Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

“Did Josie do all these?” I asked, marveling.

“And Wynne. They were reluctant to hang them, but I insisted.”

I watched Sara adore her friends’ art, her lips pursed in placid wonder.

“They’re amazing,” I said.

“Get closer. The detail is staggering. You can really lose yourself in them.” She pointed to a large rectangular piece farther down the wall. “I think that one’s my favorite.”

It was a silhouette of a solitary tree on a hill, the evening sky behind it rendered in swirling layers of orange, yellow, pink, and purple. A circular mirror was positioned high in the right corner to signify the moon.

“This is what you do when you’re hanging out at their studio,” I said, as much to myself as to her.

Sara nodded weakly. “Sort of. They do it much better, obviously.”

It wasn’t obvious to me. I’d seen her mosaics and had always felt some kind of power emanating from them. I’d seen my reflection in the tiny mirrors, I’d been swept into the meticulously ordered randomness of the tiles. For someone who’d always had to pretend to love art, it came surprisingly easy to me to love Sara’s.

“You’re a good artist, Sara. And I really like that I live with one.”

A concealed smile glowed just beneath her cheeks. “Me too.”

We hung around the party for another half hour or so, and Sara didn’t let go of my hand the entire time. As we were leaving, Wynne walked us to the door and said, “I sure hope the rest of these jackasses follow your lead. We’re trying to get Miguel on a fucking sleep schedule here.”

Having consumed two glasses of wine, Sara declared herself unfit for the wheel and decided to drive home with me. We strolled down the street to where my car sat cradled under a curbside beech tree. Before I could turn the ignition, Sara reached out, gripped my face with two hands, and pulled me into a long kiss. The taste of her mouth, so eager, so present, was almost unrecognizable to me.

Her hands disappeared, and soon I felt the button of my jeans unhook and my zipper being yanked down.

“Whoa,” I blurted out. “Here?”

She looked at me, wild and slinky through her mane of black hair.

“We’re at a baby shower,” I said.

She leaned over and I felt her tongue in my ear. “It’s not a baby shower.”

As she probed for the fly of my boxers, I peered through the windows. “I don’t know about this. Half your office will be coming through that door in five minutes.”

“So?” came her defiant reply. And just as I scolded myself—What kind of musician are you?—I realized it was too late to unshame her. With a sigh, she fell back into the passenger seat, a blend of depletion and bewilderment on her face. She was the bull on hind legs in the painting. Okay, tell me again how I ended up here.

“I don’t know what you want us to be,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t know if you want us to be.”

For most of the drive, she sat in silence with her elbow angled against the door. Passing fits of light swept through the car and corrupted the darkness inside. As we exited the highway and glided through the city streets, which were now hissing under us with a smoky sheen of light rain, she spoke quietly to the window. “I got divorced today.”

I felt a sudden clenching in my chest.

“Jesus. Are you okay?”

She said nothing and leaned her forehead against the cool glass, oblivious to the high-rises, brownstones, and occasional late-night dog walkers gliding past. As for me, I didn’t know exactly what I was feeling. Fear. Relief. The disquiet of a belated revelation.

“You should’ve told me,” I said. “I could’ve come with you.”

I, who in her eyes didn’t know what I wanted us to be, didn’t know if I wanted us to be.

“It’s okay,” she said, her breath shaky but rising with hopefulness. Her mind was drifting back to the lawyer’s office where they’d signed the papers today. Drifting to Billy and away from me.

“Listen—it’s not enough to be good. We have an obligation to be interesting, to not be obvious.”

That afternoon, Sonny was all up in Jumbo’s grill. It was validating whenever another human being reprimanded or otherwise lost his or her patience with our guitar player.

“We know you’re technically proficient,” Sonny went on, as Jumbo blinked out at him from the recording booth. “Who cares? Technical proficiency does nothing for me. You’re in my studio because of your ability to make choices with that there Strat, because of this instinct of yours about what should be done, not just what can be done. I’m not hearing that decision making on this song. You’re boring the shit out of me. What you’re playing me I can find in any old McDonald’s.” He pronounced it MacDonald’s . “Don’t bring fast food into my studio. I want a Moroccan market at midnight! Take me to an outdoor churrascaria on the beaches of Rio and serve me something that sizzles!”

Jumbo began to nod, his fleshy face ballooning into a cocksure grin. “I totally get it now. You’re looking for a Latin vibe.”

Warren and I decided that was a good time for a walk.

“Any word from Mack?” he asked, as we stood at the counter of the coffee shop down the street. Our bass player had traveled back to Pittsburgh for a follow-up visit with her oncologist.

“Not yet,” I said. “But she wasn’t worried. She says she’s been feeling like a million bucks.”

I knocked twice on the counter and Warren held up two crossed fingers.

“Look, I can’t believe you talked any of us into doing this,” Warren said. “But Mack? She had the best reason to pass.”

“Or maybe the best reason not to,” I suggested.

We dropped into the chrome fifties-era diner chairs and creaked backward from the Formica table. The dull murmurs from the two or three other patrons afforded our eardrums a much-needed respite. We lazed at the table, staring out the window.

“Going well so far, wouldn’t you say?” Warren ventured.

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” I said tepidly. Confidence was an emotion well out of reach for someone of my particular station.

“You’re aware of the irony here, right? Your optimism is always cautious, your enthusiasm always guarded. Yet you’re the songwriter, the one we rely on for passion, for fire!”

“I got fired up over my so-called legacy, did I not?”

“A colossal abuse of the word, I admit, but I’m clearly overpaying my penance for that phone call.”

He took a slow sip of coffee, then leaned back professorially. “You ever hear of Henri Rousseau?”

“Sure. The French artist. The guy who painted jungles.”

“I teach my students about him. We study a lot of his work— The Dream , Tiger in a Tropical Storm , Eve and the Serpent —and we talk about primitivism, painting in the naïve style. Rousseau takes you into the forest through a child’s eyes. It’s dense and exotic, there are wild animals and fleshy naked women, all painted with bold colors, all seductive and fantastical.”

I sipped as the art teacher evangelized.

“Here’s my question to you,” he said. “Do you know which actual jungles he was painting? Which jungles Rousseau visited for inspiration?”

I shook my head.

“Not a one,” Warren answered. “Henri never left France. This man, famous for painting the world’s lush jungles, never actually saw one. The botanical gardens in Paris were probably the closest he ever got.”

“What are you trying to say? What’s the big lesson here, teach?”

“I’m just talking, Teddy. I’m not trying to teach you anything,” he said with an oblique deadpan. “But sometimes there’s a lot of real estate between a man and his legacy—wouldn’t you say?”