Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (19 page)

The listener grows concerned. Having been informed of the epic forces aligned against our lovers, we are eager to discern their exact nature and potential remedy. Instead, the narrator reiterates his devotion. He concludes with a couplet that calls to mind Heidegger’s ultimate declaration in
Being and Time (Sein und Zeit
, 1927): “a primordial mode of temporalizing of ecstatic temporality itself must make the ecstatic project of being in general possible.” Translation: your smile, my heart, let’s roll.

The chorus has arrived. With it, our hope for clarity evaporates. We have been proceeding under the assumption that our lovers were somehow “torn apart.” We now discover what actually tore them apart: the narrator. He dumped her. More precisely, he dumped her after a long period of emotional neglect.

The problem is one of credibility. The speaker is playing the part of a victim when he is clearly the assailant. We must now endure his entreaties. He wants her to “come back and carry me home” (huh?) not because he recognizes in her precious qualities he once neglected, but because he’s lonely. Love in the realm of Air Supply is a lot like shock and awe: an overwhelming force that erases any trace of moral responsibility. What matters is that your head is on a phone and it kind of hurts because phones are hard and this pain is reflected in your voice, you are digging deep into your man-pain, you are truly coming clean, you are saying for the whole bloody world to hear, My bad, babe.

Having already lied and groveled, our hero now turns to the next refuge of the abusive boyfriend: guilt provocation. If his ex, whom he dumped, refuses to love him, he will kill himself. Or maybe by “gone” he means only that he’ll abandon her (again). Regardless, he has established a clear pattern of deceit, obsession, and unsolicited contact that seems predictive of assault. It’s time for the bridge.

I’m thinking about Elise again, actually. I’m thinking about how she knew the words to all the Air Supply songs she played for me. And I’m thinking about the fact that 98 percent of the people who listen to Air Supply are women and how much they must enjoy hearing men “express their feelings” and plead for forgiveness—even when those
men are poised to inflict more damage. As in the romance novel or the Lifetime Channel original movie, the SRB peddles women a version of love that manages to hold them in contempt. It comes on like surrender and delivers abuse.

But I’m also thinking (again) about the broader relationship between language and music, how melody and rhythm can animate dead language, which is on the one hand beautiful and inspiring and on the other hand disturbing, to have all these dead words stumbling the earth like zombies in makeup. And I’m thinking that this is what it’s like for me to hear “All Out of Love.” It’s like a zombie in mascara wants to bite my neck, a slow clumsy zombie but one with terrific stamina, as is so often the case with zombies, meaning eventually I have to sleep, or I trip over something I wouldn’t usually trip over, and the zombie gets close enough to chomp through my skin, and when that happens I don’t die, but the part of my brain that regards language as an instrument of truth dies, the part that does the honest work of investigating romantic ruin, the hows and whys of the emotional harm we do one another, and instead of feeling nauseated by “All Out of Love” I get choked up and try to sing along, which is when my friends realize what’s happened and put a bullet in my brain.

The Marriage of Fanatico

It is fair to ask at this point how I ever managed to get married. That is certainly a question my family has pondered. A proper librettist—or perhaps Air Supply—would have drawn it up perfectly: my wife, Erin, and I locking eyes across a windswept piazza, plenty of loud obstacles in the wings (a dastardly count, a mischievous ghost, a buxom romantic rival capable of nailing high C). Alas, the truth is a bit lumpier. But I’ll start at the beginning, because our courtship only survived by the good graces of our Fanaticism.

In April 2002, my first book came out, a collection of stories. I was thirty-five years old, seven summers removed from grad school, and so desperate for regard that I would have approved the title
Stupid Things My Penis Has Done
. The publisher settled on
My Life in Heavy Metal
.

Already, there was a bit of operatic fortune at work, because my future wife happened to be a former metal chick with literary aspirations. The only reason she came to my debut reading was
because of this title. There she was on the appointed night, a shy woman with dark hair and sad blue eyes, though I wouldn’t have noticed her because the venue—a tiny bar in Cambridge—was hot and packed. Erin kept having to step outside to clear her head. She left before I even started.

After the reading, Erin’s friend Kate approached me and told me about Erin falling ill and mentioned that their book club was reading my stories and I immediately volunteered to visit. I was all about chivalry that might get me laid. The book club visit turned out pretty awkward. Of the five members, the most vocal was an ill-tempered lesbian doctor who clearly hated the book. Erin said very little, but she did mention that she was a writer, and naturally I urged her to call me for advice.

A couple of nights later my phone rang. Erin wanted to say thanks, and to take me up on my offer. She had some stories she needed feedback on. I told her that I’d love to read one, but I was up to my neck in student stories.

“You’re missing out,” she said.

“I’m sure I am,” I said. “Maybe you could read one to me sometime.”

She paused. “Sure.”

“What would you be wearing at this reading?” I said.

“I’d be naked, of course.”

Erin was trying to sound casual, as if this were the sort of proposal she dispensed with some frequency. But her voice fluttered and both of us could feel, in the flushed half-second afterward, the abrupt acceleration of our pulses. Whatever it was we’d been up to previously, the real purpose of her call had been revealed.

Erin showed up Saturday night and I fed her linguine with homemade vodka sauce and sweet white wine. We were both terrified by
the audacity of what she’d promised. For all her bravado, Erin was a modest woman. And I myself, despite having published a book so graphic that a cousin of mine felt it necessary to transport it in a brown paper bag, despite the inevitable reputation this book saddled me with, remained crushingly insecure. The idea that a beautiful woman had shown up at my apartment prepared to remove her clothing flummoxed me. In my experience you had to do a lot of pleading before anything like that happened.

It was soon apparent that the bottle we’d drained at dinner was not going to see us through to the main event. We needed help. And so I led Erin into the sunroom and put on the sexiest record I could think of, Joe Henry’s
Fuse
, and waited to see how Erin would react to its narcotic drum loops. We wound up slow dancing.

“What is this
music?”
Erin whispered, which you must know by now is the question every Fanatic yearns to be asked.

So I told her about Joe Henry, about how
Fuse
was his finest record, how I’d nearly wept when I found six copies in the ninety-nine-cent bin at Disc Diggers, how I’d bought every one and sent them to friends with a note reading
Please allow me to save your life
, how
Fuse
had convinced Ornette Coleman to work with Joe on his next album. Then I played her Coleman’s solo, which lasts just over a minute and transforms the blues scale into something more like a dream state. It was like having someone brush their fingertips along the pleasure center of our brains. Erin showed her lovely crooked smile. Her body unclenched, then swayed.

But there was this other matter to attend to, so Erin marched into my bedroom and shut the door.
The king-sized bed. The dark wainscoting. The chocolates scattered about
. What must she have thought? It was all quite dismal. To her eternal credit, she undressed anyway and slipped under the covers and I walked in and her pale shoulders were blazing. She read me a story about a repressed nun who lusts after her star pupil. Then I stripped and read her a story about a vegetarian
woman who lusts after a steak. Then it was time for the hot blood to do its work.

Why did I sit Erin down a mere two weeks later and announce that we had to stop seeing each other? Because my superego had decided I needed to find a wife, and while my superego had not bothered to inform my slobbering id, it had made a pretty convincing case against Erin who, for all her charms, was twenty-seven and just a few years out of college. I looked at her life—the damp apartment, the corporate job, the quotes from famous writers taped above her desk—and saw a prettier version of myself a decade earlier. It felt tawdry and maybe even a little ruthless to lead her on.

And so I bid her farewell, convinced I’d behaved with noble restraint, and returned to my alleged quest for a bride. It turned out there was a whole army of us out there, men and women in our mid-thirties, zooming around our big cities in bright cars with lousy suspension. We met online and through friends and at parties and grinned desperately and poured our life stories out over artichoke dip. We waited for Cupid to hurry up already and shoot us in the ass so we could start having all those kids we were supposed to want.

I drove an hour through the snow to meet one woman. We’d made sexy talk on the phone and swapped photos. It was going to be tremendous. (It was always going to be tremendous.) Then she opened the door and her face was that of an ostrich, pinched and belligerent, and mine was that of a weasel, beady and mean, and our hearts staggered through the rest of it, the hope punched out of us.

It was on such nights, a little later than was appropriate, that I dialed Erin’s number. “I’ve got something you need to hear,” I’d say, which was deplorable but at least true because when I wasn’t off turning dates into Bergman films, all I did was hunt for new dope. And so
Erin appeared and we retreated into my cave and did what was required, all the sweaty investigations, though best of all was lying in the dark afterward and listening to the songs that were—unbeknownst to either of us, I think—slowly twining our fates.

I played her
Lovers Knot
by Jeb Loy Nichols and
Living with Ghosts
by Patty Griffin and
Rabbit Songs
by Hem and
The Sons of Intemperance Offering
by Phil Cody and
Everybody’s Got Their Something
by Nikka Costa. We ate French toast in great abundance and slept as if dead. After a few weeks, I’d break up with her, though sometimes she broke up with me, coming to her senses with a soft reluctance while I nodded soberly.

But then the new Chuck Prophet album came out,
No Other Love
it was called, and I knew Erin would want to hear it. She was as nuts about Chuck as I was, as gaga for his Southern California drawl and the sticky-sweet sorrow of his melodies, as aroused by his languid arrangements. “I know we’re broken up,” I said. “But you’re not going to believe this record.”

This was the summer of 2003 as I recall and we spent the next week doing nothing but listening in bed, until we knew all the words and the tempos had been absorbed by our muscles and every song seemed to be trying to tell us something new about our dire arrangement. It was the perfect record for us, gorgeous and doomed, like a kiss that tastes of blood, and the song we took as our anthem was “Summertime Thing,” which we sang to each other and to ourselves, dancing across the dirty floors of my apartment naked and bracing ourselves against the relevant countertops. Erin knew she shouldn’t have allowed herself to get sucked back into my orbit, and I couldn’t tell her otherwise. So there were some fresh tears, and when it was all over, well, to quote Chuck, “We snuck off like thieves, with our backs to each other.”