Someday_ADE

by Lynne Tillman

  John’s hippie-dippy male secretary hands Marvin a mug of tea, sweet and dark. Ain’t this the life, white grand, white couch. Marvin kicks back, the weed relaxing him. Jackie was singing his hit “Lonely Teardrops” when he collapsed, Dick Clark saw Jackie drop, and hit his head real hard on the stage, and that was it—over, man—in a coma almost five years. Jackie danced like a boxer, like Joe Louis, man, he could move. “In the place I was after Tammi died. I didn’t want to sing, I couldn’t.”

  “You and she weren’t.…” John says.

  “It wasn’t like that.” Marvin watches something behind John. “She was young and good, so good.”

  “I’m no Tammi Terrell,” John says.

  “Man, you’re so right, ‘woman is the maker of the world.’” John laughs and tells Marvin he wants to find a groove, a straight-ahead sound, round up the best sideman, a top rhythm section, with a bass player like James Jamerson (Marvin knows there’s no-one like him around, either), and turn a lyric like “Love is wanting to be loved” funky. Real, on the money, no bullshit. John’s tired of the bullshit. His cover of Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” was pathetic, but Marvin doesn’t say it. He doesn’t say he’s dying for the kind of respect John gets. Marvin starts to croon, “Lonely teardrops, lonely teardrops,” and his palms tap his thighs. He stands, John walks to the piano, Marvin follows, swaying a little. “Come home, come home, just say you will, my heart is fine, just give me another chance for our romance, every day you’ve been away you know my heart does nothing but burn.” John reaches for the lines, Marvin’s already there.

  Collaborating puts you through a lot of intense shit. They both know that. Marvin was once married to Berry Gordy’s sister. He thinks Yoko and she could be twins. “That was heavy, my boss’s sister is my wife for seventeen years, it’s like you with Paul, it didn’t go down great around Motown,” Marvin says.

  “Imagine” was soulful, Marvin tells him, not funky but soulful. John shoots him a familiar half-smile, half-frown, and Marvin sits beside him at the piano. John slides over. Marvin looks at the keys and begins noodling “Imagine,” but his left hand belongs to Ray Charles. John returns to his mother Julia, the familiar refrain. “Yoko is actually more like my mum, don’t laugh, she’s no nonsense, like Julia. Yoko took me back after I’d been a foolish lad. I really hurt her. Julia would’ve always been there if she could.”

  Marvin shakes his head affirmatively and sings, “Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try, imagine all the people living for today, imagine there’s no country, it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too, imagine all the people living life in peace…”

  John could never have written it without Yoko. He cocks his head and, like a chorus of one, talksings: “Father, father, we don’t need to escalate, war is not the answer… You know, we’ve got to find a way to bring some loving here today… Don’t punish me with brutality, talk to me, so you can see, what’s going on.” They’re trading lines, then blending them contrapuntally.

  What’s going on. Marvin can’t go home, shouldn’t, he’s escaping to London, but his mother needs him here, his children, too, and he can’t make it, he has to save himself from the madness, his madness. He doesn’t know what else to do. He’s weirdly determined to give something to John, their bond is new, maybe peculiar, ain’t that peculiar, but he wants to leave him with promise, a song they can do. It’ll be about hope and home, motherless and fatherless children. It’s more for him than for John, probably. John stands, singing the line “Don’t punish me with brutality” over and over. “Imagine” and “What’s Going On” are talking to each other. Marvin pumps the pedals, his left hand striding, his right bridging more than songs now, and he looks up at John. That intent face has crumpled, sort of, but he’s content, maybe. Marvin intones, “Nothing to kill or die for,” while John chants, “Don’t punish me, don’t punish me.” That’s it, Marvin thinks. It’s a beginning.

  More weed and lines of coke. Marvin tells John they’ll go to the studio, get a version of it down, they’ve got their idea, a duet of two minds, voices, old songs into new. Dynamite. It can work, and they’re both wired. Marvin hears himself saying again, “I’m fucked up now. We’ll get it down, when I’m back in the States.” Imagine. The sun is coming up over Central Park. Marvin pulls on his coat. “It’s a promise, man.”

  “I’ll be here,” John says. “Later.”

  Love Sentence

  O, know, sweet love, I always write of you, And you and love are still my argument; So all my best is dressing old words new, Spending again what is already spent; For as the sun is daily new and old, / So is my love still telling what is told.

  —William Shakespeare, Sonnet 76

  Evelina lowered her lids while he read. It was a very beautiful evening, and Ann Eliza thought afterward how different life might have been with a companion who read poetry like Mr. Ramy.

  —Edith Wharton, Bunner Sisters

  It’s strange… it’s strange! / His words are carved in my heart. / Would real love be a misfortune for me?

  —Verdi, La Traviata

  I wrote and told you everything, Felice, that came into my mind at the time of writing. It is not everything, yet with some perception one can sense almost everything… I don’t doubt that you believe me, for if I did you would not be the one I love, and nothing would be free of doubt.

  —Franz Kafka, to Felice Bauer, July 13, 1913.

  Everything Paige thought about love, anything she felt about love, was inadequate and wrong. It didn’t matter to her that in some way, from some point of view, someone couldn’t actually be wrong about an inchoate thing like love. “An inchoate thing like love” is feeble language. If my language is feeble, Paige thought, isn’t my love?

  Love, are you feeble?

  It was spring, and in the spring a young man’s, a young woman’s, heart turned heedlessly, helplessly, heartlessly, to love. Were those hearts skipping beats? Were eager suitors walking along broad avenues hoping beyond hope that at the next turn the love they had waited for all their lives would notice them and halt midstep or midsentence, dumbstruck, love struck? Were women and men, women and women, men and men, late at night, sitting in dark bars, surrounded by smoky glass mirrors, pledging their minds and bodies?

  In her mind’s eye, Paige could see the lovers in a bar, where plaintive Chet Baker was singing, “They’re writing songs of love, but not for me,” and Etta James wailing, “You smiled and then the spell was cast… For you are mine at last.” And what did the lovers sing to each other? Did they, would they, utter the words I love you? On the computer screen, “I love you” winked impishly at Paige.

  I love you.

  Paige wondered whether words of love, love talk, would survive, whether that courtly diction would rest easy on the computer screen, where words appeared easily, complacent and indifferent, and disappeared more casually, deleted or scrolled into nothing or into the memory of a machine, and so wouldn’t the form dictate the terms, ultimately? Wouldn’t love simply vanish?

  Even so, I love you.

  Once upon a time the impassioned word was scratched into dirt, smeared and slapped onto rough walls, carved into trees, chiseled into stone, impressed onto paper, then printed into books. On paper, in books, the words waited patiently and were handy, always visible, evidence of love. In that vague, formative past, love was written with a flourish, and it flourished.

  Is the computer screen an illuminated manuscript, evanescent, impermanent, but with a memory that is no longer mine or yours? Is love a memory that is never mine, never yours?

  Remember I love you.

  Paige thought, I give my memory to this machine. I want ecstasy, not evidence. Can a machine’s remembering prove anything about love? If she points to its glowing face, could Paige attest, as one might of a poem written on the finest ivory linen paper: Here, this is evidence of my love.

  “For you are so entirely fair, / To love a part, injustice were/… B
ut I love all, and every part, and nothing less can ease my heart.” (Sir Charles Sedley)

  Paige glanced at the little marks, letters in regular patterns making words and paragraphs, covering sheets of paper that were spread haphazardly around her on the desk and on the floor, and she gazed at the computer’s face, as comforting and imperturbable as a TV screen.

  Love, my enemy, even now I love you.

  Romantic love arrived with the singer, the minstrel, who traveled from court to court, from castle to castle, relaying messages of love, concocting notions of love, torrents of poetic emotion, and in the courts men and women listened to these plaints and added more, their own. The singer heard new woes and put them into song, fostering a way to woo, but why did the minstrel sing in the first place, and what did traveling from one place to another do to produce songs of love? And later, did the printing press change love? Did the novel, offspring of Gutenberg’s invention, transform love? Did love become an extended narrative with greater expectations, not a song but an opera?

  “When people used to learn about sex and die at thirty-five, they were obviously going to have fewer problems than people today who learn about sex at eight or so, I guess, and live to be eighty. That’s a long time to play around with the same concept. The same boring concept.” (Andy Warhol)

  Dearest,

  I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way before, not exactly. Not like this. Is it possible? I thought about you all day, and then in the night too, and I felt I was going to die, because my heart was beating so fast, as if it were a wild bird caged in my chest, flapping its wings madly, trying to escape. Even if my heart were a wild bird, it would fly to you.

  Paige wondered if love disinvented, too, undid her and him. She moved from the computer, which seemed now to glower, into the kitchen and walked to the sink and turned on the cold water. She watched the water flow into the teakettle, and then she put the kettle on the stove.

  Dearest,

  I love you especially when you’re far away. I can feel you most when I don’t see you. I carry you with me because your words carry, they fly, and yet they stay with me, stay close to me, the way you do even when you’re not beside me. To be honest, love, sometimes words are all I need, words satisfy, your words, your words.

  “Does that goddess know the words/ that satisfy burning desire?”

  (Puccini, Madama Butterfly)

  “I can love the other only in the passion of this aphorism.”

  (Jacques Derrida)

  Paige thought writing might be an act of love, a kind of love affair, or a way of loving. She hoped it was a possibility, because even more, more horribly and wretchedly, she knew that it was also an incessant demand for love, enfeebling and humiliating. Always wanting, writing exposed its own neediness, like unrequited love, which might be the same thing, she wasn’t sure. Except that when her own worthless desires rebuked her, her writing turned derisory, dissolved into worthlessness, and then became transparent.

  “My Love is of a birth as rare As ’tis, for object, strange and high; it was begotten by Despair / Upon Impossibility.” (Andrew Marvell)

  Dearest,

  Maybe I’m always writing love, to you. That’s the only way I can love you. What if love, like writing, was a rite enacted and re-enacted, or a habit, or a disguise to cloak a vacant lot near the streetcar named desire. Sometimes I think it would be better to remain silent, to let emptiness, vacancy, and loss have its full, dead weight, and that it would be better to let love and writing go, but, love, I don’t want to stop writing or loving you.

  It was nearly night. Paige visited old haunts without going anywhere, and she wallowed in dead loves and called upon memory, which competed with history, dividing her attention. Paige indulged herself, as if eating rich chocolates filled with her romantic past, and looked at pictures of former lovers stuck between pages in journals and albums. She mused and cut hearts out of paper towels, she held up one, then another, to the light. The hearts were large and ungainly, imperfect shapes meant to represent a romance or two or four. What would she write on a cheap paper heart?

  “I wrote you in a cave, the cave had no light, I wrote on pale blue paper, the words had no weight, they drifted and danced away before my eyes. I couldn’t give them substance. I could not make them bear down. I keep failing at this poetry, this game of love.”

  “O love is the crooked thing/ There is nobody wise enough/ To find out all that is in it…” (W. B. Yeats)

  Dearest,

  I know you think I have no perspective, and I know without perspective, everything is flat. Our love exists on available surfaces, beds, floors, on tabletops, on roofs. Tell me to stop. I can’t help it, I want more, I want everything now. I love you, silently and stealthily. I love you as you have never been loved. I love you because I cannot love you.

  “True hearts have ears and eyes, no tongues to speak; / They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break.” (Sir Edward Dyer)

  I love you.

  It was just a sentence. Paige was struck by it and, she thought, stuck with it. Three ordinary, extraordinary, diminutive words, I love you, and just eight sweet letters. “O” repeats, oh yes. So little does so much, three little words, three little piggies make a sentence: I love you. The love sentence, arret d’amour.

  Dearest,

  What if I were sent to love you? What if I were the sentence “I love you”? Do you or I ever think of love as a sentence? I don’t think so, you and I can’t stop to do that, we don’t bother with its syntax, or who is sentenced, and for how long. I think you and I can’t think love at all. I can’t now.

  “What voice descends from heaven/to speak to me of love?”

  (Verdi, Don Carlos)

  “Wild thing, you make my heart sing./ You make everything, groovy./Wild thing, I think I love you./ But I want to know for sure. Come on and hold me tight. I love you.” (The Troggs)

  Feeling stupid, Paige tore up one of the hearts. She crumpled the others and looked at the mess. With hardly a second thought, she took each newly crumpled heart and straightened it out, then patted down all of the hearts until they were more or less flat and unwrinkled, and lined them up on the table in front of her like a place mat. Paige smiled at the hearts, paltry emblems of couplings gone. She even liked the hearts better with creases, because she liked her lovers to have lines around their mouths and eyes. So strange to concoct emblems, to want signifiers of old loves, but it was, she thought, stranger not to keep faith with memory and to desire, as obsessively, to forget.

  Dearest,

  I love you trembles inside me. It trembles and I can feel it just the way I can feel you. You can’t think love, I know you can’t, not when you think about me. I’m the one who loves you, no matter what, and I love you, no matter that I want to take apart “I love you.”

  “But, untranslatable,/ Love remains/ A future in brains.” (Laura Riding)

  I love you.

  What or who is the subject of this sentence, the object or the subject? Love confuses by constructing a subject/object relation that forgets what or why it is—who subject, who object. “You” never refuse “I,” my love.

  To Paige, a torn-up heart, its pieces scattered on the table top, represented all the broken hearts, not just hers. There were too many to name and count, countless numbers.

  “My first broken heart wasn’t a romance. My heart broke before I even thought about love. It broke when I wanted something and couldn’t have it, and I don’t even remember when or what that was.”

  “…When the original object of an instinctual desire becomes lost in consequence of repression, it is often replaced by an endless series of substitute objects, none of which ever give full satisfaction.” (Freud)

  Paige worried that memory, like love, was something she couldn’t make decisions about, even when she made sense of the past, or it made some sense to her. Unlike love, memory was constant, and she was never without it. It was holding her hand as she tailored hearts.

&n
bsp; Dearest,

  I can’t think straight, I can’t do what I’m supposed to do. I can’t eat or write or wash or cry or scream or die or decide, since loving you. Now “I love you” becomes a suffocated gasp, an involuntary gush. When you touch me, I can’t swallow, when you touch me, everything’s a movie, and everything in me moves over to sigh. I gasp, I suffocate, I gush for you. If “I love you” becomes a lament, then I will gag on love and die.

  “Know you not the goddess of love/ and the power of her magic?” (Wagner, Tristan and Isolde)

  “ ‘Cause love comes in spurts/In dangerous flirts/and it murders your heart/They didn’t tell you that part/Love comes in spurts/Sometimes it hurts/Love comes in spurts/oh no, it hurts.” (Richard Hell)

  I love you is the structure through which I love you. “I” is such a lonely, defiant letter. In this fatal and fateful sentence it’s the first word—in the beginning, there was I—a pronoun, the nominal subject. In the love sentence, “I” submits to “you.” That I is mine. That I is yours. That I is for you.

  Dearest,

  I’m the one who loves you better, longer, stronger, whose passion robs you of passion, whose daring steals your courage, whose boldness provokes your fear, whose gentleness savages you, whose absence electrifies you.

  Paige waved a paper heart in the air and pretended to enact an ancient, time-honored ritual. She considered burning the heart in a funeral pyre and laughed out loud, a hollow sound with reverberations only for her. You never see yourself laughing, Paige realized. Once upon a time a man she loved caught her looking at herself in a mirror and noticed something she didn’t want him to see.

  “I’ll be your mirror/ I’ll be your mirror/ Reflect what you are/ In case you don’t know.” (Lou Reed)

  “The woman who sang those lines died in a bicycle accident on an island. When she first sang the song, she was beautiful and somber and lonely, but not alone. She died in what’s called a freak accident, and, at the time of her death, her body was swollen from years of shooting heroin, so she was no longer beautiful, but she was always, or still, lonely. It was spring when she died, it may have been summer.”