by Tod Wodicka
“OK.”
“Thing was, Leezy was already seven years old and stupid as a tub of suds. That’s a brain that had long since budded, you hear what I’m saying? But moms. They want the best, and I guess she thought: Hey, probably can’t hurt! Maybe Bach’d do some good! Anyway, what happened was I fell in love with this Bach for Babies. Secretly, you know? I was so embarrassed that I loved it so much because, back then, I’d thought that Bach had made the music specifically for babies. Like Bach had made music for babies and music for adults, and I couldn’t get enough of the baby music. It made me cry, I’m not even joking. I’m a tough girl but this Bach? So, all right, embarrassed, I took Bach for Babies home with me one day. I figured they’d just think freaking Leezy buried it out back or ate it or something. I planned on returning it next time I babysat. But I forgot it, and then next time they had this new one with a freakish cover with like four multiracial babies and this one was called, simply, Build Your Baby’s Brain. That’s where I first heard a song called ‘Canon’ by Johann Pachelbel. It was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever heard. Long story short, a little while later I discovered, duh, the music wasn’t composed specifically for making babies smarter. That was a relief! ‘Pachelbel’s Canon’ is my favorite song. I’ve got about three or four CD versions of it, but this one is my favorite. It makes me happy and sad at the same time. But here. Shut up, Rho. I’ll shut up.”
Rho played the song. It was difficult for Howie to follow: it seemed so weak and transparent compared to what he was seeing. The shadow of clouds moving through the fields; the river, the lumps of cow. The music sounded like the ghost of a very pretty gown.
“Nothing?” Rho asked.
Howie shook his head. He shook it hard, as Emily had instructed him. “Maybe I’m too old,” he said.
“I said it’s also for adults, butthead.”
“I don’t know how to listen to music.”
“Here,” Rho reached over and, with both hands, closed Howie’s eyes. “One, two.” Like a doctor administering to a brand-new corpse.
She played it again, then again. Then again. Howie thought about Emily, what she would do here. She would laugh, surely. He wondered what she was doing now, alone in their house. That was when Howie felt Rho’s hand in his own and, for a small second, he thought it was Emily’s, that they were in his room, in bed, and suddenly that ghost of a very pretty dress filled with a real body, a woman, and something less like sound and more like emotion. Howie thought: Music is how people pretend that time is human. Music is a way of moving through time unharmed. Music is not a fish, it’s a boat.
This made perfect sense; then it did not.
The trick was Rho’s hand, holding that. The music sounded like a commercial for diamonds or medication for loved ones losing their minds in the twilight of their years. It was a midrange luxury sedan. The other trick was that all of the emotions people feel when they hear music are already there, inside them, so if Howie was going to feel anything here, he was going to have to feel something. It was not going to come from the music. Rho’s hand, he supposed, was a start.
Howie opened his eyes.
Rho was looking at him, her face a fleshy plug in the day. She had tears in her eyes.
Howie panicked, pulled the plug, pulled his hand from hers, remembering his mother playing the national anthem and he thought, angrily, suddenly: Why would you listen to something that makes you sad?
He caught himself.
No! That was not what was happening here. Rho was not sad exactly. Nobody but Howie’s mother had to be sad, and Howie, for once, thought that he had the power to make someone happy. He thought about Emily. Hadn’t he helped Emily? Howie could make someone else happy. He reached out and returned Rho’s hand to his own.
There.
—
The day progressed. Rho smoked a lot more, switching from drugs to menthol cigarettes and back again. The white wine, at some point, became red. Then an indigestive pink. Rho had Howie explain his fishing rod. She baited it and fished. She wanted, she said, for Howie to see what she looked like with a rod in her hand. “Joking!” she said. “I’m sorry, oh my God, I am so bad today!”
“You’re not bad.” But the fish would hear that face from a mile away.
The presence of Rho’s house loomed behind them. They were going to be dining in French tonight. Howie tried a menthol cigarette because Emily, he thought, would have. It tasted like coughing and Christmas.
Rho asked Howie questions about his daughter, and he answered as best he could. Emily had never once asked him about his daughter. He did not tell Rho, as he had not told Emily, that Harri’s last e-mail had requested from him a loan of more than twelve thousand dollars. This money was an “investment,” and to be spent on her art. The number was not a typo. She wrote, “I can break down the costs for you later if you like.”
Yes, Howie thought, perhaps that is something I would like.
If she’d have said that the money was for her life, for New York City sustenance, shelter, for a first-class one-way plane ticket home, then Howie would have sent her his entire boat savings, no question, she was his little girl, but that much money for her art had given him pause. He still did not know how to reply. She had never promised to repay him before either. This word: investment. Why was that more disturbing? He’d gotten another heated e-mail from his ex-wife, one of her dreaded cap-locked, late-night missives, imploring him to not GIVE THAT GIRL ANOTHER PENNY and, hey, next time Harriet was at his place, which was supposedly NEXT THURSDAY, have her MAYBE STOP BY SO DREW AND I KNOW SHE’S ALIVE FOR A FREAKING CHANGE!!! Howie had no idea what to do with this e-mail either. The only reason he had replied to it was because he was anxious that his ex-wife or Drew might stop by his place looking for Harri and find, instead, Emily.
He wrote, “Thank you for this e-mail, Doris. I will see what I can do.”
Normally, he never typed her name if he could help it.
Howie told Rho that Harri had been spending a lot of time at his house lately, painting and whatnot. It did not feel like a lie. Perhaps that was the trick about lying. Several times he thought about telling Rho about Emily, asking Rho for advice about young women and their possibly epileptic nightmares and—but, no, how impossible was the idea of Emily Phane while sitting next to Rhoda Prough? She would not understand. Howie did not understand, not from this distance. Rho lived in the past and the future; Howie’s house no longer did, if it ever had. It was like remembering a dream.
He would see what he could do.
Before they went in for dinner, Emily buzzed Howie’s phone again.
“u ok?”
Howie figured that he was. He wrote back: “YES I AM OK. ARE YOU OK?”
“i miss you.”
—
Howie and Rho returned to the shore of the pond after a stately, uncooperative dinner. Rho said, “I’m trying too hard here, aren’t I?”
“You’re trying just fine.”
“I remember you said that you liked duck. I’m such an idiot.”
It was unlikely that Howie had ever said anything about ducks.
Rho lit the candles. She had stopped talking but could not stop producing noise. She hummed. They listened to the night. Bats slapped the air above them like oars; owls, too, and rabbits or cats or raccoons, crickets, and the occasional insomniac cow in the distance. Trucks. She rested her head on Howie’s lap. She breathed. He thought about touching her hair. Rho said, “You know what I hate? I hate stars. I hate the moon and everything up there.”
“OK.”
“That’s just how I feel.”
She tossed a cigarette into her pond.
“You can live your whole life alone even if you’re married, is what that Cape Cod fortune-teller told me. She said if you know yourself then you’ll never be alone. Like, you’ll never know anyone if you don’t know yourself first. No point even trying. I think about that a lot, but I think I talk too much sometimes. Do you think I talk too much?”<
br />
“Sometimes.”
“Well, damn.” Rho laughed. “Like when?”
“Maybe you have a lot to say.”
“That’s right, maybe I do. Do you know yourself, Howie?”
Howie knew that he did not appreciate riddles. He thought of many ways to announce that he had to go back home where he lived, though he suspected that he would not be returning to Route 29 tonight. For one thing, he was inebriated. He was worried about Emily.
Rho stood up. “Maybe we should go back to the house,” she said, sadly. “Maybe I overplanned this, too.”
Inside, after Rho tried and failed to interest Howie in learning how to play poker, then Uno, they sat together in her living room. The floor was unsteady. She put on her Bach for Babies CD, flashing him a sloppy, knowing smile. “Our secret?”
Howie said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Minutes later, Rho ran her finger down Howie’s arm.
“I knew it’d be like this,” she said. “But not like this, actually. Something like this. I always thought you’d be, I don’t know, more mean?” She made a serious face. “More of an asshole. I guess I’m glad you’re not more mean? You’re not mean at all, are you?”
“No.”
“I’ve always had a crush on you, but you know that,” Rho said. Her finger stopped on his wrist. “I’ve kind of looked up to you. My father was the same. You don’t suffer fools. You’re so strong.”
Howie could not think of anything to say to this.
“But I get it,” Rho said. She pulled back. “I’ll stop. You don’t want to kiss me. I’ll stop. I’m sorry.”
Oh, mud, Howie thought.
He closed his eyes. This, he thought, is something that inebriated people are allowed to do: suddenly sleep. He pretended to do that.
But then Howie really was asleep, because the next thing he knew, Rho was pulling him from the sofa and up the creaking, swaying old wooden stairs. They were on a boat. “Richard,” Howie said.
“Rho,” Rho corrected.
She was naked from the waist down, wearing only a long T-shirt. She’d lit candles in her bedroom. Not a T-shirt, a gown. The bed was white and covered like a wagon.
Howie was unused to being inebriated. Rho undressed him for bed. “Arms up. There we go. Shhhh.”
Giggling, she kissed him. They were kissing. It was a sensation like eating and being eaten at the same time. But no rush. It felt like a circle, it felt good, fish mouths silently talking, drowning in air. She nibbled his ear. Howie felt her breasts on his chest, then on his stomach. It felt like she had at least four of them. The word boobs popped into his head and he laughed.
“That’s more like it,” Rho said, also laughing. She took his penis into her mouth.
It occurred to Howie that he was doing this, all of it, for Emily. Or somehow as Emily, but that did not make sense because Emily would certainly have opened her eyes here. She hated having them closed.
Everything felt good.
For some reason, whenever he wondered if he would ever have sex again he thought that, if he did—which had been doubtful—he would remember how to do it like people said that you remember how to ride a bicycle. That saying. This was not the case. Howie remembered how to have sex in a similar way to how he remembered extreme, feverish pain: it was a continuum that could only truly be remembered by being powerlessly inside it. It was not casual. It was like a city in a recurring dream that you only remember being in when you’re actually dreaming inside it, wandering about, being hunted, ignored, frightened. Being loved. Howie remembered every street. He did not want to open his eyes. He did not want to leave. Why had he ever left? Where the hell have you been?
—
Hours before, over dinner, Rho had told him that sex was important to her, and she admitted to finding people to have sex with on the internet computer. Men, she’d said. She hoped that this didn’t bother Howie. It didn’t. It was unusual, he thought, and didn’t exactly make sense, but OK. Howie often found new places to fish on the internet computer. He found a boat. Therapy, she’d continued, was like going to school to study yourself—you needed a good professor but you also had to do your homework. Howie had not been sure if homework, in this analogy, was supposed to mean sex with people that Rho met on the internet computer or something else entirely.
Then, in the middle of the night, Howie was awoken with, “By the way, I only met one person online like that and it was a long time ago and it wasn’t even good. Howie? I thought you were awake. Howie, sweetie, you awake?”
“Yes.”
“Just in case that was freaking you out.”
It had not been.
She said, “I don’t know why I say the things I say sometimes. You make me feel so safe or nervous or I don’t know.”
“It’s OK.”
“Is it?” Rho touched his head as if making sure that it was still there. “I really like you, Howie. That’s all. I’m sorry about tonight. If I was a disappointment.”
“OK,” he said.
He was awake again and not as drunk as he had been. He needed to get home. It was terrible; he hadn’t texted or called Emily since before dinner.
“Howie?”
He stood up. “I need to make a phone call,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I have to call my daughter.”
“In New York City? Now? It’s four in the morning, Howie…” Then Rho laughed. “Do you always call your daughter in the middle of the night after…?”
She turned on the light for him. Howie looked through his pants on the floor of the bedroom. His phone was not in his pocket. Now that was something.
“Oh,” Rho said. She explained that she might have taken his phone when he wasn’t looking and turned it off because, she said, she’d gotten kind of stoned and, OK, a little paranoid with the way he kept checking it, the constant buzz buzzing text messages he’d been getting, like a high school girl, and she’d really wanted the dinner to be perfect and romantic and she’d been planning it for so long, and she was sorry that it’d all gone to shit, total f-ing shit, but when Howie went to the restroom, and the phone started buzzing again next to his fork and knife, and she was sorry, but who was Emily?
“Shit,” Howie said.
“You’re mad at me.”
He was not. “No,” he said. “But Rho, where is my telephone?”
It was in the kitchen. On it were fifteen unopened text messages and more than sixty missed calls, one after another.
—
Emily would not answer the phone. Howie passed trees that he knew by heart. He searched the radio for Pachelbel’s “Canon,” thinking that maybe he’d just drive himself to sleep.
He did not want to go home.
He was worried, ashamed, confused. Desire felt like regaining a limb that he hadn’t even known he’d been missing. He was also happy.
He could not carry Rho and the past day back home. He did not know how to bring that through the door, and the last month with Emily began to feel like hearsay to Howie: an exaggerated fishing tale. The three-hundred-plus-pound lake sturgeon berserker that got away. Howie saw himself and Emily as Rho might, as anyone would. It was not normal. Then the vision of that splashed once and disappeared beneath the surface. Bloop.
He was exhausted. He was maybe still a little drunk. He had assured Rho that Emily was not a girlfriend. “It’s OK if she is,” Rho said. “No strings. I get it.”
“She is not.”
But the idea of bed now, of sleeping next to Emily after all this, after Rho, was unmanageable.
He would try to talk to Emily. He would tell her that they could no longer sleep in the same bed. But, then, wouldn’t that be admitting that they had actually been sleeping in the same bed? It was not something he felt like they should talk about.
He had told Rho that he wanted to see her again because she had been so sad there, standing watching him get dressed, handing hi
m a sock, another sock, and also because he did want to see her again. He sure did. But first things first.
—
Howie stood in his living room. Something was missing. The plants stared accusatorily. It was morning. They knew. The TV was on, but muted, CNN types going to town, hurling bricks and bottles, waving flags and swinging burning person-shaped pillows from sticks someplace far away.
There were flayed, thin, silvery junk food wrappers on the floor. Pizza crust parentheses. Two empty bottles of Diet Dr Pepper. Howie remembered what Emily’s house had looked like when he’d found Peter Phane half dead on the floor. Emily was the thing that was missing here, obviously, and she was, Howie reassured himself, probably only upstairs in his bedroom. But she was a whole different kind of missing is what Howie also thought. He checked the kitchen.
He opened, closed the refrigerator. From the kitchen window he saw his chandelier in Emily’s backyard. It looked as if it had crash-landed from another, more magnificent planet.
Think about that later.
Nor was Emily half dead in the downstairs bathroom. Or the laundry room, and Emily was not in the cupboard with his money, which, Howie saw, was no longer in the cupboard, anyway. Howie went upstairs.
22
Because Emily wouldn’t open and read her own e-mail, she read Howie’s. Similar to sharing a home and a bed with him, this was an invasion of privacy that she didn’t try to rationalize. In a sense, it was all part of the covenant that they’d made. None of this was really happening.
The e-mails she’d read, coupled with Howie’s disappearance and his phone going off-line, broke Emily’s heart. They made her angry. Most of the e-mails he got, he didn’t reply to. His inbox was a fearful container. There was the needy, slangy, admirably indefatigable love of Harriet’s e-mails, especially considering Howie’s bureaucratic replies (Emily read those, too), and then there were the ones from Dori, Drew, and Howie’s pals, most reaching out to Jeffries, as they called him, inviting him to birthday parties, fishing getaways, middle-school graduations, gourmet nights, Little League championships, bowling, or just sincerely inquiring as to how he was doing. Drop us a line, bud.