from the second house in Winnetka (was it wound in these white plaster leaves, was there this suggestion of wise but astonished eyes, peering through the leaves?).
They’ll be back soon. Somebody will be back soon. Someone stern. The harder Beth searches, though, the less sense she has of what it is she’s lost. It’s small, isn’t it? Spherical? Is it too small to be visible? It might be. But that doesn’t alter the urgency of its discovery.
She’s the girl in the fairy tale, told to turn snow into gold by morning.
She can’t do that, of course she can’t, but there seems to be snow everywhere, it’s falling from the ceiling, snowdrifts shimmer in the corners. She remembers dreaming about searching through a house, when what she needs to do is turn snow into gold, how could she have forgotten …
She looks down at her feet. Although the floor is dusted with snow, she can see that she’s standing on a door, a trapdoor, contiguous with the floorboards, made apparent only by its pair of brass hinges and its tiny brass knob, no bigger than a gumball.
Her mother gives her a penny for a gumball machine outside the A&P. She doesn’t know how to tell her mother that one of the gumballs is poisoned, no one should put a penny into this machine, but her mother is so delighted by Beth’s delight, she’s got to put the penny in, hasn’t she?
There’s a trapdoor at her feet, in the sidewalk in front of the A&P. It’s snowing here, too.
Her mother urges her to put the penny into the slot. Beth can hear laughter, coming from underneath the door.
An annihilating force, a swirling orb of malevolence, is what’s laughing under the trapdoor. Beth knows this to be true. Is the door beginning, ever so slowly, to open?
She’s holding the penny. Her mother says, “Put it in.” It comes to her that the penny is what she thought she was searching for. She seems to have found it, by accident.
Tyler sits in the kitchen, sipping coffee and doing one last line. He’s still wearing the boxer shorts, and has put on Barrett’s old Yale sweatshirt, its grimacing bulldog faded, by now, from red to a faint, candyish pink. Tyler sits at the table Beth found on the street, cloudy gray Formica that’s chipped away in one corner, a ragged-edged gap the shape of the state of Idaho. When this table was new, people expected domed cities to rise on the ocean floor. They believed that they lived on the brink of a holy and ecstatic conjuring of metal and glass and silent, rubberized speed.
The world is older now. It can, at times, seem very old indeed.
They will not reelect George Bush. They cannot reelect George Bush.
Tyler pushes the thought out of his mind. It would be foolish to spend this lambent early hour obsessing. He’s got a song to finish.
So as not to awaken Beth, he leaves his guitar in the corner. He whisper-sings, a cappella, the verse he wrote last night.
To walk the frozen halls at night
To find you on your throne of ice
To melt this sliver in my heart
Oh, that’s not what I came for
No, that’s not what I came for.
Hmm. It’s crap, is it?
The trouble is …
The trouble is he’s determined to write a wedding song that won’t be all treacle and devotion, but won’t be cool or calm, either. How, exactly, do you write a song for a dying bride? How do you account for love and mortality (the real thing, not some till-death-do-us-part throwaway) without morbidity?
It needs to be a serious song. Or, rather, it needs not to be a frivolous song.
The melody will help. Please, let the melody help. This time, though, the lyrics need to come first. Once the lyrics feel right (once they feel less wrong), he’ll lay them over … a minimal tune, something simple and direct, not childish of course but possessed of a childlike, beginner’s earnestness, a beginner’s innocence of tricks. It should be all major chords, with one minor, at the end of the bridge—that single jolt of gravitas; that moment when the lyrics’ romantic solemnity departs from the contrast of its upbeat chords and matches—fleetingly—a darkness in the music itself. The song should reside in the general vicinity of Dylan, of the Velvet Underground. It should not be faux-Dylan, not fake Lou Reed; it should be original (original, naturally; preferably unprecedented; preferably tinged with genius), but it helps, it helps a little, to aim in a general direction. Dylan’s righteous banishment of sentimentality, Reed’s ability to mingle passion with irony.
The melody should have … a shimmering honesty, it should be egoless, no Hey, I can really play this guitar, do you get that? Because the song is an unvarnished love-shout, an implorement tinged with … anger? Something like anger, but the anger of a philosopher, the anger of a poet, an anger directed at the transience of the world, at its heartbreaking beauty that collides constantly with our awareness of the fact that everything gets taken away; that we’re being shown marvels but reminded, always, that they don’t belong to us, they’re sultan’s treasures, we’re lucky (we’re expected to feel lucky) to have been invited to see them at all.
And there’s this, as well. The song has to be infused with … if not anything as banal as hope, an assertion of an ardency that can, if this is humanly possible (and the song must insist that it is), follow the bride in her journey to the netherworld, abide there with her. It has to be a song in which a husband and singer declares himself to be not only a woman’s life-mate, but her death-mate as well, although he, helpless, unconsulted, will keep on living.
Good luck with that one.
He pours himself more coffee, draws out a final, really final, line on the tabletop. Maybe he’s just not … awake enough to be gifted. Maybe one day, why not today, he’ll bust out of his lifelong drowse.
Would “shiver” be better than “sliver”? To melt this shiver in my heart?
No. It wouldn’t.
That repetition at the end—is it forceful or cheap?
Should he try for a half-rhyme with “heart”? Is it too sentimental to use the word “heart” at all?
He needs a looser association. He needs something that implies a man who wants the ice shard to remain in his chest, who’s learned to love the sensation of being pierced.
To walk the frozen halls at night
To find you on your throne of ice
Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds this early in the morning. That’s a possibility.
But still. If Tyler were the real thing, if he were meant to do this, wouldn’t he have more confidence? Wouldn’t he feel … guided, somehow?
Never mind that he’s forty-three, and still playing in a bar.
He will not come to his senses. That’s the siren song of advancing age. He can’t, he won’t, deny the snag in his heart (there’s that word again). He can feel it, an undercurrent in his bloodstream,
