Turn Around Bright Eyes (9 page)

My wife is an absurdly cool mix of completely girlie traits and total dude traits. On one hand, there’s her fashion sense, her love of pencil skirts, her thirty thousand pairs of shoes. On the other, there’s the side of her that resembles a nineteen-year-old boy. When we’re eating pizza, instead of tearing a paper towel off the roll, she might wipe her fingers on the roll. Once, after dinner, she took a half-empty can of soda, put a baggie over it, and fastened it on with a rubber band. Then she put the can in the fridge. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I felt like the luckiest guy in the world. I couldn’t even tell any of my male friends about this story, or it would just make them wistful.

She loves indie slop and postpunk and math rock and all kinds of spazzy noise bands. She cannot tolerate folk music in any form. She loves all these goth industrial bands that I assumed only appealed to wizened leather satyrs with beards and tattoos. She’s the only person I’ve ever met who has a favorite Pailhead song that
isn’t
“I Will Refuse” (which I thought was the
only
Pailhead song, like most of the other .001 percent of the populace who have heard of Pailhead). She loves Pigface almost as much as she loves the Monkees. Ask her what Schrödinger’s equation is, and she has an answer. “Look, you just solve for the wave function and take the complex conjugate and square it and integrate over some area to get the probability. Done! It’s easy!”

Once we were in a pizza place where the Gwen Stefani song “Hollaback Girl” was blasting on the radio, and Ally asked, “Why is Gwen singing about the Hall effect? She keeps saying, ‘I ain’t no Hall Effect Girl.’” Then she explained to me what the Hall effect is—it has something to do with negative charges moving around in a metal and a magnetic field. I liked the song better Ally’s way. I’d seen the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey
dozens of times before I met her, but it was a whole new experience watching it together. They only knew about
seven
of the moons of Jupiter then? And they thought it had a solid surface? Jupiter has dozens of moons, and it’s made of gas, so it doesn’t have lakes or trees or dinner tables. Was I supposed to know that? Well, now I did.

Her career as an astronomer has taken her many different places, from telescope to telescope. She lived for a while in Tokyo, which is where she first got into karaoke. She was the first person who ever informed me about the whole “Pluto not being a planet” thing. She pointed out that the sun is going to burn through all its hydrogen in about five billion years, a process that’s already been under way for billions of years so there’s nothing we can do about it, and that the universe might be shaped like a Pringles chip. She also told me about the night one of her astrophysics friends went to a bar trivia contest where the final question was “What does Kelvin measure?” The winning answer was “heat,” but her friend explained that Kelvin measures temperature, not heat, since heat is energy and is measured in energy units like joules or ergs. The astronomer refused to back down, until the battle had to be settled with a chug-off. These astro people are hard-core.

Ally made everything seem new. So many familiar things about my world were different now that I was seeing them through her eyes. Falling in love with an astronomer made me fall back in love with all the songs I’d ever heard about looking up at the stars, whether it was Hüsker Dü’s “Books About UFOs” or Madonna’s “Lucky Star” or Lois’s “Capital A” or Barry White’s “It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me.” For so long, I’d been in the dark searching for a star; now the search is over, and here we are. Like Boy George says, choose a color, find a star.

AS A SCIENTIST, ALLY KNOWS
a lot about the courtship rituals of different species. It always seems to involve a song. For instance, the male frog has one song that he uses for his mating call, and it’s the same for every frog. They croak the same notes, in the same order. No room for creativity or improvisation. Any frog who tries to freestyle is not getting lucky tonight. When it comes to love on the lily pad, slavish accuracy is the male frog’s game.

For birds, it’s different. When a bird has love on his mind, he needs a song to separate himself from the flock (or pack or murder or whatever it is). For finches, every male sings his own distinctive courtship song. Every breeding season, he perches in his nest and lures the female finches with his individual love song. (It’s usually the same tune his father sang, and he sings the same one his whole life). The female finch hears him sing, and that’s how she decides whether she wants a piece of his beak. The males and females repeat this ritual every breeding season, no matter how many times they’ve mated before. The song is what seals the deal.

Other birds have a more varied repertoire. Perhaps the most seductive bird in the forest is the lyrebird, which has an uncanny ability to mimic any sound it hears. It can imitate other birds or human voices; it can even beatbox. In some documentaries about the lyrebird, you can hear the bird mimic the sound of the cameras rolling. Ally’s also into this death-metal band called Hatebeak, who have a parrot for a lead singer. There are two human dudes in this band, plus an African gray parrot named Waldo, who squawks over their guitars. Hatebeak never perform live, of course, because the guitar volume would be too much for a parrot’s delicate ears. But they make records with titles like “Hell Bent for Feathers” and “The Number of the Beak.”

But whether it’s love or hate, the bird’s song is a crucial part of the way it relates to other birds. Ally and I are birds, not frogs. We knew we belonged together because of the songs we loved. In the karaoke room, we’re lyrebirds, trying on different voices. Ally’s favorite kind of rock star to adopt for karaoke is the swishy mod English rock boy, the same way I love to sing songs by brassy mega-femme sex warriors. She loves to do the hits of Placebo and Pulp and Franz Ferdinand; she’s drawn to the androgynous femme-boy voices like I’m drawn to girlie dames like Taylor Dayne and Chaka Khan and Sheena Easton. It’s probably a mix of lust and identification. She loves to do Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” a song about an androgynous young rock star who meets his match at the well-lubricated hands of Nikki the Sex Fiend. She takes Prince to her castle and grinds him until his eyes spin like a pair of one-armed bandits. That’s the same kind of intensity Ally brings to karaoke. She’ll show you no mercy, but she’ll show you how to grind.

Music is just one of our fundamental obsessions. And that’s part of what music is for—bringing people together. Every couple has their songs, and they’re not always the songs you’d expect. They don’t have to be goopy love songs, either. I know a couple whose wedding dance was AC/DC’s “Let Me Put My Love into You.” People can turn anything into a love song if it helps keep them together. The artist doesn’t really get a say in the matter—it definitely doesn’t matter what the artist might intend the song to be about. Bono used to complain about people using U2’s “One” as a wedding song, since for him it’s a song about conflict and self-doubt. (“Love is a temple, love’s a higher law”—make up your mind, guy!) Sting used to complain about people thinking “Every Breath You Take” was a romantic ballad, the same way Michael Stipe complains about how people hear “The One I Love.”

These guys might think the fans are misreading the dark, ironic subtext of their lyrics. But as far as I’m concerned, the fans are right. Anything can be a love song as long as two people care about it. We can twist any artifact to our romantic purposes. Friends of mine, for their first date, saw
Dr. Death
, a documentary about a guy who makes electric chairs. I thought, That’s a first date? If there’s a
second
date, there is definitely going to be a wedding. (There was.) And they both owned copies of the album Crispin Glover made in the nineties. That’s a beautiful thing, and it’s exactly why the Crispin Glover albums of the world exist—to help total freakazoids find each other.

We need those shared obsessions, whether it’s bird-watching or motorcycles or cooking or shoplifting. A friend of mine once told me, “Larry Storch is the guy who saves my marriage.” He and his wife are obsessive fans of the long-forgotten sixties TV comedian. They love Larry Storch so much, they bond by hiring a babysitter and checking into motel rooms where they can stay up all night watching Storch do his thing on their videos of the sitcom
F-Troop
. Hey, it works for them. I’m not such a huge Storch-head myself, but I knew exactly what my friend was talking about. Every couple needs their Larry Storch or their Crispin Glover.

For Ally and me, it’s always the song. It was our favorite songs that first helped us notice each other and recognize that we were birds of a feather. Music is a huge part of our lives, with countless songs we think of as
our
songs. And that’s why Boy George is an essential element in our marriage. He never fails to remind us that we belong together in the church of the poison mind.

10:59 p.m.:

I get my singing voice from my dad, who got it from his dad, who got it from some other Irish guy with a terrible voice. I come from a long line of these guys. My grandfather, Ray Sheffield, was a president of his local chapter of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America. (My grandmother, Peggy Sheffield, was in the sister organization, the Sweet Adelines.) A barbershop quartet generally consists of a tenor, a baritone, a bass, and a crow, who is the guy they stick in the back because he can’t sing. My grandfather was a crow among crows. We had records of him in the house growing up, dating from the fifties days of private-press shops where you could make your own ten-inch 78 records.

My dad sings in church and likes to tell the story of when he was in high school, singing onstage with his local chapter of the Catholic Youth Organization, when they would do their annual show. This involved dressing up as a hobo to sing “That Lucky Old Sun.”

(Side note: The CYO called its annual production the “Minstrel Show.” This was the 1950s, so it raises the historical question: Did this minstrel show involve white kids putting on blackface? That’s an excellent question. And I have never asked my dad, because I don’t want to know. Irish males are very good at not asking questions when we already know we couldn’t deal with the wrong answer. I suppose it’s a survival strategy for living with Irish females.)

My aunts like to tell stories of my dad’s teen enthusiasm for vocalizing. When he was fifteen, in 1956, he would spend hours in his bedroom singing along with Elvis Presley records. He sang “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Love Me Tender,” and the little-known country weeper, “Old Shep,” which was his special favorite to sing. It’s about a farm boy and his beloved dog. It has a plot with a long spoken-word recitation. (Spoiler alert! The dog dies.) This song was too sad for me to tolerate, even when I was a kid, but I always love the picture of my dad playing that one record over and over, fifteen years old, sneaking cigarettes until his mom had to ask why the shades in his bedroom were turning brown.

My dad and mom, as fifties high school students, were fond of Elvis and doo-wop, the hits they grew up on. They both used to sing “In the Still of the Night” with their high school friends—my mom sang the melody, my dad sang the “shoo wop, shooby doo” part. My dad still sings along with the radio, and I have always loved hearing him—he would amuse my sisters and me by doing the bass voice from oldies like “Little Darlin’.”

As his (lucky old) son, I have inherited his enthusiasm for singing. Alas, I have also inherited his talent. I have inherited many of his other traits, which become more mysterious to me the more clearly they emerge. My dad is the kind of Irish male that Irish females call “easy,” or “aizy” as they pronounce it—the biggest compliment we can get from the Irish females in our families. Being called easy means we are easy to please, easy to get along with, easily amused. We’re fine with that, whatever “that” is right now. And my dad is extremely easy, a guy who never gets ruffled, never loses his temper, never seems the least bit awkward or uncomfortable even in the strangest situation. He knows what he likes and it doesn’t take much to make him happy. When we were kids, we took a road trip through Italy, and my dad brought along his little jar of Taster’s Choice freeze-dried instant coffee. He didn’t like the cappuccino or the espresso they offered him. Anywhere we went to eat, my dad would ask for a cup of boiling water and produce his private stash of Taster’s Choice. His children rolled their eyes, but it didn’t faze my dad. Nothing really does. He puts people at ease. People would rather be kind to my dad than mean to him. He gets away with things the rest of us can’t get away with. He gave me unrealistic ideas of what a grown man can charm his way out of. I don’t know how he does it. He won’t tell me.

I am named after him, except he is Bob and I am Rob. He is the most Bob man who has ever existed. (There is no way we could trade first names.) He has lived in the same town his entire life, except for when he was at Fort Dix in the army, and two years he spent in Boston when he first married my mom. He lives barely a mile from the house where he grew up. Everybody in town knows him. When I first got my driver’s license, I got pulled over by the cops because they wondered why some kid was driving Bob Sheffield’s car. When they saw my license, they said to tell him hi.

He and my mom have been married since 1964, after meeting at Boston College. The summer of 1989, when it was their twenty-fifth anniversary, he and I went for a walk at Castle Island by the sea in Boston, and I asked him point-blank: How do you keep a marriage together? What’s the secret? How do you do it? He said, “Well, it’s heaven if you marry the right one, and it’s hell if you marry the wrong one, and you don’t find out which one you got until it’s too late.” Oh. Thanks, Dad. I was angling for something a little more useful.

My mom has a slightly different answer. “I’m only saying this because I’m on the second stinger,” she said. “But the secret is, your father has a short memory.”