He had cut his hair just so and had that accidental-on-purpose ruffle in his shirt and jeans that was supposed to sell the idea that he’d just chosen them at random instead of spending hours.
The other reason my mind went to “Drifting” and sort of the reason I tracked this guy down first, was that it was at the top of Jenny’s last playlist.
She didn’t want it getting out that she knew me, remember, so she started leaving me notes on the community board by the health-food store.
At first they were mostly just requests for rare books or vinyl recordings of obscure bands. Could I, please? Would it be a bother if? Et cetera.
Eventually, after she got comfortable that I was as laconic as I seemed, she started with the lists. A lot of them were just random little things: collections of images or quotes from unnamed philosophers or places I had to go in the city because she felt that they meant something to each other.
I don’t know what our connection was, but it was there. I felt it every time I looked at a familiar building in a new way or cracked a book that I hadn’t known existed before.
It might not have been Love, but what it turned into was just as deep. It could even have been something completely fresh, some new way of enjoying another person that was outside holding hands or trying to get in their pants. Whatever it was, it was ours. Now it was gone.
The last note she posted, maybe the last contact she had with anyone before she died, was a list of songs without the artists’ names attached. It would have been my job to find those names, dig up the tracks, and burn her a disc with the music. Well. I wouldn’t be burning anything, but I would be digging.
The first song was “Drifting in the Ocean of You.” It was easy to peg, sort of a wink from her to me.
“That’s a gimme, Jack,” I could almost hear her say. “Just to get you started. The rest aren’t going to be so easy.”
So, after deciding to talk to some of her friends about the parts of her life I didn’t know, I found myself at the Capra Memorial Library staring hard at Joshua Sykes.
He didn’t notice me until I was right next to him. In fact he didn’t until he felt my breath on his neck as I looked over his shoulder at the book he was reading.
“Sorry,” I said after he nearly jumped out of his skin. “You’re Josh, right?”
He gave me a quick scan and I could hear the gears in his head clicking: Do I know this guy? What party was he at? Who does he know that I know? Can I afford to shine him on or do I have to be polite?
“And you are?” he said. Obviously he figured I was close to the brush-off level of his personal totem pole.
“John Red,” I said, smiling. Yeah. I can be charming when I want. “We met at India Pierce’s last thing.”
India was Number Three on my list of Jenny’s friends. She was one of those chicks who threw a lot of parties where attendance was mandatory if you expected to maintain your social life.
“Oh. Yeah,” he said after completing the social calculus in his head. “Hey.”
“I didn’t know you were a Lear fan,” I said, indicating his book. It was one of those leather-bound tomes that got churned out in the 1950s by upstart publishers trying to simulate Old World Credibility.
“What?” He blinked rapidly as if I’d asked him to solve a particularly knotty algebra problem, before remembering the copy of The Complete Edward Lear in his hands. “Oh. No. Just, you know, looking for something to say at the funeral.”
“Funeral?”
“Yeah,” he said as he resumed thumbing through the thing. “You didn’t hear about Jenny?”
“Jenny?” I said, as if tasting the name. “Jenny Charles?”
“Did you know her?” There was something like suspicion in his voice. For a second his face held the expression of somebody who’d just realized he wasn’t the only person with a map to the buried treasure.
When I said I didn’t know her, that I must have heard India mention her sometime or other, he relaxed again.
“How did she die?” I said in an intimate whisper. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
I watched him decide how much to tell me. I might be some peripheral friend of India’s and I’d served the purpose of letting him vent a little, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be the one to dump the details of her suicide into the rumor mill.
“She fell,” he said eventually. “Broke her neck.”
“What, like at a party or something?”
“No,” he said, still flipping pages. “She was by herself.”
“At home?”
“No. At some museum, they said.”
“ They?’ ”
“Her folks. Her brother. Maybe it was at the symphony. It was so sudden I actually had a hard time processing it all.”
“Sure,” I said. Then I waited a bit so he’d think I meant it as sympathy. “So, it was an accident?”
“Look,” he said, slamming the book shut, his perfect actor face all furrowed in the middle. “What’s with all the questions? You said you didn’t even know her.”
“Sorry,” I said, doing a little acting of my own. “It just seemed like, you know, you wanted to talk about it.”
“Well, I don’t.” For a second it looked like he was thinking about hitting me. This guy probably hadn’t smacked anything bigger than a tennis ball in his entire life, if that. So, even though he would’ve been on the downside of any scrap he might start with me, the fact that he considered it told me a lot.
His face shifted again, back to the mask of pretty-boy grief he’d been wearing when I walked in. He snorted something piss-offish and moved away.
I liked him a little better after that. The mask was for the ongoing stage play that was his life, but underneath it was some very real sorrow. Maybe Jenny should’ve moved him to the front burner.
As I waited for the muni-bus, I thought about the playlist. “Drifting” had been the first song and the few things Jenny had told me about Josh had instantly linked the two of them in my mind. The second track was “Trouble in the Bubble” by the Wavecats.
The ’cats were an obscure band — nobody ever went in much for punkabilly and, honestly, they weren’t very good at it — but that song was their one moment of actual inspiration. It bounced in the right places, scratched in the right others. It wasn’t overproduced, like the rest of their crap.
Yeah, there’s some trouble in the bubble tonight.
But the rhythm don’t care if you’re black or white.
Trouble in the bubble tonight.
Let’s dance.
See? Nice. If they’d written it in the sixties they might have actually gotten somewhere. The problem was, while “Drifting” fit Josh Sykes like a tailored jacket, “Trouble” didn’t fit anything. Not even the ’cats. It’s just one of those songs, no matter who you are, that makes you want to move when you hear it. Maybe that was Jenny’s point.
Track three was “Heavy Water” by Michael Thomson. Okay, not that obscure, obviously, just straight out, middle-of-the-road pop/rock. But Jenny specified the acoustic version from that network special in ’98.
The song’s about drowning, of course, but only in that oblique way that doesn’t depress you too much the first time you hear it. The second or third time is when the words, down under it all, under it all, under it all, pushing down, really sink in.
The Charles house — I won’t call it an estate because it was in the middle of the city and didn’t have any real grounds to speak of — was a four-story brick thing that took up a quarter of its block.