It’s too quiet in here. My phone will not link to the Bluetooth player so I get up and walk over to the turntable and LP collection.
Eeny, meeny, miney, mo. I don’t even care, I just don’t want to hear my cynical, sad-boy inner dialogue any longer.
It’s The Velvet UndergroundLoadedalbum. I turn it around and look at the songs on the back of the cover. “Sweet Jane.”
I let out a laugh, remembering an argument I had gotten into with Dani about this song. I take the record out of the cardboard, leaving the sleeve inside. It wasn’t exactly an argument, more like a little glimpse of Dani’s passion, which I now refer toas her bitchiness. But back then it didn’t feelbitchy, self-righteous, or braggy. It was charming.
The song starts and I’m back to twenty years ago.
“Standin’ on a corner
Suitcase in my hand…Oh, sweet Jane.”
We had finished the hardwood floors and paint in the house and were finally moving furniture in. Dani and I had done everything ourselves. We had to. We had thirty-five dollars left in our bank account when we closed on the house. Those days were wild. I think we were still high from the lacquer fumes, because we were unreasonably giddy about spending our first night in the house even though we couldn’t even afford groceries.
It was late and the rooms were cluttered with boxes and furniture in odd places, but we managed to get everything out of the moving truck so we could return it.
“Let’s call it a day,” Dani said, plopping onto the green velour couch my mother had given me in college.
“I feel disgusting,” I said as I sat down next to her.
“I don’t even know where my clothes are.”
“I found some of mine in a box you must have packed,because it was only five of my T-shirts and your wedding dress. You can wear one of my shirts.”
She got up to go take a shower. “Thanks, I will.”
We had gotten married a year and half before we bought the house. Our wedding was small. At the time, it was still hard for Dani and her parents to celebrate anything because of Ben’s death. It sounds sad, considering it was our wedding and it was hard for them to celebrate, but it was enough for me and Dani. The size of our wedding was never an issue. Neither of us are flashy people. We sort of fell into being engaged after a long conversation one night and marriage felt like an easy next step. We picked out the rings together, planned a small wedding at a little outdoor venue in Pasadena, and that was it. I wouldn’t have done it differently and I don’t think she would have either. Well, except for the getting married part, I guess? It’s pretty hard to regret the marriage, though, when it gave us Noah and Ethan.
Almost immediately after the wedding, we started looking for a house. There was a specific street in Los Feliz that we wanted to live on. We would drive up and down it looking forFOR SALEsigns until finally there it was…our house. It needed a lot of work and we paid an inordinate amount of money for a Spanish revival that basically needed the entire interior redone, but welovedit.
We spent months sleeping in the garage while we were remodeling. Dani was a trooper and I worked tirelessly to make the house exactly what she wanted.
I had showered, was sitting on the couch in the fume-filled unpacked room. I was too tired to do anything more. I had been swept up in a house design magazine when Dani came sauntering out in one of my T-shirts and nothing else.
I arched my eyebrows.
“Well, I wasn’t gonna put my wedding dress on,” she said with a laugh.
“No, you look adorable in my shirt. I like it.”
She made her way over to a tall, built-in bookshelf where we had stacked her records and the record player. She put on “Sweet Jane.”
“Is this the Cowboy Junkies song redone?” I asked.
She spun around quickly like she had been stung by something. “This?” she said as she started to dance around to the music. She was so sexy with no makeup, wet hair. Her nipples were hard through the thin T-shirt fabric. “This, Alex, is not the Cowboy Junkies,” she said with mock indignation.
“I know it’s not, but it’s their song, right?”
“Oh, Alex, Alex, Alex, you are so wrong. This, my friend, is the original. You don’t know who this is?”
I shrugged.
“Well, you have to guess, then,” she said. “And every time you’re wrong, you have to take off an article of clothing.”
I laughed and looked down at myself. I was wearing a T-shirt and basketball shorts over boxers. I didn’t have too many wrong answers to spare. “Okay,” I said. “But what about you? What do you have to do?”
“Obviously if you get it right, then I will have to strip something off.”
