All the Time in the World by E. L. Doctorow Page A

times we got together in our professional travels and the only time to sing on the same record; and we sang many takes, and tried many ways, and finally stood at the same mike and held hands and closed our eyes and sang, as if closeness would make our voices match. But they didn’t. Our voices didn’t belong next to each other. So I knew that as a sign. Missy’s talking voice was an ordinary girl’s talking voice with no suggestion of how large it could sing. But my talking voice becomes my singing voice with just a slight heightening of attitude. And in our different relationships to our performing voices I had read the future. But I remember things about her that don’t harden up. That, for instance, I thought for a while her singing voice was accountable to her fear; she was always so scared of being up there, the tremolo in the large, witchy voice was the sound of her fear. But I was wrong. That she was physically delicate and had to rest herself every day, strong in nerve and soul and in the clearness of her mind and determination, but just a slim girl in her bones and with a scarf for her throat on a warm song day of mild breezes. That she saw no contradiction in her practical commonsensedecency recipes for the fucked-up world and her private belief in mystical presences, nameless powers who inhabited pebbles and stones, the clouds in the sky, and sometimes the face in her mirror. That she loved to bet I couldn’t make her laugh, and always lost. That she was happy for all the money she made but worried that it compromised her. That she enjoyed the way we made it in our own style, cool and concessionless. That she liked big-beat dancing. That people sent her books they had written—which she never read. That, for a while, while I was writing the songs she liked, she revered me. That maybe I am wrong in thinking I was way ahead of her in the knowledge of us, for perhaps what she called lazy was her glimpse down the tunnel of my eyes to the deep seabed of my murky soul where my songs waited like electric fishes. And one other thing is true: after she caught up to me and neither of us had a secret left, and we were done; after she knew there was nothing I would not try and no road I would not go down; I called her once or twice and she came. When I’d had it with all the clanking machinery of being Billy, with everybody and everything lining up on me—not just the managers and accountants, not just the armies of hacks and flacks and makers of sweatshirts who live off you because they live off the idea of success, but the very iron filings of historical fashion loading themselves on my outlines. And when it was this bad she came and went away with me to my hideout and let me persuade her that we were the only two people alive on the earth. And let us find some air to breathe and breathe it. And let us make up the names of grasses we found and bushes and berries. And love each other’s face in the different lights of morning and afternoon. And eat crackers and canned fruit and go to bed early. And it was    Even and Odd in the Garden of Adding    And we ate all the fruit we could find    From apples persimmons peaches and plums    To the sour green watermelon rind    And me and my lady we did what was shady    And we tried to add up for our kind    But Odds add up Even and Even’s in Heaven    And God has gone out of his mind
    Billy’s Dream of a Dead Friend (3:40)
    When you take away a man’s sensations he will make up his own: take away his seeing and his hearing and let him smell nothing and let nothing touch him, he will see and hear and smell and feel what his mind makes up. And what does that prove but the loneliness we are born into, that we are born hungry for the world and lonesome in our hunger, and that the heart floods its banks of loneliness and runs over the earth, and is soaked away till there is no more blood of the lonely heart’s spring and our river runs dry. And my dream is of