by Lewis Shiner
“Oh.” Cole could hear the disappointment in his own voice.
Madelyn sighed. “You can listen at my place. Come by the gallery and get my key. And I know it’s Christmas Eve, but you really need to stay at Alex’s place tonight. Okay?”
“Sure,” Cole said. “This means… this means a lot. Thank you.”
*
When Madelyn rang the bell for her apartment, Cole didn’t answer at first, and she had a moment of panic; she had hated to let go of her key, even knowing that Cole’s particular irresponsibility was not of the material sort. At last he buzzed her in. When she got to the apartment, he had left the door ajar for her and he was sitting cross-legged in front of the turntable with his acoustic guitar, playing and singing along with an up-tempo song in a minor key about running from the sun and catching the rain. Cole’s voice blended with the singer’s, and yet Madelyn would have known it anywhere; she had to stand in the doorway for a moment and hold tightly to the frame to get her feelings under control.
The click of the closing door made Cole turn. His eyes shone as he said, “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is.” She hung up her coat. Her better judgment told her to send him away, now. Common courtesy, and a long loneliness, only now making itself apparent, instead sat her on the floor near him and said, “Show me what you bought.”
He was patient when he explained who the various singers were, admitting that half of them he’d never heard of until a few hours ago. He was surprised that she’d heard of Springsteen and pleased that she remembered the Zombies, but it was Boz Scaggs that he wanted to play for her, a record that from the first line threatened to hit too close to home: “We were always sweethearts, different in our ways.”
“Do you want some wine?” Madelyn said, getting to her feet to shake off the warm, intimate glow that had seeped out of the speakers and suffused the room.
“I should probably go,” Cole said. “I promised I wouldn’t hang around.”
The idea of spending Christmas Eve alone suddenly seemed depressing and a little ridiculous. “It’s okay,” Madelyn said. “Stay for dinner. We can get Chinese takeout around the corner.”
They drank a glass of wine each, and when the record was over they brought home the food and Madelyn set out plates and bowls on the table. They listened to another of Cole’s new records while they ate and drank more wine. Madelyn realized she was feeling it more than she should. At the same time she felt in control and comfortable and happier than she’d been in a while; she wasn’t ready for it to end.
The wine made her open up. She’d been talking about Alex’s obsession with Callie Janus and how that had led to the unfortunate show at the gallery, and Cole said, “Still, you’re making it work. You set yourself this incredibly ambitious goal and by this summer you’ll have your master’s. That’s really amazing. Whereas I got to where I was going and it all fell apart.”
She ignored the invitation to feel sorry for him and said, “It’s not what I wanted. It’s what Ben wanted for me. It’s not even a compromise; it’s a completely different life. Between work and classes I don’t have time to see any plays or read any novels. I want to teach English and study literature, not listen to a lot of intellectually rigorous defenses for emotionally bankrupt art.”
She poked at her lo mein with cheap wooden chopsticks. Her own words shocked her; she hadn’t realized how much she’d been hiding from herself.
She had also surprised Cole. “I didn’t know,” he said.
“Sorry,” Madelyn said. “I guess that’s been building for a while.”
“There’s nothing you can do?”
“Not without breaking my promise to Ben. And anyway, it’s not so bad most of the time. It’s just…”
“Yeah,” Cole said. “’Tis the season of disappointment.”
“I so wanted to be in Dallas for Christmas. I mean, I know people are starving in Biafra and Bangladesh, and sometimes it feels really selfish, but… do I have to give up everything that makes me happy? Am I not allowed to have any fun at all?” She couldn’t meet Cole’s eyes, which she knew would be warm and sympathetic. “Is it worth making all these sacrifices to not even get what I really want?”
Cole reached across the table and took both her hands. She squeezed back, then, feeling the heat rise in her cheeks, she pulled away and forced herself to take another bite of fried rice. “The record’s over,” she said.
After dinner they sat on the floor by the stereo and Cole handed her a small, gift-wrapped box. “Oh no,” she said.
“It’s nothing, really.”
“I didn’t get you anything.”
“It doesn’t matter. Go ahead, open it.”
Inside a forest green Macy’s box, nestled in cotton, was a pair of 14K gold earrings shaped like sea shells. “Oh no,” she said again.
“You don’t like them.”
“They’re beautiful. It’s too much…”
“They’re not quite the right shape, but I wanted to make up to you for the clams you didn’t get last night because of me.”
She stood up, wobbling a bit, and tried them on in front of the mirror by the door. They were very much her style, delicate, elegant. While she was admiring them, Cole’s face appeared in the mirror behind her. “How do they look?” she said.
His eyes were shining again. “Beautiful,” he whispered.
This time when he put his hands on her shoulders she didn’t say no.
*
She woke up disoriented, her buttocks glued to the sheets with dried semen, sour wine on her breath, Cole snoring gently next to her in the too-small bed. With growing horror she remembered details: her clothes falling to the floor seemingly without human agency and her making no attempt to stop them; the softness of his beard surrounding his familiar kisses; his mouth between her legs, making her crazy with pleasure; him inside her, whispering that he loved her; her hands in his hair, digging into his back, feeling how the manual labor had transformed his body, his biceps hard and smooth as marble; her own voice saying yes again and again.
She crawled out of bed and huddled, freezing, on the toilet. She felt as if she’d finally gotten out of prison, only to somehow end up in a 7-Eleven with a gun in her hand. Or like she’d suddenly found herself at the track with a handful of losing tickets that had cost her life savings. The last year of her marriage unspooled in her head: the cold, echoing apartment when he was on the road; the times he was home and she saw nothing of him but an unconscious body and dirty dishes in the sink; the jealousy he awoke in her, the poisonous silences, those first months after Woodstock when she lay awake imagining him injured somewhere, lost, broken, helpless, because of her rejection.
On top of everything else, she hadn’t been on the Pill in over a year.
She sat on the edge of the tub and washed herself repeatedly, thinking, I should have left him in the snow. She hated herself more than him because he was what he always had been and she should have known better.
She took a hot shower and wrapped herself in towels and moved around the apartment in the dark, putting on clean underwear and jeans and a sweater and thick wool socks and finally curling up on the couch in a blanket. She believed in God, even if she couldn’t quite picture him in her mind, and rarely made time for church; she could feel his presence out there, floating above the world, and she begged him to just let her get past this awful moment, and she wouldn’t ask anything ever again.
*
It had snowed overnight and Cole could see it in the muted, colorless sunlight and hear it in the hush from the streets. He had a few blissful moments before he realized that he was alone in the bed and that Madelyn was huddled on the couch with her back to him.
He got dressed as quietly as he could. Madelyn must have heard him because he saw her pull even further into herself and tug at the blanket. He knelt on the floor next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. He felt the tension through the layers of fabric and it went up hi
s arm and into his stomach.
“Madelyn? What’s wrong?”
“Just go away, Cole. Please. Just go away.”
“What did I do?”
She turned over, holding the blanket to her neck. “I told you I didn’t want to go back. Remember?”
“This isn’t back,” he said. “This is forward. We’re different now, older…” He couldn’t continue when confronted with the bleakness in her swollen, bloodshot eyes.
“It’s over, Cole. It was over before you went to Woodstock.”
“It wasn’t over last night. I know what you were feeling last night.”
“Desperate. I was lonely and desperate and stupid.”
That one, Cole thought, was going to sting later. “I know I hurt you. I know it’s scary to give me another chance. But who knows you better than me? Don’t run away from us, from what we can be.”
Carefully emphasizing each word in turn, she said, “I don’t want you here.”
“If you send me away now…”
“What?” she said. “I’ll never see you again? That’s what I’m asking you for.”
It was like he’d switched off his Twin Reverb at the end of a gig. A red light went out inside him and a steady background hum that he hadn’t been aware of faded to silence. He gathered up his records and put his guitar in its cardboard case and put his boots on, and his layers of jackets. With one hand on the door knob he looked back and saw that Madelyn had turned away and pulled the blanket over her head.
He spent a few of his remaining dollars on a bus ticket to Newark, where he could pick up I-95. Christmas Day. Maybe somebody would be moved by the spirit of the season.
He had the bus nearly to himself, so he snuck the guitar out of the case and played it so quietly that his fingers barely touched the strings, making just enough sound to quiet the voices in his head. They’d been on him since he closed Madelyn’s apartment door, full of self-pity and I-told-you-so, lousy Christmases past and empty futures.
The driver let him off near the I-95 on-ramp, where he stood in the half-melted slush for an hour and a half before a pale-yellow Cadillac wobbled onto the shoulder and the front passenger window powered down. Cole ran over and saw a man inside in a tie and a cashmere overcoat, fifties, dark thinning hair.
“Where you headed?” the man asked.
Without thinking, surprising himself, Cole said, “Tupelo. Tupelo, Mississippi.”
1974
Joe was watching Darrel Royal’s Longhorns get their asses handed to them by Nebraska in the third quarter of the Cotton Bowl. He didn’t sit around all day brooding about ut, but on the other hand, he didn’t mind seeing them cut down to size either. That was when the doorbell rang.
“Who on earth can that be?” his mama said and went to answer, kindly pretending not to notice the way Joe jumped at the sound of the bell. His daddy gave one of his sidelong looks from his Barcalounger so Joe would know that he in fact did notice, and then turned the volume up with the remote that never left his hand so that the Pontiac Firebird commercial would drown out whatever was happening at the front door.
Joe got up and stood in the shadows behind the door, wondering what it would feel like if it was Denise. She still wrote every six months or so, and he still sent her letters back unopened, though lately he had to work himself up to it and his curiosity was starting to itch him some.
The tv was loud all right, and Joe couldn’t hear the words of whoever it was on the porch, only the tenor of the voice, which was male and familiar, and he didn’t know who it was until his mama said, “That’s right, they just call you Cole, don’t they?” and Joe understood that he would have to make a decision. “I’m sorry,” his mama said, “but Joe doesn’t want to see anyone he used to know,” which was the line he’d instructed her to say if anybody from his past showed up, but he hadn’t thought it would be Cole, and suddenly he thought, what the hell.
“It’s okay,” Joe said. “Let him in.”
His mama hesitated, the way a dog will when you tell it to get up on the couch that’s always been forbidden. Joe took himself a deep breath and stepped into the light from the door and said, “Hello, Cole.”
He wasn’t sure he would have recognized Cole without the warning. All tanned and beefed-up, hair to his shoulders, neatly trimmed beard, somewhat the worse for lack of sleep and looking older around the eyes, wearing an Army parka and gi surplus knapsack, which Joe hated to see for a couple of reasons. Big smile, though, when he reached out to hug him, saying, “Tupelo! It’s so good to see you.”
Joe let himself be hugged, slapped Cole on the back a couple of times, and said, “Good to see you too, man.”
Joe took him into the kitchen where Cole piled his guitar and pack and jacket in the corner while his mama hovered over him, trying to get him to eat some leftover Christmas turkey, while he tried to explain to her that he was a vegetarian, which was not a word in his mama’s vocabulary. Pretty funny, really, and Joe let the two of them work it out, which ended up with Cole accepting a cup of coffee and a slice of chess pie.
“Delicious,” Cole said, after his first bite. “Why do they call it chess pie?”
“Nobody knows,” Joe said. “Thank you, Mama, me and Cole’ll be all right now.”
She dried her hands on a dishtowel and smiled nervously. “Y’all holler if you need anything.”
When she was gone, Cole said, “Shouldn’t I meet your father?”
“Later.”
“So how the hell are you? Are you all right? Nobody’s heard anything from you since the spring of 1969.”
“I’m fine,” Joe said, “but you ain’t exactly one to talk. Denise called my mama that fall looking for you.”
“Yeah. I kind of fell off the planet for a while there. But nobody was shooting at me. What was it like over there?”
Stupidest question in the world, and folks could not keep themselves from asking it. Like you could describe it in 25 words or less. “I don’t talk about it.” He tried to keep his voice even, though he heard the cold edge in it.
“At least tell me that you’re okay physically, that you don’t have a wooden leg under those jeans or anything.”
“I got a little shrapnel in my ass when a guy behind me stepped on a mine, that’s all.” That had been falling back from Happy Valley, southwest of Da Nang, October 1970. The monsoons had started and the gray, pounding rains had left them all on the careless side, and for weeks afterwards, long after he’d gotten out of the field hospital, there had been this tiny scared voice in his head saying, “That could have been me,” over and over. He remembered, like it had just happened, hitting the ground and hearing the pieces of pfc Emmett Washington slap into the mud around him, raw meat falling with the rain.
Joe carefully visualized the image as an 8 ✕ 10 glossy and folded it in half, plain white on the other side, folded it again and put it into a wall safe, closed the door and spun the dials, and covered it up with a painting of trees hung with Spanish Moss that was hinged into the wall.
“That’s been healed up now for a good long while,” Joe said. “I got the gi Bill when I come out, and I went to Ole Miss over to Oxford and finished my ba last year. Now I’m going for my Juvenile Delinquent degree.” Cole looked confused, so Joe said, “jd? Juris Doctor? That’s law school to you, hippie.”
Cole shook his head. “Crazy, man. Listen, can we, like, go drive around for a while or something? I feel like we can’t really talk here.”
“Drive around?” Joe said. “Drive around? Where you been? The North Pole? There’s a gas crisis, son. People don’t just ‘drive around’ these days.”
“Okay, how about walk around?”
Joe was starting to wish he hadn’t let Cole in. That was the way of impulse decisions, you ended up regretting them like as not. He could have been watching football and digesting turkey and maybe dozing off in front of the tv, and now instead he was getting a mental slide show from not one but two sets of memories, the Nam, which
was always there, and Denise, who he had pretty much managed to not think about for a while, plus he was going to have to parade around in the cold besides.
Joe put on his old brown hunting jacket and some boots and they went outside. Out here on the north end of town it was all big ranch-style houses on big ragged lots, two-lane asphalt roads, no sidewalks. Lawns all brown, tall hardwood trees all bare. It was maybe 50 degrees with low-hanging clouds and a pestering breeze.
“One thing I never understood,” Joe said, “is why is it y’all wear Army clothes? You’re supposed to be against war and for individuality and doing your own thing, and then y’all wear our uniforms. Is it some kind of mockery or something?”
Cole smiled. “I guess the main reason ‘we-all’ do it is because it’s cheap.”
Even with the long hair and all, Cole still had that charm thing going on, and it was hard for Joe to keep fighting it. “Where’d you disappear to, anyways?”
To a commune in Virginia, turned out to be the answer. From how Cole described it, it was like being in the Corps in some ways. There was the lousy hours, the being out in the weather all the damn time, the same boring chow every day. There was the comradeship. There was the selflessness.
Just now Cole had been in New York City, trying to get back together with Madelyn, and she’d let him do it one night and the next day thrown him out, which Cole was pretty busted up about. Joe asked him what was next.
“Back to Austin, I guess. Maybe start another band. What about you? You’re going to be a lawyer like your old man?”
“Nah. Politics.”
“Are you serious?”
“Why not? Nixon made me ashamed to be American. We got to show the world that we’re not all like that. Hell, maybe I can stop us from getting into the next war.”
Joe stopped where Lakeshire met Van Street and pointed east by southeast. “Yonder about three miles is the house where Elvis was born. That’s more of an outing than I’m up for today, and it ain’t nothing but a shotgun shack with too many coats of white paint. There’s a pocket-size lake due south, and west and south of here half a mile is the Bel Air golf course, nine holes, par thirty-six, pretty nice.”
