But, no, none of it happened like that.
4
Caitlin had been more or less right about my life at the upper flat, stupidity being a frequently occasioned thing, bending now and then toward trouble. One morning, not long before the sun rose, Andrew and I found ourselves standing in the beer and wine aisle of Farmer Jack grocery. It must have been the stillness there, Muzak echoing through aisles of cereal boxes and soup cans—suddenly I knew we were shit out of luck.
“Wait,” I said. “It’s gotta be three A.M.” Long past Michigan’s cutoff time.
A case of High Life was nestled beneath my arm.
“Four,” Andrew said, holding up his wristwatch as if he’d known all the while.
This was his slow season, no lawns to mow and little electrical work, allowing him full-bore pursual of his self-education in quantum physics and solar energy, studies that were often aided by drink. The coolers rattled. Shelves of wine bottles stretched away from us—fifteen feet or so of gleaming reds and greens. Andrew was pacing. It was like he was walking in a hall of colored glass. “Imagine that,” he said. “Time disappeared.”
For weeks, we’d been celebrating my new residency in the upper flat with beer and records and a whole lot of nothing much. Earlier that evening, we’d had an impassioned debate over natural selection, nature and nurture, and other mysteries about which we knew only catchphrases, interrupted only by the discovery that we’d run out of spirits.
Will remained at the flat, a mere two hundred yards across Michigan Avenue. A weeknight. Hugging the box of beer forced me to consider the fact I had to be at the rug shop in a matter of hours.
“What now?” I said.
Andrew walked to the end of the aisle. He wore a flannel jacket and work boots. Will had buzzed his dark blond hair right down to his thick, hearty skull.
“Now is now,” he said.
With a gentle palm, he dusted the wine bottles, hearing them clack together like loose teeth. He paused, teasing a bottle neck with a finger, smiling, fingering the glass neck a bit harder, until the bottle tipped from the rack, falling end over end toward the floor. As the glass shattered, I knew we were in for something. Andrew moved down the racks with a creeping fascination as one after another the bottles crashed, spilling purple through the aisle.
Moments like that: I guess you could say we lived for them.
I was sure I heard a commotion coming our way.
What happened next wasn’t a decision, exactly. I asked myself if I had the nerve to bust for the exit, and the answer arrived with a jolt to my thighs, igniting a flurry of strides. My arms cradled the chilled box. I heard Andrew chuckling behind me. As we passed the checkout station, an employee cried, “Hit the doors! The doors!”
Andrew dashed past me with a gingerly step. He’d been able to leap backyard fences with barely a running start; I’d seen him scale brick buildings—they wouldn’t catch him. The automated doors had closed tight, unresponsive to our jailbreak approach. Evidently they hadn’t locked, because Andrew wrenched them apart, holding them open long enough for me to get a leg through and squeeze myself into the night.
Andrew ran alongside the building’s facade with the awful idea of taking cover in the woods behind.
“Aye,” I said, but it was every man for himself.
I booked ass across the parking lot, cradling the beer, heading for the upper flat, which sat in plain view beyond the avenue. Halfway across the asphalt expanse, I heard the huff and puff of the vigilante gaining on me, steps away from tackling me to the pavement. A voice behind, motoring, “Mo-fucker, mo-fucker, mo-fucker.”
Sacrificing our booty was my only chance. I whirled, tossing the box of beer. It skidded across the blacktop, wide of a husky, bug-eyed employee coming at me with pumping forearms and a face reddened with a need for cruel justice. I saw all this in the space between heartbeats; then fear carried me into a frantic sprint. Running with a singleness of purpose, I opened each stride a little wider, knowing that you never, ever look back until you’re certain you’ve escaped.
WILL WAS SITTING ON the couch, lost in music, as I barged through the door.
“Andrew,” I said. “He started breaking bottles.”
“Yeah?” Will looked as though I’d spoiled a meal he was in the midst of blessing. There was free jazz playing, or one of his psycho-ambient records. His hair was slicked with royal jelly, the latest sleaze he was working. “You never know with Andy,” he said, and Will was one of the only people who could shorten Andrew’s name and get away with it. Andy Dandy—fighting words.
“Andy, Andy,” he said, and went to bed.
I was spooked the way people get when they’ve been bedeviled by a horror flick and cannot rest until they’ve checked the locks, bolted the windows. I switched off the lights and lay on the couch, listening for Andrew’s return or a phone call. Jail, I imagined. Bail money. This was life in the upper flat. How it would be from here on, and I was okay with that.
A half hour passed before Andrew’s steps sounded in the stairwell.
I met him at the door.
“What happened?”
In his hand was a cup of coffee, steady as could be.
“I ran out back, down by the river,” he said. “A rent-a-cop was on me, but he wasn’t going into the trees.” He sipped from his Styrofoam cup. “I would have turned his lights out.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“It’s decaf,” he said. “Here, you take it.”
He wasn’t breathing heavily, not a bit. Andrew was deadpan serene, always. Even when he’d snap, come undone, which wasn’t often, he’d move swiftly and methodically. Only his eyes would go feral, as if he’d stared into an eclipse and seen the end of all of us. You’d have to shake him out of it—after the fight or fire or whatever. Sometimes he’d get that way talking about the solar panels he was saving for. The sun’s energy, quantum what have you. It was a good thing the guard hadn’t found him.
“I threw the beer at the other guy,” I said. “He almost got me.”
“No,” Andrew said, scanning the room like there were energies yet to be detected, as though I were an impartial presence. I never liked it when he did that. “No,” he said. “No, he didn’t. You would have done what you had to.”
Angela and I managed to swap phone numbers through the college radio station where she volunteered as a DJ. We talked for hours, late at night, about books and records and who we understood ourselves to be. She had depths, and wounds, and a giant need for honest love—I heard it in her voice. After I hung up, the memory of her raspy alto and exhalations of cigarette smoke kept me awake, going over whatever we’d said. When the phone bill came, Andrew circled the long-distance charges and made me cough up the fees, which I paid gladly.
Mom and Caitlin said they’d noticed a difference in me. I’d been hugging them chivalrously. One afternoon, I bought them flowers. I’d heard that when love gets a bite on you, it can blind you to your fears, and it was true that I was feeling some type of rapture. Good weather energized me. Music sounded better than ever. I’d even begun cracking jokes at band rehearsals, which I’d leave early enough to call Angela before she fell asleep. Blaine would diddle on his snare, glaring in a way that confirmed he knew what was going down.
By late April, Angela and I finally made a date. I spent the preceding days jogging and doing push-ups, being frugal with my weekly pay while enlisting Caitlin to trim my hair. “You need a professional,” she said, nevertheless putting the shears through a workout, snipping until an undeniable pride crossed her face.
That Saturday, I drove two hours across Michigan toward Kalamazoo, listening to what I believed was sentimental music: the Cure’s “A Strange Day,” “Praise Your Name” by the Angels of Light. It was the first time I’d taken that stretch of highway without the band, and there was something right about it, and a little bit wrong, which made me want to get there that much faster. Arriving in Kalamazoo, I became instantly lost and waste
d an hour tooling around the university my mom had attended thirty years before. When I found Angela’s dormitory, I called her from a pay phone in the lobby.
“I couldn’t do it,” I said. “I had to turn around and go back.”
“You’re downstairs, aren’t you?” she said, magically and shockingly busting my first attempt to pull one over on her.
No sooner had I entered her room than the phone rang and Blaine’s voice came over the answering machine. I stared at the device, the red dot of light that flashed as he spoke. He’d timed this to perfection. I hope you’re both happy, he said. It’s the last you’ll hear from me. I won’t be here tomorrow.
“Man,” I said, “you don’t think he’d—”
“He plays that card,” Angela said. “You have no idea.”
I’d had a man-to-man with Blaine the day before, using the tone my father took when deliberating with cops or busybody neighbors. I told him if he wanted to quit the band, it was fine by me, because my seeing Angela was something destiny had insisted on. He claimed I was breaching the musicians’ unwritten code. “A band,” he’d said, “is like family.” Then he said that I might as well have broken into his house and ganked his wallet, which gave me a clearer idea about his conception of her.
The machine snapped off, and Angela opened her arms. We hugged for the first time, casually, except for the length of it, until the phone rang again.
“Enough of that,” she said, unplugging the device.
Her roommate had left for the weekend, and the space was divided into two very different halves. Angela’s oil paintings and books faced a wall on which her roommate had hung pennants and family photographs. I felt I was exactly where I should be but had no sense of what to do now that I’d arrived. Playing cool, I inspected Angela’s cassettes and discs, finding a number of jewels I’d never have expected. Deep cuts—a Nick Cave bootleg, especially.
“Those are old,” she said. “Are you judging?”
For the sake of touching her, I wanted to reach out and do something goofy to her cheeks. She locked the door, and we avoided looking at each other, and then we laughed because there was this feeling that we had a whole lot to say—but why rush a goddamn thing?
WE TOOK A WALK. We sat on a bench by a pond. Escorting her to dinner, I must have believed our best option to be the palace-sized Italian chain restaurant on the periphery of the local mall. Free bread and a syndicated soundtrack of italiano hits. I made a show of flashing my ID while ordering a bottle of the red stuff, thinking a legal drink would appear classy. I took it down in gulps, putting my stomach in knots. Angela was nineteen and had to sneak nips from my glass because the waitress had made a stink. She hardly touched her noodles and would later tell me she’d been so nervous she’d thrown up before I arrived. I’d never have known. When we stopped for ice cream on the way home, Angela raised her cone in a toast and daubed her nose with it. A vanilla gob slid down her chin as she crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue, and in every second of her joy I felt also the most tender sadness, which made me all the more crazy for her.
Back in her dorm, once night fell, she put on a disc, the Cocteau Twins, angelic-sounding gibberish that, until that moment, had baffled me. A radiator in the corner blasted hot air. Angela pulled off her sweater. Beneath, she wore a black tank top. Her arms were taut from striking ballet poses; her skin had the smoothness of something never before touched. We smoked and clanked beers, each of which she pried open with her teeth because it made me laugh. Her manner of looking me dead in the eye caused me to mispronounce certain words. She didn’t correct me—but she would, soon enough.
The stories we traded felt like they were astrological alignments or proof of our having the same rare blood type. She’d seen her father raise his fists; I’d seen my dad cracked out of his head. I told her my sister had a sad streak. Angela claimed her twin had always outshone her, which seemed unthinkable. And once I kissed her, we did nothing else until the sun rose. Fully clothed. Hands in hair. Our dry tongues figuring out every possible combination there was to discover.
Sometime that morning I broke to use Angela’s bathroom, a chamber full of lotions and hair ties, where in the mirror I noticed a cable of hardened snot clinging to my nostril, twisting onto my upper lip. When I returned, my expression must have looked that of a man who’d just pissed himself midflight.
“How long had it been there?” I pointed to my septum.
“Just about all night.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t care,” she said. “I didn’t want to waste the moment.”
Once the schools let out, Mom was home every day, perfecting her garden. Caitlin took full-time hours at the steak house and lamented the fact that I was rarely around. Angela came home to live with her parents on Grosse Ile, a well-to-do island in the Detroit River that I helped her escape at every chance. At the foot of the Grosse Ile bridge some joker had raised a signpost decorated with the word REALITY and arrows that pointed away from the island and toward the industrial mainland, an apt symbol for what it felt like each time I drew near. By day Angela worked in a chiropractor’s office. Most evenings I drove a half hour south to wait in her parents’ driveway until she slipped out the back door. Then we’d creep through Grosse Ile’s bird sanctuary or cross the bridge into Windsor, Ontario, where the legal drinking age included both of us.
Hoping to make things official, I brought Angela to Dearborn and introduced her to Mom and Caitlin. Angela shook their hands and spoke clean, eloquent sentences. The word “perverse” made its way into their small talk, as did “posthumous,” and I could tell Caitlin was astounded by how unlike Lauren this dark-haired stranger was. My sister seemed to shirk away, perhaps feeling under-spruced and underdressed, except for the silver watch Lauren had given her many months prior. Angela wore no makeup at all but had added a new piercing—a steel band that clamped her upper lobe.
“She looks so young,” my mom said. “A beauty.”
Caitlin nodded. Though she was three months older than Angela, and an inch taller, my sister was stunted by my new love’s unspoken intensity, her sharp green eyes, which looked straight at you, took in your details. Yet another thing I loved about her. And I interpreted by Caitlin’s enhanced shyness that she found Angela at once dangerous and enviable. The two of them smiled at each other with friendly, uncertain faces, like devotees unsure whether their religion was one and the same.
My dad happened to drop by that evening, greeting us with a black eye and head gash he claimed to have suffered while opening his kitchen cupboards. Caitlin opted to roll with this one, letting him take the floor. His mood was all shine, and he turned up his charm, stealing the scene with a few wisecracks. “You let me know if he gives you a hard time,” he told Angela. “I’ll take care of it.” Other than his gash, he looked in fighting spirits—I was glad to see it, to see Angela smiling as he jived away. It wasn’t until later, once we were alone, that she said, “You have your mom’s eyes and your dad’s face.”
ANGELA’S PARENTS WERE STINGY about lending her the family car, which stranded her on that island between Canada and America. They grounded her for being out past her curfew and were ready to battle at any time; in the near past there’d been fists and hair pulling, bruises and soul-burning insults of a psychotic nature. Angela was just beginning to disown them, truly and irrevocably, as I was slowly comprehending the miracle that a person like her had risen from such ugliness. Hearing about her parents inspired gratitude for my own. When the night came to sit down at their dinner table, I drove to Grosse Ile nipping a quart of Black Velvet with a wish for instant tranquility. Pulling off the highway, I took a clumsy swig as my Escort coasted along a winding exit ramp. The bitter swallow stirred my gut, and without further warning I retched a hot plash of ramen noodles onto my jeans.
Ten minutes of sink showering inside a truck-stop restroom, then spreading the crotch of my dampened jeans beneath the hand dryer, only convinced me tha
t Angela’s parents would sniff me out and know I was a wayward Dearborn shitheel. As it happened, her mother and father shook my hand fiercely, relieved to see any face in lieu of Blaine’s. Angela’s father offered me a beer. Her mom made a point of roasting Blaine, and I nodded accordingly, thrilled that they found me a preferable suitor. Angela scowled because nothing these people said brought her peace. And the farther she got from Blaine, the more ominous he seemed. That very night, he sat parked at the end of her street, revving away the moment I left her house. Days before, he’d trailed us to the Canadian border, turning back only once we reached the foot of the Ambassador Bridge.
“So,” he said at our next rehearsal, “you met the parents.”
Band life was stranger by the day, neither of us saying much more but occasionally locking eyes while we played. Ethan carried on, pounding his bass and talking strategy about upcoming tours. Blaine seemed to delight in the arrangement, as if through proximity he still had the opportunity to spoil my idea of Angela, who’d seen him parked outside her workplace and answered hang-up calls at all hours of the night. He was making it known that he had no intention of quitting. Though I’d never have admitted he was anything more than a hired gun, I felt with him the closeness one does to a rival. Our first Canadian tour was booked, just weeks away, and I saw no choice but to continue as planned. If Blaine could endure it, that was reason enough to prove I could, too.
Having worked three months at the rug shop, I knew the proper threads for any given carpet, how to dye and distress the yarn before needling it through the weave. In the same way, I’d gotten used to the unanswerable questions the Armenians fussed over: what day of the week the burger shack across Michigan Avenue served the best sliders, and who was the richest man in Dearborn. The owners lived in an apartment above the shop. We called the man of the store the General. His wife acted as a saleswoman and worked the showroom. Their youngest son, Georgie, was a failed pop singer whose job was to clean rugs.
Songs Only You Know Page 15
