I Knew You'd Be Lovely (18 page)

“Out of nowhere, you became this completely different person. Constantly insecure and suspicious.”

“There's only one thing that makes a woman suspicious: a man who's fooling around.”

“Do you hear the flawed logic in that statement?”

“I'm not talking about logic!”

“That's your
problem
!”

My cell phone rings. It's Catherine. “Guys, I have to take this call,” I say, but they're too busy hurling insults to care. I wait until I'm out in the hall to flip open the phone.

“Have they killed each other yet?” Catherine asks.

“It's unclear whether they're going to kill each other or kill me.”

“Maybe that's all they need—a common enemy.”

“Well, they've got one.” I pause, then figure I might as
well come out with it. “There's something I need to ask you,” I say, and tell her about Zeb's baby-name idea.

“But I thought we could name him Rufus, if it's a boy,” she says. “After James Agee.”

“Sweetie, you don't name someone after a person's middle name.”

“Why not?”

“You don't want him to start life in the middle of something, do you? He'll get there soon enough.”

“Let's not talk about names till we get through the first trimester,” she says. “Besides, I found a quote for you—for Zeb and Deb. It's from
The Prophet
. Hold on, here it is, I've got it:
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that you are weeping for that which has been your delight
. Isn't that beautiful?”

“It is,” I say. “But I just tried the country-western version a minute ago. It didn't work.” On the other side of the door, I hear the sound of breaking glass. “I'll catch you later, sweets. I've got to go.”

The Prophet
. That's Catherine for you. The summer we met, we dropped acid together in a barn after crashing a party in Culpeper. She was visiting from California.

“Isn't it funny,” she said, wiggling her fingers, “that we have bodies?” Indeed, it seemed hilarious. She ran her heel up my shin and told me she was editing a collection of poems titled
While We've Still Got Feet
. She was lying on her back in a white sundress, surrounded on all sides by fire-yellow straw. I remember becoming increasingly aware of an electricity all around us, as if the hay were
somehow waiting to be transmuted into gold, if only I knew the right words. At the same time, I had another feeling: I wanted to crawl up Catherine's skirt. I put my head down and had a profoundly contrarian response to LSD: I fell asleep. When I woke up, she was laughing.

“Your snoring is like the sound the world will make,” she said, “when it's coming to an end.”

“I have allergies,” I said. “And I'm surrounded by hay.” But she didn't seem to care; she was having too much fun: eyes brimming with amusement, bits of golden straw flecking her dress.

When I open the door, Zeb's waving his arms as if trying to direct an emergency crash landing.

“What about the surprise party I threw for your fortieth birthday?” he says.

“Surprise,” says Deb, “is inherently hostile.”

He turns to me. “She threw the china at me! Everything's a cliché with her, not just her lyrics!”

“Let's ask Walt,” Deb says, and immediately I think:
Let's not
. She steeples her fingers. “True or false: If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing for television.”

Zeb bounces on his toes. “It's so obvious! And he'd have a blog, too.”

“You're such an ass,” says Deb.

I don't know what to say. All I can think is:
What if Catherine and I end up like this?
Zeb and Deb loved each other once. Then they got married. Poor Catherine; I'm going to break her heart. I sit on the floor and bury my face in my hands.

“Walt, honey? Are you crying?” Deb drops to my level.

Zeb squats, too. “Everything okay there, buddy?”

“No,” I mumble with my face still in my hands. “Everything is not okay. As you can see.” They've stopped yelling, and for the first time all day, I have their undivided attention. I feel a twinge of conscience, but I ignore it.

“Catherine's sick,” I say. “She lost the baby.”

“Oh, God,” Deb says softly. “Catherine's pregnant?”

“
Was
pregnant,” Zeb says.

“And I lied to her,” I say. “I told her I'd be on the first plane out tomorrow morning, and that she shouldn't worry, we were almost finished here anyway.”

“I'm so sorry,” Deb says. “Is there anything we can do?”

“As a matter of fact, there is. Do you think we could try to get one song written before they throw us out of this place?
One song
?”

We reassemble around the coffee table. I pull out my stack of paper and again pass it around. We find, to our surprise, that tragedy has united us, given us strength of purpose, the way a martyr's death galvanizes the troops. But we still don't know what to write about.

Zeb steals a glance at what Deb has scribbled and recoils in horror. “ ‘Faded freesia'? What the hell kind of lyric is ‘faded freesia'?”

“They're flowers, idiot,” Deb says. “Beautiful, delicate flowers.”

“No one knows what freesia looks like.”

“Anyone who cares knows.”

“No one cares!”

“Freesia
sounds foreign, doesn't it, Walt? And freezing. Foreign and freezing, like Belgian endive. And what are you going to rhyme it with? With
rose
, you've got
nose, grows, throws, blows.”

“You haven't written a line, and already your lyric is disgusting.”

“Guys, can we maybe find an image that isn't a flower?” I say. “There must be one.”

“The trouble with this assignment is, we lack a subject,” Deb says.

Zeb takes her pencil from her and props his paper against his knee. “When in doubt, write what's right in front of you,” he says. But what's right in front of us? Broken hotel china, a train-wrecked marriage, one final, desperate attempt to recapture a glory long gone. So that's what we write about. By the time we're finished, we know it's good.

“Hallelujah! Let's eat,” Zeb says. But within minutes, we're arguing over where to go. It's amazing: While we're working on the song, Zeb and Deb are cordial to each other, even cooperative. But as soon as we put the pencils away, the old animosity returns. It reminds me of the famous Christmas truce of 1914, where those English and German soldiers on the Western Front sang carols together before they resumed shooting one another. And it's giving me major flashbacks to my parents' own ill-fated marriage, which they stuck out for four decades, quietly hating each other all the while.

“You two are on your own,” I say. “If you were together for twenty years and can't share a table for twenty minutes, I can't help you.”

I go back to my room, lock the door, and lie down on the bed with my arms and legs stretched out in every direction. We got the song written. I can't believe it. I almost feel as if I could crank out another song right here, right now, but that would require getting up, and it's much too blissful being splayed out like this. A buddy of mine back in Virginia, a splendid hipster named Marcellus, recently had me sing backup on a song he wrote called “Star Position.” “When you're single, you can sleep in the star position” is the chorus. I assume he didn't write it just for me—just to taunt me, that is, because he knows how much I don't want to get married, but also how much I don't want my kid to be born illegitimate.

I just wish I didn't feel so trapped. It's not that we're not pro-choice; Catherine even volunteered at Planned Parenthood for a year before she got her first job in publishing. But when the decision was hers to make, this is what she chose. Oh, and I was the one who forgot to buy condoms that night, and also the one who wanted to have sex anyway. Although it's true: Catherine is the one aching to get married and start a family. Among her mother's last words to her were: “If you really want to meet a man and settle down, why in God's name are you living in San Francisco?”

In a way, her mother helped bring about her wish. It was because Catherine wound up spending so much time in northern Virginia, taking care of her, driving her to chemotherapy and all that, that our long-distance affair had a chance to take root. When her mother died, Catherine stayed. That was five years ago, and it didn't take us long to go through her small inheritance. Catherine
doesn't make much working at a boutique publisher that acquires only about three titles a year, and I'm a good-for-nothing, washed-up, so-called singer-songwriter. Or I
was
, until this afternoon. Now not only do I have the song, but the backstory of the celebrity reunion that produced it is a publicist's fairy dust. Maybe Zeb and Deb could even be prevailed upon to get up onstage and sing it with me: “We've Got a Great Future Behind Us.”

I wake a few hours later with a start, but there's nothing there. My heart's racing, and I've been sweating in my sleep. I walk over to the suitcase that's open on the luggage rack like an inhuman maw, reach into the side pocket, and pull out the box. Even the box is beautiful, black and velvety, like a night sky housing a lone star—a star so perfect, you only need one. It was Marcellus who told me about the pawnshop on Crenshaw I went to after checking in this morning. I entered with my prize possession in tow: a tenor saxophone that had been my father's and was once owned by the late, great Coleman Hawkins. I hoisted the case onto the counter and watched the owner try to hide the frisson he got when I announced what it contained.

“Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit!” said a customer who'd overheard me speak of the sax's provenance. He was an old black man in a tweed jacket who, unlike the owner, had no reason to mute his enthusiasm. The owner was a tall man named Fred. When I asked why his shop was named Impermanence, he told me he was a Buddhist. Devout. Each time he handed me a ring and I stared at its facets, trying to see if I could envision my future among them, the old man in the tweed jacket would
catch his breath. “Oh, she'll like that one. She's
bound
to like that one!” he'd say.

Now I'm holding the one I hope she'll like. It's beautiful, and simple, because Catherine is simple—in the largest, finest way. Not like me. I envy people like her, who are so sure of what they want. I stare at the ring, and think:
Even though taking this leap isn't something I'm certain I want to do, it's something
she
wants to do, and it's something I can do for her, as a way of giving to her, a way of loving her
.

My cell phone goes off, and as soon as I hear her say my name, I know. I'll never get to a place where I don't believe I somehow made it happen, simply by uttering the words. I listen, and tell her I love her, and envision myself wrapping my arms around her, letting her cry into my chest.

“I'll be on the first plane out in the morning,” I say, and we discuss whether she should go to the hospital now, or wait, and go to the doctor tomorrow with me. The bleeding has stopped, and she's not in any pain, so we decide the best thing to do is to try to get some sleep.

“Maybe this one just wasn't meant to be,” she says.

After we hang up, I go to the unit by the window and shut off the air-conditioning. Immediately the white noise vanishes. If Catherine had been here with me, she'd have done this as soon as we set down our suitcases. Holy quiet, she calls it.

I'm still holding the box, and I think:
Fate no longer has me hostage. The choice is mine. I have the power to make the woman I love immeasurably happy. Or I can stick with the status quo
. I'd like to say the decision was
difficult, but I can't. I feel nothing so much as released, relieved. And I tell myself that since Catherine never knew I bought the ring, I'm not hurting her by returning it.

The next morning, when I buzz Zeb's room, there's no answer. No answer in Deb's room, either. When I go to the front desk to put their tabs on my credit card, I'm told Zeb has checked out, but left a note.
Nose broken. Will forward bill for rhinoplasty
. On my way back to the elevator, I spot Deb in the lobby.

“What happened?” I say.

“Twenty years of frustration,” she says. “Balled into one fist.”

“You hit him?”

“Don't be ridiculous. I think
he
wanted to hit
me
. But he never hurt me like that, you know? So instead he decked some asshole at the bar who'd been razzing me all night, and the guy up and smashed him. It was as if he was defending my honor or something. It was kind of sweet.”

“The two of you saved my life,” I say. “If anyone deserved to be punched in the face, it was me.”

“It may happen yet,” she says, and kisses me on the cheek. A liveried valet arrives and takes one of her bags in each hand. “Give Catherine my love,” she says.

I'm not sure what the protocol is for redeeming a pledge, but I'm hoping it doesn't take long, because I have a plane to catch. As I step through the jingle-bell door, the owner of the pawnshop lifts his eyes from a thick paperback and dips his head in recognition. I finger the black
velvet box in the pocket of my Windbreaker. The old man in the tweed jacket is gone.

“What happened to our friend?” I say.

“Moseyed on home.”

“Did he find what he was looking for?”

“No.” This answer, and the finality with which he delivers it, surprises me.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Percy wants to sell his insulin to buy a canoe. Comes in every week.”

“Oh,” I say, and find my inner O. Henry wondering if the man who sold his canoe needed the money to buy insulin. I feel bad for old Percy now, and wish he were here, although it's probably better time-wise that he's not.