by Lewis Shiner
“I love you, Ray. Go to sleep.”
My therapist’s name is Georgene. She’s in her late forties, maybe. It’s hard to tell. She has good skin and doesn’t wear makeup. She has a kind of stern look about her which is good because it makes me afraid to bullshit her.
After the first couple of sessions I thought to hell with it and told her about Brian and Jimi. I said they were elaborate hallucinations. She said if the experience was real to me, then we would treat it as real. She didn’t seem alarmed and she didn’t want to put me in an institution. I offered to bring in one of the tapes, but she said it wouldn’t mean much to her.
Mostly I talk and she listens. She asks me how I feel a lot. If I ask, she’ll tell me what she’s thinking. It’s not quick or efficient, but whatever this process is, speed and efficiency don’t seem to be the point.
Graham called the first week I was home. “Two things,” he said. “First I was worried. I heard from Elizabeth but not from you, so I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”
I told Graham the whole story, including the near-death experience part. “So it’s not going to happen,” I said. “No First Rays. I guess we, I don’t know. It’s like we don’t deserve it.”
“I wish I’d never sent you after it.”
“You tried to call me off after the first time. There was nothing you could do to stop me, once I had it in my head. It wasn’t just about the album, it was about my father and a lot of other stuff too. But it’s over now.”
“Well, Carnival Dog is paying your hospital bills. No argument on that one.”
“Okay, I won’t argue. You said there were two things. What was the other?”
“Hang on to your hat. Capitol Records is buying the master for Smile. They played it for Brian, and he supposedly said, ‘I don’t know where it came from, but that’s my album.’ He thinks it’s great. There’s a clause in the contract that’s airtight immunity for me and everybody else involved. They’ve got this massive reissue series planned for next year, every Beach Boys album in the Capitol catalog, most of them two albums per CD. They were planning to wind up with Pet Sounds as the climax. Now it’s Smile. There’s more money, of course, but the main thing is it’s going to be out there, in record stores. They might even release singles off of it.”
“Graham, that’s fantastic. What about Celebration?”
“Well, I probably should have talked to you first, but I don’t feel good about that record anymore. I’ve let it go out of print. If somebody else wants to bootleg our bootleg, they can have it.”
“I think that’s fine. What about you? Are you okay? You don’t sound right.”
“Well, hey. I’ve got a couple of medical problems myself. My kidneys, you know, are not that great. Being in a chair like this is not the best thing for you.”
“How bad is it?”
“It’s not bad, I just get stones sometimes. They have to fly me out to this special clinic. They put me in this swimming pool and then break them up with sound waves. Sounds crazy but it works.”
“Nothing sounds crazy to me anymore. Listen, will you promise me, if things are not okay, will you promise to tell me?”
“Sure, man, I’ll be straight with you. There’s nothing anybody else can do for me. I need to take better care of myself. Maybe have a couple less beers.”
I hung up feeling there was something else I should have done, but I didn’t know what it was.
My mother stayed for two weeks. She did her best to keep out of the way: went to bed early, spent a lot of time in her room reading. I had to give her the white room, of course, but it didn’t seem like that big a deal. She cooked and cleaned for me and at night we would play Yahtzee or cribbage. It went against all my conditioning to let her wait on me, even though I knew it was necessary, even though it made her feel more useful than anything had since my father died.
I called the Chronicle and had them run my ad again. I knew it would take a while to get my clientele back up to where they’d been, but I was ready to start. I needed something to do with my hands, something that looked toward the future instead of the past.
I worked every afternoon for a few hours. I slept a lot, eight or nine hours a night, plus a nap after work. We played games, and we talked.
She told me about the first year and a half of my life. Some of it I knew and some I didn’t. “You were a breech birth. You stood up the entire pregnancy. Sometimes you would kick me so hard you would knock the magazine off my lap. You were two weeks late, but when you were ready, you came right out.”
This was in Oregon, in the dead of winter. I came home to a one-bedroom apartment. “There weren’t any other kids in the building, so we were afraid to let you cry. We never let you cry. I wanted to breastfeed you but I didn’t have any milk. I bled when I tried to nurse you. We even tried to use a pump but there was nothing there.”
We moved for the first time when I was three months old. The place we moved to was cinder block and very damp. My mother said her asthma got worse and worse until she couldn’t take care of me. She started leaving me with a neighbor during the day, then for supper as well, then after a while I would only come home to sleep. Finally I was at the neighbors’ full-time for a couple of weeks while my mother was in the hospital and then in the desert recuperating.
“The doctor said no more kids,” my mother said. “If we’d had another child the asthma would have killed me.”
I was ten months old when we moved out of the cinder block house, and we moved twice more in the next eight months, ending up in Tucson so my father could get his Ph.D. “I tried to make up to you for what I felt was neglect when I was so ill. I remember that winter when you turned one was a very happy one. We read. We listened to music. We had coffee breaks. If you hate the Peer Gynt Suite today it’s because you wanted to listen to it every day.”
The morning after she left, the house felt empty and lifeless. I had weirdly conflicted emotions. As grateful as I was to have her there, she still drove me crazy. She still called me Jack and my father Ray. Most of what she talked about was completely trivial. And she has the same unyielding quality my father did. She’s never satisfied, not with other people or her physical surroundings or her health. I guess he had to die before I could see how much it’s a part of her.
Alex’s number was on the notepad by the phone. I looked it up when I got home from the hospital and had been trying to decide ever since if I was ready to call her. I made myself a sandwich and ate it standing up in the kitchen, by the phone, while I tried to work up my nerve.
In a way this all started with Alex, with her and “The Long and Winding Road,” with fantasies about what we could have been. Now I had fantasies of a different sort. What if her marriage was in trouble too? What if they’d split up, even? It could happen. I wondered what she would look like after twenty years. Her mother had been thin and wiry, but it was hard for me to picture Alex like that. I wondered if she ever thought of me, if she remembered the romantic summer afternoons at the park and the botanical gardens, the long, sex-drenched weekends when my parents were out of town, or if she just remembered the jealousies and tears and countless teenage acts of cruelty that passed between us.
On impulse I went to the garage and found a box of papers that went back to high school, saturated with the smell of incense. There were letters from Alex, paycheck stubs, old driver’s licenses, chords and lyrics for songs I wrote in the winter of 1970 in one of my sporadic attempts to learn the guitar again. Two black-and-white photos of Alex in capri pants and a halter top, circa 1968, coy, flirting with the camera. I can’t remember what making love to her felt like. We were just kids, after all, barely knew what we were doing.
It was two in the afternoon. She might not even be home. What the hell. If I thought too long I wouldn’t go through with it. I picked up the phone and dialed.
It rang twice before she answered. I recognized her voice from the way she said hello, high-pitched but with this throaty purr inside it. �
��Alex, it’s Ray Shackleford. I don’t know if you—”
“Hi, Ray. I was just thinking about you.”
My heart lurched. “You were?”
“Of course. That’s why you called.”
I remembered all her claims of psychic powers. “I did?”
“Just because it’s been twenty years doesn’t mean I haven’t kept track of you.”
“I’ve thought about you a lot too.”
“So, are you ready to talk to me?”
“I guess that’s why I called.”
“You should probably come out here, then. That way you can see the place. I’ll give you directions.”
I took 183 south of town, almost to Lockhart. I turned off on a county road and drove 3.2 miles to a mailbox that had a rural route box number on it but no name. The land was flat, with a few scrub oaks and mesquite trees. This late in the summer the grass was parched and yellow, except close to the house where it had been watered. The house was small and square, finished in those big white asbestos shingles. Behind it was a corral and a corrugated-metal barn.
I could see Alex as I drove up. She was on the back of a huge, muscular horse, and a girl of seven or eight rode a large pony next to her.
Alex waved as I got out of the truck “Do you want to ride?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Okay. I need to brush this guy out and feed him. Come on in.”
I climbed over the rail fence as she got down from the horse. My imagination had failed me. She hasn’t changed that much since high school. Reddish-brown hair, parted in the middle, hanging past her shoulders; large, light brown eyes, a small, bent nose like the beak of a tiny hawk, full lips. She was wearing jeans and a loose, long-sleeved white shirt. She’s older now, of course, heavier in the waist and hips, and motherhood has changed the coy look to something more confident and a trifle stern. She has small, square, wire-rimmed glasses that emphasize the maturity over the glamour that’s still there.
“I’m a little horsey,” she said. “You may not want to hug me.”
“I’ll live dangerously.” She did smell of horses, but also of perfume, strong and floral, as always. She squeezed me and then kissed me for just a second, her lips very soft and barely touching mine. It was an effort not to lean into her for more.
“Mmmmmm,” she said. “I remember that.”
So did I. Deep, cellular memories recognized Alex and claimed her as fair game. We were still standing very close and there might have been another kiss if her little girl hadn’t said, “Mommy?”
Alex snapped to and went to help her down from her horse. “Ray, this is Jennifer.” Jennifer is clear-eyed and beautiful and that afternoon she was wearing shorts and a plain brown T-shirt. With a bit of urging she came forward to shake my hand, one firm pump. She stared at me pretty hard, as if she’d picked up some kind of vibe between her mother and me.
We led the horses into the sweltering heat of the barn. I sat on a hay bale and watched the two of them rub the horses down, using metal brushes strapped to both hands. “Isn’t he beautiful?” she asked me. “He’s a Morgan, we just got him this year. This winter, if everything goes right, we get him a mare and start breeding them.”
“It sounds like what you always wanted,” I said. “House in the country, horses, family…”
“It’s exactly what I’ve always wanted. I love it. I just wish you could meet the rest of them. David’s at work and D.J.’s off on a camping trip.”
“Maybe next time,” I said. My fantasies melted in the August heat.
“D.J.’s going to be a senior this fall.” She stopped combing long enough to look over the horse’s shoulder at me. “He’s the same age you and I were when we went around together. I’ve thought about that a lot.”
The kiss had opened me to a flood of emotions. In another world I might have been D.J.’s father. The thought filled me with wonder and vertigo. I didn’t feel old enough for fatherhood, let alone for the idea of us as potential grandparents. I had a sudden memory of Alex and me at a party the night I graduated, all of our closest friends together in one place for what we already suspected was—and in fact would turn out to be—the last time. Candles, rosé wine, a couple of joints.
“That’s enough, sweetheart,” Alex said. I realized she was talking to Jennifer. They shook the combs off their hands and we walked to the house.
It smelled a little musty inside, the way old houses do. The linoleum was warped here and there, and the walls were cheap paneling painted white. We walked through the kitchen past a dusty TV and VCR, a shelf of books with titles like Drawing Down the Moon and Pagan Meditations. I sat at a wooden drop-leaf table while Alex washed her hands and arms at the sink. Jennifer tugged at Alex’s blouse and whispered a question in her ear when she bent down. “Okay,” Alex said, “but stay close by.” Jennifer flashed me a shy smile and ran out of the room.
“I saw your ad in the Chronicle, years ago,” Alex said. “I thought about calling but I didn’t know if you’d want to hear from me or not.”
“Sure I would have.”
“And your wife’s picture was in the Statesman last year. Some kind of teacher’s award.”
“We’re separated. The divorce’ll be final in a few weeks.”
She nodded. “I had a real funny feeling from that picture. I thought, ‘Ray’s not married to her.’”
She got a couple of Cokes out of the refrigerator and told me about David. He runs a printing company, is finally making enough money that she was able to quit her legal secretary job two years ago, when they moved out to the country. She showed me a picture of the four of them out by the corral, Alex leaning her head back in laughter, David next to her, dark and bearded, with a glint in his eye, Jennifer huddled against her mother’s skirts. And then there was D.J., off to one side, in a white T-shirt and jeans, his long brown hair tied in a ponytail.
“Yes,” she said, as if she really could read my mind. “It was the first thing I thought of when I saw you. How much D.J. looks like you. But it’s not biologically possible. He was conceived in Seattle, and I hadn’t been near you for two years at that point.”
“You and David have been together for what, almost twenty years now?”
“It was a bit off-and-on at first. I never doubted he was the one. I just had a little trouble convincing him of that.”
“You knew it from the time we broke up.” I’d found the letter that afternoon, out in the garage. It had arrived early in the spring of my sophomore year at Vanderbilt, the spring I dropped out. I remember reading it before English class. It talked about David, how he was the love of her life. She had finally found the one, she said. My friend Les snatched it from me and started to read it out loud. “Jesus,” he laughed, “how corny can you get?” I wanted to kill him.
“It wasn’t just David,” Alex said, reaching across the kitchen table to take my hand. “I couldn’t have gone on with you, in any case. You had me on such a pedestal. You wanted me to be too perfect. I couldn’t keep from disappointing you. It finally got to where I couldn’t stand to see that disappointment in your eyes.”
I thought of my father, and now my mother, so disappointed in everyone. “I still think about those times, wonder how much of a jerk I really was.”
“No,” she said, and slapped the table. She seemed genuinely angry. “You weren’t a jerk. You were wonderful. I loved you then, and I loved you when we broke up. I never stopped thinking about you. I just couldn’t be the person you wanted me to be. The two of us weren’t cut out to be lovers, partners, soul mates, whatever you want to call it, not the way David and I are. That doesn’t make anything wrong with either of us. It doesn’t mean we can’t still care for each other.”
She got up and walked across the room, then turned and faced me with her arms folded. “Or still be attracted to each other. I am still attracted to you. But it’s a dead end, and I’m not going to risk what I have here for that. Even if it might be a pretty damned exciting
dead end.”
I held up my hands. “Hey. I didn’t even ask.”
She smiled. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. I was thinking it.”
She came back and sat down. “Maybe it’s our generation. We seem to have a hard time growing up. Maybe because when we were in high school we thought we’d never have to. The music told us we would live forever, everything would be love and peace and harmony. It took me a long time to let go of that. Even having D.J. didn’t do it. But I’ve finally started to get there.”
“And I haven’t.”
“I can’t tell you that, Ray. You’ll have to answer it for yourself.”
“You can’t read my mind?”
“Of course I can. You’re easy. But that’s not the point and you know it.”
“I guess. You’re still into all that occult stuff?”
“Of course,” she said. “I always told you I was a witch. Did you think I was kidding?”
Back then I guess we all believed in magic. Alex was just a bit more literal. Over the years she’s gotten more serious. She’s part of a coven that meets on full moons and pagan holidays and does a few simple rituals, helping the crops along, guaranteeing a safe birth for one of her foals.
“Out here you’re closer to the natural cycles,” she said. “You feel the connections more.”
“I met some witches in Cozumel. I liked them.”
“It’s growing. People are tired of technology, they don’t believe it has all the answers anymore. They want to feel connected to the earth, to each other, not like they’re caught up in some 3D video game. I’m preaching, aren’t I?”
“To the converted. Listen, I should go.” I was truly happy for her. But there was no place in her life for me, not as horny and sad and out of place as I felt then.
“Can’t you stay for dinner? It’s no trouble, I promise. David would love to meet you.”
“Next time,” I said. I hugged her good-bye and held her for a good long time, horsey smell and all.
