A few weeks later, back home, you hear a teenager at the market—a girl with dyed-red hair, a nose ring, and sad, brown eyes—singing the same song off-key. You’re tempted to ask her the name of the song, the name of the singer, but don’t. Instead, you trust that you’ll hear the song again, that eventually it will lead you to the singer, and when that happens, you’ll write about it in your next book, tell the story to audiences across the country, how you met the love of your life by expecting miracles, by trusting the power of intention and the law of attraction.
During the next few months you keep hearing the song. A man hums it as he hands you the bagel you ordered. A woman in scrubs sings the refrain between cigarette drags outside a hospital as you walk past. A woman on the subway sings a verse while you sit beside her pretending to read.
And then one February night you duck into a Chelsea bar to avoid sudden rain and lightning, and you hear the song. But this time it’s her. Not a recording, but her actual voice. You see in your peripheral vision a woman onstage; she’s singing a song about hello and goodbye. The lyrics are sad, but you’d never know by her happy, ethereal crooning, and her smile. It’s like listening to two songs at once. You want to move closer, lean in. But you don’t want to look. You’re not ready for her to be anything more than a voice. Despite what you wrote in your first book, you’re a little afraid each time a miracle happens.
You move closer to the stage and look. A woman seated on a stool behind a microphone, guitar on her lap. Brown curly hair, green eyes. Thin gray sweater single-buttoned over black T-shirt, dark jeans, thick brown belt, brown boots. You look away, and she’s only the voice.
When a fight breaks out at the bar, she keeps singing. A drunk man in a suit tries to push his way to a much larger man who’s laughing, arms at his sides, as if daring the other man to hit him. Unable to reach the larger man, the man in the suit throws his beer bottle, which hits someone, not his intended target, and soon a dozen people are shoving and throwing punches or trying to prevent the fight from escalating. Two bouncers with compact bodies of veined muscle aren’t enough to control the crowd, and through it all she keeps singing with eyes closed. She doesn’t open her eyes despite the crowd pushing its way toward the stage. The world around her could blow up and she would keep singing.
You move closer, and it seems you’re the only person listening, she’s singing to you alone. She opens her eyes, sees you, smiles, closes them again, and now she’s not only a voice, she’s a face, but not yet a name.
“Hello,” she said, and offered her hand. “I’m Cary Weiss.” She’d come to sit with me between sets, as if we’d arranged to meet beforehand.
“Hello,” I said, and we shook. “I’m Eric, but my name was almost Cary—you know, like Cary Grant.”
“That’s how I spell it—with a y.”
“Weiss was Harry Houdini’s real name, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Ehrich Weiss,” I said. “I was named after him.”
“Are you a magician?”
“Not really.”
“An escape artist?”
“No,” I said. “An author.”
“What do you write?”
“Books.”
“I meant what kind of books.”
“Actually, just one book.”
“What’s it about?”
“A man keeps hearing a song, then meets the woman who sings it. I write about things like that.”
When it was time for her next set to begin, she said, “I don’t think I can do it.”
“Do what?”
“Get up there and sing.”
“Why not?”
“I feel sick,” she said. “Happens every time. I keep a bucket backstage.”
“But you’re great.”
“I should have been a veterinarian,” she said. “In my next life I want to come back as a vet.”
“Do you not like singing?”
“I love singing,” she said. “This happens when I’m not singing—when I’ve just finished a song, especially a song I’ve really nailed. I can hear the echo of my own voice, and I like it, and I think, That wasn’t me, that couldn’t have been me.”
“Are you afraid of success?”
“I don’t want fame, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I’m very happy,” she said. “My friends tell me I’m the happiest person they know.”
“Being happy is good for you,” I said. “Chapter 6 in my book.”
“Oh,” she said. “So you write self-help books.”
“Book,” I said. “Singular.”
“What’s your book called?”
“Everyday Miracles.”
“I like that,” she said. “Will there be a sequel? I mean, is it part of an epic trilogy or something?”
“I’m not a novelist.”
“Seriously, I’m going to get your book.”
“Sure, but will you read it?”
“Of course,” she said. “I’ll even write you a fan letter.”
She lived in a high-ceilinged two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn; she used one bedroom as a studio, where she wrote songs. Running around the apartment, chewing newspapers, table legs, my shoelaces, anything in her path, was a German shepherd puppy, a female named Ralph. Huge ears, needle teeth.
A warm night for March, so we ate our first dinner together in a narrow, brick courtyard Cary shared with two other tenants. Rainwater from an early-evening shower dripped from the fire escape into my wineglass. We sat in silence—not at all an uncomfortable silence—waiting for each drop. I thought we might spend the entire night this way, and that would have been fine. Drip, a long pause, drip, a longer pause, drip, an even longer pause, the red wine at the bottom of my glass a shade lighter.
After dinner we played with Ralph. We threw a tennis ball for her to fetch, hid training treats in our pockets and made her sniff them out, played hide-and-seek, Cary in one closet, me in another, then both of us in the same closet, quiet in the dark, the smell on her breath of the cherries we’d had for dessert, her finger on my lips to tell me to stay quiet, Ralph scratching the door, crying for us to open.
When we opened the door, she jumped on us, licked my hands, latched on to Cary’s jeans, and pulled. We ran through the apartment until the downstairs neighbor banged on his ceiling, then we looked at the clock and saw that it was late.
* * *
That was the year of hello. The song, the bar, an exchange of names, our first date, our engagement six months later.
It’s a cliché to say that some couples just know, but we did. There was no drama, no doubt, no complications having to do with career or geography or religion, no recent messy breakups not yet fully cleaned up. It’s also a cliché to say that we felt as if we’d always known each other, so let me revise that one: it felt like every date, every dinner, every movie, every kiss, every night we slept beside each other had already happened, as if we were living lives already lived. We joked about this almost constant déjà vu, the surprise—a good one—we felt every time we had that strange feeling that we’d done all this before, that we were characters in a story already written, one we’d read a very long time ago but had forgotten.
At the end of every year we made a list. Seven years, seven lists. A way of naming the recent past; practice in short-term memory. There was the year we bought the house in Chilmark, where I now live alone. There was the year my second book was published, the year one of Cary’s songs was used in a sweater commercial, the year I shaved my beard and immediately grew it back because I didn’t like to see my own face. There was the year we watched every Woody Allen movie, the year I started running, the year we made our own bread. There was the year the towers fell, of course, a difficult year for entirely different reasons. There was the next year, the year of color codes for fear, but for us there were no codes, just fear, and ours had nothing to do with planes flying into buildings or anthrax or
smart bombs—our fear, I should say mine, was a much more personal, a much more selfish fear.
* * *
After the year of hello was the year of silent Saturdays. Our first year of marriage—one of my favorites.
No talking. Just gestures and facial expressions and touch to know what the other wanted, what the other was feeling. There were gifts in silence: to put my finger to her lips to say hungry, to have to touch more, to make love without words and to lie, after, with only the sound of our breathing. Every Saturday every year until the last, when I didn’t not want to hear her voice, didn’t want her not to hear mine.
The last year, I couldn’t not speak. It was too quiet. I would panic, would forget she was in the bedroom, would call out to her, and she would walk into the living room, her finger to her lips to say, Silent day, did you forget? and I would say, “I don’t want to do it anymore,” and she would mouth, Are you sure? and I would say, “Say something, anything—it doesn’t matter.” Then she would sing to me—not words, just sounds, humming—and that way I could hear her voice, but she could still say that she hadn’t spoken.
WE CHOSE NAMES before we tried. Lucy and Vincent for Lucy Vincent Beach, our favorite place on Martha’s Vineyard.
Cary was against it: she was content living in the present; she didn’t want to pretend something was real when it wasn’t.
To believe, I told her, is to make it real.
She smiled at me, rolled her eyes. Our differences, then, endeared us to each other. I believed in knowing; she believed in uncertainty. I believed in control; she believed in surrender. I believed in what could be; she believed in what was.
“But you wrote me a fan letter,” I joked. “Chapter 6 cured you of your bucket problem.”
“I was flirting,” she said. “Besides, I still have my bucket problem.”
“Sweetheart,” I said, “you need to read my next book.”
In my mind, we already had twins, a girl and a boy, Lucy and Vincent. Born before they were born.
I reminded Cary that she had done something similar with Ralph. Her previous boyfriend didn’t want a dog, and so for a year Cary pretended she had a dog named Ralph—a joke, yes, and to annoy her boyfriend, but also to win him over, to convince him that having a dog would be fun. She pretended to walk the dog; she set a bowl of water on the kitchen floor; she bought a collar, a leash, and a rubber bone.
The boyfriend didn’t find this funny or charming, but aggressive. No surprise, they broke up, and a few months later a friend called about a litter of puppies. Cary fell in love with the first one she picked up, a German shepherd that looked exactly like the dog she’d been imagining.
“You see,” I told her. “We really do see the universe the same way.”
“But I’d imagined a male dog.”
“Small detail,” I said. “You wanted a Ralph, you got a Ralph.”
The first time we tried, Cary felt a sharp pain in her abdomen. She was the type not to make a fuss over pain, but it became so severe that I had to take her to the emergency room in the middle of the night.
She sat beside me, her eyes closed, and tried to take deep breaths. Every so often she winced, then returned to her breathing. She was good at living in the present even if it was unpleasant.
It was August, hot and humid. A sweaty young man, too skinny, hair in a ponytail, paced the ER, his shoulder bleeding through his white shirt. He had large, frightened eyes and the long, delicate fingers of a pianist. A short, overweight woman sat across from us, moaning. Her legs and arms were stubby, but her face was beautiful. She took off her shoes and socks, as if this might help. Her feet were dry and calloused, her toenails painted pink. A nurse had to call the woman three times before she looked up; it was as if she’d forgotten her own name. She took her shoes with her, but left the socks behind.
When a nurse called Cary’s name—we had been waiting two hours—she turned to me and said, “My sister was pregnant when she died.”
I didn’t know how to respond; it was the last thing I expected her to say.
“When I told you the story, I left that part out.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said.
“I just wanted to tell you,” she said, and together we went to see the doctor.
It was one of the first stories she told me about herself when we were dating. She bought her father flying lessons as a retirement gift; he had retired early, in his late fifties. After he earned his license, he planned a day to take Cary, her sister, Parker, and their mother for a flight over the Berkshires. But Cary woke that morning with the flu and couldn’t get out of bed. She hadn’t been that sick in years—not since the chickenpox in sixth grade. Her father said they could reschedule, but Cary said they should go without her; there was always next time.
Even had anyone remembered that she’d bought the flying lessons, that it had been her idea, no one would have blamed her.
At the funeral, Parker’s husband—widower, rather—leaned over to Cary and said, “She was pregnant. She told me a few days before.”
“Maybe we’re not supposed to have children,” she said. “Maybe it’s something we have to accept.”
We were making a salad. I was peeling carrots, Cary was chopping lettuce. The knife against the cutting board, the pile of carrot peels in the sink, the whir and suck of the garbage disposal—we both had strong déjà vu. It was as if the conversation we were about to have had already happened, as if we were reading a script. I knew all my lines. I even knew that I was about to say something foolish, that I was about to make a mistake.
“You accept things too easily,” I said.
“Life’s easier that way.”
“Your life, maybe. But this is our life.”
“It’s my body.”
“I don’t think you should give in so easily.”
“You heard the doctor.”
“Doctors don’t know everything.”
“Things happen for a reason,” she said.
“But we’ve talked about having children,” I said. “They have names.”
“That wasn’t a good idea.”
“I saw them,” I said. “They were real.”
“They were never real,” she said.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what I really believed: that her guilt about her sister—about her entire family, but especially about her pregnant sister—was causing her endometriosis. Her guilt, unless she changed her thoughts, would never allow her body to become pregnant.
The doctor was recommending that her ovaries—each covered with a grapefruit-sized cyst—come out immediately, before the cysts could rupture. Her bladder, bowels, and uterus were covered with scar tissue.
We went to see a fertility specialist, who gave us an option other than hysterectomy: surgery to remove the cysts and scrape away the scar tissue, followed as soon as possible—whenever Cary recovered—with fertility drugs and hormone injections.
Cary was in the hospital four days, recovering from surgery; I slept on a cot beside her bed, answering letters from readers. During the first few nights, when Cary had a tube in her nose and was too weak to talk, she’d tap on the sides of her bed, and that was how I knew she was thirsty—I’d feed her ice chips—or wanted me to sit with her for a few minutes.
On the third day she was able to get out of bed and walk to the bathroom. I asked if she needed my help, but she said no; she walked past me holding her hospital gown closed.
She’d been in the bathroom ten minutes, so I went to the door; that was when I heard her crying.
I opened the door. She was looking down at the scar.
“Were we supposed to do this?”
“If we want children.”
“This doesn’t seem natural,” she said.
We fought quiet fights. Sometimes I think I was the only one fighting. She was usually unflappable: when she was angry, she sang; when she was happy, she sang. No matter what, she went into her studio at home and sang: songs she’d
sung a hundred times or songs she wrote as the words came out of her mouth. Some songs—beautiful songs that made me forget what I’d been angry about—she sang only once; I never heard them again. I’d ask her—my way of making up, of saying sorry—if she would sing a song I especially liked. “The one about waking from a dream,” I’d say, and she’d say, “I’m not sure which one you mean,” and I’d say, “The one about dreaming—it goes like this,” and I’d hum the refrain as best as I could, and she’d look at me blankly as if she’d never heard it. “I’m sorry,” she’d say.
I believed her.
Most people have it in them to be that aggressive, to refuse to give something so beautiful, something only you can give, a song no one else knows. But she didn’t have that kind of aggression in her, or if she did, she was bigger than it. So I believed that she didn’t remember; believed when she said that it really hadn’t been her singing—it was something singing through her; it passed through her the way water and air and life pass through a body.
Those songs are lost; I can’t remember them. She didn’t mind losing them. Everything came and went, she said, and that made them more precious while they were here. Hello, goodbye, the only story we know.
We got to practice hello and goodbye: I was traveling to promote my second book, It’s On Its Way: Creating the Life You’ve Always Wanted, and she was singing at some clubs on the East Coast. If we were gone at the same time, she took Ralph with her and they stayed with friends or in pet-friendly hotels. She’d call me in my hotel room and say park and run and boy, words to make Ralph bark into the phone.
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