The Original 1982 (20 page)
P
ushed up against the living room window, the table becomes my desk. It gives me a familiar view of rooftops and sky. Thirty years ago, I lived in another brownstone just twenty blocks from here.
I turn my computer on, check e-mail, and read the paper. Finally I reach for a manila envelope in my bag. Finding the DVD inside, I slip it into the disk drive of my laptop.
I Gave My Love
is a documentary about a young single mother in a depressed Catskill Mountain town. I'm to meet with Marta Lightman, its director, later in the week and hope to have a better idea of what I'm doing by then.
In the opening scene, the camera follows a nurse into a bright hospital room where a young woman, Ashley, is screaming and crying as she gives birth to a daughter. Ashley is pretty and blond, even as she grows red-faced, her hair soaked in sweat. She's screaming, “Oh,
shit
! Oh, my fuckin'
God
!”
My song “Don't Fall In” is playing in the background. Marta has filled her temp-score with songs from my second record,
Room Inside,
a collection of folk rock and ballads that
Rolling Stone
gave three and a half stars in 1992. I'm to replace all the music with a new score.
After her baby's birth, Ashley is abandoned by her abusive boyfriend, moves back in with her crack-addicted mother, loses her job at Dunkin' Donuts, fills out forms for public assistance. In the final scene, the baby's first birthday is being celebrated in her grandmother's double-wide with an angel food cake and a few unwholesome-looking relatives. She grins happily, her face and hands covered in cake.
“Still True” plays through the scene. Its lyric, written so long ago for Gabriel, is now a love song to a child.
Baby, all I've ever looked for is a safe place,
All I've ever longed for is your warm embrace . . .
The most moving scenes in the film are the ones between Ashley and her newborn. In one, she breast-feeds her daughter while being interviewed. “What does it feel like?” the unseen interviewer asks.
“I can't describe it,” whispers Ashley. The way she says it tells you everything. The best part is when the baby reaches up to hold a piece of her mother's hair. Such a touching, intimate gesture. It's like a knife to the heart every time.
B
y early afternoon, the sun is reflecting so brightly off the windows across the street, I decide to go for a run. Outside, the air is almost balmy, one of those spring days that feel more like summer. A young couple ducks past me on the sidewalk. I see them nuzzle like colts and remember, instantly, what that felt like.
Looking toward Central Park in the distance, I try to pace myself. Lately, I tend to get overheated and can't cool down. The hypothalamus gland is located at the base of the brain. It regulates body temperature and ceases to work properly after menopause. I know this because I've googled my symptoms. Unfortunately, aging is not a problem that can be solved with a little exercise or Botox.
I jog past the brick and limestone buildings on East Ninetieth Street on my way to the park entrance at Fifth Avenue, where curved staircases lead to the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. On opposite corners stand two very grand buildings: the Cooper-Hewitt Museum and the Church of Heavenly Rest. It's one of the loveliest spots in the entire city.
Over the last ten years, the city seems to have undergone a transformation, too. Maybe only my perspective has changed, but it now appears to be overrun with young families. Baby carriages, pregnant women in tight T-shirts, bellies round and proud; men wearing baby harnesses; mothers and fathers still in their early thirties with toddlers and infants on every arm, hand, and shoulder. I'm pretty sure it wasn't always this way.
The ache that lodges itself between my shoulder blades and beneath my rib cage struggles to accept things as they are. That's what middle age is all about, acceptance and regret. The realization that you're no longer young comes smack up against the recognition that, soon enough, you will be old. What will it be like to have the world shift out from under you, to live in a failing body but still feel like a shiny bird inside?
I think of my father then, as I often do. I want to remember him as a robust man of sixty, but sometimes his final face creeps in like a bad dream. He knew the answer to everything. How did he do that? From tectonic plates, to algebra, to who the movie stars were dating. I can still conjure the sound of his voice saying my name.
After he died, my mother seemed stunned and confused for a while, as if she'd left him somewhere and needed to go find him. But amazingly, she's made a new life for herself. I can barely keep up with her descriptions of bingo and bridge and movie nights. She's going to Israel with her widows' group in the fall.
I veer off the bridle path, over a hill, past the tennis courts, and pick up a dirt road that runs along the Park Drive going south. Everywhere others are enjoying the warm day. Runners and cyclists, students, squirrels and birds, dogs rolling in the grass. It's hard not to feel a part of it all.
Approaching the Sheep Meadow, I come upon a television crew. A girl is being interviewed with the green field behind her. Evidently, she's to give a concert as part of the SummerStage series. She has long, dirty-blond hair, parted in the middle, and wears too much makeup for the bright afternoon. I can feel her confidence radiating. Others stop to listen, too. She's at the height of it, or nearly so.
“I don't want to be another guitar girl,” I hear her say, in explanation for why she plays the ukelele. It makes me smile. I was once a version of that girl, I think, and Jules was, too, just a few years before me. There's always a girl starting out: a musician, or actress, or dancer, who believes she is special, that her youth, or beauty, is not the reason. But the world is just as happy with the next girl, and there's always another girl waiting to step into the temporary light.
I'll tell Jules, I think. It will remind her of the summer she played Ophelia. A prestigious Shakespeare in the Park production, at the start of her career. “That was such a good time for me,” she always says. “Remember?”
I stumble upon
Conspiracy
sometimes flipping through channels late at night. It always takes me by surprise to see her fine young face. What is Jules doing right now? I wonder. Pulling her cart along Venice Beach?
Sometimes you see people you used to know when they were young, and they look like they're wearing an “old” suit, a Halloween costume of fat and wrinkles. You can still see the person beneath, but barely. Jules is the opposite of those people. Time has concentrated her. Dressed in bright vintage sweaters and jeans, her hair dyed a version of the old yellow-blond, she's well known at the thrift stores and junkyards in Santa Monica and Venice, where she finds metal wire, dresses with crinolines, doll parts, shoes, and other things for her artwork. She lugs it all back to her studio in a fold-up cart, which gives her the look of what we used to call a bag lady. But she either doesn't know or doesn't care. Holding her cigarette between thumb and forefinger, paint or plaster beneath short fingernails, she squints one eye as she brings it to her lips and drags deeply. She's become a character she'd have loved to play in her acting days.
Last week, we stood together in her yard as she fed acorns and walnuts to the squirrels. They come right out of the trees and stand on hind legs for her like little men. She's always had a way with animals.
“See that one there? That's Charlie. He's very brave.”
I noticed she was covering her mouth with her hand. “What's going on with your face?” I asked.
“Oh, I broke another damn tooth,” she said. “Pain in the ass. Next life, I want to come back with good teeth!”
“I'm coming back as a bird,” I told her.
“An old turkey?” she joked, and we laughed.
“Maybe a sparrow,” I said, thinking of the way they gather in spring.
“Nice,” she said, but later she sent me a clip of a sparrow being pecked at, relentlessly, by another sparrow. In the subject line, she'd written,
Are you sure?
O
n Sunday my mother takes the train in from Long Island. Climbs the three flights of stairs slowly but steadily.
“Oh, this is nice,” she says, about the rental apartment. Her sunny nature, which used to drive me crazy, now seems a rare gift. She's different, too. I think it's because she doesn't have to stand by my father anymore, to translate for him and cajole him. But she says it's because they were like two parts of one organism, and now she is only half.
The restaurant we choose for our brunch of eggs Benedict and blueberry pancakes is not one he would have chosen. He'd have steered us toward the coffee shop on Ninety-sixth Street instead. We pay the expensive bill and talk about what he'd have said: “Outrageous!”
After brunch, we hail a taxi to the West Side. We're on our way to see a movie that's playing at an art-house theater across from Lincoln Center. This, too, is new. Art-house movies and brunches. It feels like his ghost is watching us in amazement. My father's absence is so pronounced, it's a presence. But we pretend to be just the two of us, doing what we want to do.
We arrive at the theater early and after buying our tickets wander into the courtyard behind Avery Fisher Hall to see what's going on. A stage has been set up there, along with about a thousand folding chairs. Security guards stand by a red velvet rope, stretched across to keep fans at bay. We have no idea what the event is or who is scheduled to perform, but it's a nice day, so we take a seat beneath a stand of trees and listen as a sound check gets under way.
From the first blast of trumpet to the unmistakable beat of the timbales, I recognize the music of my twenties. Salsa. Afro-Cuban music, it's sometimes called. I pull out my phone to research who's playing, but before my search is complete, I hear a voice speak into a microphone. “And one and two,” it says, and I know.
“It's Gabriel,” I say to my mother even before he starts to sing.
“How can you tell?” she asks.
“I just can.” It's a surprise, even to me, that after so many years I recognize the sound of his voice from the first word. We sit under the trees and listen to his song as he stops and starts again. It's a sound check, after all. He seems frustrated. I can't be sure about what from so far away, but I figure it's probably because he can't hear himself in the monitors or is unhappy with the mix. I've been in his shoes many times. Finally, he seems satisfied, or at least has accepted the limitations of the sound system. He thanks everyone and leaves the stage.
“Are you going to say hello?” my mother asks. I can see that she wants me to. But the stage is a block away, and even if we were able to get a message to him, what would be the point? Maybe he'd come out to say hello, and then what?
“I don't want to be late for our movie,” I say.
She looks disappointed, as if it's a coincidence too big to pass up, maybe even meant to be. But I steer her away.
Many years ago I went to see Gabriel play at a supper club in Midtown. I convinced Alan to come along, because I was nervous to go by myself. Seeing him perform again had been confusing and upsetting. His every mannerism was so deeply familiar to me, though I didn't really know him anymore. It struck me that I would never get over it, not the pain of losing him, or the relationship itself. The experience had left me depressed for weeks.
Life is like a big empty house when you're young, windows open wide. But over time, you close off rooms that are too painful to visit, whole wings you can't bear to enter. Eventually, you live in a book-filled kitchen off the porch, hiding from your own history.
“What?” my mother asks. I must have a faraway look in my eye.
“Oh, it's nothing,” I say, leading her through the crowd.
T
hat night, when I google Gabriel, among the many photographs I find is one I took myself, thirty years ago, on a trip to Paris. Its caption reads
Gabriel Luna by the Eiffel Tower
. Somewhere, I have one just like it of me standing in the same spot. I don't recall much about the trip, but as I look at the picture, a few things come back to me. We'd gone to Berlin first and then to Rome, where I got a haircut that made me look like a baby bird.
I drag the photo to my desktop, to inspect it more closely; it's a Polaroid, taken with my old SX-70 camera. Gabriel's hair is lifting in the breeze (when he still had hair!). As I stare at the image, the soft blue work shirt he wears becomes more familiar and then the gold cross around his neck. I remember his hands, smallish with slender fingers. Funny to find such a personal memento on the Internet. How did it get there? The thing that strikes me most about it is the love in his eyes. Eyes that were looking into mine. Gabriel had loved me on that gray day in Paris.
I don't know why it takes me so long to remember the most important thing, but suddenly I doâI'd been nauseated over breakfast in Rome, realized my breasts were swollen and my period was late. Had I told him yet, when this picture was taken? Maybe I was waiting until we were back in New York, afraid of ruining our holiday. His expression gave no clue.
In my mind, I make a revision to its caption:
Gabriel Luna by the Eiffel Tower with Child.
This is a photograph of the time when everything could have been different.
R
iding the elevator up to the fourth floor, my excitement mounts. It's like time travel to come down this hallway and stand at the door of Silver Sound.
Harv has retired to Miami, and the studio has new owners and a new name. In the office, I check to see if my eight-by-ten, a Warner Bros. publicity photo, is still Scotch-taped to the wall, but of course it isn't.
I breathe in its particular scent of musty, refrigerated air. Most of the smaller recording studios are long gone, but Silver has hung on, somehow. Or Planet has. Its new name is not the only change; C is a digital room, and much of the equipment has been updated. But I'm happy to see that the Yamaha C7 still occupies a corner of room A. Once, I recorded all of my demos here, for Warner Bros. Records, and even before that, with my first band, before I had a deal.
I plan to record live drums and piano in the big room for the documentary project. It's the most fun thing in the world to record with a band in a studio like this one. At one time there was no other way. You saved up your pennies, or made a spec deal with a studio. You bought expensive two-inch tape and hired an engineer to work the Neve console. It's a way of life that has gone extinct, really, for most musicians. We'll be doing the majority of this projectâoverdubs and editsâat Alan's place, using Pro Tools.
Marta arrives a few minutes later. She's an elegant woman who carries a few extra pounds well. There are silver streaks in her dark hair, and she wears a crisp white tunic. As she takes my hand, I remember having heard that many years ago she lost a young child to cancer. It occurs to me that she's addressed the tragedy in every film she makes. That's what we do, as artists, I think, explore one obsessional subject. Address a specific trauma, or wound, again and again.
I show Marta around the studio and explain my idea to her. I want to hire all of the musicians who played on
Room Inside
to play on the new score
.
It will give the music a similar feel to that record, which I know she wants, but will also be very different. I'm not a fan of using songs as film score, I tell her. I think it turns a movie into a music video.
“What about âStill True'?” she asks.
As a compromise, I agree to do a new version of that old song. It will be fun to revisit, and maybe I can convince her to use it only as the credits roll.
After we leave the studio, we stop for a bite to eat at a French bistro on Eleventh Street. I know the restaurant from when I lived across from it, on Sixth Avenue. We're seated at a marble table by the oak bar. I can see my old apartment through the plate glass. It looks different, because the ancient casement windows have been swapped out for ones that are probably energy-efficient.
We order lunch, and I ask about Ashley's baby, Lorelei. They're both doing well, Marta says. Ashley has a good job working for a utility company. The little girl is exceptional, bright, and cheerful. “She got the happiness gene,” Marta says. “Do you have children?”
“No,” I say. “No children.”
Marta takes his photograph from her wallet then and places it on the table between us. Her son, Claudio, has been gone nearly twenty years, but time means nothing to grief. “I still think about him every day,” she says. For a moment I think of you, Minnow. I picture you floating like a mist or a spirit.
After lunch we say our good-byes, and I wander through the Village, struck by how much it's changed. Everything has been replaced, renamed, renovated, reopened in a new location. Doorways are cleaner, or more decrepit, new windows shine over old brick. I can see the past, layered beneath the facade of storefronts, restaurants, and apartment buildings. It's like being in all of those other years at the same time.
That night, I have a dream: I'm in my house in Silver Lake, opening closets and doors into rooms that are empty. As I search the house, I grow more and more agitated. Everything is gone.
Waking from the dream, I feel disoriented and try to fall back asleep but can't. The red numbers of the bedside clock blink 5:00
A.M.
It's three hours earlier in L.A. The man I loved will still be sleeping beside the woman who shares his bed now. I called him E, his first initial and also his last.
When the sky gets light, I put on my running shoes and go down to the street. The morning is cool, though it's been warm the last few days and is supposed to be again. The sun is coming up over the East River, pink and orange. A neon sign glows red beside it. Other runners are out, dog walkers, a few people just getting home from the night before. It strikes me that in the early morning, there is often this feeling of optimism. What will the day bring? It must be a tool for survival of the species, I think, programmed into our DNA. Even if your house has burned down, or you're sick, or realize your life is full of mistakes that can never be undone, still you feel it. Hope.
