She sipped some tea as she looked over the words, made a few revisions, drummed out a few different tempos on her knees. How hard it had been. All the cross-outs, the false starts, the ideas that seemed to hold promise but went nowhere, dribbling off the page like some wayward doodle. She respected the brother even more now that she had written her own song. And all the songwriters they’d worked with and she’d just taken for granted, how she’d assumed they’d always come up with something great for her, that it would magically appear on her music stand. “Thank you,” she whispered across the side table toward the window, and picked up her hands to push the words out into the world, swooping her arms in a full drum fill, hoping that somewhere all the songwriters who’d ever written something she’d sung would hear them, or at least feel them. She’d get around to thanking as many of them as she could in person once she was back in L.A. again. And let them know she was back, and ready again to give their songs flight. Songbird.
She looked over the words one last time, then hit the record button. The key she’d picked — she wasn’t sure what it was, maybe D-flat major, but it wasn’t too high or low, a nice midrange, just like that first hit of theirs. She flubbed the lyrics a few times and had to start over. The first time she got all the words, she still wasn’t happy with the tempo. Just a smidge slow. The song wasn’t a ballad per se. She knew things had to move a bit these days. Then when the tempo was good, relaxed but sprightly, she thought her pitch was slightly sharp, and she had no pitch pipe to help her correct.
But after an hour or so, she had the song down. She listened to the playback a few times. Was it a hit? Well, who knew what made a hit anymore? If that “Tainted Love” was a hit, who could predict? And it was only her first try. But she’d done it. She’d written a song, and here was the evidence on the tape. She wrote the title on the white strip, stuck it to the cassette, put it in the case and dropped it in her purse.
The next afternoon she checked three times to make sure she had everything. Small bills for the crazy cart guy. A subway token and a 50 for the busker’s finale, her final finale. And the tape.
That morning she’d woken and felt something babbling, burbling in her chest. Something trying to get out. Must be all those songs I haven’t been singing all these months, she thought. Putting down her song last night on the tape must have loosed all of them inside her.
F. had called that morning, while she was lying down after dressing, showering, eating. “Won’t be long now,” she said. “All these months, all this time, all that I’ve lost. Time for some things to come back to me now.”
“Honey, are you sure you’re ready?” F. said. “The holidays, there’s so much pressure, there’ll be so much. . . .”
“So much what?” she said. “You know.” “It’s all right. You don’t have to dance around it. Go on, say it:
The F-word. . . . Food! Food. Food. Food.” Shouting the word gave her a rush, a burst of energy to sit up in bed.
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m not afraid of it anymore. And anyway, I have all these contracts to sign, things to get in order. Gotta ditch the creep, too. And see my godchildren. How are the little munchkins?”
“They can’t wait to see you!”
“Well, tell ’em I’ll be there soon, with lots of presents for them both.”
Her godchildren, were they really 5 already? She’d missed a big chunk of their lives too. Another reason she had to get back to L.A. Hell’s exit gates were finally opening for her, and she had to pass through them while she could.
She tried on a few different outfits for her last walk around New York. The usual sweater-and-jeans ensembles, but in about six different color combinations, with her pink satin jacket. She enjoyed trying on clothes now, playing a little dress-up, loved the fact that the clothes actually fit, didn’t fall off her anymore. Some of them, the smaller pieces, were actually a little snug. But after a half-hour or so, she finally just picked some blue jeans and her usual merino sweater. Then she put on her baseball cap and the one pair of Nikes she hadn’t packed. She was ready.
On her way out the door she felt a little dizzy. She was so used to bounding around. Her doctors said she had to remember that she’d just put the equivalent of 25 percent of her weight back on. Imagine someone who weighed 200 suddenly going to 250, they said. She needed to take it easy, to let her body get used to the extra she was lugging around. When she got outside and started walking, the weather seemed to change on her every block, the wind like icicles slicing through her on one, the next the heat beating down on her from above and steaming up from the pavement below, trapping her in a pressure cooker. Still, she pushed on. Her body would adjust, she thought.
The walk felt like a farewell, even though she knew it wasn’t. She’d be back in February for the birth of P. and I.’s baby. Just as soon as the business affairs were in order. Maybe she’d move to New York someday. Her walk felt like the last date of a tour before they headed home, knowing they’d be back again when the next album came out.
She thought she might actually talk to the smelly guy with the cart this time, to tell him she was leaving and to wish him well. But as she approached his usual corner on Sixth Avenue, she didn’t see him. Maybe he was marching up and down the block. She turned the corner, but he was still nowhere in sight. She looked all the way up Sixth Avenue as far as Radio City, and down toward Macy’s, but he was clearly not around today. Then she looked down and saw a few crumbly flowers and votive candles ringed around a 45, perched up against the corner building, a store that sold tourist tchotchkes, almost like a mini-shrine. She bent closer. The 45 was Diana Ross and the Supremes’ “Someday We’ll Be Together.”
She was sorry to miss him. She thought about leaving some money under the record in case he came back, but she knew he’d probably never see it. Maybe they’d meet again the next time she was in the city.
When she stood up straight, she had to steady herself on the wall of the building, press her hand into the cement slab. The burbling in her chest again. It’s nothing, she thought. Her body would get used to this.
Her next stop was the subway platform. The finale. She hadn’t been around to hear it in weeks, since before the hospitalization and the family visit. She wondered if the man would even be there, especially now that the days were getting colder. Maybe buskers had seasons, too, like crazy guys with carts. She would try the same time as always: 3:20. Even with her slower gait, she still had a good 15 minutes to go just a few blocks.
But as she crossed Sixth Avenue, she felt her mind moving faster, her body lagging behind it, trailing it again, as if all the new weight she was carrying dropped down her legs and into her feet, turned her sneakers into solid lead blocks, the air in front of her something she had to break through, pierce. The more she pressed, the harder it seemed to move. People passed her, bumped her, jostled her. She had to stop several times to catch her breath. It was never like this when she was thinner.
She got to the subway hole at 3:10, still in plenty of time, but it was closed off, with yellow police tape spread from railing to railing. Construction or crime scene or something. She tried another opening a block over but wasn’t sure where it took her when she got down the stairs. The extra steps fatigued her, and on the way down another set of them she got caught going against the current of school kids emptying out and up. By the time she got her bearings, it was already 3:23. Maybe the busker would have been late himself that day.
When she finally got to the platform, she was relieved and elated to find he was still there. But he was already starting to pack up his keyboard and his shoebox earnings. She must have just missed the song, if in fact he had sung it. She decided to give him the 50 anyway. He might need it for the cold winter ahead. She moved close to the nearby magazine kiosk to open her purse — all that time in New York, maybe even being stopped by the cop months ago, had taught her some street smarts, so she knew not to take out the money in the open space. Sh
e clasped the 50 in her fingers and started to move toward the shoebox, which was still on the ground. She crept right next to it and opened her fingers, looked around and got ready to drop the bill into the box, less than a foot from the busker.
“Put your money away,” he said suddenly, in a deep, resonant whisper, his body a monument, his face locked straight ahead.
“I’m sorry?” she said, bolting upright and closing her hand around the bill.
“You heard me. Keep your money.” She stared at him. Was he really blind or another city hustler? His eyes didn’t seem to move toward her, and yet the sheer shiny hulk of him held her there.
“You haven’t been around here in a while,” he said. “Where’d you go?”
“I’m sorry, you must have me mistaken for somebody else,” she said, trying to back away from him.
“I don’t think so,” he said, his voice now a confident burring bass, intoning both below and above the rumble of the unseen trains coming and going in other tunnels. “I know exactly who you are. Always here for the last song.” He paused for a beat. “Your song.”
Now she was frightened for maybe the first time since she’d been in New York, much more than the day when the cart guy spit on her. Did he really know who she was? Had he known the whole time? “I have to be going,” she said, but before she could move very far, a train emptied, and the people pouring out of it pinned her close to the busker. She lost her footing a bit trying to move, to mix in with the crowd, but somehow ended up right before him. She took a step toward the shoebox again.
“I told you, I don’t want your money,” he said. “But there is something else you can do for me.”
Could she scream if she needed to? This wasn’t on the itinerary for the day. Improvisation still didn’t come naturally to her.
She turned to face him, but far enough away to run if she needed to. “What . . . what do you want?” she said.
“I want you to sing with me.”
“What?”
“Sing with me. You know something about that, don’t you?”
She couldn’t, didn’t want to believe that the man knew who she really was. He’d probably just heard her humming along all those times she came to hear the finale. Could she risk it? She hadn’t sung in public in months. Most of those last TV performances they did, they lip-synced. It’s true that she had been able to sing into the tape recorder the night before, but that didn’t mean she was up to it now on a New York subway platform. Maybe F. and I. were right. Maybe this was all happening a little too fast.
The busker unfolded his keyboard stand again and placed the little piano on top, and soon his meaty, ringed fingers were gliding over the keys. She thought he’d choose the finale again, but once he stopped noodling and played the opening bars of a song, it wasn’t the finale at all. It was another one of hers, though. The one about the groupie. So there was no doubt now. He knew.
Say yes to everything: Singing.
She steadied herself, letting him vamp over the opening eight or 10 times, and started to take the first breath before the first note, but then stopped every time.
“Whenever you’re ready,” he said, not breaking the vamp.
A small crowd was forming now, slowing, in that blasé New York way, to absorb a little of the scene without seeming too interested.
He played the opening riff a few more times, and finally she started. “Long ago. . . .”
After the first phrase, the busker stopped playing. “What’s that?” he said.
“You asked me to sing,” she said.
“I did. But I want to hear your real voice. Not that approximation.”
“I, I don’t think I know what you mean.”
The busker lifted his left hand from the keyboard in a slow, grand sweep, moved it next to his mouth, and closed his thumb and forefinger next to his lips. Then suddenly his other hand joined it, and they moved in reverse directions along his body from the top of his head to the end of his torso, his bottom arm suddenly dropping untethered.
“Use all of your voice,” he said. “Like on the record.” He started to play the intro again. “Put the soul back into it.”
Why am I standing here, putting myself through this? she thought. Isn’t it enough that I put the weight back on my body? Do I have to put it back on my voice too? But as the busker played a flurry of arpeggios, leaving her lots of room, she realized something: She’d been making her voice smaller because she thought it was the only way she’d be noticed inside her brother’s bigness. Or because she’d felt guilty for crowding him out of what was supposed to be his spotlight. His life. Now, with just a single piano, no strings, no four-part harmony tripled over, she didn’t have to make her voice disappear anymore. Or herself.
Singers reveal things.
She started again. It was almost like that first take of the song all those years ago, reading the lyrics off the napkin, when she wasn’t thinking that that would be the take they kept, when she wasn’t concentrating too hard, when she was slightly spilling over the words, making them give as much as they had. The busker stayed with her, shadowed her, followed a baby step behind her so that she knew she was the star of this show. As things heated up around the first chorus, they were both almost attacking the song. But she led the charge. The final line of the chorus brought things down to the earth, and by then he practically wasn’t playing at all. It was all her, and she didn’t back off. She leaned into that last line the way she used to, her own low voice now seeming to push against the wall on the other side of the subway tracks.
She figured she’d catch her breath for the second verse and chorus, regather her voice, but the busker never got there. He just ended the song. She looked again for some recognition. There was a smattering of applause.
He just nodded at her. “Now that,” he said, “is what I’ve been waiting to hear.”
32. New York City, Fall 1982
Andy watched the E.M.T.s load the body into the ambulance from across the street. He’d seen the man collapse, one minute striding with his cart, again in camos, chanting something about all going down together, and the next minute actually going down, dropping so fast, rag-doll-like, almost as if he’d been shot or had fallen out of a window, that he couldn’t even try to grab the handle of his cart before he landed on the pavement. Andy called 911 and started toward the man — he’d had extensive CPR training in the academy — but by then a beat cop was on the scene, waving the crowd back and trying to revive the man himself. The cart, with a small tub of cigarette butts and crushed pizza boxes on top, rolled back and forth, as if searching for its master’s grip. Andy stepped away as the sirens of the ambulance got closer.
And still there was no sign of the woman. With the cart man almost surely dead now, there was one less reason for her to pass by this corner again.
She was somewhere close, though. He could feel it.
He kept watch on the block a few more times, when he could get there on his days off. Someone left a 45 and some flowers on the corner near where the man was frequently stationed. Andy always made sure the thing was in place when he walked by. The record was by the Supremes. Their last No. 1. The last No. 1 hit of the ’60s. It seemed a proper shrine for someone who never got out of the ’60s himself.
Andy spent the time he was waiting thinking of what he would say to her when she showed up. Always be prepared for the perps, who had the litany of excuses, versions of “the dog ate my homework.” “I was only here for a minute, Officer.” “I didn’t see the sign.” “I thought I had the light.” “My old lady is really sick, gotta get to her.” “I don’t know how that got there.” “I never smoked a joint in my life.” “There’s no problem, Officer, really.” The usual comebacks were just as programmed: “So you’re telling me I’m wrong, is that it?” “You’re saying that I’m not seeing what’s in front of me?” “Telling me I need glasses?” Get them back on their heels. Get in front of them. Let one go every now and then with a stern warning, especiall
y the ones who admitted they’d done something wrong. Andy’s firm but gentle manner was usually such that they felt sorry for him; by the end people he stopped often sounded as if they wanted the ticket. “A natural confessor” is what his partner once called him.
But what to say to her now if she actually showed up? It was easier when he was writing a letter and could keep that distance, that artificial intimacy, between them. Was he ready for the reality
of her? Could he really say anything to help her? What more than “Please live”? Would he come off as an interrogator? Would she think he was just another New York crazy? Would she remember him from the last time? What would she have to confess? Andy’s thoughts were crowding him, making his heart race, sucking up the air around him.
And there was still the chance that it wasn’t the singer after all.
Another week went by. Andy was almost starting to feel stood up. And hungry. He’d been subsisting on coffee and carrots, the occasional bagel or banana or Snickers bar. It was easier to go hungry when you weren’t really trying. He’d be a sight for her now, disheveled and unshaven and looking not much different from the cart guy.
It got well into November. Even in the bull’s-eye of Midtown, of city grime and junk, a million heart-attacks-waiting-to-happen walking by him every day, there was something calming in the autumn light to Andy, in the way the sun caressed the buildings now instead of pouncing on them, bounced gently off the pavement, everything low to the ground. The crackling melancholy in the air. He thought of the singer’s second big hit, so full of spirit and promise and yet also embracing, not confronting, a song of perfect autumn harvest. So full of her. At her best, he realized, she had an autumnal voice, deep and dark-hued, yet fluttery. Even the first hit, the big summer song, had that shading, that warmth of a sweater about it, a low but steady fire. He thought of that boy in the booth. The way the baseball cap, wrapped backward on his head, seemed almost sculptural, ingrained, part of the boy’s skin, as if it couldn’t be knocked off no matter how anyone tried. That day they’d met was over 10 years ago now, and still Andy occasionally wondered where he might be, what he looked like, if he was listening to her still.
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