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She: <
She texts her address—I had a vague notion already of where she lived: one of the nicest blocks in Saint Paul. Of course.
Me: <
She: <
The walk from deep in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood to the southernmost edge of Crocus Hill is about forty-five minutes at a respectable but not hurried gait. Considering my intentions upon arriving at the Allegheny Estate (a slight exaggeration, I suppose), I know I’ll need some firing up. I’ll need to keep my stones at full strength, as Greg would probably put it, so I create a playlist special for this walk. The bpm’s are right for the pace, and the aggression of the lyrics and the music will prepare me for this conversation, which will no doubt go very badly.
I should text back that I’m still grounded.
But I don’t. I slip my phone into my pocket and drop my headphones around the back of my neck. It’s not late, so when I pass Mom and Dad’s room and call in, “I’m going out for a bit,” I don’t hear any protests—just one word: “Midnight,” which is when I have to be back.
I glance at the clock in the kitchen as I slip out the back door, and it’s not even six. If I’m not home by midnight, it means the conversation went very badly and I jumped from the Smith Avenue High Bridge.
Or it means she was so supremely flattered by the situation I’ve gotten myself into out of the deepest admiration for her mind, body, and soul that she pulled me to bed for several hours of passionate lovemaking. This is where my mind is as I start walking south.
I’m never completely comfortable on the south side of Grand Avenue. Hell, I’m never completely comfortable south of 94, to be honest. There’s just too much money down there, and too many little signs on too many front lawns with my dad’s garage company printed cheaply on the front. He might build great garages, but he can’t afford great signs, and I don’t love that the name Tungsten is on display.
It’s probably not that many lawns, I guess. If it were that many, we could probably afford to live down here. But when you’re hoping not to see something, it feels like it shows up all over.
The farther you go past 94, heading south through Saint Paul, the more money you’ll find, at least until you hit the hill that overlooks West Seventh—that’s a neighborhood and a street, by the way. On that hill, with their cobblestone streets and sweeping vistas and architecturally exciting shapes, live families like Svetlana’s, including, naturally, Svetlana’s. These are very, very, very rich people.
One cobblestone street in particular has a steep curve as it reaches the summit. That’s the Alleghenys’ block. As I reach their house, the playlist I put together for the walk finishes and starts to repeat. I grin to myself, proud of the perfect length I made the playlist based on my best estimate on how long it would take to walk here, and switch off the player, then pull the headphones from my ears. I ring the bell. Nothing happens. I don’t even hear the ding-dong, so either it didn’t work (seems unlikely considering the immaculate condition of this house), or the house is so big and the ding-dong player so deep in its innards that I couldn’t hear it out front. Still, no one comes to the door. I push it again.
Now, at my house, when someone’s at the door—well, first of all, our bell doesn’t work. It’s painted over, and always has been, as far as I know. I think it was probably painted over at some point in the middle of the last century, long before it was our house. But anyway, the minute someone is on the porch, we all know about it. It’s about twelve inches of house, from the front door to the back. Old joke: my family’s so poor, the front door and the back door are on the same hinge.
Not so among the architect-designed behemoths that line the cobblestoned lanes on Crocus Hill. My point is, perhaps the maid is in one of the guest wings, maybe tending to the particular needs of a visiting dignitary, and it’s taking her a very long time to traipse down the main hall to see what miscreant is at the door while the family is taking their tea in the south garden.
I’m reaching for the knocker—I first figured it was just for decoration, since it looks older than my dead great-grandma and might be made of pure silver—when I hear fast feet on the other side of the door. Sounds like they’re hurrying down the steps. I pull my hand away and the door flies open. I say hey.
“Hi,” she says, out of breath. “Sorry. I was upstairs.” She steps back to let me in, and something’s different. She doesn’t seem like Svetlana, not the girl I know at school. Maybe it’s the house, like I’m seeing the real, supercomfortable Svetlana for the first time.
Or maybe it’s her hair. “What’s different?” I say as I step inside. I duck a little, like there’s a chance I’ll bang my head on the doorway, which is ridiculous.
“About what?” she says, and she closes the door. It has a nice thick click. It’s a good heavy door. Seems positively medieval, like she just closed behind me the front door to Dracula’s castle. Of course that would make her Dracula—and me Harker, I guess. Or Lucy.
“Is your hair always like that?” I try. But it’s not her hair.
“You haven’t seen it braided before?” she says, tugging at the long, tight braid. She even pulls it around front, like to examine it, see if it’s weird.
“I guess I have,” I say, and she shrugs.
“Come on up to my room,” she says, and she turns for the stairs. “Top floor!”
Then she’s on her way up, and I’m dumbstruck, almost gasping for breath. I’m not trying to be melodramatic, but I’ve never see her like this before, and it occurs to me what’s different.
“I figured it out,” I say, slowly starting to follow her up the steps. “You’re wearing jeans. You never wear jeans.”
She’s past the landing now—they’re the kind of steps that have a break halfway up and then turn around for the second half of the trip—and leans over the banister to look at me. “I do on the weekends sometimes,” she says. “Especially if I’m not going anywhere.” Then she’s gone again, on her way up, so I hurry and spin around the landing for another glance.
They’re not Jelly jeans. They’re not low in the hips and skinny and faded black and torn and so tight that every glance makes you feel like you should totally not be looking at this, but you cannot look away. But they are soft-looking and faded blue, and they’re tight enough in the right places so that I’m quivering a little. She looks incredible. I’m nowhere near capable of telling her so, so I chase her—so to speak—up to the second floor and then up a narrow set of steps into the most obviously Svetlana bedroom in the history of bedrooms. It’s like her, except it’s a place, not a girl.
“This is awesome,” I say. “It’s like you have your own apartment.”
“I know.” She’s already seated at a little desk under the half-circle window that looks out over the front of the house. “It’s really the only thing about the house I like.”
I laugh, but she’s not kidding. “What? This house? What’s not to like about this house? It’s huge.”
“True,” she says, but she doesn’t explain, so I just move a little farther into the room and take off my coat.
“Just throw it on the bed,” she says, not even looking up from her laptop. “You wanted to talk?” She’s got iTunes open and is scrolling through her music library. “What should we listen to?”
“I don’t care,” I say, “unless you secretly have a huge metal collection.”
“You found me out!” she says, but she double-clicks something, and out comes … I don’t even know. It’s electronic and sounds completely random. If a throttling guitar riff blasted over it, it would have sounded cool, actually. A little like What Dwells Within sometimes, when the keyboard is at the top of the mix. But that’s not what happens. Instead a snare drum—or an electronic duplication of a snare drum—starts this marching roll. Then a five-year-old girl with a funny accent starts singing. The
re are also violins.
“Björk,” says Svetlana. “Is it okay?”
I shrug and toss my coat onto her bed, then sit down next to it.
“Sure,” I say.
“I love her,” she says, and she spins her chair so she’s facing the bed. “She’s who I always put on when I’m drawing or working on an encounter or even just sewing or whatever.”
I smile. “This explains why your clothes are so weird.”
Her mouth falls open, thankfully in a grin. “They are not!” she says, so I raise my eyebrows at her, because honestly, she has a dress with a giant eyeball stitched into the skirt. That’s all kinds of weird.
“Fine, they’re not typical,” she says. She crosses her arms, obstinate. “I like them.”
I throw up my hands. “So do I! I’m just saying they’re weird.”
“Yours too,” she says, so I nod slowly.
The music has grown quite a bit. The vocals have become a confusing pile of voices, all Björk. They vibrate over and around each other. The strings are swelling at the top of the register and chopping along at the bottom. I can sort of imagine a metal band covering this, even. The rhythm of it is a lot like the blast-beat some of my favorite songs use.
“So is Björk your favorite?” I ask, mainly for something to say that isn’t what I came over here to say, because Svetlana is just looking at me and smiling, and I know it’s because she likes the song, not because she’s in love with my stupid face.
She shrugs. “I guess so,” she says. “Not yours, huh?”
“I don’t hate it,” I say, “but it’s not something I’d probably put on.”
“Sure, because you’re obsessed with death and Satan,” she says, and her voice gets louder and more urgent and kind of growly, and she stands up from her chair and thrusts a fist into the air, “and charging armies of the undead!”
“You got it,” I say, and I tap my nose. “That’s what heavy metal is all about. You got it in one.”
“You seem to be implying it’s not all about that,” she says, and she drops down on the bed next to me. She wasn’t aiming to sit too close, I don’t think, but beds are soft and tricky, and the bed itself bends just enough so that we end up practically thigh to thigh.
I lean back on my outstretched hands, so we’re at least not shoulder to shoulder. “It’s not,” I say, and I take a deep breath because I’m nervous as hell and I have a fair amount to say on the subject of heavy metal’s relevance as a genre, but I take this deep breath through my nose and quickly realize something: if Svetlana on her own, even among the foul stench of Central High School’s cafeteria, emits a scent so intoxicating that my head spins, then her bedroom—full not only of her but of her clothes and bedsheets and blankets and fluttery silver curtains and pens and pencils and a towel hanging over the back of her chair and a hairbrush on her nightstand and a pair of satin pajama pants folded on her pillow and her pillows and their cases and the gossamer canopy hanging over her bed—is atmospherically a Lesh drug.
I might hyperventilate, so I lean forward again and wipe my nose with my sleeve. It proves clarifying. “Heavy metal,” I say, now that I have my breath and mind under control, “is the most challenging, progressive, difficult, and exciting music currently being produced.”
“You practice that speech?” she says.
“I don’t have to,” I say with a shrug. “I’m called upon to defend metal often enough that it comes pretty naturally at this point. But it’s true. These guys—the great ones, anyway—are super talented, really proficient at their instruments, and willing to try things and experiment with music and scales and tempos and stuff more than any other musicians out there.”
She shakes her head slowly, like she can’t believe what she’s hearing. “I don’t see how you can say that with a straight face”—she gestures toward the laptop—“with this coming out of my speakers.”
I have to admit it, the Icelandic banana is doing some pretty insane stuff at this point. Crackling like speakers lit on fire. Clicks and whirls. Synthetic voices arpeggiating all over the place. “But just being weird for its own sake isn’t breaking ground,” I say. “It’s just, like, getting attention.”
“‘For its own sake’?” she snaps, turning on the bed, her shoulders high and arms stiff at her sides. “This is gorgeous.” Her head goes back as she says “gorgeous,” and she draws the word out for several seconds. She closes her eyes, like the insanity is the ocean crashing on her naked body.
I’m sorry, but that’s what it looks like to me. And the music has gotten even more insane. Björk is screaming. The music has devolved into nothing but echoing clicks. She wails and shrieks and screeches. I wonder if Björk recorded this track—I can’t call this a song at this point—while naked, with the ocean crashing on her.
When it ends, Svetlana opens her eyes and smiles at me, maybe expecting me to say, “You win. She’s the best!” But I don’t. I just smirk.
“Fine,” she says. “Fine. I’ll put on something else.”
“I didn’t say—”
“No, no!” She’s messing around. We’re messing around. I decide then and there to never play the dumb video game again. I’m giving up any and all future chances to pretend to be her, because I much prefer actually being near her. “You want groundbreaking? You want challenging? You want technical musicianship? Here it is.”
A tympani roll appears, quietly and gently, like it snuck into the room. There are soft horns with it, sneaking around like an elephant on its toes. But then it stops with one thunderous pound, and it retreats, and the music is strings and one little horn. The violins mourn, maybe, and the horns blast a warning.
“What is it?” I say. “I don’t know anything about classical.”
“Romantic,” she says. “It’s ‘Marche au supplice,’ by Hector Berlioz.”
I start to say, “Who?” and she cuts me off and stands up. She raises her hands like a conductor as the music builds and falls and builds and falls. It’s fast. It’s bright and a little frightening, too. Then it blasts. The horns are proud and sort of amazing. And Svetlana. She’s the most amazing of all, because her hands start moving, and then the rest of her, like she’s on a podium, and she’s facing the laptop like her orchestra, conducting—her arms all a flurry, and I just wish I could see her face, because I know she must be beaming.
After the flurry is over, the music settles back down, and Svetlana catches her breath and drops onto the bed again. “I love it so much.”
“You don’t say.”
She nods. “I want to tell you about it.”
“Okay.”
“So it’s from his Symphonie fantastique,” she says, grabbing her braid. It’s all messy now, and she runs her palms over it like it needs soothing. “That means—”
“Let me guess.”
“Okay, okay,” she says. “But the full name is An Episode in the Life of an Artist, and it’s about this artist. He’s madly in love, and in this part he can’t take it anymore. She doesn’t love him back. So he poisons himself.”
I groan audibly.
“It gets better,” she says. “Honestly, you’re such a boy.”
Ha.
She settles back in, with the caressing of the braid. “The poison isn’t enough to kill him. It just makes him hallucinate, and in his visions he believes he has murdered the woman he loves. He cries and wails and begs for forgiveness, but he’s captured and sentenced to death. Then he’s marched to the scaffold—that’s what the name of this part means, ‘Marche au supplice’—and it’s where they cut the heads off murderers.”
The music swells again, for the march. Svetlana sits up a little taller, and her hands start to work again on the music, and she speaks louder. “And now at the very end—” She points at the room, like the music is there to see, not just hear, and it blasts horn after horn, in very big and grandiose classical style, with the crashing of cymbals and blowing of trumpets, and Svetlana has to shout over it: “His head bo
unces—daDUM! daDUM! daDUM!—down the steps!”
She sags again and shakes her braid back around back where it goes and leans back on her stiff arms. Out of breath, she turns to me and smiles.
“I like it,” I say. How could I not? Honestly, if the sound of a rock scraping against a metal file cabinet made Svetlana react like that, I’d buy the boxed set in Dolby Surround.
“Good,” she says. “I think the Romantic era and heavy metal have a lot in common.”
“Really?”
She shrugs. “I think I read that online once.”
“So is this guy—”
“Berlioz.”
“—your favorite?”
She chews her cheek. “Maybe? I always put that symphony on for encounters. I swear, if Reggie even hears the opening strains of ‘Rêverie,’ he starts sweating.” She gets the tiniest French accent when she says “Rêverie,” and though in anyone else I would think it pretentious and it would make me want to laugh or roll my eyes and then walk out, with her …
I say it back: “Rêverie,” and I try for the accent.
“Don’t make fun of me,” she says.
“I wasn’t,” I say, and it’s true. “You say it nice. I was seeing if I could too.”
She isn’t sure whether to believe me, and I feel my face going red—it reminds me of why I came over here tonight—so I stand up and lean over the laptop. “Let’s see what else you have.”
“You can put on whatever you want.”
“You know the real test?” I say. “The real way to figure out what your favorite is?”
“What?” she says, all slow and suspicious, which is just what I was going for.
“You sort by the ‘plays’ column,” I say, and I scroll to the top and click said column. She’s on her feet and trying to push me aside at the same instant. “Uh-oh,” I say, blocking her and double-clicking the top song.
“Don’t!” she says. But it’s too late, and a very fat, very 1970s, and very cheesy keyboard line bounces from her speakers. Svetlana falls backward onto the bed and covers her face with her hands.
“Love. Love will keep us together.”
Guy in Real Life Page 22
