Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel (11 page)

The hotel lobby was cool, the carpeting thick and inviting beneath my swollen feet. I tried not to gawk at the lobby’s grand furnishings, or the other guests streaming past us in their chic sunglasses and unwrinkled linens and silks. Although some, I noticed, were not suave enough to leash their own stares when Ronny waltzed into the lobby,
holy cowing
the scene entire, his cowboy boots announcing him like a drumroll.

At check-in, the concierge informed us that our rooms were already paid for, courtesy of a Mr. Leland Sutton.

“Goddamn it, Lee!” Henry hissed, though I suspected he was just as relieved as I was, given that the rooms would have cost us upward of five hundred dollars or more a night, money that we just didn’t have.

“He also left you this,” said the concierge, handing us an envelope. The paper carried Lee’s sloppy left-handed chicken scratchings. Henry opened it.

Dinner tonight at Chloe’s. A car will pick you up at seven. Enjoy the city.

Love, Lee

“Hey Ronny,” Henry said, “you two lovebirds gonna be all right? Beth and I might just take a nap.”

Ronny’s arm was around Lucy’s waist. The smile that formed over his face broke slowly, exposing all of his teeth, and making his eyes shine. He nodded at us, as if privy to some secret of ours, something juicy and incriminating.

“Oh,
we’ll
be all right,” Ronny said suggestively. “We was just about to head up to our room to take a
nap
too, right, Luce?”

He slapped her ass playfully, right there in the lobby of that five-star hotel. I glanced quickly at the concierge, whose look of amused disdain might have been worth the cost of the trip alone, had we to pay it. Ronny nudged the gas-station sunglasses off the crown of his head and down onto the crooked perch of his nose. He showed his magnetic room key to us like a golden ticket, and said, “Sometimes I even nap with my boots on.”

*   *   *

I do not relish leaving home, leaving my children, leaving the familiarity of my bed, my coffee maker, my slippers. But I do love hotels.

Up in the room I kicked off my shoes and immediately went to the window. Below us were the HVAC units of a lower building and off to the side were the skeletal fire escapes. Above: taller skyscrapers, clots of pigeons racing through the sky, and a single sheet of newspaper, somehow blown hundreds of feet up off the hot pavement below. The din of car horns, though muffled by the triple-glazed windows before me, was incessant, like a hidden alarm or a telephone ringing off the hook in some vast warehouse. I called my parents, eager to verify that our children were still, indeed, alive.

“We’re doing fine,” my dad said. “Haven’t eaten anything but pancakes, chocolate chips, and maple syrup since you left.”

“The kids are doing okay?”

“Kids?” Dad asked, calling out away from the phone. “You okay?”

I heard no response from the muted background.

“They’re okay,” he said. “We were thinking about maybe driving into Eau Claire, go see a movie at the mall or something.”

“They’d love that.”

“How’s New York? Your mom and I haven’t been there since before you were born. Still just a bunch of hookers and porno theaters?”

“Oh, Dad, I don’t think it’s been that way for a while now.” Sitting on the edge of the bed, I ran my hand over the duvet, appraised the new television, the framed art prints on the wall. In the bathroom, Henry was trimming his nose hairs with little scissors, his shirt off, studying himself in the mirror. I watched as he ran his hands over the gray hair above his ears. He frowned at himself.

“Well all right, pumpkin,” Dad said. “Enjoy yourselves, okay? And if you don’t hear from us, everyone’s probably alive and well.”

“Probably?”

“All right then,” he said, cheerfully, and hung up.

“I love you,” I told the dial tone.

Henry came out of the bathroom, a length of floss wrapped around two fingers. He sawed at his teeth and gums, as if with a bow. “Wanna go for a walk?” he asked.

I thought about Ronny and Lucy in their room, and for a moment, I have to say that it did turn me on, the notion of a cowboy and this stripper, fucking with abandon in a New York City hotel room, cowboy boots and heels still on, their anonymous bed frame rattling almost apart. They seemed well matched that way, though I can’t say that I had ever given much thought to who Ronny might end up with, because if I was honest, I would have told you that I doubted he would have found someone. I put my hands over my eyes and shook my head, trying to disrupt the image I had formed of them.

“Yeah,” I said, “I
would
like to stretch my legs, I think.”

“You going to wear sneakers?” Henry asked.

“It’s either that or the heels I brought for the wedding.”

He nodded. “I know. I’m in the same boat. But I don’t want to look like a goofball. This is a pretty high-class joint.”

“Well,” I said, “we can look stupid together.” Then I motioned him toward the bed. “But maybe we oughta take care of something first.”

*   *   *

We rode the elevator down to the lobby, in our sneakers, holding hands, feeling as if we had accomplished something, which was true. It isn’t very romantic, but after you’ve been married almost ten years, an afternoon fuck can feel like you’ve gotten away with a minor crime, an act as thrilling and banal as shoplifting. And with the kids, that element of our marriage had become at once more satisfying and a great deal less frequent. As partners, as lovers, we’ve become better attuned to each other, to each other’s bodies. We know what things to whisper, to scream, to beg for. But it isn’t as if we’re making love every night. Sometimes, a week goes by, or two. Especially in the fall, during harvest, when Henry comes back into the house late at night, corn dust and loose loam caked all over his body and in his nose, every fiber of his hair dirty, his eyes red and tired.

We stood on the sidewalk, the city sweeping past us, and glancing over at Henry, I could see sweat beading on his forehead. He gripped my hand tighter.

“So much to see, huh?” he said, laughing uncomfortably. I watched him check his old wristwatch, the crystal long since broken. “Well?” he asked.

“Let’s go to the park,” I said.

He nodded. “Sounds good.”

With several hours before we needed to be at Chloe’s house, we strolled north along Madison Avenue, our hands growing sweaty, and as we passed by giant flagship stores and chic little boutiques, there was the desire to go in and look at the dresses, suits, shoes, books, scarves—all those things we could not and would never find in Little Wing. And yet, standing before the shop windows in our sneakers and shorts, sweating, Henry in his battered Milwaukee Brewers cap, there was also the notion that perhaps we were better off pounding the pavement, stopping at food carts and shaved ice carts, rubbernecking the people and buildings. We had only a general idea where the park was and where we had come from, and were terrified and too embarrassed to ask for directions. So we wandered.

In the park, Henry removed his shirt and we sat on it, watching the joggers and jugglers, the young families and dog people throwing frisbees.

“I’m going to take a nap,” I told Henry, my head in his lap. I threw an arm over my eyes to shade out the light.

“Do you want my hat?”

“No,” I said. “That thing reeks. You need to wash it.”

“Naw,” Henry said, “I could never wash it. That’d be sacrilege.”

*   *   *

While the rest of us doggedly plowed our way through college or two-year technical schools, Lee was forming short-lived bands, traveling the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic, playing bars, fraternity parties, and talent competitions. Word came back to us every so often that he was picking up momentum, that some record label or another was interested in signing him, that a celebrity had seen him play in Chicago, or Boston, and dispensed some champagne-and-caviar advice, but it never seemed to pan out and every year was another year Lee grew older, and the notion of his musical success seemed less and less likely.

His friends, Henry included, understood. They were defensive of him, of his dream. In crowded dorm rooms and in smoky off-campus apartments smelling of spilled beer and stale bong water, they played his demo tapes to strangers, people we hadn’t grown up with, people whose parents didn’t clip out every positive newspaper article, every wishy-washy concert review ever published about Lee.

“He’s going to be famous,” they’d say. “You hear that? You hear what he just did there?” I can still see Henry, going over to the stereo and rewinding a few bars of music, turning the volume up, and then hitting Play. “There.” He’d point at the speakers. “And there again. Do you hear that? You’re not supposed to play the guitar that way. You take guitar lessons or go to Juilliard or some shit, they’ll beat that right out of you. But the thing is, that’s
Wisconsin
. That’s
winter,
right there.”

After college, Henry and I split up for a while. This is a polite way of saying that we wanted to have sex with different people, though our timing never seemed to be quite in sync back then. When I loved him, he was interested in Tara Monroe or Rachel Howe.
Whores,
I thought at the time. Likewise, when he was in love with me, when he wanted me back, there were months when I thought I might prefer Cooper Carlson or Bradley Aberle. Or Leland.

Lee had just broken up with his band, a group of guys who weren’t from Little Wing, but from the nearby town of Thorp. They had grown tight together, even toured in Germany, France, and England. They were close to honing, calibrating a sound of their own, something new, something that at first I didn’t like or couldn’t appreciate. It didn’t sound like Lee’s music, or at least not anything I recognized as Lee’s music. It was cold, lonesome, and discordant. The best I can describe it is the way sound travels in winter, when everything is cold and still. How, at first, there is no sound. You can’t imagine anything living or moving around. And then, after you tune your ears, after you wait, you begin to hear the crows in the treetops, the barely perceptible sound of their flight, their wings on the crystalline air. And then more: a far-off chainsaw, a motor idling, ice forming, creek water burbling past that ice, icicles dripping, birdsong. Layer all those tiny noises beneath Lee’s sad, sad falsetto, and you had an anthem for our place on earth.

He was depressed, living in a rented room, in a huge farmhouse outside town. No one had seen him; he wasn’t coming into town, he wasn’t drinking at the VFW. He was living like a coyote, out on the margins. And I wasn’t talking to Henry, so I heard none of the intimate reports I normally would. But then a letter came to my parents’ house, addressed to me, though I’d moved to Wabasha, Minnesota, after graduation.

“I could hardly read the envelope,” my mom said. “It looks like a kid addressed it.”

“You didn’t open it, did you?” I asked nervously.

“Should I have?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll be home next week. Please put it in my old room.”

That next week, I drove home in my old Pontiac, the heater close to dying. I had to drive wearing my parka, mittens, and hat, a layer of long underwear beneath my clothing, just in case, and on the coldest evenings I frequently had to stop the car and scrape the windshield because the defroster was so useless. I was working two jobs in Wabasha: answering the telephone at a hair salon and in the evenings, waitressing at a fried chicken and beer bar. My hair always stank of fried chicken grease, even though the stylists gave me all their free samples of designer shampoo and conditioner.

“Honey,” they would say, “most of us buy expensive perfume to get the right guy. You’re the only one we’ve ever met who is trying to catch the dudes going around smelling like a bucket of extra-crispy wings.”

I don’t remember that time of my life, that so-called freedom, as being particularly happy. I was living in a studio apartment, eating for free at the bar at night, neck-deep in credit card debt, and working around a salon full of female egos all day long.

“Hey, Fried Chicken,” they’d joke, “how’s that college education treating you now?”

Or,

“Who majors in English? Couldn’t you speak English
before
college?”

If I met men, it was at the bar. Men working the railroad, married men, many-times divorced men, sad men, old men. Most of the time, they treated me with respect. Some I got to know pretty well, what drinks they favored, what sports teams they wanted to follow on the corner televisions, whether they’d had a good day, or a bad one. Some nights, though, I was treated a little more shabbily. My ass would get pinched, some guy with a wedding band would leave me his telephone number on a receipt, or a hotel key and a condom beside it. But that didn’t happen too often.

All just to say: I was happy to be returning to Little Wing for a weekend of my mom’s cooking, for free laundry, a respite from the bar. And an envelope from Lee waiting for me. Keyed up to open his letter, and excited to be out of Wabasha, I drove the Pontiac recklessly, slipping on black ice, swerving away from raccoons and wayward deer. After pulling into my parents’ humble one-lane driveway, I waited inside the car a moment, collecting myself. I could see my mom’s face peeking around the drapes, then again from the front door, where she stood, waving at me, her slippers pointed out into the chill of the night. I pulled a laundry basket from the car, my toiletry bag atop it, and walked up the front path toward her.

“Hey Mom,” I said.

“So good to
see
you,” she said, hugging me, though my arms were full and I could not return the embrace.

“Mom, let me put this stuff in the wash real quick while I’m thinking about it.”

“Oh, you let me do that. Go find your father. I think he’s in the living room.”

I shut the door, happy to be inside that familiar house, its smells and drafts and sounds so much the fabric of my life. I removed my shoes, rubbed my feet against the thick brown hallway carpeting. Mom had clearly spent hours getting the house in order for my arrival. I could see the lines of the vacuum sweeper in the carpeting, could see that all of the candles burning in the dining room were new and tall, that from the oven gasped rich food smells. Casserole, I knew, of course. Hamburger, corn, onion, ketchup, and cheese casserole.