The Words of Every Song

by Liz Moore

  Though Naomi Plassey has been here many times, she never tires of taking in the rooms in this home. Here in the living room there is a stately photograph of Abraham, Pacifica, and their daughter, done in black and white, taken perhaps twenty-five years ago; their daughter must have been fifteen, thinks Naomi. It was taken on Shelter Island, where the Powers-Klines summer. In the photograph, a brown-haired, bespectacled Abraham stares straight at the camera, his arms wrapped about his wife. Pacifica looks down and to the left—a shame, thinks Abraham, who loves her eyes—and she might be looking at the water, or she might be looking at the sand. Their daughter stands to their right, one hand placed tentatively on her father’s shoulder, the only one smiling in the portrait. One might describe it as serious but for her.

  Naomi is contemplating the photograph when two things happen simultaneously.

  “Hello!” says Pacifica, descending the stairs like a dancer.

  “Hello,” says Jax, coming in through the door, left un-latched by the Blandes, and locking eyes with her mother. She too holds a bottle of wine in her hands. “Happy birthday, Mother.”

  IX.

  Che’s joviality and general good-naturedness have helped him to win an astounding number of allies in New York over the span of his short life. One of his close friends from high school is at culinary school and owes Che for two eighths of weed he borrowed more than a month ago, for which he still has not paid. He readily agrees to see what he can do upon receiving Che’s phone call. Che meets him outside the French Culinary Institute and runs down the steps of the N/R stop at Canal Street, a package under his arm. On the train, he pretends not to know where the smell of meat is coming from, looking at the ceiling as the passengers around him edge away. Despite the plastic that surrounds the cooked racks of lamb, a small spot of grease has worked its way through the paper bag and onto his cotton jacket.

  He taps his foot impatiently, waiting for Brooklyn Heights.

  X.

  Maris emerges from the kitchen with her quiche lorraines, some table crackers, and the Gouda.

  “Maris!” proclaims Abraham, who is already on his third glass of wine. “Maris, everybody,” he says.

  “Hello,” comes the awkward murmured response.

  Maris bends toward Abraham and whispers something to him. He nods in understanding, says, “Yes, that’s fine then.”

  Maris retreats into the kitchen and the room lapses back into conversation. Georgina Thompson, who has always been a flirt, tosses her head back with laughter at something Fred Harcourt is telling her. Abraham and Pacifica gaze into each other’s eyes from across the room, as they have done so many times—each conversing with someone else, each focused on no one but the other. Pacifica begins to enjoy herself. She is discussing Ellen Mills, the newest soprano at the Met. Pacifica has always secretly liked her birthday, for Abraham has always made sure to make her feel special. Her friends are here and she is eighty. She glances at her daughter, who sits unsmiling in a corner, speaking to no one.

  Then there is a ringing. Jax’s cell phone is going off, emitting a shrill high-pitched version of “La Cucaracha.” Jax pauses, considering her options. It could be a client. It could be Tommy Mays, who has been missing in action since last week and is scheduled to be on Letterman in two days.

  “Excuse me,” she says, and walks from the room, her mother’s glare on her back. Naomi Plassey covers her mouth and shakes her head unsubtly, and Pacifica’s attention is diverted from her anger with her daughter to her disgust with Naomi.

  “Busy, is she?” asks Fred Harcourt, helping himself to a generous slice of the Gouda and placing it, crackerless, on his tongue. There is silence in the room, and a record of Carmen, playing in the background, skips a few beats to emphasize it. All around Pacifica, her guests eye her with measured pity.

  “Yes, well,” says Pacifica.

  Suddenly, she is overwhelmed. I must help her, thinks Pacifica. I must help my daughter; I must save her from herself. She has a sudden impulse to take her daughter upstairs and sit her on her childhood bed and stroke her hair, as she remembers doing. From the hallway she can hear Jax’s voice as she talks on her cell phone, but it is not her voice, not really; it is the voice of an unscrupulous woman, of an inhumane woman.

  “I don’t care, I don’t care!” Jax is saying—nearly shouting.

  The silence in the living room is deafening.

  “Will you excuse me?” says Pacifica, and rises unsteadily from her chair and walks into the hallway. She takes the phone from her daughter’s right hand and holds it uncertainly for a few measured beats—the tinny voice inside it repeating a confused “Hello? Jax?”—and then shuts it with a resounding click.

  XI.

  Maris cannot postpone the dinner any longer. She calls everyone in to the table, praying that Che arrives with the racks of lamb before the guests have finished their soup.

  Maris has arranged the table beautifully. As a centerpiece, white candles frame a pot of ivy. The silverware has been polished so it shines. Abraham has instructed her to use their ancestral china, and he is pleased as he seats himself at one end of the long table. On the runner by the wall, Maris has placed her bouquet of violets and a large tureen of white bean soup. She serves the soup now, as slowly as possible.

  “Thank you,” each guest murmurs in turn. Then Maris walks away and stands in the kitchen, the burnt racks of lamb glaring at her from the garbage, and waits for the buzzer to signify Che’s arrival.

  The guests have almost cleared their bowls when the buzzer goes off. “I’ll get it,” says Jax. She is wounded from her earlier conversation with her mother and has been searching for an excuse to leave the table.

  In the kitchen, Maris starts and then runs for the door, but the Powers-Klines’ daughter has gotten there first. Maris has met Jax only a very few times; she is rarely there in the evenings, which is when Jax visits, on the rare occasions that she does. Maris stands back and lets Jax turn the handle.

  Jax opens the door and sees a young man.

  Che walks in the door and stops. “I know you,” says Che. “I’m Che? I sat next to you on the subway? When it stalled one time? I gave you my demo?”

  Jax remembers and is moved, inexplicably, forcefully. She takes in a breath and holds it.

  “Did you listen to it? Did you get a chance to listen to it? This is crazy; this is a sign,” says Che, his voice cracking with excitement.

  Jax is very tired. She drops onto the bench in the hallway, a bench made of dark wood with a large mirror behind it. In the mirror, her back looks small and fragile, like the back of a much older woman. As it so often does, her head finds her hands.

  Maris is confused. “Che,” she says. “Leave her alone.” She reaches out for the package of meat, and Che extends it to her absently.

  “I can’t believe this, man,” he says.

  “Che,” says his mother. “Come in here with me to the kitchen.”

  Jax looks up and smiles at Maris. “No, please,” she says. “Sit down next to me, Che.” She is almost whispering. “Sit down right here.” She pats the dark wood of the bench, and Che obliges. “I want to tell you something.”

  Through the open double doors that lead from the foyer into the dining room, Pacifica Powers watches her daughter speaking with Maris’s son and her heart is lighter than it has been in many years. She cannot hear what Jax is saying, but in her aspect there is real concern. Che is nodding; his right foot is tapping the ground to whichever rhythm is in his head at the moment. Pacifica sees the two of them laugh and feels like laughing herself—feels like hearing a good joke, or being as carefree as she used to be sometimes when she was very young.

  At the other end of the table, Abraham sits with his back to the hallway. He sees his wife and his hands tremble. She looks very beautiful by candlelight, and her face has softened. If he knew she was looking at her daughter! Her daughter, who is more and more the image of Pacifica. He thinks his wife is remembering something about him and h
erself, as he does so often; perhaps remembering the bed-and-breakfast in Maine, or the boulangerie in Paris, or Abraham’s homecoming from the war—all memories of their life together before their daughter, all the memories most cherished by Abraham. He tries to catch his wife’s eye, but he can’t. Her gaze is fixed and loving, and Abraham wonders that she does not see him there at the end of the table at which they’ve eaten so many meals together. She is distant and blooming with warmth, and he wants to touch her face, to stroke the outline of her jaw with a trembling finger, but she will not look his way.

  When Maris emerges from the kitchen with the racks of lamb on a silver platter, she raises her gaze to the hallway and sees her son speaking with the Powers-Klines’ daughter.

  She can hear Che laughing, a clear low manly laugh that she barely recognizes above the din of conversation that fills the dining room.

  In her head she sends him a message: You are all that I have in the world. She wishes that Jax would leave him alone. After all, she thinks, he’s only a child.

  9.

  GREGORY GETS A KISS

  “Why are you so far away?” she said

  “And won’t you ever know that I’m in love

  with you?”…

  You’re just like a dream

  —THE CURE, “Just Like Heaven”

  I.

  “You’re my horse!” says Jilly, who is clinging like a koala to the left foot of her brother. “Dad. Dad. Daddy.”

  Gregory looks down at Jilly. She is nearly hysterical with joy, her small face alight with heat, her yellow hair hopelessly snarled, beginning to form a lock at the back of her head.

  “You’re my horse!” she says again, and grins aggressively, and buries her face in the leg of Gregory’s pants. “Go!”

  “Jilly, get off,” says Gregory. He gives his leg a small shake and his sister shrieks with laughter.

  “Dad. Daddy, Daddy, Dad!”

  “Why are you saying ‘Dad,’ Jilly?” asks Gregory.

  “You’re my horse named Daddy,” says Jilly. “Hi, Daddy!” She collapses once again into yelps of joy, and Gregory seizes the opportunity to pry her thin limbs from his own. He runs toward his room, which was once a walk-in closet and can hold exactly one twin bed. The door does not open all the way. He turns sideways to enter, then shuts the door behind him and says hello with his eyes to Tommy Mays. The poster has lived on the back of Gregory’s door since his family moved to Manhattan three years ago. In California, Tommy Mays had lived on the wall, but the walls of his room here are so close together that to decorate them at all seems impractical, ridiculous.

  Gregory lies back on the bed. He reaches behind his head and feels for the small stereo on his windowsill, presses Play. Tommy Mays is the only thing he really listens to anymore.

  On the other side of his door, Jilly is livid, betrayed.

  “Gregory? You’re my horse!” she wails, her fists in balls by her sides. “My horse, my horse. Daddy.” She bangs on the door once, a bit afraid of her own bravery, and there is no response. Then Jilly knows she has lost, and she walks solemnly down the hall to where her mother is reading in the common room, which includes a kitchen area and a table for four.

  “Gregory has gone into his room again,” says Jilly, and her mother, Helen—who remembers childhood more compassionately than most women her age—puts down her book and offers her lap to Jilly. Her daughter climbs into it with dignity and settles back against Helen and lets out a great sigh.

  Jilly always accepts defeat gracefully. For this reason, for many others, she will one day become a successful local politician in suburban Pennsylvania, losing twice to an incumbent and then winning the mayoral election by a landslide after a third campaign.

  For now, her thumb finds her mouth and she turns her head toward her mother’s shoulder.

  “Silly Jilly,” says Helen. “Poor Jilly.”

  Gregory feels a pleasant sense of guilt at shutting out his sister. He has a plan and he is mulling it over on his bed. It is nice inside his room: tiny and absurd. It is a perfect place to hatch the sort of plan he is hatching.

  He is sixteen and hopelessly confused. Since meeting Tommy Mays, three things have changed: his after-school job at Sound-Off has taken on a new significance for him, as he watches the door every moment and expects that Tommy Mays will walk in again, the way he did last time, as if he were human, as if it were natural; he has become quieter in school, has become easily distracted; and he has become preoccupied with sex.

  The third change has been the most difficult for Gregory, since his preoccupation with sex does not happen to coincide with an increase in sexual activity, or really any sexual activity at all. Gregory cringes when he thinks about how he is sixteen years old and has never kissed anyone, girl or boy. Certainly he knows by now that he has no interest in kissing girls, but at least if a girl wanted to kiss him it would confirm something for Gregory about his own desirability. He has friends. He has many male friends with glasses or acne or too-short pants who are similarly undesirable. But recently it seems that even they have achieved a fumbling feeling-up at some party, a terrible sloppy kiss on some street corner. Gregory cannot imagine telling his friends that these things do not interest him—that his dreams are not of Heather Hall at school, or of actresses or models, but of Tommy Mays. He wakes often to a vision of Tommy Mays undressing him, kissing his eyes, his mouth. He wakes and nearly cries out in frustration. Wakes and wonders if he will ever meet a boy.

  He aches for physical contact. Every nerve in his sixteen-year-old self buzzes for it—he has turned brushes with his peers in the hall into meaningful events in his life. There was the time that Ryan Mulligan ran a hand across his back in lab—the possibility that it had been intentional thrills Gregory to his bones. There was the time that Mr. Adams, very young and handsome, leaned over his desk so close that Gregory could feel the teacher’s breath on his ear. Gregory is swimming in thoughts like these, but acting on them has always seemed impossible, like shrinking in height seems impossible, like breathing underwater.

  He still pretends for his friends. He wants to kiss a girl for their sake, because they have such high hopes for him. When Gregory and his friends get together outside school, his friends talk about the best-looking girls at Stuyvesant and look at him encouragingly, for really Gregory is not bad to look at, though his body on the bed seems impossibly thin, and his feet, huge and distant, turn out awkwardly against the wall.

  When lying down, Gregory himself nearly spans the length of his room. To him this seems preposterous. Just a year ago he was almost graceful, still childish like Jilly, still able to run without looking giraffelike and ungainly. Now he ducks his head as a habit when walking. He is six-three. He has very little facial hair. He has even features and a slender face that always looks worried because his eyebrows turn up a little near the bridge of his nose. His lips are full and pale. Yes: he is just a boy still, a very tall boy.

  Now Gregory checks his watch and shrugs with a little thrill of pleasure. At last, he has a plan.

  II.

  David comes home with a surprise for his son. He is carrying a large box and Jilly greets him at the door.

  “Hi,” she says. “Dad.”

  Helen appears with her book, and her glasses have fallen down on her nose.

  “What in the world,” says Helen.

  Gregory hears his father, opens the door to his room. He sees what his father is holding—sees the writing on the outside of the box—and feels terrible and ashamed. “Silent Drums,” it says.

  His father looks up at him like a child waiting to be praised. Gregory feels sick. In the box, he knows, is the electronic drum set he has been coveting since they moved to New York. He cannot have a real set in their small apartment. It would not fit, for one thing; it would disturb the neighbors. Since he got the part-time job at Sound-Off last year, he has been playing their sets on his breaks. But not having a set at home has been the worst part of the move for Gregory.
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  But David has been unemployed. He has not worked in a year.

  Now he watches Gregory expectantly, still in the doorway with the big cardboard box. The drums cost more than a thousand dollars. Gregory knows.

  “A late birthday present, Gregie,” says David, using Gregory’s childhood nickname. His eyes are hopeful. Lately his son has been acting strange. “Set it up with me?”

  “Dad,” begins Gregory.

  “How could you,” Helen whispers. “David.”

  Jilly observes her family. Her small body is tense. She walks to her father, puts an arm around his leg. She cannot see his face above the box.

  “I’ll help you,” says Jilly.

  At this moment, Gregory hates his family with a passion that only a sixteen-year-old could muster. He looks at his father reproachfully and retreats into his room. If he could slam the door, he would. But he can’t, so he throws himself on the bed and pounds his pillow instead.

  He hears his mother and his father as they speak in low tones. He hears Jilly singing one of her Jilly songs, this one about a brave soldier who goes off to war and leaves behind a series of pets. Each pet gets a verse.

  “Sneakers, oh Sneakers, oh Sneakers, my cat,” sings Jilly through the door.

  Then Gregory falls asleep.