Famous Builder (21 page)

***

I’m not sure exactly where I am over the course of the next several days. I know I’m somewhere in Santa Clara, California, in a paneled room in an industrial park abutting the freeway, but I can’t take in the date palms, the jacaranda, the dry sun-warmed air blowing across the down on my forearms, or even the occasional tremor that trembles the car that I’m in with anything but the most glancing attention. I’m entirely caught inside some protracted conflict inside my head. Certainly I’m inside the recording studio at least seven hours a day. I’m wearing a pair of black padded headphones trying to sing with Lawrence Nilsen’s bass, guitar, and woodwind tracks, but the voice that comes out of my mouth isn’t my own. It’s the voice of someone who wants to be—well, he doesn’t know exactly where, but in a different place and time. And although he wrote these songs not long ago, and although he toiled over every cadence, chord, and lyric, he doesn’t know what they have to do with who he is now. The voice inside his head is bright, forceful; it strikes the notes like sunlight on a ski slope. Unlike the voice that comes out of his mouth, which is chronically just a shade below pitch and is slightly nasal, muddied. It requires laborious breaths between phrases to keep forging ahead, to the annoyance of the engineers in the booth, who moisten their lips and tap their fingers against the console. He finishes “Magnificat.” He thinks all he needs to do is to close his eyes and imagine himself in Laura’s skin. He’s singing “Captain St. Lucifer” from
New York Tendaberry
, banging the keys of the grand piano, trying to hold onto the inner “fuck you” she must have summoned thirteen years ago when she was booed off the stage at the Monterey Pop Festival. But even this exercise feels absurd to him, so he asks to go outside, where he stares down into a patch of poppies and silvered desert plants beside the door. A thin black boy throws rocks against a red aluminum shed by the freeway. Then he walks over to a car in the parking lot and starts scratching at the paint surface with a piece of broken glass.

Lawrence steps up from behind. He kneads my shoulders, pushing and pulling the muscles and tendons with such concentration and—is it anger?—that I have to pull in my belly button toward my spine to stop myself from feeling. Violet lights pinwheel before my eyelids. “You’re tense.”

I drop my chin to my chest and push my jawbone into my clavicle. “I can do better than this.”

“You’re doing just fine,” he says merrily.

“Not good, no good. It’s just not good enough.”

“Now, now.” I attempt to turn and look at him. There’s something about his tone: he’s lost the chipper edge he’d had at the airport the other day, the cheery, blank voice he’d use to command the high-school marching band he directs.

“But I
can
sing better.”

He frowns, but laughs out the corner of his mouth. “So let’s hear,” he says and pushes me along toward the door.

What a riddle I must be to him: he seems as confused by my response as my father would be. I stand at the mike, sing through “You Are the Potter” two, three, four times, but it feels as if I’m murdering the song over and over and over again. Every inner proclivity toward failure I’ve ever kept hidden is now revealing and asserting itself. And it goes on like this and on like this and nothing ever changes.

In the control room the engineer leans back in his chair with a tense and mannerly face.

I turn first to God and then to Laura, but neither of them says a thing.

Seven people sit around a dinner table one night and ladle spaghetti and meatballs onto Melmac plates. We’re in the kitchen of Don and Claire O’Byrne, the owners of Folk Mass Today, Inc. Their house isn’t in a new development of zero-lot-line ranchers like Lawrence’s (I’ve been staying in his guest room since my arrival), but on the west side of Santa Clara in a tract of houses with mottled cedar-shake roofs and burglar bars in the street-side windows. Our table faces the sliding glass doors. From my place at the head of the table, I see a sad palm with unclipped fronds, an orange tree with green fruit on its limbs, and broken toy cement mixers lying on their sides in the mashed grass. The house smells inexplicably moldy inside, with short piles of outdated engineering magazines lining the foyer. Three towheaded children shriek, run back and forth across the length of the living room, and aim at one another with clear water pistols. On the coffee table I see the proofs of the next magazine cover (JOY!) lying atop an open electric bill stamped PAST DUE. Something doesn’t feel right to me here, though I know it’s about more than the lack of money. Maybe it’s just that it feels a bit too much like home: the whole house seems to be held together with musilage; all it would take would be a cold rainy night to wash it down.

I tear off the end of a loaf of bread. Lawrence, sitting across from me, lifts a bright blue bowl filled with Brussels sprouts. “Eat these,” he says. “Calming vitamins and minerals.”

Don takes off his square black glasses. Immediately his face looks kinder, almost vulnerable, less like the engineer he was for twelve years before people started strumming guitars in church sanctuaries. “You’ve been nervous?”

His voice is higher, pitched forward in his throat, inquisitive, yet incriminating. Has Lawrence told him something? “Yes,” I venture. “It’s a lot harder than I’d expected.”

He squeezes, massages the bridge of his nose.

“It’s not so easy to sing with those earphones on. I sound muffled to myself. Like I’m singing with cotton in my ears. And the room’s dark and—”

Where is my nerve? Why do I feel so ridiculously raw and green, without any tough, protective coating?

Across the table a woman named Pam leans forward, resting weary elbows on the tabletop. Her eyes glitter flatly. “Maybe you’d like to pick out a banner from our church to bring in. We have some pretty ones. Some crosses and uplifting words. Something to help you think about the Lord.”

And everybody just looks at her. She might as well be cursing softly, uncontrollably at the table. I drift off for a moment, imagining myself entirely alone in the dark, as I pitch my voice upward to a felt violet banner.

Don says, “You’re not pleased with your performance?”

I think about the broken toys on the floor, the chaos of unopened bills, the chandelier with the missing bulbs over the foyer. Around the corner there’s an unfinished room with unpatched drywall that hasn’t been touched in years. He wants me to tell the truth. Yet, if I do, he won’t want to hear it: he’ll have to lay out more money for studio time, money that doesn’t exist. To date this album has cost him $15,000, a figure Lawrence has quoted to me, with tightened throat, at least 3 times over the course of the week. How to tell him that I don’t care about liturgical music anymore, that the boy who worried over those songs on the braided blue rug of his Cherry Hill bedroom is dead now? The one he’s become can’t find his way back inside the skin of that other creature.

“I’m happy,” I say.

The corners of his mouth flex. He puts his glasses back on. “I don’t want you to get back on that plane if you’re not completely, entirely satisfied.”

I laugh uncontrollably. “Of course not.”

But his tone says:
You better get this right. You better do everything you can to get me out of this mess or—damn you.

“In a couple of months we’ll get you out on the road to start selling these things. We need to sell at least two thousand units to break even.”

I call my parents collect from Lawrence’s guest room. It’s two-thirty in the morning back East. They’re listening on two separate extensions: I picture my mother sitting on the edge of the orange paisley spread of the king-sized bed, my father hunkering over the desk in the kitchen, in white jockey shorts with a stretched-out waistband. I don’t hold back. Whispering, I tell them that my performance has been ghastly, that something inside me will not permit me to sing, that I’ve given something that was once mine—deeply, unquestionably, irrevocably mine—to someone else, and I can’t find a way to get it back.

“I’ve lost it,” I tell them.

“I’m sure you’re doing much better than you think,” my mother says finally.

“You have a beautiful voice,” says my father.

“You do,” she says.

“I still remember you leading the congregation at Christ the King,” he says. “I didn’t even know you could sing, and there you were, strumming your guitar.”

“Daddy—” I blush, yet somehow I feel strafed by his praise.

“Listen,” he says. “We’ll buy 200 copies. We’ll send one to Aunt Myra and Uncle Steve, Uncle Alfred and Aunt Vicki, Mr. Forte, Mrs. Fox—”

“No!”

And the intensity of my cry silences them. They’ve never heard such talk from me. For so long they’ve both admired, and been confused by, my desire. Now that they’re seeing what lies beneath it, they don’t quite know what to do. It’s as if they’d been expecting me to nose-dive all along, and they’re both despairing and relieved all at once. They stop countering me. They stop trying to say the right thing. They don’t tell me that I’m the greatest singer who ever lived; they don’t say that I’m making something out of nothing. They’re just silent, utterly open, and ready to listen. I stare at the orange plug-in night-light glowing in the socket. The white electric blanket on my bed ticks twice. Outside my closed door, someone shuffles on carpet, then runs water in the bathroom across the hall. Is that an ear pressed to the door?

“I can’t talk now,” I whisper.

“I know I should have gone out there with you,” my mother whispers.

“You couldn’t go out there, hon.”

“Why not?” she says, her voice gathering volume, force. “Sometimes you need somebody to speak up for you. It’s not so easy to do things by yourself.”

My father’s cry is harsh, guttural. “Aaaah.”

“Will you both
stop
,” I say. And again, footsteps. I press the receiver to my breastbone, tugging the phone cord between my fingers, and turn the doorknob to the right. I look down toward the master bedroom door, but nothing. At hall’s end, the minute hand of the clock jerks forward.

When I get back, my parents are still talking to each other from opposite rooms in the house.

On my last day in the studio, I’m hoarse, a taste of burnt grapefruit peel in my mouth. My shoulders have curved forward for so many days that they’ve practically solidified into a bow. There’s nothing to prove anymore. Too much has already gone wrong to care. I stand up to the furred black microphone and start singing the final song. I listen to the bass line, the flute and clarinet duet recorded days before my arrival. For the first time, I don’t try. I channel so much into my voice that I seem to fall away from it. How freeing it is not to be, not to work so hard, or build my house in resistance to—
what?
To let go of that nagging, incessant urge. All there is is sadness: fierce, unquenchable sadness. Tomorrow I’ll go back home. I’ll step through the metal detector, walk down the jetway, take my seat in the rear of the plane, and eat every last bit of the lukewarm chicken dish placed in front of me, but the way I hold my knife and fork will be different; the chair ahead will be tinted, less likely to be plaited with light.

I step up into the booth to listen to the playback. The voice I listen to is young. It isn’t at all distinguished in terms of phrasing or timbre. It wouldn’t even be enough to cause an A&R man at Elektra/Asylum to sit up even slightly in his seat. But it’s simple and true and full of longing.

Both Lawrence and the engineer look up from the mixing board, faces suffused with warmth, blood. “Now we’re talking,” Lawrence says.

But they’re tired, too. Neither offers to suggest we start recutting the other songs. And it doesn’t even occur to me to think I have the right to ask for it.

***

For the rest of my winter break, I work. I take down the Christmas lights off the house and the tree; I wrap the ornaments in torn sheets of toilet paper. I throw out old songbooks from my desk drawers; I clean up an old baritone ukelele from the back of my closet in the hopes of giving it away. I make sure I’m in motion from morning through night, and when I sleep, I sleep so deeply that when I wake, I can’t keep from being startled, heart banging, at the sunlight pouring in through the bottle on my bureau. Outside a plow scrapes the snow off Circle Lane, and the smell of waxy burning Duraflames drifts from my neighbors’ chimneys. I’m sluggish and dehydrated, as if I’d taken sleeping pills before going to bed. But all it takes is a swift, violent rub to the face and I’m off again.

One day, on her way out the door to Clover, my mother buttons her wool, gray-green coat and stops by the piano. I dust the lower rungs of the love seat across the room. She stretches her hand across the keyboard and tentatively plays a note. Then plays it again, more crisply this time. Middle C: sturdy meridian. Its coherence and elemental optimism reverberate through the room. Its mocks whatever it is I’m feeling. “Would you like to go to the store?”

I stand and stretch my arms with an involuntary squeal. “I’m going outside to weed.”

“It’s the dead of winter.”

“There’s weeds out by the Lennoxes. I noticed them last night.”

She presses her finger to the key again. “You haven’t played the piano in two weeks.”

I spot a single spruce needle on the carpet. I lean over, pinch it between my fingernails, and drop it into my pocket. “I’m just taking a break.”

She turns her back to me and plays. “What note is this?”

“C.”

“Which C?”

“Middle C.”

“This was my mother’s piano.”

“I know.”

And although her eyes are glossed with the slightest sheen of tears, she smiles, as if my ability to name random notes on the piano gives her the answer to what she’s looking for. I stare at her, exasperation and expectancy tightening the skin around my eyes. But I don’t understand what she’s getting at, and I don’t quite know how to give her what she needs. I get up and walk out of the room and start pulling at the frozen soil, even though nothing’s grown there for months.

By the beginning of the following week, I’m back at Loyola. The campus seems to have gotten more cramped. The tree limbs crowd the space above the sidewalks, the classrooms are tight with junked chairs that appear to have been gouged, punctured with ballpoints. Even the students have changed. A couple have put on some holiday weight around the middle, while many more have gotten skinnier, with more prominent features and shadows beneath their eyes. I step into the cafeteria line my first night back and fix on the hooded bronze lamps tinting the bins of chicken cutlets orange. Suddenly, the back of my shirt is swamped with sweat. I know for sure I’m going to be asked how the recording went. I start to fabricate. To say, sorry, sorry, it didn’t work out this time, the album’s been postponed till June, we’re looking for better session players. But when I sit down, someone heaves a lump of chocolate pudding at the white shirt of the person sitting across from me. In relief, I toss some back. And within seconds, chocolate’s flying through the air, sticking in our hair, dripping into our faces, down the fronts of our shirts. Everyone howls, joyless and driven as fratboys. To the right Lauren keeps busy by running back and forth between the salad-bar tub and the table to replenish the supply. I think of her greedy, wild expression, and all at once I see her twenty years from now. She sits at her desk at some law firm, fingers massaging her temples until her mouth falls open. I look at the others, and they, too, have aged twenty years. They stand at their windows and look out onto their splendid lawns and wonder how and when their bodies thickened, their children started hating them behind their backs.