in the house was his . . . he stood up and meandered through the house, the first drink sharpening his need for the next one. Where was his guitar? He had, at last count, 122 guitars, but really only one, his Peal, mahogany and maple with abalone inlay. It had been his first guitar, acquired when he was fifteen from a rich summer woman who had bought it for her son, who didn’t want it; she had sold it to Matthew for a hundred dollars. Max always used the Peal to play any new song he wrote; it was, in some ways, the only instrument he could truly hear. The guitar fit into his arms the way he imagined his own child would.
He poured himself another drink and tried the song. How can I tell you that I love you? He and Claire had been crazy for Cat Stevens; they bought every album and played them again and again, and Matthew figured out the chords and memorized the lyrics. Cat Stevens was outré by then; he had converted to Islam and disappeared from the public eye, but this didn’t matter. Matthew and Claire had discovered him together, unearthed him, dusted him off; the songs were their currency, their gold, their treasure.
How can I tell you that I love you? Claire, in her track shorts, with her long legs, milky white, with freckles behind her knees. He loved to watch her stretching those legs up and over the hurdles, with her arm out, perfectly timed. She sprinted, too. She was on a relay team, second leg; she took the baton, she handed it off. Claire’s mother would attend the track meets but spend the whole time with her hands over her face: I can’t watch! And Bud Danner never showed up at all. Matthew was her cheering section. He was her family.
Another drink. Their senior year, Claire would sneak out of her house in the middle of the night and run all the way over to East Aster and tiptoe brazenly past Sweet Jane’s bedroom, right into Matthew’s room. She would shed her clothes and climb into his bed—he could remember it as if it had happened the night before. He would wake up and find Claire, naked and warm, on top of him. They were seventeen. It was as sublime as love gets.
He read through nearly forty notes—it took him the whole bottle of Tanqueray. And there was other stuff to ogle, too: his diploma; programs from the holiday concert, the spring concert, their senior banquet, their prom; pay stubs from Captain Vern’s, where he bused tables for two dollars an hour; tokens for skeet ball on the boardwalk; a cracked 45 of Billy Squier’s “My Kinda Lover”; an Algebra II quiz on which he’d scored an 84 (if he took the quiz again now, he’d get every question wrong). There were song lyrics, too—stupid, wrong lyrics, and lyrics he’d rethought, rewritten, and turned into Top 40 hits. At the bottom of the box, encased in a large wax-paper envelope, were a mess of snapshots, but he couldn’t look at them. He’d had too much to drink, he was too sad, and the pictures were all of Claire.
They had talked recently and Max thought he’d heard a crack in her voice, a place where he might climb back into her life. Was he deranged? He didn’t know. He hadn’t seen Claire in years and years; she would be a different person now, the mother of four little kids. It was silly, but he thought of her kids as his kids, even though he had never set eyes on them. He was drunk, delusional, but what he was realizing was that Claire Danner lived in his heart and always had; she was a part of him. They were connected by their shared history, by having grown up together and given each other their first attempt at love. He wasn’t New Agey like Bess, and he didn’t even really believe in God, much to his mother’s dismay, but he did believe in connections between people. He had written all those early songs for Claire. She was all he knew; she had been there at the beginning. His subsequent relationships had all failed. He let women down—his first wife, Stacey, his second wife, Bess, and Savannah in between.
Could he go back to Claire? Would she have him? Would there be anything left?
He strummed the Peal. The Peal, like Claire, was his true