A Perfect Blindness

by W. Lance Hunt

  The first chord of “Joie” flows easily, which melts into the first phrase, and the rest comes so effortlessly. I play “Joie” the way I did on the morning she and I recorded it—the morning I brought it to the office of Wax Trax! Now I sing it to her once again.

  As usual when I play, time flows differently, as if it doesn’t exist; it’s always as if I’ve just started playing when the song ends and I find myself sitting at a silent piano, my fingers over its keys, with nothing left to play.

  There is a smattering of applause. I let my hands fall to my lap, as a droplet of sweat trickles down my lip. I lick it. It tastes like life.

  “I could really use a drink,” I say.

  The birthday girl bends toward me. “Thank you,” Michele says. “That was lovely.”

  “Oh, yes,” I say, remembering that I was playing for her and not Jennifer. “You’re very welcome.”

  Turning away, Michele runs her fingers along the keys of the piano.

  “Hey,” someone says. “That’s that guy from that band.”

  “Mercurial Visions,” someone else says.

  “Jonathan Starks. Hey, the whole band’s here.”

  “Play something else,” a woman says.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Play!”

  “Pop-up concert!”

  “He’s back!”

  • • • • •

  The sounds of a windblown city loft late at night: the rattling of windows, a hollow rush at the door, muffled buses lumbering by below, the faint hum of cars, the distant rumble of the ‘L’ making its way between buildings along raised tracks. This greets me when I arrive home alone. I throw myself onto the couch. Through a gap in the heavy drapes, I gaze at the dull aura over the choppy skyline, including a sliver of the Sears Tower’s light-speckled silhouette. Scents have impregnated my clothes and hair: Michele’s musky-floral perfume, the malty yeastiness of beer, the sweet herbaceousness of Jägermeister, the rich reek of tobacco, the salty musk of my sweat—pungent, living smells. I breathe them in deeply as if they are magic vapors.

  Letting a satisfying fatigue settle over me, I carefully line up everything that’s happened today: a call from Jennifer, the birth of a new song, a party at the Gingerman, performing as I once had, and an unexpected kiss—right before Michele walked from the piano, she turned and brushed her lips on mine.

  I feel that delicate kiss even now.

  You’re still such a cipher.

  I don’t know if I’m thinking of Michele or Jennifer, and that doesn’t seem to matter right now.

  • • • • •

  The next afternoon, Nancy and I are sitting at the table in the loft with a half-empty press pot of coffee between us. Scott’s out running errands while Ron sets up for a shoot in a half hour. Rehearsal’s right after he’s done.

  “You’re acting all different today,” Nancy says. “It’s the sex, right?”

  “The sex?” I scoff. “Boy here’s regrown his hymen. Been years.”

  “But sex is what you’re thinking about, right? Or what you’re avoiding thinking about.”

  “Don’t think so.” I shake my head.

  She arches her eyebrow at me and takes a sip of coffee.

  “Okay. Avoid. Yes. Possibly,” I say. “But not quite, either.” I roll my coffee cup around in its saucer. “It’s more about being on a precipice and looking down into the yawning gulf of a possible new life, and then stepping off into it and falling. Being embraced by your lover on the way down, in a way no one else can. Until you hit the bottom. It’s over. Smash.” I flare my fingers flat over the table. “Then we bounce back up.” I raise my hands. “Or we die down there.” I lay my hands flat on the wood. “Sex is merely a way of falling—a way of slowing down the descent. Even floating back up.” I frown. “To avoid having to turn her into literature. A song. For a time.”

  I pop my lips.

  “And here I am,” I say. “Staring over that precipice again.”

  I catch my breath as I feel myself teetering over the edge of Jennifer’s being back. I close my eyes to keep from tipping all the way over, the same way I’d pulled myself back yesterday afternoon when she’d called.

  Again I feel the pull of the new song. I know it will better than “Joie,” in the same way I know things while I’m dreaming, but it keeps slipping away, the same way dreams elude capture. This one, though, keeps coming back, teasing me.

  Leaving Nancy to her smirk, I wander toward the center of the loft. I tap my fingers lightly on the keyboard and then run a finger down the keys. Leaving the machine turned off, I tap out a mute “Chopsticks.” Then I let my fingers meander up and down the keys in silent scales.

  I need to catch that song now—before it does fade completely away. A soft push of my finger on a toggle switch, and the green and red LCD lights of the keyboard wake, glowing.

  Then I strike a chord and the speakers cry out, rending the late-afternoon stillness with a ferocity that startles everyone, including me.

  I splash another chord into the air—my first flirt with the memory of the song that stands at the edge of my mind.

  “Okay,” I say. “Too direct. More foreplay then.”

  I send it a single note, a whisper, to beckon. The memory doesn’t melt away but lingers, coyly. I send another note out, and the two seem familiar together, and enticingly, the song feels as though it’s gelling. Quickly I offer three more.

  Too much too fast, and the memory starts dissolving.

  Frantically I imagine what it would be like to have Jennifer watching as I try to catch the memory of a song before it vanishes completely. My fingers start to move along the keys with more ease.

  The memory shimmies but has stopped fading.

  I pursue the memory with a phrase of notes.

  A silhouette of the melody forms for a moment.

  I try to grasp it with another phrase.

  It eludes me yet again.

  I keep offering it phrase after phrase, yet the true melody escapes capture, flirting, just out of reach of my memory.

  My next variation, and then the next, and the next can’t quite describe the melody’s shape. I throw my hands up.

  Nancy turns her sequencers on and starts a rhythm, which fills the space with beats like heartache. Now the melody makes sense. I hear it and can play it, and it’s breaking my heart again, as if I were lost, without any way of finding home.

  Ron has come over and started photographing us.

  Scott opens the door and watches us with his arms crossed.

  After Nancy and I run through what we have figured out so far a few more times, Scott slips off his coat.

  Nancy and I stop.

  “So,” I ask, “what do you think?”

  “Bleak but catchy,” he says.

  “Now, lyrics,“ I say. “I’ve got a few lines. Here.” I tap the side of my head. “Let’s fool around with what we’ve got. Let the rest of the lyrics come out as we play. It’s about an ex-lover. Long gone.”

  “That’s the bleak,” Nancy says.

  “Being empty. Killing time. Until they,” I say, interlacing my fingers.

  “Told you it’s all about the sex,” she says.

  “Play,” I say as I start, and she follows along.

  “I’d like to do a song now called ‘Daydream and Try,’” I say to the audience I picture in front of us.

  Then, I sing words as they tumble onto my tongue:

  Empty

  That’s all I am now.

  Even despair

  Has turned its back on me.

  Apathy is all I have left,

  But she could bring it back—

  The confidence I had

  When the two of us

  Had been here together,

  When we’d be
en happy,

  When everyone believed in me,

  When we were broke

  And all we did was

  Daydream and try

  Chapter 51

  The Songs We Write

  —Jonathan—

  It took me four days to get Jennifer to agree.

  Spinning my Zippo on a tall table for two in the front bar of the Red Lion, I’m wondering if she’s actually going to show up. Until last evening, I didn’t think it would even get this far. I’d called her so many times, acting more like a stalker than someone who simply wanted to talk. First I tried her parents’. That was good for several messages. I can only imagine what her mother thought when she heard them. Eventually her stepfather answered and told me she wasn’t there and to stop calling. That left me calling her work. As expected, I got the “She’s too busy to come to the phone right now. Can I take a message?” routine, repeatedly. I could hear the contempt in the voice of the receptionist growing with each call. I’d leave a message anyway: I needed to see her. Not to excuse what I did two years ago; there’s nothing that can do that. Nor to explain myself; it’s far too late for that, even if I could.

  My need is not to offer an apologia for what I did in the past but to reveal what she has done for me now and what that could mean for the future.

  I’d been the walking dead before she called, but now I’ve written half the songs we need for the album. The rest? That’s up to her. It depends on what happens between us now.

  This I need her to understand. I’d even gone so far as to call Wendy’s. Once, I got her machine but didn’t dare leave a message. Once, Wendy picked up: I hung up without a word.

  Then, yesterday, around six, Jennifer was on the phone when I answered it.

  At first I couldn’t offer more than “Hi.” I wanted to tell her everything the sound of her voice had done but knew that would sound insane, or like an attempt to seduce her. But it’s neither crazy nor a lure. It’s a hand out for help, a plea for something to hold on to—a tether to keep me from getting lost again. Yet this isn’t something I could have said over the phone. I have to see her face, and she needs to see mine, to make any of this intelligible. So I forced myself to start talking—of nonsense and trivia, of new bands and cities—until I asked her to meet with me over a dinner.

  “Promise: I’m paying this time,” I said, and she chuckled, and while she said yes, I got the impression she agreed mostly to get me to stop calling.

  Now I’m here, spinning my Zippo, and I think back over the four days since she broke our silence with her “Hi”: the explosion of lyrics and melodies, songs almost composing themselves as I sat at the keyboard, stories completing themselves on paper, while teetering on the edge between everything and nothing: the insanity of Jennifer. Of her being close again. I haven’t felt this real since we were together. Before I betrayed her. Before I did what Scott wanted me to do—choose music instead of her. But did I ever really have to choose?

  I hold my hand up to stop that thought.

  Doesn’t matter. I made the decision. I did choose. Yet couldn’t I have refused? Scott, couldn’t you have not asked—

  “No,” I say, “can’t do that. This time it was me who couldn’t figure a way out for us. Not her. She’s not Amy.”

  “What was that?” the waiter asks, having appeared at the table.

  “Oh. Hey. Didn’t see you standing there,” I say, shaking my head. “Talking to myself. Bad habit.” I wave the words away.

  “So. What can I get you to start, then?”

  “Um. Yes,” I say. “I’m meeting someone.”

  “Okay …” The waiter stares at me blankly.

  “For me,” I say. “Yes. To start—scotch. On the rocks. No, wait. A coffee. Yes. That would be better.”

  “Cream?”

  “No. I need a real drink. Scotch—rocks.”

  Waiter gone, I turn to watch the doorway. I want to see Jennifer first so I can play calm and have her come to me. I tap my fingers to occupy my hands.

  My drink arrives.

  Running my fingers around the top of the rocks glass, I look out the bank of multipaned windows at the gray forms people carve out under the streetlights as they pass by. The Biograph Theater’s marquee glows from the far side of Lincoln Avenue. It feels old-world—like London; I half expect fog to roll past and blot away the street, cars and taxicabs included.

  The door lets out a wispy groan. The sound yanks my attention around. A tall man with a woman on his arm enters, and I breathe out, relieved yet more anxious; my watch reads 7:10. Ten minutes late. I imagine her working parking karma—wiggling the first two fingers of each hand like quotation marks.

  In a fit of alarm, I shove my hand into my coat pocket to make sure, again, that the box of chocolate-covered espresso beans still sits at the ready.

  Hanging my head back, I let out a long sigh of self-disgust. Gotta chill, boy. ’S not prom night.

  I close my eyes and turn my attention to the indistinct music, the occasional bolts of laughter, the click and clatter of plates, the bell announcing that food’s up—the comforting sounds of a restaurant.

  “Still smoking unfiltered,” Jennifer says. “Mean stuff.”

  I jerk my head forward at the sound of her voice. “If you’re going to kill yourself—”

  “You may as well do it with style,” she finishes.

  I stand. She’s in a black leather jacket with a faux-fur trim, a slender low-cut top clinging to her willowy body as it pours into slim hips clad in faded blue jeans and a thick black belt.

  You seem taller than I remember.

  She’s standing close by, so I open my arms slightly, checking for a hug, but her arms remain at her side.

  Instead I offer her the tall chair across the table from me. I hold on to the edge of the table to fight off the sensation that I’m leaning too far over a precipice that goes infinitely far down.

  “How are you?” she asks once I’ve settled into my own chair.

  I nod. “You, of course, are looking … incredible.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere,” she says.

  “There is a difference between flattery. And the truth.”

  “You are, of course, only telling me the truth.”

  “Pointing out the obvious.”

  “You haven’t changed,” she says. “Not a bit.”

  “I beg to differ,” I say. “I’m growing a goatee. See. That’s different.”

  “Not what I meant …”

  “Do you like it?” I scrunch my fingers through it. “Still not sure about it.”

  “Well, you’re certainly as vain as I remember.”

  “Oh, now really,” I say, exaggerating a look of surprise. “Who, exactly, am I sitting across from?”

  “Me.” She grins, full of self-satisfaction.

  “You. Yes. Indeed. It is. You.”

  “And you too,” she says, picking up her menu.

  “It’s the same as when we …” I say, stopping before “came here on our first actual date.”

  She doesn’t acknowledge what I almost said, though I’m sure she thought it too, and suddenly I’m not sure coming here was such a good idea.

  “Yep. Looks the same. Smudges are new.”

  I smile. “Think I might have made that one.” I point to a water stain on the back of her menu. She glances at it and politely raises her eyebrows in acknowledgment—no smile.

  “So, um,” I say, sensing that the chance to say what I need to is slipping away into the trite and overly polite, “what brings you back to town?”

  “Oh. I needed a break—to see a friendly face … or three.”

  “Running an office getting you that down?”

  “Yeah. So many people are lazy, stupid, or want to rip you off.” She purses her lips. “I got used to getting
tough, working shows here. But Wendy was around to handle to deep problems. There. Nope. I’m the heavy. That, sure. And, um …” She looks down into her hands for a moment before staring at the trail of smoke from her cigarette.

  “Um …?”

  “Nothing,” she says, waving a hand. “Really. Things I needed to talk to Wendy about.” She shrugs.

  “Don’t take this wrong,” I say. “But I don’t … quite believe you. I know—I knew you better than that.”

  The waiter arrives, and we order more drinks and our food, and when he leaves, we’re back to sitting across the small, tall table from each other in silence.

  “Oh, before I forget.” I reach into my pocket and bring out the small box, covered in light gray paisleys with a black-and-red sticker reading “The Myopic” fixed across the opening. I push the box across the table.

  A smirk breaks over her mouth before she looks up with a question in her eyes.

  “You mentioned once that you wanted to try them. At least that’s what I think you said.”

  “Possibly. Very possibly.” She snatches the box and rips the sticker in half with her finger.

  “The forgotten comment, remembered.”

  She blanches as if I’ve stumbled over a dark secret. I try to remember what it was about these that was so important. Her eyes wide in alarm, she stares at me.

  “Here.” I reach for the box. “You don’t have to eat them. I can toss ’em out. I …”

  “No. Not that. I thought you said … something else. Nothing.”

  “So it didn’t have anything to do with those—”

  “How’s Scott?” She pulls open the box and pops a bean into her mouth.

  Without a word, we’ve decided to keep things safe and talk about everything except why she’s actually in Chicago and what really we’re doing here. Glasses empty. Food vanishes. I’ve struggled to keep from revealing that she’s rescued me—partway.

  Eventually there’s nothing left to talk about except what we’ve avoided, which has been hanging off the edges of so many remarks. So it falls quiet between us again and feels like this will be the last silence before we say good-bye, and I’ve not had the chance to tell her how she’s woken me from the sleepwalk life I’ve led since we lived together, and that I still her need help. It won’t happen if I don’t ask her tonight.