The Words of Every Song

by Liz Moore

  II.

  Jax calls Theo into her office. Recently Theo has been dreading these meetings with all his might, going out of his way even to avoid running into her in the hall. He has signed only one band in the past year, a surprisingly good girl group called Hype Girlz. They’re in the studio now working on their first album. Theo prays that it will do well, but their music is so far outside his realm of expertise that he hardly trusts his own judgment. He signed them impulsively. Thinking about it gives him an ulcer.

  His fear of another failure along the lines of the Burn has increased. He still has hopes that the Burn will make a comeback of some sort, but it doesn’t look promising. Their first album sold just under twenty thousand copies. Theo has always looked at them as a band in great need of development. Even still, their drop party last spring was at the Bowery, not at Irving Plaza, not at the Roseland Ballroom. And their tour was so sparsely attended that when they came back to New York, they played at Southpaw. Theo heard they packed it, but still—it was Southpaw, and Southpaw is small. Southpaw is in Brooklyn! Not exactly the type of venue that you want your band to play at after a critically acclaimed debut on a major label. He has been working so hard on getting the Burn’s second album out this month that he has hardly had time to listen to any of the demos that have landed on his desk recently.

  Theo figures that Jax is going to give him another lecture along these lines. Why haven’t you signed anyone, why has the Burn been flopping, why aren’t you working harder?

  Theo does not know this as he walks down the hall toward Jax’s office, but something has softened her recently. She is sitting in her office, gazing at her Elvis cutout, fantasizing about taking a vacation someplace by the ocean.

  When Theo gets to her office, he mistakes this faraway look for extreme displeasure, and he almost turns around and books it.

  “Hey, Theo,” says Jax. “Come on in. Sit down.”

  “Hey, Jax,” says Theo, warily. “What’s up?”

  “I just met with Lenore Lamont.”

  “Oh, yeah? She’s doing well?”

  “She’s on Colin McAllister next Wednesday.”

  “That’s great.” Theo thinks that if Titan would give the Burn one eighth of the attention they’ve been giving to Lenore Lamont, they’d be on Colin McAllister too.

  “Good opportunity for her,” says Jax.

  “Yeah,” says Theo. “Colin’s funny.”

  “But I’m worried about her.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Just met with her. Didn’t seem like herself. She seems quieter. I asked her how she was feeling and she said, ‘Okay.’ I asked her if she was excited for the show, and she said, ‘Not really.’ ‘Not really’! It’s Colin McAllister.”

  “That’s weird,” said Theo. He’s had limited contact with Lenore; she played at the Burn’s drop party because she was friends with Siobhan, but that memory was tarnished by the fact that Jax was supposed to come and didn’t show.

  “I’ll say,” says Jax. “She’s always been a go-getter. I couldn’t get out of her what was bothering her.” She swivels around in her swivel chair: one full rotation and then she is facing him again. “Theo, I want to ask you a favor.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m going to be away next week for a long-standing family thing; my parents are doing their anniversary in Paris. I’m going too. Can you keep an eye on Lenore? Babysit her a little bit, supervise rehearsal. Be there for her before the show.”

  “Yeah,” says Theo. He gets it. It’s a chance for him to redeem himself, to make himself useful in the eyes of the higher-ups at Titan. “Sure. Certainly. I’ll do it.”

  “Great,” says Jax. “Thanks.” This is Theo’s cue to leave.

  Then Jax remembers something. “Theo!” she stage-whispers as he’s opening the door. He turns around. “What’s the new secretary’s name?”

  “Wanda,” says Theo.

  “Wanda, Wanda, Wanda,” says Jax. There have been so many since Cynthia that it’s hard to keep track.

  III.

  On her way out, after a brief meeting with Jax in which Lenore felt like she was drowning in something sticky, Lenore glances at the new secretary and once again has a vision of Cynthia sitting right there.

  Wanda smiles slightly, hoping that maybe Lenore will say something to her. She knows who Lenore is. Everyone at Titan does. Lenore Lamont is the next big thing.

  “Hi,” Lenore mumbles, before pushing the down button. “Hi,” says Wanda. “Have a good day.”

  IV.

  The next day, Friday, Lenore digs out her photo album, readying herself for another Martin-related crying session. Since Martin opened the floodgates, Lenore has hardly been able to contain herself. Commercials set her off, specific songs, specific memories. Of course she thinks about Martin-in-bed, because who wouldn’t. But it is Martin-in-the-kitchen that she thinks she’ll miss the most, because in Lenore’s mind, Martin’s cooking for her meant that Martin was caring for her. She loved it most when Martin told her she was too thin. “I’m not,” she used to protest, holding out a limp arm as if to prove his point.

  Lenore only started taking and keeping pictures once she fell in love with Martin. Before, she was careless about her album, thoughtlessly accepting doubles from lovers and friends, putting them in when she remembered to or when they commanded her to. She was with Cynthia for almost four years, and she doesn’t have a single one of her. But Martin was always a bit out of reach, so pictures of him became precious.

  Here is one of Martin on a mountain in India. Lenore asked him for it specially because she loved the way he looked in it, strong and content. Here is one of Martin and Lenore together at a wedding, Martin in a dress shirt and tie—the only time Lenore ever saw him dressed up. And one of Martin as a child with his mutt Geronimo. Lenore liked thinking about Martin as a child. She wished sometimes that they had grown up together, that she had been his first and only love.

  She flips back quickly through the pages, a fast rewind of her life. In doing so she dislodges a photo that falls to the floor. She reaches for it and sees that it’s a picture of her and Cynthia performing onstage. It looks like they’re on the main stage at the Knitting Factory. Cynthia is looking at Lenore, and her right hand is raised in anticipation of the downbeat. Lenore is looking at the camera.

  She imagines Cynthia must have put the picture in the album, but briefly she wonders if anybody else would have. Or if she herself had and just forgot. She looks closely at the picture again and likes it. She tucks it into a corner of the mirror in her bedroom.

  V.

  That afternoon, Theo calls an emergency meeting with the Burn. They file into his office one by one over the course of a half hour until finally they are all there before him: Siobhan, Mike R., Mike G., Pete, and Katia. To Theo’s chagrin, Katia and Pete have started going out. He has heard this from Siobhan, who told him off-handedly because Siobhan doesn’t care about such things. But in Theo’s mind, this is a recipe for disaster. They are trying to hide it from him, he can tell. They are sitting on the same couch, but they have left a proper six inches between them. He glares at Pete and Pete smiles back at him.

  “What’s up?” asks Mike R. when they have finished with small talk.

  “Bad news,” says Theo, who has in fact just received this news himself. “Your album comes out next week.” He pauses. He can’t think of how to say what he has to say next.

  “Yeah?” asks Siobhan finally. “That’s the bad news?”

  Theo looks at the Burn and remembers them a year ago. Two years ago. He has never invested so much in any other band. He knows their music is good. He knows they’re better than anything new he’s heard on the radio in the last five years. But maybe he has been naive; maybe he has fallen victim to his own conceit, thinking he could make something work when it wasn’t supposed to, thinking anyone would buy an album just because Theo Brigham thought it was good. The Burn’s marketability isn’t immediately apparent. T
hey are a scraggly bunch. They just don’t look like stars.

  “Corporate’s really been on my back,” says Theo, looking at the floor. “I don’t know how to say this. If it’s—if this album doesn’t sell well, they’re dropping us. You, I mean. Unfortunately.”

  Five band members look at Theo silently. They do not look at one another.

  Finally, Mike R. asks, “What’s ‘well’?”

  Theo pauses. “No one specified. But I bet they’re thinking gold, at least. They’re really trying to revamp the label.

  ‘Cut the fat,’ someone said. Focus on bands with more of a shot, bands that haven’t already gotten a go.” He snorts. How the hell did he get into this business? He can barely remember. He feels like an old man.

  Siobhan has suspected this was coming. She feels strangely unresponsive. This is it, she thinks. Probably the end of the road for the Burn. The five of them will split up if they don’t make it. It would be too much to bear to go back to drifting along in the abyss of unsigned bands. Maybe they’ll get day jobs. Maybe they’ll form other bands, try something new.

  “But hey,” says Theo, and his voice breaks a little, and then he wants to tear at his own skin for this little display of emotion. “Let’s not jump the gun. We’ve got an album to promote!” A pose. A sham.

  VI.

  Over the weekend, Lenore starts a strike of sorts. It isn’t a hunger strike: it’s a strike from not eating. She has always thought of eating as mildly disgusting, something one must do to stay alive, an activity to be done privately and infrequently. Suddenly, though, she has discovered the joys and comforts of food, and has found herself obeying her appetite’s every whim. Spying a plump apple muffin in a store window, she allows herself to go in and buy it and eat it dreamily while walking through the city. A piece of cheesecake? Half of a meat-heavy pizza? Certainly. A friend of hers calls to ask if she wants to go to dinner and she surprises herself and her friend by suggesting, of all the restaurants in New York City, the Olive Garden in Times Square, because she craves a heaping plate of sauce-and grease-drenched pasta. She and her friend sit next to a family of humongous midwestern tourists and she tries unsuccessfully to make conversation in between generous bites. On Sunday, she simultaneously craves and cannot remember how to make a dish that Martin used to make for her. She believes it had something to do with rice and coconut milk, so she goes to the store, buys both ingredients, and then cannot stop herself from having first one, then many sips of straight coconut milk while the rice is cooking. She drinks the whole can, then loads the rice with butter and salt and eats that too.

  She lies on her bed afterward and unbuttons her jeans with effort, rubs her distended belly. She has been very lonely without Martin. She has never been without a lover for so long—and it’s only been days since he left. She turns her head to one side, wanting to feel the cool pillow on her cheek, and sees for the hundredth time the picture of her and Cynthia that she has placed in the mirror.

  She wants love so badly that she considers for a moment calling Cynthia, who was wrapped about her finger for all of the four years they were together. Lenore imagines that she would come running, would drop whatever she was doing and come as fast as she could. Lenore has always had this power over people because of her carelessness. Not even Martin’s leaving her can weaken her conviction that Cynthia is still under her control. But she lost her number months ago, and Cynthia doesn’t even work at Titan anymore. It would be a bad idea anyway, she tells herself.

  VII.

  Colin McAllister has been on TV for most of his life. He was in commercials as a baby, on talent searches and variety hours as a kid (his talent was having a voice that sounded like an adult female gospel singer’s and belting out showstoppers while clutching the mic as if it were a trophy), on soap operas as a teenager, on a few short-lived sitcoms in his twenties, on a wildly popular late-night comedy show in his thirties. The Late Show with Colin McAllister has been on for ten years now, and Colin is bored. He has just gotten married to a woman twenty years his junior and he wants children, wants to feel their little feet and hands and heads, wants to take a portrait that looks like a painting of the Holy Family and send it out at Christmastime.

  He is due to renew his contract on Monday—tomorrow. No one has had any thought that he might not, and so there has been no negotiation prior to this. But the idea of another five years on TV is too much for Colin. He has been pondering his next step for a while, and over the weekend he and his wife have come to a definite conclusion: Colin is done with the show. The abruptness of this decision startles even Colin, but he is quite sure of what he’s doing, and he was to take a break for a few weeks anyway, and it all makes sense to him. He phones his producer with the news on Sunday afternoon.

  “Colin,” says his producer. “You can’t quit. This show’s just getting started, baby.”

  But his contract is up, and he wants out. He has more money than God. He wants to retire with his wife and his babies. He wants to live in Napa Valley, goddamnit, and drink California wine.

  “Send out the press release, alert the sponsors,” says Colin. “Wednesday’s my last show.”

  VIII.

  Lenore’s strike against hunger continues unabated until, after a few days, she feels quite ill. At this point she heads to a diner to reassess. She dons an old dress that has no waist to speak of, for her own has expanded considerably.

  At the diner, she pulls her long bangs over her face and really lets her anguish sink in. My God, what have I done, what have I done? she asks herself. The way she has felt since Martin left has been almost unbearable, and yet she herself has done the same so many times over that she can hardly count. In high school there was Brian, there was Will. Julia came next, in college, her first girlfriend. A string of nameless girls until Christy the Brit came along and convinced her that she liked boys again for a brief sixth months, and then she dumped him too. All of them had overlapped: she would find someone new and cease all contact with the old. She didn’t believe in staying friends with her exes. She wouldn’t even allow her boyfriend or girlfriend to meet anyone she was interested in. Christy the Brit, for example, had not been allowed to see her perform because Cynthia had been in her band and Lenore had had designs on Cynthia.

  Cynthia. Her longest relationship had been with Cynthia. Four years, and then Martin had come into her life and she left. She had met Martin in a café in Park Slope, the same one she always went to when she was trying to work out the lyrics to a song. She had liked him right away, so—as was her custom—she didn’t tell Cynthia of his existence. They had gotten together with increasing frequency. They had started sleeping together a week before she and Cynthia got into a fight. It was a minor fight, the kind of fight they should have been able to fix, but Lenore had stormed off. She wonders now if she had even orchestrated it, to give herself an excuse to leave. She went to Martin’s house and spent the night. She told him she was in a fight with Cynthia (whom Martin knew about but had somehow managed to meditate or rationalize out of existence) and wondered what she was going to do.

  “Stay with me, baby girl,” Martin said. “Just for a while, just until you find a place.” Lenore leapt at the chance. She stayed with him until she got signed and got her advance and the two of them found a bigger, nicer place together.

  And now it is hers alone. She hates it.

  How must Cynthia have felt? Like this? Worse than this? Lenore works hard to push these thoughts out of her mind, but they return and batter her with an odd sensation that she assumes must be guilt.

  At last, the waitress comes. “What can I getcha?” she asks, and Lenore must think a bit before she realizes that for the first time in days she is not hungry at all. “Coffee, black,” she says. The waitress nods and retreats.

  Lenore looks out the window of the little diner and sees a familiar figure walking down the street: a woman in her thirties, short-haired, a slight slouch. Cynthia, thinks Lenore. Oh my God. Cynthia.

 
She stands and sits and stands again, then runs to the door of the diner and flings it open. Cynthia has passed, and Lenore watches her for a moment, giving her a lead, thinking hard about whether she wants to do this. She realizes that she must, and even feels glad to see her: the familiar walk, the back of the neck—here Lenore has a sudden memory of Cynthia’s back, which was smooth and freckled in a pattern like a constellation—the small brown head. It is Cynthia just as she remembers her, and Lenore’s feet feel momentarily stuck.

  Go, she tells herself, run, and at last she does, waiting until she is only five feet behind Cynthia to say her name aloud.

  “Cynthia,” she says, but Cynthia must not hear, for she keeps walking. “Cynthia!” she shouts again, and Cynthia glances back at last and Lenore sees all at once that this woman is not Cynthia. The woman smiles, and Lenore looks across the street abruptly, pretending she was calling out to someone else.

  She stands breathless on the sidewalk for a while longer, looks back to the diner, and realizes she doesn’t even want the coffee. She wants to talk to Cynthia, to apologize, to make everything right. She is convinced suddenly that she must find Cynthia or her life will be ruined forever. She does not believe in karma, but Martin believed in karma, and maybe this is it. She walks home, leaving the waitress with a steaming cup of black coffee in her hands.

  IX.

  Jax’s phone rings Monday morning, but she’s not answering her phone, so the call goes to Wanda.

  “Jax Powers-Kline’s phone. Wanda speaking,” says Wanda.

  “Hi, yes, I’m looking for Jax,” says Lenore. Wanda rolls her eyes. Everyone is looking for Jax.

  “She’s not available right now. May I take a message?”

  “Tell her Lenore called. Tell her it’s important.”

  “Lenore Lamont?” asks Wanda. Her heartbeat quickens. She’s still new enough to be fascinated by celebrity.

  “Yeah.”