Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

“Because you could turn it around and say, ‘You got me falling free,’ and that way you don’t have to cheat to get it to fit the rhythm. And then the name could be Laura Lee.”

  “Which sounds like Lorelei, which is like some German legend or something.”

  “Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Alex said. “Lorelei Lee was her name.”

  “Yeah, it works,” Cole said. Reluctantly he added, “You should sing lead on the bridge. For contrast. And we should do harmony all the way through.”

  “From the top,” Alex said.

  They’d just gotten to the bridge when the body of the phone suddenly shot across the floor and slammed into the inside of the closet door, followed by his father shouting, “What the hell?”

  “Talk to you tomorrow,” Cole said, and put the receiver in the cradle a split-second before the closet door flew open.

  “What the hell are you doing in here?” his father said. “I just tripped over that phone cord and damn near killed myself.”

  “I was talking to Alex,” Cole said. “I didn’t want to bother you—”

  “Well, I’m sure as hell bothered now. What was so goddamned important that you had to call him at this hour?”

  Cole nearly told him, he was so high from what they’d created. “Just talking about the band.”

  “Get it out of your system, because when school starts I don’t want to see you unless your head is in a textbook. Did you manage to break the phone?”

  “Me?” Cole said. “I wasn’t the one who tripped over it.”

  His father had already squatted down and snatched the receiver. From three feet away, Cole heard the dial tone with relief. Then he saw his father’s face.

  “What did you say?”

  Cole lost his nerve. “Nothing.”

  His father straightened up. “I don’t care much for the attitude you’ve had around here lately.”

  Cole stared at him in disbelief. He had the nerve to criticize Cole’s attitude? After sending him off to get crippled on his fucking oil rig?

  “If you want to keep playing that guitar,” his father said, “I’d better see some improvement, and fast.”

  He tossed the receiver onto the carpet and walked away, leaving the closet door open.

  Cole had no room for coherent thought, only for white-hot rage. He hung up the phone and put it on its shelf. He gathered up his notebook and his guitar and carried them to his room. He locked the door, a small but vital act of provocation. He sat on the bed and slowly, gradually, let the memory of the song, his song, call him back from the edge.

  Finally he picked up the guitar and played “Laura Lee.” The first time through, he was still too angry to pay much attention. By the second time, his father started to fade. He played the song until he couldn’t stand to hear it anymore, and then he copied the revised lyrics onto a fresh sheet of notebook paper and wrote the chords above the words. On a blank line under the title he wrote “(Cole” and then, with only a moment’s hesitation, “/Montoya)”.

  *

  Cole went into the next day’s practice braced for another confrontation with Gary, only to find that Gary had thought up a drum part for the new song. He worked the toms during the verses, punching up the two big accents in each line, and it put the thing into overdrive.

  They went through it three times, with Mike chiming in on harmony on the choruses. After the third time, which he wished he’d gotten on tape, Cole said, “Great drum part, Travis.”

  Gary seemed genuinely touched. “Thanks,” he said. Then, reluctantly, “I stole it from ‘Ticket to Ride.’”

  “Well,” Cole said, “at least we’re robbing the same bank.” Gary laughed, and as he turned back to the mike, Cole saw a look of approval on Alex’s face.

  Maybe, he thought, we can do this.

  *

  Dr. Skinner had written a prescription for exactly three Valium. Cole took one the night before the appointment and the other two an hour before they went in, per instructions. Dr. Skinner sat him on the paper-covered exam table and Cole, sweating, said, “I can’t do this without a shot. The Valium didn’t do anything.”

  Skinner asked Cole’s mother to leave the room. Then he said, “I think in Tyler they gave you too much Demerol. It is very addictive, Demerol, worse than heroin, some say. The first time I saw you, I thought, ‘This young man is in withdrawal.’ Today you are much better. I will not give you something that would start the cycle again.”

  “It hurts,” Cole insisted. “You have no idea how much.”

  “Don’t I?” Skinner said. He gently lifted Cole’s hand in both of his own. He wheeled over a tray table like the one Cole ate from in the hospital and placed Cole’s hand on a folded towel. “Here in this country there is not much hardship, I think, for a family like yours. I would guess you have never really known hunger, not the hunger that comes from not even the possibility of food. As for pain, pain is simply a warning system, like a fire alarm. And sometimes we must have fire drills, when we know it is coming and the warning is for nothing.”

  Skinner clipped the ends of the two wires that emerged from the inside of Cole’s finger. His slightest touch on the wires ignited sparks of pain. Skinner turned the hand over. The button was glued to the skin with dried blood. He dabbed at the blood with a swab, and the chill of the alcohol traveled up Cole’s arm into his chest and stomach. Skinner picked up a pair of needle-nose pliers with one hand and used the other, with surprising strength, to immobilize Cole’s finger. Cole panicked and said, “Wait…” and Skinner ignored him. He gripped the loop of wire that protruded from the button, and a fireball of pain exploded down the right side of Cole’s body as he passed out.

  When he came to, Cole was lying on the exam table, a pillow under his head and his knees propped up. His hand lay on a towel on his chest, the finger lightly wrapped in gauze. A bright dot of blood stared at him from where the button had been.

  His mother held his left hand and Skinner was saying, “… nerves only, nothing more. Ah, there he is now. Do you think you can sit up? Slowly, slowly.”

  Cole was only a little dizzy. His finger felt no worse than if he’d smashed it with a hammer while working in the shop.

  Skinner gave a list of instructions to his mother. The bandage could come off tomorrow, no need for another appointment unless there were signs of infection. The boy should continue exercising it as soon as possible.

  Cole’s head felt clear enough. He got up and walked out and stood in the waiting room, holding his right hand shoulder-high. He heard his mother thank Skinner, then they walked out of the elevators.

  “That was rude, to walk out without saying thank you,” his mother said.

  “He wouldn’t listen to me. Do you think he was a Nazi in the war?”

  “He’s Jewish, dear.”

  Cole, embarrassed, couldn’t make himself stop. “I thought suffering was supposed to make you more compassionate.”

  “Really?” his mother said, looking him in the eyes.

  Cole turned away.

  *

  Madelyn’s fall classes were ap French, Calculus, ap Biology, and for her elective, Mrs. Plumlee’s History and Culture of India. And of course ap English, where they would read Hamlet, Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice, and Shakespeare’s sonnets. No other poetry, no Tolstoy or Stendhal, though The Charterhouse of Parma and the unabridged Garnett translation of War and Peace were both on the list of “recreational” reading her father had given her. Drama club at school; ongoing art history at home, where they were up to the Impressionists. Not to mention the ongoing and less formal classical music quizzes, where she would be expected to identify whatever piece her father was listening to when she happened to walk into his study. Or, during dinner, be expected to match the Köchel number to the Mozart piece, or the date of the premiere to the Haydn symphony.

  Her sister Julia had rebelled early on, seeing the enforced scholarship as a burden rather than a game, or, perhaps, not wanting to com
pete with Madelyn’s two-year head start. Though he clearly loved Julia, and made intermittent attempts to find other ways to be close to her, erudition was the coin of her father’s realm, and Julia resisted all his offers, as his favor increasingly became a wedge between her and Madelyn as well.

  On the first Friday of the new school year, Hope and Madelyn walked out of History and Culture of India together. Hope said, “There’s a party at Brad Potter’s house tomorrow night. I’ll pick you up at eight-thirty.” Brad was a St. Mark’s kid that Hope knew through a cousin’s girlfriend’s brother.

  Madelyn had just looked at slides of untouchables standing in the filthy water of the Ganges at Benares, sorting through the ashes of freshly cremated bodies with fine-meshed nets, hoping to find a gold tooth or nose ring, and was not sure she was in the mood for St. Mark’s boys.

  “There’s going to be a live band,” Hope said. “Free food and probably beer. The boys will outnumber us two to one. If you don’t come, you’re crazy.”

  Thus Madelyn found herself looking down a rolling, grassy hill at a band playing on the patio of a house the size of a museum, set on grounds the size of a state park. Madelyn did not listen to a great deal of rock, given her father’s distaste for it and her own passion for the subtlety and restraint of a good string quartet. However, she did appreciate the way a rock song could free her up and make her move—in the privacy of her own room.

  This band was raw, but if the harmonies were loose here and there, the pitch and the emotions were all firmly in place. The drummer understood his job and she found herself swaying on her feet, risking the attention of predatory boys. She asked Hope, “Who’s the cute guitar player?”

  “The one on the left, or the one on the right?”

  Madelyn sighed. The one on the left was playing bass, a distinction lost on some. “The right.”

  “I’ll go find out,” Hope said. “Don’t wander too far.”

  A number of boys watched Hope make her Amazonian way down the slope, none with the height or the self-confidence to approach her. At the side of the stage, she engaged somebody in a conversation that involved her pointing to the guitar player in question.

  The song stumbled to an end, and over an instrumental interlude, the cute bass player announced that they would be back in fifteen minutes. Madelyn noted, as the guitarist bent to put his instrument on a stand, that he had augmented the band uniform of jeans, white shirts, ties, and navy-blue blazers with a pair of cowboy boots, an uncommon affectation in the current crowd, at least among the younger generation.

  Madelyn took a sip of her Tab and as she lowered the can, she locked eyes with a clean-cut young man with acne and a faint odor of whiskey on his breath who had somehow appeared in front of her. He nodded at the Tab can. “Maybe you’d like a taste of something stronger?”

  Madelyn suppressed the urge to ask, “Than what?” and smiled sweetly. “No, thanks.” She started downhill as Hope was coming up.

  “They’re called the Corvettes or some car name like that,” Hope reported. “The ones on the ends are from St. Mark’s, the other two from Richardson High. The one you like is Cole. I’m led to understand that this is the band’s debut. I have also located the beer. There’s a garbage can in the garage full of Coors and ice. The chaperones are not to know. Are you coming?”

  “You go ahead.”

  Madelyn wandered into the house, pretending not to be looking for this Cole person, instead merely making herself available for some unspecified interesting thing to happen. Outside, the boys wore sport coats and ties, the girls mid-calf dresses from Neiman’s. Here in the den it was mostly adults, the men in open collared dress shirts, the women in slacks and cashmere sweaters. Both generations had gravitated into same-gender clumps.

  In the kitchen, which was large enough to serve a good-sized restaurant, the drummer stood in conversation with somebody’s father, apparently about the stock market; a girl nearly as tall as Hope and wearing a cream-colored dress rummaged casually through the refrigerator.

  A deserted formal living room contained furniture that appeared to have never been sat upon. Madelyn was vaguely tempted to wander down the hall and see what shenanigans might be going on in the bedrooms; instead she turned the other way and continued the half-hearted pursuit of her primary target.

  A plain hollow-core door opened into the double garage, where at least a dozen young people leaned against either the Cadillac coupe or the Buick station wagon, beers in hand. Hope raised hers in salute, darted her eyes toward the far wall, then returned her attention to the football player whose shoulders curled toward her and threatened to split the seams of his jacket.

  Madelyn followed the direction of Hope’s glance to see Cole in conversation with someone next to a rack of lawn implements. She moved closer, keeping her eyes focused elsewhere in attempted misdirection, then risked a long look.

  Cole’s outstretched arm was planted against the wall, very close to the long, dark hair of a pretty girl who had tilted her head down in order to stare up at him through her thick eyelashes in a way Madelyn hoped she herself would never be caught at. And dear God, was that Tabu that she could smell a good five feet away? Cole seemed to be struggling not to look down the front of the girl’s dress, despite the sizable incentives on offer there.

  Madelyn decided she didn’t care how the struggle turned out. She eased out of the garage, through the den, and up the hill. She took a handkerchief out of her purse, spread it on the grass, and settled into a funk, where Hope found her a half hour later.

  “I’m ready when you are,” Madelyn said.

  “Sorry. From what I saw, he was quite charming.”

  “Evidently.”

  “Well, there’s plenty more sharks in the sea.”

  “It’s not just him. It’s the whole sex. Superficial, opportunistic, gutter-minded, fickle, clumsy, obvious…”

  “You could go on.”

  “I could go on.”

  Hope stretched out a hand and pulled Madelyn to her feet. “Good band, though,” Hope said.

  “If you like that sort of thing.” Madelyn snatched up her handkerchief, tossed her empty Tab can at a trash barrel, and began the long walk to the car.

  *

  Cole, to his surprise, was not nervous on stage. The slight tremor in his hands came from excitement, not from fear. He was aware of the mistakes they made at that first gig at Potter’s house, many of them his. They didn’t matter compared to everything else. Alex meeting his gaze across the width of the patio and smiling with joy, Gary bouncing off his drum stool with manic energy, he and Mike and Alex all stepping forward at once to sing the chorus on “Mr. Tambourine Man” as if they had been choreographed. The surge of reckless confidence that hit him halfway through the second set when he saw the gorgeous brunette shaking like a go-go dancer on Shindig and staring right at him. Janet, her name turned out to be, Janet Nichols, with the intoxicating perfume and knowing looks. He already had her phone number in his pocket when, during the break before the last set, they wandered out onto the vast grounds until they found a secluded spot under a weeping willow and Cole pressed her against the trunk of the tree and kissed her with mounting passion until Alex’s voice on the pa called him back. She blew him a kiss as she left, in the middle of “Poison Ivy,” and he watched her until she disappeared in the darkness.

  “Man,” he said to Alex as they drove home, and then realized that he not only didn’t have the words, he didn’t want them.

  “Yeah?” Alex said.

  “Yeah,” Cole said.

  *

  Alex didn’t get to sleep until sometime after 3:30, and when the band gathered at 1:00 Sunday afternoon for practice, the others were equally exhausted and sticky-eyed. Cole immediately started pushing for more gigs, playing for free or next to it to get exposure.

  Gary, as usual, was skeptical. “We’ll never pay off the pa that way.”

  “Once we get tight,” Cole said, “we can raise our prices, start pla
ying at the Studio Club or Louann’s. Get a manager or something.”

  “You’re dreaming,” Gary said. “You need a big break to get to that level. I know guys in great bands who’ve played for years and never gotten noticed.”

  Mike cleared his throat. “Well. The Richardson Jaycees are holding a battle of the bands at the end of October. Johnny Hornet from klif is one of the judges. My old band played in one last year and my dad has some pull with them. But we’d have to get really good in the next month.”

  You could see the whole room light up, like the power coming back after a storm. “Oh, hell yeah,” Cole said.

  Alex felt it too. The air hummed and everything popped into sharp focus, the blood red of his bass guitar, the purplish chocolate of an oil stain on the concrete floor. The hot electronics in the amps gave off a sweet, resinous smell.

  “Gentlemen,” Alex said, “we have some work to do.”

  First they worked on the transitions, playing the end of one song and the start of the next. Then they went over the problem songs from the night before. Alex, like the others, had caught Cole’s mood of urgency, and they quickly began to sweat in the muggy September afternoon. At five, when they called it quits from exhaustion, they agreed that the three singers would meet on Tuesday night to work on harmonies.

  After Gary and Mike were gone, Alex said, “You want a swim?”

  “Is there a beer that goes with it?”

  “I suppose. Drink it in here. No glass by the pool.”

  “No problem.” Cole got a Bohemia from the fridge and drained it in three long pulls.

  They changed into swim trunks and Cole did a couple of racing laps before hanging by his arms next to Alex in the deep end. “My parents are going to some kind of party Saturday night and they’re not going to let me have the car.”

  “Let me guess. This is about the brunette last night.”

  “I’m in love. I need to see her again.”

  He had the same desperate look as he’d had the month before when he talked about Corrina. “No more Rosaline, now it’s Juliet, eh?”