Dead People's Music

by Sarah Laing

  I’m happy to be back in Park Slope, where the brownstones and the maple trees match my internal picture of New York. I stop off at a Thai restaurant, picking up one order of basil eggplant and another of lemongrass prawns. They’re generous with the prawns; in New Zealand they’re flown in flash-frozen from Thailand, India or Australia and you’re lucky if there are three floating in the bucket of sauce. Toby and I always divide the final uneven-numbered prawn along the middle, sometimes uncovering a thread of black shit in its gut.

  I carry the bags up the stairs and place them on the kitchen table, not bothering with plates since it’s only me. If it’s Toby and me, then we have plates and forks and spoons, nice glassware. We hide the takeout containers so we can have the delusion of having cooked it ourselves. I read an article about can’t-cook-New Yorkers who host dinner parties. They order prepped food from their local restaurants, transferring it into their Le Creuset pots to heat up before the guests arrive, flooding their apartments with the aromas.

  I use the plastic spoons that came in the bag, feeling guilty that I had forgotten to refuse them. There are ten paper napkins too; did they think I was a toddler? The plastic spoon is gutless, Uri Gellering under the weight of a prawn. I throw it into the bin, getting out a stainless steel one.

  Wendy appears. ‘Is that from Thai Taste? They do good food. Mmm, makes me hungry. Only I just ate a pile of rice.’

  ‘You can have some if you like,’ I reluctantly offer. I was looking forward to eating it all by myself, despite the greediness of the intent. I would have only eaten half the rice, minimising carbohydrate consumption. Of course, there is the question of palm sugar, Thai food’s secret weapon, a sure-fire blood-sugar raiser. Maybe it’s better that I share.

  ‘Thanks,’ says Wendy, spooning out a prawn. ‘I shoulda ordered some in myself. But I’m too broke. I can’t sell the chandelier until I’ve found enough pieces of glass to redress it.’

  ‘It’s going to be beautiful,’ I say. From far away, it looks like its baroque original; from up close it’s a post-modern jangle of broken bottles and costume jewellery.

  Wendy finds a snow pea and squeezes out its innards with her teeth. She looks at me, eyes half-closed. ‘Would you buy clothes rescued from the streets?’

  ‘Maybe, if they were washed.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking. I found this great shirt, but I was worried that it might be contaminated, so I bought some rubber gloves from the pharmacy to pick it up and put it in a plastic bag that I sprayed with sanitiser. I’m collecting a pile to take to the laundry. Do you think you would model it for me when it comes back?’

  ‘What about Marcella?’

  ‘I don’t know about Marcella. She’s too droopy. And I don’t like her sleeping with this producer, he’s never going to give her a job. He’s just taking her for a ride.’

  ‘I hope Toby gets a job soon. I hope those people who are doing the pharmaceutical site call and offer him the job.’

  ‘I wouldn’t count on it. I tried to find a permanent job for months and didn’t have any luck. And Toby, I don’t know, I find him difficult to understand. He mumbles.’ Wendy gives me this look, as if she’d like to itemise more of Toby’s shortcomings. It’s not just the accent that bothers her, and I feel unsettled by the realisation that she doesn’t like him. That my taste might be questionable. I also feel defensive on his behalf, even though he doesn’t enunciate.

  ‘You know what I’ve been thinking about doing? Selling my eggs. You should do it too; I don’t think you need a green card,’ says Wendy.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The ones in your ovaries. It’s invasive but lucrative. They pay you eight grand and they also give you a medical while you’re there, so I could probably have a whole pile of things checked out. I think I have a fungal infection behind one of my toes.’

  ‘They wouldn’t want my eggs. They won’t take my blood.’

  ‘Why not? Oh, your diabetes, right?’

  ‘Yeah, they think I’m poisoned. No sugar babies.’ I watch Wendy fish out two more of my shrimps, wanting to say, Stop! Put them back! But finding myself unable to speak.

  ‘I’m sure I’m going to get diabetes. My mom is hypoglycemic. I’ve got such bad luck with health, and it kills me that I don’t have insurance.’

  ‘Maybe you should cut down on the soda,’ I say.

  Wendy screws up her face; she believes ginger ale is good for circulation.

  ‘What about you? How do you cope with all your medication costs?’

  ‘I brought quite a big supply with me, because my travel insurance won’t cover my diabetes-related costs — it’s like they think I’m being spendthrift by having a chronic condition. They’ll only pay if something freak happens, like I break my back. I don’t know what I’m going to do when my insulin and blood-testing stuff runs out. Get Mum to send it over? I definitely wouldn’t be able to afford it over the counter, it’s about forty or fifty dollars a bottle.’

  ‘That’s pricey.’ Wendy helps herself to my last prawn. ‘I’ve been thinking about setting up an online dating profile. Maybe I could find myself a rich husband and I wouldn’t have to sell my future children. If I took the photo from above, I would look thinner.’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ I say, not wanting to confirm that she looks chunky, but thinking it might do her good to get out more, maybe even to get laid, even though when I hear other people saying that, I think they’re obnoxious. I start filling the sink to wash the takeout containers, but when I turn to collect them, Wendy has already swept them into the bin.

  ‘I’m going to do some cello practice,’ I say.

  ‘Not again. Aren’t you good enough already?’

  ‘No,’ I say, slamming the door like a teenager, sawing my way through four octaves. I’ve got to pin down that melody that came to me on the train. I’ve got to chase the whirling piece of paper through four lanes of traffic.

  Wendy turns up the stereo.

  Toby comes home very late, smelling of beer. He’s at his most amorous when he’s drunk, rougher and lacking subtlety. I’m too grumpy to oblige, pushing him and his hot, hoppy breath off me, removing his hand from my pajama bottoms. Sex is not as essential as it once was, and I find other people creeping into my fantasies. I wonder whether this is a temporary slump, or a permanent state. I can’t imagine wanting to stay in bed all day like we did to begin with. It would drive me crazy.

  ‘Did you spend all that time at that bar?’

  ‘Nah, we split after the first pole dance to get hotdogs and we moved onto this bar in Noho. Downstairs, real underground, all these plywood boxes in tessellating patterns … cool.’

  ‘Great,’ I say, pulling Toby’s pinching fingers off my nipple.

  ‘I think we should move in with Ivan, it’ll be fun.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  Toby grunts, then turns over and starts to snore.

  The next morning Toby is too hung-over to get up. I look out the window to where the squirrels are running along the power lines and up the oak tree. The sky is blue and I can tell it’s cold and still. I don’t want to be enveloped in this cloud of sour beer. I climb over him, not too carefully. Wendy is in the kitchen.

  ‘Hey, do you want to go to the Chelsea flea market with me this morning?’ she asks.

  ‘Sure.’ She’s been talking this up — better than the Park Slope flea, filled with amazing things.

  ‘I’ll just take a shower and then we can go. We’ll pick up breakfast on the way. I read about this great bagel place in Zagats. It got the best rating.’

  Wendy emerges from the shower wearing the same black sweatpants and grey hoodie that she’s worn since we got here. But at least she’s washed: sometimes her hair is so greasy it looks like she’s put product into it.

  I’ve pulled my jeans back on, figuring that my cherry-coloured coat and matching beret will be my fashion statement. We’ll be mooching around outside for most of the time. I’m wearing m
y boots, which have form and function in the snow, keeping my legs dry and warm.

  The flea market is on 6th and 23rd. The one on the left is free; on the right you have to pay a dollar to get in. I wander through the free stalls, fingering the sock monkeys and the Indian silk cushions. I look at a table of Chinese dolls with both male and female genitals. They’re beautiful and freaky, as if they might contain sinister powers, rising from their slumber in the middle of the night to give birth to hermaphrodite babies. Wendy buys a ring: she has jars of rings, many of them too small for her fat fingers, but when she’s thin and in love, she’ll wear them all again. There are tables with abacuses, old biscuit tins imprinted with scenes of Arabia, maple-veneered radios that haven’t heard of FM and chipped enamel colanders. Someone has trays of type intended for posters, their reversed wooden letters still stained with ink. They’re a dollar a letter, and I buy a T for Toby, an R for Rebecca. I linger over a crate of bakelite crockery, the remnants of a diner that has upgraded.

  I stop at a little table glinting with colours. There are beads in different medicine jars, arranged in hues: blues merge into greens into yellows, which run into oranges, reds, purples and back into blues. Then there’s a show biz row of silver and gold beads on a raised stand. I pick up one of the green jars, hold it up to the sun. I catch it at the wrong angle and it blinds me. I put it back down on the table.

  ‘Mind you put it in the right place,’ says the old woman, tiny, stooped, turbanned. Her aquamarine coat matches her turban and underneath I can see a mass of pearls; I wonder if they’re real. The beads seem to be in the right place, between the blue and the lime green, but the woman moves them over.

  ‘Are you a dressmaker?’ I ask.

  ‘I was a costume maker. Now I don’t see well enough to stitch those itty-bitty sequins on.’

  I select a jar of red beads. They’re a tamarillo red, unmuddied by too much yellow. They remind me of blood. I feel a sudden pang. What if this is my great-aunt? Dad said she was a costume maker for Broadway shows. Suddenly I am sure of it.

  ‘Are you Esther Kirschen?’ I ask.

  ‘Why do you need to know who I am?’

  ‘I’m Rebecca Quinn, your niece from New Zealand.’

  ‘No, you’re not. My niece and nephew live in Minnesota.’

  ‘But Dad told me you never married.’

  ‘Look, young lady, I don’t know who you are, you might be a vulture identity thief after my social security number, but my name is Molly Hogg and my niece is called Candice Truman, married to Colby Truman. Now, would you kindly buy my beads or put them down?’

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’ I hand money over in embarrassment, the crone muttering at my too-big twenty-dollar note. I need to find the real Esther, to stop assuming that life will unfold in a manner convenient to me.

  I turn, walking towards Wendy, holding my beads against my eye so the world seems fractured and red.

  Wendy is talking to a short guy selling collaged blocks. The images are taken from 1960s and 1970s books and glued together to make a surrealist tableau. The horizon lines curve, roller skaters surging out of the picture frame.

  ‘Hey, check this out, Rebecca, REDRUM.’ Wendy is holding a scene in white and red that looks familiar: two girls standing at the top of hotel steps that looked like the one in The Shining. ‘This guy’s a big Kubrick fan. He’s also in a punk band.’

  ‘Hey,’ says the guy, holding out his fingerless-gloved hand. It’s flaccid, despite the tattoos that curl around his neck. I want to ask him if that hurt, getting a tattoo around there, but I’m conscious that everyone would ask him that question. When I look at Wendy there’s a brightness in her eyes that I don’t normally see; her cheeks have taken on a glow.

  ‘Isn’t he so talented?’ Wendy asks me, and I agree, wondering whether she’s been flirting, whether she has the slightest chance of scoring. There’s a man shortage in New York; I’m not liking her chances. ‘Rebecca’s a musician too.’

  The guy looks interested. ‘What do you play?’

  ‘Cello,’ I say. ‘Classical for money, indie for love.’

  ‘Interesting,’ he says. ‘I’m a drummer. I learned piano when I was a kid, but it wasn’t my scene.’

  ‘Yeah, well …’ I say, trailing off, fighting the disenfranchised feeling that comes over me when I meet a purist.

  ‘I am totally going to come back and buy one of your collages when I get some money together,’ Wendy says. ‘I think they would go well on my bookshelf. My shelves are post-industrial. I made them myself.’

  ‘Great,’ says the guy.

  ‘I’ve got a blog. I sometimes post pictures of what I make. Here, I’ll write down the URL for you.’ Wendy fishes a piece of crumpled paper out of her bag, muttering, ‘I really should get some business cards printed.’

  The man takes the paper scrap and smooths it, then folds it into a matchstick and slips it into his sock.

  Wendy holds up a waitress and a zebra in a Viennese tea house. ‘Oh, wouldn’t Iggy love that? Put that on hold for me.’

  I think Iggy would prefer another zebra fish friend.

  ‘He was cute,’ says Wendy, as we cross the road to the other market.

  ‘Did you see his tattoos?’

  ‘I wonder whether he had them all over his body. I bet you he did.’

  ‘I got one above each hip, and that hurt. I didn’t think it would. I thought since I was so used to injections that it wouldn’t bother me.’

  ‘You’ve got a tattoo? Really? But you seem so nice. Or maybe I’m just being fooled by your accent.’

  ‘It’s a bit embarrassing. I got f-holes so that I could look like that Man Ray photo, you know, woman as cello. But I’ll just look like bean bag with stains if I ever get fat. And also, what was I thinking, that I was my instrument? I got it done in London, with Lily, probably just to impress her.’

  ‘Lily was a tattoo freak,’ says Wendy. ‘All those Native American ones, just because she had a Navajo great-grandmother. And too many piercings. If you ask me that girl was into self-harm.’

  ‘They looked beautiful on her. She had such great skin. Honey-coloured.’ I think of Lily, her slender limbs that I envied and wanted to touch. Of the juxtaposition of her tattooed self against her viola. I remembered us going to the tattoo parlour together, a forbidding place in Brixton, red and black, strange fanged creatures painted on the ceilings. The man who tattooed us had threaded his skin with small stakes, and I was pleased to be able to lie face down, to avoid his pale-eyed gaze as he needled me. Lily was having a silver birch skeleton tattooed on her hip — we took turns, holding each other’s hand as we were marked.

  ‘I almost got a tattoo, but I could never decide what I wanted. First I almost got sea horses, then I thought about Edvard Munch’s Scream. I’m still contemplating a Louis XV chair or something. I don’t know — I’m so indecisive. Also, I really don’t like the addictive quality of it. I have a disorder-prone personality, I’m sure I’d end up with a full body tattoo. Or a horrible infection.’

  ‘Then you could be in a freak show.’

  ‘If that would earn me some more cash.’

  I laugh — Wendy’s quite fun to be around at times, as long as I let her health neuroses slide over me. I keep pretty quiet about my own. I feel like I can’t start talking because then I’d never stop. The constant commentary in my brain — Is this making me higher? Lower? How long till I need to eat or test or inject? I suspect myself of machismo, believing that one shouldn’t reveal one’s weaknesses. ‘Shall we head back?’

  ‘Oh no, I’ve got to take you to the City Deli first — they make the best hot chocolates. And scapes, have you ever tried those? Garlic shoots, they’re delicious.’

  Toby is still in bed when we get home, reading a magazine in his underwear. He has been eating toast, and the crumbs remain on the sheets, no sparrows to eat them. I grit my teeth in annoyance, think about dumping him for that reason alone.

  ‘Couldn’t you have done somethin
g while I was out? Maybe washed the dishes? Or taken the dirty clothes to the laundromat?’ I hate him when he’s hung-over, he’s so useless.

  ‘My head hurts,’ he says. He sits up, skin white and sweaty, his stomach pleating. I can’t see what attracted me in the first place. I wonder why we’re together, all the time hating myself for my inconstancy. It would be easier if one of us had a job; just a day away from Toby makes me realise how suffocated we’ve been by each other, the constant togetherness of travel.

  Toby takes his hands away from his forehead. ‘Oh, someone called while you were out.’

  ‘Who, Esther?’ I don’t know why I say this; she doesn’t have my number, unless Dad has sent it to her.

  ‘No, Ed, from your quartet. They want to rehearse for New Jersey. You should call. But tell them you can’t do it tomorrow morning — that’s when we have our co-op shift.’

  ‘Did they leave a number?’

  ‘I wrote it in your address book.’

  He picks it off the bedside table and hands it to me, and I open it to the letter E. Ed’s number is scrawled below Esther’s. But I will ring Ed second, Esther first.

  CHAPTER 14

  Wellington, 1992

  I wore my Morrissey concert T-shirt whenever I could, swapping my school uniform for it as soon as I came home. My mother tried to wash it more, but I didn’t want Edith Sitwell’s sepia face and jewel-encrusted fingers to be eroded by the washing powder’s hungry enzymes. I wanted to remember the frenzy that had been the concert, the front rows of seats felled by our leaping, the blue organza shirt that Morrissey ripped off and threw into the audience. I wanted to remember his tambourine, which landed on my head, and the hank of hair torn out by other people fighting over this souvenir. I wore my T-shirt to Diabetes Youth Group, a declaration of independence in a room full of apathy.

  ‘It’s lucky you’re not a male diabetic,’ said my mother conspiratorially, as she dropped me off for another meeting.