Summary
"People: The Funeral Director"
Albert Holding handles the dead and makes them look as nice as possible. He believes he can tell how they lived and if they died before they were ready to go. Others seem like they’ve been waiting to go forever, and whichever case it is, Albert knows it. He has worked at Holding and Son for twenty-five years preparing the dead for their long journey ahead. He talks to them, reassures them, holds their hand. The dead are demanding, which no one seems to understand, but he enjoys working with them.
Holding is never shocked and almost never gasps. Death does not have that power over him. However, today Holding does gasp. The body of Joss Moody arrives and he undresses it to get it ready for embalmment. First, he finds it strange that there is no penis under the pubic bush, then that there are tight bandages around the chest. He unbinds them and gasps even though he was expecting them. They are firm and young-looking, seemingly staring at him. When he looks back at the corpse it even seems more feminine to him. How could he have thought her male? He assumes Mrs. Moody knew and the doctor knew but Mrs. Moody said nothing to him. He is afraid to speak to her, and afraid that the son, who does not seem to know, is coming by. He has many worries, such as if there is an inquiry because the death certificate says male but the corpse is a woman. He wonders if he will have to correct it.
On Monday morning the son arrives and Holding is struck by how handsome he is. He does not feel ready to tell him so he demurs a bit. Finally, he haltingly tells the young man he will take him to see his father but there is something he must tell him. It stumbles out and Colman becomes irate, accusing him of lying and playing a game. Holding can only listen and feel like he deserves it. He takes Colman downstairs.
All day Colman’s expression of dismay and disbelief stays with Holding. Holding wonders if perhaps he should have said nothing at all.
"Interview Exclusive"
Colman recalls bringing his girlfriend Melanie home and getting frustrated that his father seemed overly interested in her, even giving her a trumpet lesson and proclaiming she was very good. When Melanie complimented Joss to Colman as gentle and handsome, he promptly dumped her. It upset him greatly that his father seemed to be jealous of him and was trying to flirt with his girlfriends.
Sophie Stones shuts the tape recorder off and thinks to herself how well Colman is doing. These are juicy stories and she thinks he’s kind of cute, albeit an asshole. She is also pleased when Colman says that he might go to Greenock where his father was born.
Colman thinks that Sophie clearly has things she wants him to say and is calling the shots, but it doesn’t matter since he is getting money. It shouldn’t be that difficult to tell the story. His thoughts then go to his memories of his father shaving. Why did he perform that ritual if he didn’t have to? He talks to Sophie about and spits out that this was sick. A moment later he wonders if he is being too harsh on Joss, then flicks back to being angry that his whole life is a lie.
"Money Pages"
As a journalist Sophie has written about many things but this Joss Moody story is sticking with her in a new way. She loves this—she loves gossip, she loves money, she loves notoriety. She knows what people want and this book is going to finally make her. She will have a pervy title and focus on the lurid details, but it will be fine because they are making Joss immortal. She wonders about numerous things, such as Millie marrying a woman who pretended to be a man, and what their sex life was like. As for Colman, Sophie can see he is clearly out for revenge. She also wonders if Joss do this all to play the trumpet, and how she (Sophie refers to Joss as “she”) pulled it off without anyone noticing. She feels like this trip to Scotland with Colman, who intrigues her maybe even more than Joss, will be good. She will make a lot of money with this book and maybe she’ll finally be better than her sister Sarah.
"Music"
This section describes Joss’s experience and thoughts playing music. He loses his race and sex and memory in this wild journey. He goes deep, deep into himself as he breaks it down. He goes so far down that he witnesses his death, goes back to when he was a baby, changing from girl to woman to man to old man to old woman. The train whistles and screams beside him and the music fills his blood. He “is the music. The blood dreaming. The long slow ache. All the light is in the music—soaring, flying” (134).
This trip is painful and it feels like dying but there is nothing like it. He could be anyone. He is disposed. It is liberating to be a girl and to be a man. He is stripped bare and has “no body, no past, nothing” (135). His trumpet is all that kept him alive. After he explodes, Joss says he pieces himself back together again.
"Sex"
Colman has no interest in talking to his friends after Joss’s death, especially Sammy, who knew Joss well. He had been working as a courier before his father died, which made him no money but was liberating. He quit because when he went in and told his boss his father had died, the man told him he was sorry to hear that and simply kept working.
Colman wishes he had a new name and a new job, pondering what "William Dunsmore" would be doing. He tells himself to stop thinking about that. It seems like he is growing backwards, that he is behaving like he is a child. He’s drinking a lot, and one night he imagines aggressive and dirty sex with Sophie.
The next morning he gets ready to meet Sophie. He sees himself in the mirror and knows people find him handsome even though he’s not sure. Sophie wants to do what she always does—talk about objectives. She lists finding out about Josephine’s childhood, talking to anyone who might know of her, do detailed interviews with those who knew him/her well . . . Colman interrupts and says to just say “him.” Sophie continues with her objectives and ends with saying that they will trace all living relatives. Colman is surprised by this amount of planning, thinking it would have been done more organically. When she says she is going with him, he is a bit disconcerted. She smiles broadly and says he needs a journalist there, and she’s discovered Joss Moody’s mother is still alive.
"People: The Drummer"
Big Red McCall was a tough, large man who loved his nickname. He and Joss were great friends and he’d always beat up anyone who said anything about Joss’s facial features or voice. He didn’t care a whit about Joss’s private life. When Sophie calls him, he is frustrated with her and hostile, and eventually hangs up after proclaiming he won’t cooperate.
He later dreams of Moody, and Moody tells Big Red he always knew. When he wakes he wonders what Moody died from. He wishes the last time they’d talked he was able to say more to him. He realizes he misses him deeply, and begins a big, heaving cry.
Analysis
The deliciously rapacious and sensationalist Sophie Stones enters the narrative now, stressing even more how biography can be problematic and fail to capture the truth of a person, as well as how the media feeds off of dramatic stories and twists them into something they’re not. She and Colman are both attempting to gather knowledge but for very different ends: while Colman seeks to understand himself in light of his father, Sophie wants information to spin into her salacious money-grab of a biography. She continually asks herself questions about Joss and his motivations, but always comes down to something such as his “thrill” in cross-dressing, or that this was the only way he thought he could get famous playing the trumpet. She also refuses to use male pronouns, yet another subtle way she both diminishes and seeks to control Joss’s identity.
At this point Colman is still aggressively angry about and with his father. He finds some degree of solace in talking to Sophie about how betrayed he feels, and how absurd he feels his father’s rituals like shaving and going to the barbershop were, but mostly he wants the money and, if possible, “a new name and a new job, that’s what he’d like. A new start in life” (138). Colman is also still wrestling with his sense of masculinity. After he sees his father’s naked body for the first time in his life, Mandy Koolen explains “Colman experiences his penis in an exaggerated form . . . Colman’s belief that his penis is bigger, harder, and more potent than when Joss was alive reflects an attempt to asset the "realness," and thus superiority, of his maleness in contrast to his father’s "performed" and "inauthentic" masculinity.” Colman has not yet come anywhere close to understanding the instability and mutability of gender, and how it is not necessarily correlated to one’s biological sex.
One of the most important chapters in the entire novel, which significantly falls right in the middle, is “Music,” a glimpse into Joss’s experience playing the trumpet. Kay writes, “When he gets down, and he doesn’t always get down deep enough, he loses his sex, his race, his memory. He strips himself bare, takes everything off, until he’s barely human” (131). He is forced to witness his own death and also “can see himself when he was a tiny baby” (132). He goes from “girl to young woman to young man to old man to old woman” (133), and “cannot stop himself changing. Running changes. Changes running. He is changing all the time . . . It is liberating. To be a girl. To be a man” (135). Joss is transcending categories that society would like to put him in -black/white, male/female, old/young; he is collapsing his self—“his idiosyncrasies, his personality, his ego, his sexuality, even, finally, his memory” (135). He is the embodiment of the fact that “down at the bottom, the blood doesn’t matter after all. None of the particulars count for much” (135).
In “Music” Joss explains how he is “nobody and no body,” as Mark Stein writes. He is able to “[free] himself from the materiality of his being. Further, he feels he can free himself from the grip of history, from his background, even from himself.” Identity is a void which can be filled and emptied and refilled a myriad of times; it is, Carole Jones adds, “decentered, discursive,” deconstructive and reconstructive. It completely defies society’s typical understanding of fixed identity and identity categories, which is what makes Joss so problematic to the world at large.
