A CAR IN MARS WHILE ANGUS STONE SINGS JONI MITCHELL
The days with Candy became cold mornings and sunny afternoons and lots of wine and a fight once in a while, an agreement once in a while. We planned to watch the Mars landing together so I drove to the building where she worked, and as I entered her office she immediately showed me everything: the thesis she wrote for her Ph.D., the textbook she was writing, a portrait of her drawn by a man who once loved her, a large tray of biscuits, boxes of spare clothes, an ab workout machine.
She took my hand and showed me her work computer. “This is where I use Facebook.”
“Your life looks fun.” I flicked through her iTunes as we waited for the Mars landing to load on her browser. “The Twilight Soundtrack. The Twilight Saga: New Moon Soundtrack. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse Soundtrack. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 Soundtrack.” I looked up at her. “Are you a fan of Twilight, by any chance?”
Candy laughed. “Now what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, except that I can’t respect you anymore.”
She placed her hand on mine and moved the mouse to Flightless Bird, American Mouth by Iron & Wine. “I love this song,” she said. “It’s so romantic. Let’s make this our song.”
We listened to it for a while, saying nothing. “I don’t understand the lyrics.”
“It’s not always about the words. Life can be about other things too, like tune,” she said. “How about this one? You know Angus Stone, right? He did a cover of this Joni Mitchell song.”
“Joni Mitchell?”
“Yes, Dean, Joni Mitchell.” She double-clicked on a new song called River.
“Angus always sounds so sad,” I said.
“Your writing always sounds so sad.”
The music played in the background as the video of the Mars landing finally loaded on screen. Candy sat next to me as we watched a room full of people in blue shirts waiting tensely as some guy stated the progress of the landing. Each of his reports beamed good news: a woman nodded, some people smiled, a guy who looked like an overweight Matthew McConaughey pointed at a computer excitedly, a bald guy hissed YES! YES! Eventually, the commentator yelled TOUCH DOWN and everyone cheered. Everyone stood up excitedly, ready for an orgy.
Candy smiled. “Can you believe that Curiosity travelled over five hundred kilometres to get to Mars? Can you believe that we can create technology that could reach that far?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, they did. They did it. And here we are, watching it all unfold.”
“Are there no other planets that are closer to us?”
“I guess not,” she said.
She unrolled a small mattress on the ground and we lay on it, staring at the ceiling, saying nothing for a while. I stood up, took my jacket off and placed it over the both of us. She patted my leg. “How many girlfriends have you had?”
“Official girlfriends?”
“Official and unofficial.”
I thought about blurting out a random number but changed my mind. “It doesn’t matter.”
“You keep saying things don’t matter,” she said. “Your past matters a lot to me.”
“Why? Why does it matter what I’ve done in the past? Our past decisions don’t always reflect who we are.”
She picked my hand up and inspected it. “They do, Dean. You’re just too young to realise it.”
“Here we go again with your youth bullshit.”
“I just,” she started, “I just haven’t lived the kind of life you… I want a simple life, Dean. A house. A guy who can support me when times are tough. A Mercedes-Benz.”
“I’m not even going to comment on that.”
“There was this guy at the dinner last night. He sat at my table,” she said. “He emailed me today. He’s a director from Price Waterhouse. He’s going to lecture here, too, and wants to meet for lunch and get some advice.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I don’t know if I should meet him.”
“Why not?”
She thought about something before shrugging. We both kept looking up at the ceiling.
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Romance"ROUGH, RUGGED AND HIGHLY ADDICTIVE": Follow the life of self-destructive writer Dean Blake and his misguided friends as they tangle themselves in a world of sex, drugs, love and everything else that comes in between.
