by Adam Haslett
When I dropped another cassette off the next day, I enclosed a note asking if she would go on a date with me. I suggested we go to Oxford, imagining she might feel awkward being seen with me by the locals. I envisioned us holding hands on the night bus back to Carterton, perhaps with her head resting on my shoulder. I would absorb all her suffering, leaving her weightless, and free to love me. We had never touched, and yet she had already voided all of my worries but one: when I would see her next.
After forty-eight hours, she still hadn’t called. Desperate, I tried to make another appointment, but her colleague said she was booked up and couldn’t see me. That night, after the salon closed, I slipped another tape through the mail slot, this one starting with Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” along with a note apologizing for being too forward, saying I understood she might need time, given that her divorce wasn’t final. It was three days later, on a Saturday evening, that Simon and I saw her at the pub. She was with one of the other girls from the salon. I could tell she was trying to ignore me. But after she’d had a few drinks she relented, nodding hello from their table in the corner. Simon told me that I was crazy, that she was an older woman, and still married. Simon had a girlfriend, and they seemed to like each other, but I could tell from hanging out with them that he didn’t feel for her what I felt for Angie. They enjoyed each other, but they were still individuals. Their love hadn’t obliterated the quotidian; it hadn’t rid them of their workaday selves. That’s what Angie and I were capable of. She and her friend didn’t protest when I dragged Simon over to sit with them. They made us buy them drinks. Angie was tipsy but not drunk, and she didn’t move her leg aside when I touched it lightly with mine (of such miracles, strung endlessly together, true happiness is made). We talked about the deathly boredom of the Cotswolds and how Simon and I were going to move to London. When the publican barked last call, her friend said she hadn’t realized how late it was, and had to dash. Simon wisely did the same. Which left the two of us. She was taking the bus back to the base, she said. I asked if she would let me walk her to her stop. The thin fluorescent light that filtered through the scratched plastic siding of the bus shelter wasn’t strong enough to reveal her expression as we stood there watching the drizzle wet the pavement. And so it was with extreme trepidation, braced for rebuff, that I put a hand on her shoulder and leaned down to kiss her gently on the lips. But she closed her eyes and let it happen. After a moment she even put her hand to my arm, giving me the passing sense that I had a physical body.
Whatever psychic bandwidth I had for A levels vanished. I could think only of our future. I had curated my mix tapes for her with great care, but now they took whole afternoons. I needed to keep impressing her with my taste but demonstrate at the same time how much emotional experience we already shared. Those tapes were the line of flight out of the trap of language. Through the incision of music we could know and love each other much, much faster.
Each time I went by the salon to give her my latest cassette, she would thank me, take it quickly, and tell me she had a customer and couldn’t chat. I’d go every evening to the pub, risking the ire of Simon’s parents, and stay until closing, power-reading The Mill on the Floss by fake candlelight, waiting for her to appear. And on the nights that she did, she and her friend would sit with me again, kidding me about my exams, drinking more than I ever could, and Angie would let me walk her to the bus stop, and if no one was around, I got to kiss her, and sometimes hug her, too.
And yet to my consternation, she refused to let me take her on a full-on date. She kept using her husband as an excuse. But contained in each refusal, by the implication of her tone, was the one acknowledgment that counted: sooner or later we would see each other again.
I don’t know what most people mean when they use the word love. If they haven’t contorted their lives around a hope sharp enough to bleed them empty, then I think they’re just kidding. A hope that undoes what tiny pride you have, and makes you thankful for the undoing, so long as it promises another hour with the person who is now the world. Maybe people mean attractiveness, or affection, or pleasantness, or security. Like the nonbelievers in church who enjoy the hymns or go for the sense of community, but avert their eyes from the cross. I feel sorry for them. They are dead before their time.
As it happened, I didn’t do so well on my exams. Angie’s husband attempted to reconcile with her the week they started. I pleaded with her to go with me on the bus to Oxford, just for a single afternoon, and finally she relented. The day before my Modern History A level, I took her to the Debenhams on Magdalen Street. I had seen a fitted silk shirt in a catalog that Simon’s sister got in the mail, and I wanted to buy it for her, but she was crying intermittently and didn’t want any gifts. If you go back to your husband, nothing will change, I told her. He’ll keep you close for a while, and then cheat again. He wants to retain you for your physical beauty, but anyone can appreciate that. We’re on the threshold of something much greater. I may have confused her when I said our worlds could end as soon as we joined, but I meant only our life-worlds as separate subjectivities, not a material end. She told me I read too many novels, and led us out of Women’s Tops back onto the sidewalk.
Though it was expensive, I had made a reservation for tea at Browns. But I could see now that this was completely wrong and stuffy, and that what we needed was alcohol. The pub we ended up in turned out to be full of university students, shouting at each other over the blare of Depeche Mode’s “Shake the Disease.” I got us drinks. After half a pint she seemed calmer. Which is when she said it was time she cleared something up. She thanked me for being kind to her over the last few weeks, but said that I had gotten the wrong idea. She shouldn’t have kissed me, she said. It had been a mistake. It wasn’t my fault, she added, she had let it happen. At which point, she reached into her bag and handed me back all my cassettes.
In retrospect, I suppose the cruelty of the gesture may have been her attempt to cauterize the wound as she inflicted it. I only knew that she was delivering me into purgatory, between the irrevocable hope of being with her and the death of life without her.
It was the next morning that Simon’s mother woke me early to say I had a phone call. I went down to the kitchen in my pajamas and stretched the phone cord over to the Aga to warm myself. It was Peter Lorian, my father’s oldest friend, calling to say my father was dead. I asked where they had found him. He said in the woods. I was to meet him at Heathrow the next morning. He’d made reservations for the two of us to fly to Boston. He said he was terribly sorry, and that I would need to take care of my mother now. We hung up, and I went back upstairs to sleep another forty-five minutes before it was time to come down for breakfast. When I told Simon and his family the news, they looked appalled.
I was at the doorstep of the salon no later than nine thirty. It was an hour before one of Angie’s colleagues eventually appeared to open the shop and told me I had better buzz off.
Have you ever had an EKG?
Alas, no.
How many caffeinated beverages do you drink a day?
What I have always found most comforting about these forms is the trace of hope I get as I’m filling them out. How they break your life down into such tidy realms, making each seem tractable, because discrete, in a way they never are beyond the white noise of the waiting room. You get that fleeting sense that you’re on the verge of being understood, truly and fully, and for the first time, if you could just get it all down in black and white before the receptionist calls your name.
Please briefly describe your work history:
My first legit employment began in the fall of 1985, after Dad, when I moved to London with Simon, as we’d planned. Z80 machine code was much in demand at the time, and I happened to have picked it up as a youth. I got a programming job at a small firm stocked with early video-game fiends who spent their off-hours disassembling Ataris. Later, during my various periods of under- or unemployment, my mother would say, Why not go
back to computers? You were so good at them. But she hadn’t experienced the conditions I was working under, conditions I knew would be the same wherever I went: the stupefying lack of humor, the wretched taste in music, and all that unforgivable clothing.
Of this last item, I should say, it wasn’t just my colleagues’ ignorance of peg-legged jeans or the use of eye shadow in club dress. Trends come and go. These boyos were ignorant of the entire canon of twentieth-century menswear, of the precepts laid down by masters like Montgomery Clift and the emperor of Japan. Rules as precise as the laws of British prose. You could violate them for effect, but only if you understood them. Which meant seeing how the lines of architectural modernism had been recapitulated in wool and linen, softened only by the heraldic color and pattern of accessories. The members of Joy Division likely weren’t meditating on Frank Lloyd Wright when they took the stage in Manchester but those flat-fronted black cotton trousers and narrow-cut shirts didn’t come from nowhere. Peter Saville, who designed Factory’s records, understood it perfectly well: the iconic weight of black and white balanced against the release of splendor, in this case the dark magnificence of the music itself. Which might describe the tension of Protestant affect more generally: all guardedness and restraint until the eruption of an unextirpated beauty wakes us for a moment from the dream of efficiency.
The point being, my cubicle mates at NextFile couldn’t make it through a London club door to save their lives. I had to make it through those doors because of what was being played on the other side: early Chicago house, or some of the most sublime dance music ever recorded. Frankie Knuckles, Marshall Jefferson, Jesse Saunders—Roland drum-machine royalty. White-rock homophobia may have killed disco on American radio play but the arc of history bends toward justice. They could burn Diana Ross records at a White Sox game, but on the south side of Chicago four-to-the-floor beats rose from the ashes and got stretched onto ten-minute loops by DJs sampling the heaven out of classic disco. The ubiquity of its traces may render it invisible today, but early house had the power of all original art, to reveal the structure of the present: the body on the rack of the electronic, the mind on the rack of the virtual. And it didn’t just lay the structure bare, it gave a body a means to metabolize it, making the new relentlessness as human as dance.
Repurposing historical forces of that size required the power of volume, i.e., a sound system that shook your rib cage, whose subwoofers slapped air to your brow with every beat of the kick drum. Music thick as a hurricane. When the world wants to kill you, sometimes inoculation requires killing little bits of yourself. In this case, your eardrums.
But in London at the time, if you weren’t wearing at least a thread or two by Vivienne Westwood, you couldn’t get past the velvet rope. As Boy George later recalled, a dandy working the door at Taboo off Leicester Square once held a mirror up to a lager lout and said, Would you let yourself in? So I did what was required. I quit NextFile and got a job as a shop assistant at Browns (London clothier, not Oxford restaurant), hawking everything from Katharine Hamnett to Yohji Yamamoto. Chambray shirts to die for. Linen pants cut to break your heart. My sartorial standards may have peaked at nineteen but they peaked high. With the store discount and a kebab diet, I could afford to attire myself well enough to pass through those yearning crowds like Marcel into the salon of the Duchesse de Guermantes. Doormen would pick me from the back of the crowd on my shirts alone. Inside Taboo or Pyramid Night at Heaven, or the less discriminating Delirium, I’d order a beer to have something to hold on to as I stood at the edge of the dance floor. I didn’t know anyone at the center of the scene, where the drugs circulated and the outrageous posed, and I didn’t particularly want to. I just needed to be in the hurricane, in that storm blowing in from paradise, pushing skyward the wreckage of James Brown and George Clinton and the Jamaican dub masters and, yes, Giorgio Moroder and the German industrialists, and all the forgotten producers and DJs who kept the ideas and the vinyl coming, vanishing mediators of a culture considered too throwaway to chronicle. Or perhaps it’s simplest just to say, in the words of Mr. Fingers, intoned in the cadence of King:
In the beginning, there was Jack, and Jack had a groove.
And from this groove came the groove of all grooves.
And while one day viciously throwing down on his box, Jack boldly declared,
“Let there be house!”
and house music was born…
And in every house, you understand, there is a keeper.
And, in this house, the keeper is Jack.
Now some of you might wonder:
Who is Jack, and what is it that Jack does?
Jack is the one who gives you the power to jack your body.
Jack is the one who gives you the power to do the snake.
Jack is the one who gives you the key to the wiggly world.
Or words to that effect. Which might leave you with the impression that I danced. In fact, I never did. After the annihilation of love, I still consider the dance floor the best cure for individualism. But if I’m honest, I can say this only from a certain remove, because I was never able to pick up that key to the wiggly world. The music shook my chest and slapped my face, but I could only sway my head, standing at the edge of the pool, watching the deep end throb. My mother, who finds many things to be a pity, found this a pity. Wouldn’t you enjoy it? she asked, plaintively, hoping as always for the absolution of a remedy. She might as well have asked why I didn’t swim the English Channel. Where my mind goes, my body has never followed.
I didn’t want to leave Britain. Things made sense there for a couple of years, living above the vegetable shop with Simon out in Manor Park with no central heat and the fetid kitchen. I didn’t mind the bus ride to the station past all the depressing little terraced houses with their chintz curtains and grubby hedges, or the overground to Liverpool Street through the blackened warehouses, or the long night buses home after the clubs let out, with the yobs’ vomit streaking under the seats. I was invincibly dressed, after all. Plus, no one asked personal questions. Not even Simon. Mom could send postcards mentioning the upcoming anniversary of my matriculation to nursery school in Battersea, asking if I’d been by the old building, but her wistful calendrics were an ocean away. If it hadn’t been for my shitty exam results I might have gotten into Goldsmiths or Bristol at the beginning of my sojourn, and stayed on. But higher education was a class necessity, and as it happened there were things that I wanted to study. So after putting it off to stay a second year in London, I applied to American colleges. Alas, grade inflation hadn’t reached the UK, and American admissions officers took a dim view of my comprehensive-school Bs. I ended up with six rejections and a job at a bakery in Walcott. After ten months living with my mother and Alec in the house, a time now blessedly voided from my memory, I got off the wait list and into Boston College.
In London, those who didn’t make it past the club doors may not have worn Vivienne Westwood, but most had at least heard of her. They read NME. They read i-D. It was generally understood that music and rigor weren’t unrelated. But not so much at BC. Well-cut linen just didn’t have the same profile. More Led Zeppelin. More Michelob. My work-study job in the rec room drained my serotonin faster than a producer snorts coke. To say nothing of my roommate from Westborough, a “tool” dressed most days in stone-washed jeans and a Guns N’ Roses wifebeater, with whom I was forcibly housed in a sub-brutalist tower sided with gravel. He hadn’t read Celan or Hardy. Death in Venice or Middlemarch. Contemplating his interior life was like staring at a velvet knockoff of an Agnes Martin painting. You needed dental work before long.
What it turned out the place did have, however, was a kick-ass radio station, run chiefly by adult aficionados who had nothing to do with the undergraduate rabble. I managed to talk my way into a weekday two to four a.m. slot. This was at the dawn of techno (at least in Detroit). The listening public, i.e., the dozen or so people who tuned in to my show, needed acclimation to something like Derrick
May’s oracular “Strings of Life,” a seven-minute syncopated piano riff looped over a barrage of pop synth and high hats kicking at 128 bpm. Putting this revolution in context required playing songs that most straight musicheads—indulging at that time in the Beastie Boys—considered fey to the hilt, like, say, Ultravox’s “Vienna.” Electronic music has long suffered this prejudice in favor of the four-piece band and the lead singer. As if to break up that nuclear family of rock was to burn the flag. But if we can’t wring spirit from the technical at this late stage, we might as well just donate our bodies to science and get it over with. The machines have to be made to matter. Not on their terms. On ours. They have to be worked back into human longing. And that’s what Atkins, May, Saunderson, and the others were doing. Their pastures weren’t the Lake District or Woodstock but the darkened basements of suburban Michigan.
After a couple of weeks, people began calling the station and asking, What is this stuff? The future, I told them, it’s the future. Listen and be thankful. Not to me, or some genius artist hero, but to the scene producing the sound—the collective witness to life in the shadow of the faded industrial base. Mostly they just wanted to know where they could get their hands on the vinyl so they could start spinning it.
It’s hard to say exactly why I dropped out the fall of my junior year. The architecture obviously wasn’t helping. Nor was my third roommate, a Zionist Patriots fanatic who’d failed to get into Brandeis. The vicious tedium of classes with jocks. A general brownout. Cement in the limbs. I’ve since read about Norwegian reindeer that simply stop moving in winter; they call it arctic resignation. The added blight being that the only place I had to resign to was the house from which I’d fled for the UK in the first place, the house I’d already been forced to retreat to once before. My mother was something of a Norwegian reindeer herself during this period, still trudging back and forth to her job at the Walcott library that she’d begun the winter after my father died. There was a low metabolic rate all around. At least the bakery took me back. I walked there at five most mornings to put the bread and pastry in the ovens. As far as employment history goes, this developed into something of a bright spot. Because I was the first to arrive, I was able to commandeer the kitchen boom box and before long had salvaged several local high school Deadheads. One went so far as to shed his tie-dyes and sweats for pleatless pants and used button-downs. I was at least appreciated.
