by David Gates
A picnic area appeared: Could she possibly be dreaming it? But he was pointing. She parked under an evergreen, let the seatback down and closed her eyes, feeling her father to her right as a luminous presence.
She woke up to the sound of him snoring. He’d let his seatback down too; they seemed to be side by side in a space capsule. She unfolded the map as quietly as she could. By holding it right up to her face, she saw that at Putnam you could pick up this 395 and go north and then eventually you’d have to end up in, what, New Hampshire probably. The White Mountains. When he came to, she could maybe amuse and mollify him by saying they were now en route to Bretton Woods, for the world conference on what to do about their lives.
—
As they came into Worcester, her father began rolling his head back and forth on the seatback like No no no. He woke up coughing.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“Bad dream. Where are we, anyway?”
“I’m really worried about that cough, Daddy.”
“It’s being dealt with,” he said. “I’m going in for more tests next week.”
“Wait—more tests?”
“Too tedious to go into. Abigail, by the by, knows none of this. Now, where are we?”
“We’re sort of taking a detour. Daddy, how long—”
“What detour?” He touched his watch and its face lit up blue. “We should be almost—”
“I just thought this would be a better thing for us,” she said.
He looked over at her. “Kitten,” he said. “You’re not having a psychotic break?”
“I’m not?” she said. “Good to know.”
“Well,” he said. “Hmm. I’ve clearly missed some excitement. Now, we’re where again?”
“I don’t know. Worcester. I’m sorry, Daddy. We could still—”
“Good God. You know, kitten, if this was a problem for you, you might have said so. Instead of—” He stretched forth a palm at the lights of what must be Worcester. “Now what to do. Louisa is probably—Oh well. I guess I won’t be inviting myself back there in a hurry.”
“Now I feel terrible,” Paige said. “Maybe you should call her?” She reached back to unzip her pack and felt around for her cell.
“Don’t feel terrible, kitten. Nothing’s worth that. Where’s the inside light? Now there I go again.”
—
At the front desk of the Holiday Inn, a young blonde with three rings in each earlobe gave them a very-much-not-my-business smile. Her father asked for a room with two queens and signed them in as Charles Eckhaus and Paige Eckhaus. “And where would be a good place to eat?”
“A good place to eat?” The girl put a finger to her lower lip and pretended to be puzzled. “Maybe New York?”
“Now, what if I were a secret agent from the Greater Worcester Chamber of Commerce?” he said. “Let me rephrase. Where will they not poison us?” Paige saw him give his head that little twist to the side. Once, drunk, he’d let it slip to her that he knew which was his better profile.
“You could try Hot Biscuit Slim. It’s just down—I don’t know, I think three lights? On the left? At least they don’t overcook the pasta.”
“Well,” her father said, “I must say we’ve lucked out in meeting you. And do your gifts extend beyond food criticism?”
“You might be surprised,” she said, then gave Paige such a look: eyes full-on, then dropped as if demurely. Only rarely had Paige thought about other women. But this was a fetching girl. “Enjoy your dinner,” she said.
“What on earth was that?” her father said as Paige unlocked the passenger door.
“Every man’s fantasy, apparently,” Paige said. “She’s probably making up her own key card as we speak.”
“Ah, I doubt that. I’m old enough to be her father. Old enough to be your father.”
Hot Biscuit Slim turned out to have white tablecloths and a pink tulip on each table. The one objectionable thing was Old Glory push-pinned to the wall. That and the line on the menu about roast beef “in its own au jus.” And to be really bitchy, had one not heard enough of Kind of Blue?
The waitress set their drinks down, and her father made Paige clink her Jack Daniel’s to his martini. “Ah,” he said. “This and this alone.” He tapped a finger on the menu. “Have you made up your mind?”
“You are being double-edged,” she said. “Have you?”
“Well, one couldn’t come to Hot Biscuit Slim and not have the pasta. I wonder if they’d do just a simple olive oil and garlic. What about you, kitten?”
“Ooh,” she said. “It all just looks so good I can’t decide.” She made what felt to her like a Betty Boop mouth.
“Oh come now,” he said. “It’s not that bad. Remind me to call Abigail, will you?”
“Here.” She took out her phone. “If she star-sixty-nines you, you won’t have to explain why you’re shacked up at a Holiday Inn in Worcester.”
“You’re always thrusting that thing at me. Anyway, I doubt Abigail is that high-tech a person.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Paige said. She put the phone away and got out her makeup kit. “I have to hit the little girls’.”
“That’s not very nice, kitten,” he said. “Hitting little girls? If you see our waitress, hit her too.”
In the toilet stall, Paige sat, peed for form’s sake, took out her speed and her pretty salt spoon. Even in here, she could still hear John Coltrane reeling off those angry coils of notes. Another of Richard’s big favorites: all these men who went on and on and on. God, this stuff took hold in a hurry—like, how could molecules get to the brain so fast? Unless they penetrated right through like rays, without bothering to take the bloodstream? So embarrassing, though. If somebody heard her snorting away in here, they’d think she was doing coke like some spoiled little Eurotwat.
Back at the table, she raised her glass to her father and took another sip. What the fuck? This wasn’t Jack Daniel’s. She vibed the waitress until she made the bitch turn and look.
—
Driving back to the Holiday Inn, she spied a liquor store and pointed.
“Great minds,” her father said. “Still open, do you think?”
“Great minds are always open,” she said. “It’s their what-do-you-call-it. Hallmark.” She actually better not get much higher. “You know, we could just drive on from here to your friend’s,” she said. “I don’t really want to, necessarily.”
“If I call her again, she’ll think I have Alzheimer’s.” He coughed. “Would you get me a pint of, I don’t know, Tanqueray? No, actually, pints are for rumdums. How about a fifth? I can’t believe I even know the term ‘pint.’ That in itself is a bad sign.” He thrust three twenties at her. “This should be enough to get us each a little something.”
She plucked one. “We’ll go Dutch,” she said. “Speaking of Alzheimer’s. Actually, you know what I love? In Variety, when they say ‘prexy’? Like, ‘So and so, Sony Pictures prexy’?” She shook her head. “Whew. And with that.”
—
Lying on their beds, each propped up with two pillows, they watched Eyes Wide Shut on the pay-movie channel. Paige sipping Jack, her father sipping gin, the plastic ice bucket on the night table between them. The beauty of the ice cubes went to her heart: each cube with a tunnel going through and about ten colors clashing around and adding up to not any color at all. The beauty of the ice bucket too, let’s contemplate that: marbleized plastic, pinks and grays swirling, done very honorably.
Just as canker was a disease of plants and cancer one of animals, so methamphetamine was—well, something like “a vice of the lower classes,” but Paige couldn’t get the phrase to turn. She’d gone out to the car, supposedly to get her CDs, but in fact to sit in the passenger seat and have her really very modest two or three little hits of pot, which she might as well make half a dozen tonight. And good pot too, what Sally called “better living through hydroponics.” But wouldn’t her father smell it on her clothes? No, b
ecause she’d hung the hand holding the pipe out the car window and breathed the smoke out there too, into earth’s atmosphere. True, someone else might have happened by and smelled her at it. But the atmosphere was so vast. It was like, parts per million.
“Why on earth would you be reading Variety?” her father said. Nicole Kidman was pretending to be stoned by looking sleepy and speaking slowly.
Paige had to spit her ice cube into her palm to answer. “What are you talking about?” Cold. This was why they called them ice cubes.
“You said you’d seen something in Variety.”
“I did?”
“Well, I’m not imagining this. I hope.”
She dropped the ice cube back into her glass and wiped her palm on the weirdly smooth synthetic blanket that wetness didn’t seem to penetrate. “Oh. Oh oh oh. Sally? My friend Sally? She sold her book to the movies, and she emailed everybody this thing about it in Variety, and it had all these words like ‘prexy.’ Prexy. I mean, it’s hilarious, right?”
“Ah. See, I was imagining something quite different.” He poured more gin, and Paige heard his ice cubes snap, even with Nicole Kidman going on and on. This was the worst performance, bar none, she had ever seen, unless it was pretty good.
“Like what were you imagining?”
He coughed. “I had this nightmare vision of you turning into one of these pop-culture—whatever they call them. Cultural media studies.”
“I don’t think I’m turning into anything,” she said. “I’m just watching this, you know?”
“I’m sorry, kitten. And I interrupted. Why don’t we—Well, I guess we can’t wind it back.” He meant the movie.
Eyes Wide Shut might ordinarily have been depressing, since it was about sex. But the jeweled mask on the pillow: that was so genius. It was totally totally Richard. Though let’s be fair: totally totally her too. A suspicion made itself known in the upper left front of her mind that if she wasn’t high she would think it was heavy-handed.
When she saw her father had fallen asleep, with the plastic glass of ice cubes on his—whatever you called it between chest and stomach—she reached for the remote and sneaked the volume down, got up and turned off his light, then lifted the glass away.
The phone rang. As Paige brought it to her chin, she had time to see her father raise his head, time to hear him say “What’s—” and time to understand that it must be Abigail.
“Hello?” She said it deeper and softer than her real voice, her tongue up and back to roll the ls.
“Who is this?” Abigail said.
“Well, who is this?” Paige said, in the same happy-birthday-Mr.-President voice.
“Who is it?” her father said.
“They hung up,” Paige said.
On the screen, people were silently interrogating silent Tom Hanks. Tom Cruise, rather.
The phone rang again. Paige picked it up and said, in the same voice, “Hello?”
“Who the hell keeps calling?” Her father coughed and rolled on his side, his back to her.
She pinched the little tab on the phone plug and pulled out the cord, the last thing linking them to earth, and snapped off the remote. Let him sleep. She would be their sentinel tonight, her eyes drilling into the dark.
A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me
The name Paul Thompson won’t mean any more to you than mine would, but if you’d been around the bluegrass scene in New York some thirty years ago, you would’ve heard the stories. Jimmy Martin had wanted to make him a Sunny Mountain Boy, but he’d refused to cut his hair. He’d turned Kenny Baker on to pot at Bean Blossom and played a show with Tony Trischka while tripping on acid. Easy to believe such bullshit back then. The first time I actually saw him he was onstage, wearing a full-length plaster cast on his—give me a second to visualize this—on his left leg, a crutch in each armpit, playing mandolin with only his forearms moving; someone had Magic-Markered the bottom of the cast to look like an elephantine tooled-leather cowboy boot. This was at an outdoor contest in Roxbury, Connecticut, in 1977, the summer I turned eighteen. The band I’d come with had finished its two numbers, and we were behind the stage putting instruments back in cases when Paul kicked off “Rawhide.” I heard our mandolin player say, “Okay, we’re fucked.”
His band—older longhairs, except the fiddle player, a scary guy with a Marine buzz cut—won first prize, as they had the year before. But we placed second, and he lurched over to me on his crutches and said he’d liked how I’d sung “Over in the Gloryland.” It was Paul Thompson saying this. I suppose I was a good singer for a kid just out of high school; I thought of Christian songs simply as genre pieces in those days, but I had the accent down. I said, “Thanks, man,” and refrained from embarrassing myself by complimenting him back. We ended up singing a few songs together out by the cars—I remember him braced up against somebody’s fender—and I think it surprised him that I knew so much Louvin Brothers stuff: “Too Late,” “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow,” “Are You Afraid to Die?” I let him sing Ira’s tenor parts; now that he’d stopped smoking, he said, he could get up there in the real keys. He was taller than me, and his cheekbones made him look like a hard-luck refugee in a Dust Bowl photograph; he had white hairs in his sideburns, though he must only have been in his thirties. He told me he’d broken the leg playing squash; naturally, I thought it was a joke.
We’d both come up from the city that afternoon, me in a van with my banjo player and his wife and kids, Paul driven by his girlfriend. He asked me how I was getting back and could I drive stick. The girlfriend was pissed at him, he said, and had gone off on the back of somebody’s motorcycle, and now he was up here in East Buttfuck, Connecticut, with no idea how to get home. His car, an old TR6, had so much clutter behind the seats we had to tie my guitar to the luggage rack with bungee cords; all the way back to New York he played the Stanley Brothers on ninety-minute cassettes he’d dubbed from his LP collection. We didn’t talk much—I had to wake him up to ask directions once we hit the West Side Highway—but I did note that he said mandolin, not mandolin, and I’ve taken care to say mandolin ever since.
He lived in a big old building on West End around Eighty-Sixth; because it was Saturday night I had no trouble finding a space on his block. He said he’d figure out what to do with the car on Monday. Did I want to come up, have a few more tunes, smoke some dope? He hadn’t given that up. But it was late to be taking my guitar on the subway, and I already had enough of a Paul Thompson story to tell.
—
Most of us were just weekend pickers, and only little by little did you learn about other people’s real lives. Our banjo player taught calculus at Brooklyn College; the fiddler in Paul’s band (the one native southerner I ever ran across in New York) managed a fuel-oil business in Bay Ridge; another guy you saw around, good dobro player, was a public defender. I was working in a bookstore that summer before starting NYU, where I planned to major in English. And Paul Thompson turned out to be a science writer at U.S. News & World Report. One day I saw him in the subway at Rockefeller Center, and I had to think a minute to remember where I knew him from: he was wearing a blue oxford shirt and a seersucker blazer, with jeans and cowboy boots. Somebody told me he’d published a novel when he was in his twenties, which you could still find at the Strand.
A couple of years later, Paul brought me into his band when their lead singer moved to California, and we also played some coffeehouses as a duet, calling ourselves the Twofer Brothers. I went to the University of Connecticut for graduate school but drove down to the city a couple of times a month, and every so often Paul would put the band back together for some party where they’d pile hay bales around the room. After these gigs we’d go up to his place, get high and listen to music, or drink and talk books. He told me he loved “Jimmy Hank,” and gave me a copy of The Ambassadors from his collection of pristine old Signet paperbacks; it had a price of fifty cents. By then I’d decided to specialize in the nineteenth century, and I resented Jimmy Hank for
his review of Our Mutual Friend—“poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion.” I’ve still got that book: the cover illustration shows a top-hatted gent seen from behind in a café chair, with wineglass and cane. I suppose it’ll be on my shelves, still unread, when I die.
While I was finishing my dissertation, I got married to the first woman I’d ever lasted with for more than a month. Diane, I might as well admit, was my student when I was a TA, and why bother trying to extenuate it, all these years later, by telling you that we started sleeping together only after the semester was over? Or that in our History of Us conversations, we could never decide who’d made the first move? She’d go to festivals and parties with me to be the cool girlfriend with the cutoff jeans, and we promised each other that once we got out of married-student housing we’d live in the country somewhere, in a house full of books, no TV, and raise our own food.
I’d grown up in Park Slope, but my father was an old folkie—he used to hang around Washington Square in the fifties—and when I was twelve or thirteen I began listening to his LPs and fixating on the photos of ruined grampaws on their falling-down porches; even the mean, sad bluegrass guys in business suits and Stetsons, holding thousands of dollars’ worth of Martins and Gibsons, had been posed by abandoned shacks in the mountains. Everybody in our little scene thought of himself as a secret country boy. My old banjo player, the one I rode up to Roxbury with, quit his teaching job and moved to the Northeast Kingdom, where I hear he makes B-string benders in his machine shop and plays pedal steel in a country band. Our bass player left the East Village for Toast, North Carolina, to sit at the feet of Tommy Jarrell. Even my father, in his bourgie-folkie fashion. He was an engineer at Con Edison for thirty years; when he retired, he and my mother built a solar house up near Woodstock.
I found a teaching job at a small college in New Hampshire, and Diane got accepted at the New England Culinary Institute. We bought a fixer-upper farmhouse on a dirt road, with a woodstove, a barn and twenty acres, equally inconvenient to my school and hers. I put a metal roof on the old henhouse—Diane had always wanted to keep chickens—rototilled our garden patch every spring and bought a chainsaw and a splitter, as well as a rusty Ford 8N, the pretext being that we needed to keep the fields from growing back to brush. Our neighbor, a man in his seventies, kept the thing going for me; he liked us because I was so helpless and Diane was so pretty. In the spring he and I would work up the next winter’s wood together, sharing my splitter and running his buzz saw off the tractor’s PTO. I don’t know how I did all this while teaching three and three and working on my book; when the old man finally went into a home I started buying cordwood. My parents drove up a couple of times a year, and my father always brought his single-O Martin, the guitar on which he taught me my first chords. He and I would sit around playing the half-dozen fingerpicking songs—“Lewis Collins,” “Spike Driver’s Moan”—that he’d never cared to get beyond. They seldom stayed more than a day or two. The woodstove didn’t keep the guest room warm enough in fall or winter, and my mother got bitten to death by mosquitoes in the summer.
