Be Safe I Love You (5 page)

Seven

L
OURDES CHURCH
a simple stone
building with a slate steeple that rose and disappeared into the fog. Across the
street the strip-mall parking lot was empty, but the glowing lights of the Rite Aid
sign shone dully through the mist, like the lamps around the blast walls during a
dust storm.

The doors were open, and she went in and sat in the dark cavernous chapel
on the creaking pews amidst the smell of wax and pine cleaner and frankincense. The
stained-glass windows were dimly lit and she looked at them pane by pane; the long
slow journey of Jesus, dragging his cross from window to window, until the Roman
soldiers crucified him. It was a storyboard, she thought, like the kind you have to
make and go over with your CO when you get back from a capture or kill. The stations
of the cross were so everyone had their story straight, created agreement and
uniformity in reporting the event.

She’d spent nearly every afternoon in that church since she was fourteen,
and loved the windows, the acoustics, the empty haunted feeling, the freedom of her
voice rising and filling the space. But this was the first time she’d thought about
the stations of the cross. Insurgent Jesus. Another pretty thing put into its proper
context. Like the way running wasn’t the same anymore, or sitting in the sun; the
way washing sand out of her hair would probably never feel the same, wouldn’t remind
her of nice things like waves lapping against a beach. The stations of the cross
made sense now, one more common war story hiding in plain sight.

Lauren had no compulsion to pray and didn’t want to acknowledge the
exhibitionism of the crucifix with a glance. And this was also new. She’d never
cared much one way or the other about looking at wrecked Jesus with his crown of
thorns. It was religious art, and it had been beautiful like the stained glass. But
now it made her think of bodies, real naked tattered bodies and real blood. And the
strange phenomena of seeing soldiers break and become religious so they’d have
someone to blame or someone to forgive them the unforgivable.

Few things were as unsettling as a person getting combat-induced religion,
rambling about ghosts, life after death, being surveilled by some all-powerful
thing. Nothing was quite as baffling as a hired killer, a soldier, a person from the
very profession that killed Jesus, saying what he fought for was Jesus. But it just
got crazier from there: They were fighting for a man who’d died thousands of years
ago but actually wasn’t dead and he wanted you to love your enemy, and not to kill,
and not to be greedy. His dad’s God and his mom’s a virgin. It was like a nonsense
song from kindergarten: “It rained so hard the day I left / the weather it was dry /
The sun so hot I froze to death / Susanna don’t you cry.” People loved this
religious stuff because it actually made no sense. Just like the war made no sense.
And she knew now for certain that feeling of mystery, that impenetrable false logic
was necessary to make people do stupid things.

Of all the things Lauren had seen that she didn’t want to see, battlefield
baptism was among the worst. She could feel it rising in her again, just looking at
the stained glass. “God’s grace” settling over someone’s face and the relief they
radiated once they gave into the unreal, and it was too much for her, actually
horrifying. Created a thick knot in her stomach. The hypocrisy. The cruelty and
terror it was meant to wash away, absolve. She didn’t care if it made people feel
better. It was fucking retarded and incredibly dangerous. Serving with men and women
who believed in God and Jesus and Mary made her nervous. Why would it make anyone
comfortable to be around a soldier who thought they’d be getting God’s reward after
they died? Those were the people they were supposed to be fighting, not standing
beside. She wanted to be with folks who knew that all you got, you got right now.
Everything else was make-believe, stories to tell and stories to keep straight.
Daryl had put it best: Anyone who came away from what they’d been doing in Iraq
believing in God was a total cocksucker.

She shivered in the pew and folded her arms across her chest, looked over
at the rows of memorial candles flickering by the feet of the Virgin in her blue
robes. The smell of wax was strong and the lingering scent of smoldering wicks from
prayers that had been extinguished by chance, or snuffed out when she opened the
heavy door, gave the place an air of fixed melancholic nostalgia; hopeful birthday
cries of “make a wish” and the faint odor of wreckage.

She stood and walked quickly through the church and into the chantry and
then down a flight of stairs into the basement, passing storage rooms filled with
holy hylics: clear plastic sacks of Communion wafers, not yet transformed into the
body of Christ; boxes filled with candles; stacks of hymnals and Sunday school
supplies.

The corridor was cloying and almost dank but not unpleasant; the cement
floor, the brick and paneled walls were welcoming in their humbleness. At the end of
the hallway a red exit sign hung above an ornate wooden door that let out onto a
cracked and weedy parking lot littered with small, Ziploc glassine baggies. The lot
was home to garbage cans and a basketball court where she’d played sometimes when
she was little; beyond that, a bent and sloping chainlink fence guarded an ancient
playground, metal climbing bars, swings and a slide and a teeter-totter.

Lauren stopped at a small white door between the exit and the boiler room
and knocked lightly, then took the handle and pushed, peeking her head around the
corner into the room.

Troy looked up from his desk. And then gave a quick, startled, “Ha!”

The room was just big enough to fit his desk, a file cabinet, and a
living-room chair upholstered in yellow and orange flowers that had long ago lost
its springs and showed its stuffing at the seams. Every wall of the office was taken
up by bookshelves filled with binders and folders and sheet music, and there were no
windows, just a desk lamp glowing hotly in the little windowless space.

Troy was thin and pale, his wavy black hair shot through with strands of
white. His blue eyes bright behind the thick black-framed glasses he’d had for
twenty years. She knew they were military issue, that he’d been wearing them since
his tour ended back in the ’90s, but they looked like Buddy Holly’s, hip, of an era.
He knit his eyebrows and then smiled, revealing the gap between his front teeth,
stood up to greet her as she came in and closed the door.

Troy shook her hand heartily, then went back behind his desk and sat
facing her in a kind of awkward mock formality as she sat down in the beat-up chair,
hanging one leg over the side.

“I have to go up and play in two hours,” he told her, rearranging some
papers. He spoke quickly, his voice resonant and overly clear, perfectly articulated
like it was coming from a radio. His eyes were downcast, but he was smiling broadly,
seeming to take in everything about her. She liked that he didn’t say “welcome
back.”

“I figured,” she said. “I wanted to stop by and see if you were here
early.”

He nodded vigorously. “I have time right now and no one else is here if
you want to go up to the choir loft.”

She shook her head. “I just wanted to see you.”

He smiled, the corner of his mouth twitched, and then he looked down. “Or
you could come after mass or before vespers,” he said. “I still have your score
here. I have it in the cabinet and we could start where we left off.”

She shook her head again. “I’m out of practice.”

“Well exactly,” he said nervously, almost angrily, his smile vanishing in
an instant. “You need to get back in.” He looked up at her with something bordering
on contempt or incredulity. “You haven’t missed a thing, really. I mean you missed
all those years while your voice would be ripening, so to speak. You have to get
back in. I don’t see any other option.” Then he said, “Have you been in touch with
Curtis?”

“Man, fuck Curtis,” she said.

He looked taken aback, gave a short offended laugh through his teeth.

She just wanted to be there with him. She did not want to talk about
Curtis or her voice. The truth was, she wanted to smell the church, sit in that
chair and look at Troy across his desk. Maybe after a few months of doing just that
they could talk about something else. Not that she still measured time in months.
Second to second worked best if you wanted to feel like you were going to make
it.

“Well what do you think you’ll do? Get a job? What did you learn to do? I
think you should come upstairs and practice now. I mean, what else are you going to
do?”

She cringed and put her hand over her eyes. Get a job was exactly what she
was planning on doing. A good job, one that could support her whole family; any
other idea was just a dream. “Have you been outside in the fog?” she asked, changing
the subject.

He smiled and nodded emphatically. “Yes,” he said, “it’s mythic.”

“How was midnight mass?” she asked.

“It was beautiful. I played Arvo Pärt’s
Annum per
Annum
.”

“You’re kidding me. With that beginning? What’s next, Schoenberg?”

“I’m not! I’m not kidding you! That’s why I like it here. I can play
whatever I want.”

Lauren looked at Troy, his face open yet completely impenetrable,
unreadable. Most people accepted that the line between crazy and genius was blurred,
but few people thought about the line between genius and retardation until they met
Troy. She loved him. Every awkward honest sentence. His dandruff. The reserved,
repressed way he carried himself and then the way that carriage shattered into a
languid, confident coordination, his whole body suddenly engaged when he played or
listened or began talking about music. She tried to imagine the congregation at
Lourdes listening to the silences and dissonance of Arvo Pärt on Christmas Eve
instead of Handel. Musically the choice made sense. Minimalists, sacred music. But
one was still alive, denied what he wrote was sacred and composed music that was so
stark, so spare and clean and desolately beautiful she’d wanted to hear and sing
nothing else. She knew she was biased, felt this as a person who’d been trained to
hear by Troy, and she didn’t care. Her ears, her mind, her mouth, the sinewy bands
of flesh that vibrated in her throat, better that he had shaped her than anyone
else.

Troy had been accompanying Lauren since she was fourteen and her
ninth-grade music teacher brought her to meet him. He’d been playing organ at
Lourdes for ten years before she showed up—and he was nothing like any teacher she’d
had. He was distracted and then suddenly hyperfocused on things she couldn’t even
hear. He talked to her almost like she was a peer, and apart from one small,
slightly confused-looking smile he gave when Ms. Heimal brought her in to sing for
the first time, he acted as though he wasn’t remotely impressed with her voice.

Now Troy was someone who knew her deeply, knew a part of her she didn’t
like very much. Some useless part she was embarrassed to talk about. Still she
wanted to be nowhere else that morning, was compelled to hear the acoustics of her
own footsteps in the hallway and to see his face, if nothing more.

“I read that Arvo Pärt’s not a Holy Minimalist,” she said.

Troy’s face broke into a huge smile and he laughed, nodded vigorously. “If
we can take the man’s description of his own work, then yes, I guess it’s true. He
doesn’t like the term, says no. It’s just fascinating!”

“Why did he say it?” she asked. “I mean, the
Magnificat
?
I Am the True Vine
? Come
on.”

“Sure sure sure,” Troy said impatiently. “You realize of course that’s not
what makes it sacred music.” He tapped the side of his pen nervously on the desk a
few times. “You know, what is the spirit in the work? You have to ask yourself. What
is the ghost in the work? And what is the holy thing we’re trying to impart when we
play? It’s not the words, for God’s sake. Words are just gibberish, just empty
bodies for the tone to inhabit, right? I mean when you hear something in Latin you
are often more transported, right? The mystery of it. Or the meaninglessness of it,
something with no meaning is the vehicle that carries something with all the
meaning. Listen.” He said, “Seriously, listen, listen.”

Then he sang, full throated and with such rich timbre she felt a surge of
emotion, felt lifted. He sang, “
My soul doth magnify the Lord,
and my spirit rejoiceth in God thy Savior for He hath
provided . . .”
Then he stopped abruptly.

“Now listen,” he said, and in the same radiant tone he sang,
“Blah blah de blah de blah de blah eggs and bacon wooden nickels,
fox in socks, ski trip tornado.”

She laughed. “Beautiful.”

He nodded. “Right,” he agreed. “I often want to get rid of all the words,
you know? They’re so silly. So hollow. They’re like a house for the tone and nothing
more, some kind of intent, you know . . . or words are a wish, you
know, part of the flat world but meaningless without the voice. The sound, or the
resonance of this kind of human sound, rather, is divine on its own. Entirely on its
own! And oh! This reminds me, I’ve been listening so much to
Cantate Domino
. Perfect for your voice. You should come up and learn
some of it right now. Right now, actually.” He set his pen down and began to stand.
“Now is the time.”

She shook her head.

And he shook his head back at her, leaned over his desk, his eyebrows
raised in question.

“No? I say yes. I say yes, you do it.” He quietly hummed the beginning of
Pärt’s
Cantate
. Again, his voice was so clear, the tone
rang from his belly, from the strength of his gut and lungs, and each phrase was
punctuated by perfect metered quiet. The absence of tone, a silent counterpart that
gave the sound its power. He smiled at her. She felt her body resonate, a coda of
the sounds he was making. She caught her breath, felt her throat constrict suddenly
as if she’d been struck by something, then she bent and covered her mouth in a fit
of coughing.