I Shall Stand, Waiting

He looks out to the crowd nervously and my head is one amongst many. He looks more nervous than usual and I am worried – he’s been acting different of late: he’s taking less water with his whiskey; he often doesn’t return my calls. God, I hope he sees me – I hope he’s looking for me.

            I remember when I was seventeen. After our first date, a few days after, he’d invited me to one of his gigs. He was twenty-one, and I was just about to turn eighteen. He looked out nervously at the thin crowd and then smiled wryly, his coy smile with its strange confidence. And then he started playing his guitar, playing for himself; merely for himself, that his earnestness would manifest itself in the hearts of others. I knew that then, and I suspected he knew I did.

            By the time I was nineteen, we were married and I was three months pregnant with our first child. He’d formed a small experimental folk band, Goldacre; they played whatever they wanted, and those listening seemed to understand where they were coming from, and were having moderate success. On this cold January evening, the snow riffling outside and caking the sidewalk in miniature white cliffs, I’d just walked into the small bar and found myself immediately absorbed in a small crowd of hipsters, beatniks, jazz freaks, and gin drinkers. The place had a palpable buzz. I turned a corner and I could see them setting up. I stood there, leaning on a wooden post, stroking my ever-swelling stomach, and he looked up. When he knew it was me he gave a warm smile – he could transmit across a room of hundreds only to me. All that night, he threw those coy, mysterious smiles and I could imagine his fingers caressing my earlobes, his soft hands stroking the small of my back as I lay looking out upon the bare moon that pours itself through the window.

            By the time I was thirty, we had four children – twelve, eleven, seven, and three – and his band (he was now in an experimental folk rock band), Path Less Travelled, was having bigger and bigger success. They would tour three to four months of the year, hitting Seattle, Portland, Frisco, San Diego, Phoenix, Denver, Austin, Atlantic City, New York, Chicago, Jacksonville, Detroit, Cleveland... I’d occasionally go to his gigs, and he’d always await my arrival with trepidation, scanning the room, the unease clearly writ across his brow, until his eyes met mine. He sang with that same true voice, never wrote a song he thought others would like to hear, and he’d always underplay his talent, believing it to be a matter more of heart than head. Our love had grown so strong through the years, and he’d still smile at me, his darling, his virgin love, his first date – his only. Although he never mentioned me by name, I knew that each song he wrote was written with me in mind.

            And now I am fifty-one. All of our children have graduated college, our eldest has a two-year-old son of his own, and only my youngest, most sensitive, son still lives at home. As I stand in this huge hall, its walls resplendent in oak panelling and burgundy-red paint, tasteful bronze chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, the varnish now gone, leaving the tarnish of age, amongst hundreds of people, I can see him looking out nervously at the crowd. I follow his eyes as they wander, as technicians come and go, expecting them to fix on some elegant young thing in a black slip and heels, but he continues looking around the huge space, seeming quietly frantic. I think of the scotch, the phone calls, the strange aloofness, his implacability like one stranded in some transparent capsule, but then the haze of creeping pain lifts, and the sharp blue steel steadily increasing its pinch is shattered into a fine calm shroud that descends slowly and silently onto me: his eyes have found mine, and he is smiling. He turns to acknowledge a passing technician and then turns back and finds me again. The smile above his greying tuft of beard is as coy as ever, a bright curl of lip that seems to soothe and quiet  my heart, and his eyes are like two soft notes that ring up my spine, and, as he begins to play his guitar, I know that everything is gonna be okay.