I Knew You'd Be Lovely Part 10

"Deb?" No answer. Zeb eyeb.a.l.l.s the room-service tray she's left on the floor, where there's a linen napkin with a triangle of steak peeking out.

"See? Carnivore," he whispers, just as Deb opens the door. She's wearing a silky green dress, and her lips have that magazine-ad sheen. Deb's pus.h.i.+ng fifty but could pa.s.s for thirty-five. Zeb's pus.h.i.+ng fifty but could pa.s.s for sixty.

"Well, h.e.l.lo," she says to me. She doesn't look at Zeb.

"h.e.l.lo, beauty," I say. We kiss each other on the cheek as I enter, and the door shuts behind us, leaving Zeb out in the hallway. I squeeze Deb's hands. "Hold that thought," I say.

Zeb is frozen where I left him. "I can't do it," he says. "She's too toxic. I don't think I can be in the same room with her."

I am a grown man, thirty-nine years old, from a seventh-generation Southern family. But I am not proud. I drop to my knees and gaze up at him.

"You promised me you would deliver," I say.

Zeb reaches into his coat pocket, pulls out one of those miniature booze bottles they give you on airplanes, and tilts it back. Then he lifts me by my armpits, and we go in.

The three of us settle around a coffee table where Deb has set out a ceramic pot and two teacups. No one says anything; Zeb and Deb have yet to make eye contact. From my backpack I pull out some sheets of paper and hand each of them a pencil.

"So," I say. I hold my pencil purposefully, as if to set an example. I've never been much of a leader-"Born Follower" was my hit song from 1998-but I know I'm the captain of this doomed misadventure. Captain McGlue.

"I thought we'd try to write something hysterically funny, but also heartbreaking, with some unexpected tenderness, maybe toward the end. But not at all maudlin. That rhymes."

"Jumping Jesus!" says Zeb. His face has an expression of such profound disappointment that for a second, he reminds me of my father. I flip over the page on which I've written: Exact nature of hilarity yet to be determined.

"What you need to do at the outset is try to write the worst horses.h.i.+t you possibly can," he says.

Debra-Lynn lifts her bone white teacup and takes a sip. "And you just might succeed," she says. Her lips form a perfect polite-society smile.

Zeb glares at me. His face says mutiny. My face says mercy. It says: Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. It says: All right, I'll name the kid Zebulon.

"Some people build entire careers," Zeb says, "out of inventing new cliches. Scarce few are truly original." He's looking at me, but speaking to Deb.

Deb sets down her teacup. "Originality is just a sign of not enough information," she says. She's also looking at me. They have yet to look at each other.

"They can say what they want about me," says Zeb, "but they'll never say I pandered to the marketplace."

"Ha!" says Deb. "This from the man who wrote 'An Oddness of Ducks' and a song about a graveyard for roadkill?"

"Are you suggesting that a children's song about interesting plural nouns was pandering to the marketplace?" Now he's looking at her.

She looks at him, too. "I'm saying that in some cases, originality is hard to come by. Not much rhymes with flaccid."

"As usual, my cherub, you are fantastically misinformed. Acid, placid, Hasid. And that's just off the top of my head-"

"Okay!" I say, slapping my thighs. "Good that we're thinking about rhymes. That's an excellent place to start." But the floodgates have been opened, and Deb cuts me off.

"Walt, do you know the moment I realized the enormity of my misjudgment in marrying Zeb? It was on our honeymoon. We were in Mexico, out to dinner at a four-star restaurant, and in between the entree and dessert, over candlelight, the man seated to your right told me how much better the world would be if women weren't allowed to vote. You may think I'm kidding. I am not. That's the sort of thing this man-if we can even call him that-thinks is appropriate to say to his new bride. I should have up and left right then."

Zeb hops to his feet. "You always take that out of context! I was trying to make a point about rationality. Women let their emotions cloud things. That's all I was saying."

"On our honeymoon," Deb repeats. She's moving her hand in a flurried way that suggests she'd be holding a cigarette, if she hadn't given up smoking ten years ago.

Zeb pulls out his Pall Malls. He never gave up smoking. Deb turns to him in disgust. "You know you can't smoke those in here."

Zeb lights up, takes a drag. "Darling, if you give up smoking, drinking, and loving, you don't actually live longer. You just feel like you do."

"Make him stop," she says to me, "or I'll leave."

"Let her go!" Zeb cries. "I wrote all the songs. She mixed the drinks. Go on, ask her. She'll tell you." He takes another Smirnoff out of his pocket-it's as if he has a clown car of them in there-and swallows its contents in one swig. Deb stares at me as he begins listing songs. " 'Crazy in the Good Way'-mine. 'Gin and Tonic for the Soul'-mine. 'Lame Duck Boyfriend'-mine. 'The Big Bang of My Life.' 'Born to Be Kissed.' 'The Last Ice Cube in h.e.l.l.' 'Everything But Married.' Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine."

Deb stands up. "I'm leaving," she says. She turns to Zeb. "Way to come through for your friend."

I'm about to formulate a plea involving the souls of my dead ancestors when I have an idea. "Which one of you wrote 'Mistake'?" I say. Neither of them answers. Zeb stubs out his cigarette; Deb stands where she is. "You don't remember? Your most popular song, and you don't know which one of you wrote it?" I open Zeb's guitar case, take out his Gibson, and for lack of any better ideas, start to sing.

"Don't miss our fights, don't miss our yelling.

Don't miss your cooking or your jokes.

Don't miss the lies you were always telling, Or spending weekends with your folks.

"But do I wish I'd never met you?

Is regret what this song's made of?

In spite of all the pain it gets you, It's never a mistake to love."

I stop. "Now, can either of you stand there and honestly say you wish you'd never met?"

"Yes," they answer in unison.

Zeb squints at me incredulously. "You don't think we actually believed the c.r.a.p we wrote, do you?"

Deb is standing by the door. "I did," she says. "Some of it, anyway. It wasn't all a lie for me, like it was for you."

"Oh, for G.o.d's sake, it wasn't all a lie for me! You just love to start in, don't you? You got so hysterical at the end, and I never knew where it came from."

"Well, your being a messed-up impossibly arrogant raving lunatic may have been a factor."

"Out of nowhere, you became this completely different person. Constantly insecure and suspicious."

"There's only one thing that makes a woman suspicious: a man who's fooling around."

"Do you hear the flawed logic in that statement?"

"I'm not talking about logic!"

"That's your problem!"

My cell phone rings. It's Catherine. "Guys, I have to take this call," I say, but they're too busy hurling insults to care. I wait until I'm out in the hall to flip open the phone.

"Have they killed each other yet?" Catherine asks.

"It's unclear whether they're going to kill each other or kill me."

"Maybe that's all they need-a common enemy."

"Well, they've got one." I pause, then figure I might as well come out with it. "There's something I need to ask you," I say, and tell her about Zeb's baby-name idea.

"But I thought we could name him Rufus, if it's a boy," she says. "After James Agee."

"Sweetie, you don't name someone after a person's middle name."

"Why not?"

"You don't want him to start life in the middle of something, do you? He'll get there soon enough."

"Let's not talk about names till we get through the first trimester," she says. "Besides, I found a quote for you-for Zeb and Deb. It's from The Prophet. Hold on, here it is, I've got it: When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that you are weeping for that which has been your delight. Isn't that beautiful?"

"It is," I say. "But I just tried the country-western version a minute ago. It didn't work." On the other side of the door, I hear the sound of breaking gla.s.s. "I'll catch you later, sweets. I've got to go."

The Prophet. That's Catherine for you. The summer we met, we dropped acid together in a barn after cras.h.i.+ng a party in Culpeper. She was visiting from California.

"Isn't it funny," she said, wiggling her fingers, "that we have bodies?" Indeed, it seemed hilarious. She ran her heel up my s.h.i.+n and told me she was editing a collection of poems t.i.tled While We've Still Got Feet. She was lying on her back in a white sundress, surrounded on all sides by fire-yellow straw. I remember becoming increasingly aware of an electricity all around us, as if the hay were somehow waiting to be trans.m.u.ted into gold, if only I knew the right words. At the same time, I had another feeling: I wanted to crawl up Catherine's skirt. I put my head down and had a profoundly contrarian response to LSD: I fell asleep. When I woke up, she was laughing.

"Your snoring is like the sound the world will make," she said, "when it's coming to an end."

"I have allergies," I said. "And I'm surrounded by hay." But she didn't seem to care; she was having too much fun: eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with amus.e.m.e.nt, bits of golden straw flecking her dress.

When I open the door, Zeb's waving his arms as if trying to direct an emergency crash landing.

"What about the surprise party I threw for your fortieth birthday?" he says.

"Surprise," says Deb, "is inherently hostile."

He turns to me. "She threw the china at me! Everything's a cliche with her, not just her lyrics!"

"Let's ask Walt," Deb says, and immediately I think: Let's not. She steeples her fingers. "True or false: If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing for television."

Zeb bounces on his toes. "It's so obvious! And he'd have a blog, too."

"You're such an a.s.s," says Deb.

I don't know what to say. All I can think is: What if Catherine and I end up like this? Zeb and Deb loved each other once. Then they got married. Poor Catherine; I'm going to break her heart. I sit on the floor and bury my face in my hands.

"Walt, honey? Are you crying?" Deb drops to my level.

Zeb squats, too. "Everything okay there, buddy?"

"No," I mumble with my face still in my hands. "Everything is not okay. As you can see." They've stopped yelling, and for the first time all day, I have their undivided attention. I feel a twinge of conscience, but I ignore it.

"Catherine's sick," I say. "She lost the baby."

"Oh, G.o.d," Deb says softly. "Catherine's pregnant?"

"Was pregnant," Zeb says.

"And I lied to her," I say. "I told her I'd be on the first plane out tomorrow morning, and that she shouldn't worry, we were almost finished here anyway."

"I'm so sorry," Deb says. "Is there anything we can do?"

"As a matter of fact, there is. Do you think we could try to get one song written before they throw us out of this place? One song?"

We rea.s.semble around the coffee table. I pull out my stack of paper and again pa.s.s it around. We find, to our surprise, that tragedy has united us, given us strength of purpose, the way a martyr's death galvanizes the troops. But we still don't know what to write about.

Zeb steals a glance at what Deb has scribbled and recoils in horror. " 'Faded freesia'? What the h.e.l.l kind of lyric is 'faded freesia'?"

"They're flowers, idiot," Deb says. "Beautiful, delicate flowers."

"No one knows what freesia looks like."

"Anyone who cares knows."

"No one cares!"

"Freesia sounds foreign, doesn't it, Walt? And freezing. Foreign and freezing, like Belgian endive. And what are you going to rhyme it with? With rose, you've got nose, grows, throws, blows."

"You haven't written a line, and already your lyric is disgusting."

"Guys, can we maybe find an image that isn't a flower?" I say. "There must be one."

"The trouble with this a.s.signment is, we lack a subject," Deb says.

Zeb takes her pencil from her and props his paper against his knee. "When in doubt, write what's right in front of you," he says. But what's right in front of us? Broken hotel china, a train-wrecked marriage, one final, desperate attempt to recapture a glory long gone. So that's what we write about. By the time we're finished, we know it's good.

"Hallelujah! Let's eat," Zeb says. But within minutes, we're arguing over where to go. It's amazing: While we're working on the song, Zeb and Deb are cordial to each other, even cooperative. But as soon as we put the pencils away, the old animosity returns. It reminds me of the famous Christmas truce of 1914, where those English and German soldiers on the Western Front sang carols together before they resumed shooting one another. And it's giving me major flashbacks to my parents' own ill-fated marriage, which they stuck out for four decades, quietly hating each other all the while.

"You two are on your own," I say. "If you were together for twenty years and can't share a table for twenty minutes, I can't help you."

I go back to my room, lock the door, and lie down on the bed with my arms and legs stretched out in every direction. We got the song written. I can't believe it. I almost feel as if I could crank out another song right here, right now, but that would require getting up, and it's much too blissful being splayed out like this. A buddy of mine back in Virginia, a splendid hipster named Marcellus, recently had me sing backup on a song he wrote called "Star Position." "When you're single, you can sleep in the star position" is the chorus. I a.s.sume he didn't write it just for me-just to taunt me, that is, because he knows how much I don't want to get married, but also how much I don't want my kid to be born illegitimate.

I just wish I didn't feel so trapped. It's not that we're not pro-choice; Catherine even volunteered at Planned Parenthood for a year before she got her first job in publis.h.i.+ng. But when the decision was hers to make, this is what she chose. Oh, and I was the one who forgot to buy condoms that night, and also the one who wanted to have s.e.x anyway. Although it's true: Catherine is the one aching to get married and start a family. Among her mother's last words to her were: "If you really want to meet a man and settle down, why in G.o.d's name are you living in San Francisco?"

In a way, her mother helped bring about her wish. It was because Catherine wound up spending so much time in northern Virginia, taking care of her, driving her to chemotherapy and all that, that our long-distance affair had a chance to take root. When her mother died, Catherine stayed. That was five years ago, and it didn't take us long to go through her small inheritance. Catherine doesn't make much working at a boutique publisher that acquires only about three t.i.tles a year, and I'm a good-for-nothing, washed-up, so-called singer-songwriter. Or I was, until this afternoon. Now not only do I have the song, but the backstory of the celebrity reunion that produced it is a publicist's fairy dust. Maybe Zeb and Deb could even be prevailed upon to get up onstage and sing it with me: "We've Got a Great Future Behind Us."

I wake a few hours later with a start, but there's nothing there. My heart's racing, and I've been sweating in my sleep. I walk over to the suitcase that's open on the luggage rack like an inhuman maw, reach into the side pocket, and pull out the box. Even the box is beautiful, black and velvety, like a night sky housing a lone star-a star so perfect, you only need one. It was Marcellus who told me about the p.a.w.nshop on Crenshaw I went to after checking in this morning. I entered with my prize possession in tow: a tenor saxophone that had been my father's and was once owned by the late, great Coleman Hawkins. I hoisted the case onto the counter and watched the owner try to hide the frisson he got when I announced what it contained.

"Well, b.u.t.ter my b.u.t.t and call me a biscuit!" said a customer who'd overheard me speak of the sax's provenance. He was an old black man in a tweed jacket who, unlike the owner, had no reason to mute his enthusiasm. The owner was a tall man named Fred. When I asked why his shop was named Impermanence, he told me he was a Buddhist. Devout. Each time he handed me a ring and I stared at its facets, trying to see if I could envision my future among them, the old man in the tweed jacket would catch his breath. "Oh, she'll like that one. She's bound to like that one!" he'd say.

Now I'm holding the one I hope she'll like. It's beautiful, and simple, because Catherine is simple-in the largest, finest way. Not like me. I envy people like her, who are so sure of what they want. I stare at the ring, and think: Even though taking this leap isn't something I'm certain I want to do, it's something she wants to do, and it's something I can do for her, as a way of giving to her, a way of loving her.