I can’t live!
If living is without you.
I can’t live,
I can’t give anymore.
The song was caught in Charlotte’s head even as the alarm clock interrupted her sleeping. She’d tried to sing it to Glenn yesterday, although neither could recreate melodies well. Carry a tune, people said. That would be an odd phrase to translate if one were learning English.
Charlotte had been carrying the tune in another sense for a week. What’s up with that? a modern voice said, a current, cute voice. She liked the question, but felt silly saying it, could say it only lightly, guying herself.
“I know the song,” Glenn said. “I just can’t think of it.”
The response was typical of Glenn lately. He seldom answered “yes” or “no,” but hedged with “I’m not sure,” or “maybe” or “I forget.”
“I heard it in Walgreen’s the other day,” Charlotte said, placing an omelet in front of him, pouring milk on her shredded wheat. She slid into her chair. “I thought it was an old song.”
“I think it is. Somebody else recorded it though. I don’t know.”
What she didn’t mention is that she had stood in the store, between the wall of cosmetics and the one of deodorants, almost stricken with the song enveloping her from the speakers somewhere in the ceilings. It’s yearning was palpable: I can’t live! And the phrase built on itself, like the musical refrain of Bolero.
It was absurd to have the song thundering in her head as she reached for cleanser under the sink, as she pulled out from in front of her house to drive to a routine doctor’s appointment, to have the refrain following her around. Even when she and Glenn watched American Idol, which she’d never tell her friends or students she actually did, the Elvis songs and combos and routines and high notes didn’t erase the supplication in her head. Charlotte had to concede to her age when it got to be nine o’clock in the evening; television was a respite then, but she liked stories, films, films of angst and dysfunctional families in particular. She found such stories engaging and reassuring, which, she realized, didn’t recommend her much in the way of well-adjustedness (What’s up with that?) and pretended to go along with American Idol for Glenn’s sake. He loved the idea of young people improving and making it against odds. Sometimes she’d see him wipe the back of his wrist across his eyes, lifting his glasses with the other hand, when one of his favorites did really well.
But afterward, after the news even, was the inner-song: I can’t live if living is without you.
One of Charlotte’s friends had been widowed, as had her sister. The word carried a sort of dignity to it; it was a term of suffering, of endurance. Still, it made them single women among other single women, not widowed, not ever paired, and there were seemingly too many of them already. Another friend’s husband was quite ill and she covered bravely for his weakness when he would sink into the chair at a dinner table and announce, “That’ s it. I’m off to bed.”
The song had to be reaching into something that was going on. When Glenn said “I don’t know” too many times, or “What? I can’t hear you?” or launched into an explanation where he couldn’t find the words he once found so readily and wittily, or when he stood in her light or asked what she wanted to do when it was clear she was already doing something,, she thought, I can probably live without him. Most of the times, though, she was glad for his company and his presence.
I can’t live!
If living is without you!
Maybe it had to do with the story she was writing. Her character, Virginia, could certainly live without Henry, so she had to realize that. She had to realize that there would be other Henrys out there and the only way she’d find them would be to leave her sexless husband, Stewart. But Charlotte had written Virginia into an ignominious scrape and had to figure a way to get her out of it. It was hard. She couldn’t give any more!