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Love Songs

Albert Somma

    “I was happy enough not knowing,” I said to Karl. “Well, that’s not true. I told you I was considering leaving the tour because I had no idea what the songs meant anymore. I don’t know. Maybe that was part of my depression; I was afraid of the fact that I never knew.” Karl’s lanky and avuncular. A septuagenarian. He crosses his legs, settles his frame in with an exhale. I sit on a worn out couch and grab a throw pillow. He watches while I take in the room again. He was always that. The mirror. I knew I’d just admitted something. “You know Sinatra’s record, In the Wee Small Hours, the one he made at Capitol after Ava Gardner left his heart in the gutter? All I got was the hollowed out heartbreak. The loneliness, but not where it came from.” I’d had two marriages that spanned a quarter century. How was it I didn’t know what love was?
     “I just reread Carver’s, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” I said. “I don’t think he knew, either. Alcohol’s his close second. Old school. Drugs work, but demand more.” Well, there was something I knew.
    I looked at the bookshelves, sloppy with books and patient folders splayed out and in use. Over the mantel, its fireplace dammed with a carved metal plate, was a painting of a river that looked like a phallus with its scrotum of roiling water around jutting rocks. It was close to being real art. A gift from a patient, I thought. Some kind of break-through.
    “She said she loved me, Karl. She said she could marry me.”
    Karl, in shorts and Nike’s with no socks sat on his shrink’s throne, a high-backed leather chair next to a narrow window showing a Manhattan rooftop. A shaft of sky.
    “And you?” he said.
    “Fuck” I said, pulling the pillow to my stomach. “I’d avoided that with her for decades. We were college friends. Even through our doomed marriages, I never thought to cross the line with her.”
    “Then she broke the spell of your stupidity,” he said.
    “Jesus. . .” I said. “But that’s maybe not the most important thing. Okay, maybe it is, I don’t know. What I do know is that I was all in. I was ready. I’ve been alone a long time, Karl. I don’t have the same conditions I had when I was young.
    Karl put his feet up on a seedy, four-legged hassock, holding a dark cigar. “Sounds wonderful.” He nearly whispered it. He knew what came next because I’d told him over the phone.
    “It was,” I said. “It was a relief to feel like I had someone, someone willing just to be and see what happens. I’d never been happier.”
    “And now you’re here,” he said.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “So, tell me again. What happened?”

***
    It was national news—again. A gunman and an AR-15. An American Evangelical and a member of QAnon—opened fire inside the Redstone Cinemas in downtown Park City. There were nineteen dead and several wounded. The gunman was a thirty-nine year old, white truck driver from Box Elder who later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Before it all, he’d mailed a manifesto to the Salt Lake Tribune. After a week of deliberation, the paper decided to published it, parsing the light on “mental illness” and the ubiquity of “weapons of war” in America. In it were all the tropes of the populist delusions: How an immoral, “Hollywood elite” is “grooming our children” while in secret league with Democrat-party-pedophiles, backed by a “Jewish cabal” of international bankers. . . In it too, were the festival’s marquis films he’d had issue with. One, featuring a lesbian wedding and another, a documentary that followed a transgender kid through their transition.

***
    “Daria was at Sundance for the week with her production company,” I said. “We were trading texts and she’d call me before she went to bed. Imagine that? She’s there with all the glitterati, actors, producers, directors, eating duck mousse and drinking Le Rêve. . . and she Facetimes me from her hotel room in her night gown. So, one night I just go for it. I tell her she’s sexy as hell. . . and she says, ‘So are you.’ It was our first real flirtation. Over that week we became truly intimate from half-a-country away, admitting to our failures, our marriages unraveling. We just confessed, without judgment. At the end of the week, after a long phone call that seemed to settle so much, there was silence. . . and she says, ‘I could marry you, you know.’”
    Karl lit his cigar. The smell was thick and loamy. He once told me they were Brazilian, from a local, boutique cigar shop whose family farm in Santa Catarina raised horses while rotating crops of peas and tobacco. I remember they speak Portuguese in Brazil and that Daria and I, having talked about all the right-wing insanity since Trump, had toyed with the idea of her leaving the U.S. for Portugal.
    “I’d been trying her phone for a couple of hours but it kept going straight to voice mail,” I said. “She’d shut it off. So, when my phone finally rang, I thought it was her. I saw our whole lives in front of us, how we could rely on each other now. It was real. We were ready. And, you know, I realized I finally did understand the love songs.
    But it wasn’t her—the call. It was her son. Daria’s son. He just said, ‘Mom’s gone, David. She was at the Redstone. . .’”
    I hunched over a pillow, hollow and sick. I thought I’d mourned, but there was more. The horror of it. The theft. The end of a beginning. Karl had gotten up and was crouched down next to me. He put his hand on my shoulder.

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