by Lewis Shiner
“Your friend Pete?” Corrina whispered. “He’s watching the door.” She pulled the T-shirt up over her breasts without taking it off. Then, as Cole watched in amazement, she slowly pulled her skirt up around her waist and revealed that she was naked underneath. She dragged the sheet down around Cole’s knees and lifted his surgical gown. “Oh, my,” she said. “What have we here?”
She controlled everything, and Cole saw that she needed it that way. The weight of the cast bothered him, as did the need to hold it still, as did the angle of the back of the bed, and the fear that they might be interrupted. She shushed him when he tried to speak, put his left hand to her breast, kissed him on the neck and chest and stomach, and chose the moment when she finally guided him inside her. She waited for him to fully experience the heat and velvet smoothness of it before she began to move against him, only a little, before pausing to let him savor it again. She did what she could to make it last, but Cole had been waiting too long, and despite all the distractions, the urgency took him and he thrust his hips faster and faster until he exploded endlessly inside her.
They slowly rocked to a stop. Cole became aware of the noise of the bedsprings, wondered if it had been audible all the way out to the hall. His entire body had been so tense at the end that now his right hand throbbed. His ejaculation ran down between his legs and onto the sheets.
Corrina kissed him and said, “Did I hurt you?”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I meant your hand, dummy.”
“No,” he said.
She lifted herself away and plucked a couple of tissues from the nightstand, dabbing at herself and then at the sheets. “Your nurse is going to be suspicious.”
All the while they were making love, he’d been able to believe that they were feeling the same thing. Now they were two separate creatures again and already he was losing her. She pulled her T-shirt down, and then her skirt.
“Wait,” Cole said. He wanted her again, wanted to take it slower, with more kissing and touching, wanted her to come too. “Don’t go.”
She climbed out of the bed and put her sandals on. “Got to, sugar.” She straightened his gown and pulled the sheet and blanket over him. “There.”
“Corrina—”
“Hush, now,” she said. She stood at the head of the bed and stroked his hair. In the near darkness, he couldn’t tell whether she was about to cry or was just being theatrical. “Dream about me tonight,” she said. She put her fingers to his lips and she was gone.
Eventually Cole pulled the sheet up over his face so that he could smell her on himself and in the bed. He curled on his side, remembering the feel of her body, and drifted until the freckled nurse brought his sleeping pill and Milk of Magnesia and a shot.
*
Cole dialed Corrina’s number a dozen times throughout the day on Wednesday and got no answer. Thursday was the same.
It wasn’t just that he missed her and wanted her again and was sick with love for her. He had no idea what was in her head, whether she loved him too, what their future was going to be. He couldn’t think about anything else. He replayed his memories of Tuesday night until they lost their sharpness, until they felt like they belonged to somebody else.
Even with Demerol, Cole’s daily routines made him restless and left him too much time to brood. Morning phone calls with his mother, walking the halls with Pete twice a day, terse visits from Granbury, tasteless meals, bad tv.
On Friday Granbury said, “I’ve left orders for you to be discharged on Sunday.”
Cole’s relief was undermined by the knowledge that leaving the hospital meant going back to Dallas, an hour and a half from Corrina even if he had a car, every phone call racking up long-distance charges. And in four weeks school would start. He pictured himself housebound until then, his mother fussing over him, and he had an overwhelming desire to hold his guitar. To make the chords and finger the leads with his left hand, even though he couldn’t use his right.
He rang the nurses’ station and asked for a shot. The nurse put Pete on the intercom. “Listen, bud, you’ve been taking a lot of that stuff. The pain should be starting to ease up. Do me a favor and just put some ice on it for now. If you still need the shot in an hour, you can have it.”
Cole looked at the clock. Two-thirteen.
Jacqui brought a sandwich bag of ice and wrapped it in place with another Ace bandage. “It’s hard being in here more’n a day or two, I know,” she said, patting his shoulder.
The sympathy made Cole’s throat close and his eyes sting. “Thank you,” he said.
After she left, he dialed Corrina’s number one more time. On the fourth ring, as he was about to give up, he heard a click on the other end.
“Hello?” Cole said. “Corrina?”
“This is her mother. Who is this?”
“It’s Cole, Jeff Cole. We’ve never met—”
“Oh, hello, Cole. How’s that hand doing?”
At least, he thought, Corrina had talked about him. “Coming along. It’s going to take a while.”
“You don’t want to rush it, now.”
“No, ma’am.” After a pause, he said, “Listen, is Corrina—”
“I’m so sorry, Cole. She’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Her vista application got accepted and she’s gone to Philadelphia for training. She left yesterday morning. Said I shouldn’t answer the phone, that she was going to write you, but every time it rang I thought of you in that hospital and I just had to let you know.”
“Philadelphia?”
“After training they’re going to assign her to some ghetto up there. Oh, Cole, I’m so scared for her, but she was always headstrong. Couldn’t nobody talk her out of anything.”
“How long has she known?”
“Two weeks. I asked her, did she tell you about it. She said she would take care of it. She was never good with telling people things they didn’t want to hear. Never wanted to disappoint anybody, that was Corrina.”
Cole noted the ominous past tense. “Do you have a phone number for her? Or an address or anything?”
“I can tell her you called. That’s all I can do.”
He tried for five minutes to break her down. It was as hopeless as trying to change Corrina’s mind. He gave her his parents’ phone number and the number at the hospital and hung up.
He couldn’t stop picturing her on a grimy street corner in her cowboy hat and cutoffs, surrounded by tall, dark, leering strangers.
Two forty-one. He focused on the second hand as it clicked slowly around the dial and waited for 3:13.
*
Alex called the Tyler Motor Inn at noon on Saturday, their usual time. He called again at two and again at four. It was possible that Cole wasn’t answering because he’d gotten lucky with Corrina on his last weekend in the piney woods. Alex would not have bet money on it.
He called Cole’s parents. Cole’s father answered, and he handed the phone off to Cole’s mother as soon as Alex identified himself. By the time he got the whole story from her, Alex had to fight to control how pissed off he was. “Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you let me know? I would have gone up there.”
“I’m sorry, I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
If it had been Alex in the hospital, his parents would have turned the place into party central to cheer him up. Cole’s parents hadn’t even been to see him since the day of the accident.
“You say he’s coming home tomorrow?” Alex said. “Why don’t you let me bring him back?”
She was reluctant, and he patiently demolished all her arguments until she agreed to talk to Cole’s father and call Alex back.
While he waited for the call, Alex talked to his own father, who of course thought it was a great idea. A few minutes later Betty Cole called and admitted that Cole would probably be happier coming home with Alex.
He threw a change of clothes into an overnight bag and his mother put some leftover pot roast and
fixings in an ice chest. “You give him our love, now,” she said.
Alex made it to the hospital before seven and found his own way to the room. Cole was working the tv remote control, which made a noise like dropping a loaded garbage can onto concrete every time he changed the channel. He had a dazed look, which lit up when he saw Alex.
“Hey, Cole. I just found out this afternoon. Your fucking parents never told me, man.”
Something passed across Cole’s face that Alex hadn’t seen there before, a look a convict might get at the mention of lawyers.
Alex kept going. “My mom sent food, and I talked your parents into letting me drive you home tomorrow.”
“Shit, man, that’s great. I am so glad to see you.” Cole blinked and leaned forward. “What the hell happened to you?”
“Growth spurt,” Alex said. “I’ve grown four inches since May. I’ve had to buy all new clothes. Twice.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah. My bones hurt. And I can’t get enough to eat. At least I don’t need my stump cushion to see over the steering wheel anymore.” He shook his head. “Fuck that, let me see your hand.”
You couldn’t see much. The most disturbing thing was the absence. It was a hand like any other hand, only less so.
“Well,” Alex said, “that’s not going to keep you from playing. Good.”
Cole didn’t say anything. Alex broke out the food and Cole got one of the nurses to bring plates and silverware and a couple of Cokes.
“So,” Cole finally asked. “How’s the band?”
Alex was braced for the question. “Shaping up. We had practice number five last week. This drummer is amazing. Wait till you hear him.”
Cole nodded. You could see how the accident had changed him. His cockiness had been hollowed out.
“Listen, man,” Alex said, “we’ll wait as long as we have to until you can play. Don’t worry, all right?”
The truth was that Mike had been pushing to bring in another guitar player, “just temporarily,” and Gary had said, more than once, “This guy must be great if we’re waiting all summer for him.” Alex hadn’t heard Cole play in two months, so he didn’t know how good Cole was now, or how he would sound with a full band behind him, or how he would handle himself in front of an audience. And that was before he fucked up his hand.
Alex was gambling everything on friendship and a hunch. The Chevelles had the makings of a seriously commercial act, a much bigger deal than he’d first imagined on the night of the Dylan concert. They only had this one year before they all graduated. Mike was shooting for one of the West Coast schools like Reed or Berkeley, and Gary had his eyes on Juilliard, so they’d be scattered across the country. If Cole couldn’t cut it, and cut it fast, Alex would have a tough call to make.
At the same time, he couldn’t deny how empty the summer had seemed without Cole around. He’d had friends from school over to use the pool. He’d met a girl at a party and taken her to the Gemini to see The Wild Angels, where he’d gotten to second base in the back seat. He’d scored some vodka from the older brother of a guy from the tennis team and gotten loaded. None of it had felt like what he really wanted to be doing.
“What if I can’t play anymore?” Cole said.
“Come on, Cole, cut the shit. If you’d lost that much off the end of your dick, you wouldn’t even notice.”
“The girls might have an easier time of it, it’s true.”
Alex heard the strain in the humor and asked the obvious question. “What’s happening with Corrina?”
“Everything,” Cole said. “And then nothing.”
It took Alex a while to worm the story out of him. Cole answered in monosyllables and by the end he was in a worse funk than before. So, Alex thought, Cole is first to the pot of gold. And look at the joy it’s brought him.
By nine o’clock he was exhausted from trying to cheer Cole up. He left with the key to Cole’s room at the Tyler Motor Inn, since it was already paid for.
The place was a dump, plywood walls and threadbare carpets, third-hand furniture and no tv. Alex called home, collect, and gave his parents an update. After that he went through the closet and drawers to get an idea of how Cole had been living. The evidence was slim—western shirts and boots, a well-thumbed copy of Playboy, the guitar sitting out ready for use, a few paperbacks, a transistor radio, the funky green tape recorder, his Chevelles notebook, two warm beers in the ice chest. Alex packed the beers in fresh ice for later. No photos, no letters, no diary, nothing else to say who lived here. A few inches or a few seconds’ difference and Cole could have been killed along with his friend Jerry, and this was all he would have left behind.
Alex picked up the guitar and sat on the bed, plucking idly through a blues progression. This could be five years from now, he thought. Me and Cole on the road with whatever band we’re in by then. Cole next door with some chick he’d picked up at the gig. Maybe mine’s in the bathroom getting ready. Tomorrow morning they’d be on a plane to the next stop.
That was all easy enough to imagine. The hard part was going to be the next four weeks.
*
For Madelyn, 1966 was the summer of Marat/Sade. Her father managed to put aside enough money to fly them both to New York in late June; to put them up for two nights at the Empire Hotel on Columbus Circle, where she passed Leslie Caron in the lobby; and to get them two mezzanine tickets for the show on Broadway.
How utterly like him. He had conceived a need to see the show and simply assumed that she would want the same thing. She did, of course, but because the idea was her father’s, a price had to be paid. By means of the interlibrary loan system, he’d obtained a copy of the script in the original German and informed her that she was to give him a four-page, typed report that detailed the most significant differences between it and the English translation.
Not that it hadn’t been worth it. From the minute she touched down at jfk, which she still thought of as Idlewild, she felt she was in the real world at last, to which Dallas was only the shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave. They saw the Guggenheim, moma, and the Met while her father lectured the entire time. At the Met they accumulated a small crowd who thought he was a professional, and when he told them at the end that tips were accepted, he took in enough to pay for that night’s dinner.
They ate bread and cheese lunches in Central Park the first day, and on the steps of St. Patrick’s the second. Her one shopping trip was to the Drama Book Store on 7th Avenue in Times Square, where she spent thirty dollars of accumulated babysitting money and could easily have spent twice that. They did walk down 5th Avenue, “as an object lesson,” her father said, like their brief glance into St. Patrick’s.
And then there was the play. The theater was substantially smaller than the Inwood movie theater in Dallas, the velvet of the chairs threadbare, the aisles cramped. Not that it mattered. Nothing had prepared her for the intensity of the performance, which left her febrile and physically exhausted, eyes swollen from crying, unable to keep her hands from trembling when she remembered the chorus of voices singing, “We want our revolution… now!”, so clearly a sham within a sham, neither about the French Revolution nor de Sade’s anarchic disruptions of the asylum but about the Watts riots and the Kennedy assassination and the war in Vietnam, and because she was watching it in New York, which was so enchantingly real, the imminence of an authentic and violent revolution was that much more terrifyingly, excitingly real.
They stood for a while outside the theater afterward, her in a royal blue cotton jersey halter dress that skimmed her body, her father in his slightly shabby brown pinstripe suit, and for once he had nothing to say, instead merely stood with his hands in his pockets, a faint glow of satisfaction in his face. This, then, was the power of great art: it could even silence her father.
And the one other thing. For the first time in her life, for those two days in New York, men turned to look at her. And for the rest of the summer, in the Tom Thumb or the library or cruising
Forest Lane with Hope, with increasingly frantic songs on the radio from Love and the Yardbirds and the 13th Floor Elevators, as the world accelerated into a strange and confrontational future, she saw that her own changes were also accelerating, from girl to woman, teenager to adult, and sometimes, in the middle of reading or eating or watching tv, she would catch herself holding her breath.
*
Eight days out of the hospital, Cole had been exactly eight days with no sleep. During the day he was exhausted and stupid, clumsy and temperamental. At night he lay with eyes jammed open, legs twitching, hand throbbing, mind racing. Two or three times he drifted off and found himself on the rig, alone, in a weird yellow light. He would look up to see the bright chain writhing in mid-air like a snake, Jerry above it, spread-eagled, arms and legs moving in slow motion, his mouth working as he tried to tell Cole something terribly important.
Then Cole would jerk awake and lie panting, heart pounding, still trying to make sense of a message that was no message at all.
Or he would see Corrina in a crowd, walking away, and he would strain to chase after her with paralyzed muscles. Or it would be the spiral again in the vast, cold emptiness, and he would fight his way back to consciousness from that one, like pulling himself to the surface of a swimming pool with weights tied to his feet.
The hospital had sent him home with Demerol tablets, which did nothing at all. If he’d known where to get heroin, he would not have hesitated. But he was 16 years old, white, middle class, in Dallas, Texas. He might as well have been on the moon.
He’d had a couple of hours of relief on Saturday, when his parents had gone out to a company function and Cole had downed two shots of 100-proof vodka. He still hadn’t slept, but for a while he didn’t feel like his skin had been peeled off.
Monday, at last. Cole was sitting in an office in the Baylor Medical complex that looked like it had been slowly deteriorating since the 1920s. Green linoleum worn nearly through at the doorways, cracked brown leather exam tables, metal cabinets with outsize chrome handles.
