The Words of Every Song

by Liz Moore

  After washing the floor of the kitchen, Vanessa moves into the bedroom. She vacuums. She washes the window with water because she has no Windex. While looking for an old shirt to use as a dust rag, she opens the top drawer of Tony’s dresser and sees a letter addressed to Tony in what looks like a woman’s hand. It bears a recent postmark. She closes the drawer. She opens the drawer. She closes the drawer.

  She opens the drawer, and takes the letter out, and reads it, and feels infinitely young, a child, an infant, a person incapable of self-care, and lies back on the bed, and cries like a widow.

  V.

  Leila: Tony’s younger child, a teenage girl, small for her age, sitting in her room and staring out the window. She should be in a movie. She feels like she’s in a movie much of the time. Imagines the camera scanning her face. Practices her thoughtful look in the mirror.

  Sometimes she says her thoughts aloud when no one is around, as if she were the narrator in a movie of her life. Now, for example, she is saying, “If he knew, would he care? Would he care at all?” She’s not sure who the “he” is, but the sentence sounds dramatic. Just right.

  Over her mirror is a picture of her family—the only picture she has of herself and Jim and her mother all together. She can’t remember who took it—a stranger, probably. They’re in New York City outside the Carnegie Deli. They’re much younger. Leila is wearing a ridiculous puff-sleeved party dress and holding an ice cream cone that has launched drips of white down her forearm. Jim is standing off to one side, the beginnings of adolescence turning down the corners of his mouth. Geri is looking past the camera somewhere and smiling. Vaguely, Leila recalls weekend trips to New York City, which her mother used to insist on annually. They have not been in a number of years. No explanation from Geri; they just stopped.

  Her phone rings and she jumps. “Hello?”

  It’s her friend Anna, and she wants to know if Leila wants to go to a party tonight.

  “Who’s gonna be there?”

  “Everyone,” says Anna. Then adds, “Bobby will be.”

  “Oh. Cool. Yeah, maybe.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell Bobby.”

  “You don’t have to—I don’t care.”

  Leila’s lying. She does care that Bobby will be there, but it is because now she will have to think of exit plans and escape routes and excuses to leave the party. Anna and Leila and another friend attended a concert a few months ago that changed Leila. Since then, boys have lost their power for her; they’ve become predictable, all the same, all eager and lusting and slightly revolting. Bobby included. Her friends have worked hard to push the two of them together, not understanding that Leila can think of nothing but leaving when she’s with him. Bobby himself—jockish, towheaded—seems totally oblivious to Leila’s dismissal of his advances. He paws her hopefully sometimes. She moves away.

  Leila walks to the mirror, watches her mouth as she talks to Anna, and wonders what the soundtrack would be at this moment in a movie. Tommy Mays, she thinks instinctively, and then winces.

  VI.

  After the gym, Tony heads for work. He feels vaguely refreshed; more human, at least. The news at Sound-Off is that one of Titan’s stars has rented rehearsal space for a week. Tommy Mays. Tony thinks: Leila is seventeen. Does Leila like Tommy Mays? Would Leila be excited? And then: Leila does not know me.

  One of the kids who works the desk is excited. Tony walks past on his way to the bathroom, five minutes before Tommy and his band are scheduled to arrive. “So you’re doing sound for Tommy Mays?” the kid says. Gregory. He’s trying to play it cool.

  “Yeah,” says Tony. “How about that?”

  “I, um,” Gregory says, “was wondering—I mean, obviously, if you don’t wanna you can just, like, tell me, but.”

  Tony stares. “What?”

  “Oh—ha ha.” Gregory has liked Tommy Mays ever since he was in middle school. He is in high school now and has been working at Sound-Off after school because his dad can’t get a job. He has a poster up on his wall. In fact, he has a crush on Tommy Mays, but he won’t admit it to anyone or to himself. Now, as he stands here behind the desk, asking Tony to get him an autograph seems impossible. Tony is going to know. He blushes.

  “You want an autograph,” says Tony. He’s feeling kind.

  “I mean, of course, if you don’t—”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” says Tony. He smiles on the way to the bathroom.

  Outside, Tommy Mays gets out of a car and stands on the street. His manager, Glen, who has been waiting for him on the sidewalk, takes a look at him and the smile drops from his face. Kai, Jeff, and Jordan are standing off to the side, smoking, looking surly.

  “Are you?” asks Glen.

  “Am I what. No.”

  “You are.”

  “A little,” Tom admits. He laughs. Glen is furious.

  “How much have you had?”

  “Oh my God, Glen, iss not a big deal. Iss just rehearsal.”

  He heads for the door. Glen and the band follow. Tom tilts through the lobby and then catches himself at the desk. The boy behind it can’t speak.

  “Hello, friend,” says Tom. “We have booked space here, I do believe.” Glen scowls.

  “Yes,” says Gregory. He has rehearsed what he might say to Tommy Mays many times, but now here he is without words. Overcome by regret at a missed opportunity, he will go home tonight and make up a different story to tell his friends and family: He will falsely report that he was invited by Tommy Mays to watch rehearsal; he will pretend that Tommy Mays’s drummer, Kai, chatted with him about the drum setup and then asked to hear him play; he will pretend that Kai told him he was a sick drummer.

  Now he just says “Yes” again, and then Tony comes out of the bathroom, shakes hands with the band, says, “Right this way.”

  Gregory watches them walk down the hall, thinking about what Tommy Mays looked like onstage at every concert he has ever been to. Seventeen so far.

  Glen is practically carrying Tom as they walk behind Tony to the purple rehearsal room. Tom is tall and broad and sweating alcoholically and leaning on Glen, who is maybe half a foot shorter.

  “There yet?” asks Tom. “We there yet?” Like a kid, thinks Tony.

  Inside, Kai and Jordan and Jeff walk to their places onstage and glance at one another, uncertain of what to do. Jeff and Jordan plug in and start tuning. Glen walks Tom over to the stage and Tom plunks down there, despondent, feet swinging side to side. His fists find his chin and he assumes a childlike position. And stalls there. His eyes close and open slowly.

  Tony looks at Glen for instruction.

  “Tom,” says Glen. “Tom.” He stands back, considers slapping him across the face, and decides against it.

  “Forget it. He’s gone,” says Kai. He twirls a drumstick triumphantly. “Can we go?”

  Suddenly Tommy Mays’s eyes open wetly and he looks right at Tony in his place behind the sound board. “You got kids?” he says.

  Glen rolls his eyes. “Tom, you—”

  Tom holds up a wavering hand and his chin trembles. “You got kids, man?”

  “Yeah,” says Tony. “I have two kids.”

  “Me too. I have two kids. Too.”

  Tom looks at Tony, and Tony looks at Tom, and for an instant each sees the other for what he is: a father, and each knows the other has failed in this role, and then they are sorry for each other and a little ashamed.

  Then Tom passes back into senselessness as smoothly as he emerged from it, and Glen is helping him up from his place on the stage and apologizing for the wasted time and asking about refunds and Tony is showing them the door and thinking, I will write back to Geri tonight, I will write back to Geri tonight.

  VII.

  The apartment at night is still noisy. The complex was erected years ago in a part of New York that was first industrial and has recently become a hot spot of sorts; clubs line the street and at every hour they spit young people through their doors, fashionable young people
who screech and scramble for cabs late into the night. Vanessa has gotten used to the noise, cannot sleep without it, in fact. But tonight it consumes her. Tony has not come to bed yet and it’s one-thirty, and outside a girl is shouting, “Christopher! Chris! Chris!” and it sounds like the crow of a confused rooster.

  On the other side of the thin wall that separates the bedroom from the apartment, Tony is working out words and sentences. He hasn’t done this since he was in school. He does not write letters. He does not write anything, really, so it is an unfamiliar feeling to him to place his pen on this paper and write the words Dear Geri. Next comes I. Next comes a blank sort of terror.

  When Tony was twelve he almost drowned. His stepfather took him to the beach at Coney Island. It was his first time to the ocean even though he grew up in New York. His mother worked most of the time and didn’t have time for things like the beach. That summer, Tony discovered girls and the Velvet Underground. His stepfather hated his music and they fought over whether or not Lou Reed could sing. So it was supposed to be a treat for Tony to go to the beach at Coney Island; it was supposed to make up for his stepfather’s terribly cruel decision to confiscate Tony’s record collection for a week. But Tony could think of nothing he wanted to do less, in fact, than to spend a day with his stepfather—a large, loud, bearded man with a habit of calling Tony “Anthony” as if he had given him the name. Tony was a small, pale twelve-year-old who had neither the muscles nor the mustache that some of his peers had already sprouted.

  It took him an hour to remove his shirt. At last, he summoned enough courage to sprint toward the ocean, his face burning at the idea of the millions of hand-shaded eyes that were undoubtedly trained on him. He wanted to plunge beneath the water quickly, to remove himself from sight, but as he moved forward the water disappeared before him like a retreating army. He advanced uncertainly.

  What he remembers next is the yell of the crowd that had gathered about him. Then embarrassment. Overwhelming, unrelenting humiliation. There was a moment, though, when Tony hovered somewhere between death and life, and felt himself slip jarringly toward darkness; a time right between getting dragged up on the beach and getting the water beaten out of his lungs, when he was awake but not alive. Which is kind of what he felt like once again on the day he left New Jersey for New York, left his family for a walk-up apartment and endless time alone.

  He wants to write all this to Geri, but instead he writes—after many drafts:

  Dear Geri,

  It would be nice to see you after all these years. I will meet you at the statue of Atlas at Rockefeller Center at 12 P.M. (noon) on June 13. I remember you liked that statue once.

  Yours, Tony

  He folds the paper and licks its envelope, then walks out the door and slips it into the mail slot in the lobby. Tony goes back inside, smiles, and feels something like the presence of God more clearly than he has for many years. He’ll sleep on the couch tonight.

  In the bedroom, Vanessa has drifted into an uneasy and dreamless sleep.

  Outside, four children with trust funds are laughing at a friend who has fallen to the ground and is vomiting up a $190 bar tab.

  VIII.

  Two days later. Evening. A woman is walking uncertainly from her car to her house. She touches her hair at the sight of a letter showing its head over the edge of the mailbox.

  “Oh,” she says.

  Anyone would guess that she is younger than her forty-four years, standing there halfway between car and house, one hand on her mouth and one holding a bag of groceries. Her lips are parted in indecision. She is small and quick. She has red hair and freckles, which have faded with time but still mark her from top to bottom as the mother of her son, who—to his chagrin—is similarly complexioned.

  She walks forward and touches the letter, gingerly, as if it’s hot. There is no return address.

  “Oh,” she says once more, and stands there on the front steps for a while, and then Leila opens the door.

  “Mom?”

  Geri turns the letter over in her hands and tucks it into the grocery bag. “Hi,” she says.

  Leila has dressed herself up: hair as straight as straw, jeans that show her hip bones, and the glittery eyeshadow that Geri once cautioned Leila against after seeing a 60 Minutes special on harmful cosmetics. “Glitter can blind,” she had said. Leila just laughed.

  “Where are you going?” asks Geri.

  “To Anna’s,” her daughter tells her, shifty-eyed.

  “Why are you all dressed up?”

  “I’m not all dressed up, Mom.” Then her voice turns nice—she has remembered her original intention. “Hey…can I have the keys?”

  “Stay alive—don’t drink and drive,” says Geri, and Leila suppresses her urge to make a gagging sound. She hates it when her mother says things like that. Geri tosses her the keys and then she is gone.

  She’s changed, Geri thinks. Maybe two months ago Leila began to take herself away from her mother and to lose the safe distance she once had from her group of friends. Geri used to enjoy watching the intelligence in her daughter’s eyes, the bemusement with which Leila observed high school politics, but recently it’s almost as if she has thrown herself toward her friends to spite herself.

  What happened? Geri wonders. Leila has lost some innocence. Geri sighs and supposes that it’s a natural thing, and she walks into the house. The letter should be opened.

  IX.

  Jim does not know some of this, but he has inherited a great many things from Tony: his wide eyes, his prematurely balding head, a tendency toward terrible puns, and a record collection that saw Jim through high school. He had found the last in a closet a day after his thirteenth birthday; his mother had never elaborated on where the box of albums came from, but somehow Jim saw them at once as a present from his father. He played each one carefully, listening for words and notes that might let him into the life of a man he remembered less each year. The Beatles were a favorite, and the Rolling Stones, but it was the Velvet Underground that played steadily from the record player he set up in his room. For a while he created elaborate fantasies in which Lou Reed was actually his father—cool, brutal, drug-addled Lou Reed, standing on a street in Greenwich Village and longing for a glimpse of his lost son.

  Jim is driving now to visit his mother at her house in New Jersey. From the backseat, his daughter emits small infant sighs, and his wife says, “She needs a change soon.”

  Jim is a very young father. His wife is five years older than he is. He wakes up at night sometimes in a panic, for in his nightmares lately he has seen himself leaving them—his wife and daughter staring sadly at him as he drives away in a car that cannot be stopped.

  He smiles now into the rearview mirror at the baby in her car seat, and he turns onto his childhood street. It is always as he remembers it.

  When they get there, the kitchen door is open, so Jim walks through it first, followed by his wife and daughter. Geri is weeping at the kitchen table. She looks up and tries to laugh.

  “Mom,” says Jim, horrified.

  Geri swipes at her eyes and tries to laugh. “Don’t pay any attention.”

  Jim’s wife smiles uncertainly and brings the baby to her mother-in-law for a kiss. Geri takes the infant and holds her, rocking slightly, her face streaked by makeup. Jim is holding back, still stuck in the doorway and still wounded by the sight of his crying mother—something he has not seen in years, not since Tony first left.

  “Where’s Leila?” he asks, to make things normal again.

  X.

  Leila is sitting on Anna’s bed, long legs crossed, waiting for her friend to get dressed. Already, her body is wound up in anticipation of the alcohol that she will consume later tonight.

  Anna is applying mascara in long strokes that end with a little flick of the wrist. “Bobby called,” she says, and her eyes shift from her own reflection in the mirror to Leila’s. “He wanted to know if you’d be there tonight. I told him maybe.” She laughs.

/>   Leila lies back on the bed. In her head, the movie narrator clicks on: “Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we dress ourselves up?”

  The football team has persuaded a new student, recently immigrated from Russia, to have the party at his house while his parents are away. This is a favorite trick of theirs, to levy a chance at friendship with the most powerful group in the school in exchange for a night of unsupervised mayhem—and the total destruction of one’s home, and the bitter enmity of one’s parents. The Russian boy is running back and forth, snatching vases and pictures from the hands of drunken high school students, saying, “Please don’t, please don’t,” to everyone he sees.

  Leila is on a couch with Anna on one side of her and Bobby on the other. She feels bad for the Russian boy, but something in her chest won’t let her act. She sits like a statue except to move Bobby’s hand off her knee every now and then.

  Someone throws a plastic cup at Bobby’s head and it beans him between the eyes. Immediately he is up off the couch, enraged, a vein in his forehead frighteningly enlarged.

  “Who the fuck was that? Who threw that?” He is shouting. He picks the cup off the floor and throws it at the wall. “That was so gay.” Then Bobby leaves to locate the offending party.

  Leila bursts into tears. Next to her, Anna is making out with a boy in their history class. She pauses to burble, “Leila, oh my God, are you okay?”

  Leila turns away from her and nods. She has just enough alcohol in her system to cry without shame, and to realize clearly—to articulate for the first time—that she is terrified of men, that she is terrified of them and hates them with the same horrible force. She has been hurt by so many.