Greatest Hits
Page 13
“Scattered to the winds,” he said. “Todd does something to do with economics at the Paris Embassy—damned if I know exactly what. Maddy teaches grade-school and has three kids. And Harper—well, Harper’s a free spirit, I guess, but of a particular sort. She’s had a ton of jobs, can’t seem to work out which one to stick with. In that, I suppose, she resembles her father. God knows what I’d have done with myself if I hadn’t found art. Or, I should say, if it hadn’t found me.”
Cass didn’t tell Larry that the architecture of his biography—birth, education, family, exhibitions, awards—was already familiar to her; that she had, in her hotel room last night, spent some time acquainting herself with it on Wikipedia.
She had found, too, the catalogue for Larry’s show at Tate Modern, five years before, and for another larger, more recent retrospective at MoMA. She had spent time scrolling through the many reproductions of his work: the graph-paper sketches, hard-angled, precise, more like architectural blueprints than other artists’ breathless, impressionistic drafts; the wooden maquettes, works of painstaking craftsmanship in their own right, but just toys, she could see, in comparison with his finished sculptures. She had observed the blocks of clay and bronze and poured concrete of his early years diminishing, over time, into smaller, more delicate pieces—wood and agate and hand-blown glass—as if the emphatic certainty of his youth were being gradually eroded by his growing awareness of the impossibility of ever truly owning a space, a thing, a moment. By the creeping knowledge that the harder you sought ownership of anything, the more slippery and evanescent it would inevitably become.
This, at least, was what Cass had seen in the photographs, though she said nothing of this aloud. She listened—enjoyed listening; slipped into the stream of Larry’s monologue. Finished her coffee, her pastry; watched the quick, animated dance of his features. Decided that it was true: he did look a little like Abraham Lincoln. And she didn’t mind the resemblance at all.
“I’m talking too much,” he said after a while, noting that their coffee cups were empty. “I’m boring you. I’m so sorry, Cass. I get like this when I’m nervous. Just drone on and on about myself. When it’s you I’d like to hear about, really.”
She smiled. “You’re not boring me at all.”
There was time enough, just, for them to slip into the Andrew Wyeth exhibition. Cass admitted, as they entered, that she had never heard of Wyeth, and Larry said, “Oh, he’s the most brilliant painter. A realist of the old school. Hated by the critics, of course, because he was actually popular. Mostly, he painted rural scenes—fields, abandoned houses, wide, louring skies. He didn’t seem much interested in people. But then, would you believe, it turned out he’d painted the same woman in secret for years, without his wife or her husband ever knowing.”
“Actually,” Cass said, “I can believe that.”
The paintings in the exhibition were all of windows, and the views they framed. Grey clouds massing beyond a white clapboard locker room. Four peaches icily mouldering on a cold concrete sill. A tall white house hunkering down into a hillside under the bare, colourless light of evening.
They walked through the gallery quickly, aware of their diminishing portion of time. And the pictures, seen so fleetingly, began to form a narrative in Cass’s mind—one of loneliness and silence, of light and life glimpsed only at a distance. Of lives lived elsewhere, viewed through a transparent skin of glass.
Outside, back on Constitution Avenue, Larry hailed her a taxi. As the car idled, waiting, he placed a hand on her arm.
“I’d like to see you again, Cass,” he said. “I can’t think exactly how, or where. But do you think it might be possible?”
She looked up at his long, rough-hewn face, with its pits and craters, its startling eyes framed by thick white brows. There was kindness there, she knew, and intelligence, and something else, too—something she hadn’t sensed, in anyone, for such a long, long time. Desire, she supposed it must be; and the presence of it, in that moment, made her afraid.
“I don’t know,” she said. And then, as disappointment struck her, and was matched by the deflated expression on his face, she added, “Yes. I think so. I’d really like that, Larry. Yes, I would.”
Now—in her kitchen, with the flowers that are not from Larry, and the house horribly quiet around her, as if reproaching her for his absence—Cass reaches for the telephone, punches in the number she knows by heart.
There is a moment of silence, as the cables or the satellites or whatever they are these days wait to make their connection. Cass looks out to the garden. The foxes have slunk off again to some undisturbed corner, and Otis is on the patio, sated (he’d followed her into the kitchen earlier, demanding food), washing himself with methodical concentration.
The connection is made: the foreign ringtone—each tuneless note held a beat too long—rises to her ear. She swallows, picturing Larry in his downtown apartment with its high factory windows and expanses of unpainted brick (he has shown her photographs, dark black-and-white studies of plane and shadow), making coffee, or shaking the water from his hair as he steps from the shower. Perhaps he is, right now, drawing the towel around his waist, leaving damp footprints on the parquet as he sprints over to the phone.
Her mouth is dry as she silently prepares what she will say to him.
Larry. It’s Cass. I’m sorry. I miss you. Come back to me, won’t you? Come back to me so we can continue what we’ve started. You must know that I didn’t mean what I said. You must know that I was afraid. And I am trying so hard not to be afraid any longer.
But the telephone rings on and on. Outside, Otis, aware of being watched, lifts his head and returns her stare with his frank, amber eyes, while on the other side of the Atlantic and beyond, in Chicago, in an apartment she has never visited, a telephone shrills out, unanswered, unrelenting.
TRACK FIVE
“Just Us Two”
By Cass Wheeler
From the album The State She’s In
There’s you in the morning
When I open my eyes
And you in the evening
When we say our goodbyes
It’s just us two and that’s enough for me
Just us two and that’s enough for me
It’s just us two and that’s enough for me
It’s just us two
Just us two
Some are only happy
When they’re in a crowd
Others walk alone
In the dead of sound
It’s just us two and that’s enough for me
Just us two and that’s enough for me
It’s just us two and that’s enough for me
It’s just us two
Just us two
One and one is all we need
One and one is all we need
It’s just us two and that’s enough for me
Just us two and that’s enough for me
It’s just us two and that’s enough for me
It’s just us two
Just us two
* * *
RELEASED 13 September 1971
RECORDED June 1971 at Union Studios, London NW10
GENRE Folk rock
LABEL Phoenix Records
WRITER(S) Cass Wheeler
PRODUCER(S) Martin Hartford
ENGINEER(S) Sean O’Malley
She knew all their names by now.
There was Serena, a primary-school teacher who was always commandeering the kitchen table for some new craft project: cutting potatoes in half in order to stamp bright patterns onto paper, or fashioning a papier-mâché model of a giraffe, standing clumsily on its sticky, tapered legs.
The house on Savernake Road ran to Serena’s rules. On Saturday mornings, she would go round knocking on doors, announcing that it was time to “clean up thi
s godforsaken pigsty.” Usually, only Cass and Kate would obey—the men remained, for the most part, impervious to Serena’s demands, drew the covers over their heads and slept on. And so, under Serena’s tutelage, the women would don Marigolds, tie scarves over their hair, and set about emptying the bins, wiping down surfaces, and gathering up the ashtrays and record sleeves and discarded newspapers. Once, not long after she’d moved in, Cass had set about cleaning the bath with bleach. (It was a Sunday afternoon, Ivor had gone off on a painting job with Hugh, and she was struggling to finish a new song.) She’d become aware, after a moment or two, of Serena standing at the bathroom door, watching her.
“Oh, don’t worry about that, Cass,” Serena said. She spoke lightly, but with the firm expectation of being obeyed. “I usually do the bathroom myself.”
Cass had happily relinquished the task. As she went back across the landing to Ivor’s room (her room, too, now: how thrilling that knowledge still was), she had noticed Serena bending low over the bath with the cloth, correcting whatever it was Cass had done wrong.
Serena’s boyfriend (though they didn’t use the term: he called her his “old lady,” and she referred to him as her “old man”) was Bob, and he was as relaxed as she was uptight. Bob was studying for a master’s in medieval English literature, but rarely left the house, for lectures or for anything else. He spent most days smoking grass on his favoured armchair, a hideous, sagging, paisley-patterned thing that had, like most of the furniture in the house, been bequeathed by the landlord, or picked up from skips and flea-markets. There was one particular variety of weed that Bob said made his mind feel pure and cloudless; he acquired it on a weekly basis from his dealer in Swiss Cottage, and then consumed it, slowly and methodically, while listening to The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Bob’s inertia didn’t seem to bother Serena: she’d get home from school, say in the good-natured tone of an exasperated parent, “Oh, Bob, have you not moved from there all day again?” And then she would bring him a cup of tea, and set about preparing his dinner.
Serena and Bob occupied the attic room; on the first floor, next to Cass and Ivor, was Paul. He was a sweet, soft-voiced man, a little overweight, with a florid complexion that was unflatteringly enhanced, most nights, by copious amounts of red wine. Paul never grew rowdy, or displayed much other evidence of drunkenness—he just shrank back into himself, inch by inch, until, quite often, they all forgot that he was in the room, and would be surprised to find him still there the next morning on the sofa, his mouth slightly open, emitting the low rumble of a snore.
Paul was, Ivor told her, rumoured to be gay, though none of them had seen any evidence of this, or of sexual activity of any sort; there was, Cass thought, something rather lonely about him, and it seemed fitting to her that he wanted to be a writer, for what lonelier activity could there be than that? He used that very phrase, too—“I want to be a writer”—as if the writing he actually did every day in his room for hours (he had no other job, and nobody knew where he found the money for his rent) were nothing more than practice for the time when he might finally consider himself worthy of the title.
Kate’s room was across the landing, beside the bathroom. She was twenty-one, an actress and so beautiful, with her waist-length dark hair and china-doll skin, that Cass had, at first, been a little wary of her—not least because she knew that Ivor and Kate had been “involved” for a time.
It was Serena who had told her—they were sitting in the garden on deckchairs one warm summer afternoon, drinking the sweet pink wine Serena favoured. “Of course,” Serena had said, “you know that Kate was desperately in love with Ivor. Probably still is. But she’s hardly the only one.”
Cass had opened her eyes wide behind her sunglasses, looked across at Serena, at the bare skin of her shoulders glistening above her long strapless dress. (They had both smothered themselves in cooking-oil before settling under the sun.) “No. I didn’t know.”
Serena lifted her sunglasses onto her forehead. “Oh, don’t worry about it, Cass. He finished with her ages ago. Didn’t want to be tied down. Not one for that, our Ivor. And of course, after Ursula . . .”
Cass, with great effort, let the ellipsis hang. She knew, by now, who Ursula was (or, as she preferred to phrase it to herself, “had been”): a singer, well regarded on the London circuit, who had been Ivor’s “old lady” for about six months, and had then, quite suddenly, suffered a breakdown and moved to the south of France, where her stepfather kept an apartment.
The south of France was far enough away to permit thoughts of Ursula to slip, mostly, from Cass’s mind; Kate, on the other hand, lived just across the hall. From then on, Cass kept her distance from Kate (a challenge, when they shared the same bathroom and their bedrooms were just a few feet apart), and watched her interactions with Ivor with a hawkish eye.
Ivor didn’t seem to notice—she was coming to understand that there was a lot Ivor didn’t notice—but Kate did. One night, when they were all down at Joe’s bar, she leant over to Cass, and said, “You don’t need to worry about Ivor and me, you know, Cass. It’s ancient history. And I’d really like us to be friends.”
Cass, looking back at Kate in the club’s murky light—remembering Irene and Linda, missing their closeness, their easy intimacy—decided that she’d like that, too.
And then, finally, there was Hugh McMaster, who had the huge room on the ground floor that had once been the dining-room, and was a law unto himself.
He played the drums: he kept his kit in his room, shaking the whole house with its clash and shudder, and causing the neighbours to issue regular complaints. He rode a motorbike, and had pinned photographs of himself, taken by the girl he brought home most frequently—Suzanne, who was twenty-six, with aggressively short black hair and a thin, sharp-chinned face—all over his walls in an ever-shifting collage.
Hugh had curly hair that framed his face, softening the hard angle of his jaw, and eyes of a quite arresting green. His presence in the house was erratic, unpredictable. Some days, Hugh would head out on a painting job with Ivor, but on others, he’d simply disappear: the space in the front garden usually occupied by his motorbike would suddenly empty, and would remain so until Hugh re-emerged, wild-eyed, his face half obscured by three days’ growth of new beard.
Ivor and Hugh had a particular rapport: they jammed for hours in Hugh’s room, and got drunk and high together. (Hugh preferred whisky to weed, and amphetamines and cocaine to whisky.) And when Ivor was with Hugh, Cass felt a tightness in her chest, for she could feel Ivor slipping away from her, out of her grasp. Hugh seemed to know it, too, and savour it. With her, Hugh employed an extravagant, exaggerated politeness—he called her “Lady Cass,” or “our own musical genius”—which made her feel that he was laughing at her.
“Hugh doesn’t like me,” she said to Ivor a month or so after she’d arrived at Savernake Road; they were lying in bed, her head on his arm.
“Of course he does,” he replied, but she shifted onto her back, looked up at him fiercely, and said, “You’re just saying that to shut me up. You’re not really listening.”
“All right. So what if he doesn’t like you? What do you care?”
“So he doesn’t, then.”
Ivor reached across to the bedside table for his cigarettes. “Cass, man, come on. Chill about it, won’t you? Why’ve you got to be so uptight all the time?”
I am not uptight, she thought, and said nothing more, in an effort to prove that this was so. But a few days after that, she came back from a walk on Parliament Hill—it was a sweltering afternoon, and she’d been feeling cooped up in the house, with nobody but stoned Bob and silent Paul for company—to find that Ivor hadn’t come home, and Hugh’s motorbike was still missing from the front garden.
They didn’t come back all night. Cass ate Serena’s rice and lentil dhal, and then sat with the others in the garden as it grew late, strumming her gu
itar; but her attention was focused on the road, on listening out for the sound of Hugh’s bike, or of Ivor’s key turning in the front door.
“I don’t know what you’re getting in such a state about, Cass,” Serena said. “Ivor’s a free agent, you know. He can do what he likes, and so can you.”
“No.” Cass’s voice was rising. “That’s not how it is with us.” Serena rolled her eyes, and Cass got up and went upstairs.
She took her guitar with her, and channelled her anger into song; a song that she had finished, note by note and word by furious word, by the time Ivor and Hugh finally returned the following night. By then, Cass was no longer angry but icily calm, and she turned the lock in their bedroom door and sat on the bed, waiting for him.
She listened to his tread on the stairs, to him moving across the landing, then reaching for the door handle, shaking it, over and over again, as he realised it was locked. She stretched out on the bed, lay her head on the pillow. Behind her closed lids, she saw her father, grey-faced and shrunken in the vicarage; the way the life had come out of him, breath by breath, hour by hour, in the weeks and months after her mother’s leaving. Why had he loved her, that plain, unremarkable girl, so many years his junior? Cass didn’t know, and yet he had, and her desertion had broken him. But she was not weak, like Francis. She would not tolerate Ivor’s absences, his sudden withdrawals, or Serena’s sly insinuations. Ivor’s a free agent, you know. No. That was not how it would be.
“Cassie. What are you doing?” Gradually, Ivor’s whisper grew louder, became a shout. Cass kept her eyes closed and drew the pillow up over her head, replaying, in her mind, the chords and cadences of her new song. Her pulse slowed; her breath came steadily: she would not back down.
After a while, she heard Kate’s voice join Ivor’s on the landing, sleepy, confused—“Ivor, keep it down, can’t you? Some of us have to get up in the morning.” And then Ivor again, stage-whispering through the door, “Fine, then, Cassie. Have it your way.” The resentful thump of his feet carrying him back downstairs.