Thank You for the Music

by Jane McCafferty

  “Looks like a prison to me,” I said.

  He turned around. “Exactly.” He looked at me with his mouth slightly open, the faintest smile on his lips, his eyes shining.

  “You’re what, fourteen?”

  “Fourteen on August twenty-second.”

  “Just a week away. I should make you a cake. Or a birthday breakfast. You want some scrambled eggs and toast with jelly?”

  I put the song on again just to hear the line

  “Young men on the corner like scattered leaves. . . .”

  “I should go.”

  “Go? You just got here! Don’t go.”

  He crossed his arms and stood regarding me for a long moment, chin lowered, eyes raised, an expression that struck me as scholarly, as he apparently weighed the pros and cons of accepting my invitation. I held his gaze, and didn’t smile, pretending it made no difference at all to me whether he stayed or not. But in that moment, I so badly wanted him to stay, had he turned me down, I would’ve begged him to reconsider. You have to listen to this other song, I’d have said. You have to sit and listen with me just a while longer. Please don’t go!

  “Hungry?” I said.

  “I guess I am positively hungry.”

  He followed me into the kitchen. I was happy. He had a quiet way of walking. I took the CD with me and put it on the little player I have on my counter. Our ceiling light was blown out, so I lit some Christmas candles (all I could find) and set them on the table, where he sat with his head lowered down and his hands folded in his lap, a posture he’d probably been taught by an adult teaching him how to behave in church. He’d agreed with me that we should have fried potatoes with the eggs. Your music played more quietly now. I put on the song “Paradise” and I told him how you’d written the first part from the point of view of a suicide bomber.

  “Nasty.” He shook his head.

  “If you listen, it breaks your heart. The suicide bomber’s just some kid.”

  “Yeah, some nasty kid!”

  “Where were you on September eleventh when you found out what was happening?”

  “In school, back in Allentown.”

  “Math class? English?”

  “In this closet by the gym with my girl.”

  “A closet by the gym?”

  “Yeah. It was nasty, but we had an old chair down there. The janitor didn’t care.”

  “So how’d you hear about it in the closet by the gym?”

  “My girl, her stepmom called her cell phone. She was all ‘the world is ending, the world is ending.’”

  “So what did you do?”

  “We just stayed real still and held on tight. What else you gonna do?”

  “She still your girl?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. She back in Allentown.” He crossed his arms, looked down.

  “Here, have some juice.”

  “Got chocolate milk?”

  I smiled at him when he asked this. He smiled back. For a moment we looked at each other. A sense of wonder had entered the room. Filled it up. For a long moment you could’ve gone swimming in it. I live for those moments.

  “Sure,” I finally said. “I have plenty of chocolate milk.”

  “It’s good,” he said, after his first gulp.

  I let the potatoes fry and sat down next to him. I’d switched on “Baby Let’s Be Friends.” With that one, Mr. Springsteen, innocence comes out of its grave and dances through the broken streets and all the ruins feel like manageable background.

  “I like this one all right,” he said. His long fingers kept time with the tune on the table, his shoulders dancing a bit.

  “So tell me why you have to walk so late at night,” I said.

  “Because of people.”

  “Because of people. Okay. That narrows it down.”

  “Yes.” He looked down. “Yes, it does. It rules out grandiose devils, and dogs.” He smiled. “Can I get some more chocolate milk?”

  I got him some more milk.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Bruce Springsteen Lover.”

  He offered me a smile.

  It was three-thirty in the morning. He was becoming my son.

  If my husband knew I’d opened the door to a stranger in the middle of the night, he’d say I was taking a ridiculous risk and he’d be right. I’d always taken too many risks. I felt an old sense of shame wash over me.

  But then this boy drank his milk down so quickly, and I realized he was hungrier than a person should be, and I got up and pushed the fried potatoes around in the skillet and told myself I will always take risks.

  I remember my black friends after 9/11 said it was sort of a relief not to be seen as the enemy for a while, that for a while it was the Muslims who people had their eyes on. My black friend Veronica said she felt for the first time she was almost on the inside of America. She said she didn’t like being on the inside at someone else’s expense, but that was the way it felt for at least a month or so. The brown people were the enemy now, she said. What a pathetic relief.

  My one friend from Pakistan, she just packed up and went back home after she and I went to this Greek bazaar and a mentally ill woman with a flag on her shirt pushed her down on the ground like some bully on a playground. That was the end of September. My friend booked a flight the next day. She was a good friend, and I missed her. At Joe from the coffee shop’s suggestion, I read Mr. Chomsky to further complicate my patriotism, which rose in me like dark sap in the shape of question marks. I prayed for the victims, for all victims, but now, looking back, I wish I’d kept praying with the same intensity I’d prayed with in September. For the victims, sure, past and present and future victims, and for the end of hatred that just keeps opening around the world like a million mouths of ugly fire. It won’t be happy until it’s one big mouth, one big fire, one big wasted world. (I could feel the truth of all that back then.)

  But by January, life was beginning to feel mundane again. Then my husband moved out. That woke me up. Then, by May, the absence felt almost normal. I do think sometimes unless you are the one holding the dying in your arms, unless you are the one in the fire, or the one falling ninety stories down to the ground to meet your death, or truly the loved one by the side of the grave as the body is lowered, I do think, Mr. Springsteen, we all recover too quickly, which is one reason why we need these songs.

  My visitor’s name turned out to be Desmond. Desmond ate all his potatoes and eggs so quickly I had to make some more. He asked for another napkin. He wiped his mouth frequently, he chewed quietly, and he ate with great seriousness. This seriousness, this intense concentration, had me waiting for him to say something profound. He looked always on the verge of that. Then I realized he didn’t have to say a word. He was profound enough, just being a kid alive in the world.

  I know that evil is all around us. I know that I was lucky to open the door to beautiful, hungry Desmond. I know that for me, your prayer,”May your faith give us faith/ may your love give us love” is working right now.

  It was hard to say good-bye to him out on the porch, the moon across the street too high, rising like a kid’s lost balloon. I told him to come back anytime the light was on. “Thank you,” he said, and stepped down toward the street.

  “Thank you for coming by,” I said.

  I wondered if his black sneakers were comfortable. I wondered if he’d walk until morning. I watched him turn the corner, and some knowledge of how singular his life was, and all lives were, filled me with dread. I missed him. I missed everyone. But it was too late to call a soul. I went back in and put on The Rising. Obviously all you can do with dread is work to change it into love, Mr. Springsteen, and that’s another reason we need these songs.

  Have you ever heard of his grandfather’s doo-wop group from Allentown, the Blue Tenders? They are not on the Web. Why did I think they would be?

  It’s hard to see those old doo-wop guys now on public TV, so innocent, so clearly from another time, so all about harmony.

  I wonder who the pe
ople were that made Desmond have to walk.

  I wonder what the Blue Tenders say when they talk about the world.

  I wonder if someday Desmond will tell someone, “Once in the middle of the night I listened to Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising with some white lady in Pittsburgh in her house. And she fed me. Wasn’t too bad.”

  God bless you.

  SO LONG, MARIANNE

  We met when we were almost young,

  deep in the green lilac park,

  you held on to me like I was a crucifix,

  as we went kneeling through the dark. . . .

  She sang the song to Ben that spring afternoon in the store where they worked. Her name was Marianne, like the song, and last night, back in his room in West Philly above the little Hmong market, eating snow peas in the dark, they heard the old song playing down in the street on a car radio. The car was an old blue fifties’ wreck with fins, the driver an ancient Hmong man who wore a T-shirt that read Please Enjoy! It was strange hearing that old Leonard Cohen song blaring from those battered windows. Marianne’s father had listened to that record when she was a child. She could remember him singing it in a sunny kitchen. She was twenty now. Her father had been dead for four years.

  She and Ben stood face-to-face behind the counter. The store was a health-food market owned by a woman named Nellie who decided the two of them could be trusted to tend the place while she went away. “Gotta go to Lauderdale with Karen. Gotta try to talk her outta marryin’ Ron,” Nellie had told them the day before she left. Nellie was short and wide-hipped, with brown eyes magnified into permanent astonishment behind glasses. Money was new to her; she liked her bracelets jangling, and she liked the audience she had in her young employees.

  “Come on, you two, you know I’m right about Ron! He’s South Philly Italian meets Planet of the Apes!”

  She pronounced it “Eye-talian.”

  “I like Ron,” Marianne said. She didn’t, really. She liked to rile Nellie.

  “Then you marry him! I don’t want him for a son-in-law!” Her face had reddened. “Karen’s father was hairless as a baby doll! Why’d she pick an ape like Ron for a husband?”

  “Maybe she wants to monkey around?” Ben said.

  Marianne laughed. Nellie slapped the air. “It ain’t funny. He’s a dropout. We had him over the house for supper, he sits at the table with his top three buttons undone, he does these bad, I’m talking bad imitations of the guy on Goodfellas, and poor Karen, what the hell does she know?”

  “Nothing?” Marianne ventured.

  “Less than nothing, honey. Maybe even less than the two of you lovebirds.”

  “If she loves Ron, then—” Marianne said, wanting to extend the conversation.

  “You know what I say about love, don’t ya?”

  “Uh, no, I don’t think we do. What do you say, Nellie?” This was Ben, who waited with a look of someone expecting to laugh. But Nellie only walked away, calling over her shoulder, “Don’t let no lunatics in here and no charity cases and lock the damn doors at five!”

  That was three days ago. So far they’d obeyed all her wishes except for the charity sandwiches at the end of the day. They gave them to the homeless men and women who lingered by the door. Word spread after day one, and the next day a crowd of twenty or so had assembled. Today Marianne told Ben they should give away the flowers, too. “Why chuck ’em in the Dumpster? Homeless people might appreciate a little beauty, don’t you think?”

  “We’ll give it all away,” Ben agreed. “Bread, sandwiches, flowers. And we’ll buy chocolate and give that away too. They can have a little feast. Chocolate sandwiches on French bread.”

  She kissed the mouth that said those words, in that voice that was painfully intoxicating to her at times. They were new lovers, two months’ history behind them a red balloon they held in their hand. It threatened to cut loose at any time. Marianne leaned against his flannel chest and breathed. Her mother flashed into her mind. She was on a houseboat with a man from Florida. Marianne had never met him. She could not even recall his name.

  Into the store walked a regular customer in sturdy sandals and a vivid Indian dress, her usual attire. She would buy her organic vanilla yogurt, her whole-wheat crackers. Her blond beauty was an affront; Marianne’s body tensed each time she was in the store. She watched Ben greet this woman, her eyes stinging in her sockets. A woman like that—so blond and clean with no makeup at all—made her own dark hair feel heavy with oil, her attempt at eyeliner clownish. Today she watched Ben’s easy smile flash more than once toward the woman, and her heart sped up. The woman paid for her goods, her steady blue eyes flashing over to Marianne, who smiled to hide her efforts at trying to decipher the secret of the woman’s beauty.

  “Thanks so much,” the woman said to Ben, and though she was no more than thirty, it seemed to Marianne she was self-possessed like someone who had enjoyed a lifetime of serious thought and work. Someday, Marianne thought, someday will I make an impression like that on a girl in a market? A stupid girl like myself who gets wrapped like a vine around the body and soul of the man who consumes her? Her heart sank heavily for a moment. Last year she had promised to keep herself solitary and safe, far from the territory of love that had nearly killed her. Far from where she stood again now, up to her thighs in it, she thought, as she turned to Ben. He stepped forward and kissed her. She stiffened, stepped back.

  “When Nellie comes back, she’ll know we broke the charity rule,” she said. “All those homeless people at the door. They’ll be expecting stuff.” She looked over Ben’s shoulder at the street filled with cars.

  “She’ll fire us for our bleeding hearts,” Marianne added. “She’ll lecture us about how contagious the homeless are. She’ll make us wash our hands with Ajax.”

  “So we’ll get other jobs,” Ben said. “We can paint houses with Richie Facciolo and them. We can save up and travel like we said. I’m thinking New Zealand.”

  She looked up at his face and found his green eyes kindly smiling down at her.

  “Last week it was San Francisco,” she said.

  “Whatever! All that matters is we’re together. And not tied down.”

  “Right,” she said, though she heard his words as if she were older, remembering them. He was her age, but sometimes his voice was swollen with such naiveté she could only envy him.

  “I’ve always wanted to see New Zealand. I knew an artist from New Zealand named Gwynneth who painted empty rooms. I waitressed with her last year. She’d take me home after work and let me watch her paint.”

  She had been strangely drawn to Gwynneth, but that she didn’t tell him. Nor did she mention how long ago the memory felt. She was in love with Ben now as surely as she’d been in love with the man who had left her a year ago—was it already a whole year?—but she had a resistance inside of her, a part of her that dispelled the usual urgency to tell her story— her life story that she had told her two other loves, one after another, nights of lying by their sides in rented rooms, her childhood coming alive in the darkness so that each one could know the girl she had been, could know her fevered sense of loss.

  Wasn’t that what love was for? Telling each other stories? She had thought so.

  The last man had extracted all her stories, his listening like a drug. She would talk and talk, then feel almost empty. Trains ran right through his backyard. They would sit up in bed and watch them, and she would weep without him noticing. He’d been older; the ghost of her father had sometimes drifted into the room on the scent of his shaving cream in the dark mornings.

  Now with Ben, she didn’t want her stories to fill the space between them. She didn’t want her history, her memories, which had been sculpted too many times for those other loves. She wanted to be present to the present, leaving the past behind like a sealed box in the attic of a house in a dream. She wanted this love with Ben to be more about the body, less about all those words she’d always needed. When Ben asked her about where she’d lived as a littl
e girl, about who her family was, she’d tell brief half-truths. The man with the trains in his yard had left with her stories in his heart and even if he returned now to give them back, she wouldn’t want them. “Keep them,” she imagined herself saying. “I don’t need them anymore.”

  “The thing about New Zealand is so much of it is still untouched.”

  “Untouched is good.”

  The store was suddenly full: the afternoon rush—the late lunchers, the vitamin people with their obsessive label-reading eyes, the doctors and nurses who needed a pick-me-up. Marianne and Ben hustled to serve them, Ben pulling fruit juice from the back room to restock shelves, Marianne at the register ringing up algae mixes, kefir, bean dips, organic chocolate bars, and fat-free everything.

  She worked, she remained conscious of Ben, no matter where he was in the store. He had taken off his flannel shirt. She could see his arms in his white T-shirt, the muscles that weren’t the self-conscious muscles of a health-club member, but rather his because he was Ben: a generous person who was always helping friends move in and out of apartments. A person who would stop to push a stranger’s stranded car off the highway in a rainstorm. Her mind was fired by his presence, and by the oddities of the regular customers who were like actors marching across the stage of the store. Marianne didn’t know if Ben’s heart felt as though it would burst when these people revealed themselves, but her own did, her own heart filled with the gestures and auras of customers, and there were times when each one seemed so sacred (her father’s word) she wanted to reach over the counter and grab a hand, touch a face, her body filled with the wild energy of wonder that any of them were here, that they existed at all.

  Whenever one of their favorite customers came in, Marianne behind the counter would clear her throat to alert Ben, as she did now, because Wagon Woman was entering in her wig and purple minidress. One of the city’s more visible and personable transvestites, Wagon Woman’s real name was Odessa, but since she pulled friends and strangers around in a large, rumbling wood-sided wagon that recalled prairie days, much of the city thought of her as Wagon Woman. Yesterday the friend being pulled around was Harry the Dancing Stain, a skinny man with warm irony in his eyes, a man known for introducing himself as Harry the Dancing Stain without explanation. Today the wagon was empty.