Good Kids: A Novel (21 page)

“Did you guys see Andy Samberg?” asked Todd. “He was on the escalator like five minutes ago. He was wearing purple high-tops.” His voice grew louder. “He and the Newsom came to an opening at our friend’s gallery last night and they canoodled by the donations tube for like twenty minutes. He made so much money—everyone was going over there to look at them. They had to donate to justify being in that part of the room.”

There was a strange silence. We all experienced, I think, a brief shiver of further degradation. The chill of caste. We didn’t like that Todd, Todd who stood straight, possessed a noble chin, made music nobody wanted to buy, would speak of Joanna Newsom and Andy Samberg as if they were higher beings.

“It doesn’t shock me at all that Andy would do that,” said Julie. “I’ve met him a couple times. I can completely see him going apeshit for the Queen of the Elves.”

“And I have no idea who he’s talking about,” Khadijah said to us. Everyone stared at her for a moment. “Sorry,” she said. “I haven’t, like, been in front of a television in, like, fifteen years.”

“You can’t say that in Los Angeles,” said Todd, looking at everyone and smiling to show it was a joke.

“He makes funny videos,” said Cora. “For
Saturday Night Live.
” She crossed her arms, stuck out her hip, and changed the subject. “I guess it must be over with Joanna and that musician dude named Smog. I feel like there were new pictures of them together on a blog last month.”

“That all went down like eight months ago,” said Williamstown Guy. “Maybe that’s what she’ll sing about.”

The lights blinked. Our parties separated, and we rode the silver escalators to our seats.

“Well,” said Julie, “that was the worst conversation of our lives.”

“There was no vibe between me and Khadijah whatsoever. Couldn’t you tell?” A stone—what did it matter? It was an in-joke between high school friends.

“Please try to help me believe it,” she said. “I know I’m being difficult. But maybe a little harder than you’re trying, please.”

During the first half of the concert, Joanna Newsom played with the orchestra. For five minutes, this was dazzling. The sheer gall of her was an act in itself. Her hair was up in deep red ribbons, and her gown and heels were the same color. In front of all the professional musicians in tuxedos, she plucked her giant harp with her gawky arms. She growled out the low notes and howled out the high ones, like a horny, lonely Appalachian.

“She’s sitting on some great big balls,” whispered Julie in my ear. “You have to give her that. To sing like a country-ass little girl, next to pogrom survivors with violins? She’s like this alien being.”

But the songs she played with the orchestra were the songs from her most recent album, which were long and impersonal and complicated and very smart. They were not the songs of hers I loved. Soon I felt she was dragging the orchestra behind her, and I wanted her to shed them.

We were all growing restless. Cora tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a pair of opera glasses. They were made of brass, small and gleaming.

“Gordon found these at some vintage store in Vermont,” she said. “Aren’t they awesome?”

They were. I found I could sweep over the faces across the chasmic hall, and catch people I knew with their guards down. Directly across from us, a little ways down, I found a multigenerational encampment of Lampoon people. In the center there was a senior
Simpsons
writer, based in the reputedly less funny, older, more powerful
Simpsons
writers’ room. He sat with his arm around his
girlfriend, an arborist suffering cancer or alopecia, who wore a pink kerchief. I’d once seen her at a party, watching her three-year-old daughter from a defunct marriage admire the hair of the woman playing Legos with her, and the look on her face as she watched was one I could not decode: maybe horror, maybe delight. To their left, a row of twentysomethings, legs crossed, from the
Simpsons
’ reputedly funnier younger room, one of them with a brunette who had a late-night eclectic hour at the public radio station in Santa Monica, drinking from a large, surely smuggled-in bottle of beer, shaking a pill from a red case into her hand, chasing it down, scribbling a note in pen on her white, hard palm, brow furrowed. Someone had told me once that she was so revered as a hookup that undergrads who had never met her compared reports of her behavior in the Lampoon Castle. To their right, a muscular, young graphic designer, with a scrawny, bearded animator who lived in the desert. They appeared to watch the stage with diminishing interest. This would have been my father’s world, I thought, if he’d been born fifteen years later, twenty; the great error of his life was to show up at the Lampoon before it became a portal to comedy. He might have turned his will to rant into a marketable skill.

Khadijah and Todd were a few rows to their right, a little higher. I averted my gaze.

I handed Julie the glasses. “Sorry this is boring,” I said, and took her hand. I felt at home, in an egg I didn’t want to break.

“Look at the nosebleeds,” she said, adjusting the focus. “See the guy with the shaggy gray hair and the glasses? With the Asian girlfriend? He was Cora’s English professor at USC. He took her virginity when she was twenty, a month after her dad died.”

I took back the opera glasses and found the couple she’d described. They were dignified, contemplative, frowning at Newsom from their inexpensive seats. His glasses were blocky and green. Hers were diamond-shaped, purple.

“He cheated on Cora with that woman,” Julie whispered. “She’s something called a Language poet. How humiliating, having a pretentious asshole cheat on you with a pretentious loser.”

“You’re being very subtle,” I said. We kissed, fast but hard.

With the glasses, I gave the English professor another look. He was leaning forward now, one elbow on his knee, his hand on his mouth, as if he was deeply moved.

“There is something all of the people here have in common,” said Julie. “But I can’t put my finger on what it is.” She rested her head on my shoulder. It was a joke between us, the size of her head; it was truly large, almost doll-like on her body. “It’s on the tip of my tongue, what it is, this thing connecting everyone here,” she whispered. “The name of the category.”

Intermission came, and I wanted the weight to remain on my shoulder. The offense against my sister still smarted. But I wanted the place we occupied in this egg with other people we’d met at parties to remain recognizable, to our friends and to ourselves. Something of this bond was in my blood. Something in me loved this kingdom. Just as forty-five minutes earlier I had felt the warmth issuing from the hearth of the motherland, so did I now feel that the home I had found in Los Angeles with Julie was twice as warm, twice as real.

“Come with me,” I said.

There were lines out the bathrooms, but I found an unmarked door a few feet left of the bar that opened on a supply closet. A bartender in a vest looked at us for a moment as if to stop us, but I thought she’d leave us alone when she saw who Julie was, and she did. There was a cinematic quality to Julie’s life, in which the boring obstacles remained out of frame, because people deferred to her. It infuriated me, and made me hate the world for its submissiveness, even as I felt like I was riding in a car through the Great Plains, very fast.

I closed the door, after I’d put back the three mops I’d knocked over, and the three cardboard boxes of sponges I’d knocked over putting back the mops. I leaned against a wall and pulled her toward me. The knowledge that my behavior had endangered what we had, had hurt her, made me want to give her something.

Julie checked her watch. “If this concert wasn’t so boring, I might not be this kind of girl. But oh well.”

At first it was awkward. We fell back on our usual talk as we kissed and put our hands down each other’s pants. The words were so familiar they were more comforting than erotic: the schools we would get our children into, Crossroads and/or Saint Ann’s; the things we were going to say to each other on our wedding night in Topanga Canyon; the fact that we owned each other.

“Do I really own you?” she asked. A warmth circuited between us.

“You own my back, my labor,” I said. “You and your babies own my hands.” The plain fact that neither my back nor my hands had any market value was banished by our kissing, by her hands and mine. It was one of those moments in making out when dry old promises bloom unexpectedly into strange new ones. We were safe.

The mops and the boxes fell over again as we fled into the light. I thought of the bartender in the vest. She or one of the custodians would have to clean up the mess. In the orange-carpeted hallway, I felt I was rushing upward, to take my place on Olympus among the gods, and toppling downward, to some plush vermilion level of Hell reserved for jail punks and homeless people who blew teenagers in Grand Central. Both seemed tolerable. Perhaps I was a traitor to my family. But this engagement, I thought, this soon to be marriage, is my home.

We reached our row before the ushers shut the doors. Cora and Gordon looked at us with poker faces as we fell beside them. Julie sat next to Cora this time, and put her hands on Cora’s belly.

“You are going to be the most cultured little baby,” Julie cooed. We were both in good spirits, contented, slightly sleepy. “When I was your age, all I heard was people talking about money.”

Then everybody stopped talking and clapped, because Joanna Newsom had swished back onstage, in a new dress, with new hair. There were whoops, and libidinous grunts. She had the knack for shapeshifting so prized in musicians. Her legs were exposed, and her hair fell across her shoulders. The orchestra was gone. She sat alone on a hard stool, by her towering harp, and the dress she wore was a silver that toyed with the light.

“BAREFOOT?” wrote Julie in the little red Il Bisonte notebook she kept in her bag. “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING
ME?” And barefoot she was, her feet gleaming in the lights. Julie laid her head back on my shoulder, and we were safe in our egg.

The stage was almost bare now. There was only the twenty-five-year-old before us, and her otherworldly harp.

“This is a new song,” she said. “I don’t even know what it’s called yet.” She reached out and hit the first strings as she sang a high, pigeonish note. The words were indecipherable. The note spilled down into a staccato flourish; it sounded like Smokey Robinson and like
The Marriage of Figaro
. Now that there was a solitary voice with one instrument, the orchestra retired to the wings, I couldn’t help but remember Khadijah’s voice imitating Nancy’s, the high, sharp tones that rose up and filled the classroom.

“Do you think she’s singing for Andy Samberg?” Julie asked me. “Or for the guy she left named Smog?” It was the question that must have been on any number of minds in this room: To whom did this music belong? The new man or the old?

“Both,” I said. Her head reestablished itself on my shoulder.

The Smokey Robinson/
Marriage of Figaro
theme was only prologue to the body of the song. It was a folk song, in its essence, a lament. Technical training gave out. Newsom drew her face close to the microphone and confided.

“You’ve got the run of the place,” she sang, “now that you’re running around.” And on the last syllable she drew back and rasped, her throat half closed. The pleasure of running, and the dizziness and illness of it—that was her subject. I turned to see the faces of my friends and found Cora looking up at the professor in the nosebleeds, though she had her hands on her swollen belly. I took the glasses off the arm of my seat and looked at the spot where I had not allowed myself to look before. Khadijah was a head in a honeycomb of heads, and I didn’t dare linger on her. All I could read on her face was a tension, an absence of happiness.

This music was for fallen men and women, I decided, gazing into the sectioned hollows of the ceiling, though the notion was jejune. The betrayals that bound Cora to the professor and bound me to Khadijah and bound the professor to his girlfriend and the
singer of the song to the men we couldn’t see, they would all be forgiven. We would all be spared, because our type of behavior had its place in the world. This music could not have been written without shame.

“The phantom of love,” sang Joanna Newsom, “moves among us at will.” It wasn’t until the song was over and applause filled the room that I missed Julie’s head on my shoulder. She was sitting erect, looking at me. The opera glasses were in her hand. She’d deduced, I knew, whose face I’d been searching for and staring at. The warmth we’d earned in the closet dissolved in the air, victim to a colder, prettier truth.

After the encore, we filed down the escalator, and outside to the podiums where valets took our tickets and ran for our cars. Khadijah and Todd must have street-parked; they were nowhere to be seen.

Gordon and I embraced. It was what we had to do, after a concert like that. As two musicians, or at least an aspiring-musician-cum-animator-cum-aspiring-musician and a middling-to-failed-musician-cum-aspiring-studio-engineer, we had to acknowledge we’d witnessed a moment of brilliance. We didn’t say the word, but that’s what it had been. Whether Joanna Newsom would be able to sustain it on an album, she’d struck that golden bell.

“We have to get you in the garage.” He whispered in my ear, so that his pregnant wife couldn’t hear. “I’m going to have the talk with Cora in the morning.”

We shook hands and belabored each other about the head and shoulders the way I’d seen the popular seventh-grade boys do when I was a despised pacifist in the school yard. Segueing into self-parody, we bumped chests.

“Look, Cora,” said Julie. “The men are so hot from the elf queen show they have to blow off some steam.”

“Didn’t you guys like the concert?” I asked.

“Her persona can be a little annoying,” said Cora. “But the music—”

“What’s wrong with her persona?” asked Gordon, too quickly. He was smiling, but there was gravel in his voice. “Can
you not be jealous of every female artist your age who gets to be the center of attention, even when she’s kind of yodeling with a harp?”