Love Saves the Day

Laura rolls over so that she’s facing me, with her eyes still closed. Her breathing gets deeper, the way Sarah’s does when she’s finally falling into a real sleep, and her arm curves out so that my tail and nose rest in the bend of her elbow. Alone in her bedroom, wearing her sleep clothes and without Josh lying next to her, Laura smells more like Sarah than ever. The TV isn’t very loud, and I can still hear the Dear Prudence song playing downstairs.

Hearing it now, with all the little crackles and popping sounds in the exact same places I remember, just the way it was when Sarah played this black disk in our old apartment, I drift off to sleep. In my dream Sarah is there, smiling at me and saying, Who’s my love? Who’s my little love? When a hand falls onto my back to stroke my fur, I don’t know if it’s real or if it’s Sarah’s hand in my dream. I purr deeply anyway and think, I am, Sarah. I’m your love.

7

Sarah

IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE IT NOW, BUT DOWNTOWN NEW YORK USED TO BE dead quiet at night. You could walk down Broadway from Prince to Reade without hearing anything other than the sound of the occasional taxicab and your own footsteps echoing off buildings. You could walk down Elizabeth Street at four AM with nothing to keep you company but the aroma of fresh-baked bread from mom-and-pop bakeries.

It was silent, that is, unless you knew where to go. Even back then—before it became big, and then commercial, and then finally the playground of middle-class college kids and the bridge-and-tunnel crowd—there were pockets and places where the noise went on all night. Soho lofts where an invitation and password got you into underground parties that played the kind of music you’d never hear on the radio. Bars where jukeboxes hummed all night and clubs where bands didn’t start their first set until two AM. The shattering-glass sound of beer bottles, the inevitable thud of a person too drunk to stand who eventually falls down, the thump thump thump of someone’s bass turned all the way up.

I’ve always hated silence. I’ve always thought silence was like death. Quiet as death. Silent as the tomb. Dead men tell no tales. Nobody ever says the opposite. Nobody ever says noisy as the tomb.

That’s what I loved so much about disco. Disco used all the sounds, all the beats, all the instruments. The noise of it was always there for you. It would pick you up and spin you around and whirl you and dip you until you were almost too dizzy to stand on your own, but it never once let you fall.

You’re probably thinking to yourself how silly disco was. Maybe you were even one of those people who wore a DISCO SUCKS T-shirt back in the day. But you only remember it that way because, by the end, the major labels thought they had a formula for it and cranked out by-the-numbers fluff, trying to make a quick cash grab. Disco never died, though. It just changed forms. And even today, if you’re at a wedding and the DJ puts on a song that gets every single person—no matter how old or young—out onto the floor, chances are it’s a dance song written sometime between 1974 and 1979.

It was 1975 when I first discovered the New York music scene. When you start coming into the City by yourself at fifteen to sneak into parties and clubs, when you move there permanently at sixteen and live in an unfinished loft above a hardware store, people assume you’re fleeing a troubled home life. Abusive parents, maybe, or some unnamed family tragedy, possibly even a grabby stepfather. When people keep making up the same story for you, it becomes easier and easier to believe it’s true. That’s why it’s so important to keep your past organized. Your past is the real truth. Your past is who you are now.

Prudence comes to sit in front of me. Little lady with her dainty white socks and black tiger stripes. “It’s important to keep your past organized,” I tell her. She regards me from rounded green eyes, then meows in an apparently thoughtful way.

I hadn’t heard music in so long before Prudence and I found each other. Not just the music in my records, which sat for years in a storage unit, but the music in my head. It just stopped one day. I lost it. And then there was Prudence. After that, it was like floodgates opened and all that music I’d hidden away came pouring back out.

Prudence, standing on her hind legs to swipe at dust motes in a sunbeam, is a conductor leading a symphony. Prudence curled in my lap while I stroke her little back is “In My Room” by the Beach Boys. Prudence sneaks into the bathroom and unrolls the toilet paper, spilling it all over the floor, in rhythm to “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango.

Pru-dence kit-ten, Pru-dence kit-ten. That’s what I hear in my mind whenever I look at her. A perfect rhythm in four/four time. The sound of a heartbeat times two. The motor of a life.