“Show me your room,” I said, hooking my arm in his elbow. We walked up the creaking staircase, past dozens of pictures of Bea’s family, her earlier past in black-and-white and sepia, then, with the passage of years, becoming more and more colorful, first in muted Polaroid hues and then the bold Technicolor shots of grandchildren, or perhaps great-grandchildren.
“Sister, huh?” I asked.
Lee blushed. “Well, I just didn’t want Bea asking too many questions.”
“But you presumed that I would sleep over.”
We stopped at the top of the stairs. Suddenly, he looked sad. “I’m sorry. I just … I just don’t know what the fuck is happening right now, and I heard that you and Henry were, you know, broken up. Look, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
“No,” I said, “it’s okay. Listen, it’s just good to see your face.” And then, I reached out to touch him, his chin and beard. Beneath the whiskers his face was gaunt, his cheekbones rising like two beautiful dunes of bone. “You’re not eating,” I said. I’d never touched him before like that. It was thrilling.
“Bea is trying to fatten me up.”
I let my fingers touch his lips. “Good.”
“Beth?”
I kissed him, gently, and he kissed back. The frequency of my world suddenly seemed to fuzz, my face so warm that I felt I was melting. Lee is tall, and so I had to rise up on my tiptoes, and I liked that feeling, of being next to a taller man.
“Come on,” he said, “I don’t want you to fall down the stairs.”
“Right.”
He led me down a central hallway and toward one of the bedrooms, where I could hear laughter, muffled voices, soft radio. “These clowns,” said Lee. “Every night.”
He opened the door of the bedroom a crack, and laying on the floor were what I supposed to be his three male housemates, sprawled around a Risk board, a clock radio beside the bed playing Top 40 hits. The smell of beer was in the room and I could see several open bags of chips, a few tins of nuts. They waved sheepishly up at me. At least two of them had teeth adorned with gold caps.
“Left to right,” Lee said, “it goes Garcia, Joaquin, and Ernesto. Say hola, gentlemen.”
“Hello,” they said.
“Hey, did you let Fernando in?” asked Joaquin.
“Yeah, he came in with Beth. Pretty cold out there.”
“You two want to play?” asked Ernesto. “We just started.”
“Naw,” Lee said, “I want to show her around.”
“Right,” Joaquin said, smiling a little too broadly. “Show her around.”
Lee rolled his eyes at me and shut the door. “Every night. If it’s not Monopoly, it’s Risk. Or Axis & Allies. They like war games.”
His room was spare, and I remember feeling a great sadness for him, as I looked at the little square of a space: a mattress on the floor, a red plastic milk crate holding some books, a lamp, a guitar, a card table, and a folding chair.
“Jesus, Lee. If you need some furniture, you could have called my parents. Or talked to Henry or the Girouxs or Eddy. Anyone. You’re living like a monk in here.”
He nodded. “I know. That’s the plan. Let me show you something else.”
We went back down the stairs, stepping gingerly. “Bea’s a light sleeper,” he whispered.
At the door we slipped on our boots, hats, and mittens. We helped each other into our parkas. Fernando the dog watched us from the top of the stairs, sniffing the air, but he declined to follow us out into the cold. We began walking away from the house, toward a barn and a collection of smaller, ramshackle buildings. A sodium-nitrate light hummed blue in the sky.
“Hold on,” I said, and tugging his arm I pulled him close to me and we kissed again in the cold.
When our lips separated, he leaned his forehead down and rested it on mine. I looked up at his eyes but they were closed.
“Beth,” he said, “I don’t know.”
“I don’t know that we have to.”
“I don’t know what I want right now. I wouldn’t be good to you. And Henry is my friend.” I could see that he was wincing and I imagined him, replaying our kisses, his letter, in his head. “I mean, I really care about you. I don’t know.”
“What?” I said. “What is it?”
He looked up at the sky and I saw him exhale deeply. “Come on,” he said, “I want to show you this thing.”
We walked past the barn, past a pole-building filled with antiquated threshers and discing machines, chains swaying gently with what little breeze blew and maybe just the tumbling of the earth through the heavens. He led me into a long, low building, and I recognized it as a chicken coop. As we entered, he flicked a switch on the wall and a single exposed bulb hanging from the ceiling slowly brightened. Inside the narrow space was a small piano, a set of drums, a guitar, and a few other instruments. Everything looked secondhand, like instruments left behind a century or more before by some ragtag gypsy troupe. He had tacked some old carpeting to the walls, littered the floor with hay.
“My workshop,” he said, spreading his arms.
“Lee,” I said, “it’s so cold in here.”
“Aha!” he said. “I have this!” In one corner of the coop was an old woodstove. Lee knelt down in the hay and began breaking kindling, feeding it into the stove along with a few balls of rolled-up newspaper, and then tossed in a lit match. In moments, the coop filled with the delicious smell of woodsmoke, and the faint popping of an infant fire.
“That sound, right there,” he said. “Those little snaps. I’m laying down a track where the fabric behind everything is that sound. A loop of fire.” He grinned sheepishly. “But who knows? Maybe I’ve kind of gone off the rails.”
“How are you recording everything?” I asked.
“Pretty basic—just a computer and a mic,” he said. “It’s a lot easier these days. Guerrilla recording.”
What I wanted to do was sit beside him on a bale of hay and kiss, to be warm together, maybe to let things go and unfurl as they might. But I didn’t, and I didn’t talk about the kisses we’d just shared, or why he sent me the letter in the first place, or what he was trying to say, but apparently couldn’t. I just sat close to the stove and we talked, occasionally stopping so that he could sing me a few bars of something he was working on. Finally, he glanced up with a somber look on his face.
“I didn’t want to come back a failure,” he said. “You know? I just don’t know what to do except to keep trying. I’m not any good at anything else.”
I think I’m like most people in the world, which is to say, untalented. I can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t paint, can’t run fast, can’t write poetry. And sitting there, listening to him, as I would for years into the future when he came to visit Henry and me at our house and sat at our dining-room table, I wondered, What is it like for him? What does he see? Where does all this music come from?
We let the fire burn down, extinguished the light, and moved back into the night. Inside the house, he hugged me, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “I’m glad you came out here tonight.”
“Me too,” I said, though in that instant, I was confused, more confused than I had been before showing up at Bea Cather’s old farmhouse. I had no idea where we stood, Lee and I, to say nothing of what I would tell Henry, if I could tell Henry.
“Good night,” he said, and then I watched him climb the stairs, his shoulders hunched over, as if he were an old bachelor farmer, retiring for the night.
I crept through the darkened house, touching the walls as I navigated toward the bedroom Bea had prepared for me. I climbed into the bed fully dressed, afraid to disrobe, afraid to fall asleep, excited by the notion that somewhere overhead, Lee was lying on his own mattress, perhaps thinking of me. I lay that way a long time, hours maybe, I had no way of knowing, until finally I got up, and retraced my steps to the front door. I stood on the welcome mat, my boots lying on an old woven rug, and just as I reached down to pick them up, I heard a creak at th
e top of the stairs. I looked up.
It was Lee, in a pair of black polka-dotted boxer shorts, his pale chest bare, his long arms marked with tattoos, his thin hair standing in a thousand different directions. He looked at me with a sad smile on his face. I climbed the stairs and took his hand.
* * *
I left that morning, before dawn, driving slow, watching for the sunrise, taking the roads with care. Just beyond a narrow bridge over a nameless creek, I stopped the car and left it to idle. I watched the sun come up purple and orange and pink.
At my parents’ house, I stole in quietly, removed my boots, and crawled into bed.
* * *
We rode through the skyscraper canyons in a Mercedes-Benz with a cool leather interior and smoked windows that kept the din of the city snugly at bay. Twice, I found myself opening and closing them, just to study the contrast between the world outside us and the one we experienced inside. We rolled through the city, the driver indicating points of interest in a tone at once bored and kind. I held a pale blue shawl over my shoulders. Henry held his own hands, played with his wedding band. In the front seat, Ronny gazed, openmouthed. Lucy blew on freshly painted purple fingernails. There was tension in the air that I can only describe as similar to that which descends over a pregame stadium, or the seats of an elementary school pageant just before the child-players walk onto the stage. Lucy had seen something on the television about the wedding tomorrow.
“They said on the television that everyone in town who’s anyone’s gonna be there,” she told us in the lobby.
“Wonder where we fit in?” Henry said with half-hearted irony.
“Where is the ceremony?” I asked. Lee’s invitations had been so vague, with just that note and the plane tickets.
“All I know is that we’re supposed to show up at some mansion tomorrow night at five. Lee didn’t say anything other than that.”
“Is Chloe religious?” I asked.
“No idea,” Henry replied.
“So, no church?” I continued.
“Kip and Felicia weren’t married in a church,” he countered.
“I suppose not.”
The driver stopped on a brick-paved street bereft of trees and opened our doors. Henry tried to slip him a tip, but the man waved it off.
“My pleasure,” the driver said. “You guys were a hoot. Now, just head up inside there. Take the freight elevator up to the fourth floor. And I’ll be waiting down here whenever you’re ready to go. No hurry.”
He waved us good-bye and then leaned against the hood of the car. We watched him fiddle with an expensive cell phone while lighting a cigarette.
We were quiet in the elevator. Lucy and I straightened our men’s collars, arranging their hair for them, and then quickly applied our own lipstick. I wore a light peach cocktail dress that I’d had for years, a dress that I loved in the summer, when my skin was tanned brown. In winter, when my skin is so starved for the sun, that color would make me look like a ghost, but now, after months of jogging and gardening and watching the kids’ soccer games, it made even my moles and freckles look decorative. I felt confident.
Ronny yanked open the elevator doors with an ancient leather strap. A deejay spun records in one corner, breezy, fun music, and the party thrummed with conversation, some in attendance already swaying with the beat. The air smelled of lime juice and alcohol, expensive perfume and seafood. A hundred and fifty people must have been there already, shoulder to shoulder.
“Wait,” Lucy said, “you guys go ahead. I have to ask Beth something.” Lucy waited for the guys to step out of the elevator and then pressed the G button and slammed the elevator door down.
“So, um, here’s the thing,” Lucy said. “I thought I wanted to come to this thing—you know, to meet Ronny’s friends, and honestly, it’s been great getting to know you and Henry, and the hotel room is fabulous and Ronny’s fabulous, but I have to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
The elevator reached the ground floor. Two well-dressed couples started to enter the elevator, and Lucy pulled me out quickly, our high heels loud on the steel floor of the car. The partygoers now standing in the elevator regarded us quizzically. I thought I recognized one of the women from my mom’s favorite soap opera. We moved out onto the brick sidewalk.
“You know what I am,” Lucy said. “I mean, you know how I met Ronny. What the hell am I doing here? What am I going to tell these people when they ask, ‘So, what do you do for a living?’” She had intoned a haughty, upper-crust delivery, and it made me smile. “I’m a fucking stripper, okay? I dropped out of college after one semester. Occasionally, I may like to do a little blow. You know?” She was silent for a moment. “I feel like these people are going to look right through me.”
I understood, though; until that moment I hadn’t considered that it might not be enough for any of us, just to be Leland’s friends. That perhaps, people in attendance might well judge us not just by our inexpensive clothing and shoes, but our jobs and income as well. Since Henry and I had been married, I had worked only infrequently, more often than not staying at home with the kids. The last job even worth putting on my resume was probably the receptionist gig at that hair salon in Wabasha.
“Got any cigarettes?” I asked.
“Hell yes,” she said.
She passed me a cigarette, lighted it for me, then sparked up her own.
“You know who we are?” I asked. “Tonight, I’m going to be either a chef or a restaurant owner. I haven’t decided. And I think you should be a…” I appraised Lucy a moment while I drew on one of her Misty 120’s. “I think you should be a photographer. Or, even better yet, maybe a painter.”
She smiled. “What do I photograph? Or, you know, paint?”
“Nudes.”
“I do have some expertise in that department,” she said.
I gave her my elbow. “Let’s go for a walk. I don’t think they’ll miss us.”
We laughed as we clattered loudly down the sidewalk, two unlikely girlfriends in sudden solidarity. Our heels did battle with the cobbles and bricks, mainly losing, and even before we returned to the party my feet hurt.
* * *
Chloe had lost weight, I noticed, her arms too thin, the veins of her feet oddly bright and blue. She greeted us warmly, complimented Lucy immediately on her dress and nail polish. I could see that Lucy was smitten, that some of her inhibitions were quickly melting away. She held her champagne flute casually, keeping Ronny tight at her side.
She had found him immediately when we finally entered the party, at a table of hors d’oeuvres, tossing grapes into his mouth. I wondered what the room thought of him, of them, but I also knew that Ronny couldn’t have cared less. He grinned broadly as we approached him, took a big swig of his Coke, one hand perched on his big belt buckle.
“They put a lime in my Coke,” he said, leaning into me confidentially. “I kind of like it.”
“Very cosmopolitan of you, Ronny Taylor.” I made a mental note to stick close to him, to watch the waiters circulating through the flat with their trays of easy cocktails.
“Where’s Leland?” I asked Chloe.
“Oh, he’s out on the deck, I think. He’s been looking for you guys. I think Henry is with him,” Chloe said, giving my arm a little squeeze, before excusing herself to chat with other guests.
Sprinkled throughout the long, lofty space were faces I recognized from magazines and television: actors mostly, but also musicians—musicians whose work I knew my daughter, Eleanore, had begun listening to in the privacy of her still-pink bedroom, and I knew then in a different way than I ever had before how important Chloe and Lee were, that these sorts of people had come out to pay their respects to them, to be seen with them.
They were indeed out on the deck, Henry drinking a mojito, Lee nursing what looked like a cranberry juice. He smiled broadly when he saw us approach. His eyes were tired looking, but he looked fit in a trimly cut suit, his face tan and shaved, hair cut sho
rt.
“Hey, Beth,” he said, hugging me.
“Lee,” I said, “congratulations. That fiancée of yours looks exquisite.”
“Thanks—and, really, thanks for coming out, guys,” he said. “It would have been nice to get hitched in Wisco, but Chloe’s people are from out here, and you know…” He cocked his head in resignation.
“Why the hell are you apologizing to us?” Henry said. “Gives us an excuse to abandon the kids for a few days. See the city.”
Lee set his drink down quickly. “Oh man! I wanted them to come too, but we decided to have a no-kids wedding, you know. No crying babies in the back, no early night for the parents. I guess tomorrow night’s going to be the real deal.”
“So where’s the church?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No church. We’re just having a friend of Chloe’s do the vows. He’s actually studied religion at Yale. Really neat guy. Then a dinner and dance.”
There is a certain charm to the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am wedding ceremony. Excluding great-aunts, mothers, and grandmothers, no one flies cross-country for a stuffy ceremony. No one buys an elaborate wedding gift to hear some hackneyed homily about the Institution of Marriage, or some second-rate vocalist’s screeched-out solo. Somebody’s barely literate cousin butchering Bible verses or a Neruda poem. People come to see their family and friends, to get drunk, to kick off their heels and mimic a deranged chicken. To hear a brother give a long-winded and mostly inappropriate best man’s speech. To watch the bridesmaid weep through her own cavalcade of saccharine teenage memories and inside jokes. I’m no different.
But here’s the thing, the older I get, the more I do care about the ceremony. Because the reason you invite anyone to your wedding in the first place is because you want your friends and family to share in the ritual. If the ceremony wasn’t worth anything, everyone would just have parties and exchange rings, no problem. I was nervous as hell the day Henry and I got married. I was afraid of tripping down the aisle on my train, of fainting during the service, of botching the vows, of crying, of looking like a bad kisser, or worse, looking like too experienced a kisser. I was terrified. And as the pastor stated the vows for me to recite, I thought about the words, each of them, weighed them out like something precious. I knew, when I said them, that I meant it. That even in that moment of recitation, even as the words came tumbling out of my mouth, I could foresee the challenges that would surely come down the line over the course of our marriage. I knew it was unlikely we would ever have much money. That Henry would always work more than I’d like him to. That we would probably never move away from Wisconsin, ever, not even to try out a city like Minneapolis, Chicago, or even Duluth. That marrying Henry was tantamount to marrying his family’s three hundred acres of corn and soybeans and alfalfa and cows. But it felt good to say those words, those vows. And I remember how happy I was, staring into his face, focusing on him.
Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel Page 10
