Street Music Read online

  And that’s it, that’s the tip that she’s dreaming. She’s heard that laugh dozens of times, always on the other side of a closing door, and she knows that the dream is about to turn too sad to bear and that there’s only one way to end it. So she does it: she runs at full strength toward the hard, smooth gray wall, leaning toward it, leaping at it head-first so that her face, with all its nerve endings and delicacy, will take the full, shattering force of the collision, and she flies through the air toward it, anticipating the shock and the pain, and then she hits the wall; and when the pain doesn’t come, the surprise wakes her up.

  . . . complicated, he writes, and then he leans forward, his elbows on the counter, and rubs his eyes with his free hand. He lets the pencil drop: at this point, he needs a two-handed rub.

  Complicated? And he’s supposed to be a writer? Using a word like that to describe this state of mind is like performing heart surgery with a can opener: it’s just not up to the job. He leans back and makes the yoga lion face, eyes wide, tongue out, mouth so far open he could bob for apples. Then he relaxes, blinks away the tears from the yawn that had seized him by surprise, and looks down at the page again.

  Words. He might as well have picked them at random. They could have escaped from a thesaurus in a poorly coordinated jailbreak, emerging into the light as absolute strangers, blinking at each other in total incomprehension.

  This is his life he’s trying to write about. And perhaps the word he’s searching for is schizophrenic.

  On the one hand, there’s the baby as an abstract, as a new life, a blessing, the creation of the love between him and Rose: in short, the way he feels when he’s wandering around Bangkok, looking for someone he hasn’t yet told about it. It’s an event, the kind of event that he recognizes as absolutely architectural; he feels like most of his life he’s been slippery as an eel, slithering through the world without changing anything, not even himself. Here and there, getting snagged on something of consequence: writing his first book, moving to Thailand, meeting Rose and Miaow, the kinds of things that, if he were to look at his life as a house he’s creating, might be painting the walls or washing the windows. But this, the arrival of—oh, just say it, of Frank—this is a whole new wing, a major change to the floor plan, the addition of new rooms as yet unexplored, uncounted, and even unmapped. On the theoretical plane he can accept it in its full magnitude, with the uneasy and unfamiliar sensation of having been present at the miracle. A miracle he prattles to strangers about.

  But. The thing was . . .

  . . . the thing was the other level, the day-to-day living level, that he’d had all this time to prepare himself for, during the past eight and a half months, the months they were all trapped in the seemingly endless white-knuckle thrill ride of Rose’s pregnancy, with its tight curves and sudden drops, the endless terror of miscarriage, that yet another child would be turned away, just inches from the door to the world. And then, a week and a half early, the terrified cab ride to the hospital to find Fon waiting for them, the coolly amused nurses guiding him to a chair as impersonally as someone moving furniture, the squeaking wheel of the gurney carrying his wife and—still unseen—their child into the room Rose refused to let him enter.

  He’d protested, but not very energetically. He’d been fairly certain he would pass out when the big moment came. His own parents had treated biology as a kind of unseen force, something like cosmic radiation; it might be important, but it was better to not look at it too closely. His mother, when he had pressed her for details at the age of eleven or twelve, had described it as undignified.

  But all that was over now. Undignified or not, it had played itself out, with a positive—he mentally erases the word and replaces it with happy—outcome. He is a father, a biological father. He has a son to complement his adopted daughter. Of course, part of the problem is that his only experience as a father had been with a child who could already communicate when she joined them, who could make her wants known and wasn’t shy about doing it, who could take better care of herself than he could. She’d been dirty, unhappy, self-loathing, and morbidly sensitive, but she’d been a person.

  Unbidden, the words of a British king come to mind: presented with his swaddled, screaming heir, the king had nodded approval at the number of fingers and toes and said, “Bring him back when he can talk.”

  He could relate to a person.

  But living with this tiny-fisted, squalling, diaper-filling, bristle-haired whirlpool of need—this is something completely new to him. This is miles off his map. Looking at the baby, he supposes he is in there somewhere, represented obliquely, like one of the smaller states on an election-night tally, but he hasn’t spotted himself yet. He is feeling unnatural, he is feeling superfluous, he is feeling left out.

  And she’d called it—oh, shit, him—Frank. Honoring his own wretched father. To go back to politics for a moment, doesn’t he get a vote?

  He lets out a sigh that ruffles the pages, picks up the pencil, and writes, I feel like I’ve bought something with no guarantee and no return policy. I feel like the three bears must have felt when they found that someone had been eating their porridge and sleeping in their beds, and it turned out to be someone they’d never heard of. What I feel like is an absolute shit.

  And he remembers that two nights ago he had turned off the living room lights and then cracked open the bedroom door, as he had every night since the baby came home. As he was trying to negotiate with the lumps in the sofa, he’d heard Rose laugh. He’d gotten up and tiptoed into the bedroom, and she was on her back, eyes closed, sound asleep, and then she did it again: she laughed in her sleep.

  He leans forward and underlines the words absolute shit.

  Holding her breath without being aware of it, Rose slowly pulls the door open.

  And there he is, all the way across the room, hunched over at the kitchen counter, writing something with a yellow pencil in a hardcover notebook. She can hear the skritch of the lead on the paper. He’s resting his forehead on the fingers of his left hand as the right hand loops its way across the page. Even at this distance, he looks tired, and she knows he’ll wipe all that away, replace it with some semblance of energy, some slightly forced sunburst of pleasure, the moment he knows she’s there.

  So for a long, secret moment she just luxuriates in the feeling of being invisible, and she drinks it all in while it lasts: in the bedroom to her left, her new son, breathing almost inaudibly; to her right and down the hall, behind the door she closes each night, her adopted daughter, probably fighting her way through some uncertain dream of the street. And there—across the long room in front of her, silhouetted against the rain-jeweled glass of the balcony door—hunched over and looking weary, the one for whom she had risked everything, the odd foreigner who’d persuaded her to quit the job she loathed but which supported her family up north, who’d assured her over and over, in the wake of all the men to whom she had lied and who had lied to her, that his love wasn’t bar love but something real that would endure and even deepen and grow, and that her mother, father, and sisters would be cared for. And he’s done it, she thinks, on the strength of a trickle of book royalties, some magazine and newspaper articles, and even—in several tight pinches—a surprising amount of money earned writing catalog copy for some company that sold, he told her, “adventure clothes for people who avoid adventures.”

  She steps all the way into the living room and glances at the couch, minus its cushions, beneath the thin, wadded-up blanket he’d obviously thrown off. It looks seriously uncomfortable. She tries to fight the smile, but she can’t deny that it amuses her. Poor Poke.

  His head snaps around, eyes wide and startled, and she realizes she’s said it out loud.

  “On the contrary,” he says, closing the notebook and resting his arm on it, “I feel pretty rich.”

  “This bed is awful,” she says, indicating the couch.

  “
There are so many things you’re going to have to make up for later. Once that kid can walk and sing bass, I’ll be in paradise.”

  “You make a list?” she says in English, tilting her chin toward the notebook as she crosses the room. “Do I get to see?”

  “You do not.” He pushes the book away as though that will lessen her interest. “I’m making notes for my autobiography. I need to remember all of this, every grim, lumpy detail. In the part I’ve written so far, I have to confess that I come off a lot better than you do.” She comes up behind him and puts her arms around him, bending down so she can rest her chin on top of his head, and he luxuriates in the warm, soft fall of hair over his neck and shoulders.

  “You have . . . surprise me so many time,” she says. Thai lacks a past tense and doesn’t pluralize the way English does, and she’s never felt a need for either when talking to him.

  “All I’ve ever asked for,” he says, “was a chance to have to put up with something really unreasonable so that you’d owe me. Not necessarily something as big as sleeping on that couch, but, you know, something I can take advantage of later on. Emotional money in the bank. Maybe buy a pardon if I lose the remote again.”

  She blows into his hair and says, “You not lose, you hide. I like the room better with teewee over there.”

  “I’d like it better out on the balcony.” The stool squeals as he swivels to face her.

  She warns him: “I haven’t brush my teeth.”

  “One more gold star on my report card. You’ll pay for it later.” He wraps his arms around her waist, and she bends to kiss him. It lasts a little longer than he’d thought it would, but he still feels cheated when she pulls back. He says, “I think Miaow and Edward are finally noodling around a little. When I came in this evening, they were sitting as far apart as the couch allows, laughing like lunatics.”

  “Noodling?”

  “Ummm. Messing around. Romantically. What my mother said her mother called canoodling. Moofky foofky.” He laughs at the expression on her face. “You know what I mean. I’m certain I interrupted something. Edward was as red as Rudolph’s nose.”

  “Rudolph—oh, Rudolph. He give the light to Santa Claus.” She runs her index finger down what she calls his big foreigner nose. “Moofky what?”

  “Foofky. Never mind, very obscure.”

  She says, “Is time, I think.”

  “Time?” He looks startled.

  “She not a baby, Poke. Big girl now.”

  “Like hell,” he says. “A little canoodling, no problem. But within limits.”

  “You have limit? When you are her age?”

  “At her age, I was terrible.”

  She leans up against him. “Ooohhh. Tell me.”

  “Yes,” Miaow says from the hallway, “tell us.”

  “Wow,” Rafferty says, stretching like someone who’s wanted for hours to go to sleep. “Look at the time.”

  “You don’t have a watch,” Miaow says.

  “It’s two-twenty,” he says. “Give or take. I always know. And you should be asleep.”

  “Two-twenty-four,” Rose says, flipping her wrist over. She’s worn her watch with the face on the inside of her wrist for as long as Poke has known her.

  Miaow comes the rest of the way into the room and stakes a claim to her end of it by sitting on the white leather hassock. She’s wearing a faded T-shirt that’s got a sprinkling of pale little abstract ghosts ornamenting its front, courtesy of some over-enthusiasm with a bottle of bleach, and a pair of athletic shorts with Chuck Jones’s Road Runner on the leg. It’s her third pair. She once told Poke she wore them so she could outrun her nightmares. Her hair is standing straight up on one side, looking like it’s been crocheted. “So,” she says, settling in. “When you were my age, what?”

  “When I was your age,” Rafferty says, “I was a boy.”

  “Wow,” Miaow says, “that’s so grandpa. So you were a boy, what does that mean?”

  “When I was your age,” he says, “I knew it was impolite to ask adults questions they didn’t know how to answer. Why are you up at this hour?”

  “The baby wasn’t crying. Woke me up.”

  “Miaow,” Rose says, and Miaow sits back as though someone had swung at her. Rose’s tone has real disappointment in it.

  “Umm,” she says. “I’m sorry?”

  “You have barely come to see him,” Rose says in Thai.

  Miaow says, “I don’t think he misses me.”

  “He can hardly see you at all. He’s still nearsighted. Anyway, you’re practically a stranger to him.”

  “Well, then, he doesn’t miss me.”

  Rose says, “I love both of you, Miaow. It would make me happy if you came in sometimes.”

  Miaow pulls the neck of her T-shirt up over her nose, like an outlaw in a western. Through it, she says, “I will.” Rafferty can barely hear her.

  “Why are you awake?” he says.

  “The play.” She grabs some of the little volcano of hair and tugs at it. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

  “It keeps you awake at night?”

  “No.” She scrubs at her eyes with the heels of her hands. “I go to sleep okay, and then I wake up after some stupid dream, and I feel like something’s wrong. Like something horrible followed me out of the dream and it’s in the room with me. Sitting on my chest. And then I realize what it is. It’s me.”

  “The middle of the night,” Rafferty says. “It’s the most defenseless time.”

  “When I first came to Bangkok,” Rose says in Thai, twirling Rafferty’s stool so she can sit in his lap, “I could get through the day and the nights in the bar, and even the time I spent with customers. But when I woke up in the dark, I was at the bottom of a deep, deep hole. I didn’t want to live.”

  Miaow has pulled the neck of her shirt down to reveal that her lower lip is caught between her teeth. Lately, Rose almost never talks about that time in her life. Miaow says, “What did you do?”

  “I lived,” she says. She grasps the counter’s edge in one hand and swivels the stool back and forth by a few inches. It squeaks. “What was the other choice? It would have been selfish to die. My family needed me.” She ruffles Poke’s hair, something she knows reduces him to putty.

  Clearing his throat, Rafferty says, “You’re nothing when you wake up in the middle of the night.” He pats Rose’s hips a couple of times to get her attention, says, “Up we go,” and crosses the room to the bookshelves he put up in the corner where his desk stands. “All your defenses are gone. You’re a naked, helpless glob of protein without anywhere to hide.”

  “What did you just say?” Rose asks, reclaiming the stool.

  “You tell her,” Rafferty says to Miaow, pulling out a big book and thumbing through it.

  Miaow does the best she can to translate, and Rose starts to laugh.

  “Here,” Rafferty says, “just to let you know that everyone goes through this.”

  He crosses the room and gives her the book, and she looks at it and breaks into laughter. “It’s not this bad.” She holds it up for Rose to see: a woman on her back in bed, one hand thrown up helplessly, with a demon squatting on her chest and a bone-white, ghostlike horse, its nostrils flaring, staring through a gap in the heavy curtains beside the bed.

  “Almost two hundred and fifty years ago,” Rafferty says, “a guy named Fuseli painted it. And he made a lot of them. This thing has been duplicated a million times because everybody instinctively recognizes it. It’s a nightmare, but it shows you why you’re so helpless when fear gets hold of you in the middle of the night. Who’s there to defend you? How sure are you, really, whether you’re awake or asleep? And you, in that room, you don’t even have a window. You’re in the darkest room in the house.” His face lights up. “I know—you can sleep here, on the couch, and I’ll go into—”
/>   “You would, too,” Miaow says. “You’d put me on this collection of lumps and grab my bed—”

  “It’s not much of a bed,” he says.

  “Now you admit it. I’ve been saying it for—”

  She breaks off because Rose has risen quickly, and then they all hear the baby crying.

  “I’ll be right back,” she says, hurrying to the door. “Maybe.” She stops next to Miaow and puts a hand on her shoulder. In Thai, she says, “You can play that part, you silly girl,” and she hurries into the bedroom.

  “You can, you know,” Rafferty says, drifting toward the fatal couch. “You’ve already played it, haven’t you? It’s your story.”

  Miaow ignores the comment and smooths her hand over the open book. “Do you get like this at night?”