Wonderful Feels Like This

by Sara Lövestam

Fanny is not reacting at all. “It’s a good thing if she was listening. She’ll learn how to avoid electric mixer kisses, that is, if she even likes boys.”

  She nudges Julia with her elbow, and this seems to give Julia the ability to speak. “To avoid something, you have to be able to attract it in the first place … that is, to get a guy you have to attract a guy.”

  That was the least effective insult Julia has managed for at least six months. Steffi puts cheese on her toast and begins to chew. The message on her Web page, Julia’s burning red cheeks, Karro calling her dyke slut, and now Fanny, who has no clue about Julia’s feelings. All of it is beginning to be too much.

  — CHAPTER 23 —

  Fanny has gone home and Julia is in her room with her door firmly shut.

  Steffi wanders back and forth outside Julia’s door, but since she can’t really think of anything to say, she finally goes back to her room and takes out her dismembered bass. Perhaps if she’s really careful and takes off the strings first and uses some superglue, she’ll be able to fix it. She starts by taking off the strings. Now only the body of the bass is lying there all alone. As she tries to position it next to the fingerboard, she realizes the whole thing’s impossible. The saw has taken away almost two millimeters so that the fingerboard would be too short even if she could glue it back together. The notes on one half of the fingerboard have come completely off. She puts the strings back on just to make sure. Yes, this is not a slap bass but a loose bass.

  In the silence of her room with her useless instrument, Steffi wonders if Julia is crying. It almost sounds like it through the wall, if it’s not the water pipes. If Pappa were home, he’d go in to Julia and call her Julita and ask her what was wrong. Julia would never tell him, of course, but she might feel better anyway. Perhaps she’s really not crying. Steffi listens closely. Is it the water pipes?

  She’s on her stomach on her bed writing down the lyrics that had come to her on the way home. She writes down the bass line that might work with it. The last words still don’t work as well as she’d like. That’s how my world turns. No matter how much she tumbles them around in her head, she can’t come up with better ones.

  Is Julia crying?

  Steffi goes into the kitchen and cleans up the bread crumbs to make Pappa happy. Then she sits down on the living room sofa and flips through a magazine. Finally, she goes back to Julia’s door. She listens, but doesn’t hear anything. Knocks. Knocks again.

  “Don’t come in!”

  “It’s me, Steffi.”

  “I told you, don’t come in!”

  Steffi keeps standing there perplexed. She’s prevented by the strict protocol of not entering a room without someone’s permission. Then she knocks again.

  “WHAT?”

  When she opens the door, Julia is lying on her bed. She looks like she hasn’t been crying at all. She doesn’t have the puffy eyes that Steffi usually gets, but her eyes are somewhat bloodshot. And maybe she’s frightened.

  “I won’t tell,” Steffi says.

  Julia looks suspiciously up at her, not moving from her position on the bed. “What are you talking about? There’s nothing … I’m not … didn’t you get what Fanny said? Or what?”

  She grins with the effort and it looks more like a grimace. Steffi wonders if she should leave, but she sits down on the edge of the bed.

  “I won’t tell.”

  Julia turns over on her side. She doesn’t look at Steffi or anything else either. Her mascara-rimmed eyes are focused on something invisible. When she takes a breath, it’s shaky. Then she looks at Steffi. “If you tell … if you say one word…”

  Steffi could have reached out and stroked Julia’s hair like Pappa would have done, but she’s only the little sister. Time stands still.

  Julia breathes heavily. “You really won’t tell?”

  “I won’t tell. I promise.”

  Julia turns onto her back. Her voice is thick and almost unrecognizable. “I don’t understand why this is happening to me. Why me?”

  Steffi lies down next to her. Like she used to do when they were small. A time so long ago, she’s almost forgotten it. They lie there for a while.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being one,” Steffi says.

  Julia snorts. Or she’s taking a deep breath. They’re not looking at each other. Steffi looks at the ceiling. Julia looks at the ceiling.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you being you, either,” Julia finally says after a long pause.

  “I know.”

  Julia’s words spread all through her body, although she’d already known. The words have the feel of a warm bath when she was small.

  “You’re good at playing your stupid instruments,” Julia says with a giggle.

  “You can be in love with your stupid—”

  Julia’s stare stops her. Now Julia is going to throw her out. Steffi can feel it. She shouldn’t have spoken those words. But Julia just sighs. “Don’t talk about it. Go play your stupid bass or something.”

  The ceiling in Julia’s room is the same as Steffi’s, but it still feels different to be staring at it here. Steffi looks from one corner to the door and then to the bed frame and then the poster with Justin Bieber. “They broke my bass.”

  “What?”

  Julia sits up on her elbow. Steffi bites the inside of her cheek.

  “They broke my bass because they think I’m a lesbian.”

  Julia doesn’t reply. Steffi doesn’t dare look at her. She just stares up at the ceiling and listens to the water pipes. Someone is flushing the toilet in the apartment upstairs. The streetlights have come on. She can see them through the window.

  * * *

  As Steffi is about to go to sleep that night, Julia comes in. She doesn’t knock. She never has and she never will. She doesn’t sit on Steffi’s bed, either. She just stands there in her pink sleep shirt. “I thought of something. You can ask for another bass for your birthday.”

  Steffi shrugs, but her shoulders are beneath her blanket so Julia can’t see it.

  “I’m going to ask for money. I don’t want them to know about it.”

  “OK. Well, I hope you get a lot of money, then, so you have enough.”

  Steffi has never said thank you to Julia. Julia has never said sorry to Steffi.

  “OK.”

  — CHAPTER 24 —

  From: Stephanie Herrera

  To: Simon Kjellman

  I’ve had a chance to listen to Avishai Cohen now. I watched the video you sent. He’s really good, although he plays too much fusion for me. Like all real musicians, it’s like he’s one with his instrument, if you know what I mean. And when I’m playing my best, it feels like that for me, too. You play guitar, right?

  From: Simon Kjellman

  To: Stephanie Herrera

  It’s real when you are one with your music, not with your audience. At least, that’s what I think. Didn’t know if you’d like the modern stuff, but talent is always talent. If you like funk, you should listen to Meshell Ndegeocello when she’s playing bass.

  Yes, I play guitar. Like everybody else at the auditions. So unique, I know.

  From: Stephanie Herrera

  To: Simon Kjellman

  Have you heard from them yet? I check every day, even though I know they said not to expect a response until May.

  By the way, it’s not unique to play a different instrument than most people. You’re unique when you are successful playing the same instrument as everybody else does, but in your own way.

  From: Simon Kjellman

  To: Stephanie Herrera

  You’re right. Infernally important if you want to be a real musician. And I’m not talking about a song in the Melody Festival but being a real, timeless musician. Like you. Honestly, when I saw you, I thought: here’s a musician I can play with. I hope you get in. And I get in.

  Steffi now has both Avishai Cohen and Meshell Ndegeocello on her mp3 player. When she plays them for Alvar, he snorts. “Yes, well, that
’s pretty modern, isn’t it?”

  “But listen! Listen to the bass! Wait…”

  Steffi looks for a video clip on YouTube and shows Alvar her phone, but Alvar says he doesn’t see that well and that the sound is strange, which is true, since it’s coming from a phone.

  Then he totters over to his record shelf and pulls out a record of Duke Ellington and his orchestra. “Have you listened to Jimmy Blanton?”

  Steffi sighs, but there’s something about rumpled old Alvar she can’t be angry with. “Many times, but we can listen to it again.”

  Alvar glances at her as he puts the record on. His wild, bushy eyebrows are frowning almost admonishingly. “He died of TB, you know.”

  “He did?”

  “Just twenty-three years old, still a kid. When I took the train to Stockholm, Jimmy Blanton was lying in bed coughing blood. I’ve often thought about it. Still, his music lives on whenever I play it on the gramophone. Erling often pointed this out to me.”

  * * *

  In 1945, Erling started saying that they’d all die someday. “Just like Blanton. You never know.”

  He wound up his portable gramophone, which was given a place of honor in the middle of their rehearsal space on Åsö Street. The word portable was due more to the manufacturer’s positive thinking than the real practicality of it, but as Erling had said while the two of them wrestled it down the stairs: twenty pounds weighs less than forty pounds.

  “I’m only twenty,” Alvar said. “He was twenty-one when he recorded this song.”

  Erling grinned.

  “That’s the whole point, Big Boy. Do you think you’d be able to play this a year from now?”

  Anita snorted. “Of course he could.”

  “How would you know?” Ingmar demanded so quickly that it must mean something.

  “All I’m saying,” Erling continued, obviously irritated by Anita’s interruption. “All I’m saying is it doesn’t matter when we die as long as we’ve left something good behind us.”

  They all sat quietly a moment and thought about this while Duke Ellington’s piano and Jimmy Blanton’s bass were giving life to music none of them could play yet.

  I’d like to leave something really good behind me, Alvar thought. I have to take every chance I get. Always say yes to Lulle Ellboj, Seymour Österwall, and Thore Ehrling.

  After his success at Nalen, they were all more eager to have him fill in as a bassist. He didn’t dare tell Erling how many gigs he was starting to get or how much he was getting paid.

  “Right now we’re listening to Blanton, right?” Erling said as the record was reaching the end. “He’s dead. Dead and gone. We’ll be dead and gone one day, too, and long after we’re dead, far into the next century, people will play an Erling Trio record! Then we’ll be alive again, although in a different way. We’ll be immortal. And people will say, ‘Hey, listen to that bass player, Alvar Svensson of the Erling Trio! Listen to Ingmar’s virtuosity on the piano!’”

  Anita laughed. “And that Erling,” she teased. “The greatest of them all!”

  Erling laughed, too, slightly embarrassed but actually pleased.

  Alvar stood. “I have a piece,” he said, blushing at having told them. “I wrote it myself, that is.”

  Erling stood. He picked up his clarinet. “I don’t know, Big Boy. I have to go to the printer’s in an hour and we have to rehearse ‘Sweet Georgia Brown.’ We’ll never get any serious gigs if we don’t get it down.”

  “I bring it up every time.” Ingmar got up, too. “If people are going to take us seriously, we can’t play pieces nobody recognizes, you know.”

  Alvar didn’t let anyone see his irritation. It was obvious that Anita wanted to protest, but she didn’t say anything and so neither did Alvar.

  Erling looked at Alvar and then at Ingmar’s back as he sat at the piano. “All right, then! Let’s take it from the top!”

  * * *

  As Alvar was getting ready to get on his bike and head back to Vasa Stan, Anita came up to him and gave him a quick and completely respectable hug.

  “’Bye now!” she said loudly and then whispered, “Bike around the corner and then wait for me there.”

  Her warm whisper remained in his ear and intoxicated him so that he felt he was flying around the corner. He stopped and waited, as out of breath as if he’d biked for blocks.

  Anita didn’t come. She still didn’t come. Alvar’s breathing calmed down, but the warm feeling on his ear remained. Anita didn’t come. She didn’t come. And then there she was. “I really had to figure out a way to make sure Ingmar didn’t walk me home.” She laughed and Alvar laughed, too, and hiccupped, and fought for breath.

  She was standing so close to him. It was March and all the headlines were about the concentration camps they’d found in Germany and everybody was talking about death. Perhaps that’s why he felt so alive in the breathing space between his red nose and hers.

  “I want to hear your piece.”

  None of them had a key for the rehearsal space, but that didn’t matter. She knocked on the door and cocked her head at the doorman with the fleshy lower lip and they were let in at once.

  “That would never work for me,” Alvar said.

  Anita smiled. “No, it wouldn’t.”

  By now, Alvar had kissed four different women. Almost. One of them had wanted to kiss him, but he’d turned away and gotten spit on his cheek. Anyway, by now he was experienced. One girl had even compared him to the American movie star Ronald Reagan. But he still found it impossible to try to kiss Anita. She was too self-contained, and being near her went right to his stomach until he had no defense.

  Now she was sitting on the piano stool waiting for him to play his piece.

  “It’s in English,” he said, and regretted it immediately. He should have said there were no lyrics.

  “I’m looking forward to hearing it.”

  Was she smiling at his nervousness? Was she pleased by it? He had no idea. But he took out his bass because she wanted him to play.

  “It’s in B.”

  “Go on.”

  “And it’s not really finished yet.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “It’s not all that great.”

  “Alvar! Just play it!”

  At home, Alvar had used his guitar. Now it didn’t sound that bad on the bass, either, but you had to imagine the other voices. When he got past the intro, he felt surer of himself and hummed along more loudly and dared let the words come out. It was just a song, not some confession that he’d have to back up.

  “There is something else in the air,

  when she is near and I can feel the smell of her hair.

  Something in the air says to me that she is near.

  The air becomes so clear. Oh, the air becomes so clear.

  I think maybe I love her.”

  He had barely enough courage to look at her as he sang the last line. Her face showed a good deal of emotion, but he couldn’t make out which. After the second verse, she turned toward the piano and began to play along in B. If he’d been a different sort of man, he’d say it was special that the girl was playing the song about herself and she’d fallen for his words. But he was just Alvar, still feeling seventeen years old when it came to Anita.

  She broke off in the middle of a chord. “Is this someone special you were writing about?”

  Very special, Alvar thought.

  “It’s a jazz song,” he said. “That’s how it’s supposed to sound.”

  Anita turned the piano stool so she could face him. She gave him a teasing, questioning look. “It sounds like more than just that.”

  She kept chatting away as they left the room to walk upstairs to the outside. When he blushed, she thought it was amusing; she giggled and recited the parts of the lyrics she remembered and improvised the rest.

  “Is it Ulla?” Anita asked. “Is it Anna-Lisa? Kerstin? Britta?”

  He was pushing his bike to her streetcar stop and was a
mused by the improvised English she used to fill the spaces in his lyrics.

  “The air is everywhere, I have nothing to wear, the air and a bear, oh the fear and a spear! Is it Elsa?”

  The streetcar was nearing from the crossroad and Alvar looked at the giggling girl rhyming to his song and he looked at her with everything he felt, straight from his heart. She fell quiet immediately. They were both silent and the streetcar would be there in two seconds.

  “It’s about you, of course.”

  Did he really just say that?

  The streetcar stopped, the doors rattled open, and people streamed out and others streamed on. Anita was still looking at him. He threw himself on his bike and rode off so quickly he almost fell over and almost, but luckily only almost, crashed into a streetlight. The whole way home, his stomach bubbled and he kept thinking—did I really say that? He rushed on, laughed out loud, and then started singing to the city he’d now become part of: “The air becomes so clear, I think I maybe love her!”

  * * *

  The Jimmy Blanton has now played three times in a row and Steffi changes the record. She chooses “Honeysuckle Rose” with Louis Armstrong, but she holds the needle hovering over the record. “And what happened then?”

  Alvar grins and she can see how he must have looked in the spring of 1945. “I thought you were going to criticize my rhymes.”

  “They were terrible. But can’t you sing to me what happened next?”

  He seems even more like a twenty-year-old, maybe even like a fifteen-year-old. He gets up with difficulty and starts to search through his records far up in the left corner. He has to reach high and still it seems he’s not finding what he’s looking for. His fingers move more frantically and Steffi steps toward him in order to catch him if he falls.

  “Maybe it’s not important,” she says, but Alvar is not looking at her.

  Finally he finds what he was looking for. The record has a red label, handwritten. The cover is made from a paper in a greenish color like mold and says Your Own Voice.

  “Let’s see,” he’s mumbling, and it’s clear he’s worked up. “Let’s see if this old record still sounds like anything. But we’ll have to change the needle for this one.…”