The Words of Every Song

by Liz Moore

  Jax doesn’t know whether to check her watch or not. She thinks she might be having a heart attack. The blood is pounding in her temples. She imagines the committee room where, right at this moment, the CEO of Titan and six board members are probably sitting in utter silence. She tries using mental telepathy to let them know where she is. She trained her secretary, Cynthia, to make up an excuse whenever Jax was late for anything, but Cynthia quit last month and she has not found a replacement, and her personal assistant, Mimi, is on vacation.

  Jax checks the watch on her wrist and stifles a scream. Even if the train started moving right now, she would be twenty minutes late. And who really believes anyone who claims subway problems as an excuse for lateness?

  Next to her, Che is muttering lines, oblivious that everyone in the car can hear him. “MCs out there, how deep does the underground get? Deep enough to set up the upset…with your dreams and aspirations of personal status in activation…”

  A girl on the floor in front of him laughs out loud.

  Jax can’t take it anymore. She turns to face him. “Hey,” she says. “Hey!”

  Che pulls out an earphone and looks at her.

  “I listen to that crap in your headphones all day long,” says Jax. “Actually, I’m supposed to be listening to more of that crap right now. But I’m not there. The only fucking good thing about this train being stopped is not having to listen to the crap that I have to listen to all day. So if you don’t mind, I would like you to do two things: turn down your headphones and then stop singing along. Okay?”

  Che’s mouth is open. His mind is turning. He pauses. He takes his headphones off.

  “What do you do?” he says.

  X.

  Kendra has been walking past men with her head down since she can remember. It doesn’t matter, though; they still call out. She’s walking back from her internship at UNICEF. It’s raining. The stupid subways aren’t working. And the buses are packed.

  “Hey, mami, where’s your umbrella?” says a man who thinks Kendra looks a lot like that woman on the television. What’s her name again? “You look good when you’re wet, girl.”

  Kendra doesn’t know why she doesn’t ever say anything back. What if she replied? What if she said, “Oh yeah? You wanna go out sometime?” What if she said, “Fuck you”?

  She doesn’t have a boyfriend. She’s not sure why. She thinks boys are scared of her, but maybe she’s just ugly or something. Fat? Kendra keeps her eyes on the pavement so she doesn’t see herself in the glass of buildings she passes.

  Thirty blocks to go.

  XI.

  Oh, shit, thinks Jax. Che is about to hand her a demo. His eyes are bright with excitement. This is usually what happens when somebody finds out where she works. “I’ve got a friend,” they say. “Let me give you my CD,” they say. She still doesn’t know how to handle it. It always feels slightly unethical to take a CD she will never listen to. She imagines these people going home, feeling like their lives are about to change; waiting by the phone, by the computer; telling their families who they met, telling their friends; not letting themselves give up the hope that one day Jax will call them up and say, “I’ve got to sign you.”

  She never does. The CDs go into the garbage. Jax feels the weight of all the unsolicited demos she’s ever received pressing into her skull. All that hope. Would it be better to tell them no right away? But the look in their eyes…it’s already on the face of the boy sitting next to her.

  “And the third track is my favorite,” Che is saying. “These are all produced by me and my friend Ty. We’ve got this idea for the first track…”

  Distantly, Jax remembers why she started working for Titan. Was there ever the thought that she might change something? Was such an idea possible?

  The darkness of the subway tunnel has turned the window across from her into a mirror, and in it Jax sees her age. She’s old enough to be the mother of the boy sitting next to her. In some places she might be his grandmother. Goddamnit.

  “I’m so glad I had this with me,” says Che earnestly. “I mean, I never carry it around, but it’s like fate or something.” He smiles. The passengers around him are pretending not to listen. Some of them have actually started talking to each other. The train has been stopped for almost an hour.

  Jax looks at Che, looks down at the demo he’s holding. It’s just a blank CD. On it Che has written his name and number with a Sharpie. She wants to cry.

  Jax opens her hand to it. “Thank you,” she says. Maybe she’ll listen to this one. Maybe she’ll call Che tomorrow and tell him she wants to meet with him. She imagines it—his excitement palpable through the line, the way he might answer the phone with a tremble in his voice.

  Abruptly, the train lurches forward. The hum of the engine. The screech of the wheels.

  Jax closes her eyes. She’s missed her meeting completely.

  XII.

  Che takes the subway stairs three at a time. He feels like a new man. This might be the start of something. It was destiny. He is grinning like a fool when he emerges onto the street and into the rain. And there, as if on cue, is Kendra. She’s walking toward him. She is drenched, her arms crossed across her chest defensively, her brow furrowed. She looks great, thinks Che.

  He’s still high from meeting Jax and, in a burst of happy self-confidence, he waves to her. Kendra looks up, squints at him, and raises a hand.

  They walk toward each other.

  “Hi, Kendra,” says Che.

  “Hi, Che,” says Kendra.

  6.

  TONY AND THE ATLAS STATUE

  I thought of you as my mountain top

  I thought of you as my peak

  I thought of you as everything I had, but

  couldn’t keep

  —THE VELVET UNDERGROUND, “Pale Blue Eyes”

  I.

  Last night when Tony got home from work, there was a letter in his mailbox from his ex-wife. Dear Tony, it said, in Geri’s neat handwriting. I am going to be in New York from June 12 until June 15. Would you like to see me? I can meet you where you want. If yes, pls write back soon. I am fine. Kids are fine. Same address, as you will see on the outside of this envelope! She had scratched something out there. Geri.

  Tony said, “Jesus, Jesus,” out loud in the hallway. He shut the door to his mailbox and went into his apartment.

  Vanessa was inside, sitting on the couch in her underwear, eating Cheetos by tossing them into the air and catching them in her mouth. One after another. She was good at it.

  Tony walked past her into the bedroom and shut the door. He sat on his bed and he read the letter again. He hadn’t talked to Geri in seventeen years.

  II.

  At the Chelsea branch of Sound-Off Studios, there are three large practice rooms. They double as performance spaces for record label showcases. Each one is painted a different ugly color: bright purple, teal blue, orange. Tony spends most of his day in these rooms, setting up equipment or breaking down equipment for rehearsals. Doing sound.

  There are tricks Tony knows about sound that come only with thirty years of working sound boards. Like how every member of a band wants to hear a different instrument loudest in the monitors. And how when they ask you to turn them up in the mix, you just nod and move your hand like you’re doing it. Otherwise they’ll just ask you to go louder and louder until the mix is cooked. Tony knows what will sound best. Most musicians can’t tell the difference anyway from their places onstage.

  Tony checks his schedule as soon as he gets in for the day, usually around eleven. First up, a band of five young girls. Hype Girlz. He’s never heard of them. They must be new: one of the many acts who get some industry attention early on in their careers. Most fade away as quickly as they are noticed. A few make it.

  He sets up five vocal mics—all they’ll need, according to the chart. Easy enough. He checks them out.

  “Test, test, one, tssssoo, tsssooo, three, four,” he says. Then the door opens. A middle-aged m
an in a suit walks in, followed by five girls, most about thirteen or fourteen. They look ridiculous in their makeup and their tight clothes. The man walks up to Tony.

  “Hey, buddy,” he says. “Everything working?”

  “Yeah,” says Tony. Stupid question. A father, probably, he thinks. Record people don’t wear suits.

  “Dad,” says the tallest girl. “Dad.”

  The man ignores her. He hands Tony a CD. “So here’s what they’re dancing to. We’ve got a big showcase coming up, don’t we, girls?”

  A half hour later. The girls are singing along to a prerecorded soundtrack and doing their best to dance during instrumental breaks. The girl in the middle can’t sing for shit, but she looks the best. Cutest. Best dancer. The girl on the far right has the best voice. Tony figures it out and cranks her up. He turns the middle girl down.

  The man in the suit has assumed a position in the middle of the room, and he’s standing there with one arm crossed over his middle and the other covering his eyes.

  He has stopped the kids eight times so far. Tony can tell he’s about to do it again.

  Sure enough: “Wait! Wait! Wait!” He marches toward the stage. Tony stops the music. The five girls slump, shoulders hunched, arms dangling.

  “Daaaad,” moans his daughter.

  “Tia,” he says to her, and his voice turns mean. “Get over here.”

  She straightens. “Get…over…here.”

  He waits while she walks toward him. He stares at her hard, as if he might slap her. “Pick up your feet when you dance,” he says. “You’re dragging everyone down.”

  The kid starts to cry. The other four girls have moved slowly toward one another for support.

  Tia sits down on the edge of the stage and makes fists of her hands, wiping tears away like a much younger child. She takes short gasps. Her father turns around, smiles at Tony.

  “I think we need a break here, guy. Five minutes?”

  Tony stands there and stares at the wall. He thinks of Geri.

  Reagan died today. Tony finds out halfway down Fourteenth Street on his way home from work—a man hawking the late edition—and almost cries, there on the street, almost falls to his knees. Reagan in a cowboy hat, mouth parted just a bit as if to speak, there on the cover of the newspaper, and an old man yelling in Spanish-accented English, “Reagan dead, Reagan died today, read it here!” Over and over again.

  A memory hits him. Geri and Tony on a couch in their first apartment in Manhattan, a sixth-floor studio walk-up that felt like the jungle in the summer and Antarctica in the winter. They kept warm on that couch in January, and they watched the news each evening on a television that got reception only sometimes.

  The day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, they watched the ceremony on TV and then they had sex on the couch. Geri loved Reagan; he reminded her of her father. He was tall and thin like that, she said. He was friendly. So they had sex afterward; it wasn’t right to do it while Reagan was on.

  Their son was conceived. Tony thinks it’s strange, what he remembers; but he knows that Jim was conceived on the day of Reagan’s inauguration as surely as he knows the day that Jim was born.

  He also remembers Geri saying “Congratulations, Ron!” and toasting the television with a beer; the two of them moving together, buried under piles and piles of blankets from secondhand stores; a certain pattern of light that used to show itself on the wall above the TV just as the sun was setting in the winter.

  Tony buys a paper, folds it in half, tucks it under an armpit, and walks home.

  Now he lives in a slightly nicer apartment in Chelsea. It’s still a walk-up, but Vanessa has decorated it so that it looks something like an airport: red plastic chairs, vinyl cushions, and three oddly placed blue dots on the wall opposite the door. There are three rooms. Four if you count the bathroom, and Tony does. It’s a nice bathroom with a full tub and a wall that’s all mirrors.

  When he gets home, he checks the mail again, thinking maybe Geri has written a second letter, one that says, “Please ignore what I wrote—it wasn’t meant for you. I put down the wrong name and address.”

  Instead he finds a few bills, a gossip magazine for Vanessa, and an ad for a gym opening up across the street.

  Inside the apartment, Vanessa looks up guiltily. She is wearing an apron without any sense of irony, and she has set the table.

  “I made dinner,” she says; she sounds embarrassed about it. Tony laughs.

  “What’s funny?”

  Vanessa is a cocktail waitress at a gentlemen’s club in Times Square. Today a man told her that he would pay her five thousand dollars to live in his apartment for a week. She said no without thinking. “I’ve got a boyfriend.” He probably wasn’t serious anyway. But now she feels like she should get a reward for that from Tony. Does he know the offers she gets? Would he be jealous if he did?

  “It’s pasta,” she says, and empties the noodles into a bowl, and sits down at the table. “Aren’t you hungry? It’s good.”

  “Yeah, starved,” Tony lies. He’s not hungry at all. He ate a package of Hostess cupcakes late in the day. Then he ate a bag of Doritos. And he’s getting fat. But he sits down across the small table from Vanessa, and smiles at her, and eats the pasta that isn’t very good after all. Lately she’s been looking tired.

  The next morning, feeling larger than ever, Tony decides to join the new gym across the street. He has a few hours before work; most bands won’t rehearse before eleven or twelve anyway. He digs around in the trash for the flyer he brought in with the mail yesterday. It had mentioned some discount. He uncrumples it and leaves, crossing Ninth Avenue with a spring in his step.

  Inside, the gym is pulsing with techno music and with bodies that are, on the whole, younger and much harder than his. Recently, when Tony looks down, he has not been able to see his toes. He notices this most in the shower.

  A girl in a pink tank top is saying, “Hi, sir? Hello, sir?”

  “Hi,” says Tony. He walks toward her desk and extends the piece of paper to her, smoothing it halfheartedly with a fist. “I’m interested in joining.”

  The girl smiles. She wants to be encouraging. She’s probably twenty. Tony can’t stand her already because he suspects that she feels bad for him.

  “I’m just gonna page Clarissa for you, ’kay? She’ll get you set up.” She dials the black phone on her desk and presses the earpiece to her shoulder, pursing her lips while Tony paces casually around the small waiting area they have set up. Over his shoulder, Tony watches the girl as she speaks to Clarissa in a near-whisper.

  “Yeah,” he hears her say. “Yeah, he’s…” Something inaudible. Tony’s paranoia grows. He should just leave—he doesn’t belong here.

  Then Clarissa comes bouncing out of her office and Tony has the sudden urge to bolt, to hurl a chair in the path of would-be pursuers and make for the door.

  It’s only a glance at himself in one of the many mirrored walls—and the thought of seeing Geri—that keeps him there.

  He still hasn’t written back. But he might; he might.

  III.

  Jim was born nine months into Reagan’s first term, but it wasn’t until he had entered the first grade that his sister, Leila, was born. She was pink, and small, and full of snot for the first three months of her life. Jim’s mother stuck a green suction ball syringe up each of her tiny nostrils twice a day. He liked watching.

  Jim’s father brought him to the hospital on the day that Leila was born. Jim wanted to look nice for his new sister, so he wore his bow tie around the nonexistent collar of a shirt that showed Superman flying across its front.

  The hospital smelled like school, but sadder. Jim and his father walked together toward a room with an open door and inside it was a curtain and inside that were his mother and his grandmother and Leila, who wasn’t Leila yet, and she was asleep in his mother’s arms.

  “Hi, honey,” said his mother. “This is your sister.”

  “Go say hi to her,” said
his father. But Jim stayed back, his arms wrapped around Tony’s leg. He watched the baby and felt shy.

  Jim is a father himself now. When his own daughter was born, a month ago today, he tried hard to remember the day of Leila’s birth. He realized with a sudden ache that the memory stopped at that point, with his arms wrapped about his father’s leg; he couldn’t remember what Leila looked like, or what his mother looked like, or what he did next. That day is important to him for one reason: it is his last and best memory of his father. The strength of him, the width of his calf, the fabric of his pants. How Tony had reached down and placed one large hand on the back of Jim’s head—not pushing him forward, just leaving it there. Just letting him be.

  That’s what Jim remembers of his father.

  What Leila remembers: nothing. A black shape standing over her crib. Music. Nothing.

  IV.

  Clarissa is young and firm.

  “Come on, Tony,” she’s saying. “You’ve done twenty reps—five more aren’t gonna kill you! Do five more for me, Tony!”

  At the moment, Tony wants nothing more than to do five more bench presses for Clarissa. But his arms seem to have turned into Play-Doh.

  “I can’t,” he mutters. The weights are sinking toward his chest. He panics and says it louder: “I can’t!”

  Clarissa heaves a disappointed sigh and casually returns the barbell to its original position.

  “’Nkay, you’re done. Good job for today, Tony,” she says. “Will I see you Wednesday, then?”

  “Yes,” says Tony. It’s a lie. He’ll never set foot in a gym again.

  Across the street, Vanessa is cleaning the apartment for perhaps the first time since she and Tony moved in together. Cooking dinner last night has inspired her. She thinks—in an abstract way—that maybe acting like Tony’s wife will make Tony ask her to be his wife. If she let herself voice that hope too specifically, she’d only realize the impossibility of it. Right now it is a subconscious desire, this idea of marriage to Tony; it is far enough away from the forefront of her mind that it remains nothing but a sweet and unexamined feeling most of the time.