Peculiar Moods

She'd been ready for hours, wearing a little black number, the two of us attending the opening night at the San Francisco Opera. After the opera, we were to enjoy a late dinner.

I was two hours late, a misfit in a suit, scrubbed to reasonable untidiness. I could have produced a plausible excuse, lied about it, but didn't say a word knowing her anger is silence. Such peculiar moods I've experienced before.

What is it with you, Harry?

She is pacing the floor, anger flaming behind her eyes. Now I have a headache, she complains, no doubt brought on by something…someone…yes, me.

There are no words. I'm a fragmented man.

Standing barefoot, still in her figure-hugging dress, she asks: Am I wrong, Harry? Is this our Anniversary or something all too absurd? Her tears are so large I can count them. Apologies are useless, even if I could find the courage. So instead, I use a twist of words aimed to culminate in the word sorry. 

Still, there's a dissolution of those words into syllables, becoming stutters, moans, ready effects helping me make the word sorry indiscernible. It's this kind of territory I find myself in all too often, rudeness, disrespect, apathy, or any reason not to attend a fucking opera. It's not a territory that comes with a map.

Why not just say, fuck you, Harry? Let me know where I'm at. What am I supposed to do with this question - What is it with you, Harry?

For most women, anger appears like a flood of night. It's never been that way with Jenny. Her silence places me in a bad dream, one where I'm alone, having to repeat the word sorry a hundred times before being released. These days I never sleep well at night, convincing myself there's another place where wild men with restless hearts go to beg forgiveness.

I always wanted to be the best kind of lover, better friend, and not just another. I could have told some story, anything, but whatever I might have said, well, it would have been a story.

There is nothing wrong in Jenny feeling this way. We cannot both be reasonable; it gets harder for her each day. I want to work it out, get it right, listen, remember dates, movie nights, and anniversaries, but increasingly I seem to forget…and can't find the need in these fragile years to remember anything.

I tell the Uber guy to take us to Bush Street, Music City Recording Studios.

Don't you dare, Harry. Jenny says. She is cross and abrupt. I'd been at the studios all day.

Stop the car here, driver. I get out of the car at the end of Battery Street; the night is warm. The Uber guy turns his head to watch as Jenny stretches her body across the car to get out curbside. He's treated to a sight between her legs. Taking her hand, I stare him in the eyes. He knows I know. I could throw some words at him, tell him to go somewhere and jerk off before his next ride, but it would be like throwing a pancake against the wall and expecting it to bounce off. We walk for an hour. Jenny has no appetite and no desire to talk. I buy her a flower from a street vendor. Happy Anniversary, I say.

Fifteen minutes later, we arrive outside the door of Music City Recording studios on Bush Street. She's too angry to say anything. Musicians gather at the entrance, having a smoke, but with little tobacco. Strange greetings are expressed between us, words to the untrained ear that might sound like frustration, disgust, or triumph of a sort but is simply hello in abstract form.

Those men, the ones at the door, are following us, Harry. She takes my hand for the first time this evening. I feel her nervousness. If you're a woman and don't make music, and don't use dope, it's easy to imagine there's nothing here for her. Howling Henry is blowing his harmonica as we walk down the corridor. I recognize the musical strains. He is warming his lips. The room we enter is dark, illuminated by a red lamp. The boys behind pile into the room, taking their places behind shapeless forms before lights brighten, and a saxophone lingers on a tune, a guitar sharpens the night, and several chords from the organ sustain in the air. The blood from an earlier squabble is a light stain on the tiled floor. It could have been mine, on this occasion not so. I don't remember exactly what happened, but the blood is Howlin Henry's, having sparred with Luka on electric violin. It's not bad blood, but took a couple of hours to settle the creative score, and me late for my anniversary celebration. No one loves opera; it's a joke that poor people play on the rich. 

Seeing the creative fistfight, I felt jaded and old and ashamed the blood was not mine. Creativity will always dictate my time, what's important in my life, what's real, and remind me how I spent my youth.

Jenny has the flower still. I sit her down and walk over to the piano.

Earlier in the evening, we recorded a new song. It's about two people making promises, new ones over old, packing every decent memory worth carrying; those ones to get lovers through the blue velvet nights of sorrow and regret, and the repeating phrase of home:

can you hear my song take me with you, take me home see the seabird wheeling telling me the way to go drifting out of sight feel the wind, see the sky, punished by the waves as they break upon the shore watch the fishing boats sail beyond the harbour walls to the Minch, or Firth of Lorne

Later, we kiss on the bridge, laughing at ourselves, hidden by fog in the remains of our night's romance.