“Is that dog dead?” she asked. “Do you think this is really the place?”
I pointed to the bumper stickers on the minivan, all local Duluth indie bands currently in vogue: Finding the Monkey, The Wentz, Alien LifeForms. I hadn’t heard any of them—they were too small to get radio play—but their names were tossed around enough in local advertisements for me to recognize them. “Yeah, I think so.”
“If we get kidnapped by weird hippies, I’m blaming you,” she said, opening her door. A rush of cold morning air got sucked into the car, smelling of city: exhaust, asphalt, the indefinable scent of a lot of people living in a lot of buildings.
“You picked the place.”
Grace blew a raspberry at me and got out. For a moment she seemed a little unsteady on her feet, but she recovered quickly, clearly not wanting me to see it.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Couldn’t be okayer,” she said, popping the trunk.
When I reached down to get my guitar case, nerves punched me in the stomach, surprising me not by their presence but by the fact that they took so long to get there. I gripped the handle of my guitar case and hoped I wouldn’t forget all of my chords.
We headed up to the front door. The dog didn’t lift its head.
“I think it is dead,” Grace said.
“I think it’s one of those things to hide keys under,” I told her.
Grace hooked her fingers in my jean pocket. I was about to knock on the front door when I saw a tiny wooden plaque with permanent-marker lettering: STUDIO ENTRANCE AROUND BACK.
So we went around the back of the rambler, where cracked concrete stairs too wide to easily fit our steps led us to an exposed basement and a hand-lettered sign that said ANARCHY RECORDING, INC. ENTRANCE HERE. Below it was a planter with some limp pansies that had been put out too early and battered by frost.
I turned to Grace. “ ‘Anarchy, Incorporated.’ That’s ironic.”
Grace gave me a withering look and rapped on the door. I wiped a suddenly clammy palm on my jeans.
The door opened, revealing another Labrador, this one very much alive, and a twenty-something girl with a red bandanna tied around her head. She was so interesting-looking and unpretty that she actually traveled through ugly to someplace on the other side that was almost as good as pretty: huge, beaked nose, sleepy-looking dark brown eyes, and sharp cheekbones. Her black hair was pulled up in a half a dozen interconnected braids coiled on top of her head, like a Mediterranean Princess Leia.
“Sam and Grace? Come on in.” Her voice was gorgeous and complicated, a smoker’s voice, though the smell pouring from inside was coffee, not cigarettes. Grace, suddenly motivated, stepped into the studio, following the scent of caffeine like a rat after the Pied Piper.
Once the door was shut behind us, it was no longer the basement of a shabby rambler but a high-tech escape pod in some other universe. We faced a wall of mixing boards and computer monitors; the entire room was dark and muted by soundproofing; recessed lighting illuminated the keypads and a chic low black sofa. One of the walls was glass and looked into a dark, soundproofed room with an upright piano and an assortment of microphones in it.
“I’m Dmitra,” the girl with the braids said, reaching a hand out to shake. She looked unflinchingly at me at the same time that I lifted my gaze from her nose to her eyes, and just like that, we had made an unspoken pact: She would not stare at my yellow eyes because I would not stare at her nose. “Are you Sam or Grace?”
I smiled at her straight-faced delivery and shook her hand. “Sam Roth. Nice to meet you.”
Dmitra shook hands with Grace, who was making friends with the Labrador, and said, “What are we doing today, kids?”
Grace looked at me. I said, “Demo, I guess.”
“You guess? What sort of instrumentation are we looking at?”
I lifted the guitar case a few inches.
“Okay,” she said. “You done this before?”
“Nope.”
“A virgin. Sometimes just what you need,” Dmitra said.
She reminded me a little of Beck. Even though she was smiling and joking, I could tell that she was watching and judging and making decisions about me and Grace as she did. Beck did that, too: gave the impression of intimacy while he was really deciding whether or not you were worth his time.
“You’ll be in there, then,” she continued. “Do you want to get some coffee before we get started?”
Grace made a beeline for the kitchenette that Dmitra indicated. While she did, Dmitra asked me, “What do you listen to?”
I set my guitar case on the sofa and extracted my guitar. I tried not to sound too pretentious. “A lot of indie rock. The Shins, Elliott Smith, José González. Damien Rice. Gutter Twins. Stuff like that.”
“Elliott Smith,” Dmitra repeated, as if I hadn’t said anything else. “I see.”
Grace reappeared with an ugly mug with a deer painted on it, as Dmitra did something with the computer that may or may not have been as useful as she was making it look. Finally, she directed me into the other room. She gave me an audience of microphones, one for my voice, one for my guitar, both leaning attentively toward me, and handed me a set of headphones.
“So we can talk to you,” she said, disappearing back into the other room. Grace lingered, her hand on the Labrador’s head beside her.
My fingers felt grimy and inadequate to the task ahead of them; the headphones smelled like they’d been worn by too many heads. From my perch on the chair, I looked plaintively up at Grace, who looked beautiful and peaked in the strange recessed lighting, like an edgy magazine model. I realized I hadn’t asked her how she was feeling that morning. If she was still sick. I remembered her losing her footing outside the car and taking care to make sure I didn’t see. I swallowed, my throat clinging to itself, and asked instead, “Can we get a dog?”
“We can,” Grace said, magnanimously. “But I will not walk it in the morning. Because I will be sleeping.”
“I never sleep,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
I jumped as Dmitra’s voice came through the headphones. “Would you just sing and play a little bit so that I can set up the levels?”
Grace leaned over and kissed the top of my head, careful not to spill her coffee into my lap. “Good luck.”
I sort of wanted her to stay here while I sang, to remind me of why I was here, but at the same time, it wouldn’t be the same to sing songs about missing her while looking at her, so I let her go.