Start Without Me

by Joshua Max Feldman

  “It’s all sort of pathetic, though,” Laila announced, flopping down in one of the recliners. “When my dad was my age, he wanted to be a musician—a jazz drummer. He gave it up when he went to law school. This room is, like, eighty thousand dollars’ worth of overcompensation.”

  “I know a lot of drummers who’d trade places,” Adam answered, pushing buttons on the stereo.

  “Still, though. It’s like a museum of broken dreams.”

  Adam looked up from the stereo. Her legs dangled over one arm of the chair, her head was propped on the other as she stared into the ceiling, a contemplative look on her face. The comment had surprised him, like when a band he’d given up on came out with a chord progression that was actually sort of interesting. “Can I ask you something?” he said.

  “Sure,” she answered, turning her face to him, cheek on the chair’s arm.

  “Like, what’s your deal?”

  She brightened. “I started an NGO in Berlin that helps dissidents living under nondemocratic regimes access the Internet without risk of government surveillance. We facilitate anonymous VPNs in China, Iran, Cuba. Places like that. It’s an extension of my master’s thesis.”

  “Oh,” said Adam. “You speak German?”

  “Ja, aber, you don’t really need it.”

  “Right . . .” Okay, definitely smarter than him, and she was not just a book-smart nitwit, either, like a lot of college girls. From what he understood of her work, there was even something a little punk rock about her. She was really kind of a badass, Adam concluded.

  “You like being a flight attendant?” she asked him.

  “What? Oh yeah, it’s great. You fly all over the place.” The lying was problematic, from a Stone Manor perspective, but at least it was for a good cause. He returned to the stereo, pressed the protruding play button on the turntable. He turned up the volume and watched the mechanical arm lift its head, glide an inch to the left, lower itself to the spinning record. And next he heard what he considered the most beautiful sound in all of recorded music: the staticky, pregnant murmur as the needle approached the grooves of the first track. Beyond this liminal hush, anything could follow. It was what the universe sounded like before the Big Bang, Johanna used to say. He sat down in the recliner next to Laila’s as the first bars filled the room—slouched down in the chair, his legs extended.

  “What’s this?” Laila asked.

  “Al Green.”

  Whatever did end up playing was always a disappointment, one way or another, but the voice was as great a consolation as one could hope for. And there was no denying the sound quality was fantastic: big and warm and intimate—money well spent, he’d remember to tell Leo.

  “Is Al Green the one who got shot?” asked Laila.

  “Nah, Al Green’s still alive. You’re thinking of Marvin Gaye, he got shot by his dad.” Adam paused. “Or maybe you’re thinking of Sam Cooke. He got shot by, like, a night manager of a hotel or something.” Another pause. “Or maybe you mean Otis Redding. But he died in a plane crash.”

  “Fuck, that’s a depressing list.”

  “Kind of. But I think about that a lot—maybe it’s better if these guys just disappear one day, instead of turning into sad, old parodies of themselves.”

  “‘Runners whom renown outran, and the name died before the man,’” she commented.

  “Laila, are you dressed for pictures?” the deep, disembodied voice asked. This time, they both ignored it.

  “I met Al Green once, y’know,” Adam said.

  “Al Green? For real? What was he like?”

  “I don’t know, he was a pretty weird dude . . . But soulful, too, y’know?”

  “How’d you meet him?”

  Adam didn’t answer—didn’t feel like explaining what he’d been doing at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2008. And Laila didn’t repeat the question; she seemed to share his instinct to make way for the grace and tenderness of what they were hearing. If Adam closed his eyes, he could see the voice, like curling liquid tendrils, flowing free across a void. Making music was incessant failure and frustration—but God in heaven, he still loved hearing it.

  In the gap before the next track, Laila asked plaintively, “So am I wrong to hate myself for never listening to this record?”

  “You shouldn’t hate yourself for anything. No one can listen to all the great music in the world, it’s just impossible.”

  “So would you say Al Green is your favorite singer?” she asked him, oddly formal now.

  “I don’t really think of it that way. What’s the point of ranking these things? Does it actually mean anything if you put Al Green above, like, Leonard Cohen, or Freddy Mercury, on some imaginary totem pole of All Singers Ever?”

  “All hierarchies are inherently reductive, I agree with that.”

  “I dropped out of college,” he confessed.

  “Oh yeah?” she replied admiringly. “I wanted to a few times, but I never had the balls.” Is that what it had taken to drop out of college? Balls? Sort of the opposite, he’d always thought.

  “I’m just saying the more you talk about these things,” he continued, “the further you get from them. You want to know how good Al Green is? Listen to his music. And if you don’t know after that, reading an article that shoves him between Lou Reed and fucking Emmylou Harris isn’t going to help you.”

  “So it sounds like you’re saying,” she responded carefully, “consider the music qua music, without attention to relative aesthetic—”

  “I’m saying don’t trust rock critics. In fact, don’t trust anybody who says ‘I’m going to explain this,’” he pointed into the air, in which Al Green’s voice floated, “using words. Do you know how many books people have written, trying to explain the Beatles? I mean, throw on Rubber Soul, it’s pretty obvious what’s going on there. But no, they gotta dissect it, break it down: Is this song thirty percent Paul and seventy percent John? Or fourteen percent Ringo? Or they act like the whole band was an experiment to determine which of them was ‘the best Beatle.’ Like it makes you some kind of courageous idealist if you argue that George was the secret genius behind the whole thing. Hey, newsflash, George Harrison’s just the best guitarist in the ashram without the other three. But he was in the fucking Beatles. I’m pretty sure that’s his high watermark as an artist. I mean, do these people even understand what a band is? Do they understand why anybody plays music at all?” He waved his hand with frustration. “Everyone’s stuck inside their own heads, everyone’s stuck in their own lives. Only sometimes, when you play music with other people, or for other people, and no, not only then, but sometimes, I don’t know, in a band, in a good band, you feel like for once . . .” He struggled to find the right words, felt the familiar gasping futility of it. “You’re in it together,” he finally said. “You’re in it together. And no, it doesn’t happen all the time, and when it does, it never lasts, but just for that song or those five bars or those fifteen seconds or whatever it is, you’re in it together. What’s the point of slicing and dicing that moment, since it’s a miracle it happens at all? You can play two hundred shows a year, you might get there five times.”

  He’d strayed so far from his original point, he’d lost track of what he was talking about. Laila was pushing herself up in the chair to stare at him, her T-shirt bunched up above her belly button. “You used to be in a band, didn’t you?”

  He felt embarrassed, felt like he was guilty of everything he’d been accusing everyone else of. What did he care about rock critics? Or George Harrison? “Yeah, a few of them, whatever.”

  “I think you’re pretty soulful, too, Adam.”

  “Well . . . Thanks, I appreciate that.”

  “Do you want to go to my room to get high?”

  He opened his mouth to say no, but before he could, he asked, “On what?”

  “Weed, man, chill out!” she laughed. “This isn’t Burning Man!”

  Pot had never been a problem for him, but he knew better than to fu
ck around on the slippery slope. “I’m okay. But I’ll watch you smoke, if you want.”

  “Okay, great. Let’s do that. Let’s go do that right now.”

  As Adam got up, he heard footsteps on the stairs: heavy, unhurried, like a cop knocking on the window of your car. A moment later a large man appeared at the top of the stairs, his skin several shades darker than Laila’s, but unmistakably her father: tall like her, with the same high, flat forehead, the same ovular face, even the same tussock of incongruous hair, his a fraying rectangle of white in his beard. He wore wire-frame glasses and a maroon cardigan over his broad shoulders, and took in the scene before him with a dour expression that, despite the music, seemed to effect a sort of vacuum of disapproving silence around his person. “You two have made yourselves comfortable,” he observed.

  Poor Robbie, was Adam’s first thought: to have a guy like this for a father—plainly the sort who’d unironically deploy phrases like “Not while you live under my roof” and “You have your homework to think about”; who’d hold himself gruff and remote until he insisted on conversations about how shitty your life was turning out; who’d generally carry himself as if because he’d gotten his rocks off at the right time of the month, he’d been vested with some form of implacable authority over a personal fiefdom: his family. Adam’s own father was nothing like that. His dad was the type who cried during movies and gave hugs (though, to be fair, the tears and the hugs had in recent years become as unbearable to Adam as any assertion of paternal privilege). Still, Adam saw in Laila’s father the dad of every girl he’d dated in high school, every aggro bouncer and backstage heavy and boots-and-braces meth dealer he’d ever crossed paths with.

  But he’d made a promise. He stood up, held out his hand. “Hello, mister—er, hello.” He’d intended to say Sir, couldn’t quite get there. “I’m Adam, I’m a friend of Marissa’s.”

  “Senator Russell,” Laila’s father answered, his voice a predictable basso profundo.

  “Jesus, Daddy.” Laila said to Adam, “You can call him Leo.”

  “That’s a strong grip, Leo.” This seemed to be the point of the way Leo was shaking Adam’s hand.

  “You’re a friend of Marissa’s?” Leo asked, not releasing his grip.

  “I think I said that already? We work together. We’re flight attendants. Hmm, ho. So do you use one of those hand exerciser things when you’re watching CBS, or are you a rock climber?” Adam was smiling, but marshaled every other part of his face to contradict the upward bend in his lips.

  “Okay, then,” Leo said, finally releasing Adam’s hand. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Adam.”

  Leo regarded him with poker-faced stillness.

  “Adam Warshaw.”

  “Okay, then.” Leo moved his gaze over to Laila, her ankles crossed on the arm of the chair, her arms behind her head, her shirt pulled up above her lower ribs. She returned a look of blasé disgust she’d probably been honing since puberty. “You could find a more seemly way to sit in that chair, I think,” he said to her.

  She yanked her T-shirt down over her navel. “As it happens, Roz and I invited Adam to stay for dinner. I assume it’d be more seemly to make our guest feel welcome?”

  He ignored this. “You didn’t hear me over the intercom?”

  “I think I’ve made my feelings about the intercom abundantly clear.”

  “It’s time to get dressed. The photographer will be here in twenty minutes.”

  “Speaking of things about which I’ve made my feelings clear . . .”

  “Hey, if you guys want, I can take the picture with my iPhone,” Adam offered.

  Father and daughter were momentarily united in giving Adam a bemused, pitying look. “It’s not that kind of picture,” Laila explained. “Come on,” she said to him, standing, giving her T-shirt another perfunctory yank. “You can help me pick out what to wear.”

  “Sound system is amazing, Leo,” Adam said as he walked by him.

  Leo responded with a stiff nod, remaining at the top of the stairs and looking into the conservatory as Adam and Laila descended. And Adam had an impulse to turn, and apologize for the sarcasm and the shit-eating grin with which he’d spoken, and assure Leo he meant it: The sound system was amazing. He’d been hit with an unexpected stab of shame, like he owed Leo better than this—leaving him alone with the Al Green, in a room Leo had erected to something both he and Adam had tried and failed at.

  “He’s not always such an asshole,” Laila said on the stairs, once Leo was (probably) out of earshot. “Something’s going on in Boston, he’s been in his office all day. And believe it or not, he really values his family time. Real talk, though”—and here she lowered her voice—“I don’t think he likes white people.”

  “Um, didn’t he marry a white person?”

  Laila laughed. “Roz is probably the white person he likes least!”

  At the bottom of the steps, she opened a door in the hallway—he was about to follow her into the bedroom when his phone rang. He’d forgotten it was charged. He yanked it out of his jeans pocket: Jack was calling. Inchoate death metal screaming rang in Adam’s head. He hit the ignore button—big, red, round, exactly like an emergency exit button ought to look—then texted Jack.

  Headed back to SF. Have a great day!

  He hit send, turned off the phone, went into the room after Laila.

  A neatly made-up king-sized bed occupied most of the square room. The blinds were pulled down over a pair of picture windows, black-and-white photographs of Greek statuary lined the walls. On a shelf opposite the foot of the bed sat a cluster of colored glass sculptures, small and globular. “They call it the sculpture room, because of the . . .” Laila motioned toward the photos, didn’t bother to finish. As Adam walked in, she reached behind him, pulled the door closed. “So be honest. Is every family totally fucked, or is it just mine?”

  Adam thought about it for a moment. “I’d say if you leave me out, my family is doing pretty well.”

  She patted him on the chest. “You’re right, they’re wrong. Never forget that.” She frowned in an impressed way, patted him on the chest again. “You do Pilates?”

  “Swim.”

  “Your boyfriend’s a lucky man.”

  He gave her a puzzled smirk before he remembered. “Oh, right. No, I don’t have a boyfriend. We broke up because . . . He kept fucking other dudes. He was super dishonest.”

  “Sucks,” she told him. “Been there. He was good-looking, right? You can’t trust good-looking guys.”

  She turned and crouched at a purple hard-shell suitcase on the floor beside the bed. “I wasn’t kidding about Leo and my mom,” she told him as she opened the suitcase. “When we sit down to eat, count how many times they talk to each other. Their marriage is such a sham,” she declared, fishing around inside the case with her hand. “Which is why it pisses me off about the photographer. Just the hypocrisy of it. We send these pictures to half of Massachusetts and—” She looked over at him. “Do me a solid and don’t touch those?” He’d drifted to the shelf of glass sculptures, had lifted a green one shaped roughly like an apple, and was peering through its opaque surface. “They’re probably the most expensive piece of artwork in the house.” He replaced it on the shelf. She pulled out a palm-sized chrome vaporizer, and switched the device on. A little curving infinity symbol lit up in red on its face. “Look, I don’t begrudge them their misery. If they want to live a lie, so be it. But this parading of ourselves as a symbol of twenty-first-century postracial harmony . . .” She took a long, contemplative hit from the vaporizer, exhaled out the corner of her mouth, and sat down on the bed, folding her legs underneath her. “I accept that we have to make sacrifices for my dad’s career. But spending every holiday in a fucking Potemkin village, it just gets depressing.” She took another hit, let the smoke drift between her lips. “It’s complicated, though,” she allowed, blowing the rest of the smoke from her mouth. She tossed the vaporizer on the comforter, st
ood, and went to a closet in the corner. “Leo isn’t well-known nationally, but walk through certain neighborhoods in Boston, he’s like DeNiro in Godfather II. Everyone has a story of this time he saved their gas station, the time he got the landlord to fix their pipes, the time he got a street plowed after a blizzard. The fact is, my father is a hero to a lot of people. And I respect that.” She was surveying a quartet of dresses dangling from hangers in the closet. “But doesn’t his happiness and my mom’s happiness count for anything at all? Or mine and Robbie’s, when we were growing up?” She was quiet for a moment, as if pondering this, then took a green dress from the closet, held it in front of Adam. “Nice, right?”

  It looked a lot like every other green dress he’d ever seen, but sometimes the answers were easy. “Yes, very.”

  “Tracy Reese. It’s one of the two shades in the visual spectrum that’s actually flattering with my skin tone.” She laid the dress on the bed, smoothed it with the back of her hand. Then she turned again to face Adam, who leaned with his back against the door. “Sorry, I’m high. What was I talking about?”

  “Uh . . . Your dad’s a hero, but your parents aren’t happy?”

  “Right. Exactly. And that’s the thing: family, integrity, personal responsibility in the black community. That’s pretty much my dad’s entire political brand. Divorcing his wife after forty years of marriage doesn’t quite align with that, know what I mean?” She crossed her hands at the wrists, grabbed the hem of her T-shirt, pulled it over her head, and dropped it on the floor. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and Adam wasn’t sure what to do with his eyes. They darted over her narrow hips, fitness-magazine abs, breasts curving over her highest ribs, tiny, nearly black nipples before he got them to settle on a point just above her eyebrows. Laila picked up the vaporizer, took a hit, and sat down beside the dress. “Roz sometimes says they stay together for us. Which is bullshit. I mean, Robbie and I are adults. I came within an inch of getting arrested at the Turkish border. I think I can handle my parents consciously uncoupling.” She shook her head, her breasts shaking a little, too, like they agreed. “Real talk, though . . . Sometimes I think they’re right. Well, not that they’re right,” she corrected herself. “But . . . They’re trying to set an example. Sacrificing their personal happiness for the greater good. Does that sound corny?”