When You Went Away

by Michael Baron

“What are you making?”

  Codie called right after I began preparing dinner. Reese sat in his high chair with some toys, alternately pounding them and chewing them.

  “A cornmeal-crusted chicken breast which I’m topping with a little pineapple- habanero salsa.”

  “Set the table for two. I’ll be there in an hour and a half.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  “I’d love to, believe me. The client I’m working on tonight is creativity-averse. I don’t know why he doesn’t have someone in his accounting department do the campaign for him.”

  “So come on out. Reese can put the pitch together while we’re eating.”

  “No, Reese is too sophisticated for this guy. And I actually do have dinner plans tonight.”

  “Date?

  “More like an exploratory interview for a date.”

  “Sounds very romantic.”

  “Everything in its place. So what’s my favorite nephew doing?”

  I put a little bit of olive oil into a hot pan and glanced over at the high chair. “At the moment, trying to put an entire stuffed rabbit into his mouth.”

  Codie laughed. “Pretty oral these days, huh?”

  “Exclusively oral these days. I also forgot how much pre-teething kids drool. I feel like I should dress him in scuba gear.”

  “There’s an appealing image.”

  I put the chicken in the pan and turned to the counter to get the salsa ready. “So are we still on for the Sunday after next?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll be there in the late morning. Unless you guys want to come into town for brunch again.”

  “I think we might want to wait seven or eight years before we give that another try.” When I’d finally managed to get into the city with Reese, the three of us went to a restaurant and things didn’t work out precisely as planned. The place was far too sophisticated and Reese had no patience for it – something he felt it necessary to voice at tremendous volume. Codie and I wound up taking turns walking with him on the street outside. “Late morning out here would be great.”

  I put on a pair of plastic gloves. I wasn’t usually that wimpy when dealing with hot chilies, but I didn’t want Reese teething on one of my fingers and scorching himself on habanero juice. As I pulled out my chef’s knife, I heard a dull thump and then a scream from the high chair. I have no idea what he did to himself, but his face was scarlet and he was wailing.

  “What happened?” Codie said.

  “Nothing that doesn’t happen five times a day. There’s no blood.” Propping the phone between my ear and my shoulder, I pulled Reese out of his chair. He choked back a couple of sobs and buried his head in my chest.

  “Do you need to go?”

  “No, he’ll be fine in a second. My guess is that he banged his head against his tray. He hasn’t figured out yet that this is a bad idea.” Reese had already stopped crying, but still had his head down. The chicken needed turning, so I slid him over to one shoulder, the phone on the other, and reached for my tongs.

  “Can I say hi to him or is he too upset for that.”

  Reese lifted his head up and watched me manipulate the tongs, his pain and indignation forgotten. “No, he’s totally okay.” I put the phone up to his ear. “Aunt Codie wants to talk to you.”

  I heard Codie’s contralto salutations through the earpiece. Reese seemed fascinated by this and leaned his head into the phone. He smiled and burbled. A minute later, I took the phone back.

  “He talked to me,” Codie said.

  “You really need to get one of these for yourself.” “I can’t believe he talked to me. Do you think he recognized my voice?”

  “Of course he recognized your voice. Didn’t you hear him say, ‘What did you buy me, Aunt Codie?’”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass. That was very exciting to me.”

  “Geez, I hope you’re tougher on older men.”

  “My nephew is not a man.”

  “I don’t think I have the energy to get into the psychology of that comment. Besides my chicken is nearly cooked and I haven’t made the salsa yet.”

  “I’ll let you go. I have to sleepwalk through the rest of this presentation and get out of here in an hour. This guy I’m going out with is a fashion photographer. I might actually need to wear makeup.”

  “Ridiculous. If he can’t tell that you’re naturally gorgeous, he can’t be much of a photographer.”

  “Gee, thanks. Can I talk to Reese one more time?”

  I gave him the phone again, but he didn’t react at all to Codie’s cooing. Before hanging up, though, I told her he smiled the entire time she spoke to him. She just loved hearing that.

  • • •

  That night, I checked my e-mail, as I always did after I put Reese to bed. As usual, there wasn’t a message from Tanya. But I received a Google alert regarding a new article about River. While I had no idea whether Tanya was still following the band around, it was essential to me that I stay up to date with their press.

  This piece focused on a recent concert in Indianapolis and on a ritual bassist Kent Swanson performed a couple of times every tour, going out to the parking lot to party with the Riverriders. I imagined Tanya among this group and wondered what her reaction had been to it. Cool in the face of celebrity, I’m sure, but more than a little tickled inside.

  For the first time in a while, I thought about my own days as a rock musician. Though I never got anywhere near breaking through, there was a time in my teens when this was the only important thing to me. Back then, I would have retched to think of working in an office to make a living. The one and only time I ever went on the road was during the summer after my freshman year in college with a rock band that was good enough to book a series of dates along the eastern seaboard. The four of us spent six weeks lugging our equipment from club to club, sleeping in the van, and eating and drinking far too much. It had been exhausting and exhilarating. And it left me with more than a little appetite for the lifestyle – an appetite I lost very quickly when I met Maureen that October and realized how much more fulfilling a romance with her was than burritos and beer at 2:00 a.m. with three guys who had gone too long between showers.

  I never told Tanya about that trip – or, as I preferred to dub it back then, my “tour” – though I planned to do so around the time when things between us became tense. In fact, she knew very little about my fascination with being a rock musician. There was the piano in the living room and the songs that I wrote for her on her birthday, but she certainly had no idea that I once dreamed of being in the place where River was now, with followers traveling from arena to arena to watch me play.

  Would things have been different between us if she grew up knowing how much this kind of thing once meant to me?Maybe if she saw her father less as the kind of guy who made meaningless things for a living and more as someone who created and dreamed, we would have actually bonded more during her tumultuous years. Or maybe not. Since she wasn’t even happy when I told her that I liked some of the new bands she listened to, maybe she would rebelled more. Regardless, holding anything back at this point seemed pointless – especially since I was revealing myself to a leather-bound journal.

  Did your mom ever tell you that your dad used to be a rocker? Yep, long hair and everything. I took piano lessons when I was seven and eight and hated it. Back in the olden days, piano teachers didn’t believe in training their students through rock and roll, and I thought exercises like “Balloons” or “Hide and Seek,” or dumbed-down Mozart and Beethoven was just stupid. But when I was 13, some friends decided to start a band and I wound up being their keyboard player. I started writing songs a year later and by the time I graduated high school, I the idea of being a rock star had become an obsession. I hooked up with a great group of players and we got a bit of a local reputation. Even went out on tour the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at college. I have some of the shows on tape that you can listen to if you promise not to laugh about how dated most o
f it sounds now.

  When I started playing in these bands, I did it for one reason and one reason only: to get girls. Any rock musician who tells you they got into it for any other reason (including fame and fortune) is lying to you. I wrote some of the most dreadfully ridiculous songs because of the impact I thought they would have on the girls listening to them. Treacly ballads to show how deep my soul went. Pounding rockers to illustrate that I could be a “bad boy” (stop laughing!). I was certain these songs would launch me to international superstardom and that women would throw themselves at me wherever I went.

  It didn’t quite work out that way. First of all, these prefab songs were just plain bad. Second, even though I got to play on stage (though many times the “stage” was a friend’s patio during a party) hundreds of times over those rock and roll years, I never attracted many women. Your mother told me that this was because I projected too much sincerity up there and that the women attracted to rock musicians were not looking for “real” guys. And of course, I never became a celebrity. In fact, within a year of meeting your mother, I didn’t play in bands at all anymore.

  But the happy accident in all of this was the lifelong love affair I began with music. I always liked listening to rock and roll. But once I started playing it – even if my reasons for doing so were less than pure – I extracted all kinds of new meaning from the form. The songs I wrote for myself (as opposed to the ones I wrote for the bands) allowed me to express all kinds of things I couldn’t have said easily otherwise. And the sound of the music, whether it was a power chord played on a distortion-drenched guitar or a light piano arpeggio, held trance-like qualities for me. I came home from school and got lost in playing. Sometimes hours went by without my noticing they’d passed. And none of this was because I chased a dream of romance or riches. It was because I’d developed a deep and permanent bond with the music.

  Do you remember the songs I wrote you for your birthday? I did it every year until you were 14. It was part of the whole celebration ritual – big dinner, followed by lots of presents, followed by your mother’s toast in which she bestowed her wishes upon you for the coming year (and yes, she did this even when you were a toddler) and finally my birthday song for you. I think one of the top five moments in my life came when you were six and I overheard you singing one of those songs in your room.

  I don’t think I ever explained to you why I didn’t play you a birthday song at 15 or 16. The main reason I never explained it to you – and the primary reason why there wasn’t a song – was that you didn’t ask. You see, you never heard the entirety of your 14th birthday song. The family dinner ran late (your grandmother told this excruciatingly long story about how the Seniors Community Center elected her president) and you had some friends picking you up to take you to the movies. I was into the second verse when Lizzie showed up at the door. You came over to tell me and I said that I only had one more verse to go. Your response was, “Dad, I have to leave NOW,” and you took off.

  I’m sure you didn’t mean for me to be as insulted as I felt. But it was obvious that this little tradition had lost its charm for you – underscored by the fact that you didn’t even seem to notice that there wasn’t a song the next year. I realized then that, while I expressed my love for you by sharing something that I loved, it had gotten to the point where I cared much more about it than you did. And since it was your birthday, that didn’t make a lot of sense.

  Your mom and I had one of our bigger arguments about my not writing any more songs for you. She told me that she didn’t think it was helping our relationship for me to adopt a defeatist attitude. I told her that I wasn’t being defeatist, but rather realistic about where we were in our lives at that point. She felt that the difference was semantic.

  This wasn’t the only conversation that went this way. By this point, you were completely unpredictable and your mom and I felt differently about how to deal with this. She felt that you needed constant reminders that we were there for you. I felt that you needed some space. We debated philosophies a lot and sometimes these debates became heated, perhaps more so than any other conversations we had in our lives together. I think these were the only times we literally stalked away from each other.

  And here’s the dirty little secret: I wrote songs for you for both of those birthdays, as well as your 17th. I kept them from you because I wanted you to ask for them. And I kept them from your mom because I didn’t want her talking you into asking for them. You see, I couldn’t stop writing them because I couldn’t let go of that moment when I heard you singing my song when you were six years old. And I couldn’t let go of the hope that you might wish for these songs again some day and that my instantly delivering them to you would be a watershed moment in our lives.

  Yes, I think it was safe to say that the simplicity had fled our relationship quite some time before you ran away.

  • • •

  I hadn’t played the piano since Maureen died.

  This was never my primary band instrument. For one thing, one couldn’t lug a piano from practice to practice. For another, the piano wasn’t very rock and roll. Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis could pull it off. Billy Joel and Elton John could. But most of us didn’t have the level of cool required to make such an elegant piece of equipment work that way. Instead, I used an electronic keyboard, which I still had in the basement, and I taught myself the rudiments of electric rhythm guitar. There was even a point when I fashioned a strap for the keyboard so I could strut around the stage with it, though fortunately that period didn’t last long.

  But the piano had always been my main instrument for writing. And when Maureen came into my life, my writing evolved. My lyrics became richer, which was no surprise considering I was in the first serious relationship of my life. But the music I composed became more nuanced and graceful as well. I used chord structures I never attempted before. The songs were more melodic and I found the beauty in modulations I never even considered in the past.

  I wrote my prettiest songs ever and never played one of them in public (other than Tanya’s birthday parties). Songwriting evolved into a very personal avocation for me. It was something I would share with Maureen and later with my daughter. It was something that I did for my family and myself simply because I loved doing it and because it was important for me to express myself this way. Not all of the songs were about my wife and child. Some of them were about how I felt or about an observation I made, and some of them were about utterly inconsequential things. But all of these songs felt different from the ones I had created before. These weren’t wannabe hits aimed at making me a rock star. These were songs written with the intention of compiling some kind of personal record.

  I didn’t quit playing in bands because of Maureen. In fact, she encouraged my playing and told me regularly that she thought I looked sexy (though it was a sincere kind of sexy) on stage. But once we were together, playing in bands just seemed so secondary compared to spending time with her. There was no reason to take hours and hours away from our lives to pursue this dream because my dream had evolved. It centered on Maureen now.On the life we were undeniably building and the future that was inextricably a shared one. And where I once vowed to follow my goal of success in the world of music until the bitter end, I found that the end was very sweet instead.

  After writing in Tanya’s journal, I finally went to the piano. For the first time in months, I wanted to play. My fingers instinctively moved to the two chords I always played when I first sat at the instrument, a Gmaj7 and a C9. I then played (softly, to avoid waking Reese up, though his room was a floor away) one of the first songs I ever wrote for Maureen. This had been a breakthrough moment for me musically, because not only did I use my first augmented chord but also because I rhymed “friend” with “relent,” the first time I employed something less than a strict rhyme in my lyrics. I considered this a huge sign of maturity at the time.

  After playing this tune, I felt a little blocked. Songs came into my head, but eit
her I couldn’t remember the chord changes or I was unsure of a verse. It was time to pull out my old songbooks. And once I did that, I was gone for hours. I went all the way back to my very first one – a loose-leaf binder filled with lined paper on which I wrote lyrics with chords marked over them.My handwriting was a mess back then; I had trouble deciphering some of the innocuous phrases. And the melodies had a humbling sameness, but I still found this excursion entertaining. It was easy to laugh at myself on reflection, even though I knew I took this work very seriously at the time. I played a verse or two from some protest songs I wrote (one on the environment and one on the atrocities in Africa), an homage to a friend who moved away when I was a sophomore in high school, and a cliché-riddled tune I wrote after my first kiss.

  A second notebook contained the songs I wrote with my first serious band, a group called Tone. A few of them held up amazingly well. I imagined myself performing these songs, envisioning the fluid solos played by the lead guitarist and the appreciation of the people who listened to them. I hadn’t played many of these songs in nearly two decades and my memory had morphed them. I had somehow convinced myself that I hadn’t written a single worthwhile tune until I met Maureen, but playing these now suggested something entirely different. There was hardly enough here to make me a household name, but there was more competence – and even a little more inspiration – than I remembered.

  Still, when I got to the third notebook, the songs I wrote after Maureen and I got together, there was a dramatic difference. And every one that I played now took me back to another place in our lives. Sometimes these memories were the direct motivation for the songs – the first time we made love, our first trip together, her agreeing to marry me – and sometimes what I recalled instead were the times when I played them for her. Her sitting on my lap while I played with one hand and whispered the song into her ear. Her lounging on the floor next to the piano while we were alone in my parents’ house and then pulling me down next to her when the song was finished. Her rocking an infant Tanya back and forth in her arms while I sang to both of them. Her paint-spattered face smiling down at me while I played with equally spattered hands the day after we moved into this house.