The Words of Every Song

by Liz Moore

  XI.

  Tony is distracted at work. His boss notices and asks him about it, and he says that he’s been having trouble sleeping. The excuse sounds lame even to Tony.

  He is distracted by the thought of Geri coming. He has a frequent daydream that will not let him be. In it, he pictures Geri waiting by the statue of Atlas—her hair has grayed, perhaps, or maybe she dyes it—in the same dress that she used to wear in the summer when they first knew each other. She smiles when she sees him, and they kiss as if they have never been apart.

  “I’ve missed you,” says Tony. “I’m so sorry.”

  Or better: “I’ve never stopped loving you.” Like in the movies.

  Geri doesn’t need to say anything. She just smiles, and sighs, and points to a car that she has parked on the avenue. Tony looks at her, incredulous, gesturing to himself as if to say, “Me?”

  Geri nods. She takes his hand and they walk toward the car, and get into it, and Tony shuts the door behind him and then they are leaving New York City for good, the two of them, back to New Jersey to a small house and two children who are young and loving and who will welcome him home as their father. Leila and Jim have known all along that he is sorry. He doesn’t even need to say it to them. He and Geri grow old together.

  Then the daydream ends and he is staring at an orange wall, a teal wall, often a band manager.

  Last night, he made love to Vanessa for the first time in a month, and he thought of Geri the whole time. When he finished, Vanessa had said, “I love you” with more urgency than Tony had liked. It wasn’t that they did not use the phrase; they had been saying it, when necessary, for years. It was that Vanessa’s voice brought Tony back to the same cold place he had been trying to leave.

  XII.

  “Jim,” says Geri. She’s on the phone with him. It’s seven P.M. on Friday, June 11. She has spent the day pacing and packing a small bag that she is not sure about yet. When she wrote to Tony, she had chosen the dates arbitrarily; June 12 to June 15 sounded casual, somehow, planned and responsible. But they were just words. She had no plan.

  “Hey, Mom,” says Jim. He senses something strangled in her voice.

  “What are you doing tomorrow?”

  By evening’s end, Geri has persuaded both her children to take a trip to New York City with her, just for the day, just for old time’s sake. It’s something that they used to do when Geri’s kids were younger—mainly as an excuse for Geri to walk down the street looking up and down for Tony while pretending to take in the sights. She was never sure what she would have done if she had seen him there, and she wasn’t sure if she even wanted to; it was just the thought of the chance that made her blood flow more smoothly through her system than it ever did in New Jersey.

  Jim’s wife will watch their baby for the day, and Jim and Leila will humor their mother by accompanying her to New York City. Both of them have been worried about her recently, and even Leila has managed to put aside her adolescent hostility for once and do as her mother wishes.

  They will leave in the morning.

  In bed, Geri remembers her walk-up apartment with Tony and smiles. They were so young. They were so pretty then, the two of them; walking down the street was a thrill, just the look on people’s faces. When she got pregnant with Jim it was the same: she was just twenty-one and still so good-looking, and Tony was beaming with pride and fear, and when she got big they would see old people nod and approve and everything was right with the world. And Tony had never been stronger.

  XIII.

  On the other side of the Hudson River, Tony is standing by his window. He can see the lights of New Jersey if he stands at a certain angle to the building that partially obscures his view. A question is going off in his head like an alarm, an inner voice that has been with him since childhood, a sort of narrator he can’t turn off.

  He had thought Vanessa was asleep, but now she comes up behind him and holds him there, her arms wrapped around his ample waist.

  “Hi,” she says. Tony can see her face reflected in the window with his, and for a moment he wants to turn and kiss her, to hold her as if she were a child. Instead he brings her arms away from his waist and presses his lips to her forehead.

  “Going to bed?” he asks.

  She shakes her head. “You’ve left me,” she says.

  It is then that Tony looks behind her and sees her things packed neatly into a suitcase and three boxes, and then he looks in front of him and sees that she is wearing going-out clothes.

  “I don’t understand,” says Tony. But he does; he understands.

  “I’m not sorry,” says Vanessa. “So I won’t say it.”

  Tony is sorry, more sorry than he has been in a very long time. But he won’t say it either. So Vanessa leaves, and the two of them will not see each other again, ever; in seven years they will come close to bumping into each other in a subway station, but they will miss by inches.

  Tony watches Vanessa’s back, and then watches as the door shuts behind her. That was me, he thinks. But I was wrong and she is right. He makes himself a cup of tea. He waits for morning and does not sleep.

  XIV.

  The next day, in a cab on his way from one meeting to another, Theo is riding down Fifth Avenue. He’s on his cell phone.

  “Yeah, taupe. The taupe,” he is saying. “No, I—it is dope, but I’m saying taupe. I want the taupe one.”

  He taps the driver on the shoulder and gestures right. “Turn! Turn!” he mouths.

  The driver rolls his eyes and slaps the wheel.

  Then, to his right, Theo sees a man standing by the Atlas statue, a man—he squints—he recognizes as a sound tech from Sound-Off Studios. The poor guy looks terrible. He is pale, tired; he is dressed in a shirt that he has clearly outgrown. He has the stance of someone who has arrived at a party hours before it will really begin. Through traffic, through stopped cars and pedestrians, Theo can discern that the man by the Atlas statue is waiting for somebody or for something. He thinks briefly of an old movie he once saw—what was its name?

  And who is this guy waiting for? Theo feels bad for him. He makes a wish for his well-being, and then the cab turns the corner and Theo loses sight of him.

  “The taupe one is dope. Can we have it by Friday?”

  XV.

  Somewhere else, somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike, a small disrupted family is driving toward their missing piece.

  In the backseat, Leila leans her head on a hand and dreams of being filmed. She narrates internally: “The summer I was seventeen was the worst summer of my life.” Leila thinks there is something more honest about movies than about real life. Things work out right in movies, most of the time.

  In the passenger’s seat, Jim has thoughts of dying in a crash and never being able to say goodbye to his wife and his child. “Careful,” he says to his mother at every change of lane. He is not certain why he came today. He thinks it has something to do with the album he was listening to when she called. The Velvet Underground and Nico. He had been feeling romantic; he had been feeling like a lost boy, and he had a brief desire to be in the city that inspired Lou Reed. So here he is.

  Next to him, his mother has turned the dial to an oldies station and she is smiling out on the road. Her children do not know this, but the song that has come on was popular the first summer she lived with Tony. So many memories, and her children know none of them. Is that right? They know nothing at all of their father. Geri has a sudden urge to tell them everything, to tell them where they are going, why they are going, to tell them why their father left—to tell them that she loves them, most of all. They are so young. She is so young. The three of them together. All so very young.

  Geri turns the radio off and gazes for a while in the rearview mirror at Leila, who has leaned her head cinematically against the window in the backseat.

  She turns to Jim. “I was almost your age when I had you,” she says. And then: “Do you remember your father at all?”

  Jim looks
at her. It is the first time she has talked about Tony in years. He thinks of the day in the delivery room, his father’s strong hand, his father’s strong leg.

  “No,” he says. “I don’t remember him.”

  In the backseat, Leila closes her eyes and smiles. “I do,” she says.

  Their exit appears like a beacon. Geri puts on the blinker and they hurtle over the bridge toward Manhattan in their little car, the three of them together leaving New Jersey.

  The three of them together. And they are all so brokenhearted. And they are all so very young.

  7.

  MIKE HAS NEVER SEEN

  I may know the truth but not face it

  I may hear a sound, a whisper, sacred and

  profound but turn my head, indifferent

  —NATALIE MERCHANT, “I May Know the Word”

  I.

  Mike R.’s mother called on Saturday to tell him that his first girlfriend had killed herself. Nora Cross.

  “How?” he asked, and then regretted it deeply. It was an uncouth question, but she had caught him off guard.

  “She shot herself in the head, Mikey. At her parents’ house.”

  “Nora Cross,” said Mike, and again for good measure: “Nora Cross.” It had been years since he had spoken the name aloud.

  “I know, dear,” said his mother. Mike heard her drinking something on the other end of the telephone line. Something with ice cubes, probably whiskey. “Her poor parents. The poor dears. Oh, Mike, it’s just such a shame.”

  “Did she leave a note?”

  “No,” said Mike’s mother, and then Mike marveled once more at the questions that sprang from his mouth unstoppably like sparks through a hearth grate. They were selfish. Predictable. Morbid.

  He imagined, on the other end of the line, his mother sitting there in her kitchen, dabbing at red eyes with an edge of the tablecloth, her hair piled on her head to an astonishing height. The picture made him startle suddenly with grief, and he was relieved. He pretended the sadness came from Nora. When the lump in his throat started, he felt better.

  “When’s the funeral?” He was crying now, and sniffling audibly.

  “Don’t cry, honey,” said Mike’s mother. “It’s next week sometime. The Cross family has been talking to funeral homes, but—” Her voice broke.

  “What, Ma?”

  “Mikey, they can’t even have an open casket!”

  Mike said he had to go and hung up the phone and then didn’t know what to do next, so he put on Led Zeppelin IV and wished he could play like Jimmy Page—sloppy and careless and great. Next, he wondered how his mother knew whether or not Nora had left a note. Would such a thing appear in an obituary? Had there been an obituary?

  Nora might have left a note. It might have gotten lost. Mike wondered how many suicide notes had been lost in history; how many questions unanswered; how many final wishes unfulfilled. He thought of Nora’s note sitting next to an open window, being blown gracefully behind a desk, swept aside like a petal, like a feather. Perhaps it was lying where no one would think to look. Perhaps it was in the mail. Perhaps it was in the mail to him.

  II.

  Today Mike feels worse. Feigning illness, he has canceled the rehearsal that Titan scheduled a month ago for the Burn. The rest of the band will hate him. They’re on shaky ground with the label as it is. Their first record came out last spring and has only done moderately well, but they’re planning a tour based on Titan’s prediction that it will help sales. Theo has been lobbying for them since he’s signed them, but Mike gets the feeling that the rest of Titan couldn’t give a shit about them. Theo has been out on a limb for them for the last year, and Mike likes Theo, so he feels bad.

  And he’s supposed to be the responsible one.

  But now, prone on his unmade bed, his heart pounding with something unnatural, Mike thinks he might actually feel sick. He is hazy. The image of Nora Cross floats from his mind outward, forward, until she is before him in his room, roaming from eye to eye to eye. Nora Cross as he remembers her: sad, plump, blond. Eighteen-year-old Nora Cross, home from her first year at college for winter break and eating a candy cane and pointing out the Christmas lights on his childhood street (or on his wall now, on the wall of his little room) and saying, “They’re nice this year,” and then, “Mike, I miss you tons.” Sucking on a candy cane, her full pink cheeks working at getting all the sweetness out of it. Nora Cross, her mittened hands clutching and catching at his and saying, “Mike? Mike?” like some desperate animal, like some round plaid animal. Here in his little room in New York.

  “Why are you here?” asks Mike, but then his phone rings and he answers it.

  A mistake. It is Jax Powers-Kline, and she is unhappy. He has never spoken to her on the phone before; he has seen her fleetingly at industry events and, of course, it was she who formalized the signing of the Burn.

  “Is this Mike R.?” she asks.

  “Yes,” says Mike, and knows who it is immediately—Jax calls all the members of Titan’s bands by their stage names. None of his friends use that name, except when distinguishing him from Mike G.

  “Mike R.,” says Jax sweetly, “I understand you’re not feeling well.”

  “Yeah,” says Mike. “I’ve got this cold.”

  “I’d like to clarify something for you,” says Jax, and then tells him all the things he has done to hurt the band, the record, the label, and precisely what she will do to him if he misses another rehearsal, and while she is talking Mike closes his eyes and remembers being young enough to live at home in Rhode Island, and across the room Nora Cross has started crying, wiping her nose with her sleeve, just as she did the last day he saw her alive.

  III.

  On Wednesday, after speaking once more with his mother on the phone, Mike decides that he will go home for the funeral.

  He has learned from her that the Cross family has arranged a closed-casket funeral for next Wednesday. Mike has never seen a dead person before. He is glad he will not have to yet.

  He has also learned the following:

  Nora Cross shot herself in the head while her family was out.

  It was on her bed.

  Her younger brother found her.

  It was his gun.

  His mother has always had a knack for finding things out. Like when Mike was twelve: he shoplifted two packages of Hostess Ding Dongs and a ruler with all the presidents on it from the White Hen Pantry just because he had been feeling too nice all day. His mother found out and didn’t punish him but cried for a while and made him promise not to do it again.

  He did do it again, the next day, but that was all. After that he was done with shoplifting.

  IV.

  Nora Cross was sleepy on the day she lost her virginity. “‘Losing your virginity,’” she had said to Mike. “An awful phrase.” She had just turned seventeen, and she had always told herself that she would wait for seventeen—which seemed to her to be distant, an age that would never come. This she told herself at fourteen, when Mike asked her out. He was small and loud. She was large and sad and prone to fits of unstoppable nervous giggling in class, which caught her teachers off guard and made them frown at her. She was never laughing at anything, really. But once she started it was nearly impossible to stop.

  By the time she was seventeen she had found a way to stop the giggling before it began: she would bite her tongue, literally—bite it between her front teeth and then her side teeth until it nearly bled. Her tongue, a pink snail between pebbles, a sea anemone gone soft, was something she took pride in. Nora Cross was proud of her tongue, and giggled, and sat large and blond in her seat in English class, and for these reasons Mike asked her out—because the prettiest girls wouldn’t pay attention and the ugliest wouldn’t talk.

  And Nora lost her virginity at seventeen. Later she thought—though she hated the phrase—how appropriate it was, for it was a loss more than anything. It was giving something over, it was giving up some part of yourself to no one in parti
cular. Not Mike; not anyone. It was opening a hole and making it deeper. It was filling yourself with space. Losing your virginity.

  She was sleepy that day, nearly falling asleep in the warm basement of Mike’s house in Rhode Island, nearly content on the couch, but she was seventeen, so when Mike began fumbling around and reached into a pocket and pulled out a condom that he had stolen from a stash his older brother kept in his car, Nora Cross felt that it was no longer in her power to say no, and she lost her virginity, and she never found it. It was gone after that.

  Nora Cross, sleepy, almost trusting, lost her virginity at seventeen.

  V.

  Mike’s apartment is mainly a bedroom. There is a sink in the corner, which Nora Cross has found and is examining, touching the faucet and the basin and the handles with a wandering finger, running it over everything, just the way she used to.

  Curious: she was always curious when Mike knew her.

  Mike watches Nora Cross from his bed. He wonders what she’s doing, but he is weak. He has not really left the house since he found out the news, except once to buy food for his cat, Maxie, and once to buy a paper, just to make sure the world had not blown apart during his stay in bed. Then yesterday he went out to buy the Natalie Merchant album that Nora Cross listened to compulsively in high school. She had given him a copy of it one Christmas because she loved it and she thought he would love it as well. It was her gift to him, so he listened to it and liked it warmly but not passionately, not the way she did, not enough to listen to it over and over again, the way she did. She listened to it like breathing: each morning when she woke up, each evening while falling asleep.

  Mike went out to buy it yesterday with the hope that it would tell him something about her that he didn’t already know. It has been playing on repeat mode in his CD player for the better part of the last twenty-four hours, and he thinks he has some answers now, but he’s not sure. It has made Nora happy anyway; it has her smiling. She is pleasant to have around the apartment. She sits on Mike’s bed and soothes him. She looks at things as if they are endlessly interesting: pictures in frames on Mike’s wall of Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page, positioned casually so it looks as if they are friends of his. Mike has been lying in bed, tossing from side to front to side to back like some animal on a slow-turning spit.