Then everybody stopped talking and clapped, because Joanna Newsom had swished back onstage, in a new dress, with new hair. There were whoops, and libidinous grunts. She had the knack for shapeshifting so prized in musicians. Her legs were exposed, and her hair fell across her shoulders. The orchestra was gone. She sat alone on a hard stool, by her towering harp, and the dress she wore was a silver that toyed with the light.
“BAREFOOT?” wrote Julie in the little red Il Bisonte notebook she kept in her bag. “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?” And barefoot she was, her feet gleaming in the lights. Julie laid her head back on my shoulder, and we were safe in our egg.
The stage was almost bare now. There was only the twenty-five-year-old before us, and her otherworldly harp.
“This is a new song,” she said. “I don’t even know what it’s called yet.” She reached out and hit the first strings as she sang a high, pigeonish note. The words were indecipherable. The note spilled down into a staccato flourish; it sounded like Smokey Robinson and like The Marriage of Figaro. Now that there was a solitary voice with one instrument, the orchestra retired to the wings, I couldn’t help but remember Khadijah’s voice imitating Nancy’s, the high, sharp tones that rose up and filled the classroom.
“Do you think she’s singing for Andy Samberg?” Julie asked me. “Or for the guy she left named Smog?” It was the question that must have been on any number of minds in this room: To whom did this music belong? The new man or the old?
“Both,” I said. Her head reestablished itself on my shoulder.
The Smokey Robinson/Marriage of Figaro theme was only prologue to the body of the song. It was a folk song, in its essence, a lament. Technical training gave out. Newsom drew her face close to the microphone and confided.
“You’ve got the run of the place,” she sang, “now that you’re running around.” And on the last syllable she drew back and rasped, her throat half closed. The pleasure of running, and the dizziness and illness of it—that was her subject. I turned to see the faces of my friends and found Cora looking up at the professor in the nosebleeds, though she had her hands on her swollen belly. I took the glasses off the arm of my seat and looked at the spot where I had not allowed myself to look before. Khadijah was a head in a honeycomb of heads, and I didn’t dare linger on her. All I could read on her face was a tension, an absence of happiness.
This music was for fallen men and women, I decided, gazing into the sectioned hollows of the ceiling, though the notion was jejune. The betrayals that bound Cora to the professor and bound me to Khadijah and bound the professor to his girlfriend and the singer of the song to the men we couldn’t see, they would all be forgiven. We would all be spared, because our type of behavior had its place in the world. This music could not have been written without shame.
“The phantom of love,” sang Joanna Newsom, “moves among us at will.” It wasn’t until the song was over and applause filled the room that I missed Julie’s head on my shoulder. She was sitting erect, looking at me. The opera glasses were in her hand. She’d deduced, I knew, whose face I’d been searching for and staring at. The warmth we’d earned in the closet dissolved in the air, victim to a colder, prettier truth.
After the encore, we filed down the escalator, and outside to the podiums where valets took our tickets and ran for our cars. Khadijah and Todd must have street-parked; they were nowhere to be seen.
Gordon and I embraced. It was what we had to do, after a concert like that. As two musicians, or at least an aspiring-musician-cum-animator-cum-aspiring-musician and a middling-to-failed-musician-cum-aspiring-studio-engineer, we had to acknowledge we’d witnessed a moment of brilliance. We didn’t say the word, but that’s what it had been. Whether Joanna Newsom would be able to sustain it on an album, she’d struck that golden bell.
“We have to get you in the garage.” He whispered in my ear, so that his pregnant wife couldn’t hear. “I’m going to have the talk with Cora in the morning.”
We shook hands and belabored each other about the head and shoulders the way I’d seen the popular seventh-grade boys do when I was a despised pacifist in the school yard. Segueing into self-parody, we bumped chests.
“Look, Cora,” said Julie. “The men are so hot from the elf queen show they have to blow off some steam.”
“Didn’t you guys like the concert?” I asked.
“Her persona can be a little annoying,” said Cora. “But the music—”
“What’s wrong with her persona?” asked Gordon, too quickly. He was smiling, but there was gravel in his voice. “Can you not be jealous of every female artist your age who gets to be the center of attention, even when she’s kind of yodeling with a harp?”
“Can you not interrupt when your wife occasionally tries to say something?” Julie asked him. She placed a hand on Cora’s shoulder. “I mean, if we’re on the topic of wanting to be the center of attention.”
This did not augur well. When Julie criticized Gordon to his face, it was often a prelude to darker observations about men in general. It was time to speed our exit. I put on my jacket, which had been draped over my arm, and detected a strange weight in the left pocket.
I shoved my hand in the pocket and closed it on a stone wrapped in a napkin. It was the same size as the one I’d plucked from the urinal trough. Khadijah must have dropped it in during intermission, when I’d left my jacket on my seat. I was aghast—it could have slipped out and tumbled onto Julie’s shoe. Could Khadijah have kept it in her bag all this time, and carried it to Massachusetts and back to Los Angeles? What was the function of the napkin? Was something written on it? Could my sweat have soaked through my body into the pocket and destroyed a freshly written note, or poem? My face, probably, was not normal.
“I’m sorry, Gordon,” said Julie. “That was an unfriendly thing for me to say.” She put a hand to her chest. “Sometimes my mother just sort of explodes out of me. It’s why I work with wild animals.”
Julie’s VW came and we said good-bye, each couple leaving the other to fight.
I steered through the net of traffic between the concert hall and the 110. Usually I liked to drive, and Julie liked to enjoin me to drive faster with jokes at my expense, and usually I liked these jokes. But now we were both silent.
When we were on the 110, she cleared her throat. “I’d like to advance a theory.”
I waited. I took the ramp to the 10 for the short jump to Olympic.
“The theory,” she said, “is called the theory of elves.”
“I gave you something reasonably similar to a hand job,” I said. “Why do you sound like you’re going to say something divisive?”
“It almost redeemed the concert. Thank you. But what I was about to say was just that it was like being an anthropologist, watching this intriguing tribe of people who enjoy this music. And this tribe I will call the Tribe of Elves. The theory of elves states that many pretentious, young, white and whitish people want to be like the elves from The Lord of the Rings. The deal with the elves in The Lord of the Rings is that they’re on their way out. They’re this vanishing race of willowy, pale, scruffily elegant superpeople, and they like to be out in the woods, and they speak this soft, pretty language, and they’re kind of constantly unfazed. They wear doilies on their heads, and they play the harp. They have this better land they’re eventually going to go to. But they can’t just get in their magic boats and disappear. No. They have to persevere, and save Middle Earth. They have to stick it out just a little longer, so they can help the humans and the dwarves and hobbits and all the shorter, stupider people fight the evil wizard and the orcs. And the elves are like, ‘Take hope, Stubbier Ones, little dwarves and hobbits and shit. For we just barely remain, with our sense of noblesse oblige, to save you. And by the way, our numbers are dwindling, because we’re about to sail away to our just reward. Look upon us while you can. You should be grateful for this Language poetry we’re writing, and this beautiful folk music you should like, because they’re our vani
shing art forms, and they’re how we will keep you away from television, which is the Eye of Sauron. Well, my friend, I am Gimli the Dwarf, and I am proud. I have a big head, and am thus well-suited for television. My arms couldn’t reach halfway across a harp without my arm flesh swinging into the strings. I am not an ethereal girl. I appear on TV for money. And my parents actually want me to make money, because they just arrived in Middle Earth, which was what the Jews were like fifteen minutes ago. So you can jizz all over your Sephardic elf, in her raggedy clothes, and Andy Samberg can have his elf queen, and you can all go dwindle together. I’ll go find a rich dwarf, and everybody’s happy. It’s like that book they talk about in The Great Gatsby, the book Tom likes about the passing of the great race. You’re just passing from this Earth, you and your elf sisters, and I’m going to stay here, and I’ll be okay. I mean, I hate Persians and Armenians too, and I forget that I am them, but at least Persians aren’t like, ‘Look at me, you guys, because I’m the last unicorn.’”
“I think I missed Olympic.”
“That response didn’t have enough words in it.”
I put my hand in the pocket of my jacket.
“Why are we talking about race?” I demanded. I rubbed the napkin-wrapped stone with my thumb. “We talk about race in this country when we don’t want to talk about something else, like economic equality, or global warming.”
“Yeah, those are the topics on my mind. I was trying to tell you how I feel without being accusatory. I take back what I said about finding a rich dwarf. I am angry!”
I yanked the VW off the 10 so we could make our way west on side streets and cut over to Olympic past Koreatown.
“Baby, don’t drive one-handed. This is silly.”
“You’re absolutely right.” I extracted my hand from my jacket and put it on the wheel.
“Do you have something in your pocket?”
“Sorry, my cell phone was vibrating.”
“Do I scare you? Does it scare you when your baby talks about race? You look like a tiny, frightened deer.”
“Tiny, frightened deer” was a relatively recent variation on the traditional “shy deer,” which we’d coined on our second date. It was what she called me when she’d asked me to try on a membranous Prada bathing suit at the outlets near Joshua Tree and we found it could hide either my butt crack or my genitals but not both, and we’d made out on the bench in the dressing room even though we knew the clerks could see our legs.
“It’s all good,” I said. “It’s just like what do you say to assure someone you love that you’re not racist?”
She took my hand in hers, which prevented two-handed driving and thereby signified that our love was more important than safety. Warmth filled the cockpit of the VW and made it a pair of battle stations.
Back in the vestibule of the house, we assumed a shoe-removal posture in which we placed our backs side by side against the wall. Once we were barefoot she threw her silver cardigan on the living room couch and I stayed in my jacket. We were quiet; Samson’s Mercedes was still in the driveway, so he must have decided to stay the night in the guest bedroom.
“Are you cold?” She squinted at me. “Why do you still have your jacket on?” She whispered, although Samson might have already been wakened by the engine in the driveway, or by the three inquisitive beeps emitted by the alarm system as we opened the front door and entered the code.
“Yeah, I’ve got the chills for some reason.” I buttoned my jacket, and crossed my arms in front of it, in order to ensure that it would not be taken from me. My hand itched to sink into the pocket and hold the stone. But I knew it was there from the way it brushed against my waist.
“Oh no,” she said. “Sick boy. Lie down.” She took me to the couch, made me lie on it, and crawled on top of me. “I’ll keep you warm,” she said. “I’m like a seal shielding its pup from the wind. In medieval Greenland.” And then: “Ow. What do you have in your jacket?”
“Listen,” I said. “I need to tell you something.”
She could move gracefully, Julie. Maybe it had to do with having logged so many hours with lab mice in grad school. Unhurried, her hand slipped into my pocket. She drew out the stone and its napkin sheath, flipped the stone, unfolded the napkin, studied both, separated her body from mine, and rose from the couch without looking at me. She walked with the stone and the napkin through the living room.
Her chest rose and fell. I floated to her side, feeling like I was hovering over my body, a ghost in the house. I read over her shoulder.
The message was written in blue ballpoint pen on the kind of cocktail napkin that comes with the cups of seltzer you buy at intermission. I could not help but note that it broke none of the rules Khadijah and I had set for ourselves.
K HAS WRT. ON YR WALL:
GO AWAY
It was the same stone I had given Khadijah, with the crude circled A. I backed away from Julie to address her. I needed some physical distance from the stone to convince myself I was a real person in the midst of real events, to shake the feeling of unreality.
“Baby,” I said, trying to conjure heat in the air.
Julie looked at me with no expression. The stone still in her hand, she cranked back her arm like a radical of ’68. I wondered if she was going to throw it at my head.
I flinched, and the stone went wide. It struck the window, near the corner where the living room met the foyer, and cracked the pane. Julie had not, I realized from the crack’s location, had the intention of throwing it anywhere near me.
But because the window had been struck, the banshee wail of the alarm system saturated the house. It was everywhere all at once, with no point of origin. Beneath it, the male robot began to speak. Security breach, team mobilized, patroller now in route.
Julie ran to the alarm box and jabbed the keys. The voice would not stop. Nor would the wail. Indeed, subtracting elements from the picture proved impossible; elements added themselves. First, Sam ran into the living room in his pajamas, his mouth moving, inaudible. Second, the security firm arrived in the form of a helicopter. The blades filled a midrange between the Talking Heads baritone of the robot administrator and the banshee wail. Then the helicopter switched on its spotlight, and the scene assumed the quality of war.
Julie didn’t look angry now. I could tell she had the same vegetable taste in her mouth that I had in mine: humiliation. This only child, who had surpassed the wildest expectations of her father, had thrown a stone into a pane of glass, and it was inconceivable that the damage could ever be undone.
8.
It’s the Spontaneity That Will Make the Energy Feel Real
The next morning, Julie had to wake up at 5:30 to spend fourteen hours in the editing room. The starfish-focused episode currently in progress at Julie vs. Animals made no sense to anybody narratively or scientifically. “Their mating,” Julie had explained to me a week ago, “is too slow, and when you watch it in fast-forward it looks like fractal art or something. We actually made two of the writers do an enactment in costumes, but that was unfunny because you felt bad for two guys who aren’t actors trying to be actors.” If the episode could not be edited into an acceptable state, Julie would have to put on a puppet show with two dried, store-bought starfish, and make them speak in funny voices. This was a recourse she hoped dearly to avoid.
I had no such reason to rise before dawn. But when Julie’s phone sounded its alarm tone and she rolled out of bed, I followed her into the bathroom. As she showered, I closed the lid of the toilet and sat. We did not speak.
When she emerged from the steam, I moved past her into the shower. Our arms brushed, like the arms of strangers passing on a bus. She washed her face beneath the future-children as I ran cool water over my head.
“I can’t morning-talk with you right now,” she said. “You don’t look like my husband to be, to me, in this moment. When you look halfway like that guy again, I’ll talk.”
When she left the house—no kiss, slammed door—I shad
owed her all the way to the front door. It was strange how acutely I felt it, having to say good-bye until daybreak came and the world went dark again.
I drove to Canters, the only restaurant open at 5:55 a.m., and stewed in coffee through the dawn. I did nothing for ten minutes. Only after I had an egg sandwich in my hands did I realize what booth I was in. It was irregularly shaped, secluded, wedged in a shadowy corner. It was here that Julie and I sat whenever she’d need last-minute prep for an audition. We’d convened such sessions three times, the two of us face-to-face, she delivering her lines, I staring at her, trying to hold myself like an enigmatic director.
“I am actually saying these things in front of people in three hours,” she’d said, on one of these occasions, drawing skulls on a script. “This is happening. This is happening.” My main job, I had known, was to persuade her of the possibility of her nonfuckedness. “It’s being relaxed that will make the spontaneity possible, and it’s the spontaneity that will make the energy feel real,” I said once. “It’ll be more like just you talking and they’ve brought you in because you talking is enchanting.” She called me uxorious; we held hands. Desperation, teamwork in defiance of a fast-falling night, medieval Greenland.
I will write a song about my internal torment, I thought, like Joanna Newsom’s. I took the paper place mat from the seat across from me and lay it beside my own place mat. I will write lyrics about what it would be like being with Khadijah, I thought, on the left, and lyrics about what it would be like being Julie’s husband on the right. But no lyrics came. Instead, to my surprise, I drew two houses.
When the place mats were done, I looked up. Hours had passed. Outside, rainy Fairfax was clogged with lowing rush-hour traffic. If I had written lyrics, as I’d intended, expressing the same sentiments as the drawings, I might have called it a productive morning and gone home to find some chords on the guitar. But these floor plans, and the zeal with which I had composed them, made me pause and contemplate the condition of my mind.
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