The Music of Your Life

by John Rowell

  “Hampton?” Mother suddenly calls out from the back of the store.

  The guy is almost inside. He’s about to make a gesture toward me—is he going to speak to me or hit me?

  “Hamp?” Mother calls, now turning in my direction to see where I’ve gone to.

  And like a Three Stooge, I wheel around and knock over the entire standing rack of crushy belts. Oh, this is a disaster. Because what if I’m wrong and what if he actually was going to come over to talk to me because he was interested, what if he was an unmoored person like myself, looking for someone to share his life with, to set up house with, to love forever, to have and to hold till death do us part? And now, like a circus clown, I have knocked over a display rack and he’s thinking: “Oh, he’s cute, but klutzy—better not,” and there goes an entire lifetime of love and romance down the drain because I couldn’t control my own motor skills when faced with the unbeatable combination of having to feign interest in a rack of ladies’ crushy belts while playing hard to get with a potentially desirable suitor. So I drop to my knees as if overcome by the Catholic need to pay penance, which makes no sense as I am a dyed-in-the-cashmere Presbyterian, but I know I have blown it anyway, and I have to pick up these goddamn crushy belts before the salesclerks uniformly decide to kick my mother and me out of Montaldo’s because I’m a liability to the merchandise, and then Mother really will have to wear a potato sack to Topher’s wedding, just as she feared all along, and it will be all my fault because I couldn’t handle myself with decorum in a women’s dress shop in Crabtree Valley Mall when I saw a cute boy who might be interested in me and—OH GOD!!!!

  The guy stands at the entrance of the store for a moment as I hurry to replace the belts on the rack. I deliberately don’t look at him, because if I did, I know I would be forced to scream out: “No, go away, save yourself! You don’t want to date a Three Stooge! Run!” And when I right the rack, I see sideways that he has turned his back on me at the edge of the store and gone back out into the mall, presumably—now that it is clear our relationship will never work out—to trawl again among the great milling masses of the unloved. I want to call out after him: “Good luck! He’s out there! You’ll find him!” and then just hang myself from the Montaldo’s ceiling with the orange velveteen crushy belt.

  Mother walks over to me as I stand holding the rack, gazing out into the mall, lost in thought and staring like a hypnotized person into the gleaming red and white lighting of the Chick-fil-A.

  “Hampton, what do you think of this, honey?” She has traded the peach dress (which, even in my panic state I knew was the wrong color) for a light silver-gray, knee-length satin brocade dress with a low round neckline encrusted ever so subtly with faux mini-pearls. This one has potential.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you picked that one, that’s one of my favorites,” gushes Kimber, coming up beside us. “Don’t you think so?” This is directed at me, though I’m sure she hasn’t got the foggiest clue as to the dynamic of my being here in this store. She’s probably just glad she didn’t have to pick up the belts.

  “It’s beautiful, Mother,” I tell her. “You should definitely try it on.”

  “There’s a fitting room right here,” says Kimber, taking the dress from Mother and leading the way.

  So now I have, what, four, five minutes of free time? Mother has to take off her sweater, her skirt, and get zipped into the dress. And then she will quickly fluff her hair, say “I look like the Wreck of the Hesperus” to the mirror before walking back out onto the floor to model the dress for the salesclerk and me. Maybe it’s not too late to find My Hero again, and convince him that I’m really worth it, after all …

  I have five minutes.

  I dash out into the mall. I look quickly into Spencer Gifts, then World Bazaar, then Baskin-Robbins. No sign. A quick glance into The Hub menswear. Zip.

  Oh, what did I expect anyway? This is stupid, infantile behavior; I clearly have lost my mind. And that’s when I see him— about three yards ahead of me, walking hand in hand with some girl. A girl! Aha. Well, isn’t that interesting. I gain on them, then slow down, then deliberately walk past them. I turn around to catch his eye, and our gazes do lock in a boy-to-boy stare for something like a quick second. But then his eyes glaze over—reflexively? intentionally? both?—under the intensity of my high beams. His look and his message are clear: Now’s not the time. I smile at him, of course; I may be the Gay Village Idiot, but I’m a gentleman, too, and really—isn’t a simple smile the least of kindnesses one can offer when an affair comes to an end? I pause at the window of Crate & Barrel, pretending to gaze at the gleaming display of new copper cookware, and allow the couple to pass me.

  I walk back into Montaldo’s just as Mother is coming out of the dressing room. Suddenly, in this instant when I catch sight of her, I forget about the guy in the mall, about Robbie, about New York, about all the minutiae of my life, about everything. Because I see Mother emerging from the dressing room with the regal bearing and immaculate glamour of a ′50s movie queen, and for a moment, casting aside family bonds, ages, and sexual orientation, I feel like nothing more than just a guy gazing at a beautiful woman in a gorgeous dress. The silver-gray color offsets her dark hair and blue eyes perfectly, the neckline is exactly right for her graceful, feminine neck, the length of the skirt shows off her still-shapely legs to great advantage. All my childhood fantasies of having a mother who looked and dressed like a combination of Grace Kelly, Jackie Kennedy, and Marlo Thomas, with a little June Cleaver thrown in for reality, suddenly come rushing back to me. I’m so proud of her. I’m so proud she’s mine.

  “Hey,” I say, finally.

  “What do you think?” she asks, expectant, clearly hoping I will say yes. I would, even if I didn’t like it, because for her, it is already yes.

  “Mother, it’s gorgeous. You look … fabulous.”

  “I told you he’d like it,” says Kimber to Mother, then back to me: “We were hoping you would.”

  “Do you think Daddy will like it?” Mother asks, turning away to make slight adjustments in the mirror.

  “Of course.”

  “What about Topher? Think he’ll like it?”

  “I’m sure he will. Especially when he finds out how close you were to a potato sack.”

  “Oh, Hampton. Well … I guess …”

  “Definitely get it, Mother. It’s the best one we’ve seen all day.”

  I move up into the mirror and stand next to her, and we look back at our reflections. For a second, her sudden glamour casts its glow on me, too, and I get to be Tyrone Power or Cary Grant taking her arm. And then what I think is: Has Mother, at any time today, wondered if this is her only chance to ever be the mother of a groom?

  After Mother and I do a late lunch at the mall’s food court—I at the Chick-fil-A, she at Salads ’n Such—we stop into Grant’s of the Hill, which is Crabtree’s best men’s clothing store. She buys me a sweater and tells me how grateful she is that I was here to help her today. I feel a little guilty, because of course I had wanted something for myself all along, but I can tell that buying this for me is something she wants to do, and she knows, anyway, that I always have a good time shopping in a mall, no matter what I’m looking for. It’s always been this way between us, thirty-three years of small, silent understandings. Besides, it’s a great sweater: it’s teal! Maybe I’ll have at least one date this winter where I can wear it. I almost say this to her, too. Almost, almost, almost. A date, Mother. I’ll wear this on a date. Maybe he’ll like it as much as we do. Maybe he’ll like me—almost—as much as you do. Maybe, if he stays, you’ll like him—almost—as much as you like me. Maybe, if he really stays, I’ll love him, Mother. And he’ll love me—almost—as much as you love me. Almost, almost, almost I say this. And I almost see her looking at me with a clear-eyed look of expectancy, as if she knows what I’m going to say. Is it too obvious for me to even proclaim it? Is it too obvious for her to even acknowledge it?

  “This is a beautif
ul sweater, Mother,” I say, slowly, my breath coming in choppy waves, though maybe only I can hear that. “Thank you.”

  “Oh, you’re welcome, honey.”

  “Mother … it’s so beautiful … that maybe I could … even wear it … on a date.”

  I’m afraid I might just fall to the floor of Crabtree Valley Mall right at this moment and conk my head on the hard surface and pass out for eternity, clutching a teal sweater to my chest and dreaming of Prince Charming.

  She looks at me, right in the eyes. I’m still standing. So is she.

  “Well, yes, Hampton,” she says, also slowly. “Maybe you could. And wouldn’t that … person … be lucky to be on a date with you? With you and your sweater.”

  And we both turn away from each other, as if cued, keeping our gazes fixed at the exit sign, but walking side by side for as long as it takes to reach the doors.

  Outside, it has grown almost dark, and the tall, fluorescent lights of the parking lot are starting to flicker against the navy blue sky. Mother looks suddenly panicked.

  “Oh, I wanted to be home before dark,” she says, fumbling in her purse for her keys. “I wanted to get home before Daddy does.” And I know what’s coming next, because I have heard it many times before:

  “So he doesn’t have to walk into an empty house while I’m still alive.”

  “Oh, Mother,” I say impatiently, as she starts up the car and begins to navigate us out of the Crabtree parking lot. “It’s one day. I think finding your dress was a little more important than making sure Daddy gets dinner on time.”

  And after a moment, or two, she says, quietly: “Nothing is more important than Daddy, Hampton.”

  That stops me; I don’t say anything after that. At least not for about five hurt, brooding, selfish minutes. But then I realize that she includes me and my brother in that remark too, and Mary Beth; nothing is more important than us. I lean my head back against the headrest, and we ride in silence for a while. But soon after we turn onto the Beltline, I pop the Ferrante and Teicher tape back into the tape deck, and the car reverberates with their instrumental piano “stylings” of “Moon River.”

  “This was popular when you were born,” Mother says.

  At the stoplight, she all of a sudden reaches over and takes my hand and squeezes it. I squeeze back, and we hold hands until the light changes. “But you knew that already, didn’t you?” she asks.

  I hum uh-huh. I’m hearing the lyrics to the song in my head, over the instrumentals, and I’m thinking of that line about the Moon River being wider than a mile. And I think it’s funny how people are always saying something is a mile wide, when what miles are, really, when you think about it, are long. Rivers are wide, miles are long. But maybe it’s just the way different people have of seeing the same exact thing; one person’s mile is wide, another person’s river is long.

  “Let’s sing with the music, Hampton, like it’s karaoke,” says Mother.

  And that’s what we do—we sing, as the mother of the groom steers us, all of us, south, toward home.

  WHO LOVES YOU?

  CALIFORNIA, 1954

  The only person here who knows I’m a boy is Lucille Ball.

  A boy. I have to keep adjusting under this dress I’ve got on so I can feel myself down there, just to remind myself. I’ve never worn an evening gown before, and it’s the oddest thing. Not to mention that I can barely see out of these stupid false eyelashes. Why on earth I ever agreed to be a showgirl, I’ll never know …

  I met Miss Ball at a party in Bel Air a few weeks ago, a real fancy type affair, with waiters and valet parking, cocktails, canapés—things like that, things I’d never even heard of till I came out to California. My friend Arthur, who works as an Assistant Director on a lot of movies out here, took me along; he has acquaintances with a lot of showbiz people, and gets invited to lots of important parties. He knows Miss Ball and Mr. Arnaz from when he AD’d a movie they made together a few years ago, and got to know them a little bit, at least enough to speak to. Once he even baby-sat for their kids, and worked in their garden a few times, when assistant work was hard to find.

  So we got to this party. And there was Lucy, wearing a bright green party dress, smoking, drinking, standing in the middle of a group of about five or so people, laughing and carrying on. All I could think was Damn, it’s Lucy in the flesh. And then Arthur just up and waves to her, all familiar and everything. And she sees him and waves back and motions for him to come over.

  “Do you want to meet Miss Ball?” he whispers to me.

  “Yeah … I mean, do you think that’d be OK?”

  “Of course. Stick with me, ’Bama Boy.” Ever since Arthur found out I was from Alabama—Hollinsville, to be exact, about forty miles outside of Montgomery—he’s called me ’Bama Boy, though my real birth name is William Abernathy Ford, Jr. “Will” if you just met me here in Hollywood, “Willie” if you know me from Hollinsville, “Willie-Bud” if you’re a member of my immediate family or one of my thirty-four aunts, uncles, and cousins, accounting for both the Ford and Abernathy sides. Mama was an Abernathy, of the Biloxi Abernathys.

  “Hello, Miss Ball,” Arthur says. “Nice to see you again.” He takes her hand and kisses it, real gallant, like something Errol Flynn would do in one of his pictures. The people who have been hovering around her kind of move away, seeing as how she has made room to talk to us. They were probably, in the language of Hollywood that I’m finally starting to figure out, “hangers-on.”

  “Hello, darling,” Miss Ball says. “How’s business? What are you up to?”

  She has an unfiltered cigarette going in one hand—a Philip Morris, I’m sure, since that’s who sponsors her show—and some big goblet kind of drink in the other: tea colored, probably some kind of hooch. Everybody drinks liquor at parties out here; nobody I knew back home ever drank, and I still can’t quite get used to the taste of it myself.

  “Oh, I can’t complain,” he says, though I know he really could. “Just finished the new Rock Hudson picture.” He runs his hands through his wiry black hair and pushes his tortoise-shell glasses up on his nose. He does that when he’s nervous. He probably doesn’t want Miss Ball to know he was just an assistant to the assistant this time.

  “Oh yeah,” Miss Ball says. “Over at Universal.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I ran into Rock last week. He’s got high hopes for it, but who the hell knows. How’d they treat you over there, Artie?” Her huge, turquoise eyes with the big lashes narrow in at him as she sucks in a vampy drag of her cigarette, like I’ve mostly only seen in the movies, and then mostly from Bette Davis. The end of the cigarette, I notice, has turned scarlet, from her lipstick, and so has the side of her glass that she’s drunk from. Maybe when she’s done I can steal the cigarette butt from the ashtray, with a Lucy lip print on it. I could send it back home to my cousin Starla Scott, who claims to be Lucy’s biggest fan and is always going on and on about her, mimicking her faces and such from the show. Of course Starla’s pretty mad at me for coming out here to be a movie star before she did. Maybe I’ll just steal that cigarette butt for myself.

  “Everything went well,” Arthur tells Miss Ball. “I think it’ll be a good picture, but you never know how it’ll play in the valley.” This makes everybody in Lucy’s little circle break out laughing, and Lucy just rolls her eyes, like to say, That’s for sure. I have no idea what all that means, but it’s fun to watch Arthur hobnobbing and being real Hollywoodish. He sure is smooth and familiar, and really knows what he’s talking about, and that makes me like him even more than I already do, but I still don’t see how he can be so nonchalant about all this. (He calls it a French word: blasé. “You have to learn to be more blasé around movie people, ’Bama Boy, or they’ll think you’re too desperate.”)

  “Who’s your friend here, Artie?” Miss Ball asks, narrowing those eyes and looking in my direction now.

  I’ve never seen hair even close to her shade of red before—it
’s not really red, it’s orange, like a Halloween pumpkin. And with her blue eyes and orange hair and white skin, what I keep thinking is she looks like the colors on the outside of the Howard Johnson’s hotel in downtown Biloxi. Arthur says her coloring is so perfect for the camera that here in Hollywood they call her “Technicolor Tessie.”

  Arthur puts his hand on my back and pushes me gently forward, probably thinking that I’m a little scared, since I’m hanging back a little. He’s right.

  “Lucy, this is Will Ford. He just got into town a couple of months ago. Will, Lucille Ball.”

  “How do you do, Miss Ball?” I say, allowing Arthur’s hand to move me forward a little more. I’m remembering the way my Aunt Eugenia taught us children how to always greet somebody new, though when you finally say “how do you do” out loud like that, it sounds like you’re meeting the Queen of England or something. “I’m pleased to meet you,” I tell her. I offer to shake hands, but she doesn’t accept. Suddenly I wonder if I’ve done the wrong thing, and I feel my face flush.

  “Hoo-wee! Where’s that accent from?” she asks, blowing smoke.

  Now I’m positive my face is as red as Miss Ball’s lipstick.

  “Alabama, ma’am. Near Montgomery.”

  “Good God, child, what are you, all of fourteen? Does your mama know you’re here?”

  I look to Arthur for help. Since he’s twenty-nine, which seems pretty old to me, I figure he’s smarter about things than I am, and always knows what to say. But now he just looks at me like: You’re on your own here, buddy.