American Music

by Jane Mendelsohn

Marvelous. Give me six.

  How’s the proud papa?

  Working hard. He’ll be thrilled to have lamb chops.

  The man behind the counter wiped his cold wet hands on his apron and began hacking away at some meat. He measured it and wrapped it up in thick white paper and then he tied it up with string. He leaned forward over the counter to hand it to the woman and as he did so he said, Let me see the gorgeous little princess.

  The woman turned the carriage around so the man could see.

  No, no, lift her up. I need a good look.

  The woman removed the infant from her comfortable bedding and lifted her up and showed her to the butcher.

  Is she a beauty, the man said.

  The woman beamed. The baby squirmed a little. The woman gave her a loving squeeze.

  Arnold, c’mere, the man said. Look at her. Look at those gorgeous green eyes.

  What was her name?

  Who?

  The child?

  No one said.

  I kept searching but I couldn’t find out.

  Honor had both hands on his rib cage. She moved them around his back. I looked all over. It isn’t there.

  It’s somewhere.

  Will you lie on your back? she said.

  He shook his head into the pillow.

  You can find it without that, he said.

  Her hand stopped. She saw a woman rising out from the entrance to a subway station. It was raining slightly when she emerged onto the street.

  1973

  The rain grew harder. The woman opened an umbrella. It was later, decades later, and although much on the street could have been there when the woman with the baby walked into the butcher shop, you could tell by the clothes, the cars, the style of the streetlights, that time had passed. The woman walked up Lexington Avenue past shoe stores and coffee shops and newsstands that sold cigars. They had black awnings that said Optimo in red. She turned east and headed over toward Second Avenue. She walked down a block of brownstones at the end of which stood a tall brick apartment building and she turned under the awning and walked inside. The doorman said hello.

  She got her mail from a wall lined with silver mailboxes. There were letters addressed to Mrs. Alex Michaels. And a postcard that began “Dear Iris.” She turned right at the black-and-white sign that read Fallout Shelter and waited for the elevator. She rode up to the twentieth floor. It was one of the last times she would ever enter this building and she was acutely aware of every landmark on her journey home. On her floor she stepped down the hallway and before she had opened the door her little girl was running to her. Mommy, the girl said. The mother scooped up her daughter. She would not tell her that they were leaving yet. Mommy, the girl said, Did you get rained on? Are you wet? Guess what happened!

  Tell me everything, Anna, her mother said.

  2006

  Honor lay down next to Milo in the narrow bed. My mother’s name is Anna, she said.

  Is she alive? he asked.

  Yes, she said.

  That’s good, he said.

  But we haven’t seen each other in a long time.

  He put his arm over her chest and touched her hair. Why not? he said.

  She had me when she was very young, a teenager. It was hard. She wasn’t ready for me. Not really ever. I know she loved me but she was not ready and so it seemed as if she was always gone, in the midst of leaving, never really there. I left to become a dancer when I finished high school. I came back to New York where she was from and she didn’t want to come back. My grandparents had been very disappointed, and once she left New York they cut her off until she would come back. She didn’t. They reached out to her before they died, but she felt it was too late. And by the time I came back they were gone. They both died fairly young.

  Where is she now?

  I don’t even know.

  But you could find out.

  I suppose so.

  Do you think that’s her? In the apartment?

  Right now I think anything is possible.

  She leaned her face on the back of his wide shoulder.

  Your body is like a haunted house, she said. And it seems as though I live there.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Anna

  The shadows and reflections chased each other across the ceiling. Cars enacting an endless search party. How did the lights reach up so many stories? She knew she lived on the twentieth floor and it seemed impossible that the tiny automobiles like Matchbox cars so far below could cast such shadows in her room. But what else could it be? Twenty floors, twenty stories, twenty centuries. She should have felt removed from the street and history and the past so high up above but she was always aware of some force coming from behind to catch her. She was only six. She had an Easy-Bake oven and a firing squad of stuffed animals along her bed and she was reading books nearly as big as she was but nothing could protect her from the eternal race on the ceiling of her bedroom, the screaming from the other room.

  When they told her they were not going to live together as a family anymore she thought: Now I understand. The chasing never stops.

  So it was with a dark wisdom beyond her years that she had a baby at seventeen. It wasn’t done but she did it. (She never told anyone who the father was, and he, with his ski parka and feathered hair and abashed smiles in the cafeteria, never thought to ask or thank her.) If the past was always coming up behind her she thought she might as well turn around and bite it back. She hadn’t expected to love the girl so much. She hadn’t expected to want to give the girl something so much better. If she had thought it was possible to stop the chasing, she would have done everything differently.

  2006

  I want to know what this has to do with Joe and Vivian, said Honor. What this has to do with us.

  It may not have anything to do with us, Milo said. It may just be another story.

  But you know it’s more than that, she said.

  I’m not sure I have as much faith as you do, he said.

  It makes no sense if it isn’t somehow our story, she said.

  Why does it have to make sense? I had to get used to things not making sense.

  But you only started to get better when you stopped thinking that way, when you wanted to know what would happen next. When you cared about the stories, about the people, about us.

  I still care about you, he said.

  Am I enough to keep you going?

  He looked at the ceiling. At the walls. No saxophones sliding through them. No scarves billowing down.

  For now, he said. I’ll keep going until the chasing ends.

  They were standing opposite each other, facing each other.

  Then I don’t want the chasing to end.

  She fell asleep. She slept deeply and didn’t dream. In the night he rolled over and she woke with her hand on his chest. He was lying on his back.

  The sun was a hole in the sky like a cigarette burn. Around it the sky was a pulsing white light that hurt to look at. He looked at it. He had never learned to tell time by the sun but it looked like lunchtime and there wouldn’t be any. They were waiting by the side of the road. For something.

  The desert stretched out around them and he felt like the first of many figures to be painted on a canvas. Where was everybody else? The artist had up and left. For lunch, he thought to himself and laughed.

  What’s so funny? the other guy said. His name was Caleb.

  Nothing, Milo said.

  You laugh a lot, Caleb said.

  I guess that’s a kind of compliment, Milo said.

  To yourself, Caleb said. You laugh a lot to yourself.

  Milo looked out at the empty canvas.

  It’s not because I’m so happy, he said.

  Didn’t think so, Caleb said.

  Why were they just standing there? Milo couldn’t remember. He’d even been told, afterwards, by people who knew, and he could never remember. They had something to do by the side of the road and they were going to be picked up but the t
ruck was late. They were waiting by the side of the road like they were waiting for a city bus.

  What’s your favorite movie? Caleb said.

  That’s a hard question, Milo said.

  It’s not a trick question, Caleb said. Just answer.

  Milo scrunched up his face and looked down and kicked the dusty road.

  What’s the first thing that comes into your head?

  The first thing that comes into my head isn’t necessarily my favorite movie.

  Caleb turned his face to the side and looked out at the desert. Milo didn’t think he was looking for that AWOL artist.

  Do you want to know my favorite? Caleb said.

  Sure.

  I’d have to say it’s oh shit there’s the truck.

  Milo laughed a little. To himself. He saw the truck driving toward them too like a blob of paint at the end of a brush coming nearer and nearer.

  They both leaned down to pick up the things they were carrying and had left to rest on the road and small clouds of dust spewed up around their legs and Milo said I guess you’ll tell me later and Caleb said sure and then they could both see the truck coming nearer and it didn’t look like the kind of truck they were expecting but everything was so fucked up around here that they didn’t immediately think anything of it and then as the truck which was coming fast and which looked now to Milo like a whole can of paint being thrown at them from a distance came closer they could see a body lean out the window and it had an arm and the arm was holding something and it was still too far away for them to really see but it was not good and Caleb had been standing to the side of Milo and now for no good reason that Milo could ever think of Caleb jumped on Milo and pushed him down to the ground and Caleb was on top of him so that when the explosion came it came inside of Caleb’s person like a body possessed being flung around by an inner demon catapulted by inner fireworks as if the demon were being extinguished and in its place the most beautiful thoughts and brilliant inventions were being visited on the pale and fragile body that remained. Caleb’s heavy body lay on Milo for ten hours before Milo heard the other truck. Milo’s spinal cord injury made it impossible for him to move and his arms were broken so that he could not push Caleb off. Milo was lying on his back.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  When he woke up her arm was no longer on his chest. It was flung above her on the pillow curving around her head as if she were dancing in her sleep. Her face was pointing toward her inner elbow as if there were something written there. He had rolled over and was lying on his front, his face pressed into the pillow. He did not remember or know that he had been lying on his back and that her hand had touched him where the embers burned. He only knew that he was waking with a fear in his ribs and an ache in his solar plexus and a hum of panic in his head. It was as if something terrifying was about to walk through the wall into the room and crush him into the bed.

  He felt a sun burning down on him and a weight bearing down on him and then he smelled the smell of flesh and blood hot and sticky against his chest. He pressed his face harder into the pillow. He shut his eyes tight and let out a thin wail but he did not want to wake her she looked so perfect and calm. With each degree of closing his eyes a new image flew toward him: a white sky, a little explosion of dust around a boot and leg, a blob of paint growing closer, a body thrown and jerked in the air by an invisible horse, a head of hair so matted with blood that it looked like a kind of dark sea creature that had attached itself to his chest. Then he saw the whole scene, again, clearly in his mind and he knew that she had found his story.

  They say that for some patients the telling and retelling of the story brings relief. For others, it is too much. Milo pressed his face into the pillow for a long time and he wished that he could suffocate the memories. When he thought about them they seemed so banal, just an average wartime disaster, but when he relived them they were his disaster, and that made all the difference. When he thought that Honor now had access to his story he felt ashamed at the paltry nature of his trauma. No massacre, no heroics, no mutiny. Just violence and waiting, mutilation and sorrow, and basic, everyday death. How surprising was that? How special? Was it worth the wait to find out? he wanted to ask her. Did it make him seem even crazier than he was? Wasn’t that just what war was?

  But then he heard the questions he was asking himself and he realized that he was being cruelest to himself, that of course a dead comrade lying on top of you for hours would leave a trace, a scar, a wound. So if he stopped being cruel to himself about it, what would he do with all that anger? When he had this thought at first he thought: I must be getting better. This is the kind of thing they have been trying to teach me here. How to forgive myself, how to move on. But then a moment later he had a vision of his own death, and he knew that he would never really get better.

  Light came in the room from the window. It was night but there were bright lights shining from someplace. She got out of bed, disoriented, and closed the shade. It took her a moment to recognize the little table, the bed, the body sleeping. She had never before fallen asleep here. She wondered why the nurse hadn’t woken her and told her visiting hours were over but then she remembered which nurse was on duty and knew that it was one who bent the rules. Honor was wearing her clothes: jeans, socks, a long-sleeved T-shirt. She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at Milo. He was lying on his front with his face pressed into the pillow. For a moment she was worried that he wasn’t breathing. Then she saw the gentle inflation and lift in his rib cage and she could breathe again herself. She talked to him while he slept. She told him that he was going to be okay. She stroked his light brown soft thick hair.

  She took off her jeans and slipped back under the covers. Suddenly, he rolled over onto his back. Instinctively, she put her hand on his chest and then she remembered the body inhabited by a demon. He moaned in his sleep. His eyes were still closed. He was clenching his fists and he was crying now. She lifted herself onto him and from up above, for the first time, she touched his face.

  1937

  The feeling that his life would be a series of revelations, the feeling that Joe had had in the little kitchen while Vivian stood in the weird lavender light that afternoon in September so long ago, was not a feeling he would ever have again. There were no more revelations.

  The streets were deserted after dusk.

  He walked along the same Brooklyn streets that she had covered so many times without him. He could see her family’s house now up the block and he felt his heart pick up the pace and run ahead of him, up the street, up the sloping steps of the dark brownstone. He had put on a tie for this occasion and now he felt too formal and so he took it off and stuffed it into his pocket. He walked faster and then he was standing at the landing. Lights were on within and he waited in the yellow glow. Her mother opened the door. He stepped inside and although he had been to the house only once before he felt oddly at home amidst the heavy carpets and dark wood furniture and he moved down the hall after Vivian’s mother as if he had moved down this hall many times before or in a thousand dreams. The older woman floated in front of him like an apparition, paused at the entrance to Vivian’s room, and then walked away.

  She was sitting up in bed under a faded quilt. She was wearing a demure nightgown he had never seen before. Her hair was down and it fell softly below her shoulders, longer than he had ever seen it. He had not seen her for some time. She put the book she was reading down on the bedside table beneath the lamp with the red silk shade and he stepped forward into the pinkish light.

  Come closer, she said.

  She nodded her head toward a basket next to the bed.

  He looked inside. She’s beautiful, he said. She looks like you, he said. He was trying to smile. Vivian reached out her arms and he realized that she wanted him to hand her the baby and with great trembling and a swimming feeling in his head he bent over and picked up the infant and handed her to her mother. Oh Vivian.

  And then he broke down. Vivian, he said, are you
sure you want to do this?

  He would not do this if she had the slightest hesitation. She looked so beautiful, he said, holding her child. And Vivian rocked the child gently and for a moment the girl opened her eyes slowly like nature changing under time-lapse photography and looked up at her mother and then closed them, contented, and fell back to sleep. He kept saying Vivian and he was crying and his hands lay helplessly in his lap and then she said to him:

  I’d like to name her Iris.

  Of course, he said, whatever you want. A darkness was outlining everything he saw like a border that separated his vision from the rest of the world. Somewhere in the house a door closed. It seemed as though a million doors were closing in his mind each at a slightly different time and the effect was of a virtuosic drumming, a percussion of endings softly building to a final slam.

  The baby let out a small cry.

  Vivian’s face was red and splotchy. She looked like she had been in battle, and she had the worn beauty of the still standing. She looked down at the infant with a weary expression full of love and unbuttoned her nightgown and began to nurse her. She seemed older to him, and possessing a dignity that he knew he would never be able to approach.

  They had been through so much, he said, the two of them. Was she sure …

  She did not look at him. She looked at his open collar and the strength of his neck.

  I couldn’t do this alone, she said—

  You wouldn’t have to, he said.

  But I don’t want to take you away and I need, I need other things.

  She looked at some spot in the air between them. She seemed fragile and he saw her right eye waver.

  I couldn’t take care of her the way you can, she said. The way both of you can.

  He could see that she meant it. Her eyes were steady now, gazing through him.

  We will always take care of her, he said.

  She shivered when he said this and holding the baby tightly to her she said Thank you very quietly and with more tenderness than he had ever seen from her or anyone.