The Air You Breathe

by Frances De Pontes Peebles

  The only reason you’re here is because of me.

  I limped up the curved staircase intending to shut myself inside my room. Instead, I saw the door to Graça and Vinicius’s master suite was open.

  The bed was unmade, the sheets tangled at the footboard. I clicked on the lamps. Graça’s closet was nearly as big as the bedroom itself and, at Graça’s insistence, painted flamingo pink. The clothing racks were reinforced with braces at each end to bear the weight of her costumes. Part of her deal with Fox was that as a free agent she received less pay, but was allowed to keep her entire wardrobe, costume jewelry included. Now the costumes from each of her dance routines hung from those thick brass racks like the empty husks of some strange, exotic insect—iridescent, rigid, even sharp. I was careful not to run my hands across them as I searched the closet.

  On the shelves above the costumes were mannequin heads—faceless and hairless—that wore Sofia Salvador’s bejeweled hats, tiaras, berets, and feathered fascinators. And then there was the wall of drawers filled with a tangle of bracelets and necklaces, and her massive clip-on earrings. In the back of the closet, squeezed between shoe racks and lingerie drawers, was a narrow space with her Sunday clothes: a few swimsuits and ten dresses, each identical except for their color. They were simple and made of the thinnest cotton I’d ever touched. Graça wore these dresses only at home, when she wasn’t Sofia Salvador.

  I looked at my watch: the boys were most likely on their way to getting stupendously drunk. Graça would still be filming her song and dance.

  I always save you. You never save me.

  Her vanity was a laboratory of creams and tonics, glass vials with rubber droppers, used cotton swabs, balled-up tissues, discarded eyelashes glued to the table’s surface like flattened bugs. I let out a long breath and plopped onto Graça’s vanity stool. My hat was crooked, its pins tugging at my hair. The side roll I’d tried to wrangle my short, straight hair into was limp, resembling a flattened tortilla instead of a wave. I tugged off my hat. Sofia Salvador’s lipsticks were scattered across the top of the vanity, most without their lids. They were not the drugstore brand we’d bought in our early days in Brazil but a fancy kind, in gold tubes, as heavy as jewels in my palm. I rolled one open. It smelled of wax and vanilla.

  I glanced at my bare mouth in the mirror, at my stingy lips, their ends turned down. I dabbed the lipstick against them, then closed my eyes and rubbed my lips together. It tasted good and felt quite smooth. I rolled on more, over-lining my lips to make them fuller, like Sofia did. The slash of color was startling. It was a bright coral, more orange than red. I needed to balance it out, somehow. I moved a powder puff across my cheeks and then blotted them with rouge. Inside the vanity’s drawer was a set of earrings—clip-on roses, as big as a child’s fists. I opened the mouths of their clips and snapped them onto my lobes.

  Downstairs, there was a noise. I turned from the mirror, toward Graça’s half-open bedroom door. I listened, holding my breath, for steps on the stairs. Was one of the boys home? My heart leapt—was it Vinicius? Had he abandoned Graça to check on me? I imagined him climbing up the stairs and finding me not in my room, but in his and Graça’s.

  I sprang to the door and quietly shut it, turning the lock. When I sat back at the vanity, I met my reflection with surprise. The powder made me pale. The circles of rouge were uneven. The lipstick was too bright. My earlobes pulsed and burned under the weight of those roses. I looked like a drunk who had stumbled onto a makeup table. I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes. The noise downstairs had stopped; it was the wind, or just the old house creaking. Either way, I was alone, and I had been there too long. I slipped off the earrings, took a generous fingerful of cold cream, and wiped away the mess I’d made.

  * * *

  —

  Exile and fame have similar side effects: if you experience either one, your world is made narrow, and the only people you can bear—the only ones who truly understand you—are the ones who are in the same boat.

  After filming wrapped on Fruity Cutie, a weight pressed upon all of us—Graça, the boys, and me—settling on our shoulders, making it hard to move, to eat, to talk to one another. Our fight on the Fox set had changed things among us and we all sensed it. Each of us felt betrayed in our own way.

  We stayed in L.A. together, under the same roof, even after filming wrapped, in part because we didn’t have enough money to go home, and in part because our home didn’t want us back. We were all bound by the excruciating intimacies of exile and fame.

  Three days into our break after Fruity Cutie, and before Sofia Salvador was carted off to another fat farm, Vinicius and I had our standing middle-of-the-night reservation at the recording studio near Disney, where we usually laid down our Sal e Pimenta tracks in secret. But that night, we couldn’t bring ourselves to sneak away from Graça and the boys; they’d know exactly where we were going and what we’d do there. It felt undignified.

  “We already paid for the session,” I said to the boys and Graça, who’d gathered beside the pool. “It’d be stupid to waste it.”

  So we piled into the DeSoto and, for the last time, all traveled to the recording studio together. There, we made up songs on the spot. We stretched out those songs—playing them slower and slower still—until we couldn’t stretch them any further. Graça sang a note until its sound petered out, and then she paused. These pauses are so long that when you listen to the album (the last we ever made together, as a band), you think her voice has disappeared. And, as a listener, there is a moment of panic, a moment when you think: What will sustain this silence, this emptiness? Then you hear Graça take a breath. You hear Vinicius’s fingertips preparing to strum his guitar strings. You hear Tiny sniffle. You hear Kitchen let out a small sigh. You hear Little Noel, Banana, and Bonito shifting their feet or licking their lips. It’s all there. And we recorded it—even those mistakes—because they were a part of that moment, of those last ballads, of that terrible night sweating together in that cramped and suffocating L.A. studio, where we sat as exiles from our home and now from one another, with only music to console us.

  BETWEEN US

  Everything was a lark

  between us.

  Everything was child’s play

  between us.

  Everything was

  a silly bet,

  a give and a get,

  a laugh, a touch, a shared cigarette

  between us.

  Everything was a talk

  when all others were sleeping.

  Everything was a walk

  when the beach was dark.

  Everything was

  your voice,

  your smell,

  your mouth closing around the secrets

  between us.

  I fell off the wire,

  and there was no net.

  I dove into the riptide,

  and there was no lifeguard.

  I drank the poison,

  and there was no antidote.

  All along knowing,

  there could be nothing

  between us.

  Everything was a song

  between us.

  Everything was all wrong

  between us.

  Everything was

  a poem,

  a prayer,

  a plea

  between us.

  I fell off the wire,

  and there was no net.

  I dove into the riptide,

  and there was no lifeguard.

  I drank the poison,

  and there was no antidote.

  All along knowing,

  there could be nothing

  between us.

  But hope is a talent of mine.

  Patience, too.

  Waiting isn’t hard when there’s nothing left to do.

 
Everything isn’t lost

  between us.

  Everything had its cost

  between us.

  Everything can be

  remembered,

  and forgotten,

  and forgiven

  between us.

  When I was young, I sat in rodas every day. I listened. I waited. I made a promise to the music: I’ll be here, I’ll open a space within myself for you. I showed it that I was devoted, and in return it rewarded me with words, with creation itself. There was the passion of a love affair in these moments because the music demanded my time, my full attention, my complete devotion. And so long as I rendered myself entirely to its service, the music allowed me inside itself, immersed in a space where time didn’t exist.

  Some artists, if they are wise and lucky, can remain faithful to their work—giving it the time and attention it deserves—for their entire lives. Others of us stray. We stop carving out a space within ourselves; we ignore its calls to us; we make excuses. After Graça died I made no music for twenty-five years. Vinicius appeared with his radios, record players, and invitations to clubs, and those helped me to listen again but not to create. There were moments—flashes, really—when I heard a melody in my mind, or thought of words and rushed to write them down. Scraps of paper littered my squalid apartments like fallen leaves.

  Then Vinicius dragged me into that Las Vegas studio to record with that young Tropicália buck, and it was like a locked door clicked open within me. Slowly, over the course of months, I began to turn the knob and peek in at the other side. I got a haircut. I began to shower more regularly and eat meals that consisted of more than stale bread and fried eggs. I bought new clothes. I didn’t stop drinking—not immediately—but I felt as though I needed it less. I began to join Vinicius on his trips to the recording studio, though I didn’t participate like I had that first time. During these months, I felt like I’d returned from a long exile and saw once familiar people with new eyes.

  I was fifty-three years old and Vinicius sixty-two. He smoked too much. He had wrinkles on his face and a shock of gray hair in his pompadour. He was handsome in a wounded way that women still adored; every week Vinicius had a new girl in his bed. But although the women were new, the songs were not; without me, Vinicius hadn’t written anything new. He’d spent the past two decades playing and recording covers of our old, stale songs.

  During one of my visits to that cramped Vegas studio, I listened to Vinicius and a different exiled musician record our same tired tracks but with a Tropicália twist. The result was painfully exuberant, like someone forced to dance samba with a broken ankle.

  “You sound ridiculous,” I announced.

  Vinicius asked the other musicians to leave the studio.

  “You’re a piece of work,” he said. “You check out for twenty years and now you’ve got opinions?”

  “I’ve always had opinions, I just didn’t share them.”

  “Maybe you were better that way,” Vinicius said.

  There was a sharp, familiar ache within me, one that rose after years of numbness. For an instant, it was too terrible to bear. My mouth felt dry. I scanned the studio for a bottle of beer, a half-filled glass, anything that might help me. There was only Vinicius—an old man with a gray pompadour and stooped shoulders—smoking in front of me. I grabbed the cigarette from his lips and shoved it between mine.

  “It’s embarrassing, what you’ve been playing,” I said. “You’re too good for it.”

  “You’re the most selfish person I’ve ever met,” he said. “I thought it was Graça, but it’s you. It’s always been you.”

  Her name, said aloud, made me flinch. “If it’s selfish to tell the truth, so be it. Make me the villain. I’m used to it.”

  Vinicius stiffened. “You don’t get to tell the truth. You left me. Kitchen’s dead. Tiny’s stroke means he can’t play anymore. We can’t go home because those military fucks are throwing people like us out of helicopters. Everything’s gone to shit, and where have you been through it? Sitting in some dump like a goddamn zombie.”

  He slumped into a chair and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. I knelt beside him.

  “I’m here now,” I whispered. “You helped me wake up. And it’s a good thing, because this music you’re playing is real shit.”

  Vinicius stared at me, his eyes wet. “Go to hell, Dor.”

  “I can’t. It’s too far away.”

  “From what?”

  “From you.”

  Vinicius stood. There was a piano in the studio and he strode toward it, slammed open its bench, and rifled through the scores inside. He returned with a notebook and a pencil nub, throwing both in my lap.

  “That’s a good line,” he said. “Write it down.”

  I shook my head. We stared at each other like two tigers, waiting for the tiniest shift, the smallest flinch of muscle, as an excuse to pounce. There was a knock on the studio door. One of the production boys popped his head inside.

  “You two okay?” he asked.

  “Go home,” Vinicius said, still staring at me. “Dor and me are going to work. Lock the door behind you.”

  We sat face-to-face, like in the old days. We started and grappled and stopped and then started again. We sighed, bickered, crossed out lines, crumpled pages in our fists and threw them to the floor. My lyrics were rough and filled with curses. His melodies were stingy and mean with abrupt endings. When we were kids we could’ve wrestled those tunes all night, but the years had taken their toll on us. After only a few hours we were exhausted, sweaty, and trembling. We had one measly song to show for all of our suffering. We played it again, from beginning to end.

  “What do you think?” Vinicius asked.

  “I think it’s a disaster.”

  He put his guitar down. His voice shook. “What’re we going to do, Dor?”

  “Write more. Write them better. Cut a motherfucking record.”

  “Me and you?” he asked.

  “You got better company to keep?”

  We worked hard after that, building up our stamina each day. When we wrote, we drank only apple juice and filled trash bins with cigarette butts. After a few months we had more awful songs than we could count, but we also had enough decent songs to fill an album. Vinicius asked those exiled Tropicália boys, with their long hair and tight pants, into the studio to help us record. After we’d cut the final track, one of those boys planted a kiss on my cheek.

  “I don’t know what you two did to birth this baby, but it’s a real monster,” he said. “In the best sense of the word.”

  With the dictatorship there was too much censorship in Brazil for any recording company to be willing to sell our record. In the United States in the 1970s there was little interest in an elderly samba duo. Our later records as Sal e Pimenta would eventually sell and be hailed as cult favorites that paid homage, as critics said, “to a quiet style Sofia Salvador had single-handedly invented in her final show.” Even our best work was attributed back to her, but I didn’t mind. That first Vegas record—the one Vinicius and I had fought and sweated and toiled over—never saw the light of day. That might have mattered to the young Dores, but to the old one, just cutting a record again was enough. I sat in that Vegas studio and held the master disk in my hands for what felt like hours.

  “Isn’t she a beauty?” I said, my voice catching in my throat.

  Vinicius stood behind me. He placed his large, wrinkled hands on my arms. His chin sat comfortably in the valley between my neck and shoulder, his mouth near my ear. I closed my eyes, remembering a similar embrace. Something rose within me: a heat that began at the base of my spine and radiated up and out. It was familiar and yet changed—not desire but something else, a seed born of similar fruit.

  “We have to cut other records, better ones,” Vinicius whispered. “You can’t disappear again. I
need you.”

  I put down the disk and moved out of his arms. “You know what Graça told me that night, at the Copa? That I could never be magnificent; I just force myself on people who are. Like her. Like you.”

  “She always said things she didn’t mean when she was angry,” Vinicius said.

  I shook my head. “She wasn’t angry. Not that night. I was the angry one.”

  “You couldn’t have saved her. Once she got an idea in her head she always went for it. She never thought about consequences, she only thought about herself. And you always thought about us—me, her, the boys. I know what you did for us. I’ve known for a long time, I was just too selfish back then to see you clearly.”

  “And what do you see?” I asked, afraid to look at him.

  “A great musician. My partner.”

  When I look back on our life together (and I call it a life—not lives—because we were so deeply intertwined), I think of us as two athletes in a race, struggling for the same prize. Sometimes Vinicius pushed ahead, sometimes I did. When we married I was fifty-four and Vinicius sixty-three. We were battered, bruised, limping from the course of our race so far, and our prize was long lost in a Copacabana hotel room decades before. But there we were, Vinicius and I, still together, and we saw in each other the youths we’d been once, long ago, and the gentleness we might have forgotten, if we hadn’t been together to remind ourselves of it. We shared a bed, among other things, although the rumors are true: over the years, Vinicius had his girls and I had mine. But those unions were sparked by desire, not love. We only ever made music with each other.

  BETWEEN US

  The end of the war brought the liberation of concentration camps in Europe, ticker-tape parades, GIs and navy boys returning home and kissing girls in the middle of Times Square like a scene in one of Sofia Salvador’s Technicolor movies. But behind the color and confetti and song and dance was a grim, festering anxiety that lingered well beyond the war’s end. It was as if the world had battled an illness we’d brought upon ourselves—an addiction, really—that lasted for years and left us ravaged and stumbling and exposed the pettiest, basest parts of our natures. Millions were dead. The atomic bombs dropped on Japan had unleashed a technology that threatened us all. The world didn’t know if the peace that had cost so much would continue, but America was determined in its gaiety. No matter what, it would smile for the cameras.