Strong Motion (25 page)

The jar sailed down the hallway and the glass popped and the pencils bounced tunefully. Louis tickled her convulsing belly, and she slugged away at his arms and ribs, not hurting him at all and shouting pretty much constantly. Clothes were partially removed, body parts exposed, necks bent, the hard floor cursed. They kissed with their entire heads, like mountain goats. What was happening wasn’t so much sex as a kind of banging together, a clapping and clenching of hands the size of bodies, a re-creation of strong motion; something other than satisfaction wanted out. Louis came violently and hardly noticed, he was so intent on the way she pitched beneath him. It seemed like she was trying to shed him even as they kept colliding, and finally they collided so hard they did separate and, still vibrating like bells, sat up against opposing walls in obscene disarray, shackled at the ankles by twisted jeans and underpants. Farther up the hallway there was broken glass and a swollen tampon at the end of a bloody skid mark.

Renée frowned. “I cut my hand.”

Louis found his glasses and crawled over to look. On her palm was a semicircle of loosened skin, a bluish fish scale surrounded by crimson trickles and orange smears. “Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“Are you OK otherwise?”

She looked down at her ankles. “I can’t imagine a more degrading position to be caught in. But otherwise.”

They took turns washing in the bathroom, which was in antiseptic condition apart from the fact that in patching her hand Renée had unaccountably left a Curad wrapper in the sink. Louis opened her medicine chest and found expensive facial cleansers, the basic drugs, nonoxynol jelly, some dental floss.

She was opening beers in the kitchen. The fan had fallen from the window, unplugging itself; it was still on the floor. Louis started to turn on the radio. “Don’t,” she said.

“What do you have for music?”

“The radio. But I don’t want to hear about the earthquake. Not even—not even anything.”

“You don’t have any tapes?”

She leaned against the table and drank. “I have . . . no tapes.”

“What’s this?” He held up a tape.

She regarded it soberly. “That’s a tape.”

“But it’s not music?”

She tried several times to say something, and stopped each time. “You’re kind of nosy.”

“Forget I asked.”

“It’s one song. Which I never listen to. There’s no significance to this, it’s just a song. Do you want me to embarrass myself?”

“Yes. Yes. More than anything.”

She sat cross-legged on a chair and hugged herself, covering the nakedness that went through clothes. “It’s only that when I was seventeen . . .”

“I was ten!”

“Thank you for pointing that out.”

Louis wondered what the awful confession would be.

“I was a punk fan,” she said. “Or should I say new wave? These words.” She hugged herself more tightly. “I can hardly make myself say them. But I was very happy at the time. And I still want people to know I saw Elvis Costello four times in ’78 and ’79. But there’s so much to explain about how he was different and I was different. I want people to be impressed but it’s just not impressive. I was sprayed by David Byrne’s saliva before he got blissy. I was right up against the stage. I got a pick from Graham Parker, I took it right from his hand.”

“Are you serious? Can I see it?”

“Exciting. It really was. I saw the Clash and the Buzzcocks and the Gang Of Four. It embarrasses me to even say the names now, but I saw them and I knew their lyrics, and they were all so good until eventually they all got so bad.”

“They were great,” Louis said. “I was kind of a ham operator, in high school? I used to trade Nick Lowe lyrics with this person in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in Morse code. "She was a winner / That became the doggie’s dinner’? Di-di-dit, di-di-di-dit . . . ?”

Renée seemed to assume he was joking. “I liked the attitude,” she said. “But I wasn’t really a punk. The real punks scared the hell out of me. They were violent and sexist, and they hardly even listened to the music.”

“Did you have a biker’s jacket?”

“Suede,” she said bitterly. “Which I was very happy with then and which is now a source of shame that will never die. A suede jacket sums me up completely. There were a lot of people like me at the concerts, although I think a difference between me and the others was that I thought this was
it
. I
loved
the music. I applied it to my
life
, but in a, what’s the word, hermetic way. The place where it all happened was in dorm rooms, where I had the lyric sheets. It kills me to think about how innocent and happy I was, even though at the time what I thought the whole message was was black humor and anger and apocalypse. You can be very innocent and happy about that stuff too. And it seemed so much safer than sixties and seventies music, because it wasn’t really happy or innocent or hopeful at all. It was tough and simple. I kept all the records, and I liked the records
better and better
. I kept on dressing the way bands dressed in ’78. The same way I dress now, which is like nothing, you know, jeans and T-shirts. But it got to be 1985, and it started to seem pathetic that the only records I listened to were these old records. But I didn’t like the new music or at least I wasn’t finding out about the good things, because I wasn’t in college anymore.”

She took the last two beers from the refrigerator. Louis had been observing that every time he drank from his bottle, she drank from hers.

“Meanwhile I stopped listening to more than a song or two at a time. I guess partly I was trying not to get tired of the things I loved, and partly I was so affected that it was too distracting to play a whole album, I couldn’t do any work, I mean, because the music was
designed
to rev you up, to make you anxious and angry and excited, and so it was very bad music to move on in life with, because it’s one kind of music that simply won’t function as background. But the biggest thing was just how embarrassed I was to see myself still listening to it.”

“You like the Kinks?”

“Never much.”

“Lou Reed? Roxy Music? Waitresses? XTC? Banshees? Early Bowie? Warren Zevon?”

“Some of them, yeah. I never really bought that many records, because I stopped taking money from my parents. But—”

“But so.”

“I started to pare down. I got rid of the really old stuff, the stuff I had from high school, and I got rid of the records that only had one or two good songs on them. Then I started taping the medium-good records, and keeping the good part. Then I decided it was stupid to have a big stereo, because I could get the same effect from the little tape player—you know, you’re the first person I’ve ever really talked about this with. I just wanted to say that.”

They looked at each other. The refrigerator shuddered and fell silent. “I like you too,” Louis said.

She pushed her hair around, doing a good job of seeming not to care. “But so I was left with about twenty tapes which I listened to less and less, just one or two songs every once in a while, when I needed to feel better. It used to make me feel better because it made me feel tough, and angry and lonely in a good way. But then without my even really noticing, it started to make me feel better because it made me feel
young
, the way ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ makes forty-year-olds feel young. When I finally noticed this I was even less inclined to play the tapes. And did I really ever need to hear ‘Red Shoes’ again?”

“No argument on that one.”

“Or any of
Give ’Em Enough Rope?
Or even any Pretenders?”

“Fine records. Keep ’em.”

“I got rid of everything. I pared it down to one song, one more or less arbitrary song, which I haven’t listened to in at least six months, if not more like a year. I don’t listen to it. But I also can’t bring myself to throw it away.”

“Can I play it?”

She shook her head. “Sure. Just be decent to me. I know you’re a radio person.”

Out of the little tape machine came the opening guitar line on Television’s first record.

“Oh,” Louis said, increasing the volume. “Fine song. You dance?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Me neither.”

“I could when I was twenty.”

Iunderstandall . . . ISEENO . . .

destructiveurges . . . ISEENO . . .

Itseemssoperfect . . . ISEENO . . .

I SEE . . . I SEE NO . . . I SEE NO EVIL

“You can turn it off.”

“Wait, doesn’t Verlaine have like a perfect riff in here? It would have been good to hear these people before they broke up. Or did you?”

“No.”

“I hear they were very fine.”

“Everything became a competition. I stopped trying to get to concerts because it seemed like I was only trying to build credentials as a concertgoer. Which wasn’t working anyway. I ran into people who went to clubs every weekend. People who’d seen the Clash before I had. People who were friends with Tina Weymouth’s siblings. People who hung around at CBGB and could invest so much more time in being cool. Maybe it was just self-protection, but I started despising these people, and the way they all had to constantly be scrambling to discover something new. I decided this was just pathetic. But I was still afraid of these people. I was afraid they’d find out how much I loved the music I’d grown up with. It seemed like the only way to compete with all their originality, the only way to keep my love safe, was to hate music. Which wasn’t a particularly original solution either, but at least I was protected. And it really is pretty easy to hate rock and roll.”

“Less so jazz and classical.”

“No problem, for me. I just think about the personalities of the people who play it for brunch, and even worse the people who really love it. How good it makes them feel about themselves to know who played drums for Charlie Parker in nineteen-whatever, and how the songs in The Magic Flute go. I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes, and be known and defined by them. If you’re not artistic, which I’m not, at all, and you still have to make these aesthetic decisions . . . That’s why punk was so good for me. It was this style I picked up before I got too selfconscious about style. I didn’t have to apologize, in my own mind. But then I got older, and suddenly it started to define me anyway, in a very pathetic way. Plus suddenly everybody under the age of forty had a leather jacket and fifties sunglasses and punky clothes, and they all felt really cool. At which point jazz might have been a good thing to turn to, except it was art, and as soon as something becomes art, you get experts, and do I want to be one of these experts who’re all trying to be more knowledgeable than each other? But if you don’t become an expert, you might play something and like it and then find out it’s considered sentimental or unoriginal or something. And I know from experience that people are so insecure that they never hesitate to let you know that what they like is more original and better than what you like, or that they liked what you like years before you liked it . . . I don’t even have
time
. And it’s the same with African music, and Latin music. I’m terrified of being implicated by all the smarmy experts. Either that or finding out my tastes aren’t good, or aren’t original. Radio would be the perfect solution, except so much of what they play is bad.”

I’m running wild with the one I love

I see no evil
—

I’m running wild with the one-eyed ones

I see no evil
—

Pull down the future with the one you love

Louis turned off the tape player. “Let’s go get some stuff from my apartment.”

“Can you drive?”

“Spoken like a true punk.”

On the stairs Renée said, “The time to be a punk was fifteen years ago. It’s just utterly embarrassing to try to be one now.”

“Anarchy’s a very old idea,” he said, breathing through his mouth in the dog zone.

Outside, on Pleasant Avenue, it was no longer a holiday but a dead Thursday night. The night was cool, with a foretaste of dew in the air. Louis drove as fast as he dared and in his drunkenness caught only about one out of every three or four seconds as they passed. Distant, ghostly sirens in the night formed a cushion of noise on which the tires seemed to glide and bounce like water skis. Just east of Davis Square, the Civic plunged into a tunnel of powerlessness, deep inside which was visible the turning of blue flashers. Two figures lit only by glowing urban clouds were straining to hustle what appeared to be cartons of liquor up a side street.

“Looters! Were those looters? They were looters!”

Lights were burning in his apartment. The biggest pieces of furniture hadn’t budged, but the vase made of Mount St. Helens ash had fallen from the wall unit and broken in two, and some of the dining-room chairs had edged away from the table. Behind the closed door of Toby’s room a dot-matrix printer gulped and stridulated. Renée flopped in a U-shape on Louis’s futon. He had to set down the beer and gin and tapes he’d collected and pull her to her feet.

When they returned to her apartment she opened beer bottles briskly. “What’s your favorite kind of music?” she said.

“I don’t believe in favorites. I don’t have any. This is my favorite, just a second here.” He turned the machine up loud.

I love the sound of breaking glass.

Especially when I’m lonely.

I need the noises of destruction.

When there’s nothing new.

“This is good. Who is it?”

“This? My God. The great Nick Lowe? It’s a classic.”

“How old?”

“Bronze Age. Here.” Louis interrupted the song. “We’ll put in something almost as old as me. Everybody likes this record. It’s a classic. It never gets old. Isn’t that what a classic is?”