Bliss (37 page)

“That album is going to be huge. Everyone in Miami who was at
the showcase says Sunny was so hot. That you were so beautiful. That you … get it.”

You always big me up, Pritz. I swear I love you. I never see you and I love you
. “Maybe I do get it, and maybe that’s why I want out.”

Pritz shook her head. “So you will live forever on Cat Island. Nursing Big Dart and running from Ron Leetle John.”

“I’ll figure something out.” Her leg hurt. Eva saw her mom in her mind. Felt like she smelled sour milk. She limped heavily.

“I don’t see Roadshow,” Pritz said, looking at Eva with worry. “I don’t know if I see Sunny. I see something new for you.
Exciting
. Plus, the baby. Have you been to a doctor?”

“I see things I should have seen a while ago.” They were on a road that had become familiar to Eva. She knew the inclines and dips. A man with his goats waved at her.

“Do you see Leetle John?”

“What are you, his agent?” Eva then said the thing that came to her mind first. “Ron needs to find a white girl to settle down with, and leave me the fuck alone.”

A
long the way back to the Rowe House, Pritz and Eva heard music coming from a yellow, very neat shack. A few goats stood guard in front of it. Eva knew the place was Édouard’s, but Eddie was at Jenny’s most of the time, and so Eva was surprised to see Benjamin between the small porch and giant satellite dish, smoking, as he always seemed to be, the last of a cigarette. “My brother-in-law has a sense of humor,” Benajmin said, smiling. “Your Dart, he’s upbeat, too.”

“Is that Eva?” Audrey called from the house excitedly.

“What, Audrey?” The music was loud, and slow like a dirge, but with what sounded like a tinkling, slow-shaking tambourine.
I can name that tune
, Eva thought,
in ten or twelve more notes
.

Dart bounded out of the house and stopped short in front of Eva. “You will never BElieve,” he said loudly, “what we DID!”

Eva had no patience for Dart’s voice, or this new mood swing. He
was wet with sweat, his eyes were bright, and he was smiling. She said nothing to him.

“I made a SONG. WE made a song. Me and Eddie. Come look!”

Eva could hear strains of the Temptations, or what sounded like the Temptations. She put her hand over her mouth and coughed.

“I Wish It Would Rain” Nineteen sixty-eight. The rain song. My mom is straight calling me out from the afterworld
.

“Eva!” Audrey called. “Come in here!”

Eva and Pritz walked into the miniature living room, which was made up as a sleeping room complete with double bed, nightstand, weak lamp, and huge television. Plus there were albums and cassettes and labeled digital audiotapes everywhere. Audrey grabbed Pritz and Eva by their wrists and pulled them into a bedroom recording studio complete with natty egg-crate foam, a dehumidifier, worn Mackie console, monitor, mixer, and speakers. Audrey, face lit up with delight and possibility, pulled the door closed behind them. With Édouard, Pritz, Eva, and herself in the room, plus the equipment, it was tight. The air had a dense, room-within-a-room, basement studio feel.

The Tempts. Produced by Norman Whitfield. The peak, really, of his first phase with them
.

Eva’s leg throbbed, her head throbbed.

Song was their … sixth, yeah sixth, number one hit in three years. Song made Dave Ruffin want the group to be billed as David Ruffin and the Temptations or the Temptations featuring David Ruffin or some such. Basically asked for what Diana and Smokey asked for and got
.

She put her hand on her belly. She wanted to sit, but there was nowhere.

So the Tempts cut Ruffin, called Dennis Edwards, and went all “Cloud Nine.”

“I’ll start it again,” Édouard said from his low bench. He looked like a beanbag chair with a proud pillow face attached.

No long lead-in for Édouard’s version. The song started with a piano deeper than the original’s—distorted and slightly more slow. And unlike Ruffin, Dart let go no humming moan before he sang,
Sunshine/Blue sky/Please go away
.

He sounds amazing
.

There was a bass line under the piano, too, completely different from what the Motown players had done, different from what Whitfield had ever imagined.

What Eva could hear most clearly were her worlds ramming together. It wasn’t until Pritz reached for her hand that Eva realized she was trembling. And the wound in her leg screamed.

Pritz looked at Édouard curiously, and he had the answer before she asked it. “No sample,” he said coolly. “It is mine.”

The loop was sparse and clean. Plenty of room left for Dart’s burnished baritone, which, by the time he got to the words
day after day
, went deeper and scratchy where Ruffin had gone perfectly higher and scratchier.
Day after day
—Dart sang like it was more bittersweet treat than torture—
I stay locked up in my room
. Édouard had kept the tambourine sound in its original place, but it wasn’t a tambourine.

Pritz looked at the song’s producer again.

“Little bells,” Eddie said, nodding his head up and down, completely pleased with himself. “And some bigger ones, too. Copper. Old. Lil’ rake ‘n’ scrape for you. But you don’t know nothing about all that.”

Eva didn’t know much about rake ‘n’ scrape, but she knew what sounded good. She’d heard the Temptations version a thousand times. She’d heard the other versions, too, had made it her business to find them, and to have them in her New York and her California apartments.
Recorded also by Little Caesar, by Ike and Tina, Marvin Gaye, Bobby Womack, Aretha, the Chambers Brothers. Gladys Knight and the Pips hit high with it that same damn year. That country guy in the seventies, McClinton Something. Rod Stewart, on a live album, when he was still with the Faces
.

Eva made her brain move. She forced her brain to click so her heart wouldn’t stop, or break. The pain in her leg rang through her whole body as her mother’s rain song boomed from the speakers
exactly the same
, Eva thought,
but totally different from the original
.

Dart was singing his own background vocals, and sounded more forlorn than ever.
Raindrops behind my teardrops
… and all the ooooos and ooooooooos.
Let it rain
.

The room was too small. Eva wanted to cough, but barely had room to lift her arm. She pushed her brain again.
Song written by Whitfield along with Barrett Strong—and them helped out by Roger Penzabene. He worked on the song, and then killed himself soon after, sad or mad over his wife’s cheating. He never knew the song was a success, never knew it went gold, never knew it became a classic, a standard, a song really, for all time
.

Eva pushed at Pritz. “I need to go,” she said. Then Eva pushed at Audrey, too, who looked at her crazily as she opened the bedroom/ studio door.

Once outside, Eva trudged back toward the Rowe House. It was her home, at least for right now, and she wanted to be in it. Her leg throbbed. She felt dizzy. She hadn’t eaten anything since the day before.

Dart chased her down as she got to the Rowe patio, and Pritz was right behind him. Eva wished they both would disappear. She didn’t want Dart, he didn’t want her. The things they’d shared were passionate but not intimate—meaningful, but without sacrifice or risk or even hints of confession or interrogation or introspection or promises.

There’s no giving in. Or faith. He and I are ports for each other. In this perfect storm
.

And when it came down to it, Pritz wasn’t Eva’s friend. Pritz was someone she’d done business with and had known for a long time. Standing there, in the Rowe’s living room, Eva was floored. She looked at the place as if for the first time. It was a vacation spot. Generic and filled with third-best furniture and knickknacks, dry, cracked bars of soap, and items that would go unmissed if the Rowe House were swept up in a hurricane. The Rowe House reminded Eva of her place on Riverside Drive, and of her place in Santa Monica.

No trace of me anywhere. Nothing to say who I am. Nothing to break. Not too much to move
.

Eva suddenly hated that she’d put herself in a position where Dart and Pritz were, for watery miles around, the very best friends she had. The only thing she had now was truth. She wanted to tell it, but not to Dart or to Pritz.

But this is what I get
.

Her head raged:
It’s my own fault. All of it. Everything
.

Eva met her own eyes in the mirror. They were red, she was breathing hard, and she needed some water. Eva heard her people come through the sliding door.

She took a long look at herself and decided she was not about to start playing the victim now.

I am completely the same as I was before I got here
, Eva thought.
Except totally different
.

D
art said, “You don’t look all right.”

“You should sit down, Eva,” Pritz said.

“Like you give a shit,” she said directly to Dart. “Oh no, let me get it right—thank you in advance for your sympathy. You’re so happy to give it. I’m sad now, little orphan Eva. But you can deal with that. Save me. Comfort me. Thanks. When I’m strong, though, when I got a plan, you hate me. Fuck you.”

Dart looked at her evenly. “You’re orphaned now? Who died?”

“My mother died.”

“Stepmother.”

“No.”

A long pause. “But your real mother’s been dead.”

Pritz looked at Eva and Dart as they stared each other down. She’d no idea what was going on.

“You can do what you want,” Eva said to Dart. “Because I lied.”
Just us, you said. That’s why I don’t like “just” in a statement. It can mean “only,” it can mean right or fair or deserved, but mostly it trivializes what comes after it. Just us. You lied. I lied. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. Billy Preston, piano prodigy, songwriter, vocalist, Beatles collaborator
.

Dart left the patio.

There is a song for everything
.

“This is how you act,” Pritz said, “when your mother dies?” She was staggered. “Your mother is dead, now, today?”

“Yes.”
Or yesterday, when my troubles seemed far away
.

Pritz needed facts straight. “Did you grieve for her when you told Dart this lie?”

“No.”
I’ve been grieving since I was eleven
.

And then Eva thought,
Is this the kind of stuff you’re supposed to say out loud? “I’ve been grieving for her since I was eleven?” This is why Ron runs? This is me, not “submitting”? This stuff in my head, I should say out loud. It seems weak. Self-indulgent. A bother to anyone else but me
.

“Do you need to get back?” Pritz said. “For a funeral?”

“It already happened.”

This took a moment for Pritz to digest. “Do you have anything of hers?”

Fine. I’m going to say stuff out loud. Submit
. Eva got up and went to her bag. Came back, limping, with her passport. From one of the clear plastic protective sleeves, she pulled a folded piece of butcher paper. It looked old, but not battered. The handwriting fat from a flying felt tip. In a hurry, Elaine had cut it at an odd angle. Unfolded, the sheet was a parallelogram.

Pritz read it. Eva didn’t have to.