by Liz Moore
“Take him wherever he wants to go,” says Tom. He leans into the backseat again.
Gregory’s mouth hangs open a bit in wonder. Tommy Mays’s face is warm, and older than Gregory expected. In the light from the roof of the cab, Gregory can see small wrinkles around his eyes.
“Good luck,” says Tommy Mays. He shuts the door, pats the roof of the cab twice, and trots toward the sidewalk. Gregory looks after him, feeling the place on his back that was touched by Tommy Mays. He sees Tommy Mays place an arm about the waist of a woman who Gregory thinks is very beautiful, and he doesn’t even mind. The woman turns around to look at him, says something to Tommy Mays. She smiles at him. They walk down the sidewalk.
“Where am I taking you?” asks the cabdriver.
X.
At Gregory’s apartment, everyone is up, even Jilly. She is sitting silently on the floor, her small face drawn in worry. Her parents have forgotten to monitor their own troubles in front of her, as they often do. She has not been put to bed because Helen and David have other things on their mind. It is quarter of twelve and their older child is not yet home. Normally they are fairly lenient about curfews; they know that the trains can be delayed, that sometimes they can break down. But Gregory was supposed to be home more than an hour ago.
“I called Tim’s apartment again,” says Helen. “Still no answer.” She paces ineffectively about the tiny kitchen. “Gregory’s not answering his cell phone.”
She widens her pacing circle, stepping over the large cardboard box of drums that lies like a carcass before the front door.
“I think maybe we should call the police,” she says, and then wonders if she has become a hysterical mother, a psychotic mother—the kind of mother her own was.
David gazes at his wife and considers the odds that his son is, in fact, in danger. He doesn’t believe that he is. David believes deeply that his son is angry with him, that he is avoiding him because of the drums that are sitting there on the floor. He wonders if he will ever get a job again. It seems impossible in New York. Maybe they will have to move back to California. He shakes himself, pulls himself back to the present, and looks at his wife, who is now crouched on the floor next to Jilly.
“The police?” says Jilly. “The real police?”
David stands and stretches. “Gregory’s just growing up,” he says. “Wait an hour more.”
10.
THOREAU’S PEN
First you must cure your temper, then find a
job in a paper
Then you need someone for a savior
Rudie can’t fail
—THE CLASH, “Rudie Can’t Fail”
I.
He has finished his training. He is a reporter, and here is a pad of paper in his left hand, a reporter’s pad with a spiral binding at the top, and here is a portable tape recorder in his right. He holds up his pen to the dim light inside Southpaw and thinks about how the pen is the tool of his trade, his noble and respected trade. It is like a needle to a seam-stress, like a baton to a conductor. This pen is a particularly nice one that his parents gave him last year when he graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism: smooth and dapper and pleasantly fat, it is unquestionably a reporter’s pen. It is marbled and brown, with gold trimmings and a gold clip close to its stem that holds the pen nicely in place when he tucks it into his front shirt pocket. The tip of the pen lives inside its body until he turns the base, and then it emerges into the world like the head of a turtle. The pen writes gracefully, gratifyingly, in a smooth black line that is not thick enough to bleed through a page and is not too thin to be easily read.
Thoreau D’Hemecourt is here at the Brooklyn club to write about a band, the first of many pieces he will complete for his new employer, NY, NY. It’s a start-up magazine, he knows, not nearly as prestigious as working for the Times or (someday! someday!) The New Yorker. Some of his classmates got hired at these establishments straight from J school. But here, now, he convinces himself that he is lucky; while Therese Kriegel and Leo Greene are probably doing slave work for their fancy titles—covering weddings or something, answering e-mails, even—he is out in the field. He crafts his own assignments. He writes his own stories. He answers to himself. And, of course, to his editor, Marie. Still.
NY, NY is small yet, with a circulation of just under ten thousand. Most of their sales come from the magazine stands around New York. This gives Thoreau hope. He has fantasies of taking the pub over, of coming up with something that will make the magazine take off. What this might be, he cannot quite imagine, but standing here he feels a surge of inspiration—the kind of creative pulse that he has felt at intervals throughout his life for as long as he can remember. It is something he cannot quite describe: the feeling is one of boundless capacity for accomplishment of an attention-getting kind, of a praiseworthy kind. The kind of accomplishment that makes people really think of you as somebody different, somebody with a great deal of talent. An artist. Thoreau wants to be an artist. He is an arts writer, he thinks; his reporting should be as artistic as possible. Sentences form before him in the air. Phrases compose themselves almost by accident. The band has not even taken the stage, and already he knows something of what he will write. He is impressed.
With his beautiful pen he writes down whatever comes to him. Drums like cannon fire, he writes. The lead guitarist [insert name!] plays with a kind of intensity that merits notice. He is fervent, nearly reverent. His instrument seems almost to be an extension of himself. Then: The Burn is so young and pretty that it would not be a surprise to see its members on MTV someday: their clothes are ideally unkempt, their faces even-featured, and their skin flawless. He pauses, hopes that these statements are true enough to work in his story. He likes them a great deal. He looks up at his surroundings, feeling that he is on a roll, craving further inspiration.
Southpaw is quickly becoming crowded with people who look very much alike to Thoreau. Most in their twenties. Some in their thirties. Thoreau himself has done his best to predict what the audience will be wearing, to blend into the crowd, as a true reporter should. He has dressed down in khakis and a plain black T-shirt, trading his standard Italian leather loafers for a pair of old sneakers. Still, he wonders if his distinguished wire-rimmed glasses give him away as an outsider, as someone with an important reason to be there.
Everyone else is wearing T-shirts too. Thoreau feels good about this. Most of the men wear T-shirts with writing on them of one kind or another (he should have worn his Rolling Stones T-shirt—he knew it!) and Converse All Stars. Most of the women wear some variant on the same theme, usually with a feminine touch: a pair of chandelier earrings, a patterned skirt. Thoreau is just beginning to describe the crowd when the curtain opens and the crowd surges away from the bar, away from the pool table on the upper level, toward the front of the midsize room. Thoreau is left behind. Indignant, he pushes his way closer, and then realizes he cannot possibly make notes with his elbows pressed as they are to his side. Also, it’s too dark to see his pad of paper.
Defeated, he retreats backward through the crowd and sits on a stool at the bar, resigning himself to watching the show from there, to use the dim brassy light from behind the bar. The band is still tuning and he makes a note of this giddily: they are inexperienced. A more practiced band would have waited to open the curtain until they were totally ready. Or is it the fault of Southpaw? Either way, he thinks, it’s a sign of their youth. And then he knows what the angle of the piece will be. Young bands—the trend of young bands. Why is it that bands have to be young? Why don’t old bands get signed? Interesting. Very.
Then the lights point to the stage and the Burn is illuminated. They begin to play and the crowd cheers.
He is disappointed to see that the lead singer (what was her name? Shauna?) is not, in fact, flawlessly pretty. She could lose a few pounds, and her face looks more tired than perfect. Disappointed, he draws one line through his description of the band as “pretty,” leaving “young” in place. H
e supposes that her face is still even-featured enough, and her skin is not bad. He leaves the last half of his sentence alone.
He listens carefully, decides that yes, the drums do sound like cannon fire. Yes, the lead guitarist is intense enough. He is relieved. Now all he has to do is find out his name. And confirm that the lead singer’s name is Shauna.
He could easily look it up online once he’s home, but he prefers to have the information now—it is important, he thinks, to have names for the subjects of a piece. Names tell a great deal about an individual. His own, for example: Thoreau D’Hemecourt. He loves his name. At the time of his birth, his mother had been reading Walden and had discovered in herself a great affinity for the concept of the Oversoul. Yes, his mother had been something of a bohemian; though her fifties have finally brought her to dress a bit more conservatively, Thoreau can remember his extreme embarrassment, as a grade-schooler, when she picked him up from school one day wearing a long skirt, a sports bra, and a T-shirt that she had cut off just below her ample bosom. Her navel was set deeply in a stomach that was too plump for her fashion sense, and her coarse black hair fell to her waist—it was always much longer than the hair of any of his friends’ mothers.
Most embarrassing of all: Meredith, the precocious fourth-grader who had stolen Thoreau’s heart two years earlier with her astounding ability to recite the alphabet backward, had pointed at his mother when she emerged from her car across the street. “Her stomach!” she had said to Thoreau. “Look at that stomach!”
For a moment, Thoreau considered laughing with the beautiful Meredith, who had hair that was sleek and blond, the opposite of his mother’s. He considered walking home, pretending that he had not seen his mother there across the street, standing in front of her blue VW bug. Instead, little Thoreau gurgled something unintelligible to Meredith—“Goodbye” had been his intention—and walked toward his mother, eyes down, and begged her to get into the car. He was silent all the way home.
“D’Hemecourt” comes from his father: a mathematician and a professor, the son of French immigrants, who lacked social grace but never lacked for opinions. Fortunately for Thoreau, his parents’ views, political and otherwise, tended to align. Had they not, Thoreau’s childhood memories might not have been of games like “dictionary” around the dining room table after dinner, of happy but bashful participation in weekend festivals put on by the Society for Creative Anachronism. Thoreau used to marvel sometimes at the humiliation that would surely ensue at school had anybody planted in his classroom a picture of him in his medieval costume. Certainly, Thoreau was different from his classmates. He grew up trying desperately to be as like to his peers as he could be, but his parents felt always like anchors of strangeness in his life—no matter how close he came to normalcy, his parents were there, pulling him enthusiastically away from acceptance. Perhaps this explains why Thoreau is more politically conservative than his parents; why he avoids poetry but embraces journalism; why his wardrobe is expensive and made from unpatterned, very-high-quality material; why he believes in knowing about things like wine and geography and, yes, pens.
Perhaps it is for this reason also that he feels a thrill now at blending in so nicely with this crowd. He did his research well. He may not know as much about music as the average member of this audience—cannot pull from memory the names of obscure early-nineties hardcore bands, or name every album by the Sex Pistols or the Clash or whomever these people like at the moment—but Thoreau is quite certain that he is a much better writer than any of them. He feels satisfied: he is going to be an unbiased arts writer. He can be a naive listener. If music sounds good, then it is good, he thinks. He feels no need to engage in the kind of name-dropping that he has read in other music reviews.
He turns to the young man next to him. “What’s the lead singer’s name?”
“Siobhan O’Hara,” says Hugh. He’s about to say something pert about his sister, but then he notices the guy’s pen and paper. A reporter. A sudden benevolent impulse takes him over. “Isn’t she great?” For good measure: “This is my favorite band.”
Thoreau shrugs. “Yeah,” he says, writing Chevonne O’Hara? on his reporter’s pad with his beautiful pen. Actually, this kind of music doesn’t appeal to him very much at all, or perhaps it is the noise in the club—he wishes he had brought earplugs. He can barely hear his own thoughts, and he certainly can’t have a conversation with the young man next to him, though he’d like to. Always important to get the crowd’s opinion, he thinks. He makes a note to do it after the show.
Then he thinks about her name. Chevonne? What kind of name is that for a young girl? Strange. Very.
He focuses on the music. The noise inside the club makes it hard to hear what the lead singer is singing, but he thinks it sounds like “Save our souls, save our souls.” Thoreau rolls his eyes. How trite.
II.
This is a good crowd. This is a crowd that makes Mike like playing again. They are rapt and respectful, enthusiastic and energetic. There is a girl in the front who is making eyes at him, and he plays a game with himself: how long can he hold her gaze? He is a nervous person by nature and eye contact makes him uncomfortable. But this is a test. Over the length of a measure? Yes. Over the length of an eight-bar solo? Yes. Over the length of a song? No.
The girl, who is there with another girl who might be her sister, is a brazen girl, a girl who would jump on a bar and dance. A girl who gets drunk, Mike imagines. She is slight and catlike. Big eyes.
Mike is afraid of women recently. It’s nice to flirt from onstage. He knows it’s safer than flirting in person. From onstage, he feels held down, anchored to something. He feels that his feet are pulled reassuringly toward earth; when offstage, he feels he might float off someplace like a helium balloon. He cannot, therefore, speak with women. What would they think, should he find himself suddenly launched into space?
The girl with the big eyes smiles at him, and for the first time since Nora Cross killed herself, Mike considers talking to a girl after the show. The odds are in his favor. He does not fear rejection; he can fairly guarantee that this girl would be interested, would be nice to him, at least. Here she is making eyes at him from the audience. Looking up at him. Yes, he decides; he will find her after the show. He’ll say something ridiculous like “I noticed you in the audience. I like your shirt.” He laughs to himself at the thought and then remembers that he is onstage, that he’s in the middle of a song. It’s a song they’ve played hundreds of times and he doesn’t really need to pay much attention to it and then suddenly he’s afraid that he’s getting burned out already. That being onstage no longer holds his interest the way it did once. That soon he will be waiting to get offstage, or that playing will become as dull as any other job.
Southpaw is the smallest club they’ve played in more than a year. They have not been commercially successful. After opening for Tommy Mays, their album came out and sort of flopped. They tried to tour on their own, but the clubs Titan booked them into were too large. They were only ever half full. The Burn and Theo have high hopes for their next album, which they’ve been working on, due in the spring, but in the meantime it is refreshing to play to a packed house in their hometown.
He tries to focus on this feeling, to enjoy the show. Soon, though, his eyes find the girl with the big eyes once again and he is thinking to himself now that a girl like that has had a lot of sex. A lot of sex with a lot of different people. Sex in strange positions—the kind of sex he has no desire for. Mike is really very uncreative, when it comes to sex, and he has always felt a bit uneasy and defensive when asked to experiment: as if he is being told, “I’m bored with you.” This is a girl who would like to have sex with him upside down. In a swing. Something like that. She would fool around behind his back with other men. Other women, even. She’s very pretty. She’s very small. Mike wants to put her in his pocket. No: he wants to forget she exists.
He looks down at his guitar and turns his mind back to Siobhan and the
band. Katia, the drummer, drops a beat and fumbles her way back to a semblance of the original rhythm. The mistake is small enough that Mike feels quite sure that no one in the audience noticed, and Mike feels a sudden thrill at being on the inside of things, for once in his life. He and his bandmates catch eyes, smile a little at the error. They’re having a good time. Mike G. is jumping on the fourth beat of every other measure. Pete is stomping his feet. Siobhan is melting forward, into the microphone, into the crowd, bending her knees, swooning along with her words. Mike thinks to himself that he feels real affection for them. They’re like family. He loves them. He doesn’t need to talk to the girl in the audience, who certainly has had too much sex, who would certainly leave him for someone else anyway. All he needs is his band.
The girl with big eyes wonders if Mike will come into the audience after the show. She’s excited by the attention he’s paid her. She’d like to meet him. She’d like to shake his hand. She’s been listening to the Burn since a friend gave her their CD a year ago.
She’s very young. She’s had sex with one person, and she called it making love. It was her boyfriend. They broke up last month.
She will get married in four years. She will not ever be unfaithful.
III.
Thoreau writes:
It is not common to hear music that is immediately appealing, that seems at all musical upon a first listen, and the Burn’s music is no exception. One can imagine liking their songs after a few intensive study sessions, headphones on, eyes closed. But last night’s show at Southpaw revealed not much more to this reporter than a dedicated local fan base and a distinct lack of stage presence.
He is pleased. Then he considers the way the Burn looks onstage and momentarily thinks of amending his description, for the members of the Burn do indeed have a scrappy sort of stage presence: each player does something different at a given time, the bassist swinging his head about erratically, the dueling guitarists jumping into the air occasionally or staring into the space of the room. The lead singer too has an appeal that Thoreau cannot deny, and he regrets his first impression of her; for despite her unfashionably full arms, her almost motherly bosom, she is supple and moves well and gracefully, and Thoreau is stirred by her.