Songs Without Words Read online

  He smiled.

  “And I talked to Sarabeth—she’s going to a gamelan concert tonight.”

  Sarabeth was always doing something just a little hipper than anything he and Liz would do on their own, and every third or fourth time Liz would get a bee in her bonnet and they’d end up at some warehouse in Alameda, watching naked people write on one another or something. On the plus side, it gave him some great stories for work.

  “You know those Indonesian chimes?” she said. “And gongs?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He reached for her hand, interlacing their fingers. “Sounds like fun. Hey, I was thinking about the city today. About walking home from work.”

  “Nostalgia?” she said.

  “No, I was remembering the foghorns.”

  “Sounds like nostalgia to me.”

  He swung his legs onto the coffee table and leaned back. Thinking of those days, of the guy he’d been: what a striver, what a go-getter. That guy never could have imagined this life. What had that guy wanted? To be sharp, aggressive, confident, canny, smooth. To be Russ.

  There were footsteps on the stairs, and Joe came in, twiddling a pencil between his fingers. At dinner he’d still been amped up from soccer practice, but he looked tired now. Brody liked it that Joe had practice on Tuesdays this year—his own tennis day. He figured Joe’s legs felt the same way his did.

  “Hey, bud,” he said to Joe.

  “I’m starving.”

  Liz pulled her hand free from Brody’s and scooted forward. “Want some more lasagne? I can heat some up for you.”

  Joe thought for a moment. “Nah.” He went into the kitchen for a box of crackers and brought them to an easy chair near the couch. He stood to one side of the chair, turned around, and fell straight back into it, his legs swinging way up and then folding over the padded arm. “Sweet,” he said.

  He sat quietly, stuffing crackers into his mouth, his bare feet moving a little.

  “Is your homework done?” Liz said.

  Joe glanced at Brody, then looked at his watch and said, “I think it needs a little longer.”

  “Wise guy,” Brody said.

  They all sat there: Joe chewing, Liz shifting to the end of the couch and resting her feet against Brody’s thigh, Brody holding the remote loosely in his hand. Above them Lauren’s floor creaked, and he heard the sound of her desk chair scraping across the floor. At dinner she’d said she had a lot of chemistry homework tonight.

  “Dad,” Joe said suddenly, mouth full, “guess who’s going to the Yankees.”

  Brody tried not to smile. “Not this again.”

  “No, he is,” Joe said. “Trent told me. He is.”

  “Barry Bonds is not going to the Yankees. It’ll never happen.”

  “I don’t know,” Joe said. “I think you’re in denial.”

  “Better da Nile dan da Hudson.”

  “Errrr,” Joe protested, but he smiled and stretched, then got up and tossed the cracker box onto the coffee table. He went back to the kitchen, filled a glass with milk, drank it down and filled it again. When it was empty, he burped loudly.

  “Honey,” Brody said to Liz, happier than he had any reason to be. “We forgot to teach the kids manners.”

  In a little while the house shifted into its penultimate nighttime form: both kids in their rooms, the dishwasher running, Liz upstairs scouting for small tasks and saying goodnight. Brody remained on the couch, in no hurry to move because once he did he’d have to set his alarm for 4:30 a.m. He had a 6:50 flight to Seattle.

  He thought again of the apartment he and Liz had shared in San Francisco: the two small rooms, the tiny kitchen, the balcony with its narrow view of the bay. He remembered how strangely thrilled he was by his first sight of Liz’s makeup in their shared medicine cabinet, how it seemed to prove something important.

  When he proposed they were on the living room couch eating takeout Chinese. He’d been thinking about it for weeks but hadn’t had a plan; what got him to speak was a conversation he’d had at the office that afternoon. One of his coworkers had said, more or less in passing, that people chose their spouses for the flimsiest of reasons, and when he asked what she meant, she insisted that she’d married her husband because he had a nice blue shirt. And that her friends had reasons like: because he gives a great back rub, because his sister’s really nice, because he can order wine in a restaurant. Right then and there Brody thought: because she has a great laugh. She did—a wide, unencumbered laugh that was tantalizingly at odds with her calm demeanor. And that was her reaction, over the Chinese food. She said yes and cried a little, and then she laughed and laughed.

  6

  Sarabeth’s house was set behind another, larger house, on a flag lot without its own driveway. This meant she had to park on the street, which should have been easy—it was a tiny, quiet street—but the parking situation was completely out of hand. Berkeley being Berkeley, there had been petitions to limit the number of cars per house that could park on this block, petitions to formally disallow rules about how many cars per house could park on this block, flyers left in mailboxes urging more considerate parking (“Dear Neighbors: Please, if you park in a space next to a driveway, take a moment to think of the rest of us and park within a foot of the curb cut”), and even, rumor had it, an enraged letter from one party to another about the immorality of a single family’s owning two SUVs.

  All of this was on her mind as she made her morning tea, because last night, coming home from dinner with Nina, she’d had to park way down the block, and she couldn’t quite decide if she was shameless enough to go out in her pajamas to retrieve the book she’d left in her car.

  She wasn’t, quite.

  Instead, she carried her tea to the front window and watched the familiar sight of the Heidts doing their morning relay. The Heidts were the family of five that lived in the house in front of hers; it was their driveway she used to get to and from her house.

  Bonnie came out first and started the car, an old white Volvo station wagon. She was followed soon after by her husband, Rick, who carried three-year-old Isaac and his fire truck lunch box. As Rick buckled Isaac into his car seat, Bonnie got out of the car and headed back to the kitchen, only to step aside as Chloe and Pilar burst from the door and raced down the steps. Chloe was ahead, but she stopped abruptly, made an extravagant gesture of displeasure with her arms, and then turned and trudged in the direction from which she’d come. Which left Pilar, apparently free now, to set down her backpack and spread her arms wide and twirl.

  She was Sarabeth’s favorite—six years old and impossibly winsome. A couple days ago, she’d accosted Sarabeth on the sidewalk and said, “Guess what we did at school today,” and though Sarabeth had been on her way out, she’d been helpless to resist the conversation.

  “Let’s see,” she said. “Did you learn a new song?”

  Pilar rolled her eyes. “We have singing on Mondays.”

  “Silly me.”

  “Guess,” Pilar said, bouncing on her toes and smiling a smile crowded with tiny white teeth. She was wearing too-small purple leggings and a pink turtleneck, and a ribbon of white belly showed where they didn’t quite meet. She also had green paint in her hair, which was probably a clue.

  “Was it good or bad?” Sarabeth said.

  “Good!”

  “Did you learn how to stand on your head?”

  “We made a real train!” Pilar exclaimed, and she turned and raced away.

  Mornings were very regular, and once Rick had pedaled off on his bicycle, and Bonnie had backed the car out of the driveway and headed off to drop the children at school, Sarabeth returned to her kitchen with her empty mug.

  It was the day she’d been dreading, the one-year anniversary of her breakup with Billy, and yet she felt OK. Maybe it would end up being like turning forty: lots of trepidation beforehand but the day itself absolutely fine. She was even feeling unusually sanguine about her house, which was in a state of serious ill repair. There were days
when she worried over the old wiring, the dilapidated roof, but today she looked around her living room and thought that the structure didn’t matter that much because she really liked her stuff: her braided rag rugs and flowery armchairs, the curlicue wrought-iron shelving she’d rescued from an ice-cream shop that was going out of business. She liked her stuff.

  At ten, Jim pulled up in front of the Heidts’ driveway in his shiny white Lexus, and she waved from her watch point at the window and headed out. She was joining him for part of the weekly realtors’ tour, as she sometimes did when she had time.

  “Sweetness,” he said as she got into the car, and they leaned together and kissed cheeks, his close-trimmed gray-white beard bristling her a bit. The radio was tuned to his customary classic rock station, and he reached for the volume knob and turned it down. In certain moods, he would leave the volume high, sing along at the top of his lungs to “Helpless” or “Brown Sugar.”

  “You look charming,” he said, tweaking the hem of her skirt, a flippy knee-length print with bright orange and yellow flowers scattered across a black background. “Are you debuting this or have I just not seen it?”

  “This would be its second outing.”

  “It’s cute. Very I-may-not-earn-much-but-I’ve-got-style.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Sorry.” He waited for her to fasten her seat belt, then pulled away from the curb. “I’m pissy because I’m furious at Angela. She asked me to take these clients of hers this weekend, which is fine, but it’s like, I’m doing her a favor, not the other way around.”

  “That Angela,” Sarabeth said.

  “I know. Life is too short for this bullshit.”

  “Working with Angela?”

  “Caring what she does. What she thinks.”

  “That’s right,” Sarabeth said. “It’s what we think of ourselves that matters.”

  “Please shut up,” he said, but a cheerful look had appeared on his face.

  They made their way to Cedar and then to Shattuck. The rains of the last few days had stopped, and a tiny green shoot of happiness sprouted somewhere inside Sarabeth. She loved Jim, had loved him since the day she met him, in the living room of what was now her house. He had stood there handing out flyers in a way that seemed to say he was both a serious businessman and a completely approachable, funny, ironic guy playing the part of a serious businessman. He had a talent for heartfelt duplicity.

  “So there’s actually a very cool place on tour today,” he said. “Or reportedly cool. An in-the-hills contemporary with really high-end finishes and wraparound decks, and Richard Misrach’s view.”

  “Ha,” she said. “Doesn’t Richard Misrach have Richard Misrach’s view?”

  “It’s like next door or something. Just up the hill. I’m not sure.”

  “But I mean, having that view would just be having that view.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And your point is…”

  “Never mind,” she said with a giggle. She had no idea what her point was. More likely, she didn’t have one.

  On they went. Today is the first day of the rest of your life, she thought, and then: Well, maybe the second. But she was fine, she was fine; she was good.

  They arrived in Elmwood and drove past one huge house after another. Sarabeth thought of the show of Richard Misrach photographs she’d seen at the Berkeley Art Museum a few years back, a show of maybe two dozen photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge taken from the deck of his Berkeley hills house. They’d been shot at all different times of day, over the course of a year, maybe longer, so that the color and light were astonishingly varied and evocative. Early morning shots of the bay at its palest blue, the bridge at night forming a scallop of lights. They were amazing, and as Sarabeth moved from photograph to photograph she felt herself transported, into an enchantment that was laced with something darker, awareness of the passage of time, maybe, the end of the museum visit looming and somehow signaling the end of life itself, creating an interval of grief-shadowed exaltation.

  Jim parked, and they made their way to a two-story house set way back from the sidewalk, at the end of a path that curved past a variety of ornamental grasses. At the door, a group of three was just leaving, and Sarabeth saw that it included a man she sort of had her eye on, Peter Something, though today he seemed kind of ordinary, just a guy leaving a house. A clean-cut guy in khakis.

  The listing agent was Rita Lassining, whom Jim called RL, or Realtor Lady, and she did indeed play the part very fully, never a hair out of place. Today she stood at the dining room table with her smoked salmon and her flyers, in a tobacco-brown blazer over a high-collared gold silk blouse that was like a display stand for her impeccably made-up face.

  Jim said hi to her, and she said he should make sure to look at the master suite, and he whispered to Sarabeth, when they had moved out of earshot, “That’s a signal to not look at something else.”

  But there was nothing to not look at. It was a beautiful house, beautifully staged. Sarabeth’s little bag of tricks seemed paltry indeed here. She recognized the hand of Bethany Chen—or rather the linen sofa of Bethany Chen, the damask curtains of Bethany Chen, the gorgeous cherry dressers of Bethany Chen. Sarabeth’s staging materials could fit in one room and in fact lived in a storage unit not much bigger than her bathroom; Bethany Chen’s staging materials occupied, according to rumor, an entire apartment in Oakland. This kind of thinking, though: Jim was right, life was too short for it.

  But something had changed. She felt it as they drove from house to house, as they looked at the view that was like Richard Misrach’s view and saw…the Golden Gate Bridge. Yep, there it was.

  When they were finished touring, Jim dropped her at home. She’d been planning to work on lampshades, but she was suddenly incredibly tired. She kicked off her shoes and lay on her living room couch, her old purple velvet couch that was bald in places and also a little lumpy. And yet, it was her couch, her couch in life. That this was true seemed wrong, even unfair.

  Whatever she’d possessed this morning was gone.

  She turned onto her side and stared at the fireplace. On the mantel was a row of seven unmatched silver candlesticks, one of which had belonged to her parents, had been part of a pair that had sat on the Cowper Street mantel for most of her childhood. She had separated the pair, she could no longer remember why, though the symbolism was pretty obvious.

  She thought of a recurring dream she’d had in her twenties, of her parents’ wedding, in which her father stood at the altar with his back to the aisle, and her mother walked in on her hands. A dream about how wrong they’d been for each other—upside down, backward—though she had also come to see, with the help of a therapist, that, walking on her hands with her dress falling around her fingertips and her underwear showing, her mother was basically going down the aisle crotch first, and her father by turning his back was saying no thanks. The therapist was on the Freudian side, or perhaps that was Sarabeth, dreaming the dream.

  Where was the other candlestick? She had no idea. She might have given it to someone, might even have thrown it away. She stared at its mate—its twin. It was so pretty: a slender stalk holding a flowerlike petal on which rested a tiny cup to hold, most beautifully, a plain white candle. Last time she’d used it, Billy had brought her a box of just such candles as a present, and they’d gathered all the candlesticks she owned, set them here and there around her bedroom, and turned off all the lights in the house. Lying with his arms around her, surrounded by flickering candlelight…it was nearly too painful to think about it, and yet here she was, thinking about it. Remembering.

  That evening, when she took her place in front of the microphone in the community room of the Center for Integrated Living, she was queasy with dread. She was a hundred and seventy-two pages into Anna Karenina, the longest book she’d ever brought here, and the idea of continuing all the way to the end, chapter after chapter, Thursday night after Thursday night, struck her as literally impossible. There they all were�
��Esther, Harry and Melba, Dick, Stuart, Sylvia, at least sixty people and perhaps ten guide dogs, who were waiting, too, Sarabeth knew—and she couldn’t fathom how to find her voice.

  “Good evening,” she managed, and as one the crowd said good evening back.

  “It’s great to see you all,” she continued, and she waited for another idea to come to her, more chat, anything, but her mind was blank, apparently less likely than the endless book to help her. This is Sarabeth, Jim had said to someone today. My partial stager. And now, as if she’d never heard the phrase before, had never joked about it before—and, oh, the jokes were endless, given the plenitude embedded in both “partial” and “stager,” let alone in “stage”—as if she were considering the phrase and its application to her life for the very first time, Sarabeth felt pinpricks inside her eyelids and wished as fervently as she’d ever wished for anything that there were some part of her life, some part of herself, that was whole.

  7

  Amanda had this idea, and Lauren thought she might be desperate enough to try it. Just go up and say: Hi, I’m Lauren. It was so insane to think she could even do that, but how insane was it that he didn’t even know her fucking name? Hi, I’m Lauren. Right, like she wouldn’t be shaking and sweating. Hi, I’m Lauren. From the library? Do you, uh, have a towel I can borrow?

  It had been six months since the day at the library, half a year, and nothing had happened since then, nothing. He probably wouldn’t even remember by now. It was during midterms last spring, and she was at the library downtown, sitting at a computer, when he walked up and glanced around and without hesitation took the terminal next to hers. She knew who he was, but only in the sense that he was one of the hot guys at school, though not at all the hottest. But hot, no question—tall and broad shouldered, with pale, clear skin and lips that looked carved, like a statue’s. Her heart raced, slowing only after he’d been there for several minutes. Then, for a while, they both worked; she tried from time to time to sneak a peek at his monitor, but she couldn’t really tell what he was doing. After about half an hour he got up. Without thinking she looked at him, and he gave her a little wave and said, “Knock ’em dead.”