Even the fear I’d felt in our SoHo apartment, following the shooting, began to seem preferable to this nothingness, endless hours marked by the movement of shadows on the bedroom wall, punctuated by birds or kids outside flaunting their cheerfulness. Yet I felt unable to do anything to relieve this private, ugly grief that I couldn’t explain to Cynthia. The truth was that I had fallen, a little, for Gwen. She and I had been partners, drums and bass, night after night making music and sweating together under the same hot lights. After she died, my feelings of genuine sadness were undercut—polluted—by the selfish wish that Gwen were still alive just so I could prove my faithfulness to my wife.
Mostly, I wanted to lie in bed and not think about Gwen or the shooting. I didn’t want to think or feel anything, or even exist.
When Cynthia tried to talk to me, I answered in monosyllables. Or I didn’t answer at all.
Get up, I’d think. Say something. You’re hurting the woman you love.
When she suggested that I get professional help, it took every bit of energy I had just to refuse.
I’d hear Cynthia unpacking our things, stacking dishes in cabinets, and running loads of laundry. I would sleep during the day, and at night I would lie in bed awake while Cynthia slept. Sometimes I’d get up in the middle of the night and sit in the kitchen with the lights off, returning to bed with the first hint of daylight.
After three weeks, Cynthia got around to tough love.
“Will,” she said one morning, her hair wet from the shower. She sat on the bed and shook me to be sure I was awake. “Will, today you’re leaving the house. I’m going out to run errands. I’ll be gone an hour or two. When I come home, I don’t expect to see you here.”
When I got around to opening my eyes, I saw that she’d left on the bed the Help Wanted section from the newspaper and a county map. I wanted to remind her about my heavy limbs, but she was already gone.
I showered for the first time in too long, and on my way to the kitchen for juice I took a good look around. While I’d been sleeping, Cynthia had made the house ours. Our pictures on the walls. Our books in the shelves.
Rather than look at the help-wanted ads or the map, I got in the car and drove. Drove for hours, getting myself lost, and then more lost. Midafternoon, on my way back home, I found myself on the main street of some run-down, slightly urban area, and I remember feeling a strange comfort in having found a neighborhood reminiscent of the one I had just fled. Seeing a weathered sign for Snakepit Recording Studio, I pulled over to the curb. The building stood between an antique furniture store and a nail salon that appeared to be out of business, its glass door cracked. The studio’s entrance was around back. The door was shut but unlocked, so I went in. The dark, musty hallway reeked of stale beer and cigarettes, and I felt thankful for the familiar, acrid smell. I didn’t hear any activity, though, and I was about to leave when a man’s voice called out from someplace deep inside the studio: “What do you want now, for fuck’s sake?”
My eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light as I went farther down the hallway, past a restroom, past the darkened recording room, to the control room. Sitting behind the sound console was a man of around sixty with a messy white beard and a pair of wet, resigned eyes that suggested he was world-weary, drunk, or a little of both.
“Sorry,” he said, “I thought you were that homeless guy. He wanders in here if the door doesn’t latch shut.”
“No,” I said, “I have a home.” The man was paging through a copy of Hustler. “This your studio?” I asked.
“Proud owner since eighty-six. Bought and mostly paid for.”
I introduced myself.
“Joey Pitts,” he said, and we shook hands. “So what can I do for you?”
“You don’t by any chance need an extra recording engineer, do you, Joey?”
He sized me up. “You have any studio experience?”
I told him the name of the New York studio where I worked and, briefly, why I left.
“Are you into any hard drugs?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Are you a douchebag?”
I told him I wasn’t.
He nodded. “I could actually use a little help. I got a band coming in an hour. You want, you can stick around and assist. Like an audition.”
I called home and left a message telling Cynthia where I was. That I’d be home late.
“Okay,” Joey said, shutting the magazine and setting it on the console. “Have a seat. Let’s talk.”
At eleven that night, after the band left, Joey hired me on a trial basis. We negotiated a salary (that is, Joey proposed one; I agreed). We shook hands and left the studio together.
The street was quiet except for a streetlight buzzing at the end of the block. On the curb beneath it stood an old man in torn pants and a gray hooded sweatshirt, rocking from foot to foot. Seeing us, he started to come our way.
“And here we go,” Joey said. “You work here, you’ll be seeing a lot of this one.”
The man asked us for a dollar. “For protecting your car,” he said.