The Song Remains the Same (7 page)

“Fine,” I say. “Tell me. Tell me our story. Though I can’t make any promises that it will help.”

5

“Have a Little Faith in Me”

—Joe Cocker

P
eter chews his bottom lip. You can tell that he wants to pick the best place to start because he has so much riding on this. That if he inadvertently chooses the wrong place to begin, she’ll never concede, never look at him the way she once did, never, of course—and this is all that mattered—take him back.

She stares at him expectantly, but only for a few moments. Then she flicks her eyes away and rolls her jaw around, as if she’s reconsidering, but then she finds her way back toward him, breathing and waiting and breathing.

He flicks off his baseball cap, runs his fingers through his hair that the low-pressure hotel shower did no favors to, and inhales. And then he begins.

“I should start at our wedding,” he says, unintentionally nodding, like he’s reassuring himself even more so than he’s reassuring her. He knows how much he has to lose here. He knows that he can’t return to that shitty one-bedroom apartment that he rented when she kicked him out. The type that you lease just out of college and erect a plaster wall in the living room to create an extra bedroom for your just-as-broke roommate. Where the residents are a decade younger and stumble in from walks of shame while he’s already heading out to work in the morning, reminding him of his lost youth and, well, of how the rest of him has been pretty lost, too. “Let’s start at our wedding because, well, really, I know it’s cliché and all, but it was the best day of my life”—he clears his throat—“of our lives.”

Was it really the best day of hers? He doesn’t know. But there are enough land mines to avoid in the stories of their life together, and this one seems safe, a round, comforting place to get a toehold.

“I saw the pictures,” she says, and he hesitates again, unsure if she’s simply making conversation or if she’s trying to make this harder on him.

“I know, I know.” His head bobbles up and down. “But they can’t convey how great it was, how seriously magical it was.”

“Magical?” she says, and stifles a laugh.

His ears burn when she laughs at him, though he’s used to it all the same. She was never the kindest of wives, not the type who rubbed his feet nightly on the couch, not the type who relied on him day in and day out, leaning on his shoulder when the chips crumbled. No, she was the mother ship and he was her wake—though she didn’t look over her shoulder too often to ensure that he hadn’t drowned while swimming behind her. At first, it had worked well, this configuration: his friends told him how lucky he was, that his wife let him have endless guys’ nights, that she wasn’t clingy and begging him for a baby when he wasn’t yet ready. And sure, he loved his guys’ nights and was as
appreciative as any new husband would be that his days hadn’t been totally upended because they swapped vows. But, let’s face it, he told himself about a year ago in the mirror while shaving, “You are a guy who likes to be needed, and she, well, she didn’t really need anyone,” so their banter grew less funny and more acerbic, and one thing led to another and, eventually, that led to Ginger, his coworker.

“Say what you want, mock me if you must,” he says today in the hospital, holding his ground, trying to forget all about Ginger. Ginger! The massive fucking mind-blowing mistake of Ginger. “Our wedding was magical.”

He pauses, and she smiles, and he can tell that she’s not being cruel now, not mocking him like maybe she would have before, so he smiles back. She seems different, he thinks—happier, less angry despite the circumstances. Then he worries that he’s pushing his luck, jinxing himself. Like your wife surviving a plane crash isn’t lucky enough and that hoping it’s somehow changed her for the better is just too much, pushing the Vegas odds too far in the wrong direction.

“We got married in Saint Lucia in April. April twenty-third. Your mom tried to talk us out of it—she wanted us to do it in her backyard or even at your dad’s old studio in Vermont, but you fought her on it. You were very, very sure of Saint Lucia.”

“Why Saint Lucia?”

He shrugs. “I suppose it was anywhere your mother, well, I don’t know, and your dad—reminders of him or whatever—were not. And hell, I didn’t care where we got married. But you cared—you cared about that, and you cared about our music. So I just shut up and did what I was told.”

“Joe Cocker,” she says, because her sister had told her.

“Joe Cocker,” he says back, then sings a line, embarrassed at himself but desperate all the same. “‘Give these loving arms a try, baby, and have a little faith in me.’” He veers slightly off-key, but it’s not a half-bad rendition. Not her perfect-pitch level, but still, not awful.

She stares at him for a beat, and he steels against it, ready for the mockery. But instead, she squints and says, “Just put a tux on you and you’ll be there,” like this is an inside joke of theirs, which it was, even though she can’t remember.

“Yep. Exactly! That’s more or less what I said.” Peter grins now, genuinely, less nervously, and she can see, for one of the first times, how he is handsome beyond the generically handsome way that he already is. In the tiny folds around his eyes, in the dimple that craters into his left cheek. He is almost large enough to be oafish, but bent over in his chair, he looks more compact, less imposing, and she can see that way back when, maybe in high school, his size would have made him the lead tackle on the football team rather than just the biggest guy at a cocktail party, which he probably is these days.

“It was a small wedding—we invited only fifty or so, and about thirty made their way down. But you wanted it private and not a big to-do, and again, your mom wanted two hundred, but this was all the hotel could accommodate, so you won that argument in the end.”

“Up on the cliff,” she says. “There’s a picture here somewhere of the wedding—we got married up on a cliff?”

“Yes, yes,” he says, a wave of momentum building in his voice. “It had rained about an hour earlier and you were devastated—sitting in your room getting ready with Rory and Samantha and your mom and sobbing because it turns out that the weather was the one aspect you couldn’t control—but then it cleared up right before we started.” He smiles now, lost in the vision of what he’s trying to re-create for her. “And you—and this is the part that I’ll never forget. You surprised me with your guitar. For the first time in forever, you played, much less played for me. I still—to this day—don’t know how you got that guitar down to Saint Lucia without my noticing.” He floats his eyes down to meet hers. “I don’t know. It was just, like, out of a movie or something. The clouds rolled out, and the sun came through, and you were making music for me again, and it felt like God was watching down on us.”

“But he wasn’t,” she says, the conversation flailing instantly from where he intended. She thinks she might cry for a beat but then realizes that her sadness has already passed. She wants to consider the wedding, the simple white gown she saw in the photos and how euphoric she looked. But without the background to their love and their history, she feels like he’s reading her a story about someone else’s life. There was something for a moment—in the melody when he sang, in the lyrics—that maybe resonated, but like everything else, that’s gone now, a flicker that has been extinguished.

Peter’s sucked back into the reality of the moment. He narrows his eyes at her as he intuits her meaning and shrugs.

“You’re here, aren’t you? Doesn’t that mean something?”

“Who knows what it means?”

“I think it means that we’re supposed to be together. To do great things.”

Easy for you to say, she thinks.

“That cliff, you don’t think it’s a metaphor?”

“A metaphor?” he apes. “Like, for us?”

“Yes, like for us,” she says. “Our marriage. Your cheating.”

He sighs and rubs his nose, his wedding band tarnished but still catching the dim hint of the overhead lights. Indira, Nell’s mother, had told him yesterday, when they were refilling their sour coffee in the hospital cafeteria, that she, too, thought Nell seemed different since the crash, that—despite the physical damage—she somehow seemed more buoyant, less controlling than she used to be. Indira had patted his right shoulder and said, “Hang in there,” like he had any choice in the matter. “She’ll come around. I’ll talk to her,” she’d said, though Peter didn’t add that Indira talking to Nell, in just about any context, was often among the worst ideas. He didn’t have many options here, so he’d gulped down a bitter swallow of coffee and nodded his okay.

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.”