The Fortress of Solitude (46 page)

chapter  
1

I
n the attic room I called my office sat a daybed that was usually spread with paper, the press packets which accompanied promotional copies of CDs and the torn bubble wrap and padded mailers the CDs arrived in. This morning, though, the bedspread, bathed in sideways seven
A
.
M
. September light, Indian summer light, was clear of packaging husks, clear of publicity. Instead the daybed held two things: a CD wallet, with plastic sleeves to hold twenty-four discs, and Abigale Ponders, in threadbare Meat Puppets T-shirt (mine) and Calvin Klein men’s underwear (not mine, she bought her own), her limbs bent in sleepily elegant disarray. Only one of the two would be joining me on the nine-thirty flight to Los Angeles. Discman and headphones were already packed, along with a single change of clothes, in a small overnight satchel waiting at the door downstairs.

It wasn’t usual to see Abby in my attic office. In truth, I was peevish to have her there. I’d been hoping to slip from the house while she was still asleep in the room below. Instead she’d trotted upstairs after me. There, in slanted light, her white shorts glowing against her skin and the maroon bedspread, she made a picture—one suitable, if you discounted the Meat Puppets emblem on the thin-stretched white shirt, for the jacket art on an old Blue Note jazz LP. She resembled a brown puppet herself, akimbo, head propped angled, mouth parted, lids druggy. I would have had to be a scowling Miles Davis to feel worthy of stepping into the frame. Or, at least, Chet Baker. Abby’s whole being was a reproach to me. I loved having a black girlfriend, and I loved Abby, but I was no trumpet player.

Shopping at my wall of CDs, I opened a jewel case and dropped Ron Sexsmith’s
Whereabouts
onto the spread beside the wallet.

She yawned. “Why are you staying overnight, anyway?” Abby counted on groggy insouciance to break the stalemate of the night before. We’d been in a silent war, worse than ever. This was worth a try—I rooted for her, even if I couldn’t cooperate.

“I told you I’ve got a friend to see.”

“Are you going on a
date
?”

I mumbled the lie out. “An old friend, Abby.” Bill Withers’s
Still Bill
was my next choice. I flipped the disc to the bedspread without looking away from the shelves.

“Right, old friend, dinner, I forgot. Oops.” The CD clattered to the floor. “I kicked it.” She laughed for an instant.

I caught the disc still spinning, and slid it into the wallet, near her toes.

“I’m trying to make you talk to me.”

“I’ll miss my plane.”

“They leave on the hour, I’ve heard.”

“Right, and I’m expected at Dreamworks at one. Don’t fuck this up.”

“Don’t worry, Dylan, I won’t fuck anyone. Is that what you said?”

“Abby.” I tried scowling.

“Not even you. So don’t be jealous of yourself, because you’re not getting any.”

“Go back to bed,” I suggested.

She yawned and stretched. Hands on her bare thighs, elbows dipping toward her middle as if seeking to meet. “If we
were
fucking anymore, Dylan, maybe that would help.”

“Help who?”

“The nature of fucking is it involves both people.”

I tossed Brian Eno’s
Another Green World
onto the bed and envisioned a row to myself at sixty thousand feet.

She ran thumbs under elastic. “I made myself come last night after you were asleep.”

“Telling someone else about masturbation involves two people, Abby, but that doesn’t make it fucking.” This sort of stuff passed easily between myself and Abby. The tang of déjà vu to the banter made it a simple task to carry on browsing my record collection.

“Do you want to know who I was thinking about when I came? It’s gross.”

“Could you see the whites of his eyes?”

“What?”

“Never mind. I’m interrupting.”

“I’ll tell you if you tell me the name of your secret date in L.A.”

“We’re swapping a real person for an imaginary one? That’s supposed to be a good deal?”

“Oh, he’s real.”

I didn’t answer, but made another couple of quick CD selections—Swamp Dogg, Edith Frost.

“I was half dreaming, really. Guy d’Seur was putting his froggy little hands all over me. Isn’t that
stupid
, Dylan? I’ve never thought of him that way, not for a minute. When he took out his dick it was
enormous
.”

“I’m not surprised.”

I wasn’t. Not at d’Seur’s appearance in Abby’s fantasy or at the size she’d granted his apparatus. Guy d’Seur was more than Abigale Ponders’s thesis advisor, he was a Berkeley celebrity. Forget being a rock critic—forget even being a rock musician. The professors of the various graduate departments were the stars that wowed this burg. To walk into a Berkeley café and find seated before a latté and scone one of the Rhetoric or English faculties’ roster of black-clad theorists—Avital Rampart, Stavros Petz, Kookie Grossman, and Guy d’Seur formed the current pantheon—was to have your stomach leap up into your throat. In Berkeley these were the people who hushed a room. Their unreadable tomes filled front tables at bookstores.

Abigale Ponders was the sole child of a pair of black dentists from Palo Alto, honorable strivers through the middle classes who’d only wanted to see her attain a graduate degree and then been completely bewildered at the result. Abby’s thesis, “The Figuration of the Black Chanteuse in Parisian Representations of Afro-American Culture, from Josephine Baker to Grace Jones,” had led her, two years earlier, to come calling on the one working journalist in Berkeley who’d interviewed Nina Simone. I’d made my humbling pilgrimage to Simone on behalf of
Musician Magazine
in 1989, and Abby had proved she could research a bibliographic index with the best of them. That day, I’d charmed Abby out of interview mode by playing rare Simone records, until it was late enough to suggest a bottle of wine.

We’d moved her into my little Berkeley house three months later.

“Now you owe me one,” she said. “Who are you seeing in L.A.? What’s worth a hotel room you can’t afford?”

“The hotel room is in Anaheim, and it isn’t costing me anything,” I said. “I guess that’s a clue.” I’d resigned myself to giving up the secret.

“You’re being
paid for sex
? With a
Disney character
?”

“Try harder, Abby. Who in life, when you visit them, insists on paying for everything?”

She fell silent, just slightly shamed.

I took my advantage. “You’re dreaming about d’Seur because you owe his froggy little hands a chapter draft, you know.”

“Fuck off.”

“Okay, but why not use this as a chance to get back to work?”

“I’ve
been
working.”

“Okay. Sorry I said anything.”

She sat up and crossed her legs. “Why is your father going to Anaheim, Dylan?”

“He’s got business there.”

“What kind of business?”

“Abraham is the guest of honor—the
artist
guest of honor—at ForbiddenCon.”

“What’s ForbiddenCon?”

“I guess I’m about to find out.”

A pause. “Something to do with his film?” She spoke this softly, as she ought to have. Abraham Ebdus’s unfinished life’s work was no laughing matter.

I shook my head. “It’s some science-fiction thing. He’s winning an award.”

“I thought he didn’t care about that stuff.”

“I guess Francesca convinced him.” My father’s new girlfriend, Francesca Cassini, had a gift for getting him out of the house.

“Why didn’t you tell me he was coming?”

“He
isn’t
coming. I’m meeting him there.” Our tone was rote and flat, a comedown from Abby’s sexual provocations. Those now drifted off as easily as fumes from a solitary cigarette.

I took Esther Phillips’s
Black-Eyed Blues
from its jewel case and slid it into the wallet. The light outside was altered. An airport shuttle van would come in half an hour.

Abby tugged at one of the short dreadlocks at her forehead, twisting it gently between her knuckles. I recalled a baby goat scratching tender, nubby horns against a gate, something I’d witnessed in Vermont a hundred or a thousand years ago. When she felt my gaze Abby looked down, stared at her own bare knees. Her mouth worked slightly but formed nothing. I thought I could smell that she had made herself a little excited hectoring me.

“You seem a bit down,” I said.

“What?”

“A little depressed again, lately.”

She looked up sharply. “Don’t use that word.”

“I meant it sympathetically.”

“You have no right.”

With that she suddenly took herself out of the room, peeling the Meat Puppets shirt off over her head as she descended the stairs and moved out of sight. I only got a flash of back. A minute later I heard the shower. Abby had a seminar today, the second of the new semester. She ought to have spent the summer months writing a segment of her dissertation—as I likely should have been drafting my screenplay. Instead we’d fought and fucked and, increasingly, lapsed into separate glowering silences in our two rooms. Now, just as Abby was going in to face her mentors more or less empty-handed, I’d be winging down to Los Angeles to talk out a hot notion for which I’d not scribbled even the first hot scrap of note.

My sometimes-editor at
The L.A. Weekly
had arranged the pitch meeting, my first. Over the last two years I’d slowly ground myself into $30,000 of credit card debt as a freelancer, my recent livelihood consisting mainly of the work I’d been doing for a Marin-based reissue label, Remnant Records. My dealings with Remnant’s owner, a graying beatnik entrepreneur named Rhodes Blemner, vexed me. So today’s pitch was a bid for freedom.

I must have lapsed into some kind of fugue, because the next thing I knew Abby was dressed and back at the top of my stairs. She wore jeans and a black sleeveless top and knee-high boots which raised her above my height. The boots still needed to be laced through their elaborate upper eyelets. She stood rubbing moisturizer into her palms and elbows and regarding me with steely fury.

“I don’t talk about the hardest parts of my life only to have you throw them back at me,” she said. “If I’ve ever been depressed at least I’ve had the nerve to admit it. I don’t want you to ever use that word with me again, do you understand?”

“Sure you’ve got a nerve. Apparently I touched it. That’s called letting someone know you intimately, Abby.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s it called when you don’t know
yourself
intimately?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why didn’t you tell me your father was coming, Dylan? How could you let me twist like that?”

I stared.

“
You’re
depressed, Dylan. That’s your secret from yourself. You don’t let it inside. Your surround yourself with it instead, so you don’t have to admit you’re the source. Take a look.”

“It’s an interesting theory,” I mumbled.

“Fuck you, Dylan, it’s not
interesting
, it’s not a
theory
. You’re so busy feeling sorry for me and
whoever
, Sam Cooke, you conveniently ignore yourself.”

“What exactly do you want, Abby?”

“To be let inside, Dylan. You hide from me, in plain sight.”

“I suppose that’s another way of describing one person sparing another their violent shifts of mood.”

“Is that what we’re talking about here?
Moods
?”

“One minute you’re jerking off on the carpet, now this outburst. I can’t take it, Abby.”

“You think you’ve spared me your
moods
? What do you think it’s like for me, living under your cockpit of misery, here?” She gestured at the wall I’d been contemplating, covered with fourteen hundred compact discs: two units each holding seven hundred apiece. “This is a
wall
of moods, a wall of
depression
, Mr. Objective Correlative.” She slapped the shelves. They rattled.

“Wow, you’ve really drawn up an indictment.” I was fumbling for breathing room, nothing more.

“That’s what you call it when I won’t play
depressed
for you? You switch to your little Kafka fantasies? I don’t have the power of
indictment
, Dylan. I’m just the official mascot for all the shit you won’t allow yourself to feel. A featured exhibit in the Ebdus collection of
sad black folks
.”

“That’s unfair.”

“Let’s see, Curtis Mayfield, “We People Who Are Darker Than Blue”—sounds like depression to me.” She chucked the CD to the floor. “Gladys Knight, misery, depression. Johnny Adams, depression. Van Morrison, total fucking depression. Lucinda Williams, give her Prozac. Marvin Gaye, dead. Johnny Ace, dead, tragic.” As she dismissed the titles she jerked them from the shelf, the jewel cases splitting as they clattered down. “Little Willie John, dead. Little Esther and Little Jimmy Scott, sad—all the Littles are sad. What’s this,
Dump
? You actually listen to something called Dump? Is that real? Syl Johnson,
Is It Because I’m Black?
Maybe you’re just a
loser
, Syl. Gillian Welch, please, momma. The Go-Betweens? Five Blind Boys of Alabama, no comment. Al Green, I used to think Al Green was
happy music
until you explained to me how fucking
tragic
it all was, how he got burned with a pot of hot grits and then his woman
shot
herself because she was so very
depressed
. Brian Wilson, crazy. Tom Verlaine,
very
depressed. Even
you
don’t play that record. Ann Peebles,
I Can’t Stand the Rain
. Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, blecch. “Drowning in the Sea of Love,” is that a good thing or a bad thing? David Ruffin, I know he’s a drug addict. Donny Hathaway—dead?”