has this inability.”
“You mean disability?” Daktari looked closely at Joe’s body. A flicker of horror crossed his beauteous mien at the idea that the label might have signed a disabled person.
“Inability,” Daniel said. “He can’t really listen to loud noises that sound like explosions all the time.”
“Because of what, war trauma?”
“He’s unable. It’s like when you say you’re unable to come to the phone or unable to forgive somebody. On the one hand, it’s an admission of weakness, because you’re saying you’re at the mercy of forces beyond your control, but to other people it sounds arrogant, since those forces might be you.” Flora was pushing a six-inch beanbag hippopotamus up his pants leg, and he leaned down to pet her head, the way he always did when speaking an eternal truth he hoped would accompany her on her way.
“In other words, it resembles my inability to put out a hit record with no percussion,” Daktari countered.
“I didn’t say ‘no percussion,’” Joe said. “I love congas and bongos. Can we get a studio with congas and bongos?”
“Our studios have pro arrangers and session musicians and every goddamned instrument in the book,” Daktari said. “Bring me hit tunes, and I’ll record them any way you want.”
RIDING HOME ON THE BUS, DANIEL LOUDLY MOURNED THEIR FAILURE TO SIGN WITH AN independent label. He was tortured by the illogic of their discussion with Daktari, who had bested him in negotiations without negotiating or even paying him any attention. Instead of gaining the label’s assent to songs without drums, he had committed Joe to earning congas and bongos with all-new material.
They stood for a long time talking about it at the playground. Daniel set Flora down on the ground. Indoors she was a floor baby, but outdoors she was a baby rooting for acorns in mud. Sandboxes were rare in New York, considered dangerous because of pet feces. There was never an evening when she didn’t need a bath.
“I screwed up,” Daniel said, turning over a succession of fallen leaves with his foot. He saw a shard of broken glass and picked it up so he could throw it in the trash. “We should have signed with Matador.”
“That guy likes hit songs,” Joe said. “So I’ll write hit songs. He’s going to love my new songs. Everything’s completely fine, so stop worrying.”
“My feeling was that he hated us. I mean all of us, even Flora.” He looked down. She had placed a cigarette filter in a bottle cap so that her hippo could eat it off a dish. When the hippo failed to react, she mimed eating the filter herself. “That’s a no-no!” he said. “Don’t eat litter!” She put it back. With her help, the hippo extended its prolapsed pink mouth like an amoeba over the bottle cap and its contents. “Hippos hate cigarette butts,” he said, picking it up so he could throw it away. “Even though they’re rich in minerals and fiber. They prefer grass. Why don’t you offer him some grass from your open hand?”
“Where’s any grass?” she said. “I don’t see grass.”
“I see dandelions,” Joe said. “That’s hippos’ favorite food. They call it hippo-pot.”
“I see hippo-pot!” she said. She stood and approached a solitary dandelion that was standing by a fence. With the hippo clamped under one arm, she did her best to rip it out of the ground.
“That was pedagogically questionable,” Daniel commented.
“You’re so nugatory all the time!”
“I hope you mean ‘negative all the time.’”
“Even about Daktari. He hates indie rock music because he works for a major label. It makes total sense.”
“So why the fuck did he sign an indie rock artist like you?”
“Because he’s a prescient guy. He can tell I’m going to bring him big hits!”
Joe’s first girlfriend was the former singer of the defunct band Broad Spectrum, a slim, dark-haired classical archaeology major named Bethany. She was interning at Matador that summer because it was too hot in Asia Minor to go on digs. She wore hundred-dollar Laura Ashley dresses with Doc Martens, the look Eloise’s housecoats and Hush Puppies were supposed to suggest. Her features were delicate. Her teeth looked like Chiclets. She shared a two-bedroom summer sublet in the West Village with an absentee figure-skating instructor. She styled herself a “geek girl” because she wore glasses. In her spare time, she followed New Dance. She had read somewhere that attending dance performances can qualify a person to be a dance critic. Her father, a banking executive, occasionally met her for lunch at Delmonico’s, where he assured her that dance was another arrow in her quiver.
She volunteered to sing harmonies on Joe’s record. It surprised her when he said no. She thought his trusting ways would make him a pushover. Instead they made him assume she wouldn’t mind rejection. She didn’t let on how mad she was, because she didn’t want to lose him. She believed that his surreal sense of humor made him a hard person to know.
Her relationship specialty was evenings out. She liked plays and recitals. He didn’t care who paid. She led him to art museums and to restaurants with arty food. For several weeks that fall, they were regulars at American Ballet Theatre. She tapped his new American Express card for culture and comfort. In her own mind, she was educating him, so it seemed to her like a fair exchange.
Joe worked diligently on his songwriting, as usual. He mastered his demos on sixty-minute cassettes. Every time a tape filled up, he delivered it to Daktari’s secretary. There was general consensus around the office that he was going to end up owing the label a lot of money. No one there believed in him but Bethany, who did it on principle because they were dating.
PAM HATED HER WITH GREAT BITTERNESS. SHE SAW HER AS A MOOCH AND A LEECH WHO was using Joe as an auxiliary dad, one of those upper-class women who aspire to be children all their lives. As an excuse for poor eyesight, the “geek girl” tagline bugged her big time. But what bothered her most was how Bethany’s girlfriendly blandishments stained Joe’s pure soul with egotism. All his innocent self-regard and faith in his innate value metamorphosed into campy self-adoration in the light of her approval. She heightened his pleasure in life when he was already living a joyful dream. She reinforced playful impulses that didn’t need any encouragement. His behavior in her presence careened right past joie de vivre into something resembling hysteria. He called her “the orgasm factory” to her face, and she followed him around like a duckling. She constantly displayed to onlookers that she was with Joe—of all people—and this, Pam simply did not understand. How could some hot-looking, jet-setting, dance-theater-watching rich bitch be possessive about Joe? Had she reencountered him after the House of Candles show feeding hot dogs to squirrels, instead of walking the halls of Atlantic with a contract in his hand, would she have gone near him? (Hot dogs that spent too many hours in the slimy waters of the Abyssinian Coffee Shop burst and became unsalable, and then they were Joe’s.) Any child of six could have told you she was a deluded social climber who’d boarded the wrong train. Why couldn’t he see through it?
Stupid question, she knew. He trusted everyone, even bitches. His former life hadn’t been long on the bitches. For a poignant half second, she wished she had kissed him, or even gone to bed with him, so that no star-fucker bitch could have been his first.
WHEN FLORA WAS THREE, DANIEL TOOK HER TO THE TRIENNIAL SVOBODA FAMILY reunion. She came back raving about tricycles and wagons, wearing a tiny gold-plated cross on a chain around her neck. He was no longer an accredited family member, but the Svobodas seemed to feel there was hope for her. He let her wear the cross until they got home. Then he said it was too valuable to wear every day, took it off her, and threw it in the trash. A week later, she asked for the cross again. When she couldn’t have it, she cried.
A week after that, her hippo ate dog shit and had to be