Sway (19 page)
Anita turned and looked at the baby. She smiled at him with spontaneous Pleasure, mouthing some quiet nonsense at him, the
mumbo jumbo of a spell.
After a while, Mick came outside. He stood by the doorway, in the dark, lighting a cigarette. He didn’t look at the people
on the porch. They were pretending not to notice him. They were trying out the trick with the cigarette papers now, chin on
the elbow, thick-fingered, uncommitted. Each time the trick worked, they admired it. Each time it failed, they admired the
smallness of the failure.
Mick pushed his scarf over his shoulder, exhaling, and walked off onto the lawn. Anger got up and followed.
“Have you given it any more thought?” he said.
Mick looked out into the darkness. “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
“It’s usually not like this. It’s usually the other way around. It’s usually the actors who keep bothering me. I’m not used
to bowing and scraping like this.”
Mick pushed his hair out of his eyes. His face was not so much ugly or beautiful as forceful, implacable. “I’ve been getting
death threats,” he said. “People watching me, people sending letters. There are police cars in front of my house some nights.
All I want right now is to get out of here and out on the road. I don’t want to think about anything else right now.”
There was a moat that cut around Keith’s property, separating it from the woods and the farm fields to either side. In the
distance behind it was a lake, a charcoal smear gathering width as it spread from left to right. It was lit by a full moon
centered above a clearing between two banks of trees, a thin disk with the fine texture of rice paper.
Mick started walking away, off toward the trees.
“Maybe it scares you how much I’ve been thinking about it,” said Anger, following after him. “Maybe you think I won’t leave
you alone.”
“I think you’ll leave me alone when I want you to.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”
Mick turned. “Come on, Kenneth, we’ll take a walk. I’ll show you something. You haven’t seen this place before.”
They were just outside the ring of light coming off the porch, a third of the way down the lawn. Mick walked toward the trees,
one hand placed lightly on his back, just above his waist. It was the way a woman might walk after a day of housework, the
wide cuffs of his pants shimmering at his ankles. He didn’t look back to see if Anger was following. There was nothing hurried
in the way he walked, nothing but certitude and boredom.
When the lawn ended, they reached the moat. Its brick retaining wall was sunken in thick tufts of grass, and Mick stepped
up onto the ledge and balanced himself with his arms, walking the curve above the water. The ledge was only a few inches wide.
He seemed to be tottering a little on purpose, accentuating the danger. The drop to the water on the far side was at least
ten feet.
“They think that Keith is the wild one,” he said. “I’m the cool one, the deliberate one, faking his way through it all. That’s
what a lot of people think. That’s what a lot of people want to believe.”
He jumped off the near side of the ledge and landed in the dirt. He pushed his hair out of his eyes, then placed his hands
on his hips the way Anger’s were, seeming to mock him. His face was almost invisible. Anger was standing at the edge of the
woods, half in darkness, breathing a little heavily from the walk.
“I have different lives,” Mick said. “You know, some people know about one life and some people know about another and none
of these people ever gets to piece together the entire picture. That’s what they call ‘faking.’ I don’t worry about it anymore,
if it’s faking or not. I can say what I like to the journalist and I can say what I like to you right now and I can say what
I like to the Queen Mother and you can all go fuck yourselves if you don’t like it. That’s the way it is for me now.”
“Always faking,” said Anger.
“It’s not hard to see what you’ve been wondering about all this time, Kenneth. What you’ve been thinking. Do you want to come
over here and find out if it’s really true? Isn’t that what you want?”
It was dark enough that Anger didn’t have to look into his eyes, but he did, his body tense, his mouth set at a strange angle
as if preparing to laugh. There was nothing in Mick’s voice to suggest that he was joking, but that was the danger of course.
He thought he might grab Mick by the back of the neck — ambush him, pull him against his chest — but it was harder than he
thought. Once he got close enough, it was hard to move at all. He reached for Mick’s body — his hip, anything — but Mick backed
away, smiling, watching Anger’s face.
“Maybe some other time,” Mick said. “What do you think? You can imagine whatever you like, Kenneth. Maybe you’ll get to know
me better than anyone else ever has. But maybe you won’t. Maybe the more likely scenario is that nothing will happen at all.”
“I’ll see you later,” Anger said.
“Right.”
“Are you coming back to the house?”
“I told you before, I want to be alone. I’m staying out here.”
“You’re a shit.”
“I know that. I’ve been one for a long time.”
Mick stepped closer, his hands crossed behind his waist. “Don’t get moralistic,” he said. “You’re going to say that there’s
nothing inside me, that I have no soul or whatever, but it isn’t that simple. Nothing is ever that simple.”
He put his hand on Anger’s face. His eyes were blank, examining Anger’s expression not with curiosity but with the confirmed
suspicion that everyone was exactly what he knew they were. There were no surprises. It would have been just as easy for him
to kiss Anger at that moment as not to kiss him. It would have been the same no matter who Anger was, whether he was a man
or a woman or a figment of Mick’s imagination.
“Good night, Kenneth,” he said. “We’ll talk more tomorrow.”
“We’ll have to see.”
“We’ll talk about the film. I still want to do it. Don’t think that I don’t want to do it.”
Anger turned away. He looked at the branches above his face, oak branches that were so still they were almost artificial-looking
in the moonlight. When the breeze came, the leaves moved like lifeless hands, shaking and stopping, shaking and stopping.
He waited to hear Mick walk off, wherever he was going, then headed in the opposite direction. The pale leaves jostled on
their branches, a mimicry of living movement that was utterly without mind. All he could see of the porch and the people on
it were vague, elongated shadows, almost like mirages, disturbing the glow from the candles.
He was awakened the next morning by the sound of rifle fire. There was no clock in the room, nothing to orient him at all
but the dark mahogany bed and the Gothic chairs that reminded him he was at Keith and Anita’s house. When he looked out the
window, he saw the abandoned lawn, a plush rolling green that led out to the trees and the moat and the lake beyond. It was
a sunny day. There was a quilt left out on the grass, a single leather sandal, a whiskey bottle with a black-and-white label,
nothing else. He heard the rifle again: a firecracker pop elongated by its report. It was coming from out in the fields or
in the trees where he’d been last night. He realized then: it was just Keith, Keith and his friends out playing with their
guns.
He looked across the room at the wrinkled shopping bag he had brought with him yesterday. In the bag were two top hats. One
was black like the one Bobby had worn in San Francisco. The other was an Uncle Sam hat with red and white stripes and a blue
brim. He held them both in his hands, looking down at them quizzically. He had brought them to give to Mick, props for the
Lucifer film, but also stage props for the band’s American tour. They would be good for large crowds, visible from a long
distance. He could see Mick onstage in either of them, moving toward the microphone, raising his fist. The devil in the top
hat — they were associated somehow. The god of power — money, politics, war. The sly, sophisticated con man who in the end
was just a bewildering reflection of all the people who were looking at him.
Something hit the gutter on the eave above his window. It clanked down onto the stone porch below, then rattled for a few
seconds and stopped: an empty tin can. From the distant fields, there was another round of rifle fire. Were they shooting
at the house?
FOR MORE THAN A YEAR,
Bobby had just been drifting, moving up and down the coast, playing music in bars, not thinking very much about where it
would lead. He had managed to keep some of his musical instruments, some of his good clothes, the black top hat he liked to
wear onstage. He had pawned almost everything else he had of value, including the 16 mm camera he’d stolen from Anger, which
had brought him less than forty dollars. No one had offered money for the Lucifer film, and so he’d just kept it for a while,
moving it from place to place, not knowing what to do with it, until eventually he’d lost it, like so many other things, still
thinking it might be worth something someday.
In his ruffled sleeves and top hat, he bent over his guitar now, his legs crossed, listening through his hair for the underlying
pattern in the endless, coiling melody Charlie was playing. Beside him, Charlie looked feral, his face and hair visibly grimy,
black grit beneath his broken fingernails. He was moving through a strange progression of chords, his song at first a blur
of lullaby and muted groans, then an improvised poem that, like the music itself, made no literal sense but was full of suggestions:
a desert road, darkness over the Santa Susana Pass, a night ride into the city, clouds passing over Devil’s Canyon. They had
just recently met, so Bobby wasn’t used to this phenomenon of Charlie being the uneasy center of the room whether people were
looking at him or not. They were in a Mission-style house in Benedict Canyon, not far from Beverly Hills, at a fashionable
party full of record industry minions and full-fledged stars. In the living room, the girls Charlie had brought with him all
wore five-inch Buck knives fastened to their belts. They were sunburnt, their clothes stained, their hair tied back with bits
of string, and this raggedness made everyone in the house aware of them — anonymous girls who looked alike, sweetly vacant,
conspiring. Bobby could see his girlfriend, Kitty, in the darkness in the corner of the room, huddled next to another girl
named Leslie. Kitty’s fingers were entwined in a cheap necklace on the floor between her feet. He didn’t know how to read
anything about her anymore, whether she was really lost or just manipulating him by acting lost. He leaned in and tried to
follow the unpredictable curves of Charlie’s music, the most unusual music he had ever played. He used all the technique he
had to make the song even stranger, elongated and off-center, avoiding the simple pentatonic scales of blues and rock for
the mysterious spirals of the Dorian mode, the Mixolydian mode. The music reflected back a range of tensions in the room,
all the social hierarchies that no one wanted to admit existed anymore, drawing them out, magnifying them. It was not aggressive
— it had an ethereal, dreamy sound — but it spread a malevolence that came at first as a faint surprise, then blossomed into
something so familiar that it seemed obvious. It was the music of dim rooms, of red wine in gallon jugs. It was the music
of slow violence unfurling in a secluded house in Benedict Canyon.
It was an amorphous party in the style of the time, a place an intruder could walk into without much chance of detection,
much less confrontation. People were gathered in the kitchen, surrounded by ashtrays and bottles, and every bedroom had a
shrouded group whispering in the shifting glow of tea lamps inside paper sacks. When he’d first seen Charlie tonight, Bobby
had been fighting with Kitty in the backyard, struggling with her wrists in his hands, trying to wrestle her into being quiet.
She was spitting insults at him in a muffled shout, scattered and fierce, and he’d turned to see a small figure in the darkness
at the edge of the bushes, his hands crossed behind his waist, his long hair and slightly hunched figure somehow suggesting
a crone beneath a shawl. When he stepped closer, his angular face was like a daguerreotype from a hundred years ago, a bearded
man in deerskin pants and shirt. He gestured at his forehead, pointing with his index finger, and told Bobby to stop acting
like a pimp, some low-life pimp slapping his whore around in an alley. There was a small moment of jockeying over how serious
he was being. It was hard to see Charlie’s face beneath his hair in the darkness. But as he stepped closer it became clear
that he wasn’t joking, that he didn’t like what he was looking at, his eyes appraising Bobby and Kitty with a barely curious
scrutiny, as if unsurprised by the lack of anything interesting or distinctive there. Bobby adjusted the top hat on his head,
letting Kitty go, and she pushed her hair behind her ear, embarrassed but oddly still as Charlie stood in front of her, one
hand on her shoulder, the other one caressing her cheek. He was the comforter now, menacingly strange, his stern face somehow
enhancing the biblical overtones of the pose. It was a con, Bobby felt certain of that, but he didn’t object, sensing some
cynical game just beginning to unfold, knowing that if Charlie had seen through him, then he had at least seen through Charlie
too.
It was September 9, three days before the band was to leave for the American tour. They had finished one album, the next one
was already in progress, and Keith was sitting outside his house on a plain wooden kitchen chair, playing his guitar. It was
early afternoon and the sun was hitting everything at a tilted angle, the wind tossing the boughs of the trees, filling the
air high above him with a sound like thousands of rattling plastic bags. Some friends were playing golf on the lawn, using
plastic balls that wafted back toward them in wild curves. He looked out at the old carpets on the grass, the shabby furniture,
all the things he would be leaving behind for the next three months, and all of it looked perfect. The golf cart sagged in
the high grass beside the moat, a purple banner trailing behind it like a giant, colored serpent coiling in the wind.
“You don’t even see me sometimes,” Anita would say. But it wasn’t true, he saw her all the time. She was upstairs now, getting
her things into suitcases, the bedroom a heap of clothes and jewelry, magazines and cosmetics. He could see her standing with
her hips canted forward, one hand on her thigh, the other on her cheek, looking down with pensive hostility at the mess. She
was not coming on the tour. She was going to a drug clinic in St. John’s Wood.
She had given him a lot of things to forgive lately. She had slept with half the people he knew — that was what he had signed
on for, he knew that. She had even slept with Mick, because she was crazy, or just to hurt Keith, or possibly just because
she wanted to. She was threatened by Keith in some way. Maybe she had reason to feel threatened, because after all he had
forgiven her even for Mick. She didn’t have as much power to faze him as she’d thought. He had forgiven everything except
the scene last week, when she had taken too much heroin and blacked out for close to an hour.
Every sound had a slight flange to it, a little sag at the middle, as if he was manipulating time, bending it and stretching
it. He chopped out a rhythm of big chiming chords and heard all the textures of the different notes lined up in rows. It was
a sad song, but it didn’t feel sad to play it. There was nothing that needed to be done right now, nothing he could do anyway,
nothing but the sight and sound of his friends beneath the trees and the ability to communicate it through the notes of his
guitar. He was high in a way that slowed down the apprehension of sound just enough for him to hear little textures beneath
the surface, a graininess of copper wire, steel wire. If music was just an escape — an evasion of “reality” — then how did
you account for this moment when the wind and the light on the trees and the sounds of his friends’ tapping golf clubs permeated
him so entirely that he seemed to embody these sensations, to encompass everything outside him so that there was no “him”
and no “outside”?
She came down in her buckskin jacket, bare-legged, her head tilted a little toward one shoulder. “I’ll be ready in a few minutes,”
she said. “Will you tell Tom?”
He nodded, closing his eyes, still strumming the guitar.
“I’m just going to take what I take,” she said. “It’s too much to think about. I don’t know how people pack.”
“I think there’s a sheet of paper somewhere,” he said. “Candace sent it. Addresses, phone, all that. The itinerary.”
“I’ll just ring her. I can’t be bothered with a sheet of paper.”
She was standing in front of him, her hand in his hair. Her eyes moved slightly from side to side as she stared at him. “You’re
not coming with me, are you?”
He looked down at the patio. “I’ll tell Tom you’re almost ready,” he said. “I’ll be in in a minute, all right?”
It came back at the strangest times. It had been two months since Brian’s death and most of the time it still wasn’t real,
except at times like this. This was the period when Keith was smashing up cars on the M1, falling asleep with lit cigarettes
in his hand, staying up for three nights in a row, shooting rifles from the cockpit of his Hovercraft. It didn’t look or feel
like mourning. In most ways, it was the happiest he’d ever been.
When he was a boy, maybe eight years old, his aunt had bought him an atlas of the United States, one of those well-meant gifts
that triggers an unexpected enthusiasm in a child. He would linger over the maps before he went to bed — the legends, the
statute miles, the shapes of the states, the words “Pacific Ocean.” He could see with his eyes how huge the places must be
— Texas, Wyoming, California — the shaded areas of their mountain ranges, the pale blue contours of their shorelines and lakes.
Stockton, Mariposa, Bakersfield — the names had nothing to do with the rows of brick houses outside his window. They led him
through moviescapes of rubbled forts, horses in the sand, riflemen, cattle. He knew it was out there, a physical reality,
not a dream. He had the maps, the names, the borders and geography. He was a boy who went to school in a cowboy costume with
holstered toy pistols and spurs.
Right up until the time he’d died, Brian would call in the middle of the night, as if he were still a part of the band, as
if they were all still friends. He had made so many tapes, why did he keep erasing them? Could he come over and play Keith
his new tape? All his best songs went wrong because he waited too long, kept picking at them, second-guessing himself. Or
maybe it was time for him to strike out on his own, start something new, a different kind of band.
Keith would hold the phone uncomfortably between his shoulder and his ear, sitting on a kitchen stool in the dark, playing
his guitar. In the living room there would be a throng of people — friends and hangers-on, people whose names he knew and
people whose names he didn’t — listening to music, smoking, laughing, sulking. Brian’s voice would lapse into silence, a child
trying to tell a story but getting lost in the mire of details, or sometimes it would intensify into weeping, into outraged,
paranoid tears. Keith would talk him down with a persistent stream of factual information: records he had listened to, meals
he had eaten, places he had driven in his car. It was always he and not Anita who fielded these calls. He was the one who
was always awake, always smiling, the center of things even when he wasn’t in the room, always feeling situated in his skin
by three or four o’clock in the morning.
“You just have to get something down and then we can work with it,” he would say. “You have to stop thinking so much. Mick
doesn’t hate you, he doesn’t even think about you, I tell you this over and over. No one thinks about other people half as
much as you do.”
Keith put on a Chuck Berry record in the library. He stood in the half-lit room and gripped the counter with his right hand,
staring down at the record player, waiting for it to start. He watched the record spin and listened and didn’t move, standing
there in his sunglasses and his scarf and his cowboy boots, a cigarette burning in his hand. When it came on, it was loud.
He could feel the warmth of it beneath his skin, the soothing pulse. He heard the clean, bright twang of the guitar, the thick
bash of the snare drum, the rattle of the upright bass: a song about high school, girls, hamburgers, cars. He heard the piano
with its splashy laughing trills, felt the stupid joy of it, and knew that this was why he had to go to America again, to
make this sound. Even after it was over, he felt the perverse certainty that nothing else mattered, nothing was more important
than this three-minute song.
The room upstairs was bright but cool, a country room that smelled of moss. The light came in through a screen of trees and
made a mottled, watery pattern on the walls, the wooden beams, the faded tapestries that hung from wrought-iron bars. Anita
was on the floor with the baby, leaning toward him on her hands and knees. It was one of those moments when their eyes seemed
telepathically joined, both mother and baby smiling, but just faintly — more than just smiling, communicating. She rattled
the ball with its tin bells, and he lay there on his back, trying to reach out with his hands, watching her eyes. His tiny
feet curved inward on bowed legs, a few inches above the ground, as if resting on an invisible stool.
“I’ve found him a job,” Keith said.
She didn’t look up. It was a running joke, already old. “You’ve found him a job,” she said. “What is it, factory work?”
“It’s physical work. Heavy lifting.”
“Quarrying. Building houses.”
“Has he got his documents sorted?”
“I haven’t asked him.”
“They’ll want to see documentation. Credentials.”
He sat down on the floor, sprawling, his head next to her knee. The baby had that drunken, slovenly look now, his head leaning
to one side. It was as if he were puzzling over how to breathe or what breathing meant, how it felt.
“When he moves his head sometimes,” she said, “his eyes change. They look just like yours. They become adult eyes all of a
sudden.”
“He hardly ever cries. It freaks me out a little.”
“He cries when I leave. But I never really leave.”