Wonderland (10 page)

Nils eyed me. “Let me give you some advice, Anna. We’ve stuck our fingers in the socket with this one. Begin drinking on the plane and don’t stop until you’ve been home at least a month. The g-forces will knock you silly.” He slapped Boxer on the back. “Let’s all weep! Let’s weep for the proletariat! Huzzah!”

I left the two of them there, under the eye of the hypertrophied flamingo, and made my way back to the actress’s flat. I couldn’t get a taxi, but it wasn’t far to walk. In the early-morning light, the white stone of London’s finer houses was cold and grand as angels standing upright, hands pressed together, eyes closed. The sky was broad and gray. The lorries weren’t out yet. All was quiet. My ears rang in the lull. The tips of my fingers, the tip of my nose, were cold as I hurried along, trying to pull my shirtsleeves over my hands. I was exhausted, emptied, yet in that emptiness, supernaturally light, radiant. I had given it all, used it up. I could see myself hurrying along the London street at the drained end of the night, skinny and wrecked and shredded, like a sheaf of bright ribbons, ripped and tangled and trailing down the street. At the same time, I wanted to weep, too, like Boxer, weep until I slept and woke in my own bed, in my tiny tiny apartment on 19th Street, with my own calico cat looking at me from the windowsill, my sky-blue bedroom, my pumpkin-orange living room, my own jewelry hanging from the closet doorknob, my dinged, cobalt-blue teakettle waiting on the small, gassy stove for me to pick it up and fill it. How long had I been on the road? I counted. Six months. Was that possible? I counted again, ticking off the months on my cold fingers. Actually, it was seven. Where had we been? Had we made any money? Was I a star? It had all seemed so slow and random for such a long time, years of secondhand junk, and then it had all gone so fast.

I had no idea. I wasn’t even sure I knew what a star was, really. A vertigo uncentered me. I managed the heavy building door, made my way slowly up the steps toward the actress’s flat, dizzy. As I put the key in the lock, I realized that I wanted Simon to be there waiting for me. I wanted to untether him, I wanted his face to seek my face, I wanted to feel again the restlessness of his hawk’s eye. And what was Janáček? Just before opening the door, my cheek pressed against it, listening for this Simon inside, I remembered the surprising weight and heat of him, and at the center of the motion a deeper, silent motion, the perpetual motion of a man who is never at home anywhere.

I could have wept. Still leaning against the door, I thought,
I’m exhausted,
which I was, and not,
I just got pregnant,
which I also was, as it turned out. I reminded myself that I didn’t know this man in real life and doubted I would like him if I did, a too-short, married, fortyish, densely packed, hawk-faced, tethered, Lebanese architect (from Switzerland? from Wales? from Beirut?), with ostentatiously European glasses, bespoke shirts, and expensive laceless shoes. Translation: a married guy with kids. I reminded myself that I had just essentially slept with a fan, and everyone knows that that’s the beginning of turning into a crazy hag with breast implants and lipstick drawn way beyond the lips. A little soon, and not very indie, to be there.

I opened the door. The air in the flat was still. The modern appliances gleamed. The mantelpiece was crowded with framed photos, souvenirs, odd and beautiful artsy items. A generous bouquet of dried red roses hung upside down in the fireplace. Frilly, but far from stupid. I could imagine the actress, her rounded laugh. In the bedroom, the bed was neatly made, the pillows fluffed, empty of the impression of Simon’s head or mine. The brass bed knobs seemed larger in the morning light, like small suns. No tread of his on the carpet. Folded on the bedside table was a small piece of plain white paper that said
Anna
on the front. Inside he had written,
What a lovely evening, bon voyage,
and his cell phone number.

I put the piece of paper in my filthy pocket, then took all my clothes off and hurled myself into the Colette bed for the second time that long night, buried my skinny, sweaty, aching self in eyelet sheets. Even my kneecaps hurt. I was a single, frayed live wire. I didn’t call that number the next day, or the next. I didn’t call it when I found out that I was pregnant. (Oh, thirty-three—what I would have given later for such a recklessly easy conception; at the time, I just thought, aggravated, that the energy of the last night had made me reckless, had to look out for that, add it to the list of tour mistakes.) I didn’t call when I went for the abortion back in New York. I might have called Nils, the only person I knew who knew Simon, but he was already dead. I didn’t call, but I kept the piece of white paper on my dresser top in the 19th Street apartment, next to the two pairs of good earrings, the slender bottle of musky perfume I loved, the dish of various European coins, the bit of rubble from the perforated lighthouse in its vitrine. I went down after that tour, went down hard. The abortion, I’m sorry to put it so coolly, didn’t seem to have much to do with Simon at the time. It seemed like part of a larger death. It made me sick, maybe it was the roller coaster of confused hormones, soul fever, I don’t know. Even the calico cat got sick, as if my malaise was contagious, and lost big patches of fur. She and I got better, fatter, together, slowly. The crown on my tooth felt like a door closing. Nils had been right, of course, though he neglected to mention that the g-forces get you anyway. It’s really just a question of location. It was only later, much later, that the almost-baby mattered.

So I didn’t call Simon then, but I did call a year later, from Heathrow. I thought of it as curiosity.

“Anna! Where are you?”

“On my way to Rome. Just for a few days, I’m opening for—”

“Tell me where you’ll be.”

That was the first time we were in Rome.

T
HE PLACE WHERE
it tips. There. You feel it within first, the fulcrum of the seesaw as it shifts. A sliding that isn’t falling. If someone says to you, “I want to be in your dreams,” what does that mean? Dream of me. Let me in. Write about me, think about me, sing about me. It’s the Orpheus problem—once she turned away, she wrote the songs he would sing for the next billion years. But it was he who turned, he turned first, he knew what would happen, so can’t it also be said that he decided his own fate in that moment? Maybe he turned into the motion that was already happening within, he had already decided. Turning—in my imagination, he is higher up than she on the dim path as it slopes upward to the surface. He feels it before he sees it, the pull backward. He knew it would happen before it happened, the motion had already begun. You don’t know where it begins, not really, but you know where it tips, where the tilt starts. The air seems to grow heavier on one side, lighter on the other. The problem for my father of upending that rotting pier in Trondheim was that, small as it was, it wouldn’t stay upended. It kept tilting to one side or the other, it fell, and each time it fell it cracked in a new place, and the question of bracing became massive and, ultimately, insoluble. The Trondheim pier had to express a preference; it had to lean, to tilt, to fall. “I want to be in your dreams,” a woman said to me at a party once. As if, once requested, it was a thing that could be done. As if the motion could be inserted. She wasn’t in my dreams, not ever, lovely though she was. I don’t know where the tilt begins. They didn’t either, in Trondheim, so to everyone’s vast disappointment they lowered the pier back down. Bent from its recent struggles, it tilted and twisted and sagged into the sea. The Trondheim Arts Council paid the commission in full anyway, but they dismantled the pier, because it had long since rusted; now that it was bent, it was a public-safety hazard. As both art and commerce, it failed. It wouldn’t be used. It didn’t want to be part of anyone’s dreams. Maybe the dismantling is what it wanted all along, who knows?

T
HE HAY BALES
everywhere, why are there hay bales? Don’t make this venue feel any less like the airstrip that it is. The festival is enormous, it goes on for acres, guarded at the many gates by big, blond Slovak men who look as if they got out of the secret police yesterday, or might still be in it. I walk the hot tarmac road beside the tents devoted to beer, books, food, Greenpeace, body painting, and hookahs, or simply filled with people lying around on enormous, pouffy, multicolored cushions. I walk out to the edge, to a chainlink fence. A young Asian man with a ring on each thumb is standing there. The noise of the festival is behind us. The afternoon sun has a brute Slovak strength.

I nod hello.

The young man says, “What band are you with?”

“Mine.”

“Cool.”

“You?”

“I crew for Jason.”

I nod as if I know who this is. Together, the young man and I watch a small plane land and taxi in, growing larger, louder, coming to rest fifty yards from us.

“I love that,” says the young man. “It looks like a dragonfly, doesn’t it?”

C
LASSICAL, ESPECIALLY CHOPIN
. And folk, the kind of songs that are so worn, so ancient, that they no longer have an author, if they ever did. Songs of deaths and drownings, miners lost in the mines, true loves never to be seen again, oceans and rivers and sailing ships. Hymns, though he has never been a religious man. I think he likes their heavy, regular thumping toward Jesus. Ever since he lost the hearing in his right ear, he holds half of a set of big headphones to his left ear, leaning forward, listening, his bad foot twitching. In his studio, he always played the music loud, filling the room with long, melodic loops of sadness. The inevitable next question. No, he didn’t. It’s true that he never cared how loud or long I slammed away at the guitar, starting at twelve, in Wellfleet and Trondheim and Rome and London and on St. Mark’s Place. True that he helped sell T-shirts in the days of The Squares, brought his latest girlfriends to shows, sat in the front, attentive, tapping a finger on the table. He has always liked my voice, that’s true, too; he liked the depth and oddness of it, the roughness. That’s his line drawing of an anxious little elephant on the front of
Bang Bang.
His drawing skills were extraordinarily fluid; he covered the walls of our rooms, as children, with menageries of creatures real and invented. But the music didn’t touch him; he likes a melody. He balked at
Whale,
squinted at
Bang Bang,
was more or less polite about
The Pillars.
When I sent him an early mix of
Wonderland,
he emailed me, “So happy you’re working again, Annie. Seems like an awful lot of thought went into this.” I mean. The inevitable next question: yes, of course I saw the connection with Simon. No kidding. He translated parts of
Whale
into Arabic, read me his teenage poetry over the phone, laughing at himself, although the poetry was pretty good. Knowing, which happens slowly, takes you only so far. The listening, which happens in an instant, is difficult to refuse.

T
HE BARKING OF
the deer fucking in the woods outside the chateau was very loud. They were especially active at twilight, which was also the time they usually grazed. When they fucked they made harsh, bellowing sounds that seemed to bear no relation to pleasure. Gigi, who’d heard the males’ strangled calls, said their veins stood out on their necks as they craned forward, attenuated, straining, barking hoarsely.

“Such beautiful creatures,” she said, “making such a terrible sound in such a terrible way. How can that be?”

“Like us,” said Cleo, my backup singer, who was also a painter. She pushed at the soft candle wax that had dripped onto the table, frowning. She had strong, square hands, a strong, square voice; she was expensive, and she knew it.

The others—Ethan, the producer; David, the sound engineer; Jean, the bassist; and Hubert, the all-around rhythm section—made demurring murmurs that hovered soggily in the humid July evening. Gigi, the concierge and major-domo of this domain, maintained a judicious silence, head tilted toward the woods. Condensation beaded on the wine glasses, the water glasses.

The seven of us were at dinner at the long table in the overgrown garden. It was our last week, and we were failing. We had come to the chateau to make
Bang Bang,
my second album, which was going to take me even higher. Ezra, my new friend and patron, had arranged this, shaking the chateau out of the folds of his robes. Legendary records had been made there, legendary things had happened, and more legendary, darker things were rumored to have happened. But so far, for us, nothing was happening.

“They’re just looking for some touch,” said Ethan, spooning sugar into his tea. Large and bald with faintly pointy ears, Ethan was the genius producer of that moment, the Magnum, the Magus, the Dream, the man who knew your other self, your past lives, your shadow side, and could coax it all onto tape. When he was working, he went off his medication, which meant that sometimes he slept all day and sometimes he didn’t sleep at all. At the chateau—he’d been there before, of course, many times—it was his custom not to sleep.

“But are they ever getting it?” said Gigi. “They sound like they’re dying.”

Cleo molded the soft candle wax into a small, naïve head, rolling it in her palm. “We’d better get it tomorrow,” she said. “We’d better get something. I have to be in Munich on Saturday.”

Jean, the perfect boy whom everyone wanted and no one could have, said, “Munich!” and drained his wine glass.

Hubert, the sinewy curlicue, glowered at Cleo, whom he could not forgive for wanting him so blatantly. “Don’t let us keep you.”

“We’ll get something,” I said. “We’ve already gotten
something.
A few tracks.”

A deer bellowed into the night. Another echoed him. “Poor prick,” said Ethan.

I kept the thought to myself that the deer were an embodiment or emanation of Simon, calling to me, barking himself hoarse from some alp. I saved up that thought to tell him later, during the night we had planned in Paris. I also kept the thought to myself that the record was going to blaze up, phoenix-like, at the eleventh hour. I knew that this would happen, but I knew that saying it would seem like the worst sort of whistling in the dark, the witless confidence of the ingénue, the outsider. No one would trust me if I told them how beautiful it was going to be.