Submit (Songs of Submission #3)(4)

Out of the gutter meant one thing to the rest of the world and the opposite to us. It meant, Stop thinking it’s about money.

“You know, I didn’t ask you to come here to talk about us. If you could give me another ten minutes, we can sit in the kitchen, and I’ll make you some tea. Properly. I want to pitch something to you.”

I looked at my watch. I had the night shift. “You have half an hour.”

He leaned down a little to look me in the face with his big chocolate-coin eyes. “Thank you.”

He walked quickly back to the kitchen. He made tea with efficiency and grace, speaking with a catch of thrill in his voice I hadn’t heard in a long time. I couldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise if I’d wanted.

“We all make art about these big concepts. We feel like we need to put it all under a cultural umbrella if we want to get into the lexicon, but I haven’t cried in front of a piece of art since I was in college. It’s because the whole scene is up in its head. Banksy’s scribbling culture, Barbara Kruger’s still yelling about consumer culture, John Currin’s talking about sex and culture, and Frank Hermaine is... I don’t even know what that guy is talking about. No one’s doing anything about the stuff that matters, stuff that gets us up in the morning and rocks us to sleep at night. When I realized this, I started being thankful you walked out. I mean… not really, but it made me realize that nothing I was doing made a damn bit of difference or touched anyone, and I thought if I could take that pain I felt and put it in a room, so when someone walked into that room who was going through the same thing, they’d recognize it. They’d say, yes, I’m connected to this. I’m feeling it. Can you imagine it? The bond? The potential? The power?”

In the middle of his pitch, he’d sat down, and like a coiled spring, perched on the edge of the seat, his legs splayed, heels rocking his seat back onto the corners of the legs. His elbows were angled to the tabletop, hands gesturing.

How young I’d been to fall so deeply in love with his enthusiasm. “So this is what you were trying to do with the Eclipse piece?”

“I was trying to exorcise you with that, trying to figure it out so I could get rid of you. But it made me think about what something truly personal could mean as a visual narrative, and then I thought, maybe it’s not a visual narrative. Maybe it’s a multi-media narrative, with one party speaking to the visual and another to the aural.” As if reacting to my expression, he leaned forward even farther. “Before you think anything, both narratives need to fight each other. There needs to be an aesthetic tension until it all goes black and silent. It’s an experience of fullness before death. Pow.”

I sipped my tea. He needed to wait for me to think. I wasn’t f**king him anymore. I didn’t have to jump like a brainless fangirl on every idea he pitched me. Except it was a good idea. Everything about it could be beautiful, a truly moving experience, a three-dimensional cinema of tone.

“You’re not talking about a linear narrative,” I said.

“Of course not.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, what?”

“You should do it. But without my toiletries.”

“Fuck your toiletries. I want you.”

I took a long breath through my nose and closed my eyes. I needed to avoid lashing out. He couldn’t have meant it sexually. Couldn’t.

“Let me rephrase that,” he said.

“Please.”

“It’s a collaboration. You do the aural, obviously.”

I pursed my lips and stared into my tea. “Kevin, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“For one, it would be awkward.”

“Only if we let it be.”

He leaned on the wall, his posture relaxed now that the pitch phase of the process was ended and the artistic seduction phase was about to begin.

“And two,” I said, “I haven’t been able to write a word or make two notes together make sense. I’m stuck.”

“Getting stuck is part of the process”

“It’s a no.”

“So you’ll think about it?”

“Your thirty minutes are up, Kevin.” I stood. “It was nice to see you.”

“Let me walk you out.” He smiled like a man who hadn’t been rejected but had just gotten exactly what he wanted.

CHAPTER 2

Fifteen minutes after Jessica Carnes implied Jonathan’s roughness in bed had broken her wrist, Jonathan had texted me.

—What did she tell you?—

I didn’t answer, and I didn’t hear from him again. Debbie, my bar manager and a friend of Jonathan’s, had seen but not heard the exchange and had alerted him while he was in San Francisco. She’d admitted it with no guilt.

“If you saw your face,” she said, “you would have called him too.”

“Sometimes I think you’re more invested in this relationship than either of us,” I’d replied, arranging drinks on a tray.

“I like you both. Jessica, not as much. Now go serve those before the ice melts.”

But I was glad I didn’t hear from Jonathan again. I didn’t want to have some drawn-out phone conversation about what Jessica had told me and why it upset me whether or not he f**ked her. I didn’t want excuses. I didn’t want conflicting stories. I just wanted to do what I was supposed to be doing: making music, being at peace with it, watching Gabby, doing my paying job without a sad look on my face or clumsy spills.