Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,54
On the way to McCarren, Matt motioned them into a bodega, where he bought cups of Italian ice for the girls and, without asking, brown-bagged cans of beer for Laura and himself.
They sat on a bench and drank while the girls ran back and forth on the dusty path in front of them, playing some variation of tag that required a lot of screeching. Matt didn’t try to get Laura to talk, so they just sat there in silence, watching the girls. Halfway through her beer Laura burst into silent tears.
“You want to talk about it?” Matt moved tentatively closer to her on the bench, still allowing her the protective buffer of space you’d give a fellow subway passenger, if you weren’t an asshole.
“I don’t want her to know that I’m upset.” Laura sniffled, hiding her face in her hands in case Marie was looking in her direction, but of course the girls were oblivious.
Matt fished a napkin out of Kayla’s miniature owl-shaped backpack and handed it to her. It smelled like jelly. Quietly, as simply and unemotionally as she could, she told Matt about how she’d met up with Callie and told her that she couldn’t play any more tour dates but could be in the studio with them over the summer and would play shows in New York if they wanted. It had seemed like a reasonable compromise. She’d even offered that she might revisit touring when Marie was a little older. But Callie had said no.
“She’d said that it would be good to have my songs, but that if I wasn’t going to go on tour it wouldn’t make sense to have my voice on the tracks; it would set them up to disappoint people. I wanted to get mad at her, but I realized that she’s right, actually. It would be weird for them to sound totally different on the album than they do live.”
Matt blew air out of his mouth slowly, a genteel belch that also managed to convey solidarity and understanding.
“I want to believe—I want to pretend that this is something that will still be there for me when Marie is older, that I’ll be able to just reenlist whenever I feel up to it. But I can tell that this is my chance to get back to doing what I’m good at, what I’m meant to do. And I’m not taking it because I’m scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“That I’ll like it. That I’ll like it too much. That I’ll forget about her, or that it will change the way things are between us, and we won’t be able to get it back. She’s the most important thing in my life; my life is hard, but it’s also simple. How can a life have two most important things?”
Matt finished his beer and tossed it into the overflowing trash can next to the bench they were sitting on. “Well, I don’t think you’re being fair to yourself. I think you’re making the right choice. It’s what I would do, in your shoes. Look, life is long and your talent isn’t going anywhere. Patti Smith took a thirteen-year maternity leave.”
It was surprising that Matt seemed to have already thought this through. It was like he had spent time thinking about her. She felt obligated to push back against what he’d said, though; it was so optimistic and unrealistic.
“Patti Smith was already famous! She had made three great albums before she had her kids. I haven’t done anything. I’ve accomplished nothing in my life so far.”
It was a melodramatic thing to say, and Laura knew that she’d said it because she wanted to be contradicted. She was also aware that she was leaning on Matt for support the way that people did when they were in relationships, which was inappropriate; they were barely friends.
Instead of telling her how great she was and how much she’d done and citing keeping Marie alive and happy as an accomplishment, the way a female friend almost certainly would have, Matt started laughing at her.
“Seems like you set the bar pretty high for yourself. What would satisfy you, even? You want to raise a little kid and be a world-famous musician, knocking out the best songs of your life while also giving her everything she needs from you twenty-four hours a day?”
Laura smiled, in spite of how miserable she’d been feeling a minute ago. “Playing big venues, making lots of money, still tucking Marie in bed every night myself. Yeah, that’s all. I