Deep Cuts

You Said Something

You Said Something

Labor Day weekend I returned to my apartment for the first time in weeks. Raj had decided to visit a friend in Boston for the long weekend, and his roommate was back: summer was officially over. As predicted, Raj made an awkward show of being unbothered by my attending the wedding, and I avoided mentioning the borrowed dress and lipstick.

Sunday I took two subways to a hotel on the edge of Brooklyn. The lobby had tufted couches and lots of those lightbulbs with the filaments showing. Nobody stopped me, so I rode the elevator up to Joe’s room, 601. I felt like someone was going to accuse me of wearing a stolen dress. I could count the number of times I’d been in a hotel on one hand, and they had all been Holiday Inns or Best Westerns.

When he opened the door in his wedding best I couldn’t hide my shock at how good he looked. I coughed. Had it been that long? Was he always this tall? Had I ever seen him in a suit?

“Perce,” he said, and rested his head against the doorframe. There was some product in his hair making his curls pile higher. The eyebrows at attention, two black rainbows.

“Hi.”

“You look so good,” he said, his breath catching on the last word.

“It’s called Prada,” I said, holding out the fabric of the skirt so he could see its rich texture. “It makes you feel feminine and powerful, according to the girl I borrowed it from. Fashion is her music.”

He lifted the tip of his slim black tie. “H he had been clear, in a logistical email he’d sent the day before, that we were to attend the whole thing.

“Should we go?”

He nodded. But his hand moved from my shoulder to the back of my neck, under my hair. Now the eyebrows were angling toward each other in a way I didn’t remember ever having seen before. He pulled me into the room and the door closed behind us.

“I’m ready,” he said.

I felt disoriented to the point of dizziness. He bent down until our faces were touching, his nose lying alongside mine. He smelled like shaving cream and toothpaste. “I have a boyfriend,” I said.

“Fuck him,” he said. “I’m your boyfriend.”

I tipped my mouth into the kiss. I couldn’t stop myself, I was entirely flooded. The kissing was so good as to be instantly unsatisfying, a ladder up to a whole new level of longing. I pulled off his tie, then his shirt. He unzipped my dress so it pooled at my feet and he almost made me come right there, with his finger, though it was mostly the sight of his dipping shoulder as he worked—the stretching tendons in his neck, a small mole on the knobby end of his collarbone, this totally new view of his body—that turned me on so fast. All I wanted was more, everything, and maybe that’s how I became a person who has an affair in a hotel room—maybe it was the sheer relief of the fact that I wanted it.

We fell on a wide, square bed, sending a chocolate mint sailing off a pillow. He said he loved me, which did not come as a surprise; of course Joe loved me, of course I loved him. But hearing him say it as he sank inside me made me hysterically happy.

Then it was happening. For the first few seconds he stayed very still. The pain I remembered was mostly but not entirely absent.

“This good?” he asked softly. His eyes were so close they nearly filled my field of vision. One of his curls came loose, a shellacked brush on my forehead.

“It’s you,” I said. It was all I could think: This was Joe, this was real. He lifted his head and I saw a small smile. And then the pain disappeared, bowled over by a pleasure that felt like nothing less than the secret of the whole insane universe.

Afterward we lay on the bed on our backs, laughing a little, looking back and forth from the ceiling to each other. I felt blown out now, blown up, like I might see bits of my brain splattered on the walls.

He pulled himself up to look at the digital clock on the nightstand—I watched his abs working, small folds of skin over muscles, surprisingly tanned—then fell back down. “We missed the ceremony and half the cocktail hour,” he said. “Do you want to come with me now? Or join me later for dinner?”

I panicked at the idea of being alone with my thoughts, which I knew would turn to Raj. Legs wobbling, I stood up and put the dress back on, reapplied Nomi’s lipstick. The room, I noticed now, was cold and modern, all right angles and gunmetal gray. Once his suit was back on, he pulled a CD from the pocket and handed it to me.

“The last one I burned you is out of date,” he said.

I winced. “Sorry,” I said, with a look of what I hoped was genuine apology. The CD wouldn’t fit in Nomi’s tiny purse so I left it on the desk.

We made it to the roof in time for cocktails. The humid air and hanging lights reset my mood, like falling back into a good dream after briefly waking. I mingled surprisingly easily both with and without Joe. It helped that I didn’t know anyone; I was just the wedding singer’s date in a killer dress, anonymous and intriguing. A quality sound system played a loud, excellent playlist, 90 percent contemporary indie and 10 percent “You Can Call Me Al.” I learned that the bride and groom were New Yorkers who loved music festivals and had tech jobs that allowed them to work from anywhere. They’d spent the summer floating around Europe and were “obsessed” with Caroline. I hated them on principle, but happily partook of their open bar.

After a while I peeled off to stand at the railing, watching dusk settle over Brooklyn, smiling behind my bushy mint garnish. I remember deciding I would be happy to stand here all night, I would be happy to stand here forever, on the roof of room 601. I kept thinking of how different the same act could feel, depending on the whims of desire: a revelation that felt obvious, embarrassing to admit at my age. But nobody had ever told me this. Nobody had even implied it to me. When sex had been presented positively, it was always a rational decision—“you’ll know when you’re ready,” “wait for the third date, fourth is too late”—all those TV scenes of leg shaving and exfoliating. There was nothing rational about it. Not if you wanted it to feel good.

Joe came up behind me and kissed my neck. I angled it to improve his access, a thrill shooting down my spine. The new Spoon single bounced over the chatter and laughter. Across the roof, amid a group of people gathered around the black-tableclothed bar, I noticed a blond girl in a fedora watching us. She said something to another girl, who turned and looked at us, then said something back to the girl in the fedora.

“Joe,” I said.

“Yep, stopping.” He stood next to me at the railing and we turned our backs to the party. The sun had set, just a dense stripe of orange behind the low skyline.

“Congratulations on all this,” I said, gesturing over my shoulder.

“Thanks.” He smiled. “But mostly we’re still sweating it out in the medium-terrible time slots. Luckily we’re done with Europe—looping back through the States this fall now that we have a bit more of an audience, and then we’ll take a break to make the second album. I think we’re going to find apartments here. The guys want to be a New York band.”

I nodded casually, as if this weren’t huge. The news was snowballing.

“Of course, I need to write the album before we can record the album.”

This was a reference, I knew, to the disc downstairs. “I’ll get you my thoughts soon,” I said. “Promise.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Luke’s writing now too, and the longer I take, the more he seems to come up with.”

“Whoa.” Luke Skinner had greeted me earlier with a gregarious back slap. I looked over my shoulder and saw him standing with the rest of the band, his once long hair trimmed to a dark mullet, pretty-boy features arranged in a slight pout. “Is he wearing eyeliner?”

“He wants us all to wear eyeliner,” Joe said. “It’s a real big issue for him that I won’t wear eyeliner.”

“Are his songs bad?”

“So bad,” he said, and I believed it; even from across the rooftop, with his dramatic gesticulations and self-conscious hair flips, Luke Skinner radiated style over substance. “I’d be willing to help him get better, if he weren’t such an asshole about it,” Joe added.

I decided to change the subject. “So what’s your set list tonight?”

He touched some whiskey off his upper lip with his cocktail napkin. “We learned a couple of classic wedding songs, you know, earning our five grand. Otherwise it’s all originals. Oh, and for the first dance they asked for ‘You Said Something’ by PJ Harvey.”

“No way! I love that song!”

He sent a rueful smile out to the horizon. “I know.”

The song, I remembered, was set on a Brooklyn rooftop. “I don’t even mind how obvious it is.”

“I wondered if you would.”

“Always loved that line about the smells of our homelands.”

“Me too,” he said. He slung his arm around my shoulders, relaxing again. “What are the smells of Indiana?”

I leaned into him and thought. “Freshly mowed grass, wet in spring. Soil from my mom’s garden. My brother’s football gear in the back of the van.” Nostalgia stirred in me, raising its head from a long hibernation. I wondered what it would be like to bring Joe home. “What about you?”

After a minute he said, “Freshly poured asphalt, baking in the heat.”

I saw him sitting on a curb in brilliant summer, his sensitive eyes squinting in the brightness, waiting for his mom to get better.

A waiter came by with a tray full of squat glasses. “Johnnie Walker Black?”

I took one automatically, because it was free; Joe shook his head. I was about to make fun of myself for holding two drinks when Joe said, a little anxiously, “PJ Harvey is actually really tough to cover.”

“It’s just a wedding!” I set one of my drinks down on a nearby table and put my hand on his chest, feeling for his heartbeat. “Are you nervous?” My fingers slid between the buttons of his white shirt.

“Only because you’re here.”

“Don’t do that,” I said. “You’re going to kill it.”

He leaned down until our faces were touching and said quietly, into my ear, “Did I kill it downstairs?”

The question embarrassed me, but I murmured assent. I tasted the light sweat on his freshly shaven cheekbone.

They called us to dinner. Seated at our table were Luke and the other Caroline guys, none of whom had been granted a plus-one, and a pair of wedding photographers who wolfed down their meals and disappeared. I had known the bandmates only slightly in Berkeley, and one of them was new, a replacement for the original drummer, who had started smoking heroin on the road. But they knew a lot about me. I fell comfortably into the role they wanted me to play, arguing about music and probing for stories from the road. They were easy to talk to, though there was a taut line of tension between Joe and Luke, like a rubber band the guys had all learned to avoid. I accidentally tripped it a few times, once when I inquired about the next album—“We’re struggling with finding our sound, ” Luke said, and Joe rolled his eyes—and once when Luke invited me to come see him DJ at Don Hill’s, and Joe looked like he might murder me if I said yes. It was a bit of a relief when all four of them left to set up their gear downstairs, in the hotel’s top-floor restaurant, where the cake cutting and dancing would be happening next.

It was dark by this point but still warm. I sat alone at the table and stared at my hands, whose stubby fingers and bitten-down nails looked ridiculous against the rich fabric of my dress. I was grateful for the quiet; Joe’s snowball was careening around my head, waking up all sorts of feelings, one by one. I was about to go to the bathroom when the girl in the fedora appeared, her shoulders squeezed up around her ears in what appeared to be an expression of her enthusiasm to see me.

“Hi!” she said. “I’m Raina! I met Joe at ATP!”

ATP, I had learned earlier, was All Tomorrow’s Parties, an indie rock festival in England. These people had their own language.

“My best friend and I went together. Rebecca? We met Leanne and Greg at Primavera.”

“Cool.”

She paused. “Anyway, just wanted to introduce myself. We think Joe is a genius.” She looked over her shoulder quickly, as if about to say something controversial. “I mean, obviously they’re a band, but it’s pretty much a one-man show, right? Those songs !”

She leaned so close I could see the uneven shape of her lipliner, a crust of foundation in the outer ridge of her nostril. The only conversation I wanted to have with this person was an extremely immature one in which I quizzed her on Caroline—What was her favorite lyric? Had she ever noticed the way the drum pattern changes in the third verse of “Somebody Said”?—just to watch her fail.

“I have to pee,” I said, and left. I blamed this behavior on the Prada. A person could do whatever she wanted in a dress like that.

—

The indoors portion of the wedding was a different vibe, dark and air-conditioned, background jazz. The band stood on a small black stage during the cake cutting, pretending to be invisible because everyone should be looking at the bride and groom, which I guess everyone was. Then Joe began strumming his electric as the happy couple walked to a dance floor signified by parquet tiles and a spotlight. I recognized these rituals from movies, of course, but here in real life they seemed plainly absurd. The little toy figures on the cake! The white dress! Were we not all adults here?

“On a rooftop in Brooklyn,” Joe sang, and a few of the guests whooped. My breath caught at the sound of his singing voice, which was dramatically improved, more controlled and expressive.

But he was right: it was tough to cover. It occurred to me for the first time that “You Said Something” is a perfect track more than a perfect song. There’s not a lot to it, musically; the magic is all in PJ’s delivery, the wisdom and emotion dripping from her voice. Joe’s solution was to mimic her phrasing verbatim, which just made me miss the real Polly Jean. And the new drummer held a generic rock beat through the post-verse refrain that was all kinds of wrong. I was a bit embarrassed for Joe. Did he feel whorey up there, playing requests for cash, butchering this classic for a bunch of hipsters and their uncles? On the final repeated string of “you said something”s, which he delivered with decreasing intensity, I felt a strange flare of anger. Leave PJ alone, I thought irrationally, as if each phrase was an insult hurled at her face.

I could feel his relief when he reached the end. Everyone clapped, and Joe said, “Congratulations, Leanne and Greg!” with the manufactured charm of a game-show host. Then the band ripped into “Funny Strange,” and Leanne and Greg and their friends went nuts.

Briefly I enjoyed myself again. I had helped bring this song into the world, and now I was in a room full of rich people acting like it was “Hey Ya!” I would’ve joined them if it weren’t for the attitude I’d just given the fedora girl, who was holding court in the center of the dance floor.

Watching Joe perform was like observing an animal of a different species. How could someone I knew so well, someone who had just been inside my body, be so comfortable up there? So natural with his instrument, with his voice, with all his limbs? He owned the mic from every angle, laughed at himself, jerked his shoulders emphatically before standing totally motionless to deliver a line. I wouldn’t even be able to speak into that microphone, even in the Prada; my voice would crack and dissolve on a single hello. I wondered if seeing him live would ever stop making me feel inferior, if I would ever be able to just enjoy his talent, or if that required a strength of character I lacked.

By the bridge, the song was dredging up its usual memories: the cold night air on that creaking Berkeley porch, the pissy way he picked his guitar; the hardness in his eyes when he said, “What do you do, when you write a great hook?” Strange how recent it felt, how brightly it still stung. What would this song be if I hadn’t forced him to rewrite it, almost from scratch? What good is a great hook if it rests atop a steaming pile of Billy Joel’s garbage? “Those songs !” the fedora girl had squawked. Her little pet genius. She probably thought “Funny Strange” had sprung straight from his heart, perfectly formed, like a tulip from soil.

I sat down at a table with two grandmas and a niece making origami out of napkins. Raj would like this table, I thought. He would help with the origami. He would rescue all the mint garnishes that had been cast onto the table, squeeze the oils onto my wrist, put a sprig in his lapel.

Joe didn’t play “Bay Window,” probably because its subject matter would’ve been wildly inappropriate for a wedding, but I was disappointed anyway. He covered “The Book of Love” by the Magnetic Fields solo on the guitar and then, as a closer, I couldn’t believe it: Graham Nash’s “Our House.” The band gave it an almost new wave treatment, and Joe sounded great, amped up the sweetness with more passion. But something soured on my tongue as he sang those lyrics I’d just analyzed so intensely. I couldn’t stop it from happening. His romantic performance seemed to swallow my own interpretation of the song. Meanwhile, the fedora girl and her friend stood at the edge of the dance floor, swaying in unison, staring up at him. His limbs became even looser in their gaze; he hung the mic by its cord a couple times, swung it, winked. I hated how objectively desirable he had become—his off-center attractiveness now rewritten as plain fact, no longer my little secret—but of course that’s the old line about why guys learn to play guitar, isn’t it: get your chicks for free.

—

I waited for him on the roof. Downstairs the bride was DJing from an iPod to a handful of diehards while Joe packed up.

Finally he appeared in the white light of the stairwell door with a slumped posture. “Jet lag kicked in around ‘You Said Something,’?” he said. He dragged a chair to where I was leaning on the railing and fell into it.

“You were great.”

He pulled me onto his lap. “My favorite thing about right now is that our bedroom is in this building.”

“Can I ask you something?” I turned to face him, but we were too close, so I stood up. “Why now? You said you’re ready, but what did you mean by that? Ready how?”

He sighed and rubbed his eyes with his palms. “I don’t know. More confident now, I guess. I’ve always been so scared I’d mess it up with you.”

I looked out at Brooklyn again. More confident how? I remembered him asking if he’d “killed it downstairs.” I turned back around. “Joe, who are Raina and Rebecca?”

His gaze was steady through its tiredness. “Let’s remember you have a boyfriend.”

“Yeah, but I was up front about that.”

“I have to be up front about the fact that I’ve slept with other people in the past year? Fine. Raina is Rebecca’s friend, and Rebecca is nobody. She and I hooked up a few times in England.”

“She’s not nobody. She’s a person. Is Rebecca the one with the fedora?”

“Is a fedora a hat?”

“Yes.”

“No. That’s Raina.”

“Raina was annoying.”

“She was acting weird tonight. Offended on her friend’s behalf, or whatever. Becca seemed fine.” He yawned.

“Raina probably likes you too. Probably likes you more, I’d bet.”

He made a face at this like it was insane. “Nothing ever happened with Raina.” Then he waved his hands in the air, erasing the whole subject. “I’m sorry I didn’t warn you.”

“I want to ask you something that might seem like none of my business.”

“Fine.”

“How many Rebeccas have there been?”

He sighed again, heavier this time. He stood up from the chair and leaned on the railing.

“Fewer than ten? More than ten? More than a hundred?”

He bent his head far over the railing and let out a frustrated growl. Then he straightened and said, “More than ten.”

I calculated this to mean roughly ninety-nine. A cramping void opened in my gut. “Is this what you were thinking that night in my hallway, after your first show? ‘I’m hot shit now, I’ll get back to you after I go bang a bunch of groupies real quick?’ It was, wasn’t it?”

“I was twenty-one, and I’d only ever slept with a lesbian who hated my body!” He said it fast and loud, defensively.

“I didn’t know anything about sex either! We should’ve been figuring it out together all this time!”

He rubbed his forehead. “I wasn’t ready.”

“Stop saying that.” I picked up Nomi’s stupid purse. “It makes me sick to think about, Joe. Using other women for practice.”

His face darkened. “I didn’t say it was practice. Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Wow. You really are just a dude, aren’t you? Following your dick around like a blind man’s walking stick. If you put that thing anywhere near me again, I will throw up on it.”

I was about to storm off, but the look on his face stopped me—pure, acute shock—and then he started laughing. Softly at first, then harder. My mouth twitched against my will. I collapsed onto the chair he’d pulled up.

“Put that one on The Greatest Hits of Percy Marks, ” he said, as his laughter faded to a smile.

After a moment the smile faded too. He slid down against the railing wall and sat on the ground facing my chair, his elbows on his knees.

“I know I waited too long,” he said. “I’ve been in such a panic since you told me you were seeing someone. I did try, on my last visit—but you were in a weird mood that night, and then we got caught up in writing ‘Bay Window,’ and I wasn’t going to mess with that. Next time, I figured. I didn’t know I was about to be shipped off the continent.”

Our snowy day in Manhattan played briefly in my head like a home movie in which you are unrecognizable to yourself, shot from another angle. But it was already too late by then. I’d already puked on a frat lawn listening to Radiohead; I’d already leaned my shoulder into Harrison’s. Who would I be now if I’d been with Joe all that time? I looked at his sad, exhausted face and tried to muster forgiveness. When it didn’t come, I tried to find the excitement I’d felt earlier that day, but the memory just gave me a shameful stab of desire for Raj.

He must’ve seen it on my face. “Is this about that guy?”

I looked away.

“If you’re feeling guilty, I have to say, I don’t think it should count as infidelity when it’s with the person you were always meant to be with.”

This annoyed me—the idea that Joe and I were each other’s answers, no matter how we arrived; that he got to travel the world, playing music and gorging himself at a groupie buffet, while I waited patiently at our inevitable destination. What had I gotten to do? I had been a blow-up doll for a fiction writer at a show. I had dragged words around a screen in a claustrophobic bedroom. I had spent a summer with Raj.

Tears stormed my eyes. I had found happiness that summer. It wasn’t as exciting as Joe’s adventures, but at least it was mine.

“I want to go home,” I said, my voice sliding up an octave. “I want to go home to Raj.”

For a second he looked confused. “What? Who?”

I hadn’t planned to say the words. But there they were, hanging in the air: game changed. I wiped my eyes before tears spilled. “That’s his name.”

Now his mouth and eyes were hanging open, his whole face slack. “You said it wasn’t serious.”

“I said I didn’t know.” I caught another spill of tears just in time. “We’ve been together since Christmas.”

His skin turned white. “What?”

“I was ready to leave him,” I said, my face hot with shame. “That was my plan, all night. But—” I didn’t finish. A noisy mess of hooks clashed in my head: turn on the bright lights and bring it on home to me and our house, with two cats in the yard.

“Jesus,” he said quietly. “I will never be good enough for you, will I.”

I shook my head—that wasn’t right, that shouldn’t be his takeaway—but I was really crying now, struggling to get a full breath. “He makes me feel good,” I managed. “You make me feel small, and bitter.”

His face was still hangdog, unresponsive. Finally, slowly, he put a hand down and pushed himself up. His long body unfolded to a standing position. He picked up an abandoned glass of scotch from a table and tossed it down his throat, then found another and did the same, then walked across the roof to the stairwell. His steps echoed into a fade-out.

I sat in that chair a long time. A waiter cleared the glasses into a black plastic bin. I did want to go home to Raj—to one of his scratch-made meals and our red notebook, to the warm, enveloping light of his apartment. But of course I couldn’t. He wasn’t there. And I had just wrecked our home.

—

I was shuffling through the hotel lobby, shoes dangling from my hand, when I remembered the burned CD and froze. My bare toes curled on the lacquered hardwood floor. Quiet jazz fell from the ceiling like snow.

I couldn’t abandon those songs again. Better to go back, to say something lovely and sad in his doorway and slink away with at least that one single thread of our bond—the music—intact. I slipped on my shoes, cleaned myself up in the lobby bathroom, and took the elevator to the cherrywood door of room 601.

No answer, but I heard movement in the room. I knocked again.

“Yeah?” came Joe’s voice.

“Just wanted to grab that CD,” I said. “Sorry if I’m waking you.”

A girl’s giggle cut off abruptly.

Blood rushed to my head. The heel of my palm pounded on the door, drilling a bright pain down my forearm. The fedora girl—no, the other one. “I hope you washed me off first,” I shouted.

Footsteps inside. The CD shot out from under the door into the hallway.

“Guess she makes me feel good, ” he said through the door, pitching his voice high, mocking me.

“Play her the original demo of ‘Funny Strange,’?” I said. “See how good she makes you feel then.” I snapped the CD in half and shoved the two shards back under the door.