Famous Builder (19 page)

“Go, Lisicky!” someone cries.

“Yah!” And when I toast myself, half the bottle sloshes down my shirtfront. I pull it over my head and stuff the sleeve in my mouth to everyone’s delight.

I wake the next morning, face pressed to the floor, a rug burn beside my mouth. The alarm rings wearily, as if it’s been working overtime. There’s a cold, precise knife in the core of my head. My sinuses are stuffed. I take in breaths of air, trying to still the snow squall inside me, when the blurry numerals on the clock face start coming into focus. Could it possibly be ten minutes to nine? Shouldn’t I be at the lectern in the college chapel, leading the congregation in the opening bars of Lucien Deiss’s “Yes, I Shall Arise”? Didn’t I promise Father George that I’d fill in for the regular cantor? No! I scramble to the shower, but can’t keep myself on my feet: the floor’s coated with—ice? oil? What is this howling in my head? I think: beer, malted-milk balls, Deborah Harry—all coalesce into an etherous winter cloud beneath my nose. I lean against the shower stall, open my mouth, and silently, with fingers touching my brows, barf an orange-yellow plume down the bright green tile.

***

Bottles chink, faucets gush. The bar’s loud and rowdy, packed to the walls with workers from the office parks around I-695, all of whom appear to be engaged in various drinking contests. A waitress with a twinkling, harried face weaves in and out between tight tables. My friends Libby, Maya, Julie, and Bernardine have driven to The Fat Fox, a club in nearby Towson, to hear Amy Goldfin, a local singer/songwriter who’s been dubbed the “Joni Mitchell of Baltimore.” She sits on a high stool near the street window, tuning the pegs of her Ovation guitar, a largely artificial instrument with a rounded, fiberglass back. She adjusts a knob on an electric tuner. It’s hard not to be flummoxed by so much equipment. But her ritual is clearly as much a part of the show as the actual performance—a demonstration of her expertise and high standards. A boozy voice calls: “Take It Easy.” And across the bar: “Margaritaville.” Amy pulls in her lips, tosses her blond hair over her left shoulder with a remote expression, not even bothering to acknowledge the banality of their requests. She’s in absolute control here—or at least she wants to give that impression. She takes no shit. And though it’s a hard crowd, it’s a familiar one.

“Would you like something to drink?” the waitress asks.

“Absolutely not!” I say, to the woman’s alarm.

I can’t stop looking at Amy. She opens with Karla Bonoff’s “Someone to Lay Down Beside Me” followed by Joni’s “Black Crow.” (How strange, even awkward, to hear the chord changes in standard tuning.) Over the course of the performance, I pick up on something poignant: she swings her guitar, bends her knees, leans backward as if she’s playing to a concert hall, not to some smoky, cramped space designed to hold a hundred people at best. After each song there’s applause, but if anyone is wildly enthusiastic or has fallen privately in love with her, he’s not letting Amy or anyone else at the table know about it. Clearly the audience would rather she stick to her covers of Tom Petty and Eagles songs so that they could sing along and show off for their friends.

She follows a crowd-pleaser with one of her originals, “Shoot the Stars.” I like it—the chiming harmonics, the open chords fingered high up the neck. But something’s not quite right—is it her phrasing, the slightest exaggeration of emotion? I think about her moving hands, her artfully pained face, that crease above the bridge of her nose, and see something of myself in her wanting, and soon enough she opens her eyes, fixing me entirely with her attention. She’s watching all these thoughts move through my head like black transparent shapes that I’d rather hide. And I know what she knows. And she knows what I know, and
we
know that she’s going to play in places like this until she’s too old and tired; we know that she’s going to spend half of her time haggling with two-bit club owners who don’t give a damn about anything but how much money she brings to the bar tab. And she hates me for knowing it. And I hate her for not being more. No Elektra/Asylum recording contract, no chauffeured limousines, no audience members holding lit matches, crying out her name for one of her songs instead of some stupid cover, but alone, alone, alone, lugging her amps in the back of her station wagon, driving 200 miles to play to 6 people, scrambling to pay the rent on her studio apartment with a conversation pit in Pikesville. But, in truth, she’s never going to be anything more, because she’d never risk anything more. She loves her comfort, loves her proximity to her parents, her brothers and sisters, her Siberian husky too, too much. She’d never take off for Los Angeles, for there she’d have to confront the fact that there are hundreds, probably thousands of her. (Better to be the queen of the field here than to give it all up.) So she’ll put up with the catcalls and the indifference and the waitresses who’ll stand right in front of her during a quiet, intense moment to take an order for buffalo wings. And how can I blame her, really? It’s certainly a better life than working fifty hours a week in an office park. Still, all these thoughts are enough to rattle me to my core.

She keeps her head turned to the left—nowhere near my direction—for the rest of the performance.

The four of us step up to her, with caution, to pay homage once she’s finished for the night. She lays her guitar in her velvet-padded case as if it were something living.

“Thank you,” she says, wiping down the neck, the fingerprints on the body. “Thank you very much.” Although her appreciation is restrained and her voice is hoarse, she’s clearly touched that someone’s come up to talk to her. This is the kind of moment she’ll take with her to bed, long after she’s run a hot shower over her shoulder to ease the ache from the weight of her guitar strap.

“What a gorgeous bracelet,” Libby says, picking up Amy’s wrist.

“Thank you. I got it in Manteo last summer. Some little shop off the causeway.”

Then talk about jewelry, the Outer Banks, the undermined cottage in Rodanthe where the waves are corroding the pilings. I shift my weight from one shoe to the other. I can’t conceal my impatience. To make matters worse, I can’t stop sweating: the fabric of my shirt’s practically soaked beneath my underarms.

“Amy?” I interrupt. “I’m sorry—Miss Goldfin?”

Amy looks at me with a cool, inquisitive face. It’s not a mean face, but it’s not without strains of superiority. She looks as if she’d just dropped a Seckel pear beside her green felt slippers and is assuming, quite naturally, that I’ll wash, core, and slice it, before serving it to her on the finest china. “What kind of guitar is that?”

A Kenny Loggins tape churns in the background. Why ask a question that I plainly know the answer to? Am I that filled with admiration for her longing and will, in spite of what I know about her limitations, that I’m willing to make myself stupid for her? If I were in her place, I certainly wouldn’t want such a thing. Still, I can’t keep myself from performing as the dutiful supplicant. We both inhabit the roles expected of us, though I’m not sure it’s exactly what either of us want. Who in his right mind would really want to be an object of reverence? Who’d be willing to transform himself into a mirrored phantom onto which strangers project their own fantasies and dreads, giving up, in effect, what makes him real: his longings and failures and strange, inchoate needs.

Perhaps she knows that I wish for her courage and persistence more than I wish for my name.

“Paul’s making an album of his own songs,” Libby says suddenly.

I shoot her an angry look, which I soften the second Amy registers it. Gradually, the back of my brain warms. My smile feels false, wider than it’s supposed to be. The change in Amy’s face is palpable: it says,
you’re alive, enfleshed, there’s blood in you. Tell me how you got to be who you are.
And here’s where I could change everything. Here’s where I could say, listen, I am in trouble here. Did you ever feel yourself pulled between two things you loved? How to be solo, yet a part of the whole? To be turned toward God and Lucifer at the same time? But I want to talk so much that there’s a pain sluicing my throat. My voice fails; I’m helpless, as a big man in a trenchcoat pulls Amy toward the back of the bar.

***

“You’re never going to believe it.”

If my mother were a coffee percolator, she’d be bubbling all over in sheer joy, gushing all over the countertop, washing beneath the dish drainer, pooling inside the open drawer full of twist ties and silverware. I swear that she’s ten years younger than the last time she was in the kitchen: her face glistens with a slight shine about the forehead and nose, the green of her eyes as warm as steeped tea.

I cross out the last word of the refrain. I put down my pencil. “What?”

“Michael’s gotten into All Eastern.”

Her voice thrills, though it’s not without uncertainty. (Does she already envision him packing up his instruments and clothes to leave for good, though he’s only sixteen?) On the other side of the kitchen, past the hearth room and the foyer, Michael plays the opening passage of “Carmina Burana” over and over again. Like a weather instrument, something inside me is spinning, powered by part joy, part dread.

“That’s great,” I say.

She pulls back a chair from the kitchen table and looks at me, smiling. Love has transformed her face. Now she knows why she’s been a mother, why she put up with shepherding us to music lessons in Moorestown and Cinnaminson, or driving periodically to Paul Laubin’s workshop in northern Westchester to look at oboes. Our family will never be the same. Every time we walk through Clover, or the St. Thomas More church parking lot, it will be known that Michael triumphed over hundreds of other high-school oboists from the entire East Coast who wanted his position. People will greet us, will ask to sit near us at concerts, will think the most banal comments we proffer are witty, worthy of passing on from person to person.

Our lives are changing. And yet I can’t help but feel a disquieting spasm of jealousy.

I glance down at the song I’ve been working on.
Kids kick a soccer ball, hot dusty street. Not much to laugh about, not much to eat.
Immediately its lyrics feel forced, willed into being, more conventional than I thought it was.

I get up and walk to Michael’s doorway.

“Michael, that’s brilliant.”

“I mean, I thought I’d probably get in, but I’m still sort of shocked.”

“You’ve worked so hard,” I say. “I’m really, really excited for you.”

He shaves cane for a new reed beneath a high-intensity desk lamp. He puts down the knife on his desk, then raises his face, beaming. “Can you believe it?” he says.

Even he’s been transformed by the news. His lower lip looks fuller than it typically is, tinged with vermilion, bright with moisture. He’s lost any bit of baby fat around the jaw; his whole face is leaner, as if sharpened with a reed knife. I scan the cluttered shelves of his room—a small bottle of aspirin imprinted with Julia Waldbaum’s face, a container of Ann Page Pure Ground Sage, a candy tin from Gimbels, a thimble from A&S: his shrine to fading American retail—and feel a love so ferocious and strong that I’m almost sick. If we weren’t so close, if I didn’t see him all the time, I might hug him, but such a demonstration would only seem showy, formal, making the two of us stiffen.

“When’s the concert?”

He pulls in his lower lip, wraps twine around the reed. Such methodical precision: he holds it but two inches from his face. “May.”

“I can’t wait,” I say and leave.

I lie in my own room with the door shut; my mind wanders as his music penetrates the walls. He’s playing something older now, more harmonically traditional—is it Mozart? Haydn? The lyric leaps; the splendid, dazzling, red-gold feeling: where does it come from? How has he tapped into its source? The emotions feel almost pure, unbidden to me. Every time I’ve been trying to sing these days, I can’t get my voice to do what I want it to do. There’s a complex feeling in my head, but as soon as I open my mouth and try to translate it to sound, I’m frustrated. Either the pitch wavers or the phrasing’s too deliberate or the timbre of my voice blurs and muddies when I want it to paint sharp, sharp lines. I can’t even sing a note without stepping outside of myself, judging. Could it be that Michael is the real talent in the family? I bite myself just below the knuckle of my ring finger, almost breaking the skin, and leave two little fences of indentations, before the flesh stretches back. On the other side of the house, a soup ladle clangs against a pot. I can’t help but think that the mother I’ve known and loved for eighteen years is lost for good, that the lighthouse beam of her attention will be turned toward Michael from here on out. Already she’s the president of Band Mothers; already she’s the love and delight of Rob Soslow, Cathy Wiener, Andy Susskind—all of Michael’s musician friends. How could she possibly have the energy and interest left to care for another son who has the ego and audacity to think that he can be an entire All Eastern Orchestra on his own—not only to be all the musicians, but the conductor, the concert meister, and the composer of all his works?

(But what would I expect? Should my parents know all my Laura Nyro albums inside and out? Should they follow me around to the bars and coffeehouses of the Mid-Atlantic states? Ridiculous!)

I slap my guitar strings over the soundhole, a sassy trick I’ve picked up from Joni. I have no problem with the refrain, in which the speaker asks a big boat to spirit him away, but the whole project collapses, at least lyrically, when I try to examine and specify what the speaker’s sailing from. (What would Sister Mary Jonathan make of
that?
) Although I have a hard time admitting it to myself, I have a tough time writing about love. Why do my attempts to explore the terrain of relationships always make me feel like I’m trying on someone else’s shoes? Love—how does one write about the difficulties of romantic love without saying the same thing that’s been written two hundred million times? If the truth be told, I know as much about love as I know about the workings of my father’s car or the wires linking an amplifier to an electric guitar, and in my stingiest moments, whenever I flip through the packet of the twenty songs I’ve written in the past year and read the gassy, hyped-up lyrics of love hoped for and squandered, I think:
What’s all the fuss about? Get up, for God’s sake! Live!
What makes anyone think he’s even worthy of love? So much mewling and heartache while people go hungry in the world or are hostaged in cells by militant fundamentalist students in Iran. At least when I set the line “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?” to music I can convince myself I’ve contributed something serious and profound to the world.