Wonderland (20 page)

Behind me, Tom diligently makes his way down the slalom run of the peculiar, shifting beat of “Wonderland.” I can smell his Purell, the alcohol and lemon, from here. I breathe it in, hoping it will help keep me awake. He’s more careless on the turns than he used to be. The unexpected shifts have grown all too expected; in fact, he’s dropping into them a little too soon. He knows this story. He’s heard it many times before, he wants to skip to the end, he wants his own dinner. In this fat city, he and Zach can probably rack up a lot of points in their ongoing eating game. (I don’t get it, no one does except them.) His carelessness doesn’t matter, since the audience isn’t following anyway. I pick up an electric guitar for the small, playful, subtle solo I do in the middle of the song, but something seems off, what is it? I am getting lost, the sound of my guitar is faint, and for a minute I want to get lost entirely. I want to float away. Zach, unsmiling, jabs the amplifier cord into my guitar and stalks two inches off, just in time for an ear-splitting wave of feedback to break over all of us. The sound I make now with the electric guitar is a mess—too loud, covered in sonic trash, like a massive electronic fart. When I take off that guitar and turn around to face another direction, I knock over my two other guitars on stands next to the cello. Alicia’s eyes widen. The audience laughs a little, then continues eating. Zach’s expression can fairly be described as homicidal. I shrug in a futile attempt to laugh it all off. He won’t even look at me, eyes directed to his own hands on his bass. A stagehand scurries up, crouching as he rights the guitars, scurries away again, hopping off the round stage.

I turn around and around, but in every direction the view is the same: well-heeled couples and large groups, looking to be in their mid to late thirties, the women in classic cocktail dresses and smooth, shiny hair worn loose or in artfully disheveled chignons, the men clean-shaven, pink-cheeked, fit. Whose audience is this? What do they think they’re listening to? The white light in my eyes is harsh. Dropping yet another line, I try to add it up: if they’re these people, then who am I? When did I become so tasteful? From the stage, I watch an exceptionally beautiful, dark-haired woman in a hat with a veil watch me. I don’t stare straight at her. I keep her in my sights out of the corner of my eye. Her lips, behind the veil, are a vivid dark red. Her cheekbones are high. Her black dress glitters. She is pretentious, she is playing at being some figure in her imagination, but, in the way of the exceptionally beautiful, her play seems to hint at a larger truth about the illusions of the visible world. Tonight she looks like a torch singer, tomorrow she might be a maid, a soldier, the soldier’s widow. She isn’t speaking to any of the people seated around her. She may be the only person in the room who is actually listening to us. She taps her glass lightly as I sing, nods. I sing more softly to make her lean in, cock her head; behind the veil, her lips are moving. She is singing with me. I don’t turn when I should, bad stagecraft, bad manners, but who cares? The night is a disaster. And I hardly need another look at Zach’s scowl.

“By the sea,” we sing together, “on the green ship / I will be waiting.” To what internal drama of hers am I the soundtrack? Her hand moves, waves. In the corner of my eye, it looks like a small bird fluttering up. “We will go then / only then / only then / we will go then / we will go then / we will go then / wonderland.” She lifts the veil to blot her tears with her napkin. She is quite young, I see now, perhaps twenty-two. Is her pain real or is it part of her solitary dress-up? Does it matter? “We will go then / we will go then / we will go then / wonderland.” Zach bites off the final chord. When I turn around, he has already left the stage, flash of his white jacket disappearing at the side door.

The rest of us exit to dutiful applause. I gingerly clamber off the stage last, not wanting to trip. The instruments, left behind, look glad to be free of us. The young woman with the veil is clapping madly, smiling, shouting, “Bravo!” What concert is she at? I wish I were there. We go through the side door and hover on the other side, smelling one another’s sweat, with shrugs and stiff smiles. There will be no encore tonight, this is a formality. But the woman with the veil keeps clapping so hard that the Hamburgers clap with her, maybe they don’t wish for her to be embarrassed, and so we are forced to shuffle back onstage again. Zach, however, is nowhere to be seen. The encore depends on him—we can’t do it, or much of anything really, without a bassist. Alicia, Tom, and the smiley bald guy, frozen in position, look from me to the blank space where Zach is supposed to be. At the tables, checks are down, credit cards are slapping on top of them, the sleek women and pink-cheeked men are visibly impatient, squeaking their chairs, putting on their coats.

I mouth “Rush” and we stumble into it, and then we fall and fall. This isn’t the encore we’ve rehearsed. I forget half the words; Alicia, it seems, is playing some other song; Tom’s beat is panicky and impossible to follow, the rhythm of someone running away screaming. The bald violinist with vitiligo gamely plucks out a few chords by hand. The woman with the veil is undisappointable, beaming at us from her seat. I turn around, I turn around, I turn around, like a plastic ballerina on top of a music box. In the movie, the heroine who has just lost her father gives the performance of her life, she is tragic and beautiful, she soars. I am not soaring, not transformed by grief. If anything, I feel more stubbornly and irredeemably myself, flattened and contracted, alienated, very much alone, and something like bored. I shouldn’t be here. I should be in Vermont, sorting through my father’s bad canvases, the overly aestheticized detritus of his later years, the worthless photos and keepsakes I don’t want to see. I wish I could forgive him for dying so bewildered and collapsed, but I can’t.

I touch my fingertips together in a theatrical gesture. They’re callused from playing every night; my left shoulder aches the way it always does by this point on a tour. I feel as if I’m inhabiting someone else’s body, hoping that she knows the way. Dropping lines, blowing notes, I long for the strudel with the lobster in it, for ten, twenty wordless minutes with William.

I surrender to the wreck of the evening. I cut the song off, such as it is, a stanza early, bow, and call out, “Good night, Hamburg!” The others stop playing abruptly; I hope the audience thinks it’s modern and ragged, but basically I hate them, so I don’t really care. Just before I go through the side door, I turn and throw the woman in the veil a kiss. Fuck you, Hamburg.

Boone is waiting alone in the green room (which is, in fact, a tender shade of green, warm, with good, comfortable furniture, a bower for our humiliation), drinking coffee, a pastry in his other hand, his earpiece dangling at his collar, wearing a knit hat with knitted ridges along the top, like the bony plates of a stegosaurus. “Jesus, Anna,” he says, “what the hell happened out there? Where’s Zach?”

“Isn’t he here?”

Boone gestures at the small, empty room.

“Goddamnit,” I say, shifting into an irritable rage.

The others tumble in with tense faces. The bald guy begins to put his violin back in its case, still smiling, but not at anyone in the room.

“Shake it off,” says Boone. “We have another night, it’s almost sold out, don’t worry.” He closes the green room door. Even on a catastrophic night like this, people will be coming backstage, milling around, wanting to talk, admire, soak up the schadenfreude.

Tom drops onto the sofa. “Motherfuck,” he says. “That was excruciating.”

“Like being slowly boiled,” Alicia says, slumping against the wall, pulling at a split end.

“Or raped in a coma,” Tom continues. “In a semi-coma. No one can hear you try to scream.
Hgggghhhlllp. Hgggghhlllp,”
he whispers.

“What’s up with Zach?” I ask Alicia and Tom. Alicia bites her lip.

“You know,” says Alicia. “He’s a perfectionist.”

“The house sucked,” says Tom.

“Give me a break,” I say. The rage feels good, orienting. “What was his
fucking
problem out there?”

“Hey, hey,” says Boone. “Hey now.” He puts his arms around me, hugs me tight. He smells like pastry, like coffee, a sugar dinosaur. He whispers in my ear, “Pull back, sweetheart. It’s not their fault.”

I sit down next to Alicia on the sofa. She puts her feet in my lap. “I’m sorry,” she says.

I take off her golden, complicatedly laced shoes, rub her small feet in their mauve stockings. “We need to get you some new stockings,” I say. “These are done in.”

“I know,” says Alicia, closing her eyes. “I never bring enough of anything.”

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” says Tom. “Time for the bar.”

Boone dunks his pastry, sighs, purses his lips. His woolen stegosaurus ridge remains upright, goofily optimistic. “Rock-and-roll,” he says in an airy tone.

The door clicks open and Zach slides in, wraith-like, moves toward the corner of the room. He has intense green eyes, the eyes of a crazy American pioneer, with long lashes. He is light on his feet, but his arm muscles are substantial; the combined effect is that he often seems to be levitating as he walks, hovering disdainfully by his biceps a few inches above the ground. I am a little afraid of him, truth be told. I think he judges me. He does judge me, even now, in my grief.

“Yo,” says Tom.

Alicia squints up to see what I am going to do, glances at Zach, blushes. I rub her instep, her pinkie toe. I do this with great concentration, as if it were my job, as if I were the tour masseuse (as if we could afford such a thing) and not the presumptive star. Her mauve feet are warm, like a pair of sweet, furless, mauve animals. Outside, the corridor is buzzing and humming with talk, laughter, exclamations in German. Out of the corner of my eye, that flicker, flicker, quick as a snake’s tongue. It lashes me under the ribs.

Zach leans his head against the wall, looking at me from under lowered eyelids. “What happened out there, Anna?” he asks.

I don’t answer right away, moving my hand around Alicia’s ankle. “You tell me,” I say quietly. Alicia tries to slip her foot out of my hand, but I hold it tight. I meet Zach’s gaze and do not flinch. “You ever walk off like that again,” I say, “and you’re fired.”

Zach turns his chin up and sideways, like a horse pulling away from the bridle. “The guitars—”

“Fuck the fucking guitars.” I push Alicia’s feet out of my lap, stand up, right my skirt, settle my feet in my high heels. Flicker, flicker, but I still can’t catch it. “You’re on the clock. We all are.”

The room is silent. Boone dunks his pastry again. His phone is chortling, but he doesn’t answer it. Tom and Alicia look at me, then Zach, then back at me. Tom pulls his hat down over his ears. Zach kicks the wall, shrugs. “Sure, boss,” he says. “They’re your guitars, do what you want.”

I cross the room to the door. “Stand up. People are waiting for us.” I throw the door open, let in the tide of good and bad will. I expect the woman with the veil to be there, but she isn’t. Crazy and young as she is, maybe she understands that there is nothing more to be gained from coming backstage. It is I who wish to see her, to ask her, “What did you see? What did you hear? Who are we to you?”

As the backstage crowd swirls around us, diluting our heat, I text Simon. I tell him that I’m on tour again in Europe, that my father has just died.
My God, Anna,
he writes back with gratifying speed.
Anna.
Where are you?

R
ECORDS USED TO
have A sides and B sides—well, there used to
be
records, flat rounds of black vinyl. The sound of the needle bumping against the label.
Skritch, skritch, skritch.
The sound of the end of the evening, end of the party. Turn the record over, holding the disk with your fingertips, if you’re still awake. I listened to Talking Heads’
More Songs About Buildings and Food
and The Slits’
Playing with a Different Sex
again and again;
Twist & Rain;
also, endlessly, Prince. I couldn’t get enough of Prince. The muscularity of listening, like surfing, like turning into the skid. Like falling, turning over and over; they said my father was lucky, that he turned on his side as the wall began to collapse, immediately knocking him unconscious. His shoulder was shattered, his spine was a mess. They had to put metal inside him to bend him straight again, or straight enough. Straighter, actually, than he’d been before. But if the wall had landed more squarely on his head or his neck, he would have been killed instantly. What is the degree of that arc? One side, and then the other side. They aren’t the same; the sides do matter. In this case, one was life and the other death. Flip a coin, feel the weight as it leaves your thumbnail, turns in the air. What law of physics explains how it is that the coin lands this way or that? Can we say that the coin has any control over its fate? Did he know he was turning, and which side was he trying to land on—the wrong one or the right one? I will never be able to ask him now, and in any case he probably didn’t remember, given the force of the blow.

The fascist gymnasium project was never finished; it remained as unfinished as the massive, half-built, marble gym itself, intended to build the muscles of the fascist victors of the future. The team had gotten as far as incising partway through an interior wall when the wall collapsed; for various engineering reasons, they needed to work from the inside out, and obviously it still didn’t work. Out of respect for what my father was trying to accomplish and the severity of his injuries, the wealthy Italians who had commissioned the project left the wall like that, a circular layer removed from it, leaving a thin, ghostly round of dull, rough stone. I hope it is still there. The one side and the other side, perpetually nearly touching.

T
HE UNDERGROUND CITY
in Perugia is smaller than one might imagine, not at all as big as Perugia itself, which is only a bit bigger than many of the tiny villages tucked into the hills of Tuscany. The underground city is the original city, on top of which a sixteenth-century Pope built a fortress he liked better. Simon and I reached the end of the underground city so fast that we turned around and walked back over its cobblestone streets, away from the day and back into the ancient city’s perpetual night. He touched the stone walls, looked up for a long time at the vaulted stone ceilings. “This could still be used,” he said. “The construction is beautiful.” Above us, endless boutiques selling chocolate, lingerie, bath salts, and myriad varieties of olive oil infused with flowers and spices and fruit. An adulterer’s city if ever there was one. In the city beneath the city, sober, unnaturally clean, mottled stone walls; empty streets; iron lamps; empty churches; empty houses; empty squares that were once shops. It was cold and it smelled of earth.