“Kind of,” she agreed with a cheeriness that was hard to parse. It made me vaguely uncomfortable. It wasn’t that I was going to be all torn up when Sourplum and I had to part ways,but Iwasgoing to miss the spectacular sex. She, apparently, was not. It was disconcerting to see how easily she was going to be able to walk away.
She started to go—I could recognize that she was cueing up a leap or a jump to dismount my porch—but I grabbed her arm and said, “Come in for thirty seconds.”
She made a mild noise of protest, but she came. I pushed her gently against the inside of the door and planted one on her. I was addicted to kissing her, now that we’d broken that barrier.
She had that heart shape in her lips, which I’d learned—while tracing it with my finger and expressing admiration for it, mortifyingly—was called a Cupid’s bow. I just wanted to… eat it. All the time.
It was strange, though, to be kissing her knowing it wouldn’t be leading to more. If we were having a last hurrah—meaning, as she’d said, sex and not romance—what was I doing luring her inside for the purpose of kissing her? Why was I getting myself all riled up to no end?
I broke the kiss. She looked a little dazed but rolled her eyes when I said, “Thanks for the mini sex toy.”
I followed her outside. She leaped off my porch, as I’d known she would, and something kind of… stuck in my chest. I watched her jog off, but when she was a few yards away, she turned back. There was something about the angle of the afternoon sun, the way it hit her hair, which was piled on her head in a messy bun in such a way that the pink was extra visible. The catch in my chest deepened. I told myself it was regret over how profoundly I had misjudged her initially.
“Hey, Knight,” she said, like she was trying to get my attention, though she had never lost it.
“Yeah?”
“Campfire tonight. You coming?”
“I am now.”
She beamed at me and skipped off.
Damned if, a couple of hours later, I didn’t have the bones of a new song. But I didn’t know if it was any good, and I was exhausted. Even though the songs were finally coming—this was the third now—writing was slower than it used to be. Harder, too. Instead of songwriting feeling like solving a puzzle, the way it used to, it felt like solving a puzzle while wrestling a bear.
Maybe I worked better with collaborators. But I was increasingly feeling like whatever happened in the long term, the next album needed to be mine. Mine alone. Not because I needed to prove myself to Scott, but because I needed to… I didn’t even know. Prove myself to myself? That didn’t feel quite right. I knew that with Brady on board, and given the Concrete Temple pedigree, I’d be able to get a record made. It was more that the record that was beginning to take shape in my mind was a different kind of record. A solo record not just in the sense that it was me without the band, but a solo record in the most elemental sense of the word: a record made by a man alone in the woods. I guess because this album was about this place—Wild Arts, but also “this place” psychologically. This limbo I was in, which, once I stopped fighting it, was an interesting, if sometimes uncomfortable, place to be.
The record was going to be different stylistically, too, which was a bit wild. Three songs in, I had to accept the fact that Iwas writing a folk-rock album. I was playing the songs on the keyboard or acoustic guitar, so they maybe sounded extra folky at this stage. Iwasimagining giving them some edge in the studio. But there was no way around the fact that these songs had more in common with Peter, Paul and Mary than with Concrete Temple.
It remained to be seen whether this marked the beginning of a new era for me or was just something I needed to get out of my system—a one-and-done before I went back to the harder stuff. Or maybe I’d move into producing for people beyond Anna.
Regardless, I’d broken the logjam. I really was working on a solo album now, even if not as quickly as I might have hoped at the outset of the summer.
I grabbed my phone to call Auden since I had some time to kill before dinner. I’d ignored a FaceTime from her the other night because I’d been getting it on with Gretchen.
“Are you OK?” Auden asked when she picked up.
“I’m fine.”
She cracked a smile. “I think we’re the only family who gets alarmed when a call comes in during daylight.”
“Ha. Yeah, I don’t know, there’s something about this clean air or some shit that continues to have me out like a light well before midnight.” Of course, it could be the mind-blowing orgasms. Either way, these days I wasn’t conscious during our usual chat times. “What are you doing?” She was wearing her darkroom clothes—she had converted a closet in her apartment into a darkroom.
“I’ve been experimenting with this thing called light painting.” She reversed her phone camera. “I don’t know if you can see this.” It was a dark scene—it looked like a forest, or maybea garden?—with big circles of yellow light that almost appeared to be moving. “You use a superlong exposure on a moving light source—in this case, me in Bryant Park with a glow stick. You can also move the camera around a static light source. I haven’t tried that yet. This is just practice.”
As per usual, Auden’s “just practice” looked amazing. “That looks like something you’d see in a gallery.” Also as per usual, she waved me off. “I wish it was darker, though. Maybe I should go into the depths of Central Park.”
“You should come here,” I said, reviving my earlier invitation. “It’sdarkhere. And there’s a painter here, Maiv Khang. Look her up. You’d love her, and I think she’d be interested in this light painting thing. She’s doing a series on the overlap of city and nature. And—” I felt like a huge dork saying the rest. “You could see my music kids do their final performance.”
“Your music kids? Aww!”
“We’re working on this big cheesy finale—‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’” Which I suddenly very much wanted Auden to see.
If she came, maybe I could also talk to her about Mom. I hadn’t forgotten what Gretchen said, about leaning into the pain Mom had caused as a way of trying to discharge it. I wondered if that was what I was doing with my album, with all this folk-rock.
I also hadn’t forgotten what I’d said to Gretchen in return, that I didn’t think I could do that—lean into the Mom junk—without Auden being willing to do the same, or at least willing to witness me doing it. “Please come,” I said, letting the urgency of my desire infuse my tone. “It would mean a lot to me.”
She paused long enough that I thought I might have won her over, but then she said, “I can’t.”
