by Dylan Hicks
At game’s end it was coming into focus that Archer’s friends were implicitly rescinding the offer of their guest room. Lucas texted them once more on the drive back to the hotel, a rambling DJ now doing a theme show of songs about con artists and small-time criminals. “The radio’s so good here,” Karyn said. “It makes me ashamed to be an American.” Lucas agreed, his voice perhaps showing some embarrassment and unease about his sleeping arrangements. “There’s room at the inn,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
Lucas waited in the hotel bar while Karyn redeemed the last of her points. She couldn’t help feeling miffed when all the available rooms sounded better than the one she and Maxwell were sharing. They said their goodnights.
Ten minutes later there were three quick knocks on her door. She opened it.
“The pool’s open till eleven,” Lucas said from the hallway.
She waited. She didn’t want to appear overeager or in a swimsuit in front of Lucas just yet.
“You up for a quick dip?” he finally said.
Maxwell: “I am!”
She looked at Lucas’s cutoff Dickies. “Is that regulation swimwear?”
“You gonna rat on me?”
“I think I’m too tired to swim.”
“I’ll take Max,” he said, and stepped inside. “Damn, my room’s nicer than this.”
“Is it?”
“We should totally switch. My bath’s all, Calgon, take me away.”
“We’re unpacked.” (They weren’t quite.) “It’s no big deal.”
Maxwell was already in his trunks and shirtless.
“Thanks,” Lucas said. “I mean for everything.” Some vibrato in his voice. “I . . . I don’t think I’m a lifelong fuckup.”
“I know.”
“I had fun tonight.”
“Me too.”
“I have fun with you.”
Maxwell, getting gooseflesh in the overconditioned room, followed the adults’ conversation like a tennis spectator.
“Take him swimming before it closes,” she said.
She listened to Maxwell’s voice get quieter as he and Lucas made their way to the elevator. With the two of them gone, a quiet spread over the room and opened up a line of thinking that she’d repressed for the past few hours. She reached for her purse, took out the pregnancy test, and walked into the bathroom. She thought she had to urinate, but only a few drops would come. Maybe it was that false signal she used to get before performances.
She put the dry stick on the sink, drank a glass of cloudy water, and decided to use this unforeseen privacy to finally commit to an outfit for the wedding. Two weeks earlier, she’d gone shopping for a new dress, but everything in the stores had seemed ugly, expensive, or both. So she’d packed two older dresses, both purchased in what for her constituted a shopping spree in the postdivorce spring of ’07. She pulled on her shapewear, then the front-running dress, black and effectively scoop-necked but marred by a silk tie that now seemed twee and an Empire waist that now seemed unflattering. There wasn’t a full-length mirror in the room and the lighting was bad—the bathroom unforgivingly bright, the bedroom gloomy and jaundicing—so she stood on the lip of the bathtub to see her legs and shoes, then tried the dress several times with and without a cream shawl that was beginning to curdle, as it were, with age. Intended as a glamorizing agent, the shawl was working instead on behalf of dowdiness. There might be time to buy something tomorrow. She wanted to make a good impression on Archer and the other relatives, most of whom had never seen her grown up, and she wanted to look somewhat transformed for Lucas, who had never seen her completely made up. Weddings were always erotic for her, and though her own wedding night had been sexually uneventful, she and Jason had usually made love after other people’s weddings, had even had hasty, bibulous sex in a reasonably isolated gazebo during a wedding party, a memory sometimes revisited years later when they needed to applaud themselves for bygone wildness. She looked over at the test, took a moment to gauge if she was ready, and glimpsed, with an odd laugh, the Norplant scar on her arm. No, not ready. She turned to the backup dress, a low-cut, studded thing in an indecisive color (perhaps a hybrid plum) that had earned her many spoken and unspoken compliments but now made her feel like the lopsided webmistress of an Emmylou Harris fan site. Not right for a wedding, anyway, and she wanted to blend in more than stand out, or blend in outstandingly.
She got into her nightie and took the test, her bladder now cooperative. Holding the stick, she walked slowly, as if the test were delicate, to the edge of her bed and sat down. The stick was supposed to rest for five minutes on a flat, dry surface, so she put it at her feet on her room’s copy of Winnipeg Vistas. With Maxwell and the miscarried pregnancy before him, it had been impossible not to stare at the results window in a state of intensified Polaroid anticipation, but naturally this time was different, more like the feeling you have when the phone rings at three a.m. She stared straight ahead at the gray TV screen, not quite able to cry, trying not to think about the test, trying to resolve whether this thing with Lucas could be called courtship and, if so, whether her feelings could be called love. She turned on the TV, turned it off, looked down: a faint positive.
January 2011
Outside the Elmwood Villager, a man was shouting at something or someone invisible to Sara, spreading his arms in protest as if his fruit stand had just been disrupted during a climactic car chase. Sara looked back down at the proof sheets from The Second Stranger and took a bite of her pumpkin-cranberry bread. She was spending every morning in this café now, forcing herself to wake up by eight, shower, blow-dry her hair (most days), and put on something other than yesterday’s outfit. The baristas knew her by name; she had watched the bulletin board take on fresh overlayers of business cards from handymen, guitar teachers, psychics, and dog walkers.
Shawn, the café’s lanky, gray-haired owner, liked to spend some of his time performing routine tasks: cleaning the espresso machine, making folk-art changes to the chalkboard menu. Now he was wiping off one of the round wooden tables near Sara’s. He nodded at her dictionary, papers, and red Pilot G-2s. “Whaddaya got going there?”
She answered with the mix of pride and humility she had adopted when proofreading was a full account of her work: a modest office, her tone said, but an important one not entrusted to fools. As for the full account of her work, it had been an unsettled half year. Her demand for retroactive parity had been followed by months of quiet from Archer, interrupted only by sporadic businesslike phone calls during which nothing was uttered about their earlier argument or Sara’s fattened salary. There were no in-person interactions. Not sure if she was sincerely welcome at Archer and Gemma’s engagement party, she had cited a prior family obligation. Meanwhile she carried on with her basic duties: communicating by e-mail with Archer’s editor and agent, pitching and writing reviews, turning down a teaching opportunity, trying to stay more on top of his social-media presence. She still forwarded everything for his input, but after giving him a few days to respond, she would take his silence for ratification. She felt simultaneously like a lame duck and a regent, on her way out but more powerful than ever.
“Yours?” Shawn said.
“No, no, it’s by this guy, Archer”—she pretended to check the name—“Bondarenko.”
“Bonda . . . yeah, I read a cool essay of his a few years back, trying to think where.”
She worried that he would want to talk about masturbation.
“About this blues singer, Arkansas Bob. You see that one?”
As if searching her memory: “No, I don’t think so.” She had often hoped for a chance meeting with an unwitting fan, getting to be both the fly on the wall and part of the conversation being overheard, or Viola disguised as Cesario discovering Olivia’s love for Cesario via Malvolio, if Olivia’s love was really directed at Cesario’s selection from Best American Essays 2008. But Archer still didn’t have many readers, and for a long time Sara hadn’t taken steps, such as those le
ading out of her apartment, to bring about meetings of any kind.
He sat down across from her but at a neighboring table. “Oh, it’s a great story,” he said. He sniffed, pushed away his dishrag. “So a few years ago this old guy from the South Side of Chicago dies.”
The West Side.
“His grandson’s sorting through the old man’s stuff and finds a small collection of classic blues 78s.” Every Wednesday night at the café, Shawn hosted a songwriter’s showcase that Sara never attended. “This guy—the granddad—had grown up somewhere in Arkansas—”
Helena.
“—then came to Chicago via Memphis in the forties. Played a bit o’ resonator guitar but never recorded or performed in public. But he kept his 78s—there weren’t more than nine of them—”
Exactly nine.
“—in pristine condition. So the grandson passes ’em on as a donation to a company that puts out compilations; I’m talkin’ beautifully packaged comps of old blues, country, gospel—all type o’ old-timey stuff. Come in boxes with, like, a repro train ticket inside, or some fuckin’ actual dirt. Just a one-man operation run by a kid in Chicago.”
A classmate of Archer’s.
“The guy’s records, the dead guy’s, are cream—there’s a Charley Patton, a Washboard Sam, a Blind Willie Johnson—all pretty familiar stuff, ‘least to aficionados. ‘Cept there’s one record, ‘One-Sided Love’ by Arkansas Bob, kid’s never heard of. Seems to come from one of the operations where you paid a quarter to have an acetate disc cut on the spot for your own personal enjoyment. Used to be a bunch of those. Chicago address on the label; kid dates it circa ’51, ’52, but more in an early thirties style, if you can even nail it down. Flip side’s just so-so, but ‘One-Sided Love,’ Jesus H.: solo performance, but there’s like all these polyrhythms, whacked-out guitar figures and little paradiddles or some shit tapped out on the body o’ the guitar; guy singing with a low, razor kind o’ sound, then talking, then going way up high—it’s immensely raw and complex and, like, you know, where’s he going? And heartbreaking! He’s just leaving it all on the table like this ammonia-funk rag, though I’m not gonna leave the rag here. Buddy of mine, used to work at Jazz Town before they closed, sent me a link. You listen, you think the guy’s gonna deliver his twenty-five-cent record to his old lady, then go off and shoot himself.” Shawn held his index finger to his temple and made a sibilant gun noise.
“Jeez.”
“One of the most riveting country-blues records ever made. And no one’s even heard of Arkansas Bob! Before, I mean. The kid, record-label kid, asks around. Nothing. A complete unknown. They think maybe it’s one of the major cats recording under a different name, ’cause that happened for contract reasons ‘n’ that. But who? Sound like Patton? No. Sound like Broonzy? No. Guy’s one of a kind. So the label kid makes ‘One-Sided Love’ the leadoff cut on his next comp, and a thousand, whatever it is, two thousand blues junkies like Wade used to work at Jazz Town go nuts for it. I call him up, I say, ‘Man, I gotta get my hands on more o’ this Arkansas Bob shit.’ Yeah, well, good luck.”
“Just that one record?”
“Naw, it’s better. A blues professor from down South somewhere—”
Alabama.
“—hears something hinky about the record. The hisses and pops seem to be—what’s the word?—looped. It’s like the outer groove on a bunch o’ old records was digitally fused together, but then they start to repeat. So he asks, the scholar asks, to examine the record itself. Finds more anomalies.”
“Okay.”
“Turns out Arkansas Bob’s really Tyler Russell—”
Russell Taylor.
“—the grandson who donated the collection.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, Russell’s been making this throwback stuff for years, in private, though, and never to his satisfaction. Born at the wrong time. No matter how good he is, it always sounds to him kind of, I don’t know . . .”
“Ersatz.”
“Ersatz is exactly the word Bondarenko uses! You gotta read this thing. I’ll find it for you. What happened was Russell heard about a pressing plant in Germany that still made 78s. Vinyl’s back, right? So he cooks up his scheme, prints the labels himself. He told Bondarenko he just wanted people to really hear the shit, you know? Without baggage, without, whatever, Is it authentic?”
“Right. It seems, though,” Sara said, “that before the hoax was revealed, people would be listening with lots of historical baggage. Maybe Arkansas Bob’s record sounded rawer, more nakedly emotive, because that’s what people look for in blues records from that period. Or it sounded especially impressive because it had gone so long undiscovered.”
Shawn wasn’t visibly swayed. “Yeah, maybe,” he said. He stood up, picked up his rag. “Bondarenko didn’t get into any o’ that.”
Of course he did!
“I should help with lunch. To me, the important thing is—the who, what, why, when, how, none o’ that matters when you listen.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a beautiful record.”
“I see what you mean.”
“It just is. ‘One-Sided Love.’ Google it.”
July 2011
In the otherwise empty pool, Lucas and Maxwell competed in a series of races, beginning with freestyle, proceeding to a hybrid form that Maxwell incorrectly dubbed the crawl, finally to hopping, running, and various so-called rematches in which Lucas was saddled with an insurmountable handicap. They were both unlessoned swimmers, flailing around with their heads above water, their splashes reverberating in the high-ceilinged, half-glass room. Lucas’s cutoffs exerted a strong drag on his swimming and didn’t decently cover his ass. Breathless at the edge of the pool, he looked through the partially steamed window-wall at the Friday night traffic, the hotel sign, the silhouette of an evergreen, trying to remember the Kool G Rap couplet that rhymed “silhouette” with “pillow wet.” The water was warmer than the air, and he bent his knees to submerge his shoulders while Maxwell dived for a penny.
There was a moment of relative peace as Maxwell searched underwater, bubbles popping around his legs, his hair sticking up like those troll doll pencil toppers. A nineties MOR hit with religious overtones played on wall-mounted speakers, taking on a layer of pathos that Lucas figured was mainly situational. The industrial sadness of piped-in music was most pronounced in uncrowded places built for fun, he thought, the fast songs like empty seats at a kid’s birthday party, the ballads like wrinkled balloons dropping from the ceiling a week later. This particular ballad was one Lucas’s mother liked. He remembered her humming along with it in the second truck, the glove box held shut with duct tape. Hearing it with Maxwell, he felt homesick for the home he couldn’t return to in Thomas Wolfe’s terms and the one he hadn’t jointly established in any. The water lapped his chin. Maxwell breached during the song’s go-for-broke key change, a penny between his thumb and middle finger. Lucas had brought the penny for that purpose and was happy to see his instincts affirmed. “You got a lot of lung power,” he said.
“In Cancun once I held my breath for five minutes.”
“Come on.”
“It was thousand-one time ’cause my dad lost his watch.” Maxwell cupped his hands and poured water on his forearms.
“What’s his name again,” Lucas asked, “your dad’s?”
“Jason. What’s yours’s?”
“His name was Gary.”
“Oh.” He looked at Lucas. “Is he dead?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry.”
Some of Lucas’s friends had children—mostly babies, toddlers, and preschoolers—and he tried to tousle their hair, take an interest in their rumored talents, remember their names. If nothing else he tried to hide his irritation over the screaming, shrieking, and whining, the interruptions and distractions that obliged him to take three shifts to finish a thought whose resumption was never solicited by the parents. He hoped to sustain relations with his procreative frie
nds just enough to permit a renaissance when the kids were old enough to be off in their rooms quietly sexting. Maxwell, though, was older than the other kids on the fringes of Lucas’s life and easy to warm to: kindhearted, quick to laugh, somewhat precocious but not smug or dweeby, except maybe about the Free Parking kitty. It was a relief, too, to be around someone who didn’t care that Lucas wasn’t currently in possession of health insurance, a working car, or respectable swim trunks, though Karyn didn’t seem put off by those absences either.
Maxwell butterflied, in a way, to the other side of the pool and back. He was rapping the chorus to “Flava in Ya Ear.”
“You can have that mix from the car if you want,” Lucas said. He felt bad for the kid, having to endure the Insufferable String Band and the rest of his mother’s Ren Fest music.
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“It’s cool with no one else here,” Maxwell said. “Like having our own pool.”
“Or our own hotel chain.”
“Can you do the penny thing again?”
When the pool was about to close, Lucas taught Maxwell how to air-dry by flapping one’s towel, touching it only with one’s fingers and thus eliminating the need to launder it more than annually. Then he escorted him back to Karyn’s room. It seemed overdone to say goodnight to Karyn at close range, so he lingered by an ice machine till she opened the door. When she poked her head out, he gave her the Air Force One wave while walking backwards to the elevator. She smiled. “See you tomorrow.”
Back in his room, the prospect of the Adult Adventures channel birthed some tiny wingbeats of excitement, but of course he couldn’t make such charges as Karyn’s guest, and he was trying to cut down on porn. Particularly in these time-teeming years of his joblessness, it was important to manage the habit, not to impose unrealistic Lents of abstinence, but to stick to the liberated DVDs available for rent at the local woman-owned sex shop, or to the campy Jessica Rabbit site on which he was a leading pen-named commenter. When he was troubled by his porn consumption, he couldn’t determine whether his concerns were mainly feminist and ethical (which concerns he wanted to take seriously) or mainly puritanical (which concerns he wanted to overcome). Maybe what bothered him most was the idea that something as seemingly personal as sexual proclivity—personal beyond the biologically determined or influenced fundamentals, that is—might be so lacking in autonomy, so historically shaped (a gay male friend’s reaction to this theory: “Gee, you think?”), and what’s more that some of his primary sexual influences were depraved misogynists. (Although hadn’t he learned to kiss, in part, from Hollywood? The search for autonomy and independence in these matters was in two senses vain.) At any rate, he was trying to watch in moderation, often as a carrot for finishing an arduous task, or an easy one.
