I made my way back to the kitchen and shone my phone light around as if I were expecting to stumble on a shower I had somehow missed on my first pass. The shower in the Greenpoint apartment of my childhood had been in the kitchen. But no such luck. My light snagged on a three-ring binder on the counter, cover emblazoned with the wordsWelcome to Wild Arts. Flipping past a text-dense letter up front—What can I say? I really do not like to read the fine print—I found a map of the property. Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was indeed where the artists in residence were housed. The central area we’d come from had a camp office and a dining hall—those had been the log buildings I’d seen. Behind them was some artsy infrastructure: a visual arts studio, a kiln, indoor and outdoor performance and practice spaces, and a dance studio—hopefully Gretchen would be spending most of her time there. Beyond that was what I would consider normal summer camp stuff, though I’d never been to one: an archery range, a canoe shed, an area of the lake labeled “Swimming.” Beyond all that and along the lake were cabins I assumed housed the campers. Near them was a building labeled with a shower icon. I looked for something similar in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, but there was nothing.
“God damn it!”
I could feel the anger rising, this new but increasingly familiar visitor of mine. It was the same ire that had had me being such a jerk to Gretchen. That had made me lose my cool withScott a week ago in that hotel room. The same anger he was now blaming for the breakup of the band, when he knew full well our demise was on him.
The unfairness of it all made me rage.
I swept my arm across the counter, and the binder hit the floor. The clatter it made—it was eerily silent here—was a wake-up call. It was one thing to get mad because your life’s work was crumbling before your eyes, another because you were too much of a fucking child to wait a day to take a shower.
More importantly, I wasn’t this guy. I wasn’t the rock star who trashed hotel rooms, the entitled manbaby who got pissy when the world didn’t offer itself up exactly to his specifications.
So I needed to stop fucking being him.
I took a breath and told myself to listen to the silence. To appreciate it. The silence was why I was here, right? I was going to write a shitload of songs in this silence.
It wasn’t actually silent, though, when you paid attention; there was a rhythmic background humming of some sort. Crickets? Cicadas? I didn’t know nature stuff, but it was a pleasing sound.
I headed for the bed, but as I walked, I moved the phone light around the rest of the cabin. There was an old but comfortable-looking love seat near a small bookshelf and… holyshit.
A keyboard.
I detoured over to it like a moth drawn to the light that is ultimately going to be its demise. The keyboard and a lamp next to it were plugged into the wall. So hey, no shower, but at least there was electricity—come to think of it, why the hell had I been using my flashlight in here when we’d seen a light on in one of the other cabins? Idiot.
I switched on the light to reveal a full-size Yamaha. Thismust be what Lena meant when she’d said five and six were “music cabins.” Gretchen must have a keyboard, too.
What was Gretchen going to do with a keyboard? She was—
I interrupted this train of thought—what the hell did I care if Gretchen had an extraneous keyboard?—and stepped closer.
Concrete Temple had been all guitars—lots and lots of guitars, which was probably what Gretchen meant when she’d called our sound “emphatic.” We were the grandchildren of Phil Spector. I had a baby grand piano in my apartment in New York, but I hadn’t been home much over the past year. And honestly, I never tried to write anything on it. It was for show, for grandstanding at parties, where I was known for being able to play pretty much anything anyone requested.
I hadn’t written on a piano in any meaningful way since my teen years. We’d had a shitty, perpetually out-of-tune upright in Greenpoint. Mom had inherited it from a guy in the building who’d overdosed. I had found a needle and a spoon in the bench seat.
A memory rose, seemingly from nowhere, a snake rising to the sounds of its charmer: Mom and Auden and I, singing in the dark while I played that piano, candles all around us. “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” “For What It’s Worth.” “Both Sides, Now.” Mom had been obsessed with the folk songs of her parents’ era. I’d absorbed it all, replicating what I heard on the scratchy records she was always playing. There had never been money for formal lessons—I only learned to read music as an adult—but I taught myself to play both piano and guitar from that stack of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell records. My grandparents’ records, I supposed, though I’d never met them. Peter, Paul and Mary had been a favorite ofMom’s because our little family of three could do the trio’s harmonies. “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” “500 Miles.”
“Lemon Tree.” We’d even had a potted lemon tree in the apartment in homage to Mom’s folk heroes.
That fucking lemon tree. I’d have thought it was long forgotten, but nope. Apparently it had been lying dormant under the soil that was my psyche all these years, sour as ever.
The night I was remembering had been dark. The electricity had been cut by the landlord, which in retrospect was not an unreasonable thing for a landlord to do when faced with a building full of hippies and artists who didn’t much care for paying rent. We had often gone without things most people would consider necessities—power, running water. Food.
But we’d sit in the dark and sing by the candlelight. We’d had no power, but we’d had the piano.
I wasn’t romanticizing those days. I wouldn’t go back for anything. Lemons could grow on trees in pots, even in semiconverted warehouses in Brooklyn, but a kid couldn’t live on lemons.
A kid couldn’t live on love, either, though Mom had sure preached that gospel. It had taken Auden and me years to deprogram ourselves. To understand that Mom’s version of love had been more about rallies and songs and whatever her agenda du jour had been than about actually caring for her kids.
“‘Don’t put your faith in love, my boy,’ my father said to me. ‘I fear you’ll find that love is like the lovely lemon tree.’”
It was funny how, like the memory of the tree, the song was still there, hiding out in the folds of my brain. I hadn’t thought of it or heard it for literal decades, but it had risen to the surface of my mind like the rubber balls Auden and I used to play with in the McCarren Park pool. We’d sit on them, hold themunder water, and laugh when we lost our balance and they shot to the surface.
We’d go to the pool when the water was turned off at home. We’d swim, shower and shampoo in the locker rooms, and emerge clean and cool into the early evening. That had been a good feeling. A respite.
I looked over my shoulder, out the window into the blackness. I didn’t have a shower, but I had a whole damn lake outside my front door.
Turning back to the keyboard, I hit the power button, my throat tightening as a green light came on. The first note of “Lemon Tree” was a G. My finger hovered over the key for a few seconds as I swallowed a hard lump of emotion. The anger from before, from the past week—from the pastyear—had alchemized into something heavier and slower. Something more like sadness. It was thick and metallic in my throat.
I pressed the key. It was weighted, so it was both soft and heavy under the pressure of my finger, both familiar and strange to my guitar-calloused hands. I let the note ring out into the night and waited until the reverberations had fully faded before walking out the door and into the lake.
