My thoughts, however, were anything but harmonious. A disquiet gathered in my head, faint at first, like the distant rush of a car engine finding its way through the neighborhood. But then the car was outside, honking in the driveway, and the hinges of every closed door within me started to shake. My mind went wild and my thoughts became unbound and unstable, disobedient and carried by no current. Like jazz.
Then something completely unexpected happened, and it was like I never saw it coming.
PART TWO
EXCUSE ME, DID I ASK YOU TO BLOW ON MY FOOD?
CHAPTER 4
I came back weird. On that first morning after the trip, I awakened, showered, and dressed feeling slightly off and a little jittery. It was more than the routine anxiety of not wanting to return to work. I sensed an invisible force telling me I wasn’t supposed to return to work.
On her way out to an early appointment, Sara poked her head into the bathroom and called to me above the steady teeming of water on tile. “I’m going. I left you some coffee.”
“Thanks,” I shouted back. Then I pushed open the glass door and stuck my head out like a wet terrier. “Thanks,” I said again.
She smiled. “Bye.”
My mind seemed to be circling above something I wanted to say to her; I just couldn’t land on it.
Buttoning the sleeves of a light-blue oxford while avoiding eye contact with the bedroom mirror, I realized I was humming a tune. My mouth was forming words: “I could’ve sworn she’d gone missing, she was hiding in plain sight.” Then it formed the words again, then again. I just couldn’t place the song.
In the kitchen, I poured the remains of the coffeepot into a mug. But instead of taking a sip, I rested both hands on the countertop and stared at the stream of vapor rising out of the cup. By some mystery, I felt like I’d already chugged a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, so I upended the mug into the sink and headed out.
It was out in the hall, awaiting an elevator to begin my six-block commute, as the one-melody phrase kept repeating itself to me, ever clearer, that I had a perplexing thought: I’d never heard this song before. “I fucking made it up,” I said out loud to the empty cream-toned walls.
At eight a.m., Metcalf was already popping Xanax like Flintstones vitamins. Before I could even set my briefcase down, he came bursting into my office with information, anecdotes, and tales of bad behavior that I’d missed during my European jaunt.
“I can’t deal with you right now,” I told him, waving him away. I faced the window and gazed out at the metropolis, surfing a sensation of coasting above the snarling zoo of buildings, as opposed to being lost within it.
I opted out of a practice group meeting, e-mailed my colleagues a succinct abstract of the Ireland deposition (“Went fine”), and fought off a progressively hysterical Metcalf, who kept returning to my door with a Big Gulp in his paw. I was used to these displays of Metcalf’s ever-tense mental state, which had accelerated a physical deterioration that was getting harder to ignore. With the vitamin D–deficient complexion, the jowls of Silly Putty, and the taiga-like hairline, he appeared to be in perpetual treatment for a disease that beat the shit out of him but didn’t have the decency to kill him dead. Several times a day, he would charge into my office, his shirt trying to untuck itself, and cry paralysis over a list of pressing issues he was unable to resolve without my input. My input was usually something along the lines of “You figure it out” or, if I was in a good mood, “Metcalf, you need a girlfriend.” My reward for being taxed with a human being so overwrought and frazzled was the gift of an occasional gaffe. There was, for instance, the conference call a few weeks earlier, an hour-long shouting match involving a dozen or so lawyers. As it concluded, everyone throwing out parting shots and threats of running to the judge, Metcalf was so busy scribbling on his notepad that he barely noticed himself absently chirping “Love you” into the speakerphone. He would’ve heaved himself out a window if the fucking things opened.
Noon found me walking back to my condo. Once inside, I marched straight down the hall to the room we’d set up as an office. Hands in my pockets, I stared at the wall. My Martin D-28 acoustic stared back. She’d been in here all along, and while I’d always been aware of her, like the old picture frame hanging in the bedroom, I hadn’t looked at her, really looked at her, in ages.
I allowed my eyes to settle on the sides carved of East Indian rosewood, the neck of mahogany, the ambertone top. I’d bought it in a guitar shop in the East Village in the midnineties figuring that if it was good enough for Jimmy Page and Hank Williams, it would probably suffice for a rhythm player who knew no more than two dozen chords. It had accompanied me into the studio and onto stages across the globe. It had been a patient accessory when I sat down in living rooms, hotels, and bus seats trying to follow the bread crumbs of a song that wanted to be written.
Slowly, I reached over and gripped the neck. The lower strings rang out in soft dissonance at the disturbance of being touched. I blew dust off the frets and held the body up to my face. This is weird, I said to myself. I should be at the office reviewing that discovery motion. It needs to be filed in a few hours.
With great care, I carried the guitar into the living room and, dropping a yellow pad beside me on the couch, I strummed. Although I’d been estranged from this instrument for longer than I cared to remember, we picked up right where we left off. I immediately began to pair chords with that unrelenting melody that had been looping through my brain since my shower. “I could’ve sworn she’d gone missing, she was hiding in plain sight.”
An hour later, I stuffed one of Sara’s caramel nut Luna bars into my jacket pocket and headed back to the office. Once there, I returned to my window and resumed my trancelike absorption in everything within view.
I felt isolated, on edge, out of my element, and unsure if there even was an element out there that would feel like my own. I didn’t know whether these were growing pains or the pains of realizing your growing days were done, but either way, for a reason I couldn’t place, it all hurt so good.
* * *
That evening, Sara scooped up her goblet, ambled lazily around the table, and planted her bony ass on my lap. Dinner often ended in this seating configuration. She tended to eat faster and drink more than I.
“Were you here today?” she asked.
The Martin, my tell-tale heart, was propped up against the sofa.
“I stopped back at lunch,” I confessed.
Her jaw literally dropped in amazement. “You came home in the middle of the day to play guitar?”
“I had to pick up some work that I left here,” I said, fumbling through a lie while stirring my penne in vodka sauce. “I grabbed a bite and just decided to strum for a few minutes.”
Red wine stained the edges of her smirk like day-old lipstick. Her words were smeared together in something just shy of a slur, as if she were speaking in cursive. “I’ve never seen that thing come down off the wall. Play something for me.”
“I don’t think so. And your exceedingly bony cheeks are crushing my legs.”
“Masculine to a fault,” she muttered, turning around and straddling me as if readying a lap dance. At close range, I could see her bloodshot eyes, and I wondered how she’d found the time to drain a glass or two before I’d walked in the door.
“What did you do today?” I asked.
“Nothing. A couple of client meetings. The usual.”
With a luxurious yawn, her head tumbled onto my shoulder and I caught the dying wisps of her lavender shampoo. It always reminded me of our trip to Provence years ago. It was the happiest I’d ever seen her, breezing from one medieval town to the next in our tiny white convertible two-seater, lunching on baguettes and cheese, lounging in cozy cafés under lamplight at the foot of a mountain. For that brief period, Sara seemed to have left herself and the dark weight of her past back home. One afternoon we p
icnicked on a rock in a secluded gorge by the Verdon River. As she leaned back on her hands, barefoot with her knees bent, she watched the current with a serenity that matched the river’s constant flow. “I’d like to live by the water one day,” she said. “The sea or a lake or a river, it doesn’t matter.” I didn’t see myself ever moving out of the city, but since we were just talking, I said, “How about a summer home on the Riviera?” She smiled, still staring at the rush of cold water. “Or a little cottage in Maine or Cape Cod,” I added. She turned to me and there was no denying the look on her face. She was holding me accountable for the peace she’d momentarily found. “Promise?” she asked.
Still draped over me like a wilted rose, Sara was now half-asleep. We stayed that way awhile, sandwiched together between chair and table, serenaded by Stan Getz’s breathy sax atop a Jobim composition from the sixties. Sara often cooked to bossa nova, disappearing into the lush sway of its rhythms, the sandy scent of its melodies. Unless she was cooking for a crowd, in which case she went Jackson 5 for the energy boost.
“Go lie down,” I said, patting her back. “I’ll clean up.”
She planted a delicate kiss on my neck. Then came another, and then a warm, wine-dipped whisper. “Come with me.”
“You’re sound asleep.”
“I can rally.” She lifted her head and tried to make her bleary eyes dance, but it was a dance that foretold swift collapse. I wasn’t without sympathy: if I were in a relationship with me, I’d have to beer-goggle too.
Her eyes closed in a hazy flutter. I soothed her back with the tips of my fingers and surveyed the disturbance of plates, glasses, and utensils in front of me.
Sara let out another long hush of a breath. Just as she drifted off, she drizzled a sigh of words into my ear. “I’ve always hated this table.”
* * *
Sara and I, classmates in high school, had reconnected during my band years. One afternoon, on the way to Warren’s to go through some new material, Jumbo and I stopped into a strip mall deli to pick up sandwiches, and as we waited for our takeout, I ran into Marianne Sadler, a friend from the old neighborhood. After we’d exchanged pleasantries, Marianne gripped my shoulder. “Did you hear Sara Rome lost a kid?”
“What?” I remembered the girl from school, a stylish broomstick, quietly intelligent, someone you knew your whole life and noticed only in a certain, limited way.
“Her son, Drew. Just a few weeks ago. Totally unreal.” Marianne had become friendly with Sara through mommy-and-me classes. She told me Sara was now an interior designer.
“Jesus. How old?”
“Two.”
“Jesus.”
I don’t know what compelled me to call her the next day. Maybe it was the blade of tragedy cutting deep in the place where I’d grown up and into the people I’d grown up with. And why wouldn’t I call? It was me. In those days, I owned the world.
“Is this Sara? Sara Rome?”
“Yes,” answered a lifeless voice.
“It’s Teddy Tremble. Do you remember me?”
“Of course, Teddy. Wow. How are you?”
“I’m okay. Listen—I just ran into Marianne Sadler. She told me some awful news. I’m so sorry . . .” As my voice trailed off, I heard only a quaking breath on the other end.
A half hour later, I was sitting on a black sofa in an immaculately decorated den, a mirror with a mosaic assemblage of pastel tiles hanging overhead. Our paths hadn’t crossed since graduation, but Sara was still long and lean, with black hair and penetratingly Welsh blue eyes. Her face now seemed gaunt and lifeless, unnourished by food or sleep.
“You didn’t have to come over,” she said.
I looked around the room. Toys sat undisturbed in bins lined up along the wall, a jarring orderliness to the colorful games and playthings. The place was full of quiet, empty of mess. Her husband, Billy, had fled to the office for a few hours.
The accident had happened on the ride home from the Academy of Natural Sciences, where Billy and Drew had spent the morning marveling at dinosaur fossils, digging for bones at the mock archaeological site, and working up the nerve to touch turtles and snakes cradled by young staff members. On their way out of town, an SUV raced through a red light and rammed into the door where Drew was strapped into his car seat. Billy escaped with a few gashes and bruises. Drew died at the hospital before Sara could get there.
She seemed eager to shift the subject. How was it, she wanted to know, that a mediocre student of average popularity and unremarkable charisma could land himself in a world-famous band? She didn’t quite put it like that. She told me I looked exactly the same as I did in high school, which was not in this case a compliment, since rock musicians do not aspire to the appearance of dishwater-dull teenagers.
A few years later, when Lucy and I were tunneling into divorce, I moved into my condo. My decorating vision being what it was, I thought it best to outsource all decor decisions and immediately thought of Sara. Really, it was an excuse to call her. I hadn’t been able to shake her story, my connectedness to it all.
Sara made my condo up nice and swank, a place I could only pretend to fit into. My life was anything but normal in those days, so she’d be over at odd times trying to pin me down on blinds versus curtains, steel blue versus denim blue, my views on something called a sconce, and oh, how about an island in the kitchen? She always seemed to be working, combing through catalogs, holding swatches up to the light, and often swinging by my place deep into the evening so as to oblige my anarchic schedule. It never even occurred to me that the late hours helped keep her mind from wandering into other places, from going home, where her husband no longer lived. More than once, I asked her how she was doing, employing a tone that made my meaning clear, and each time she answered, without looking up, with a curt “I’m fine.” I started offering her a late-night drink, and then found myself offering her an early-morning coffee.
It was not a romance born of romance. The rhythms of courtship unfolded over carpet patterns, tables, comforters. I did not wow her with limos to Broadway shows, introductions to Michael Stipe. I did not take her to a meadow with a picnic of chutneys and urge her to smell the eucalyptus in bloom, nor did I lead her out to a beach at midnight and enchant her with lines like “Do you know what the Mayans used to say about the moon?” I was an open door, that’s all, and she walked through it.
I welcomed her into my condo and my life because she was beautiful in a real and natural way, and she seemed like a portal out of the world of the fickle and into the world of the sophisticatedly mundane. Where conversations concerned friends’ upcoming birthdays, pesto sauce preferences, and the pitiful state of the school district. Where it was perfectly acceptable to pass an evening together holding lattes at Barnes & Noble.
There was nothing about her that brought the thorny end of Tremble to my nose. That’s why I connected with Sara. Why she connected with me is a bit of a mystery. Maybe it was because I neither required nor offered depth of any kind; my waters were shallow, she could see the bottom. Maybe it was to escape the metastasizing poverty in her core; maybe it was because she had already succumbed to it. All I know is that by being with me, one day at a time she began to walk different blocks, speak of different things, and distance herself from who she was.
Compared to the heavy Wagnerian circumstances of Sara’s separation from Billy, the dissolution of my marriage was easy listening. It wasn’t the age-old story either: I didn’t dump my minor-league wife for a piece of ass worthy of a rock star, although by all standards and clichés I had every right to do so. Lucy was my college girlfriend, cute and comfortable, like a Volkswagen Beetle. At the time we got together, I was no more than a political science major who happened to be in a band. After graduation, when our demo miraculously got some attention and things began to spiral, Lucy bravely bore the adjustment to being a band widow, despite her nagging suspicion that everyone
in that industry was a closet heroin addict.
There were, however, little things—you could call them signs—that indicated my marriage was in trouble. We stopped going to movies together because we couldn’t agree on one. Musicwise, we were totally incompatible, which might seem like no big deal—you play your albums, I’ll play mine—but it reflected a more basic divide. Once, when Bitches Brew was on the stereo, she said that all jazz sounded the same. That stung. When she announced that her favorite song was “Against All Odds” by Phil Collins, I knew our days were numbered.
“Cliché?” she asked.
“Absurd,” I said, with a mouth full of disdain. “That’s like saying your favorite movie is Revenge of the Nerds II. It’s just not appropriate. Phil Collins himself would slap you for saying that.”
She looked defensive. “It’s a matter of opinion.”
“Not always.”
Ask her what her favorite Beatles song was and she’d say “If I Were a Rich Man” from Magical Mystery Tour. But “If I Were a Rich Man” isn’t on Magical Mystery Tour. It’s on Fiddler on the Roof. Who cares if she meant “Baby, You’re a Rich Man?” That’s not the point. This is the greatest band in the history of the universe. Know the fucking song title.
On top of everything else, I sensed she was leading me down the path of sexual apathy. She acquiesced, rarely initiated, and during the act itself, her face registered never excitement or lust but rather impatience and frequently discomfort. The fact that I was hanging out with musicians who seemed to have far more adventurous partners only fueled my dissatisfaction. I deserved better. Didn’t I?
The end finally came when she caught me at a Phoenix hotel with Mackenzie. My luck being what it was, I’d never touched the bass player before that day. Tremble had a show that evening, so the afternoon found me setting off on one of my get-lost drives. These were essentially the vehicular version of a get-lost hike: I’d borrow a car, steer it out onto the road, and discover America. It was the only time I had to myself.
Thank You, Goodnight Page 7
