The Narrow Door by Paul Lisicky Page B

polite work who’s standing behind the podium. Later I tell him that I’m a fan of his first novel. I tell him that I know Denise, as he and Denise have the same editor. But do I let on that I’m attracted to men? Of course not. And he doesn’t let on anything about himself either. That is the contract of the day, and we agree to it without realizing what we’re giving up, simply because we, too, want to be standing behind that podium up front. And not only that, we want a place at the table, the head table, but we can’t yet conceive of doing that if we let on that there are concurrent lives going on in our heads.
    On the day of our departure, Julie and I fall into each other’s arms and weep. We weep and weep, though our weeping is soundless. We don’t shake. Hot tears soak into the shoulders of our T-shirts. Everyone around is loading up their cars, standing outside them with folded arms: all these people we’ll never see again. We begin to laugh at ourselves, but we don’t look each other in the face lest we start crying all over. I think we know that our friendship is only bound to this moment, that it would be impossible to sustain it with such intensity, with me in New Jersey and her in Baltimore.
    Besides, I am already tied to someone.

Furious
    In the mid-1980s Joni Mitchell wants us to know that her search for love is over. After years of relationships coming together and falling apart, she wants to let us know, through her music at least, that she’s married and met her match. In theory this is a good thing. If only those happy songs—“We got this solid love”—could stand up next to the more complicated songs. Denise and I probably want to like these songs more than we do. It’s not that we want Joni to be miserable. It’s just that the positive feeling behind those happy songs is so absolute. Where are the oppositions, the nuance, the ambivalence, “the hope and hopelessness of thirty years”? The new songs almost spit cheerfully in the faces of the troubled songs that have preceded them, the troubled songs we’ve been identifying with. They say, that Joni? Well, that Joni was screwed up, selfish; she just wanted too much. She was unlucky in love. She made bad choices, she gave herself away to childish, narcissistic men. Denise and I are willing to entertain that. But it’s confusing to have identified love with trouble for so long, and now we’re supposed to think of love as pure.
    Then another album comes out. The album opens with one of our favorites, “Good Friends,” a love song that doesn’t appear to be troubled by sexual tension. Sure, the two friends have their disagreements, but their love takes care of them in the end. But the other songs on the album make me nervous. They’re hard songs, angry songs, songs about the environment, songs against war and capitalism and advertising—all the right causes—but they’re as subtle as billboards, with none of the singular chord progressions and harmonic leaps that make Joni’s songs what they are. They’re external songs; they don’t enact inquiry, a mind at work; they already know what they think before they start, before she even writes them. In that way they sound like the songs of someone who’s trying to write a Joni song.
    The question keeps ticking after so many years: if she is so happy, then why are these songs so pissed off?
    Or maybe that isn’t fair. On one level she doesn’t want to repeat what she’s done again and again. In that way, she’s a model for any artist who reinvents herself over time. But it’s impossible not to hear these songs without hearing her husband’s influence, the straightforward harmonic progressions, the blocky synthesizer chords, the overbright sound of the day. He’s all over the album, from his face on the cover, to his name as songwriter, even though Thomas Dolby has been credited as producer. I don’t doubt that he’s a nice guy, you can see it in his face. To be honest, he