Dinner was five courses of cafeteria-quality food, served to us at a table downstairs by a tiny blonde girl in a white jacket. I took it that this, the main house, was where Jean himself lived. Perhaps the girl was his daughter. It was meat, potatoes, green beans the color of army fatigues, cheese, fruit, and wine that tasted the way our family basement smelled, back before we'd had it fixed up and the carpeting installed. But it also wasn't pâté out of a can, and I paid attention, thinking I might live to tell someone about it sometime. A five-course French meal!
A path ran alongside the house and back to three one-story, concrete dormitories, as well as a central recreation building. They had a stage for us, with lights, even a small sound system. I gathered from a poster on the wall that we were the last-minute replacement for a ventriloquist who had canceled. Maybe Jean figured the broken-glass guy was too much of a fire hazard. Our crowd was so drunk we could have been playing in different keys and they wouldn't have minded. There were about fifty of them, men and women, on foldout metal seats. Dress was casual. We played close to an hour.
Jean paid us in cash and told us when he'd take us back to the city in the morning. "I return you to the Beaubourg, yes?" he asked.
After he left us, Wendy grabbed my arm. "Come on," she said. "Let me show you something."
There was a phone booth in the courtyard. She took the receiver off and held her thumb over the button that turned the phone on and off. "You have to get it just right," she said. "OK. Who do you want to talk to?"
"No one."
"Don't you have a girlfriend or something?"
"No, not just now."
"Well, there must be someone you want to call. Give me a number." I told her my mother's. Keeping her thumb over the button, she used the forefinger of her other hand to tap sharply on it. "It's all in the rhythm," she said. She must have tapped fifty times. "Yes! Take it—it's ringing."
I huddled up next to her. The answering machine came on, and I left a cheery message—I was OK, I was making money, I'd write soon. Then I nodded and Wendy let up her thumb. "How does that work?"
"You can only do it with this kind of phone, but they have them all over. You keep the button out just far enough to get a dial tone, then tap the numbers. It takes some practice, but if you get the rhythm right, you can call anyplace for free."
She showed me, and for the next few minutes, I tried unsuccessfully to call my own number in Brooklyn. She told me to think in triplets—a nine was just a series of three threes—and that helped, but I eventually gave up. The whole business just reminded me that I had no one to talk to anyway. I'd illegally sublet my place to a guy named Clem who was a video technician down at CBS-TV, in charge of making sure the right tapes ran between 2:00 A.M. and 6:00 A.M., when it was all just prerecorded programming. His bald head reminded me of a mushroom, and his dilated pupils and oddly timed way of speaking made me suspect he did a lot of hallucinogens, but he was the only person who had responded to my ad, and he'd paid cash in advance.
Back in the room, we smoked cigarettes by the window, the cool air bathing our hot faces, our bodies inches from each other. I told her about trying to be a musician in New York. I told her about how the house I'd grown up in, in New Jersey, was now for sale. My mom was moving in with Re-Pete, a bearded guy she'd met on the tennis courts, and my dad—Original Pete—had a new apartment.
"This friend of mine I knew from high school, Adam Gordon, comes in to this place where I'm waiting tables," I said. "He'd just spent a year playing his way around Europe. Paid for his whole trip. He gave me his map." I dug it out to show her. It was a Michelin one, with the good money towns circled in red, and it had been folded and refolded so often that it had the integrity of a laundered Kleenex.
"Been there," she said, studying it. "There, too. Want to go there, there, and there."
I thought about what else to tell her. My life seemed deeply uninteresting. This, right now, was probably the high point. My best friend might as well have been married—I never saw him anymore. I had one guy I hung out with back home, a Vietnam vet named Doggie John who washed dishes at the cafe. He and I would get stoned, go to Prospect Park, and throw the Frisbee to his Doberman pinscher, Ralph. Ralph had an inoperable brain tumor that made him blind in one eye, and as often as not, the Frisbee smacked him right in the side of the head.
"Original Pete," she said. "That's pretty funny."
"Not to him it isn't."
"No, I guess not."
"I'm glad we met," I said.
"I might go to law school. That's the other thing I'm thinking over. This is my thinking summer. Do you like martinis?"
"Not so much. I'm more of a shot-and-a-beer guy." I thought this might be the kind of thing a girl from Baltimore would like to hear.
"I love how they look. I love how the word sounds. And I've never had one. I'm not sure I want to. Then I'd have nothing to look forward to."
"There might be other things," I said.
"You understand that I couldn't possibly have sex with you?"
The moon was descending from a cloud, a big silver coin. I could feel the weather clearing. "What's he do? Your fiancé."
"Artist."
"Like a painter? A sculptor?"
"Yeah, like that."
"Does he at least have a name?"
"Tomislav."
"That sounds made up. Did he make it up?
"No, it's real. He's Serbian. From Yugoslavia."
"Ah," I said. "And votes Republican and hates music."
"He doesn't hate it. It's just not something he notices. It's funny when you think about it, because he's a gifted artist."
I stared at my boot, the toe of which had begun to come apart from the sole, and thought about how much I hated the word gifted.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"You can tell me." She reached out and touched my knee. "We ought to get to know each other."
"I'm not looking for sympathy."
"No one said you were."
"So, forget it."
"Forget what?"
"I'm not going to say."
"Sure you are." She exhaled through the screen. "Otherwise, I'm going to tickle you."
There was a bulge in the plaster where it had been resealed and painted over. The scar ran diagonally from the ceiling to the bottom of the window. "I have a tumor on the brain," I said, and then added, "inoperable."
"Are you serious? You're joking, aren't you?"
An uptown bus of a moment passed by, but I didn't get on. "You're right," I said. "I'm joking."
"Oh, my God." She took my hand. "You aren't joking. I knew a girl that happened to, back home, but they were able to operate. She was okay after the surgery. No hair, though." She touched mine, which hadn't been cut in a while, and was looking fairly wild. I hadn't shaved in a week. In general, I was pleased with how disreputable I looked. "Does it hurt?"
"Not usually. I feel like it's focused me, though."
"I'll bet."
"Sometimes I have visions. Brief ones."
"I get migraines, and right before, everything takes on an aura. Is it like that, or do you actually see things?"
"More like that."
"Brains are weird."
"Yes," I agreed. "They are."
"I'm really sorry about your head." She stood up, pushed her hair back behind her ears. "I'm going to take a bath."
"Knock yourself out." This was something Katz and I used to say.
She proceeded to take off all her clothes, right in front of me, then went into the bathroom and closed the door. I listened to the water as it fell into the tub, watched the light on my little amp in the corner where I'd plugged it in to recharge.
I'm ashamed to say that what followed was not a period of regret, or self-loathing, or anything like that—I found the role of dying musician fit me well. I almost began to believe it myself. Life took on a heightened quality—individual moments seemed artificially lit and oversaturated with color
, like in a fifties musical. Occasionally I caught my own reflection in something—a bus window, the side-view mirror of a parked car—and noticed with satisfaction how nobly I seemed to be bearing up.
After Jean dropped us back in Paris, we went straight to the train station and headed to Switzerland, where the really good money towns were. Since what you earn as a street musician is the change in folks' pockets, you want to situate yourself in a country where the pocket change means something. Also, the Swiss are so orderly, so painfully aware of anything remotely out of place in their little windup towns, that they tend to throw money at you out of a kind of civic duty; they think if they pay enough, you'll go away. On a busy street in Bern, our first stop, we made nearly two hundred francs, and no one watched us for more than thirty seconds at a time.
We camped. Most towns had campgrounds on their outskirts, with reasonable facilities, a laundry room, perhaps even a Ping-Pong table or a bar. Wendy had a small tent, and every night, after a few hours of partying and maybe practicing a new song, we'd lay out our sleeping bags. I'd watch her kick out of her jeans, roll them up into a ball, then slide in. I grew to know her smell, which reminded me of sourdough bread. I learned the rhythm of her breathing when she slept, deep and even and a bit like surf. Occasionally, I'd make some kind of gesture—rub her shoulders, maybe, or try to nibble her ear—but although she'd let it go on for a minute or two, eventually she'd always push me away. When a campground had the right kind of phone, I'd practice my technique, calling the number of this nurse I'd gone out with one time, Rita, but with no luck. Foreign voices spoke to me, and I'd quickly hang up. I had no plan for what to do if I ever did get through, if Rita ever did answer. I knew she'd remember me. She was nice enough, older, maybe thirty, and had a kid. We'd eaten Chinese food at a place in the neighborhood. We'd just had nothing to say. Our waitress had taken our order, then disappeared for a long time. We'd heard shouting from the kitchen. We were the only people in the place. Finally, after another twenty minutes, during which she told me all about that evening's episode of Wheel of Fortune, the cook had come out to retake our order, very apologetically. He had almost no English at all, and we'd pointed to the items of the menu. For some reason, I still had Rita's number in my pocket.
A week passed, then another. We went up to Amsterdam, where I'd started my trip. The tall ships were coming, which meant crowds, which meant money. Money was the thing that kept us together, the subject of most of our conversations, the closest thing we had to a direction or goal. We stayed with Wild Bill, who ran a flophouse-style hostel, with strictly enforced house rules about being out of the house between 9:00 A.M. and 4:30 P.M., and required attendance at an afternoon tea at 5:00 P.M. He was Dutch, but long ago he had lived for a while in New York. Underneath his bossiness and generally irritable veneer, I suspected he was actually a nice guy. "Hey, look who it is," he said, when we showed up on his doorstep. "The Voodoo Child."
He gave us a room all to ourselves. It was tiny—there was barely space to stand up, but it had an actual bed in it, and even a tiny dresser. "Weren't you embarrassed?" she asked. "Going around pretending to be Hendrix?"
"It was like being in a tribute band," I said. "Just without the band. One of the few things I do well is imitating Jimi. I've been working on it since I was twelve. In high school, I was a god."
"You are so much better off with me." She broke off a piece of a Toblerone and popped it in her mouth, offered me the rest. "Listen, the Gnats are planning a big jam tomorrow night. They asked us to play." The Cashville Gnats were a bluegrass quartet made up of two Americans, upright bass and guitar, and a star banjo player named Jens, who was German and all of about sixteen. They had a mandolinist, too; I didn't know where he was from. We'd seen them in Bern and also Zurich—they always seemed to be leaving a town when we got there, or vice versa. It figured they'd come for the tall ships.
"How do you know?"
"I ran into Matt, the bass player, at the train station."
"You did?"
"When I went to get French fries. He was getting some, too."
"How come I didn't see him?"
"I don't know. Because you're oblivious? Anyway, I told him we'd come play."
"I don't want to play with them. We won't make any money."
"Maybe not, but it will be fun. Don't be a baby. Now, let's go see if we can find something to eat."
"Matt? How do you even know his name?"
"He told me. What's your problem?"
We played all the next morning down by the harbor. Two teenage girls had a stand selling soft ice cream cones, and around noon they brought us over a couple. The tall ships were due in the following morning, and the city was filling up with tourists. According to a headline I'd seen outside a newsstand, Iraq had just attacked Iran, but both these places seemed so remote to me as to almost be fictional. My jeans pockets were stuffed to bursting with guilders, so heavy I'd had to crank my belt another notch to keep my pants up.
A young couple was making out on a bench, really going at it. Wendy took an extra-long lick at her ice cream, then cleared chocolate from the corner of her mouth with the end of her finger. "I should call Tomislav," she said.
"Why haven't you?" I'd been wondering this for a while. I'd even begun hopefully to entertain the idea that there might not be a Tomislav.
"That wasn't our deal. Our deal was time apart. You aren't apart if you keep checking in."
I crunched the rest of my cone, swallowed. "I'm going to have to leave," I said. "We're going to have to split up."
She licked again and thought some more. A group of big, black birds pecked at the cobblestones a few yards away. "You mean it?"
"I have to live life to its fullest. Carpe diem."
"Don't T-shirt philosophy me. Speaking of time, yours is improving."
"I didn't know anything was wrong with it."
"You drag a little. More than a little, actually. But you are getting better."
"Well, that's nice." I checked my watch. "We don't want to be late for tea. Bill will toss us out on our asses."
"What?" she said.
"Nothing."
"I told Matt we'd be there."
"I might hit Greece," I said. "Go lie on a beach someplace and eat grape leaves."
She was studying me. "All right."
"All right, what?"
"You know. Maybe the normal rules don't apply to us."
One of the crows took a vicious swipe at another. Then the lot of them took off over a warehouse like a gust of sooty wind.
In theory the things you want most, the things you've waited longest for, ought to be the sweetest, but everyone knows this isn't always true. The apples reddening so attractively on the tree turn out to be mushy or tasteless; the fantasized-about, dreamed-of career turns out to be just another desk in a cubicle in an office with bad air. The dope so delicately traced with red fibers turns out to give you a massive headache, the big game is a blowout, the expensive shoes just make your feet hurt.
I thought about getting a hotel or something, but we didn't have so much saved that we could afford to blow a lot of guilders. Plus, that would have made it a big deal, and the idea was that it was not. People assumed we were a couple anyway—certainly Bill did. To go check into some fancy place would have upped the stakes too much. This was casual. We just needed each other, and the bottle of Côtes du Rhône we picked up on the way back.
We'd had tea; we'd had dinner. There was still some pastel light coming through the tiny window by the bed. It all went reasonably well. She told me she'd remember me. "How?" I said. I was happy the way I was happy once on Halloween, when I'd gone out twice, in different costumes, spread out double the candy I deserved on the floor of my room and started to divide it taxonomically: Snickers and Baby Ruths, 3 Musketeers, Hershey's, right on down to the lowly boxed raisins and worthless candy corn. But she never answered. After a while, I realized she'd fallen asleep.
The next day we went out and made some
money in the late morning, but then she wanted to rest, and I went for a long walk around the city. I was furious with myself, because I was pretty sure I was in love. I wanted more nights like last night. I thought about ways of fixing things. Did tumors ever just go away by themselves? I tried to imagine how that might happen. It wasn't something you just coughed up like a hairball. Perhaps I could be the recipient of miraculous news from the States. It was a mistake. We mixed your X-rays up with someone else's! All is forgiven!
I didn't want to play with the Gnats, and I was reasonably sure they didn't want me to play with them, either. One guitar is plenty for bluegrass. Plus, Wendy was right about my time—I couldn't even get the phone trick right. What they needed was a fiddle. I'd seen them watching us back in Zurich, enemy faces among the tourists, appraising, scouting our little Division III team for its pro-quality running back.
At 7:30 P.M., we all met down by the docks. Wendy had put on a sleeveless black top that showed off her figure, and she had a purple scarf that fluttered in the evening breeze. The ships had arrived, a leafless forest of masts and rigging. I remembered a book my father had bought for me when I was twelve, called simply Pirates. I searched the decks of these enormous vessels for men in breeches and blousy shirts. "They were ruthless," he'd told me. "They took what they wanted. They made up their own rules."
The air held the mingled harbor scents of fish and diesel exhaust and open ocean. I looked at her, I looked at the gathering Gnats, and then it hit me—the fix was already in. She hadn't just run in to the bass player—she'd made a deal with him. It was why she'd finally agreed to sleep with me—out of guilt. When we started up, I stood on the far side of the action, watching and listening as the five of them burned their way through some very professional-sounding stuff. I'd learned a lot from Wendy over the past weeks. We did "Uncle Pen," and "Salt Creek," and "Way Downtown." They had other, more complicated material up their sleeves, too, including "Take Five," and a banjo version of "Flight of the Bumblebee." I sat those out, resentment growing in me. When it came my turn to solo on "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," I stomped on the fuzz pedal, and started playing Jimi's solo from the Woodstock version of "Fire." A couple of people cheered.
Black Elvis Page 12
