William
Could a person just stay in bed forever? And if not forever, how long could a person really get away with it? William wanted to push it if he could and not get out of bed, ever. Today, facing the sunlight seemed more like a chore than a gift. He remembered days when sunshine, and enjoying it, felt like something to savor. After many long years growing up in a place where the sun didn’t usually want to shine, he had an appreciation for the sun when it shone. But today he didn’t want the sun. He wanted more alcohol, more cigarettes, and more hibernation in his self-consuming misery. Certainly not the sun.
Another thing he didn’t want was a lecture. In his adult life he had come to accept most fates and gotten used to most annoyances, but a lecture from a ‘well-meaning’ friend? That he simply could not handle. Every time he heard even the hint of disappointment or contempt in someone’s voice, he was immediately twelve, back in his fancy prep school feeling as he always felt, second-rate. Today he wanted none of that, and he knew that was exactly what was in store for him when he would meet Lizzy for lunch. William was ready to paint her a nice picture of what he had been up to. All morning he had been mentally preparing himself for the lies he would tell her. He knew he would have to do a lot of glossing over the details of what he’d really been up to for the last few months because in truth; drinking, that’s what he’d been up to…and that’s all.
He imagined himself being interviewed on one of those late-night television shows. He’d be all dressed up, looking his very best and the host would say, “So, William, what have you been up to since we all last saw you?” And he imagined himself looking out to the audience trying to think of any other answer other than, “drinking, and then drinking a bit more, really.”
Today was two months. Two actual months of hell. It was also the day he promised his friend, Lizzy, he would meet her for lunch and he knew if he didn’t stick to his plan she would come over uninvited and then she would really know the truth, and there would be no way to hide it. She would see how unkempt his place had become, the dirty dishes piled up, and the dust bunnies so big it was almost time to name them. So, he would do what he did best on days like this, talk his way around it, put a positive spin on how things really were. He’d say words like, “getting used to it,” or “transitional period,” he’d make a few jokes he knew would work on her, and then he would head straight back to the dim lighting and alcohol. That was his plan and he would stick to it.
What were all of those expressions about life happening to you when you least expected it? William never bought much into clichés or maybe he did at one point before his heart was ripped out, but when Lizzy sat there over sushi and zero alcohol, and tried to remind him of all the things that could happen when he was least expecting them, he really didn’t think he was going to be able to manage his look of disgust. He tried doing that half-smile thing and nodding his head, but finally, when he couldn’t take another second of her trying to cheer him up, he begged, “just please stop. I know you are trying to help, but all you are really doing is making me come up with all sorts of ways I can imagine injuring myself with my chopsticks…I appreciate you so much for forcing me out into the light of day, I really do. But I’m not ready for the positive spin or the bright side. Please don’t hate me for this, but I have to leave.”
“William…”
And with that, he did walk out on his friend, something he knew he had never done in his entire life. He made a mental note of sending her the money for lunch with an apology note and a huge bouquet of daisies, her favorite flower. But then came the thought of Kate and her love of daisies, and then suddenly, just like that, in the broad utterly blinding daylight, he started to cry.
Crying? What kind of man had he become? Crying in the middle of the day. He could hardly stand himself anymore.
William
Christmas Eve Two Months Ago…
William knew he was making a mistake by pressing the conversation. He should have just kept it light, after all, it was Christmas Eve and things were, well, complicated enough. But he was William and he never could keep things light, so he did press the conversation. He pushed and he did end up regretting it. If only he could have her back, once more in the warmth of his covers, he’d never let go.
Today, Two months later.
William walked away from Lizzy and sat alone with his thoughts on a bench near the restaurant, making sure it was in a direction that Lizzy would not go on her way home. He couldn’t imagine how angry she probably was at him. Who would just walk out in the middle of a meal? He sat thinking about how embarrassing his behavior had become lately.
“Excuse me, do you mind if I sit here?”
“Not at all. I am just about to go anyway.” William answered, happy to escape the thoughts of how terrible lunch had really gone. He knew that when Lizzy got home and told Pete what happened, he would get a call from him, and probably even a fatherly visit from his oldest friend in the world. Yes, he deserved it, but that wasn’t actually a helpful thought either.
“Please don’t leave for me, I just have to quickly rest my leg, I hurt it last night, and it’s bothering me a bit more than I thought.”
“Well, I’m just resting my brain, it hurts a bit more than I thought." William hesitated, "I’m joking. I just have a bit of a headache."
She took two Advil out of her bag and offered him the bottle.
Sometimes silence on a bench next to a total stranger can bring an enjoyable kind of peace. It’s not the silence of being with someone you know where you feel the pressure of filling the space with nonsense and useless chatter, and it’s not the silence of being totally alone that brings with it the pull of loneliness and urgency. He accepted the Advil and thought to himself that he could probably take almost the entire bottle and it wouldn’t help.
“So, where are you actually heading then?” he offered after a few too-sunny moments. “Are you going to make it with your leg hurting that way?”
“I should be ok. I am just heading over there to that music shop. I sometimes work there on the weekends when my friend is out of town. She owns it, and I owe her a few favors.”
“Owing favors, I know that pastime quite well.” He joked.
She laughed and rubbed her leg once more for good measure.
“What did you do to it?” he asked.
“Nothing major, just decided to start running again for the first time in well, forever, and possibly got a bit ahead of myself.”
After a few more minutes of unexpected relaxing silence, she said, “Well, I am off. Thanks for the company.”
“Thanks for the meds.”
“Stop in if you need music, records, I should say, there is only vinyl and lord knows no one else is stopping in.” She sighed and started limping away.
Records? Really? Of all things! He had just felt the heaviness of his mood slightly shifting when this one little word sent him right back under the weight of it all. The weight of rejection and loneliness and having to start over, again. He didn’t want to start over again, ever.
Back to two months ago…
“William, before we get into a fight that we can’t find our way out of, please just open your gift from me. I really think you are going to like it.”
He had just given her the gift he bought her a few moments before, and as usual, was happy to see the look on her face knowing it would be something that she would love. But this time there was a sadness to it as well. What he wanted to buy her was something big and expensive and life-affirming like a house, a diamond ring, or a vacation for just the two of them, but instead, it was another gift that she would love but would ultimately keep tucked away. Tucked in the privacy and in the hidden life they had created.
He wondered, but never asked, if she had rented a locker at the bus station or had a wooden floorboard in her house to hide all of the gifts he had bought her over the years. “If I bought her a new home, she wouldn’t be able to squirrel it away in a locker,” he thought to himself as she handed him a present wrapped in brown paper with an incredibly festive, all wrong for the mood, ribbon.
"Thank you," he said.
“You’re welcome.” She sat down and put her hand on his knee and looked straight into his sad eyes. She very firmly said, “I love you. I hope you still know at least that.”
Before he could actually open the gift, he became overwhelmed by a sadness and a happiness so deep that he didn’t know what to do other than grab her onto his lap and kiss her until he could be calm enough to speak again. He felt that the longer they were touching, the more settled he felt and the easier he could speak and breathe.
Eventually, he let her go, and even though she was now only a few feet away from him, immediately it felt like she was in a different place entirely.
He unwrapped the brown paper to find an old-fashioned record player. She said she had found it in an antique store they had been to once before when they were waiting out the rain near a cafe they visited often. “I like it,” he said. And he did, but somehow he knew that it would soon make him sad that he had it.
Without much hesitation, she stood up, cleared off space on his desk and put on a record that she had also bought him at the same antique store. In a moment’s time, he went from feeling like the world would end, to dancing with her slowly and lazily to a Billie Holiday rendition of Come Rain or Come Shine.
Now he knew why she bought him the record player; she obviously found the old record first. “You can never be mad at me when you hear this song. That was our deal, remember?”
“I remember.” And she was right. It was the song they played to make them forget how crazy things really were. It was the song that forced them to pause and just be. “Then why are you crying?” he said, even though he was afraid to ask.
Today, Two Months Later.
When William finally talked himself into getting up off the bench, he cursed the sun for being too damn bright and headed back to his apartment after first stopping to restock any kind of alcohol he could find. He realized when he was done buying wine that the record store the girl was talking about was right next door, and unfortunately their eyes met, and she waved him in. He wasn’t all that comfortable being rude, but a record store was the very last place he wanted to be. So he just waved and started walking toward home.
“Hey, I don’t suppose you could do me a quick favor?” she shouted to him.
“Me? Sure, I suppose I could. You did give me Advil, and it does seem to have helped.”
“Honestly, if you could just stand inside the store for two minutes, I think I dropped my keys near the bench when I was sitting there. It will just take a quick moment.”
Immediately the smell of the record store made him want to run home. This was too much. This was a Kate place, a place she would love. A place she would have dragged him into and immediately a place he vowed he’d never walk into again.
He felt an unwelcome urge to rummage through the boxes and stacks of old records for the Billie Holiday record, turn it on the loudest volume possible, and cry for days. But then he remembered that before he had ever met Kate he really did have an ounce of pride, and even a touch of an ego, and he didn’t want to completely embarrass himself in front of a total stranger- right?
When Rebecca came back, it turned out her name was Rebecca, she apologized profusely and shared the happy news that the keys were found and that she could now happily get into her house.
“I really appreciate it,” she hesitated for his name.
“William, it’s William.” And with that, William realized that he hadn’t introduced himself to anyone in a long time. He reached to his face to remind himself if he had shaved or not. He hadn’t.
Suddenly he realized that he had no idea what state his physical appearance was actually in and he set out to head home.
“Honestly, you’re a lifesaver. Do you have a record player? Take anything you want.”
He couldn’t help but laugh.
“Sorry, I know that’s random, but I don’t really have anything else to offer you. I am sort of low on cash, and the records are all that I could think of to offer.”
“It’s not that, really. Thank you, you don’t have to worry about giving me anything. Besides I don’t actually ever want to see a record again for the rest of my life.”
With that, a sort of light went on in her head. Until he said those words there was a dullness about her and an almost purposeful way of speaking using a very limited amount of words.
“Oh, William, you did say William, right? You can’t swear off records. I simply won’t allow it. They are a key, a very essential key to our past. They are a bridge between us and so many generations before us. A song wouldn’t be a song without a record or a record player." She took a long, thoughtful breath and continued, "You know, listening to a song, one actual song used to be a thing. There was no such thing as a playlist. If you wanted to listen to something you had to stand up, walk all the way across the room, very carefully lower the needle onto the record, and let it play. But then just as quickly as it started, it was over." She was so animated while she was talking it took William off guard. "At first one entire side of an album was dedicated to just one single song. Can you imagine that? There was no passivity in listening to music, you had to work for it. You had to appreciate every single note. This whole idea of shuffling past a song that is hiding somewhere within a playlist made up of thousands of songs. It’s an insult really.” She was done, she had exhausted herself.
William looked at her amused yet clearly taken by her sudden passion.
“I’m sorry,” she said with a touch of embarrassment. “I get a little carried away sometimes.”
“Please don’t apologize. Don’t apologize for having a passion for something. I envy it, I really do.”
“I know I get on my soap box, but I listen to songs all day that remind me of all the people that I have loved, and that have loved me. One minute I am dancing with my grandfather in his maroon cable-knit sweater and smell of red wine to Bing Crosby singing, ‘You’re nobody ‘til somebody loves you’ and the next I am watching my mother cook a casserole listening to a piano concerto of Mozart. It’s like my whole life reduced to the A side and B side of these records. A musical of my life, without any beginning or end, my own personal soundtrack.”
“Ok, you’re starting to convert me,” William said quietly. He couldn’t match her enthusiasm today. Today he could barely be out in the sunshine, but he still wanted her to know that he appreciated her talking to him, so he made the friendliest face that he could manage and said, “Ok, I will take a record as a thank you. It turns out I do actually have a record player that I haven’t even used, so I will allow you to choose one for me, if you don’t mind.”
“That would be an honor, she said.”
As she started rummaging through the piles for what he figured she would consider the perfect offering, he tried to think of who he would give the record player and the record to, since he knew for damn sure he would never be using it. “Maybe this will make up for running out on the sushi bill to Lizzy,” he thought.
His mind wondered back to a few months ago.
“William, I can’t do this anymore.”
“Kate, don’t say it, please.”
“We can’t. I need to let you move on. It’s my real Christmas present to you. It’s the thing that you will never give yourself.”
There were words after that, he was sure of it, lots of words, most likely hundreds and hundreds of them. But all he remembered the next morning was “I’m gonna love you, like nobody loves you, come rain or come shine…” that’s what he remembered, and that’s what he was determined to forget.
Here you go. Rebecca tore him from his painful memory with the Michael Jackson Thriller album. She smiled, “it’s not that you look like a huge MJ fan, it’s just that this album has universal appeal. Either people love it, or they love to hate it, but posthumously no one ever turns down a copy. Besides, I don’t really know you well enough to give you anything else, accept for maybe the Beatles or something else that’s sort of generic.”
“Thank you. I will enjoy it. I better run along. Thanks for the pep talk about records.”
“You’re welcome. You’ll see I’m right one day. I promise,” she said reluctantly, realizing that he really was in a hurry to leave. Not being able to stop herself from sharing this new theory she had come up with, she kept talking to him as he was walking out the door. “The thing about music is- it’s actually your own personal score to life. And my theory is that every relationship you have with someone can be told in five songs. Five songs, that’s all you need to bring yourself through life with someone. Or a life without them in a lot of cases.”
William noticed the way her face turned melancholy on this last part and couldn’t stop himself from being intrigued, even though he could feel the wine bottle in his hand and couldn’t wait to open it. Five songs, he thought, if it were only that simple.
“So, five songs you say?”
“Yup. Five. I have thought a lot about this. There’s not a lot else to do in this shop other than think and listen to songs that remind you of people.”
“Yes, I would imagine,” William said as he looked around the very empty, quiet store realizing how not one single customer had even walked by since he’d gotten there.
“Well, I won’t keep you with my continual opinions about this. Thanks again. Enjoy the MJ and stop back in sometime and tell me if you think I am wrong about the five songs. I’d rather you say I was right, but I never mind a little debating.”
“Ok, will do. I’ll start trying to disprove your thesis as soon as I can.” He laughed for the second time in one day. He couldn’t believe it.
She laughed too. A feeling she wasn’t all too familiar with these days either.
William walked back to his apartment contemplating the five songs per person idea. He even let the sunshine hit his face for a couple of extra seconds before heading back in, pouring a glass of wine and staring at the record player in the corner. This time it took a little more than a minute for him to get choked up- so things were at least improving.