Doxology

No non-Christian person had ever been invited to their home before. Even Daniel had originally appeared uninvited, so to speak. Nobody ever asked him what he believed, and he usually knew better than to talk about it. On this occasion, the role model provided by Pam herself—a person whose openness with her parents had produced a rupture she clearly felt was preferable to living a lie, or at least preferable to going to church—prompted him to come to her defense with solidarity. He said, “I don’t believe in God or Jesus either, but it doesn’t matter!”

FOR PRESENTS, HE HAD BOUGHT EVERYONE IN HIS FAMILY SOME INDIVIDUALIZED ITEM of exotic Asian strangeness from Chinatown, a figurine or odd snack. He and Pam were due to receive many socks and fruitcakes, and Flora was getting hand-knit baby booties.

On Christmas morning, he took the Asian presents to his parents’ front porch and tried to negotiate. It became clear that alone, without Pam and Flora—without evidence that he had his disobedient wife well in hand—he would not be welcomed, and that they would credit no personal profession of his faith. He would have to attend church with them and set an example by coming forward to be saved.

His heart sank because he knew he would never do it. Seeing that he was expected to be a patriarch, to rule over Pam, alienated him as nothing ever had before.

Flora didn’t care about missing Christmas. She wasn’t even two yet, nor entirely clear on which of those strangers had been Grandma and Grandpa.

Their return flight was postponed by thirty hours due to typical Wisconsin winter weather. The likelihood that they would return for a second holiday season in Racine diminished to a vanishing smallness.

JOE’S NEXT SHOW WAS BY INVITATION OF SIMON, WHO HAD STUMBLED INTO ENVIABLE gigs reviewing classic rock LPs for the new website Amazon and heavy metal for the magazine Thrasher. Dumb luck and connections had lent him the aura of success, and some indie rock band was trying to siphon it off by getting him to book opening acts for their CD release party at a storefront on Stanton Street called House of Candles.

The band members had their own label, the way Joe had Lion’s Den, so they had no label-mates to pack the bill with. They were from Albany, so they had no fan base in tow except their girlfriends. They were paying rent for the venue, so they wanted bands with social circles, but not party bands that would steal the show.

Being something of an asshole, Simon invited bands that would help cement his professional position as a critic. He added Joe as an afterthought, to make sure Pam knew he could have booked Marmalade Sky and didn’t. He told the indie rock band that Joe was an outsider singer-songwriter with a loyal following, which was true.

She stayed home with Flora. Joe was promised no share of the door but granted permission to sell merchandise. Simon encouraged him to skip the sound check, because he couldn’t have cared less how he sounded. Thus Joe and Daniel didn’t head over until eight o’clock, as the first band was starting. Daniel carried twenty-eight singles in a box labeled “$3.”

Daniel set it down on a table in the back and looked around for Eloise. But she never showed that night, because there had been no publicity for anyone but the headliners. He stayed near the merchandise to make sure no one stole it.

Joe sat in the front row, bass on his lap, playing along quietly with the opening act, billed as Broad Spectrum. It consisted of a woman singer, a scared-looking boy playing tenor recorder, a sequencer that wasn’t working right, and a keyboard player holding a tambourine. The keyboardist was responsible for the sequencer. She kept jabbing at it, shaking the tambourine at random, and alternating between two chords on the keyboard with her left hand. You could hear that she was right-handed. The woodwind looked frustrated, trying for low notes and getting overtones. The singer’s dance moves kept taking her away from the microphone. Her voice could be heard when she stood still for the chorus, but it remained incomprehensible, because she cupped the mic with both hands, looking very earnest and sexy while it was practically inside her mouth and kept feeding back. The group performed as though they not only hadn’t rehearsed, but had won the gig in a raffle, earlier in the day, before they founded the band.

After their first number subsided, the singer nudged the keyboardist aside and fiddled with the sequencer. The setup began to play “Sussudio” by Phil Collins. She returned to the mic, glared at Joe for singing along, and said, “It’s a borrowed keyboard. Give us a minute.” Three minutes later, the band continued its set with four-finger organ, tambourine duties devolving on the singer. The woodwind took a rest. The singer’s yawping teetered on the edge of feedback until Simon, the soundman, rendered the mic inaudible. The whole thing was pathetic, and when it was done, everybody clapped for a long time.

Daniel thought, The name kind of fits, assuming they meant “broad” as in “woman” and the autism “spectrum.” Also, in his opinion, their conceptual project didn’t stand a chance against the art of music. Joe had craft, not a concept. He could hear himself play—he could really listen—and when he wasn’t sounding good, he took steps to fix it.

He played three numbers, rocking out to his own conception of beauty, alone and weird. The applause was cursory, because there was no one in the audience but members and friends of Broad Spectrum. He sat back down in his seat in the front. An older but not repulsive man in standard-issue indie rock garb (Black Watch plaid shirt, Cubs cap) sat down next to him, introduced himself as Eric, handed over a business card, and said, “Call me if you’re interested.” Joe scampered to the rear, breathlessly waving the card, to tell Daniel he’d been scouted by Matador.

Matador was an important indie record label, Joe’s favorite in all of New York next to 4AD. It turned out that Broad Spectrum was made up of people who had office jobs there.

Daniel had come to feel gloomy about distributing the single. If Joe got a contract with Matador, his work was done. The remaining singles would sell themselves. He said, “That’s awesome!”

He knew that Matador was doing some kind of dance with Atlantic—an unequal partnership or a not quite acquisition—the idea being that collaboration would offer artists all the advantages of a major label with none of the degradation. What the reality was, he didn’t know, but the company itself was respectable: it possessed bourgeois realness; it had offices in Manhattan and fine and noble founders, and it distributed its wares to the farthest corners of the earth. As for signing with Matador, there was little Joe could have possibly done that was more likely to get him fair treatment and decent money.

Daniel sold two singles that evening and gave away five to people who said they were reviewers for magazines whose existence he doubted, strengthening his resolve to nudge Joe from the indie rock gift economy into the big time. He offered to call Eric for him the next day.

WITHIN A WEEK JOE AND SOME GUY NAMED RANDY HAD SIGNED A MEMORANDUM OF understanding drawn up in ballpoint pen on a steno pad at a beer bar on Sixth Avenue. Joe signed it in the presence of Daniel—not in an official capacity; his role as Joe’s label executive and manager was a combination hobby and joke—who saw nothing to criticize. Somebody somewhere had skipped Joe right over Matador and signed him to Atlantic, with an advance of $80,000 for a single LP. He might take home only $10,000 after taxes, recording, and publicity, yet spending even $10,000 was likely to be fun for him. On some level it was money for nothing, since he would be making music anyway. With a major label contract, he could make it in a fancy studio with professional engineers.

When the finalized contract arrived in the mail—eighteen pages of legalese—Daniel belatedly suggested getting a lawyer. Joe said no, because he trusted Eric and Randy. Daniel suggested involving Professor Harris. Again, Joe said no.

He wasn’t anybody’s ward. He was impulsive and vulnerable. His own weaknesses told him, directly, that he didn’t need protection.

It wasn’t paradoxical. It was tautological, like all the most daunting and bewildering things in life. Things are the way they are: unthinkable. Trying to understand can feel like a struggle, but the conflict is internal to each of us, ending in surrender each night when we close our eyes.

Looking through the countersigned contract months later and seeing points he maybe should have argued over, Daniel couldn’t say for sure whether Joe had gotten a raw deal. Maybe other fledgling artists were being treated better; he didn’t know. In absolute terms, it was a gift. Joe had gone straight from babysitter to rock star, while there was nothing in the contract that would oblige him to give up babysitting.

RANDY WANTED TO MAKE AN ANTI-FOLK RECORD WITH ROCK DRUMMING À LA BECK OR major-label Butthole Surfers. He claimed that Joe’s vision of bubblegum dub was an audience-free joint that wouldn’t even fly in Brazil. That’s how he phrased it, thinking Joe would get bewildered and surrender. Joe did not. It seldom impressed him that things are the way they are.

“The bass on Doggystyle makes my vision go blurry!” he insisted to an elevator full of random label employees after his third chaotic five-minute meeting with Randy. “That’s what I want! Deep music for deaf people!” He told Daniel, who was waiting for him in the lobby with Flora to go to lunch, that Atlantic was going to turn his lovely demos into crashy-bangy alternative rock.

“It worked for Suzanne Vega,” Daniel pointed out. “They add kick drum and hi-hat to some folkie vocal thing, and there you are. That’s how CBS made a number one hit out of ‘Sound of Silence.’”

“That’s the main substance of my lament!” Joe said. “With too many drums, you can’t hear the music. I don’t need drums. I have my rhythm in the music where it belongs!”

“That’s good. Try that on Randy. Say what you just said to me.”

“You do it! He doesn’t listen to me.”

DANIEL, IN HIS FUNCTION AS PRETEND MANAGER, CALLED RANDY THE NEXT DAY. IT wasn’t a productive conversation. Joe had presented an irresolvable impasse as mere friction. Randy informed him that Joe was all set to make a record that the label would never release. Subsequently he would be free to go on making records for them at his own expense forever, until he happened to make one they liked.

Daniel replied, “That’s a no-good deal, and you’re a piece of shit.”

“Am I now,” Randy said.

“If you pile roadblocks on the creativity of Joe Harris, that’s exactly what you are. An ignorant, self-defeating piece of shit.”

“I didn’t say he can’t record any album he wants,” Randy pointed out. “I just said we won’t release it.”

“Fuck you, ass-wipe,” Daniel said, marveling at his own inarticulacy.

Randy referred him to a senior executive producer, a blond surfer-snowboarder of fifty who called himself Daktari.

DANIEL WENT WITH JOE AND FLORA THE FOLLOWING WEEK TO SEE DAKTARI, WHO TOLD them he’d be adding a rhythm track whether they liked it or not, and that from what he’d heard people saying around the office, Music for Deaf People would be an excellent working title.

Daktari was handsome and regularly spent time in France. Many years before, someone in Paris had told him it was a mark of breeding to insult people to their faces without breaking eye contact.

His skills were wasted on Joe, who replied in gratitude that he had resolved to call his opening track “Daktari.” He started writing it right there. Tapping his foot, he sang, “Daktaree-ee-ee, is Randy’s boss so maybe he can te-ell me, if we need drums on this so give the bass to me, I’ll show you drums are not the sole reason to be.”

“A percussion jam is a big crowd-pleaser,” Daktari interrupted. “Don’t you want to be bigger than Jesus?”

Switching back to normal conversation, Joe said, “Lots of Aretha Franklin songs don’t have drums!”

“Afraid of the neighbors? We can find you rehearsal space.”

“It’s not the noise,” Daniel interposed. “He 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!”

VI.

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 put out of its misery. She saw a crucifix in the window of a Santeria store and asked Joe to buy it. It was as though she couldn’t get Jesus out of her mind and wanted him for her new stuffed animal.

Fortunately it was a cash-only store. The crucifix had been blessed by a voodoo priest and was very expensive. Joe couldn’t help her out on the spot, but he told Daniel about her wish.

“If she needs a shirtless guy with a beard, we can get her a G.I. Joe,” he replied.

“We’ll make our own cross, and she can put him on it with rubber bands.”

“If it’s a cross she wants, we can—no. There’s no way I’m making her a toy cross! What’s next? A toy cat-o’-nine-tails, so she can self-flagellate?”

“Jesus is weird,” Joe remarked.

“You can say that again!”

“Why is he on the cross?”

Daniel raised his eyes to heaven. “Oh, man, Joe. Well, historically, he wasn’t always on the cross. I think for something like twelve centuries, he was the risen Christ, fully dressed. Then there was Gothic art and, like, the black plague or something, so they switched to showing him on the cross. You know he died on the cross, right?”

“Why?”

“The weight of his own body, I guess. Makes it hard to breathe when you’re hanging by your arms.”

“But he’s so skinny!”

“Not in real life! He was always eating out with rich tax collectors, and he could make food appear by magic and turn water into wine, so he was a total land whale. That’s why he died so fast, like hours before the skinny dudes they crucified at the same time. The Romans didn’t even have to break his legs.”

“That is so gross,” Joe said.

“And he’s scared shitless up there, screaming out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ But you know who God was, who could have helped him the whole time? His dad!”

“My dad would not do that.”

“My dad would.”

THE REVERBERATING CHRISTIANITY DEBACLE AGGRAVATED PAM’S SENSE THAT HER daughter was growing up without her. Every moment she spent at the office was a moment when some stranger and/or family member of ill will and worse intentions could plant a fateful wrong idea in Flora’s head.

Joe tried to console her by recording selected playtime. It didn’t help. The cassettes merely made audible how he kept Flora in stitches. He was giving her a solid grounding in verbal wit, preschool style. Her parents’ role was to drop by nightly and impose dour worries about nutrition and rest.

After the fourth and final taping session, Pam’s path forward became clear. One dialogue passage was as follows:

JOE: Never rub your nub where people can see.

FLORA: But I want to!

JOE: [singing] Got to rub my nub in the club, rub my nub in the club, got to rub my nub in the club—now dub—see my nub nub nub nub nub nub nub nub in the club club club club club club club, it’s like a sub sub sub sub sub sub sub—

FLORA: Don’t make fun of me!

JOE: Then stop rubbing your nub and do the dance! [singing] Rub my nub in the club, chugalug in the pub, rub-a-dub in the tub … [etc.]

FLORA: [clapping along] Rub my nub I rub my nub I rub my nub I rub my nub I rub my nub [etc.]

Flora’s improvisation of a contrapuntal rhythmic chant made her seem extraordinarily musically accomplished for her age. At the same time, Pam experienced a heretofore unsuspected and overpowering need to raise her child herself. Flora was getting old for a babysitter. She wasn’t a baby anymore. Her psyche needed to be molded in Pam’s image, or Daniel’s at least. Otherwise, what was the point?

“I need to cut down on my hours,” Pam said to Yuval the next morning as they stood drinking coffee in the office kitchenette. “My kid doesn’t even know my name. She calls me ‘Mom.’”

“So you want to spend time with Flora.”

“Yes. The problem is maternity leave is unpaid, and it’s a little late.”

He sneered, wrinkling his nose. “Who told you that? Your union rep?”