by Erin McGraw
By the time I got back to the computer I was almost not thinking about Richard.
“You’re right—those days do feel very far away, and so I’m especially glad that you reached out. I haven’t been back to Cool Springs since Mother died, but I remember it clearly. The long willow branches hung like a girl’s hair. No willows in Barcelona.”
I skimmed the rest. Esther asked if she could have a cookie, and I said roughly, “Take them all.”
Paul was late home from church, and when he finally got in, his mouth was full of words. His blessing before dinner clocked ten solid minutes. He wouldn’t feel the need to voice so many thanks if he had prepared the food congealing in front of him. “For the blessings of Esther’s soccer team’s win. For Jonathan’s homeroom teacher, Lord, we thank you. Our hands are your hands in the world, Lord, our faces your face. Bless our hands and faces.”
He lifted his eyes and smiled. Wordless, I smiled back. The lasagna was a mouthful of rubber.
Now that Paul has gone to bed, I stay up and look at the computer’s screen saver for a long time: a picture of a seagull and “Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise.” Josh set it up to please his father; I’m pretty sure there was another one he shared with his siblings that had a different quote. When the computer came into the house Paul blessed it, asking that it be used to serve and praise God. I am willing to think that looking up cookie recipes or helping Mary with a history paper are both service and praise.
“Dear Richard, I pray that God will continue to send blessings upon you, your work, your children and your wives.” That ought to do it.
In the kitchen, I splash ice water on my face, which is God’s face, over and over. It’s supposed to keep us from crying. It’s done it before.
Cat
My mother’s thick hair tumbles over her shoulders, and her body is as taut as a heron’s. She is making her way across hot Piazza San Marco with quick, annoyed steps, sliding past pods of noisy tourists and vendors. If someone asks her a question, she will answer in Italian, which I do not understand.
It’s rare to be able to watch her, and I’m staring from my spot across the plaza. The sizzling wind molds her skirt to her long legs, her blouse to her shoulders. Her face is flawlessly impatient. She could be on her way to an assignation. She could be preparing to buy oranges. Before she is halfway across the dazzling square, a man steps in her way. She listens to him for a moment, then continues walking. He puts his hand on her arm, and she shakes him off as if she were shaking off rain. He is still talking. People watching laugh. He catches up with her and grabs her silky skirt at the waist, leaving a mark. I stand up to go to her, my chair’s aluminum legs stuttering on the flagstones.
Before I can get close, a second man arrives—tall, like her, holding a necklace that catches the light. She dismisses him, too, with a hissing sentence. Her calf muscle flexes as she drums her high heel—Milanese shoes, invoking raw silk blouses and high-strung sports cars. Though I’m close now, she doesn’t glance at me. Only when a third man arrives tethered to an animal on a leash does my mother stop looking angry. The animal is a cougar, maybe, or an ocelot. Its muscular tail is almost as thick as my wrist, and swings as if scanning for prey. The cat shows no interest in the people around it, even the sticky-handed child following too close behind. This cat could take off one of those hands with an indifferent swipe of a heavy, soft paw.
My mother nods at the cat. She looks barely tamed herself, her body an undulant muscle in the brilliant sun. It isn’t right for me to look at her like this, but for years I’ve wanted to see her palm back her rich hair.
Her hair was thin. She spent a lifetime struggling with it.
The man with the necklace is talking again in an urgent voice. Maybe his family is about to be displaced or his son let out of prison. My mother is more interested in the cat, and does not change her expression when the animal leaps up and knocks the necklace from the man’s hands, a careless claw raking the inside of his wrist. An instant holds before his arm jets blood, spraying his face and linen shirt. The cat tastes the necklace, then drops it to the flagstones. The man wails, and two horrified women rush toward him. My mother turns to the man holding the cat’s leash. “Prosimmo?” she says, as if a conversation has been interrupted. “Di che cosa hai bisogno?” I am furious not to know what she is saying.
The blood of the collapsed man froths over his arm, but all I care about is the cat batting the glittering necklace over the hot gray flagstones. I have to force myself not to reach out as if to a tabby. My mother says something sharp and the animal rumbles deep in its throat; I don’t know whether it is pleased or the opposite, but my mother speaks again, heedless.
She was famous for her softness—her body, her voice. The men who liked her liked whipped cream desserts and approved of a woman who would order the first dish on the menu. “Anything is fine, really. There’s nothing I especially want.” By the time I was five years old I’d learned that wanting nothing was the same as wanting everything. “Either the veal or the chicken. I don’t want anything special,” she’d say, and I felt her want something much more than veal or chicken. I brought her bouquets when I was a little girl, and then, as the years passed, books, pictures, food, clothes, a car. “How nice,” she said every time. I should have brought her a cat.
In Venice, my mother says something curt and takes the leash. The cat is carrying the necklace in its mouth, the jeweled end hanging out like a mouse tail. The first man, who left the mark on her skirt, starts talking again. I don’t need to speak Italian to know he is repeating himself, dejected. Whatever he wants, it will not be coming.
My mother turns for the first time toward me. “And you?”
“That.” I nod at the cat. My mother shrugs, but she can’t be surprised. “I have always loved animals,” I tell her, and for the first moment she looks indecisive. I say, “Do you know who I am?” She smiles, snaps her fingers, and the cat looks at me, growling and tensing before it jumps at my face.
She is dead, and I can imagine her any way I want.
Nobody Happy
When I was a teenager, I heard a woman propose to a man in the parking lot of Ralphs grocery store. It was spring and they were sitting in a convertible. Next to the cart corral, I stood rooted, my hand clamped around the plastic bar on the cart. “I love you,” she said, her voice stringy with fear. “I want to wake up every morning and see you.”
Asphalt burning through my flip-flops, I held my breath. I didn’t know whether I was pulling for him or her, but I wanted somebody to be happy. He didn’t say anything for a long time, and when he finally did, it was, “Let’s go home.” Nobody happy.
Nobody Happy. That would make a good song title for a good songwriter.
I’m a bad songwriter, so I sing. That’s the way it goes with music. Cole Porter could put a lifetime’s worth of agony into one line that somebody else would deliver, and it would be a funny line. “Cole Porter was a fruit,” Frank Sinatra said, and he then he sang “So in Love” with tears in his eyes.
I don’t cry, but I know how to do tempos and phrasing, how to sound confident when my voice surrounds a note. Give me somebody else’s words and you’ll swear you can hear my heart breaking. Give me a piece of paper, a pencil, and all afternoon, and you’ll get some cartoon cats, a list of words that rhyme with moon, and a hole on the page where I kept erasing the stupid lines, the ones I’m good at. I’ll keep trying until I write one good one. That’s all. One song to make the world remember me. I can’t decide whether that’s asking for a lot or not nearly enough.
Then it’s time to put on my tux and do my show. Sometimes I go onstage with a highball glass of apple juice, pretending it’s whiskey, like Dean Martin. Everything I do is fake—the orchestra arrangements that steal from Nelson Riddle, the soft approach on a note like Mel Tormé, the goddamn lapels on my tux that I tell the tailor to keep slim.
“What do you want to look like, it’s 1956?”
> “Bingo.”
The part in my hair is sharp as a razor and my shave is paper clean. I sing at nightclubs that have 1956 wallpaper and 1956 coat-check girls. At every set there’s at least one guy who’s splashed out big money to take his wife—face-lift, heavy diamonds—to hear music the way it’s supposed to be. When I experiment with a tempo, I get summoned by the guy and his wife. “That is not how Tony Bennett sang it. You’re a kid. Don’t try to improve.”
I spent the better part of a month on a song that rhymed improve with disapprove, before I realized that the whole song stank.
I’ve forced myself to finish a few songs that seemed good while I was writing them. The next day I’d see the obvious lines, the predictable progressions. Nobody should write a song unless he has something to say, and what I have to say is that I wish I could write a decent song.
Once, after a girlfriend left, I gave up sleep and wrote one bad song after another about empty beds and lonely breakfasts. I thought that if I just kept writing, something good would break through, like a superhero crashing through the flimsy wall of a movie set. Whatever talent I’ve got isn’t a superhero. My talent is a kid with his nose flattened against the toy-store window, wanting what he can’t have.
Lorenz Hart said that he could have been a genius. You get to say that when you’re a genius. Billy Strayhorn was black, gay, and anguished, and wrote songs so sophisticated we’re still scrambling to catch up. In photographs he looks happy enough, like me. Why isn’t my anguish good enough?
After a show, there’s always somebody to meet—somebody my manager wants to remember me, one of Johnny Hartman’s arrangers’ grandkids, a hipster boy spinning vinyl who wants to talk about outtakes. “That’s for the scholars,” I say. I’m not much of a drinker, but these people turn me into one.
This time it’s a woman, red hair a waterfall down her back. She tells me she’s a cabaret singer and I start looking for the exit. “I do just enough Great American Songbook to keep the doors open,” she says while we’re still shaking hands. “After that, I’m looking for new material.”
“Tough sell.” I start a countdown to see if I can get from ten to one before she admits that she has written some songs herself.
“Audiences come in thinking they want to hear ‘Stella by Starlight.’ They just need to be exposed to more.” Seven. Six. She smiles. “I hear you’ve got some songs.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Okay, I didn’t hear. But doesn’t everybody?”
She coaxes me over to the piano where I play her the chorus of the song that sent my girlfriend out the door, the one about sunset. It’s so bad, I can’t even make myself play into the verse.
“That’s beautiful.”
“Glad you like it.”
Three. Two. “I write songs, too.”
At that point there’s no choice but to stand up and offer her the piano bench. Her song starts with a line about how blue can be the sky, but also the ocean. Girl, there’s a reason audiences want to hear Duke Ellington. She stops at the bridge and says, “It’s not as good as yours.”
“Sure it is.”
“I know it’s not a song for the ages, but there’s room for the little ones, you know? The small moments need songs, too.” She plinks around while she talks, replaying what she just played. Her song is about walking on the beach.
She’s waiting for me to say something, and the longer the moment extends, the more unhappiness creeps into her eyes. It spreads toward me like a stain, and just to stop it I say, “You really know how to put a song across.”
There’s the smile. “Let me play you one more. It’s the one audiences love, about how people who belong together find each other.” It starts with exactly that line and plods on from there, one blocky, over-earnest line following the next just like in any song of mine.
As soon as she finishes, she turns to me, her eyes round and moist. I lean over the piano bench and kiss her, running my hands down her back until I feel her relax and know she won’t ask me how I like her song.
When she straightens up and pushes back her hair, she half smiles and half coughs and says, “Well. That was not a small moment.” How many times has she said this before? It takes practice to make a delivery sound effortless.
She gets a spark in her eye, and I’m thinking, Don’t, don’t, don’t. “We can make beautiful music together,” she says.
I can’t stop the wince, and to her credit, she winces, too. “I know. Cheesy. But still—you want to get a drink?”
I’m already straightening my coat, moving toward the door, so sorry, already, plans. She’s got her own lines braiding around mine, too bad, next time, so great. Everybody knows this duet. But where is the song about the missed disaster, the shipwreck that didn’t happen?
Shipwreck. Flyspeck. Breakneck.
Disaster. Plaster. Faster.
Soup (1)
Michael
Sunny arrived the day before my wife, Laurie, started chemo. She’d already had surgery that took away her ovaries and her uterus; the chemo was, her oncologist said, “to clean house.” Laurie posted a Facebook update, and inside two hours Sunny was at the house with a basket of gifts—special lip balm because chemo does such a job on moist tissue; vitamin E lotion for her arms after all the needle sticks; hot pink socks that didn’t look like sickroom clothes. I don’t know how she knew what Laurie would need. Sunny was as new to this as we were.
From work, I called home throughout the day to make dumb jokes or ask what Laurie wanted for dinner, though I already knew she didn’t want anything. Sometimes Laurie would say, “Sunny’s here,” and I’d hold off telling her I loved her, suddenly shy over the telephone. One day Sunny answered the phone and ice ran through me, but she only said that she happened to be close to the phone, and then she handed it over to Laurie. Sunny answered all the time after that.
Laurie and I never asked Sunny to come; she just came. She spent her nights at home researching side effects of Taxol versus Taxotere, and came with us to oncology appointments armed with questions. “Are you a family member?” the doctor asked.
“Almost,” Laurie said.
“Just a friend,” Sunny said, smiling down at her folded hands.
“Quite a friend,” the doctor said, his voice scrubbed of emotion or judgment, so I heard emotion and judgment. What did he care if we came in with a clown car full of people? I wished he would stick to the subject.
The subject, when the subject is cancer, takes over the room. Protocols, test studies, carboplatin, neuropathy, IP, IV. Sores, rashes, nausea. Percentages. After the initial consult we didn’t once mention our plan to raise chickens in the backyard for the children we now were not having. At a working lunch somebody ordered chicken salad, and I had to go outside and spend five minutes getting a grip on myself.
“You didn’t see it coming?” people ask, as if they themselves would have hidden in a safe interior room with plenty of batteries and bottled water. Laurie and I played tennis the day before the diagnosis and she beat me, straight sets. She had gone for her annual physical and something funny showed up in the blood work. That was all. No tiredness, no distension of the belly, no weight loss. Laurie would have been overjoyed with some weight loss, at first. The joke everybody makes.
Even the oncologist sat there looking at Laurie’s chart and shaking his head. “Sometimes it happens like this, like lightning out of a blue sky. I’m so sorry.”
Then home, then tears, then phone calls and emails and people I’d barely heard of, friends of Laurie’s from work or tennis club. Then Sunny. She had been at Laurie’s company, and they still got together a few times a year for lunch or a movie. She was just a name my wife mentioned from time to time.
The first time Sunny called me at the office and asked me to bring home dinner, I was happy to help. I couldn’t expect her to make dinner for us every night. The second time, she told me which Thai takeout place to go to for hot and sour soup. When I got home she ha
d washed and folded all the sheets, which surely was worth some tom yum goong. “You didn’t ask for fish sauce?” Sunny said, rummaging through the bag.
She was my wife’s best friend now.
Laurie’s descent wasn’t even. She would level out for weeks at a time, when we would tell each other that she had hit bottom, and this round of sores and invisible, agonizing pain was the worst, and suddenly she would be much worse, as if she had been clinging to the side of a well and was losing purchase. She slept so lightly that I was afraid to fall asleep myself; some errant twitch or snore could wake her from her wan rest. Sunny said it would make sense for me to sleep in the guest room, and she was right, but I wasn’t about to sleep in the room for strangers, where Sunny often left her bag of knitting. Instead I got a cot and pushed it next to Laurie’s bed. At night I rolled as close as she could bear and breathed her smell, now a sour mix of chemicals and the nausea that was at best partially controlled.
I couldn’t begin to feel what she was going through. Sunny told me this before launching into a list of Laurie’s symptoms and complaints, the intimate details Laurie herself didn’t tell me. Sometimes bowel discharge came through her vagina. Sunny had to change the sheets several times a day. Laurie had bought those sheets, and even though they cost the earth, she assured me she had gotten a deal. She taught me that sheets could be special.
Sunny’s coffee drinks in the refrigerator. The TV tuned to Sunny’s channel. She liked to watch talent shows and set the kitchen radio to a classical station that I changed every morning so I could hear the news.
Today I come home with the Italian wedding soup Sunny stipulated and hear Laurie’s laughter pealing from the bedroom. It’s been months. I hurry in to find Sunny sitting on the bed, the two of them looking at our wedding album.
