The Song Remains the Same Page 6

  As if intuiting his thoughts, Nell gives him an out now, skips the conversation about cliffs and affairs and how their relationship may well have plunged off the side of the mountain and shattered into tiny, untraceable splinters.

  “Forget the wedding, forget the great things about it,” she says. “Tell me one thing in your life that you’ve already done that’s a great thing.” She thinks of her promise to herself, to find her own greatness.

  He stumbles, the question catching him off guard.

  “A great thing? Jesus…” He shifts his watch around his left wrist, something to do, a way to buy himself some time.

  “Okay, I’ll make it easier,” she offers. “Let’s start with something basic: What do you do in real life? Would you consider that a great thing?”

  He hesitates because before, before she would have judged him for this. Judged him because she was the one with the gift, the ear, the aptitude. Even though she abandoned it and only played for him, or with him, in their finest—and rarest—of moments anymore. When they first met, it was all the time. It was their thing—guitar or piano late into the evening, the music the thread that bound them together. So she knows or she knew. Knew that he would never have what she did.

  He inhales and says: “I write music. Commercial jingles.” He reaches for the remote, feeling his fingers shaking, and flips on the TV. A truck commercial with a country music riff is playing on that cable station she always has on. “Like that.” He gestures toward it. “That’s the type of thing I write.” Then he flicks the TV right back off.

  “That’s not really a great thing,” she says, and he holds his breath. Then she laughs, and he can tell that she’s joking, not because she’s mocking him but because, well, it’s decidedly not a great thing.

  “No.” He laughs, too. “It’s not. But it pays okay. And I like it. For now.” He doesn’t bring up Ginger. That she sits in the office two doors down from him and that they produce nearly 80 percent of their music together. He doesn’t mention that Rory had been the one to tell Nell of the indiscretion—she had heard from a friend of a friend—and that this only added to the pile of their—both Rory’s and Peter’s—problems with Nell. He doesn’t say that the last time he and Nell spoke of his work—four months ago—she threatened him with a meat mallet in their kitchen and then kicked him out of the apartment for good. Their one drunken interlude nine weeks back—he assumed she was still on the pill, but perhaps she’d given that up, too—notwithstanding. Even though he has now realized that of course he wasn’t in fucking love with Ginger! Of course he never should have looked twice (or three times) when she leaned low (then lower) in that scoop-neck top over the mixing board. Jesus Christ! Of course he’d give his left nut to have a take-back.

  No, he doesn’t bring any of that up.

  “Still, though, it’s not the stuff on which dreams are built,” Nell says. “Commercial jingles. Who knew there was such a job?”

  “No, it’s true. My legacy will hopefully be something greater than having written the jingle for Pizza Hut,” he concedes.

  “So you don’t have your one great thing, then?”

  He pauses, wondering how far he can push this, push her, push their bond. He feels her equivocating, trying not to like him but trying to like him all the same, giving him a little rope, whereas in the past, she would have simply knotted it into a noose and cavalierly tied it over his neck. Maybe Indira was right: maybe she’s returned to him a little changed, like her reset button was jiggered in the crash.

  He decides to go for it. She doesn’t remember all the carnage, after all. Doesn’t remember the things they’ve said to each other, how Ginger ruined them. Well, if he were being totally honest, really, how he ruined them—though for a long time, and even still now, part of him thinks that Nell shares some of the blame, too. If she did remember—if she could remember—he’d never have gone for it because she’d never have gone for it, either.

  She wasn’t even speaking with him when the crash occurred. He got the phone call from Rory about the accident—she was fleeing Giants Stadium and he could barely make her out over the crowd—oh god, pack some things and meet her at the airport, she said. He didn’t even comprehend quite what she meant. And then all of a sudden, he got it: bam—his wife, who, by the way, hates him down to his core, is dead. Only it turns out she’s not dead. He finds this out six hours later, and swears, upon hearing this undead news, that there is nothing he won’t do to remedy his marriage.

  So this is why he pushes it now. This is what he’s been through. This is what he’s learned.

  “Maybe you can be my something great,” he says, hoping she won’t make fun of his sincerity. Before all of this, she had no time for sentimentality, even when he was wooing her, but now, perhaps she will. “Maybe I’ve been working up to this, and now you, fixing you, helping you, proving to you that I am a better man, maybe that’s my something great.”

  She hesitates for a beat, then another, and he knows that this can fall either way. He watches the clock in the hallway through the glass window, the second hand looping a full circle once and then again. Finally, he sighs, thinking she has fallen back to sleep, so he pushes himself from the chair, its legs squeaking in reply. His hand is on the metal knob of the door when she opens her eyes, and as if he can hear this, he turns and meets them.

  “Stay,” she says. “For now.”

  He nods.

  Yes, he thinks, forever.

  6

  You would think that after a month, I’d be itching to leave the hospital. That when Dr. Macht and Alicia come in, shake me from my state of half-dreaming, with The Best of Nell Slattery as the sound track to those dreams, and tell me that I can head home, albeit with a rigorous rehab schedule and biweekly shrink appointments, I would leap out of bed—my nearly resealed ribs notwithstanding—and tackle them with euphoria. But when they do tell me this—that I’m ready to return to my old life, mostly—I want to reply, What old life?

  Earlier in the week, Peter returned to New York for work obligations, and truth be told, though I am trying, trying, to let us be something great—to honor that promise I made to myself—I’m relieved to have the space to breathe, to sort it all through. My mother, too, has been muddying the waters, urging me to give this second chance an honest go, a buzz in my ear that can’t be swatted away.

  Shortly after Peter confessed his one-night stand, my mom swooped by and convinced the doctors to let me take a spin outside. In hindsight, of course, she also knew that this would indebt me to her—the first person to offer me a literal breath of fresh air after two weeks of sterilized, recirculated hospital oxygen. And she must have known that she was thus bound to earn her way into my good graces. She’s cunning, my mother. Even without knowing her well, I know this. But she wheeled me outside, delicately, like a china vase, and I inhaled the lung-expanding sunshine while she talked to me about forgiveness. About how you never regret doing it and how it can be the greatest gift you’ll ever give yourself—Take the other party out of it entirely and do it for yourself, she said. About how things aren’t always black and white, even though my earlier incarnation almost always thought that they were. There is gray, you know, she said. About how vulnerability was never my strong suit but now, she thinks, it might be. I confessed to her about my vow to seize this second chance, and she in turn embraced me and said, “There is life in you yet, a new life, a new course.” I nodded and felt the heat of the late July air burn my cheeks, and I felt good enough, forgiving enough, to want to dance on the sun. Okay, I nodded to her in agreement. Forgiveness. Yes. I will try. That’s what the new me might want anyway. My mother rubbed my forearm and smiled in a way that reminded me of someone who had taken too much morphine, and told me that she knew it, she knew that I had it in me now.

  Still, though, I’m relieved that Peter has gone back to New York all the same, not because I don’t want to rebuild, or that I don’t think I can trust him again, but because working toward this f
orgiveness that my mother impugns is exhausting. It requires tangible effort. And I’m already exhausted enough.

  Not that Peter knows this. Before he flew back on Monday, I was breeziness and happy anecdotes (from him, not me, as I still have no anecdotes of my own to speak of) and the occasional kiss, which still felt like a first-date kiss—all hesitation and question marks. He brought me chocolate bars and vanilla pudding, which he said were my favorites before, and which now taste good, mediocre good, and the fabulous me wonders if maybe I might enjoy something more exotic, more me, but I thank him and don’t say anything else.

  While I ate, he told me of our first date—a setup, and not a good one at that—stilted conversation, no common ground. But then he got up to put a song on the jukebox, and that he chose “Sister Christian” made me smile and tell him of my sick, deep crush for the lead singer of Night Ranger in the seventh grade. And then we both loosened ourselves up and ordered another beer, and when he walked me home, he kissed me, and—extra beer or not—I kissed him back.

  “You guys had that,” Samantha said over the phone the other night, “that music thing. Every once in a while in college, we’d karaoke and we’d all see how good you were—perfect pitch, you said, but mostly, you were over it. But with him, you found it again.”

  “What do you mean, over it?” I fingered the iPod on my lap, where it almost always sat—plugged into my ear—when I wasn’t being tested, rehabbed, prodded.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You didn’t talk about it. Only that you once loved it, were great at it, but then…I guess you just lost interest.” I heard her pause to bite into her lo mein, still at her office, stuck waiting for a client to file some paperwork. “Like I said, to be honest, I don’t know all of the details.”

  “Funny, isn’t it? How people only know what we want them to know?” I said.

  I think of Peter, of the confession he made after the first-date story: “In the interest of full disclosure, I want you to hear it from me, all of it,” he had said. That one evening, I was staying late at the gallery to put up a show and we’d been fighting, though about what, he couldn’t remember, only that we were fighting badly and often. And that he and Ginger had just wrapped an H and R Block commercial (they have music in H and R Block commercials? I’d asked), and that they went to the bar in their building to celebrate. And that when closing time came—armed with either too much alcohol or, in his case, too much vitriol at his wife—they’d become that coworker cliché by retreating to their mixing studio and doing it on the floor. But that was it, he said.

  How well do I know you, Peter?

  “I knew you plenty well,” Sam said, and pulled me back to the conversation.

  “Still though.” I shrugged, though she couldn’t see me.

  “Well, also, you liked that Peter was reliable,” she offered.

  “Ironic since he wasn’t,” I said back.

  “True enough,” she agreed. “The easy reads are never what they appear. Though you are. You were.”

  “I’m not sure if that’s a compliment,” I said.

  “I’m your best friend. Of course it’s a compliment,” she said.

  “So if it wasn’t music, what was it, then?” I asked. “What made me happy? What did I do in my downtime?”

  She hesitated, and I wondered if it was because she was still chewing or if it was because she didn’t yet know the answer.

  “Work, I guess.”

  “Work, you guess?”

  “Well, I mean, the truth of the matter is, now that I’m really thinking about it, most of the time when we catch up, we’re…well, we’re bitching about something.”

  “Like what?” I asked. The face from the cover of People certainly looked like she had plenty to bitch about.

  “Oh, my mother-in-law, your mother. My sleep schedule, my work schedule. Your sister. Things like that.” She exhaled. “I never really thought about it until now—how little of our time we spend discussing the things that actually make us happy.”

  “What would I say about my sister?” I said, ignoring her prophecy on happiness. “What could I possibly complain about with Rory?”

  Sam laughed. “Oh god, see, and I don’t mean this to come out wrong, but in some ways, it’s probably better that you don’t remember. Clean slate and all. But you guys—you were always getting into it. You know, sister stuff. Competitive stuff. Driving each other crazy with gallery disagreements, nitpicky things. You were meticulous, she was less worried about the details. You were reserved, she was a show-off. Yin and yang, oil and water.”

  “I don’t see that at all,” I said.

  “Well, that’s the good thing about those clean slates,” she said, right before her brief came in and she had to run. “You don’t see what you just wiped away.”

  Shortly after Dr. Macht informs me that he has granted me freedom to fly back to my sister, to my husband, and to discover why I once made music for him, Jamie pops his head through the door frame.

  “News,” he says. “I have news.”

  “Me, too,” I say. “I also have news.”

  “You’re going home. I already know.” He grins, a little too self-importantly.

  “Of course you do.” I close my eyes.

  “It’s part of the job.”

  I hear him sliding a chair next to the bed, and I open my eyes to find him already seated.

  “So you already know mine. What’s yours?”

  “American Profiles,” he says.

  “American Profiles?” I say.

  “Yes, American Profiles.” He emphasizes both words like that will answer my question. “That show on Thursday nights?” I shake my head, still unknowing. “Well, they ‘profile’ all these amazing stories, amazing people. I think they might be interested.”

  “Interested?”

  “In us, in a story!” He claps his hands for emphasis. “I’ve been pitching it like crazy, and I think today they bit.”

  I busy myself wrapping the headphone wire around the iPod and consider it. My instinct—despite my initial zeal for Operation Free Nell Slattery, a zeal that has since waned, as these cockeyed ideas often do—is to burrow under the covers until the public loses interest. But the new me, the fabulous me, the one that conceived of OFNS in the first place, and the one I committed to as a penance for surviving the crash, implores my instincts to rethink this, to see it as an opportunity—for what, I’m not even yet sure. Maybe just to live on a grander scale, to fly down life’s zip line instead of standing beneath it, craning my head to see what was coasting by. Besides, Jamie is a means to an end—he’s out there, uncovering details, angling for information—and my new instinct, my new gut is telling me to trust him, telling me that there’s something here to believe in. Just last week, we did an hour-long interview that his station stretched over three nights, and viewers marveled at my voided memory and told us as much in e-mails.

  What I wouldn’t do to erase the memory of my lousy ex-husbands (three of ’em) and son-of-a-bitch boss, Clara from Iowa City wrote in.

  My heart goes out to this poor girl. What a loss—I have asked my church group to pray for her this Sunday, Eugenia from neighboring Wichita, which now received the show via satellite, told us.

  “Before you answer, I have these.” Jamie reaches into his bag and thrusts a pack of postcards in my hand.

  I finger through the lot of them. They’re semi-abstract paintings—if you look hard enough you can see the shape of a woman’s breast or the ampleness in her butt cheek or the curve of her chin in almost all of them. They are in glaring, blinding colors—cherry red the shade of fresh blood, vibrant blue so vivid you couldn’t find it in nature, a yellow that forces me to squint.

  “My dad’s, I take it?” I ask. “I thought he did pop art?”

  “This was his early work. And it wasn’t easy to find. Rory blew me off when I asked about getting some prints and your mom flaked on me twice. I finally called a friend of a former colleague who’s an as
sistant art professor at Columbia. These were from some of your dad’s old shows.” He pauses. “Anything look familiar?”

  “I’ll give you two guesses.” I pause and cock my head, turning one of the images vertically. “Still, though, I can tell he was amazing.”

  “Rory told me—curtly, I should add—that you were his apprentice.” He shakes his head. “No, maybe she said muse.”

  “I could have been. I wouldn’t know.” I look again at the photos. “But these aren’t of me. Not if he left when I was thirteen.”

  “No.” Jamie reaches for a postcard and examines it. “These predate you.”

  “My mom, maybe?” I suggest helpfully.

  “Maybe,” he says, handing it back, refocusing. “But that’s not the point. The point is American Profiles.”

  “Well, you’re not making your point about it.” I pause, examining the scattered postcards, of the archaeology that Jamie has uncovered when no one else has. “So what exactly is your point about American Profiles?”

  “I think they’re going to make us an offer: you, me, Anderson—none of their regular anchors—a four-part series tracking your recovery, your transition back into the real world. I’m still negotiating it.”

  “Shouldn’t people be sick of us by now?” I say this, and yet I know they are not. I still hear the calls to the nurses’ station, can still see the media trucks parked on the street outside my window. There have been no other national catastrophes since the crash and until there is—a bomb threat, a sports star scandal—I’m still it.