Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (13 page)

I drove back to Charlottesville with Duane. She was howling because she knew that Renée wasn’t going to be on the other end of the drive. She was way ahead of me there. Stupidly, I stopped at the grave the morning I was going back. I parked in the Wal-Mart parking lot at the foot of the hill, bought a carton of Camel Lights, and walked up to the Sunrise Burial Park. There were no trees, no shade, just the widow boy standing on the side of a hill, with a dog waiting in the car. The sun was shriveling me up, the air was draining out of my lungs, but there was nothing to see. She wasn’t here. I couldn’t have felt farther from her anywhere else. Duane and I drove away with nothing inside us. I talked to Duane a bit, kept repeating to her the line Harvey Keitel says to Tim Roth at the end of
Reservoir Dogs
: It looks like we’re gonna have to do a little time.

It was high noon, and I remember it all—the nausea, the dizziness, the way my head felt like it was melting in the heat. I pulled off at a gas station in Syria, a small town near the Natural Bridge, and bought a souvenir shot glass. It was a Florida souvenir glass, with a big smiling yellow sun. We had always liked this town. It had a few junk shops, a Little League park, a movie theater. It was pronounced “sigh-REE-a,” for the same reason Buena Vista was “BYOO-na-vih-sta” and Buchanan was “BUCK-cannon.” I got back on 81 and tried the radio. Biggie’s “Hypnotize” was comforting; George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today” was too hard. I knew I would have to relearn how to listen to music, and that some of the music we’d loved together I’d never be able to hear again. Every time I started to cry, I remembered how Renée used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs are believable and real life isn’t. Everybody knows what it’s like to drive while crying; feeling like a bad country song is part of why it sucks. There was an empty house on the other side of this drive, and I had no idea what it would be like to try to go inside it. There was nobody there. I wasn’t driving back home—just back.

As I started to approach Afton Mountain, I heard a Prince song I’d never heard on the radio before, and I haven’t since, either. “Adore” is a slow jam from 1987, the last song on
Sign ‘O’ the Times
, and I always thought of it as one of those Prince songs that should have been a hit. But it’s over six minutes long, and there’s no way to trim it down without losing the whole point. “Adore” might be the most beautiful make-out ballad ever—six minutes of erotic bliss that’s more delfonic than The Stylistics and more stylistic than The Delfonics. I don’t know why they played it. It was one of those lonesome stations you pick up between mountains when there’s nothing else on the air, no mike breaks or commercials, just a song or two before the signal fades.

Prince was singing in his falsetto about heavenly angels crying tears of joy down on him and his lady. It was hard to hear. I pulled into a rest stop on 64 East, at mile 105 in Greenwood, on the side of the mountain. I parked and listened to the rest of the song, then got out and walked the dog. I sat on the trunk of the car in the sun and smoked a cigarette. It made me dizzy. I made my plans for the day. I was going all the way over the mountain, just another half-hour to Charlottesville. What would happen on the other side, I couldn’t tell you.

I thought about this tape,
Crazy Feeling
, and wondered if I would play it when I got back. I kept hearing a song in my head, the first song on the tape, Sleater-Kinney’s “One More Hour.” I didn’t know if I would play that song when I got back, or whether I’d ever want to hear it again. But ever since Renée died, I’d been thinking about “One More Hour,” the saddest Sleater-Kinney song ever. It was blaring in my mind all week, whether I was at the funeral home, or trying to sleep, or sitting on the floor waiting for Richmond to call and say it was all a mistake. It was all around and in my head, like the train rumble Al Pacino hears in
The Godfather
right before he shoots the Turk.

“One More Hour” is a punk-rock song where Corin Tucker sings about how she has to leave in one more hour. Once she leaves this room, she can’t come back. She doesn’t want to go, and she tries to talk her way out of it. But Carrie Brownstein sings to her in the background vocal, telling her it’s over. The way their voices interact is like nothing else I’ve ever heard. Corin sings about walking out of a place she can never return to, leaving something she never wanted to let go, trying to haggle with someone who can’t talk back. The guitars try to hold her in check, but she screams right through them, refusing to go quietly because it’s already too late for a graceful exit. Corin snarls and she stalls, all for a little bit, just a little more time.

paramount hotel

JUNE 1997

T
here was a lot of music
that summer. I made tapes for the long nights when I would sit out all night in my backyard chair, smoking Camel Lights and listening to my Walkman, staring out into the black woods at the edge of the backyard. I’d watch as deer with glowing eyes would tiptoe out of the woods, and then tiptoe back. Anything to keep from going back into my empty bed in our empty house.

My mix tapes were the life rafts that I held on to. I sat out there in the yard all night and listened to Frank Sinatra sing about waiting in vain, when the moon is on the wane, because he’d rather be swingin’ down the lane with you. I would listen to the Germs scream L.A. punk noise about damaged kids sharing secret agonies nobody else can understand. I would listen to Bryan Ferry serenade his lonesome star in the sky.

I would listen and dream along. Sometimes I would sing to Renée; sometimes I would let her sing to me.

Sleep was the worst. I would lie in bed and my shins would ache, remembering how she used to kick them while she slept. Who knew shins had feelings, much less memories? I had no idea how to eat alone or sleep alone. I didn’t know how to cook alone, go out alone, listen to music alone, shop for groceries alone. The things we used to do together were alien now. Lonesome star, shine on.

A few days after the funeral, a box arrived in the mail from New York’s Chinatown. Inside was a bright green cuckoo clock, the old-fashioned kind with bells on top. On the dial were a couple of orange chickens. With each tick of the second hand, the big chicken would peck at the corn. Renée
definitely
picked this thing out. According to the credit card slip, she ordered it a few days before she died. She hadn’t said a word about it to me. I had no idea where it came from or why she wanted it. I put it up on her purple desk and let the orange chickens peck away.

I kept everything in the house exactly how Renée left it, so she could find her way back. I left her toothbrush hanging right by the sink. Her boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese stayed on the same shelf where they’d always been. I didn’t move a thing—her lipsticks, her cookbooks, her clothes, her shoes, the Pee Wee Herman bicycle she hadn’t ridden once in all the time I’d known her. The pile of CDs we were listening to the night she died stayed right where it was. I wore her old Sonic Youth and Boss Hog T-shirts every day. I put my keys on her Guided By Voices bottle-opener key chain and used her Pavement ashtray. Sometimes I opened her sweater drawer to breathe in traces of her scent. I knew every time I opened the drawer, more of the scent would get lost for good. Duane kept scuffing over to her notebooks or her baseball glove, looking for any scent she could find.

At night, I would sometimes go out and drive in the mountains. I stayed out on the roads for hours, listening to Renée’s old George Jones and Hank Williams tapes. Sometimes I’d go find roads we used to drive on together; other nights, I’d look for somewhere new. I had shrines and altars for her all over town, cruising around Route 33, “The Gateway To The Blue Ridge,” or Waynesboro, where we went to the movies on our honeymoon. I decided to revisit the outlet mall where we got
The Best of the Best of Skeeter Davis
, so I just popped Skeeter Davis in the tape deck and let her guide me there. Now that I lived alone, I could do all the driving I wanted, and nobody would know or care. Renée’s old country tapes kept me on the road. Hank Williams would sing all night about Jonah in the belly of the whale, Daniel in the lion’s den, and how they tried to get along. If you don’t try to get along, brother, you don’t get another chance. Dear John, I sent your saddle home. I was looking for glimmers of light, but I only wanted to go looking for them in the hills where the dead spirits hung out.

I drove out to the 7-11 in Ruckersville to fill out a ballot for the baseball All-Star game. If Renée had had time to leave me a to-do list, I’m sure that would have made the top five. I cast her votes: Andruw Jones, Mo Vaughn, Joey Cora, Chipper Jones, A. Rod, Wade Boggs, Kenny Lofton, Brian Burks, Jose Canseco, Javy Lopez—all her faves. I knew Canseco wasn’t a real All-Star, but I punched his box anyway because Renée always had such a massive crush on him. I completed her ballot and drove away.

When I had to go home, I would brew coffee and smoke cigarettes. I used to be such a great cook, but now I just ate chewy granola bars and peanut butter sandwiches. I was hungry all the time. I would drive to Arby’s or Burger King and find a space in the parking lot and eat something hot and salty that would make me feel even hungrier when it was gone. I was surrounded by friends and family who wanted to help, but I was too frozen to admit how much I needed it, so I forced them to help on the sly. Friends sent me food, books, tapes. My cousins Joan and Mary sent me homemade blackberry jam from Alaska.

Whenever I got near the edge of sleep, my heart would race and I’d bolt upright, hyperventilating. So I watched a lot of late-night TV, especially old movies about hit men and gangsters and pillowy dames. I watched movies starring Renée’s favorite movie stars: Ava Gardner’s cunning body, Rita Hayworth’s hungry dumb flesh, Jane Russell’s sullen sneer. I loved the scene in
The Killers
when Ava walks up to the piano in her black dress and sings her little torch song. “The more I know of love, the less I know it / The more I give to love, the more I owe it.” Ava Gardner didn’t lie.

When I fell asleep, I had dreams in which Renée was trying to find her way home, but she got lost because I’d moved a chair or something. In one dream, she was stranded in England after she joined the Spice Girls without telling me. (That is
so
something she would do.) She spent six months in Madrid, trying to get back to the United States, but she couldn’t get a visa, and she cried for me to come and get her.

It made no sense for me to get morbid over Renée; she was the least morbid person I knew. Tragic, gaunt people bored her. She liked noise, she liked people, and she especially liked noisy people. She had no interest in death at all, so I stopped going to the grave because it made me feel too far away from her. God knows she didn’t want to be there. I felt closer to her in Taco Bell—she loved the Choco Taco as much as she hated cemeteries. When I started feeling morbid and empty, I felt like I was turning into a different person from the guy she fell in love with. I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language. Without her to talk to, there was nothing to say. I missed all our stupid jokes, our secrets. Now, we had a whole different language to learn, a new grammar of loss to conjugate: I lose, you lose, we lose; I have lost, you have lost, we have lost. Words I said out loud, every day, many times a day, for years and years—suddenly they were dust in my mouth.

Once, around supper time, I pulled over at a little general store in Crozet. I remembered this place—Renée and I went there one night, looking for a corkscrew, since we’d gone up into the hills with a bottle of red wine but hadn’t brought anything to open it. How many years ago was that? Couldn’t even guess. The guy didn’t have a corkscrew, but he sold us a jackknife, and we did our best. I thought about going into the store and looking around, for old times’ sake, but I didn’t. I just killed the engine and sat there in the parking lot. I watched porch lights flicker in the hills around me. The headlights on the roads went dark, two by two, as everyone got where they were going. Soon the porch lights went dark, too.

mmmrob

JUNE 1997

M
y friend Stephanie sent me
this tape from San Francisco a few weeks after Renée died. She was totally obsessed with Hanson. Hanson’s “MMMBop” and Missy Elliott’s “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” were the first new pop songs I loved that I couldn’t share with Renée. She would have loved them both.

Stephanie, as you can tell, worships The Who. I do not, and we have been arguing about this for years. Stephanie once explained the plot of “Rael” to me, but I forgot it. As you can also probably tell, she has an extremely mod and generous new wave So Cal soul. She was a friend of ours in Charlottesville who split quick for the West Coast, but she was the coolest. She was the first friend I told when Renée and I got engaged. Her reply was, “It makes cosmic sense.” She and Renée were tight. A few nights after the funeral, Stephanie called and told me about a crazy dream she’d had where all the dead people she had loved were riding bumper cars, and they were teaching Renée how to drive.

“If you’re feeling happy vibes, they’re from me,” Stephanie told me after she mailed the tape. “I’m vibin’ you real hard. I’m building a wall of love around you, three inches all around.”

Did I mention that Stephanie went to Ridgemont High? She did. Her high school, Claremont in San Diego, was the school in the book, which later became the movie. She had Mr. Hand for history. I knew her for years before she ever brought this up, and I was pissed that she hadn’t mentioned it before.

Hanson had such a cheery sound. Steph called them “Tony DeFranco for an Ani DiFranco world.” Hearing Hanson segue into the Osmonds, I had to admit there was a cosmic connection there. I always had to fast-forward past the Soul Asylum song, but I listened to the Who songs a few times. (Steph labeled the tape with song titles on the front but no artist names, just to keep me from skipping the Who songs.)

I didn’t know what to do without Renée. I didn’t know what I was. I didn’t have a noun. I was casually calling myself a widow, but was I really a widow? All the widows I knew were old people. I didn’t know any young widows, and neither did anybody else. Nobody even had friend-of-a-friend stories. How could I be a thirty-one-year-old widow? I was a husband before any of my friends were, and just when I was getting used to the word “husband,” what was I supposed to do with the word “widow”? After a few days, people started saying the word “widower.” That was a surprise. Do people still say “widower”? Isn’t that one of those archaic Victorian words, like “poetess” or “co-ed”? The verb is to be widowed, not to be widowered. I also once saw “widowed persons” in a book, but that was somehow even worse than “widower.” I didn’t know whether widowers existed, and I hoped we didn’t since it was an even more brutal word than “widow.”

All the songs on the radio started to sound like they were about Renée’s death. I would hear the Radiohead song “Creep,” and it sounded like Thom Yorke was singing, “I’m a creep, I’m a widow.” Or I would hear Heart’s “Crazy on You” and hear Ann Wilson whisper how last night she dreamed she was a widow beside a stream. Before Renée died, I always thought Radiohead was singing about a “weirdo” and Heart was dreaming of a “willow.” Now, I could never go back to hearing them the way I heard them before.

The terrible thing about widows, is widows are terrible things. Their eyes are covered with sunglasses. Their fingers are covered with rings. They’re jumpy, dumpy, frumpy, glumpy, dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb. But the most terrible thing about widows is I’m the only one. I’m the only one.

“Widow” was bad enough. Widow, widower, widowest. Widow’s walk, widow’s weeds. Grieving, merry, professional, peak, golf, grass, black. When copyeditors at the magazine need to cut a word at the end of a paragraph because it wastes a whole line, they call it a widow. But “widower” has that nagging “er” to remind you that you’re not just a bereaved spouse, but a failed husband. You failed your wife by not saving her, or not dying along with her or before her. You’re a widow with an asterisk.

I was ashamed to show my face anywhere, although my friends refused to let me disappear. Whenever I had to leave the house, I wore my wedding ring. I didn’t know if widows were supposed to do that or not, so I just did it. I’d always been casual about wearing or not wearing it, but now I wore it every day. I would also wear my big Yoko shades. I always had thought of the widow’s veil as a degrading medieval tradition, but now I realized it had a practical purpose because when you cry all day, your eyes become sticky and dust gets in them constantly.

There is so much
about being a widow or widower that nobody tells you. There are no handbooks, and there aren’t really role models. You learn a lot of useless knowledge you would rather not know. For one thing, the junk mail
never
stops. I am still amazed by this. It’s been years since the funeral, and I am still getting junk mail and catalogs for Renée. It doesn’t matter how much you call or write. It doesn’t even matter how many times you change addresses. For example, today I got an envelope addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Sheffield,” promising “Updated Information” from Pinelawn Memorial Park and Garden Mausoleums. There’s a personalized letter, plus a leaflet titled, “Let’s Face It Now.” It reads:

Dear Friend,

There are a number of questions that every family must have the answers to. That’s why Pinelawn Memorial Park wants you to have the information you need right now to provide your family with total protection and peace of mind.

The letter invites us to call for “our free family-planning booklet.” Renée and I got a free family-planning booklet from the City of Charlottesville when we got married, but this is a different kind of family planning—junk mail from a cemetery. Who decided to send this to “Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Sheffield”? Do they have any clue that the Mrs. is already in a cemetery? Or do they assume there is a new Mrs. by now? I’m impressed.

Another envelope came in the mail today, this one promising Renée “New Hope for Debt Consolidation!” Come on, give death some credit. At the very least, it takes care of your debt consolidation.

Another thing I learned as a widower is that you get a check from Social Security for $255. This is their way of paying back the decedent (another word I’d never used before) for all those years of work. I had to do an exit interview by phone with Social Security to confirm that the decedent had indeed died—it’s required by law. They just wanted to check to make sure Renée didn’t skip off to Brazil or anything. They were very nice on the phone.

The funeral cost $6,776.50. The guys at the funeral home were very cool about it; they said I could just pay it whenever I got the money, with no interest or anything like that. I sent it to them in checks, piece by piece, over the next year, until I paid it off. Copies of the death certificate from the State of Virginia cost $35 apiece. On my tax form, I checked the box, “Qualifying Widow(er).” I paid off Renée’s credit cards after I paid off the funeral home. Her federal student loans were cancelled. Check this out: I sent Sallie Mae the check for her student loan on Friday, May 9, and they refunded the charge because they deposited the check on the following Monday, when she was no longer alive.

It is difficult to explain being widowed at the DMV, at the bank, at the post office. People get freaked out by it. Some people will give you a break, some won’t. The very nice woman at the DMV let me re-register our car (it was in Renée’s name) even though my copy of the death certificate was a Xerox because at that time I couldn’t afford the $35 to order another. That was very kind of her. She didn’t have to give me a break, but she did.

That was one of the strangest things I learned as a widower—how kind people can be. Renée’s work kept coming out in magazines after she died, and people wrote in to these magazines to say that they were fans of hers. I remember a call I got about a year later, after Tammy Wynette died. I played a bunch of Tammy songs on my radio show that day, because honoring Tammy would have been Renée’s beat at WTJU, and I wanted to take care of it for her. A total stranger, someone who just knew us from hearing our voices on the radio, called to say he liked the show. He said he was always a fan of Renée’s show, and Renée would have been proud that I did right by Tammy. He also said that the next day was the Richmond Braves’ home opener, and he was going to attend and think of Renée.

You lose a certain kind of innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic. You can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know what you know about kindness. It’s a defeat, in a way. One afternoon, I sat by Tonsler Park in Charlottesville and watched a Little League game and remembered my own days as a right fielder in the tall grass. I thought, None of these kids knows yet how much a coffin costs. None of these kids knows anything about funeral bills or the word “decedent.” But there’s a lot I know that I wouldn’t give up. People kept showing me unreasonable kindness, inexplicable kindness, indefensible kindness. People were kind when they knew that nobody would ever notice, much less praise them for it. People were even kind when they knew I wouldn’t appreciate it.

I had no idea how to live up to that kindness. There were so many people on the edges of Renée’s life, and I didn’t know how to take care of them. How do you tell her hair stylist? Her optometrist? Her shrink? The lady at the Barracks Road pizza place where we would hang out on Friday afternoons? I went back there often by myself, and saw recognition in her eyes, and heard curiosity in her “hello,” but she never asked. Sometimes I was scared she would, or hoped she would.

What I wanted to do was simple: write notes to people, say thank you for making Renée’s life better, you made her happier, you took care of her, I remember you for that, thanks. I got two of these notes written—one to her shrink and one to her massage therapist. And then I lay down on the floor and shut my eyes and thought, Well, that’s enough of that. It knocked the wind out of me. I tried to say as many of Renée’s goodbyes as I could, but damn, there was no way I could ever get her slate clean. She wasn’t a person to tie up loose ends or settle scores. I wanted so much to write to Jean, her hair stylist at Bristles. She gave Renée three of her all-time top-four haircuts. She took care of the fake-redhead dirty work. She wrote out a list of Bette Davis’s five best movies and told Renée how easy it was to get an annulment after we got hitched (well, thanks for
that
one). I wanted to explain why Renée wasn’t calling anymore. Our friend Elizabeth, God bless her, wrote that note. I still have so many questions and regrets about all the people who knew Renée and enjoyed her and never got to hear the news from me, wondering what happened to that girl, why doesn’t she come around anymore. To my great sorrow and shame.

I heard from the owner of the Meander Inn, the bed and breakfast in Nellysford where we spent our honeymoon. She saw Renée’s name in the paper and sent me a card. What do you do with kindness like that? I felt tiny beside it, and stupid for not understanding the first thing about it. I had a lot to learn. It was bewildering and humbling to keep discovering how many brave things people can fail to talk themselves out of doing. There are a hundred excellent ways to talk yourself out of writing a note like the one she sent me, and I’ve used them all.

I even went to the bookstore and read Emily Post on the etiquette of thank-you notes. It said not to use the funeral home note cards, but to buy new stationery with black gilt around the edges and to use black ink. I got as far as the stationery store, but I didn’t get out of there with any stationery because while I was browsing, I ran into my friend David, whose girlfriend was printing up some business cards. We talked for an hour. He said some nice things he’d been thinking about Renée lately. I drove home and crawled into my now-customary fetal position. I never got the stationery and left countless notes unwritten, again to my sorrow and shame.

I was helpless in trying to return people’s kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that’s for sure. Cruelty isn’t that hard to understand. I had no trouble comprehending why the phone company wanted to screw me over; they just wanted to steal some money, it was nothing personal. That’s the way of the world. It made me mad, but it didn’t make me feel stupid. If anything, it flattered my intelligence. Accepting all that kindness, though, made me feel stupid.

Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don’t live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renée, but we don’t burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don’t know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don’t need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can’t. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people’s psychic hearts.