Gray (4 page)

I say something stupid like “
That
was nice,” and she answers with something like “Yeah.” Then we head back into the party, this time with Her hand in mine. No one is aware of what happened down on the street, that magical transference, that melding of spirit and body, but I have the proof right here in my hand, and I’m not letting go. I have a girlfriend now, with big, beautiful eyes and a neck like a swan’s, perfection in a hoodie. And she’s not letting go either.

•   •   •

Later—much later—she would tell me that she came to the bar that night hoping I would be there. When she saw me, she ditched Her roommate and stood right in front of me at the jukebox. She laughed when she told me all this, rolled right over in bed to shove it in my face. She had set the trap and I had snared my leg in it. Tried to chew it off. To be honest, none of it really bothered me all that much.

W
e
are holding hands. We are having sex. We are each becoming the other. She wears my shirts. I wear Her. We are spending late nights sitting in booths, watching the wind whip down the street. Blow, wind, blow, we are safe and sound. We are holding each other in bed, I am stroking Her hair, she is falling asleep on my chest. We are buying each other used books at Quimby’s (I am
The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music,
1970, featuring DeFord Bailey, the singing shoeshine boy; and John Wesley Ryles; and Charley Pride, “the first Negroe Country star.” She is a tattered
Glory & Praise
song-book, with its Penitential Rites and such lines like “For love is stronger than death, stronger even than hell”—I underlined that bit). We are way symbolic. We are driving to the edge of the city and talking in vague-yet-resolute certainties about our dreams and our futures. We are leaving things in the medicine cabinet. We are falling in love.

This is the good part, the beginning, when everything is new and exciting, when every avenue is clear, every
shop open, even though there is a parade in town. Life is endless, limitless. I haven’t even thought about taking my medication in months; she is every pill I need. I am going in hard, I am putting it all on the table. I am casting off pieces of my past without hesitation. I am becoming who she wants me to be, even though she doesn’t want me to do it. I am giving up the late nights; I am keeping my eyes forward on the street. I am saying good night to insomnia, saying good morning to the sun. I am everything I hated.

And what’s more, I am writing new songs—better songs, the best I’ve ever made. “I love the way you have with words,” she says, looking over my shoulder, but somehow replying “Thanks” after something like that just doesn’t seem like thanks enough. I want to give each word a bit of vindication. But I don’t, because each line is about Her, even if she doesn’t know it yet. There is no magic formula, no deep well from which this flows. I am pouring my love for her into spiral-bound notebooks.

I could throw modesty Her way, but modesty never looked too good on either of us. So, I just nod my head absently. My pen was a life raft in the middle of the ocean, it was the only place I could ever be free. Grammar and punctuation were just someone else’s ownership of my words, so I raged against them, blew through borders, made them mine. I would keep all my secrets inside parentheses. I would hold my breath before every period.

Now I’m writing Saturday-night words. I’m not dying with the words on the page, I am living
for
them. They give me strength. I don’t worry about what will happen
when the inspiration stops, because as long as I have Her, it never will.

•   •   •

We are in the studio now, a tiny space in a squat, corrugated office park outside Chicago. It’s a by-the-hour kind of place, with egg cartons nailed to the walls, and a vending machine in the lounge that is never refilled (someone has written
Why bother?
over the Sunkist button). The matted carpet has cigarette burns, and the recording booth reeks like old coffee and powdered creamer. “The Bill W. smell” is what they call it.

•   •   •

I am sitting on the curb outside the studio now, watching cars idle at the stoplight. Their mufflers rattle, spitting out blue clouds of exhaust. Their wheel wells are caked with salt from the street. The drivers are wearing hats and scarves behind the wheel, smoking with the windows cracked. Someone is listening to the Bears game on the radio. Across the street in the 7-Eleven, the guy behind the corner is reading a magazine. I am pushing around puddles of slush with my sneakers, watching the tips get soaked, waiting for Her to call.

The snow is falling again, tiny flakes that flutter from the gray skies, land on the ground, and quickly disappear. I watch them stick to the arm of my coat, then blur away into nothing more than dark spots. Wet wool. I feel the flakes land on the back of my neck, melting, sliding down under my collar. I drop my feet squarely in an oily puddle,
feel the icy slush ooze into the soles of my shoes. My socks get heavy with the dirty water. An old man emerges from an office across the parking lot, glances at me for a second as he lights up a cigarette, his hand shielding the flame from the falling snow. He pulls his coat tight and looks up at the sky, eyes squinting, then brings his head level with mine. We both stare at each other across the icy asphalt, me with my feet still in the middle of a puddle. A part of me thinks he’s jealous.

The light changes again, and more cars huddle at the intersection, shivering, making the air heavy with exhaust. Piles of snow are on the sidewalk, the peaks black with dirt. The breath is steaming from my mouth, the snowflakes collect on my eyelashes. I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket, and I fish it out. It’s Her. I answer it with “My feet are soaked!” and she laughs. I hop up out of the puddle, duck back under the awning. I listen to Her voice and watch the old man toss his cigarette onto the ground, coughing and spitting phlegm onto the ice. She’s talking about Her exams as the cars rumble away from the light. The snow is starting to fall heavier and faster. It’s beautiful. All of it. Everything is happening.

•   •   •

We finished the record just before Christmas, and right after, we shot the cover.

W
e
have a new drummer now, a masher from Milwaukee. He’s got more tattoos than the rest of us put together, is a militant, straight-edge vegan, and is always ready to fight because of that. He has a shock of red hair, and when he gets going behind the kit, he reminds us all of Animal, which is what we start calling him. Needless to say, our shows get a little more interesting.

•   •   •

Finally a major label has taken notice. We get a little bit of money from the deal, start to realize that, hey, maybe we really can make a living at this, so we decide to say good-bye to our ordinary lives once and for all. I drop out of Columbia one semester short of graduation. My parents are pissed. I’m not. I tell them someday they’ll give me an honorary doctorate from the place, or at least spot me the twelve credits I need for my diploma. Those kinds of details seem trivial when your life is opening up, when the road is unfurling before you, when the future is yours for the taking.

There are, of course, roadblocks. When I tell Her that I’m leaving Columbia, she responds with silence. Then she asks, “But you’re coming back, right?” I tell Her probably not, that the band is starting to do well and I was never really into political science anyway, so this is the right thing to do. I can tell right away that she doesn’t believe me, and that, for the first time in our relationship, she has doubts . . . about me, about us, about the future. She didn’t sign on to be the wife of a rock star, she didn’t contemplate that she’d be left behind while I went off on my adventures. Most important, she thinks this is silly, some foolish children’s crusade. She doesn’t actually say any of this, but I can tell just by looking at Her that it’s what she’s thinking.

“What’s wrong?” I ask Her, even though I already know the answer.

“No, nothing. I’m
happy
for you,” she says, adding emphasis to take all joy out of the word. “It’s just . . . I don’t know, you know? Couldn’t you just wait until you’re finished at Columbia? I mean, it’s only a couple of months, and maybe we could get a place together in the meantime, so when you come back, we can—”

“But I don’t
want
to come back,” I spit. “I don’t ever want to come back here again. This place has nothing for me anymore.”

It was probably the wrong thing to say. I didn’t believe it anyway, but I didn’t care. Something in the way Her voice sounded, something in Her tone, something in Her throat . . . I’m not sure
what
it was, but it signified doubt and had flipped a switch inside me. It made me want to
hurt Her. So I swung for the fences, I let the uppercuts fly. I blew this entire issue out of proportion. Such is the way with these things.

“Oh, nothing, right, I forgot. I guess I’m nothing then, right?” Her voice wavered just a bit. “You think I want to just sit here and wait for you? You think I want to be your dutiful fucking girlfriend? You think I’m okay with doing that? That’s fucking unbelievable.”

This is going to be a disaster. The goddamn plane has crashed into the goddamn mountain.

“I thought you’d be happy for me,” I mumble. “I thought—”

“That’s right, you thought about you, not me. Not us,” she fires back. “I’m really fucking happy for you. Is that what you want me to say? Okay then. I’m
really fucking happy for you
. Leave school, leave me here. I’m fine with it.”

“You know, you can just come out and say you think this is a stupid idea,” I say, for reasons unclear to pretty much
everyone
. “You can say you don’t think I’m good enough to make it. Go ahead, I know it’s what you’re thinking anyway. And that’s fucking bullshit, and it’s not fair, because if this were you making this decision, I’d support it.”

“But it’s not me,” she says, her voice trailing off. “It’s you. And you wouldn’t.”

The air in Her bedroom is heavy with smoke, but the fireworks are over. We sit on opposite corners of Her bed, and she leans forward, burying Her face in Her hands. I watch Her shoulders rise and fall with each breath, first
in slow, measured cycles, then building into more pronounced, irregular jerks. She begins sobbing, and there’s nothing I can do to pull Her back to me, into my arms. Her face is flushed and the tears are pouring out of Her eyes so fast that I can’t wipe them away, so I just sort of rock Her back and forth, kiss Her forehead. I want so badly to tell Her it’s going to be all right, that I’ll leave the band and forget this silly crusade. I want to tell Her that I am ready to settle for this life, that she is all I will ever need in the world, and that we’ll never be apart. I want to tell Her that I will protect Her forever. But none of that would be the truth. So I don’t say anything at all.

The silence is the worst part of any fight, because it’s made up of all the things we
wish
we could say, if we only had the guts. And the unspoken truths here are plain: For the first time, I am thinking of
me
instead of
us
. For the first time, she is worried about our relationship, about whether it can survive the tyranny of distance (and what does that say about our relationship anyway?). And, for the first time, we’re both wondering why we’re doing this. It was a bad fight, it got out of hand quickly, and it was all my fault—seriously, go back and reread the transcript if you don’t believe me—but it was by no means a
pointless
one. If anything, it was too pointed. This is how your heart gets snagged, like a balloon on a barbed-wire fence, this is where pieces of you get torn away.

Her roommate is washing dishes in the kitchen, clanging the pots and pans a bit
too
loudly, just so it’s clear she’s
not
paying attention to our fight. I hate her so much right now.

The tears have stopped flowing, and she sits up, sniffles a bit, rubs Her eyes with the heels of Her hands. She sighs. “How long will you be gone? Weeks? Months?”

I tell Her I don’t know the answer to that, even though I do. The plan, we have been told, is to load back into the van next month, do a run of shows around the Midwest, then head directly off the road and into the studio. And we won’t be recording in Chicago, either: The label has booked us into a studio in Madison, Wisconsin . . . a redbrick building owned and operated by the guy who produced Nirvana’s
Nevermind
(they even recorded some of it there). It is going to cost money. It is going to take a while. It is not going to turn out the way she wants.

Let’s just make it through tonight, worry about the rest later. I can see she is coming around now. I am pulling the wool over Her eyes. I am not the wolf or the sheep. I am another animal altogether. This is not dress-up.

“However long it is, I promise that when I come back, you and I will get a place together,” I lie. “And, if you want to move somewhere else—if you really want to go to Berkeley like you’ve been saying—we’ll go. Together. I promise.”

Smart girls always want to go to Berkeley. Most of them never make it there.