Tempo Change (4 page)

“Mom, would it help you to know that I’m being forced to join the chamber choir at school? I mean, it’s music, but it’s not isolating.”

“Really?” she said, and I couldn’t tell if that made her feel better or not.

“And I have a job. That’s something.”

“I know,” she said.

She was staring at my guitar case. It was my father’s old guitar. A Gibson J45 with a crack on the top, but it sounded amazing.

She said, “It’s even his guitar.”

“Right.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he wanted it back someday. It’s probably worth something.”

“He’s not going to want it back.”

“You don’t know him,” she said.

It was true I didn’t know him very well. But I knew him better than she thought.

We never talked about my communicating with him. I didn’t know if she knew or not. It didn’t matter as long as we never discussed it—that was my attitude.

I said, “Mom, why don’t you stop worrying? You work hard enough all day. Why don’t you meet Louise for some tea at the Fig Tree? I am fine.”

“I want you to be better than fine, Blanche, I want you to be happy.” She looked at her watch. “I guess I’ll go meet Louise. She’ll want to talk about her married boyfriend.”

“Why doesn’t she go back to drinking? I mean if she’s just going to do stupid stuff.”

Mom said, “Her thing wasn’t alcohol. It was cocaine. Now she just starves herself and dates unavailable men.”

“I thought when you get sober you’re supposed to give up stupid.”

“No, you just give up substances. Stupid hangs around.”

“Really, Mom. Go out.”

“Okay,” she said.

“I’m so glad we had this talk, which got us nowhere. See you later, Mom.”

“I just chip away at the wall,” she said. “One day I’ll break through.”

“God loves you for trying,” I said.

She blew me a kiss and went out.

I pulled out this scrapbook that my mom had kept when she and my dad were still together and he was starting to get famous. She had thrown it out when we moved but I found
it in the trash and took it and had kept it hidden in my room ever since.

For two years in a row, a famous critics’ poll had listed my father as the top artist of the year. This was the year I was born and the year after. In the pictures of him he is sullen and serious. He is a skinny, wiry guy; his hair is all over the place, and he’s always carrying that cracked Gibson and staring anywhere but right at the camera.

In one picture, he’s in the house in Silver Lake and my mother and I are in the background. You can barely see us. We’re shadows. She’s wearing a halter dress and lots of jewelry and I’m slung over her shoulder, and all you can see about me is how wide my eyes are, like I’m completely shocked by my life.

My father is staring, his chin propped on his fist, as if he’s just dreaming us.

I
STOOD IN A CORNER OF THE CLASS, PRETENDING
I
WASN’T
really supposed to be there. I listened to the inane chatter of the Chelseas and Madisons, talking about how they would die if they didn’t get a solo in the upcoming auditions.

I didn’t say anything. I just stared at my text messages. My text file was empty but I stared anyway. Every one of the girls in Madrigals was destined for greatness because of their parents’ or their parents’ friends’ proximity to the entertainment industry.

No one knew about my connections. They didn’t because I didn’t want them to. Not that they would have heard of my father. People in Madrigals didn’t know what had happened in music two years ago, let alone fourteen.

Music nerds knew who my father was. They were enthusiastic about him but they were smallish in number. Except
on the Internet, where you could find entire Web sites devoted to him—his work, along with trivia and so-called sightings. I checked in every now and then but forbade myself to log on. I enjoyed being a spectator.

I had decided long ago that I wouldn’t trade on my father’s fame. Then again, how could I? He wasn’t famous anymore. He had dropped out of society at the height of his popularity. For a while that was the thing that made him famous, all the speculation about what happened and when he was coming back and if he was dead, had lost his mind, changed into a woman, every imaginable scenario. After a while, though, other people got famous and did crazier things, like Jeff Buckley jumping into the water with his boots on or Kurt Cobain going wild on drugs and fame and killing himself or Paul Westerberg drinking himself off the map or Elliot Smith stabbing himself in the heart. My father’s moving to a tropical island just didn’t rank up there with the rock disasters.

My mother worried about the fact that I had his genes. She thought it was the art that made him crazy, not that he was an artist who went crazy. But she also had this part of her brain that still believed in him. She’d hear a song on the radio and say, “Your father invented what they’re doing. Right there, that riff? That thing? He invented it.”

She didn’t really know how to talk about music but she knew when he had invented it. That was ironic to me. I said nothing.

Mr. Carmichael came into the room. Mr. Carmichael had a sad and lethargic look. He had a weepy-looking goatee, and earrings in both ears, but was otherwise the picture
of normality. He sat down at the piano and approached it as if it were a wounded patient he needed to revive, and his efforts to revive said wounded patient mostly ended in disappointment. He was, I’d have to guess, forty, and he carried around with him some kind of desperately lost ambition.

He said, “Okay, girls, let’s calm down and talk about music.”

The Madrigals scattered into order and I was the only one left standing, not knowing where to turn.

Mr. Carmichael turned to me. He said, “Are you the latest addition? Blanche Kelly?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you a soprano?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, stand on the riser next to Viv and we’ll figure it out.”

That’s when I met Viv. I stood on the riser next to her.

Viv barely glanced at me and I barely glanced at her.

As far as I knew, Viv Wyler was the soccer goalie. I had no idea that she had any musical interest, let alone aspirations. She was tall and boxy and full of muscles that I’d assumed only boys had. She was pretty, but she had no grace and apparently no sense of humor. I had never seen her smile, let alone laugh. She had long, blond, unkempt athlete’s hair and a bland face.

I looked at her but she stared straight ahead. I knew she was a bad student. At LaHa, you got to know the bad students. Rumor had it that her parents were scholars and scientists; she had two sisters who were on their way to being astrophysicists; and she somehow had the brains of a nylon
rope. To the degree that she had a name for herself, she had made it in front of the soccer net. Her parents were hoping that her soccer accomplishments could at least get her into a state college.

I tried to smile at her but her eyes just flitted across me and went back to the center of the room.

Mr. Carmichael started playing “Fire and Rain,” an old James Taylor song, and I just jumped right in since I knew it. At first I wasn’t sure what that beautiful sound was, that elegant tone and tight vibrato. I looked all over the room and it sounded like it was coming from me, which I knew was impossible. Then I realized it was coming from right next to me.

Viv Wyler had a beautiful voice.

Mr. Carmichael stopped playing piano and looked straight at me.

“Blanche, aren’t you singing the alto part?”

“What?”

“You’re singing with the altos.”

“Oh.”

“So step up a level.”

I did. The Chelseas made room for me. But I couldn’t stop staring at Viv. She saw me staring at her and I looked away. Madison raised her hand and said, “Mr. Carmichael, can we sing something else? This is like a hundred years old.”

“We’re singing James Taylor,” the beleaguered Mr. Carmichael said, wiping his brow.

I said out loud for all to hear, “You know this song is about a friend of his who died in an airplane crash.”

“No way,” the girls crooned.

“Really. Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.”

The girls started mumbling. Mr. Carmichael gave me an appreciative smile.

“From the top,” he said, and we stumbled our way through it.

When the class was over, Mr. Carmichael made an announcement.

“School talent competition is a month away. I’m accepting applications now. Please list the song you’ll be performing, all participants, and all instrumentation.”

Everyone stared at him.

It wasn’t that kind of school.

The bell rang and we filed out. I couldn’t help catching up to Viv.

“Hey,” I said. “You have a great voice.”

She looked at me. “So?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought I’d tell you that.”

“What good will it do me? Is it going to get me into college?”

“Maybe.”

“This is an easy A. That’s all it is to me.”

“But you could actually be a singer or something.”

She slowed down her soccer player’s lope and stared at me. “I read your column. I know you care a lot about music. What I can’t figure out is why.”

“Because it’s … I’m … What else is there?”

“Soccer,” she said. “And trying to keep my head above
water to make my parents happy. That’s all I can handle right now. But thanks for the compliment.”

She hurried down the carpeted hallway to her next class. I could feel an idea forming in my brain like a storm cloud. Like a crack of light under the door.

Sometimes a little light is worse than none at all.

W
ORK
. T
HAT’S WHAT
I
DID AFTER SCHOOL AND ON THE WEEKENDS
. While the other girls from LaHa were hanging out at the Promenade or the Pier or Amoeba Records in Hollywood or the Abercrombie at the Grove or the Arclight Theaters. Working in their spare time was something poor kids did.

I worked at Peace Pizza. Only in Santa Monica would a pizza restaurant name itself that with no irony whatsoever. The owner, Toby Myerson, was a burnout from the seventies who had never gotten over Amnesty International and Greenpeace. The place was full of signs that said things like “Love Is All You Need” and “Be Good to Your Mother—Earth.” Toby rode a bike and wore hemp clothing and meditated a lot. He only showed up at the store late in the evenings, usually stoned. So the whole place was basically run by a bunch of teenage surfer dudes. The oldest guy
there, the assistant manager, was Jeff, a lanky nerd who ran track and jumped over stuff at Pali High, a public school in the Palisades. He was a junior and he was smart, I could tell, because he was always hitting his books between customers and I knew the colleges he was applying to—Stanford, MIT, and Northwestern. I’d heard he wanted to be an engineer but I didn’t know what kind.

Jeff was always wrangling the younger guys, the Seans and the Bos and the Tylers, trying to get them to do something other than yak about surfing and skateboarding. When they did that, all the work fell on Jeff’s shoulders and mine, and sometimes on the snarly cook, Ella, who had to jump in and work the cash register. That was never a good plan because she didn’t have much in the way of people skills. She looked like a boy and didn’t mind people making that mistake. Other than the fact that she cooked really fast, I didn’t know much about her.

Jeff and I always took our breaks together and we talked about music. He had great taste and he was the only person I knew who could talk music history. He could get from Jimmie Rodgers to the Beatles to U2 in three steps. I liked that in any person. I wondered why he couldn’t put on a few pounds. But it was none of my business.

It was shortly after Madrigals, and we were sitting on the picnic bench outside of work, when he said to me, out of nowhere, “Hey, Street, I heard a rumor that your father was Duncan Kelly. That guy from the nineties who invented the whole grunge movement before its time.”

He called me Street because my name was Blanche. I
didn’t mind the nickname. Get it?
Streetcar Named Desire
, Blanche DuBois. That was engineering-geek humor.

“It wasn’t grunge,” I said. “It was more like hard acoustic.”

“What?”

“He played acoustic guitar but it wasn’t, you know, soft. It rocked. And the lyrics were smart.”

“Like Paul Westerberg or something?”

I had to admit, I was impressed that he knew who that was. Paul Westerberg was a guy about my dad’s age who had a band called the Replacements who were poppy and punk at the same time. My dad was a little like that, only more moody and less poppy.

“Not exactly like Westerberg. They were contemporaries.”

“Did he know him?”

“Jeff,” I said, “who told you about my father? How can a geek like you care about music? Aren’t you going to build bridges or rockets or something?”

“Just because I’m good at math doesn’t mean I can’t like music. Now, come on, Street, answer my question.”

“Yeah, that’s my dad.”

“Wow. So do you know where he is and stuff?”

“Not really, she lied.”

“Why don’t you ever tell anybody?”

“I’m not supposed to know where he is. He doesn’t want anyone to know.”

“I mean that you’re related to him.”

“Who would I tell?”

“You could have told me.”

“Nobody cares who he is anymore.”

“I care who he is.”

“You’re weird.”

“I’ve heard his music, too. That record
Ineffable
, that’s a seminal record.”

I looked down and blushed. Suddenly it made me feel weird to think of anyone other than me listening to my father’s music. Someone I actually knew.

Even though I teased him about being a geek, I knew Jeff’s iPod was the envy of everyone. It’s the one we always plugged into the system when we were working.

Jeff was one of those people who collected music, and the information about it, as if it were baseball cards or stamps. He didn’t try to play it himself. He thought knowing about it somehow got him in the club. I knew I was in danger of becoming exactly that kind of person. Writing
about
music wasn’t the same as writing it. I intended to correct that about myself one day. Just as an exercise, to prove I could do it. A pastime, not a way of life.