Wonderland (23 page)

“I dye it now. Simon. You never even told me you got divorced. We wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t written you—I would never have known.”

He bends his head. “I hardly thought I had the right. After everything. I was ashamed. Please forgive me. When you wrote me, I came right away. Thank God you wrote.”

I get up. I take a shower with scented hotel soap, washing Hamburg down the drain. When we are settled in bed, my skin damp and cool against his, he says, “I sometimes think about our child, what our child would have been like. Do you?”

“Yes. I think she would have been a girl.”

“Ah! So do I. Tall like you, but fiery like me. Very smart. A musician or artist.”

“Yes. I’m sorry, Simon.”

“That was then,” he says.

We don’t make love. We sleep curled together, my feet on his flat feet, first setting the alarm on the clock as if there is some reason to do so. In the morning, I wake before him, before the alarm. He is sleeping on his side, facing me. His hand still looks strange to me without the wedding ring, almost unbearably vulnerable. The curtains on the windows are slightly parted, a line of gray between them. I wonder what we will do today. Walk by the water? I have tonight off. I put my hand on one of his. He opens his eyes.

“I love you,” he says.

“We leave for Brussels tomorrow.”

“And then?”

“Then . . . Luxembourg. Basel. Latvia, some festival. We end in Rome.”

“Shall I come to Rome?” He tightens his fingers on mine.

“My ex-husband’s name was Jim. He was from Texas. He got clean after ten years of being a pretty serious junkie. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but he had this incredibly hairy chest. We called it the tree of life. He had perfect pitch and tinnitus. He owns fifteen violins, some of them expensive, but he plays on the cheapest one. I teach school for a living.”

Simon frowns. “Yes, okay . . .”

“I won’t have kids now. That was it.”

He shrugs. “My children are grown. I’m free. We’re both free.”

I put a hand to my eyes. Some kind of light is in them.

“Things have changed, Anna.”

I shake my head, keeping my eyes covered.

“Anna? Anna?”

W
HAT RUSHES FORWARD
creates a vacuum of equal force behind it. A space filled with nothing but gravity, the pure thing, weight. Air is very heavy. If water rushes forward, consider that it is, in some sense, also pushing backward, donkey-kicking its way into life. We know this in our bones. We have felt it, standing in the ocean, our heels sinking unevenly, always somehow surprisingly, into the wet sand as the waves zoom forward, away from us. We have felt it at the edge of the pit, looking in. We want to know how far, how deep, how wide, standing in the place where one kind of gravity becomes another kind of gravity. I loved you, I loved you, I loved you. When I think of his face, I think of it as a shape in my hands, as the scent of his breath. The visual field scrambles. It is a perversity in me: to have to close my eyes, as it were, to feel him more distinctly as shape, as weight, as air. I don’t know why. If I knew why, I wouldn’t still be out here. Which is where, exactly? anyone might ask. The same place, but it changes. Time passes. We only really hear the song the second time. The mountain moves to the other side.

B
OONE AND I
take a walk. We leave the hotel and head in a random direction, passing cafés jammed with people watching a soccer game: Uruguay is playing South Korea. Bits of legs, arms, in close-up as we go by. The side of a face, dark hair, a sky-blue jersey. A woman with a long, dark face, perhaps Somali, passes us, looking dreamy. Brussels itself has a dreamy quality, crooked cobblestone streets, signs in both Flemish and French. Flemish admires the vowel, doubling and tripling them up, led by an
h
or a
g.
For some reason I find this quite funny, like the sight of ducks crossing a road. Why didn’t I notice how charming this city was when I was here before? All I remember is that cold house, that plexiglass table of my defeat. Today I see that Brussels is inviting, but with a slightly mad quality, like a handsome man with a squirting flower in his lapel.

Boone looks at his phone, then puts it back in his pocket. “So, you’ve been in love, right?”

“I guess.”

“You were married.”

“Yes.”

Boone scratches at his chin. He sighs. “But now you’re not.”

“No. Why?”

“There’s this guy—his name is Sam—he’s exhausting me.”

I notice, embarrassed not to have seen it before, that Boone’s eyes are dull, his skin is dull. Maybe this is the first time he’s been in love. “You know,” I say, “yeah, I was married, and he was a good guy, but it felt false, do you know what I mean? I started to feel that there was something false about us, that we looked the part, and we could have gone on that way for a long time. It looked a lot like good love. No one would have noticed that anything was wrong.”

“What was wrong?” Boone looks as if he truly wants to know, as if my answer will help him in some way, which of course it won’t.

“I don’t know how to explain what was missing. Like I said, no one would have noticed if we had continued anyway, probably no one would have noticed our entire lives. We would have died like that.”

Boone says, “So it was mutual.”

“I didn’t say that.”

We turn down a crooked little street.

“Do you know what happened to a friend of mine?” says Boone. “He was driving somewhere down south, family business, and he stopped at a lookout to eat lunch. All of a sudden a beautiful boy drops right out of a tree, falls, rolls, looks at my friend for a minute, then jumps up and runs away. Falls out of a tree.”

“Falls out of a tree?”

“Falls out of a tree.”

Boone stops in front of a shop window. The shop is closed, as they all seem to be, inexplicably, on this Tuesday afternoon. Are they closed for the soccer match? “Look here. What is this?” In the window are a picture book open to a page of fluffy white dogs, an old portable record player (pink), a toy car (also pink), a grinning Sambo figure in a green jacket, and a stereo set that looks to be from about 1995. In the window glass, pinkening as well from the setting sun, I see myself and Boone from the waist up, haunting these odds and ends, placed among them like two more items to be sold: a tall lady and a man with a chipped-plate face. Somewhere nearby, a shout goes up. Do the Belgians root for Uruguay or South Korea?

“I guess it’s just stuff someone likes,” I say. “Do you have any pets?”

“Can’t. I’m gone too much.” He laughs. “God, I’m so doomed . . .”

I take his hand. In the window, the tall lady holds the hand of the man with the chipped-plate face. He turns his head and she sees him in ten years, fifteen years. He won’t have the ambivalent beard then; his face will be tight. “But if you had a dog, what would you name it?”

“Wellbutrin.”

“Do you think this could be someone’s house?”

“No. But it is someone’s fantasy.”

The tall lady and the man with the chipped-plate face regard the contents of the shop window for a minute or two more, then depart without disturbing the fluffy dogs, the car, the hideous grinning figure in the green jacket.

Brussels, I think. So this is Brussels.

A
GIRL OF
around two, wearing matching flowered shorts and top, chases a ball down a garden path. I watch her from the window of my room. Tonight’s show has been canceled, poor ticket sales. Zach, Tom, and Boone have gone off to hang out with another band of Boone’s, some bald guys out of L.A. Perhaps, I think, some exercise. Alicia and I lurk ineffectively around the equipment—two StairMasters and three molded plastic, polka-dotted hand weights—in the tiny hotel gym, then, wrapped in towels, we go to the steam room.

“Hey,” she says. “Do you want to talk? I know it has to be hard.”

I don’t know where I would even begin, but who else do I have to talk to? Alicia, so pale she’s almost transparent, rests one small, spectral foot against the tile wall. In repose in the steam, she looks angelic.

“I guess—I thought this was going to be a new beginning, but so far it’s just been endings. And we’re nearly done. I’m so tired, Alicia. My father. Other stuff. I shouldn’t even be out here, this has to be some kind of sin. I feel like I’ve fucked up everything.”

Alicia, eyes closed, angles her alabaster foot on the tile wall, angles it back. “No,” she says. “It’s just the whole weirdness. The way it gets. And then it all just stops, and it’s worse. Right? Like Flatland.”

“Exactly.” To my surprise, I am comforted.

A silence falls. Then, “So, you know Ezra?”

“Yeah.”

“He snaked my entire stash while I was sleeping. I wouldn’t
mind,
you know, it’s sort of an honor, but, like, wouldn’t you think he could afford his own? What’s that about?”

“He has issues.”

The steam puffs loudly. Alicia’s white foot on the wall begins to disappear, then her ankle. “Yeah, you could tell. The vibe was kind of weird.” She yawns. “Tom’s trying to get on that tour with Skullcrusher going out in the fall.”

“He doesn’t want to go back?”

“Nah. He had some sublet in San Diego, but he let it go, so now.” Her calf disappears. “The guy pays. Wish they needed a cellist, I could use the money. You and Billy Q, you’re friends?”

D
IARRHEA: TWO DAYS
. Chamomile tea. CNN. Europe: red with heat, pink even at the top of Norway. On the CNN weather map, the continent looks like an inside-out roast beef. Boone produces an afternoon for rehearsal from some hidden pocket of the budget (don’t ask), in a well-appointed music room at the university, which is on the Rhine. In the music room, I settle myself into my guitar, tuning up, sing a note or two of “Wonderland.” The acoustics are pristine, Swiss in their precision.

Boone says, “I’ll leave you to it. Back in a few hours.” He darts out.

Light falls from an oblong window high on the wall, illuminating the top of Tom’s round head. He sits at the kit, adjusting the seat, running his hands over the drum skins, listening, tuning. “Dry in here,” he says, standing up to turn the clasp on a drum. He rolls his shoulders as he sits down again, refitting himself to the kit, moving the seat a fraction of an inch here or there, up, then down. “I can’t keep gaining weight,” he says. “The kit is getting fucked. Anna, give me your diarrhea.”

Alicia unbuckles the cello case and takes the cello out; it looks like Marlene Dietrich coming out of the gorilla suit in
Blonde Venus.
She buckles up the case and leans it against the wall, our audience of one. Unfolding the little folding stool, she sits down and positions the cello before her, then runs her hands up and down the strings, tuning. Her flip-flops have big plastic roses on them, blooming between her toes. Alicia has perfect pitch, which means that the tuning can go on for some time until she gets it exactly right. Zach, bent over and plugging things in everywhere, says, “Alicia, it’s a rehearsal, okay? Let’s not get all Yo-Yo Ma about it.”

“Shut up,” says Alicia softly, one hand high on the tuning pegs.

I feel strange and light from having been sick. The room is cool and superb. We can’t see the river from here, but its brackishness comes in through the open window. The three others, weary-faced, move into position at their instruments. Like the hundred little girls with hammers, they look at me expectantly, waiting for the signal to begin. “Let’s start from the top,” I say. Alicia’s low notes take us into “The Orchids.”

After two lines, I say, “No, that’s the problem.” Alicia puts the cello bow down. “Zach, you’re not listening to anyone else. We’re already off.” Because I don’t read music very well, I have to say things like this: “You’re being muddy while the rest of us are being sneaky. You have to get more sneaky.”

Zach says, “Sneaky?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Sneaky.” He raises an eyebrow.

“Yes. Fucking
sneaky.
We’ve done this a thousand times. It’s why we end up pulling in opposite directions by the middle of the set.”

Zach shrugs. I remind myself that he went to Juilliard. It leaves its mark.

“Let’s go.”

Alicia lifts her bow, sounds those low notes, and Zach, not looking at me, sneaks through every window and down every chimney. Tom is the wind around the house. I sing the things I sing—“The Orchids” is about a murder—as plainly as I can. The others bring the complexity, turn day into night, night into day. I still feel a little queasy, my guts are roiling, but I ignore it, concentrating on how the light moves from the top of Tom’s head to one rounded shoulder. In the song, blood moves over the floor.

Alicia puts down her bow. “No. I got that wrong. Can we start again?”

We pause. We start again.

The sound lifts. Although I wrote these words, this music, while sitting on the floor of my tiny apartment on 19th Street, sometimes with Jim eating a sandwich or typing on his computer next to me, they feel as if they came from somewhere else when the band is together like this. He shot his baby down (doesn’t he always?), blood on the orchids, blood on the floor, and the sound is like that: the blood that moves through us all.
I wasn’t there is what he said.
Alicia is the rain. Zach is the earth. The sound fills the room like the blood in our ears. The sound finds our pulse, the backs of our knees, the roots of our hair, our hearts, our lungs, the insides of our elbows. I can’t really read music, but I can find it with my hands, groping blind. I can pull down the notes I want from the air, like stealing fruit from someone else’s garden.

“Waiting for a Sign.” “Smoke and Mirrors.”

“Give the snare the finger, it has a throat to it when you hit it with the mallet.”

“We’re rampaging through the second verse.”

“Alicia, stop cracking your knuckles.”

“Tom, it’s ganging up on the four on the floor.”

Seven years of sound, of music only I could hear, now produced in the bodies of these strangers. I never imagined them, how could I have? I wasn’t sure anyone else would ever hear that sound. The light touches Tom on the elbow. We all have our heads down, to listen. The awkward half-note—
never
ever,
bro
—shapes the door, and we duck, heads down, through the door, through the eye of the needle, to the place where the roads double back on themselves. Zach, Tom, Alicia, and, last, me. We are there.