Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

  “He did.”

  “I need to see you. Immediately. I’m canceling all my appointments today.”

  “Danny’s asleep.”

  “Immediately.”

  • • •

  Danny and I hurried through a Burger King, a second-hand clothing store on La Brea, and a florist on Sunset Boulevard where the lady didn’t know what kind of flowers to buy for a dead cat. So we bought roses. We walked up to Hollywood Boulevard feeling that we were not mere tourists, the kind of people surprised by seediness where there was supposed to be movie-star glamour. But still, walking past the place where they hold the Academy Awards, we looked around to see if anyone famous was hanging out. We went further along the street, holding the roses and reading the names of the famous people in bronze stars on the sidewalk in front of cheap souvenir stores, Scientology centers, and wig stores. A lot of those names we’d never heard of. Paul Muni? Jesse Lasky? It got better when we turned down Vine Street and walked across James Dean.

  But by this time Danny was starting to believe everything we saw was a sign. That business of the cat dying had really unleashed a torrent of symbols. When he saw a woman with beautiful, dark hair walking in front of us, it was Ariana’s hair, a sign that she was trying to be with him. And when another dark-haired woman was standing outside the Egyptian Theatre on the other side of the street it was Ariana waiting for him. And when a white Mercedes pulling out from a curb parking space was hit by a black Chevrolet it was like Alfie and—“Don’t even go there,” I said to him as we walked over the Beatles and then Marlon Brando.

  By then I realized that every tourist in the whole place was walking along, reading the names just like we were.

  We headed south, and then east into another world past Larchmont Boulevard. A world of small houses bristling with claims of bigness. Old small houses, built in the silent film era, daring you to ignore the ghosts of Hollywood, of lives led and dreams born dead for years afterwards. For me those were the real signs. The whole place gave me a chill. But maybe that’s what happens when you’ve been raised at the beach where the closest you get to mysticism is someone talking about UV protection or a great wave.

  Constance’s place looked so different in the light of day. There was none of that unleash-the-werewolves spookiness. Daylight had burned off all the Gothic battlements we’d imagined the previous night. Now it was just one of those crummy two-story, stucco apartment buildings, the ones with a forlorn interior courtyard that had been dropped across Southern California in the 1960s like warts on the landscape. But it was a crummy stucco building with a new Cadillac Escalade parked outside in a red no-parking zone. Of course, the black Escalade was on its way to becoming another sign, but before Danny could even say anything, I rolled my eyes and he shut up.

  We stood with our roses in front of the wire mesh security gate and the push button intercom that stood sentry for Constance. The buzzing noise ushered us inside, up to an exterior walkway that seemed to bounce when we walked on it. Dressed in a T-shirt and silk cargo pants, she was waiting for us, looking haggard, that tangle of Goldilocks hair flying off in all directions as if she’d just gotten up. Right away we knew the roses were somehow a problem. She didn’t even want to touch them when we offered them to her. “Oh . . .” she said, not taking her eyes off them. “Thank you. But all flowers are wrong at this moment. Unless they are black.”

  We ditched the roses and tried to think of one black flower either of us had ever seen as we waited for Constance to finish with the Escalade guy who’d refused to cancel his appointment. Sitting there on that exterior walkway that went past the individual apartments, we could hear the guy going crazy—“You never said anything about this. It could be a tumor for christsakes. I been coming here for two years and all you ever said was something about a cloud being over some part of me? That’s it? . . . I take vitamin E, omega-3, selenium. All that shit, so tell me how the fuck it’s possible . . . Just tell me how to fix it, okay? Please? I don’t have time for this.”—each time followed by some low murmur from Constance until she said gently that his time was up until next week. “Next week? I think I might have a tumor and you want me to wait until next week?” The Escalade guy left, barreling out, stepping over Danny and me like we were speed bumps. He looked younger than he was, wearing an expensive leather jacket and jeans with a crease in them. “Kind of guy who shines his feet and then puts his shoes on,” Danny muttered.

  We waited for a while, heard nothing but silence and then decided to go inside. For some reason we felt almost obliged to tiptoe in. She was seated at the wooden table against the wall in the small living room. Sunlight streamed through the pale orange curtains. Heavier black velvet curtains had been pulled back to the edges of the living room. A single candle was lit and flickered for no reason I could see.

  And on the floor in a corner near the kitchen was a white towel draped over something that bulged.

  “Hello?” I said.

  She didn’t acknowledge me. She didn’t even look at us. She was staring into a small bowl of water. As if she was in a trance, she reached for a mirror and put it into the bowl, staring into it again.

  “What are you doing?” Danny asked.

  “Scrying,” she said with her eyes closed. As if we were supposed to know what she was talking about. “When I scry I get information from anything that has a reflection,” she said, staring into the mirror in the water. Her voice sounded like it came in from Burbank. “Yes . . .” she said. “Oh.” A silence. Her eyes were closed. “I’m going in,” she said, rocking slightly back and forth.

  We stood there waiting for whatever was next.

  “Sit,” she said, waving her hand, her eyes still closed. Danny looked over at me. I nodded and he sat in the single chair in front of her. Her eyes remained closed. “Last night when I saw you I sprayed wintergreen here in the room. I need to protect myself. But I didn’t do enough. I told you—witches will put juniper branches beside their front door. To keep out evil spirits. I should have put juniper up by the doorway, a lot of it. But I didn’t. So evil spirits got in past the door. And Alfie paid the price.”

  I quickly checked out the entrance to the apartment. What looked like Christmas tree branches were now hanging from a nail beside the door.

  Her eyes opened. It was almost a shock when they did. Danny looked uncertain. “I’m really sorry about your cat. I was just trying to find Ariana. Maybe we shouldn’t be here right now.”

  She didn’t take her eyes off him. She got up slowly from behind the table, walked over to the white towel, and removed it from the floor. Like it was all some kind of drama. With her pulling aside the curtain in a theater. Under the towel was Alfie, starring as the dead cat.

  “Evil came in here last night. Alfie paid the price. But we are not finished.”

  I’d wanted to ask the question, easing into it in did-he-have-a-good-life? terms, but instead I went straight for it. “Let me ask you something. How old was Alfie?”

  “Thirteen,” she said, as if that had nothing to do with Alfie’s demise. A thirteen-year-old cat suddenly croaks and it’s a mystical event? I tried to flash Danny a look, but the ghost of Alfie was obviously pawing with his mind. “We are not finished,” she said again, looking right at Danny.

  “Okay,” he said uncertainly.

  “You’re going to bury Alfie.”

  A cat? We’re burying the cat? My mind went tumbling through a kaleidoscope of flashbacks to other dead, human dead, strewn across the mountains. And now we’re burying a cat? “Hey Danny, maybe we should—”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Afterwards,” she said. What afterwards?

  “After what?”

  “After we get to the trauma that made Alfie die,” she said, switching on a lamp beside the window and then turning out all the others in the room. She sat down and took the Tarot cards from the velvet bag, looked at them, shook her head, and uncovered that black mirror and looked into it. It was like she
was inspecting it for flaws.

  “You have kept something from me,” she said. Almost like an accusation.

  “What are you talking about?” Danny wouldn’t look directly at her when he answered on behalf of both of us.

  “Maybe it wasn’t lying,” she said. “But something like lying. Concealing?”

  “No.” Danny almost leaned into the word.

  “Yes. That’s why Alfie died. He was using up all of his energy. He was a channel for something bad. Even healthy psychics get sick a lot because some channels aren’t clear. We have to clear the channels. But a cat? Poor Alfie didn’t stand a chance.”

  “Yeah,” he said quietly.

  “Death. One you haven’t talked about.”

  With almost a jolt, Danny’s eyes suddenly focused on her.

  “A man?”

  “Oh jesus,” Danny said, looking like I’d never seen him before. And that was the instant I figured out that we were in an elevator after the cables had snapped. With me pushing buttons for every floor all the way down.

  “And this woman you seek . . .”

  Danny suddenly started to shiver as if he was freezing. “I don’t really want to go into this.”

  “Someone died.”

  “Yes.” Danny’s whisper came from some part of him that was far away.

  “When you were with the woman. The one in the white veil.”

  “Yes . . . sort of.” Silence.

  “You still don’t want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “Fine.”

  “Wait . . .” Danny was twisting in the chair, going through some personal portal all his own. “My father . . .”

  “Your father?”

  “He shot himself.”

  “He . . . ?”

  Nothing. Silence.

  “It took me a long time to figure out that maybe it was his way of warning me.”

  “About what?”

  “About not taking chances.”

  She got up and pulled the towel back over Alfie as if he had done his job and it was time to bring the curtain down. Then she sat across from Danny and waited.

  “After Omar left, Ariana and I were supposed to meet again at the house on Algonquin Avenue, the empty house, the one I was supposed to be looking after for my father until the estate was settled and he could do the renovations.” He stopped and was staring blankly at something only he could see as his hands silently strangled the edge of the table.

  As close as I was to Danny, I wasn’t sure I should be there. I looked toward the door. I just wanted to leave. I felt something was about to be said that was just too personal.

  “I got there early, before Ariana. I knew something was wrong the moment I went inside. Like some cold, invisible wind was blowing, the kind that freezes in your spine. I called out, ‘Hello?’ and there was only silence. I was almost creeping through the darkened rooms where the streetlights lit the crevasses. In the shadows, way over in the corner of the back room, past the big sliding doors that were pushed back, my father was there. He was sitting on the floor, his eyes wide open. Like he was watching me. He seemed so peaceful. Looking right at me. It took me a while to really see the big pool of his blood that had run from his chest down across the floor until it congealed in a dark sticky circle. The gun was lying beside him.

  “I stood there like I was nailed to the floor, trying to say something to him. But no words would come out. I couldn’t move. It was only the sound of Ariana’s footsteps outside that shook me loose. I got to the door before she could open it, making some excuse about my father coming to the house unexpectedly.

  “She never knew. That entire evening I was an actor. I wanted desperately to break down and cry. But I didn’t. And to this day, I’m sure she had no idea.”

  In all those months of wandering the Afghan mountains with Danny, of talking about the most personal parts of our lives, not even a hint of this had ever come up. “You never mentioned anything about this,” I said.

  Constance answered, not Danny. “He couldn’t.”

  “I should have known. It was there all along and I never saw it. I could have stopped it.”

  “How?”

  “After my father moved back with my mother, with us, he just wasn’t the same person he used to be. I remembered when I was little he used to laugh a lot. He was great fun to be with. He was my hero then. But when he moved back into our house there was no laughter, nothing. Just him and Mother, two people who went right back to being welded together by whatever they loathed in each other. I thought maybe he came back because he felt guilty about leaving me behind. He always wanted me to take over his business. The more misery there was in the house, the harder he worked at that business.

  “But when I look back on it all, I think I always knew he was going to kill himself. I just knew goddammit.”

  Constance was still looking into the black mirror. “But I see someone else.”

  “My father came to me one day out of the blue, about a year after he’d moved back in, and said something about how we all have only one soulmate in our lives. And whatever you have to do, you never let her go. Never walk away. I thought that was pretty strange, coming from him. He never usually talked like that.

  “But back then I didn’t pay much attention. Whoever does at that age? But I didn’t understand anything about either of them back then. My mother’d gone back to smashing their old photographs, thinking it would make him mad. But instead of losing it he’d just watch her and say nothing.

  “I didn’t even pay attention when he came back late one night and just sat in the car until dawn. I went outside because I could hear the car start about four times. He’d start it, put it in gear, sit for a while, and then shut it off and sit there some more. I saw something I never wanted to see. He was crying. I couldn’t believe it. My old man—crying! He was the toughest guy I ever knew. Nothing got to him. But here he was. Sitting there alone. Without a sound. I could see his face in the light. It was like, tears were pouring out of him. I backed away. It totally freaked me out. I couldn’t handle that. And now? All I can think about is why? Why didn’t I just go up to him? Why didn’t I say something? Because I knew. I just knew.

  “So, in that instant, in that old house on Algonquin Avenue, something in me was not surprised. And there he was, sitting on that floor. Staring right at me after he shot himself. I had known. And I hadn’t tried to help him. And to this day I don’t know why.

  “At his funeral there was one car that hung back from the others in the cemetery. I had seen it parked outside the funeral parlor. It was a gray Mercedes, pretty new, and driven by a woman who had sat at the back in the chapel. She was attractive, with shiny black hair, and looked sort of darker than most of the other people there. She never made eye contact the whole time. She was crying, though. Very quietly.

  “At the cemetery she didn’t get out of her vehicle. She was there watching as the rest of us were heading up to the gravesite on that little ridge. I was at the end of the group of people going up there. I turned around for some reason and went back to the little road where she was parked. ‘I’m his son,’ I said.

  “‘I know,’ she said. She was still sitting in the car. ‘I’ve seen photographs of you. A lot of them.’

  “I asked her if I should know who she was, and she said, ‘Just someone who loved him.’ She looked straight ahead when she said it. She wouldn’t look at me. I started to walk back toward the gravesite and then something made me turn again. ‘Why didn’t you and my father stay together?’

  “At first I thought she hadn’t heard. Then she said, ‘I still don’t know.’ She was still looking straight over the steering wheel. ‘Maybe he let his fears become a wall he couldn’t climb,’ she said, and for the first time she looked at me. I thought she was asking me for some kind of understanding. ‘After he went back to your mother, I married someone else.’

  “Then she drove away. Really slowly. I never even knew her name. I think about
that woman. A lot.”

  Constance could have been in a trance, for all I knew. She sat there listening, staring straight into the lamp. She finally said something: “I am hearing music again.”

  “Is it ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’? That Frank Sinatra song? The one that my mother started playing again? About a million times after the funeral? When she decided she loved my father again?”

  “No.”

  “Is it Liberace?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And?”

  “He will help you. And . . .” Her eyes closed. Her lips began moving in some silent conversation that only she could hear.

  “And what?”

  “Alfie.”

  “What about Alfie?”

  “He was speaking for your father. No wonder Alfie died. He was overtaken by the voice of a dead man.”

  “Alfie was my father?” Invisible parts of Danny started flying off in all directions.

  “Be still,” she snapped without opening her eyes.

  “A dead cat was my father?”

  “You’re blocking the energy.” Constance raised her voice for the first time. “Be still.” She opened her eyes and looked into the light behind Danny. We were back to that same jangled silence, the one that seemed louder than any mortar attack. “Alfie paid the price.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Put your hands on the table. And turn them over.” Constance held her hands over Danny’s. Then she slowly lowered them until they rested on his. Her eyes were closed. “Yes.” Quickly, she took the Tarot cards from the small velvet bag and laid them out in front of her. She looked from the cards to somewhere past Danny’s head and then back again. “She is alive.”

  “Of course she’s alive.”

  “There is no ‘of course,’” she said. “But this woman you are looking for has survived.”

  “Survived what?”

  “She waits for you. It will not be the same, though.”

  “What won’t be the same?” Danny was in static motion, the way he got when he was tense, his leg jackhammering under the table.