All Our Pretty Songs

by Sarah Mccarry

  “You don’t even try to have fun.” She pouts at me. I know Aurora drunk by heart. I don’t even need to see the flush in her cheeks or hear the challenge in her voice. Minos lurks behind her, bone-thin but somehow taking up too much space. I don’t like him, don’t want to talk to him, don’t want to watch Aurora flirt with him, giggling, like a rabbit teasing a wolf. He could eat her whole. He looks at me over her shoulder and smiles again. It’s not friendly.

  “I’m going to find Jack.” I push past them before she can say anything else. I cut my way through the crowd to the door that leads backstage, wait until no one is looking and duck through it into the dingy and badly lit corridor.

  Jack is in the green room, alone, sitting on a decrepit velour couch that looks like it’s been abused by musicians for longer than I’ve been alive. His guitar is next to him and his head is in his hands. I feel suddenly foolish, duck my head in embarrassment. But he looks up at me with such naked joy that I have to look away. I cross the room and before I even reach the couch he’s on his feet, leaning toward me, his mouth meeting mine.

  “They want so much,” he says into my hair. “Every time I play for more people, they want more of me, and I feel so empty when I’m done. But it’s the only thing I know how to do. It’s the only thing I’m good at.”

  “You can learn other things.”

  “It’s the only thing that makes me feel alive.” He is holding my wrists now, so tightly it hurts. “Do you want to get out of here?”

  “Let’s go.”

  He lives in a one-story cottage caught between two larger buildings. A jungle of front garden hides it from the street: huge, glorious dahlias luminous in the moonlight; heady-scented wild roses; broad-leaved and tall green plants I do not recognize. Cass would know their names. The ground is carpeted with mint, and a riot of jasmine obscures the front porch. I stop to look at the flowers. “I’ve never seen dahlias this big.”

  “I play for them,” he says. “I think they like it.” He unlocks the door and I follow him inside.

  The house is a single open room, with a small kitchen in one corner and big windows that look out on another, even junglier garden in back. There’s a mattress under one of the windows with a book-stuffed shelf beside it, a cheap card table and two chairs, a soft rich rug, a dresser, a single lamp in one corner. A record player sits beside a wooden crate full of records. There’s nothing on the walls except for a print of Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy tacked up over the bed. I’ve always loved that painting: the reclining figure stretched out on desert sand underneath a night-blued sky. Multicolored coat, striped blanket, lute. The moon is full, edging a range of mountains in silver. A lion stands over the sleeping figure, one yellow eye staring. Not at the sleeper, but at me. No one in the world knows where I am except Jack. I cross the room and squat next to the bookshelf. Mostly classics: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Odyssey, Keats, Shakespeare. A copy of The Inferno illustrated by Gustave Doré. Art books: Lucian Freud, Kiki Smith. “Schiele,” I say, “you like him?”

  “I love him.”

  “So do I. You like Rousseau, too?”

  He touches the picture. “Did you know he never left France in his entire life? He was a tax collector who painted taxidermied animals and invented a jungle out of the exhibits at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. He painted people like me without ever having met a black person.” He stops and I wait for him to say something else. “It’s a reminder,” he says. “For me. Of what people see.”

  “Oh. I never thought about it that way before.”

  “Well,” he says. “You’re white.”

  “Oh,” I say again.

  He puts on a Nina Simone record, sits on the bed. “Come here,” he says gently, and I move up from the floor so that I’m sitting next to him on the mattress. My heart is beating so hard I think he must be able to hear it. Nina Simone’s low rich voice seals us in. “What do you paint?” he asks. “Surely not lions.” He puts a hand on my back, his thumb gently rubbing the knot of bone where my neck meets my spine.

  “People, mostly. Sometimes places. Sometimes things that aren’t real.”

  “Would you paint me?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Try.”

  I hook my bag toward me with my foot, get out the jar of India ink and the soft brushes I carry with me everywhere. I get up, drag over one of his chairs, sit in it facing him, prop my sketchbook on my knees. I look at him for a long time, trying to see him as a series of lines, trying to see the shape underneath his skin, a language of his bones and his body that I can translate into marks on paper. The white page leers at me, mocking. I fidget, chew my brush. Then I have an idea.

  “Take off your shirt,” I say, “and lie down. He raises an eyebrow. “Not like that.” I can feel heat rising to my cheeks, and I turn my head away. “Just do it.” I hear the rustle of him moving around and don’t look again until he is still. The lamplight gilds the smooth muscles of his back and arms, his long and beautifully shaped hands. He’s turned his face away from me, and his hair coils across the pillow. I set down the sketchbook, put my brush between my teeth, and uncap the bottle of ink. “Keep still,” I say into his ear, and then I go to work.

  I draw a flight of shorebirds winging their way up his spine and a cluster of sea urchins spiking across his shoulder. I draw an osprey, stalled in midair with its wings crooked, in that still moment before it begins its dive. I draw waves rising between his ribs. I draw fish winking silver through the depths, kelp winding around them in thick glossy coils. I thought I knew my own desire, until the wind changed and a storm blew in and remade the sky, dredged mystery from the deep. I put a spell on you, Nina Simone croons. His back rises and falls as he breathes, and it is all I can do to keep myself from dipping my head and licking his skin. When the record ends I get up and turn it over. Nina Simone sings about sorrow and love, and the gold of her voice fills the air around us. When I am done I set the brush aside and put one hand over what I’ve drawn, fingers spread, not touching. Rousseau’s lion watches over us, wide-eyed, solemn. Desire rises in me, humming like a song. The room is very still. I blow on his skin to dry the last of the ink and he shivers, catches my wrist. “Is it good?”

  “It’s beautiful,” I say.

  “Show me,” he says.

  “Do you have a mirror?”

  “Not like that,” he says. “With your hands.”

  You think that the world we live in is ordinary. We make noise and static to fill the empty spaces where ghosts live. We let other people grow our food, bleach our clothes. We seal ourselves in, clean the dirt from our skins, eat of animals whose blood does not stain our hands. We long ago left the ways of our ancestors, oracles and blood sacrifice, traffic with the spirit world, listening for the voices out of stones and trees. But maybe sometimes you have felt the uncanny, alone at night in a dark wood, or waiting by the edge of the ocean for the tide to come in. We have paved over the ancient world, but that does not mean we have erased it.

  Once upon a time, girls who were too beautiful or too skilled were changed into other things by angry gods and their wives. A cow, a flower, a spider, a fog. Maybe you boasted too loudly of sleeping with a goddess’s husband. Maybe you talked too much about your own talents. Maybe you were born dumb and pretty, and the wrong people fell in love with you, chased you across fields and mountains and oceans until you cried mercy and a god took pity on you, switched your body to a heaving sea of clouds. Maybe you stayed in one place for too long, pining for someone who wasn’t yours, and your toes grew roots into the earth and your skin toughened into bark. Maybe you told the world how beautiful your children were, and the gods cut them down in front of you to punish you for your loose tongue, and you were so overcome with grief your body turned to stone.

  You know as well as I do that those things don’t happen anymore. Girls stay girls, no matter how pretty they are. No matter who lusts after them. But in this time, like in any time, love is a dangerous game.
r />   Who among us has not wanted to be transformed? I had lived all my life surrounded by extraordinary people, and some nights I would fall asleep wishing to wake up worthy of them. Not a painter, but an artist, someone who could capture life in a single perfect line, render the movement of light on water with the stroke of a brush. But the lesson in stories is always that metamorphosis comes with a price. Think of Midas, who asked for the power to turn the world around him into gold, only to sit alone in his palace full of riches, meat and wine turning to metal in his mouth. Think of Icarus, builder of wings, who flew too close to the sun and plummeted in one last fall. Think of Aurora’s father, who woke up one morning with his songs playing on every radio in the world. He was never happy again after that, and now he’s dead. The old gods do not give kindly; what delights them most is taking away.

  Both of them, Jack and Aurora, burned like stars, and light like that draws things that are better left alone in the dark.

  When I let myself into the apartment the next morning I know right away that I am in trouble. Aurora is sitting next to Cass on the couch, her knees drawn up to her chin. Cass is holding a mug of coffee. “Where the hell were you,” she says, her voice tight.

  “I thought you were dead!” Aurora cries. She’s still wearing her slip, her barrettes askew. There’s a blanket around her shoulders. They must have spent the night on the couch.

  “You could have at least called,” Cass says.

  “There wasn’t a phone,” I say.

  “You were with him,” Aurora says. “You left me at the club and didn’t tell me where you went and I came here at three in the morning and told Cass I couldn’t find you. We almost called the cops, and all you can say is that there wasn’t a phone?” Cass puts her hand on Aurora’s shoulder.

  “Aurora, sweetheart, why don’t you go sleep, and I’ll deal with this.” Without looking at me, Aurora runs into my room and slams the door behind her. “Come into the kitchen,” Cass says. I follow her, sit in my favorite chair as she gets down her jars, measures out herbs, puts water on the stove to boil. The silence is like a third person in the room.

  “Don’t you ever do that to me again,” she says at last. “I don’t ask a lot of you, and I know you—” her voice breaks. “I know you grew up fast. But I’m still your mother, and you live in my house, and if anything happened to you I don’t know how I would keep going. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” She sets a mug in front of me. I drink my tea in chastened silence. Nettles and oat straw. She’s stopped being mad. If she were still mad she’d have given me burdock or something worse.

  “Do I need to give you the safe-sex talk again?”

  “Mom. He didn’t give me a lobotomy.”

  She shakes her head. “Go to bed,” she says, “before I kill you myself.”

  I think Aurora is fast asleep but when I slide under the covers she puts an arm around me. “I’m still mad at you,” she murmurs.

  “You were with that horrible man.”

  “He isn’t horrible. He’s nice.”

  “How old is that guy?”

  She yawns. “Don’t be bourgeois. And you’re not off the hook.” She closes her eyes and burrows closer to me. I hug her close and we fall into a dreamless sleep.

  I wake up hours later. The long afternoon is slipping into twilight. I can hear Aurora in the kitchen, talking to Cass. I sit up, run my fingers through my choppy hair, look at my familiar walls covered in drawings and photo-booth strips of me and Aurora, me and Cass, an ancient one of Cass and Maia with their hair spiked and padlocked chains around their necks, flipping off the camera and kissing in the final frame.

  When we first moved into the apartment, Cass let me paint one wall of my room a matte cream and draw on it. Over the years, Aurora and I mapped out our own kingdom, its outlines becoming more legible as my drawing skills improved. We’d started at the very center of the wall, a few feet off the floor. We’d been too small to reach any higher. We drew a village of lopsided houses with stick-figure people holding the leashes of stick-figure dogs. As the drawing spread outward, we added mountain ranges and forests, a sea dotted with tall ships, a solitary dragon undulating overhead. We’ve never outgrown it. We’ll get stoned on a sleepy, rainy afternoon and go to work. When Cass was teaching me to read tarot I drew the Queen of Wands with her cat, Strength and her lion, the Empress reclining on her throne. When Aurora first started sleeping with rockers, she added a slew of long-haired boys. Now, we draw people we know: Raoul and Oscar Wilde, Maia, Cass. We’ve never thought to add ourselves.

  I root through my dresser for a clean pair of cutoffs and a T-shirt, carry them into the bathroom with me, and turn on the shower. Ink runs off my skin, pooling in the bottom of the shower, reminding me of the night before and turning my legs shaky with desire. I am not this kind of girl, I think, trying to be fierce with myself. I am not the kind of girl who ditches her best friend and runs out into the night with a stranger and kisses him until dawn. I am not some lovesick dupe. I am not at the mercy of my new, most favorite vice. I am not. I scrub until all traces of the ink are gone and the shower’s out of hot water.

  Cass and Aurora are still in the kitchen, stir-frying vegetables. A pot of brown rice simmers on the stove. Hippie dinner. I sigh. Some days, like this one, I wish Cass was not a witch so that we could have steak. After we eat, Aurora follows me into my room and rummages through my records, and I know I’m forgiven. She sprawls across my bed with an old issue of Magnet and I take out my sketchbook to draw her. We’re quiet for a while, Aurora turning pages and humming, me laboring over each line, trying for fluid grace and failing miserably. “I have something for you both,” Cass says from the door.

  “Presents!” Aurora says happily. “I love presents!” She rolls over, sits up.

  “Hey,” I say. “Now I’ll never finish this.” Getting Aurora to hold still long enough for me to draw her is a futile endeavor, but that never stops me from trying. Cass hands us each a bundle wrapped in silk. I unfold the cloth to find a little leather bag on a leather string. She’s given Aurora the same thing.

  “What’s in here?” Aurora says, tugging at the bag’s knotted drawstrings.

  “Don’t,” Cass says sharply. “Don’t open them. They’re bound.”

  “I know it’s bound,” Aurora says. “I want to see what’s inside.”

  “Not bound like that,” I say. I take Cass’s witchiness more seriously than Aurora does, although nowhere near as seriously as Cass does herself. “They’re amulets. Thanks, Mom.”

  “Amulets for what?” Aurora leaves off picking at the strings, but she’s still eyeing the bag like she thinks it’s full of secret treasures and wants to tear it apart.

  “Protection,” Cass says. “Safe travels through dark places.” Her voice is even. A chill runs through me, and for a moment the room is very still. Aurora stares at Cass. I can the challenge in the set of her chin. The leather bag is warm in my hand, warmer than the heat of my skin.

  “I don’t need amulets,” Aurora says. They are watching each other like cats raising hackles, growls starting in the backs of their throats. I look from Cass to Aurora and back again. Whatever is happening here, it definitely bypassed go and went straight to really fucking weird without collecting two hundred dollars.

  “Hey,” I say, but they ignore me. Cass blinks first and Aurora looks away, the corner of her mouth curving up in a malicious smile. “Hey,” I repeat. Cass shakes her head as if she’s walked into a spider web.

  “I can only help you if you let me.”

  “I don’t need anyone’s help.” Aurora hands her amulet back to Cass. “Thanks, though,” she says in a normal voice, and some of the tension seeps out of the room.

  “You’ll wear it,” Cass says to me.

  “Sure.” She looks at me. “Okay.” I loop the leather over my head. The bag settles between my breasts. It’s heavier than it felt in my hand.

  “Don’t take that off,” she says. “Good night.”


  “’Night,” Aurora says to her retreating back. “God,” she yawns when Cass closes the door behind her. “Your mom is such a fucking weirdo.”

  “Tell me about it,” I agree, touching the leather bag.

  “I should go.”

  “Spend the night.”

  “Nah.” She looks almost furtive. “I have to be somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Aurora.”

  “No, really. Just this dumb thing.”

  “You want me to come?”

  “You would hate it,” she says.

  “I’ll still come.”

  “I know.” She smiles. “You’re the best. I’ll spare you.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Have fun.” After she goes I sit on my bed, staring at nothing. We’ve always had secrets, me and her. But we’ve never had secrets we didn’t share.

  Aurora calls me late the next morning, talking nonstop as soon as I pick up the receiver. “What are you doing? Go to the window. Go to the window right now.” Dutifully, I carry the phone across the room.

  “And?”

  “And look outside. Look! Outside!” I peer down the street.

  “I’m looking?”

  “Tell me that is not the most magnificent motherfucking morning you have ever seen in your natural life, sweet child of mine. We are going out into it, you and I. Call Jack.”

  “Jack doesn’t have a phone.”

  “Then send him a missive of the heart. We are coming to fetch him. He’s going to busk for us.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Perfect, I’ll be there in ten.”

  I’m still laughing when she pulls up outside my window, honking furiously. I grab my backpack and take the stairs two at a time. “What are you wearing,” she says.

  “Clothes.”

  “God grant me the serenity to accept the disastrous fashion choices of my best friend in all the world, who elects to garb herself in rags even when being transported by her faithful chauffeur to the abode of her beloved, possibly the foxiest man in the