piano on the NARKOTIKA album, it was surprisingly difficult to imagine Cole taking piano lessons. To learn a musical instrument, you had to have a certain tolerance for tedium and failure. An ability to sit still helped, too.
I watched lightning jump from cloud to cloud; the air was getting the heavy feeling that comes before a storm. “You’re putting your fingers too close to the fret. That’s why you’re buzzing. Move them farther behind the fret and press harder. Just your fingertips, too, not the pad.”
I didn’t think I’d described it very well, but Cole moved his fingers and played a chord perfectly, no buzzing or dead strings.
Looking dreamily up at the sky, Cole sang, “Just a good-lookin’ guy, sitting on a stump …” He looked back to me. “You’re supposed to sing the next line.”
It was a game that Paul and I had used to play, too. I considered if I was too annoyed at Cole for making fun of my music to play along. After a slightly too long pause, I added, mostly the same note, halfhearted, “Watching all the satellites.”
“Nice touch, emo-boy,” Cole said. Thunder rumbled distantly. He played yet another D chord. He sang, “I’ve got a one-way ticket to the county dump …”
I sat up on my elbows. Cole strummed for me and I sang, “’Cause I turn into a dog each night.”
Then I said, “Are you going to play that same chord for every single line?”
“Probably. It’s my best one. I’m a one-hit wonder.”
I reached for the guitar, and felt like a coward for doing it. To play this game with him felt like I was condoning the events of the night before; what he did to the house each week, what he did to himself every minute of every day. But as I took the guitar from him and strummed the strings lightly to see if it was in tune, it felt like a far more familiar language than any I would use to hold a serious conversation with Cole.
I played an F major.
“Now we’re cooking with gas,” Cole said. But he didn’t sing another line. Instead, now that I was sitting with the guitar, he took my place, lying down on the stump and staring at the sky. Handsome and put together, he looked as if he had been posed there by an enterprising photographer, like last night’s seizure hadn’t even fazed him. “Play the minor chord one.”
“Which —?”
“The good-bye one.”
I looked at the black woods and played an A minor. For a moment, there was no sound except for some sort of insect crying out from the woods.
Then Cole said, “No, sing the actual song.”
I thought of the little mocking change to his voice when he sang my summer girl lyrics and said, “No. I don’t — no.”
Cole sighed, as if he’d anticipated disappointment. Overhead, thunder rumbled, seemingly in advance of the storm cloud, which was cupping around the tops of the trees like a hand hiding a secret. Picking absently at the guitar because it made me feel calmer, I gazed upward. It was fascinating how the cloud, even between lightning flashes, seemed lit from within, collecting the reflected light of all the houses and cities that it passed over. It looked artificial in the black sky: purplish gray and sharply edged. It seemed impossible that something like it would exist in nature.
“Poor bastards,” Cole said, his gaze still on the stars. “They must get pretty tired of watching us make the same damn mistakes all the time.”
I suddenly felt incredibly lucky to be waiting. Because no matter how it gnawed at me, demanded my wakefulness, stole my thoughts, at the end of this endless waiting was Grace. What was Cole waiting for?
“Now?” Cole asked.
I stopped playing the guitar. “Now what?”
Cole shoved himself up and leaned back on his hands, still looking up. He sang, completely unself-conscious — but of course, why would he be? I was an audience two thousand bodies smaller than he was used to.
“One thousand ways to say good-bye, one thousand ways to cry …”
I strummed the A minor chord that started the song and Cole smiled a self-deprecating smile as he realized he’d started in the wrong key. I played the chord again, and this time I sang it, and I wasn’t self-conscious, either, because Cole had already heard me through my car speakers and thus couldn’t be disappointed: