The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

  Meanwhile, our trip to Bologna proved pointless, a fool’s errand that began the rapid demise of Mother and Gerald’s love affair, though they remained friendly and we continued to take an occasional meal at the Caffè di Todi. I was treated for an intestinal parasite that I probably picked up from the archaeologic plumbing at our ancient hovel, or perhaps from the runoff from the chemicals so blithely spread over the sunflower fields by the bare-chested farmhand. From then on it was strictly bottled water, even for tooth brushing, and no more showers, only baths. I was confined to a hospital, but I was better in a few days, after which Mother, who was now on her own again, and I headed back to Todi, via rail.

  Todi, of course, had not changed in our absence, but our place in the little town was certainly transformed. Luke had spent two entire days there, at first searching for Esther, and then just waiting for her to appear. Though people readily directed him to our house, no one knew where we had gone. By the time we returned, Luke was already back in the U.S.A. (“I like to see that Statue called Liberty / She carries a torch, just like me”), but he was hurt and angry enough to strip all the beds in the house and throw the yellowed, well-worn linens into the dusty shrubbery on the house’s southern downward slope, where the distant Tiber shimmered two hundred meters below. My mother and I walked slowly, fearfully, and silently through the house, looking for any other sign of his furious visit. My mother’s hands were shaking. She touched her lower lip with the tip of her tongue and moistened that same little spot over and over. Luke had even stripped the stern little single bed in my room. The ancient horsehair mattress with its faded peach-and-gray-striped ticking looked forlorn, funereal, the bed in which some child had died, and it was not much of a leap at all for me to imagine that in his fury he had wished me grievous harm. When my mother left the room, I lifted the mattress to make sure the monster had not discovered the small spiral notebook in which I had written the words to fifty of his songs.

  THAT night in Leyden, Esther retired to her room early, a generally reliable sign that she was not drinking. During dinner I had noted the absence of beer or wine, but I wasn’t entirely convinced that she rode in the Wagon with any comfort. I suspected her, not out of any meanness of spirit, nor from any desire to belittle her by trying to control her actions. But I worried about her, deeply at times, almost convulsively. (And not without cause, as it happened.) She kissed me sweetly on the cheek, tousled my hair, and fairly floated toward her bedroom. A few minutes later, the thread of light disappeared from the bottom of her bedroom door and I snooped through her kitchen cabinets. There was a huge supply of ramen noodles, there were herbs and tinctures she used to treat her one tiny patch of psoriasis (elbow, winter) and vitamins of all descriptions, cans of low-fat vegetarian chile, hearts of palm, fava beans, but not a thing as spirited as even a bottle of cooking sherry.

  I was, naturally, relieved. Unhappiness had, in the past, caused my mother to drink, and to make foolish calls in the middle of the night: to her mother, while she lived; to her father; to her brother, until he started screening his calls; to Luke, when she could find him; and to me. The unhappiness caused drinking and the drinking, in turn, caused unhappiness, its own unhappiness—remorse, hangovers, embarrassment, bloating. I worried about her. I worried about what she might do. There were crummy bars ten minutes downhill from her cabin. I could imagine her walking into one of them, wearing jeans, a tight shirt, I could see her sidling up to some computer repairman, dipping her finger into his beer and flicking the suds into his face, ripple dissolve, a half-hour later, in a motel, or a camper, the two of them tearing off their clothes. It’s not that I begrudged her her sexuality. I just dreaded her unhappi- ness and embarrassment upon awakening. She would have to imbue her man of the night with so many qualities he did not possess—she’d have to pretend he was a naturalist when he was only a hunter, or that he was a socialist when he was only on welfare. Her drinking terrified me.

  Satisfied that the house was dry—and somehow not having the wit to even consider that her stash was safely locked behind her bedroom door and that she was at this very moment drinking Wild Turkey right from the bottle—I settled down onto the sofa and went over my notes from today’s interview.

  Richard Parker—priest for past twenty-five years—nearing fifty—fat—swollen feet—white hair, red, veiny nose—Friar Tuck—Catholic church in crumbling, postindustrial slum Troy, New York—announcements of bingo, baseball card swap-a-thons—stained glass window showing Mary with dead Jesus in her lap, metal grill protecting it from vandals—Father Parker in his study behind desk—distractible—fidgety as child—smelling of lilac water, garlic—a palpable weakness for the finer things in life, exiled now—so glad to talk to someone about the old days, his brief ride on the Tail of the Tiger—

  I took off my shoes, settled myself beneath one of Mother’s handmade afghans, and fished my micro-tape recorder out of my bag. I switched off the lamp behind my head as I plugged the Aiwa into my ear. I pressed Play. The red droplet of light appeared, and then a few moments of magnetic hiss, and then Father Parker’s rich plummy voice.

  “Is it on?”

  “Try to ignore the tape. You were going to tell me how you happened to go on the road with Luke and his band.”

  “Yes. Well. Luke was on the Tail of the Tiger tour, playing as many as five concerts a week. It was a grueling schedule and everyone on the tour was exhausted. I was your basic young-at-heart parish priest [laughter] in San Francisco. This was 1983, and believe me we had our work cut out for us. [laughter] Well, the archbishop was up in arms because rumors about the Tiger tour were flying fast and furious—it was a big drug party, a kind of wandering circus capturing the hearts and minds of young people, and all the rumors about young girls being abducted and defiled. Very exaggerated, of course. And personally embarrassing to me, since it was well known in the Church that I was a huge Luke Fairchild fan and had been since the early folk music days. They actually wanted me to speak out against Luke and the whole rock subculture. It was strictly a reactionary stance. I understood where they were coming from, but my point was, What could be more self-defeating? We were having a difficult enough time reaching young people with Jesus’s message of universal love. Why shoot ourselves in the foot, you know?

  “Then, who should contact me but Alice Burns.”

  I clicked off the machine. Alice Burns. I’d seen her myself, a few months before, in a noisy little Italian restaurant on East Fifty-fifth Street. She was living in New York, teaching music at a Catholic girls—school on the Upper East Side. She had strong, rather masculine features—a solid jaw, large hands—and she dressed with some formality. Pearls, a silk scarf. Her black hair was expensively cut. She was married to a pediatrician; they had two children and lived on Sutton Place. We talked about teaching; we talked about a recent outbreak of measles in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Her piercing blue eyes drank in all of the ways I resembled Luke, whom she hadn’t seen in fifteen years.

  I pressed Play.

  “She was a San Francisco girl, a regular at the Church of the Ascension, and had gotten to know me when I was a novice. Then she went east to Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart. She wrote me from time to time, about spiritual matters. She had a fine mind. She was also a fine musician. She played violin, keyboards, and she had the voice of an angel. She was on the Tail of the Tiger tour and she wanted to talk to me about Luke.

  “The first thing she did was assure me that the stories about the debauchery that had been running in the press were completely exaggerated. I tried to put her at her ease. I wasn’t interested in judging her, or Luke, or anyone else. But there was obviously something else she wished to communicate. I mean, she didn’t come to my parish at nine in the morning after a concert in Los Angeles and a plane trip just to tell me that the stories about Luke were distorted.

  “What she wanted to tell me was that over the past several weeks she had been talking to Luke about Jesus Christ and they had
been reading the Bible together.

  “I was somewhat surprised to hear this. I remembered hearing somewhere or other that Luke came from a Jewish background. And of course he had been so closely associated with the contemporary movements of sexual liberty and antiestablishment this and that. But to tell you the truth, I wasn’t shocked. I had always heard the righteousness in Luke’s poetry. And every good Catholic believes in the correctness of the Church’s teachings, and since we believe men are rational creatures it stands to reason that reasonable people will eventually come to accept the Catholic faith.

  “She told me that Luke had been suffering a great deal. Fame and money and his travels had not healed his spiritual wounds. In fact, the more he gained in the world, the more he longed for God. He was having heart problems. His hands were cold. He was having bowel problems. He was frightened. He worried about death, and he was extremely worried about going to Hell.

  “It’s not so unusual. She said that Luke wasn’t really ready to commit to the conversion process, but he was interested, and she wondered if I would agree to meet with him. It was all I could do to keep from leaping in the air and shouting with happiness. I was a big fan, a very great admirer. In fact, I had used a few of Luke’s songs in my sermons. My ‘Talkin’ Hell on Earth’ raised a few eyebrows in the archdiocese, I can tell you. Anyhow, I kept a solemn face and told Alice I would be happy to meet with Luke, and then she told me he was right outside the church, sitting in a limo and waiting for the okay to come in.”

  Alice’s large hands made me wonder about her last meeting with Luke. She had slapped his face—very hard, by all reports—and I imagined, sitting there over our pasta on the East Side, that it must have really stung. Yet I found it extraordinarily difficult to bring up that final meeting outside of the church in St. Louis, when the Tail of the Tiger tour had degenerated into utter sexual and biochemical chaos. She was so dignified and remote, it made me wonder why she had agreed to see me. I could talk about Luke and her in a general way, but once I crossed the threshold of her reserve and asked her about her love affair with him, she took her starched white napkin off her lap and dropped it over her linguine and left me there.

  Father Parker’s voice was going on.

  “You want to know my first impression? Here was a man who had spent his entire life looking for his match. He was always looking for that moment when a hand—heavenly or otherwise—would be laid on his shoulder and a voice would say: No! Now you listen to me! He had thrown himself into so many things—communistic thinking, Hinduism, drugs, patriotism, materialism, you name it. Whatever he could find. But he always burned right through it—it was never enough, it could never hold his attention, or his heart. He always found the fault. There’s an arrogance in that, to be sure. He always ended up thinking he was too smart for any of the systems of belief that people presented him. And perhaps he was right in that. Perhaps he was right.

  “But my second impression is the one that has stayed more powerfully with me. I saw in Luke … a man haunted by God. There was an immensity to him, for all his physical slightness. A great goodness in a pitched struggle with, oh, I don’t know, baser elements. I have met only a very few people like him in my life. His Holiness, the Pope, has something in common with Luke. A sense of being possessed by spirit, a kindness offset by wariness—too many people have asked too much of Luke. But in Luke, there was also a struggle. He struggled for his serenity. He longed to be good. Sometimes I think there are people, just a few of them, and they are really at the center of the struggle between God and the Devil. Whoever wins this soul wins the world. Not that one, and not that one there. But this one. You. Can you imagine how terrifying that must be? God must worry, and even the Devil. But for that one soul? How terrifying every day must be! I looked at this man, not much more than a boy, really, with all his money and houses and cars and celebrity, and all his fears and doubts, and, Billy, I felt so sorry for him. So deeply, deeply sorry. It has never ceased to haunt me.

  “Oh, did I tell you? I saw him in concert two years ago….”

  2

  I WAS THERE, too. Luke was making his performance comeback on an outdoor stage on Martha’s Vineyard, beneath a thick starry blur of eternity, with meteorites table-hopping around the universe, and a salty sea smell in the night wind. By my father’s standards it was to be an intimate recital—nothing like the years playing festivals from Cape Town to Helsinki, in soccer stadiums, all-weather domes, always the largest venues available. This Vineyard gig was meant to be somehow reminiscent of Dad’s early days in smoky folk clubs in Greenwich Village, before it became big business, where he once played for drinks and worked the crowd afterwards for a place to stay. Luke must have thought that the nature of the island would automatically limit the turnout. Martha’s Vineyard normally restricts the size of the visiting population by controlling the number of ferries that make the forty-five-minute sail from Woods Hole on Cape Cod to Vineyard Haven on the island—people who want to summer on the Vineyard often buy their ferry tickets a year in advance.

  Only a fraction of the people who came to see and hear Luke Fairchild were able to snag ferry tickets—although I did; I booked passage even before word of the concert leaked out into the subculture of hard-core Luke fanatics. The rest of the fans—and here we’re talking about more than twenty thousand—made their way to the island on a flotilla of schooners and trimarans and tugboats and fishing boats, sailed by a crew of enterprising islanders, who saw in the emergent Lukemania a chance to make thousands of dollars, more than enough to tide them over a long winter.

  Woods Hole, the taking-off spot for the sail to the Vineyard, and normally a staid little village, reigned over by the aquatic academics of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the only spot on earth where the typical Ph.D. has shapely, nicely tanned legs, was at an absolute standstill. Father’s worshippers clogged the narrow streets, cleaned out the stores like an invading army, and struck their deals with the boatsmen. The bay was clogged with boats, so greedily and perilously overloaded that the slightest wave came sloshing onto the decks, eliciting shrieks that drowned out the imploring calls of the hovering gulls.

  It was an event. The media people were beside themselves, scratching at each other like a pack of Siamese cats. They were interviewing everyone they could shove a microphone at. Why are you here? When was the last time you saw Luke? What does Luke’s music mean to you? (If they had gotten wind that I was around, Luke’s bastard son, and a person not utterly unknown to hard-core Lukologists, they would have cannibalized me.) Those seven years without public appearance had ending up doing Luke more good than harm. It may as well have been a publicity stunt. But it had not been a publicity stunt. It had taken him that long to recover from the public debacle of having defended Sergei Karpanov.

  Strange now, to be talking at last about my father, and having to circle back to Sergei. Even with what I partially know, I can say that the Karpanov incident has never been reported truthfully in the press or in any of the books about Luke.

  Luke met Sergei at a party at Ken Steinberg’s house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania—just one of the many houses Steinberg had paid for with the money he’d made since signing on as Luke’s manager in 1965. (The Fairchild-Steinberg deal was the end of the dream for the naive and idealistic core of Luke’s early followers. Steinberg was a tough, Bronx-raised, put-the-money-on-the-fucking-table sort of guy, with a keen eye for the main chance and a kind of weird visionary quality when it came to business, unlike Luke’s first manager, the late Big Tom Pierpont, who, with his barrel chest and blood-red shirts, his pirate eyepatch and whiskey breath, was basically a sentimentalist, always more than willing to send Luke to a mineworkers’ benefit in Utah or a regional ACLU meeting in L.A., and who saw in Luke not the beginning of a new world but the survival of the old.)

  It was a Sunday summer party, with middle-aging music- business executives and their rapier-thin young wives, their high-strung children and gloomy, homesick nannies.
Tacos and cocaine around the swimming pool. Steinberg expressly forbade any talk of business at these Sunday parties; if he caught you whispering about publishing rights or about signing up a new act, you’d be asked to leave. A pickup softball game was going in the former cow pasture behind Steinberg’s postmodernist farmhouse. A game of horseshoes—nice country touch. Parties were art-directed, now that everyone was so ridiculously rich: great-looking food; photogenic, unattached women to keep the young wives on their toes; the ungrazed meadows cut just so. Hard to believe that funky chaotic angry pimply rock and roll had brought them to all this.

  Luke was with the kids—he had a real affinity for children. (It was child support that gave him trouble.) He loved them and they were crazy about him. They liked his wild hair, his conspiratorial winks, his leftover feline grace, the constant threat of spilled secrets and sudden hilarity in his voice, his way of leveling with them, speaking to them as if they had a real stake in the world.

  “Come here, Luke,” Ken said. Steinberg was by now balding and bearded, his once fidgety, fuzzy body now conquered by utter obesity, bloated to bursting with Burgundy, smoked salmon, and Mallomars. Pop a pin in him and he’d zoom around the room like a balloon. “Luke! Leave the kids alone for a minute, will you, for crying out loud! Jeremy! Uncle Luke’s going to talk to Daddy now, okay? You can go fly your airplane over there, away from the house. By the slave quarters.” This was Steinberg’s fun name for the tenant house where the property’s farmer used to live. Ken had spent time being poor himself and he thought it gave him the right.

  Sergei Karpanov had won a silver medal at the Montreal Olympics and he wore it over his raucous Hawaiian shirt. His chest hair was straight and silky like the hair on a newborn’s head. His legs were mighty oaks. He carried a fistful of canapés in a napkin upon which had been printed a picture of Ken’s house.