you like this?
MRS. JERROLD: Mmm, mmm, mm. Yes, yes. That’s my kind of cruller.
MR. YUMMY: Want a free sample?
MRS. JERROLD: Oh, yes! Give it to me!
MR. YUMMY: Open wide.
MRS. JERROLD: Oh, yummy, yum-mmm-mmm-mm . . .
The recording gave me an idea, an idea born of jealousy and envy. First the jealousy: I didn’t want Mrs. Jerrold to be with Mr. Yummy (or, to be technical about it, to have been with Mr. Yummy). If that had been my only motive, I would merely have done what Mrs. Jerrold had asked me to do and obliterated the record of their having discussed their preferences in crullers, but there was more to it than that. There was envy: I wanted to be in Mr. Yummy’s place.
I rewound the tape a bit and played it again. When I heard Mrs. Jerrold say “. . . Junior comes looking for me,” I stopped the tape, shifted to record, and said, “I gave the little guy a whole box of those new twisted crullers with the sugar glaze. They’re my favorites, because they’re puffy and sugary and kind of chewy. They ought to keep the kid out of our hair for a while.”
I rewound, shifted to play, and listened. I heard Mrs. Jerrold, and then myself, and then Mrs. Jerrold, coming back abruptly, a little overrun by what I had recorded, but still, apparently responding to me, “. . . I like my crullers straight, if you know what I mean.”
The illusion wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to inspire me to continue the work until I had gone through the entire conversation, replacing Mr. Yummy’s voice with mine, insinuating myself into the exchange that they had had. When I had finished and I played the whole tape, I was able, if I suspended my disbelief sufficiently and employed the aural equivalent of letting my eyes drift out of focus, to imagine that this was a recording of Mrs. Jerrold and me, made upstairs, in her bedroom, during an impassioned discussion of baked goods. However, each subsequent listening made me more aware of its small but annoying imperfections. For one thing, my voice lacked the teasing self-assurance that I had heard in Mr. Yummy’s. I re-recorded some sections, trying to imitate that tone, but all I could manage was a boyish eagerness, so I decided to settle for that. There was also another: the ambience was wrong. I could hear the living room in my parts and the bedroom in Mrs. Jerrold’s. Mine were surrounded by echoing space and silence, Mrs. Jerrold’s enclosed within a smaller, padded space and layered over by the swishing of bodies moving on sheets. I decided to carry the machine upstairs, get into Mrs. Jerrold’s bed, and go through the whole process again.
At the top of the stairs, something made me pause. I stood there, holding the heavy recorder, looking into the bedroom, waiting. A band of sunlight lay across the bed. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then the smallest bit of a shadow fell within the band of sunlight. I began backing up. After a couple of steps, there was a sound, clear and loud, from the cellar, the sound of a washing machine door closing, followed by the sound of footsteps on the cellar stairs. When I reached the entry hall, Mrs. Jerrold reached the kitchen. She leaned around the kitchen door frame, holding a basket of laundry in both hands, the way I was holding the recorder.
“What are you doing, Peter?” she asked.
“I was going to put the recorder back where I found it,” I said.
“Oh, you don’t have to — ”
“Okay,” I said, setting the recorder down on the floor. “I guess I’ll head for home then.”
[to be continued]
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