“I’m off to the Mill!” Sarah would shout up the stairs. I could see the edge of her white jacket.
“Ciao, Mama!” Mary-Emma would shout down. She was saying so many words these days. “I feepy,” she said when she wanted to go to bed. She loved to watch old Esther Williams movies, which I brought her from the university library, but they either revved her up or wore her out.
“OK. Let’s go.”
“I die,” she said.
“Well, someday. But not for a very long time.”
“I die into the pool!” And she took a flying leap onto her new futon, which Sarah had just bought to transition her out of the crib.
Twice, back in my apartment, the phone rang, and when I went to answer it there was just all this terrible noise: muffled speech, electronic moaning, whooshing sounds of water. “Hello?” I cried repeatedly into the mouthpiece. But I heard only eerie underwater groans. The caller ID on our Radio Shack phone said “cellular call,” nothing more. Dialing star-69 gave me nothing. Later, comically and perhaps correctly, I imagined it was Reynaldo’s cell phone, that he still had me on speed dial and accidentally bumped the keypad and was taking me into the bathroom with him. Some bathroom somewhere. Probably it was flushing noises I was hearing. Or maybe he was on the other side of the world in a hot zone and his phone was trying to blow up something — it wasn’t called a cell phone for nothing — and the secret blow-up code had instead misdialed and reached romantic interference: me.
I began to miss Murph. All I needed was her company, a sense of her presence again. Every day I felt that if she would somehow come back into my life, things would be brighter.
And then astonishingly, she did. As if I’d wished it on a lucky penny: at this perfect time for me, Murph returned, which if it had been earlier would have been a slight bummer as I had recently been using her stuff, bullshit things like her “hair ionizer,” which I had imagined had made my hair shine and took the static out, and her mister — a “handsome mister,” I used to call it — which lightly sprayed mineral water on your face. But as brokenhearted as I felt now, I was using nothing, just letting static electricity streak my hair across my teeth! I had let my face crumble to sand. And then I just walked in one afternoon and there she was, sitting on the couch. She’d arrived the same day as the xylophone and had herself just wheeled it in off the porch.
“This is cool,” she said, pointing at it.
“Hi!” I exclaimed. I dropped my books and hugged her. I was so happy to see her.
“Yes.” She smiled.
“Are you? High?”
“Yup.”
“As a kite?”
“As the Hubble!” She looked tired. “I feel like a veteran.”
“Of highness?”
“No.”
“Of what, then? Hineyness?” Ritual ribaldry was part of the Muwallahin Sufic way, if I remembered correctly.
“A veteran of the gender wars.”
“Yeah, well, me, too. But I’m afraid those were never declared.”
“Fucking do-nothing Congress! And we never got a parade or anything!”
“We’ve got marching bands,” I said, pointing in the direction of the stadium.
“That’s not a parade,” she said.
“It’s a quasi parade.”
She and her boyfriend had also broken up. “He put me in the freezer,” she cried, “and didn’t even have the decency to chop me up first!” And so together we stayed in our apartment, smoking cigarettes and making up tunes for our grief. “He played me like a yard sale lute! If he calls here, give him the tone, man.”
But he never did.
“Do you realize,” I said, “that when women have orgasms scans show large parts of their brains go completely absent on the screen?”
“Yes, well, that corresponds with my anecdotal research in the field.”
“Mine, too.”
I would get out my bass, though the strap was always slipping—“Wait, let me put this strap on,” I invariably said, and Murph would cry, “Hoo-hee!” There wasn’t an innuendo anywhere she couldn’t be the first to locate and illumine with her hoots.
We played all the things I’d recently made up. Though in real life a boy’s love was a meager thing, we liked what a boy’s love could do in a poem or a song. “Driftless Dan, he had no plan / Prairie Pete, he got cold feet / Great Lake Jake was hard to take …” And so we would give back our own grieving songs of sorrow at love’s mystifying impersonations. We even had a song called “Mystifying Impersonation.” Also a sad, slow one titled “Why Don’t the Train Stop Here?” which Murph thought was too country; even when I changed the don’t to won’t, she found it unfocused, with its verse about a church turned into condos, though I liked that part best. “It’s like ‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,’ ” I protested.
“It’s not,” she said. “Believe me. It’s not.” She knew how to speak without gentleness or malice, either one, and preferred my song “Everyone Is You — in Your Dreams,” based on something someone told me once about dreams, but also a defiant anthem to rally us against the narcissism of the betraying lover! Oh, yeah: impotent vengeance, baby, sing your song! What could be better than words that worked every which way? Who cared if the train stopped here or not? I would lay in the rhythm with my electric bass and she would throw herself into that xylophone with ecstasy and pain, a nearby cigarette perched on a saucer, sending out its smoke like the tiny campfire of two tiny prisoner squaws. Who knew she could play?
“It’s really just a toy,” she said. “Anyone can.”
“That’s not really true,” I said, unconvinced and impressed. Murph’s hands and arms moved up and down the keyboard with the undulating movements of a squirrel — sine and cosine interlocking. She would then suddenly stop and point at me with her right mallet, indicating that it was time for my solo, and I would let it rip — or try. Murph liked our collaborations better than such lone efforts by me as “Dog-Doo Done Up as Chocolates for My Brother,” and we seemed best on the rocking ones, like “Summer Evening Lunch Meat,” a song we had written, combining the most beautiful phrase in English with the ugliest, and therefore summing up our thoughts on love. “Summer evening” was what God had provided. “Lunch meat” was the hideous human body itself. When I lay the rhythm in with my bass, when I did it right, Murph could take over with the xylophone and it sounded great. Well, maybe not great. A little stupid, but sweet. “Let your bass-face shine!” she shouted. Probably my features were contorted in concentration and transport. In between the more rollicking stuff, in useful weariness, we found ourselves sailing even on our waltzy ballads:
Did you take off for Heaven
and leave me behind?
Darlin’, I’d join you
if you didn’t mind.
I’d climb up that staircase
past lions and bears,
but it’s locked
at the foot of the stairs.
Are you in paradise
with someone who cares?
Oh, throw down the key to the stairs.
One can see shining steps
and think love is enough,