A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [11]
They went single file down a narrow flight of stairs to the sisters’ basement recording studio. Their father had built it for them years ago. It was tiny, with orange shag covering the floor, ceiling, and walls. Bennie took the only seat, noting with approval a cowbell by the keyboard.
“Coffee?” Sasha asked him. Chandra led her upstairs to make it. Louisa sat at the keyboard teasing out melodies. Olivia took up a set of bongo drums and began loosely accompanying her mother. She handed Chris a tambourine, and to Bennie’s astonishment, his son settled in beating the thing in perfect time. Nice, he thought. Very nice. The day had swerved unexpectedly into good. The almost-teenage daughter wasn’t a problem, he decided; she could join the group as a younger sister or a cousin, strengthen the tween angle. Maybe Chris could be part of it, too, although he and Olivia would have to switch instruments. A boy on a tambourine…
Sasha brought his coffee, and Bennie took out his red enameled box and dropped in a pinch of flakes. As he sipped, a sensation of pleasure filled his whole torso the way a snowfall fills up a sky. Jesus, he felt good. He’d been delegating too much. Hearing the music get made, that was the thing: people and instruments and beaten-looking equipment aligning abruptly into a single structure of sound, flexible and alive. The sisters were at the keyboard arranging their music, and Bennie experienced a bump of anticipation; something was going to happen here. He knew it. Felt it pricking his arms and chest.
“You’ve got Pro Tools on there, right?” he asked, indicating the laptop on a table amid the instruments. “Is everything miked? Can we lay down some tracks right now?”
The sisters nodded and checked the laptop; they were ready to record. “Vocals, too?” Chandra asked.
“Absolutely,” Bennie said. “Let’s do it all at once. Let’s blow the roof off your fucking house.”
Sasha was standing to Bennie’s right. So many bodies had heated up the little room, lifting off her skin a perfume she’d been wearing for years—or was it a lotion?—that smelled like apricots; not just the sweet part but that slight bitterness around the pit. And as Bennie breathed in Sasha’s lotion smell, his prick roused itself suddenly like an old hound getting a swift kick. He almost jumped out of his seat in startled amazement, but he kept his cool. Don’t push things, just let it happen. Don’t scare it away.
Then the sisters began to sing. Oh, the raw, almost-threadbare sound of their voices mixed with the clash of instruments—these sensations met with a faculty deeper in Bennie than judgment or even pleasure; they communed directly with his body, whose shivering, bursting reply made him dizzy. And here was his first erection in months—prompted by Sasha, who had been too near Bennie all these years for him to really see her, like in those nineteenth-century novels he’d read in secret because only girls were supposed to like them. He seized the cowbell and stick and began whacking at it with zealous blows. He felt the music in his mouth, his ears, his ribs—or was that his own pulse? He was on fire!
And from this zenith of lusty, devouring joy, he recalled opening an e-mail he’d been inadvertently copied on between two colleagues and finding himself referred to as a “hairball.” God, what a feeling of liquid shame had pooled in Bennie when he’d read that word. He hadn’t been sure what it meant: That he was hairy? (True.) Unclean? (False!) Or was it literal, as in: he clogged people’s throats and made them gag, the way Stephanie