Sundays and evenings, when Dave arrived at the DUMBO space, they were generally all there already, sitting around smoking pot and drinking beer, talking and laughing. Sometimes they stopped abruptly when he walked in the door, which terrified him (were they discussing him?). Just as often, they simply ignored his arrival, the reedy Curtis continuing on whatever stream of thought he’d been following before Dave’s arrival. Had they all decided to meet early purposefully, in order to exclude him? Had they told Dave to come at eight, knowing they’d arrive at six thirty to share a pizza and perhaps trade stories about Dave’s lameness? Thinking about this possibility, he’d grow furious, for he was so utterly and decidedly not lame. He had not sold out. He hadn’t gone to law school or become a web designer or a day trader. And he knew more about music than the four of them put together. Not just classical or whatever—all of it, Beethoven, Schopenhauer, the Carter family, Bill Monroe, Gershwin, Elvis Costello, Hüsker Dü, the Sex Pistols, David Bowie, Bauhaus, Bob Dylan, Django Reinhardt, every fucking thing.
And the fact was that they were wasting him, wasting his talent and skill (playing these piddly little parts, not letting him write songs), not to mention his knowledge, his experience, even his Jan Jensen connections. He kept thinking he would quit, but then he would think better of it, mostly because of one incontrovertible fact: they were good. Really good. Curtis’s songs—which somehow managed to be both ironic and romantic—were lovely and true. It was a pleasure to play them. And yet, he wanted to play his own songs, which had, since his joining the band, begun to materialize. They were different from Curtis’s, of course, but in the dark of his apartment, at the ancient upright he’d pulled in off the street, or the too-expensive keyboard his uncle Steve had given him his first year at Eastman, they sounded just as good. Darker, plainer, more plaintive, and with, he thought, more humor. They were piano songs, of course, not guitar songs, though the guitar would come in, on most of them. And he wanted a violin—a fiddle, really—on some, a sort of Weimar sound on others.
“Does he even know you’re writing songs?” suggested Sadie, when he complained about Curtis and his lack of interest in Dave’s work for the millionth time. Dave was trying, really, to not be irritated by the fact that he now only saw her alone when Tal was out of town. Though he supposed he saw her more often than he saw Tal. “Why don’t you just tell him? Play them for him.”
“Trust me,” Dave told her. “He does not care. He knows I did comp at Eastman. He knows I’m writing stuff.”
“So, then why don’t you just quit and start your own band?” asked Sadie, in an overly patient way, as if to indicate that they had had this conversation before, hadn’t they, which, of course, made him furious.
“I don’t want to quit,” he told her. “I like the band. You don’t understand.”
But she had a point, and the real truth was that he was afraid to quit, afraid that without actual physical people—people he knew and could touch and whine about in their absence—for whom to write songs, he would cease to write them, as he had after leaving Eastman and before joining up with Curtis. Each time he worked up the nerve to quit, something happened that disallowed him from doing so. First, they booked that show at Mercury Lounge (Marco’s dad knew the owner). So he decided to stay on for that. And now this Reynold Marks gig, which was, really, a huge fucking deal, even though Reynold Marks was, yes, lame. He’d been vaguely cool at one point—a college radio staple—but then there’d been that big single, some shitty ballad, and—bam—the baseball-capped morons at Syracuse and SUNY-Binghamton and wherever had stopped listening to Hootie and the Blowfish or Dave Matthews or whoever long enough to buy a million copies of Reynold Marks’s second album and go all apoplectic when he appeared on Letterman.
The thing about Reynold Marks, though, was that he was a pianist (like Dave) rather than a guitarist (like Curtis), and for this reason alone Dave felt a strange affection for the guy—though he would never admit it to anyone—and wondered if the presence of a pianist, not just a keyboard player, wasn’t what attracted Marks to Anhedonia (if that was what they were going to call themselves), now that it mattered, for the show was almost upon them, and Curtis et al. were going kind of nuts about it. Actually, it was two shows—two sold-out shows—a Thursday and Friday night at the end of the month. Dave had found subs for his shifts at Madame Woo’s and carefully laundered his favorite T-shirts, a faded black relic from the first Pixies tour (“Death to the Pixies”) and a tattered navy thing with the Oberlin seal on it, in cracked white ink, passed down from his father. They sat on his dresser, sending out faint beams of promise in advance of their wearing. He had secured VIP passes for all of his friends, except Beth, who wouldn’t want to come anyway. They were rehearsing nearly all night, every night, and Dave was behind on a huge copying project for some big-deal Juilliard guy. He’d have to work night and day in August to catch up.
Curtis had prepared the set list, of course, without input from anyone else. He’d chosen mostly newer songs, which was sort of stupid, Dave thought, and kind of stressful, as they now had to rush to learn them all. And as soon as they’d mastered one, Curtis decided it sucked and swapped in something newer. The guy was incredibly prolific, churning out a few songs a week, and always thinking the newest stuff was better. And even the new stuff, he couldn’t leave alone. “What if we try it really slow?” he’d say, about a fast, anthem sort of thing that was, Dave thought, meant to be fast. Or “What if we change the key?” Then why did you write it in this key, Dave wanted to ask, but never did, of course. And Curtis, of course, never asked what Dave thought of anything. He seemed to regard Dave as something akin to an animated piece of furniture. “Why don’t you just talk to him?” Sadie had moaned a few days prior, dropping her head heavily onto her right hand. Tal had left for L.A., his big-deal film, so suddenly Sadie was free for drinks whenever Dave wanted. “You’re killing me.”
“You don’t understand what this guy is like,” Dave told her.
“He seems perfectly nice,” she insisted. “Play him the stuff you’re working on.”
“Seems nice,” Dave explained, “but has the icy heart of a hired assassin.”