I’d gone to a show alone only once before. In New York, in my twenties. At Brownies, in August, Rose out of town, a singer she wasn’t into because she thought the songs were too sweet, a singer who was just as good a songwriter as Elliott Smith, whom we loved, and was almost as sad as Elliott Smith, but who in his sadness could flash a bit of deep dry wit where Elliott Smith did not—could not? That singer and I are still alive but Elliott Smith is not. At the show I stood up close to the stool, closer than I usually did, thinking that if I got right up next to that voice and his guitar, to his hands, to his face, so close I could see the dirty fraying Band-Aid wrapped around his thumb and the acne scars on his cheeks, I would forget that I had only my own thoughts for company. But love was not enough. I could walk cities alone, see movies alone, see art alone, become ravenous at the prospect of having those experiences alone, but I could not see music alone. Shows had been too tied up from the beginning with the need to belong to a tribe, and with the need for collective acts of tribal witness.
This is what we do, Rose once said as we stood in a long sweaty line for the ladies’ room, on another Thursday night, around 10:00 p.m., at the end of July, in an old roller rink in Philadelphia waiting for a band to take the stage. On the lam from routine and obligation, while all the other women back in New York were mothering, sleeping, or emailing their bosses in a panic. We drove home to Brooklyn drinking fountain Cokes and eating Shorti hoagies from Wawa. Laughing and singing. We were thirty-four. We were seventeen.
Now I was forty-two, waiting outside the Fillmore in a line I’d been standing in for twenty-seven years. A bouncer in a windbreaker sat on a stool at the back entrance taking our IDs and stamping our hands. Inside the auditorium, hundreds of us stood beneath the chandeliers, colored light rushing over and around us, our faces, older than the hearts they shielded, raised toward the stage, where, for two short hours, the singer and his piano issued a thunder so total and radiant it made the world outside shrivel up and blow away. Back out on the street, I looked around at the crowd spilling from the exits to remember what we all looked like, who we were, the people who had all been spoken to by the same sound at the same time—class picture, group portrait. We might be irrelevant but we were handsome.
When I turned to walk down Geary I noticed a man, about twenty feet away, standing a little apart from the crowd, almost at the curb. Bent over a phone, wearing a black wool shirt jacket, black jeans, black work boots. I thought I recognized his profile and his coloring and his posture. The man felt the stare and looked up and in my direction. I hadn’t been wrong.
You really do look exactly the same, said Karl, the next Thursday, after he ordered the first of what would be three rounds at a bar near a meeting he had on Fourth Street. His drink: Macallan, on the rocks. It made me smile to see that he had come up in the world and grown past those hard-boiled eggs into a little epicureanism. My dress: the one I’d paid $250 for in the East Village.
So do you. In fact he looked healthier. Tan where he had been pale; heavier, rooted, where he had been bony. Eyes warm where they could be cold. His jawline looked as sharp and clean as I remembered it. He had all of his hair and had not jowled.
You laugh more, I said. It’s nice to hear.
Parenthood lightened me up. Some other things did, too, but mainly that. Should we get something to eat or are you fine?
I’m fine, I said, but thank you.
What does Rose think of you being out here?
Rose doesn’t know.
Oh, he said. His eyes and voice surprised.
I think at this point the fault may all be mine. There had been no one, until then, to say it out loud to.
I’m sorry, he said.
Me too, I said.
I used to think she needed you more than you needed her.
I sat there thinking about that for a little while. He must have sensed that comment had gone too deep too quickly, or had sent me too far back into the past, or was not his to make, so he changed the subject.
What did you think of the show? he said.
By the end of the evening, I’d learned that: after he moved back to Utah he got a job at the Salt Lake City Weekly but New York had spoiled him for the minor leagues, and he didn’t want to be writing music reviews or editing them when he was forty-five, didn’t want to have to pretend to have to get it up for every next big thing pretending it was timeless genius when it was just that year’s version of the zeitgeist in a bottle, in that year’s version of a bottle, and he tried writing a novel at night but it was crap, it was like realizing you couldn’t draw hands for shit, even though you could draw everything else, noses, feet, lips, but not hands, and he knew he wasn’t the kind of journalist you wanted stepping under the police tape, knew he wasn’t any kind of journalist at all, but he knew his mind needed to calculate and create and get lost in a problem in order to feel useful and powerful, otherwise it would turn brooding and black. And he didn’t need to make his thoughts about music, or anything else, public for them to seem real, in fact he thought they would remain more real, more potent, if he kept those thoughts to himself. So he taught himself web design, bought books, took classes, and the paper hired him to help design and program the website. And now he ran a UX department for a big evil tech company. So that’s how that started. Through friends he met a girl, a woman, he’d known her in high school. Ex-Mormon, too. Jenny. A graphic designer who used to have her own radio show at Utah State. So I couldn’t hate her too much.
They had three children, two boys and a girl. He didn’t want a third child, but she did, and he had no real reason to object to her desire other than ten years in he found himself not wanting to tell her everything the way he used to and he thought she might be turning into the kind of woman his sisters always said his mother was—a better mother than a wife. The children and the life the children plunged them into—soccer games, homework, bake sales, barbecues with neighbors, vacations with neighbors, scrapbooks—
Your wife scrapbooks?
Yes, he said. The Karl I remembered: warning me off the property with a word and a look. Defending his wife’s embrace of the homespun and his embrace of such a wife. He should not have been telling me any of this, probably.
—scrapbooks, school projects, Halloween costumes, two dogs and a cat, piano lessons, violin lessons, elaborate birthday parties in backyards—absorbed her the way she needed to be absorbed and it made her very happy. And this was a good thing, her happiness, and Karl loved his children. He showed me pictures of three shy and happy and serious faces. James and John and Suzanne. Suzanne, after Leonard Cohen’s song. The result of a deal he’d struck with his wife: she could have the third and he could name her. How beautiful, I said, as I looked at them. Because they really were. It was a good thing, he said, to have created a happy family. Neither he nor his wife had known that pleasure growing up. They moved to San Francisco five years ago, when he landed a job at one of the big evil tech companies, and they’d always been planning to move to a blue state for their children’s sake and their own once her mother died, and now, because last year Karl got a big deal job at another big evil tech company, she was a self-described pig in shit because she could be a stay-at-home mother, and was now thinking of becoming an event planner, with a friend of hers, an equally maniacal organizer, who was going through a divorce and needed something to distract her, they’d start out pro bono and see what happened.
I could have spent some time judging him for being yet another man content enough to remain married to a wife who, while she might have been his intellectual equal, preferred to exercise her mind’s powers through the frighteningly competent running of a household, could have spent some time examining what it was about me that had led me to attract and be attracted to these men, but I didn’t feel like it. If that was all I got out of this meeting—the realization that I no longer wanted to waste time intensely envying other women for having loved themselves enough to love their lives and everything in it, for loving their lives so much they’d helplessly lavish even the smallest of tasks with a care that turned anything they put their minds or hands to into works of art—that would be enough. But of course I could tell myself this only because I sensed he needed something from me, and it was going to be my decision whether he received it or not.
I’ve talked a lot, he said.
It didn’t feel like it to me. If I had not known him then, would I have listened this long now? Yes, I thought. Yes.
By the end of the evening, he’d learned that: I’d been married and divorced, I’d published two books, and I loved San Francisco more than I ever thought I would. He asked me why and I told him, and I talked about the city we were sitting in longer than I’d talked about anything else that night.
You always did really love what you loved, he said.
I said nothing.
Only two books? he said.
Only three children? I said.
He looked down at his glass. I might have chastened him but he also seemed to be trying not to laugh. When he looked back up, he said:
Are you happy?
That’s one of life’s more impolite questions, I said, and took a drink.
Well put, he said.
I’m happy right now, talking to you.
The bartender slid us the check on a brass tray. I pulled it in my direction and Karl pulled it away from me, gently.
This neighborhood makes me spiritually sick, he said, after we’d stepped outside, and I laughed. A true, loud, delighted laugh. It was nice to hear someone call bullshit on bullshit. He sounded aggrieved; he sounded amused by his own grandiose crank. It sounded like New York talking and not San Francisco. Or, rather, an old version of New York. An old person.
He looked at me and smiled. I was waiting to hear that sound, he said.
I’m not doing this if I can’t have you inside me, I told him, the first time he kissed me, the first few seconds into his kiss. I cried every time I came. The way you do when you discover that your body was right all along, and then remember how useless that information will prove to be once everyone’s clothes are back on. We never said I love you. He would call from a street corner or some free minute to say I want you again, and I would make him repeat it. It sounded like his strength speaking to my stubbornness, his grief speaking to my grief. Three months later I was pregnant.
Your heart and my heart, he said, when I told him, and set his hand on the skin below my navel. As if to say: they live in there. We lay on my bed, naked, looking up at the ceiling. The sun in the bedroom turned from bright to hot and I could feel my skin start to burn. He said: I wish you hadn’t told me.