Vexation Lullaby (25 page)

Peter knew his mother had an artist's soul, which meant, well, it meant she couldn't make fifty identical necklaces, let alone five thousand.

Judith said, “I promised Rolf I'd pour another batch today and see if I enjoy making them.”

“Could you license the idea and have someone else cast them?”

She let out a sighing syllable. The topic was closed for discussion. “How are you? Are you happy?”

“I'm not unhappy.” Then he said, “You and Rolf should come out.”

He listened to her silence as his suggestion echoed on the line.

“That's a nice offer,” Judith said. “I think we'll pass.”

“I'd pay.” He was playing chicken with her, though he wasn't sure why.

“It's not a good idea right now.”

“Because of the pendants?”

“What has he told you?”

A tan dog with a smushed face stopped to sniff Peter's ankles before scampering away.

“What sort of friends were you?”

“I never said we were friends.” Her voice had gone flat.

“I guess it's none of my business.”

“That's not what I was getting at. What did he tell you about meeting me?”

Cross had said something about her eyebrows and he'd remembered her height. He called her fearless.

“Did he tell you that when we met I'd just run away from home?”

Of course she'd run away. But for their eyebrows, they were nothing alike.

“Did he tell you that I related everything back to
The Tempest
? It was the only thing I'd read in junior English.”

Now Peter felt bad that he'd tricked her into telling this squalid story.

“I'm sorry.”

“We're not done,” Judith said. “What did he tell you?”

“You were skinny.”

“And?”

“You didn't want coffee. He brought you milk.”

Judith didn't say anything to encourage him.

“I didn't know you'd run away.”

“I was pregnant.”

“He told me.”

“How many mornings do you think he's found a girl waiting on his steps?” Judith clucked her tongue. “I should get to work. The morning's half gone and I promised Rolf I'd have fifty pendants done before he got home for lunch.”

Peter glanced at his watch; it was still a few minutes before noon. He wondered if all of Ohio smelled like smoked meat.

53

If I open my book about Cross with him staring at produce, the next chapter mustn't follow him outside to the car waiting across the street. You can't tell a story the way it happened; you've got to manipulate things so the reader finds entertainment in the untangling. For whatever reason, a story needs to be folded and flipped, like how an atlas will reorder the world so that adjoining states appear unrelated, or so a river concludes at the side of a page.

The reader needs to feel involved in the sense making of a story, or they're not involved in the book. A book is a negotiation between what a reader wants to see and what the writer wants to show. Songs must satisfy and resist in a similar way. Cross's voice isn't seductive, but there's a pleasure to be had in submitting to it. If a singer can get away with reading the phone book,
³⁹
what's to stop them?

So the second chapter in the book about Jimmy's life on the road will focus on me. Should my story not prove as interesting as the parts about Jimmy, that's not such a big problem. That's sort of the point.

So
I will step away from a bodega and the threat of crime, away from an international recording star hiding in plain sight. I will open, instead, on July 27, 1988. I will open with a perfect kelly green square of lawn, a lush island bordered by two blue-black, almost iridescent driveways, bordered on another side by a freshly paved road, bordered on the last side by a 1,600-square-foot colonial. And attached to that house: a two-car garage. Inside of that garage: two cars (a nearly new Honda and a ruby-red Mercury), plus a push mower with a 5-hp Briggs & Stratton engine. Peering behind the house, the reader will see a shaded rectangle of lawn with an aluminum swing set painted like a maypole and, in the shade of an oak tree, a square sandbox ringed with sand, which if viewed from above might recall da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.

And who lives in this house? Why, this nice couple named Arthur and Patricia, and their beautiful daughter, Gabrielle. And with them a dog, a tubby beast that likes to curl up beneath the kitchen table and nips at their feet if they accidentally step on him. A big farter, this dog; they are constantly saying “Oh, Cherokee” and “Not again, Cherokee.” The girl, especially, loves the dog. They're not embarrassed by the dog's name, won't be for years and years, and by then there will be so much more they're embarrassed by it will hardly matter.

On every side of this 1,600-square-foot colonial lurk other 1,600-square-foot colonials. In all, fifty-six houses on a cross-hatching of roads branching off a much, much older road, a road that, because it's in Virginia, once hosted a battle that claimed 3,100 American lives. When boredom settles on the minds of the boys and girls living in the colonial houses, they dig in their yards and recover things that might have been horse tack or belt buckles or brass buttons. A junior-high boy from across the street, playing in the tangled roots of a white cedar—one of Hurricane Gloria's many casualties—discovered the curving blade of a cutlass, which time and moisture had eaten until it was as brown and fragile as a dog turd.

The twenty-seventh is a Wednesday, so, if both cars are in the garage, it must be quite early. Think of morning light; think dew on the grass and stillness. In fact, Arthur is up. He is drinking instant coffee from an aluminum mug. Before him he holds a copy of one of the various mimeographed newsletters that he's been contracted to print—catching typos reminds his clients that he cares. Gabrielle is at the kitchen table slotting checkers in a Connect Four game while her cornflakes disintegrate in their milk bath—she has taught her parents to appreciate this quiet interlude while she waits for the cereal to turn into a yellow slurry; the girl hates scratchy foods. Cherokee nuzzles his owners' ankles.

Arthur's thoughts drift from the document before him to the things he needs to do when he gets to the store. He'll have to make room for their paper delivery. The shuffling wouldn't be so problematic, but they'd given over half the back room to a large-format printer—they didn't want to be caught flat-footed if, as seems inevitable, one of the national office-supply chains enters the market.

Using the checkers, Gabby constructs a red house with a yellow door on the Connect Four grid. She shrieks when she finishes, then tilts the grid so the pieces splash in the tray. “House,” she yells, but by then, of course, the house is gone.

With a blue pencil, Arthur makes a check on the top of the page to indicate that he's looked it through.

Patricia comes in, her eyes half closed with sleep; she's wearing striped pajama pants and a Van Halen concert tee, gifts from her stupid—as in, soon to be convicted of mail fraud and sentenced to three years in a federal penitentiary—brother.

Arthur pats the dog under the table, stands, kisses Patricia and Gabrielle good-bye, heads into the dark garage—how those unpainted rafters suggest a barn, how the line of windows in the garage door suggest a church. He thumbs the garage door opener, which causes the whole house to shudder—it's a fine house, respectable, upright, but it doesn't necessarily feel permanent, as though it might sail away in a strong breeze. Their first winter in the place, after a blizzard dumped a foot of snow, Arthur hadn't been able to sleep for fear that the roof would collapse and bury the three of them; Cherokee, of course, would survive, would wind up in some clinic for tragic pets, abandoned, farting away his numbered days.

H
E PARKS BEHIND
the store, unlocks the back door, deactivates the alarm with the weird O-shaped key that reminds him, always, of a smallpox vaccination scar. The photocopiers hum and shake when he flips the main power. He goes through the orders awaiting pickup. Checks to see when their sole employee—what will they do if he decides to enroll full-time at the community college, or if his girlfriend infects him with ambition?—punched out, reads the kid's entries in the job log.

This essential employee arrives before lunch, bringing with him, from the place near his house, two sandwiches, two sodas, two bags of chips. Then, while the kid watches the counter, Arthur wanders out back to consolidate paper stock, to break down boxes, to stack and shift. A few items for which Patricia had sought amnesty wind up in the Dumpster.

He hears the buzzer that means a customer has come in, figures the kid can take care of it. Arthur looks at his watch, knows the paper truck will be by soon, and pulls the chain to open the loading dock's roller door. Scalded air rushes in, snatches up a cloud of dust as well as the confetti scraps from the binding puncher.

Dangling his feet off the dock, Arthur eats his lunch.

The delivery arrives: two pallets of boxed paper bound with plastic wrap. Arthur helps the driver wrestle the load across the stamped tongue, off the truck. The driver won't stick around to check the invoice, even after Arthur reminds him of the time he accidentally delivered 140-lb deckle-edged card stock.

Arthur slices the plastic with a box knife, disposes the wrap out back.

He winds up with an extra box of canary and no fuchsia; he files this fact away—he is very good at remembering facts. Then he washes his hands because the formaldehyde they treat the paper boxes with irritates his skin.

The kid comes back, looking bored. He's waving an envelope. “Someone left you a present.”

Small businesses run on relationships. You can't do a corporation a favor, but you can do a person a favor. You can remember a person's name, ask them how a project went, know something of their days, etc.

The envelope bears the logo of the local TV station. Arthur and Patricia print up their quarterly newsletter. A short sentence in cursive: “Thanks for all your help.”

Inside Arthur finds two slips of perforated 65-lb card stock, tickets to see Jim Cross that night in Richmond.

Arthur holds them before the kid. “You want them?”

“Maybe,” the kid says, “if it was fifteen years ago.”

Arthur slips the tickets back into the envelope.

“Or if like, I don't know, I didn't have a TV.”

“Fair enough.”

“Or a girlfriend.” The kid is chasing the joke around the room. “Or a dog.”

Arthur picks up the phone.

“Or if I only had one day to live—”

“I get it.”

“And I wanted for the time I had left to seem much longer than it actually was.”

“Funny,” Arthur says, dialing Patricia.

H
IS WIFE IS
excited about the tickets. “You know, I thought I saw him once, jaywalking in Fredericksburg. He had on those black Wayfarers and an orange turtleneck sweater.”

“What was he doing there?”

He can hear her flip her wrists the way she does.

“Do you want to go?”

“I wish it wasn't tonight.” She's really trying to be disciplined about her eight hours of sleep. She feels better able to cope with things when she's well rested. “And it's hard to get a sitter midweek.”

“I know.”

“You should go,” she says.

He says he's undecided.

“You should.”

W
HY AM I
writing in the third person? Who am I trying to fool? The answer: I'm trying to fool myself. Because that person who owned a printing shop is a stranger to me; I barely remember living in that house. I certainly don't remember what it felt like to anticipate seeing Cross play for the first time.

•••

At six, I found myself changed out of my work clothes, in my car, headed to Richmond. I'd been to the theater once, with Gabrielle: a puppet troupe performed
Little Red Riding Hood
and
Jack and the Beanstalk
. Gabby spent the whole show hiding behind my coat, unable to watch and unwilling to leave.

An older crowd had assembled for Cross's concert. Most of the people could have kids in high school. A few college kids, the anti-fraternity crowd, tossed a Frisbee in the parking lot. I regretted that I hadn't called a friend. If someone asked me if I had tickets to sell, I might have driven home with cash in my pocket. If someone asked, I might have given the tickets away. Nobody bothered asking.

So I headed inside, the spare ticket alone in my pocket.

I walked across the lobby, pushed through the double doors with their porthole windows. My eyes adjusted to that cool darkness—the place looked half full. Bells on women's anklets tinkled. I watched people smoke marijuana in tight little knots, the twisted cigarettes held backward to ease passing, the way Russians smoke in movies.

After the houselights cut out, the red lights of the Exit signs asserted themselves.

A tall man with a guitar stood beside a pretty woman who appeared to be hiding behind an accordion, the opening act. The duo ran through four or five songs without ever really engaging the audience, as though they had only stopped by on their way somewhere else. They walked off to a smattering of applause. As the curtain glided closed, men in dark clothes shifted equipment on the dimmed stage.

I knew the lights wouldn't stay down forever. On the other side of the curtain, someone brushed past, sending a ripple across the stage. The crowd yipped and yelped. Feet stomped against the floor, an agreed-upon cadence, a universal rhythm. Over the PA system, a voice like a game-show host's announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome five-time Grammy winner and Kellogg recording artist . . .” The unmistakable
whanging
of an electric guitar sent the crowd around the bend. Someone gave the signal, made the curtain fly.