V
The clocks were wound forward an hour, and light flew down early and persisted into evening. My sleep was shallow, and the nights were long and full of chiding conversation from people who seemed actually to be in the room. But when I awoke there was no one. The apartment was muggy. The prairie, increasingly, I had noticed, could not hang on to spring. It was as if there were not enough branches to grip it, hills to hold it—it could get little traction, really, and the humid heat of summer slid right in. Soon the chiding conversation of hovering people was replaced with a feeling that I was being bitten by bugs I couldn’t see. Everything I ate seemed to collect in a clayey ball in my bowel, and my pulse would stop in my sleep then start up again in a hurry, discombobulated, waking me from dreams of blind alleys, naked running, and wrath. I would get out of bed with the scary meat-step of a foot that had gone to sleep and toenails that had loosened oddly, lost a firm grip on the actual toe—all this from a broken heart.
I had not mopped or swept the floors in months. I had used paper towels when there was a spill and hoped that eventually the entire apartment floor would get wiped up this way. This method of cleaning the floor, in patches, I imagined was like writing a poem every day until you eventually said everything about the human condition there was to be said. But it didn’t really work that way, even in poetry: grimy corners remained while certain floorboards got burnished to a slippery hellish gleam. Sometimes, when out of paper towels, I would use one of the wipes I often packed in my backpack for Mary-Emma, and I would start with the counters and work down: it seemed I could clean almost an entire room with just one—that was the sort of delusional housekeeping I was becoming a devotee of.
Not one person asked me about Reynaldo, which made me realize just how private and isolated our affair had been. Temporary and vanished. Like Brigadoon with headscarves. My own emotions felt a disgrace. There was apparently no indication left of me in his apartment—except the blood—and no one came knocking on my door. I felt as blue as the lips of a fish, which was really just a line from a song I had going through my head. “The grass don’t care / the wind is free / the prairie—once a sea—don’t sing no song for me.” Bad grammar was totemic for bass player grief.
What I really felt was this: chopped down like a tree, a new feeling, and I was realizing that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good. And feelings might take on actual physical form, like those sad fish lips, a mouth speared into a gasping silence, or worse. I swung my hair and slapped the face of my bass like Jaco Pastorius, squinting the neck into a fretless blur; perhaps one day I would dig those frets out with a file and fill them with epoxy, too.
Sometimes I would awake too early in my bed and would feel my foot flap beneath the sheets, and I wouldn’t know at first that it was mine. I felt only the movement of the cool sheet, and it felt like someone else was there, in the bed with me, but I would quickly turn to see there was no one; it was always just me. At night before I fell asleep I was not above staring at the phone. Are you there? Yes. Are you falling asleep? Not really. How many fingers am I holding up?
In reality, no one asked me any questions whatsoever. No one said a word, except Sarah.
“Did you see in the papers the story about this student who disappeared? They found blood in his apartment but they don’t know whose.”
“Really,” I said.
“This wasn’t the guy who was taking pictures of Emmie, was it? Or a friend of his?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You see, that’s the problem: Not that I know of. There’s room for possibility.”
Her look at me was a darting thing. I just stared at her without seeing all that much, and I must have looked crazy with unhappiness, because she then came up to me and smoothed my sweater sleeve and petted my arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m going on like this.”
“It’s OK,” I said. It was quasi OK.
She returned to her theme menus. Invasive Species Night: the mustard-vine gnocchi; the steamed zebra mussels; the soup of wild carrot and wild parsnip; the salad of chicory, mustard garlic, fig buttercup, watercress, and burdock. Napkins of human hair! Well, that I just invented, piping up to amuse her, but she said, “Hmm. Yum.” And then there was Endangered Species Night: wild rice and free-range bison; American eel gratin and Chanticleer chicken with short and thick parsnips. Eating endangered species made some ecological sense, she claimed—if it was tasty and grew popular, people would save it?—but I wasn’t paying complete attention. The general idea was that food always survived. I wondered.
“I’m off to the Mill!” Sarah would shout up the stairs. I could see the edge of her white jacket.
“Ciao, Mama!” Mary-Emma would shout down. She was saying so many words these days. “I feepy,” she said when she wanted to go to bed. She loved to watch old Esther Williams movies, which I brought her from the university library, but they either revved her up or wore her out.
“OK. Let’s go.”
“I die,” she said.
“Well, someday. But not for a very long time.”
“I die into the pool!” And she took a flying leap onto her new futon, which Sarah had just bought to transition her out of the crib.
Twice, back in my apartment, the phone rang, and when I went to answer it there was just all this terrible noise: muffled speech, electronic moaning, whooshing sounds of water. “Hello?” I cried repeatedly into the mouthpiece. But I heard only eerie underwater groans. The caller ID on our Radio Shack phone said “cellular call,” nothing more. Dialing star-69 gave me nothing. Later, comically and perhaps correctly, I imagined it was Reynaldo’s cell phone, that he still had me on speed dial and accidentally bumped the keypad and was taking me into the bathroom with him. Some bathroom somewhere. Probably it was flushing noises I was hearing. Or maybe he was on the other side of the world in a hot zone and his phone was trying to blow up something—it wasn’t called a cell phone for nothing—and the secret blow-up code had instead misdialed and reached romantic interference: me.
I began to miss Murph. All I needed was her company, a sense of her presence again. Every day I felt that if she would somehow come back into my life, things would be brighter.
And then astonishingly, she did. As if I’d wished it on a lucky penny: at this perfect time for me, Murph returned, which if it had been earlier would have been a slight bummer as I had recently been using her stuff, bullshit things like her “hair ionizer,” which I had imagined had made my hair shine and took the static out, and her mister—a “handsome mister,” I used to call it—which lightly sprayed mineral water on your face. But as brokenhearted as I felt now, I was using nothing, just letting static electricity streak my hair across my teeth! I had let my face crumble to sand. And then I just walked in one afternoon and there she was, sitting on the couch. She’d arrived the same day as the xylophone and had herself just wheeled it in off the porch.
“This is cool,” she said, pointing at it.
“Hi!” I exclaimed. I dropped my books and hugged her. I was so happy to see her.
“Yes.” She smiled.
“Are you? High?”
“Yup.”
“As a kite?”
“As the Hubble!” She looked tired. “I feel like a veteran.”
“Of highness?”
“No.”
“Of what, then? Hineyness?” Ritual ribaldry was part of the Muwallahin Sufic way, if I remembered correctly.
“A veteran of the gender wars.”
“Yeah, well, me, too. But I’m afraid those were never declared.”
“Fucking do-nothing Congress! And we never got a parade or anything!”
“We’ve got marching bands,” I said, pointing in the direction of the stadium.
“That’s not a parade,” she said.
“It’s a quasi parade.”
She and her boyfriend had also broken up. “He put me in the freezer,” sh
e cried, “and didn’t even have the decency to chop me up first!” And so together we stayed in our apartment, smoking cigarettes and making up tunes for our grief. “He played me like a yard sale lute! If he calls here, give him the tone, man.”
But he never did.
“Do you realize,” I said, “that when women have orgasms scans show large parts of their brains go completely absent on the screen?”
“Yes, well, that corresponds with my anecdotal research in the field.”
“Mine, too.”
I would get out my bass, though the strap was always slipping—“Wait, let me put this strap on,” I invariably said, and Murph would cry, “Hoo-hee!” There wasn’t an innuendo anywhere she couldn’t be the first to locate and illumine with her hoots.
We played all the things I’d recently made up. Though in real life a boy’s love was a meager thing, we liked what a boy’s love could do in a poem or a song. “Driftless Dan, he had no plan / Prairie Pete, he got cold feet / Great Lake Jake was hard to take …” And so we would give back our own grieving songs of sorrow at love’s mystifying impersonations. We even had a song called “Mystifying Impersonation.” Also a sad, slow one titled “Why Don’t the Train Stop Here?” which Murph thought was too country; even when I changed the don’t to won’t, she found it unfocused, with its verse about a church turned into condos, though I liked that part best. “It’s like ‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,’” I protested.
“It’s not,” she said. “Believe me. It’s not.” She knew how to speak without gentleness or malice, either one, and preferred my song “Everyone Is You—in Your Dreams,” based on something someone told me once about dreams, but also a defiant anthem to rally us against the narcissism of the betraying lover! Oh, yeah: impotent vengeance, baby, sing your song! What could be better than words that worked every which way? Who cared if the train stopped here or not? I would lay in the rhythm with my electric bass and she would throw herself into that xylophone with ecstasy and pain, a nearby cigarette perched on a saucer, sending out its smoke like the tiny campfire of two tiny prisoner squaws. Who knew she could play?
“It’s really just a toy,” she said. “Anyone can.”
“That’s not really true,” I said, unconvinced and impressed. Murph’s hands and arms moved up and down the keyboard with the undulating movements of a squirrel—sine and cosine interlocking. She would then suddenly stop and point at me with her right mallet, indicating that it was time for my solo, and I would let it rip—or try. Murph liked our collaborations better than such lone efforts by me as “Dog-Doo Done Up as Chocolates for My Brother,” and we seemed best on the rocking ones, like “Summer Evening Lunch Meat,” a song we had written, combining the most beautiful phrase in English with the ugliest, and therefore summing up our thoughts on love. “Summer evening” was what God had provided. “Lunch meat” was the hideous human body itself. When I lay the rhythm in with my bass, when I did it right, Murph could take over with the xylophone and it sounded great. Well, maybe not great. A little stupid, but sweet. “Let your bass-face shine!” she shouted. Probably my features were contorted in concentration and transport. In between the more rollicking stuff, in useful weariness, we found ourselves sailing even on our waltzy ballads:
Did you take off for Heaven
and leave me behind?
Darlin’, I’d join you
if you didn’t mind.
I’d climb up that staircase
past lions and bears,
but it’s locked
at the foot of the stairs.
Are you in paradise
with someone who cares?
Oh, throw down the key to the stairs.
One can see shining steps
and think love is enough,
Then sit at the bottom and wait.
The climb up to sweetness needs more than my love:
Darlin’, please just open the gate …
Can someone just open the gate?
“I want to write something, too,” said Murph one evening, and because it was night, and because we’d had two beers apiece, she grabbed my bass and picked awkwardly away at a new song, written right there from scratch, from a four-stringed see-through, each of us making up a line and the other one supplying the next line, and so on.
Why did I let you make off with my head?
Now when I go out I pretend that you’re dead.
But if I glimpse you,
don’t know what I’ll do,
’cause I’ve never been as crazy
’bout someone as crazy as you.
Madness is sadness—
I loved you the most.
Now my future’s the house
for your lunatic ghost.
Why are the leaves still bright green
and the sky so damn blue?
Can’t they see I’m just crazy
’bout someone as crazy as you?
She wanted to rhyme “don’t abhor us, that would bore us, just adore us” with—“Which is it?” she asked. “Is it clitoris or clitoris?”
I didn’t know. Why didn’t I know? “It may depend on which you have,” I said.
To say all this made us laugh our heads off does not begin to express its consolations. Soon every night I’d get out my electric and we’d do every tune we knew how in easy keys of G-minor and E-minor, with riffs that were like climbing the same three stairs over and over. We started making up songs that had no choruses, just one cursed, merciless verse after verse, complaint like a flipping knife wandering around, debating, resting no place at all. In line after line, we tried to compose meaningful phrases with twinned endings: sinister to rhyme with minister, cubic with pubic, flatbread with flatbed, bearable reason with terrible treason, lucky with Kentucky—well, the songs angrily made no sense. We took turns, each of our verses sounding like the rhymes of stalkers bleakly drunk with love, a little hope like dust beneath our nails, from where we clawed, though all was flawed, still, now, our lives were shorn of plot, cuz baby you were all I got, waiting out here in the parking lot, beneath the stars, outside of bars, there I am, baby, there, there, idling in the fescue, waiting for your rescue, but you’re nowhere, why don’t you care that love is rare—my love is rare!—I’m going to drive to see … what you think about me.
We reached a point at which it was a good thing there was no chorus.
One night we got dressed in bag-lady clothes, got a shopping cart filled with beer, and went down by the railroad tracks just to howl like wolves. This was late-stage Sufism, mid to late.
“When we make our CD?” said Murph as we trudged back home, “we’ll put a razor blade right inside each and every one.”
“And those little bottles of gin,” I added. “And a pistol.”
“You’re great,” said Murph, putting her arm around me.
“Yeah, well, I feel like I’m headed for a future where I’m just every guy’s sister,” I bleated. “I think the fact that I read The Rules in Mandarin didn’t help any.”
Murph smiled, but what she said next was unsettling. She put her hands tenderly to my face and said, “Look at you! You’re nobody’s sister.”
Outside in the flowerbeds the yellow irises had unfurled in the sun with their lolling nectarine-pit tongues. There was a kind of ticking, humming all around, as if every living thing were contemplating bursting.
“I’m wondering why Emmie has been singing this particular song,” said Sarah, pointedly, in the kitchen. She had her chef’s hat on, the one that wasn’t a conventional toque but a brimless canvas cap.
“A song?”
“‘Prairie Pete, he got cold feet’?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I made that up.”
“That’s OK,” she said, as if I needed forgiving, which I could see I might.
“I’ve also been singing regular standards with her,” I added hopefully.
“Yes,” she said. “‘I Been Working on the Railroad.’ I’ve heard her sing that. Ther
e’s just two things I’m worried about with that: the grammar and the use of slave labor.”
I wasn’t sure I was hearing things correctly. Her sense of humor was still not always explicit or transparent or of a finely honed rhythm, and it sometimes left me not in the same room with it but standing in the hall. The words “You’re serious?” flew out of my mouth.
“Kind of.” She looked right through me. “I’m not sure.” And then she went upstairs, as if to go figure it out. When she came back down she added, “Correct subject-verb agreement is best when children are learning language, so be careful what you sing. It’s an issue when raising kids of color. A simple grammatical matter can hold them back in life. Down the road.”
“Yes,” I said mechanically.
“We are pioneers,” she said to me. “We are doing something important, unprecedented, and unbearably hard.” And then she left again, and I turned away to hide my own teariness behind a door, because I was tired and wasn’t exactly clear what Sarah was talking about.