The Music of Your Life

by John Rowell

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  He turns and looks at me for the first time. Those blue eyes that I woke up to yesterday morning … they’re not the same eyes now. Steely and distant, they look through me and around me; they don’t look at me.

  “Just don’t think I can do it anymore, buddy. I’m just not that way. Not like you. I mean, I don’t know if you really are or not … but … well, things are going great with Susan now. And you know I’ll always be your friend.”

  I’m your friend.

  Slap.

  I’m your special buddy.

  Slap.

  I’m your friend and your special buddy.

  Surprise! Cut.

  “You’re so full of shit,” I say. “This is bullshit. What’s going on with you?”

  “I’m sorry, Hunter,” he says, sharply. “I knew you wouldn’t deal with this too well, but you can at least try to understand.”

  “What about New York? In September? The apartment?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that too, and I’ve decided I might do better out in L.A. There’s more movie work there.”

  He turns away again; he has nothing if not an actor’s timing. I start to reach for his hand, his arm, anything; then I don’t. I shove my own hands in my pockets and look down at the ground.

  “I gotta go, Hunter,” he says, quietly, after a minute or so of silence. “Listen, I’ll see you at graduation next weekend, OK?” He doesn’t offer me a kiss, of course; he doesn’t even offer a handshake. He just turns away from me and sprints back into the Pi Kapp house. As he passes the basketball goal in the driveway, he jumps up and grabs the rim, holds himself there for a second, then drops and thwumps the net on the way down, as if he’s just … scored. Then he disappears into the frat house.

  I stand there for a moment, then turn in the direction of town and start walking. I saunter down Franklin Street, trying to carry myself like a normal person who hasn’t just been run over by a truck, because if I think about it, if I give in to it for a second, I’ll just—

  No. I’ll be damned if I’ll let him get to me. Fuck him, I’ll just go see the movie anyway, I think, but as I head toward the Varsity, I can’t concentrate on anything. Everything around me is a blur, like an out-of-focus movie, and the traffic sounds mix with the shouting voices of students and the usually reassuring hourly chiming from the university bell tower—now it sounds more like a death knell. From some distant, open window in the music building, a soprano practices a difficult aria, repeating one phrase over and over, stopping and starting again, trying to get it right. Everything looks and sounds out of sync, unreal, fuzzy. Warped. Super-cali-fragi-waa-waa …

  There’s not much of a line to get into Cruising. I know I should look around to see who’s here to see me going in, but I really don’t care anymore …

  Sitting in the dark theater, I watch the homosexual characters dressed in black leather cavort across the screen; some vicious murderer lurks among them. They disco dance and sweat and do drugs and “cruise” each other—I do know what that means—and some of them die, murdered before, during, or after sex. These are not people that I know anything about, and I don’t think I’d ever want to—I certainly don’t want to be any of them; not a person in black leather, not a drug-taking disco dancer, not a rootless, anything-for-a-high homosexual living in New York City, a place where, the movie seems to be saying, it’s very easy to get yourself killed if you hang out with the “wrong” people.

  I don’t know if any of the other audience members can see me sitting alone in the back row. If they were to turn around and look, I’m sure they would think it strange that, as I watch this weird movie, tears are streaming down my face, as though it were really Gone With the Wind and I’d just heard Clark Gable bid good-bye to Vivien Leigh at the door, frankly, as he says, not giving a damn.

  IV.

  The moderately famous movie critic leaves the screening and heads out into Times Square. It is a gray, chilly October day; it has been raining off and on, and large pools of water have collected at curbs and intersections. It is nearly evening, and the electricity of midtown has begun its spectacular rainbow dance amidst the dirty gray-brown buildings; he loves that he can actually read the signs and theater marquees as they reflect in the rain puddles—muted, pastel neons shimmering in shallow water. As he walks, he dodges them neatly, having spent quite a few years now maneuvering through rain-soaked city streets.

  He takes his familiar route up Broadway, heading back to his magazine’s midtown office. It is always better, he feels, to write the review as soon after a screening as possible, and he has no particular reason to rush home anyway. He likes working in his office rather than from his apartment; he actually enjoys working late, after most of Manhattan’s nine-to-fivers have long since gone home. He is a writer, after all, a critic; it’s a “late beat” kind of job.

  The movie was long; it had been daylight when he got to the screening room, and even while walking the last few blocks, it has begun to grow steadily darker outside, the early end of the day that is particular to autumn, especially to the city in autumn. Still, this is one of his favorite times of the day in New York, always has been; just before “curtain going up” at the theaters, the last few moments of evening before everything becomes night.

  He pauses at a corner to watch theatergoers rushing hurriedly into theater lobbies, many of them arriving at the last minute, clearly full of the anticipation of an expensive evening of live entertainment. It saddens him that people aren’t as glamorously turned out as they used to be, in the evenings, though that satiny, tuxedo-and-mink-stole era was even before his time. He knows it only from old photographs and long-forgotten record album covers. He misses it, if it is possible to miss something you never really knew, never actually experienced. He’s seen the photos; he believes in what used to be.

  The wind is bitter, and insistent, but he is nearly at the office now. The narrow sidewalks are still crowded with city dwellers hurrying and scrambling, inconsiderately sideswiping one another in their agitation to get where they’re going. How annoying it is, even useless, to try and dodge them all, especially with their umbrellas opening and folding at a mad pace, as if in some Busby Berkeley production number, as they dash from subway stairs to curbs and corners, to taxis and doorways and beyond. He, of course, is in no particular hurry, seldom is. Turning up the collar on his pea coat, he thinks instantly of the famous photograph of James Dean walking through Times Square on a cold, blustery afternoon. He catches a glimpse of himself in the reflection of a storefront’s glass door, and laughs at his own pretension: he’s probably much more Roddy McDowall than James Dean.

  He passes the theater where one of his childhood idols is appearing in a show. She has not been back to the stage in years, and her return has been treated as a momentous event. He stops to study the large, blown-up photos of her lining the side of the theater. She’s still uncannily beautiful, and still exudes that same bewitching presence that allured him so completely, so inexplicably, when he was a child. He wishes his mother had beaten the cancer long enough to have come up and seen this show. How he had dreamed of taking her to see it! Just as she had taken him to see the star’s first movie over thirty years ago. He recalls that his mother is the same age as the star—well, she would have been.

  He has a friend in the show, one of the boys in the chorus, and his friend has spoken highly of the star, told him how lovely and gracious she truly is. Just before his mother died, on one of the last afternoons that he spent sitting beside her bed and holding her thin hand, he related his friend’s stories to her, telling her what the star had been like in rehearsals, how friendly she was, how courteous and kind to everyone. His mother had smiled and whispered that she wasn’t surprised; that’s how she had always seemed in the movies, too. It was one of the last coherent conversations they had.

  He continues on a few blocks to his office building; the rain is lighter now. He passes throu
gh the revolving door into the pink marbled lobby, waves hello to the guard behind the desk, and steps into an open elevator, which closes, hums, and ascends: one fluid, noninterrupted pattern of movement that has become for him an almost nightly ritual. He travels silently and alone up to his office on the forty-fifth floor, a height that makes him think of the Rainbow Room and Cole Porter songs and the old movie where the lovers have a reunion on the top of the Empire State Building. It’s quite a glamorous height to ascend to on a daily basis, he thinks, even though, once at the top, he goes only to a small, nondescript office. It does have great views, though, overlooking the city from one of its loftiest You Are Heres, otherworldly, in its way, noirish. He laughs when he compares it to his own apartment: a third-floor one-bedroom in a Chelsea brownstone, with a view of an air shaft.

  His closed office door bears a label with his name printed on it; he stares at it for a moment, as though he had never come face to face with it before. Sometimes he thinks Hunter is a ridiculous name for a man nearing forty; it was fine when he was a child, but even then some people called him “Hunt Boy.” He hasn’t been “Hunt Boy” to anyone for years. Hunter. He mulls it over, stares at the sheer lettering of it. It now sounds to him like a character in children’s literature—a minor friend of Davy Crockett’s, some kid character in a Disney summer camp drama from the ’60s.Hunter. It’s too youthful for the age he is; too youthful, he thinks now, for him.

  There are messages on his voicemail, but he is anxious to write his review, get it over with, so he ignores the blinking red light for the moment. He is thinking only of what to write of Dalton Foster in his first starring role in a major studio film. He sits at his desk, and smiles, and rubs his eyes. He thinks how after years of fair to decent supporting roles in both low- and big-budget films, Dalton has finally gotten himself a starring role, a vehicle. A big-time romance, no less! His character, a family man, loses his wife in a car accident, and soon finds himself, in his grief, falling in love with her best friend. Ah, the guilt the poor man feels. It was there on the screen in those big blue eyes, a little weathered around the edges now, gazing down on the actress playing the friend. Explaining to her, sotto voce (having finally lost that southern accent that haunted his performances in earlier movies), how he couldn’t love her like this, not when he loved someone else so dearly. Well, at least, the memory of someone else. It had been lousy dialogue; he couldn’t help wondering if Dalty had thought so, too. Dalty had always been so fond of good dialogue.

  The critic thinks a while, and consults his notes, circling a few key phrases that he had scribbled on his pad in the dark, crossing out other ones. He decides to give his review the tone of a curt dismissal, rather than that of an all-out, juicy pan. Turning to his whirring computer, he begins to type rather quickly, but slows suddenly when he gets to the actors’ performances. He types, stops, reads, deletes …

  He is unsatisfied.

  He looks at the clock; he doesn’t want to belabor this. He’ll probably go out for a drink, or two, after leaving the office; there’s a bar in his neighborhood he frequents. He’s sure to see someone there that he knows, if only casually; someone to shoot the breeze with, anyway.

  He turns to his telephone and again notices the blinking light. He listens to his messages. The first is from a man he has had a few dates with who seems, well, nice. When can we get together again, blah blah blah. Beep. His father, whom he has called Ed since he was in college, wanting to say hello and report on his latest visit to the doctor; also something about confusion over an insurance claim. Give a call. Beep. His brother Henry, thanking him for the silver piggy bank he sent the new baby, saying how much he was sure little Eddie would love it when he was old enough to know it came from his Uncle Hunter in New York. From Tiffany’s! Beep. No more new messages. After a moment or two of staring out the window, he turns back to his computer and types:

  “Dalton Foster, as Stone Michaels, commands the screen with his enormous physical presence and intense, still-vital good looks. After years of supporting the stars, he has finally been given the chance to become one himself. Unfortunately, he is simply not up to the task, and remains unconvincing in the key love scenes with his two leading ladies, who seem to be acting overtime in an attempt to get him to register some emotion, any emotion in response to them. (Romantic interest would seem to be what is called for here.) For an actor of his considerable charm and leading-man appearance, this seems an especially damaging thing not to possess in his performer’s bag of tricks.”

  His phone rings. He hesitates for a moment, then decides to pick up.

  “Hunter? It’s Billy. I thought I’d find you there.”

  “Billy. Hey. Where are—aren’t you performing tonight?”

  “Yeah, but I’ve got a couple minutes. I’m in the chorus, you know. Right now, it’s Star Time out there.”

  “Oh. It’s always Star Time.”

  “Tell me about it. So, did you see the film?”

  “Yeah. We’ll talk about it later, OK?”

  “Sure, fine. I gotta go on soon anyway. Listen, I just wanted to let you know I got Julie to sign the record album for you.”

  “Wow. Thanks, Billy, I really … thank you …”

  “You’ll love this: she said she’s always glad to do whatever she can to make a critic happy.”

  “Ah. Imagine that. I should be so lucky.”

  “She also said you must have played the record a helluva lot to have warped it like that.”

  “That’s a long story.”

  “I’m sure. Actually, she said heckuva.”

  “Of course. What did she write?”

  “Hang on, I’ve got it. ‘For Hunter … So glad to know your mum took you to Mary Poppins all those years ago. I’m honored … Love, Julie Andrews.’”

  For a quick second, Hunter can’t really respond to that; he freezes. He feels the sudden catch in his throat—God, what a cliché I am, he thinks—but he steadies himself with a hand on the desk. He has learned how to suppress these moments, so he does. Quickly.

  “Hunter? You there?”

  “Yeah. That’s great, Billy. Thanks. Hold on to it and I’ll get it from you when I see you.”

  “Sure. Hey, listen, I’m on in a second here. I gotta go.”

  “OK. Thanks, Billy. I’ll see you.”

  He hangs up and turns back to his computer screen. He is composed, once again. He finishes the review and files it. With a click, he sends it via e-mail to the entertainment editor. Done.

  He turns off the desk lamp, and gathers up his coat and briefcase. He pauses at the window, illuminated by the silvery lights of the city shining into his darkened office. For a few moments, he stares out over them, as he has done so many times before, as he once stared out at the tops of dogwood trees in his front yard from the window of his boyhood room, as he once looked out onto the campus bell tower from a window in the industrial-green hallway of his dorm, so long ago. He’s always looking over things, he thinks. Or … overlooking things? He laughs out loud to himself: it’s a word problem!

  The rainy city streams and twinkles and honks below him. He has always loved this view of New York, even before he saw it for himself, even from when he gazed at photographs of Times Square on album covers and in old magazines, imagining it for hours at a time, imagining it in three dimensions—the sounds, the smells—what does it really look like? Now he knows.

  He watches as lights in other offices—desk lamps, overheads—are turned off and on in windows across the way. He wonders if other people in other tall buildings are also standing alone in their windows, at this very same moment, looking out over the city … he wonders if they’re wondering if other people like themselves are standing in windows looking out over the city! So many people in such high altitudes, just under the clouds, staring out across the city, their city, the one they know so well, yet filled with people they’ll never meet, never even see. So then: a city they live in, but don’t know at all.

  He s
tands in his window and counts other windows, as many as he can make out, as many as he can count. He could stand here forever, he thinks, just looking, just looking and counting; looking and counting, but not moving. And that’s good enough, he thinks; the city needs people who are merely content just to look at it, to watch it, to regard it from a distance … to gaze upon it without ever touching it, to study it, in admiration, as if it were—all of it—nothing more than a rare and famous painting, stretched across an endless canvas, protected by glass.

  Perhaps he has always stood here.

  DELEGATES

  The traffic is thick and stop-start along the Henry Hudson Parkway heading out of the city; it is, after all, Friday afternoon in the middle of the summer. Fortunately, Perry’s new Ford Explorer is blissfully air-conditioned, and from my vantage point in the backseat, I feel like I’m at a drive-in theater, since Perry and his new boyfriend, Duffy, are putting on a show up front. This is the scene where they’re arguing about what music should be played in the car.

  “I get to pick the CD this time,” says Duffy.

  “No,” says Perry. “You always pick your own music without consulting me.”

  He leans on the horn with a violent blast, though I hadn’t noticed that the car ahead of us had done anything to warrant the honk.

  “Don’t be so premenopausal, Perry,” Duffy says. “It’s just a CD.” And with that he chooses one from what I note is indeed his own personal CD collection, contained in something like a photo album, with DUFFY printed in gold letters on the leather cover.

  “Rufus Wainwright!” he announces suddenly, flipping the flat silver disc between his palms like a pancake, and here he turns his pretty, youthful little head back to me.

  “Do you know who Rufus Wainwright is?” he asks, his eyes fixed on me. It sounds more like an accusation than a question.

  I stare back at him for a moment, then turn my own head around to look over my shoulder. Then I turn back around again. “Are you speaking to me?” I ask.