by Lewis Shiner
Most evenings he would watch the boarding house tv for an hour or two with the landlady’s cat in his lap. He had emerged into a different world. The war was over and Congress was talking about impeaching Nixon over Watergate. The men on tv had hair over their collars and the women were blatantly sexual. A show about doctors in Korea was an obvious allegory for Vietnam. In another show, a half-Chinese guy in the Old West spouted Taoist sayings and reluctantly kicked people’s asses with martial arts. Cole’s generation had become a desirable demographic. He thought of Sirocco and how much she would hate the pandering.
On weekends he read novels from the library, played guitar, and caught up on the sleep that he seemed unable to get enough of. In good weather he would walk for three or four hours at a time. One Sunday in late October he hitchhiked out to the deserted roadside stand and turned up the long dirt road to Eden Farm. The day was cloudy, dry, and cool enough for the new, dark-gray windbreaker he’d bought two weeks before. The chained and padlocked gate was easy enough to climb over. The front door of the Big House was unlocked, and the furniture was gone, upstairs and down, except for the table in the office. Somebody had sawn it in half, with the apparent intention of carrying it out.
He went out the back door and it took him a second to realize that the thing he was missing was the tepee. He wondered where it had ended up. Most of the other structures he’d built were gone, down to the concrete slabs, in the cases where they’d bothered to pour one. Piles of lumber lay here and there, cleaned of nails and ready to be carted off.
The fields were dry and yellow, the last crop of soybeans rotting on the vine. Cole walked as far as the orchard and picked a few apples that the birds and bugs hadn’t gotten at too badly. On the back stoop of the house, he ate one of the apples and wondered where those four years had gone. He had nothing to show for them. He remembered how cold the house had been in the depths of winter, how hard it had been to get up at 5:30 and throw his work clothes on his shivering body, to eat beans and eggs and tortillas and get in one of the farm’s barely-running school buses for the half-hour drive into town and the long, cold day on the job site. He remembered the hot, airless nights in the summer when the only thing he wanted in the world was a box fan in his window, when, after dozing off repeatedly in the fields all day, he found himself unable to sleep in the relentless heat. He remembered the endless Sunday morning meetings and a woman named Pat who, every time things wound down, always had one more niggling question.
Then he thought about putting his tools in the barn at the end of a day’s work, relief in sight for his fatigue and hunger, and feeling another man’s hand on his shoulder in wordless communion. He remembered an afternoon riding home from Wytheville on the bus when somebody had started singing the lick from “Sunshine of Your Love,” and somebody else began drumming on the back of the seat, and then everybody on the bus fell in, Cole and another guy singing the lead guitar solo in harmony, the whole thing boisterous and largely out of tune and altogether intoxicating. Or one of the kids he’d watched grow from infant to toddler to miniature human coming to him and asking him to read The House at Pooh Corner. Sitting in a field before dawn on the summer solstice with fifty other people, panting the Kundalini Breath of Fire, feeling like they were pulling the sun up over the horizon with the power of their lungs. The incendiary conversations that would spring up out of nowhere about Kierkegaard or blacksmithing or ufos or acupuncture or chess or numerology or the Dhammapada, as sharp minds made agile by psychedelics fearlessly attacked the eternal questions of the universe.
If happiness, as Sirocco had once postulated, was the ability to appreciate the things in front of you—the clean taste of winter wind, the texture of a wooden spoon, the whisper of your own body turning under cotton sheets—without being overly impinged upon by regrets or anxieties, without being twisted up by anger or needy romantic love, then Cole had been happy, for the first time in his life, for four long years.
Before, loneliness had meant being without a woman. This was an altogether different and insoluble hurt.
*
On Thanksgiving the diner closed early and Cole let a waitress named Sandy take him back to her trailer. She was 28 to Cole’s 23, black-haired, wide in the hips and narrow in the shoulders. She smoked Camel filters and the trailer smelled of old smoke and perfume. She’d been married young and divorced young, had wanted to go to veterinary school and never had the money. She fed a collection of stray cats that she’d named Tammy, Loretta, Dolly, George, and Hank. Cole stayed there for two days as they tried to chase each other’s sadness away, grateful for the warmth of each other’s bodies, unable to connect any other way.
A week before Christmas, five days before his 24th birthday, Cole finally broke down and called the Montoya house in Dallas. He stood at the pay phone in the diner with a stack of change, feeling Sandy’s reproachful gaze on him as he dialed.
Alex’s mother answered and he said, “It’s Cole.”
“Cole? My God, is it really you?”
“Yeah,” he said, feeling something in his chest relax. “It’s really me.” He gave her a thirty second summary, mentioning the pay phone. She called him back, put Montoya on the extension, and went to wake Alex up. Susan got on too and told him she’d been worried about him and wished him a happy birthday and merry Christmas. Cole sat on the edge of a banquette next to the phone and talked to Alex for half an hour, trying to absorb all the changes—Alex as radical, Alex as filmmaker, Alex in New York, Alex in love. And Madelyn was in New York too.
“Does she hate me?” Cole asked.
“Madelyn? No, she doesn’t hate you. She has the right. Pulling that disappearing act, that was cold. You cost her a lot of pain that she didn’t deserve.”
“I need to see her.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I can call her and see if she’s willing to talk—”
“No,” Cole said. “I have to surprise her, face to face. It’d be too easy for her to blow me off on the phone.”
Cole was determined and he knew Alex’s weaknesses. Five minutes later he was writing Madelyn’s address on the back of a napkin.
Before he could hang up, Alex said, “Hang on a sec, Mom wants to talk to you again.”
Cole knew what was coming and it left him with a sick, fluttery feeling in his stomach.
“Cole,” she said, “I’m going to call your mother and tell her I heard from you. I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. They’ve both been worried sick for more than four years now.”
“Yeah,” he said, “okay.” Then, grudgingly, “Thanks.”
“Your father’s changed. Two years ago the company tried to move him to Houston and he refused. He told them he’d moved enough and they could fire him if they wanted. They gave in. But the real reason? The real reason was your mother didn’t want to give up the last connection she had with you, which was the house you used to live in. She still keeps your room the way it was when you left.”
Cole didn’t have it in him to give her the reaction she wanted. “Is she all right?”
“All things considered. I call her every couple of months to check up. She kind of shut down when you disappeared. I’m hoping this will give her a jump start.” She paused. “Is there… anything you want me to say to them?”
“I don’t think so,” Cole said.
By six the next morning he had closed out his bank account, settled up with his landlady, returned his books to the library, packed a knapsack, put the Silvertone in its cardboard case, and hit the road.
*
As soon as Madelyn understood that it was in fact Cole, back in her life, her first reaction was disappointment. Her second was guilt; did she really want him to have been a John Doe cremation somewhere? The third was anger: He’d been alive all this time and hadn’t had the human decency to let her know? The fourth was fear; what if he were mentally ill? The fifth was horror. This ragged, pathetic, homeless person had been lurking inside Cole the entire time they�
��d been together, waiting to emerge.
She tried to keep the reluctance out of her voice as she said, “Come on upstairs. You must be freezing.”
“Thank you,” he said, watching her with needy, anxious eyes.
They rode up the elevator together. He didn’t have the sharp, vinegary odor of the hardcore homeless, though he was clearly not fresh out of the shower either. She wasn’t ready to ask the big questions yet, so she said, “Does anybody else know where you are?”
“I talked to Alex last week.” As she digested the implications, he said, “I made him promise not to call you.”
She saw that impulse control was going to be required; better to seem cold and distant than to lash out with sarcasm. She unlocked her apartment door and said, “Take the boots off, please, so you don’t track snow in.” She put her own boots on the newspaper by the door and left Cole to struggle with his. “Want some coffee or tea?”
“Herbal tea, if you have it.” He got the boots off, hung his Army surplus parka on the back of the door, and perched tentatively on the edge of the couch. He wore a gray zip jacket over a flannel shirt; his hands were in his armpits, and he stared at the rug under his feet. He was both Cole and Not Cole at the same time.
She put the kettle on and found pâté, a block of cheddar, and half a salami in the fridge. She put a baguette in the oven and it was warm by the time the kettle shrilled. When she set the tray on the coffee table, Cole hadn’t changed his submissive posture. She sat in the overstuffed chair with her feet under her. “Herbal tea?” she said, trying to keep it light. “Since when do you drink herbal tea?”
“I spent the last four years on a commune,” he said.
She shook her head. “What? How—”
He told her about Woodstock, backing up and starting over a few times to get an adequate level of detail, interrupting himself frequently to eat cheese and bread. Madelyn nibbled on the pâté and sausage, which she noticed Cole hadn’t touched. She saw that he was more muscular now, tanned and fit. She tried to tune out his physicality, her memories of their bodies together. As antidote she reminded herself of the cruelty of his disappearance, the loneliness of their marriage.
Cole was clearly uncomfortable with the clichés of betrayal: I met someone, my defenses were down, it was “mostly” physical, whatever that meant. None of it was a surprise, except for the power it had to hurt her. Still. Again.
The sex part she at least understood. Cole’s motivation for joining the commune, for staying on after his new girlfriend went home, above all for not contacting anyone to let them know he was alive, remained slippery. The gist seemed to be that, between the breakup of their marriage and the failure of the band, he was too hurt to go on.
Some of us, Madelyn thought, were hurt and went on anyway.
He asked about the gallery and her family. He told her repeatedly how good she looked and she did not reciprocate. When he awkwardly asked if she were seeing anyone, she told him, politely and firmly, that he had hurt her really, really badly and it would take some time before she was willing to talk to him about her personal life. He was suitably chastised and, she thought, a bit disappointed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I hurt you.”
She said, “It’s over and done.” She was about to add something trite about forgiveness and Christmas, and that triggered a memory. “Oh dear God,” she said. “It’s your birthday.”
He smiled ruefully. “Yeah.”
She asked herself how she would behave if she were truly over him, with no bitterness or residual desire, if they had managed to salvage a friendship with nothing but good intentions for one another. “All right, then,” she said. “We’re going to go out and celebrate.”
She determined that he was in fact now vegetarian and that he was fine with Italian. He asked if he could shower and borrow some scissors to trim his beard. While he was doing that she called Amici ii and got an early reservation.
Except for Cole’s refusal to consider clams vegetables, ruling out the Linguine Con Vongole, dinner was a big success, complete with checkered tablecloth, Louis Prima on the sound system, and signed celebrity photos on the wall. They split a bottle of wine, with Madelyn carefully limiting herself to a single glass. By means of somewhat greater efforts on both their parts, they managed to tell each other funny stories all the way through dinner, then walked back to her apartment in the cold to work off the starch overdose, low clouds making the city for once almost human in its proportions.
Back in the apartment, Madelyn was all raw nerves. She went to make more chamomile tea. Cole came up behind her and held her by her upper arms. She bowed her head. “Cole, no,” she said. She could hardly hear herself over the beating of her heart, the rushing water in the sink. “I’m not going back to what we were. I’m not. It’s been a long struggle, and, and I’m not going back, that’s all.” Words, ever her most trusted tools, had failed her.
Cole took his hands away. “Okay,” he said sadly.
She turned off the faucet and faced him. “You can sleep on the couch tonight. I’ve got Alex’s spare key, and he’ll be in Dallas for another two weeks, so you can stay there until you figure out your next move.”
“Okay,” he said, and smiled. The beard emphasized the softness of his eyes. “Thank you. It was the best birthday dinner I can remember.”
*
Cole woke early, the shortness of Madelyn’s couch quickly reminding him where he was. He looked across the room to where she slept in the position he knew so well, on her side, arms crossed, hands on opposite shoulders. He felt an upwelling of love. Her forgiveness was more than he had any right to expect, and he was content for the moment to have won that much.
He performed a quick mental audit. Last night Madelyn had told him that she had taken her rightful half of the money from their joint account and left him the rest. Combined with the cashier’s check he’d bought in Wytheville in the amount of $812.79, he would have a few months with no financial pressure. He wouldn’t have to buy new equipment—she had also shipped his guitars, his amp, his stereo, and three boxes of clothes and records for Alex to store in the basement of the Castle. Her generosity had left him mute.
In addition, he had a hundred dollars in small bills, distributed between his wallet, various pockets, and his boots. He had not bought a record or a book in four years. It was Christmas Eve and he meant to go shopping.
After a hurried but friendly breakfast with Madelyn, he stopped by Alex’s apartment to drop off his guitar and knapsack. From there he walked to the West Village and spent four hours in record stores. He knew he would have to hit the road soon, and promised himself he wouldn’t buy more than five albums, and in the end he only went over by two. He started with the first Santana album, only needing a few seconds to verify that it was the same songs and the same sound he’d heard at Woodstock. Boz Scaggs had split from Steve Miller, and though the clerk pushed his Atlantic debut, Cole fell immediately in love with his second, Moments. Boz had put a jazz pianist together with a country guitar player and a horn section that could have come off a Stax session in Memphis, and, as with Santana, Cole knew where all the pieces had come from, but the way they fit together was brand-new and sounded like the future. Led Zeppelin had put out four more records since the one Cole had bought in January of ’69, and Cole went with the clerk’s recommendation of Houses of the Holy. He was partly swayed by the beautifully weird album cover, but mostly by the music, which had matured into something that was textured and nuanced one minute and a sledgehammer the next, as contemptuous of 4/4 time as it was of Western modality. At a used shop he found a pristine copy of a solo album called Ennismore by Colin Blunstone, produced by fellow former Zombies Rod Argent and Chris White. Like so much of the music he was hearing, it was based on acoustic guitar, in this case sold by Blunstone’s breathy, emotional vocals. At Village Oldies they played something Cole had never heard before, a Jamaican band called The Wailers doing a rough, hypnotic music with
an irresistible backbeat on an album called Catch a Fire that was primal and new at the same time. The owner looked through the other records in his bag and sold him on a new singer named Jimmie Spheeris and an album called Isle of View, a jazzy, soulful kind of folk-rock. At the last record store he hit, as he was trying to decide between Dave Mason’s Alone Together and Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, the clerk convinced him instead to go for The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle by a John Hammond discovery named Bruce Springsteen, some kind of crazed Dylan fan who warbled and howled and played gorgeous lead guitar over everything from accordions to tubas to more acoustic guitar and jazz piano.
Eden Farm had owned an am/fm transistor radio like the one Cole had in high school. After a few months, Cole had stopped listening, believing that it only made him want things he couldn’t have. Now, with an overdose of new music burning through his synapses, he felt the way he had so many times when dumped into a new school—left out, unwanted, hopelessly behind. He was afraid to measure himself against what he’d heard on these new records, both musicianship and the sheer inventiveness. At the same time, he knew he would have to try.
His frenzy of capitalist consumption left him with nagging guilt and a bit of nausea, as if he’d binged on Snickers bars. Hoping it was just hunger, he grabbed a slice of pizza and walked up to Macy’s on 34th Street, then down to the Strand bookstore, where he found two new Matt Helm novels and a pair of Joe Galls.
He hurried to Alex’s apartment to listen to his records, only to discover that Alex no longer had a stereo, or records, or much of anything except cans of tomato soup, a musty unmade bed, and piles of textbooks.
He called Madelyn’s work number from the downstairs phone. “Sorry, I forgot to warn you,” she said. “He left his stereo in Texas and sold off most of his records because he thought they’d get stolen.”
