Moonlight Water, con’t.
Chapter 2: STANDING IN THE DOOR TO HELL
Several weeks earlier, just north of San Francisco:
Denial. Robbie had been fending off reality for years, and he never needed his denial fix more than now.
So there he was, sitting at the kitchen counter of his fancy house, Anchor Steam at hand before breakfast, toying with the break in a new song. “You’ll come,” he said. “Just one simple break, why are you holding out on me?” He could have been talking to his wife. Music was like that sometimes.
Robbie often talked to his songs as he wrote them, especially now when it was getting harder to bring them into the world. Frustration ate at him as lyrics and melodies hid in the shadows. Sometimes he whipped his songs into being, his words a charging team of horses. Other times he seduced them into life. Performing under the name Rob Roy, he threw his tall, burly body around the stage with the madness of a Scot warrior going berserk, and he belted out songs like battle cries.
Robbie played half the musical instruments known to man, sang choruses with the brassiness of a trombone, and wrote every kind of music imaginable and some that wasn’t. Rolling Stone once wrote that his songs resembled classical music gone Grateful Dead. Robbie thought they meant something positive, though he didn’t know what.
So get at it.
His band, the Elegant Demons, had to have a new song for its upcoming tour. If personal life was hellish for Robbie right then, so what?
The guitar break was coming, he could feel it now, a gentle interlude before a pagan-blast chorus. At the end of the second line, where the verse made mention of the lost lover, he tried a B minor in place of the D major. “Nice,” he said.
He crossed out D on the lead sheet and wrote Bm. Tried it again — “Grabs the ear.” This didn’t feel like a great song, but when the band had it going on, when the moment and the music fused with the energy of a huge crowd, any of his songs could turn magical. They were a jam band, not known for their studio recordings but for their break-down-the-wall improvisations.
He took a deep breath and let the tune run through his bones. He coaxed the first phrase along, it was just about there.
The phone outclanged the music. “Shit!” he snapped. But he answered it. Only his wife, the band members, and his manager’s office had this number.
“Speak,” said Robbie, the greeting he always used.
“It’s Nora.”
“Yes.”
“Georgia and I are on the way. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Ф
He put his guitar in its case, thumped back onto the stool at the counter, and pulled on the beer. This was wrong, all wrong, more of the hell he was denying.
Two days ago his wife Georgia had lost the baby — three times they’d tried now, three miscarriages. He’d first gotten the call about the baby catastrophe from Nora — “Get down to the hospital, Georgia’s lost the baby, and she wants you.”
He spent the short drive furious at Nora. His wife was in deep trouble. Why hadn’t anyone, why hadn’t Nora, called him until it was over?
He brushed by Nora toward the hospital bed, ready to yell back at that damned woman, but…
One look at his wife’s face stopped all words. He felt like he was inside a walk-in freezer. Her pallid cheeks, her hands lifeless on the sterile white sheets, the chrome IV stand, the tubes, the needle — the thought of the dead child — this region of grief struck Robbie dumb. He had no words for anything as brutal as the life the gods threw at human beings.
Dr. Packard talked to him. He explained. When the doctor discovered that the baby in Georgia’s belly, their baby, had no heartbeat, he gave her a shot that forced her to issue forth a dead thing. You couldn’t call it a birth. Robbie had no energy for questioning anything. The sorrow, the bitterness, the weariness gonged in his head. Three tries, three miscarriages.
Dr. Packard threw Robbie and Nora out. “There’s more bleeding than I’d like. I’ve sedated her heavily. Go home and let her sleep.”
Robbie gave his wife’s hand a squeeze. Though the grief belonged to both of them, they were ice cubes in separate trays. Even her closed eyelids seemed to shut him out.
“Robbie,” Nora whispered, as if to tell him everything would be all right. He shook his head and barged out of the room. He couldn’t bring himself to talk. Nora had been their business manager for a decade, and the band’s accountant. Robbie liked her fine but had never felt as if he knew her, not really. Georgia’s best buddy or not, he couldn’t get close enough to hear her rhythm. And recently things with Nora were off, way off.
The next day at Georgia’s bedside was a jumble of half-toned memories. Their decade together, Georgia all scarves and bangles and bracelets and gaiety. Georgia the explorer, meditator, practitioner of feng shui, devotee of Pilates and yoga, connoisseur of fine wines. Georgia, who loved to dance, Georgia the whirligig of fun. For years they had everything but the children they wanted. In the last year or so, less fun, but he didn’t know why. Hadn’t asked, either.
The second half of the day was a shuffle of comings and goings of people who called themselves helpers when their world was beyond help, actions that were useless, occasional words from Georgia. He sat numbly in his bedside chair, unable to talk to anyone, unable to talk to Nora. He felt like he was wandering through endless corridors looking, looking for something he would never find. And the corridors meandered on.
Dr. Packard put an end to it. “Clear out, both of you. Tomorrow after I’ve checked on her, maybe ten o’clock, I’ll call and you’ll probably be able to take her home.”
Now the heavy front door of their house opened and broke his reverie. He swigged on the beer. I’m drinking too much, but fuck it.
