Start Without Me

by Joshua Max Feldman

  “I will do—”

  “Shut up,” he said, brusque, disinterested. He sighed, a small puff in the air. “The fact is I’ve been lying to you, too. I haven’t had a freelance job in two years. My mom’s been writing me checks. And the thing is, there’s nothing wrong with that. Only you make me feel like such a . . . And now this, it’s . . . it’s like fuck you, y’know?” He said it almost casually. Then he brought his lips to her ear, and whispered, intimately, “Fuck you.” He stood up and brushed off his sweater, though there was nothing to brush off. “You can go now. You can get the fuck out of here.” And he walked up the steps, went inside, and closed the door.

  She was shaking with cold by now; her face and fingertips had gone numb—all she could feel, really, was the pain from her fall, and the regret was so vast she didn’t know where to begin to feel that, either. She groaned, and the sound of the groan surprised her—like it was a noise she never heard herself make.

  She pictured in her mind the inside of the car: locked doors, heat pouring from the vents. This image propelled her to her feet. She lifted her purse to her shoulder, picked up her suitcase where it had landed on the lawn, and started gingerly down the steps, ignoring as best she could the various splintering sensations. And as she came around to the driveway, there was Adam, sitting on the hood of the car, smoking a cigarette.

  She must have looked worse than she’d even imagined, because the cigarette tumbled from his lips. “Oh, shit, what did they—” She held up a finger, cutting him off as she dragged the suitcase to the car. She pulled the car key from out of her pocket, but her hands were shaking so badly she couldn’t get it in the door to unlock it. “Hey,” he said, his voice gentle, respectful. “Why don’t you just chill for a minute?” It was the way you talked to a drunk.

  She handed him the key and he unlocked the door, leaned in, and pressing down the brake with his hand, turned on the engine. She watched him crank the heat all the way up, and then moved aside so that she could sit down. She got her ass in the seat, but her back suggested lifting her legs in was going to be a problem, so she remained with her feet on the driveway, half in, half out, her fingers pressed against the vent by the steering wheel.

  When the feeling returned to them, she said, “Can I have a cigarette?”

  He put two in his mouth, lit both, and handed her one. She inhaled through chattering teeth, and held the warm, tobacco-rich smoke in her lungs for a long second before exhaling. “Can I ask you one question?” he said. She nodded. “He hit you?” She shook her head. “Because I heard some shouting, and if anybody hit you, I mean, fuck, I’m a peaceful person, but—”

  “Stop it, Adam.” She’d had her fill of unconvincing machismo.

  “Okay,” he agreed.

  She smoked the cigarette, her first since she was twenty and Robbie made her quit, down to the filter, then asked for another one. As Adam handed it to her, he said, “You’ve got a cut above your eye there.” She reached up. “Right eye.” She touched a space above her eyebrow and winced. “It’s not like you’ll need stitches or anything.” He added, “I’m really sorry about Laila, I . . .” She glared at him and he shut up again.

  She took another long drag on the cigarette. Then she slid her purse off her shoulder, and tugged out the envelope. It took her a minute to get her fingernail under the arms of the envelope’s clasp, then finally she pulled out a sheaf of papers. The first was a copy of a handwritten letter of complaint some passenger had written about her. (“She was EXTREMELY rude to me and did NOT say she’s sorry!!”) Next was a copy of her credit report—admittedly, enough to make any father-in-law wary. Then she got to what must have been their crown jewel, a page with an eight-by-ten photograph stapled to it: her, at a table at the Chili’s in the Norfolk airport, seated across from Brendan, in his fatigues. He was holding her hand over the table. She looked happy.

  “I’m fucked, Adam,” she said.

  “I’m really sorry,” he answered.

  The photograph made her want to start sobbing again, so she opened the stack to the middle, and came upon a streaked printout of a mug shot: a defiant, black-eyed woman, sneering at the camera—tough, pretty, her hair fighting its way free from a ponytail.

  “Who’s that?” Adam asked.

  “That’s my mother.” Marissa could make out the date on the placard Mona held at her chest, 6–8–82, four years before Marissa was born. On the back of the page were scrawled a few notes:

  colorful character

  bookmaker? Italians? Bulger?

  DUIs, fencing

  No convics

  “She looks like you,” Adam told her.

  Marissa agreed. Years younger and a hundred pounds lighter than she’d ever seen Mona, the resemblance was unmistakable: the almond-shaped eyes, the thick dimple in her chin, the outward curved nose.

  Adam said, “So I need to tell you something.” She looked up at him, and he was holding a pale blue glass ball in his palm.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “Art. Expensive art. Your in-laws’ art.” He went on, “I don’t know, they’re not even bad people, I just felt like . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “What the fuck is wrong with you, Adam?” she asked, exhausted. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  He shrugged more definitively, wedged his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and walked with the ball to Laila’s Range Rover. He balanced it carefully on the door handle. “She’ll find it there,” he announced as he walked back to Marissa. The coat seemed to have gained a size over the course of the day, his eyes to have sunk still deeper into his skull. He looked like a refugee who’d wandered out of the woods: a vagrant, a stray.

  He produced a crumpled tissue from somewhere, offered it to her. She didn’t know whether it was meant for the cut, for her nose . . .

  “Are you still in love with Johanna?” she asked him.

  As she might’ve guessed, this set off a spasm of unhappy fidgeting, from his fingers to his feet. “Yeah, I’d say so,” he finally answered.

  “And you think she’d be happy to see you again?”

  And all at once he was perfectly still. “Yeah,” he said somberly. “Yeah, I think she would be.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  “Where?”

  “The bus station. You’re going back to her.”

  He swallowed. “What about you?”

  “I’m going to spend Thanksgiving with my mom.”

  III

  Once More, with Feeling

  [ 1 ]

  The Johanna Impromptu on the Way to the Brattleboro Bus Station

  When Adam dreamed of Johanna, there was never any music. He didn’t dream of listening to her play, or of playing with her, or of writing songs with her, the tugs and tussles and wrong turns and eurekas of composition. And he didn’t dream of speaking with her again, or sleeping with her again, as he sometimes did with other exes, nor did he any longer have the dream he had right after it ended: running into her again in the most mundane places, a pharmacy, a food court, and ta-da, there she was.

  No, Adam’s recurring dream about Johanna was always set in the moments before they played. They’d just walked onstage, in the days when the Kiss and Kill crowds were swelling like destiny—dozens, then a hundred, then more. All around him was the swirl of swooping spotlights, the cheers and screaming, a mass of expectant strangers, eyes and noses and open mouths drifting from the edge of the stage, and the eighty-eight keys under his ten fingers, tasked with making sense of it all. In the dream, he didn’t know what city they were in, he couldn’t remember what they were supposed to play, if it was a set opener or an encore, he couldn’t remember how a keyboard worked at all, as had sometimes been the case when he was a little boy, in a jacket and throat-strangling tie, and he was expected to come out with Brahms’ Rhapsody in B Minor from memory. And then he’d look up, and on the other side of the stage would be Johanna, guitar in her hands, her blue eyes luminous, still, w
aiting for him. She’d mouth the name of the song—“Any Given Sunday,” “Still Life,” “Naomi”—her chin would nod in time, and he’d know with perfect calm what to do. And then he’d wake up.

  In the passenger seat of the Sonata, Adam pressed his handprint into the plush, sand-colored fabric of the seat near his thigh. Marissa hadn’t known how to get to the bus station, so she’d searched on her phone, then propped it against the stick so she could watch the scrolling digital map as she drove. They’d turned off the Russells’ winding lane onto a sharp, unbending street, wooded hills on either side. They were eleven minutes away, according to the phone’s display. “We’ll be there soon!” Adam announced, his voice loud and a few steps flat of enthusiasm. Marissa nodded stiffly, making it clear there wasn’t going to be any talking. Occasionally, she glanced at herself in the rearview—pulling a scrap of leaf from her hair, licking her thumb to wipe at the inkblot-test makeup stains under her eyes. But other than that, her jaw was set, her eyes were on the windshield: She was taking him to the bus station; he was going back to Johanna.

  But there were some things he needed to explain to Marissa—only he didn’t know how to begin. Explanations were not his strong suit, and he’d found in the process of getting sober, in the day-to-day of sobriety, demands for explanation were constant: Why’d you start drinking? Why’d you stop? Why’d you quit playing? Why’d you move to San Francisco? And what about Johanna? All his explanations seemed to lack something though; there was a blank he could never fill, and that blank actually represented the greater part of what he was trying to say.

  If he wanted to explain to Marissa about Johanna—what could he tell her? Even the simple question she’d asked left more out than it let in. Was he still in love with her? Sure, of course. But what did “in love” mean? The words had gotten so tired and overplayed, you couldn’t even hear them anymore, like Frank Sinatra’s voice, like the first bars of Beethoven’s Fifth. If he said yes, did Marissa know what it was like, from those first searing vivid moments, when she sat down next to him on the piano bench? Lifted her hands behind her head to tie her long hair in a loose knot, the frilled straps of her sundress slipping inches closer to her neck, took two of the three guitar picks pressed between her lips and set them carefully on the bench beside her knee, tips together, in an hourglass shape, and drew the third pick down the open strings of the acoustic in her lap, a quick, full, jaunty check or demonstration that she was in tune, and, so—let’s go.

  Adam had heard of her but never met her. She was someone they talked about in the low-end Brooklyn indie-punk scene: Johanna, with the big blue headlight eyes, who sang like Joanna Newsom and played guitar like Annie Clark. And he almost hadn’t come out that night. It was the dead February of a brutal winter. From the window of his apartment in Williamsburg, he could watch ice floes sliding solemnly down the East River. He was creeping up to thirty; the Deployers had broken up; and he felt sort of in between things or maybe past the best things—sitting in for a show with this band, playing keys for a studio session with that, dipping his toe in half-assed groups that formed over beers and broke up the next week when the drummer’s girlfriend kicked him out of her apartment, and he had to sell his kit and move back to wherever. He was playing music all the time, listening to music all the time, hanging out almost exclusively with people who did the same—and in this way, living a life very close to the one he’d dreamed of. But what seemed most urgent was the music he wasn’t making; the recognition his talent wasn’t getting; the inescapable fact that it wasn’t happening for him.

  So when Parker (whatever happened to Parker?) texted him about a party in Bushwick, he thought maybe he’d rather just stay in and smoke weed and listen to Lateralus for the millionth time. But, as fate would have it, Adam changed his mind. And after doing a few laps of the packed and sweat-smelling apartment, and finding the usual crowd of acquaintances and randos, musicians and hangers-on, trust fund DBs and the graying guys with the ridiculous nicknames (Dr. Funkenstein, Pheromone Ben, Montclair Matty) you always did at these parties, he sat down with over-it-all defiance at a battered upright against the wall in the living room, and started playing. And after a while, Johanna sat down next to him.

  She was twenty-two then. Long, ropy limbs, blond hair dyed with streaks of blue, fine cheekbones, eyes presented in Technicolor. She tied her hair in a loose knot, she drew her third pick down open strings, and they began to play. Without looking at each other, without saying a word, they took, gave, begged, surrendered, fought, kissed, killed. God, she was great, she was so, so great, he thought. She was the real thing.

  The pedantic robovoice of Marissa’s phone demanded, “In a quarter mile, turn right onto Middle Street.” Looking up to the windshield, Adam saw they were passing through a residential neighborhood: ranch homes, shoveled walks, slumped two-ball snowmen, a diamond Children at Play sign—the suburbs. Every lawn had a tree, the black, leafless branches forking like cracks in the low gray clouds. They were eight minutes away.

  Because here’s the thing, Adam could tell Marissa—playing music with someone isn’t like sitting next to them in a fucking cubicle. When he was a kid, he played alone, and the music he played had been written by men who’d been dead for hundreds of years, and the highest aesthetic achievement he could attain was to play the music correctly, and if he felt any other presence with him at the piano, it was of the dead composer glaring at his fingering, a man who a century or two before had written something so refined the world was compelled to keep listening to it forever. He didn’t deny that Chopin was perfect. But the dusty folk-rock legends on Kristen’s mixtape were alive. And even a drummer who couldn’t keep time and a guitarist who couldn’t play more than a dozen chords were alive, too. It was no great revelation, but it had been a revelation to Adam: Music was something you could do with other people. The intimacy of it didn’t have to be terrifying or oppressive. It could be liberating. And most times, no, you didn’t attain some transcendent communion of souls. But sometimes you did. You could play music with a woman you’d never met and twenty minutes later know her better than people you’d spent your whole life with. Was there a word for that? Holy, maybe.

  After they played together like that, it was no surprise they had the mundane “shit in common,” things to talk about when they weren’t playing, or writing, or fucking like they believed if they came hard enough, often enough, they could reverse the rotation of the Earth. She’d been branded a prodigy at a young age, too—her gifts making her as unaccountable to her actuary father and stay-at-home mother as Adam was to his family. The afternoon he met her parents, he watched a color-bleached VHS of Johanna, age five, her hair preposterous with curls and ribbons, singing “Amazing Grace” onstage at some megachurch, every syllable a corkscrew of vibrato. So they’d both from early on become accustomed to other people thinking of them as a little strange. But they got each other. So no one else in the world mattered.

  “Would you stop that?” Marissa said.

  “What?” He noticed he was flicking the metal lock on the glove compartment latch.

  “Turn left onto Hamill Road!” the voice instructed. Marissa signaled, turned. The Sonata rolled onto a covered bridge, the darkness abrupt and droning with the sound of the car echoing against the walls. “Da, da, da,” he sang, harmonizing with the sound.

  “What?” Marissa said.

  “Forget it.”

  He could tell Marissa he and Johanna made each other happy. They were good together. There was a perfect frankness to her gestures of love toward him: She baked him a cake on his birthday (misshapen and hours in the making and borderline inedible, the sugar and cinnamon quantities mixed up—but she baked him a cake!); she bought him coats and hats and gloves at thrift stores all winter, boxes full, more than he could ever wear; she reassured him when he woke from the anxiety dream that plagued him, the one where all his fingers fell off, promised him that even if that did happen, she’d love him anyway. It might sound like the un
remarkable stuff of any relationship. But Johanna understood from minute one what it took them weeks of group and individual sessions at Stone Manor to put together: that Adam could never be told often enough, plainly enough, that he belonged; that he was normal; that he was loved. And he did the same for her, offered her that same unaltering affection—tried to, at least. Because she needed that, too.

  That North Star love only became more important as everything else started to accelerate around them—as the music they made got better and better, and more and more people noticed it, wanted it, wanted to pay them for it. She was into New Wave, would listen to Howard Jones songs again and again and again. Adam could find his way into that. They arrived at a sound that was elaborate without being dense, pop—inviting and symphonic. Their sound was “exciting,” the A&Rs told them. Before they knew it, their lives were ten shows a week, magazine parties and playing on TV, Kafkaesque meetings with label executives, reviews, interviews—but they were in it together. She never let him forget it, he never let her forget it. Or anyway, he did his best.

  Because if he were honest, he’d have to admit that Johanna was a difficult person to know how to satisfy at times. Maybe if he were honest, he’d have to admit that Johanna was a difficult person to know—even for him.

  She understood that, better than anyone. She found her differences from other people more alarming, more isolating, than Adam did. Part of the problem was that she was just very fucking beautiful: at eleven, lanky, gangly, teased for looking like she’d popped out of a UFO; at twelve, stared at by grown men, approached on the street by model scouts. Assumptions accrued to her face: that she must be mysterious, or wise, or flighty, or angelic. And this fostered a kind of paranoia in her. She was never convinced which affection and what scorn she deserved, and which belonged to the accidents of her big eyes and symmetrical features. When Adam could tolerate hearing about her exes, Johanna complained of an emotional sleight of hand her former boyfriends and girlfriends performed: fucking, dating, falling in love with some idea of her, and leaving her in a solitude that grew the longer the relationship lasted and the clearer that gap became.