Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

I heaved a sigh. I hated these inquisitions. It was his way of leading me to criticism.

“I don’t know. They’re a little out there. I guess I liked them originally, but now they’re sounding lame.” My eyes drifted to the lower half of the lyric sheet. “Now that I look at it, I don’t know what’s going on in the second verse. I was obviously shooting for a double entendre with the word infectious , but maybe that’s too clinical. Yeah, you’re right. The lyrics need work.”

“No, they don’t,” he said with monastic certitude. He took a sip of his coffee, which he’d been consuming in frightening quantities, having swapped a nicotine addiction for a caffeine one. “You’ve got some lyrics here that knock the goddamn wind out of me, man, and they’re carried upon one of the most natural melodies I’ve ever heard from you. I’ve awakened in the middle of the night and heard this song in my head. I feel like I’ve known this song my whole life. My mother could have rocked me to sleep with this song before I even knew what music was. But I swear on my empty grave, if you sing it the way you did on those practice takes, I’m going to cut it from this record and go to court to get you permanently barred from ever playing it again.”

He banged his fist on the table, startling me and sending a tiny brown splash over the brim of his cup. “If we’re going to make an awful album, it’s going to be boldly awful. We will not make one that limps into awfulness, that isn’t even sure if it’s awful.”

Then he pointed at me, a strong finger jutting out of an autocratic fist. “This song deserves better than what I’ve been hearing. You’re not going after it. Go after it! Deliver this song the way it wants to be delivered. Picture something in your head, something you want more than anything else in this life. Some person. Some dream. Some place. You decide, but think about it, hold it right before your eyes. Then sing as if you’re telling that thing how much you want it. You need to convince that thing that you want so bad to give itself to you. You know what that feels like, Teddy, I know you do. There isn’t a beating heart out there that doesn’t, and it’s your job to access that frequency, that cosmic longing that puts all of us in the same leaky goddamn canoe. For the rest of my life—the rest of my life!—I want that desire to drip out of the air every time I hear this song. I’ll hear that desire, I’ll know you speak my language, and I’ll feel a little less alone in this life because of it.”

After that, nothing moved but the ceiling fan, its wood-plastic blades clicking over the control room. At that moment, the isolation booth had never felt more isolating.

Then the music began to flow into the headphones. As I waited to sing, my eyes found Mackenzie sitting on the back of the sofa in brown capri pants and a light-blue shirt with a scoop neckline, her bare feet up on the cushion.

I closed my eyes and pondered Sonny’s words. What was my dream? No simple question for a man about to begin his fifth decade on the planet, an age by which most people had surrendered or at least downsized their ambitions.

When the faces of my bandmates swept through my head, I found myself wondering if this, right here, was it, if this was the thing I wanted more than anything else the world could offer. And I considered what it was that had brought each of my old friends here to sweat out the summer in this dilapidated room. Why had they allowed me to scare them up out of the afternoon of their lives?

With my eyes tightly shut, my neck craned toward the silver microphone, a look of twisted struggle on my face, a voice unknown to me sailed out of my mouth, and I realized that what I wanted more than anything was the wisdom to know what it was I wanted.

In a split second, the song was over. Red-cheeked and drenched, I hazarded a look out into the control room. Warren and Mack stared back at me inscrutably. Jumbo ruptured the stillness by pumping his fist, pointing a fat finger at me, and mouthing “You!”

Sonny was reclining in his chair, his browning coffee cup held to his mouth, his eyes closed. All at once, he wiped his upper lip and leaned into the mic. “You’re done.”

Sonny couldn’t always sermonize competency out of us. When we took up our instruments and played him “Painless Days,” which we all thought was the song most likely to end up under a DJ’s needle, Sonny listened with a doubtful scowl and said, “I don’t see what all the fuss is about.” Decreeing the composition “undercooked,” he ordered me to write him a bridge. I took to the piano and attempted to cure it right then and there. I proceeded to improvise, and Sonny proceeded to shout out words of discouragement like “derivative,” “uninspired,” “beneath you,” and “cut that out,” until it became abundantly clear that my efforts would not soon produce anything that anyone should have to listen to. “It must not be a song yet,” our producer declared, and sent everyone home early.

“Except you,” he said, pointing at me. “Stay and fix it. Bic is gonna want this yeast infection of a studio back eventually.”

As the people I thought were my friends filed out and abandoned me, I cracked open a Snapple from the mini-fridge and started riffing. I tried everything. A twangy little bounce that got too cozy with Conway Twitty. Analog synths that gave sorry birth to a cheeseball “Uh-oh, it’s magic” outtake. Even a jaunty piano that was too much Elton circa ’88 and not enough Elton circa ’73.

A few futile hours later, I threw in the towel. “Must not be a song yet,” I grumbled in my best impression of our leader.

As I locked up, I remembered that Sara had planned on visiting Josie and Wynne’s house that night, as friends were gathering there to welcome their new baby. The couple had recently traveled to Ethiopia to claim their eleven-month-old son, and since they’d been back but a week, Sara had only met the kid through e-mailed photos from Addis Ababa. In all the pictures, the new mothers looked disheveled and thrilled, while the little tyke’s startlingly wide eyes conveyed how deeply confused, but not altogether uncharmed, he was by all this. I decided to meet Sara out there.

The profusion of cars buffering the house forced me to park down the block in the wooded Mount Airy neighborhood. It was a community where people settled and took up residence for generations, where the wishfully hippie or bohemian middle class could live affordably with a front porch and an undersized lawn and still deflect accusations of having moved to the suburbs.

Wynne opened the door and laid eyes upon the scuzzball of dried sweat that stood before her. “Well, holy fucking shit. Look who it is,” she exclaimed.

“Congratulations,” I said. “How’s motherhood?”

“Great so far,” Wynne replied, her flowing fountain of curly blond locks bouncing in step with her head. She was tall and big-boned and seemed to go out of her way to downplay her naturally pretty facial features, as if being conventionally beautiful was somehow sexist—and conventional. “It’s real exciting shit, Teddy.” She cuffed me on the shoulder and added, “You should try it some time.”

As she shuttled me through the house, I spotted decorating choices that betrayed Sara’s thumbprint, like the sconce that was a close cousin of the one in our condo, or the slender vase that had become her trademark.

“Teddy!” I heard Josie’s raspy croak before I saw her step out of the pack of guests congregating in the living room. She held an almond-skinned baby. “Sara didn’t tell me you were coming.” She smeared an affectionate kiss onto my cheek, then tilted her head of spiky hair at the baby. “This is Miguel.”