by Gwen Cooper
“That’s boilerplate, standard,” Laura tells him. “We just fill in the numbers based on the information the client provides.” The skin of her knuckles curls and tenses around her wineglass until it’s whiter than the rest of her hand. Maybe she’s afraid of the kicking cobras Josh is talking about. Sarah is afraid of snakes, too, which is why I always check newspapers so carefully.
“What about on the third page? It says something about waiving my rights in perpetuity and throughout the universe.” Josh tries again to smile. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“That’s also standard. They’re just trying to cover all their bases to avoid a lawsuit. Which was nothing you were planning to do, anyway. A nice, clean break—that’s all they want.”
Josh winces when Laura says this, although I don’t think she notices. “Everything might be standard, but I’m not going to call it nice or clean,” he tells her. “So I’m okay to sign it? Should you take a couple of minutes and look through the whole thing? You’re my lawyer, after all.”
Laura continues to hold the papers without unfolding them. She takes a long swallow from her wineglass. “I can’t do that,” she finally says.
“Really?” Josh sounds like he thinks Laura is saying something not-true. “Really?”
“Your company is my client, Josh. Forget all the ethical issues and conflicts of interest. The people at my firm had to go pretty far out of their way to keep me from knowing about this. There were meetings and memos that I didn’t know anything about—about one of my clients—and nothing ever crossed my desk. And you really don’t have to worry,” she adds quickly, seeing how Josh’s eyebrows come together to make an angry line across his forehead. “These severance agreements are—”
“Yeah, I know. Standard.” His voice gets louder. “And I guess I don’t meet the standards to get some legal advice from my wife. Maybe I should call your buddy Perry—he seems like a nice guy.”
“Josh, if I send you back with this thing all marked up, Perry will know it was me. He’s not an idiot.” Laura’s voice is also getting louder. “And even if somehow he didn’t figure it out, I couldn’t look him in the face and lie.”
“It didn’t seem to bother Perry to look you in the face and lie.”
“He didn’t lie. He kept client information confidential. That’s Perry’s job. It’s my job, too.” Laura’s eyes look hurt. Sarah says that Laura has her father’s eyes, but Laura looks like Sarah now as she runs her fingers through her hair. “This is the kind of thing that could get me fired, Josh. And for what? It’s not like we can afford for you to walk away from five months’ salary, anyway.”
“You know, I think I’ve heard enough legalese for one day.” Josh takes the papers back from Laura.
“Let me call a friend at another firm. I’m sure I can find—”
“Don’t worry about it.” Josh’s voice doesn’t sound angry anymore. It has no expression at all. “There’s nothing to worry about, right? It’s standard.”
“I’ll make some calls first thing tomorrow morning,” Laura says.
“I said don’t worry about it. I wouldn’t want to see you get your hands dirty.” Josh is completely right about that. There’s nothing more disgusting than a human with dirty hands trying to touch you. He gets up and says, “I’m going upstairs to check email.”
Josh hands his glass back to Laura. She just stands there for a long time, holding two glasses of wine without drinking from either of them.
Most nights, Laura stays up much later than Josh. She likes to read her work papers when the apartment is quiet. But tonight, Josh is still awake in the living room when Laura gets into bed and turns on the TV. The only times Sarah ever watched the little TV in our bedroom, instead of the bigger one in the living room, was when she was too sick to get out of bed. Laura never watches TV in the bedroom, either. Not usually, anyway.
I remember one night, a year and three months ago, when Sarah came home very late from work. It was unlike her to spend so many hours in a row away from our apartment, and I was worried by the time she finally got back. Our neighbor from the building—the same one who came to feed me when Sarah stopped coming home at all—was with her. Sarah was pale and her face was pinched, as if she were in pain. But when the neighbor helped Sarah get settled on the couch and hovered over her, asking if there was anything else she needed, Sarah said, “I’ll be fine, Sheila. Thanks so much again for everything.”
Sarah stayed in bed watching TV for the next four days, and those were probably the happiest four days I’ve ever known. I had Sarah to snuggle under the covers with, and she didn’t have to go to work or anything. I’d never had Sarah all to myself for so long.
But I wasn’t happy that first night. Sarah didn’t turn on any lamps after the neighbor left. She just sat on the couch with me in her lap until the sun came up. Even though she didn’t say anything, I could tell that something was very wrong, and that she needed me close. In the darkness I could still see the tiny cracks in the skin around Sarah’s eyes. And when the water from her eyes flowed into those cracks, that was where I licked her gently. To let the light in.
Now I follow the sound of the TV up the stairs and see Laura in bed like she’s asleep, but her legs keep kicking. They kick so hard, she almost kicks the covers right off the bed. That’s something else Sarah used to do—kick the blankets in her sleep when she was upset.
When Sarah was worried about something in her sleep, I used to curl up tight right next to her left ear and stretch out one paw to rest, very gently, on her shoulder. I didn’t want to wake her, but I did want her to know that I was there with her. Sometimes my lying next to her was what made her able to fall into a deep enough sleep that she wasn’t kicking anymore.
Josh is in the living room listening to one of Sarah’s black disks. He’s playing the song Sarah sang to me the day we found each other, the song that has my name in it. Dear Prudence, the song says, won’t you come out to play …
I’ve been trying not to get too close to Laura and Josh. After all, only one person can be your Most Important Person. For me, that person is Sarah. And when she comes back, I don’t want anybody—including me—to be confused about the way things are supposed to be.
But Laura looks so much like Sarah, lying there with her eyes closed and her legs scrunched up, that I find myself jumping onto the bed. The ache in my chest from Sarah’s not being here, which I’ve been living with for so long, eases a little. Moving stealthily, so my Prudence-tags don’t jingle and startle her, I settle onto the pillow next to Laura’s left ear. Curling into a ball, with my tail wrapped around my nose to keep my face warm, I reach out one paw and let it rest on Laura’s shoulder.
Laura rolls over so that she’s facing me, with her eyes still closed. Her breathing gets deeper, the way Sarah’s does when she’s finally falling into a real sleep, and her arm curves out so that my tail and nose rest in the bend of her elbow. Alone in her bedroom, wearing her sleep clothes and without Josh lying next to her, Laura smells more like Sarah than ever. The TV isn’t very loud, and I can still hear the Dear Prudence song playing downstairs.
Hearing it now, with all the little crackles and popping sounds in the exact same places I remember, just the way it was when Sarah played this black disk in our old apartment, I drift off to sleep. In my dream Sarah is there, smiling at me and saying, Who’s my love? Who’s my little love? When a hand falls onto my back to stroke my fur, I don’t know if it’s real or if it’s Sarah’s hand in my dream. I purr deeply anyway and think, I am, Sarah. I’m your love.
7
Sarah
IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE IT NOW, BUT DOWNTOWN NEW YORK USED TO BE dead quiet at night. You could walk down Broadway from Prince to Reade without hearing anything other than the sound of the occasional taxicab and your own footsteps echoing off buildings. You could walk down Elizabeth Street at four AM with nothing to keep you company but the aroma of fresh-baked bread from mom-and-pop bakeries.
It was
silent, that is, unless you knew where to go. Even back then—before it became big, and then commercial, and then finally the playground of middle-class college kids and the bridge-and-tunnel crowd—there were pockets and places where the noise went on all night. Soho lofts where an invitation and password got you into underground parties that played the kind of music you’d never hear on the radio. Bars where jukeboxes hummed all night and clubs where bands didn’t start their first set until two AM. The shattering-glass sound of beer bottles, the inevitable thud of a person too drunk to stand who eventually falls down, the thump thump thump of someone’s bass turned all the way up.
I’ve always hated silence. I’ve always thought silence was like death. Quiet as death. Silent as the tomb. Dead men tell no tales. Nobody ever says the opposite. Nobody ever says noisy as the tomb.
That’s what I loved so much about disco. Disco used all the sounds, all the beats, all the instruments. The noise of it was always there for you. It would pick you up and spin you around and whirl you and dip you until you were almost too dizzy to stand on your own, but it never once let you fall.
You’re probably thinking to yourself how silly disco was. Maybe you were even one of those people who wore a DISCO SUCKS T-shirt back in the day. But you only remember it that way because, by the end, the major labels thought they had a formula for it and cranked out by-the-numbers fluff, trying to make a quick cash grab. Disco never died, though. It just changed forms. And even today, if you’re at a wedding and the DJ puts on a song that gets every single person—no matter how old or young—out onto the floor, chances are it’s a dance song written sometime between 1974 and 1979.
It was 1975 when I first discovered the New York music scene. When you start coming into the City by yourself at fifteen to sneak into parties and clubs, when you move there permanently at sixteen and live in an unfinished loft above a hardware store, people assume you’re fleeing a troubled home life. Abusive parents, maybe, or some unnamed family tragedy, possibly even a grabby stepfather. When people keep making up the same story for you, it becomes easier and easier to believe it’s true. That’s why it’s so important to keep your past organized. Your past is the real truth. Your past is who you are now.
Prudence comes to sit in front of me. Little lady with her dainty white socks and black tiger stripes. “It’s important to keep your past organized,” I tell her. She regards me from rounded green eyes, then meows in an apparently thoughtful way.
I hadn’t heard music in so long before Prudence and I found each other. Not just the music in my records, which sat for years in a storage unit, but the music in my head. It just stopped one day. I lost it. And then there was Prudence. After that, it was like floodgates opened and all that music I’d hidden away came pouring back out.
Prudence, standing on her hind legs to swipe at dust motes in a sunbeam, is a conductor leading a symphony. Prudence curled in my lap while I stroke her little back is “In My Room” by the Beach Boys. Prudence sneaks into the bathroom and unrolls the toilet paper, spilling it all over the floor, in rhythm to “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango.
Pru-dence kit-ten, Pru-dence kit-ten. That’s what I hear in my mind whenever I look at her. A perfect rhythm in four/four time. The sound of a heartbeat times two. The motor of a life.
What I remember most about the house I grew up in is the silence. We had wall-to-wall carpeting in every room except the bathrooms and kitchen, so even the sounds of us walking around doing everyday things felt more like sleepwalking than living.
By the time I was a teenager, my parents hardly spoke to each other anymore except when necessary. What are you making for dinner tonight? When is the plumber coming? Sarah, could you pass the peas?
They had been desperate for a second child. When I was eight, my mother gave birth to a baby boy who lived only ten hours. After he died, it was as if it was painful for my mother to be reminded that she’d ever had any children at all. The only thing she wanted was a quiet home. When my junior high music teacher said I had a good voice and should maybe take private singing lessons, my mother declined on the grounds that she didn’t want noise in the house all the time. Trying to stop my “endless chatter” once (I’d been asking her questions about her own childhood), my mother told me I’d better get past my need for constant conversation, or someday when I grew up and got married myself there’d be no end of fighting in my house. The funny thing is, I never did fight with my husband until one day just after Laura turned three. He said, I don’t think I can handle this anymore. And then, the next day, he was gone. Just like that.
Eventually I got used to the silence that emanated from my mother like smoke to fill the rooms of our house and choke our words. I spent most of my time trying to disappear into it. Still, I remember nights when I’d lie in bed and pray for rain just so I could hear the sound of it, like a round of applause, beating down on the roof above my head.
All that changed for me the day my parents gave me permission to take the train by myself to Manhattan from where we lived in White Plains. All I had to do was promise I wouldn’t go farther downtown than Herald Square, where Macy’s was. But the subway system, which had seemed so easy to understand when I went into the City with my mother, confused me hopelessly when I tried to figure it out on my own. I took the wrong train from Grand Central, and then another wrong train at 14th Street, and somehow I ended up on Third Avenue. The streets were mostly empty. I saw only a few bums huddled miserably in doorways, and clusters of tough-looking girls standing on street corners. Buildings, even the ones that didn’t look so old, were crumbling from the disrepair of neglect.
By the time I reached Second Avenue, I knew beyond a doubt that I was nowhere near Macy’s. Up ahead I saw what looked to be a newsstand with a yellow awning that inexplicably proclaimed GEM SPA (inexplicable because it didn’t seem like you’d find either gems or a spa inside) and, farther down, a store whose black awning extended out onto the sidewalk. The words LOVE SAVES THE DAY were written along its side in multicolored block lettering. The store’s window was a riot of color, a delta of ruckus jutting into a sea of gray and dull brick-red. It held exotic-looking clothes and magazines and toys and more than my eye was capable of taking in all at once. I could tell that it was a secondhand store, and I knew how appalled my mother would be at the thought of my buying used clothing. But against the gunmetal silence of the street, the colors of that store window were like shouts calling me in.
I took the first dress I pulled off the rack, made by somebody called Biba, into the dressing room. It was a muted gold, interwoven with a cream-colored diamond pattern. The sleeves were long and elaborate, blousing away from tight cuffs. The body of the dress fell in pleats, in a baby-doll fashion, from just above my still-flat chest to a hem so far up my thigh that, when I exited the dressing room to look at myself in the mirror, I blushed.
“You should buy it,” I heard a voice say. A girl, barely five feet tall and weighing maybe all of ninety-five pounds, looked at me admiringly. I guessed that she was two or three years older than I was. Beautiful in an impish sort of way, with enormous hazel eyes, a snub nose like a cat’s, and a mouth so small it just made you look at her eyes again. Her hair was short and chopped off unevenly in a careless way that nonetheless looked deliberate. It was mostly blond except for where it had streaks of green and pink.
The girl noticed where my eyes went and, touching one of the pink streaks, she said, “Manic panic.” Later I’d learn that Manic Panic was a store on St. Mark’s Place where they sold off beat hair colors in spray-on aerosol cans. At the time, though, I had no idea what she was talking about. She added, “I go there a few times a week to let Snooky spray my hair, but I think I have to stop. Too many other people are doing it now.”
I nodded, because I wanted to look like I knew what that sentence meant. An entire trend had apparently taken root and flourished here in the City. And I’d known nothing about it out in White Plains, where nothing ever changed except to get drabb
er.
“You should definitely buy that dress,” the girl repeated.
“I’m not really sure it’s me,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s much too short?”
The girl laughed, loud and harsh. She had a voice like a chain saw, too gritty and hard-edged to belong to someone as young and delicate-looking as she was. How many sleepless nights of cigarettes and shouting over music had gone into the making of that voice? Eventually I’d hear her sing and come to know just how hypnotic and blissed-out she could make it sound when she wanted to. “Girl, that dress is more you than anything you’ve ever had on.” She aimed a dimpled smile at me. “And I don’t even know you.”
I laughed, too, at the absurdity of her logic.
“What kind of music are you into?” she asked unexpectedly.
“The usual stuff, I guess.” I tried to think of something to say that would be truthful, but that also might impress her. “I’ve been listening to Pet Sounds a lot lately.” Then I blushed again, because what could be less impressive to this girl than Pet Sounds, which had come out way back in 1966, nine years earlier?
She looked at me appraisingly. “You sound like you can probably sing.”
“I used to,” I said. “But my parents didn’t like it.”
The girl’s face registered deep understanding, and I saw that I’d unintentionally passed a test I hadn’t realized I was taking. “I’m going to a party tonight that’ll have some really great music,” she told me. “Stuff nobody else is playing. You should come. I’ll meet you somewhere at midnight and we can go over together.”
I imagined all the insurmountable obstacles between me and a midnight party in the City. I’d never been to a party that started at midnight. The girl must have sensed something of this because she asked, “You’re still living at home?” I nodded. How old did she think I was, anyway? I waited for her to decide I was just some kid, unworthy of her time, but she said, “Look, call your parents and tell them you’re spending the night at a friend’s house. You can hang out with me the rest of the day if you don’t have anything else to do. I’ll figure out something for you to wear.”