Читать книгу Stone Arabia - Dana Spiotta - Страница 10

THE CHRONICLES

July 1, 2004

Dear Ada,

It is nearing midnight, and I can’t wait to leave this travesty of a day behind. It was not good or happy or kind. It took a long time to get here, and it will take a long time to leave. Be warned, I feel disoriented. But I will proceed in the finest faith I can muster. I must take care. Because, as we know, memory all too easily accommodates the corruption of regret.

You may surmise that I have had something to drink. This might make you think I am being hyperbolic or histrionic or that word that makes all women of my age cringe, hysterical. As if my hormones or my uterus (the Greek word for womb is hustera, etc.) were the engine of my writerly ablutions. That’s not it. Mostly I am writing because I know and see things no one else does. Because I have to. It is my job, my assignment. I am on the verge of elation. Liberated. Part of me feels relief, I cannot deny it.

I will elaborate, I promise.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Denise said, barely audible in the empty room. Is this really what she was left with? Another overly elaborated joke?

How peculiar this feels: before tonight I never imagined I would try to write about anything, much less this. I don’t mean I don’t understand why people write. Written words demand the deep attention that spoken words just aren’t entitled to. Writers get to pull something solid out of our relentless, everyday production of verbal mucilage. A writer is a word salvager and scavenger and distiller.

As you know, I have occasionally fixated on words—I love to talk and sometimes words come out with embarrassing urgency. I can feel them as almost physical things as I push breath into them. This, I am afraid, is a consequence of solitude. Spoken words become extravagant and magical, and I admit that I have, on more than one occasion, caught myself speaking my thoughts aloud, as though vocalizing them gave them an extra reality, but I don’t think I ever felt any urgent expressive needs about actually writing words down. No desire to extrude something that would endure beyond my mere mortal squeak. Except now, when writing them down seems not to be about cheating the given human terms but instead simply a way to relieve my isolation. “The artistic impulse,” wrote Colette, “even more than the sexual impulse, breaches the barriers.” So be it—smash these walls down. Raze them to the cellar.

Denise stopped reading and took a long breath. And then another. She swayed and steadied herself against her brother’s desk. She realized she had been holding her breath as she read. And standing. She pulled out his desk chair with her elbow. She did not put the letter down. She held it in her hand, her index finger and middle finger keeping the last page distinct from the first. She sat on his chair and leaned toward his desk. Her damp hair stuck to the back of her neck. She should take a sip of water, something. Denise read on to see what Nik had “Denise” say next.

The simplest answer and probably the most accurate answer is that Nik’s art was his life. And I don’t know what that means about a life. I have always resisted artistic impulses of any kind. I always believed that if you weren’t good, what right did you have to do it? This question dates back to when I did try, for a time, to be an actress. A deliverer and even exalter, I imagined, of all those delightfully rescued and worked words, phrases, and sentences. At seventeen I even enrolled in a very exclusive acting workshop. You didn’t know this, did you? But I must confess my initial appearance there, like many things in my life, was accidental. The class met at an equity-waiver theater on Melrose Avenue every Wednesday night. He was a famous teacher; he coached serious movie actors. He would be hired to be on set during important scenes. He held secrets, we were led to believe. And despite how cliché this may sound, I was not even intending to audition for his class. I was there with a friend who wanted to audition. My friend Avril (who burned to be an actor from the moment she saw Judith Anderson’s repulsive-yet-compelling performance in Hitchcock’s brilliant domestic torture film Rebecca), wanted to go and I came along to help her. We did a scene from Done by Hand. I played Janice. I knew nothing about acting. I had no desire to act. But, in the same way a broken clock is right twice a day (I apologize for another cliché), anyone can act for one scene if the one scene happens to require the exact comportment with which you are naturally inclined to when on stage. So in this specific role, in this specific scene, my fontal rush of propulsive fear, my prickly self-strickenness, and my strangled underlaugh that was (and still is) a result of what Sigmund Freud identified as the “liminal dilemma between the intense desire for supplication and the concurrent need for masochistic provocation” all combined to create an illusion of a brilliant stage presence, bursting with potential and future possibility. All of which I didn’t have—not as an actor, certainly.

So I was astonishing, a dazzling creature of tangled, alluring complexity. For five minutes, at seventeen, in the Barbara Stanwyck Theater on a Wednesday.

I said my last line, blurted it in a manic breath. I heard the famous teacher say, “Stop there.” I felt dampness leaking under my arms; I was glistening with what I would have guessed is called “flop sweat”; I could even feel a trickle down the side of my neck. I opened my eyes (they must have been closed for the entire last line). Avril stared at me, her lips quivering. Her face was red and she was clearly on the verge of tears. Was I that bad? I could feel the whole room on the edge of a deep intake of breath, and then into the breach came an avalanche of intense applause. What a thing, Ada. The rough din of all that sudden hand-smacking: you actually can feel it as well as hear it. It is an assault; it is as if they are trying to break in to you somehow. They are laying a claim to whatever it is you just created. I nearly fainted.

The teacher appeared out of the dark and mounted the stage. He waved his hand at the audience and the applause abruptly stopped. His face betrayed no apparent pleasure or displeasure: it was a studious, controlled expression. (One should expect nothing less from an acting teacher than control of the face.) Then I realized his intent, his concentration, was fixed. And it was not fixed on Avril; it was fixed on me. I was along to merely assist, but I was asked to join the workshop on the spot and Avril was not.

Looking back, I must concede there was a little more to it than my coincidental impersonation of a gifted actor. The more to it that I am alluding to is the way I looked. This is a sketchy thing to discuss, but I was frankly pretty in a very actressy way. I had that extra-pretty shine that seems to fix to actors, a shimmery charisma that you can’t miss even if the actor has unwashed hair and no makeup on. I saw Cary Grant, once, at the Beverly Center on a Saturday afternoon. He was silver-haired, way past his heyday. Yet he was that extra-shiny thing, a gorgeous old man, not at all like anyone else there. What is more, he seemed to suck up all the attention in the place, he was like a black hole, drawing curiosity and desire like matter toward infinity. And it had nothing to do with fame, at least not for me, because I didn’t even recognize him. I noticed him before I saw everyone whispering and I discovered who he was. A young woman pushed the shopping cart as he strolled alongside; he appeared conspicuously unaware of the gaze of others as he attended a cantaloupe with an outstretch of his cashmere-covered arm. His power came from his electric prettiness, his extra glow. If we were all in a painting, he would have one of those intricate halos around him, gilt-traced, radiant. That’s exactly what it was, a radiance that felt holy. At least as holy as one could feel shopping at the Beverly Center on a Saturday afternoon. I nearly stopped and applauded as he walked by. We all nearly did.

My extra-prettiness was a minor version of that. I had the regular, symmetrical features of a pretty girl. I had the slim yet plush figure of the standard object of desire. And on top of that I had this little sparkly extra thing, the thing that makes people think you ought to be an actor, the thing that makes everyone sneak disbelieving glances at every detail of you. (Does the exquisite hollow of her philtrum meet her lip at exactly the most alluring depth? Yes, it does. Do her tiny pale earlobes hang only halfway before attaching in the most elegant and demure way? Oh yes. And so on.) I still have some remnant of that kind of beauty, but even I know that it really peaked for me at around seventeen. Some women grow into their peak beauty: they are deep, powerful creatures. Some women seem to miss it entirely, the sum of their pieces becoming somehow less than is really fair. My mother was in the latter category. Her attractiveness had always felt unrealized. She was fifteen pounds away, or she needed a new haircut, or clothes that fit her better. But that was an illusion. She just didn’t add up in quite the right way, and no matter what she did, there would always be something just out of reach for her. She was a woman who always appeared past her peak but who actually never had a peak. And then other women, like me, peak very early. It is a subtle distinction. I mean, I was still quite pretty at twenty-five. I am still reasonably, wearily pretty at forty-seven. (Way prettier than I need to be, especially now that I am a writer.) But when I was on stage at the Barbara Stanwyck Theater, in that audition for that very exclusive acting workshop, it was natural for people to mistake me for a born-to-be-a-star type. I looked like someone whose fabulous peak was yet to come. (Because what peak beauty ever reads like a peak? It must all be becoming, it must all be a leap into the future for a woman.)

He, the famous teacher Herbert Mintov, stopped the applause and we all stood there. He ignored Avril and looked into my face. I remember he cupped my face with his hands, but I am sure that can’t be right. That would be creepy. Herbert was full of all sorts of character flaws, but he would never have made the mistake of appearing creepy. So he didn’t actually touch me, but he did something that was an appropriate teacherly version of that, something along the lines of opening a hand toward me, nodding sagely at me, and saying I was invited to join the class. As I recall, nothing was said to Avril, and so it was with the brutal terms of the acting world. How could I refuse? I had no idea what I was going to do in this life. When you grow up in Los Angeles, sooner or later it occurs to you that acting could be your calling. Especially if you were more or less recruited, Schwab’s-style, into the thing.

As you might have guessed, my acting career went steeply, vertiginously downhill from that first brilliant peak. Herbert’s mistake soon became clear to me, Herbert, and the other students. (But not Avril, of course, because we were no longer friends. She was convinced, and she could have been right, that I upstaged and displaced her. That she never had a shot. Which might have been true, but it certainly wasn’t on purpose. And my refusing Herbert’s invitation would not have furthered her cause in any way, that was clear. I do think it gives the lie to one acting cliché: it isn’t true that if you surround yourself with brilliant actors you will only look better. What is true is you will look weaker. All other actors are your enemy, tarnishing and interrogating your aura of holy radiance. What you need is to be surrounded by serviceable, competent journeymen. Avril learned that and so did I.)

I hate, so deep in this little digression, to insert yet another actor cliché, but if I’m here for anything, it is for truth, for disclosure, for the full story, no matter how tacky that full story might make me seem. It will all, in the end, figure in to the decisions I have made recently. All mistakes lead to further mistakes: all we can do is make a plausible, causal accounting. And maybe I can be excused for the predictable trajectory of my actor’s journey. Here it is: I did have an affair with Herbert. Of course I did.

But I really should get back to the story of Nik, I should have said how all of this pertained to Nik. Nik, unlike me, never had a doubt about who he was or what he wanted to do. He didn’t wait for people to tell him what he was good at. He didn’t just go along with some authority figure the way I just joined Herbert’s acting class because I was invited. I don’t think you could flatter Nik into doing something he didn’t feel all the way through him. But me, I had to say yes to Herbert’s offer, and then I had to sleep with Herbert, too. I don’t need to invite your disgust by going into the details of our lurid assignations. I did start it, I think it is important to be truthful about who initiated things. I knew Herbert wanted me, that was obvious. So I started an affair with him because I felt sorry for him. I was such a terrible actress, he was so completely wrong about my potential, and there he was, stuck with me in class. I brought the whole place down. I was so stiff and self-conscious on stage that I made everyone—all these talented, ambitious actors—hate acting. They would watch me do a scene, and they would think: I hate acting, I hate actors. I quit. I know this was how they felt when they watched me. When you aren’t good at something, you just make everyone despair about anything ever being good again. That is why Gertrude Stein said “Bad art smells human in all the wrong ways.” And bad stage acting is the worst of all—you are stuck right in the room with the embarrassment of the actor’s failure. You become a party to the failure. And there I was, in this room full of very talented actors, actors who could take you to the depths of anyone’s soul. Actors willing to enliven the most hated skins, actors capable of impersonating—of infusing personhood into—whatever words some dark little writer piled up on a page. And they did it with flesh and spirit, they did it with breathing, they did it with finely elucidated human detail. These actors were Zen geniuses, selfless beings capable of both extreme control and fearless spontaneity. They could listen and react to each other, and yet they were disciplined in their devotion to text and coherence. They observed every little self-revealing tic and gesture. They had such endless insight into the compelling whys and ways of human behavior. They prized the integrity of the souls they created; they were fearless.

Except, of course, when they watched me.

Or even worse, when they had to perform with me. I embodied their rediscovered fear. As the class continued, my bad acting became more and more elaborated and intricate. I have to be exact about this—if there is any possible accomplishment in these sentences, it dwells in exactitude. So here is not just how bad I was but how I was bad: I wasn’t lazy. I memorized my lines (by rote and repetition, by groping, by blind will). I wrote notes in the margins. I thought of Motivations. Objectives. Actions. As-ifs. I dutifully penciled them in. I had, I believe, deep insight into the characters I was assigned. I would go to the library and do research. When I was supposed to have pleurisy, I read every detail of what pleurisy does to you (it creates a heaviness in your lungs, labored breathing, and knifelike cutting pain in your chest). I read about the Depression. I read about St. Louis. I worked hard at my acting. I am, if nothing else, an extremely hard worker. I have always worked hard because I have always had to.

You must understand something: Nik and I went to crowded urban public schools. We lacked supervision, parental or any other kind. Necessarily, our education was an act of autocarpy. We didn’t know a thing we didn’t teach ourselves. Nik found a way to revel in his self-conjured education and even saw it as his strength. As the twelfth-century literary genius Abu Jaafar Ebn Tophail wrote in his primordial epic novel, Philosophus Autodidactus: “The feral child will develop the purest form of creativity.” But for me it was different: my feral childhood left me hounded by doubt. When you are self-taught, you get a lot of things wrong. You mispronounce words because you never actually heard anyone speak those words aloud. You use what linguists call hypercorrect language that is in fact not correct, like sticking whom all over the place. Or you use the first-person subjective pronoun I even when you should use the first-person objective pronoun me because you think the word me is only for selfish children. You try to never say the word like, because you can’t be sure how to do it without thinking about it. You learn to second- and triple-guess your instincts, which can really change how you make your way through the world. You are slow because you have to take the long way around to everything. No utterance comes without labored preparations. None of this weighed on Nik, but I always found it humiliating that I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. So my hard work, unlike Nik’s, was underwritten by a kind of despair. I worked desperately hard, you see? I couldn’t give up. I was determined to at least be a rigorous failure.

Herbert did try his best with me. He patiently and clearly expounded the techniques of controlling your body as an actor. I did his Movement exercises. I did his Breathing exercises. I did Sense-Memory exercises. I hummed, I shook out my limbs, I pliéd.

But.

Nothing could override my continuing and enduring awfulness. For all of my efforts and Herbert’s efforts, I actually started to get worse. But that isn’t exactly true. I couldn’t have gotten worse, that wasn’t possible; it was just the longer my attempts at acting went on, the more hopeless it felt to do it. My actual performances were strikingly consistent and uniform: I would get on stage with all of my hard work behind me. I would carry it all out there. I didn’t go blank or anything like that. Here is precisely what happened every time: nothing. I couldn’t take all that underlife, all that between-the-lines annotation, all that hard-willed work and alchemize it into any felt thing. I couldn’t feel. I couldn’t make anyone else feel. As Herbert said once, in exasperation (in bed, actually, after we had had perfectly fine sex), “It is make-believe, don’t you get it? You just have to make me believe. You can get away with whatever you want if you can make me believe it.” Which I couldn’t do, and Herbert could not teach me. I thought of it all, I even thought of not thinking, but I felt nothing, convinced no one. At last I quit. When I finally told him I was done with it, I didn’t just feel relief, I felt a deep release, a reprieve from being so horribly bad.

But now I understand that I had it all wrong. The issue isn’t, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don’t matter. Ability doesn’t matter. Need is the only thing that matters. I need to do this.

Enough, Ada darling. I’m way off subject and I don’t seem to have managed my task very well. You will say, You haven’t explained, why didn’t you do something if you knew? And you are right, I did know. And you are wrong, I shouldn’t and couldn’t have stopped anything. I will try to make you see that. I will try again after I sort things out. And Ada, despite my rambling and middling self-recriminations, don’t—please don’t—pity me. Or Nik. As Gloria Steinem once said, “Pity is simply hate without the respect.”

Yours always,

Ma

Denise stuck the letter back in the envelope glued to the page under the taped-in, cut-out typed heading July 1, 2004. This was not a letter from Denise to her daughter, Ada. It was a sham, a hoax, a put-on. This document was from Nik’s Chronicles. Denise found it there, as she was meant to. This was a letter, written by her brother, in her style—or his conjured style of her—for his Chronicles. He did a rather fascinating and painful facsimile of Denise, a witty, brutal parody of her. For her, actually, because Denise was pretty much the main audience for the Chronicles (besides Nik himself, of course). He exaggerated her pretensions, her diction, her grating trebly qualities. He made fun of her memory skills. (Denise took supplements to aid memory. She did brain exercises. She convinced herself that her ability to remember was speedily evaporating.) She pressed her hand against the open binder. She smoothed the page and could feel the weight and chunked thickness of all the pasted-in entries. The sun had come up, she could see a faint glow at the seams of the garage door and in the small row of windowpanes. She should call someone. What would she say? She tucked the open binder under her arm and climbed up the ladder through the trapdoor to Nik’s apartment. She made a cup of coffee with Nik’s plug-in percolator. She pulled back the black curtain on one of the east-facing windows. The pink edges of the dawn made the scrubby desert oaks look carved in light. It was very quiet. No coyotes or cars. She sat down at his desk with her cup of coffee and pulled the volume of the Chronicles toward her. She took the faux letter out and read it again.

He didn’t really exaggerate her digressive tendencies, she couldn’t argue with that. All that ridiculous acting stuff. She had taken one acting class and she wasn’t that bad. She was commonplace bad. She was much more commonplace in all respects than this Denise-on-steroids that Nik created for the Chronicles, which she knew was never meant to be about the facts or actual life out in the world.

As for the fake quotes, she got a kick out of those. That was Nik’s signature affectation for her, his marker of anything rendered in her voice. The made-up quotes were her attributes, like Saint Lucy always appearing with her eyes on a plate, but the reference was only understood by Denise, only really understood in the context of the entire Chronicles, and so, finally, a profoundly elaborated private joke between them.

What was he getting at with some of this? Nik threw little pebbles and they pinged against the glass; his versions of the two of them kept very close in their own weird-logic way. There was no question that she would have to call Ada next. She would have to account for her actions—or lack thereof—to Ada. She must delineate, with some exactitude—as he ironically put it in his fake letter—the truth of their sadness and troubles.

It was also accurate to say that Nik reveled in his solitude and Denise did not. She figured that was the first thing that separated them—that and when she began to become his audience. It wasn’t just that Nik got a guitar from their father. Nik took it, grabbed hard at it, and never let it go. They diverged early, and after that there was no changing or stopping him.

From where she sat at his worktable, Denise could see his original guitar perched on a stand in the corner. An Orlando with a rosewood body “just like a Martin.” Nik had taken good care of it. She knew he felt there was some destiny to the day he received it: the Beatles, the guitar, the last time they would see their father. She knew because Nik felt there was destiny in everything. The story was part of his legend: he hadn’t even wanted a guitar—it never occurred to him, he would claim with a laugh. And yet it changed his life. Which was true, it did change him. It took him over like a disease. From that very evening he would not quit with that Orlando.

He used to sit by his record player and listen over and over to the same song until he figured out how to play a particular lead. He didn’t read music or learn music theory. But Nik had a capacity for dogged devotion. He was doglike, really, the way a dog will chase a car it can never catch or will never tire of retrieving a ball you throw. He would come home from school or a party or a date, and he would automatically pick up his guitar, in just the same kind of habitual and nearly compulsive way Ada would run to her computer. Many times Denise remembered trying to tell Nik something and he would still be playing his guitar, working something out with fingers and string. It irritated her, the way he would sit there, then say, Yeah? And nod as she spoke, but still stealing glances downward, his left hand depressing strings, his right hand clutching a pick, just touching the pick to strings without strumming. He was showing Denise this great amount of attention and respect by not actually strumming. She said, one time when she really wanted him to listen, “Could you just put your guitar down?” and he looked at her as if she’d asked him to put his arm down.

As it turned out, he was not the world’s most brilliant guitar player. He was good, good enough for songwriting and singing, which were the things he really cared for. He worked at learning the guitar and achieved a high level of competence. Nik taught himself everything about playing, even taught himself the fact that he was not ever going to be a virtuoso.

The actual demise of Nik as possible guitar hero came in 1973. Nik had just begun to play out with his new band, the Demonics. Previously there had been some jam sessions with school friends, but the Demonics were his first band to venture past the garage. He had a bass player, Sam Stone, and a drummer, Mike Summer. (Or maybe it was Dave Winton first and Mike later?) They had scored a regular gig opening for bands at this shitty club called the Well. They played early in the evening when no one was really there, kind of a fill-in thing. But it was a great opportunity—they were just beginners. They still had these long shags and they were a little pimply and peeled. Nik was always pretty good-looking, but he hadn’t found his look quite yet—he was still in the developmental stages. He was on the verge of good-looking. Denise went to all of the gigs even though she was sixteen and well under the legal age. She just slipped in as part of the group. She found a perch near the stage and folded her legs and arms until she felt nearly invisible. The Demonics played the same ten songs over and over. Although Nik had already written hundreds of songs by this point, the only ones they had rehearsed and could even play at all were these ten fairly simple songs. After a few weeks of their boring set, Nik tried to introduce new songs. But something wasn’t working. They would just fade on the stage, already sick of themselves. Then they would get some minuscule amount of money and mope around the edge of the performance area. They’d stay for the next band if they could, but the club knew the Demonics were all underage and they weren’t supposed to hang out after the gig. One night, though, they did manage to stay for the next band, the Cherries. There were four of them—drums, bass, and two guitars. They all had short hair (for that time) and wore collared, short-sleeved tennis shirts buttoned all the way up and tucked in to their beltless, tight, flat-front khaki pants. Nobody looked like that yet.

“Speed preps,” Nik whispered, staring at them. The singer hardly touched his guitar and spent most of his time closed-eyed at the mic, hurling words into the dark. He would hold a chord and then wave his right hand at the strings at crucial moments, giving an underfill to their sound. The other guitar player, the taller, sweatier one, played the leads and sometimes sang harmony—his singing kicked in about as often as the lead singer swiped at his guitar. They played seven hard, fast, close rockers. They wiped the Demonics off the stage. Nik knew it, Denise could tell by how he studied them.

From that moment on, he focused on his songwriting. He recruited Tommy Skate to play lead guitar for his shows. And the rest was history. He understood he wasn’t ever going to be one of those great live guitar players, no matter how hard he worked on it. He didn’t spend forever flogging his failures. He moved things along. Denise slowly began to realize how deeply serious he was.

The Demonics grew to be a pretty decent live band. But Nik preferred composing to performing. He never stopped writing new songs. As devoted as he had been to learning the guitar, his obsession with songwriting trumped everything. He wrote in notebooks, he wrote while he watched TV, and yes, he wrote even while someone was trying to talk to him.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding, but with that dazed noncommittal style the true nonlistener adopts. I’m agreeing with you—just a crapshoot, but why not? But Denise knew the songs were really good, so she couldn’t mind all that much. She figured that’s just how artists were.

The amazing thing was Nik didn’t seem to pay attention to anyone or anything around him and yet then he would write something that seemed entirely to depend on the closest attention. Like “Versions of Me,” his great early song about playing poseur and then wondering why no one knew the real you. He already let the ironic twist come in, the self-admonishment that made him such an appealing songwriter. When he first played this song for Denise, they were sitting in the kitchen of Casa Real. It was late, they had been out at a party. Denise followed Nik in, drunkenly shushing each other even though their mother was still out on a late shift and they were the only ones home. Denise walked straight to the pantry and took out a box of Wheat Thins. She stood with the pantry door open and gnashed a steady stream of salty squares between her teeth. This was her strategy to avoid room spins and subsequent hangovers. She always crammed as many starches in her stomach as she could before she made any attempts to go horizontal. And she always woke up sixteen and fresh-faced.

Nik held his guitar by the neck as he hoisted himself up on the old aquamarine tiled counter. He rested the guitar against his lap and attempted to reach in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes—he shifted his pick to teeth and tried again. He then replaced the pick with a cigarette and started to play. Denise didn’t stop eating her crackers as she walked over to the narrow transom window above the sink and pushed it open.

“I’m not gonna smoke it,” he said without looking up. She put her hand in the Wheat Thins box again and watched him strum. “You want to hear a new song?” he said, looking up. She nodded, leaning against the sink. He began to play “Versions of Me,” and all at once Denise’s very familiar but distant brother became someone else. This was truly the moment when she saw how different he was from everyone else she knew, including herself. He, just by singing his song, could change how she saw the world. He became a vivid human to her, someone who understood her as yet unnamed alienation. She had, all at once, a deep faith in his perception, as he pinpointed the way she often felt, angry at the world for misunderstanding her while playing at deliberately misrepresenting herself. He stopped and shrugged. He lit his cigarette and took a long, proud drag.

Brother is a rock star.

“I love it. It’s great!” she said, still chewing.

He smiled.

“Your first hit!”

“A chart-topper,” Nik said, with a sarcasm about his chances at success that would soon be replaced with something more, well, unusual.

The moment stood out to Denise for other reasons as well. She realized then that he was good at this, songwriting, in a way he never was at guitar playing. He had figured this out, while she was still nowhere.

Denise really should call someone.

She sat down at Nik’s worktable, a huge unfinished piece of wood set on two sawhorses and pushed against the wall. His razor-point black pens of various widths and sharpened General’s Cedar Pointe pencils were neatly lined up. Scissors, X-Acto blades, erasers, homemade wheat paste, double-sided photo tape, rubber cement, and Tombow Mono Adhesive were all within reach. A ream of acid-free pure white paper, and off to the side the white Royal manual typewriter with the lazy a that he used to type his formal entries in the Chronicles. Evidence of the Chronicles was everywhere around her. The earlier volumes were shelved in chronological order starting in the garage downstairs (1970s–2003). But he kept the volumes of the current year in a neat row on a shelf above his desk. On the walls near the desk she could see the framed album covers, posters, master images for label art, photos, and pasted-up fake news clippings. And under her hands and all in front of her was Nik’s clear, inviting wood desk. All set up for work.

His archive oppressed her. She needed a chronicle of her own, with her own opposite silly penchant for reality and memory and ordinary facts. Because that was all she could think to do with what had transpired. She must conclude it liberated her in some deep way, and maybe it even did.