by Nicolai Houm
‘Am I a bit out?’
‘Dude, listen, you’ve been waltzing right through. Wrong beat.’
‘Oops, it wasn’t syncopated then?’
‘Yeah… the last tune was.’
It was almost impossible to understand, especially when you saw Greg move. She could lie in the bed alcove in the small apartment, full of delight as she watched him making coffee: his hands had such perfect awareness of space and distance that he handled everything without fumbling. He seemed at ease in the present. Was that not also a kind of musicality?
Whatever, they did not want him in The Hard Stains.
Jane did her best to create a version of events that could be lived with.
‘Of course, they totally lack direction.’
‘Do you think so?’ Greg said.
‘Sure, all their new songs are stuffed with over-technical rhythmic notations.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I mean, there was a clear trend towards progressive metal.’ She said this with her upper lip curled to indicate a musical expertise. Meanwhile, she suppressed the thought it had only been a few months since she had said goodbye at last not only to stone-washed jeans with high waistbands but to all her glam metal rock mixtapes.
They had even more time to be together. Her belongings increasingly ended up in his Brooklyn place, which was a few square metres larger than hers and less full of oppressive student clutter. There they would sit, each on a kitchen chair, looking past the edge of the window-mounted air conditioning unit to catch glimpses of New Jersey. They smoked too much and talked until the early morning, about lecturers and their quirks, about form and content in the novel. They would speculate about news stories like the one about the elderly Palestinian teacher who had, in February, shot wildly in all directions from the top of the Empire State Building and murdered – out of all the innocent people on the observation deck – a promising Danish musician, whom Greg had met several times. Another musician, a band member and friend of the dead man, was shot in the head but survived. Like Mayor Giuliani, Jane and Greg joined the many-hundred-strong crowd that went to the Bellevue Hospital where a separate room had been set aside for the visitors.
The story of the gunman on the observation deck was one of many events that spring which contributed to Jane and Greg’s suspicion – typical of their age and time – that the world was fucking with them. The feeling of injustice stayed with Jane, for how was one to live in a world that seemed especially intent on killing off young and good people?
There was just an ounce of truth in this immature intimation of martyrdom. Young adults are easy prey. Greg and Jane noticed it as soon as they sneaked outside: he in his second-hand clothes, she still shy about her femininity, and both so polite and diffident, with outrage just below the skin and cash from casual jobs in their pockets. Their unease at not being taken seriously would radiate from them with blushing, shining rays that attracted all the assholes they ever met:
‘You look like you could do with our bargain offer on a year’s supply of essential vitamins and minerals.’ Or:
‘Correct, there is legislation establishing tenants’ rights in New York, but in this case the rent can be raised with immediate effect because…’ Or:
‘Do you have to sit at this table? This gang here is a whole law firm that…’
All of which added to Jane’s conviction that the two of them were up against an entire world full of warmongers, financed by advertising.
They made love and made love again, and planted chilli and pepper seeds in pots lined up on the window sill in an attempt to save money, but their optimism faded as they observed the sad-looking, black soil; they listened to post-hardcore rock tapes featuring Shelter or Fugazi and became militant vegans (though they were not quite sure what the ‘militant’ bit entailed).
And he stared at her body and wanted to have her all the time but not in that way, it wasn’t like that, because she could see straight through to his innermost self, and it no longer bothered her that he was not a guitarist in a band, he could be what he liked and it wouldn’t change anything. Unless he was a brewery salesman or a trader in agricultural spare parts.
Christ, no. Never, never become the living dead, like Robert and Dorothy.
Like Robert and Dorothy? You’ve got to be kidding. They love each other, for a start. But check out my parents! My mom and dad – what can I say? Just think about it. Divorced in spirit ages ago. Sticking together mostly to have each other to pick at. Like an ever-lasting negotiation. Spaces they define as his or hers, just to get away from each other.
So? What about my dad’s workshop? Have you thought about that?
A shed workshop, that’s nothing. My dad is like an impotent museum curator. He has the largest collection of Union Army-issue water canteens in the world.
I know, but it’s so much better to own loads of water canteens than to have no reason for living at all, like my mom.
True. But I love you and we’ll never become like them.
No, we’ll never be like that.
Never.
Jane and Greg had their first serious row outside John Updike’s childhood home in Shillington, Pennsylvania. They had been together for a year and now it was summer again. Shillington was the first stop in their Great Literary Odyssey – that is, a four-day car holiday. The trip had acquired its splendid title during a night of scribbling down possible places to visit on the back of a beer mat. They would go from New York to Shillington, and then head south, to Richmond, where Edgar Allan Poe spent his childhood years. Next, they would cross the border into North Carolina and try to find O. Henry’s birthplace in Greensboro before ending their long journey in what they felt was the Mecca for devotees of the art of fiction: Savannah, Georgia, where Flannery O’Connor had bred peafowl and written her stories.
This itinerary that, without time for breaks, added up to more than twenty-four hours of driving, proved something about their youthful chutzpah and lack of common sense as well as – and this was the conclusion Jane and Greg preferred when they recalled that summer holiday – that they loved each other very much. They had borrowed a Civic without air conditioning and bought a carton of Marlboros. She was going to wear knee-length skirts in flowery materials and cowboy boots, like the young, rootless women in the films about violence and romance that were much admired at the time. He was to take black-and-white pictures of her. Both would enter inspired fragments of writing in the leather-bound notebook each had brought. Clearly, a plan with scope for disappointments.
A storm front was chasing them during their first day on the road. At dusk, when they reached Shillington, a bruise-blue cloud bank rolled over the car roof towards the horizon where it spread out and, by then fit to burst, erupted in flashes of lightning. Shillington was not a town on its own, as they had thought, but a development on the edge of Reading, which wasn’t much of a town in the first place. The wind grew stronger as they drove endlessly along the ruler-straight roads lined with neat, two-storey brick houses and kept a lookout for Philadelphia Avenue. John Updike presented a problem, anyway: he was alive. Jane found this especially troubling. Because the other three writers on their itinerary were long since dead and buried, tracing them was a romantic pilgrimage, an appealing as well as appropriate task for young people with an interest in literature. On the other hand, rubbernecking outside the childhood home of a great living author was somehow quite different. It felt like hero-worship or the kind of thing crazy people did.
The wind blew over the roofs of the buildings and through the heavy summer canopies of the trees. Wet, green leaves rained down on the car and briefly jammed the wipers before fluttering nervously and disappearing across the windscreen. No one was to be seen on the trim lawns. It wasn’t the weather for enjoying the hammocks on the porches, where they were swinging senselessly on thin chains. There was no access to mobile phones or GPS navigation; it would be another year before Google became a registered trademark. Their map was a poor copy taken from a road a
tlas in the New York Public Library, and when they saw a street name that meant they had driven even farther away from the avenue where Updike had once lived, they homed in, like insects, on the dome of light over the football stadium. They tried three times to find someone in the stadium parking lot to ask the way, but despite all the parked cars it was as deserted as everywhere else, so they gave up and found a Best Western hotel in Reading.
The room had a double bed that vibrated if you fed a quarter in a slot and was covered with a pale brown, knobbly bedspread. The seed of their disagreement was sown in this room. The background was that, a week earlier, Greg had asked Jane to read a short story he had written. Critiquing his work was one of her least favourite things. She had told herself during the past year that her sense of unease about Greg’s writing was due to her being so close to the writer that their very closeness prevented her from relating to the text in an appropriate way. It was an excellent explanation, as such: it was complex, made sense psychologically, was nicely linked to their relationship and shared high-flown ideas about the complexity of reading and writing. It was even in line with the dominant literary theory at the time, which insisted that proper reading must be done without reference to the lived life of the author. The only problem was that the explanation did not fit the case.
‘Jane, have you read that short story yet?’
‘Ye-es,’ she said hesitatingly.
She made for the bathroom and locked the door behind her, but heard his voice through the plasterboard walls.
‘What do you think? Why haven’t you said anything?’
The double question meant that she could delay a little longer.
‘I guess I was waiting for you to ask.’
To see your own mirror image, not the face of the man you were talking to.
‘Well?’ Greg said.
She turned her lower lip inside out, moved her lower jaw from side to side.
‘Well… what?’ she said in the end.
‘What do you think?’
Both toothbrushes stood in a plastic glass on the shelf above the sink. She pushed her toothbrush closer to his so that the bristles touched. She had waited for too long to reply.
‘I think it was good.’
She dreaded leaving the bathroom. If she had to tell him the truth, he was sure to react as he had when he was asked to give up playing in the band – with exaggerated reasonableness.
(Without his knowledge The Hard Stains had been booked to do a demo tour with a professional skateboard team. They would play in twelve cities during the summer and actually be paid to play while the skaters performed for the audience. The contract had been negotiated without Greg as a partner in the deal.)
Bursts of rain hammered on a small window above the toilet. She somehow heard him waiting for her answer, imagined him lying on the bed with his hands under his head and looking up at the motionless fan in the ceiling. She had a vision of herself emerging naked from the bathroom, going over to sit on him and make him forget about asking questions.
The truth was this: Greg was incisive, clear-headed and intuitive but when he put pen to paper, he wrote like a man who has lost control. She had almost come to think of it as a failure of coordination, a brain-hand issue, like that affecting Drew back in the elementary school who simply couldn’t place his right hand on his heart and recite the first words in the Pledge of Allegiance at the same time. However many years he practised, it made no difference. In moments of honesty with herself, Jane had to admit that Greg seemed to create a literary world of shadows where there was little genuine thought and too many knowing literary devices. His work might give an impression of profundity at first but, on closer reading, the text was only obscure. A leading character might be thinking something, using too many words, while walking city streets or possibly looking out through a window. There seemed to be little else. Apart, that is, from a dream of being a writer. In his latest short story – the one he wanted her to talk about now – one thing had left a serious impression on her. It was a major mistake made on the first page where a casual reference to a dog had surely slipped into the description of the male protagonist. At least, the text read: He lit another cigarette. Then he crossed the pedestrian area on his hind legs.
Jane felt it should be possible to charm her way out of all this. She showered, for what could be more natural after a long journey in a car? She joined Greg on the bed afterwards and said something about great forward movement in his narrative, a very special atmosphere. That kind of thing.
‘That kind of thing?’
‘Yes.’
The next morning, standing outside Updike’s childhood home, he kept prodding her. The row that followed contained pointers to how their respective roles would play out whenever they disagreed: she got angry even though it was he who had reason to be, while he grew talkative even though she was better at using words. When he felt hurt, he expressed it. When she felt hurt, she started a counter-attack.
Afterwards, Jane couldn’t remember much of what had been said, other than her telling Greg the truth about his writing – but in a raised voice, as if she had been offended against. Much clearer in her mind was the impression left by Updike’s house, which had become a doctor’s surgery. It had a name plate on the wall and the open area in front was littered with broken branches and rubbish, blown there like driftwood. A narrow, flagstone path led to the doctor’s waiting room. Because patients were lumbering past now and then, they had to light new cigarettes and try not to sound as if they were dealing with a crisis. During these interruptions, standing in that mercilessly exposed place, they learnt what it feels like to fight with the person you love when you have no experience of what it is like to fight with the person you love. It means that the method of arguing, the phrases, the very facial expressions are taken straight out of film and novels, or out of possible memories of arguments between your parents. The desperation stays in your mind, and the taste in your mouth of all the cigarettes that were dragged on and then dropped in the grass and flattened under the smooth sole of a stupid cowboy boot. You still don’t know from experience that rows usually end by your swift return to the all-forgiving present, with your self-regard still largely intact. And you still believe in the serious intent of every word said, and dread losing the person you love because it will kill you, and you sink into solemn grief because you have not yet been ground down by life into a less self-important version of yourself.
Despite the lasting bad feeling between them, they completed one more stage in the planned journey: the Edgar Allan Poe museum, which was very appropriately unnerving. Greg did not seem bitter but the dancing lightness in him was gone. He must have been so deeply shaken that Jane could hardly bear her own bad conscience. They dragged themselves from room to room, looking at Poe’s handwritten manuscripts, which neither of them had the energy to try to decipher. The shrill voice of the guide. The feeling of being awkwardly young and prone to nervous yawning and febrile sweating and unable to follow anything that was said.
This silver-plated coffee jug belonged to Poe’s sister’s foster family. This pair of Old Sheffield candlesticks belonged to a woman to whom Poe dedicated a poem.
This shabby, narrow Gothic chair tells you nothing because your heart beats far too fast and, besides, you have developed a strange heat eczema that is crawling down your neck and breasts and will make him hate you even more.
Cigarettes and more cigarettes, and afterwards, in the parking lot, you see no fewer than four young women wearing the same skirt as you. And his hand is limp, it doesn’t squeeze yours hard in return.
So they returned home, Jane to Broome Street and Greg to Brooklyn, and she heard nothing more from him.
She left long messages on his answering machine, using more stock phrases from films and TV series. She told him things she hadn’t said to anyone before and would never say again. There is an age for telling someone that I’m nothing without you and sounding truthful, perhaps because it is true.
Then, it is possible to believe that you are who you are only because the person you love has loved you.
She called Peggy Noland, who told her that Greg was not at home with them in La Crosse.
‘I thought you two would’ve got to somewhere in Tennessee by now?’
She went round to his place and listened at the door. She waited in the stairs until four in the morning but he didn’t come. The summer heat in New York and the grief over her love turned into one and the same thing. Sleep was impossible, thought was impossible.
After a week, he stood outside her door. He was wearing a red-checked shirt with cut-off sleeves and a baseball cap with a Marshall logo. She feared that all he wanted was to pick his things up, that they would never meet again. At the same time, she was relieved that the torment of waiting would be over. Recently, she’d worried that it might bring on a ruptured blood vessel in the brain and speculated about how many days in a row you can tolerate a high pulse rate before the damage is done.
She let him in and stood with her back against the kitchen alcove, waiting for him to tell her if it was all over or not by the place he chose to sit down. Would he sit on her bed? Or at the low, crescent-shaped kitchen table he could barely fit his knees under? That was the place a visitor would choose. But he remained standing in the middle of the room. A week earlier, it had been her undisputed right to stick her spoon into his ice cream or snatch a can of Coke from his hand and drink from it. She could have gone to him and put her hand on his crotch. As exceptional and unaccustomed as that contract between them had felt at first, as extraordinary was its possible cancellation just now.
‘Jane, I’ve done some thinking. Actually, quite a lot,’ Greg said.
She looked fixedly at her feet on the linoleum flooring.
‘I no longer believe that I will be a writer,’ he continued.
Her relief that he had perhaps not come to end it all made her shoulders less tense. She had to focus not to sound thrilled by what he had just told her.
‘Greg, listen,’ she said. ‘That’s not the point.’