An impromptu benefit has been planned at Bottom of the Hill on Saturday night. I suggest maybe she should go alone, but she insists that I come with her. When I get home from running errands on Saturday, I catch a glimpse of her in front of the bedroom mirror, and I barely recognize her. Her hair is crazy, her makeup extreme, the black minidress, fishnets, and Doc Martens unlike anything she has worn in years. She looks great, but her ability to transform so swiftly back into the creature she once was makes me uneasy.
I struggle with my own clothes, finally settling on jeans and an old white button-down. We look entirely mismatched, like a couple heading out on an ill-conceived first date set up by friends who don’t know either of us well. Alice is nervous about being late. We finally squeeze into a parking spot six blocks away, and we run-walk all the way to the club. Inside, Alice is swallowed up immediately by a crowd of old friends, acquaintances, and fans. I stand back and watch.
The music starts. It’s a strange mishmash of musicians playing all of the old favorites. Green Day is there, the keyboardist from the Barbary Coasters, Chuck Prophet, Kenney Dale Johnson, others who look vaguely familiar. The crowd seems to be enjoying it. It’s a mix of sadness and joy, people celebrating their friend’s life, still stunned by his death. The music is good, and I can tell the musicians are putting their hearts into it. Still, it has been many years since I’ve been to a club like Bottom of the Hill, so it’s not long before my ears are ringing. I scan the crowd, but I don’t see Alice.
I grab a Calistoga at the bar and find a spot against the wall in the back, in the dark. As my eyes adjust, I realize that there are three other guys against the back wall, two of them also drinking Calistoga, all three wearing white button-downs and jeans, all three around my age. Probably A-and-R guys.
When did I get old?
It happens slowly, but rarely with ambiguity. In restaurants, the waiter places the check beside you. At work, in meetings, when a difficult decision arises, others look to you first for direction. A tint of gray at the temples, the obvious signs: a house, a car that’s paid for, a wife instead of a girlfriend.
A wife. I finally spot Alice, talking with people I don’t recognize, a crowd between us. Despite the complications, I’m so happy with my choice, and I hope she’s happy with hers.
Eventually, the noise becomes too much, so I get my hand stamped and step outside. The fog feels good on my face. I watch the cars moving up Seventeenth Street.
“So I hear you’re a therapist.”
I turn to see Eric Wilson standing beside me. I see now what I didn’t notice that day in our garage—probably because I was so focused on Alice. He no longer looks like the young, good-looking bass player from that photo out front of the Fillmore. His hair is a little greasy, and he has bad teeth.
“Yes,” I say. “And you are a bassist in a band.” It comes out more derisive than I mean for it to, or maybe not. The fact is, I have nothing against bassists in general. Just this bassist.
He pulls out a cigarette and lights up. “By night,” he acknowledges. “During the day, I’m a professor at Cal. Biology. Didn’t Alice mention that?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“It’s not unprecedented. The guy from Bad Religion teaches at UCLA.”
“Interesting.”
“Yeah, we’re co-authoring a paper on the green turtles of Ascension Island. Chelonia mydas. Ever heard of them?”
“No.”
Through the wall, I can feel the vibrations of the music inside. I want to go back in, but more than that I want to punch Eric Wilson in the face. It’s a fairly new sensation. What would happen, I wonder, if I were to simply put my more rational nature aside, just for once, and act on instinct?
Eric must have just come offstage, because he has sweat running down his neck. I’m reminded of a recent article from JAMA, a piece about how women are often attracted to their future mate by the smell of his sweat. The theory is that women look for a man with unique-smelling perspiration because it implies a difference in genes, a better prospect for immunity in their children, a better chance for the family line to endure. Immortality, all in the smell of sweat.
“These giant green sea turtles,” Eric says, “are born on Ascension Island. Then, they spend their lives far away, enjoying different waters, exploring, swimming off the coast of Brazil and things like that. But you know what?” Eric has turned to face me, so close I can feel his breath on my face.
“I imagine you’re going to tell me.”
“When it’s time to settle down, time to have a family, they return to who they are. Can you imagine that? When the time to get serious comes—and trust me, it always does—wherever they are, whoever they think they’ve become, they put it aside, and they swim, and they swim. Sometimes, thousands of miles. They shed their current life without a moment’s hesitation. They return to that beach on Ascension Island, give up all pretense, and become exactly who they are, exactly who they were.”
Eric finishes his cigarette, drops it on the ground, and grinds it under his boot heel.
“Nice seeing you, Jake,” he says.
I watch him walk away, the back of his shirt streaked with sweat.
Later, Eric is onstage with his band. It’s hard to look at him. It’s hard not to think about him in my house, eating off our plates, drinking from glasses we got for our wedding.
Eric calls Alice up to sing. She appears from the side of the stage, and the volume of the applause surprises me. She perches on a stool beside Eric. They start with a popular song from their old band, then move into one of the songs from the CD she gave me.
I watch them up there onstage together, sitting so close, and I shudder. When we first met, Alice was inching out of music, already on a different path. It wasn’t clear where the path would lead, but it was obvious that she’d given up her old life and was determined to move forward to a new adventure. I worried that one day she would discover this new adventure, of which I was a part, to be nothing more than a tangent she was ready to discard as she returned to her former life.
At times, I tried to distract her from returning to that life. I encouraged her to take the job at the law firm, I bought her the first designer suit she ever owned. It was stupid, maybe even manipulative, but I was scared. I wanted to keep her.
What I didn’t fully understand was that Alice isn’t a simple idea, she isn’t an unbendable object, an unchanging showpiece. Yes, I knew she was complex, I didn’t need a degree in psychology to see that. The first day I met her, I was reminded of the Walt Whitman lines Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.