4. Aster
— ? —
Aster
A couple of weeks after the party, I’m home on time.
Six o’clock, like she asked, with the good wine from the place in Silver Lake and a box from the jeweler on Rodeo that I picked out myself. The house smells like garlic and rosemary and a cake cooling on the rack. For about four seconds it’s the house I bought.
She’s in the kitchen in a yellow dress with her hair up and flour on her forearm. She looks up when I come in and she’s glad to see me, not relieved, which is a different thing and one I’d stopped noticing the difference between.
“Look at you. Daylight and everything.”
She comes around the island, kisses me quick, takes the wine out of my hand and reads the label. “Show-off.”
“You only turn twenty-five once.”
“So they tell me.” She goes back to the stove.
She’s twenty-five today, and she told me weeks ago she didn’t want a restaurant, not after the last one, and she didn’t want anything with a guest list. She wanted to cook in her own kitchen for four people with me at the table for all of it.
I said of course. It took me until tonight to work out she’d asked for the smallest thing she could think of so that even I could manage it.
Mara arrives at half past with a bottle she says is terrible and a bag nobody’s allowed to look in.
Dylan comes at quarter to, still on a call, which he finishes on the porch before he’ll come inside.
He kisses Flora on the cheek and asks what he can carry.
Mara hugs her in the doorway for a long time and says a thing into her hair I can’t hear. Flora laughs and shoves her off.
We eat at the little table in the kitchen, because the twelve-seater in the dining room is, in Flora’s words, for people who don’t like each other.
Roast chicken with lemons under the skin.
Potatoes that have gone crisp on the bottom.
A salad from things she grew on the back patio.
I sit there eating my wife’s food, watching her laugh at Mara across the candles, thinking this is the thing I keep saying I’ll get back to.
There’s an empty spot on the floor by her chair where the dog’s bed used to be. Nobody mentions it.
“Presents,” Mara says when the plates are cleared. “Me first. Mine’s small and it’s going to make you cry, so let’s get it over with.”
It’s a photograph in a plain wooden frame. A family on a porch somewhere, two kids and a man in a baseball cap, and in the middle of them, tongue out, a scruffy brown dog with one ear that doesn’t stand up.
Flora makes a sound that isn’t a word.
“The coordinator sent it,” Mara says. “I asked her to. He’s got a yard. The little one sleeps on him.”
Flora is crying and laughing at the same time, holding the frame in both hands. Mara has an arm around her. Dylan is studying his wine glass. I’m across the table with a box from Rodeo Drive in my jacket that has never felt so heavy.
“Okay,” Flora says, wiping her face. “That’s not fair. Nobody’s allowed to follow that.”
“I’ll try anyway.” I put the box on the table.
Emeralds set in old gold, beautiful, and they cost what a car costs. She looks at them, then up at me, with a smile that’s real and isn’t the one she gave the photograph.
“Aster.”
“They’re the color of your eyes.”
“I know what color my eyes are.” She says it kindly. She leans over, kisses me, puts them back in the box. She’ll wear them to something of mine and never to anything of hers.
Dylan’s present is a gift card to the garden place she likes and a card with a joke in it that makes her snort. It’s a better present than mine.
She brings out the cake. Lopsided, covered in the little sugared violets she does, candles on crooked. Mara sings badly on purpose. Dylan films it because he’s the only one of us who thinks to. Flora leans over the flames with her hair coming down and closes her eyes.
My phone rings in my pocket.
I know who it is before I look, and I look anyway, and it’s the director.
“Don’t,” Mara says, quietly, not looking at me. She’s looking at Flora, who has opened her eyes, blown out the candles, and is looking at me too.
“Two seconds. It’s the mix.”
I take it in the hall.
The vocal on the duet isn’t sitting right, he says.
The label wants it locked by Friday. Cecilia’s in the booth now, came in on her own time, and if I could get down there tonight and hear it in the room he’s sure it’s a twenty-minute fix.
Then Cecilia’s voice, bright and close to the phone. Tell his wife happy birthday from me.
Twenty minutes plus forty each way plus the twenty that always turns into two hours. I know all of that standing in the hall. I hear myself say I’ll be there in an hour.
I come back into the kitchen with my jacket on.
Nobody says anything. Mara has stopped singing. Dylan has turned his phone face down. Flora is at the head of the table with a knife in her hand and a cake in front of her. She looks at my jacket, then at my face, and her expression doesn’t change.
“The duet. The vocal’s off. They need me to hear it in the room.”
“On my birthday.”
“I’ll be back before you’ve finished the cake.”
“It’s a cake, Aster. It takes ten minutes.”
“Flora.”
“Go.” She says it gently, like she’s letting me off something. “Before it gets awkward.”
I kiss her. She lets me. Mara looks at me over Flora’s shoulder the way my first guitar teacher looked at me the day I quit lessons because I’d gotten a record deal.
Dylan follows me to the door.
“He’ll take a no,” he says.
“He said Friday.”
“Friday is four days away. I’ll call him from the porch and tell him you’re at your wife’s birthday. He’s not a monster, he’s a man who asked.” Dylan’s hand is on the door. “You’re the one who said yes.”
“I’ll be back in an hour.”
He looks at me for a long second, takes his hand off the door, and I go.
The freeway is empty for once. Thirty-five minutes, and I spend all of them knowing it could have waited.
I could have turned around at any exit between the house and the studio.
I didn’t, because somewhere downtown there was a version of me in a booth about to fix something, and I liked him better than the man at the kitchen table who’d bought the wrong present.
The studio is quiet. The director isn’t there. Held up, the engineer says, ten minutes out. I stand in the control room with my jacket on and look through the glass at Cecilia, on a stool in the booth with a bottle of water and her headphones around her neck, waving at me like we’re old friends.
“He’s on his way,” she says through the talkback. “I told him it’d be faster if you and I ran it once without him.”
“We’ll wait.”
She tilts her head. “It’s a duet, Aster. Nobody else is on it.”
The director gets there at nine-thirty with a coffee and an apology, and we run the duet once so I can hear what he’s hearing.
He’s right, which is the worst part. There’s a note in the second chorus where her voice sits on top of mine instead of inside it, and once I’ve heard it I can’t stop hearing it, and I know the way I know my own name that I’m not leaving until it’s fixed.
So we fix it. She goes back into the booth and I stand at the desk with my hands flat on it and talk her through the phrase, softer, hold it a beat less, let the consonant go, and she does everything I say the first time.
She’s good. I’ve never pretended she isn’t.
We run it and it’s better and it still isn’t right, so we run it again with the harmony pulled back, and then with mine pushed forward, and somewhere in there I take my jacket off and hang it on the chair and stop being a man who’s leaving in an hour.
My phone is face down on the desk. I put it there myself. I could tell you it was so I wouldn’t be distracted, and that would be true, and it would also be the reason I don’t see the clock.
By the eighth pass the director has gone quiet in the corner and the engineer is doing that thing engineers do where they stop offering opinions and just move faders.
Cecilia comes out of the booth for water and doesn’t go back in.
She stands beside me at the desk with her hand on the back of my chair, close enough that I can smell her, and listens to the playback with her eyes closed like she’s in church, and every so often she says a thing about the take that’s exactly right, and I answer her, because it is.
That’s all it is. Two people who are good at a thing, doing the thing. I’d say that to anybody who asked. I say it to myself on the drive home.
I don’t look at the clock until the engineer yawns, and when I do it’s ten past midnight.
I drive home with the windows down and the radio off.
The freeway’s empty again, both directions, and I’ve got forty minutes and nothing to do with them but rehearse.
She’ll be asleep. I’ll slide in next to her without waking her.
In the morning I’ll tell her the vocal’s better, that it was a real problem and not an excuse, and she’ll listen the way she listens, and she’ll understand, because she always understands.
Somewhere around the Silver Lake exit it occurs to me that I’ve been saying that sentence about my wife for a year and I’ve never once checked whether it was still true.
The house is dark. The kitchen is spotless. The little table has been wiped down, the chairs pushed in. No plates, no candles, no crumbs. Like nobody sat there at all.
On the counter, under the one light she left on, there’s a note in her handwriting.
Cake’s in the fridge.
Four words on the back of an envelope. I stand there at half past midnight reading them over and over, looking for the anger in them. There isn’t any. She wrapped a slice of her own birthday cake for a man who left her table, and she went to bed.
I open the fridge. It’s there on a plate, the violet on top still in one piece.
I don’t eat it. I stand with the door open and the cold on my face until the light inside starts to feel like a question, then I close it and go upstairs and lie down next to my wife without touching her. She doesn’t move. I don’t know if she’s asleep.
In the morning the plate is still in the fridge. She’s already gone to the shelter when I come down, and there’s coffee in the pot, and the plate is on the second shelf where she left it, and I stand there with the door open again and I don’t eat it and I don’t throw it out.
It’s there the next day. I move a carton of eggs to get to the milk and put the eggs back beside it, careful, like it might break.
On the third day I catch her looking at it while she’s reaching for the butter, and she closes the door and asks me if I want toast, and I say yes, and that’s the whole conversation.
On the fourth day it’s gone. I don’t know if she ate it or threw it away or gave it to the birds. Neither of us says a word about it, then or ever, and that plate sits in the middle of that week like a thing we’ve both agreed to walk around.
The tour leaves in a week.