“Monday,” I said.
“Ohhh, Monday’s too hard. Getting the girls off to swimming lessons, getting the week started...”
“It has to be Monday. You want it to be Monday too.”
She drew up in bed and sat with her arms wrapped around herself, her face partly hidden by her hair.
I pulled at the strand of hair until she bent her head. Then I kissed her and caught her lip between my teeth. “Come on Monday,” I said. She struggled away, making a great wave in the water-bed that rocked us to and fro.
The apartment looked so good that after she left I decided to stay in. I did a little more cleaning and then I started fooling around with both tape recorders. I played Sophie’s message again, pushing the Pause button and running the tape backward and forward as I fit my side of the conversation onto the new tape.
“Peter?”
“Sophie, you old douche bag, how are you?”
“Peter, why don’t you answer your telephone?”
“I’m too busy jerking off, Ma.”
“On Mondays I go to see Father Stephanotis.”
“That faggot! He’ll never lift his cassock for you, Ma. You’re wasting your time.”
“He says, Peter is such a fine-looking young man.”
“I bet he does. But I’m saving it for the women, Ma.”
“They don’t know how to say no to you.”
“You’re right, Ma. They don’t. Such a cock.”
“And such a brain.”
“I agree.”
“I am only a mother—”
“That’s right, Sophie, you little dumpling. Only a mother. And don’t you forget it.”
“That first Christmas, I actually tried to send Christmas cards, Tiffany Christmas cards embossed with our names. Our formal names, Mr. and Mrs., then I signed them, Storey and Screw. It sounds silly now. I was trying to have a marriage, you know. Be married. I kept after Screw to give me his list. I finally discovered that he didn’t know most of his friends’ last names, and had no idea where they lived. They mostly got together when it was time to go on the road, or they ran into each other at coffee houses and clubs, or at the studio. The only people whose addresses and phone numbers he knew were his agent, his manager, his lawyer, and his producer.
“Everybody always knew where to find Screw,” she added. We were camping on the living room floor. The waterbed was leaking again. I had my sleeping bag unfolded and spread out, so there was plenty of room. I was stretched out on my back, Storey was sitting up with her arms around her knees, a favorite position of hers. I had both pillows, and an ashtray on my chest with a joint. We kept lighting it and taking a hit and putting it out again.
Along the edge of the sleeping bag were the remains of breakfast. Storey had gone around by Murray’s for bagels and cream cheese and smoked fish, and somewhere along the way she had picked up orange juice and champagne. That was all right. That was sweet of her, although I don’t really like people giving me things unless it’s something I specifically want.
While she talked about Screwbosky, I looked up at the poster. I kept putting his records on, playing a cut here and a cut there, sometimes a whole album. I was trying to make it seem that he was there with us, that there were three of us, but it wasn’t working. Somehow the things she was telling me were not what I expected. She seemed to remember the most inconsequential things. And not to remember big things at all. She didn’t remember the first time she heard “Right of Way.” Imagine not remembering the first time you heard it. I remember the first time I heard it.
“We were living on the third floor of a brownstone in the West Village,” she was saying. “It was nice. Small. But it had a lot of charm. There was a garden below, at the back, with a brick wall around it. Our apartment looked down into the garden. Screw’s fans used to hang around in the alley, on the other side of the wall. They used to jump up and catch the top of the wall and try to look over. They’d hang there until their arms got tired, then they’d drop back to the sidewalk. Sometimes I’d look down and see just their fingers showing on the top of the wall.”
“How did you meet him?”
“It was between semesters at Radcliffe. I was doing an internship at a theater in the city. I was getting credit, no pay. It was one of those improvisational theaters, where the audience takes part, so the performance is different every night. Screw came in several times. He thought that he was doing something similar at his concerts. There were times when he wanted to control his audience, and times when he wanted to turn it loose. He was studying the actors’ techniques, and talking with the director. I met him there.”
“And you started going out with him?”
“Um-hmmm.”
“And?”
“And we got married.”
“How long?”
“Two years... two and a half.”
“How come you broke up?”
“He didn’t want to be married anymore. I wanted to be married, but not to him. I wanted to be married to a businessman, a lawyer, a doctor, anybody but a rock musician. I wanted a house in the suburbs. I wanted children. I thought I was wasting my time in that life, and not having any of the things I wanted.”
“Maybe you just weren’t his type,” I suggested.
She looked at me for a moment. “But I was. Every woman he had after me was just like me. The girl he was married to when he died — she was a Sarah Lawrence film student, and her father’s a vice president at IBM.”
I wondered if she had been much different fifteen years ago. Of course she had. Her hair had been paler and longer probably. She’d probably been thinner, or thin in a different way. She must have been narrower across the shoulders too. Now she had that band of muscle across her back that comes from carrying a couple of kids around. I wondered if she’d been more talkative then, more fun. She seemed to me to be always preoccupied, always thinking of all the things she had to do. She came in once, twice a week; but she always seemed to be thinking about making it home before school was out or phoning Connecticut to see if the man was going to fix the clothes dryer. All those details drove me crazy — she could never just forget about them and listen to me. Only when we were making love would she concentrate on me. Then I would realize — this is what she came for. I tried to play some of my own tapes for her, but she just waited politely through them until it was time to crawl into the sack. I even played part of my father’s funeral eulogy for her, not the part Sophia doesn’t like, but the part where Father Stephanotis says he was a pillar of the Greek community in New York. All she said was, “I thought your father was a Russian émigré.”
That brought me up short. Reminded me, once again, to decide what I’m going to do with these tapes. At one time, I thought I’d use them, turn them into an art form of some kind. One idea was to build a gigantic 1930s kind of radio cabinet, the kind that looks like it has an art deco face, with all the cabinetry and wood veneers done just right, and play the tapes through it, in a big empty gallery, in a big white room like a squash court, with a dim orange light coming from the radio dial. Now, I don’t know. If I ever have to leave this apartment, I might just dump all the tapes in the trash cans up and down Columbus Avenue. I might mail them to some body. They could be evidence. Of what? I don’t know. I’ve taped and retaped and messed around with them so much, nobody could reconstruct the originals.
“Tell me about the concerts,” I said. I wanted to hear something. I mean, he was somebody. He had talent, he had money. He was a big star. She must remember all that. “What were the concerts like?”