No Names, page 31
“Never even knew she left school, let alone got pregnant.” I shake my head. “In case you don’t remember, I was generally too stoned to pay attention to most high school stuff.” I laugh to get past the doubt she’s put in my head. I laugh to get past the fact I didn’t tell her I’m the one who told Isaac that Pete’s his father, that he didn’t hunt me down for that. I laugh again.
“It’s going okay with him?” she asks.
“He basically wants to know everything about Pete and the No Names.” I’m on the verge of losing it. I’ve really got to change the subject. “But enough of the past.” I raise my glass, she raises hers, we clink. “To seeing you again.” I force a smile.
“To seeing you again,” she says with a smile that’s deep and true. “You’re looking good.”
I shake my head. “You’re drunk. Last I checked, I look like hell.” I take a couple more deep gulps of beer.
“Hey,” she laughs, “don’t you get drunk. You probably didn’t get the memo. We don’t drive that way anymore.” She’s had three of her Jack and TaBs. Plus, wine with dinner. I’m on only my third beer.
“Oh, yeah?” I say, imitating some flirty smirk I maybe picked up from Pete. “Then how you going to get yourself home?”
This banter almost starts to sound real, or at least like a bad rom-com.
She tilts her head, looks me in the eye. “Guess I’ll call myself a cab, then.”
I settle the bill with my tip money. “Let’s hail one.” We’re twelve miles from town and no cab has probably ever ventured out here, let alone cruised for a trick. I put my arm around her as we walk outside, like we’re on a real date. “We’ll come back first thing in the morning for yours.”
She giggles. “First thing?”
I open the passenger door of the Fury, close her in, go around, hop in, and we’re off.
Lisa lives only four avenues over from the Arkadia, but it’s definitely a better neighborhood. Better, though not that fancy. She and her ex sold their house in the Heights when they divorced. “Tudor just wasn’t me,” she jokes. “Heights wasn’t either.”
“What about the Yacht and Country Club.” I turn to look at her. “That you?”
“Corporate membership.”
I don’t remind her that she is the corporation.
The apartment building we pull up to is modern, like from back when everything was so modern. It’s yellow brick, with turquoise tiles around the windows. The glass entryway goes the three-story height of the building, holding the floating staircase. Three white globes hanging at different heights, step-like, light it up. On the expanse of glass above the entrance, written in gold script, is the building’s name: The Margaret Anne. Carved into the cornerstone is 1958, the year we were born.
“We’re here,” she says.
I put the car in park but keep the engine running. I guess I’m supposed to come up. I guess I’m getting cold feet. I guess I’ve forgotten how to be with a girl. What I always loved about Lisa is that she can tell things. In some way, we’re back in the salt cave before I let Pete have her—as if anyone could have anyone, like we thought they could in those days.
She leans over and gives me a G-rated kiss. “No need to rush things.”
I’m relieved. “I’ll stop by in the morning and drive you back out to the Pines. What time?”
She opens the door. “I can catch the bus to work. How about swinging by here after work? Say six?”
“Sure.” I feel good, or at least like I haven’t blown it entirely.
I’m actually starting to resemble a real human being. Working a fulltime job. Paying rent. And now dating. All nice and proper: going to restaurants and movies, kissing goodnight outside the Margaret Anne. I bought a button-down shirt, khakis, and hard shoes, and was good to go. We haven’t slept together yet, maybe because the one time we both dozed off in the car down at Dreamland I got embarrassed when I woke her with one of my nightmares. She said I kept calling out something about the dark. And though she hasn’t said as much, I get the idea she’s not into casual sex, and I guess, given my non-track record, I’m not either. She’s been dating since her divorce and is looking for someone to settle down with and have kids. She doesn’t say so, not exactly, but that’s what I’m picking up. I don’t mind the idea, at least not in theory, but it would be impossible for me anytime soon. I mind a little that she usually picks up the tab when we’re out, though she doesn’t seem to care. She makes probably a hundred times what I do. She also doesn’t seem to care that she’s a bona fide executive and that I am, at age thirty-five, a bona fide busboy. She likely thinks that I do care, which actually I do. Lisa’s not a snob, though. No, not at all. She’s still the same great girl from the Flats.
Sometimes I do pay for things. I’ll buy a six-pack and some kind of chips or pretzels and take her to the drive-in, like we did in the old days with Pete. One Saturday afternoon, I picked up a couple of boxes of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and we drove to Dreamland for a picnic. It was a nice day, so we didn’t need to go for one of the pavilions. We sat on the only blanket I own—a ratty plaid one from a flea market—under a giant willow. A crowd started gathering at a nearby pavilion. Then a kid got up on one of the picnic tables, plugged a rhythm machine and mic in, and started rapping. He was really good. Rapping’s new to me. I like it. Back in the day, I suppose I was the punk version of that boy performing here at the park.
We opened our boxes. I gave her my breast; she gave me her drumstick. I gave her my coleslaw; she gave me her biscuit and honey. I drank four beers, she drank two. I loved how carefully she licked the grease from her lips with her bud-like tongue and just as carefully wiped her fingers with the napkin.
Dating still feels weird, though. Especially without Pete. Which I know is an even weirder thing to think. And being around people in general still feels weird. Especially without him. Which is maybe a less weird thing to think. The point is, living still feels weird without Pete, which is maybe or maybe not a weird thing to think.
“I want to hear some real music,” she said. Obviously not a rap fan. “Yours, for instance.”
“Don’t want to upstage him,” I laughed, nodding in the kid’s direction.
“How about the salt mines, then? You can serenade me there.”
I sat cross-legged in the cave, facing the lake, Lisa sat cross-legged, facing me. I started tuning the guitar, a not great Yamaha I found at Goodwill.
“Can you play ‘The Heart’s Just Another Muscle?’”
Hadn’t thought about that one ever. It came before the No Names. One of the first songs Pete and I wrote. I kept my eyes on the tuning pegs, as if I could make her request go away. I didn’t know how to get out of it without sounding like a jerk. And the song’s too simple for me to have pretended I didn’t remember how it goes. Gulls hovered and dipped in the sky behind her. I played the first two chords. My mouth felt dry as I began to sing, “The heart’s just another muscle, and I don’t pump iron …” It starts out cynical but the ending’s a little cheesy: “You do the heavy lifting, baby, and I’ll follow …” Not our best by any means, but it’s from the time the three of us were hanging out. The memory nearly sent me into a tailspin.
The song finished. I switched to newer stuff. After I’d played a few, we started making out. I leaned forward to kiss her in the middle of a long piece called “Air,” and it went from there. Mid-kiss I lay the guitar back in its case. I was making out with Lisa, and she was taking off her blouse. I was holding her beautiful breasts, when Pete appeared. She was unbuckling my belt, and Pete was watching. I hesitated. Nothing abrupt. But Lisa isn’t clueless. She pulled out from under me, asking in a truly kind way, “What’s the matter?”
I couldn’t explain. I told her, “You deserve more.” Vague, cliché.
She started buttoning her shirt back up. “What do you mean by that?”
I didn’t want to lie, though I continued down the path of vagueness: “You have plans.”
She looked at me, blinking twice. “You don’t?”
I pushed up to a kneeling position. “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.” That’s the truth, the easy truth. I felt like I’d ruined everything. She knows my past—by which I mean Pete—and would accept me in a way most any other girl would not. She knows my past and maybe that’s the problem.
We headed home, not exactly sullen but real quiet. We drove along the lake. It was shining like Achilles’s shield, something Pete once compared it to.
Before she got out of the car, she turned for me to kiss her on the cheek. “Maybe we should cool it for a while,” she said. “When you’re ready, let me know.” She looked at me directly, not hurt or blaming or accusing. It was a look of deep feeling, maybe sympathy. She then added, “I think you’re still in love with Pete.”
As I say, Lisa’s not clueless.
A whimper, not a bang. I hate T.S. Eliot.
SEPTEMBER 1994, DANIEL
Out of a diamond-blue sky a vagrant cloud, more silver than gray, appears over the Øresund. A few random raindrops fleck the score of the impossible Hammerklavier spread out in front of me on the table. The morning has been a titanic struggle with Beethoven. The rhythm of the unexpected rain quickens, forcing me to sweep the sheets up. I retreat from the terrace into the house, less confident about the piece than when I started going over it right after breakfast. This sonata has always vexed me. I’m doubtful it will be ready for the all-Beethoven recital in New York later in the fall. I wish I had another year to get it right, whatever right could possibly mean with this music. Today I’ve been only studying the score, avoiding the keyboard, and still, it appears to me as hieroglyphics. It feels new to me, which is ridiculous, as I have twice recorded it. It’s my signature piece, or so critics say, but I’m still deeply dissatisfied with my interpretations to date, and likely will have a similar feeling about any future attempts as well.
I force myself to sit down at the piano. Before I can think too much and call it quits for the day I begin to play. It doesn’t take long before I am lost in the complexity, thinking, what do I know about music? About art? To be sure, this loss of confidence is, at least in part, the effect of Michael and Isaac disappearing from the Island and from my life without a word of explanation. That, however, does not make these questions any less honest. By the time I get to the fourth movement, with its three-voice fugue in triple meter, I am defeated. I really do know nothing.
I stop before even completing a decent run-through of any one of the movements. I am so distracted I head into the study, suddenly desperate to find the record I made with the No Names, as if listening to it will somehow, someway act as antidote to my musical and personal crisis. I have not played the recording since the day after we left the studio all those years ago. I have avoided it. I find the plain white jacket exactly where I placed it that day, on the lowest shelf of the wall of recordings in the study, among the miscellaneous.
I remove the record from its sleeve, place it on the turntable, lower the needle. As the music begins, I lean back on the sofa, locking my hands behind my head. I focus on Michael’s playing. Those Möbius-strip riffs are impossible wonders. Within a few measures, he torques them into something orbitoid. A weird geometry, like Bach’s contrapuntal, though twisted. And yet, through this complexity, he still somehow maintains a primal pulse. Beyond all analysis, there is something in his music, in his playing—on recordings and in person—that I cannot account for. It’s as if he taps into some vast undersong running through the infinitely intricate network of caverns that make up the aural universe. The music flows into my head and body, estranging me from myself.
It simply doesn’t make sense that Michael left his guitar on the Island yet took the case. Even if I could understand why he and Isaac left without letting me know, I cannot figure out leaving the guitar behind. When I finally reached the Island after my tour ended, I had, perhaps naively, expected a joyous reunion with the two of them, my newfound family. As I docked, the sky was fading. The dogs bounded down to greet me and, much to my surprise, were followed by Abraham. He explained how, some weeks earlier, he had received an unsigned message at the post office—in English, so obviously from Michael—asking him to please come look after the dogs and the sheep. I spent only a day on the Island before sailing back home. There was no message for me here, either.
SEPTEMBER 1994, ISAAC
The night I met Obaachan (once she determined I wasn’t a burglar and didn’t blow my brains out!), the two of us sat on her sofa talking until the sun started coming up. Her stories were not only about my dad, though. Things she told me got me thinking about more than myself for a change. For instance, about her American cousin Keiko in California. During the War, Keiko’s family had their strawberry farm in the Bay Area confiscated and were sent to an internment camp far away, at a place on the Oregon border called Tule Lake. Not just them but thousands of other Japanese Americans were sent to camps. I can’t believe I’d never heard about this before. Obaachan also told me how my grandfather’s family had disowned him for marrying her because she wasn’t white. People can be pretty shitty.
Obaachan said that, if I wanted to, I could get some rest in my dad’s room before starting the day. Needy freak that I am, I took this as an invitation into the life I’d missed, whether she meant it that way or not. It felt as if Fate herself was leading me up the stairs. Entering the room was like entering a time warp. Twin beds with matching plaid bedspreads and plaid curtains like “the boys’ room” on really old TV shows. Sports pennants, some from teams that no longer exist, like the Brooklyn Dodgers and Minnesota North Stars. Two rows of autographed glossies of sports heroes from back before my day. I recognized only the really famous ones: Joe Namath, Roberto Clemente, Pistol Pete, Bobby Orr. A poster of Mark Spitz, in a patriotic Speedo, with his haul of gold medals hanging from his neck. Somehow, the Hendrix poster seems timeless in the way the rest of the room does not.
As she put sheets on the one bed for me, she told me I may call her Obaachan, which is Japanese for grandmother, if I’d like. She would like that. I told her I’d like that too. Very much. And that I’d also like to learn the language. She smiled.
Within a week, I was practically living with Obaachan. When it gets late, and we’ve maybe had too much to drink, I stay over. Our running joke is how lucky we both are that she wasn’t more trigger-happy the night we met. After dinner we sometimes watch TV together, like a real family, like Vashti and I never do. My picks are Doogie Howser, M.D. and Beavis and Butt-Head; hers, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and Missing Persons. But mostly we talk, and mostly we of course talk about Dad. It does seem kind of weird calling someone you never met Dad, but it feels wicked good. I can’t get enough of her stories about him, or even just plain facts. His first words were Japanese—inu (dog), oshiri (butt). I get a kick hearing about the quirky things too. Before he even started school, he was catching lizards in their backyard in California and putting them on leashes he made from strands of Obaachan’s hair. He also loved snakes. A few times when she would go in at night to cover him up (he hated covers), she’d find a snake he’d caught coiled beside him for warmth. Not knowing whether it was poisonous or not, she put on thick gardening gloves and, using my grandfather’s long-handled fishing net, scoop the snake up from the mattress, dump it in a burlap sack, and drive far into the surrounding wilderness to release it. When he was in elementary school, Dad would lie on the sofa for hours reading biography after biography of famous people because he, as he often announced, would one day be famous. He wanted to be the next Alexander the Great or Beethoven or Jim Thorpe. She imitated the way he played the cello, head shaking, face twisted into a super intense expression. What size were his shoes? Ten. His shirts? Fifteen collar. His jeans? Twenty-eight, thirty-two. Favorite snacks? Fritos and dried seaweed. No detail was too random or obscure. I’d even like to know what his shit smelled like, if it wasn’t rude to ask.
The best story, though, is about the time she returned to Japan with him when he was eleven. Just the two of them because the flight was too expensive for my grandfather to go along. It was the only time she has ever returned. The trip was to visit her dying mother. She wanted her to meet her grandson. When my dad saw his mother change into what’s called a yukata, a kind of informal kimono, he asked if he could wear one too. Obaachan was pleased. She borrowed one in his size from a cousin. She beamed when she showed me a Polaroid of her and my dad in the cotton robes, him looking so proud, chin stuck in the air, arms folded across his chest like a samurai. He was fascinated by the family house made of wood and paper and set on a rock above the sea.
It made her so happy, and also nearly broke her heart, when he entered his grandmother’s room quietly, totally aware of the seriousness of the situation, and in perfect, formal—maybe a bit too formal—Japanese, said, “I am so happy to finally meet you, Grandmother. I have looked forward to this day for a very long time.” Then, his grandmother—my great-grandmother!—too weak to speak, lifted her hand and touched his cheek. She died the next day. I love this image of him as the good boy almost as much as the one of him as the punk bad boy he’d later become.
Since I wormed my way into Obaachan’s life, I’m happier than I’ve ever been. If happiness even counted before her. Happiness always seemed kind of lame, something for losers. There seemed to be more important things in this messed-up world. For instance, not taking things too seriously (except for gnarly math problems!). Besides, getting stoned seemed a better option. The small things that I used to blow off, I’m now finding I like. Such as chores. Unlike at home, here I’ll make my bed, put my clothes in the laundry, take the trash out, and all that stuff. Or Obaachan and I will do yardwork together. I’ll be mowing the lawn and she’ll be pruning bushes. It feels weirdly satisfying, this family kind of thing. At home, we’ve always had a house cleaner and lawn service.
