Rossetti Song
Alex Irvine
Some people have always wanted
to be president, or a baseball player, or a movie star or business
tycoon. Me, I've always wanted to own a bar. Not some flaky franchised
chicken-finger paradise for post-fraternity muscleboys and their
bimbos; a real shot-and-a-beer kind of neighborhood joint. Pool
table or two in the back, an old Wurlitzer by the bathroom doors,
a long mirror behind the bar suitable for the sort of what's-he-got-that-I-ain't-got
scrutiny that melancholy drunks love to subject themselves to. Tables
with a topography of cigarette burns, water rings, dents of uncertain
origin, all preserved under a quarter-inch layer of varnish. Beer
signs on the walls, no bikinis or volleyballs allowed, just painted
mirrors and classic flickering neon like the sign out front that
says FRANK'S PLACE. Cab company numbers taped
to the side of the phone. A blackboard leaning against the mirror
advertising the day's special and a permanent addendum: HANGOVERS
FREE OF CHARGE.
An
old neighborhood bar, like I said, but it's hard to find a good
one because fewer and fewer people live in the old neighborhoods
any more and the ones who are left don't talk to each other. Harder
still to start one up, because any place that will support one already
has one, but that's a defeatist attitude as Susan would have said.
A real go-getter can-do type of person, that was my wife. She died
the day after my small-business loan was approved. Car wreck. She
wanted me to have the bar, though; ever since I'd known her she'd
said I was born to be a bartender. How do people decide things like
that?
Did you know that more Americans
die every year in car wrecks than were killed in Vietnam? Or maybe
it's every two years. Nine months ago I wouldn't have known that,
but tending bar fills you up with more useless trivia than you would
think any one brain could hold. I know that the Ambassador Bridge
in Detroit runs south to Windsor, Canada and that Wally Pipp is
the name of the guy who lost his job to Lou Gehrig. Bar bets. There
is nothing so esoteric or irrelevant that someone won't bet a beer
over it.
I spent Susan's insurance policy
on an antique Wurlitzer that plays real records. Limits my selection
a bit, but the kind of crowd I draw has a certain collective taste
and the guy who sold me the juke threw in about 1200 forty-fives
that he'd been collecting since 1956. So I have Elvis and Patsy
Cline, the Beatles and Marvin Gaye, Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash,
along with tons of stuff that I've never even played. And I take
requests, got a sign over the Wurlitzer, so I find myself sorting
through those boxes of forty-fives looking for something that I'm
pretty sure I should have even though I've never actually seen it.
It was because of one of those requests that I struck up an acquaintance
with Milt Chrzanowski.
A guy -- not Milt -- sat down
at the bar once in the early evening, not long after I'd opened,
and said, "Beer."
I love people who order like
that; to a bartender, it's an expression of trust. At least, I choose
to look at it that way since the alternative is believing that people
don't care what they drink, and that concept is unsettling and foreign
to people such as myself. This guy looked at first inspection like
a local-brew sort (not something I can explain), so I cracked open
a Pike. After a second look, I set it down without a glass.
"Nice juke," he said,
finding the beer without looking at either it or me. He took a long
swig, glanced at the label, and dug a 20 out of his shirt pocket.
"What's on it?"
People always ask me that when
they see it's an antique, as if I'm only going to have some sort
of theme music. It annoys me. The guy got up and walked over to
the box, standing slightly bent in front of it as he examined the
selections; he was taller than he'd looked sitting down. He stayed
that way for a long time.
There were eight or 10 people
in the place, Boeing workers and fishermen killing time until their
boats went back out. Two or three trickled in every time one or
two wandered out. I lost track of the guy as I filled orders and
shot the shit with regulars about the Sonics' postseason collapse
and the continued influx of Californians into our fair city. Eventually
my granola-punk waitress Donna came in and everything leveled off
into an average Wednesday night. I was unloading the dishwasher
when I looked up to see the tall guy back at the bar. He waggled
his empty beer at me. As I set a fresh one in front of him (I'd
guessed right about the glass), he dropped a five on the bar and
walked off.
Donna sashayed up to the bar
laden with empties. "You haven't even noticed my new tattoo,"
she said petulantly.
"I lose track," I
said, flinging bottle caps all over the floor behind the bar. I
have a trash can by the coolers, but some nights my aim is off.
"Do tattoos change color
when you get a sunburn?"
The speaker was not the tall
guy. He was a slight balding fortyish guy in a pinstripe suit that
looked kind of crooked. Except for the suit he looked kind of like
me. I looked around for Donna but she was gone, a faint odor of
patchouli her only remnant.
"Dunno," I said. "I
never had one."
"Neither have I,"
he said.
"Fine place you have here,"
he added, squinting into the narrow neck of his bottle. "The
Wurlitzer is a lovely touch."
He gave me a funny look when
he said that, like he expected it to mean something more, or at
least other, than just what he said. I'm a bartender; when in doubt,
I always agree. "Yup."
"You don't recognize me,
do you?" he said, looking back into his bottle. I've heard
many a man swear that they saw God in the bottom of a beer bottle.
Myself, I just usually feel Him pounding on my head the next morning.
"'Fraid not."
"Ah well," he said,
motioning for another beer. "I guess you wouldn't, but those
of us in invisible occupations occasionally pine for recognition.
We are the offensive linemen of the commercial banking world, the
mid-level functionaries."
Lawyers and bankers, two kinds
of people you never want to piss off. "I'm sorry, ah, Mister
. . ."
"Chrzanowski."
"Oh, yeah," I nodded
vigorously. "I remember talking to you now." It was actually
true. He had called to reassure me that the loan was not in danger
because of Susan's death. I had been worried because she made quite
a bit more money as an engineer than I did as a local government
reporter for the P-I, and I had quit my job to give the bar
a go. So they could justifiably have worried about my ability to
make the payments. But we had some money put away, and even after
the funeral expenses and the Wurlitzer there was a bit of insurance
money left over. I was a financially comfortable widower, at least
as long as the bar broke even. "It's Milt, right?"
He brightened. "That's
right, Mr. Sutter," he said, reaching for his wallet.
I shook my head. "On the
house, Milt, as long as you never call me Mr. Sutter again."
I caught myself just as I began to slide into smarmy-bartender mode.
"The name's --"
"Frank, yes, I remember."
We shook hands, me self-consciously wiping my hand on a towel first.
He peered into the full bottle, wrinkled his forehead as if in disappointment,
then drank anyway. "You know that this space was occupied by
a bar before you leased it, don't you?"
I nodded. "Yeah, they left
it a mess, too," I said. "Place was a dive."
He nodded, wistfully I thought.
"It was that, at least in its last few years. But in the years
before that, it was a place not unlike this one; not too rowdy,
but not sanitized either."
I was surprised that my taste
in bars had anything in common with that of a mid-level bank manager.
"I used to stop in fairly
frequently when I worked out of the branch near here," Milt
continued. "Ten years or more, until I transferred downtown
in '81, I came to this place to decompress after a busy day of climbing
the corporate ladder." He chuckled and shook his head. "God,
has it been 17 years? Ambition; glad I've given that up. Middle
management is the lubricant in the great engine of commerce,"
he said grandly, raising his bottle in a toast.
I returned the gesture with
a dirty highball glass, and Milt fell silent I filled Donna's orders.
I never did ask her about the sunburn thing.
"They had one of those,
too," he said suddenly. I looked up and he was gesturing at
the juke with the now-nearly-empty bottle. "Splendid machines,
those. Memories as pleasant as the music." He drained the bottle,
waved it at me. He was getting lit pretty fast, and the more he
drank, the more English he sounded. Not an accent, but choices of
words and emphasis. Something.
I set another beer in front
of him. He clinked the neck of his empty against its replacement,
a sardonic little fare-thee-well. "Have you ever heard of a
folk duo called Five and Dime?" he asked.
"Nope," I said. "I
wasn't much of a folkie; earnestness makes me squirm."
"Well, you couldn't really
be expected to know them if you weren't a native, either. Are you?"
I shook my head; I'd grown up and gone to school in Michigan, then
ended up in Seattle by way of Texas and Colorado. Susan had more
to do with it than anything else. I've always been a sun-worshipper,
and there are winters here when I'd willingly trade a week at the
beach for melanoma. But love will make you do strange things.
"I didn't think so. Anyway,
they were locals, students at the U-Dub." This is a strange
local colloquialism; University of Washington, therefore U-W,
therefore Yoo-Dub. "They never amounted to more than playing
coffeehouses for tips, but they pooled all of their money once and
recorded a single. It was 'Tangled Up In Blue,' as Simon and Garfunkel
might have done it while on a sodium pentothal IV
drip. Godawful song. But it was backed with the most amazing
piece of pop music I think I've ever heard, a lovely ballad called
'Rossetti Song.'" He raised a questioning eyebrow at me; I
shook my head again and looked at the clock.
Nearly 10. I cracked open my
first of the night, cheating by only a few minutes. Since the accident,
nostalgic people give me the jitters.
"'Rossetti Song,'"
I said under my breath. The sound of the words out loud brought
to mind 'Rosetta stone,' and it was in the grip of strange allusions
that I went back to lean on the bar opposite Milt.
"The reason I ask all this,"
he continued, "is that your predecessor had that song on his
jukebox. I was wondering if perhaps you hadn't acquired his collection
as part of the lease or something."
"No, I got the spinner
and the records from an ad. 'Actually plays records!' the copy said,
like it was walking on water, and the guy who sold it to me referred
to it as an antique. Shit, it's only two years older than I am."
I paused to drink my beer, get
something in my mouth before I started some maudlin rant. "Helluva
collection came with it, though; supposed to be 1200, but I haven't
counted."
"Twelve hundred,"
Milt repeated. He drummed his fingers on the bar for a moment, then
added, "Did you get it around here?"
"Jesus, Milt," I said,
rolling my eyes. "Yes, I'll look for you."
"It's called 'Rossetti
Song.'"
"I know."
"Reminded me of the words
'Rosetta stone' the first time I saw the title; isn't that strange?"
I drained my beer. Slowly. "You
don't say."
"I do, and you know what
else? The word juke comes from Wolof, a West African tribal language.
Their word dzug means 'to live wickedly'. How about that?"
He knocked back the rest of his Pike. "Another, please?"
I got one for him and another
for myself, and it still wasn't 10 o'clock.
"Rosetta Stone, "
I said, sitting cross-legged on the attic floor of the home Susan
and I had bought 4 BC. Before Crash. Every event, every memory of
mine was starting to orient itself around the accident, around the
afternoon that I'd come in the front door shouting "I got it!
I got it!" and heard the phone ringing. I picked it up and
the voice on the other side identified itself as one Maura Yee from
Swedish Hospital downtown. I didn't get there in time to say goodbye.
And that was it, really; I was
a married newspaper columnist one day and the widowed proprietor
of a drinking establishment the next. I wasn't able to either mourn
my wife or exult in the realization of a lifelong ambition. They
canceled each other out, and I trudged ahead in a sort of dazed
equilibrium. No great epiphany, no sudden collapse; just a bit more
beer than was really good for me and an aching vacant spot that
I tried to pretend wasn't there. And every now and then I would
wonder when I would begin to mourn, or stop mourning, or begin enjoying
Frank's Place, and by the time I got done thinking about it I didn't
know what the hell was going on. And at that time it was nearly
1 AC, almost a whole year; when did everything
start up again?
The streetlight across from
my house flickered weakly, mortally wounded by neighborhood teenagers.
It its sporadic pink-orange light I could just barely read the label
of the forty-five that rested in my lap: FIVE AND
DIME, it said at the top of the circular label, and on the
bottom ROSSETTI SONG 3:47. And running along
the outside edge was the legend SPARE CHANGE RECORDS.
I'd never heard of the label.
Rossetti, I knew, was a poet.
Two of them, as I discovered when I rooted out Susan's Norton Anthologies
from her undergraduate English courses. I flipped through the wrinkly
translucent Norton paper and found Christina Rossetti, younger sister
of Dante Gabriel. The first two poems were simply titled "Song,"
and I put the book down. It was four o'clock in the morning; Milt
would be happy and the poems could wait until tomorrow. I reached
for my beer, remembered I'd left it upstairs next to the boxes of
records. The book lay open in front of me, and I suddenly registered
that the handwriting between lines and in margins was Susan's. Susan's
from 20 years before, when the only Frank she was interested was
Zappa.
"Yeah, well, he's dead
too," I said, and stood up. I flipped the Five and Dime record
over in my hands and laid it B-side-up on my ancient Garrand turntable.
The soft crackle in the dim room as I laid the needle smoothly on
the lip of the record gave me a shiver; it was a sound I loved,
bringing a weight of anticipation that the tiny spark of a compact-disc
laser cannot match, and the few seconds of not-quite-silence that
follow it always flood me with memories of songs, and memories of
Susan.
I sat on the floor in front
of the couch and picked up the book as the music began, a melancholy
call-and-response between two guitars with a faintly Celtic flavor
and a definite tinny recorded-in-someone's-bathroom edge. One guitar
dropped into a steady chorded dum dadadada dum dadum and the first
voice came in, a half-chanted lyric baritone:
I met my love and wooed her,
overarched by cypress leaves
She was so frail, her
face so pale, I feared that soon I'd
grieve.
My love proved stronger
than my fear, and her fair hand I
won
Though we both knew
her illness grew, our two lives we made
one.
It was my wont to mourn her
as we clasped our hands together
To slowly walk and hear
the clock toll far across the
heather.
I had but to caress
her cheek; my touch bespoke my fear
"But I still live!"
she'd say, and give this song to stop my
tears:
And now the second voice (was
it Dime or Five, I wondered?) took over from the first, a sprightly
tenor dancing a cappella except for a double knock on the guitars
at the end of every phrase:
When I am dead, my dearest,
sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses
at my head, nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above
me with showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
and if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the
nightingale sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through
the twilight that doth not rise nor
set,
Haply I may remember,
and haply may forget.
At the second line, I recognized
the second "Song" in Christina Rossetti's Norton entry.
I followed along as that lovely tenor embraced her words and then
soared into wordless arpeggiated harmonizing as the baritone and
guitar leapt back in:
One day she lay and could
not sing, nor raise her lips to
mine
Her breath was stilled,
hard sorrow spilled my love upon her
dying.
I laid no roses at her
head, nor sang a dirge to mourn
An oath I swore, to
nevermore love any woman born.
She was my Lady of Shalott,
my belle dame sans merci,
And when she died, I
only cried to keep her memory.
I walk the grass above
her now, and every shady tree
With her voice rings;
I know she sings, and know she
welcomes me.
I sat very still, Susan's handwriting
in the margins of the blocky book wavering in my teary gaze. There
was a pop from the speakers as the needle kicked off the end of
the runout groove, and a tear fell directly onto a note she had
made next to "Song."
Expressions of mourning, it
said. Dead don't remember us, why should we them?
The tear sat trembling in an
auroral ring of dissolved black ink, smudging the word don't. I
started to close the book. There was a touch on the back of my left
hand, a familiar brushing across the backs of my fingers that started
a quivering in my stomach as it paused briefly over the still-pale
stripe on my ring finger. Then it was gone, and I was left alone
in my house an hour before dawn, my only company the ticking of
the runout groove and the crushing realization that she really wasn't
ever coming back.
Milt didn't show up until the
next Wednesday. I spent
the week staring at the Five and Dime record peeking out from where
I'd stashed it behind the cash register. I suppose I was convinced
that if I stared at it long enough I would figure out whether what
had happened was real. I was wearing my wedding ring again. Donna
noticed right away and asked me if I'd been to Vegas and what was
her name; after an inexplicable crippling wave of embarrassment,
I threw a washcloth at her and went to open the doors. I mopped
the floors, got deliveries, sparred with Donna, called cabs for
laid-off Boeing riveters, and not once did I find myself suddenly
destroyed by remembering that my wife was dead. Well, I found myself
thinking at irregular intervals, I guess I went and got over it.
The words wouldn't attach themselves to an emotion.
When I turned around from the
register and saw Milt there, the first thing I noticed was that
it was nearly 12, much later than it had been the first time he
came in. He was wearing the same crooked suit, wet from the misting
rain. I wondered if he wore it every Wednesday. He was the kind
of guy who might have a schedule like that.
"Whatever it was I was
having last week, I'll have it again," he said, and damned
if I could remember. I reasoned that if I couldn't, he couldn't
either, though, and cracked him a Pike. "So," he said,
and I cut him off.
"Got it," I said,
pulling the disc out from behind the register. I returned to the
bar and spun it on the polished wood in front of him. "It's
been here a week, waiting for you to come back."
Milt seemed afraid to touch
the record, afraid even to get near the corner of its plain paper
sleeve that pointed at him. "That isn't funny," he said.
It happened to him, too, I thought,
although what exactly I meant by it I wasn't sure. I looked at the
clock again, suddenly in a hurry to chase everyone out and close
up; I didn't want to play the song with people around. If whatever
had happened in my living room happened again, the whole bar would
be treated to the sight of my flipping out over a 30-year-old garage-folk
ballad.
A scan of the premises revealed
only three bodies not in my employ, and one of those was Milt. The
other two were down to the lukewarm dregs of a pitcher of Budweiser
and showed no great promise of finishing it. "Call you a cab,
fellas?" I asked, hardly raising my voice over Patsy Cline
singing "I Fall to Pieces." The pair squinted up at me,
then stubbed out cigarettes and rose to leave.
Donna had already put most of
the chairs up. I called her over. "You can go early if you
want," I said. "I'm coming in tomorrow morning anyway."
She shook her head. "Rent's
going up. I need the hours."
"What, it's Wednesday;
you'd be gone by one anyway -- never mind, I'll pay you until two.
Just go. Deal?"
She looked quizzically at Milt,
then back at me. "You just put your wedding ring back on, Frank."
After she left, I turned out
the neon signs in the windows and the hanging lights over the pool
tables. Streetlights cast spiny shadows of chair legs on the floor,
made wavy by the rain and crosshatched by the sharper shadows cast
by the single light behind the bar. Across the street was a vacant
factory building, most of its windows broken out, graffiti covering
the padlocked doors and grimy brick walls. It was raining like hell.
I wondered if my place was going
to turn into a sleazy dive the way my predecessor's had; I was on
the edge of a vacant part of the city. But who knew? I was also
on the edge of a perfectly healthy retail area, and in six months
Frank's Place could be surrounded by a completely new trendy zone.
Fashion was too capricious to be outguessed.
Milt was still staring at the
record as if it was a booby-trapped memory. I walked by him and
picked it up on my way over to the jukebox. I pulled the juke away
from the wall and opened its case, removing the Supremes and dropping
Five and Dime in their place. Milt hadn't moved; he was looking
at me out of the corner of his eye and gripping his beer in two
hands.
I dropped the canopy back into
place and was pushing the Wurlitzer back against the wall when Milt
said, "It's happened to you too, hasn't it?"
I stood slowly up and wiped
my palms carefully on my a towel until I was sure I could speak
without making a fool of myself. "What exactly do you mean
by Ôit'?"
"Come on, Frank, you kick
everyone out as soon as I get here, send your waitress -- who obviously
thinks I'm some sort of rough trade -- home early, and you're wearing
your wedding ring again. I hadn't noticed that until she brought
it up, but I'd bet the contents of my branch safe that you played
the song and something happened." He was looking at me greedily,
practically begging me to admit to something. I wondered what he
saw when the song was played. Or thought he saw; maybe I'd just
been drunk and feeling guilty.
I dug a quarter out of my pocket.
"Why is this song so important to you, Milt?" I asked.
He hesitated, but only for a
second. "Because my wife died here while it was playing."
I was looking at the selection
cards, and I saw number 126, "Baby Love" by the Supremes,
but my hand wouldn't quite move to put the quarter in the slot.
"I remember humming along with the tenor over the melody line,"
Milt went on, "And right at the words 'raise her lips to mine'
she put a hand to her temple and just pitched over out of her seat.
Her name was Petra and she would have been 46 this September."
He said all of this as if he was the Ancient Mariner, doomed to
repeat his tale of woe. I saw that he still wore his wedding band
as he pointed to a window table and said, "Right there, under
the Mount Rainier sign. That's where it happened."
Milt slid off his stool and
walked towards the front table, still pointing. "And now when
I hear that song in this place, I can see her," he said, his
voice beginning to tremble.
His arm fell back to his side
as he approached the table and stood in front of it. "After
I was transferred downtown, I found a copy of the song and took
it home thinking that whenever I needed her I could play it there.
But it didn't work," he choked, and I could see tears shining
in the odd pink glare of the streetlights. "It didn't work,
and then this place closed and it was years, years before you came
along."
Milt paused, his fingers tracing
the surface of the table. When he spoke again, he was calmer. "And
when your wife died I was terribly afraid that you would refuse
the loan and the space would remain vacant for longer than I could
stand. A midlife crisis is difficult enough without the added complication
of a dead wife you can't talk to, ha ha. So even though I had no
idea what you would do with the space, I had to make sure your loan
wasn't recalled. And after you actually had the place open, I came
in just sort of -- quixotic, you know, and saw the jukebox..."
He shrugged miserably and produced a handkerchief.
I caught myself punching buttons
and realized that I'd put the quarter into the jukebox. The selector
arm reached up and plucked the Five and Dime single from the row
and laid it on the turntable, and the sad, searching guitars began
their once-upon-a-time.
The colors in the Wurlitzer's
bubble-glass began to dance, and I could feel gentle vibrations
in the palms of my hands as I leaned against the machine and watched
Milt stand quietly for a moment, then pull out one chair and stand
behind it. He smiled and went around to the other chair, sat down
and leaned forward, spoke quietly and reached out, his hand moving
like he was brushing his thumb lightly across invisible fingers.
He stayed like that, smiling and talking, his eyes alight, and once
I swear he laughed out loud and I couldn't hear it.
And I felt nothing.
The song ended, and Milt looked
down and shrugged, then lifted his hand in a halfhearted wave. He
looked up at me like a man beatified a long time after death.
I stalked across the room and
flipped the door key onto his table. "Lock up when you leave,"
I said harshly, and charged out into the storm.
"YOU HAVEN'T SLEPT,"
MILT CHIDED, LOOKING ME UP AND down from the other side of my screen
door the next morning.
"Your goddamn pounding
on the door woke me up," I answered truculently, lying. Milt
shifted nervously from foot to foot.
"The key," he said,
almost as if reminding himself, and he lifted it wrapped in a handkerchief
from his breast pocket. "I left the two dollars for the beer
next to the register."
"Oh, for Christ's sake,"
I said, snatching the key from him. We stood there for a moment
not looking at each other. "Well," he said, but I cut
him off.
"You had coffee?"
"Well, no," he said.
"Is that an invitation?"
Neither one of us spoke again
until I'd gotten coffee and we'd both had the first scalding sip.
Then the silence seemed more companionable, and finally Milt said,
"You can tell they're not English, can't you?"
"What?"
"Five and Dime. Whatever
their real names were. Are. I mean, heather and cypress trees don't
even grow within a thousand miles of each other, I don't think."
"What's your point, Milt?"
"No point. It was an icebreaker.
Another middle-management skill." He sipped at his coffee.
"As was accepting this coffee. It gives us a chance to talk.
Communication is the first step towards a solution of any problem."
"How come I didn't feel
anything last night?" I asked. I have no middle-management
skills.
"Why do you expect me to
know?" Milt answered.
"Goddammit, Milt. Answer
the question."
He paused, and then spoke carefully.
"There is a difference," he said, "between mourning
and nostalgia. That's as simply as I can put it. And some people
make the transition from one to the other invisibly, over a period
of time. Invisibly. Ha. That's me," he said bitterly.
Then he shook it off and continued.
"Others make it in a great terrifying epiphanic moment. You
felt something the first time you played the song?" I nodded.
"And where was this?"
"In my living room."
"But Susan didn't die there,
did she?"
"No."
"Well." He rubbed
at one eye. "Hm. There's an old saying, ancient really, to
the effect that magic only works on those who believe in it. Now
I don't necessarily believe that's true, but I do think -- how to
put this -- that there are some things that can be used in unusual
ways given the proper circumstances. Which wouldn't arise unless
the person was aware of the object's capability, so there you have
your 'magic only works' canard. And I suppose this record, or this
song, is one of those things. What's it about, after all? Getting
past mourning. Are you through mourning your wife?"
I thought about it. My wife
is dead, I thought, and waited for the squeeze in my chest, the
anger, the rotten ache of loss. It didn't come. In its place was
a memory, almost a waking dream, an image of the way her fingers
used to brush across the backs of mine and linger for a moment on
my wedding band, like Piglet saying I just wanted to be sure
of you. And then it was gone.
I found that my throat was tight,
but I was smiling. "'Tis better to have loved and lost, right?"
I said. "There's a canard for you."
"That's what I thought,"
Milt said.Donna got used to it, I guess, but she always gave me
an odd look when I let Milt stay past closing on Wednesday nights.
I let it go; after all, it wasn't something that could be easily
explained. Milt and I evolved our own set of rituals attendant only
on Wednesdays: he brought a roll of quarters, I left the door key
by the register. Usually when I came in the next morning, there
were a few empties on the bar and a sawbuck on the register, and
in return Milt drank free whenever I was there. It was a peculiar
arrangement and it proved satisfactory for both of us, if not for
Donna.
And after a dozen Wednesdays,
I took a detour on the way home after leaving Milt to his visit.
I sat with a six-pack on a park bench facing the Sound and drank
slowly until I had to turn around to watch the sun came up. The
colors of the dawn take on a certain enduring splendor when you've
stayed up all night to see them, as if you've ridden the underworld,
been swallowed by the wolf and come out the other side. And the
sun, oh, the sun, leaping huge and molten from the Cascades and
waxing into its full blinding brightness as the city began to wake
up around me. I drove home accompanied by foreknowledge of nostalgia.
The next Wednesday was miserable,
gray and drizzly, the sun a pale smudge. I spent the day running
errands. The evening at the bar passed pretty much like it always
did, and Milt showed up at quarter to 12 like he always did.
I stopped Donna before she could
escape and handed her an envelope. "Don't read it before you
get home," I said.
She shook her head and said,
"Nothing you do surprises me any more." I held the door
for her as she left, thinking Yeah. We'll see.
Milt and I didn't usually talk
on Wednesday nights, him being incoherent with anticipation and
me likewise with exhaustion, but tonight I went over to his table
after I'd shut everything down and said, "I put the key in
an envelope tonight."
He looked at me quizzically.
I'm the worst liar in the world, and I know my face was giving something
away, but all he did was nod, God bless him, and I walked out the
door. Outside it was still raining and I whistled all the way to
my car. Then I whistled all the way home, and then I went through
the list one more time. Accountant; check. Realtor; check. City
clerk; check. Bank account; check.
Loan officer. "Check,"
I said, and laughed out loud.
I thought about it as I hummed
down I-90 past the suburbs and the outlying communities and up into
the mountain towns. Thought about the progression from mourning
to nostalgia, and moments of epiphany. Invisible, ha, that's me,
Milt had said, but what he hadn't figured out is that he didn't
want it any other way. He'd opted out, settled into a comfortable
mid-level job, saved my loan after Susan's death, done everything
he could to keep everything the same.
Or not even that; he'd gone
back, recreated a previous sameness. Petra keeps coming to him because
he wants her to.
And that was the one thing Susan
was wrong about. The dead do remember us, and they do want to be
mourned, and they will keep coming as long as we keep wanting to
go to them. I didn't want to do that any more.
Frank's Place was a huge temple
to Susan's memory, an everlasting flame hoping to draw her like
an ectoplasmic moth. I threw everything I had into it after she
died because it was her dream for me as well as my dream for myself.
It was more than a year before I figured out that dreams you dream
with someone die with them. Frank's Place was a dead woman's dream
kept alive by the living.
And I couldn't keep it alive
any longer, but Milt Chrzanowski could. He was on that invisible
slow climb, that vision-dulling trudge through the bleak underground
of loss and inadequacy and abandoned anger, and Frank's Place had
been his dream for a dead woman before anyone had dreamed it for
me.
Or maybe that's all bullshit.
But Milt signed the quitclaim, and sent a letter to my accountant
too. I don't think I want to read it just yet. I do hope Donna still
works there, and I told her so in the letter I gave her that last
night. There was a check in that envelope too, in case she thought
she couldn't work for Milt, but my accountant says she hasn't cashed
it. So maybe things are just going along there like they always
were. Maybe Milt quit at the bank to take on the barkeep's life
that was dreamed for him. Maybe not. I imagine I'll find out whenever
I read his letter.
Meanwhile, the check from the
realtor came, and due to the robust nature of the Seattle housing
market I can afford to drive myself a bit further down this road
or that, looking for a little sun to worship and a new, living dream
instead of a monument to loss. I'm leaving the sad songs to Milt.
Let him hear the nightingale. And let him rendezvous with the dead,
too; I'll remember if I will.
And if I will, forget.
"Rossetti Song" is
excerpted from Alex Irvine's chapbook, Rossetti
Song: Four Stories.
Alex Irvine's website
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