Lit Riffs (12 page)

author inspiration

I was a big grunge fan in the early nineties, and one of my favorite albums was Pearl Jam’s Ten. I loved the band and the lyrics suited me: angry rants about poverty, violence, alienation—and especially, the treatment of children. I was in grad school at the time and the topic of my dissertation was youth politics. Songs like “Jeremy” and “Why Go” seemed especially meaningful.

I started the story inspired by “Why Go” back in 1995, when I was on my third copy of
Ten
and still pissed off about all the kids who were “diagnosed” and sometimes even institutionalized because they couldn’t or wouldn’t fit in. As the story evolved, though, it became less about child politics and more about the human condition. The world is full of people rejected by mainstream culture; Stacey isn’t as alone as she thought. This is a possible answer to the question of the song “Why go home?”—to make a connection with the other strangers, to maybe even achieve a limited form of transcendence, with anger still intact.

aimee bender

I
moved in ten years ago, with one suitcase and a brokenness, like the bird that has hit the window by accident. If you’re that bird, you are surprised for the rest of your life, because air, which you know better than anything else, is not supposed to turn hard and painful. The air should be soft enough to soar inside. That’s the worst of it for the stunned bird, whose body heals fast enough; for me, too.

I had my suitcase and a small hat on, a proper hat with a brown band, and the building rose up next to me on the corner and the front door was open, and there was a For Rent sign up in one of the high windows, enough to invite anyone inside, except no one else on the busy street was stopping but me. The security guard at the front smiled and asked if I was interested in looking, and I nodded, yes please. My one suitcase, getting hard to hold. The handle slippery with my anticipatory sweat. I hardly even noticed the lobby then, what with its silvery walls and the tinkling sound of glass mobiles above.

The room they were offering was everything in its right place, and the spectacular view of the far-reaching corners of the city made me finally put the suitcase on the floor and stretch out my clenched hand, and take off my proper hat and sit down in a chair. I’ll take it, I told the security guard, who apparently felt safe enough to leave his post for longer and show me the excellent bathroom and spacious closet. We signed papers together, and someone came rolling by with a sandwich cart, and I ate a turkey on sourdough and lemonade with cherries floating redly beside the ice cubes. When the security guard left, I rolled around on the towels, white as salt, still warm from the dryer.

It took me honestly a year to notice that I had not gone outside once. Who ever needs to do such a thing? When there is a fine restaurant and bar, and so many different rooms galore from floors 1 to 42. And the security guard team there twenty four hours keeping it safe for all of us, and a basement in case of war. A bomb shelter. A greenhouse terrarium. Iron balustrade fire escapes and ballrooms if you want to throw a ball. On the seventh floor, you’ll find rooms of mothers, and they will hold you on their laps and stroke down your hair. I try to see when they leave to go home, but whenever I knock, they are always there. Beautiful mothers, with tired, warm eyes. I bring them armfuls of flowers from the nursery on the third floor, and I take hours to make the decision: who gets the lily, who the rose, who fits with dahlia, who is all orchid. And then there’s his room, down the row from mine. Our meeting in the hall, oops, was that your foot? Sorry, sorry, hello. Hello. That first lunch together, in the squares of reflected sunshine. Who would notice the absence of fresh air in the presence of all this? The thought did not cross my mind for a year and then it crossed it so fast I missed it and it took three more years for it to cross again for long enough to consider, and then three more after that to gain the strength to form some questions and then three more still to decide on an answer. After all, did I really miss the rest of the world that much, which I could see so clearly outside my window? I could hear the nasty traffic outside, and sometimes the yelling. And him in his room, and me, lying in bed together on Sunday mornings with someone bringing us coffee, and the liquid look of his eyes, and the way he says he loves me and knows me. I love to let him know me for me. He hates it when I return to my room to shower.

But all that is other information. Don’t get sentimental on me now. All that is past history, and the ten years is up. You, all of you, standing around here in the lobby, don’t you have other places to go? Aren’t you late for work already? Everyone is in perfect gray suits, both men and women, but the heels for the women are all different heights so that each woman becomes the same height, or that appears to be the grand plan. The very short woman is wearing heels that are almost a foot and a half high. She is wobbling like crazy but she understands the power and purpose of unity. The tallest woman is in flats. There are men here, too, but their heights are different: it’s the women who want to be alike. They want to perform their oneness, against me. They turn in profile and become a series of portraits over the tall glass windows. Over the growing whiteness of the snow outside.

They all speak at once. There is no reason, they tell me, to leave here except for the reason of leaving, and there are seminar sessions they hold in the conference halls to remind me that leaving makes no sense, that it is a foolish idea. And that that new hat is foolish and that the idea, once again, is foolish, in case I did not hear the first time. Put down the chair. All I need. And he is here. And love is here. And the building is enough, isn’t the building enough? A building, with everything you need in it, should be enough. The warmth of a welcome lap. Look, outside, at the tumbling, cold snow. There are starving people, and not only in China.

On this day, the day I decide it is not enough, he is reading the paper. No, he is broken in pieces on the floor. He is about to die; no, he is reading the paper. He is unconscious. He is bleeding on the floor from pain, the pain in his heart starting to flow out his mouth in red rivers. No, no, he is reading the paper: the funnies section. He likes to read me the comics out loud even though they don’t make sense without the pictures. I don’t ever understand the joke.

He is dying, they say, in tinny voices, through the intercom into my room. Look at his pallor. Soon he’ll be dead on the floor from your callous departure. He is choking. He is suffering a wound inside his gut that is eating him, wormlike, from the inside out. I have to look again. Listen, I say out loud, it’s true that he is sad, but he is also reading the paper. I say it as firmly as I can but the intercom only works one way. I make the finishing touches on my new hat, made from discarded towels, and dead flowers from the room of mothers, and seashells I tore from the mirror border. I tie it under my chin in the now unbordered mirror while he reads the paper aloud.

Let me tell you a comic, he says. Let me tell you about this one, see there’s this apocalyptic landscape and a dog is in it with only two legs left and he’s about to tumble into a priest and instead he—

You were once, then, the whole sum and total of the up and down and north and south, in my body a quiet peacefulness. The warm lap I find when I look in your eyes. Please. The rescue of your gentle hands. Thank you. But then the warm lap that lasted about ten minutes until I had to sit on my hands in order to withstand the peacefulness and then no hands but no legs either, crossed, in order to hold on to the quiet, and then the gag over my mouth, too, and no words, and your love is a blanket I could fall asleep under forever.

The women in the lobby with their equilateral heels wait as I descend. Tap tap tapping. They know I’m coming. I take the stairs, winding down and down, the chair bumping against the rail, and there they are, everyone, all their faces in rows against the snow outside. And I smell the ocean off my brim and maybe it’s only that that keeps me walking, the smell of fish and sea salt and roses, with the chair so firmly raised in my hands. He’s reading the paper, I declare, but my voice is small. They shake their heads together. Nope, they tell me. Foolish girl you are. He is shivering cold. He is small and weak. He is useless and cannot move. You selfish, unfair girl.

He is reading the
paper
, I say. There’s this comic of a dog in the apocalypse.

No suitcase this time, and a new hat. I bring the chair higher, so that it rakes the underside of the glass mobiles and pokes them into clinkings and ringings. Hold on. The door. I have to elbow my way through the suits to get there. I don’t even recognize the security guard this time, and usually I know them all by name: Safety Smith. Shelter Perry. Comfort Jackson. Solace Sherwood. Sanctuary Wu. Custody Koffman. Asylum Jones.

When you have only seen the world through glass for the last ten years it is daunting to imagine it unglassed. The bare world, unclothed by windows. I remember danger. I am not stupid. Someone clicks on the lobby speakers and there’s his voice, loud, everywhere: Oh
no
, he says; You can’t leave him like that, they say; Excuse me, miss, says the security guard; Ring! trill the mobiles, and Suck Suck goes the glass door, and then in a wash there’s that same air from long, long ago, flooding in. New air. Large air. They all shout at me through the closing door. Please! Stop! Never! Crisis!

Outside, enter the blurrier world. It smells blastingly full out here, like popcorn and cars and trees and shit and bright sun—not quite sweet, and a little bit gross, but my nose is about to fall off my face from the change. And the noise! Honk honk. Fuck you. The boom of a bass line.

I won’t turn even though I can feel their faces, mouths open in O’s, pressed up against the glass, all the same height. I know the way he’s sitting in the room that was mine, his foot on his knee, the slow closing of the paper. The pulse of sadness living in the arch of his eyebrow. I loved him, truly. I loved the mothers with their wide-open laps who have been telling me gently to go for months now. Last I saw, they were ankle-deep in petals, and their hair had grown white. We are all dying. I still have the chair in my hands, fingers brittle from holding it so hard, and I put it down and sit. Snow crunches underfoot, and car exhaust smokes out everywhere. The chair is sturdy. I’ll take it a few more blocks soon, away from the faces behind me, and sit down there, too. If I have to, I will sit my way across the entire city.

My brain has a lobby. It has a lobby at its front tip, where the thoughts wait after they have come out of hiding, from deep down inside the murkiest corridors of the mind. They fly down the fire escape and pause in the silvery room, deciding if they will launch themselves into the world. Some never do. Some slink right back down into the bomb shelter forever. But others make it out. Today. I take a breath and let the bird go, her song and my story, where it exits the door of my mouth. This is the action I will take. This is all I can ever give, the most I can give always, and my darling, my love, it will have to be enough.

author inspiration

And I still can’t get over how Siberry can have a line so absurd—“Take off that foolish hat. Put down the chair”—and wrap it in such beautiful three-part harmony and reverberating keyboards that it becomes almost holy. Suddenly, the foolish hat is really, really important and holding up a chair seems like the right thing to do. I’ve often puzzled over how to replicate that tone clash in prose—how to make the ridiculous luminous. The song also got me thinking about the idea of lobbies, of waiting rooms, of places of pause and limbo. An interim space. How much time we spend in our internal lobbies, waiting. Deciding to go out or go in. Waiting for someone to come out with a clipboard and call us. Wearing our foolish hats and holding our chairs with both powerful hope and defiance.

anthony decurtis

It was a gray Tuesday morning in early December, and as Julian Marks stood at the window staring at the Hudson River and the soft sky above New Jersey, he found himself longing for a cigarette. He felt the yearning in his chest. It was so voluptuous, lighting the match, smelling the sulfur and putting the filter to his lips, feeling the smoke hit the back of his throat and then sucking it into his lungs and then luxuriantly exhaling. Voluptuous, but now just a memory. Like drinking, haunting the clubs, chasing girls, and getting high—cocaine, which he loved, and pot, primarily—smoking had become too debilitating an indulgence once he’d begun to slog his way through his forties. Somehow, getting older seemed almost exclusively to consist of passages like that, a continual judicious editing of potentially dangerous pleasures from his life. It was a process that sometimes seemed designed to eventually render you entirely safe, just in time for your death. Outside his window, a beautiful blue bird flew by, floating on the wind, heading north along the river.

Marks was fifty-two now, and he never felt better, physically at least. He worked out for an hour every day, which bored him to stupefaction, but, once again, seemed necessary. While he was not as thin as he was in the whip-thin splendor of his pop-star glory days two decades or more ago, his weight was well within the acceptable range for his height, which was five feet ten inches. His cholesterol was normal; ditto his blood pressure, though salt, too, had, alas, gone the way of smokes, whiskey, fast girls, and blow.

He walked away from the row of windows overlooking Riverside Drive, crossed the loft-size room, and seated himself on a stool at the kitchen counter, his urge to smoke forgotten. His dog, Gracie, a 160-pound Saint Bernard, sauntered into the room and dropped herself clumsily at his feet. After six years together, longer than all but one of his girlfriends and wives, neither of them required a greeting. Their intimacy was deep and assumed. It was 7:20 a.m., and he knew that within twenty minutes or so, she would need to eat and go out. And she knew that he knew. He popped
Rubber Soul
into his CD player, poured himself a decaffeinated coffee, added some skim milk, and began to think about his day. The sound of “Drive My Car” flooded the apartment.

After mentally rifling through his possible responsibilities, he realized, happily, that the day essentially required nothing of him. Deal with the dog. Call his manager to discuss the developing logistics for his annual six-week club tour in the summer. Check in with his girlfriend, Angela, who lived in Boston, where he would be going this weekend. Make arrangements for the session he was set to do in Philadelphia in a couple of weeks. That would be good. Catherine Williams, a singer-songwriter whose debut album (
Unavailable
) had been one of the previous year’s most dramatic breakthroughs, planned to record one of his songs (“The Darkest Night”) for a B-side, and she had asked if he would play acoustic guitar and sing backup on it. He was looking forward to that.

As he drank the last of his coffee and began to dress to take Gracie out, however, he felt that dreadful inward tug of looming, unfinished business, something vaguely discomforting that required his attention but that he had conveniently put out of his mind. At first, drifting in the sweet fog of the just-awakened, he wasn’t able to recover it. He teased himself with the possibility that he had made some kind of internal mistake, that despite the unsettled feeling in the pit of his stomach, no emotional loose ends remained to be tied.

But instincts never lie. As the strains of George Harrison’s sitar on “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” faded, it came to him. When he had arrived home the day before from seeing Angela in Boston, he had found a letter from Hannah. He and his former lover hadn’t communicated at all in nearly ten years—she would be close to forty now—but in her characteristic way she wrote as if they had just spoken moments before. She was like a ghost who could pass through barriers and boundaries of all kinds. Time never seemed to pass in her hothouse inner life; it was always, eternally, right now. Hence no need for chitchat, small talk, catching up, filling in the gaps. The heat was always on.

“I heard ‘Disappearance’ on the radio the other day, and thought of you, of course,” she wrote. “That was always my favorite song of yours. It made me think of how we used to meet every morning at my apartment on Cottage Grove, how you would come to me, light a fire in the fireplace, play me the songs you were working on and we would spend the entire morning in bed. Wasn’t it good? How have you been, my love? What is your life like?”

Those mornings she referred to were among the most erotic experiences of his life. He could still remember lying next to her, the smell of their sweat and their sex filling the room, and looking out at the trees and sky beyond her window. He had been married and living in Boston, not far from where Angela lived now, actually, when he met Hannah after one of his gigs at the Thermometer, a local club. As he was playing, he had seen her walking across the room to join some friends at a table. She was tall and slender, and she moved with exquisite grace. He liked that she had not dressed as if she were going to a club. It was summertime, and she wore a light blue silk blouse, a long, dark blue skirt, and sandals. Her straight blond hair fell nearly to the small of her back. He looked over at her occasionally as he performed, and she always was looking directly at him. Her sloe eyes were both serious and playful.

Their affair began that night. When he left the club with her, he had hoped that by sleeping with her he would get her—and all the girls like her, whom he had a hard time resisting—“out of his system.” His marriage was fading at the time, he now realized, but then he wanted to be able to return to the monogamy he had been struggling, with intermittent success, to accept. Somewhere inside himself he knew, though, that if Hannah had gotten into his system so quickly, she would not leave so easily.

Their conversation was easy and flirty as they walked the early-morning streets to her apartment. He set his guitar case down, and she removed her sandals as soon as they entered her studio. It was 2 a.m. “There’s not much to see, but let me show you my room,” she said. “Sit anywhere.” He looked around and noticed there was no convenient place to sit but her large, low bed. He sat on her rug, watched her, and waited.

She was a literature student, and wooden bookshelves lined the walls. She put on
Blonde on Blonde
and poured them each a glass of red wine, looking quietly pleased with herself as she moved deliberately about the room. She sat on the edge of the bed, then lifted her bare legs onto it and lay back on the pillows. She looked over at him and smiled playfully. “Does this seem just unspeakably bold?” she asked. “It’s time for bed.”

He got up, carried his glass to the nightstand, and lay down next to her. When they kissed, which they did immediately, her lips felt like soft, liquid flames. Her eyes, impossibly blue and never closed, glazed over, defenseless. They were light pools, glinting in the darkness, that provided another way to enter her. As they kissed and touched, he could feel her emptying herself into him, letting the outlines of her personality dissolve so that he could reconstruct her according to whatever shape his desires might take. “Do you like your version?” she asked, aware of how she had already signaled her compliance to whatever he wanted. “Another fine edition of you,” he said. Her molten hollowness inspired a violence in him; the willing sum of his fantasies, she seemed perfect and, therefore, perfectly violable. She felt those feelings in him, and they thrilled her.

When he entered her, she moaned and slowly turned her head to her left. He wanted to look into her eyes, so he pulled her hair to the right until she faced him. She lay there, her eyes were wide, her mouth open. He pulled her hair harder until her neck, long, white, pulsing, was fully extended. “You’re hurting me,” she whispered, but there was no judgment, demand, or even plea in the statement. It was a mere declaration of fact, and it was entirely up to him how to proceed. He pulled harder and she shuddered. Everywhere his mouth could reach he sucked and bit on her, leaving her marked.

They finished with her on her back, her legs extended along his stomach and chest, her long, elegant feet resting on his shoulders, her high arches and smooth soles pressed against his face and lips, his cock thrusting rapidly and forcefully into her. Her eyes were closed now, and she was whimpering. She seemed to have no spine or will. When they were done, he collapsed on his back next to her, gasping for breath. Stretching out her long body, she reached over and took his cock, slick and drenched with their juices, into her hand and stroked it. The ridge of its large, thick head was so sensitive he could barely stand her touch. She then rested her head on his stomach and licked him clean. “I feel like a virgin,” she said. “I’ve never been fucked like that in my life.”

Marks was roused from this reverie by the thud of Gracie planting herself by the door. When he looked over at her, she was sitting like a sphinx, her back erect, her face bright with expectation. It was hardly the first time she had pulled him back from a funk or a descent into the quicksand of his past. Her openheartedness and readiness for experience, her grounding in the present and eagerness for the future, had led him to adapt that annoying fundamentalist acronym—WWJD—to his own purposes.

“What would Jesus do?” became WWGD: What would Gracie do? He’d ask himself that question whenever he felt emotionally paralyzed, perplexed, or overwhelmed by feelings he couldn’t comprehend, turn into action, or use in some effective way. As clearly as he could tell from Gracie’s behavior, that question typically had one of four answers: get something to eat, find something or somebody to play with, take a nap, or go for a walk. He found that those four options usually did the trick for him as well, snapping him out of pointless obsession. This morning, obviously, he would take a walk.

It was cold and damp outside, but he and Gracie headed toward Riverside Park and the Hudson anyway. It was easy for him to think there, and there was something cleansing about the cold. They entered the park near 120th Street and walked down the long stone stairway that ended near the vacant tennis courts, Gracie pulling all the way. Then they headed south. Marks had loathed the cold until he got the dog, who loved it. Now he experienced it through her and actually got excited for her as fall yielded to winter.

He still had to decide what to do about the letter. Its arrival made him feel like the French poet Paul Verlaine, unwillingly shocked out of bourgeois comfort by the appearance on his doorstep of the young madman Arthur Rimbaud. For years he had been unable to resist Hannah whenever she turned up. A friend had wryly termed his relationship with her, which had gone around about four times since the initial fire of that first affair, “the crying game.” It was an apt description. Hannah’s passion for intrigue was in-exhaustible; she seemed incapable of settling into a relationship that wasn’t an unending tumult.

For his part, he was addicted to her, there was no other way to put it. When he would be on top of her staring into her face, he felt like Narcissus, gazing into his own reflection in the pond and, beyond that, into the bottomless depths of himself, in which it would be all too easy to drown. The feeling was both exalting and frightening, as if he could sink in there and lose any grip he might have had on the external world.

Their sexual conflagrations were just one thing. He also regarded her as his best, most discerning, and most sympathetic audience. Her (admittedly disturbing) desire to erase herself and become him made discussing ideas with her or playing songs for her like collaborating with a second self. She had been the muse for his richest and most mysterious album,
The Secret World
. Where he was concerned, nothing was too subtle for her. There was no nuance she didn’t get.

Finally, though, it was hard to tell if he had her, or if she had him. He had left his wife for her, and then, predictably enough, everything fell apart soon after. This bird has flown, indeed. Not long after that, he moved to New York, his favorite city, and tried to build a new life. Still, Hannah never escaped his mind. A couple of years later his album
Wilderland
won a Grammy, and she wrote him a letter after seeing him perform on the awards show. This time, in the endlessly witty ways of reality, she was married and he was single.

“I never took much,” she wrote, “and I know that everybody must give something back for something they get. But I feel like I have lost everything. I think of you all the time. Every day I imagine coming to see you.” Inevitably, they started up again, though she was living in Vancouver. When he would fly to see her, it was like the buildings in New York evaporated as he made his way west, finally deliquescing into the watery outdoors of the Northwest, a haze of gray and green shadings. He begged her to leave her husband. She couldn’t. That was it for that time around. And even that had not been the end of it.

Gracie dragged him toward the dog run, but, much as he loved watching her raise havoc there, they didn’t enter and join the canine fray. He wanted to continue walking along the nearly empty promenade, under the canopy of bare trees. The spare chill around him provided an ideal complement to his introspective mood. Who could tell what Hannah’s reemergence at this point meant? A divorce? A dead husband? She had written from Wilmington, North Carolina; maybe she was living there now. Marks thought of those stalker profiles security experts compiled for celebrities and politicians. Mobility is a key characteristic of someone whose threats must be taken seriously. He and Gracie turned to walk back toward the apartment.