Элисон Скотч: The Song Remains the Same

“But he wasn’t,” she says, the conversation flailing instantly from where he intended. She thinks she might cry for a beat but then realizes that her sadness has already passed. She wants to consider the wedding, the simple white gown she saw in the photos and how euphoric she looked. But without the background to their love and their history, she feels like he’s reading her a story about someone else’s life. There was something for a moment—in the melody when he sang, in the lyrics—that maybe resonated, but like everything else, that’s gone now, a flicker that has been extinguished.

Peter’s sucked back into the reality of the moment. He narrows his eyes at her as he intuits her meaning and shrugs.

“You’re here, aren’t you? Doesn’t that mean something?”

“Who knows what it means?”

“I think it means that we’re supposed to be together. To do great things.”

Easy for you to say, she thinks.

“That cliff, you don’t think it’s a metaphor?”

“A metaphor?” he apes. “Like, for us?”

“Yes, like for us,” she says. “Our marriage. Your cheating.”

He sighs and rubs his nose, his wedding band tarnished but still catching the dim hint of the overhead lights. Indira, Nell’s mother, had told him yesterday, when they were refilling their sour coffee in the hospital cafeteria, that she, too, thought Nell seemed different since the crash, that—despite the physical damage—she somehow seemed more buoyant, less controlling than she used to be. Indira had patted his right shoulder and said, “Hang in there,” like he had any choice in the matter. “She’ll come around. I’ll talk to her,” she’d said, though Peter didn’t add that Indira talking to Nell, in just about any context, was often among the worst ideas. He didn’t have many options here, so he’d gulped down a bitter swallow of coffee and nodded his okay.

As if intuiting his thoughts, Nell gives him an out now, skips the conversation about cliffs and affairs and how their relationship may well have plunged off the side of the mountain and shattered into tiny, untraceable splinters.

“Forget the wedding, forget the great things about it,” she says. “Tell me one thing in your life that you’ve already done that’s a great thing.” She thinks of her promise to herself, to find her own greatness.

He stumbles, the question catching him off guard.

“A great thing? Jesus…” He shifts his watch around his left wrist, something to do, a way to buy himself some time.

“Okay, I’ll make it easier,” she offers. “Let’s start with something basic: What do you do in real life? Would you consider that a great thing?”

He hesitates because before, before she would have judged him for this. Judged him because she was the one with the gift, the ear, the aptitude. Even though she abandoned it and only played for him, or with him, in their finest—and rarest—of moments anymore. When they first met, it was all the time. It was their thing—guitar or piano late into the evening, the music the thread that bound them together. So she knows or she knew. Knew that he would never have what she did.

He inhales and says: “I write music. Commercial jingles.” He reaches for the remote, feeling his fingers shaking, and flips on the TV. A truck commercial with a country music riff is playing on that cable station she always has on. “Like that.” He gestures toward it. “That’s the type of thing I write.” Then he flicks the TV right back off.

“That’s not really a great thing,” she says, and he holds his breath. Then she laughs, and he can tell that she’s joking, not because she’s mocking him but because, well, it’s decidedly not a great thing.

“No.” He laughs, too. “It’s not. But it pays okay. And I like it. For now.” He doesn’t bring up Ginger. That she sits in the office two doors down from him and that they produce nearly 80 percent of their music together. He doesn’t mention that Rory had been the one to tell Nell of the indiscretion—she had heard from a friend of a friend—and that this only added to the pile of their—both Rory’s and Peter’s—problems with Nell. He doesn’t say that the last time he and Nell spoke of his work—four months ago—she threatened him with a meat mallet in their kitchen and then kicked him out of the apartment for good. Their one drunken interlude nine weeks back—he assumed she was still on the pill, but perhaps she’d given that up, too—notwithstanding. Even though he has now realized that of course he wasn’t in fucking love with Ginger! Of course he never should have looked twice (or three times) when she leaned low (then lower) in that scoop-neck top over the mixing board. Jesus Christ! Of course he’d give his left nut to have a take-back.

No, he doesn’t bring any of that up.

“Still, though, it’s not the stuff on which dreams are built,” Nell says. “Commercial jingles. Who knew there was such a job?”

“No, it’s true. My legacy will hopefully be something greater than having written the jingle for Pizza Hut,” he concedes.

“So you don’t have your one great thing, then?”

He pauses, wondering how far he can push this, push her, push their bond. He feels her equivocating, trying not to like him but trying to like him all the same, giving him a little rope, whereas in the past, she would have simply knotted it into a noose and cavalierly tied it over his neck. Maybe Indira was right: maybe she’s returned to him a little changed, like her reset button was jiggered in the crash.

He decides to go for it. She doesn’t remember all the carnage, after all. Doesn’t remember the things they’ve said to each other, how Ginger ruined them. Well, if he were being totally honest, really, how he ruined them—though for a long time, and even still now, part of him thinks that Nell shares some of the blame, too. If she did remember—if she could remember—he’d never have gone for it because she’d never have gone for it, either.

She wasn’t even speaking with him when the crash occurred. He got the phone call from Rory about the accident—she was fleeing Giants Stadium and he could barely make her out over the crowd—oh god, pack some things and meet her at the airport, she said. He didn’t even comprehend quite what she meant. And then all of a sudden, he got it: bam—his wife, who, by the way, hates him down to his core, is dead. Only it turns out she’s not dead. He finds this out six hours later, and swears, upon hearing this undead news, that there is nothing he won’t do to remedy his marriage.

So this is why he pushes it now. This is what he’s been through. This is what he’s learned.

“Maybe you can be my something great,” he says, hoping she won’t make fun of his sincerity. Before all of this, she had no time for sentimentality, even when he was wooing her, but now, perhaps she will. “Maybe I’ve been working up to this, and now you, fixing you, helping you, proving to you that I am a better man, maybe that’s my something great.”

She hesitates for a beat, then another, and he knows that this can fall either way. He watches the clock in the hallway through the glass window, the second hand looping a full circle once and then again. Finally, he sighs, thinking she has fallen back to sleep, so he pushes himself from the chair, its legs squeaking in reply. His hand is on the metal knob of the door when she opens her eyes, and as if he can hear this, he turns and meets them.

“Stay,” she says. “For now.”