you blow the modest inheritance your mother left by sitting in ever-smaller rooms, strumming a guitar. It’s his open secret, the self inside the self, secret because he believes he knows within himself a brilliance, or at least a penetrating clarity, that hasn’t come out yet. He’s still producing approximations, and it vexes him that most people (not Beth, not Barrett, just everybody else) see him as a sad case, a middle-aged bar singer (no, make that a middle-aged bartender, who’s permitted by the owner to sing on Friday and Saturday nights), when he knows (he knows) that he’s still nascent, no prodigy of course, but the music and poetry move slowly in him, great songs hover over his head, and there are moments, real moments, when he feels so certain he can reach them, he can almost literally pull them out of the air, and he tries, lord how he tries, but what he grabs hold of is never quite it.
Fail. Try again. Fail better. Right?
He sings the first two lines again, softly, to himself. He hopes they’ll open into … something. Something magical, and obscurely on target, and … good.
To walk the frozen halls at night
To find you on your throne of ice
He sings quietly in the kitchen, with its faint gassy smell and its pale blue walls (they must, once, have been aquamarine), its tacked-up photographs of Burroughs and Bowie and Dylan, and (Beth’s) Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. If he can write a beautiful song for Beth, if he can sing it to her at their wedding and know that it’s a proper testament—a true gift, not just another near miss, another nice try, but a song that lands, that lances, that’s gentle but faceted, gleaming, gem-hard …
Give it one more go, then.
He starts singing again, as Beth dreams in the next room. He sings quietly to his lover, his bride to be, his dying girl, the girl for whom this song and, probably, really, all the songs are meant. He sings into the brightening air of the room.
Barrett has gotten dressed. The tight (too tight? fuck it—if you present yourself as a beauty, people tend to believe you) wool pants, the Clash T-shirt (worn down to pearl-gray translucence), the ostentatiously ragged sweater that drapes limp and indolent almost to his knees.
Here he is, bathed, hair-gelled, dressed for the day. Here’s his reflection in his bedroom mirror, here’s the room in which he currently resides: Shinto-inspired, just a mattress and a low table, the walls and floor painted white, Barrett’s private sanctuary from the funky-junk museum that is the rest of Tyler and Beth’s apartment.
He takes out his cell phone. Liz’s phone will be turned off, of course, but he should tell her he’s going to open the shop this morning.
“Hey, it’s Liz, leave a message.”
He’s still surprised, sometimes, by the clipped force of her voice, when it transmits unaccompanied by her animated, rather off-kilter face (she’s one of those women who insists, successfully, on her own beauty—Barrett has learned from her; on the assertion that a hooked jut of nose and a wide, thin-lipped mouth is, must be, added to the list of desirable features), the careless gray tangle of her hair.
Barrett speaks into (onto?) her voice mail.
“Hi. I’m going in early, just to lurk around, so if you and Andrew want to stay snuggled up, go ahead. I’ll open. And it’s not like there’s going to be any customers on a day like this. Bye.”
Andrew. The most ideal being among Barrett’s inner population; graceful and inscrutable as a figure from the Parthenon friezes; Barrett’s singular experience of the godly. Andrew is as close as Barrett has come to a sense of divine presence in the world.
A minor epiphany circles his head like a persistent fly. Did his most recent boyfriend leave so casually because he sensed Barrett’s fixation on Andrew, which Barrett never, ever, mentioned? Is it possible that the departed boy perceived himself as an imitation, of sorts; as the most possessable version of Andrew’s offhand, no-big-deal beauty; Andrew who will do, for now and possibly forever, as the most persuasive living evidence of God’s genius, coupled with God’s inscrutable propensity for sculpting some of the clay with a degree of attention to the symmetries and precisions He (She?) withholds from most of the population at large?
No. Probably not. The guy wasn’t, frankly, a particularly subtle or intuitive thinker, and Barrett’s devotion to Andrew carries no hint of actual possibility. Barrett adores Andrew the way one might a Phidias Apollo. You don’t expect a marble sculpture to step down off its museum pedestal and take you in its arms. No one dumps a lover because the lover is besotted by art. Right?
Who doesn’t want—who doesn’t need—a moon at which to marvel, a fabled city of glass and gold on the far side of the ocean? Who would insist that his corporeal lover—the guy in his bed, the man who forgets to throw his used Kleenexes away, who used the last of the coffee before he left for work—be the moon or the city?
If Barrett’s latest ex did in fact desert him because Barrett maintains a private fascination with a boy he’ll never have … That might, in some perverse way, be good to know. Barrett prefers a version in which the vanished lover turns out to have been unreasonable, or paranoid, or even a little bit insane.
On his way out, Barrett pauses, again, at the open door of Tyler and Beth’s bedroom. Beth is asleep. Tyler must be in the kitchen, cranking on coffee. Barrett is glad, of course—everybody is—that Tyler has stopped doing drugs.
Barrett stands for a moment in the bedroom doorway, watching Beth sleep. She’s as frail and ivory-colored as a comatose princess, slumbering through decades, waiting for the spell to be broken. She looks, strangely enough, less sick when she sleeps; when her conversation and her concerns and her mannerisms aren’t so clearly struggling to survive the failing of her body.
Has Barrett been given a sign about Beth? Does the fact that some immense inhuman intelligence elected to appear to him at this particular time have anything to do with Beth slipping off into more and more sleep?
Or was the vision just a little flesh-stone pressing against his cerebral cortex? How will he feel when, a year or so from now, someone in an emergency room tells him they could have caught that tumor if only he’d acted sooner?
He’s not going to see a doctor. If he had a regular doctor (he imagines her as Swedish, sixty-plus, stern but not fanatical about his health; prone to mild, mock-serious scoldings about his modest amalgam of less-than-salubrious pleasures), he’d call her. Given that he’s uninsured, subject to clinics and the ministrations of medical students who are learning on the job, he can’t seem to bring himself to face the questions an unknown doctor would pose about his history of mental health. It’s only possible for him to imagine discussing the celestial light with someone who knows him, already, as fundamentally sane.
Would he rather risk death than embarrassment? It seems that he would.
Quietly (he’s still in his socks, shoes are left by the front door, a strange local custom, given the apartment’s less-than-tidy nature), Barrett walks into the room and stands beside the bed, listening to the steady murmur of Beth’s breathing.
He can smell her—the lavender soap they all use, mingled with a smell he can only think of as womanly, a ripe cleanliness that’s somehow enhanced and deepened by sleep, all mixed up now with the powder and nettle of her medicines, the strangest roil of pharmaceutical immaculacy and some sour chamomile-family herb that has in all likelihood been gathered for centuries in bogs and marshes, along with a sickroom smell he can only think of as electric, the indescribable cauterizing invisible whatever
