The Hour of the Innocents

by Robert Paston

  She stood by the water fountain in the foyer. Waiting. When she saw me, she smiled. But her look was newly diffident.

  “You make me feel like a groupie,” she said. “Just standing here waiting for the big star to come out.” She cocked her head and her hair gathered on one shoulder. “I guess I am a groupie, when you think about it.”

  “I wouldn’t say so.”

  “You wouldn’t know. Would you? I’ve tried everything, smoke signals, telepathy.” She sighed playfully, almost the wry girl I valued. “But you never send roses.”

  “Joan…” Back in the hall, the band condemned to fill in between our sets kicked off “Season of the Witch.” The coincidence seemed too perfect.

  “Come on. I’m teasing you,” she assured me. “Want to go outside for a couple of minutes? Just to talk?”

  “Let me grab my coat.”

  “I could keep you warm,” she said, choosing from her repertoire of good-humored smiles. “But I suppose that would be against the rules.”

  I wasn’t in love with Joan. I knew that much. But I lacked a name for the form of attraction I felt toward her. It wasn’t just lust, although that was certainly in the package. For years, my appetites had outrun my emotions. Catching up confused me.

  She drew me toward her the way a lighted window draws a traveler.

  “I didn’t think you were going to show up,” I said.

  We walked between the rows of cars. Ice glinted.

  “I almost didn’t. When I started out, the road was so bad.”

  “I’m glad you made it. I’m glad to see you.”

  “And that, along with a quarter, will buy me a pack of Tastykakes.”

  We got into her car, a no-nonsense Delta 88 Olds. She turned on the engine for heat.

  “Well, here we are,” she said.

  “Here we are.”

  “I guess it would spoil the fun to tell you that I’m in love with you,” she said. “But I’m not having much fun, anyway. And don’t tell me any lies. Please. I know you’re not in love with me. Although I’m not ruling out all future possibility of it.”

  “I can’t explain what I feel.”

  “Then don’t. Don’t fuck me up even worse.” She lowered her chin toward her chest. Dark hair curtained her off. “Doesn’t love suck, though? I mean, I hardly know you, you were a one-night stand. And here I am, twenty-six years old, and I think about you like I’m hoping against hope you’ll ask me to the prom and bring me a corsage.” Throwing her head back, she closed her hands on the steering wheel. But we weren’t going anywhere. “I just want you to tell me one thing, all right? Just one thing, and don’t lie about it.”

  “Sure. All right.”

  “You like me. Don’t you? I mean, you genuinely, honest and truly, like me, right? If it wasn’t for your other girl…”

  “I really like you. I wish I had a better word for it.”

  To my wonder, a tear fled her eye. The neon sign on the club’s roof tinged it pink.

  I shifted toward her, to take her in my arms. She fended me off, gently, with both hands.

  “Please don’t. I couldn’t handle it, all right?” She looked at me. But as she turned, her features were lost in shadow. “Why do we love the people we love? Why the fuck do we do it? Do you have any fucking idea?”

  “No.”

  I felt incompetent. And stupid. I had assumed that Joan saw me as a desirable good time, but little more. I had judged her as tough enough to handle herself.

  “I know what you’re feeling,” she told me. “I really do. I’m not totally stupid about guys.” She looked away again. “I hope she’s worth it, Will. I really do. I hope, whoever she is, she’s worth what I’m going through.” She shook her head. “You’re a decent guy. Underneath it all. Behind all the strutting and posing and shit. That’s the trouble, you know? It’s such a worthless goddamned lie that it’s better to fall in love with a decent guy. They’re always taken before you get there. It’s easier to be in love with some low-life shithead.” She sniffed. “At least you know where you stand.”

  “I’m a fool.”

  “Yeah. That, too. Listen, I’m going to go home. I just can’t do it, I can’t go back in there and watch you. I’m not going to do it.”

  “All right.”

  “And you’re not even going to try to persuade me? What on earth have I done to myself?” She granted me another good Joan smile, pale in the gloom. “‘It’s all right, Ma, I’m only bleeding.’”

  I wanted to reach her, to tell her to give me a little more time and maybe things would work out. But I didn’t think I could make the words sound anything but utterly selfish and piggish.

  As I got out of the car, I scrounged up a tribute I could say and mean.

  “Joan? Okay, I’m not in love with you. But I love how you are. I mean it.”

  “All the boys love it when they make girls cry,” she told me.

  * * *

  Angela cornered me as soon as I passed the ticket booth.

  “I’ve seen that one before,” she told me. “She tries to make herself look like Grace Slick.”

  “She’s not Grace Slick.”

  “She give you a blow job? Out in the parking lot?”

  “Angela. Jesus. Give me a break.”

  “His sweet little girlfriend isn’t with him, so he’s off like a rocket. Getting blow jobs in the parking lot from any slut he can pick up.”

  “Stop it. What’s the matter with you? Nobody gave anybody a blow job. And she’s not a slut. Knock it off.”

  Compared with the lithe conversation stopper I’d had a crush on eight or nine months before, she looked almost unrecognizable. Her damaged skin stretched taut over her skull and her clothes draped loosely over missing flesh. Angela had never been voluptuous, but now she was positively emaciated. She looked sick. With her hair dull and thin, only her eyes remained furiously alive.

  “Come out in the parking lot with me,” she said. “I’ll give you a blow job you won’t forget. If that’s what you want.”

  I drew back. But I kept my voice down. There was already too much interest in us. And I didn’t want Frankie popping up and going nuts.

  “I don’t want anything. I’m trying to play it straight, all right?”

  She tried to make herself appear seductive. Posing. The effect was pathetic, even comical.

  “Just come out in the parking lot,” she said, “and we’ll see what happens.” She reached for my wrist. “I remember everything you like.”

  I pulled away. “No. I’m not going out in the parking lot with you. Get a grip on yourself. You’re Frankie’s wife, for God’s sake.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. I never knew what to say to any of them.

  “Yeah, like that bothered you before.” Angela glared at me. With hatred in her face. “You think you’re too good for me. Don’t you? All high and fucking mighty. You think you’re too good for me. What, do you think something’s wrong with me? Do you? Is that it?”

  The truth was that I did think something was wrong with her. Everything about her had grown wretched.

  I was afraid she’d start shouting. Instead, she closed the distance between us and looked up into my face with viper’s eyes. “I know what the problem is,” she said. “Don’t think I don’t know, you faggot. You cover it up so good, but you’re a fucking queer. You faggot. You should get together with somebody else we both know, ain’t?”

  I turned my back and walked away.

  “Faggot,” she called after me.

  * * *

  That was on a Saturday night. By Sunday evening, Laura had come back from her biweekly journey home and she lay beside me on our mattress, with Tim Hardin singing quietly on the stereo in the other room. His voice was drenched with sorrow, and his songs mourned loves that failed.

  Things had gone ever better between Laura and me. Her new kindness had not faded and she even seemed less terrified of exams. If she really had been locked away—and I could not doubt
it—she probably had faced no end of painful “reentry procedures,” as the astronauts put it. Perhaps things just took time.

  She had come along to several of our band’s performances and told me that it might not be entirely impossible to acquire a taste for our kind of music. At times, she almost seemed proud of me. And she got along well enough with everyone else. Angela treated her with brusque acceptance, while Red kept her mitts to herself.

  With her head and that cushion of thick dark hair resting on my shoulder, Laura moved so that our flesh touched all along our bodies. Then she laid her arm across me, as if barring a door. We smelled of sex and sweat.

  “It must be lovely,” she said, “to be you.”

  “It doesn’t always seem that way to me.”

  “I mean, everything’s so easy for you. You write your songs, and the lyrics just come to you. And the way you wrote that story for me. You just sat down and did it. I wish I could be more like you.”

  “No, you don’t.” Again, it struck me how little we ever know about one another. My life was a constant fight to become the musician I longed to be, a war against music’s forbidding complexity, against the recalcitrance of my fingers, against the ear inside the brain that could not hear the things that Matty heard. The songs, the lyrics, were insignificant compared with the ability to play.

  “I don’t mean I’d want to be like you in every way,” she said. “Obviously, that wouldn’t do us any good. But I wish I had your … your facility. Do you know the dictionary meaning of the word?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what I want. Your facility. I’ve hated being jealous of you. I think, really, that’s the reason I did what I did.”

  “What did you do?”

  She tilted her face up toward me, letting me see her paleness across my cheekbone. The altered posture pressed her breasts against me.

  “Shall I tell you? I wasn’t going to. I’d decided not to. But I don’t like having secrets.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

  I feared some revelation about her madness, some admission that would tether me to her unmercifully. It was better to go on pretending I didn’t know.

  “You don’t keep secrets from me, do you?” She laid a hand under her chin, the better to meet my eyes in the near darkness.

  “Generally, no.”

  “You don’t sleep with other women, for instance? When I’m not around?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, I’m going to tell you. What I did was wrong, and I know it. I’m penitent, you see.”

  “Laura, you don’t have to tell me anything.” Whatever it was, I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted her to shut up and go to sleep. Or to start making love again.

  “When I was home … over Christmas break … I slept with someone else. Please don’t be mad. It was just one time. And I didn’t really sleep with him, that’s only an expression. We just had sex. It was awful, just pathetic. I felt sick afterward. It made me appreciate you even more.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re so much better. In every way.”

  “No. Why did you do it? Why did you fuck somebody else?”

  “Please don’t get angry. You and I are more grown-up than that. Aren’t we? It was a mistake, I made a mistake. I’m so sorry, Will. I really am. I had to get it off my conscience.”

  “But why did you do it?”

  “I think I was jealous of you. That everything’s so easy for you. I think that was really at the heart of it, that’s what I was trying to explain earlier. And I’d known this guy for a long time, he’s a doctor. I just ran into him. Out of the blue. To tell you the truth, I was surprised when he came on to me. I was, I don’t know, in emotional disarray. But, down inside, I suppose I wanted to hurt you. Have I?”

  I didn’t know. Certainly, she had hurt my pride. But the news also came as something of a relief. She had handed me an excuse, if ever I needed one.

  “Well, it’s not good for my rock-star ego,” I said. Speaking a line written for me by a stranger.

  She paused for a moment—a long moment—then ran her hand over my body.

  “Have you decided to forgive me?” she asked.

  TWENTY

  The profs at the local campus had forgiven all they could. I turned in clever papers, written easily, and had no trouble with exams designed to move the cattle down the trail, but even the most indulgent junior instructor expected me to appear in the classroom now and then. Consumed by the band’s possibilities, I had been absent for weeks at a time, relying on plain, friendly girls to pass on the assignments and hand in my papers for me—I was an exploiter of the toiling masses, just ashamed enough to believe I was still decent at heart. Now I found I had to pay my dues.

  That’s how I met Angela in Chekhov. I had run out of choice courses at the campus and signed up for Drama from Marlowe to Miller with an assistant prof notorious for Freudian insights and laying his hands on the kneecaps of male students. One of the meager readings was Three Sisters.

  And there she was, with better table manners and renamed “Masha.” Perhaps no one else in the world would have made the connection, but it struck me by the end of the first act. An attractive woman, married young and unhappily, trapped in a provincial town, longing to escape, and, meanwhile, grasping at what slight pleasure she finds. It wasn’t hard to picture Masha hitting up with speed, given the chance.

  Reading the play, then writing a silly paper arguing that the baron deserved to die, I finished with a renewed sympathy for the real woman poisoning herself with drugs and laying waste to every relationship she had. Perhaps nothing could ever fully content her, but Angela longed to give the world a try. And, I reminded myself, she had kept one crucial faith with me, never telling others about Laura’s problems.

  As for Laura, she wearied me, although I was too stubborn to admit it. Her calculated kindnesses annoyed me, and her conversation, which had seemed so wonderfully sophisticated, struck me now as gratingly pretentious. I thought of Joan when Laura and I made love but lacked the courage to make the fantasy real. Laura’s history let me frame my cowardice as virtue, inertia as loyalty. As for that pathetic infidelity of hers—I pictured a doctor taking unfair advantage—it insulted my pride but moved me less than it should have. The brilliant girl had become a tiresome bore.

  I hoped some painless event would take her from me. As she grew ever gentler, my temper flared. I had to read The Glass Menagerie for class and hated it. In lieu of making up a quiz I’d missed, I did an extra paper, insisting that the daughter was the villainess.

  One snow-slowed day, I told Laura to wash her cunt.

  * * *

  Things were better in Florida. My mother called to tell me she had accepted a marriage proposal. She had met the guy for the first time over Christmas and her haste seemed embarrassing in a woman her age, but marriage was a better bet than moping in the old house and fighting the tug of the liquor cabinet.

  She sounded excited, almost girlish, and forgot to ask me how my life was going. I congratulated her, more or less sincerely. She didn’t ask me to attend the wedding, which would be in Darien, Connecticut, in the spring.

  * * *

  Matty broke his uncle John’s nose outside of a bar in St. Clair.

  * * *

  We know. We deny it to ourselves. But we know.

  The studio lights had been turned down to create a smoky dusk. Behind the glass of the control booth, a green glow lit the face of the engineer. Frankie crushed out his cigarette and centered himself behind the lead mike, waiting for word through his headphones that the tape was rolling for the last vocal lay-down. The rest of us sat amid the jungle of amplifiers, drums, and cables, waiting for the instrumental track to come through the speakers mounted high in the corners. Except for the hard red EXIT light, everything in the world seemed to have softened.

  Our collective mood was as fine as it could have been. The second session had begun w
ith us listening to the mix-down of the earlier recordings. Since we all agreed he had the best ear, Matty had worked with the engineers after the first round. We sensed that he would be fair, that the volume level he approved for each instrument and voice would be right for the song in question, if not for the ego involved. The results were exhilarating. Played back, those first four songs sounded better than we had any right to hope.

  We had booked an eight-hour block for our return visit and everything went smoothly. I nailed each of my parts this time and we laid down four more songs so quickly that we had time left over to work on the final mixes. Miraculously, there was no antagonism. Frankie even preempted my single criticism. For the one slow number on the demo, we had chosen a brand-new song of mine, “The Road to Heaven (Joey’s Song).” Frankie had recorded it with what we called his “pretty-boy voice” on the first go-round, but it needed his “whiskey voice.” When he heard the playback, he commented on it himself.

  Now he was giving it one last try. If he scored, we only needed to polish the mixes a little more to have a demo so strong, the reality unsettled me. It wasn’t supposed to be so easy.

  In the semidarkness, I saw Frankie nod. Restrained and wistful, the music crept out of the monitors. It balanced all the attack-dog numbers and, somehow, completed them. Freeing a strand of hair from the clamping headphones, Frankie closed his eyes and began to sing:

  How we laughed at borderlines,

  We tore down the warning signs,

  The road to heaven drew us all along.

  We lit the darkness with our lives,

  Drank the days and … clutched the nights,

  Then I awoke to find my friends were gone.

  Some in war and some on drugs,

  Some on highways, some in love,

  The road to heaven leads through troubled lands.

  Some survive the stormy days,

  Others fall … along the way,

  Consumed by visions, broken by God’s hand …

  On the tape, I strummed a sharp arpeggio just in front of the Les Paul’s bridge, and the song lifted into the chorus:

  Me, I knew when to stop. And start.