Love Songs for a Lost Continent

by Anita Felicelli

  Dennis was pale by moonlight. “I’m so sorry. What can we do? Come on, tell me. We’ll do anything.”

  “Your baby, your firstborn,” I said. “Give it to me.”

  He laughed. “Good one,” he said. “All righty then, I’ll give it to you.” He kneeled down and put the plant he had dropped into the basket. “Only if we can have some of this stuff every night, though. Linda loves it.”

  “Done,” I said. I pulled at the sash of my mauve dressing gown and swept back into the house and up the stairs. When I looked out my window, he was climbing back over the garden wall. After that, he came every night, leaving bald patches in the wide swath of rampion.

  During the day I would avoid going outside when Linda was there, wobbling through her yard with her enormous distended belly. Night after night, Dennis took more and more of the rampion, leaving only a little bit of it, a few plants in the back. Fairness, I knew, had nothing to do with the reality of a situation. What was fair to them was not what I thought was fair. I kept thinking about the supposed joke, the promise of a firstborn in exchange for an all-you-can-eat rampion buffet—it rattled around in my mind as Linda approached her due date, the sound of our words getting louder and more dissonant with each passing day.

  After the baby was born, I could hear her cooing every day through the screen door while the nanny cleaned their house, but I did not visit. I knew that my absence, my failure to pay my respects and meet the baby, would lead to more gossip, but I couldn’t bring myself to visit, and several months went by. One afternoon, I could hear Linda screaming at the nanny, and the sharp sound of the baby screaming. A few minutes later, Linda arrived on my doorstep, bouncing the baby in her arms to keep her calm. She claimed the nanny had fallen ill and had to go home and wanted me to watch the baby. “Can you believe it? She abandoned us on date night!”

  I nodded in faux-sympathy, but she mistook it.

  “Thanks,” she said, and paused. I wondered if she was debating how much money to offer me. “You never go out anyway, right? So this will work out nicely.” I was about to change my mind, but she was already turning and stomping down the path. I could have said no, I suppose, but instead I was thinking about the agreement. I slipped on my flip-flops and followed her back to her house.

  I had been inside the house once before with Connall. We’d privately mocked the blotchy pastel landscapes that looked like they belonged in a motel room, the sickly stench of synthetic plumeria, the expensive lime green curtains—lime green was trending that year. After Linda and Dennis left, I shuffled around the living room with the baby in my arms, feeding her from a bottle and remembering the looks Connall and I had shared about our neighbors’ tackiness.

  The baby was six months old and already terribly alert. She smelled of spit up and milk, but underneath that newborn scent, I thought I could smell something abiding—the smell of rampion in spring. She had platinum-gold hair—flax-bright like the palest part of a flame—and roses in her apple cheeks. Her eyes were black, beetle-black, stormy black, perplexingly so since both her parents had blue eyes. After I fed her formula, she fell deep into sleep in my arms. Her tiny delicate nostrils quivered with every breath. I turned on the television. A reality show was on. I started to think about why Dennis believed it was a joke, instead of a contract. Surely, they were not entitled to everything. Nobody is entitled to anything.

  It happened so quickly, I hardly thought about it. I picked up the sleeping baby and nestled her in a car seat in the back of my car. It’s just a little drive, I told myself. I drove past the thick poisonous pink oleander in the center median of the highway and up through the mountains, and gradually wound around until I was at sea level, driving along the gold-beige dunes at the coast. In a few miles, I pulled into the rough dirt driveway of the beach property.

  In the many months since I’d been there, rampion had spread across the garden, plush and meandering over the rocks, over the alyssum, over the pansies, over the hyacinth, suffocating and burying everything within its reach like a sandstorm. “You’re home,” I said to the baby, whose eyes were fluttering open as I unbuckled her car seat. I swaddled her in a yellow cotton blanket and put the bag of her things over my shoulder. We trundled to the ocean. Bright green-blue surf crashed against the jagged rocks and the horizon line burned with the setting sun.

  We climbed the steep staircase of the tower. The steps were made of stone blocks. I held the baby tightly as I climbed the narrow steps, and each step seemed taller than the last, and the curving walls seemed suffocating as they closed in on me. The bag kept falling off my shoulder and I kept heaving it back onto my shoulder. I was panting and breathless by the time I reached the porthole at the top landing, far above the ground. I looked down at the baby. She was awake, but quiet. She watched my face intently with alert, luminous eyes. I unlatched the door to the roof. “Look,” I said. We looked out into the ocean. I remembered that sometimes dolphins migrated past, their silvery backs shining for a moment before they submerged under the dark ocean waves. But now I could not see dolphins, only the faraway boats.

  “See the ships? We could take one of those ships and travel all around the world.” The baby gazed back at me and puckered her lips a few times. I thought of the quips Connall would have made if he were here. I sat cross-legged on the stone surface, cradling her and feeding her the rest of the formula from her bottle. In the corner were a few dead succulents in terra cotta pots that he had probably bought to make the rooftop nicer for me. I resolved to revive them, now that everything was, for the moment, as it should be.

  As the baby suckled at the bottle, I could almost sense Connall beside me, the salty, musky smell of him after gardening, the worn softness of his flannel shirt on my arm, even the warmth of his hand. The baby surveyed the sky through the turrets and ran tiny hot, sweaty fingers over my toes—I did not know that babies were so damp, all of them water babies. She tickled my toes, but I stayed perfectly still and content, feeling those delicate fingers and how little she knew of what the world held.

  In a few moments, violet-tinged stars started to prick the sky, a misty halo circling the full moon. The distant hum of the highway came as if through cotton. Gulls were crying. Otters squealed and the waves were hard crashing. The baby whimpered. It was well after eight. I was searching through my purse for her pacifier when I came upon a compact. It fell open in my hand.

  By the light of the moon, I could see it was not my familiar face looking back at me. There was a redness to my cheeks, a hairiness, and my white hair looked platinum blonde. I touched my face softly, marveling at my suede-covered cheeks. And the smell—garlic and cucumber—the smell of rampion was all around me, or perhaps emanating from me.

  The coastal summer air was still warm. Minutes passed, or perhaps hours. The baby was sleeping, her eyelashes invisible and her tiny nostrils quivering almost imperceptibly as she breathed in and out. I took off my sweater and wrapped it around the baby to keep her warm in the night.

  Later, the high-pitched whine of sirens would sound, and my skin would be ice-cold. I would see a peach-pink blot just above the bit of ocean between the turrets. After the police took the baby back to her parents, after they told me that the Truebloods would not press charges, I would sit in the tower alone for hours, gazing out at the cold grey waters, the thick soft whiteness of fog hanging over everything like wet cotton or memories. I would light the scraps of paper in my purse with a lighter and fling the little flaming beacons out toward the ocean on the wind. Some of them would float away, on and on over the water, and others would lie flickering and burning on the stone. Smoke would surround me as the day wore on and still I would sit there alone.

  But in that moment, the baby gurgled in a deep sleep and I was looking up into a million points of light.

  Leda meets Patterson in a dive bar named Three Thimbles, just past Atascadero. She is hitchhiking south to Indio for a music festival during a drought, and the gentle hills along Highway 5 are barren and grey-bro
wn like donkey skins. She last traveled this route with her parents as a small child, and without their bickering or the blaring of Carnatic music, the ride is strangely bleak, the cobalt sky unexpectedly vast and cloudless. The truck drivers who offer her rides are entirely taciturn or they regale her with explosive tales about their lives—an unstoppable gush of molten words. She smiles to be agreeable, but stays silent, unsure which of her stories to offer in response.

  She is drinking a Sidecar and reading Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy when Patterson approaches. On the side of the bar, patrons tack business cards as they pass through town and in front of her is a waxy paper cup full of brass tacks. Patterson tacks a card on the bar right next to her, taking a moment to screw it deep into the wood. She side-eyes the pixelation of the hokey music-store logo on the card and wonders if it’s even real. He asks whether she wants to join him for a round of pool. “Can’t play,” she says without looking at him.

  “Now how are you going to know that if you don’t try?”

  She looks up solely to tell him to fuck off, but he smiles.

  He points to her book. “I’ve always been partial to Dionysian art myself.”

  Leda graduated from a college in Eugene two weeks ago. Over the course of her years there she came to realize there are a number of folks who not only prefer wild debauchery, but also look down on those who don’t. She believes—because of the tattooed tendril making its way out from under his long-sleeved shirt—that admitting she prefers the order and clarity and light of Apollonian art and that left to her own devices, she blasts Katy Perry, not The Velvet Underground—would sound uncool and bourgeois. It would be even more uncool, perhaps, to acknowledge she prefers both art and the world to be orderly so that she knows how to react, so she isn’t confronted by the disorder, the utter aimlessness inside her. And, of course, there are Patterson’s murky green eyes and his slightly crooked teeth. She has learned to nod to avoid judgment, and she does so almost reflexively.

  Patterson buys Leda another Sidecar. The bartender, a bald, potbellied man in dungarees, shakes his head, presumably at her choice in drinks, but sugars the rim of the glass and goes strong on the cognac.

  Later, they stumble onto the sidewalk. He carries his bass guitar case, and she remembers she has forgotten her book on the barstool, but lets it go, uncertain it would provide the road map she’s looking for. Stars above, mica sparkling below the street lamps. She has rented a room at the Shrinking Violet Motel for the night and she spins around to find her bearings. Nobody else is out at this hour. The streets are wide, stygian, infinite. She turns again and one of her tan suede boots falls down around her ankle. Patterson drops to his knees and slides the suede up her shin back to her knee, slowly so that the callouses on his palms caress her shin.

  “I’m not sleeping with you tonight,” she says, pretending to be certain.

  Within the hour they are kissing in her motel room. He sets his bass guitar down by the bed. She reaches out to touch its glossy lacquered surface, but he quickly moves it out of her reach. “Got that as a gift while I was in the band, maybe twenty years ago.” He draws her to him. She tugs at his boxers, lightly snapping their elastic. When she comes with a savage shudder, he enters quickly and finishes, lets out a long sigh as if pushing a last squat beneath three hundred pounds.

  Patterson sleeps into the early afternoon and she sits on the floor, beside the bed, and fingers the glossy finish of his bass guitar. He wakes and catches her turning it over in her hands. “Curious, aren’t you? Haven’t you heard what happened to the cat?”

  “I’ve got nine lives,” Leda says, shrugging.

  His tone shifts as he tells her he is traveling for the thrill of it and invites her to go with him. “Open road—who knows what we’ll find?”

  She thinks of the pixelated business logo for a moment, but he is pulling her into the bed, and by the time they’re finished, she’s put away the nagging sensation that something is out of place and agrees to join him.

  They fuck each other in seedy motels with names like Watering Hole Inn and Afternoon Delight Motel and Seven Brides. The sheets on the beds smell like wet dog and cigarette smoke and bleach, odors that cleaning crews attempt to mask with cloying air freshener in scents of pine and rose. The first night on the road and the second and the third, he serenades her on his bass guitar. Later, she won’t be able to remember what the song was, but she will remember the quality of his voice, its high-pitched jagged tenderness, and the way he looks down while he plucks the strings, as if he’s fingering an old girlfriend.

  Patterson has sleeve tattoos on both arms, intricate jewel-toned illustrations of dragons and griffins and albatrosses, all elongated necks and enfolding wings, and surprisingly masculine. His muscular back has no tattoos, just a long, thick jagged pink keloid running like a highway from the place on his back where a wing would be if he had one to the top of his hipbone. “How’d you get that?” she asks, pointing. At first his silence seems like a slight. Most people would think he’s out of her league—she is dark and stubby, and he is vaguely leonine, all jalapeño greens and burnished gold. He should compensate accordingly. As the days pass, however, the ugliness of that long scar makes her feel closer to him, like they are more alike than she originally thought.

  ***

  They wind their way through the Grapevine, driving from Los Angeles to Tucson, where Leda learns Patterson might be psychic. They are sitting in a blue vinyl booth. Overhead is a row of lamps, each shaped like a blowfish. He points out a couple sitting at the bar. The woman has dyed blonde hair with black roots showing, and she is wearing corduroy pants and a hoodie covered with tiny grey dog hairs. The man has a shaggy beard, sideburns and earlobes sagging with wide black gauges. The woman runs her hand across the man’s arm, reassuring him. Then the woman’s hand melts into the man’s arm, disappearing and then reappearing as it moves back and forth. The couple is talking about where they should go to dinner that night.

  “They’re from the Bronx,” Patterson says in a low voice. He claims he can do this trick because he toured around the country with a metal band in his teens, hopped freight trains in his twenties. “I’ve been everywhere,” he says. “Go ask them where they’re from.” Leda raises her eyebrows. “Just ask! They won’t mind, people like to yammer on about themselves.”

  He drags her over to the couple and they say they’re from the Bronx. The four take tequila shots together. Patterson raises his eyebrows and smiles as if to crow I told you so. At the end of the evening, the man realizes he’s left his wallet somewhere and Patterson pays for the drinks. Everyone is having such a good time that Leda suppresses her suspicions.

  ***

  They travel to Las Cruces and then Houston, occasionally taking detours to enjoy the bone and gold desert, the boundless blue sky, and every night they drink at a different dive bar. He teaches her how to play pool. They spend leisurely mornings swimming in motel pools and sampling gas station pastries.

  Patterson accurately guesses a white man with dreadlocks doing tequila shots at a restaurant in Ciudad Juarez is from Ukiah. A woman wearing a violet cloche and walking her dog around the park in a small town just outside Big Bend National Park is from Ann Arbor. He guesses the bald, black bartender in San Antonio is from Murfreesboro. “So where am I from?” she asks him.

  “I’m guessing Cupertino,” he says.

  “Because there’s a big Indian population there? Well, you’re wrong.”

  ***

  They are mostly out of money by the time they get to Houston, and they start sleeping in the back of his pickup, parked off the highway, laying their heads down on his rolled-up sweatshirts and wrangling both their bodies into a single sleeping bag. In the black exhaustion of those hours, fucking loses its sharp wild intensity and she wants to be cutting, she wants to say, If you’re so psychic, why are we scavenging trash behind bakeries?

  They veer off the interstate and start running scams in small inland towns. The first scam
involves the bass guitar. Patterson researches the town’s restaurants ahead of time by asking the local bartenders about the best places to eat and what the owners are like. He gets people to chat, and then picks their mark. It is a simple plan. Leda enters a fancy restaurant with the guitar, wearing a red sticker pottu—nobody will suspect a traditional young Indian woman of anything, Patterson explains as he sticks it in the center of her forehead.

  The dining room is paneled in warm brown oak and a fire roars in the brick hearth. She lingers over the possibility of a medium rare burger and a beer, but decides it might blow her cover, and orders a mixed green salad, a coke and a slice of yellow cake frosted in chocolate buttercream.

  Heavy barrels of wine line the back wall. She flirts with the waiter during the hour she spends eating. At the end of the meal, her heart pounding and a ringing in her ears, she pretends she forgot her cash back at home. The waiter waves over the plump restaurant owner, euphoric and distracted from a recent lotto win—or so a bartender a town over told them. She shows the owner how valuable her 1960s bass guitar is on a website accessed on his smartphone. He is genial, lets her leave the bass as collateral for the meal. When she leaves, Patterson swoops in and offers the owner $20,000 for the Fender Jazz bass guitar in the corner, telling a story about Jaco Pastorius’s Bass of Doom and the sweet focused sound of the instrument—he even plays the owner a tune to demonstrate—and when the owner demurs, explaining the bass isn’t his, Patterson leaves a business card from when he worked at a music store. Leda returns thirty minutes after he leaves, and the owner offers her $5,000 for the guitar.

  Leda telephones her mother from the swanky Shreveport hotel where they stay that night. Fingering the complimentary vanilla-frangipani lotions on the oak dresser, Leda tells her it will be at least another month before she comes home. Her mother, a practical engineer, expresses concern that Leda has no plan for her life, no concrete job in the wings. In the background, Leda can hear the familiar sound of her father listening to NPR, the wheezing and barking of the French bulldog they bought after she left home. She tells her mother that it’s a long life, and there’s time enough for all that when she returns home. “Love you,” she says, and hangs up.