All for the sake of playing a trumpet. Wasn't that the issue that I read debated in the quality Sundays? . . . I'm not buying it. I'm not keen on jazz anyway; can't imagine anybody going through all that just to blow a horn.
One of the assumptions about Billy Tipton was that he dressed as a man because as a woman he would not have been able to attain the recognition and fame as a piano player. Kay alludes to the fact that the media was doing the same thing for Joss, here using Sophie to voice that. Sophie, of course, is too self-centered to entertain this stance because for her jazz wouldn't be worth it, but she does indicate that she momentarily considered it as a valid reason for Josephine Moore to become Joss Moody. Kay refutes this throughout the novel, however; Joss clearly wanted to live as a man in all particulars, not simply dress up as one for the sake of his musical career. To Joss and Millie and anyone else who refused to take a decisive stance on the inextricability of gender and sex, Joss is a man, not just dressing up as one.
When I open the trumpet in its box, it stares out at me, using its dumb keys for eyes . . . I put my lips to its gold mouth. But I can't make a sound. I put it back, lying it down in its furry case.
The trumpet is a fascinating and complex symbol in the text. Obviously, in its phallic shape it suggests male genitalia, but there is more to it. Its concave opening is allusive of female genitalia, and as this quote states, it lives in a "furry case." Fur, as Freud notes, is a fabric of choice (along with velvet) for fetishists, and as Millie has also mentioned the trumpet looking as if it resided in a jewel case, critic Tracy Hargreaves suggests, "Millie's reference to the trumpet as the jewel in the box is also evocative of female genitalia." Thus, the instrument is suggestive of both Joss's feminine and masculine identities, fusing them into one and mirroring what happens to him when he plays his music and gets to the deepest, core part of himself.
Maybe you will understand, maybe you won't. I knew you'd come here. I knew you would come looking for stuff. I've left it all for you, my letters, photographs, records, documents, certificates. It is all here. Mine and your own.
Joss gives Colman what he wants—answers, and access to his and Colman's records and documents. There will certainly be information in here that helps answer some of Colman's questions, but when it comes down to it, the "real" Joss will not be here. There is no "real" Joss that can be captured by one person or one document or one letter; a person is too complicated, too nuanced, too mutable to be pinned down. Kay knows this and emphasizes this through her multiple narrators and her resistance to try to assert a "truth" for Joss. As Tracy Hargreaves writes, "Joss is the one figure who opposes naming or closure. He is African and Scottish, male and female, a musician whose aesthetic relies on mimicry, improvisation, syncopation, marking the refusal of a regular beat." Colman will have to understand or he won't, and it will probably be somewhere in between.
Now that he's seen the little girl, he can see something feminine in his memory of his father's face that must have been there all along.
Colman had gone to Scotland hoping to get a photo of Josephine from Edith, and he does. Here he looks carefully at it and rather than decide that he sees just a girl who isn't his father, or that he sees his father in the girl in a way that erases her, Colman sees both. His father is not just male or just female, not just feminine or just masculine. Mandy Koolen suggests this is Colman "moving toward an acceptance of Joss's gender liminality" and getting to a place where he can develop "a newfound investment in shielding Joss/Josephine from those who are unwilling to accept the nuances of his father's gender." He carries the photo gently as to not damage it and ruminates on it multiple times. It signifies his official break with Sophie and her project, and prefigures his choice to open Joss's letter.
Loss isn't an absence after all. It is a presence.
Throughout the novel there is much fixation on and consternation about Joss's physical body—his breasts, what is below his trousers, his lack of a penis. His breasts shock and disturb Krishnamurty, Holding, and Colman, and even knowledge of their presence is upsetting or titillating to the rest of the world that hears about Joss. Significantly, though, Millie doesn't care about them, and she doesn't miss Joss's physical body. Critic Kirsty Williams writes that "Millie's narrative is free from the desire to know or understand the physical workings of Joss . . . What Millie has lost is not an object or a spectacle but a husband." Millie's love is not wrapped up in corporeality, and her description of loss "points beyond the body and reaffirms her love for him."
He was always more comfortable once he was dressed. More secure somehow. My handsome tall man. He'd smile at me shyly. He's say, "How do I look?" And I'd say, "Perfect. You look perfect."
Critic Carole Jones explains that "Identity as a projection of surface appearance and performance is apparent in the dwelling on the significance of clothes." This quote shows that Joss obviously cares, but even Millie, Sophie, and May Hart dress very carefully and care about their appearance. Every day Joss has Millie bandage his breasts and then puts on a suit, that very masculine and authoritative garment. This suggests that gender is a performance, a masquerade; there are certain clothes, behaviors, types of walking and talking that indicate "masculine" or "feminine," and Joss chooses to project himself as a male-gendered person to the world. Only when he plays his music can he escape from gender at all, existing as, Mark Stein writes, "nobody and no body."
I wish I could see Colman. What could I tell him—that his father and I were in love, that it didn't matter to us, that we didn't even think about it after a while? I didn't think about it so how could I have kept it from him if it isn't in my mind to keep?
This is a somewhat complicated quote. On the one hand, it is easy to see what Millie means. Joss's biological sex literally does not matter to her; they are in love, they are married, they are happy. She doesn't need to obsess over it; it doesn't govern her daily reality in any way. However, it is a bit ignorant for her to think that Colman would not feel betrayed when he found out. Of course he would find out, and of course it would be a big deal to him. Even though many people no longer feel that gender binaries are relevant, the 1990s were not such a progressive era and the shock would most certainly be felt. It is unlikely Colman ever would have felt comfortable with this information when he first learned it, but his sense of shattering betrayal because he had to learn this after Joss's death could have been avoided. Then again, we can circle back to Millie and consider the fact that Colman was an angry, selfish teenager and young man and may not have handled the information well; perhaps he would have even let the information out and put Joss and his career in danger? There is no way to know for sure, but it is a testament to the complexity of Kay's characters that even a simple passage like this prompts the reader to conduct further analysis and circumspection.
Maybe he's doing him a disservice. He bought him a shaving brush because he needed a shaving brush. Isn't that all there was to it? Does he need to go through his whole life working out his father's motives for every fucking thing?
This is perhaps the first time that Colman asks himself if he perhaps shouldn't try and dissect every memory he has of his father. When these memories have been popping up he's largely been critical and hostile, imputing motivations to his father that he has no way of proving and that are generally deleterious to Joss and to Colman. Here, though, Colman stops himself and wonders if there is no secret, perverted reason for what Joss did. This is not the end of Colman's aggression and anguish—he has a much longer road to travel—but it does foreshadow where he will eventually arrive.
Sarah's what you'd call a decisive person. When we were young, she'd decide for both of us—just like that. Then she'd turn and say to me that I was too fat to be decisive.
There's very little excuse for Sophie Stones's terrible behavior—her greed, her manipulations, her crude assumptions about Joss, etc. However, Kay gives the reader just a little bit to prompt sympathy for Sophie. She grew up with a cruel, seemingly perfect sister who reminded Sophie just how far away from society's expectations of what a woman look like she was. Growing up in this shadow must not have been easy for Sophie, and she channeled this into diet and weight loss, shopping, and her career. Later in the novel she justifies her usage of Colman to move her career forward, saying men have been doing that to women forever and she might as well do it. If looked at separately from all the other things Sophie has done this actually makes sense, but of course we cannot extend too much sympathy to someone who cares absolutely nothing for anyone else.
A bird startled her by flying close to her head. It seemed the bird had come right out of her. She watched it soar right up into the sky, its wings dipping, faltering, and rising again, heard it calling and scatting in the wind.
At the very end of the novel Millie is walking along the seashore and sees two things—her son Colman walking toward her, and this bird flying into the air. The bird is a symbol for Joss, which becomes clear when we read that it "had come right out of her," as if it were something she was letting go of. It "soars," "dips," "falters," and "rises" like music, and if that isn't enough, it "calls" and "scats" in the wind. The evocation of music solidifies the association of the bird with Joss, and it is thus important that it is flying away on its own, as if it has attained some sort of peace, because Millie is learning how to handle her grief and Colman is coming back to his love for his father.
