All I need is a bridge. The E, A, B arrangement came easy, the following chorus erupting as if always hidden inside. What I can’t seem to find is a set of chords that brings these two sections together. It could be my environment. Rosita’s apartment is spacious but feels unoccupied. The living room is nearly empty. Just a couch where I’ve been sleeping and a coffee table that’s weathered a lot of take-out dinners. In the bedroom, her mattress serves as a workstation. The body-shaped space on the bed is surrounded by books, laptop cords and photo equipment. The desk in the corner remains unused.
I’ve been a guest for two weeks. After Victor’s death, Sheriff Saunders questioned both Rosita and me about our involvement. Once convinced we didn’t know anything more about the strange suicidal spectacle, the sheriff dropped Rosita at the first hotel outside the county line and gave her the mountain tradition of a polite warning not to come back. That first night alone after Victor’s death was hard. I haunted the kitchen, unable to face either a guitar or the picture of Angela in my bedroom. Eventually, I took the frame down and sat up all night with a forgotten pack of Rosita’s Camels and my acoustic. I wrote the first of six new songs before daylight. Later, the lawyer Rosita helped me find mailed these tracks to Angela with a notice of the suit we’d filed over the wasteland lullabies. She paid for the new tracks without comment. I cashed the check.
It was Rosita that suggested I fly out to New York. Our story was major news after the video of Victor’s death went viral. The combination of my lawsuit against Angela for writing credits and the recordings of Victor’s death heightened enthusiasm for a possible album. The Troubadours settled out of court and added my name to the writing credits on all re-releases of the previous albums. Even with the exorbitant payment, Rosita still offered to buy my ticket. I think it was her final apology.
She’s tried to convince me to rent a place near her, but Brooklyn doesn’t appeal to me. No silence, no creeks running behind the house and no chickens to roust you from sleep. Nothing but a constant human noise that drones on even at night. In the end, I’ve not spent much cash. I might have purchased new shoes but found my father’s maroon wingtips in the back of the closet, hidden beneath the dead man’s biblical paraphernalia. We buried him in the black patent-leather ones I watched swinging in the trees, but I have some memory of these maroon counterparts. I’m wearing them now. The creased leather radiates warmth as if alive and the heel is equipped with a hidden platform that offers perhaps two extra inches of height. They describe the old man perfectly, false and vain.
What isn’t false is the work. Since I watched Victor strangle, I understand how limited time is and what I’m supposed to be doing with mine. In my imperfect, yet temporary mistake of a body, I have a rare perspective. I understand now that all bodies are glorious mistakes.
Only now, the song’s bridge still eludes me. I’ve searched all over the fretboard, down and up octaves, even tried to lower the tuning in the hope of discovering where it’s hidden. The melody was so alive in an earlier dream, but the notes evaporated as soon as consciousness hit. In the old days, I’d chase the muse until the idea was treed like a hounded squirrel. Now, I know that even with time always leaking away, it’s best to wait. Men like myself are better suited to the slow advance than sprinting after what we want.
And if this song eludes forever, that’s fine too. That night at the concert, picking Angela’s notes apart provided a sort of epiphany. Broken men are bluesmen by circumstance, forced to mold the catastrophe of their bodies into something artful. It’s the dissonance that matters in our lives, the jazz-like improvisation because plans will always crumble. Now, the music doesn’t always come easy, but what I finally seize is real.
Rosita returns from her showing before I find the bridge. Stills from The Body Book and other photos from Coopersville have been gathering a crowd. The gallery isn’t in Manhattan, but it’s still a spacious loft tucked into a trendy corner of Brooklyn where most of the uptown wives won’t mind traveling. Rosita smiles at me, stands by the bed and removes her earrings. She seems in a hurry to change, the dress purchased for the evening worn like uncomfortable armor. Her legs rub pleasurably together as she strides across the mahogany floor and the satin garment threatens to slide off the single shoulder that holds it across her breasts. I imagine she’s never been more out of her element, but mingled with a smile, shaking the hands of men and women whose approval could change her life. In ways, our lives have already changed.
“How was it?” I ask. I suspect she’s disappointed I didn’t go, but I was frightened of the art crowd. I didn’t want to draw their eyes away from her work. I’m already displayed enough in the photos.
She tells me about the people sipping champagne and pointing out the children photographed next to my well. Just a few states away, but they treat the images as if they’ve been imported from some distant, war-torn shore. A few took the time to seek out the photo of me on the stoop, or the one where I stand shirtless in the rain. Even I must admit the raw beauty in those prints. Somehow the camera captured the individual drops of rain, the resolution so high that if one observes closely, they can see the precipitation as it collided with my skin the moment the shutter clicked. A barrage explodes across my uneven chest as the water slides down the arch of my back. It follows my crooked lines to the ground as if needing to touch every inch of me before returning to the mud.
“They all asked about it,” Rosita says. “I told them that right after I took it, I knew. ‘Here is what was always missing,’ I told them. Not the body forced to withstand the gaze, but the body in communion with life itself. After that picture, my old canvases might as well be used for kindling.”
“Such flattery,” I say.
“Don’t be too cocky,” she said. “There was a man who didn’t know you.”
“I’m glad.” It’s been hard being robbed of anonymity.
To still be unaware of my story is difficult. Video of Victor’s death received over twelve million hits on YouTube and was replayed by all the major networks. She’s a little ashamed by it, but Rosita collects the memes and comments by Internet trolls. One of the most striking she showed me represents the final image of Victor gasping on the wet concrete. This is juxtaposed with a monk participating in self-immolation. Underneath it reads THAT’S HOW YOU FUCKING PROTEST. A different version we saw days ago reads, THAT’S HOW YOU FUCKING PARTY. She said it made her sad to see everything reduced to a punch line. I think Coopersville probably does owe the man for the recent inquiries into the safety of their drinking water.
“All night people came up and congratulated me as if I was an explorer from antiquity,” she says and sits on the bed beside me. “Like I survived an isolated winter in the Arctic instead of heading a few states south.”
She reaches out and silences my strumming hand.
“I kept pointing to the picture of you on the porch steps.”
I hate that photo. Sitting clothed in shadows, cane resting by my knee like a sorcerer’s wand whose magic has been extinguished.
“I’d tell them, ‘These are the ones worth buying,’” she says.
I can’t tell her about my fear of being a spectacle, so I bend the strings into an exaggerated whine.
Rosita grins, steps into the bathroom where I hear her changing clothes. She leaves the door open. I realize it could be perceived as an invitation. There have been other less ambiguous moments between us since I arrived. I’m not ready yet, but she’s been patient about my fear. We just need a little more time. I can’t treat her the way I did Angela. She needs to be an equal partner. Not a conduit for my salvation or the only thing that gives me worth. That wouldn’t be fair to either of us. I play until she emerges dressed similar to the day I met her. Black jeans and a Black Flag T-shirt. Rosita grabs her folded leather jacket from the chair in the corner.
“What do you say we go for a stroll?” she asks.
The sound of the city is immense. A blur of conversation and machinery that never stops running whether it’s the cars idling at the intersection or the trains rolling underneath our feet. Rosita tells me it’s impossible, but I claim to feel the vibrations in my bones. It’s as present as the coal trains back home that shook nearby trees, their whistle breaking the silence of country night.
We grab coffee in a diner a block from her apartment. The patrons quiet down for just a moment as we take a booth by the window. A young man nearby is boasting. He stands beside the table to better illustrate his story for a cackling couple and the single girl whose hoop earrings flash as she shakes her head at him.
The coffee is dark and strong. I taste something metallic in the consistency, but not a single drink has tasted right since Victor’s death.
“Are you nervous about the show tonight?” Rosita asks.
Three hours from now, I’ll play in a bar for maybe a hundred people. I shrug and stir cream into my coffee, intent on making it taste like dessert. All this time hoping to make it this far and I still feel unsatisfied. I thought some critical success would carve out the doubts. Now, I don’t know what it would take to satisfy me, but maybe that hunger is the point. Maybe satisfaction is just stasis.
“It’ll be okay,” I say.
I take Rosita’s hand. I haven’t said it all. Perhaps whatever it is can’t be said, but I can live with that. Accepting that is what’s important. Sporadic moments of grace rather than completion.
“Do you wanna stay a while longer?” Rosita asks. “Maybe you shouldn’t travel until this new song is finished?”
It’s Thursday. We both know I have nowhere else to go.
“Yeah, I’d like that.”
Across the street, a young girl with a violin stands on the corner, the case open at her feet as she lays the bow on the strings. I expect something classical, a sonata or piece from a symphony. Instead, the girl fires into lively fiddle work that comes out high and lonesome. The strings whine in glorious agony as her fingers tear up them. Her boot heel stomps out the rhythm. She sways with the music, bends a little curtsy at a couple passing by who drop some money in her case.
“Listen to that,” Rosita says. She rubs small circles in the palm of my hand, her nails dragging across the lines where some other woman might be able to read my fate.
I’m listening. The music is speaking directly to me, whispering through the pane glass as if she plays just for us, reminding me of each individual’s duty to contribute a verse.