A
s I listen to the music, my head centered between two monitors, Alan's closet-size studio seems to expand past its walls. We're layering guitar figures with transparent noise. Alan's got a bunch of guitar pedals he's trying. How to describe the thing music does? It's like drugs without drugs, God without religion, happiness for no reason. We laugh when something sounds beautiful, or loud, or silly, or wrong. We laugh until it's just right, and then we get quiet.
After we finish for the day, I ask Alan to come downtown with me. I'm in the mood to listen to songs that have just been written. He says he can't because he and Maeve have plans. I let him off the hook because I know he has no patience for most singer-songwriters, especially not the ones who go on and on.
A whole scene has sprung up on the Lower East Side during the years I've been away. There's a new generation of singer-songwriters, open mics, and hourly time slots at half a dozen clubs on Ludlow, Orchard, and Allen streets. I'm prepared to go by myself when I think of calling JC. I haven't spent any time with him in years, but once he'd sort of been my boyfriend. It had been good to see him again at the recording session.
I agree to meet him downtown at his practice room on Second Street. It's surprisingly tidy and organized, a tenement basement with carpet on the walls and floor, and black paint on the ceiling. JC's drum kit, travel cases, extra snares, and cymbals take up most of the space. “Where do you sleep?” I ask him, and he points to the spot where he drags out a rolled-up futon mattress every night. He showers at the gym, he says, and sometimes lifts free weights there, too.
“I'm used to it.” He shrugs. “It's not so bad.” He still looks good, although you can see the years of whiskey on him. He's heavier now and not quite as pretty. Once he was a handsome boy who used his smile to great advantage. The first time he used it on me I'd smoked all his cigarettes, though I didn't smoke. It was at an industry thing, a Christmas party. I'd been smitten on the spot.
Now I know him too well. Still it's fun to flirt, if you can call it that. He's halfheartedly trying to seduce me, and I'm laughing.
“What happened to the guy?” he asks.
“What guy?”
“The suit. Didn't you have a boyfriend? I saw a picture of the two of you in one of those rags at the grocery checkout.”
“He left me for another woman.” It still hurts to say it.
“No! Was he a fucking idiot?” JC rubs my shoulder.
“I guess he was.”
“You're still gorgeous, you know,” he says.
And I say, “
Come
on, J.”
“I mean it!”
It feels good to be desired. So I let him kiss me, though we're in a basement, and I'm afraid there might be rats watching us. “Let's go hear some music,” I say after the kiss.
JC shakes his head at me as if we're still kids and I'm being a tease. “Do you mind if I smoke a bowl before we go?” he asks.
“Knock yourself out,” I tell him. Some things never change.
There's an open mic going on at the Rock Den, and the club is packed when we get there. We find a spot at the bar and JC orders us a couple of shots, though I'm sure he remembers I'm sober. Onstage, a dark-haired girl is singing quietly, sweetly. She cradles a Gibson hollow body in her arms. She's been raised on jazz, or influenced by singers who were raised on jazz: Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Jeff Buckley. Her melodies travel from major to minor and back again.
I listen as one after another singer-songwriter gets up and plays a couple of originals. Their songs recall the music of Coldplay, John Mayer, Dave Matthews, and Radiohead. Gone are the three-chord progressions and folk melodies of the seventies that influenced me and a generation after me.
A young woman with short bangs and sunglasses approaches and asks if I am who she thinks I am, and I say yes. It occurs to me that she's probably about the age you would have been, Minnow.
“Oh, play something! Will you play something? I'm a huge fan,” she says.
The vibe is very low-key in the room, and I do feel like playing. I'm given a guitar and find myself seated in the spotlight, being watched intently. I'm not famous-famous, but I'm a little famous, and though most of them are too young to know who I am, just hearing that I've made records and have had a career makes me someone worth listening to.
How many thousands of times have I been in this particular position? Tuning a guitar while an audience watches and waits. Hearing my own clear voice find its way into the air. It's a good voice, I know, not strong but emotional and pure. It's always touched people in a way that surprised me.
Y
ou never wanted children,” Jules says.
We're on the phone, in the middle of another late-night conversation.
“Hrmm,” I say. I've been reading to her from the black composition notebook. I write in it every day.
“We felt we needed to be alone to be artists,” she says. “That we had to be selfish in order to get any work done. We thought they were little monsters who invaded our favorite restaurants and disrupted civilized conversation.”
“But those were other people's children,” I say. I do remember thinking that having children was what other people did when they ran out of ideas, but I can't recall when I started to feel that way, or why. There are so many layers to what's true. It seems impossible to untangle it, or get to the bottom of it.
“You're only questioning this now because it's too late to do anything about it,” Jules says.
Maybe she's right. But it doesn't feel that way.
Minnow, in home movies, I'm a little girl rocking a doll.
Over and over again, I find myself wishing it were possible to be your mother, to be twenty-three or twenty-four again, walking with Gabriel on Columbus Avenue, to say to him, “
Gabriel, escúchame, por favor.
There will never be a better time. I will never love another man this way. And no one will ever take the place of our child.”
F
or years, Alan lived alone in a dingy studio apartment, surfed the Internet, and played his guitar all day, but then he found Maeve. It seems to me he was dangling off a cliff side until she pulled him up over the edge. He's become more himself, really blossomed, as a husband and father.
I follow him through their apartment, down the hallway; it looks so lived in, so homey; children's drawings on the back of bedroom doors, toys, miniature furniture, scribbled notes, piles of laundry, everywhere evidence of love and family.
In the back room that is his studio, I say, “Get ready. You know she's going to hate it.” Marta Lightman is due to arrive any moment and I expect her to give me a hard time about the score. It's always difficult for someone to appreciate the new when they've gotten accustomed to the old. The trick is to get her to give it a chance.
“She's going to love it, because it's fucking great,” Alan says.
But Marta is very quiet as we take her through the key scenes. The score is spare with long minutes of silence. The songs she knows have been replaced with a single note of upright bass, a mournful bowed cello, or three black piano keys, gently played. Hammond organ breathes and sighs while a lone guitar figure repeats, its last note a question and then a resolve.
Does she think it's too slow, too spare? I'm already defending it to her in my mind when Alan cues up the birthday party scene at the end of the movie. Ashley, her mother, and other relatives are gathered around the baby as the intro to “Still True” begins. “Oh,” Marta says, and moves up a little closer.
The baby's face is covered in cake and icing. It's all over her hands and her dress. “Oh,
Lisa,
” Marta says.
Alan looks at me, as if to say,
I told you so.
We let it play all the way through. The song runs long but will extend over the credits once the film is completed.
As the last note rings, I see her beaming at me. “I
love
it. It's
beauuutiful
! You guys did
so
good
!”
We take a taxi to the East Side to celebrate. There's a Mexican restaurant I know of on East Ninety-eighth Street. It's very authentic, and I think Marta will like it.
She and Alan order margaritas in frosty glasses with salt on the rim. Their drinks look good, but I'm all right with my ice-cold Coke. Our waiter mixes up a bowl of spicy guacamole at the table.
“To the new score!” Marta says.
“The score!” says Alan.
“To your beautiful movie,” I say. “Thank you for allowing us to be a part of it.”
T
here's no red carpet for
I Gave My Love,
though the screening room in Tribeca looks like a red velvet jewel box. Ashley and her mother are supposed to be coming down from Ellenville for the premiere. I've invited all the musicians who played on the score. Next, the film is headed for the festivals.
Alan can't make the screening but will meet me later. We plan to stop by the after-party for a few minutes before leaving to pick up Maeve and the kids. It's the last weekend they have the rental house this summer, and I've been invited to join them at the beach.
Most of the hundred or so seats are taken as the curtain parts in the small theater. I can see Ashley's blond head a few rows in front of mine. She's holding Lorelei in her lap and keeps getting up to quiet the little girl. After the third time, I follow her into the hallway. “Let me take her, Ashley,” I say. “Go enjoy the rest of the film.”
“Are you sure?” We've only met briefly, but she doesn't seem concerned, only relieved to hand Lorelei off to me.
“Yes. I've seen it a million times.”
The baby from the movie is about two and a half now. She's got blond curls and sweet pointy ears. I give her my key chain to play with. She holds it in both chubby hands and looks up at me with wide blue eyes. She has that spark you hope for in a child. A part of me imagines stealing away with her, out the back door. But of course it's only a fleeting thought.
From the hallway, I can hear the other Ashley, the one up on the screen, saying, “It's only now that can't be any different; the past can be anything you want!” It's my favorite line in the movie. She's defending some half-truth on a job application, but it means something very different to me.
At the after-party, I see JC coming toward me, glass in hand. “Notice anything new?” he asks.
He's wearing his usual black jeans, the leather jacket. “No,” I say. “What?”
“I'm drinking club soda!”
“Well, good for you,” I say. I don't know why it's so hard for me to take him seriously.
“I've been going to meetings,” he says. “I was thinking maybe we can go to one together sometime.”
“I'd love that,” I say, “but I'm heading back to L.A. next week, so it will have to wait for next time.”
“Already?! Listen,” he says, and leans a little closer. He smiles that great smile. “I've been thinking . . . We should get together sometimeâyou know, for real. I don't know why we never have.”
I don't bother to remind him that we did get together, a long time ago. “It's too late for that, J,” I say, aiming for a lightness in tone.
“What are you talkin' about? We're not dead yet!” He takes my shoulders in his hands and gives me a little shake. He's still pretty sexy. “But no one's getting any younger,” he says, and kisses me on the side of the mouth. “Maybe I'll have to come out there and change your mind.”
Though we both know how unlikely that is.
O
n the East End, rain has moved in by morning. Maeve is trying to figure out something we can do to keep the kids occupied. There's a children's museum on Sagg Road, and after breakfast we all get in the car and take a ride over there. It's a pretty cool place with all kinds of activities for the kids. Samantha and Justin are playing in an impressive spaceship facsimile when I see Sofia across the room.
An actress with personality and style, Sofia was once one of my best friends at the Café Miriam. I remember we used to sing this song together, passing through the kitchen, plates balanced on our arms: “Woman.” It was from John Lennon's
Double Fantasy
album. The record was huge in 1981. John Lennon had been killed the year before. We knew every song on it.
Sofia looks the same almost thirty years later. Shag haircut and long slim legs. “Oh my God!
Hiiii!
” she says, when I come up behind her.
She still has the big, joyful personality, and it's good to find her that way. A lot of people I know have had the joy kicked out them by life. She's living in East Hampton, she says, directing plays for a local theater group. She's been divorced for ten years and has a boyfriend. Her children are grown.
“What are you doing at the children's museum?” I ask her.
She points out a boy who looks to be about three, playing alongside Justin and Samantha on the spaceship. “Can you believe it?” Sofia asks. “I'm a grandma!”
I can't believe it.
“Are you still singing?” she asks. “I have your music on my iPod. I'm so proud of you!”
I tell her I'm not singing so much, but that I'm still doing music. I don't say that I would trade it, in a second, to have what she has.
By then, Samantha and Justin are getting restless and Maeve is talking about finding a movie for them to see, so Sofia and I say our good-byes. I take her number, and she takes mine. “Let's stay in touch, honey,” she says.
“Absolutely,” I tell her, and hope that we will.