Vexation Lullaby

by Justin Tussing

  “Is that actually your title?”

  “That’s what they’re calling me.”

  “I don’t recall signing off on that.” The tenor of the conversation had changed somehow. “Besides the fall, have there been any other problems?”

  “This morning he called his television ‘the spoon.’”

  “Fuck me,” Ogata said. “Where is he now?”

  Peter opened his eyes. He was staring at a round trash can tiled with small river stones. “We’re in Columbus, Ohio.”

  “Show up, then shut up and listen.”

  “Please, no more maxims.”

  “You’ve got more power than you know.”

  Peter wasn’t talking with Ogata. He was listening to a recording.

  51

  Rosalyn doesn’t have any patience for Jane Austen. She wants to hear my story. It turns out I have a story. Rosalyn’s amazed that I’ve cruised on the Yellow River, spent a night in a favela in Rio, been detained by the Berlin Polizie after they mistook me for a vagrant. When I tell her about the time a pack of coyotes took shelter beneath my truck—I miss the image a truck projects—she sees evidence that I live in harmony with nature (in The Holy Screw, a pack of dolphins join Ruben when he goes for a swim in the Mediterranean). I tell her that I once got lost outside Milan and woke up in an orchard of blossoming lemon trees, and Rosalyn makes me touch the goose bumps on her arms.

  “I can’t believe Mindy never mentioned you before.”

  I say, “I guess she wanted to keep me to herself.” I’m not joking—I’m flirting.

  Rosalyn traps her skirt against her legs, then she lifts her toes to the dash and wiggles them. “I almost moved to India to be with a man.”

  “When was this?”

  She accuses me of trying to determine her age.

  Because I’d met her with Mindy, I’d assumed we were contemporaries, but I realize the flaw in my logic. “I don’t care how old you are now, but how old were you ten years ago?”

  Rosalyn laughs.

  “Tell me a secret.”

  “I used to ride a motorcycle.”

  I glance over to see if she’s lying.

  “A different man. We rode around Los Angeles in leather pants. It was exciting until I discovered he was married.”

  I tell Rosalyn I used to be married.

  “What do you miss about it?”

  “What makes you think I miss anything?”

  She rolls her window down, sticks her head out the window, and spits. When the window closes, she says, “You must have missed something.”

  “We always did laundry on Sundays. I liked folding our clothes, the three piles—my stuff, Patricia’s smaller things, and, finally, our daughter Gabby’s tiny things. I liked putting everything away.”

  “That’s a much better answer.”

  “I haven’t thought about that in a long time.”

  “We contain multitudes, Arthur.”

  Rosalyn has put her finger on the problem with the book I want to write. How can one book ever contain Cross’s multitudes? The performer I followed in ’90 is not the same man I followed in ’97 or in ’03 or today. How can I convey Cross’s central enigma: that he is an ever-evolving musician who never abandons the past or stops looking toward the future (imagine, for example, his Tex-Mex band playing a rockabilly version of a folk song he wrote fifty years ago).

  I tell Rosalyn a story. On June 4, 2004, Cross delivered a somnambulant performance at Sacramento’s Memorial Auditorium. For two dreary hours he shuffled through B-sides, silenced applause with feedback, and turned his back on the audience. It took him most of the show to earn the crowd’s antipathy, but after he’d turned us against him he played the most sublime rendition of “Proud Beatrice.” When the houselights came up, the crowd poured into the streets wearing red-rimmed eyes like badges of honor. I wanted to get some water, so I ducked into the first bodega I came to. Inside I find Cross; he’s staring into a cardboard box of green mangoes. He still had on the yellow shirt he’d worn on stage. Though the place was crowded with people who’d come from the show, nobody recognized him, not the other shoppers nor the clerk, whose attention kept darting to the front door as if anticipating a holdup.

  “And it really was him?” Rosalyn asks.

  “Sometimes I tell myself I’d see him everywhere, if I could train myself to recognize his different forms.”

  In the distance, Columbus rises from the earth. It’s just a city, yes, but it’s a city named after a man who discovered a new world where he’d expected to find the old world. Could a similar miracle happen to me? Might I find a new Arthur Pennyman where I expect the old Arthur Pennyman to be?

  Rosalyn says, “I’ve had a rough few months.”

  I place my hand on hers.

  “I was diagnosed with stage 2 ovarian cancer.”

  “You’ll be okay.”

  She takes a deep breath. Lets it out. “Well, right now, I’m sick. And neither of us can see the future.”

  •••

  High above, turkey vultures sail on invisible thermals. The road we’re on is as straight as intention. A tongue of green reveals where groundwater seeps across a brown field.

  I say, “My daughter is engaged to someone I haven’t even met.”

  Rosalyn turns to me, “Oh, happiness.”

  52

  With Ogata’s voice still echoing in his head, Peter called Judith. Lucy was right—he was a mama’s boy to his core.

  “Do you have a moment?” It was almost a joke—she was a self-employed jeweler.

  “Actually,” she said, “I am a little busy. I may have had a breakthrough.”

  He could hear a disquieting excitement in her voice. “A breakthrough?”

  “I’d been thinking about scarabs. They’re hot again. . . . well, really, insects in general. I wanted to do my own take on them, but I don’t like bugs. Then I noticed the wheat heads in the yard. When I cast them, they looked like a cross between an ear of corn and a caterpillar. I brought a dozen pendants to the farmers’ market and they sold out in an hour.”

  “Do you think you’ll make more?” He wanted to keep her talking. Her voice calmed him.

  “That’s just it—one of the buyers owns a yoga catalog. He asked if I had a distributor. I guess he thinks he can sell them. It could be real money. There’s a guy in Oregon who’s sold eight thousand scented river stones.”

  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 alik
e.

  “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.

  HE 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 tre
at 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.

  HIS 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.