There was a grand piano in one corner (Steinway, white) and across from it an electric version hooked up via a nest of wires to a pair of speakers that stood on either side of it. I had an impulse to lift the lid on the Steinway and try a key or two — and who in this world has ever entered a room with a piano and failed to go to it and tinkle out something, be it “Chopsticks” or the opening bars of Tchaikovsky’s “Marche Slave”?—but I fought it down. The neighbors might have been behind an eight-foot wall but how could they fail to remark on the sound of a dead man playing the piano at six-thirty of a Sunday morning? No. No piano playing. Chrissie would be waking soon, the paper was still in the driveway and the croissants waiting. I had to go. Had to leave right this minute… but what was this on the walls, these rectangular forms giving back the soupy light? Photos. Framed photos.
A glance showed me I’d been wrong in identifying Carey Fortunoff as the brooder in the group photograph. Here was his face replicated in half a dozen discrete scenarios, with and without his bandmates; with a pair of rockers even I recognized, famous men; with a sweet-faced woman sporting teased blond hair and holding an infant daughter, her hair teased too — and I realized, by process of elimination, that he was the one in the original photo partially obscured by a tombstone and staring straight into the camera. Not as dynamic maybe as the one I’d mistaken him for or as good-looking either, but solid in his own way. I imagined him as the composer, the arranger, the mad genius behind the band, because didn’t every band, if it was to succeed at any level, require a mad genius?
I didn’t know. But suddenly I felt something, a presence, an aura, and I came back to myself. I needed to stop prying. I needed to leave. I needed croissants, coffee, my wife. And no, I had no interest in entering that bedroom down the hall or wherever it was. I turned to go, was actually on my way across the room and out the door, when my eye fell on the bookshelf, and if there’s an impulse every bit as compelling as to lift the lid on a piano and finger a few keys, it’s to inspect a bookcase, whether a friend’s or a stranger’s, just to get a sense of the titles some other person, someone other than you or your wife, would select and read. Without trying to sound overly dramatic, this was the moment where the fates intervened, because what drew my attention was a uniform set of leather-bound books, hand-numbered and dated. Journals. The journals of a third-tier musician who’d died alone in what sort of extremis I could only imagine — Carey Fortunoff’s journals. The one I picked at random was dated 1982, and I didn’t flip back the cover and leaf through it, because another impulse was at work in me, even stronger than the ones I’d already given way to.
I never hesitated. Ignoring the warning voices rattling round my head, I tucked the volume under my arm and slipped out the way I’d come.
—
I tried to be inconspicuous on the street, just another man — citizen, neighbor, innocent — heading down to the bakery in the early morning with a favorite book, but in any case there was no one around to doubt or question me. The walls stood tall and mute. A soft breeze swayed in the treetops. On the main road, the one that arcs gracefully through the lower village, a pair of cars, pinked by the early sun, rolled silently to a halt at the four-way stop sign, then rolled on. I bought the newspaper from one of the machines ranged like staring eyes outside the bakery, folded the book inside it, and went on up the steps and into the shop, where the smells were sweet and comforting.
Coffeed and croissanted, I took a table in back and made a show of studying the headlines before sliding the book out from between the Real Estate and Style sections. I won’t say my heart was hammering — it wasn’t — but I did feel the quickening pulse of an illicit thrill. I looked up. There were three other people in the place, aside from the girl behind the counter: two women and a man, each sitting separately, and each absorbed in laptop or phone. I didn’t recognize them — and if I didn’t recognize them, then they wouldn’t have recognized me. I opened the journal and spread it flat on the table.
The first page simply stated the date in bold black numerals three inches high. Beneath it was the leering cartoon figure of what I at first took to be a devil — horns, goatee, cloven hooves — and I was put off. Here was the same old pubescent trope: devils and grinning skulls, phallic snakes, witch women and graves, a kind of wet dream of death you saw in one form or another on every band poster of the era. But then I saw my mistake — the figure was actually meant to be that of a satyr, as indicated by the definition of satyriasis written out in block letters at the bottom of the page: Excessive or abnormal sexual craving in the male. Which was at least more interesting. I turned the page.
What followed, beginning with the first entry for January 1, the day after the band had performed for a New Year’s Eve party at a place called the Whisky, alternated between descriptions of random sexual encounters (groupies), drug use (cocaine, Percodan) and recording sessions for the group’s first album, which apparently was being released that May by Warner Brothers, one of the big companies of the time. It was the usual sort of thing, the rock and roll cliché interlarded with detailed descriptions of various sex acts and demeaning depictions of the females involved, forays into new pharmaceutical experiences, visits to the doctor for burns, contusions and sexually transmitted diseases, set lists, the names of cities, restaurants, venues. I have to admit I began to skip ahead. What was I looking for? Introspection. Connection. Some sort of insight into a life, this life, a life lived coevally with my own. And pain, of course — the sort of pain and hurt and trauma that defines and delimits any life on this earth.
I wasn’t disappointed. In May, once the band went on tour, the entries began to shrink away to virtually nothing, a single line, the name of a city (Cincinnati, encore “Hammerhead” & “Corti-Zone,” vomit on shoes, whose?), and then in June the pages went blank altogether. What happened — and this was revealed in the first long entry for July, the longest entry in the journal thus far — was that Carey Fortunoff, mad genius of Metalavox or no, had quit the band in mid-tour, kicking out the windshield of the van they were traveling in after a dispute with the drummer over credit for a song he (the drummer) claimed he’d co-written.
Carey was uncompromising. He had a temper. And no matter how his bandmates pleaded with him, or the drummer (Topper Hogg, another name to look up) prostrated himself, Carey walked away from the whole thing. Just crossed the road, stuck out his thumb and spent two deprived and miserable weeks flagging rides west, sleeping rough, haunting Dumpsters outside fast-food restaurants and listening to every sort of country western and pop atrocity his thumbed rides inflicted on him, till he finally made it back to L.A. And his wife. His wife, Pamela, mentioned now for the first time, as if she’d been supplied by a casting company, as if she’d carried no more weight in his life than one of the Cindys and Susies and Chantals he picked up after every gig, as he called it. (Lost 22 pounds by the time I got back to Pamela, my head splitting open like a big ripe cantaloupe. Why didn’t you call me? she said. And what’d I do? I just shrugged, because how you could you even begin to put it into words?)