#soon sequel

She tries a fast translation of a page of the text she’s working on now, Bryusov’s “V zerkale”—“In the Mirror”—by reading Cyrillic on the page, then speaking it in English into the machine. It’s difficult to keep from simply reading the Russian aloud, so she imagines it spoken in someone else’s voice, leaving her to translate simultaneously, UN-style. She tries Helena’s voice... too distracting. Her grandfather’s and grandmother’s are too familiar, and thus untranslatable. Lullabies. Max? He has a lovely voice, but the problem with imagining him speaking is that she senses him also whispering his own translation right along with himself, and that’s no help. She settles on a departmental colleague, a native Russian speaker whom she knows not well but well enough; his quiet, measured tones turn out to be Goldilocks-correct. “He” reads her the Bryusov story, and she tells it to the machine: “I have loved mirrors from my very earliest years...”

She’d been baffled when Abigail first handed her the machine and explained what it contained, for she couldn’t imagine she knew anyone Abigail would possibly have an interest in bugging. Myka doesn’t have that kind of access, and she certainly doesn’t have the expertise needed to secure this thing in place and make sure it works. Or the nerve, she tells herself, but while that might have been true in the past, she isn’t sure it’s true now. She feels a certainty in herself when she goes to Russia now. This reason, this deal she’s made, it defines her. It’s a mission, a discipline. Like Helena practicing her violin, though Myka doesn’t know what the honing of her nerve is preparing her for. What her performance will be.

“You aren’t planting it,” Abigail had told her. “And anyway it’s just a piece. You’re passing it along.”

Myka’s flicker of disappointment at this news frightened her.

She practices taking the Philips apart, removing the device, hiding it on her person, and putting the recorder back together again: quickly, silently. It’s useful to need to keep this activity from Christina, though equating Christina with KGB, even in this little way, makes Myka morally queasy.

Myka knows KGB officers listen to the hotel rooms that she and other foreigners stay in; she knows her movements are tracked; she knows that everyone to whom she speaks might be an informer. She doesn’t know how much time she’ll have when the moment comes to hand over the equipment, and she doesn’t know where it will happen.

“Why can’t I just carry it on me?” she asks Abigail. “The thing itself?”

“This is safer. Trust me.” The don’t ask why wall in Abigail’s voice: whatever she knows about what might happen to Myka—arrest, search, worse?—Myka will need not to know it’s coming. Abigail has told her in the past that an expression of genuine surprise is difficult to fake, and similarly hard for other humans to dismiss.

“Oh,” Abigail also says, offhand but not, “you may run into someone you know. Don’t react.”

Be surprised; don’t be surprised.

****

The session is intended to produce a simple demo.

Helena is in the hallway just outside the booth when she hears the sound engineer take a call. She is about to leave for the day; she has just checked in, on that very telephone, with her booking service, but nothing other than the brief rehearsal she just attended is scheduled—not a surprise, here on this relatively quiet Saturday morning.

“Hey, H.G.!” the engineer calls to her. “Want some more practice?”

She takes the phone from him. The bleary voice of Ben Cone, in whose booth she had lately sat while he produced a song that swiftly hit number three in the nation, tells her that he is supposed to be putting together a demo, but his hangover is too fierce; can she fill in? He knows she knows what to do, he says, and anyway, it’s just a demo. Everybody should be there in a half hour or so, bye. Oh, but she’ll have to find her own singer; his passed out only a couple hours ago, still sleeping it off. In no shape, you know?

She thinks of Rudy Lewis: “I’m your man for demo vocals,” he’d told her, years ago. “Don’t you call nobody else.” His sugar voice. She would have called him; he would have done it. Cruel of fate to hand her this chance, so short a time after... well. She should not dwell on that, not now.

But then she does think about it, when the song’s writer, who shows up to play piano on the track—where’s Ben; hung over; no surprise—hands her the music.

The song is titled “I’ll Pass.” “It’s simple,” he says. “Just a ‘thanks a lot but no thanks’ lyric.”

Helena can’t discern his real intent here, for the lyric strikes her as... multilayered. The verses suggest that the singer’s beloved finds the singer inadequate, inappropriate, in response to which, the singer says in the refrain, “I’ll pass, baby; I’ll pass.” A rejection? Or a sincere, bleak promise to show a different self to the world? Rudy would have sung it with the full range of meanings right there to be heard. But it isn’t Helena’s job to care about the meanings. It’s her job to produce a demo.

She is to do it with this songwriter-pianist, plus a guitarist, a drummer, a bassist... and a young saxophonist. Helena tries to send the latter home, but he says he needs the money. He says also that he would be happy to play anything she wants, if saxophones aren’t her bag, so she hands him a triangle from a box of orphan percussion and regrets to inform that the middle eight will not belong to him after all. He looks at the triangle, looks at her, pronounces this the screwiest session he’s ever seen—how many can he possibly have seen?—and then starts asking about when to ring, when to muffle, how much shimmer, and is there a brass beater anywhere in this studio because everybody knows the sound from stainless is too cold. (Helena takes his name and his number and files them away for the future.)

The musicians run through loose takes, tight takes; Helena likes the loose takes, despite the songwriter hitting an off note or several. It’s just a demo, and the looser renditions give a better sense of the song’s potential. She considers sitting down with them in the studio to add her violin, but there’s no string arrangement, and inventing one, even something simple, would begin to define the song. The demo should suggest no strictures, just a loose sense of what this melody and lyric could become.

She tries calling a few vocalists, but—again no surprise for a Saturday—she can’t find anyone, and no singer she knows well is in the building, so she asks each of the musicians to try a few bars. The guitarist wins the brief talent competition, with a soar of a tenor that Helena can’t believe hasn’t been put on record before. (She is filing him away too.) He says nobody ever asked, that he only ever sang in church—but he never goes to church anymore, which vexes his mama. Further, he notes, “I can’t sing and play at the same time,” and while Helena is outwardly expressing sympathy for his mother, she is also worrying about her ability, even with experienced engineering help, to lay in a vocal right on such a spare arrangement.

Can the now-trianglist take over the guitar part? “No strings, sorry,” he says, and doesn’t that just fit the day.

And indeed it isn’t quite right, in the end, the way the vocal lies against the music. But Helena rationalizes it, intellectualizes it—it’s trying to pass as a right part of the track. “I’ll pass, baby”? Some can. But: for only so long. The length of a pop song, perhaps.

“I was thinking about Rudy today,” she tells Christina when she finally arrives home, far later than she’d imagined, after the lengthy mixdown. “It’s just a demo,” the engineer had complained. “How rough would you be on me if it was a real track?” Which had made Helena think of Phil, but that association, and its implications, were too much for an already overloaded day.

Christina’s reaction to Rudy’s name is a quiet “oh.”

****

It had been an unremarkable day in late May, and Helena and the rest of the musicians who had assembled for a Drifters session were waiting, smoking, and growing a little irritated, for they all had additional bookings, and the more sweet time the singers and production took to arrive, the more likely the musicians were to be late for those other sessions.

Irritation turned to blank incredulity when Bert Berns, who was to produce, and the other men walked in, for Bert said, with no preliminaries, “Rudy died last night.” He added, “Overdose.”

They recorded four tracks that session. Helena could not have said, afterward, what any of them were, save the final one, a song that had been intended for Rudy to sing: a ballad called “I Don’t Want to Go On Without You.” Charlie sang it instead... that he could do so said something about professionalism, or shock, or both of them together.

Who, hearing any of those tracks on the radio, would discern that they were documents of grief? They would seem like the simple pop songs they were, and was that an obscenity, or was it just an extreme version of the work that pop music was designed to do?

“How do I tell Christina?” Helena asked Myka. “What do I tell her?”

“I don’t know—I don’t know anything. My only thought is ‘the truth.’” Myka said this as if it really was the only thought she had right then, the only thought she knew how to think about anything.

But Myka was right, so the truth was what Helena told Christina: Rudy took too many drugs, and he died. Christina asked why, and Helena thought she was asking a medical question, about what the body could and couldn’t tolerate. “No,” Christina clarified. “Why did he want to?”

Helena did try not to lie to Christina. Shield her, but not lie to her. So she said, “I think”—because she did not, in fact, know—“I think it was because he thought the world had no good place for him. He wanted a place, yet there was no place. I think that at times he wanted to let himself forget all of that. All of what surrounded him.”

Christina said a weary, “Misinformed beliefs,” and Helena could answer only with “That’s right.”

Helena had assumed she would attend the funeral alone, but Christina asked to go, then asked if Myka would go too. But Myka said, “That’s not a picture we should make.” At this, Christina nodded, and Helena could not hold back a small internal push of pride at that knowing assent. While Christina took great satisfaction in being far more American than Helena herself was, she was persistently British in her understanding of appearances.

They went out to buy her a black dress.

“Is it for a very special occasion?” the saleslady asked, because Christina was unsatisfied with the first three she tried.

“Yes and no,” Christina told her. Helena felt the push of pride again. She looked at Myka, who wore a “what is she becoming?” face, and Helena wanted to take her hand and echo “I don’t know—I don’t know anything,” then follow that with “But isn’t it miraculous that we’ll both find out?”

That miracle meant Helena would not need to find her consolation in a needle.

The night after the service, she would have been desperate to hold any woman in the dark, but instead she was lucky enough to hold the woman she loved. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” Myka said in that dark, the same words she’d said to Christina in her new black dress, afterward. She’d also said, to Christina, “How was it?”

Christina hadn’t cried at the service, but rather sat, eyes wide, holding Helena’s hand. She hadn’t even spoken until just now, and Helena was certain that only to Myka would she have broken her silence: “They said nice things about him,” Christina responded. Then she’d leaned against Myka, as if to reassure, as if Myka were the one in need of comfort, and said, “Not the right nice things.”

****

Tonight, late at night, Myka clearly expects Helena to be pleased, both about having been asked to produce the track, and about having done it. Instead, Helena says a bitter, “It’s just a demo,” and she doesn’t quite cry about Rudy, how he was not there but should have been, why he was not there to sing a song he should have sung.

“Nothing you do is just anything,” Myka says, kissing the corners of Helena’s almost-wet eyes.

“It was the work of just one afternoon,” Helena says, trying to shake off the sadness, yet also irrationally resentful of how Myka makes her want to shake off the sadness. “I’ll be surprised if I or anyone hears of it again.”

****

Myka’s handoff is easy. Like this: A week into her two-week stay, her two weeks of lecturing and researching, she is reading in Moscow University’s library. She is heavily supervised, of course, and she has already been told that she will be gaining no access to certain authors’ work: “Sorry, not available.” (The “to you” is implied.) The librarians are happy to hand her as many issues of Novy Mir as she wants, however, particularly since she is able to show them that she herself, Myka Bering, translator of many Russian works, was mentioned in a commentary written by its editor, Alexander Tvardovsky, in 1960. She does not point out to them that Novy Mir publishes several of those authors who are considered forbidden.

It is so easy: they do not want her to take notes, so she says, “May I use my dictating machine?” It is such a novelty that all the librarians must come and look at it, speak into it, hear snippets of their own voices. After all that, how can they say no? Myka promises to be quiet with it, but there is really no need. The library is libraryesque only in that books are on offer.

So easy: when a man approaches the table and points at the machine, her first thought is that he, like the librarians, wants to acquaint himself with the dictating technology. Instead he says the correct code word, and Myka answers him in kind. She demonstrates the Philips for him, and he thanks her. He then sits at a table of his own, not far from hers, and proceeds to ignore her completely.

She asks to visit the ladies room, which is of course in an isolated location, and she is given one of “the girls”—women who fetch books from the stacks for the mostly male scholars—as an ostensible guide. Ostensible because no American can be left to roam unattended, yet this particular girl wants only to go outdoors and smoke cigarettes. She doesn’t care in the slightest about Myka, who may be American but is just a woman, and old besides. So Myka goes into the washroom, calmly disassembles the Philips, removes the device, and puts it in the pocket of her suit jacket. She then just as calmly reassembles the machine, collects her watcher (who exhibits far more care in putting out her half-smoked cigarette, to save for later, than for her Myka-watching task), goes back to the reading room, reads and dictates for another hour, then goes to the man at his table. “I forgot to show you,” she says, “that the machine plays back at two speeds.” She hands him the machine and the device at the same time, listens to her own voice weirdly manipulated, and then it is done.

An hour more she reads and dictates, then she prepares to depart. The librarians, and Myka’s heedless escort who likes to smoke outdoors, wave her goodbye. She feels no need to look over her shoulder.

The summertime sidewalks of 1964 Moscow are full and bright. The weather is fine, just right for the young women to wear sundresses, for the young men to sport shirtsleeves. Their conversations are animated. They direct their eyes high, up at billboards, particularly film advertisements, and Myka tries not to read too much into the title of one: Den’ schast’ya, Day of Happiness. A girl in a lime-green shift pulls at the hand of her male companion and directs his attention to an elaborate wooden model train in a shop window; they both laugh. The train cars’ colors are washed out, too long exposed to light in that window, no buyers. While such a sight would have been sad in New York, here, for the young and sundressed and laughing, Myka infers that it’s a mark of all they believe they are leaving behind. The faded past; who needs it?

On these same sidewalks, though, as if they have been imported from that faded past, an older generation walks heavier. Silent. They dress as if they must wear all they own or lose it, no matter the weather. They find no distraction in advertisements, and they don’t bother with window displays. The past is always there; why be reminded?

Myka tries to remind herself, and keep in the front of her mind, that she has more in common with those who walk with weight. She is doing dangerous work. She will become careless if she forgets about risk and consequences. But a sharp lightness has come to attend her time in Russia... she keeps secrets all the time, no matter where she is, but the secret she keeps here, while she is here, is distinct: the threat of its revelation accrues to her and no one else.

The most salient secret she keeps at home is vastly different, in that its discovery would damage Myka, but reverberations from that discovery would very likely destroy Helena and Christina.

Walking down a summertime sidewalk of Moscow, responsible only for her own safety, affords Myka a guilty freedom. That such freedom should be one through which she is constantly followed and watched and listened to should be ironic, but instead it seems like part of a mistaken-identity comedy, one in which Russians have been told to follow and watch and listen to Myka Bering, but they are following and watching and listening to a person who feels free, and that cannot possibly be Myka Bering, so they are following and watching and listening to the wrong person after all. Who do they think she is?

Who does she think she is?

Her final event in Russia, a week later, is a reception for all the university’s visiting American scholars. Myka is one of only three lecturers who have come for these two-weeks; several more have spent the entire now-concluding summer term here in exchange for some Soviets who are probably at similar receptions on U.S. campuses. Different hors d’oeuvres, same receptions. More than a few are scientists, which helps to explain the heavy presence of people at this party who are clearly not academics. Myka meets several American diplomats, most of whom are probably straightforwardly State; some, though, must be CIA under official cover. Similarly, there are some actual Soviet diplomatic eminences, but also, plenty of KGB making their power known.

Myka finds herself chatting with two junior diplomats—or “diplomats”—one American whose name she did not quite catch, and one Russian, his name Nikolai. Nikolai will no doubt be reporting back to his superiors everything about his American interlocutors, regardless, but in this conversation he is just a young man, dark with a softness about his mouth. “What is happening in New York?” he asks her, and his English is all right, nearly full-speed, but she tells him he should feel free to speak Russian with her.

“Want practice,” he demurs. But he flashes her a small smile as he does so. In that soft mouth, his teeth are wolf-white. Nikolai has never skipped out to smoke, outdoors or anywhere else. He is clean.

The American glimpses someone across the room and makes a “come here” motion. Myka looks over to see who is approaching... and she understands why Abigail told her not to react. “Professor Bering,” the American says, “and Nikolai, I’d like to introduce you to Joseph Holden, the famous Olympic wrestler.”

Joseph has received the same instructions Myka has; he shakes her hand and says “A pleasure, professor.” Then he shakes hands with Nikolai. The clean Russian shows his wolf teeth again, more widely.

Myka does not know anything about this, whatever “this” might be. Her fizz of ire at Abigail for not being forthcoming is probably inappropriate and definitely fruitless in this moment, but she feels it. She looks at Joseph, who always seems to make easy situations less so, and she directs that fizz at him, too.

Myka and Joseph have one moment together during which they are unobserved, or at least less closely attended to. “Why are you here?” she asks him, because she can’t stop herself.

He laughs. “Oh, I’m finding Moscow really something,” he says, his voice fully corn-fed, but that is not the end of it. Quick, quiet, he adds, “I’m bait.”

Myka has no time or space to get more from him. Nikolai reappears, and Joseph turns back to him, his charm wide, open.

The burden of risk.

****

Myka returns home from her two weeks in Russia to find... difference. Her own blood is colder, because it always is after Russia, but also because she doesn’t know the contours of the operation she brushed past. She’ll find out soon enough—she won’t let Abigail fail to read her in, not on this—but she is still shivering.

Helena, meanwhile, is hot: her demo version of “I’ll Pass” is charting.

She’d had no idea, she tells Myka, that the demo was being cut for Lester Sill—he’d been Phil’s partner at Philles Records, but their relationship had soured. “As it would,” Helena said, and Myka recognized that little curl of lip. Sill was now at Colpix, hungry for talent... Helena had been told that when the demo was played for him, he’d listened through, then stood up and walked out of his office. “We’re done,” he’d said as he left. “Release it. It’s a hit.” Helena admits to Myka that she imagines—worries?—that all he had heard was some vestige of Phil’s style, some oddity that Helena had unknowingly reproduced. That that was what caught his ear.

“It’s just one hit,” Helena says, as if in apology, and Myka can’t understand why she isn’t thrilled to have done—on her first try!—exactly what she has always intended to do. Then Helena says, “It was an accident.” This gives Myka clarity: Helena doesn’t know how to make it happen again.

After any time in Russia, Myka is always a bit more Russian than she was before. Which is not to say that she will ever understand or feel with fullness what it is to be Russian... but some not-quite-Russian lives inside her, some unschooled child of all these: her grandfather, her grandmother, all the voices she has heard on tapes, all the words on the pages she has translated, KGB, dissidents, victims, perpetrators, even young girls in sundresses. They all wrestle for pride of place within her. Those real Russians never explain themselves, never step up and tell her, never sit her down and bleed into her bones. But those Russians, and even the not-quite-one who doesn’t fill her skin, they all know: there are no accidents.

“Well, they laugh. Real quiet, but they laugh.”

“Is that okay with you?”

He frowned, just a little. “Course it is. What kind of guy am I if it’s not?”

“A not-Pete kind of guy,” Myka had assured him.

Pete’s on her mind this afternoon because she’s wrapping his Christmas present: a New York Mets baseball cap. Christina has decided that the Mets are her team, given that last year was their first year in the league and it was also her first year paying close attention to baseball, so Pete takes her to games whenever he and Abigail visit New York during the season. When Myka had wondered aloud what to get him, “a Mets hat” had been Christina’s immediate suggestion.

“Will it be okay for him to wear a New York hat in Washington?” Myka asked.

“The Senators left, so I bet nobody there even cares about baseball anymore. But also I bet it wouldn’t matter to Pete anyway.”

Of course it wouldn’t. Because Pete is a Pete kind of guy.

To wrap the present, Myka is sitting on the floor, next to the tree, because Christina is taking up most of the table with the newspaper. Christina generally doesn’t have time to read the paper before school, so that is one of her rewards for finishing her homework in the afternoons. But while she’s always intent, she isn’t always as intent as she is this day, this unremarkable, not-yet-Christmas Tuesday. She has the newspaper open in front of her, and she’s gone to get the dictionary too; she is on her knees in the chair, her whole body hunching over their small table as she reads, consults the dictionary, then reads some more.

Myka doesn’t begrudge her the table space, because she is enjoying being near the tree, breathing in green and outdoors; while she can’t imagine ever calling Colorado home again, this pine scrapes with familiarity through her lungs. They don’t have enough tree here for the smell itself to go deep, but she’ll take shallow, because it signifies her having won once again an argument she and Helena have now had for three Christmases: Helena says she wants to buy one of the popular aluminum trees, and Myka objects, based both on Colorado and on “where could we possibly store it?” Then Christina tells her mother that it’s an aluminum tree, not an aluminium one, because they are Americans now; Helena objects that she is not in fact an American, so she will continue to say “aluminium tree”; and Myka says it doesn’t matter how anybody pronounces it anyway because it isn’t a tree.

The first time Myka won this argument, in 1961, Helena had stepped back and regarded their newly decorated, blessedly nonmetallic tree. She had at that point declared that if there was no chance of real modernity, she would at least like said tree to be flocked. “Fake snow,” Myka had sighed, “on a real tree?” But the next day Helena brought home an aerosol can of the stuff, saying that Myka did not need to trouble herself over it, that she herself would deal with the application. “Tomorrow, though,” she’d yawned.

Myka had been the first one up and out of bed the following morning. She walked into the living room and caught sight of the tree. She blinked. She rubbed her eyes, then blinked again. But no, the sight stayed the same: the bottom two-thirds of the tree—the still-decorated tree—seemed to have been dolloped with melting strawberry ice cream. She stood in front of the tree for some time, trying to formulate a thought.

“Helena, could you come here?” she called.

Helena grumbled, from their bedroom, “I don’t want to get up yet.”

“I really would appreciate it if you would come here and tell me what you see.”

She emerged, buttoning her robe, muttering “fine, fine,” blinking. She leaned against Myka, nuzzling brief and warm into her neck. Then she stood straight up, facing the tree. She blinked some more. “You want me to tell you what I see.”

“Yes and no,” Myka said, “or maybe I mean yes or no. Depending on what you tell me.”

“Hm. I see that I have made two errors.”

“Two errors, you say.”

“Yes. First, I failed to attend to the color of the spray I purchased. In my defense, I don’t suppose I had any idea it came in colors other than white.”

“It’s fake snow,” Myka reminded her. That was met with a heavy sigh that did not do much to disguise an underlying growl, and Myka chuckled. “And your second error?”

“Second—well, technically first, chronologically—I had a child. Who I believe is now lurking in the hallway, and who might as well come here and regard, with shame, what she has inflicted upon our tree and ornaments.”

Christina walked to the tree and sighed. “I wanted to surprise you.” This said with remorse, but also with something a little like pride.

“You did do that,” Myka had to concede.

“Quite successfully,” Helena said. “And you managed to do this in the night without waking us, which is also a bit of a surprise.”

“I didn’t turn the light on. So I guess I couldn’t see the color in the dark. Also I couldn’t reach all the way up the tree either. Are you mad?”

“About your not being able to reach all the way up the tree? Actually, I’m not at all angry about that, because at least some of the decorations were spared a pinkening.”

Myka said, “I wonder if it comes off. The pinkening, I mean.”

Christina pulled a formerly shiny gold metal ball from the tree. She rubbed at its dried pink drips of flocking with her thumb.

So yes, Christmas was once a quiet day, a day with which Myka never much bothered. But now Christmas is something else again, something that is signified, for her and for Helena and especially for Christina, by the removing of pink-encrusted ornaments from their various protective boxes and newspaper swaddlings and the placing of them, as the finishing touches, on their tree.

Myka raises a hand to the ornament nearest her, a plastic Santa who looks as if he’d been minding his own business on the sidewalk, only to be splashed by a taxi driving through a puddle of melted cotton candy. His pink imperfection clashes terribly with his red coat, and Myka feels more than a little silly for how that makes her heart swell. He’d look even more ridiculous if he were hanging from an aluminum—or aluminium—branch... but Myka suspects her heart would swell just the same.

“Myka,” Christina says from the table. Her voice is querulous, a little jar to Myka’s Santa-inspired sentimentality.

“Christina,” Myka answers back. She will later reflect that she should somehow have known what had Christina concerned, but fate had made her take just one glance at the newspaper that morning. She’d glanced at it again, just the front page, just above the fold, when she arrived home. She hadn’t known. She couldn’t have known... but that was no excuse.

“You and Mom.”

“Yes.” She doesn’t see what’s coming.

“Are you sick.”

“Sick. Sick?” And still she doesn’t see what’s coming. “We had those bad colds, but that was last month.”

“No. Not colds. Sick with.” Christina looks down at the paper. “An incurable, congenital disorder.”

Myka stands up, walks to the table. Christina has the paper open, but now she flips to the front page—the front page, it’s below the fold, but the front page—and reads the headline out loud: “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern.” Christina stumbles, just a bit, in that out-loud reading, over the “sexuality” part of “homosexuality.”

This is the kind of situation Helena was made for, as a parent; she would know the right words to say to either defuse it or dismiss it entirely. Myka is... not a parent, so she cannot have been made for any situation as a parent. But her footing is in any case far less secure, not just because they don’t talk very much about this with Christina, not directly, but also because Myka herself tries not to think about it very much. Not directly. Except when she’s forced to. Except when things happen.

But all right, this newspaper article has now happened. Myka reads the front-page portion. It doesn’t seem so bad, despite the headline; it’s about the state liquor authority revoking licenses of so-called “homosexual haunts.” She nods and Christina turns to the continuing page—and there the article seems to go on forever, columns upon columns. Christina points to a particular section: “Out of the Shadows,” the subhead reads, and Myka braces herself. She scans the text there: apparently the best argument that the “organized homophile movement” can muster is that, just as Christina had quoted, homosexuality is “an incurable, congenital disorder”—which in turn would mean that homosexuals should be considered “just another minority.” Analytical psychiatrists, on the other hand, say it’s the result of “ill-adjusted parents.” Which for some reason means it can be “cured.”

Myka asks, “Have you read the whole thing?”

Christina nods.

“Will you give me a minute to read it too, so I know what we’re talking about?”

Christina nods again. It isn’t her fully nervous nod. Myka takes that as a genuine okay for her to go ahead.

But as Myka starts to read, Christina executes a seemingly aimless wander over to the record player. She puts on... she puts on the Drifters. Their 1962 LP, the second side, and Myka now knows that Christina is more upset than she wants to say out loud, because if she is starting with the second side? Helena plays on every track, and the songs themselves do not matter in the slightest: what’s important is that Christina knows she is hearing her mother.

She comes back to Myka, who is now sitting at the table; she stands behind Myka’s chair and drapes herself over Myka’s shoulders. “It’s okay,” Myka says, and Christina nods against her neck. She doesn’t move away, though. At no point while Myka reads does Christina move away.

The article deals mainly with men, where they go, how they talk to each other, why they act as they do. Women are worth almost no mention, and Myka comes close to convincing herself: This is not about me. This is not about Helena. This is not about me, and it is not about Helena. It is not about us.

But one section, despite its male focus, rips the ground from under her tentative self-persuasion. It’s subheaded “Impossible Dream.” It begins, “Many homosexuals dream of forming a permanent attachment that would give them the sense of social and emotional stability that others derive from heterosexual marriage but few achieve it.”

It is the kind of bald statement that she seems always to be trying to tell herself is untrue, but here it is, in the newspaper. Everyone in the entire city read this today. Everyone in the city read that her life and Helena’s, their life together, is impossible... the ten-year-old who shares that life, she is a warm mantle of worry still clasping Myka’s shoulders but now slipped down, plastered against her side, as Myka looks at this newspaper on this table at which they impossibly eat breakfast, lunch, dinner.

“Okay,” she tells Christina when she’s through. “I read it. What are you thinking?”

“You’re not sick,” Christina says.

“I don’t think so.”

Now the words tumble out. “Okay, but then the people in the article who say you’re not sick, the ones who say it’s just that you have weird parents, if your father is hostile and your mother is... I can’t remember what it said about mothers, but they say you can be cured, but how can you be cured of something if you’re not sick with anything in the first place? That doesn’t make sense.”

She really is a very smart girl. “Not much sense,” Myka agrees.

“But do you want to be?”

“Want to be what?”

“Cured.”

How to explain the difference between what you want and what you want? Not that Myka can even explain that to herself, so she goes ahead with the response that had jumped into her head: “But that would mean I wouldn’t love your mom anymore.”

“I know what it means,” Christina says, with a hint of resentment. “Is it what you want?”

Smart girl. Discerning girl. “I want to love her forever,” Myka says. It’s as true as any of the other contradictorily true things she could say, but she does have to stop herself from adding “in an ideal world.” There’s only so much truth you can tell a ten-year-old. Even this ten-year-old.

“Forever?”

There’s both hope and certainty in that word: “do you mean it” crossed with “of course you mean it.” Myka has heard the same collision in Helena’s voice. She’s never known how to give Helena the right answer, and she has no better intuition here. “I do want to,” she tries.

“Is that what Mom wants too?”

“I hope so.”

“Me too.” Christina tightens her grip on Myka, a dramatic grasp of a hug, then lets go. “I think I’ll go read now.”

“Okay. What are you reading?”

“I’m not sure. I have about three or four library books.” Feigned disinterest, a lack of precision: she’s finished talking about this. But then she cocks her head, listening to the music. “Rudy isn’t sick either.” Most singers and musicians with whom Helena works, Christina can take or leave. She’s polite to all of them, of course, because Helena would never let her get away with anything less. But a select few—and this seems to have nothing to do with how famous they are, or even how talented—she adores. Rudy Lewis is among those select few, and in this case, the devotion is mutual. He always asks after her, and when he sees her, he declares “there’s that baby!”, which never fails to accelerate Christina’s usually slow smile.

“Rudy isn’t sick either,” Myka says. “Rudy is as sweet to you as I’ve ever seen anybody be, plus he sings like an angel, and he gets a huge kick out of your mom. I don’t think anybody who does all those things could be sick.”

“And he doesn’t want to be cured either, does he?”

“I don’t think so,” Myka says, but here, she is skirting an outright lie. Because Rudy might not be sick, but he does have his problems. And some of those problems do arise from the fact that he... isn’t sick. But here, too, there’s only so much truth you can tell a ten-year-old. Myka suspects that Rudy, as well as most of the people she knows who aren’t sick, would not volunteer to be cured. But she does wonder what they would say about it, what she herself and even Helena would say about it, if they woke up one morning and found themselves cured—or rather, found themselves not like this. Like everyone else instead.

“That’s good,” Christina says. “I wouldn’t want him to be different. I really am going to read now. I have A Wrinkle in Time again, and I got Ice Station Zebra and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold for the first time.” Over the summer, she had developed a fondness for spy thrillers, in spite of needing to look up what seemed to be every other word. Myka and Helena both found this new preference a little alarming, but it sent Abigail into hysterics. “Like mother, like daughter... no, I mean, like this person, like this person’s kid!” she had chortled.

Now Christina takes the dictionary from the table, tucking it under her arm. She likes to read books in her room. Newspapers on the table, books in her room, and she leaves Myka sitting there, still staring at the columns upon columns of the article.

She can’t decide how much to tell Helena about it, or even if she should bring it up in the first place. Given how invested Christina had been, she most likely should tell it all, including about their conversation, but on the other hand, Christina seems to have wanted to put the issue to bed. Although that may have been just with Myka... but of course it isn’t as if the problem won’t come up again in some other equally unexpected way...

Helena opens the door to the apartment, interrupting Myka’s choice-making. She sets her violin case and handbag down, and then she asks, with a twitch in her voice, “Did Christina read the newspaper today?”

“You know she did. She always does.”

“Did you?”

“I hadn’t. But then she asked me whether you and I are sick.” Helena’s posture slackens. “So yes, then, I did.”

“Lovely.” It’s a sharp word. Helena comes to the table, looks down at the newspaper, doesn’t touch it. In fact she crosses her arms at it. “Why is this necessary?” She might be asking the paper itself, interrogating it about its unacceptable behavior.

“Part of it is news. About the State Liquor Authority.”

“But why the rest of it.”

“You don’t really want an answer.”

“I’m not really asking a question.” She directs her attention now at Myka. “And I hope you bear in mind: not impossible. A dream, yes, and every now and then a nightmare, but not impossible.” Because of course she would know which part of the article had threatened to overpower Myka. And maybe it had had that effect on Helena too, at first, but now her shoulders are square: that’s anger, not hesitation or doubt.

They both notice that Christina has slunk up the hallway and is hanging there, uncharacteristically reluctant to interrupt.

“Come here, you,” Helena says, and Christina flies at her. She used to wrap her arms around Helena’s legs. Now, taller, she hugs Helena around the waist. Shoulders will be next... when she grows, it’s fast. Dramatic spurts, just like Myka remembers from her own childhood. Helena asks her, “Are you all right?’

“Mostly all right. But.”

“But?” Now Helena does sound a little uncertain, and Myka, too, braces for Christina’s answer.

“I’m too old to go to Macy’s and sit on Santa’s lap tonight like we were going to.”

Helena breathes a bit. Then she says, “You had hardly any Christmas at all for the first five years of your life. Please indulge me.”

Christina sighs. She says, “Okay, Mom”: not fully graceful in her acquiescence, but graceful enough. She is showing that she is all right.

“You’re the one who likes tradition,” Myka tells Christina, this perceptive girl who knows her mother well enough to know when she, too, needs reassurance... in fact Christina may have objected to the excursion just so she could acquiesce.

“Myka, I’m ten,” Christina groans. Well, then again, maybe not.

But everything is all right. They eat their dinner—fried eggs, bacon, toast, because eating breakfast at night is different, but it binds them together in its difference—atop the opened newspaper, making a mess of it, dropping crumbs, letting yolk dribble, setting bacon down just to watch the fat-stains blight the type.

Then they go to Macy’s. It’s as overwhelming as it is every year; this year, though, the fact that they are just three small parts of the teeming crowds and silver-belling holiday racket seems to mean they could be any three people at all. That they can be any three people.

But at a certain point, Myka turns to say something to Helena, and Helena... looks odd. There’s a little dampness at her temples, and her breathing is a strange not-quite-pant. Some sort of delayed shock reaction? “What is it?” Myka asks.

“Winter wonderland,” Helena says.

It takes Myka a second or two to realize that that carol is drifting through the bechristmased store. “What about it?”

“That’s the song. Well, not this version of course, but—on Phil’s Christmas record, I told you. I played it over a hundred times. And listened to it... uncountable. I can’t stand it. I need some air.” She bolts away, saying, “I’ll meet you outside.”

Christina looks at Myka, and Myka reads that look immediately. “Oh, no. You’re talking to Santa so we can tell her that you did.”

“Can’t we say the line was too long?”

“Only if it is. But you know she wouldn’t believe us anyway, so you’re stuck.”

“I’m ten,” Christina insists, but that’s the last objection she offers.

When Myka and Christina emerge onto the sidewalk, Helena is clapping her hands against the chill of the evening.

“You could’ve come back in,” Christina informs her, as they begin to walk toward the subway. “The song ended.”

Helena ignores this. “Did you ask Father Christmas to bring you anything in particular?”

“I asked Santa. Because I’m an American. I asked him for a Vac-U-Form.”

Myka says, “He was a little confounded. Apparently she’s the first girl to ask for one.”

“I don’t see what joy any boy or girl would derive from what is essentially a plastic foundry. And why on earth do you continue to want toys that will burn the house down?” Helena asks. But she puts her arm around Christina and drops a kiss on her head.

“It’s not even really a toy. Like you said, it’s a foundry.” Christina utters the word with evident pleasure. “Besides, the only thing I’ve ever burned is my own hand, with the sulfuric acid. And only one time.”

Helena declares, “That is, from my perspective, a distinction without a difference. Certainly in terms of damage.” At which Christina sighs.

Myka would put her arm around Helena and drop a kiss on her head, but she settles for laughing at her. “Never let it be said that you avoided hyperbole. Nobody was happy about that burned hand, but I think from almost everybody else’s perspective that’s a distinction with a pretty big difference. Even in terms of damage.”

“My hand did hurt though,” Christina says.

“I know it did,” Myka assures her.

“Hyperbole,” Helena huffs.

The subway is warm. On it, they are just three people.

****

Myka and Helena put Christina to bed together. Most nights, one or the other will take the lead, but tonight they are together.

Christina says to her mother, in the middle of the yawn that followed her insistence that she was not tired, “Myka says she hopes you want to love her forever. Do you?”

Helena says, “Of course I do.” She is all business, as if no more factual a statement could be issued. Christina relaxes—she’d been holding her head a bit up, off of her pillow, but now the feathers give way with the tiniest of exhalations—and Myka wishes that she too were ten, to be able to hear that voice and believe in its infallibility. “Now,” Helena says, with no change in tone, “are you still concerned about that ridiculous newspaper article? Tell me the truth.”

“You’re not sick,” Christina says.

“Not to the best of my knowledge.”

“But Immigration might feel like they have better knowledge. Right?” She doesn’t say this with any guile, but Myka suspects she’s been thinking it out for some time.

“You’re very clever. All I can tell you is that some people hold certain misinformed beliefs. Where those come into conflict with ours... well. We will face what we must, if and when we must. In the meantime, shall I let you know if I begin to feel ill?” Again, the tone says do not concern yourself, and again Myka wants to believe her. Christina believes her enough to nod. “All right, then,” Helena says. “Myka and I will retire to our bed that is not a sickbed, and you will sleep well.”

“Okay, Mom.”

“You say that as if you are addressing someone in this room, and yet I see only Myka and myself.” She leans down and kisses Christina’s forehead, then takes Myka’s hand and kisses it—and that too says do not concern yourself. “Vac-U-Form. What are we to do with you?”

“Make sure Santa knows I want one.”

Helena’s tone doesn’t change, but her smile deepens. “I don’t know who that is either, so I could not possibly convey the message.”

Myka laughs. “See, knock-knock, that’s why we had to go to Macy’s.”

“I’m ten,” Christina insists, but with little force. She blinks a very slow blink. She yawns again.

At long last, however, the moment does come when he judges that the recording of her exhausted violin has reached a quality (a sweetness?) that satisfies him. He immediately begins to mix. She starts to ask if they might get some rest and come back fresh tomorrow, but he grunts out, “It’s building.”

The strings alone, he mixes seventeen different ways. The vocals, percussion, guitars and keyboards, horns, none of these are placed or changed with quite as much precision, and she sees no point in lying to herself: she does like the attention he pays to strings, the minute differences he can hear between one resonance and another. Phil manipulates the console’s knobs with authority; he makes large or small adjustments and clearly knows precisely what effects will ensue. At certain points, however, he sighs and offers such laments as “Larry’d do this in a flash.”

Helena refrains from noting that he might have Larry here today, doing things in a flash, if he had only let him get some rest, regardless of what may have been building for two months straight.

The track entire is put together a number of times that Helena does not bother to count; the tape machines will no doubt decide for themselves, at some point, to smoke it off, and Helena herself fights through several stretches during which she has heard the thing so many times that there is no music as such left in it. She asks constant questions—why this fader up, why that frequency clipped—and sometimes Phil can articulate a precise, technical answer. Sometimes he shakes his head and says “Larry could tell you.” But sometimes he strands her: “the sound” he says. A lifeboat into which she cannot clamber, but—

“Wait,” she says, after the fade of the latest rendering.

“Wait for what.” His head is tilted down, but—can a head be tilted eagerly down?

“Is this it? This is it. This one, this is it.”

“You sure?” Noncommittal.

“Yes?” Helena is delirious, or maybe just wishes she were.

“How do you know.” Still nothing in his voice.

“I... I can hear all of it.”

Phil lifts his head. He nods. “You’re right. Listen. H.G., listen.”

He plays it again—loud, he loves loud playback, such that the ears ring, no doubt to force any listener into acknowledging the power of his sound—and in front of her is an edifice in which she can hear, now, every single brick and bracing. Of which her ears understand, even if her mouth cannot articulate, the reason for each piece.

Bass thick, just discernible as an instrument in its own right. Percussion occupying a full, embodied space of its own, and now she does understand why everyone raves about these echo chambers.

Vocals buried deeper than she would have thought could be correct: but they are. “What will Darlene say about where you’re putting her voice?” Helena had asked, several generations of tape ago. Phil’s response: “Who cares?”

The strings are sweet but not sickly; and she can in fact still distinguish her own violin—in particular, that pizzicato, elsewhere so often dry and delicate but here saturated, robust—from the rest. He might be using the near-masculinity of that sound to mock her, but in the end, she must echo him: who cares?

The horns are... well. She begrudges him those obscenely honking saxophones.

They have been in the studio for very near forty hours; they emerge into morning sunlight as if on the opposite side of the world.

“When’s your flight?” Phil asks.

“I have no idea. What day is it?”

The travel agent had made a reservation for her in a hotel in which she never set foot. She carries a suitcase that she never opened.

She makes the plane with very little time to spare; she spends the first half of the flight too jangled to relax, the next half too exhausted to sleep. She takes a taxi home from Idlewild, and when Myka asks “How did it go?”, she says “I don’t really know.”

“You look terrible,” Myka tells her.

Helena answers, without thought, “I feel worse.” But then she stops and does think. “Or actually... no, I don’t. I was in a studio for two days, on airplanes for another half a day, but I don’t feel terrible at all.”

“I think you enjoyed yourself.”

“I think I may have done. Not at every point, and at some points not at all, but... is that all right?”

Myka doesn’t often kiss Helena often in front of Christina, not with purpose, but she does now; she pulls Helena to her and kisses her like they are the lovers they are. Through gratitude she barely knows as such, given the distraction of lips and tongue, Helena considers the unreal-yet-real possibility that she is dreaming.

Christina, apparently unperturbed, asks, “How’s Phil?” She has met him twice, just as Myka has. Their interactions began, both times, in a studio: the first time, he had looked down at her and asked “What are you?” and Christina answered, “I’m an American. What are you?” before Helena could admonish her into politeness. The second time, his question had been, “Where do they keep the patch cables in this place?”

“Haven’t you been here before?” Christina asked him.

“Yeah, but I never needed patch cables here before.”

When Christina brought him a handful, he asked, “Do you like steak?”

“Not as much as waffles.”

So when the setup for the next day’s recording was completed to his very specific specifications, he took Christina and Helena both out for waffles. He held Helena’s chair for her, then Christina’s.

After the meal—the surprisingly pleasant meal, during which he tried to explain to Christina’s not-quite-satisfaction why he liked to double, triple, quadruple so many instruments (“makes a bigger sound,” he said, to which Christina replied “but you could just have one and they could play louder” and they squabbled about the difference between “bigger” and “louder” as if they were both children)—he put them in a taxi to go home, paying the driver in advance. He did not once remove his sunglasses. “He’s funny looking,” Christina said in the cab. “Or maybe just funny. But not funny.”

“That’s quite true,” Helena said.

So now, when Christina asks how Phil is, Helena tells her, “Still funny. Somewhat differently funny.”

“Still wearing that cape?” Myka asks.

“No cape. But the sunglasses remain. I suppose he did have on a rather striking waistcoat. Jacquard.”

“Speaking of funny,” Myka says. “Funny detail to notice.”

“I think one is meant to notice.” In her back-and-forth with Myka, she hears the reaccustoming that always occurs after a separation of any length, even so short as a workday. The pretending, also, that that is not what they are doing, pretending that everything is familiar and fine, until the moment of magic when it becomes so.

Christina chimes in again with, “Is L.A. pretty?”

Never any reaccustoming with Christina. Never any need for pretending. Helena sees her daughter, hears her voice, and everything is always already as it was. “I bought several postcards. So we could all get a look at Los Angeles, because what did I see? I saw the airport and the interior of the studio. Possibly a palm tree? I did spend time in two cars. What does one see from a car?”

“That’s probably when you saw the palm tree. Is the airport nice at least?”

“I quite frankly can’t remember, but here is a postcard that depicts it. What do you think?”

“Looks new.” Then she takes hold of Helena’s right hand, from which she had plucked the postcard. “What happened to your finger?”

It does look unattractive. Not one but two slightly horrified stewardesses had tried and failed to find her a bandage for it when it began to bleed during the flight, so Helena now has, to her mortification, a blood-stained American Airlines napkin stowed in her handbag. “We’ll call it a war wound,” she says. “Sustained during the Pizzicato Hostilities of 1963.”

“God, how much pizzicato?” Myka’s voice wavers between a gasp and a laugh.

Helena looks at the offender, holds it up to Myka evidentiarily, apologetically. “Just about this much.”

“I’d kiss it, but I don’t think that would do anything but give you an infection.”

“So romantic. Although most likely also accurate.” But they smile at each other—and there is that moment: they are themselves again, and Helena is home.

Christina is still focused on the details. “Okay, so you didn’t see L.A. But you had to eat. Was the food good?”

“I can’t remember that either. There were delivery containers at certain points. Italian?”

“I’m not sure you really went to California at all,” Christina says, shaking her head and sighing.

“Neither am I.”

“Maybe you just rode around in a cab here for two days playing pizzicato for the driver.”

“Although she did get the postcards,” Myka says, nodding at the remaining stack in Helena’s other hand.

Helena had bought as many different cards as she could grab—twenty, thirty?—before having to run for the airplane. She hands the rest to Christina, who begins flipping through them. “Good point. So we know she flew to California.”

“And we know she destroyed her poor finger on the violin.” Now Myka does take Helena’s hand, does kiss her finger, just a little, just a sigh’s press.

“Or maybe she slammed it in the door of the taxi. Mom, can I put some of these on the wall of my room?”

“Of course you may. And clearly you both are quite good at deductive reasoning. You should become police detectives.”

“We could be detectives on a TV show!” Christina enthuses. “Wells and Bering!”

“Bering and Wells,” Myka says, to which Christina delivers a thumbs-down verdict.

Helena once again is visited by that unreal-yet-real sensation as Christina and Myka continue to plan their television program.... they will be not police but private detectives... they will drive a car like the one on Route 66 (Christina’s idea)... they will need a theme song (also Christina’s idea). Christina requests Helena’s help with this latter task.

“I don’t write music.”

“I know that.” Christina is aggrieved. “But you have Nelson’s phone number.”

“Mr. Riddle.” Helena supplies the automatic correction, but she thinks she may be one of the few people in the nation who knows several other parents whose children would also recommend calling on Nelson Riddle if they were in need of a melody for their imaginary television show’s theme song.

The utter strangeness of this life.  But the suitability, too, how as each day closes she cannot imagine wanting to have had a different day.

The way Christina and Myka speak to each other: strange twinned with suitable. If Helena could determine how to capture that as a sound... an approach...

“Helena,” she hears Myka say. “You’re going to fall over. Sit down.”

Helena would not have been able to say with certainty that she had not already sat down. Or fallen over.

“Come sit at the table, Mom. You missed dinner, but we saved some for you.”

“I ate a meal on the airplane,” Helena protests, more weakly than she would like.

“But we made meatloaf. And also mushroom julienne. The meatloaf was mostly my job.”

“It was,” Myka says. The smile in her voice, the very quiet pride: it’s just meatloaf, of course. But Helena can hear, in that quiet, the day-by-day of that pride’s accrual.

“I could do even more if you’d trust me with the sharp knife like Mrs. Cho does now. Then all the julienning wouldn’t have to be your job.”

“See, no, because when she’s not around, you get sloppy. I like you with all your fingers intact.”

Conversation, suitability, strangeness. Keeping Christina intact. Maintaining this space where all of this can happen, with pride and love and family all accruing. A right fit that no one could have thought to predict; unexpected, yet apt. There must be a way to translate that, its traces, its evidence, into a sound. It would not be a wall.

Helena tries to concentrate on meatloaf and mushrooms.

Yet strangeness... in bed, later, Helena says, “I didn’t hate it. Why didn’t I hate it?” All she will ever let Myka know about is the time and effort spent, but even that is enough. A normal person would have hated it.

“Are you talking about the meatloaf?” Myka asks, and Helena does laugh. Christina likes to experiment in the kitchen, particularly with sugars... and her meatloaf had featured a surprising application of a honey glaze. The result was some combination of delicious and disgusting; Helena’s mouth and digestion have not come to an agreement in the matter. Myka shrugs, a gentle wave of motion that makes Helena’s body, in its customary position against Myka’s side and shoulder, rise and fall. “Why didn’t you hate it? Because... maybe because you recognize it. You see where you’re going.”

“Do I? I can’t... I mean, not as Phil has. And not as who he is. Never like that.”

“There’ll be an H.G. Wells way to do it. You’ll be her instead.”

“Will there? I don’t know what she’ll do. Who she’ll be, who I’ll be, as she does it. That is, if I ever have the chance to... what, invent her? Because—”

“You will.” This is followed by a long, aggressive kiss, and Helena is a bit surprised when Myka pulls back and says, “I was lonely. While you were gone.”

“Well. When you’re gone—”

“Don’t,” Myka says. Mild, but it’s a warning.

And it’s not inappropriate, that warning. Helena had been, reflexively, about to restart a familiar argument, one that they have been having for two years now—almost exactly two years: Helena knows it and she knows Myka does too, because forming their household had happened so easily, just over two years ago, as if they had at last stepped into their right lives. Their right-fit lives. The rhythm set itself in the first week: they sent Christina to school in the morning, enjoyed a few moments of blessed privacy together; then Helena kissed Myka away to her campus and took an hour or more to practice the violin alone before her day’s sessions.

Five weeks it lasted, this plain and comfortable regularity. Then Myka left, for four days, at Abigail’s behest. Helena had fretted through the entire four days, hiding it as well as she could from Christina and everyone around her. She hid it very well from her violin: both in practice and in sessions, her playing was very near flawless. She produced exactly the sounds she wanted to. She hated each note.

Adding to her fretfulness was the fact that she had no way to determine which response was right, the worry undertow or her hands’ proficient disregard of it. For four days, she tortured herself. Then Myka came back, and while she did seem to try to be reassuring, did try to comfort Helena with words and actions of love, all she would say about the issue at hand was, “I can’t talk about it.” And all Helena could say to that was, “That does not help.”

Helena still does not know which response to settle on, and Myka still does not help. They talk around it, but that solves nothing; sometimes they talk directly at it, with just as little success. Myka says “you know I can’t tell you” and Helena struggles to explain her inability to reconcile what she knows and what she needs.

Myka did try, once: she said, “This time, don’t worry.”

To which Helena had replied, with a face rapidly turning red, “How do I know if you’re telling me that simply because it’s what you think I want to hear?”

“You don’t,” Myka said. They kissed goodbye as always. The next time, Myka didn’t say anything about how Helena should feel.

Now, here in their bed, Helena says, “At least you knew I was—” But then she stops.

“Knew you were what?”

Phil and his “I’ve got a gun.” But Helena says it anyway: “You knew I was safe.”

Myka doesn’t say anything. But she exhales in a way that suggests frustration, even injury.

Helena acknowledges that bringing up safety is a provocation, for the fact of the matter is that what Myka does is what she feels she must do. But Helena now has a brief vision: if they lived in California, Abigail might find it more difficult to send Myka to Europe, to Russia. If they lived in California. “I did love the studio,” Helena ventures, and that is not a lie. “Utterly unprepossessing space, but a lovely sound. Magnificent echo chambers.”

Myka turns her head toward Helena. “Unprepossessing,” she whispers, with a tiny huffed chuckle, and she places her hand, warm and well-known, against Helena’s face.

Helena doesn’t want to leave New York: its spaces, its scene. But she has been thinking so much, of late, about the future... and she is now entertaining the wild notion that she might be the one to finally secure Myka’s freedom—that California might be Jerusalem. She could at long last fulfill her promise to keep Myka safe. And so much money is there, as witnessed by Phil’s complete indifference to the cost of flying a violinist in from New York to do his bidding for two days. She suspects he is right, that the record will be huge, and that will allow him even greater leverage to create sounds that are ever more huge... and Myka is right: for whatever reason, he likes Helena. Who would prioritize spaces and scene over security?

****

The cliché is exactly that, but it is true: everyone remembers where they were, what they were doing.

Helena is in a record store, buying the just-released A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records, cursing under her breath at Phil for not sending her an advance copy. A radio is on—news of some sort; she pays little attention, except to note the oddness of its being news, rather than music, in a record store. The time... she had realized later that it was in fact one of the first announcements, if not the first, because it was not yet two-thirty in the afternoon. Not quite two-thirty, and everything in the store stops: every conversation dies, every movement ceases. Helena has a bill in her hand, suspended over the counter; she keeps that bill in her hand, suspended over the counter.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States is dead. John F. Kennedy has died, of the wounds received in an assassination in Dallas less than an hour ago. We repeat, it has just been announced, that President Kennedy is dead.”

And Helena’s first thought is not for the nation, not for the man himself, not for his newly widowed wife, nor even for his now fatherless children. She does not worry over Christina’s potential response to such an event, or even Myka’s reaction. Instead, she looks down at the new LP on the counter in front of her, at its cheery holiday cover, its Christmas-wrapped array of Philles recording artists. And she thinks, No one will care about this record. No one at all.

And no one should care about the record, but that thought—that that is her thought—is a splinter she will never quite work out of her character.

****

In fact no one at all cares about any music at all, not for the next several days. Instead, stunned spoken refrains: “I can’t believe it. Can you believe it?” “I can’t believe it.” “Where were you? What were you doing?”

When Myka is asked the question by someone she does not know well, she says, “I was at home. Waiting for... well, waiting. Then I turned on the television.” When she is asked by someone she does know, and with whom she feels safe, she says, “I was at home, waiting for Christina to get home from school, waiting for Helena to come home from a session. Then I turned on the television.” What she never says to anyone is that her immediate, first thought had been that she needed to, but could not possibly, call Abigail.

Christina remembers it thusly: “I got home from school, and Myka had the TV on. She had the weirdest look on her face, and when she saw me, instead of saying hi, she made the weirdest noise.” What she never says to anyone is that before she fully realized what had happened, she had wondered how long the strange upset that Myka’s face and noise signaled would last: whether school might be canceled the following Monday.

After a few days, Helena hears a rumor that the record will be pulled from distribution. On impulse, she sends Phil a telegram: unpunctuated, nearly nonsensical, but telegrams are for disasters. “GRIEVING EVERYTHING TRAGEDY XMAS LP”, it says.

Phil responds in kind. Helena does not know how many telegrams he has sent before, how many he sends after. But this one reads, in toto, “BAD LUCK CHARM.” Because, she suspects, Western Union would not allow him to write “FUCK YOU.”

Helena sighs. “And you couldn’t simply tell me it’s for me?”

“How do I know if you want to talk to him?”

Myka says, “She has a point. At certain moments you’ve been less than happy to talk to Phil.”

Helena marches to the phone, glaring at them both, and Myka and Christina nod at each other in affirmation of that glare’s complete lack of justification.

“This is H.G.,” Helena says into the receiver—sweetly, as if to prove how very wrong everyone else is, as if to demonstrate that what she had been hoping for this evening was to have the opportunity to speak with Phil Spector. “You do sound a bit odd. ... Oh, I see.  No, I... really? That sounds... what? ... No, I cannot tell you this minute. I’ll call you back; tell me the number. ... Tell me the number, or I’ll tell you no right now. I’ll call you tomorrow. ... All right, that’s fair—I’ll call you tonight.”

She hangs up the telephone. She stands and looks at it.

Christina demands, “So what can’t you tell Phil this minute? What are you calling him back tonight about?”

“Whether I should go to California.”

“Forever?” Christina’s eyebrows start to climb, and her mouth can’t seem to decide which way to curve.

“What? No, of course not forever. For two days, to record a song’s first violin part. Just my violin.”

“That doesn’t sound like Phil Spector,” Myka says. She doesn’t know him well at all: they have met only twice—though the first of those times had, admittedly, seemed interminable—but Helena has complained about him so, so often. Not as often, however, as she has said words in praise of the records he makes, and even of the tyrannical methods he uses to wring performances from the singers and musicians in his enormous, interminable sessions. He is less present in Helena’s musical life now that he is recording more often in California than in New York, and Helena seems to regret that. Apparently, Phil Spector does too.

“It doesn’t sound like Phil at all. But he’s finished the full sessions for the album he’s working on, and he wants to add my violin for a sweeter sound, on this one song, than Johnny Vidor’s section gave him.”

“Does he.” Myka hears the skepticism in her own voice.

Helena hears it too: she shrugs. “Well, so he says. Possibly sweeter. Possibly just different. Honestly, though, I can’t imagine why he wants me. California certainly isn’t devoid of violinists.”

“I guess they aren’t sweet enough for him,” Myka says, but with a small laugh. Helena smiles back. “He’s always liked you. I didn’t realize it was quite this much, though. To California for two days to record one song?”

“And he wants me there no later than Thursday. I do think that if he could have forced me to play it over the telephone, right now, he would have.”

Christina asks, “Why can’t you just record it here and send it to him?”

“A fine idea, darling, and were he anyone else, it might work. But for Phil, one plays until the sound is right. And he is the only one who knows when it is right.”

“That makes sense,” Christina says. She crosses her arms and nods, as if it is her approval that will seal the deal.

“Does it.” Helena’s dry tone... Myka recognizes it as her swallowing a laugh, because Christina has developed a great resentment about adults considering her amusing when she is at her most serious. Myka swallows a laugh of her own.

Christina goes on, “And it would take too long to send one take to him and then he listens and calls you and says ‘no, do it again,’ and then you do it again and send it again and on and on like that. You should go to California and help him.” Again the approving nod.

Helena says, to Myka, “You’re a bit quiet. Do you think I shouldn’t go?”

“Of course you should. But don’t let him have you for free.”

“Well. Naturally he’d pay me—”

“No,” Myka interrupts. Helena can be so... literal? Obtuse? She can be both those things, of course, but here Myka feels her as something else. Helena likes to imagine herself as sharp, even devious. But Myka is becoming, as time progresses, more familiar than ever with what guile really is. She knows it better every day, in every circumstance in which she functions: teaching, her work for Abigail... here at home. Everywhere, she hides something; now, she tries to hide her irritation at the fact that Helena is apparently not recognizing an opportunity for what it is. “Make him give you something you want,” she tells Helena.

Helena’s face makes a motion, a blink of foreign surprise. For the length of that blink, she and Myka are estranged, but Myka does not know precisely what it is that she has let her own face, or her voice, betray.

“Something I want,” Helena says. “What do I want?”

How can it be true that Helena is the one whose character was formed, starting in her late teens, by intelligence work? Myka loves her to distraction, both for the character that that work formed, and for the ways in which Helena seems to forget more of its distasteful particulars, its unsavory negotiations, every day, but... “The Margo brothers are fine producers, a lot of people here are fine producers, but they aren’t Phil Spector.”

Helena says, “Hm. I see your point.” She pauses. “You’d be all right? The both of you, here, on such short notice?”

“The short notice doesn’t bother me,” Myka says. “If Christina doesn’t mind coming to campus with me for a little while in the afternoon on Friday, that is. We’ll be lonely without you, though.” Now she can’t hold back a quiet smile—one that she has to hide, in the wider world, for it is just as truthful as whatever she had, a moment ago, let slip.

Christina pipes up, “I promise not to feel lonely if I can use the typewriter in your office, Myka.”

This makes Myka smile far more loudly. “Sure, you can use the typewriter in my office. I’m assuming you mean the Russian one,” and Christina nods with vigor.

Myka had not long ago overheard Helena say to Christina, “I don’t understand what so fascinates you about that Russian typewriter. It isn’t as if you can read what you type on it.”

“I don’t need to read it,” Christina had said, then too with utmost seriousness. “I just want to type on it. It makes a great noise.”

Helena’s remark about Christina’s fondness for the typewriter had been absently maternal. Her next utterance was not: “Tell me what it is about the noise,” she instructed, “describe it precisely,” and Christina tried out words like “big” and “wet” and Helena pushed her for finer and finer detail about the sound...

And now Myka does wonder whether Helena and Christina have any idea of how deeply similar they are.

****

Two days later, in the early afternoon, Helena sets foot in California for the first time. It won’t be the last.

She is driven directly from the airport to Gold Star Studios, where Phil greets her with, “Christmas, man. It’s gonna be huge.”

To which she responds, “‘Every Breath I Take’ was going to be huge.”

He’d been leading her into the studio—it’s a smaller, closer, less expensive-seeming place than she’d expected. Now he stops. “Fuck you.”

“You as well. Now show me these fantastic rooms everyone raves about, and let us get to work.”

His pointed droop of a mouth jerks itself up into a wet-moon smile. “Yeah, okay.”

Hours later: “Again,” Helena hears as she sits, violin on her shoulder, in the studio. She wants to snap, “I have played it over thirty times already.” Instead, she says, “All right.”

Once again through, the click track knocking in the headphone that sits on her right ear. “Now let’s hear it pizzicato,” Phil tells her.

Helena looks at her violin, then stares at his impassive face behind the glass. “Have you ever deployed pizzicato.”

With the barest lean forward, he says, “First time for everything.”

“On the thirty-fourth take.”

“You can leave if you want. Go home.”

“No thank you. We have a deal. I will play this until my fingers bleed, but you will let me stay for the mix.”

“A deal’s a deal.”

Some takes later, he mumbles—but with a giggle lurking within—that he likes the pizzicato. “But only... let’s say, first verse, last four of the eight, and then that next verse. Play it like that.” She plays it like that. Then he sends out for the sheet music of “Plink, Plank, Plunk” and “requests” that she play its first violin—“just for a little more pizz practice, you know, before we tape.” She knows he is doing it just to amuse himself... “now Bartók pizz!”... and to see if he can make her storm out.

The last time he had been in New York working on a record, some months ago, she had asked a calculated few production-related questions—about matters reasonably related to her participation in the session as a musician. Yet Phil is shrewd, crude but shrewd, and she imagines that he could tell, then, that she was expressing something beyond idle curiosity, that she was up to something. Did he ask her to come to California so that he could discern her larger purpose, or so that he could mock her for whatever he thought he had already discerned?

In the end it did not matter, because when she had called him back to say that she would travel to Los Angeles, she had added, based on Myka’s prompting, “But on one condition.”

“Who works for who here?” he’d scoffed.

“For whom. One condition.”

And when she had proposed witnessing the assembly of the track, he had snorted. She expected an immediate rejection. Instead: “You got a fucking deal, H.G.” The profanity had seemed a genuinely positive sign.

She does find something interesting, something she does not know fully what to make of, in the idea that both he and Myka appear to have been certain that Helena needs, or could use, his guidance. Clearly, Phil wants her to acknowledge the honor of sitting at his feet, to acknowledge him as the master he is. He will use her to stoke his ego... and Myka’s illegibly cold “make him give you something you want” had made clear that Helena must take the opportunity to use Phil in return.

So now, no matter how tempting she finds the idea of storming out, she cannot squander the opportunity, because she cannot face Myka and explain that she could not bear to watch him smirk, yet again, as she plucked her way through “Plink, Plank, Plunk,” yet again. She snarls at him, but she plays it. Over and over she plays it, so much pizzicato that the pad of her right index finger begins to look as if she is being fingerprinted with red ink.

After a dozen times through, Phil offhandedly says, “Not the first time for the pizz. This album, Jack let Johnny put some in ‘Frosty’ and a couple other tracks. I didn’t like it on ‘Rudolph’—mostly mixed it out. It’s on this track too, but I like yours better.”

Were microphones and glass and walls not blocking her path, she would leap to strangle him.

Some time later, after he has tired of his mischief (at a certain point, “Plink” no doubt turned to torture for him as well) and they have returned to work on the actual track, he lets her take a break to listen to a taped take. Well, rather, he says, “Knock it off. Come in here and listen.”

She goes into the booth—she breathes easier, or at least differently, on the shift to this different space. She would never admit to it, but the studio’s cavelike quality had begun to creep into her shoulders, arms, hands: a protective hunch, something she had to fight through in order to produce the requested music.

They listen. What she hears frustrates her: the pizzicato is fine, if let ring a bit too much, but her bow is attacking the poor strings, as if it is their fault that Phil Spector is tormenting her. She lowers her head, slowly, both to stretch out her neck muscles and to consciously prevent herself from slamming her forehead down against the board.

Phil remarks, “I’ve got a gun.” He says this quite conversationally. In the manner of “I’ve got an umbrella.”

She looks up. “Have you. I haven’t.” She looks down again, now at her angry, vesicated index finger. Sooner or later, its skin will give way, and it will bleed.

They listen to the tape again.

“How’d we mic you on that G.P. track?” Phil mumbles.

“Above and below, as now.”

He says, mumbling again, “Maybe we should set up one more... get more of the room... then send it through for one more echo? Not too much...” His head tilts as he muses; he taps the breast of his jacket, seemingly absently.

But Helena knows that sort of “absent” tap. “A gun with you here, or elsewhere?”

“Here.” He taps again, not absently at all.

“All right.” Outwardly, she is all calm. Inside she is beginning a panting incoherence of “I let him interact with my daughter and I let him interact with Myka they have been in rooms with him and I let that happen” that threatens to slide into a too-familiar internal chant, that she is a terrible mother, lover, protector—that she is terrible. Terrible. Wrong and terrible. Terrible and wrong.

She breathes carefully, looks at her right hand again, compares its damaged finger to the tough, impervious surfaces of those on the fingers of her left hand. “Why?” she asks.

“Why?” he parrots, as if surprised, stumped. “Why not?”

And that as if he expects an answer, so she tries, “Do you anticipate using it? Here?”

He shrugs. “I just like to have it.”

“And you like to say that you have it. But why do you like to have it?” He swivels his head toward her, though of course she cannot see his eyes. But his eyes, whatever their cast, would not change what she says next. “In my experience, guns provide protection and/or power. You have a great deal of the latter. And you could not possibly need the former.”

“Says you.” He leans back. “Why d’you think I let you break?”

“Just now? I don’t know. Because I was exhausted?”

“Because you fucked it up. It’s a thing you gotta learn.”

“Not to fuck it up?”

“No. Well, yeah. But listen to me, you gotta learn this: never let anybody break when it’s really building, no matter how tired they get. If they fuck up, that’s when you let ’em go smoke it off.”

“You’re making me listen it off instead. Shouldn’t I at least be given a cigarette?” she asks, and he snickers. “But wouldn’t they be inclined to fuck up intentionally then? Simply for the break?”

“You can tell the difference,” he says, with yet another pocket-tap. “Go play it again. Think sweet thoughts.”

She returns to the recording space, puts mics and walls and glass between them again. She cannot imagine what he thinks to prove to her. She is not afraid of a gun; if Phil Spector wants to shoot her, she might very well be able to overpower him before he did, though even if he did, that’s for her very real sins. But she feels it tiresome to have to add this to all the things she is already thinking about: because now she is considering that gun that is nestled in his breast pocket on the other side of those mics and walls and glass. All right, he likes to have a gun... Helena herself could have as many guns as she might like, but they would not help her, certainly not with power. If he is making a point, is that his point?

The young Margo brothers, so recently telling her of their production work: “We made it sound like a Chiffons record.”

Helena knows full well that Phil knows full well that it is far better for him if people, even if only people in the industry, say that something sounds like “a Phil Spector record” rather than “a Crystals record” or “a Ronettes record.”

She knows also, with reasonable certainty, that outside the industry no one will ever say that anything sounds like “an H.G. Wells record.”

Helena’s life as a whole has seemed a matter of those who know not Helena as herself, but rather some fact or another about her—so she will have to ensure that it is a fact that she can make some such singular records. She will then have to ensure that those who can understand that fact do know it. The weight of the task makes her fingers clumsy, tight again: this thing, all the things, that she must think about but cannot, literally, afford to think about, not if they make her fingers clumsy and tight.

She will not be able to establish herself in the attention-grabbing way Phil has done. In New York, two years ago, he’d been so foolishly avant-garde, flaunting his cape and sunglasses, his hair a bird’s-nest mess. Myka had at the time said that he reminded her of her more flamboyant undergraduates, and his age was certainly right; then again anyone under the age of twenty-five has tended to remind Myka of some type of undergraduate with which she is familiar.

“What type would I be?” Helena has asked her. “What type would I have been?

“I have no idea.”

And Helena pouted. “You should have said ‘teacher’s pet.’”

She’d meant it as a tease, a come-hither tease, but Myka looked astonished, sounded astonished as she said, “With me as the teacher?”

Helena had tried to shrug off the slight sting of rejection with a casual “Apparently not.”

She has always been aware that Myka can be difficult to tease. This is part of the constant challenge Myka poses: where and when the complete credulity will take over—but conversely, where and when the confounding, overwhelming sensuality will take over. Myka doesn’t enjoy being teased about that either, though Helena is far more inclined to be grateful for it. Myka’s qualms so often confound.

Phil confounds as well: no one seems to believe, on initial sight, that this small man can possibly have the means to produce enormous sound. Helena knows he is a genius at what he does. But just as she fails to understand why Myka will not bring her own genius to bear on her qualms, to settle herself more securely, Helena does not see why Phil will not bring some of his genius to bear upon himself, though not himself as himself, but himself as he relates to others. He could inspire them—all of them: singers, musicians, engineers—to follow him anywhere, if he would only give them some reason other than how huge the record will be... but the problem is, so often, that the record is huge. Not as often as Phil predicts, but often enough. Often enough that he redoubles his sadism, as if he can see only the metaphorical whip—or, now, the literal gun?—in his hand as the pawl that keeps the gears of any song from grinding backward into catastrophic failure.

“Get yourself a good engineer,” Phil is saying now: they are back in the booth, listening again. “Somebody with a good ear.”

“That’s what I’ve... ah. Heard. Sorry.”

“Normally Larry’d be here, even just for this, but he’s having some snit fit. Says he doesn’t want to work with me ever again.”

He is talking about Larry Levine, his own engineer. “I can’t imagine why,” Helena says.

“Yeah, you’re so fucking funny. I had the studio for almost two months, kept him here the whole time. Kept everybody here, around the clock, and they all looked like shit, and they all hate me now. But they’ll come back around.”

The confidence is solid—but Helena hears it as brittle, too. With just the right tap, it would shatter.

Funny, then, that Phil seems to decide to apply a tap of his own. “H.G.,” he says, in the overly enunciated way Christina likes to mimic, “are you a dyke?” He adds, “It’s what I heard.”

Yes: a matter of those who know some fact or another about her... or think they know. Her response feels automatic. Inevitable. “They call you a faggot, don’t they.” She doesn’t say it meanly. Not intentionally meanly—and not as that right tap. “That’s what I heard.”

“Not anymore they don’t,” he says in a way that is probably just as automatic and inevitable. After a moment, he amends, “Not to my face.”

“So are you calling me something?” she asks.

“It’s what I heard.” A shrug.

But Helena can see, with her side view of his face, that he is shifting his eyes toward her, then away. Toward her, then away. “You heard it’s something to call me? Or is it something about which you are genuinely inquiring?”

Now he gives an incredulous head-shake. “Sometimes you get all British.”

“Sometimes I do. Sometimes you no doubt get all... actually I have no idea where you come from. New York, surely?”

“The Bronx. Moved here when I was a teenager. But H.G., you’ve got a kid.”

“Yes I have.” This makes her smile, because the thought of Christina, in this instant, is enough. But also because this is not her first walk through a conversation of this nature.

“So I don’t get it. Why does anybody call you that then? I mean I get why they called me a fag. ’Cause they could. But you—”

“Don’t look the part?”

“Plus you’ve got that kid. A pretty decent kid. Everybody knows you’ve got that kid.”

“Thank you,” she says, “for ‘decent.’ I suppose most people do know that. But things are so rarely as they appear. People called you what they called you... and I suppose you must have suffered what they did to you. But you don’t prefer the company of men.”

“I’m not a fag.”

“Yet appearances do say what they say. Were you the boy who wore that cape, and those sunglasses, years ago? Or are you this man, today, in a lovely waistcoat?”

“And shades.”

“It’s true, you still do wear those sunglasses.” He’s a man now, but he’s also a boy, with his sunglasses, with his “I’ve got a gun.” He is young enough to be Helena’s son, if she had married as her parents had wished, if she had had children in the time and manner they would have preferred. She could easily have raised a strange, oversensitive son like this... instead, she is raising a differently strange, differently oversensitive daughter.

“Never mind.” That’s a sighing response, not unlike the sort that might be offered by her differently oversensitive daughter.

So now Helena can’t help herself; she wants to know what the response will be. “And yet,” she says. “And yet, I do prefer the company of women.”

“Yeah? Fuck me.”

Something in his tone, the artlessness of it, brings up a laugh in her. “Perhaps you don’t understand the basics: I’d rather not. Do you ever intend to settle on a tape, or am I here simply because you wished to hear a homosexual violinist play her part from a two-and-a-half-minute song several times?”

Now he is laughing too—he rarely laughs with real commitment, but he is doing that now—as he says, “Well, run the tape again.”

She runs the tape, listens.

“So? Whatcha think? What are you here for?”

She sighs. She knows what he’s asking, and he isn’t wrong. “Because you wish to hear a homosexual violinist play her part from a two-and-a-half-minute song at least one more time.”

TBC