I shut my eyes and was in a department store covered with dust. It was a picture that came to me from the photo spreads of downtown Manhattan after the towers fell, but that didn’t matter. Dust coated the shoulders of shirts on their spinal racks. Khadijah sat on a desk beside a cash register, in a wool sweater and a wool skirt, dustless, kicking her feet to a muffled floor tom counting four—that rhythm was the first component, perhaps.
In the department store, I saw everyone I knew in high school break in, through the emergency exit, and run laughing through the room. They were still teenagers, and they ran like Vikings in a church, unopposed, rustling the rows of sleeves. Dust carpeted their faces, so that you couldn’t see their eyes, and so that their hair stuck limp to their necks. They converged upon us at great speed. They were memories who wanted to be made corporeal, from my song, but Khadijah slid off the cashier’s desk and said, “It’s me you’ll bring back.” Sounds started to form discrete chords as she touched her fingers to my hand.
This was when the front door of the house opened, and there entered not a high school’s worth of spectral adolescents but Julie’s father, Samson.
“I was just reading about your father’s country house in the paper,” he called to me from the foyer, a Crate & Barrel bag full of wineglasses supported by one forearm as he locked the door behind him. Julie had warned me this morning he might be coming over to bring what he felt were necessary additions to our kitchen. “The one he converted, from a little cabin in the Berkshires.”
The Times’ Sunday Real Estate section had a piece in which my father was featured: “The Death Grip of the Summer Home.” Of course Sam had read it.
My father’s recent additions to the cabin had been a dramatic, autodidactic experiment in residential architecture. The Monopoly house of my childhood, the dacha, had grown three stories tall, retaining its original small, square footprint. Each floor was an undivided room strewn with beds and desks. It was an outpost where troops might be marshaled, where conquests and retributions might be planned. The roof was trimmed with a green stripe, and the stripe was full of white Celtic knots.
“Oh, that, yeah,” I said.
“No, no, it’s a courageous thing to design your own house,” said Sam. “A brave risk.” He stopped to glance at my head shot, lying in the island’s sink, in which I was twenty-five, long-haired, smoking a cigarette and wearing a tincture of eyeliner. This gave me enough time to seize the Crate & Barrel bag and march with it toward the guest bedroom, leading him away, I hoped, from the head shot.
“It’s good of you to carry something,” he said. “In the Times, he says the contractors have been stringing him on, making him spend money left and right,” Sam followed me through the kitchen. “It’s terrible what these people do.”
“His biggest mistake was granting this woman at the Times an interview,” I said. “She’s the new girlfriend of this guy he knows from college, Beanie Camden, and my father will do virtually anything for any person named Beanie Camden.” I shrugged to convey insignificance. I realized that, out of great insecurity, I was bragging about my family—implying a picturesque insanity, a glorious downward mobility, fin de race.
Sam looked at me sadly. “Ah,” he said, “old guys have their dreams, you know.”
Somewhere in Massachusetts, my father, buffered by Mueller-affiliated income, was lavishing cash on improvements to the cabin, instead of writing the essays he’d moved to New York to write. I began to reinterpret his story. Perhaps the problem wasn’t that he’d cheated on my mother; perhaps the problem was that he’d never gotten what he’d pursued. I could write songs about the ghost of a teenage girl and age into such a man. Or I could stop dreaming about Khadijah and get her. She’d be back in L.A. to visit Todd. Giving her the stone might not have been such an infantile performance after all. And Khadijah, whoever she might be now, would not mock a member of my family on television for liberalism.
I was able to bludgeon these thoughts into submission by the time Julie came home from work to spin into a concert-going outfit. I gave her a breezy kiss, as if affection were flowing freely between us. Samson’s voice rose and expanded with joy through the guest room as he greeted his only child. I knew from the creak of bedsprings that Julie had sat on the bed to embrace him, and for a moment they became quiet and affectionate. I could just barely overhear them.
“Sleep here tonight, Dad,” Julie said, “if you don’t feel like dealing with the traffic on the way back to Glendale. It doesn’t bother us.”
“What is this music you are going to see, Jules, instead of staying here to hang out with your decrepit father?”
“It’s indie-rock music, Dad; it’s this horrible thing. Her name is Joanna Newsom. She’s this singer with a tiny voice who plays the harp. Everybody loves her, for reasons no one can explain.”
• • •
Gordon met us in the lobby of Disney Concert Hall, in a tweed suit and tie. He wore a vest, a watch chain, and a longer beard than the one he’d had three weeks ago. Cora hadn’t followed him into the Edwardian; she wore a wool skirt and a pigeon gray cowl-neck that made her pregnancy more visible than usual. I’d known she was due in three months, but it wasn’t until I saw the mound that I recognized the threat it posed to my career. It might give Gordon a deadline by which to record his songs, but with a house full of puling, Cora might not permit the garage to become a second source of bedlam on the property.
“What do you think of the new album?” Cora asked me. “As a musician?”
“I mean, she’s fucking amazing,” I said, “but I kind of miss the home-studio sound of the first record.” I realized at this point that my need to make money had taken whole possession of my tongue, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. “On that album, you could feel that it was just her, in a space where she felt at home, and it was so warm for that reason. I actually think that’s how a huge proportion of great albums are made. People put their studios in their guesthouses, or whatever structure is at hand.”
Julie squeezed my hand and flashed me a look: Calm down. She toed Cora’s leather sandals with her black flats.
“You know how to dress for the occasion,” said Julie. “You look like a beautiful elf. Not Santa’s workshop, Middle Earth. You’re like the best version of all these other girls here. This is Elf Night.”
She had a point. Last week, Joanna Newsom had publicly renounced her medieval outfits, but this audience gave off an unmistakable vapor of Tolkien. A slender young woman quested among Gehry’s escarpments in pointed boots, her hair parted down the middle, her collar up and ready for the alpine frost. Two teenage girls stood apart from their dates as one adjusted the other’s tunic.
“This album has finished music for me,” one of their dates explained to them, loudly. “It’s complete. I’m done.”
“Julie, you are so right,” said Cora. She pointed her chin to something behind me. “That girl over there is a perfect little Sephardic elf-princess.”
Before I turned around, I knew who it was. Of course she and Todd were here. Why hadn’t I seen it? Going to Joanna Newsom Accompanied by the L.A. Philharmonic at Disney Concert Hall was like going to the opera in Dangerous Liaisons. It was where you looked at everybody you knew, and they looked at you.
Todd and Khadijah stared at me goggle-eyed for a moment, and we might have kept the conversation brief by unspoken consensus had not the third of their party, whom I recognized from an early mumblecore film, approached Gordon and Julie. He reminded them, in triumphant tones, that they’d hung out with him in Williamstown, three summers ago.
“Gordon, Cora,” I said. “This is Khadijah. We went to high school together.”
“I love that,” said Cora. “I was just talking about how pretty you are.”
Khadijah’s thrift-store dress was hideous, and would have been merely hideous placed on any other woman in the hall. But on Khadijah it was wickedly hideous. Two strips of a thick, bright red plaid material began at a point on th
e small of her back and crossed in the middle of her stomach. These components were so crudely stitched together as to seem to have been sewn, as a healing activity, by the inmates of a group home. It was only because of the absurd size of Khadijah’s eyes and nose in proportion to her body that the dress took on its evil prettiness. You are so liberal, I thought, full of longing. You believe so strongly in the contingency of your own success on factors beyond your control, you’re game to dress yourself like a crafts project gone wrong. No libertarian would wear such a dress. I could feel, as an almost tactile presence, the warmth of the northeastern hearth.
This was not an easy circumstance for Julie. Because I knew her face, I could see the weight it carried. But she kept her composure. I was smashed by a wave of guilt.
“Did you guys see Andy Samberg?” asked Todd. “He was on the escalator like five minutes ago. He was wearing purple high-tops.” His voice grew louder. “He and the Newsom came to an opening at our friend’s gallery last night and they canoodled by the donations tube for like twenty minutes. He made so much money—everyone was going over there to look at them. They had to donate to justify being in that part of the room.”
There was a strange silence. We all experienced, I think, a brief shiver of further degradation. The chill of caste. We didn’t like that Todd, Todd who stood straight, possessed a noble chin, made music nobody wanted to buy, would speak of Joanna Newsom and Andy Samberg as if they were higher beings.
“It doesn’t shock me at all that Andy would do that,” said Julie. “I’ve met him a couple times. I can completely see him going apeshit for the Queen of the Elves.”
“And I have no idea who he’s talking about,” Khadijah said to us. Everyone stared at her for a moment. “Sorry,” she said. “I haven’t, like, been in front of a television in, like, fifteen years.”
“You can’t say that in Los Angeles,” said Todd, looking at everyone and smiling to show it was a joke.
“He makes funny videos,” said Cora. “For Saturday Night Live.” She crossed her arms, stuck out her hip, and changed the subject. “I guess it must be over with Joanna and that musician dude named Smog. I feel like there were new pictures of them together on a blog last month.”
“That all went down like eight months ago,” said Williamstown Guy. “Maybe that’s what she’ll sing about.”
The lights blinked. Our parties separated, and we rode the silver escalators to our seats.
“Well,” said Julie, “that was the worst conversation of our lives.”
“There was no vibe between me and Khadijah whatsoever. Couldn’t you tell?” A stone—what did it matter? It was an in-joke between high school friends.
“Please try to help me believe it,” she said. “I know I’m being difficult. But maybe a little harder than you’re trying, please.”
During the first half of the concert, Joanna Newsom played with the orchestra. For five minutes, this was dazzling. The sheer gall of her was an act in itself. Her hair was up in deep red ribbons, and her gown and heels were the same color. In front of all the professional musicians in tuxedos, she plucked her giant harp with her gawky arms. She growled out the low notes and howled out the high ones, like a horny, lonely Appalachian.
“She’s sitting on some great big balls,” whispered Julie in my ear. “You have to give her that. To sing like a country-ass little girl, next to pogrom survivors with violins? She’s like this alien being.”
But the songs she played with the orchestra were the songs from her most recent album, which were long and impersonal and complicated and very smart. They were not the songs of hers I loved. Soon I felt she was dragging the orchestra behind her, and I wanted her to shed them.
We were all growing restless. Cora tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a pair of opera glasses. They were made of brass, small and gleaming.
“Gordon found these at some vintage store in Vermont,” she said. “Aren’t they awesome?”
They were. I found I could sweep over the faces across the chasmic hall, and catch people I knew with their guards down. Directly across from us, a little ways down, I found a multigenerational encampment of Lampoon people. In the center there was a senior Simpsons writer, based in the reputedly less funny, older, more powerful Simpsons writers’ room. He sat with his arm around his girlfriend, an arborist suffering cancer or alopecia, who wore a pink kerchief. I’d once seen her at a party, watching her three-year-old daughter from a defunct marriage admire the hair of the woman playing Legos with her, and the look on her face as she watched was one I could not decode: maybe horror, maybe delight. To their left, a row of twentysomethings, legs crossed, from the Simpsons’ reputedly funnier younger room, one of them with a brunette who had a late-night eclectic hour at the public radio station in Santa Monica, drinking from a large, surely smuggled-in bottle of beer, shaking a pill from a red case into her hand, chasing it down, scribbling a note in pen on her white, hard palm, brow furrowed. Someone had told me once that she was so revered as a hookup that undergrads who had never met her compared reports of her behavior in the Lampoon Castle. To their right, a muscular, young graphic designer, with a scrawny, bearded animator who lived in the desert. They appeared to watch the stage with diminishing interest. This would have been my father’s world, I thought, if he’d been born fifteen years later, twenty; the great error of his life was to show up at the Lampoon before it became a portal to comedy. He might have turned his will to rant into a marketable skill.
Khadijah and Todd were a few rows to their right, a little higher. I averted my gaze.
I handed Julie the glasses. “Sorry this is boring,” I said, and took her hand. I felt at home, in an egg I didn’t want to break.
“Look at the nosebleeds,” she said, adjusting the focus. “See the guy with the shaggy gray hair and the glasses? With the Asian girlfriend? He was Cora’s English professor at USC. He took her virginity when she was twenty, a month after her dad died.”
I took back the opera glasses and found the couple she’d described. They were dignified, contemplative, frowning at Newsom from their inexpensive seats. His glasses were blocky and green. Hers were diamond-shaped, purple.
“He cheated on Cora with that woman,” Julie whispered. “She’s something called a Language poet. How humiliating, having a pretentious asshole cheat on you with a pretentious loser.”
“You’re being very subtle,” I said. We kissed, fast but hard.
With the glasses, I gave the English professor another look. He was leaning forward now, one elbow on his knee, his hand on his mouth, as if he was deeply moved.
“There is something all of the people here have in common,” said Julie. “But I can’t put my finger on what it is.” She rested her head on my shoulder. It was a joke between us, the size of her head; it was truly large, almost doll-like on her body. “It’s on the tip of my tongue, what it is, this thing connecting everyone here,” she whispered. “The name of the category.”
Intermission came, and I wanted the weight to remain on my shoulder. The offense against my sister still smarted. But I wanted the place we occupied in this egg with other people we’d met at parties to remain recognizable, to our friends and to ourselves. Something of this bond was in my blood. Something in me loved this kingdom. Just as forty-five minutes earlier I had felt the warmth issuing from the hearth of the motherland, so did I now feel that the home I had found in Los Angeles with Julie was twice as warm, twice as real.
“Come with me,” I said.
There were lines out the bathrooms, but I found an unmarked door a few feet left of the bar that opened on a supply closet. A bartender in a vest looked at us for a moment as if to stop us, but I thought she’d leave us alone when she saw who Julie was, and she did. There was a cinematic quality to Julie’s life, in which the boring obstacles remained out of frame, because people deferred to her. It infuriated me, and made me hate the world for its submissiveness, even as I felt like I was riding in a car through the Great Plains,
very fast.
I closed the door, after I’d put back the three mops I’d knocked over, and the three cardboard boxes of sponges I’d knocked over putting back the mops. I leaned against a wall and pulled her toward me. The knowledge that my behavior had endangered what we had, had hurt her, made me want to give her something.
Julie checked her watch. “If this concert wasn’t so boring, I might not be this kind of girl. But oh well.”
At first it was awkward. We fell back on our usual talk as we kissed and put our hands down each other’s pants. The words were so familiar they were more comforting than erotic: the schools we would get our children into, Crossroads and/or Saint Ann’s; the things we were going to say to each other on our wedding night in Topanga Canyon; the fact that we owned each other.
“Do I really own you?” she asked. A warmth circuited between us.
“You own my back, my labor,” I said. “You and your babies own my hands.” The plain fact that neither my back nor my hands had any market value was banished by our kissing, by her hands and mine. It was one of those moments in making out when dry old promises bloom unexpectedly into strange new ones. We were safe.
The mops and the boxes fell over again as we fled into the light. I thought of the bartender in the vest. She or one of the custodians would have to clean up the mess. In the orange-carpeted hallway, I felt I was rushing upward, to take my place on Olympus among the gods, and toppling downward, to some plush vermilion level of Hell reserved for jail punks and homeless people who blew teenagers in Grand Central. Both seemed tolerable. Perhaps I was a traitor to my family. But this engagement, I thought, this soon to be marriage, is my home.
We reached our row before the ushers shut the doors. Cora and Gordon looked at us with poker faces as we fell beside them. Julie sat next to Cora this time, and put her hands on Cora’s belly.
“You are going to be the most cultured little baby,” Julie cooed. We were both in good spirits, contented, slightly sleepy. “When I was your age, all I heard was people talking about money.”
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