The Words of Every Song

by Liz Moore

  Each looks at his or her friends and bandmates and wants to say something but can’t. So it is that not a word is spoken among them before the most important show of their collective career. Each wishes to provide some comfort to the others but cannot; for this reason, sadly, no one enjoys the silence, which later will be remembered as the last truly private moment they had together.

  In a minute they will be called to the set to do a brief sound check. In a half hour, they will play—well, very well, better than they’ve ever played before. Maybe it will be the knowledge that this is their last shot. Maybe it will be Katia’s nervous rhythmic energy, which causes her to actually play better and push the rest of the band toward brilliance and excitement. Maybe it will be a glimpse of their own faces on the monitors in front of them, the realization that this is what it feels like to make it. Any of these reasons could explain the way they will play, which shocks even Theo, and makes Colin McAllister happy that this is the band that people will remember as having gotten their big break on his last show.

  No one knows this now, though, and the five of them stare at their toes and think of all that has changed and all that might.

  XIX.

  There are things in the ocean that are so big that on land they would be the size of houses, of whole buildings. A blue whale, upright, would be as tall as an average structure in New York City. Thinking of massive things beneath the sea frightens Cynthia. She has heard of some tribe someplace—Africa, was it? New Zealand?—that builds huge ritualistic elephants and pushes them on wheels into the ocean until their great heads are below the surface of the water, farther and farther until they are obscured by the weight of the sea. Coming upon one of these huge statues unexpectedly is one of Cynthia’s greatest fears, though she knows it is irrational. As if they would be off Coney Island, off Jones Beach. Cynthia has no real ambitions to travel to more exotic places, though recently she’s been considering France. Now she is watching something on the Discovery Channel about a group of scientists who are trying to take a picture of a giant squid—something that has never been done before. Everyone knows of these squids’ existence, but no one has visual proof yet. The clever scientists bait and hook a huge one, sending a camera deep below the surface and taking a series of five pictures that show the creature’s struggle: she is spread out like a many-limbed starfish, then the legs are in, then pulsing out again, and finally in anguish the monster tears her own leg from her body and swims away lighter and frightened. The scientists reel in her severed limb, not bleeding but pink enough to make you cry.

  Cynthia looks around the hospital waiting room. She thinks she is the youngest one there, but she can’t be sure. After hanging up with Theo she had waited a few minutes and then called Lenore’s parents herself, holding her breath while introducing herself as “Lenore’s friend Cynthia” and hearing no hint of recognition in Mrs. Lamont’s “Hello.” The last of Lenore’s cruel slights. Four years they were together, and not a mention of Cynthia to her parents. She’s pathological, Cynthia told herself, a mystery of a person. Still, she told Mrs. Lamont that she wanted to check on Lenore in the hospital, and Mrs. Lamont gave her the hospital’s name, and now here she is. She wants to tell Lenore that she does not love her anymore. She isn’t sure if this is a lie, but she feels it’s the only way she can ever forgive Lenore, and recently Cynthia has been trying hard to forgive, to get rid of some of the bitterness she carries with her from day to day. She will enter Lenore’s room and say, “Hello, Lenore, I’ve come to tell you that I have no feelings for you anymore,” and then she can forgive Lenore, and then she can leave with a spring in her step.

  Lenore turns over and over in her hospital bed, struggling with nausea still, though it has dissipated since this morning. She needs saving; she wants to be saved. She wonders what she can do with the rest of her life—if she has messed it all up for herself. Now that she is feeling better, she reflects on the opportunity she has missed in not doing the Colin McAllister show. Jax will be furious. Titan will be furious. Who will fill in for her? She will be banned from that network.

  Three times she has broken down and called Martin, and he has not called back. She is filled with self-righteous indignation. This is a time of great need. She hates Martin. No one is there for her. She can tell that even the nurses feel bad for her—she is young and single and alone in New York. If only Martin would come and save her. If he saw her like this, wan and beautiful and desperately ill, he would feel sorry for her and realize his mistake. She has not talked to him in a week, and her want for him and for all the other lovers she has ever known builds in her to a great peak.

  A nurse has led Cynthia down the corridor to Lenore’s room and left her outside it. Cynthia’s breath comes in quick escapes as she looks through the small glass window on Lenore’s door at Lenore herself, turned away toward a different window, the outline of her cheek hollow and graceful, just as Cynthia remembers it. Oh, but she is still so young. Cynthia knows she herself has lost her shot at whatever fame she might once have attained, but Lenore will make it, and for the first time Cynthia feels glad of this.

  She places a hand on the door, readying herself for what comes next. Lenore, I do not love you, she repeats in her head. Lenore, I don’t care about you. But Lenore turns away from the window and looks to the ceiling and she looks so frail that Cynthia is overwhelmed with compassion; her heart skips beats the way it used to when Lenore was playing onstage, before they were anything, when they were just friends and bandmates. She wishes desperately that she could get those days back. To be four years younger, to be filled with the possibility of musical success, the possibility of the love of Lenore. To be full of anticipation and emptied of regret. Is Lenore crying? No, but her face is crumpled in a way that Cynthia has never seen, and she realizes that Lenore is very alone. If she were to sit on her bed. If she were to place a hand on her cheek, which is feverish maybe, and stroke it just a little bit. If she were to hold a glass of water to those parched lips. All of these actions would be satisfying in the basest way. None would be good for Lenore.

  In a moment, Cynthia will open the door. “Hi,” she will say. “It’s me,” as if that needs to be said. But Cynthia will not tell Lenore she doesn’t love her, because for the first time it is true and doesn’t need saying. Lenore will cry again, for the hundredth time this week, and think of how much she needs to be loved, and all that she is missing, and all that she has given up.

  XX.

  The Burn walks down the long corridor toward the set for the second time. No one was in the audience for their sound check, but now a small crowd is sitting in red velvet seats, and prompt and enthusiastic applause greets them when they take the tiny stage. Siobhan marvels at how much larger it appears on her TV each night, and then marvels that she herself will appear on TV tonight. She wants to go home after the show and watch it with her father and her brother and eat popcorn with them and listen to them tell her they are proud. They may or may not do this. The odds are about fifty-fifty.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” says Colin McAllister. “The Burn!” and then Katia says, “Two, three, four,” and then they are playing, the five of them together, just as they have so many times before.

  Theo Brigham is backstage. He cannot bring himself to watch from the audience, so he is stuck in the little greenroom, picking at his fingernails, watching the band on the shitty monitors, praying they don’t screw up. He relaxes a little after the introduction, and congratulates himself on doing what he thinks was the right thing. Soon the phone calls from Jax will begin. Soon the phone calls from Corporate. But now Theo sits and thinks that maybe he has made the kind of difference that he always wondered if he could make in someone else’s life. I have directly helped someone today, thinks Theo, and puzzles over what he feels, and recalls a young band he passed over a couple of years ago—all the young bands he’s passed over in pursuit of better-looking ones, more marketable ones. The Burn has been his project for nearly as long as he’s bee
n in the business. And here they are on Colin McAllister’s last show.

  He doesn’t know what will happen to them. He doesn’t know what will happen to him. For the first time in a while, he feels happy.

  “Do you know what this means for us, do you know what this means for us, do you know what this means for us?” This is the refrain in Mike R.’s head as he hears the count-in behind him and feels his friends around him and sees the audience in front of him. He tries not to think about how many people will watch this program later tonight. He wonders how many people in his hometown are watching. He wonders if the Cross family is watching, and whether they will bless him or curse him. He wonders if Nora herself is watching; recalls a week that he thinks of daily, hourly; a letter that he keeps in a drawer. Decides that if he were the Crosses he would wish good things for himself, for, after all, he is human—after all, he is young. He makes himself smile for the cameras, then decides that maybe smiling isn’t appropriate. He has trouble knowing what is.

  Siobhan remembers a time long ago, before her mother died, perhaps before Hugh was born, even, when listening to music was the only way she could fall asleep. Up, up, up in her little room in Yonkers, the curtains billowing in and out of her window in time with the breath of the world: here was the three-and four-and five-year-old Siobhan, prone on her bed and drifting in and out of sleep to the sound of her parents’ voices wandering up the stairs. Their words, mingled with friendly, familiar strains of music, seemed to Siobhan the most comforting sound in the world.

  Strangely, it is this memory that comes to her as she sings in front of Colin McAllister’s audience; this memory, and another of her mother brushing Siobhan’s hair after a bath, and another of Kurt Cobain’s final appearance on television. Siobhan looks out into the audience and feels an emotion she has never been able to name, one that hits her at times like these. Something to do with the word chaos. Something to do with sex, or lust. Something to do with religion. She feels she is ready for something bigger. She feels that she has lost herself to something bigger, and her eyes lose their focus momentarily, and before her in the audience she can see a riot of moving colors, each a figure without a name. They will all know hers after tonight, and this frightens her. Feeling her knees go a bit weak, Siobhan is grateful for an instrumental break that allows her to turn from the audience and face the band, and for a moment all five of them are looking at one another; all five of them share something that each will recall later as a sign of something great.

  She thinks, This is what it must feel like to be truly happy. She thinks, Maybe this is what it feels like to be in love.

  About the Author

  LIZ MOORE is a singer and songwriter who has performed at such New York institutions as the Bitter End, Postcrypt, the Knitting Factory, and the Living Room, among other venues. A graduate of Barnard College, she has played at the Hudson River Museum as a part of their Women in Music series and was selected as a “New Artist” at the three-day GottaGetGon Festival in upstate New York in 2004. From October 2004 through June 2005, Moore played in a quartet called the Liz Moore Band. She currently plays solo and is working on an album with producer Rob Galbraith. Moore lives in Brooklyn.

  PUBLISHED BY BROADWAY BOOKS

  Copyright © 2007 by Liz Moore

  All Rights Reserved

  Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.broadwaybooks.com

  BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Moore, Liz, 1983–

  The words of every song: a novel / Liz Moore.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Music trade—Fiction. 2. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.O5644W67 2007

  813'.54—dc22

  2006028964

  Unless otherwise noted below, all the song lyrics quoted in this book are attributed to their songwriters. Special thanks are also due to Kurt Cobain and Chad D. Channing, for the use of lyrics from “Downer” to Lou Reed, for the use of lyrics from “Pale Blue Eyes” to Giuseppe Adami, Giacomo Puccini, and Renato Simoni, for the use of lyrics from “Nessun Dorma” to Boris Peter Bransby Williams, Simon Johnathon Gallup, Robert James Smith, Porl Thompson, and Laurence Andrew Tolhurst, for the use of lyrics from “Just Like Heaven” to Michael Geoffrey Jones and John Mellor, for the use of lyrics from “Rudie Can’t Fail” to Jeffrey Lynne and Thomas Earl Petty, for the use of lyrics from “A Face in the Crowd” to Jimmy van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, for the use of lyrics from “All the Way” and to George Michael Farr and Paul Adrian Pond, for the use of lyrics from “Privilege (Set Me Free).”

  eISBN: 978-0-7679-2793-2

  v3.0_r1

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