I noticed that Sonny now had a laptop on his knee. This was the equivalent of making a phone call in the middle of a take, which, come to think of it, I’d seen him do.
“Are you surfing YouTube over there?” I asked.
“Never you mind what I’m doing. Concern yourself with what you’re doing. You got another bullet in the chamber or not?”
Annoyed but compliant, I launched into a tune called “Painless Days,” a fingerpicking lark of a song that beckoned a girl to come outside into a springtime afternoon. Tonally, it was a departure for me. Structurally, it had no chorus. But I’d never written a song before that made me want to build a tree house and sit in it all weekend, so there was that. I’d grown slightly more relaxed, but it was evening now and my voice wore the tatters and strains of a long day. Ten years of not singing a note will do that to you. The six-pack I’d gulped down to chase the nerves didn’t help either.
As I floundered through my performance, I knew that Sonny was either getting this or he wasn’t. It was that simple. There was nothing more I could do at this point. I’d been writing at a frantic clip for weeks, and it was time to wave a wet finger into the breeze and seek feedback from someone I trusted. I needed to know if there was anything to this recent shock of creativity or if it was just a death rattle.
When my fingers had plucked the last notes of the song, I looked directly into the unblinking red eye of the mini-camera perched atop the screen. On the far coast, Sonny was reclining casually, savoring his smoke, his eyes focused downward toward his laptop. A smirk schemed its way across his face as if he’d just read an amusing e-mail.
Sonny didn’t seem to notice I’d stopped playing. I let a moment pass before clearing my throat. He looked up and took a drag of his cigarette. “What are the others like?”
“Jesus, man.”
“I asked you a question.”
My hand lurched plaintively into the air. “I don’t know. The others are in the same vein, I suppose. ‘Whereabouts’ is probably the most commercial, I guess. I don’t really fucking know what that means anymore, but yeah, I’d call it commercial. There are a few others that feel edgier to me. I hear most of these with very sparse production. Raw, stripped down, like what Rick Rubin did with Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond. Though Neil Diamond isn’t at all what I’m shooting for. I’m rambling—I should just shut up now.” I paused for a swig. “What are the others like? How do I answer that? They’re awesome, they suck, I don’t know. I guess there’s one that kind of rocks out—it’s called ‘America Eats Warhol’; that one I really like. And there are some that are darker thematically, not in the sense that they tell a story or any of that shit, but the imagery is sort of austere. I’m not saying I’ve written The Wall, just stuff that feels foreboding, brooding, Bonnie Prince Billy. But at the same time, I feel like even the darker songs still pull the listener in.” I’d descended into something beyond rambling. I was flat-out not making sense. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, so I’m just going to shut up now. But one last thing—”
“Do me a favor,” he interrupted. “Quit telling me you’re going to shut up now. Just shut up now.”
I reached again for the beer, which was now piss warm. When I looked at the monitor, Sonny wore a cruel grin.
“You having a good time over there, asshole?” I said.
Then he leaned forward and frowned. “Look, you got some serious work to do.”
I let out a bruised snort. Then I shook my head with all the dejection I’d fully anticipated. Why had I even subjected myself to this in the first place? This was a bad idea. I should’ve been able to recognize bad ideas by now.
I lifted the guitar off my knee and slid it away across the carpet. “You know what? Fuck that. I’m not working on this anymore. I’m done. Fucking done, man.”
“Go make a record, motherfucker.”
I stopped and looked at him. “What?”
“Get it down and get it down right. You need to make a record.”
“Are you serious?”
“I don’t like it when people ask me if I’m serious. It undermines all the other words that come out of my mouth.” Then he checked his watch. “I’m late.”
He folded up his laptop and bore down into the camera, pointing the blistering end of his cigarette at me. “You be careful with these cunning plans of yours. You hearing me?” He returned the cigarette to his lips and added, “I love you, motherfucker.”
The screen was overtaken by a hand reaching out at me, as if to cover my eyes, or tear off a blindfold. And then he was gone.
* * *
I stood next to my guitar, unable to move, the light sweat of terror staining my shirt. Sonny’s directive had taken on a dreamlike quality, like something I was told to do a millennium ago.
You will never again feel the way you do at this moment.
That’s what he told us on our first day in the studio. At the time, I took our producer’s words as both a call to Zen and a call to battle, a maxim intended to rouse a band of tenderfeet into both savoring the promise of the moment and delivering on it. Over the years, I’d recalled those words with melancholy. Sonny was right. Never again did I feel the way I did at that moment, on the precipice of my life, awestruck by everything, including my own sense of limitlessness.
Sony Music had signed us on the strength of some hook-driven demos and a strong draw on the bar circuit all along the Mid-Atlantic. From the Bitter End in Greenwich Village to the Bottle & Cork in Dewey Beach, from the 9:30 Club in DC to the Chameleon in Lancaster, we packed the house. Our pitch for a record deal had been played tantalizingly by a brash agent trying to make a name for herself. Two meetings with the slicker-than-thou Alaina Farber—a woman who could imbue the act of picking up dry cleaning with a whiff of eroticism—and the Sony rep, a seasoned, affable, and prematurely gray chap named Colin Stone, was putty in her hands. He believed her when she informed him—informed him—that we were destined to make a brilliant album or, at the very least, a homogenous blockbuster. Our debut, The Queen Kills the King, ended up going multiplatinum.
At the first of those recording sessions, we were led through the chic Brooklyn studio a little before noon (first thing in the morning in musicians’ hours). The bewitching instruments, sparkling microphones, and serpentine arrangement of boards, cords, and wires lay about us like an indoor state-of-the-art Garden of Eden.
Sonny immediately ordered us to take up our instruments and play through the songs we considered our strongest, the ones we felt defined us. As we obliged, he sat on a swivel chair in front of the board, staring at us through the glass with his legs crossed and an inscrutable expression on his face. He reacted to nothing; his eyebrows had gone on hiatus. When we were done, I arrogantly volunteered my views as to which songs were radio ready and which were the deep cuts and how each was necessary for a complete and whole record. I said this to the man who made Aerosmith’s and Dave Matthews’s bestselling albums.
While I went on about hit potential and the demographics of college radio and the mass-market pipelines of MTV and VH1, Sonny stared back at me through piercing eyes. When my mouth had finally emptied itself of nonsense, he pounded a pack of smokes into his palm and said, “You can make something that people will celebrate or you can make something that’s worth being celebrated. You have until I finish this cigarette to decide.” And he walked outside.
It was the band’s unanimous conclusion that his question was rhetorical.
But now, all these years later, standing alone in my condo, there was only the memory of confidence, only the metallic taste of fear. And then I heard a key sliding into the door.
Something about the way Sara entered the room made me forget all about music for a moment. With eye contact that felt slippery and hasty, she paused at the curious arrangement of instruments and computers clunking up the living room, then turned to the closet
, drawing her long, chestnut-brown jacket off her shoulders.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she answered over the wind chime of coat hangers. Brushing the hair out of her eyes, she nodded at the mess. “And what exactly is going on here?”
“I was just screwing around,” I said with a shrug. “Hey—Ravi called.”
“Here?”
“Yeah. Something about a meeting.”
“That’s odd. He knew I wasn’t going to be around. I specifically told him. I was with Josie and Wynne.”
I waded back over the wires and proceeded to remove the mic from the clip and dismantle the boom stand.
Shifting her frown to me, Sara said, “Teddy, not once in all the years we’ve lived together have I come home to find you playing music. That is, until the past few weeks.” She looked serious, unusually pensive. “Let’s talk. Can we do that? Both of us?”
I’d shared very little of my recent musical reawakening with Sara. While she could plainly see I’d taken to strumming the guitar again, I’d told her nothing of my Switzerland hijinks, or of this unforeseen avalanche of music and words.
“You know Sonny Rivers, right?”
She nodded. “He produced your records.”
I took a long breath. “He wants me to record again.”
“He wants you to what?”
“I’ve been writing a little lately, and I played him some of my new songs tonight. He kind of liked them. He thinks I should record them.”
“Like, with the band?”
“We didn’t get that far, but I think so.”
Her face was a blank slate.
“I don’t get it either,” I offered helplessly.
“That’s great,” she said, her voice tepid, her eyes beset.
Even if Sara had known I’d been writing songs again, it never would have occurred to her that I harbored any sort of plans. She would have assumed I was writing songs the way most people write poetry, or the way she did her mosaics with her friends—as an outlet, a tawdry little secret. You write your songs or your sonnets, and then you bury them in your dresser drawer where they gradually sink lower and lower under the cuff links and condoms.
“So what does this mean?” she asked.
“I don’t really know.”
“You must know. Why else would you have played him your songs in the first place?”
Standing in the living room of my apartment, a lawyer of generic looks and advancing age—hardly the moment to ramp up a career in pop music—there were simply no words.
“I’m not kidding, Sara. I don’t know what this all means.” I looked away from her. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
Sara circumnavigated the gear and yanked on the sliding door that opened onto the balcony. The room had become stale and muggy, the strumming and singing and perspiring having stirred the air into a broth.
“I see somebody’s having a hard time getting older,” she ventured with a smirk.
“Maybe.”
Sara eyed the disarray before her—the chairs, the amplifier, the computer, the snake pit of cables, all of which looked as if it had been swept into the room by a flood. She took ginger steps to the sofa, smoothed out her pant legs, and dropped onto a cushion. “Let’s back up. You wrote some new songs and decided to play them for the guy who produced your band’s albums fifteen years ago.”
I nodded, continuing to wrap the microphone cable in large loops that extended from my hand down around my elbow.
“And you did this because . . .”
“Well. It’s complicated.”
She let out a dark laugh. “What isn’t?”
For some reason, I had the inexplicable urge to tell her that I wished she and I were less complicated. I wanted her to hear me say that. But that would have been a clear violation of our tacit, long-standing agreement to allow all our angst, hope, dread, joy, grief, guilt, and panic to jumble around of their own kinetics, largely unexamined.
“You’re a musician, Teddy. That was your life until your luck ran out. And then you evolved. I hope you haven’t been unhappy all these years, but by the same token, it would be perfectly natural to fantasize about going back to that world, especially since you would’ve preferred not to have left it in the first place.”
I tossed the microphone cable toward my trusted old bag of gear. It was blue and faded and the fabric was unraveling on the sides where the boxlike tuners and guitar pedals pressed against it. It was the same bag I’d lugged around to gigs in college. It used to smell of stale beer. Now it smelled like the back of my shoe closet.
I took a seat next to her on the sofa. “Have you ever wanted to do something different?” I asked her, exploring the weary curve of her spine. “Have you ever felt the itch to change?”
She tilted her head downward, peering at me over a pair of invisible spectacles. “I’m not restless like you. When I feel the urge to change, I explore a new design style or I buy myself a new outfit, or we plan a trip and disappear off the face of the earth for a week. That’s probably as much redefinition as I’ve got in me at this point.”
I didn’t say anything. As she stared at me, I knew she wanted to ask me if she was one of the things I wanted to change. She had to be wondering what it was in my life, or absent from it, that was leading me down this path.
“Speaking of change.” She slapped a hand on each of her thighs, something people tended to do before standing. But she didn’t move. “Sometimes it comes looking for you, not the other way around.”
I had the notion she was speaking of present tenses, and I felt the air in the room thicken.
“There’s something I want to tell you,” she said.
“Okay.”
I waited in the pregnant silence as she gathered herself.
“Billy called me.”
“Billy. Your Billy?”
“Yeah.” She looked away. “He wants a divorce.”
That, I did not see coming. But somebody should have. Sara and Billy didn’t last very long after the accident, the marriage falling into a slow, methodical disintegration. One detail left unattended in their mutual flight, however, was their marital status. Over the years I’d wondered just how accidental that was, if maybe, on a subconscious level, a divorce would’ve been the final hammer swing on the life they once shared, and neither of them had it in them to do it.
Her being married never factored into our relationship because I never threatened to make Sara a bigamist (my starter marriage having been an event I wasn’t keen on replicating) and Sara, for her part, seemed preoccupied with just making it through the day. It was a perverse sort of equilibrium, mutually assured purgatory.
Sara and I spoke of marriage exactly once. It was on a Sunday morning, a year after she’d moved in. As I pounded a ketchup bottle over an omelet, I offhandedly asked if she thought we’d ever get married. It wasn’t a proposal; it was for discussion purposes only. I merely wanted to know where her head was on the issue, like if she thought we’d ever sail the Strait of Magellan or if she reckoned Puerto Rico might one day become a state. She looked out the window for a long moment. Then she asked if that was something I really wanted to discuss. I took it as a rebuke, but have since wondered if she was truly posing a question. I honestly can’t remember it ever coming up again.
“Why now?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. He may be involved with someone and . . . I don’t know.” The thought dissolved into the air between us.
“Is he getting remarried?”
She shook her head slowly. “I don’t think that’s what’s driving this.”
“Wow, Sara.” I stared at her, weighing the many questions I could’ve asked. “So, what was it like, speaking to him after all these years?” I assumed it had been years, although there really was so much about Sara Rome I did
n’t know.
“It was strange. Needless to say, his call caught me off guard. Just hearing the sound of his voice knocked me a little. We kept it superficial—our jobs, our families, things like that. Then he said he thinks we need to, you know, make it official because of how long it’s been. And one day one of us might want to get married again.”
She didn’t personalize it. The remarrying didn’t necessarily involve me.
“How are you with all that?”
She shrugged with a woman’s natural pragmatism. “It makes sense.”
“Yeah,” I agreed softly. “I suppose it does.”
Sara never talked about Billy and I never inquired, assuming any thought of him would carry her to thoughts of Drew, a topic strictly off-limits. But now that I thought about it, there had been one instance. Late one night, soon after she’d moved in, I sensed an emptiness in the bed and, half-asleep, went looking for her in the predawn chill. I found her crumpled on the kitchen floor, the phone to her ear, sobbing to Billy. When her wet, puffy eyes flickered my way, it was only to convey that I wasn’t part of this. This didn’t involve me.
“So, what do we do now?” I said to her. “Drink to our mutual upheaval?”
“A drink is a good idea.” She got up and dewrinkled those invisible creases in her pants. “But this divorce thing is not upheaval. It’s the opposite. It’s a settling down.”
She carried herself heavily into the kitchen. I continued to disassemble the room to the sound of a wine bottle being smoothly violated by a corkscrew.
As leisurely paced as this divorce might have been, it was sure to change things between us. It was a step in the direction of finality, of bringing to a close a chapter in her life. And endings tended to deposit you at the doorstep of some other beginning. What would Sara want to begin? This was something I’d never before needed to consider. I didn’t want Sara’s situation to push her away from me, but at the moment, given the left turn my life was potentially about to take, I wasn’t so sure I wanted it to nudge her much closer either.
This divorce was upheaval. It was upheaval precisely because it was a settling down.
Thank You, Goodnight Page 9
