Songs Only You Know (10 page)

“Jeez,” she said. “Where did you find those?”

“Who’s this guy?”

“I dated after your dad broke off the engagement. We were engaged on and off for three years. He never knew what he wanted. But when I’d see other people it drove him nuts.”

This was news. The lore I recalled was that Dad popped the question in a parked car, outside a Howard Johnson’s Restaurant on Telegraph Road. Wearing the ring, Mom had joined him for a steak dinner, and this was the tale of innocent, inauspicious beginnings Caitlin and I thought of as we passed the restaurant countless times over the years.

I gave the photo a second look, despising the young man: such an amiable-looking fellow with easy-going eyes and that hairpiece of tight, fusilli curls. You knew he’d achieved the good life somewhere; he had the face for it. And there was my mom, gleaming blondly beside him, pretty as ever. I was just coming to understand that for every one of life’s turns, there are a thousand unknown alternatives left behind. Here was one of my mother’s, encased in a laminated sleeve.

“Maybe I could have been this guy’s kid,” I said. “Looks like he has a perm?”

“Oh, throw those out.” She continued swiping empty cabinets with a feather duster. “What else did you find down there?”

“Dad’s guitar.” His six-string Alvarez with a fist-sized hole near the bridge, indicating what frustration the instrument had given him. I’d played my first chords on it, a relic that dated back to a brief phase when Dad wore a denim jacket and ordered jazz LPs, many of which I’d slipped into my own crates.

“He hasn’t touched that thing in twenty years.” Mom was in a spell, cat-climbing the countertops and dusting crumbs as I stood below, ready to catch her. “I gave him that guitar, you know?”

These people who’d strummed guitars and collected albums were versions of my parents I couldn’t yet reconcile. Caitlin had always taken special delight in the post-Academy photos of our old man shirtless beneath his denim jacket, with lamb-chop sideburns. We’d laughed at the muscled ruffian in flared jeans, wrenching on a VW Beetle as my mom, tan legged, hair parted Joni-style, leaned against the fender. To me, they’d looked pretty happening, smiling, the two of them.

“Our parents were burnouts” was Caitlin’s take. She’d been upstairs all this time, refusing to let anyone help her disassemble her bedroom yet not moving an inch to begin doing so herself.

T
RUSTING NO ONE WITH
my guitars and records, I set them aside on the front lawn. Despite the sunny afternoon, the neighborhood was silent. Garage doors were closed and the blinds drawn, every lawn trimmed in accordance with some virtue of sameness I’d never forgive. Nobody came to see us off. Mom directed our boxes into a moving truck, making sure nothing got mixed up. With nowhere to be, Caitlin sat in her Escort waiting for us to lead her away, while my dad was elsewhere, not about to stand watching as we left without him.

The divorce wasn’t yet official, but there was still a sense that the arrangement was a bluff. Caitlin refused to watch as her bedposts were carried from the house. It wasn’t that she’d loved living there; it was the haste of our departure. For me, my mother’s voice and polite directives to the men stacking our boxes made things easy.

“You take your guitar,” she said, sitting on the porch,
humoring me with a nod toward my cracked and duct taped road case. “That’s a good idea.”

Earlier that week, one of her brothers had called to tell me I was a man of honor for sticking by my mother during these difficult times.

“You take care of her,” he’d said.

But I knew it wasn’t me carrying the weight, taking care.

When the truck’s door was rolled down and latched, I looked up at the house, swearing I’d never see it again—and I never would. Dad had found a condo not far from there. Over the next few days, his brothers would help him haul away our couches and tables. Mom would buy new rugs and curtains. She’d paint the new place blue, if she wanted, her favorite color, the calmest shade she could imagine.

“Guess that’s it,” she said. “You never liked it here anyway.”

The truck left our driveway, headed for Dearborn. I packed my guitar into my minivan, coaxing Ozzy into the front seat as I selected the perfect song for the twenty-minute ride, a punk rock barn burner about making a run for it, going out of this world and never coming back. I turned up the dial as I blazed the highway, speeding past Mom in her station wagon and Caitlin in her Escort, then past the moving truck, and everything else.

R
epa wagged his head, swung his fist like a hammer.

“Never,” he said. “No way. I can’t live with it.”

We stood in an alley behind an impoverished strip mall. On the opposite side of the building was a Chinese carryout with greasy windows and a few brand-X businesses. Our new practice room was one flight up in a warehouse above a Big Lots discount store. In the trunk of Ethan’s Toyota Corolla were two hundred black T-shirts on which the band’s logo was printed above the image of a man with a gun to his head. Ethan held one up, spreading it wide for our inspection. If not for his efforts, there’d have been no shirts or decals, no accessories whatsoever, only song.

“It’s a shit vibe.” Repa turned to me. “You know it.”

Tuesday-night rehearsal had been the usual three-hour storm of dirty noise, a half-conscious run through our set—then again and again. Four times was routine, though we’d become so enraptured it was difficult to tell whether we improved anything one set to the next. Our touring had left us in tip-top form,
and we always played best with no audience but one another. Local gigs, however, were becoming lucrative—as much as two hundred dollars per show—and our rehearsal space was the fruit of an increasing band fund. Between songs, the three of us had split a case of beer and a handle of Popov, more than usual for a weeknight. We were feeling the effects now that we’d ventured into the autumn evening.

“Can you imagine,” Repa said, “the kind of chickenshit who’d wear a thing like that?”

“I got a deal on these.” Ethan teetered, an easy kill when it came to booze. His brown eyes took wild courses, as if glimpsing a number of worlds at once. “Only cost two bucks apiece,” he said.

Early October. The orange-black hue of the season, the moon visible through the shedding trees. I sensed a good mixture coursing through me—a deep, fuzzy buzz that might last awhile—and wanted the night to end somewhere other than my new basement digs. It would come on like that, the purr of some drunken muse, asking:
What else is there, where else is there to be?
That’s when I’d pine for Lauren. It didn’t help that we’d met in autumn, four years earlier, tangling on a bed of flannel shirts in Ford Field. It had been my first time; hers, too. A time that could seem so distant, but I remembered the smell of her then: a lotionlike sweetness. Once or twice I’d picked up that scent in movie theaters or concert halls, had trailed it until it disappeared. I thought I might never find it again, yet the fall breeze revived the possibility.

Repa snatched a T-shirt, spreading it wide, dancing with it across the gravel lot, while I pictured Lauren’s dorm room, out there in the land of student riots and parties gone Babylon—Michigan State University, a mere hour’s drive. I knew there’d be a pumpkin on her windowsill and paper ghouls dangling
from the ceiling. At this hour she’d be asleep in sweatpants torn at the knees and some faded T-shirt, the kind of thing only a slumbering young woman could wear with any grace.

“Oh, baby. Yes!” Repa’s argument veered toward the abstract. He kissed the silk-screened face, tongued the gun. “Do me. Do me where there’s pain.” Trotting now, clicking his heels, inspiring Ethan to break into song. They laughed; they traded verse. There could be hours of this. Neither of them noticed me inching away. By the time they’d realized I’d left, the shirts would be folded and stowed, awaiting future scrutiny.

As I cranked the starter of my minivan, driving eighty miles of highway to Lauren’s East Lansing campus seemed a valiant idea, a challenge to my wits. I knew the DUI preemptives: slapping my jaw, palming an eye when the lines in the road doubled. Set the cruise at sixty-five; keep the blood sugar up; more beer, candy, nicotine. Windows down. Never, ever use the heater. Just outside the city the highway would open up, stretching empty and dark through the Michigan farmlands. It was a straight shot on Interstate 96, the junction just a few miles away. A quick westward turn off Telegraph Road, before I gave myself time to think it over.

G
RAND
R
IVER
A
VENUE WAS
empty as my minivan rattled into town. East Lansing’s bars had closed, the fraternity mansions dark but for porch lights. Night crawlers outside the 7-Eleven and no one else around. I’d arrived this way a few nights the year before, when Lauren had been a freshman, cold-calling her from an all-night diner’s pay phone and waking hours later in her bunk. My hit-and-run experience of the collegiate dream.

We claimed we were taking a break, or broken up. But it only took one of us mustering the late-night nerve to call, and once we found each other there’d be an exciting instant when our
old passions proved their endurance. She was another world, a place where I sought shelter when my soul was on the fringe. I never knew it until I arrived.

I pulled up to the same old diner and punched the buttons of a pay phone carved with initials and plastered with stickers. The line rang, a jangling moment that forced me to consider my alternative if Lauren didn’t pick up: sleep in the minivan, in some lot far beyond the campus’s parking-ticket entrapment.

“Hello?”

“I’m on Grand River. Can I come over?”

“You know where to go,” Lauren said. “I’ll let you in.”

Sun blasted through the dormitory windows, alerting me to the worst headache and a sucked-dry feeling—in a matter of minutes I was scheduled to begin the morning shift at Repeat the Beat Records, where I’d been employed the past couple months. I climbed out of Lauren’s bed to reach for her cordless. “Calling in drunk” was how Repa described this type of postbinge operation, when you awake half cockeyed, feeling thrashed enough that your voice conveys an indisputable illness.

“I’m sick, man. Don’t think I can make it.”

The record shop’s manager, a progressive rock connoisseur with a poodled mullet, wasn’t yet onto me.

“You sound like hell,” he said.

Lauren had left for class. Her hair raking my face as she climbed over my aching limbs was the only memory I had of her having been there at all. The only other evidence was a water bottle nestled in my crotch, a note stuck to it:
DRINK
. It said so much about why I loved her, though I was no longer in love.

My hair had grown long, chin length, and smelled of stale spirits. I lay down ass-flat on the floor to allow my intestines percolation time. A feeling like rug burn worked itself up my throat. For a while I stared at the ceiling, upon which fluorescent decals were arranged in the shape of a constellation. When this cosmos became too much to consider, I turned to Lauren’s walls, decorated with art assignments and poems and a photo of me that I couldn’t remember being taken.

And there, perched on her windowsill, was the pumpkin—a sallow, yellowing gourd, really.

Caitlin was nearby, in a dorm I’d never seen. Worse than the bruised tenderness of my eyeballs was the guilt of realizing she hadn’t crossed my mind the night before. I’d been putting stock in the idea that here, in this state-college wonderland, Caitlin would have her shot at good living. Surely Mom was also banking on this. Caitlin would be the long-distance proof that our family was carrying on. Her academic awards would outshine my van tours. She’d return to Dearborn blonde and fit, tan from spring-break travels, carrying scholarly medallions that would divert attentions from my expanding gut and mangy hair and the mounting, never-mentioned evidence that I was becoming a drunk. For Caitlin: a career in humanities or veterinary science; something useful and peaceable and immune to future calamities.

I’
D BEEN ON CAMPUS
a couple days when there was a knock at Lauren’s door. She wasn’t due back for hours, and I inched down the volume of her stereo, hoping the slow fade would fool whoever was outside into believing the music had been carried off by wind.

Three more knocks.

I’d been indulging in a faux breakdown, the type of catatonic
rest I believed any hardworking musician deserved. The greats had holed up in Chelsea Hotel. My reprieve was Marshall-Adams dormitory, where Lauren kissed me hard before leaving for biology, the two of us carrying on as though we each hadn’t seen a world of new things we had no way of sharing. Though she must have known the days had temporarily broken me, because she held me tight as we lay watching VHS tapes. In her arms I’d been able to sleep for hours on end, never once thinking anyone might discover me.

From the hallway, I heard my sister call my name.

I walked over and slid the deadbolt.