I said I was tired and I’d probably go to bed. He went to the bar and for a while I walked desultory circuits of the pool, listening to the band race through “A Night In Tunisia.” From somewhere nearby I heard the sound of a helicopter taking off. I don’t know why I chose to go back into the pool house.
Inside, the noise of the party was muffled. The moon shone in through a high window, throwing a slanted band of light over the wall of photographs. The dead people in their swimsuits and tennis whites crossed their rackets and raised their glasses in an ironic toast to my social failure. Behind me was a row of changing cubicles. From inside one of them I began to make out the sound of breathing. A man’s breathing, ragged and deep. Then, quite distinctly, I heard the man groan and a woman’s voice telling him to shut up. It was Leonie. There was silence, and then a series of tiny, wet, noises. The man’s breathing got deeper again. I was trapped by what I was hearing, my feet glued to the ground by a sort of vile abjection. The groans increased in urgency until, with a soft exhalation, the man came.
I hid in the darkness.
A moment or two of scrabbling around, the clink of a belt buckle. Only when it was too late did I realize that I should have left, that it would only deepen my self-disgust to see the cubicle door swing open and Leonie come out, adjusting her cocktail dress. I attempted to compose myself, to form some emotional structure that wouldn’t collapse. Then she stepped into the shaft of light and I saw her flushed face, her disordered hair. Marc followed, buttoning his shirt. I don’t know what made him look towards me, whether I made a sound or gave some other clue. He saw me trying to bury myself in the damp beach towels hung on pegs on the wall behind me. For an instant he looked shocked. Then he broke eye contact by checking an expensive diver’s watch, its steel bracelet half-buried in his grizzled arm-hair. Excuse me, son, he said, allowing himself a half-smile. He followed Leonie back out to the party.
WHEN WE GOT BACK TO NEW YORK, Carter asked me for the audio I’d made on my walks around the city. By that time he was claiming to friends that he didn’t even own a computer anymore, so this was surprising. He usually wanted nothing to do with my environmental recordings. I put them on a drive for him and forgot about it.
The studio sucks up time. I wanted to lose myself, disconnect from my obsessive thoughts about Leonie. Despite Carter’s behavior at our meeting, the hip hop star was still interested in working with us, and I closed the door on the world and trawled through recordings of thirties dance bands, collecting samples for a demo. McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, Cab Calloway, The Harlem Hamfats. Days passed, taking me further away from that pool house, the shame and confusion I’d brought on myself. My plan was to do a mix that sounded like you could have heard it at the Cotton Club, all banjos and muted trumpets. I had the files for one of the hip hop star’s hits, the one about “going uptown” to “see what the dark side brings.” I was basically trying to make it sound like Duke Ellington’s “Creole Love Call,” without getting mixed up in a lot of complicated arrangements.
Carter wasn’t interested in helping. He communicated his preferences by shrugging whenever I brought the project up. He was busy with something else, something he didn’t seem interested in discussing. I thought perhaps it was a girl. One evening I was collecting a burrito from a delivery guy at the studio door when Carter appeared behind him, wearing sneakers and white earbuds. For a minute, I thought he’d been jogging. None of this—the shoes, the headphones, physical exercise—was normal. I put the food on the counter of the kitchenette and asked him if he wanted any. I hoped he’d ask to hear the mix, which I thought was sounding good. He didn’t answer, too absorbed in whatever he was listening to.
Eventually he gave up and held out the earbuds. I put them in and heard a mariachi band playing on the subway—nasal harmonies, a jaunty accordion, guitar. There was a change in the acoustic as the doors opened, a muffled announcer’s voice saying something about the train running express.
—This is my file?
—You remember where you were?
—The C train, I think. Uptown C.
—Oh. I guessed wrong. I thought it was the six.
He looked disappointed.
—You’re retracing my walks?
—You heard something, Seth. There might be other things.
—This is what you’ve been doing? All week?
—Mostly.
—There’s nothing on those recordings. I pulled out anything worthwhile.
—So you say. You could have heard things you didn’t know you heard.
—You understand how much work we have to do, right? We’re on deadline.
—Let me get my laptop. I’ll prove it to you.
We sat down and he made me listen to audio that I’d recorded somewhere in Bed-Stuy, an old homeless man shuffling up to me, asking for money. I remembered him. He’d done a sort of lolloping tap dance; he had a comic pitch: hey man hey brother make a donation to the United Negro Bacon Sandwich Fund. I heard myself laughing. Then he began to shout at me. You could tell that he was close, right up in my face, snarling pay me pay me what you owe me motherfucker.
I remembered the man, but I had no memory of that.
—Who was the guy?
—I have literally zero idea.
The beggar’s voice was changing stereo position, as if he or I had been moving around. I could hear my own breathing, labored and uneven, as if I were agitated or making a physical effort, but I wasn’t saying anything. A man was shouting at me in the street and I wasn’t responding at all.
—You know who that was, right?
Carter sounded as if he expected an answer.
—Some old guy. I have no clue.
I remembered the first part, the amusing part, the shuffling, the pitch.
—Hey man hey brother? You don’t hear his voice?
I knew what he meant. The very idea was frightening. But why couldn’t I remember the rest? How could my mind have erased something so intense and dramatic?
—Carter. It wasn’t the same guy.
—What did he look like?