Dead People's Music

by Sarah Laing

  ‘I’ll take you down there if you like,’ Esther said, sitting on the bed, the wire-weave threatening to squash Klara. She had found Klara’s hiding place a couple of weeks ago, on her hands and knees looking for a lost bead. ‘He is kind, Herr Weiss. He gave me candy.’

  ‘But Esther, Mama said not to take candy from strangers.’

  ‘He’s not a stranger. He’s a friend of Tante Dagmar’s. And besides, Mama’s not here.’

  ‘But she will be soon. Mama will be coming any day. Once she’s found places for all the other children.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Esther, sounding not nearly as sure as Klara would have liked. ‘Come on, let’s go visiting.’

  ‘No!’ said Klara, inserting her fingers into the gaps between the floorboards, holding on tight.

  ‘Suit yourself.’ Esther stood up and Klara watched her boots, far too hot for this weather, disappear. She pressed her ear harder, searching for the sound. Because if it came any closer, she’d know that everything would be all right.

  CHAPTER 4

  New York, 2003

  The rogue room-mate is finally collected by his U-haul-driving dad. In the last couple of weeks, he has partied in Manhattan like a squirrel storing nuts for winter, although it can’t be that boring in Baltimore. Isn’t that where John Waters and Divine come from? Surely he could have stayed here if he really wanted to, got a job in a bar, gone temping. Toby thinks he might be writing the Great American Novel and that’s best done rent-free.

  So now we have the room, and a reconditioned bed we got off Craigslist, a battered stereo and bookshelf bought from an economics student returning to Bolivia. The room is small and blue, with iron bars across the window leading out to the fire escape. There is a tall naked tree, its branches crazing the red brick apartment buildings in the background.

  Toby’s on the phone, following up on people who’ve emailed him to say his website is cool. He’s already been to a place between Broadway and 6th Avenue, on West 28th Street, and he said it was amazing down there, like Haiti or Nigeria, tall African men in batik caftans behind trestle tables of fake Prada sunglasses, calling out ‘Oh baby, you’re so fine’ to the women who walked by. The shops are more like a medina, says Toby, Arab men giving each other back massages and shouting about Guantanamo, racks jammed with oversized hoodies and I heart NY T-shirts. The guy who interviewed him looked like someone from The Beastie Boys, and his girlfriend went to Japan to crib T-shirt designs for US chain stores. He seemed to like Toby, telling him he would ring him up if he got in a suitable project, but Toby hasn’t heard from him yet.

  ‘See, Beck, the problem with New York is that it’s in recession,’ says Toby, between phone calls. The creative director at the last place was unavailable, and besides, they weren’t hiring. ‘They might like my stuff, think it’s fresh, but that doesn’t mean they have the money to hire me. Bryan emailed me from London — he’s off to Reykjavik for a brief. He says it’s a massive web development project and they could easily accommodate me. People sit in hot pools in the middle of glaciers there. And they dance all night in summer; the sun never goes down.’

  ‘You’ll find something,’ I say. ‘You might just have to take a filler job for a while. Maybe you could become a dog walker.’ We’ve seen people in parks, ten leashes looped around their wrists, Dalmatians treading on terriers, bull mastiffs steamrolling Bichon Frises.

  Toby ignores this suggestion. ‘It does my head in, boring static HTML websites. I really want to ramp up my animation skills. You’re not the only one who needs some career development.’

  I feel guilty, but I’m not going to back down. I’ve already compromised over work, subbing for a wedding quartet, first gig next weekend in Connecticut. I cringe a little at this, because I hadn’t planned on doing classical music in New York. But I know the repertoire; I played it all in music school. And it’s good discipline, meaning that I’ll have to practise, something I’ve been avoiding because Wendy usually comes down with a migraine whenever I get my cello out. I’m sure it’s some syndrome caused by her mother’s amateur repertory career. The quartet will pay me in cash, which I can easily hide or spend on groceries. I won’t be relying completely on Toby’s generosity, something I feel a little sheepish doing, even if he claims to be the one with the bigger earning potential. The quartet showed me the clipping from The New York Times wedding pages, when they played Handel’s Water Music for two famous psychoanalysts. They got fed — the catering was Japanese — but mostly they are treated like dishwashers, not even given a drink, let alone tepanyaki eel. The first violinist says he’ll let me know when some karaoke work comes in — they’re sometimes called to orchestrate new songs. I love the idea of a little ball bouncing across my notes, two lovers kicking their way through autumn leaves regardless of the song’s lyrics. Toby and I had a karaoke party before we left, screaming along to ‘Hey Mickey’, two Japanese lovers starring in that video too.

  ‘Hi, could I please speak to Salvador Jimenez?’ says Toby, modulating his voice so it is deeper, slower. ‘Sorry, Himenez.’ He rolls his eyes at me and hits his brow. ‘Hi, Salvador, my name is Toby. You sent me an email yesterday in response to my job query?’ He pinches the phone between his shoulder and ear, scribbling onto a pad. I hope he gets another interview. I don’t want to go home before I’ve written my Klara song cycle, and I don’t want to go back to London. Toby’s got a far better chance than me of securing a work visa (who’d sponsor an anonymous indie musician?) and if he gets a job at least one of us will be a legal immigrant.

  I fill my satchel with manuscript papers, pencils and erasers, a dictaphone and a few pink-fleshed grapefruit resting in my sock drawer. I don’t make the mistake of keeping fruit in the hand-blown Swedish glass bowl any more. Last week I grabbed one of Wendy’s satsumas, and she insisted that I pay her a dollar for it. I chewed my inner cheek when I saw her chuck the rest of the satsumas out yesterday, leathery, sunken, with skull caps of white mould. She replaced them with a nashi, which she unpacked from its foam net, crowing, ‘Oh, my beautiful Asian pear! I can’t wait to eat you.’ Toby and I were called in to admire its golden, speckled form and to privately speculate whether or not she would eat it or just view it as an objet d’art.

  Wendy is, however, generous with abandoned food, offering us the white sliced bread the Baltimore room-mate didn’t finish. We’ve nursed the bag for two weeks now, reluctant to eat it, and still the bread seems freshly baked. She has also given us free rein on the infused oils and vinegars that her last year’s French room-mate left, because she’s too lazy to use them herself.

  I kiss Toby on the cheek; he’s phoning the next person on his list. I’m going to the local coffee shop to work on my composition — I can’t work here, with Wendy and her computer, her entertainment set, her gloom sending out taproots. It’s more instinctive to compose directly on the cello, but I have a tendency to slip into well-worn riffs, tune-grooves that I’m unable to climb out of. If I work onto manuscript paper I’m more likely to experiment, not sidetracked by easy fingering options. I’ll also avoid hours of fruitless noodling — I’ll be forced into producing evidence of my composition. Little notes strung on lines. Crotchet necklaces.

  I’m not sure how to go about composing songs about my grandmother, given that I hardly know anything about her. She died when Dad was fourteen, and he doesn’t have much cohesive to say, just anecdotes that pop out at odd moments. The walk to Red Rocks to see the seals. The climb up Mount Victoria to go blackberry picking, and the tart they made afterwards. The day she broke a piece of wooden train track on his bottom. But she lived in New York before she came to New Zealand: this is a good place to search for her. I used to imagine that Klara and I might have a direct psychic connection, that she was my guardian angel, my memuneh. When I got my scholarship to London, it was as if she had posthumously orchestrated it, but she didn’t intervene when it was all going wrong. Was it because of the cello? Or because she was never involved in the first place?<
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  Wool coat buttoned to my chin, beret pulled down around my ears, I walk down Seventh Avenue, past the Regina bakery and the Wash-Dry-Fold Laundry Service. The snow is dirty and slushy in the gutters. A few blocks away, in Prospect Park, it is clean and white, and Toby and I have made a snowman, stained pink by the dye from my suede gloves. I cross a couple of streets, remembering to look left, then right, and push open the door of the coffee shop.

  I have resigned myself to no flat whites, apparently only found in the Antipodes, so I ask for regular coffee with half-and-half. I walk towards the table in the window, so I can have the sun at my back, but as I go, an old man swings round and hits me, spilling his extra-large coffee, black, two sugars, across both of us. ‘Jesus Christ, woman!’ he screams. ‘Look what you’ve gone and done.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I say, reaching forward with my serviette, but he bats my hand away. He dabs his grey coat with his own one, sniffing loudly, not accepting my apology.

  But when I sit down at the table, I realise that I have got it all wrong: this is America, I could sue him for spilling coffee on me. He performed a pre-emptive strike. I should have been the one yelling. I should have said, ‘No, fuck you!’ They do it on the movies, why weren’t the lines hard-wired? I am having trouble restoring my cool, too busy rehearsing the alternative ending in my head. Fuck you! No, fuck you!

  Deep breath now, summoning Klara in Berlin, where Dad says she was born. I have never been to Germany, but in school I read lots of books about wartime children. The Diary of Anne Frank, My Name is David, Mischling, Third Degree — the stories were so vivid they seemed like my own. The man who yelled looks like he’s in his seventies, Klara’s age if she had lived, and his New York accent has high notes of Eastern Europe. Maybe he escaped The Endless Steppe of Siberia, and still dreams of unyielding potato plants. He is now taking umbrage at the mother and squalling baby sitting near him — they’re moving to another table. I listen to the sound of the cars going by, to the voices of the African American kids, hip-hop powering their sentences. Jazz seeps out of the school across the road, and from among all this, a phrase emerges.

  I rummage through my satchel to find the dictaphone, and I hum it in. Then I write it down on my manuscript paper. Toby thinks I should feed it directly into the computer. They have programmes where the moment you have an idea, you can layer it up, adding samples and drums, different harmonies. He says I should get a foot controller, a fancy laptop with headphones. And I will, if he finds a job, but right now our savings are earmarked for basic survival. Besides, I like to keep it simple to start with. Also I have to get over my technophobia — the music software baffles me; I don’t know where to begin.

  Despite the distractions (or are they inspirations?) this is a better place to squat than the library, the multi-columned monolith on Grand Army Plaza. You have to go through a metal detector to get in. I’d imagined it to be quiet, but the other day an old black woman chose me to sit next to at the communal tables, her scarlet raincoat hood zippered up to her nose, her cheeks circle-rouged and her hands mittened. It was hot inside; I had shrugged off my coat and beret, and was wearing a shirt. She peered at my manuscript paper and the scribbled-out crotchets.

  ‘Are you a musician, dear? My husband was a musician.’ She smelt of beef stock and alcohol. ‘He played at the Apollo with Billie Holiday. Oh, she was a naughty girl. A very naughty girl.’ Then she fixed her rheumy attention on the school student with cornrowed hair. ‘Be quiet and concentrate! How many times do I have to tell you to stop talking?’ The hitherto silent girl widened her eyes at the woman, who took that as a challenge and stalked around to her, swooshing plastic bags against her raincoat. The girl gathered up her books and papers and walked quickly away. And then the woman began to sing ‘Strange Fruit’ in a whispery voice. She turned to me again, coquettish, waggling her hands as if she held a boa. ‘Do you have a quarter?’ she sang. I tossed a couple of dimes across the table and then she got up and left.

  I am coaxing more phrases out of my initial melody when I hear Wendy’s voice. I look up — she is flirting with the Dominican guy behind the counter. She is bright and chirpy, not the washed-out version that mopes around the apartment. He tells her a joke and she throws her head back, laughing. Then he hands her a paper bag, her daily free pastry. She turns and sees me, waves. I should hardly be surprised to see her here; this place was her recommendation. But normally she comes first thing, relying on the pastry for breakfast. She augments her coffee with milk and sugar, and makes her way over to my table. I grind my teeth — it’s like there’s a trickster at work, distracting me from my task.

  ‘Hey Rebecca, I just went to the gym. My trainer was on my case for not showing up in a month.’ Her face is red, and she takes off her glasses to mop up sweat running either side of her nose. ‘Mmm, this pastry is good. Do you want some?’

  I pull off a tuft, a couple of raisins clinging to the side.

  ‘What are you doing, writing music?’ She grabs my manuscript paper and hums the notation in a loud halting way, which makes it sound not nearly as good as I hoped it would be.

  ‘I didn’t know you could read music.’ I snatch the pad back off her.

  ‘My mom, she sent us to piano lessons, and I learned the flute for a bit. But I quit in high school. That’s when I became obsessed with new wave.’

  ‘I like new wave.’

  ‘You do? We should go along to a club I’ve been reading about in Time Out. They play new wave and punk and Goth music.’

  ‘Okay, that sounds cool.’ Wendy picks her outings very carefully, seeming borderline agoraphobic. Usually she home-detentions herself, moving in a five-block radius from the apartment. She hyped up a trip to a glass-blowing shop in Carroll Gardens days in advance, checking and rechecking the bus timetable, insisting that we wear sensible shoes if we wanted to come. She pointed out the church where Al Capone was christened, the gardens that had Virgin Mary grottos and shrines to dead firefighters. We went into a shop that made me ache with so much beauty in close proximity, and she coveted a vase, transparent and globular, squeezed while cooling.

  ‘It’s so great that I ran into you. I found this great mahogany chaise longue on Berkeley Place — you could help me carry it home. I’m going to photograph it for my blog.’

  ‘Where are you going to keep it?’ There is already a stack of elementary school chairs in the hallway between our room and the bathroom, and I keep stubbing my toe on them in the middle of the night.

  ‘I’ll find a place. Maybe under my bay windows? Anyway, my blog is getting lots of hits, I’ll put it on Craigslist too, I’m sure someone will buy it in no time. Did I tell you that my friend Marcella is coming to stay?’

  ‘No, who’s that?’ I don’t want anyone coming to stay; the place is claustrophobic as it is.

  ‘I used to go out with her brother. When I was thin.’ Wendy blows her hair out of her face. ‘I’ll show you some photos.’ She drains her coffee, throwing the empty cup into the bin, no, the trash, and stands up. ‘Let’s go.’

  I look down at my manuscript that was going so well up until Wendy showed up. I should stay here, working through the distraction, but some fresh air might do me good.

  The chaise longue is heavy. By the time we lug it the three blocks to Wendy’s apartment, heave it up the stairs and position it under her bay window, I feel exhausted and agitated. I should test my blood sugars. I put my machine in my armpit to warm it up; otherwise the reading will be inaccurate. I insert a test strip and prick my finger. The digital hourglass flashes, then a result appears — low.

  ‘Marcella’s going to sublet half of my bed,’ Wendy says, gesturing at her California King.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ My voice sounds far away, my lips and tongue numb, the world granular. I squeeze Mentos into my mouth until they rattle and the packet is spent. I crunch, working sugar crystals out of my tooth ravines, sending them down my throat.

  ‘She’s looking for a job
since she finally finished her PhD in history. Seven years, it took her! She’s thinking she might find something in television.’

  The sugar infuses me slowly; I feel like the chalk dipped in ink from the toothpaste advertisement.

  ‘But renting your bed, is that wise?’

  ‘It’s cheaper than her subletting a room. And I could do with the extra cash. Now, where’s my digital camera?’ Wendy rummages around on her dresser, then goes out to her study. She comes back with the camera and tripod, screwing them together, then moving to the window to drape the organza curtains. Snap, snap.

  ‘Do you want to pose for a shot? You look so pale and Victorian.’

  ‘I suppose.’ I recline on the chaise, which feels slightly damp and tacky.

  Snap, snap.

  ‘Hey, I was going to get out those old shots of me, wasn’t I?’ Wendy abandons her camera and starts fossicking around her top drawer.

  The photos she shows me look like they’re from Rolling Stone. They’re black and white, taken on the roof of an apartment building. A woman with long white-blonde hair, a short polka-dotted dress and knee-high boots has her arms around a Brando-ish man. There are other shots, the woman pouting, lips dark, eyebrows dramatic. She is spinning round, making the polka-dotted skirt flare like a hibiscus flower.

  ‘Is that you?’ I ask disbelievingly.

  ‘Yeah. When I lived in Portland.’

  ‘You were so thin. Too thin,’ I quickly add. All weight comments can be taken the wrong way.

  ‘We used to take a lot of crystal meth.’