drummer

I HAD BEEN SEEING Mai for a few weeks when she abruptly left me for a drummer. And not just any drummer, but Giorgio Marrakesh, the rhythm provider for one of New York’s most enduring indie rock ensembles. Mai was my kind of woman: a few years older, self-accomplished, intoxicatingly neurotic, a spicy summer cocktail of the dangerous and ridiculous, well shaken. She had her own TV show, which was called The Mai Show. She would emerge onto the stage of The Mai Show in her lovely pink tablecloth-looking dress as spellbound fans from everywhere applauded furiously. She would spin and settle onto one hip.

We had met at the Strand Bookstore downtown on a Wednesday afternoon. I had been paging through reproductions of 17th-century Swedish imperial maps; she had been reading a feature article about herself from 1994. She had just finished filming the day’s episode. She was sipping from a coffee cup. She wore those big glasses that famous people wear, to both draw attention to themselves and to avoid being seen. But those pink lips gave her away. It was all going swimmingly and summerly until Giorgio re-entered the picture. She went back to him at once. “He’s a drummer,” she said and shrugged. She related the end in a careless and wonderful way.

A drummer. Drummers sat in the back, surveying all before them. Drummers were steady, reliable. Drummers kept the beat. Drummers had their own philosophy. “But he’s just a drummer,” I wrote Mai. I sent telegrams to her apartment every hour on the hour, relayed by real messenger boys. “He’s just a drummer,” I continued. “He knows about cymbals, he knows about snares and tom-toms, he knows if it’s 4/4 or 6/8. Would a drummer write you a haiku?”

He’s just a drummer / Always playing with his sticks / Can’t write a haiku

A drummer, she was with a drummer, not a writer. But what is a writer? A writer is always writing. A writer is found in bookstores. A writer runs his fingers along old paperbacks by Salinger and Vonnegut, wishing he had written them, but secretly feeling superior to both.

“But can a writer also be worthy of your love?” I penned Mai. She read the letter while she was lounging around in her loft apartment, eating macaroni and cheese and talking to her agent. She never wrote back.

frida

FRIDA HAD SLIPPED MY MIND. She was just gone. Poof! Away in a small cloud of atoms, dust, and smoke. I hadn’t thought about her in ages. Her existence had been archived and lost in those vast stacks. Misplaced. We lived very different lives. If you took an old-fashioned globe and set it to spin, she would be over here and me all the way over here. We still spoke the same language, the language of the British, but I wondered if we could understand each other.

But there she was one day, getting into an elevator and there I was, running to squeeze in beside her. She looked the same. Her dark hair was lush, bushy, curly, her pale face wore the same look of frustration. Frustration with things. Frustration with the world. A beige raincoat, rubber boots. For Frida, life was always raining. I rushed into the elevator, but fortunately I had a dog with me. I knew that Frida would never speak to me again, even in an elevator, but I also knew she had a soft spot for dogs. Frida could not resist the temptation of small furry animals.

She gave me an annoyed look and her eyes rolled over me once and then they hit the small dog below me, restrained by a red leash. She stooped down and said, “Ooohsooowoozoo!” Or whatever it is women say when they encounter a dog they like, and she stroked him behind his ears whispering, “Yes, yes?” Then she looked at me. “Well,” she said in a northern accent. “I never thought I’d be seeing you again.” I only nodded. Better to remain silent. The elevator buttons lit up as we moved between floors. “Don’t you remember how you brought her flowers every morning?” said a faint voice. “And how you left them behind her window glass? Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember?” Indeed, I was once capable of such things so long ago.

The elevator came to a halt and its doors opened. I saw a country landscape with thick shiny green grass and a red Victorian house in the distance. A stone path led from the elevator, which was lodged inside a bus stop shelter, and the house, which belonged to Frida’s family. Frida exited the elevator and various forest animals crowded her at once, deer, hares, squirrels. She stopped and smelled an enormous sunflower. “Oh, it’s so good to be back. And my sister’s here!” she said. Then she turned to me and said, “Well? Are you coming or not?”

i’m not afraid of fires

THEY TROOPED IN from a party and one of them was just perfect, fuzzy-haired and round, just like a fire spark. I still don’t know her name or who she was, and maybe there’s no reason to. She was probably a nobody with a nothing story. But maybe that was just me trying to write her out of my mind. Maybe she was the most vivid fire starter of all. I’m not afraid to get burned anymore, you know. I’ve got those sous-chef hands. I’m not afraid of fires. I like mine hot. I want my fires hot just like her, plump and flickering, orange, red, yellow and warm, rimmed with gold, and blue at the core, with eyes the same color that wink back to you just like a blueburst flame. Every oscillation is another step out of cold dark winter’s heartache.