Boomer1

by Daniel Torday

  “Yeah,” Mark said.

  “Well, shit, man,” Costco said. “It is very good to see you again, brother, but I gotta get back to work. But we will see each other again?”

  “We will see each other again,” Mark said.

  “Give me your cell, brah.”

  After he gave Costco his number, a sense of peace surging through him when he had reason to take the phone from his pocket and check the message, the green script of a text from Costco easing down his spine, Mark said, “So what are you doing for work, anyway?”

  Costco looked down at the shirt he was wearing, then looked up and said, “Oh, right, sorry.” He reached into his backpack and pulled out a forest green knit cotton collared shirt and a forest green baseball cap. Both had the Starbucks logo on them. Mark looked down, then back up.

  “Right,” he said.

  “Right-o,” Costco said.

  Mark was working for an independently owned café. Costco was working for a corporate one. Costco was thirty. Mark was thirty-one. They said good-bye. They would see each other again. And again. And again. And again and again and again, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum.

  PART SIX

  JULIA

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  THERE WERE TWO DISTINCT WAYS in which Julia Brumfeld had suffered from serious hearing loss in the years just after her first and only son was born—one of them literal, the other not as much. The literal deafness began in earnest in Julia’s thirties. It came on so slowly it was almost as if it wasn’t happening. During Mark’s first year of life Julia would sit in a darkened nursery on the second floor of her and Cal’s suburban Baltimore home and rock him, rock him, rock him for so long she felt as if something inside of her was going to break free and drag her to the floor. In the sharp light of day she could look down at his impossibly small pink rabbit face, his impossibly small eyelids shot through with the purple lightning of veins, and smile just to see him there. Existing. Being. Breathing in her arms.

  And during those daytime rockings she would return to the most active creative part of her life—she would parse a phrase or a lick she’d played onstage with the Cherubs over and over, taking apart the bass line and the guitar licks and the rhythm chords, figuring out new arrangements for the songs she’d done with Spencer on the road. She would take a bassline and walk it up an octave, change the fingering, all in her head, all while she sat and rocked, rocked, rocked the baby. It did not occur to her that there was a sense of loss and nostalgia in doing so. Here she was, a homeowner, married, rocking a newborn, and her mind was still working over songs that they played on the classic rock station. She would open her eyes and look down at Mark and see that he was at perfect peace, and she’d figured out a new kick to open an old song, and she’d be at peace, too.

  Not in the darkness amid sleep. At night, rocking him in hours that were neither night nor morning, rocking and rocking and rocking, felt not like peace and ease but like battleground and strife, like the territory on which some epic duel was being fought, and in the days after his notoriety reached its peak Julia would wonder if some of the groundwork for it hadn’t been laid then—a capitulation to her son, to her scion, the decisions parents make every day to get through, to get sleep, to get on with it. This duality had defined her experience of having a kid: her friends would gift her Dr. Spock, old copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and new-agey book after new-agey book about the beauty of pregnancy, the glory of the early years with a child. To Julia this was bunkum. She loved her husband and she wanted to bring a child into the big bad world and she even longed to be a mother, but since she’d discovered she was pregnant her body felt as if it were being taken over by some inexorably burgeoning cancer—which in some clinical way it was. The foreign cells in her would develop in her womb, under a genetic plan, and one day become another human she was meant to love and nurture. She and Cal went to the theater when Mark was five and watched as a silver-faced alien burst through the abdomen of Sigourney Weaver and all she could think was: That’s just what it was like when, somewhere deep in my own gut, Mark was ready to get out.

  Every morning of her first trimester and well into her second she would wake with silver swimming minnows squirming before her eyes. She would make it through the shower and down to a bowl of Grape-Nuts and a couple of sips of Tab to try to settle her stomach before she felt it coming—she had just enough time to burst out through the back door and onto their ample Pikesville lawn before she emptied the contents of her stomach, slimy brown granular Grape-Nuts mess, onto the green grass. By the middle of April she’d grown so adept at it that she didn’t even need Cal to hold her hair back—she could essentially vomit standing upright, into the bushes, wipe the back of her right hand across her face, and head in to pack Cal’s lunch before he left. She was a grown woman, soon to be a mother, who’d learned to boot and rally like a frat boy from morning sickness. He was a grown man, soon to be a father, who still had someone packing his lunch for him for the day. He still hadn’t ever boiled a pot of water to make macaroni. It wasn’t even clear he knew how to make a PB&J. She barely did herself. Sometimes she snuck a whole handful of Twizzlers in the afternoon instead of eating lunch. She knew how to make Jell-O, and maybe three different casserole recipes she’d clipped from the Parade magazine that came with the Sunday paper. They were still just kids. Kids with a kid. They would never, in Julia’s estimation, become full-fledged adults. Even pregnancy would only dent it. She’d still be wearing red Chuck Taylors and Velvet Underground T-shirts when they bore her along in her casket, and fuck if she wasn’t proud of it.

  If she was honest with herself the first signs of her eventual hearing loss were starting even then. She hadn’t played fiddle in a band in a decade by the time she discovered she was pregnant—she gave private lessons on weekends, would down the road teach music in an elementary school classroom, but when parents found out she didn’t use the Suzuki method they grew indifferent, weren’t interested in a teacher who would teach kids to play only by ear—but after a long day she would often come home, pull out her imitation Strad, and saw out a fiddle tune or two. She played in A, all the main fiddle tunes were in A, and there was something about having two flats available to her, that A-flat especially, that left open such an air of possibility, as if having flats in a chord gave it a greater sense of breadth. After playing, the screak and cry of her first finger way up the fingerboard on her E string, a long high tone would continue to ring in her left ear. Sometimes she couldn’t shake it from her head for hours. It would still be ringing as she rocked the baby to sleep that night. Or earlier in the evening Cal would come up the back stairs and into the kitchen, his face a rictus of disappointment and anger she couldn’t decipher.

  “I’ve been calling you for five minutes to bring me and Irv a beer, hon. What’re you, going deaf?”

  She wondered a decade later if he remembered saying it, if he suffered guilt for having done so when it turned out that if she wasn’t going to be functionally deaf yet, she was, in fact, losing her hearing.

  The high end started to go first, stripping itself from her aural range like a snake sloughing skin, but it felt less like a loss than the muddy gaining of a kind of indecipherable low end of the tonal scale: a snake choking down a rodent it couldn’t digest. She noticed it most around the time Mark turned three. The first three years of the kid’s life felt like thirty, or like a whole new series of lives she didn’t know could be lived, nested inside each other like onion skins. The OB made them stay in the hospital for a week with the kid, he was so jaundiced. They went into a room in the NICU where he lay under the Bili lights, black sunglasses over his eyes while the infrared shot through his skin into the syrup of bilirubin accreting yellow in his bloodstream. She loved the kid to the point of aching already. To Julia, the sitting there in her wheelchair peering through the glass, the sitting and waiting amid the hospital hallway that smelled like some weird combination of Aunt Jemima’s and iodine, was almost more painful than th
e constant sharp throbbing she felt from her episiotomy. Which was of course its own kind of pain. When her closest friend from shul, Alice Janowitz, came to visit and meet Mark in the hospital she said, “Oh God, after my first kid I just referred to that whole region as my ver-blah-blah.” Cal hadn’t laughed much when he heard it so Julia didn’t say it again aloud, but that was how she thought of her own nether region for weeks.

  But life was measured out in weeks instead of months or years until Mark turned three, three and a half, and it felt like a return to herself she’d not felt since she was last on tour across the country with the Cherubs. She met every morning as if it was a discrete unit, and often the meeting of morning arrived while she was already awake, rocking, rocking, rocking in that nursery with Mark. Perhaps that was the greatest trespass of the endless nights rocking—the sense that at the moment when days came to feel most vibrant, most wholly unique units marked by darkness and then light, there was a needy imp in the nursery next to their room waiting to wake them so often, tugging like a rutting pig at her nipple, as to make days and nights feel indiscriminate, turning time into some brown muddle of unified existence.

  Just when that ultimate and overwhelming sleep deprivation had come to feel like it would be the only existence life could offer, the baby started to sleep through the night. The soldiers cleared the field and Julia’s capitulation was muddied. Years after she’d laid down her own weapons and given in to the kid, now here the other side had laid down their arms, too. Sometimes he would just go to sleep like a, well, like a human being. He was three and a half and one Saturday morning she found herself meeting the morning sun with indifference, putting the pillow over her head and going back to sleep for an hour, only waking when the ringing in her ears grew bad enough she needed to rise and take an aspirin. Cal even let her sleep, went down to read the Baltimore Sun rather than kissing her neck to see if morning sex was in the cards.

  Whatever joy that new sleep might have brought, instead it brought Julia to a kind of reconvening with her senses—only to find that one of the five, the one that had in her life brought her the most joy, was failing. Throughout Mark’s third year and into his fourth, Julia started to suffer tinnitus so bad she found herself not sleeping not because the kid was waking her up, but because of something inside. They would get a babysitter—finally, they could leave the kid with a babysitter, no matter how he cried when they left—but at parties if more than four or five people in a room were talking at once she couldn’t hear half of what a person right next to her was saying. One afternoon she took Mark to daycare at their synagogue on Park Heights Avenue and headed into the city to see an ENT, the ironically/unironically named Dr. Steinway. They did a series of tests for conductivity, cognitive function; she wore headphones like she wouldn’t see again until Mark was in college and the kids walked down the street with them on instead of ear buds—lids, they called them. She sat in a room listening for beeps, most of which she didn’t hear. Seemed about right. The lid of the world coming down and sealing her from it.

  “Is there any family history of hearing loss?” the ENT asked her. The only family history she knew of was her father’s nervous breakdown. “Did you attend rock concerts often as a kid?” he said.

  An image flashed across Julia’s visual field: the darkness of Fillmore West, the motes she could have reached out and swirled like glittering mica in a sunlit pond in the space above the crowd. Behind her a huge wall of amplifiers. Months and months of amps in clubs across the country with the Cherubs, years of amps in basements and garages in Baltimore when she’d given up her hope of getting Spencer Willmont back to the States, knowing the closest she’d come to him again was reading about his death in Rolling Stone one day, when in the lat seventies the punk scene was burgeoning and she bought an electric violin, played backing up spiked-haired guys playing Gibson Firebirds slung below their beltlines, SGs strapped so low they almost couldn’t find the strings with their picks, until she realized that music couldn’t possibly continue to interest her.

  Yes, she said. She’d been to quite a lot of live music performances in her days if she was being honest.

  “Well, that will do it,” Dr. Steinway said. “New research shows that if you’ve attended as few as a half-dozen rock concerts in your life, you will most likely lose most of your high-end hearing by age fifty. High-end goes first. And then … well, it’s still too recent to say what will happen—it’s only ten years since we started going to concerts where the amplification even was loud enough to do such damage to our hearing. It will be years before we know what kind of toll it will take on us ten, twenty, thirty years down the road. In fact, I’m starting to do some of that research with a colleague at Hopkins. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in joining a clinical study in acquired hearing loss?”

  Julia said she didn’t suppose she would be interested in any such thing, no, but thank you for asking. Her father had been in the hospital because he had to and it had ruined him. She wasn’t about to come to one voluntarily. In words that she’d just learned, she soon enough might not be able to hear anyway.

  Some part of her never would have attended enough shows to have gotten to this point with her hearing to begin with. But after she and Cal got together, he was enthusiastic about her continuing to pursue music. He was a third-year medical student at SUNY Upstate. She had come back to Syracuse after taking the fall off after Spencer left for his France jaunt. He was gone and she was just an undergraduate again. She didn’t even tell anyone what had happened out west, and Willie never came back to campus. She and Cal met at a bar in Westcott, far from the noise of the city itself, and when he discovered that she was a fiddler, that she was Julia, that she was beautiful and full of talent, and then she discovered that his own mother had been a classically trained violist, it was a matter of hours before she found herself in his bed. “I want you to play for me,” he said. He said it, said it, said it as they moved from Syracuse, to a residency at Johns Hopkins, where he matched, in the city where he’d grown up. Baltimore was close enough to Philadelphia for her to feel comfortable she could see her mother when needed, could come help with her father. Could visit him when he was healthy enough to accept visitation. Somehow the mere fact that Cal was going to be a doctor must have attracted her to him in the first place—there was a sense of authority doctors had played in her life, a control they held over her family with the unfulfilled promise, the unfulfillable promise, that her father may one day again be healthy enough to return home. How could he recover when it wasn’t clear just what he was recovering from—catastrophic inability to handle the traumas in one’s past?—but being near trained medical professionals outside of a formal setting put Julia at ease.

  But being around trained medical professionals, even one who had provided a home and a son and a life easier than it could have been had Julia become a rock star, or had fallen in love with a teacher like herself, wasn’t going to restore her hearing. Nothing would. The only thing that could provide help was hearing aids. Dr. Steinway made clear that for now, in her thirties, she shouldn’t need them. Not yet. The tinnitus was uncomfortable and could cause anxiety and sleep deprivation, but he could prescribe her five milligrams of Valium if she wanted. She wanted. Until it started to distract her ability to get through daily activity, he suggested she start trying to lip-read if she could.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  BY THE TIME MARK WAS A TEENAGER, Julia had grown far more than adept at lip-reading when talking to him, talking to Cal, or in the classroom as she needed it. The irony of a music teaching job opening at Woodlawn Elementary right as the ringing in her ears wouldn’t stop struck her and didn’t—it was either irony, or whatever the opposite of irony was—but no matter how inept kids were, she could still clap and find a rhythm and she could teach technique on violin, viola, cello, and bass. Her aural world had grown into a single amorphous blob of watery basslines and rhythm, but the aural world was better succumbed to than fled from. She still
put on her old Bill Monroe records from time to time to hear what she could hear, to discover if any of Tater Tate or Kenny Baker’s old fiddle lines were still available in her spectrum.

  Mostly what she heard was the thumping of the bass, which in bluegrass was as repetitive and boring as music got—one, four, one, four, one, five, one. Monroe had always liked playing in B-flat, no matter how challenging that was for fiddlers, and Julia had learned to play those melodies in closed positions with her left hand, unable to hit any open strings. One day in a book on astrophysics her book club was reading she discovered that when astronomers made actual audio recordings of the sound produced by a black hole, the black hole emitted a B-flat fifty-two octaves below the spectrum the human ear could hear. That seemed right. Her whole aural life was black-hole-bound, waiting to be sucked in for all eternity to a substance made of pure, soul-sucking gravity. That was a fate she’d have preferred to what was ahead.

  When Mark was eight he took up piano, and Julia felt beyond grateful he’d not wanted to play the violin as Cal suggested—“But you could teach him everything you know!” he said. She could do no such thing. By that point she couldn’t even tell if her own intonation was on unless she was playing in first position on her G string—it was one thing to teach in a huge room full of kids whose faces she could read to see what was happening. But doing so one-on-one with her own son? He needed lessons from a real teacher. From someone who could still hear the upper registers. And besides, she told Cal, it just wasn’t possible for her to discipline the kid in the way he needed—the first time he touched the hair on her bow, the first time he unscrewed the bow’s frog and let the hairs swing taut and loose, she grew so angry she wouldn’t let him near the instrument for a week. The piano—that was the instrument for them. It was tuned every six months by a professional tuner and when you hit a key, it produced a note. Playing piano required precision but it did not require intonational precision. Whatever she needed to do to help Mark when he came home to practice she could do by sight and by feel.