Deep Cuts

The Girl in the Bridge

The Girl in the Bridge

Thanksgiving at the Gutierrezes’ was jubilant and cozy. Zoe had lost her job and I still hadn’t found one, but Obama had won the election and it was hard not to be optimistic. After dessert Joe played guitar and sang Bowie’s “Kooks,” and Zoe’s parents began dancing, then Zoe and Melissa joined them. I excused myself to the kitchen to do dishes. I’d been making it work, pretending to be comfortable, pretending it was easy to share this evening with Joe—but “Kooks” was too much. I leaned into the noise of the running faucet and clanged pots and pans with abandon.

By the time I rode the train home I felt drained but okay. Joe had been awkward when addressing me directly but otherwise relaxed, so obviously happy to be back; I didn’t want him to be shut out of the Gutierrez home any more than I wanted myself to be. I could do this once a year.

The next afternoon I was at my desk writing when I saw Melissa’s car pull up out front to drop off Zoe. After Zoe got out, Melissa rolled down her window for a goodbye kiss.

Zoe came straight to my room and fell on the bed. “Thanks for last night. I have two things to tell you.”

I turned in my desk chair. The moment I saw her face, propped up with her chin in her hands, I knew. “You’re moving in with Melissa.”

She looked relieved, though her brow stayed creased. “It would be insane not to, right? I have no income, and our rent is higher than hers, plus—”

“Plus it’s time,” I said. I’d been playing whack-a-mole in my head with this possibility for weeks, ever since the passage of that repulsive Prop 8, which Zoe’s dad’s Catholic church—though not Mr. Gutierrez himself—had vocally supported. I knew Zoe and Melissa weren’t ready for marriage, but there was something about being denied the right that seemed to make her want to lean further into domesticity, to prove the stability of their union. I totally got it.

“I wanted to wait until you were ready, but—”

“I’ll be fine, Zoe,” I said, and I meant it, even though my stomach had dropped through the seat of my chair. “I’m making a little money. I’ll turn my blog into a book. I’ll get a roommate.”

She scooted off the bed and sat on my lap, hugging me. “But there will never, ever be another me.”

I held her tightly, as if I could squeeze all the love I owed her into her body by force. “Never.”

“Ow,” she said, pulling back. “Second thing. Joey’s coming over later and I don’t want to hear any whining about it. It’s the anniversary of the first time the three of us ever hung out—remember?”

She knew what she was doing, telling me her moving plan first; now I was sentimental and primed to please her. I nodded mutely. And it did make me smile to remember our day-after-Thanksgiving 2000—the strange, clean expanse of those wide suburban streets; the way my life had seemed like an uncrumpling ball of paper, smoothing out as the night went on. It occurred to me that Joe and I weren’t together then either, and it was one of the happiest times of my life.

A few hours later he showed up with a bottle of wine, a gallon-sized Ziploc of leftover turkey from the Gutierrezes, and a recipe for potpie.

I drank a full glass of wine in minutes. We took turns playing from the kitchen table iPod dock. Joe made the dough while Zoe assembled the ingredients and I cleared off our kitchen table, which was covered in books and magazines and Zoe’s various fundraising paraphernalia. Halfway through my second glass of wine, I was enjoying myself.

“Play the best song about moving,” Zoe said when we sat down to eat.

Joe dove for the iPod. When “Packing Blankets” by the Eels started playing, I couldn’t hide my disappointment.

Joe sighed. “I need more wine before I hear whatever Percy is about to say.”

“Above the fridge,” Zoe said.

“I have no objection to this song,” I said. “I just can’t believe you didn’t play ‘New Slang.’?”

Joe pulled a cork and then pointed the bottle opener at me accusingly. “You didn’t know ‘New Slang’ was about moving until we read that interview with James Mercer in SPIN .”

“So?”

“So, disqualified,” he said, sitting back down and topping off our glasses. “Also I forgot.”

“How could you forget that album? Did you Eternal Sunshine it out of your mind because it reminds you of our nonexistent college affair?”

“It’s just very important to me that you know I don’t think ‘Packing Blankets’ is a better song than ‘New Slang.’?”

Zoe was smiling widely. “If you freaks ever let me have my turn, I’m doing ‘California.’ I listened to that daily in Africa.”

“Ooh, let’s do best Joni songs next,” I said. “Joe, if you play some meandering jazzy thing I’m leaving.”

“Come on,” he said. “Obviously we’ll both choose ‘A Case of You.’?”

I smiled.

Zoe’s pick was “Big Yellow Taxi,” and I think that was her last contribution, because it led to Joe and me making fun of the Counting Crows’ cover of “Big Yellow Taxi” and then a lengthy round of worst covers ever, followed by best Christmas songs ever, at which point Zoe got up to do the dishes.

“We’re being annoying,” I said quietly to Joe, who was scrolling through the iPod to find “2000 Miles” by the Pretenders.

He clicked the song and turned to look at me. We were inches apart. “So? I’ve been annoying Zoe since the nineties.”

I looked over at her, her hands in the sink, shoulders swaying slightly to the song’s repeating guitar line, which whirled through the room like snow. “She’s leaving me,” I told Joe.

He winced, nodded. His hand reached out, but didn’t seem to know where to land; eventually his fingers rested, briefly, on my forearm. I felt the music slow and wobble, like a needle passing through a warp in the vinyl. Then he thumbed the iPod to a Bowie shuffle and announced, “I’m drying!”

We ended up in Zoe’s room, looking through old photos and laughing harder than I could remember ever having laughed, and then Zoe started explaining all the factors that had gone into the economic collapse. It was almost midnight when I realized Joe had drifted into my room.

“The CDs are gone,” I said as I followed him in, picking clothes up off the floor.

He was standing in front of the synth. “I can’t believe it.”

“Zero chance I’m playing that thing in front of you,” I said.

But now he was looking at my notebook on the desk, open to a page of verse. “Is this for Meg Vee?”

“Yeah.” I watched his face carefully.

He nodded slowly. “People are talking about it. Heard you turned a weird dirge into a lead single.”

I felt an explosion of pride so strong it must’ve been obvious on my face, but he was still looking at my notebook. “Does it bother you when I write with someone you don’t hate?” I asked.

“Not as much,” he said distractedly. He was touching the notebook with his fingertips, reading the lyrics. I didn’t mind; they were good.

“Hey,” he said suddenly, looking up. “What if we started with your idea?”

“For a song?”

“Yeah. Surely you don’t just fix other people’s songs, or write about them. What would your song be about?”

“Joe,” I said. “That won’t solve everything.”

But I did have an idea, a big one, so big I already knew I’d be powerless to resist telling him. I sat on the edge of the bed. “Fifty percent,” I warned.

“Deal.” He sat next to me, his hands folded between his legs, one of which was bouncing slightly.

“It’s called ‘The Girl in the Bridge.’?” I watched his face slowly process the “in.” “Someone said that to me after the Troubadour—‘You’re the girl in the bridge!’ Very surreal moment for me.”

“Wow. So it’s about you?”

“Only the bridge is about me. Something similar to that Fleetwood Mac post, remember, about how I’m basically the worst?”

He kissed me on the lips, fast and firmly. Then his eyes widened. “Sorry. Carry on. You’re not the worst. Carry on.”

I felt my body rocking slightly on the bed, shocked. “Joe,” I said.

“Won’t happen again.” He jerked his hand horizontally as if striking it from the record.

“Good,” I said sternly. “We went through this, remember—”

“Oh my god Percy I take it back, please, it was an accident—tell me about the song!”

I almost laughed, but I didn’t want to undermine my point. I took a breath. “Fine. The rest is your part of the story. The girl only appears in the bridge.”

His eyes rolled back in his head. “So fucking cool.” Then they snapped back, brighter than before. “Wait. I have the perfect music for this.” He bounded out of the room, and seconds later he was sitting next to me again with his iPod and a pair of over-the-ear headphones. “Do you have lyrics?”

“Some.” He looked over at the notebook on my desk, but I shook my head. “They’re not ready.”

Zoe rapped on the open bedroom door. “I’m heading to Melissa’s, freaks!”

We jumped off the bed. “What?” I said. “No!”

But she was already pulling on her coat. “I can’t handle the sexual tension in this place,” she said, giving us each a hug. “I feel like I’m about to get electrocuted.”

Something about the way she said it so plainly, loaded with tacit approval, made my last layer of defense against Joe crumble. Just one night, I decided. There’s only so long you can hold out against a force so strong the whole room can feel it.

“Zoe, I love you,” I said, then added, “More than Joe. I love you more than Joe.”

She laughed. “I love you more than Joe too.”

“I’m right here,” Joe said.

We walked her out, waving like parents as she descended the stairwell. When the door shut there was an uncertain second and then we were attacking each other, pulling off clothes, stumbling down the hallway. My brain wanted to get back to the song, but my body kept winning.

“Is it up-tempo?” I asked as we fell on the bed.

“Mid,” he said, and put my breast into his mouth.

We rushed the sex, somehow, clamored through it like teenagers. Immediately afterward he grabbed his iPod from my nightstand and handed it to me.

I clamped on his giant headphones. He was still inside me; I was sitting on top.

“If you don’t like it, we’ll find something else,” he said. I nodded, and he held my gaze as he pressed play. A syncopated snare beat. Rhythm guitar established the groove. Then some strange instrument—an electric guitar, I realized, processed beyond recognition—began playing two phrases over and over. The first phrase was tense, withholding, repeating; the second was an explosion of sixteenth notes, a burst of melodic inspiration that brought us nowhere but right back where we started. Tense, repeating; melodic. Tense; melodic. “You’d just sing right over this loop?” I asked, inaudible to myself. He nodded. A smile spread over my face. I felt him get a little hard again. The loop kept going, and other things were happening now too—more drums, synths, some sort of crunching machine-produced noise deepening the groove.

“The melody will need to be simple over all this,” I observed. He pushed up on his elbows and motioned for me to pull off an earphone; I complied, stretching it out so he could hear, and he sang a wordless melodic line over the loop. I nodded. It worked, and it was amazing—an entirely new direction for him.

We were in the bridge now: the loop dropped out, the rhythm destabilized. I pulled off a headphone so I could hear myself, then sang, “He met his match but couldn’t light it.” Instantly I felt Joe become very hard. “She was always wet. She’d draw his blood while clawing her way…to get a little respect.” The melody, which had come to me from nowhere, rose and fell like a swan dive, smoothly threading the density of his instrumentation. “Her worst brought out the best in him, but she wanted it better. And every time she found perfection, he was always better.”

The loop returned; the groove settled back in. He sat up to kiss me, and this time we made it last.

—

I woke first. My first thought was panic that I’d forgotten my beautiful bridge melody, but I found it waiting calmly at the edge of my mind.

A white sky through the window filled my room with a soft, even light. Joe’s mouth hung partly open on the pillow. I could see now what he had seen at Union Pool: that separating the songs from the sex was a ridiculous notion. Neither would be as good. I remembered Alma’s comment about music infiltrating our physical lives, and wondered if that phenomenon worked both ways—if good music came straight from the body itself, sometimes. If the best stuff happened when you kept the borders between your mind and body as open and porous as humanly possible.

I was staring at the ceiling and starting to drift off again when I heard his voice, throaty with morning: “?‘He was always better’—is that true, or just a good line?”

I rolled onto my side. His eyes were half open, flakes of sleep in the lashes. “It’s true,” I said. “But ‘better’ cuts both ways, doesn’t it? Or maybe you don’t know what it’s like to have someone be constantly better than you.”

He put a hand on my hip. His eyes were fully open now. “I do, actually.”

We looked at each other a long time. Then he rolled on top of me and disappeared under the covers, kissing a trail down my sternum, exploring with his hands. Each touch lit up multiple parts of my body, fingers and lips and random patches of my arms and legs, and the effect was dizzying; I couldn’t tell which touch was real. He bent my knee and kissed a line along my inner thigh. Somewhere in the heat map of my mind I had the clear thought that I couldn’t wait to do what he was doing, to explore his body this way. When it was my turn I pushed him over, giddy. I checked for the mole on his collarbone: still there. I bit the nipples I’d seen through T-shirts, under an open coat on his Berkeley porch. I licked the length of the muscles in his forearm that flexed when he played guitar, and held the thighs I’d felt shaking with excitement on the Manhattan showroom piano bench, shaking now again in my arms.

Afterward we moved seamlessly into “The Girl in the Bridge.” I brought toast and coffee on a cookie sheet into the bed. We worked on the keyboard and in the notebook, fitting words into our melodies, iterating on every note, every syllable. It was clear to both of us that Joe didn’t get final say anymore, which led, eventually, to a standoff over an awkward verse rhyme; he capitulated to my edit, but not before muttering something obnoxious about seeing how it sounded on tape. “How about we go out to lunch before I bludgeon you with a cookie sheet,” I said, and he kissed me, which was a reasonably effective apology not previously available to us.

While he showered I stayed in bed, checking my email and the job posting boards. He returned with a towel around his waist and peered at my screen curiously. “Do you actually want any of those jobs?”

“Of course I don’t,” I said. “But this apartment isn’t cheap.”

“Can you get a different one?” He pulled on his boxers and let the towel drop. “A cheaper neighborhood, or city, even? What’s keeping you here?”

I looked at him. There was Zoe, of course, but I knew our friendship could survive any distance. “It’s a good question.”

“Right?” he said, and joined me in bed.

But where would I go? Not New York, which was just as expensive. Not Indiana. The laptop was burning hot against my knees. “When you were touring the States for Funny Strange, you used to send emails from all these little cities—”

“Missoula, Montana.” His eyes were dancing over my face. “New Orleans. Both Portlands.”

I was already searching. Within a minute I’d found a charming attic unit in a house in Maine for less than half my share of the San Francisco apartment. The photos seemed to glow with all the extra hours that rent could buy. I could write all night. I could drive to New York to meet my collaborators. I tilted the screen to show Joe.

He pulled the laptop onto his own knees and started tapping at the keys. The look in his eyes reminded me of our “Sara Smile” night so many years ago, when the lights came on in the bar and I’d seen it for the first time, that wounded, galvanized intensity. Then I peeked at his screen. “Joe—”

“Shut up.” A minute later he turned the laptop toward me proudly. It was a small house for rent in Montana. He clicked through the photos: two bedrooms, a dining room with wainscoting, and, in the back corner of the yard, a freestanding studio, already soundproofed by the owner.

“Come on,” I said. “Caroline is a New York band.”

“I could use some space from those guys, honestly,” he said. “You heard what I’m doing these days. I need a studio.”

The possibilities crashed over me like a breaking wave.

“So do you,” he added, and his voice was tender with pride.

I pushed off the covers and stood. He looked up at me, his mouth quivering at the edge of a smile. On the screen between us, the little studio was lit from within, its windows warm and yellow. “It’s a fairy tale,” I said. “With two cats in the yard.”

Annoyance flashed on his face, like the point was too obvious to even mention. “It’s just a month-to-month lease, Perce.” He rose to his knees on the bed. “Have we ever even really tried?”

That old “Surf’s Up” sensation rose in my chest: door after door after door, endlessly opening. I felt an overpowering desire to run through them all, to see how far they went, even as I knew I’d be clawing my way, drawing blood, through every one.

“You think you know everything.” He crossed the bed toward me on his knees. “You think the songs will come between us again.”

“They will,” I said. And then I grinned, took his face in my hands. “But they’ll be so good.”