3. Hendrix
— ? —
Hendrix
There are seven balled-up pages on the floor around my chair, and the eighth is forming in my fist right now, and the cursor at the top of the blank document is blinking at me with the patience of a thing that knows it’s going to win.
I just got off the phone with my wife.
She called to hear my voice, she said, and I gave her a few minutes of it and then I told her about the people waiting on me, which was true, and I ended the call and went back to the one thing in my life I can no longer do.
I can’t write.
It’s not the ordinary kind of stuck, where the sentences come slow and you push through. This is the other kind, the kind where I sit down every night certain the book is right there, just behind my ribs, and I reach for it and close my hand on air.
It’s been a year.
A full year of this desk and this chair and this exact blinking cursor, and the manuscript I promised myself I’d finish by our anniversary is still four false paragraphs and a title I don’t believe in.
I drop the eighth page onto the pile. I drink the coffee at my elbow, which has gone cold, because all my coffee goes cold now, because I forget it exists the second I set it down. I get up and make another cup I’ll also forget.
The thing is, it isn’t the words I’ve lost. I could fake the words.
Any competent writer can arrange competent sentences. What I’ve lost is the thing underneath them, the heat, the reason, the particular hunger that used to drag me to this desk at odd hours and keep me here until dawn because I couldn’t not write.
That’s gone. Somewhere in the last year the passion drained out of me and left the discipline behind, a man showing up dutifully to a job he used to love, and the absence of it is a quiet horror I carry around all day and set down for no one.
Especially not her.
Because here’s the truth I haven’t said out loud to a single living person.
I don’t care what the critics think. I never have.
I don’t care what the industry thinks, or the readers, or the people who put my face on panels and my name on lists.
I have spent my whole adult life genuinely unbothered by the opinions of everyone on earth, with exactly one exception, and I married her.
Imogen thinks I’m a certain kind of man.
Contained. Capable. The sort who has never once been lost in his own life. And the idea of her seeing this, the crumpled paper and the cold coffee and the man who can’t find the thing that used to define him, makes a knot in my chest pull so tight I can barely breathe around it.
I would rather she think I’m distant than know I’m diminished. So I stay at the studio, and I let her believe it’s ambition keeping me here, and I never tell her that the truth is closer to drowning.
It’s the coward’s math, and I know it’s the coward’s math, and I do it anyway, night after night.
I choose the version of myself she can respect over the one she’d actually have to hold.
I tell myself I’ll fix it after the book, as if there’s going to be an after, as if the book is the problem and not the symptom.
I haven’t looked at my phone in hours, except for her call. Haven’t checked the news, the email, any of it.
When I’m in the hole like this, the whole world narrows to the cursor and the cold coffee, and everything outside this room can wait until I’ve won or, more likely, lost.
Frustrated, I ball up the ninth page.
Then the phone lights up on the desk, and my chest does a stupid, hopeful thing, because part of me thinks it might be her calling back.
It’s my father.
Of course it is. Frank Carver has a genius for choosing the precise moment you’re least equipped to speak to him. I consider not answering but in the end, I still pick up.
“Hendrix.” He never says hello. “You’re at the studio?”
“I’m working, Dad.”
“At this hour.” A pause I’m meant to fill and don’t. “It’s an odd time to still be at a desk. You’re not a man who has to be, Hendrix. You’ve never been a man who has to be. And yet…”
There it is, the whole of him in three words. My father, who has never in his life needed to work a single hour he didn’t choose to, observing that I’ve chosen to work a great many, as though effort itself were a small failure of breeding.
“Is there a reason you called,” I say, “or is this the reason for the call?”
“Family dinner. This week.” He means the family dinner, the standing one, the one that predates any of us and will outlast us. “I want to confirm you’ll be there. Both of you.”
“I’ll be there if Imogen wants to go.” I mean it. “It’s her week, it’s been a long one. If she’d rather stay in, we’ll stay in. I’m not going to drag her to a dining room for the sake of appearances.”
“How considerate.” Bone dry. There’s a silence, and then his voice changes, drops into the register he keeps for the things he only says once. “You’re doing too much, and you’re doing it in the wrong direction. I’ve watched you do it for a year. Your mother would have had thoughts about that.”
The mention of her lands under my sternum, the way it always does.
“Mom’s not here,” I say with clenched teeth.
“No. She isn’t.” Another silence, longer, and when he speaks again there’s a thing in it, old and certain and terrible.
“I’ll tell you the one thing I know, since you didn’t ask.
Some things, once lost, do not come back.
No matter how well you provide for them afterward.
No matter how sorry you eventually are.”
A beat. “I can tell you that from personal experience.”
I open my mouth to answer, and the line is already dead.
He doesn’t say goodbye. He never says goodbye.
Goodbye is a softness Frank Carver audited out of himself a long time ago, and I sit there holding a phone with no one on the other end of it, and I feel the old familiar heat climb up the back of my neck.
The audacity of him.
That’s the thing that gets me, sitting there in the wreckage of my crumpled pages.
The sheer audacity of Frank Carver, of all the men alive, calling me at midnight to warn me about losing things.
Because I know exactly which of us lost what.
I was there. I grew up in that house, in the specific climate of that man, and I can tell you precisely who was present and who was not.
My mother was present. My mother was every warm thing that house ever had, every birthday remembered and every fever sat up through and every school play watched from the front row while my father sent his regrets from an office across town.
She was the one who showed up. She was the entire supply of showing up under that roof, and she rationed it out to both of us and never once ran dry.
And my father provided.
That was his word for it, his whole theology: providing.
He kept the accounts and maintained the name and came home most nights to sit at the head of a table and ask the correct questions and then vanish into his study, and we were all expected to understand that this was love, that the providing was the loving, that a man showed you his heart by keeping a roof over the rooms he was never in.
Frank taught me a language made entirely of withheld things.
I learned to read his moods off the set of his shoulders because he’d never say them aloud. I learned that feeling was a private failure to be managed where no one could see it. I learned to go quiet and go still.
It’s even how I discovered writing. Because I cannot directly express myself and it turned into a passion.
I hated it, I have hated it my entire life, the cool detached nothing of him.
But the joke, the ugly joke I’m only now old enough to get, is that I learned it anyway.
It got into me despite the hatred. I have spent years going quiet and going elsewhere and calling it work, and I know exactly where I learned the trick, and I know I’ve never managed to unlearn it, and now the man who taught it to me has the gall to phone me in the dark and tell me that some things, once lost, don’t come back.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until the dark behind them blooms with color.
Against every instinct I have about protecting myself from my own memory, I let go, and I let it take me back to the first time I understood what I actually stood to lose.
It was the winter after we buried my mother.
I had been numb for months by then, and that was the part that frightened me.
I kept waiting for sorrow to arrive in some recognizable shape, the way it does in books, and instead there was only a great flat nothing where a feeling was supposed to be.
I moved through the world doing the correct things and feeling almost none of them.
There’s just nothing. I wrote nothing, I wanted nothing. I had inherited my father’s talent for going through the motions of a life, and I was terrified it had become permanent, that this was simply the man I’d be now, a well-dressed absence attending its own existence.
Then there was a recital I had no business attending, for a girl I’d been promised to since before either of us could walk and had never once bothered to actually see.
I only went because the families expected it, and I had become a man who did what was expected. I sat in the back where I wouldn’t have to speak to anyone, and I checked my watch, already planning the exit I’d make at intermission. I was, in every way that counted, already gone.
“Please put your hands together and welcome our performers to the stage!”
The lights came up on the stage, and she walked out into them.
I don’t have the words for it even now, and words are supposed to be the one thing I have.
Imogen Hearst.
The perfect, lovely heiress of her family.
All I knew about her until then was that she was a reserved person. Always kept to herself, quiet and liked to blend in, as if she were a wallflower.
But at the stage, she was different.
She danced, and it was not the technical brilliance of it that undid me, though it was extraordinary. It was that she was so completely, fearlessly inside her own life.