Joe was definitely asleep. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t laughed. She gave him the benefit of the doubt. Joe slept so soundly that he liked to call himself the decedent. He laughed at his own joke whenever he said that. Sophie could not sleep. She had a job that required her to lay awake for long hours retracing her steps, and nothing seemed to help. Sex did not put her to sleep but rather put her in a state of heightened awareness. While she was having sex with Joe, she found herself looking up into his face as he chugged along and wondering how it had come to this. His was the face of a child, shot through with a tragic lack of understanding of its own mortality. It was not the face of a man. Not really. She reached up and brushed his cheek and he mistook her touch for tenderness.
With Joe asleep, she found herself thinking of sex. What was it, exactly? What was pleasure? Had she felt it? Something had seemed to widen in the space behind her nose, to enlarge her, but was that pleasure? How would she know, exactly? Joe had put a finger inside her. What was he pointing at? What was that rivulet of fluid growing cold on her thigh? Was it her blood? And what was the point of Joe’s weight on her, exactly? Was he making a point about his bulk? Was he trying to remind her of his physical power? It was unlikely. He was not aggressive. Sex kept her up, thinking.
Her bed, too, kept her up. It was not comfortable. Something in the sheets gave her cause to itch. A bed should not be like that. If it was not a place of peace, then where was peace? She listened to the blood beat in her ears. Who else was awake? Her mother, probably. Her mother had never slept easily either. She was too often lonely, or afraid, or angry. Maybe sleep, or the lack of sleep, passed like knowledge or sadness from mother to daughter. Maybe all of this was her mother’s fault. She watched the time on the clock creep along and cursed her mother, her bed, her life. She cursed Joe. She cursed sex. She looked out the window and cursed the night sky. “If I never see you again,” she said to the moon, “it’ll be too soon.” She closed her eyes and thought of ways of changing things for the better. She must have fallen asleep eventually, because she remembered dreaming, though she did not remember any details of the dream. She called her mother in the morning to arrange a visit. “I love you,” she said to her mother.
“Will you bring Joe?” her mother said.
“Yes,” Sophie said.
“Well, it’s up to you,” her mother said. No one’s tone was convincing.
JOE LOVED HER MOTHER. He had an easy way with her. He told her jokes and she laughed. He got her drinks and she said thank you. Sophie resented this, not because she wanted there to be tension between them but because she knew that Joe was not touching her mother’s core. That core was a hot thing — hot and cold both, to be precise — and when it was touched in any way the result was discomfort for everyone. Joe kept her mother comfortable and he was comfortable in return. He smiled at everything she said, even when what she said was sharp or uneasy. He ate whatever she put in front of him, even though Sophie knew that later on in bed he would turn from his back to his side and sigh in a way that let her know he was worrying about his weight. If asked, he would say nothing bad about her mother. “I like going over there,” he’d say. “It’s a nice place.” And just like that, she was left to stay awake in the bed, where the corners of the mattress rose up slightly, where the equatorial bar bruised her back and shoulders.
That’s where she’s going this afternoon: to see her mother and then buy a new bed. She told Joe that she was going to the drugstore. This struck her as an acceptable lie. She didn’t want to get into a discussion with him about the bed, and whether it should be replaced, and what implications that would have for their relationship and the future of the planet. She just wanted to sleep. Joe seems to be sleeping more than ever. For more than a week he has been slack, like a clothesline strung indifferently between two buildings. The preoccupation with his weight is only part of it. He has been listless. He has started to drink too much again. He has complained that he does not know what he wants from life, that he cannot imagine going forward while he is in the grip of this inertia. “But inertia is what makes you go forward,” she says. They were both right, but she was more right.
The radio is playing Billie Holiday, a song called “You Go to My Head.” Sophie knows the song, knows it well. Here, credit is due not her mother but her father. He plays the trumpet, sometimes professionally, and when she was a baby he had been obsessed with American singers. A truck goes by with a picture of a ghost on the side, which reminds her of a line in the song: “Though I’m certain that this heart of mine hasn’t a ghost of a chance in this crazy romance, you go to my head.” She and Joe do not listen to music together very often. Mostly it’s in the car. A radio is never on as they are going to bed or waking up. When she was friends with Peter, they used to listen to music all the time. Peter was obsessed with Smokey Robinson. “These songs tell you who to love,” he used to say. “Whoever you think of while you are listening to these songs, well, that is who you love.” When Peter explained this theory, Sophie saw how brightly hope was burning in his eyes. She could not endorse that hope. Instead, she fell silent and stayed that way.
At the time that Peter had asked Sophie to date him and Sophie had refused, she had told Peter she was sorry, and while it was a lie, it was also a prediction, because that time did eventually come. She thought of him often and was sorry when she did. Now in the car, as she drives to her mother’s house, she wonders where Peter is. He lingers like a haunting refrain. The song ends. Next is another Billie Holiday song, “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” Sophie sings along. “The memory of all that, no, no, they can’t take that away from me.” She imagines her mother’s voice next. This is becoming quite a play. “Oh, but they can take that away,” she hears her mother say. “Can and will. So be careful.” Her mother loves Joe. He is often the first thing she asks about. “It is so important to pick the right man to marry,” she tells Sophie. When her mother speaks of Joe, she rarely has any irony in her tone.
Her mother picked the wrong man to marry. He had run around, had a child with another woman, and eventually left. And it wasn’t as though there was no proof of his error: his daughter by the second wife lived in America now, although everyone said she was crazy. These were some very real consequences, her mother said, and every chance she got, she told Sophie not to repeat her mistake. Sometimes she even made her voice quaver when she said it, so she sounded like a ghost. “Dooooo not doooo what I have donnnnne,” she said. Again, the pain processed in such a way that it did not become poisonous. The memory of her mother’s ghost voice makes Sophie smile, although she feels a soft thud in her heart at the thought that perhaps the crime has already been committed. The last days have been criminal at many points. She was not able to look at Joe directly during dinner. She was angry at him in the truck. She disparaged him silently while he weighed himself. This is not the way it should be. Joe is kind. Joe will never leave. Joe will eventually fix the car. In “My Man,” Billie Holiday’s lover beat her up and ran around and still couldn’t weaken her devotion. That’s not Joe, not at all.
Joe would be surprised to learn that Sophie knows nearly every song Billie Holiday ever recorded. She knows “Riffin’ the Scotch” and “With Thee I Swing” and “Spreadin’ Rhythm Around” and “That’s Life I Guess.” Joe thinks that she does not know very much about music because she is young. He takes a squinty view of both her facts and her opinions. The night before, in the truck, there was a song that he loved and she didn’t. “I don’t know it or care to know it,” she said. He sniffed and said, “You always have a bone to pick musically.” Sophie was offended. She marked off the distance from Joe in her mind. But now, as she drives, she decides that she loves the sound of what Joe said. She feels like she has been recognized as the virtuoso of some rare instrument. That is what angels should play instead of harps: a bone. She likes the image so much that it relieves the pain of the insult almost entirely.