Deep Cuts

Weird Divide

The three of us planned our respective Christmas visits to be as brief as possible—I was flying home for just three and a half days, a decision my mom found so irrational she made me buy the ticket myself—which left us a solid week after finals to roam around Berkeley, unfettered by schedules. We traveled as a unit with CD wallets in tow, cycling through our roommate-free apartments, sleeping in all the beds. We piled dishes in all three of our sinks to be dealt with on December 23rd, before my ten p.m. red-eye that had come to represent the end of our year. It felt ages away, even as the days passed.

There was an unspoken edict that week to avoid TV, email, anything that felt dry and normal. Often this translated to doing things outside that would be more comfortable indoors. Comfort was low priority. There were also a few spoken rules: share everything; no talk of school or next semester; no working on music. This last one was Zoe’s decree, and it gave Joe the affect of a businessman on holiday, restless at first and then deeply, increasingly relaxed.

One night we cooked an actual dinner and drank no alcohol, the novelty of which was its own thrill, and mapped out a hike for the next day in Tilden Park. In the morning we took a bus north and hiked up to a clearing where trees rolled in peaks and valleys all the way to the horizon. I felt like I was in the Alps. Nothing like this existed anywhere near Indiana. As it became clear that Joe and Zoe were used to seeing comparable or even more impressive vistas, I kept my amazement in check.

We went to bars, of course, empty except for grad students and, one time, my American Literature 1900–1945 professor, who left her table of women in gem tones to come tell me how much she’d enjoyed my final paper on Their Eyes Were Watching God . I asked how she’d known it was mine—there were probably a hundred kids in that class—and she said she’d had the TA point me out. I thanked her awkwardly and turned back to Joe and Zoe, who seemed stunned by the event; it took two pints of beer and a round at the jukebox before they could talk about anything else.

But the day I remember best began with eating sandwiches in the backyard of Joe’s house. We brought out a boom box and the big black stack of our CD wallets. There was no furniture back there, just a rusted-out foosball table in a tangle of extremely overgrown grass. Joe put the boom box on the foosball table, pressed play, and sat ceremoniously in the grass, cross-legged. The sight of him with the grass fanning out around him was bizarre—“Lilliputian,” I’d said, then had to explain Jonathan Swift to them—but we joined him, of course, a triangle of humans in a mess of nature.

We ate our peanut butter and jellies and passed around a carton of milk. Damp earthiness seeped through my jeans. There was an unusual warmth to the sun that day. I leaned back on my hands when I was done with my sandwich and looked at Joe’s house, a brown-shingled beauty that appeared, from this angle, like it might topple any minute. I loved these Craftsman homes of Berkeley, especially the undisturbed, unkempt ones. They were soulful and comfortable and had all the amenities that actually make people happy, like porches and window seats, and none of the things we believed to make us happy, like open-floor plans and living rooms optimized for Super Bowl viewing. They were built for reading and close conversation. Berkeley felt like a glitch in the modern machine, back then, an alternate universe for the chosen few. Maybe this is how everyone feels about their college towns.

“Somebody play the happiest song,” Zoe said.

I scrambled to my feet before Joe could beat me. I had the perfect track, from a compilation I’d found at Amoeba of ’60s sunshine pop, called “To Claudia on Thursday,” with a stony lyric about enjoying the moment. Joe started freaking out at how good it was. We all took off our shoes, working our toes into the matted grass. Zoe found a live worm wriggling in a broken earthenware ashtray.

“So it’s a song about having fun,” Zoe said from her grass-hole as the outro arrived. “Feeling present, hippie shit. Is that happiness?”

“Not really,” Joe said.

“Yes,” I said at the same time. I cleared my throat. “Honestly I think happiness and fun are kinda the same thing, at this point in my life.”

Joe looked betrayed. “How can you say that?”

“Because having fun is new to me. You guys couldn’t understand, you’ve been having fun your whole lives.”

This was embarrassing to say out loud but neither of them reacted. I hadn’t told them certain things about myself, and they seemed to have filled in these blank spaces with lighter brushstrokes. For example, they knew I’d dated that Neil guy from Amoeba, so they assumed we’d had a normal sex life; they didn’t know Neil had left me a semi-virgin, that the sex had been so painful there was probably something anatomically wrong with me. They knew I’d lived in the dorms, but they didn’t know I’d been spectacularly unsuited to communal living, that I’d hauled myself around those brutalist buildings in a high-functioning depression before finding my way to Megan. They knew she and I were close, but they didn’t know our relationship had always felt a bit stiff, like a pair of jeans you can’t wait to take off when you get home. They didn’t know they were the best friends I’d ever had. How can you tell that to people you’ve known only a few months without sounding pathetic?

“Peace, maybe,” Joe said, as a compromise. “The word ‘fun’ just sounds so trivial.”

“I disagree,” I said. “We’re having fun now, and it feels profound.”

“That’s because this is happiness,” he said. “Not just fun.”

“It’s just semantics,” Zoe said. The Ring Finger girls said this all the time: “It’s semantics.” It annoyed me. She stood up and began flipping through the CD wallet for her turn. I tried to think of times in my life when I’d been genuinely happy in a way that didn’t involve fun.

“What about when you were accepted to college?” Joe said—not the first time he’d seemed to read my mind. “What about that professor coming up to our table in a bar and basically calling you her favorite?”

“Okay, yes,” I said. “Those were happy moments. But there’s a dark side to that kind of happiness. There’s a pressure. They feel like the universe saying, ‘Great job, now don’t fuck this up!’ It’s not as pure as the happiness you feel when you’re having fun.”

Joe didn’t want to agree. “But it’s also not as meaningful, right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. It may have been the first time I’d said those words at Berkeley. I liked how it felt.

Zoe played “I Can See Clearly Now,” the version by Jimmy Cliff. Joe and I vocalized a simultaneous ecstasy at the first notes of bass.

“This one is earned happiness,” Joe said during the bridge.

Zoe nodded. “And clarity. You can feel how hard he worked to get here. Like, finally, some bloody clarity.”

I looked at Joe. He was looking at Zoe. Zoe was looking at her hands.

Joe announced his choice before he started playing it: “Everyday” by Buddy Holly. I wondered aloud if it meant something that all three of us had chosen songs from before we were born, and Zoe said happiness was better before Reagan and Thatcher.

I hadn’t heard the Buddy Holly song since my parents’ oldies radio and I couldn’t believe how amazing it sounded. The production was startlingly minimal, fresh; some sort of glockenspiel sounded through the boom box speakers like it was right there in the yard.

“This one is optimism,” I said.

“Right,” Joe said. “The happiness of knowing that happiness is coming.” He glanced at me briefly, then looked down into the grass, suppressing a smile. I felt an eruption of joy in my chest spreading outward so fast it made me dizzy.

We kept going all afternoon, moving up through the decades one by one, building a taxonomy of happiness. The carton of milk lost its nostalgic appeal during Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” when we switched to beer. Zoe got restless in the ’80s and announced she was going home to shower. I remember protesting mightily, somewhat performatively, at this separation—the three of us hadn’t been apart in several days at this point—until she promised with a laugh to be back before dark.

The ’90s were tricky, but I finally found “No Diggity” (“the happiness of knowing exactly what you want,” I said); Joe mined a mini-wallet he kept entirely for the Magnetic Fields, landing on the synthpop ditty “You and Me and the Moon” (“pure, sweet, simple romance”).

For 2000, our brand-new decade, we had only a handful of CDs. It was getting dark—Zoe must have forgotten how early that happened now—and cold in that California way that wouldn’t have been cold if you had proper clothing, but was, because you never did. We moved the boom box to the front porch, where at least we had overhead light and a wide wooden ledge to sit on. Joe brought out a scratchy wool blanket and spread it over our legs.

After much thought, I cued up “Last Days of Disco” from the new Yo La Tengo, a moody, looking-back ballad. Joe was lighting a cigarette as the song began, and he turned, mid-inhale, to look at me. I nodded, and he nodded with me.

“Lost happiness,” I said.

He sent out a long stream of smoke, still nodding, and held the cigarette up to share. I took it for the intimacy, for the moment when my fingers ran up along the backs of his. He turned up the volume until it felt like the whole porch was swallowed in the atmosphere of the song, teetering amid the shuffling brush-drumming and bending guitar notes. The lyrics were about music’s almost supernatural power to make you feel, but only at the whims of memory and experience: a song never made the narrator happy until he danced to it with her, and now when he hears it, much later, it makes him lonely. I had the sensation of my own memory packaging up this moment, absorbing and capturing its every element: the cold smoky air, the side of his leg against mine, the feel of his knuckles under my fingertips.

For his turn, he played “Gravity Rides Everything” by Modest Mouse. I was instantly confused, but I tried to listen carefully, determined not to ruin the moment. I stared into the blanket on our lap. Certainly the song had a positive feel to it.

“The happiness of knowing things will fall into place,” he said during the second verse. “Right?”

The shared cigarette had ended. I shook out the last of the beer from my can into my mouth. Joe was watching me, waiting. “2000 is hard,” I said.

He swore under his breath and returned the track to the beginning, then leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, listening.

“He’s playing with you, when he says things will fall into place,” I explained. “He means because of gravity, because of time. Flesh sags. We fall into the earth.”

Joe straightened up abruptly, clapped his knees on his hands. “Why you gotta be so sure all the time, Percy?” he said.

“But it’s better than floating away, he says!” I could see Zoe coming down the sidewalk. “He sees the beauty in it too! All things must pass!”

Zoe climbed the stoop and sat down next to us, her hair damp. “That’s not exactly happiness, though. More like acceptance.”

“My failure in this moment has been established,” Joe said, stopping the song.

“Let’s go,” Zoe said. “Ethiopian tonight, I got a coupon.”

—

Late that night I caught him breaking the rules. I’d gotten up to go to the bathroom and heard acoustic strumming coming from outside. He was sitting on the porch ledge in his boxers and peacoat, no shirt. The blanket from earlier was over his legs, although most of it had fallen off, and his marbled notebook lay open beside him. He appeared to be reworking the verses of “Funny Strange.”

“I’m telling,” I said from the doorway.

He looked up. “Why didn’t you tell me the new verse sounds exactly like ‘So It Goes’ by Nick Lowe?”

I stepped outside and closed the door, shivering through my pajamas, and tried to remember the song. “Okay, I see what you mean—that sort of lagging, talky, descending melody—”

“It’s pretty obvious, Perce,” he said.

“Are you mad at me?”

“No,” he said shortly. He stared at the page, leaned over his guitar to cross something out. “It hit me as I was falling asleep,” he mumbled. “Just wish I’d known before I spent forty-seven hours getting that recording exactly right.”

“Nick Lowe got a lot of that from ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ anyway,” I said. I ran the verses in my head, hugging myself for warmth. “And ‘The Boys Are Back in Town,’ isn’t that similar?” I remembered, triumphant.

He scoffed. But I could tell he was thinking about it.

“None of those people got sued! Now come back inside before Zoe discovers this flagrant disrespect for the rules.”

He ignored me and started humming a slightly tweaked melodic line, maneuvering it upward in the middle.

I watched him for a minute. I was pretty proud of myself for these two perfect references, but they had apparently won me no gold stars. “Sorry I let you down,” I said petulantly.

“Shut up,” he said, with a hard, dissonant strum, and then sat his guitar to the side and reached for the boom box. “I thought of a better song for 2000.”

I shivered, and he pulled up the blanket, creating a space beside him on the ledge. I sat in spite of the angry strum still ringing in my head. The side of his leg radiated warmth under the blanket.

“It’s called ‘,’?” he said, dropping a burned disc into the tray. “By the Shins. Got this EP at their show for five dollars.”

A voice I’d never heard before began singing us a sweet, languid melody. It sounded a bit like a Beach Boys song, except new, brand-new, I’d never heard anything so new. Another looking-back song, this time a guy recalling a series of late-night strolls with a girl in his youth. The lyrics were blurred by reverb, but I caught the title line: “Far below a furry moon, our purposes crossed / The weird divide between our kinds.”

Then it was over: a wispy poof of a song, under two minutes. He pressed stop. I almost asked what happened to the rest of it, but I forced my mouth shut.

He leaned back against a wide, wooden pillar. “Zoe told me she told you,” he said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear. I twisted to look at him. He was staring above my head, at the porch light. “Do you think we’re being ridiculous?”

“No,” I said, then realized I needed to say more, to explain why not. As if I knew anything. “I think…” I cast my mind over the song we’d just heard, then over all the songs of the day, but the only line I could find was by Stevie Nicks, and so obvious I almost didn’t use it. “I think you’ve been afraid of changing because you’ve built your life around her.”

His gaze dropped back onto me.

“And same with her,” I added.

He squeezed his eyes shut suddenly, hard, as if experiencing some sharp pain. His lashes wettened.

“It’ll be okay,” I said quickly. “Time makes you bolder.”

He opened his eyes, and there it was: my gold star. It was beaming out of him, the relief, the gratitude, a wash of wonder—aimed not just at Stevie for writing these lines that so gracefully justified and normalized his inertia, but also at me, for plucking them out of my brain and tossing them to him like a life raft.

“Anyway, ‘’ is perfect,” I said. “The happiness of connection, right?”

He smiled. “Right.”

He played it again and we sat listening together. During the second verse he leaned forward and the entire sides of our bodies were touching—thighs, hips, my left elbow resting in the curve of his forearm. Then the song ended and the moment became instantly illicit, embarrassing: we had passed back over the divide. He jerked away.

That’s why the song was so short, I decided—because connection, like memories, came in the briefest of flashes.

He stood and picked up his guitar. I felt a bizarre urge to yank it from his hands and gently toss it over the edge of the porch, into the weeds below. But I just followed him silently back into the house. He disappeared up the staircase to the room he was sharing with Zoe and I crawled into his roommate’s bed downstairs, under a fraying quilt that smelled of mothballs.

I replayed the day in my mind as I fell asleep, the dreamy serenity of that last song swirling in my veins. How very weird it was, the divide between Joe and me—how spiky one moment and swampy the next, then poof, just a calm, clear lake. I wondered if that was what made us feel so close sometimes. If the weirder the divide, the sweeter it was to cross.