Wonderland (11 page)

Instead, I said, “Ethan and I have been working on some new arrangements,” which was a lie, but it wouldn’t be by morning.

Ethan winked at me. He knew that meant that I had enough coke to get us through the night. He tugged on his ear, coughed, lit a cigarette. I missed Jonah—his trichotillomania, his socks, his bad breath, which smelled to me like concentration. I missed the missing Buddhists. But Ethan was almost strange enough, something of a eunuch vibe to him, and he was willing to stay up all night, every night, as long as it took, as long as I needed. He brought paper and pencils, nicely sharpened, to our sessions so that I might consider writing down the lyrics. He also brought extra erasers, schoolhouse-red rectangles. He gave me entirely nonseductive neck rubs at three in morning. To myself, I called him the River Boat Captain. I saved that to tell Simon, too.

“I will bring out the cheese,” said Gigi, turning gracefully from the table to head toward the chateau, which, when lit up, looked like something out of an Advent calendar.

Ethan leaned back in his chair, cigarette between his teeth, stretching his big arms to take in the night. “Shove your negativity, Cleo. Music is love. And war.”

A deer—the same one?—barked, barked again.

You might think from this exchange that we didn’t like one another, but in fact the opposite was true: the seven of us had fallen deeply in love, which may have been part of the problem. I hadn’t known any of them before, though some of them knew each other. They all knew
Whale;
they had seen me in concert. When we met at lunch in the garden the first day, the air was thick with unvoiced opinions, not all of them bad. The first thing we had agreed on was that we liked the chateau. It was small and gently dilapidated. Wasps lived in the rafters of the music room. Ethan was allergic to wasp stings; every day, he seemed to be risking his life for art, eyeing the rafters warily as we all worked, half expecting death to swoop down from the heavens. The walls were damp, we felt damp in our clothes, the furniture seemed sodden. The small, algae-infested pool, homeopathic, pushed the dampness away for a few hours in the afternoon, if it wasn’t raining. Our days ambled around a small, circular track: get up from our damp beds, bread and coffee laid out by Gigi in the big kitchen, quiet midmorning time to stretch and read and smoke, lunch in the echoing dining room, trying to make music into the evening, often into the night, in the music room. Ethan and I, up after everyone else had gone to bed, trying things that didn’t work, barking until morning in that vast room with the Persian carpets everywhere, all full of cigarette burns, stained, torn. The long, wavy windows onto the garden.

The magic had come on us slowly. It grew, binding us together, and then, all at once, after a few weeks, it set. The chateau became our submarine; we found one morning that we agreed on everything. Such as: we liked jam. We liked Nutella. We liked the mole-pocked bread man who came every other day. We liked the fireflies that lit the orchard at night. We liked the tan and white dog called La Loup and the cat called Farfalle. We liked to read aloud from a 1965 translation of Cesare Pavese poems that David had found in his room, where the flocked green wallpaper was peeling to reveal moldy, flocked red wallpaper. We liked to walk down the road in a straggling group to the village to get ice cream and cigarettes. We liked a few hits of ecstasy on Sunday afternoons. We didn’t like the village church: we felt it had a stingy architecture, narrow and inward-looking. We liked the light on the water of the chateau’s pool, because the algae made it thick, uncertain, murky, a primeval light, a dinosaur light. We liked Gigi for her irreverence, liked that she was Ethiopian, because we didn’t understand Ethiopia; she was the only one who spoke French, so she was our link to the world that surrounded the chateau. We liked the way she propped one foot on her knee as she talked. We knew her given name couldn’t be Gigi, and it was a point of honor never to ask her about it. We liked Ethan’s broad cheekbones, how fat he was, how high his voice was, his faintly pointy ears. We liked David’s endless tinkering with anything that had a dial. We liked Hubert’s crankiness. We liked the way Cleo sketched us during dinner at the long table in the overgrown garden, reminding us that we existed now, just now, and that time was always passing. We understood that Jean would be ruined if he allowed himself to be taken: he was our unattainable star. We lived in the chateau as if we had always lived there. We were half in love with the terrifying, death-dealing wasps, lying in wait for Ethan and who knew who else, who knew what designs on us the wasps had? We were jealous of the deer, so untuned, so raw, so unabashed. We wished we could sound like the deer. We did lots and lots and lots of cocaine; it was our salt.

We liked to touch each other constantly. We buttoned one another’s buttons, held one another’s hands. Cleo’s rosy complexion; the muscles of David’s thighs; the waves and kinks of Gigi’s hair; Hubert’s prematurely arthritic knuckles; my strange voice that had recently become stranger still, more echoes and odd turnings (Ethan waved his big white hands and sent me down every dark alley of sound, scamper scamper Red Riding Hood); Jean’s elegant, aloof cock; the dampness on our hands, our knees, our backs, the wetness of our hair after we’d braved the cloudy pool to touch the penumbra of the moody water spirit we’d named Nakimba; the chemical tang at the back of our throats; the jam on our fingers at breakfast; the smoke of our shared cigarettes—we were composed of that.
Bang Bang
was made of that.

But the one place the magic wasn’t showing up was in the music. We couldn’t quite seem to get that, us, onto
Bang Bang,
but that only made it more precious to us, the ineffable sound of our union. We pursued it relentlessly, like hunters, but we were getting tired, we found ourselves getting sleepy a lot, even with all the salt. The afternoons were growing warmer as summer thickened. The sound we could hear so well inside all our heads simultaneously—as if together we made up a radio tuned to our small area of the collective unconscious—was refusing to appear on the album. It was happening all the time, and everywhere, except on any known recording device, including a clunky old reel-to-reel that David had dug out of a closet and jury-rigged to the digital system in desperation. We were beginning to wonder if we existed; why couldn’t we see ourselves, our gorgeous seven-headed love, in the music’s mirror?

Two-thirty
A.M.
Ethan and I, cross-legged on the Persian carpet in the music room, roughly encircled by a few chairs and sofa cushions. Just outside this circle, several guitars of various sorts, an electronic keyboard, two flutes, a hot-pink electric violin, a drum machine, and Ethan’s computer, on which there is a black-and-white picture of his mother taking a large horse over an intimidating jump. Even with the big windows open, it’s hot, sticky. The carpet is scratchy. The deer must have gotten some or gone to bed, because they’re quiet. I pick out notes on a guitar and Ethan nods, his big damp head down like a flower falling from its stem, his eyes closed. Over the past twenty or so nights, the lyrics, written in pencil, have piled up. The sheaf of paper rests beside us. “Come on,” Ethan says softly, “come on come on come on come on, girl,” and I try to follow the sound of his voice into the forest, over the jump. I try again. I try again. I try again. If you were, let us say, an angel or a bat hanging upside down in a corner of that vast room, what you would see would be a tall girl, too skinny, huddled over a guitar, nearly knee to knee with a large man who appears to be passing out. You would hear sequences of notes that are interesting, alluring, even beguiling, but, frustratingly, the tall girl keeps stopping the sequence just as it’s getting started. She raps on the guitar, raps on her own forehead. The big man nods, eyes closed, smiles—apparently he’s still awake. He kisses her on the forehead she just rapped.

“Come on, girl,” he says softly. “Come on come on come on.”

If you were an angel or a bat hanging upside down in a corner of that vast room, you might distract yourself for a while by listening to the music of the heat, but when you tuned back in, you would find the tall girl still sifting through beguiling sequences of notes. Some of these sequences sound familiar. Is it even the same night?

“It won’t break,” says the tall girl, putting the guitar down beside her. “How it worked before—it won’t go. Goddamnit. Motherfuck. I feel like a retard.”

The big man opens his eyes and sits up straight. “Anna, a lot of the folks I’ve worked with over the years have had a hard time with their second record. They can’t go back, they can’t go forward, they think they’ve got some kind of image to protect, they get caught in a loop. A lot of them die right here. Are you planning to die on me?”

“No.”

“Then give it to me. Come on, girl.”

What a joy it is to be able to rise up on one’s wings in the currents neither the tall girl nor the big man can see. The tall girl squints, shakes her head. “Did you hear that?”

“I’m listening.”

After another long day of false starts, wrong notes, and bad moods, Ethan, Gigi, and I went into the village for pizza and beer. Gigi drove the cheap little car, coaxing and prodding it over the serpentine, dusty roads. Gravel flew up past the half-open windows. “Shit,” said Gigi. “We’re going to get a flat, I know it. Fucking France.” She downshifted and said something that sounded like “Shusha.”

“I think we need some celestes,” said Ethan. “I’m going to write my friend Nick.”

“That’s a fortune,” said Gigi.

“What are celestes?” I asked sheepishly from the back seat. Ethan had perfect pitch, an astonishing memory for music, an incredible collection of vinyl, and was known to throw things at his lovers, who either ducked or left. He knew everybody.

Ethan explained, “It’s a keyboard instrument with bells inside instead of mallets and strings. Very old. Very expensive.” We jolted past a mechanic’s garage. Inside, men in jumpsuits hovered over variously opened-up cars.

“I don’t think the problem is a lack of celestes,” I said, more crankily than I had intended. “The problem is that I suck.” I was trying not to panic. I needed a line.

“The celeste tracks can be emailed,” said Ethan in his vague, high tone that I always found strangely comforting. “Nick can send them from Iceland.”

“Could be worth it, then. The label will pay, Anna. Throw your weight around.” Gigi moved the car down another gear. “This fucking road! I’m hungry!”

“We’re lost,” I said.

“No, the village is right there, look,” said Gigi.

“No, I mean the record.” The weight of the thing we loved so much, our seven-headed anima, tipping into the murky pool. I grabbed for it once again, Orpheus-like. “We’re just so lost, we can’t figure it out. We’re not going to be able to do it. We’re fucked. We’re totally fucked.” A cold darkness licked the backs of my knees, moving up. The label was going to drop me for sure. I would never see the chateau again.

“Celestes,” Ethan said with certainty, driving the darkness back toward my ankles. “Let’s get those little olives on the pizza this time.”

The village was nothing much—a bakery, the stingy church, a bar-
tabac,
a school, the pizza place. In the pizza place, the families having Friday-night dinner looked at us: fat, bald Ethan in his pointy black boots and his T-shirt with an amoeba drawn on it in felt marker; Gigi with her Modigliani Ethiopian face; and me, far too tall, clearly no one’s wife, no one’s mother, wearing a short, flowered, girlish cotton shift I’d found in my closet at the chateau—it didn’t look right on me, but I knew it was meant for me somehow, it was lucky, and I wore it everywhere. I had decided that Kurt Cobain had worn it once. The three of us instinctively drew together as we walked to our table, then huddled over a single, shared menu.

“Anchovies,” said Gigi.

“Onions,” I said.

“Those little wrinkled olives,” Ethan said, pronouncing the
t
’s, the
k
’s, and the
s
’s with peculiar emphasis and precision; it was almost musical. He passed me the vial under the table, and I charged into the bathroom with it. There was hardly any left. A pinch, a sniff. I returned to the table well salted, but not exactly satisfied. I passed Ethan the empty vial.

“Jesus, Anna.”

The pizza place smelled of olive oil, coffee, vinegar, and car exhaust from the road outside. The families were scrubbed, weeknight casual, with wine on their tables; already finished eating, the kids, bored, slumped in chairs or hovered itchily around the adults. A muscular teenage boy in a white T-shirt and white apron folded neatly over his jeans came to the table to take our order, which Gigi gave in what sounded to me like bossy French.

“It’s getting bad,” said Ethan.

“Ride it out,” said Gigi, tapping Ethan’s knuckles, then holding his hand. He gripped hers in return in his meaty one, tightly, wincing. None of us understood Ethan’s weather, but we respected it. We thought the wasps were his familiars, that something had happened there, a history. He denied it, but that buzzing when he was near: we had our suspicions. Only some of us had familiars—Gigi’s was La Loup, the tan and white dog; Jean’s were the fireflies; Cleo said she had one, but wouldn’t say what it was, leaving us to wonder if she was bluffing, which would be like her, the minx. I didn’t have one, and I yearned for one, or the chutzpah to lie about it. Shouldn’t I, as ostensibly the center of this group, have my own familiar? Maybe that was the problem. Maybe that was why we couldn’t get the sound to show up on tape. My familiar was missing. I tried to imagine my familiar—fur, fins, feathers? Nothing came through. I sneezed and wondered what I might have lost by sneezing.

A round-faced woman with glasses at a nearby table stared at Gigi and Ethan, still holding hands. They looked as if they were praying together, or as if Ethan was a mental patient and Gigi was his minder, taking him out on a day pass. The woman looked at me, plainly curious. Why wasn’t I praying with them? Was Ethan my crazy brother? My husband, hopelessly estranged from me by insanity? I shrugged and smiled at the woman, causing her to drop her gaze to her salad, resume her conversation with a thin-faced man, a Jack Sprat in a black blazer. They sat on the same side of their table and had the innate reserve of French married people. I half hoped they couldn’t see the magic on us, half hoped they could. I flexed my fingers, wiggled my toes in my sandals.