The Words of Every Song

by Liz Moore

  The door opens and Jeff turns around, his right hand automatically going around behind his back with the bourbon. But it is only three girls, youngish, and Jeff does not know who they are. Neither do Jordan or Kai, apparently, but they say hello nonetheless and invite them to sit down.

  Next comes an old friend of Tom and Camilla’s.

  “Annie!” shouts Camilla, and Tom stands to give the woman a kiss on the cheek. “My God, Annie, you haven’t even met the girls!”

  Annie laughs in disbelief at the sight of Clara and Alice, who eye her shyly from their places on the couch. “I can’t decide who they look like,” she says.

  “Each other,” says Tom, and everyone laughs—an exclusive laugh, a hearty exclusive laugh. Jeff chuckles a little too, quietly, wanting to be part of it all.

  Once again the door opens, but it is only Jerry the guitar tech, who comes in carrying Jeff’s Strat in its case and marches it over to Jeff.

  “All set, pal,” he says.

  XII.

  Kenneth, Celeste, and Celeste’s parents wait patiently in the line to get backstage. At the door is a large man with a walkie-talkie.

  “Anyone without a pink pass, leave now,” he says. Nobody moves. He points at a girl halfway back. “You,” he says. “Where’s your pass?”

  “I lost it,” says the girl. “I had one, though, seriously.”

  The guard shakes his head back and forth slowly, definitely. “You’re not getting back there, hon,” he says. “Not tonight.”

  “Please,” says the girl. “You don’t understand. They’re expecting me backstage.”

  Celeste feels terribly embarrassed for her family, suddenly, and wishes with all her might that she were not in this line with these people. She misses her brother Jeff, and she holds her bag of cookies (which the guards at the gate almost did not let her bring) ashamedly. It was a stupid idea to bring cookies. Her parents are silent, and she tries hard to think of something to say to Kenneth, who is trying hard to think of something to say to her.

  “Glad we’ve got these,” says Kenneth, fingering his pink pass. It is exactly the wrong thing to say.

  “I’m not,” says Celeste. “I hate them.” She takes hers off and for a split second considers handing it to the girl without the pass. But the guard is approaching the girl now, and she has started crying—humiliatingly, childishly—and the guard actually picks her up by her armpits and carries her down the aisle away from the line.

  “No,” the girl is saying. Celeste can hear her. “I had one! I lost it!”

  In her peripheral vision, Celeste sees her father pat his own pass the way he pats his camera or his wallet, to see if it is there. She hates Jeff. She hates him suddenly for making his own family wait in this awful line. She wants to leave, but the door in front of them opens abruptly and the hellish red light from backstage spills out.

  “Pink passes only,” says a guard who has replaced the first one. Celeste’s mother, Celeste’s father, Kenneth, and Celeste file past him, flashing the pass triumphantly, gratefully, shyly, disgustedly, in turn.

  XIII.

  It has been fifteen minutes since people have been coming backstage, and still Ms. Murphy has not come. Annie and Camilla are chatting and playing with the girls while Tom signs autographs for the lucky fans who have been let backstage. Jordan and Kai are still chatting up the three girls in tight clothes who found them first.

  “I like your cross,” says Jordan, reaching for a crucifix that hangs about one girl’s neck, finding a resting place just above the neckline of her shirt.

  “Thank you,” says the girl, uncertainly.

  Jeff can guess her age.

  He watches as Kai’s eyes shift to the door and move from top to bottom of whoever just walked in; he turns as well to see his sister, Celeste.

  She looks miserable. An Asian boy in a suit jacket follows close behind. Jeff’s parents walk in last. And still Ms. Murphy is nowhere to be found. Automatically, Jeff goes over to his family and says hello. He hugs his father, kisses his mother on the cheek, puts an arm around Celeste’s shoulder.

  “You were great,” says Celeste. Flatly. She does not mean it.

  “Oh, Jeff,” says their mother. “You are great, honey. Just great.”

  “I think I’m deaf,” says his father, sticking a finger in his ear and wiggling it around. “Was it loud enough for you up there?”

  “I’m Kenneth,” says Kenneth Wang. He holds out his hand. All he wants is for Celeste to see he is unintimidated by her famous older brother, but his voice cracks when he says, “Nice to meet you.”

  “Celeste,” says Jeff. “Do you have a teacher named Ms. Murphy?”

  “No,” says Celeste. “Do you, Kenneth?”

  “No,” says Kenneth Wang, looking lovingly at Celeste as she hands her older brother the bag of burnt, halved cookies.

  13.

  ELLEN MILLS: TWELVE SIMPLE SONGS AND ARIAS

  When somebody loves you

  It’s no good unless he loves you all the way

  —BILLIE HOLIDAY, “All the Way”

  I.

  Ellen Mills begins her first serious relationship relatively late in life, at twenty-four, with a man twenty-one years her senior. His name is Heinrich and he is German. He is a producer who works with Ellen on her second album—tentatively titled Ellen Mills: Twelve Simple Songs and Arias—and seduces Ellen one evening at a sidewalk café in the East Village. It is a biergarten of the authentic variety, with waitresses who speak German to Heinrich and call him by name. Ellen smiles at them and blushes a little when she suspects they might be talking about her. Heinrich notices, and politely he switches to English.

  “Ellen is just finishing her second album,” he says to their waitress. “She is an opera singer. A very talented lady.” Heinrich winks at her and reverts to German and Ellen smiles at his formality and at being called a lady. She has had two real German beers in glasses that are as big as her head. She feels drunk and rather lovely; she imagines that her face might be prettily flushed, her hair charmingly tousled. She came here with Heinrich because she had felt thirsty after singing for four hours in a warm Chelsea studio, and because she found him exciting.

  After the waitress walks away with their food order—Heinrich has ordered them four different kinds of wursts—Ellen stretches her hands toward the sky in a motion that might be suggestive, and leans casually toward Heinrich. She is thrilling herself with bravery: she feels jokey and unafraid.

  “I’m famished,” she says, imagining it might be something Katharine Hepburn would say at this moment.

  “Fammish?” says Heinrich. He blinks.

  “Hungry.”

  “Ah. Good!” he says enthusiastically, and embraces Ellen abruptly, putting his bear hands on her arms and giving her an affectionate shake. “Good!”

  The gesture is so familiar that it startles Ellen, who comes from a family that does not use touch lightly or easily. She gasps a bit, against her will, and withdraws. Heinrich doesn’t notice, plunging once more into his third beer, which he drinks with extraordinary vigor. He shows not the slightest sign of drunkenness. Ellen wonders if he drinks this much beer every night—or more. The thought excites her. Heinrich seems vital to her, warm, endlessly human. His odor is pleasantly, mildly rank, and he is hairier than any man she’s ever found attractive. Small light curls at his neck escape the collar of his T-shirt, which is old and blue and has holes in both shoulder seams. Sweat darkens the fabric under his arms. He has light and sandy hair, a close-trimmed beard, small laugh lines that frame eyes lined with brilliantly dark lashes. Ellen thinks he’s very handsome. He’s much larger than she is, for one thing, and his presence is comfortable, almost maternal. He crosses his legs the way ladies do, and bounces his right leg along with the music, his toes wiggling in their sandal as though they are glad to be free.

  Ellen sips from her beer while he tells her about Germany. He has a wife there and two teenage sons. He is here in America because the cl
assical division of Titan is paying him to produce a number of albums, Ellen’s included. He occupies a small one-bedroom apartment in Murray Hill, also paid for by Titan. He goes home at night after working with Ellen, he says, and puts on the TV and practices his English by having conversations with the characters in the half-hour sitcoms, answering them when they ask each other questions, participating in their lives. His favorite thing is watching reruns of Cheers, though he has trouble with the accents. “I’m lonely here,” he tells Ellen.

  “I miss the little man who sells me bread in my town. I miss my sons.”

  “And your wife?” asks Ellen.

  “Yes,” says Heinrich. “I miss her too.”

  The waitress brings their wursts, all four of them huge, white or red and speckled inside with spices and herbs.

  “Danke,” says Ellen, who would never normally say such a silly thing.

  “She speaks German!” says the waitress, kindly.

  And Heinrich: “Wonderful! Wonderful!”

  “Danke,” Ellen says again, laughing, and picks a wurst up with her fingers and bites into it, aware that she is watched by Heinrich.

  II.

  In the studio, Ellen works quietly. She was not able to befriend the producer who worked on her first album or the musicians who played on it. At the Met, she does not make allies easily. She is younger than most of the other singers, for one thing: she has been studying in conservatories and training with private vocal instructors since she was twelve. Becoming a darling of the press early on in her career has not been easy on her, socially.

  Her family—mother, father, younger brother—lives upstate, in a small home in Schenectady. They spend summers at a lake house an hour north. On weekends in the summer, Ellen usually takes an Amtrak train to visit them, buying a trashy novel at Penn Station beforehand and reading it voraciously on the rides up and back. Upstate she sits by the quiet lake and imagines that she is storing up fuel for the city, that she is being blessed, somehow, by the water at her feet. She has romantic ideas about love and sex and uses her time alone to plan relationships with men who do not know her name.

  Certainly, her minor fame has brought her admirers, but the men who contact Ellen or her agent are largely older, wishing simply to congratulate her on an opera well performed or to encourage her to listen to so-and-so’s version of a particular aria.

  Most recently, an elderly pair of Brooklynites recognized her on the street while she was waiting for the bus, and told her that they listened to her rendition of “L’Habañera” almost every night.

  “It’s so lovely,” the woman had said. “Thank you, thank you.”

  She had been touched by their communal stance, the gentleman with his hand on his wife’s back, his hat removed and clutched in a thick-veined hand.

  “Our daughter knows you,” he had said. But then Ellen’s bus had arrived and she had boarded it apologetically, promising them over her shoulder that she would listen to Joan Sutherland’s Turandot, as they had requested.

  She remembers the episode and the couple fondly, as she does all older couples who seem visibly full of love and respect for one another. She has heard from her mother, Maryanne, about the girls in her hometown who are getting married to boys from her hometown, and she can barely believe it. She herself is very far away from marriage. At twenty-four, she has had dates with men who frightened her and she has had a brief fling with a busboy who wanted to be an actor, but she has never been in love.

  III.

  “Do you like this?” asks Heinrich, gesturing broadly.

  “The food?” asks Ellen. “The beer?” She smiles sleepily, and leans her elbows on the table. She’s quite drunk now, and she has stopped worrying about hiding it from Heinrich. “I like everything.”

  “And me?” says Heinrich, and once again puts a bear hand on her arm, and turns her face toward his and wipes something off the corner of her mouth. “Ellen? And me?”

  Later that night, in Heinrich’s bed, Ellen lies on her side and presses her nose into Heinrich’s ribs, inhaling deeply. He smells like the earth.

  “You have a beautiful voice,” he tells her. “May I confess you something?”

  “Confess me anything,” says Ellen. She is in the midst of noticing things about Heinrich’s room: the small framed photo of his sons, both of them adolescent and punkish, which he has placed on the windowsill; the five wooden grocery crates of LPs that line up next to each other on the floor by the windowed wall; the bedside lamp, bizarrely childish, with a boy and a girl that look like Ellen’s grandmother’s Hummel figurines chasing each other around an apple tree that serves as the lamp’s stem. Ellen imagines Heinrich must have brought it with him specially from Germany, and marvels at the difficulty of packing something like that for a plane ride. The lamp must have some kind of significance for him, and Ellen makes plans to ask Heinrich about it later—months later, when they have grown comfortable with each other, the way couples do, when they can walk down the street with their arms slung about each other, hardly noticing the other’s presence. This is Ellen’s favorite fantasy: When she imagines herself in a relationship, it is never the beginning of things that thrills her. It is the middle—it is closer to the end than anything. That stage of utter thoughtlessness, complete comfort: a stage she has never known.

  She is brought back by Heinrich’s voice: “I listened to you in Germany,” he says. “It was I who asked Titan to let me work on your second album.”

  Ellen had been under the impression that Titan had asked him—Heinrich is, she has been told, a fairly prominent producer. He has worked with other opera singers on albums that have done well for Titan’s German division. She is flattered now, and says so, hoping she doesn’t sound stilted or distant (she has been accused of these things before).

  “No, no,” says Heinrich. “It is I who am flattered, Ellen.” He takes her face in his hands and examines her, as if he might lick his thumb and wipe something from her brow. As if he might pinch her cheeks. Instead, he kisses her on the mouth and Ellen feels the same kind of thrill that she felt as a seventh-grader when some senior boys who lived on her street asked her if she wanted a cigarette one day when she was walking home from school.

  “No—I just quit,” Ellen had said. Her parents smoked and she had tried a couple of cigarettes once, back to back, the way she had seen her father do it, and she had to sit down abruptly because she felt dizzy, and she told herself she would never do it again. So it was almost true. She kept walking, making sure not to trip or to slow down or speed up, and she complimented herself on a job well done.

  Then behind her she heard the worst of the boys say, “Spit or swallow?” which almost ruined it, but not quite. She still remembers it fondly because it was the first time she ever felt like a girl. It was the first time anyone ever talked to her because she was a girl. She felt she had been inducted into a club she had always known existed but could not name—a club with members who roll their eyes at the antics of the opposite sex, and at the unwanted attention they get. Ellen was now part of that club.

  She wishes that she could tell Heinrich about those boys, but knows she cannot. Ellen learned a long time ago what makes a story and what does not.

  Instead, she places a hand on Heinrich’s furry chest and sighs deeply.

  “You are all right, my dear?” asks Heinrich.

  At some point in the night, Ellen wakes up completely sober and realizes in quick succession what she has done and what she is: respectively, she has had sex with a married man and she is a home wrecker. Maybe even a slut. Never before has Ellen thought of herself as anything close to sluttish, but she suspects that overnight she has unceremoniously joined a different club: one with members including everyone from Doreen Geiger—in Ellen’s fifth-grade class, the only unfortunate possessor of womanly breasts—to Laney Healey, the high-schooler accused of giving the entire junior varsity football team pregame blow jobs at the back of their yellow bus. Ellen has always felt laughably far
away from these girls and their legion. But here she is, and it is four o’clock in the morning, and she is naked, and she is lying in a married man’s bed. She can picture her mother saying it: a married man. Her mother did say it once, in hushed tones to her father, about one of the young women at her office. She’s having an affair, said Ellen’s mother, with a married man. It had seemed the worst sin in the world at the time.

  But now it doesn’t seem so bad. It seems a tiny bit glamorous, even—the kind of thing that one should do once in her life, so she can remember it later when she is old and crippled and very far away from youth. I’m glad that I’m getting this out of the way now, thinks Ellen, aware that she is rationalizing terribly. Glad to be sowing the oats while young.

  And then finally, finally, Ellen can no longer stop her mind from turning toward the one thought she has been scrupulously avoiding: Heinrich’s unnamed wife, probably waking up now in Germany—or no, she has been awake for a few hours, and she is wondering about Heinrich, and she is missing him and wishing she could call him, but she does not want to wake him because she cares about him very much, and she knows he is a busy producer who stays out late and needs his sleep. And she is cleaning. And her hair is in a kerchief like the hausfrau in one of the books Ellen read as a child. And she is singing a cleaning song, and suddenly, in Ellen’s mind, Heinrich’s wife becomes Lotte Lenya, cleaning house in a kerchief.

  And Ellen is in bed with Lotte’s husband—a married man. She’s having an affair.

  IV.

  In the morning, Ellen wakes before Heinrich and gathers her things together quietly. She is taking a train upstate today to visit her family for the weekend. She observes once more the apple tree lamp, the picture of Heinrich’s sons, and then Heinrich himself, sleeping faceup with his mouth open and one arm crooked over his forehead. His right eye flutters delicately, revealing a sliver of bluish white that reminds Ellen of a leechee fruit.