Summary
"Letters"
A series of letters is included: (1) Big Red McCall says he’d fight anyone who said Moody had a baby face; (2) a Moody fan says he does not know what the fuss is because only the music matters; (3) Sophie asks for all correspondence about “her”—Joss—to be sent to her; (4) the Transvestites Anonymous Group wonders what the word “really” means in terms of Joss “really” being a woman; (5) a Columbia Records figure says they will be releasing a two-album set called The Best of Moody: The Man and the Woman; (6) another musician who played with Joss wonders what the issue is and says he never noticed anything except maybe something in the face and the laugh; (7) a woman named Ann wonders why people cannot leave the dead alone.
"Interview Exclusive"
Colman is beginning to get annoyed with Sophie and wonders if he ought to stay away.
His thoughts flicker back to growing up. He knew that it was difficult being a black man in Scotland but his dad seemed to think that his own behavior prompted negative treatment. Colman also believed he suffered from having no talent and that his father was too harsh on him when he was a teenager. Yes, he was a tough teenager, he admits. He was always raging, was slovenly and lazy and selfish and shameless. Sometimes he felt bad but he did not know what could he do with such a famous and beloved father like Joss. When he was little, he liked being Joss’s son but it became harder as Colman got older. Clearly Joss wanted Colman to be talented at something or cleverer than him but he never was. Colman remembers trying to rile his father up by asking him if he’d ever had an affair and about sex with Mum. Joss laughed and humored him with truthful answers and Colman remembers this now, thinking about how his father didn’t have a cock but if he did wear a dildo he would have “jammed” it in.
Sophie is watching the drunken Colman and knows that getting him soused is the way to go. She is glad that he’s dishing out the things that the nineties want—“sex, infidelity, scandal, sleaze, perverts…the private life” (169). She cannot wait to get this book out. She enjoys being Colman’s ghost writer, her sister is going to be riveted, and she will be famous.
"People: The Cleaner"
Maggie loved working for the Moodys. Their house was beautiful and smelled good, they were always good and generous to her, and Mr. Moody was so stylish and gentle and warm. After she worked for them for two years and decided to stop, they bought her and her son a holiday.
When Maggie read the news about Joss being a woman, she was shocked. Then suddenly there was a reporter calling her and asking for an interview, and Maggie believed that she could do well by the family by giving a good one (the money would also be nice).
She cleans her house from top to bottom for Sophie. Sophie’s appearance and tiny tape recorder disconcerts her but she answers her questions about what she did for the family and if she ever suspected anything. The only strange thing she remembers was that she found a contemporary letter in Joss’s writing to his “Mum” and it was signed “Josephine.” Sophie is breathless with excitement. Before she leaves Sophie asks Maggie if she still has the keys to the house and Maggie says no, but this is a lie. When Sophie is gone Maggie begins to wonder if she did something wrong somehow.
"Travel: Scotland"
Colman is going to Scotland today. He is relieved to be leaving London where he has a damp flat full of mice and is in a great deal of debt. He wishes he could go away forever to a place where no one knows him. As he gets out of the shower and looks at himself in the mirror, he notices his once beautiful, big eyes seem smaller. He sighs and reminds himself to think of the money.
Walking down the road toward the tube he passes a barbershop and recalls how his father loved the ritual of going to a black barbershop. He does not know if his father liked the danger or if perhaps it was not dangerous at all. He heads down into the tube and passes a homeless person asking for change. The man repulses Colman and he thinks he is a waster and a parasite.
On the tube Colman winks at a small black boy staring amiably at him and feels good that the child seems to like him so much. He doesn’t read or do anything, knowing that London is a dismal and dirty and defeated city so he has to keep his eyes on things.
Colman still cannot believe Joss’s mother—his grandmother—is still alive. He heads out of the tube when the ride is over, palpably nervous as he always is when he’s traveling. It is not easy for black guys like him to travel in this country; people cannot fool him with their suspicions because they are all over their faces. It has been maybe twenty-five years since he has been back to Scotland. His father always told Colman he was Scottish but he never felt that way.
He thinks of his father playing jazz in the clubs and how “real and unreal like a fantasy of himself” (190) he was. All the jazz men looked like that. He recalls how his father waxed poetic about slave songs and blues and gospel but hated the rap Colman talked about.
Colman begins to feel a little dizzy at the thought of talking to someone who knew his father when he was a girl. He is also surprised that he is filled with excitement arriving in Glasgow, as he hasn’t expected to be. He wonders if he can truly go through with talking to all those people, but he knows he can and will go see Edith Moore.
Back on the train he drifts into sleep. When he wakes, he thinks of the letter he has in his side pocket. He decides this is not the time to read it, but he plans to soon. He watches an elegant black man carrying two cups of tea walk through the train. Suddenly he sees that it is his father, and Colman turns to watch him. He gets up to follow him but finally berates himself for being absurd. That morning he had called Sammy and told him he was going to Scotland to do a book. Sammy’s words ring in his ears: “Don’t do anything you won’t like in five years” (195).
"House and Home"
Millie recalls how much she loved Sundays. She and Joss would make love and then they’d have breakfast. Colman was always a brat and she felt so much anger to him, which would then dissipate as quickly as it came on. The family would eat and then walk on the Heath, the only place in London that didn’t feel like London. They played games, held hands, and laughed. Millie wishes Joss hadn’t died on a Sunday—any other day would have done. On that Sunday she remembers sitting with him—both the sick version of him and the spirit version of him. Though she was not religious, she prayed for a miracle. Her own terror consumed her, but finally she realized she needed to let Joss go. She kissed him, stroked his hand, and left the room to go to the bathroom. When she returned he was gone.
In the last few days before he died, Joss spoke more of Josephine than he ever had before. He also told her to remember the bandages, which she did. She had to call Colman too. He did not want to see the dead body, so he came after Joss had been taken away. Millie marveled at how efficient he was in the house, taking care of everything.
Millie realizes now that she is not alone. She is a widow, yes, but it is a common, ordinary thing. She loved her life, she was faithful and loyal and private, and she loved to her full capacity. This is the fifth Sunday without Joss and she knows now that if Colman and the reporter come, she will be ready. She will tell Colman not to do the book.
"Obituaries"
This lists all of Joss’s albums and his dates of birth and death.
"Good Hotels"
Colman is depressed as he remembers when he’d go on trips with his father in the last seven or eight years and they’d get a drink in the bar together. He does not relish seeing Sophie; her reference to the book as “our book” is beginning to grate.
After dinner Sophie realizes that for the first time she feels sorry for Colman. It is clear to her just how much Colman loved his father; it would have been so much easier and better for her if he was agitated, repulsed, furious. She is annoyed that when she suggested she go to Torr, he blew up and said there was no way she’d ever get to meet his mother. Apparently, Torr and his mother are sacred. Colman also got worked up when she talked about the book being about the “phenomenon” of Joss Moody; he called bullshit on her.
In his room Colman marvels how his mouth switched allegiance—he never liked Scotch before but he does now, and it is all his father drank. He cannot believe he is going to visit Edith Moore tomorrow. He does not know if he should say he is just a friend of Josephine’s or if he should he say his father was her daughter. He is ranting drunkenly in his head now and he likes it. All he hopes for is for a photo of Josephine. Just one.
Analysis
The shift in Colman’s thinking is starting to become more apparent in these sections. He admits to himself that he was a tough, angry young man prone to selfishness, arrogance, laziness, and jealousy. Ironically, he was fixated on just how manly his father was—how popular, how handsome, how appealing to even Colman’s girlfriends, how talented at the trumpet. Colman felt that his behavior was partially justified because his father was so larger-than-life while he was so stubbornly ordinary.
Colman also begins to be less hard on Joss, as when he first wonders if Joss liked the “danger” of the barbershop, but then corrects himself to think that maybe it was just a normal, non-dangerous thing after all. He contemplates reading the letter but decides it isn’t the right moment, meaning that soon there will be a “right” moment. He imagines he sees his father on the train and gets so worked up that he starts following the man until he realizes he is “losing it . . . spinning out” (194). He misses Joss when he remembers the hotels they’d stay in and the hotel bars they’d grab a drink in, he marvels that he likes Scotch now (Joss’s favorite drink), and to his surprise, he feels a growing sense of excitement at being back in Scotland. His hope is that Edith Moore will even give him a photo of Josephine. Finally, Sophie is the one who realizes, “Damn, Colman loves his father. He loves his father. It agitated me to discover that instead of hate or fury or repulsion, the emotion, that I saw clearly written across the high cheekbones on Colman Moody’s cheeks, was love. Love!” (211).
Colman’s subtle shift back to allegiance to his father obviously complicates what Sophie is trying to do. Whereas Colman is finding a way, however clumsily and slowly, to see his father in a non-binary way, Sophie is doubling down on her assumptions about Joss. In her offensive internal monologue, she ruminates on the nineties’ love of dirt and drama, deeming Joss’s story the “pick of the bunch” because it is “lesbians who adopted a son; one playing mummy, one playing daddy. The big butch frauds. Couldn’t be better” (170). As the novel comes to a close, she definitively states to herself, “She [Joss] liked the big cover up. Going about the place takng everybody in . . . Most of all, she liked the power” (263). Nowhere does Sophie try to understand Joss’s potential fear or worry if someone found out; nowhere does she acknowledge the violence trans-people face every single day; nowhere does she bring in Joss’s humanity.
As Colman journeys toward greater understanding of who Joss was, Kay’s hope is clearly that the reader is doing the same thing. Trumpet questions our understanding of objective reality. It, as critic Jeanette King writes, “maintains . . . an indeterminacy, making no simple identification of Joss’s sexual orientation, because this is not a text in which there is any clearly defined ‘truth.’” Gender is revealed to be a performance, a masquerade—something that we learn to imitate the cultural conventions of. Mark Stein similarly explains that “Joss’s male identity is produced performatively; it is not based on the materiality of his physical body but on his ability to project a male-gendered person to his family, friends, colleagues, and to himself.” And because of this, Tracy Hargreaves asks, “if a woman can successfully pass as a man, what then, is a woman, or, indeed, what is a man?”
Finally, what do we make of “Obituaries,” a simple listing of Joss’s albums and his dates of birth and death? Critic Ryan D. Fong acknowledges that because it appears near the end of the work and is “startlingly brief,” it might seem problematic at first. The claim “that this obituary captures the full personhood of this character’s life seems . . . absurd.” However, since music is at the core of Joss’s being and the fact that the album names “implicitly [track] a lifelong history of events and his feelings to them,” this obituary might be more telling of Joss’s sense of self than any long birth-to-death rendition. Furthermore, if dozens of accounts from multiple people cannot sum up Joss Moody, then how could one obituary?
