by Lewis Shiner
“I never had the vaguest idea what he did all day,” she wrote, “not even when the indictments came down in ’89. Or where the money went, other than for our ritzy apartment on W. 68th. Turns out he was spending quite a lot of it for high-dollar prostitutes to spank him with a tennis racket.
“By that point he had practically an entire law firm working to get him out of the securities fraud charges, so they threw in a divorce as part of the package. You know what court is like, it’s a contest to see who has the most money, and I was never in the running. I was lucky to get out with enough to buy a condo in Park Slope before it got yuppified.”
She mostly worked at home. On one of her weekly visits to the office she met a nice Russian contract lawyer and ended up marrying him. “Viktor has the misfortune to be honest,” she wrote, “so he’s not rich. But between us we do okay.”
Facebook was not Alex’s only distraction. The past was everywhere on the Internet. He’d lost an entire night to watching black-and-white tv footage of The Lovin’ Spoonful. He’d found page after page with photos of SoHo in the early seventies. A site devoted to the Studio Club had a picture of the Chevelles logo on Cole’s old hearse.
All those things had driven him to get his student film, “Nimbus,” and the edited interview with Miguel from the Young Lords transferred to dvd. He’d uploaded both of them to YouTube, using a custom email address. He hadn’t told anybody about it, not even Madelyn. His fantasy was that somebody would stumble on them one day and get in touch. Watching them now was like finding an old check he’d forgotten to cash, or a love letter he’d neglected to answer. It made him feel dislocated.
So did looking in the mirror. He’d begun to resemble Ben Franklin more every year, bald on top with a fringe of dark, curly hair from ear-level down. He’d resisted the occasional impulse to cut it short because he no longer gave a damn for anyone’s approval. Like one of the characters in Madelyn’s book, he grooved on the defiance that his image projected. He’d even gotten a pair of rectangular framed glasses that evoked both Franklin and Jim-slash-Roger McGuinn.
Though his father was officially retired, he hovered over Alex and the business like a carrion bird, watching for the first sign of distress to swoop down and start tearing things up. He questioned Alex’s investment choices, second-guessed his hirings and firings and promotions, and vetoed his every attempt to move the company into the twenty-first century. Beer was the foundation of the business, he said, over and over, and if you mess with the foundation, the house comes down.
Over the last five years, as Alex had continued to gain weight, his father had lost it. They’d all been alarmed once he dropped below 200 pounds, and they had to fight for every test they got him to submit to. He’d developed sleep apnea, which had driven Alex’s mother into her own bedroom and robbed his father of rem sleep. He had chronic digestive problems that no amount of fiber, probiotics, prunes, yogurt, or Metamucil could relieve. He’d started to develop cataracts, and when tremors appeared in his hands, the doctors put him on Parkinson’s medication.
This morning Alex was driving him home from yet another doctor’s appointment. He’d been messaging with Denise from the waiting room on his BlackBerry. Alex’s mother was in the back seat. She was 85 and in reasonably good physical health, though she’d been too frail and too easily confused to drive for some years now.
“It’s too much,” his father said. “It’s nothing but one disaster after another.”
“It’s not a disaster,” Alex said. “You’re 89 years old. You need to stop worrying all the time. You should be taking it easy. You could move to Guanajuato, watch the avocados grow.”
“You just want me out of the way so you can run my business into the ground.” Reluctantly, he added, “I’m kidding.”
“No, you’re not. That’s okay. I love you anyway.”
“I love you too. I love life so much. It’s hard to believe, looking at the wreck I am, but it’s true. I don’t want to let go.”
Alex wished he could say the same. He and Madelyn got along fine, comfortable, considerate of each other. Madelyn’s work left her fulfilled and happy, despite her complaints about budget cuts and committee work. Gwyn had her own practice now in Wilmington, North Carolina, and a house on the beach. Ethan was teaching high school in Dallas and getting married in the fall to a woman he’d met while folk dancing. Ava was in the deceptively named city of Riverside, in the middle of the California desert, doing maintenance work for a solar energy farm that Alex owned a piece of.
Alex himself was sleepwalking. He pulled himself from day to day, hand over hand, not daring to think too much about it. He needed a Restoril, a joint, and a beer or two to sleep at night, and in the morning it took willpower and the smell of coffee brewed on a timer to get him out of bed. He kept his alarm clock on the dresser across the bedroom so that he had to get up to shut it off, because otherwise he might go back to sleep and never get up again.
Something had to give.
*
Sallie had always known she would outlive Dave. She was 12 years younger, women outlived men anyway, and she took better care of herself, as she’d told him a million times. Still, she’d relegated his death to some distant future, and when it came on January 15, 2008, at 4:10 in the morning, she was not ready. She’d woken up and Dave’s side of the bed had been empty and cold. She’d waited for him to come back from the bathroom, and when he hadn’t, she’d finally gotten up, afraid to look, afraid not to, and found him in the kitchen, stretched out on the floor. A massive stroke, the emt guy said, he probably hadn’t felt a thing. Of course he would say that.
They’d only had 18 years, 18 years that had passed like a long, sleepy weekend.
Everybody came for the funeral, everybody that was left. Ahmet was gone, Tom Dowd was gone, Bill Graham, Al Grossman, Tim Hardin, so many others. But Jake and Sebastian were there, and Booker T. and Bernard and Chuck and Cornell, God bless them, and Sal and Rocky from the Meteors, and Skip Shaw, Ellie Greenwich, Don Covay, Wavy Gravy, Boz Scaggs. Paparazzi everywhere, and a double handful of artists that Dave had nothing to do with who were there for the photo op. And Alex Montoya and Cole were there, and when Cole hugged her she felt so safe, so surrounded and loved that she wanted to melt into a puddle of grief.
Still, all those years of showmanship counted for something, and she held it together, at least until she drank too much at the reception and went to lie down for a second and woke to find everyone gone and the caterers cleaning up. She didn’t discover Cole’s note on the music rack of the baby grand until the next day. “Anytime, for any reason,” it read. “You know where to find me.” She squashed her immediate urge to call him because she didn’t trust anything she was feeling. The empty silence of the apartment made her anxious, sleep deprivation amplified the anxiety, and underneath it all lurked an unbearable pain waiting to slice through her numbness. She left the note sitting by her computer, putting off calling from one day to the next until it became part of the cluttered landscape of her desk, invisible in plain sight.
That summer, to get herself out of the apartment, she proposed a songwriting class to the 92nd Street Y. It filled up in a matter of hours. To prep for it, she got the piano tuned, and once she started to fool around, she was suddenly jotting down half-formed ideas for new songs. The class came and went without bringing the fragments to life. She taught it again in the fall and ended up with more bits and pieces and nothing that could carry its own weight.
Finally, on a night in early December, after one glass of wine too many, she sat down at the piano with a portable cassette recorder and talked and played through the most promising bits, using up one side of a 60-minute tape. She rewound it, made sure it was audible, put it in a padded envelope, and sealed it up. She sent an email to Cole asking for his mailing address and went to bed.
In the morning Cole had replied with his address and a line of question marks. She knew if she listened to the tape she would chicken out. She addresse
d the envelope and stood in a long Christmas line to mail it. It was all she could do, having posted it, not to turn around and ask for it back.
That was on a Friday. On Tuesday she got another email from Cole, subject line call me and his phone number in the body.
She was freshly back from running and she thought it over in the shower. She knew she was playing with fire. If they started working on songs together, they were unlikely to stop with music. It had been almost a year since Dave died, and the ache of missing him had never gone away, the emptiness of the apartment without his presence haunted her every night. As the hot water surged over her and the steam rose, she closed her eyes and ran her hands over her body, imagining they were someone else’s hands. Cole’s hands, say. That brought on a different kind of ache. You can’t hide out forever, she told herself. Besides, Cole might have something of his own going on, or might not want you anymore. It might end up just being about the music after all.
She allowed herself one glass of wine for courage and made the call.
She didn’t remember a lot of detail afterward. Cole’s voice was so warm. He seemed so nice. He loved the songs, heard possibilities in them. What did she want from him? Critique or collaboration? Long distance or face-to-face? New York or Austin?
She thought she might feel less conscious of Dave looking over her shoulder in Austin, though she didn’t put it in those terms. He suggested the week between Christmas and New Year’s, when he’d be off work. She’d forgotten his day job. How did she feel about cats? He had a guest room, and they’d relocated the airport so he was no longer in the flight path. There were motels nearby if she preferred. She said she was fine with cats and they should play it by ear.
She arrived on December 26, a Friday. A blizzard in the Midwest had caused a three-hour domino-effect delay and she didn’t touch down until 6:25. It was dark and cold and drizzling. They were both hungry so he took her straight to a Mexican place called El Mercado where she had a margarita the size of a fishbowl and a combination plate buried in tomato and lettuce, as red and green as Christmas. She was relaxed and ready for anything, and Cole was on edge.
The margarita loosened her tongue. “Is there still a problem because of, you know, Alex and the record company and all that?”
He shook his head.
“C’mon, Cole, talk to me. We used to be friends, remember?”
“We are friends. And I don’t want to sound like an idiot.”
“And I don’t want to sound like a seventies bumper sticker, but friends are the people you can sound like an idiot with.”
“I’m jealous of you,” Cole said. “I wish I’d had your life and your career. I say that without the slightest desire to take it away from you. You earned it. You’re an amazing songwriter and a great singer and possibly the most charismatic person I’ve ever met. I’m still jealous.”
At that worst possible moment, she looked up to see a woman hovering over their table. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” the woman said, “but aren’t you Sallie Rachel?”
She was tempted to say no, mistaken identity, it happens all the time, only she couldn’t bring herself to lie to a fan, not when she could possibly make the woman’s night. She signed a napkin and shook the woman’s hand, and when she was gone Cole was smiling.
“You see?” he said. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
“You want to be constantly interrupted at dinner? Believe me, it’s not as much fun as it looks.”
“It’s one more reminder of the difference between you and me.”
“Are we so different? ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’”
“One of us will have a lot more people running up with Band-Aids.”
“When I listen to ‘Already the End’ I don’t feel different from you.” Cole looked down at his plate. “When we were on tour together, playing together, we felt like two arms of the same Hindu god. That’s what it felt like to me, anyway. At this moment the biggest difference I feel between us is that I’m happy to be warm and a little drunk and in the company of an attractive, intelligent, talented man who I really, really like a lot, whereas you are sad. And I wish I could change that.”
He looked up at her then with a longing that, God help her, reminded her of the way she’d looked at Dave for all those years of missed signals. She shoved the thought away and reached her hands across the table. “Now cheer the fuck up, okay?” she said. “And do they have any flan at this joint?”
When they walked out to his truck they had their arms around each other. Once they got to his house, he brought in her luggage and introduced her to Punkin, his plump orange cat. He helped her out of her winter coat, and she waited until he kissed her, and then she kissed him back. “We have to go slow,” he said. “I need to be less in awe of you.”
“That should be easy to fix. But slow is good for me too.”
He was a sweet and thoughtful lover, making sure of her orgasm before his own, and oh, oh, the big O, how she had missed the gift of it, so different from treating herself, and if Dave was not entirely absent from her thoughts, she never lost sight of who she was with, and the pleasures far outweighed the awkwardness.
The next morning Cole fixed potato and egg breakfast tacos and said, “Now, was this all an elaborate pretext to seduce me, or would you like to try and work this morning?”
She felt as lazy as Punkin, who dozed in a patch of hot sunlight on the kitchen floor. “Oh, I suppose we could do a little work.”
She thought Cole would break out the guitars. Instead he sat her down on the couch and said, “When Dave and I were working on my record, we ended up in his hotel room one night, really late, and he started talking about ‘tikkun olam.’ Do you know what that is?”
Sallie shook her head. “Is it Hebrew? I never did the bat mitzvah thing.” The mention of Dave made her anxious.
“Yeah, it means ‘healing the world.’ He said that for him it meant that by setting a good example, by honoring all, what is it, six hundred and thirteen commandments, by basically being a good man, you could be ‘a light to the nations.’ A model of how to behave. And that way you could contribute to healing the world. I felt like he had got inside my head and understood perfectly what I wanted to do.”
She went to the bedroom and brought the Puffs box back to the couch with her. She dried her eyes and blew her nose and said, “That sounds like him.”
“All those pieces of songs you sent me, the ones with words, anyway, they’re all about Dave.”
“Oh God, I’m so embarrassed.”
“Don’t be. You should go with it.”
When the guitars finally did come out, he continued to gently peel away her layers of artifice until she completely melted down. He held her, and then she was kissing him, and then they ended up back in bed for most of the afternoon. Afterward he cooked spinach and parmesan ravioli with fresh homemade pasta, topped with tomato sauce he’d canned from his garden, night falling hard outside and her falling too.
After dinner, she asked to hear some of the Mexican songs that he loved so much, and he got out a lot of scratchy old lps and played her Trio Los Panchos and José Feliciano and Mariachi Vargas, and then cds by Lila Downs and Cucu Diamantes. Her high-school Spanish was rudimentary, and he translated enough for her to follow along. He taught her how to cha-cha-cha.
The next day she turned it around and got Cole to talk about his marriage, and his daughter, and his father, and his relationship with Alex and Susan and the rest of the Montoyas. This time when the guitars came out, they both knew they were on to something. Neither of them felt like leaving the house, so Cole cooked dinner again, a dish of his own invention that involved layers of beans and cheese between corn tortillas with hot sauce and avocado on top. He didn’t cry that afternoon, though he did that night when Sallie went through his record collection and dj’d for him, playing songs that had special meaning for her and talking about them, and she caught him in the gut with The Hollies’”On a Carousel,” ta
king him back to his senior year in high school and his first band and leaving home. Then she proceeded to do herself in with “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye,” the Casinos’ doo-wop cover of the great John D. Loudermilk country song, where the singer says to kiss him each morning for a million years and only then, if it didn’t work out, to say goodbye.
On Monday they bore down and finished two songs, not Sallie Rachel songs, as it turned out, but something new, a hybrid that carried both their musical dna. They went for a run in the clear, cold afternoon and then Sallie cooked omelets for dinner, stuffed with more of Cole’s garden veggies out of Mason jars. They hurried through washing the dishes because Cole was eager to get to the stereo. He started off with the Dave Mason and Cass Elliot lp, which Sallie could not believe she’d never heard. After a couple of cuts, he took it off and played Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams singing “When I Go Away” from one of Levon Helm’s Midnight Rambles at his Woodstock studio. Was there anything that could turn you inside out like music? Love, maybe. Weren’t they somehow the same feeling?
That sent her to YouTube, and sure enough, somebody had posted Emmylou Harris and Daniel Lanois covering Hendrix’s “May This Be Love,” which Cole had never heard. He came back with Laurie Moss and Skip Shaw doing “Don’t Make Promises” from her first cd. “Her father was in The Chevelles, my high-school band.”
“It’s a small world. I met Skip when Dave recorded his first album. Can you believe he’s still alive?”
“Some days I find it hard to believe that I’m still alive.”
She straddled him where he was sprawled on the couch and kissed him. “Oh yeah,” she said. “You’re definitely still alive.” She sat at the opposite end and lifted his feet up onto her lap. “I’m getting a strong subliminal message from tonight’s playlist.” She closed her eyes and bunched up her fingertips on her forehead like a psychic at work. “The word ‘duet’ keeps coming into my head.”
