The Words of Every Song

by Liz Moore

  III.

  As usual, he dreams about Tommy Mays. In his dream, Tommy Mays is performing onstage, but the stage is a small one, perhaps four feet from the ground. Gregory is near the stage. He can reach out and touch Tommy Mays. He reaches out and touches Tommy Mays, and then he starts to cry.

  “Oh, Tommy,” he says.

  Tommy Mays leans down and he is still singing but he kneels at the edge of the stage and his face looks like the face of God, and with his God-like hand he traces the place on Gregory’s face where a tear has left its trail. All the while singing.

  When Gregory wakes, it is dark outside. Again he checks his watch. It is eight P.M. and he is already running behind the schedule he has created for himself. He looks down at himself and changes from his wrinkled shirt into a less wrinkled shirt. He walks out of his room and into the bathroom, where he examines his face in the light and picks at a pimple on the end of his chin.

  Then out of the bathroom and into the common space in the house, where the rest of his family is gathered: his father in an armchair before the television, not really watching; his mother reading her book, her back deliberately to David; Jilly on the floor playing with an army doll that once belonged to Gregory.

  “I’m going to Tim’s,” says Gregory. He has a messenger bag slung across his torso. “For a science project.”

  His father will not look at him. “Goodbye, Gregie,” he says, his face blue in the light of the television.

  “Bye, Gregory,” says his mother. “Careful on the subway. Don’t be past ten-thirty.”

  Only Jilly knows he is lying. “Bye, Daddy the horse,” she says.

  IV.

  Somewhere else in New York, Tom is putting his daughters, Clara and Alice, to bed. He has not had a drink in a week. He feels real; he feels scared. Camilla enters the dim, sweet room and gazes at him and their daughters, already older than she can believe.

  “Oh, Tom,” she says.

  Tom smiles and feels blessed. Camilla is wearing a red dress that she has not been able to wear since before her last pregnancy. They are going on a date.

  V.

  On the subway, Gregory examines the identification he has bought with one whole paycheck from Sound-Off. Seventy-five dollars for the ID of a twenty-four-year-old named Henry Muller, which strikes Gregory as an odd name for a young man: it’s more like a lawyer’s name, like the name of a famous prospector during the gold rush. Henry does not look like Gregory. He is dark where Gregory is fair; Henry is thin-lipped and smiling tightly.

  And Henry is five-ten. Gregory is not sure how that will work. But the boy at school who sold it to him had said that it didn’t matter. “It’s a real ID,” he had said. “That’s all they care about.”

  It was probably stolen. Gregory feels momentarily upset at the illicitness of the whole affair. He’s really very honest, and he hopes that Henry didn’t have too much trouble replacing the ID that Gregory now holds in his fluttering hands.

  He is alone as he approaches the club. He heard about it from two boys who were joking that they had walked by it one night around this time, had seen men going into it singly and leaving in pairs.

  In the doorway there is a young man who is taller than Gregory and perhaps twice as broad. Gregory nearly turns around and leaves, feeling the falseness of the ID burning a hole in his pocket. But he has locked eyes with the bouncer and feels now that he must proceed. He affects confidence and reaches for the door handle—a trick he heard about from a senior boy at his school.

  “Don’t pull out an ID until they ask for it, and then look surprised,” the boy had said. “Act like you own the place.”

  But when the bouncer places a massive hand on Gregory’s shoulder and says, “ID,” Gregory’s expression registers not as surprise, but as terror. He produces Henry Muller’s identification and looks to the left, the way Henry did for the picture.

  The bouncer looks at him and smiles. He was Gregory’s age not very long ago. He went to high school in the suburbs of Madison, Wisconsin. He waited to come out until he moved to New York two years ago, and when he did it was like taking a particularly deep breath of air after being underwater.

  “How old are you?” he asks Gregory.

  “I’m twenty-four,” says Gregory. He wonders what twenty-four-year-old Henry Muller is doing these days.

  “Go ahead,” says the bouncer.

  VI.

  In Gregory’s mind, the inside of the bar had been sleek, something like the interior of a particularly dark hotel lobby.

  On entering, his eyes adjust to the dim light and he is shocked by the barrenness of the place. The long bar is on the right, beaten and brown. Five stools line it sparsely, and behind it is a bartender who looks alarmingly like a teacher Gregory had in California. To his left, there are three booths; above them on the wall, Christmas lights that run in a blinking line toward the back of the narrow room. A framed painting of a penis hangs on the back wall, lit dramatically by three spotlights. The whole place reeks of beer and of something Gregory cannot quite identify. He imagines it must be sex.

  Gregory feels ashamed. He stares at the floor. He wants to lean against a wall in the dark corner by the door, but a coatrack occupies the space he covets. Briefly, he considers hiding behind it and then abandons the idea.

  He came here to meet a boy. You wanted this, he thinks. He cannot now turn around. Gregory forces himself to look up, to meet the eyes of the three other people in the bar. Two are a couple: older men who are laughing and wearing matching denim jackets. Gregory imagines their laughter might be at his expense. He can only hear some of what they are saying:

  “They just don’t know…a joke! A joke! I know…dear God,” says one.

  Gregory suddenly realizes that he has been standing near the door for perhaps thirty seconds and he goes over to the bar, careful to turn his back to the bartender so that the bartender will not speak to him.

  It is then that he notices the man to his right. He is low to the earth and he moves effortlessly and quickly toward Gregory, so quickly that Gregory is afraid and his whole body jerks in reaction. Then the man stops beside him, and he’s smiling.

  “Warm in here,” he says, but makes no move to uncloak himself.

  Gregory takes him in. “Yes, warm,” he says.

  The man could be twenty-five and he could be forty. His hair falls in childlike curls to his ears, which are tiny and delicate, like the ears of a young boy. His coat is fashionable: It is made of fine cotton and it hits at the hip, its zipper set left of center. Its wearer has turned up the collar at the back and out at the sides, as if protecting himself from a particularly strong wind. The coat is black and impeccably clean.

  Everything about this man is clean, thinks Gregory. Even his smell. To Gregory, he smells new, like a department store. He wonders briefly if the coat is newly bought, or—Gregory’s eyebrows furrow at the thought—stolen.

  The man notices Gregory’s expression and smiles more broadly, and Gregory sees in horror that one of his teeth is missing: a side one, a large one. So incongruous is the missing tooth with the man’s clothing that Gregory wonders if the tooth was knocked out tonight—if the man even knows it is missing. Next to the man with the black coat and the missing tooth, Gregory feels out of control, chaotic, as if his life is not his anymore.

  The man is very polite: “May I buy you a drink?” he asks.

  Gregory pauses, completely unsure of what sort of drink he would ask for, were he to accept.

  “Soda? Water? Juice?” asks the man, smiling still, complicit. And Gregory falters. It’s a joke, he thinks. It must be a joke.

  “A drink for you?” the man asks again, more urgently, and Gregory thinks of his father, David, and what David orders at their infrequent trips to restaurants. Brooklyn Lager, mostly. Occasionally a margarita if they go to a Mexican place. But then Gregory wonders if these drinks are too fatherly. Desperate, he summons the only other drink he can think of, and spits out the name of it.
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br />   “A cosmopolitan,” Gregory says. His voice falters. “Thank you.”

  The man laughs. The empty space in his mouth lends him the air of a jack-o’-lantern; and like a jack-o’-lantern, his skin is orange, his eyes lit from within by an anticipation that terrifies Gregory and thrills him at once.

  The man in the black coat catches the bartender’s eye. “A Brooklyn Lager, please,” he says. “And the lady will have a cosmopolitan.” He winks at Gregory, turns to him so that his knee touches Gregory’s. Gregory closes his eyes for one beat longer than a blink.

  “I love this song,” says the man. It’s “Just Like Heaven,” by the Cure. Gregory likes it too, but he feels speechless and slightly shocked that he has anything at all in common with this stranger, who has made fists of his hands and is now making strange little dancing movements. His weight shifts from left to right with little relation to the beat of the song. He stops when he sees Gregory is not dancing.

  “I bet you’re in college,” says the man. He places a finger over his own two lips, raises his eyes to Gregory’s appraisingly. “You look like a college boy to me.”

  “I am,” says Gregory. He tries to lean his elbow on the bar and misses, instead planting an unsteady hand on the stool next to him.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Henry,” says Gregory.

  “Does anyone call you Hank?” The man reaches for Gregory’s sleeve and fingers it at Gregory’s elbow. “I like that name. Hank.”

  “Yes,” says Gregory. “Yes, most of my friends call me Hank.”

  VII.

  Outside, the air is warmer than Gregory imagined. It is eleven-thirty P.M. and three cosmopolitans swim sickeningly in his stomach. Gregory is sure that by now his mother has called Tim’s mother, maybe even called the police. He does not know why he won’t go home. The man takes his hand and Gregory is shocked at the feeling: holding hands with a man on the street. He is wise and sophisticated; he is a man of the world. Holding hands with a man on the street. Another couple passes them and the woman smiles at Gregory approvingly. She nods to them, but the man she is with looks at Gregory a bit too long.

  The man in the black coat walks one step in front of Gregory, leading him a bit, refusing to look at him.

  “Almost there,” he says at intervals.

  Gregory allows himself to imagine that the man is Tommy Mays and feels better. Tommy Mays, who would not call him “Hank” Tommy Mays, who would know that he was lying about his name, about his age. Tommy Mays, who would take his hand gently and walk beside him, perhaps placing a hand on his back or about his shoulders.

  Gregory looks up at the man in the black coat and feels sick for himself.

  He wishes he were home with Jilly and Helen and David, who are probably watching the television in their small common room. Jilly might be sleeping, her soft blond baby hair flush on the lap of their mother. Jilly! thinks Gregory, and feels a sudden rage toward the man in the dark coat, for every part of Gregory knows that the quiet place toward which they are walking is no place for boys like him. Still, Gregory will follow him, and walk with him hand in hand while Gregory’s gut reviles and his heart races in indignation. He thinks of his sister, thinks, But I am not so much older than Jilly at all! He should know; the man in the black coat should know these things and be ashamed.

  The man tightens his sweaty grip on Gregory’s hand. “Almost there, Hank,” he says. Gone is the look of anticipation in his eyes from earlier, replaced by nervousness, by a gaze fixed distantly, frankly upon the sidewalk, and he will not look at Gregory. He quickens his pace.

  Gregory begins to feel ridiculous. He towers over this man. He feels the meaninglessness of his size as sharply as he feels that he is clumsy and great, that there is no one in the world as huge as he.

  VIII.

  The restaurant is crowded when Tom and Camilla arrive, even though it’s late. This is a restaurant that is crowded from six until closing, every night of the week.

  “Somewhere else, Tom,” says Camilla. She feels awkward next to her husband: plain-looking. Especially in crowds like this one. Every eye is drawn to Tom, and immediately afterward to Camilla, appraisingly, she thinks. If she could do so without embarrassing Tom, she would bury her head in the back of Tom’s jacket like a child, press her face into it and pretend that she was reciprocally invisible to the people she could not see. She would wait for slow, spidery colors to make their way across her corneas, as she has done since she was young and liked to press her small fists into her eyes.

  Instead, she looks at the host from over Tom’s shoulder. The host sees Tom and smiles ingratiatingly. Tom looks past the crowd of people who alternately stare and pretend not to stare. He motions with his hand: Two.

  And the host motions back: This way.

  Camilla is familiar with this exchange, for it happens wherever they go. It is nearly universal, this sort of special treatment for Tom, and Camilla thinks to herself how it is really not good for him. It makes him too unsure of himself.

  Tom takes her hand and begins to lead the way through the crowd, and Camilla begins to follow and she looks at the faces of the people who stare at her now, more than at Tom, imagines they are going to whisper about her long after she has left: “She was so ordinary-looking,” they’ll say. “That makes me like him more,” the woman in the green dress will say. “It takes a good man to keep a wife like that when fame and fortune come his way.”

  “I bet he cheats on her,” the skinny one over there will say. “They all cheat.” She will take an overly long sip from the martini she clutches in her long thin fingers.

  Camilla can hear all of these words before they are spoken, and she stares at Tom’s heels as he leads her by the hand, following the earnest host to some table reserved for people like Tom.

  Then Camilla, who is never prone to outbursts, decides suddenly to make a stand. She stops where she is, removes her hand from Tom’s, forcing Tom to stop also and forcing him to look at her. The host keeps walking toward the table across the room, unaware that he has lost his guests, thinking about the impression of Tommy Mays he will perform later for his actor friends. It will include Tom’s habit of bringing his shoulders toward his ears when he speaks; it will also include his inability to look strangers directly in the eye.

  “Somewhere else,” Camilla is saying to Tom. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

  “I don’t understand what the problem is,” says Tom.

  “They were here first,” says his wife, motioning with her eyes to the dozens of eyes that observe her in turn.

  Tom half laughs. “They don’t mind.”

  “Please, please,” says Camilla. “Please, let’s go somewhere else.”

  IX.

  Gregory is numb with disillusionment. He has never been drunk before, not even close. His face feels hot and his stomach groans in disapproval. The man in the dark coat will not slow down. Gregory is nearly stumbling to keep up with him, and then he realizes something terrible: he is going to vomit.

  Vomiting, for Gregory, is always marked by a split-second decision. It is hard for Gregory to decide whether to alert the people around him of his imminent regurgitation or to simply throw up. In this instance, he has no choice; the man will not turn around, and Gregory feels unable to speak. He stops and drops the man’s hand.

  The man turns around, annoyed. “What is…” he says, and that’s all he says, for he sees that Gregory has turned green. The man pulls at the collar of his jacket, rocks back on his heels. He looks like he’s deciding whether to just leave, and he glances up and down the street.

  They have stopped in front of a restaurant, one with large windows and a large glass door, and Gregory leans against the clear front of the building, only half-aware that the restaurant is crowded with people who are now gazing at his back. Gregory doubles over, puts his hands on his knees. He spits at the ground.

  Tom and Camilla walk out.

  Gregory, from his position, can only see the ground
, and distantly he hears a man’s voice coming through in waves: “Don’t care…it’s not a very…it’s you. It’s you.”

  Gregory vomits. He feels ashamed, drunk. He wants to be with Jilly and David and Helen. The Silent Drums are waiting for him at home. He can play them in his room. It was nice of his father to get them for him, so nice of David to get them. He wants to say thank you. He never said thank you.

  A moment later, he feels a hand on his back. He pulls away, imagining that it is the hand of the man in the black jacket, a hand that might be scaly or diseased. He is repulsed by the thought of the man in the black coat—his missing tooth, his boyish curls. He stops himself from lashing out, but straightens quickly and then almost cries out when he sees that the man in the black coat is nowhere in sight. That the hand belongs to Tommy Mays.

  “You okay, guy?” says Tom. He is surprised at how young the boy is: his position had looked, to Tom, like an old man’s. The boy is well dressed, looks like a tourist, maybe. Maybe he is lost.

  Gregory wipes his mouth and his eyes.

  “Okay?” asks Tommy again. “You should get in a cab and go home.”

  Gregory remembers his dream and wonders if it was a premonition. He waits for it: Tommy Mays is going to reach toward him and touch his face. Tommy Mays is going to touch his ear, the top of his ear. Tommy Mays is going to place a gentle, firm hand on the back of Gregory’s neck, and he will bring Gregory’s face to his, and he will lower Gregory’s head, and he will kiss his eyes and his mouth. He waits.

  “I’m going to get a cab for you,” says Tom. He walks to the curb and hails a cab. The kid looks vaguely familiar to him. He wonders if they’ve met.

  Then a cab stops and Tom beckons to Gregory, who pushes off from the wall and walks crookedly toward Tommy Mays.

  Tom places a hand on his back, and Gregory imagines that he can feel it burning him through his shirt, and makes a wish to remember that touch always. Then Tom takes out a fifty-dollar bill and hands it to the cabdriver.