The Words of Every Song Read online

  VI.

  “Why do you love me?” says Theo to Luz.

  “Because you are only mine,” says Luz. She is looking out the window of their apartment. Theo has gotten ready for work and is putting on a tie—his once-a-year tie for Titan’s once-a-year pep talk, during which the head honchos meet with the A&R crew and give each a resounding pat on the head or the rump, depending.

  “You are mine alone,” she says again, surprising Theo with this poetic turn of phrase. Luz is very good at speaking, even in languages that aren’t her own. Her answer makes Theo feel guilty: he is thinking of his various indiscretions over the past year. There was the cocktail waitress, and a few band members (never ones Theo was working with; he has his rules), and an old flame who was in town for Christmas. All of them were meaningless, he tells himself, and in fact he always thought of Luz while with these other women. Still, the weight of his actions creeps up on him now, and he crosses the room to be closer to Luz, sitting on the bed next to her and kissing her on the forehead. One day I will be faithful, he says to himself. When I’m married I will be faithful.

  “You will be late again,” Luz says. “You’re always late!”

  VII.

  Theo meets with Jax Powers-Kline, the president of A&R at Titan Records. She spends the first five minutes of their meeting together bitching about how one of her two personal assistants, Cynthia, has been turned into the secretary/receptionist for the entire A&R division. “Cost cutting?” she says. “Try efficiency cutting! Cynthia can barely keep track of my schedule, let alone yours and Tom’s and Dick’s and Harry’s!” She predicts that this policy will change once Corporate realizes their mistake.

  Theo, who walks by Cynthia every morning and has noticed a drastic change in her mood—for the better—since having been relieved from constant contact with Jax, just nods sympathetically.

  “Anyway,” says Jax. “Enough of that. I want to talk to you about your performance.”

  Theo sits still.

  “It’s been a while since you’ve signed anyone, Theo. What was your last sign? The Stark Ravers? A year ago?”

  “You know my philosophy, Jax,” says Theo. “I’m a perfectionist.”

  “To be frank, Theo, it’s not like the Stark Ravers have done all that well.”

  “I’ve got my eye on a few with real potential.”

  “Who?”

  “There’s this band called the Burn,” says Theo. “Real potential. Lead singer with attitude. Chick singer. Siobhan O’Hara. That’s what’s hot right now. Rock ’n’ roll.”

  Theo has the tendency to speak in very short sentences when he’s trying to affect nonchalance and coolness.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. They’re almost ready. I’ve been working with them for a while. Girl’s young still, so she’s got a lot of growing to do.”

  “When can we see them?”

  “Soon. Meeting with them next week.”

  “Okay,” says Jax. She waves a hand. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  Theo leaves her office and passes Titan’s biggest star, Tommy Mays, on his way out. He wonders if he’ll ever sign someone like Tommy Mays. He hates to say it, but he has his doubts. Sometimes the faking it catches up with him and he wonders if he’s been overconfident.

  In her office, Jax makes eye contact with the life-size cardboard Elvis cutout she keeps in the corner. Cynthia buzzes her and tells her Tommy Mays is here to see her. “Tell him to come in,” she says. She thinks Theo might be a lost cause. But like he himself said about that girl, he’s young still. He’s got some growing to do. He was wearing a tie. That was cute.

  VIII.

  Luz and Amelia always have lunch on Friday because Luz has no Friday classes at FIT, and today they have decided on the newest of New York’s many sushi restaurants, a little place in Chelsea. Luz gets there first and sits outside. It is warm for October. Today she is wearing an outfit that makes her feel attractive and capable of anything: a short patterned Versace skirt that she bought for half off at Century 21; a thrift store T-shirt that says WOW! on the front in orange letters, which she has mutilated and pinned back together; boots that she thinks might be described as “combat-influenced but ultrafeminine” in Vogue; and large hoop earrings.

  Luz looks around for Amelia and makes eye contact with a man at a nearby table who is reading Proust and looks like a musician.

  “What’s your name?” asks the musician. He has already romanticized Luz into a modern-day Guinevere and he will go home tonight and write a bad song about her.

  “Luz,” she says.

  Amelia arrives and the conversation stops before it can start, but Luz is delighted and she wiggles her toes inside her ultrafeminine combat boots and takes her long hair out of its ponytail to show it off to the musician, who keeps one eye on her and one on Proust for the rest of his lunch.

  Luz is so happy that she eats two California rolls instead of her usual one.

  IX.

  Another showcase. Number five. Another band passed over. These were more difficult to turn down than the last—talented, but far too old—and Theo hopes no one else grabs them and makes them big. Theo wishes for their immediate failure.

  Last night, Theo unearthed his copy of The Ghost of Tom Joad and left it on the kitchen table for himself so he’d remember to bring it to work. Now he’s fumbling around in his messenger bag for an old Discman he dug out of his closet this morning.

  He looks up once the headphones are in place, once Springsteen is urging him forward. Suddenly—there, across the street, at a sidewalk café—he catches a glimpse of the most stunning woman he’s ever seen. She is sitting at a table, looking particularly lost. Is she a tourist? She has that overwhelmed look about her. She is rhythmically kicking one crossed leg at the ground like a child and clutching her water glass at its base. Theo closes his eyes and opens them and she’s still there.

  Watch. In thirty seconds, Theo will realize that it’s Luz, but the realization will come too late; for now he has seen her as a stranger—a thought that Theo cannot unthink. He will not go to her.

  Instead, Theo will stare as she turns to speak with a man next to her; as she waves to Amelia; as she eats her California rolls in a particularly joyful way. Theo will watch her, from a Chelsea bench, as she pays the bill and stands and yanks at her short skirt and walks on thin legs away from the restaurant and Theo.

  Theo won’t go home tonight. Tonight, Theo will sleep at a friend’s apartment, feeling as if he has been halved; he will sleep in a half-empty bed, will sleep with Springsteen’s album going off in his ears and two hands that grope sleepily for their missing counterparts. He never kept much in the apartment anyway. It will be easy for him to pick up his things while Luz is at work the next day.

  Theo will leave a note. A note. That’s all.

  Next week, Theo will wake and go to work and hear another band that he will sign solely on the basis of the looks of the blond female lead singer, thinking of Jax and what she likes, and he will hate himself a little bit.

  In two weeks, Theo will turn his ankle walking drunkenly down into the subway and will wear a cast for the next few months.

  In a year, Luz will get pregnant by a man she meets at a party in Williamsburg and will have an abortion. She will notice the coldness of the waiting room seats and will buy an ice cream cone the next day—her first in years. Later in life, she will discover photography. She will have three girls after marrying a man named Fabian. She will die at 102, having outlived her husband and all but one of her children.

  And Theo: he will spend most of his life in New York City, rising through the ranks at Titan and becoming a senior vice president, at which point he will retire to the North Shore of Massachusetts, to spend his days boating with his wife, Marie, a former editor, and hosting dinner parties. He will whistle. He will not have children but he will acquire an extensive collection of records, which he will listen to, and watch the sea from his window and look back upon
these things: sitting in a car with a girl; moving forward on a Chelsea street in autumn; watching a lover without being seen; being close to any sort of edge but this desperate edge, this edge between earth and water.

  But that’s all some other day.

  Now Theo is here, oblivious, standing on Tenth Avenue with his green messenger bag, falling in love with a woman he never really knew anyway. He will not know the pain of that until it is a memory, distant and hallowed, until it is a dream.

  2.

  SIOBHAN IN LOVE

  Somebody said that they’re not much like I

  am, I know I can

  Make enough of the words for you to go

  along and sing your song

  —NIRVANA, “Downer”

  I.

  The day the second-most-famous gun in the history of rock ’n’ roll sent its lethal shot through the red parts, the gray parts, the lively parts of Kurt Cobain’s mouth and brain, Siobhan had gotten her first period. She had been sitting in an English class with Sister Mary Perpetua. At the class’s end, she rose to find a spot on her chair and knew immediately that its twin was probably blooming across her plaid-covered ass. She sat back down abruptly. She didn’t know what to do. Jamie Kerr had seen, she knew, and might tell his friends later, but he said nothing to her—he just looked shocked and left.

  The class filed out and Siobhan was stranded, hands folded, mouth distorted into a panicky smile, face-to-face with a puzzled nun. She wondered if she could run from there to her house without anyone seeing her stained uniform. But it was too late: Sister Mary’s expression had changed and she was going to talk.

  “Is anything wrong, Siobhan?” asked Sister Mary Perpetua.

  Siobhan had started crying. She was in eighth grade. “I’m leaking,” she had said. She couldn’t make herself say it to a nun: “period.” It was like “panties” or “vagina.”

  Sister Mary Perpetua paused and looked scared. “Siobhan, do you mean that your friend is here?”

  Siobhan didn’t know what the hell the sister was talking about. She kept crying and covered her face with her hair.

  Later she would reflect—inaccurately—upon the idea that she and Kurt Cobain might have started bleeding simultaneously. Really he had done it the day before it was announced on the news, but Siobhan liked to be romantic about certain things. Her dad always watched channel seven after dinner.

  The news anchor, female: “It’s a tragic day for fans of the Seattle-based band Nirvana. Lead singer Kurt Cobain is dead at the age of only twenty-seven in an incident that police are calling an apparent suicide. Cobain was known to have been addicted on and off to narcotics.”

  She had said it like “Cobain.”

  “Cobain,” said Siobhan, and she thought of the toilet paper in her underwear and how astonishingly white it had been when she had layered it there earlier. No question: it was ruined now. She still hadn’t told her dad she needed pads.

  “You like them? Nirvana?” asked her dad, pointing at the anchorwoman with his beer.

  Siobhan nodded.

  Her dad shook his head in disgust. Kurt Cobain’s sad eyelined gaze considered their dark living room from the TV screen. “Feckin’ eejit. Killin’ yourself is throwin’ away God’s greatest gift.” He took a thoughtful gulp and glanced at Siobhan. “Remember I said that.”

  “Dad,” said Siobhan. “My friend is here.”

  Her dad had looked around the room. “What the feck are you on about?”

  That night, in her small room, in her small house in Yonkers, Siobhan had lit candles she had taken from the ground by the statue of the Blessed Virgin in front of St. Jeremiah’s. She fumbled under her bed for a copy of Rolling Stone that she had borrowed from her friend Kathleen Hanrahan. She was crying again because she had found a box of tampons among her mum’s old bathroom things, still stuffed into the hall closet as if she might need them again. Siobhan had tried to put one in, but it was the kind with the cotton sticking out of the top and it hurt like hell. She couldn’t imagine ever being able to use one—she wondered if she had read the instructions right. She had thrown it out and changed the toilet paper in her underwear.

  Now she was sitting on her bed with candles on the windowsill (presumably holy—they had been blessed by the Virgin, in any case) and a Rolling Stone open to Kurt and a little pocketknife she had gotten from her little brother, Hugh. And she was crying. Kathleen had called her and told her how he died: a gun in the mouth. Siobhan tried to imagine that. Getting the gun. Writing the note. Sitting down. Picking up the gun. Putting it in your mouth.

  Pulling the trigger.

  Siobhan, looking for an appropriate tribute to the life and death of Kurt Cobain, was working away at her inner ankle with the pocketknife. She was carving “K.C.” just below where her sock would end. It hurt, but not the way the tampon had hurt her and not the way the shot would hurt. She closed her eyes and dug the knife in far enough to really hurt but not bleed too much. She multiplied by a thousand: Would that be death? Would that be a bullet in the mouth?

  Kurt was watching her from the magazine. He was beautiful, really beautiful, angelic and blond. Painful to look at.

  II.

  Siobhan lives in Williamsburg now. She’s on the bus, on her way to an important rehearsal in Manhattan. She and her band have been getting good press recently, and an A&R guy is going to be there, one who’s been prowling around the band for the last few months without offering them anything. Waiting to see if he has competition, Siobhan figures. She thinks it’s funny—she imagines sending the band flowers with notes like “Thanks for last night—you were great. Yours, Geffen Records.” Or planting boxes of chocolate from Universal around the rehearsal space.

  Her cell phone rings. It’s Hugh.

  “Hi, pal,” she says into the phone. She says it quietly because she’s embarrassed of cell phones—they remind her of businessmen and go-getters.

  “Hello?” says Hugh. “Siobhan?”

  “Yo,” she says a little louder.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Hugh!” Siobhan says. “Hi!” The old man next to her rattles his newspaper.

  “What up. So, aaaah. You know the thing I was telling you about tonight?”

  “Nope.” Siobhan is still annoyed at having to shout into her cell phone on a bus.

  “Yeah, so anyway, there’s gonna be this ill party at my friend Stats’s apartment, and I was kinda like, to my friend Stats I was like, Yeah, I think I can get them to play. Remember what I was asking you?”

  “I’m on my way to rehearsal and I’m not the only one in the band, Hugh.”

  “Yeah, but you’re the lead singer.”

  “Mike R. has to work after rehearsal.”

  “So you’re not gonna do it?” There is a whiny edge to his voice.

  “I didn’t say I could definitely, pal.”

  “Fine, you’re totally fucking me over, but that’s fine. I’ll just tell Stats my sister’s too cool for his party. No, that’s fine. We just won’t have music.”

  Her cell phone beeps at her and she sees her friend Lenore is calling her.

  “Hugh, Huey,” she says. “Lenore’s on the other line. I’m sorry.”

  Hugh hangs up on her. He will pout for the next hour and then beat a friend in basketball, which will cheer him up.

  Siobhan feels bad. There’s some girl that Hugh’s been trying to impress. But she’s late for rehearsal and the bus is stopped in traffic and Hugh’s always been a baby.

  The old man with the newspaper takes a page and rips it into evenly sized shreds, one of which he wads into a ball and pops into his mouth.

  He turns to Siobhan and winks. “Can’t be too careful!” he says cheerily through a mouthful of recycled paper and black ink.

  Siobhan runs up two long flights of stairs to the loft they use for practice. Everyone is sitting around when she gets there. Katia and Pete and the A&R guy are smoking up in a corner. Mike G. is tuning up. Mike R. is glaring at the door a
nd he doesn’t alter his expression when Siobhan walks through the frame. Siobhan has been late to every rehearsal this week, and Mike R. is pissed off. He set up this meeting with the A&R guy personally.

  Siobhan smiles apologetically at Mike R., gestures with her chin toward the A&R guy—who looks perfectly content and is taking an enormous hit from Pete’s three-foot bong—and shrugs.

  The A&R guy looks up in a stoned way and notices Siobhan. He gets up and walks over: “Hey there.”

  “Hi, Theo,” says Siobhan. She turns away to get her Fender out and tune up with Mike G.

  Theo is annoyed that Siobhan never pays much attention to him. He’s more used to bands who crave his attention, who make fools of themselves for it. He backs off and leans against a wall coolly. He considers saying something like, “Oh, man! You know what, I’ve got a meeting now.” But the Burn is musically tight, they’ve got catchy rock songs (real rock, thinks Theo), they have an obsessive and dedicated, if modest, fan base, and they’ve got something important: a female lead singer. Theo knows chick singers are going to be the next big thing. He wants in on it. He’s going to get fired if he doesn’t sign someone good soon.

  He’s really high.

  The band starts playing and Siobhan gets into it, does the little bent-kneed thing, bobs up and down with her legs pressed together. She swings her head back and forth when she’s playing guitar and raises her eyebrows when she sings.

  Sometimes she wonders if she’s imitating someone else—the way she moves, the way she sings—but mostly she’s too busy drowning in notes, keeping up with her own breath, to think.

  It is only when playing music that she feels truly at ease in the world. Her whole life, she feels she has been working hard to know who she is; when she is playing before an audience, she is able to say to herself, “Well, this is who I am,” and believe it.

  III.

  Siobhan’s parents met in Dublin in the late 1970s. Her mother, Patricia, was a student at UCD. Her dad was a barman. Patricia was majoring in Irish literature. She liked Ulysses because of the sound of it and because she loved Joyce’s fascination with her own history.