The Music of Your Life

by John Rowell

  I don’t dare glance over at Daddy now to see how he’s reacting. In fact, after this, I may never be able to look at him again. Mama was right: this is definitely not Walt Disney. I shift around again, and hope that the action will soon go back to the club where Liza sings, even if that does mean Joel Grey running around in lipstick and rouge. But still … this is fantastic. Two boys … and a girl.

  I’m not ever gonna stop thinking about this.

  “You enjoy it, son?” Daddy says. We’re in the car on the way home.

  On the way out of the theater, I’d already started to think about all his potential questions, and all my potential answers. This was definitely one I had counted on. “I thought it was good, not great,” I say, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible. And then, I probably shouldn’t add this, but I do: “What did you think?”

  He hesitates. “I don’t know. I don’t know,” he says. “Did you … was it what you thought it was gonna be, from playing the record so much?”

  Is this a trick question? I hadn’t figured on this one, so I wait a few seconds before answering.

  “Pretty much, I guess. Yeah, I’d say pretty much. So … did you like it?”

  He pauses a long time, so long I start to feel sweat at my temples. I roll my window down even further, to get a breeze and also to invite street noise and honking sounds into the car so it will be harder to talk.

  “It was all right,” he says, finally.

  I feel the tension start to drop from my shoulders; at least this is better than the anger with which he greeted Nicholas and Alexandra. I’m thinking maybe he didn’t notice that scene with the two guys nuzzling after all; maybe God did me a favor and caused him to nod off right at that moment. Now I wish I had looked over to see if he was watching. Or maybe the scene didn’t even happen, maybe I imagined it. So why did I almost faint? I will have to ask Lynette McKinney, Youth Psychiatrist, why she thinks I nearly passed out from seeing two boys dancing with each other. Except … wait … it’s because of Lynette and that stupid basketball player that this whole evening happened to me. This is the thanks I get for helping her write all those cheers and let her claim them for her own and have everybody say what a good cheer writer Lynette is and isn’t she the most valuable addition to this year’s JV squad. I plan to never speak to Lynette again, and hope that some good Christian tells her mother that Cabaret is the dirtiest thing to ever come to our town, and that no child of hers should ever even think about seeing it. Then she will be all pitiful and want to hear my blow-by-blow description of the movie, and beg me to re-create the “Mein Herr” choreography on a bar stool in her downstairs family rec room, and I will not do it. I will stick to my guns. I will deny her, and she will just have to suffer, suffer, suffer. I might even say, “Why don’t you let that stupid, thickheaded caveman boyfriend of yours take you to see it?” I won’t even let her listen to my soundtrack album anymore. Lynette and I are through!

  “Some of the stuff in that movie, though, son …” Daddy says, as we are waiting at a particularly long light, in front of the Hardee’s where we got supper earlier, and where the high school kids are now hanging out, like they always do on Friday nights, even in late winter. I stare into the parking lot to see if I recognize anybody from the church Teen Fellowship. If I see someone I know, I will lean my head out the window and scream out, “Hey!” and then Daddy won’t remember what he was just about to tell me.

  “Some of that stuff,” he says again, as the light changes green and he goes, ruining my escape plan, “Good God Almighty, I never thought I’d see—”

  “Yeah, I know,” I say. “It’s outrageous.”

  “Good Lord,” he says, shaking his head. “Good Lord.”

  Then, after a moment, a moment in which I haven’t even thought about drawing breath, he says, “But that Liza Minnelli …”

  “What about her?”

  “Well, she’s talented. But I don’t believe she’ll ever be as good as her mother. Now her mother was something.”

  I’m thinking we’ve now gotten through the worst of this conversation—maybe I’ll be spared what he has to say to Mama after I go off to my room—so I spend the rest of the ride home trying to think of movies that Daddy liked. I can only come up with two or three, most of which are before my time, but he’s talked about them since day one. The Bridge on the River … something, The Guns of Navarone, Airport. No, he hated Airport. I guess he likes The Wizard of Oz OK. He watches it with us every time it comes on TV, even though he always asks, “How many times can you all watch the same movie over and over?”

  I wish I could watch Cabaret again, that’s for sure.

  Later, in my room, I reach under my bed and pull out the Cabaret album cover; I suddenly remembered that I stuck it under there a few days before. I replace the record in the sleeve and return it to my gold wire record rack, placing it between The Partridge Family Sound Magazine and one of Mama’s records, Mantovani Plays the Best of Broadway. I take that one out and look at it. It’s one of my all-time favorite album covers because of its neat photograph of the New York City theater district, with the marquee lights glistening way up in the sky but also reflected down on the ground in neony rain puddles on the sidewalks and at the edges of the streets. In the picture, the women are all in mink stoles, with bouffy hair and diamonds, on the arms of men in tuxedos, and they’re all getting out of limousines and taxicabs and hurrying into some Broadway theater lobby. I’ve always loved this picture, and someday I plan to go to New York to become like the people in the photograph, well-dressed and glamorous, and going to Broadway shows all the time. That is, if Mama and Daddy will let me. I’ll have to start working on them soon.

  In the back of the record rack, I spot my old Mary Poppins album, the one that got all warped in the hot car when I was a kid. I haven’t thought about it in years; Henry must have been playing it. I remember he used to think it was funny how the song went “Super-cali-fragi-waaa … waaaa … expi … waa … waa” all over the place. He liked it because he said it sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher. I return the record to the last wire groove and get into bed.

  But as I lie there, I keep hearing all the songs from the movie in my head. Liza keeps singing to me, even as I roll over and try to go to sleep. I put the pillow over my head to try and block the music out of my mind.

  But I also keep thinking about that scene—that nuzzling scene. It keeps playing in my head, too. I feel suddenly sweaty, and my stomach feels airy. I look to see if my door is closed all the way. My room is totally dark now since they moved the streetlamp that used to shine in my window.

  I’m not sure I should do this, this thing I love to do, but I do it anyway. I can’t believe anything can feel so good as this. Especially tonight. I keep picturing the scene: the girl and … the two guys. It’s almost like how I used to picture my old G.I. Joe doll out of his uniform, when I’d be in bed at night, and that would do the trick. And after my cousin brought over her Barbie and Ken dolls, I switched to thinking about Ken naked. I liked Ken even more than G.I. Joe.

  I turn over in my bed, and then back over again. I picture Ken and G.I. Joe dancing together like the men in the movie, with Barbie sitting in a Barbie chair, just watching them, not saying anything, and then I see Joe and Ken lying next to each other on the floor, and they are naked. I make them nuzzle each other’s faces. I imagine the men in the movie taking their clothes off, so they can be just like Ken and G.I. Joe. Then they could all dance together and nuzzle each other and lie down side by side as I watch.

  Gee … this is … great …

  I love having secrets only with myself, and this is the best secret I’ve ever thought up. I wouldn’t even tell Lynette about this one, that is if I ever decide to start speaking to her again. Which I won’t.

  God, this is … it’s hot under the sheets. I kick them off.

  Much better … oh …

  Before I fall asleep, I try to figure out how I can get back to the Park Point Cinema
to see Cabaret again without my father finding out. Maybe I’ll take a bus, or call a taxicab, or even just walk; it’s worth it. I want to just go back and see it by myself; it’ll be much better that way. Everything always is.

  III.

  Soon after I start tenth grade, a Broadway director comes to our town and holds a workshop for some of the more talented local student actors—I make sure to get myself chosen. In my private evaluation, he says to me, “You’re a gifted young man, Hunter, but you shouldn’t always try to be funny onstage. You’re good-looking enough to be a leading man someday, someday soon, I might add, but you’ve got an image of yourself as a comedian. Try lowering your voice—it’s too high-pitched. And don’t stand onstage with all your weight on one foot, it makes you look like a sissy. Even your weight out and stand up straight. Make direct eye contact with your acting partner, and with the audience. Don’t move your hands and arms around so much.”

  A leading man … The phrase rings in my head; I’ve never considered it before. As I sit there thinking about that, he pats my hand and starts to tell me again how good-looking I am, which makes me feel kind of creepy, but I don’t sweat it, or tell anyone. I just slither away from him as politely as I can, thank him for the advice, and walk out.

  A leading man … My high school is full of them. I start looking around at the popular boys, not just the jocks, but some of the honor students, also, and the school leaders. I begin to study them up close and from far away, too: what they wear, how they carry their books and saunter, maybe even swagger, down the hallways, how they slump in their seats in class, chewing on pencils, long legs outstretched in the aisles … I watch the way they smile at girls, then look away, then scoop their bangs off their foreheads only to let them fall back again, pretending to yawn, pretending to be distracted, batting their eyes … I want to do all those things, too. And even if inside I still know I’m a “comedian,” I’m an actor, too. And if I’m not really a leading man, I can at least play one. I can look, and act, the part.

  One thing I learn is that leading men not only know how to stand, stretch their legs, and play with their hair so that everybody notices, they also know how to get elected to office, gain position, run the school. And even though at home I keep reading movie magazines and playing cast albums by myself, at school, in the midst of stretching out my legs, sauntering down the hallway, winking at girls, and scooping my own bangs off my forehead, I am unanimously chosen to be: prom chairman, vice president of the Student Council, and even editor of the school newspaper. I actually go so far as to make myself the paper’s first ever movie critic; my friends’ parents tell me they always read my reviews before deciding what movies to see.

  I have become a leading man.

  So now: Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill, the home of the University of North Carolina, is the land of leading men, like a lot of college towns are, I’m sure. And even though I am only one of many leading men here, I imagine that I’m still unique, in my way. Here, leading men practically fall from the branches of the pine and dogwood trees, and when they hit the ground, they travel alone or in packs: they come at you around the corners of buildings; they ascend and descend dormitory stairs day and night, sometimes wearing nothing but running shorts; they sit around in the quad, sunning themselves, or on the library steps, and it’s as if invisible spotlights are always aimed to shine directly on them from some unseen lighting grid up above, because they’re impossible to miss. Everyone sees them, everyone knows them, everyone wants them. Or wants to be them.

  There’s a song leading men sing at Chapel Hill: “I’m a Tar Heel born, I’m a Tar Heel bred, and when I die, I’m a Tar Heel dead.” My parents now laugh about how they tried to bring me up a Tar Heel, but I resisted what I called, at the time, “all that college crap,” content as I was only to play records and read movie magazines, go to movies all the time and act in community theater plays.

  Now I’m a leading man both onstage and off, and when the leading men of Chapel Hill come to see the drama department productions, the ones that I’m starring in, they see themselves reflected in my performances. They now want to be what I am, because, in a play, the leading man always gets the girl, always triumphs at the end, always ends up on top. He wins.

  I’m a leading man born, I’m a leading man bred, and when I die …

  Wooley Dorm, a bright Saturday morning in late April. It’s not even 6 A.M., five minutes away, in fact, from the hour-on-the-hour chiming from the campus bell tower. I don’t need the bells though, since Dalton is next to me, poking me with his fingers.

  “Hey, buddy, you awake? Let’s play Chinatown,” he says, now nudging me with his leg, and then more insistently: “Come on, Hunter, let’s play.” Now his hand is pushing against my rib cage and he’s trying to roll me awake, trying to rock me from side to side. I’m already awake, of course; I heard him the first time. I just like his hands on my body like that; and I especially like it when he wants to play the games I invented—games I invented just for us.

  “I have to study,” I mutter into the pillow.

  “Yeah, right. It’s six o’clock in the morning. Study me,” he says.

  And I do, and for this I have no need of Cliffs Notes.

  But after a while, he interrupts and says: “Now let’s play Chinatown.”

  “OK, who’s Mrs. Mulwray?”

  “I’m Mrs. Mulwray. You’re Jake.”

  We sit up in bed and hike up our underwear. We’re actors after all, and it is just instinct to want to adjust costumes and hair. Lights. Camera. Action.

  “Who is she?” I ask, in character, gruff and resonant. “The girl. Who is she?”

  Dalton/Mrs. Mulwray demurs, looking far away, somewhere in the corner of the room.

  I grab him by the shoulders and shake him. “Who is she?”

  “She’s … she’s … my sister,” he says, in a husky stage whisper.

  I mock-slap him across the face, and his shock of brown-blond hair does indeed fall over his eyes, as if on cue. He’s so incredible to look at, I almost break character. I can’t take my eyes off of him. Ever.

  I snap back as Jake. “Who is she?”

  “She’s my daughter!” he exclaims.

  Mock-slap the other cheek. Hair falls to other side.

  “She’s my sister!”

  Slap.

  “She’s my daughter!”

  Slap.

  And then, hysterical, in full movie-star breakdown mode: “She’s my sister and my daughter!”

  Great wracking sobs. I hold him. Cut.

  “You were brilliant,” I say, as we collapse back into my iron-frame single bed, of the Early American Institutional variety.

  “Faye Dunaway was robbed of that Oscar, man,” he says, as though it were his own deep personal regret.

  It is one of our favorite movies; we’ve seen it twice at the Student Union Film Series. I’ve known Dalton for four semesters, from the fall of our junior year—he had transferred to Carolina from another college. We met at a Student Union screening of The Seventh Seal one rainy late September afternoon while practically the whole rest of the student body was at a football game in Kenan Stadium. We were both sitting by ourselves; he was a few seats away from me, and when the film was over, he turned to me with a big smile on his face and said, “Well, that was cheerful!” So we became steady movie “dates,” even though his girlfriend Susan sometimes came along, too. The movies mostly seemed to bore her, though; she obviously just liked being with him. Dalton and I took in a lot of classics together: Citizen Kane, Dog Day Afternoon, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Manchurian Candidate … he even let me talk him into attending a midnight showing of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? This was October, and we were newly seniors; we had spent the whole summer writing and calling each other (his hometown was about two hundred miles away from mine) and comparing notes on the current crop of mostly awful summer movies. After seeing Baby Jane, we were walking together through the dark, lamplit campus at two-thirty in t
he morning, kicking at leaves and pushing each other into the piles, acting like kids.

  He said: “Were you scared of Baby Jane, Hunter?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Yes, you were. You were scared of her.”

  “Oh, is that so?”

  “Yeah. You squealed like a girl a couple of times.”

  “Screw you, I did not.”

  “Yes, you did, son. You squealed. And everybody heard you.”

  We were near the Davie Poplar, which campus lore says is the oldest, biggest tree on campus. When you stand underneath it, the shade of its branches covers you like a giant, leafy umbrella. It was pitch dark; no one was around. We both had on white oxford shirts, which shone in the moonlight, making it easier for us to see each other.

  “Asshole, I did not squeal.”

  “Yes, you did. Like a pig. Like a little pig who’s about to be made into barbeque.”

  I sat down on the small stone bench underneath the tree.

  “You’re full of shit,” I said. “And you make me tired.”