The Wishbones

by Tom Perrotta

  Dave Walked through a wall of Hendrix into a living room full of needlepoint samplers and the dusty porcelain figurines—milkmaids, shepherds, angels, dogs—that were supposedly Mrs. Stella's prize possessions, though she seemed to be doing just fine without them in her condo overlooking the seventh hole. Glenn lowered the volume on the stereo and turned around, dressed in faded green gym shorts and a pink button-down shirt. He had thinning blond hair and the same gold aviator glasses he'd been wearing since he was twelve.

  “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “Sure.”

  “Dr. Pepper okay?”

  Dave nodded, wishing he'd remembered to bring a six-pack. Glenn was a person with intense food loyalties, and had long ago cast his lot with Dr. Pepper. There was never any other beverage in the house except for the obligatory half-empty jar of Sanka moldering away in the cupboard. A smell wafted out of the refrigerator when he opened it and lingered in the air long after it was closed. Dave took a seat at the kitchen table and tried not to think too hard about what had produced the odor. Glenn popped the pop top and slid the can across the table like a bartender.

  “So how's it going with the wedding plans?”

  “Not bad. There's a lot of stuff to take care of, though.”

  “I still can't believe you're taking the plunge.”

  “Me neither.”

  Glenn saluted Dave with his soda. “You're a lucky guy. I never understood what took you so long.”

  “Strategy,” Dave explained. “I wanted to make her sweat a little.”

  Glenn shook his head. His expression was thoughtful, a bit melancholy.

  “Julie's the best. I mean that.”

  “She's pretty great,” Dave agreed.

  “The best,” Glenn repeated.

  Dave looked past his friend to the trucking company magnets stuck on the refrigerator door. Glenn was right, of course. Any man in his right mind would have been thrilled by the prospect of watching Julie march down the aisle to pledge her lifelong love and kiss him in front of a churchful of people. But Dave, apparently, was not in his right mind. All he seemed to be able to think about was Gretchen. The Verrazano Bridge. Her skin under silk. The taste of her mouth. He forced himself to look back at Glenn.

  “Speaking of best,” he said, “I wonder if you'd consider being my Best Man.”

  Glenn looked skeptical. He rolled the Dr. Pepper can back and forth across his forehead like a construction worker who'd been laboring for hours in the midday sun. Whatever he was imagining seemed to be giving him a headache.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “Just don't make me deliver the fucking toast.”

  Dave nodded. He felt an emotion something like love swell up in his chest. It was right that Glenn would be standing up there next to him.

  “You sure about this?” he asked.

  Glenn shrugged. “My shrink says it's time for me to start confronting my fears.”

  “You have a shrink?”

  Now it was Glenn's turn to look surprised. “You didn't know?” “You never told me.”

  “A nut like me?” Glenn laughed. “I'd be crazy not to have one.”

  His pale blue Stratocaster tucked under one arm, Glenn called up a directory on his basement computer and skimmed through the contents.

  “Let's see,” he said. “You want to be Carlos?”

  “I'm surprised you even have to ask.”

  Glenn clicked the mouse a few times and the distinctive sound of Santana began to fill the room like a fine mist. Not the familiar Latin percussion of “Evil Ways,” the tune Dave had expected, but something softer and spacier, watery organ chords quivering on a spare background of bass and drums.

  “‘ Song of the Wind’?” guessed Dave.

  “You got it. From Caravanserai. Remember that picture of the moon on the album cover?”

  Glenn spent a lot of time re-creating his favorite songs on a multitrack synthesizer, laying down all the instruments except lead guitar and vocals so he'd be able to jam with a full band behind him anytime he felt like it. His arranging skills seemed miraculous to Dave, as did his ability to simulate the trademark sounds of individual musicians—Clarence Clemons's sax, say, or Bill Wyman's bass —using only a small electronic keyboard hooked up to a Macintosh computer.

  “Song of the Wind” wasn't so much a song as a five-minute excuse for a guitar solo. Dave hit a note on Glenn's red SG (his second-best guitar) and held it, startled and exhilarated by the raw purity of tone and unflagging sustain that had somehow been programmed into the synthesizer. For a moment, it was possible to believe that he'd gotten his hands not only on Carlos's custom-made axe, but on his mortal soul as well. He milked this illusion for all it was worth, tilting his face toward heaven, grimacing as though it hurt to play such ecstatic music, as though every riff pierced him through the heart. Gretchen came to him as he played, her eyes locked on his as they made love, never blinking, not even when she cried out the same note over and over for what seemed to Dave like an extraordinary length of time, a note he found he could nearly reproduce on the SG in Glenn's basement, in the exquisite and wrenching tone of one of the greatest guitar players of all time.

  Hot as it sounded, Dave was careful not to kid himself. He understood all too well the difference between sounding like a genius and actually being one. It wasn't that hard, in 1995, if you set your mind to it and invested in the right gizmos, to fool people for a couple of minutes into thinking you were Eric Clapton or Eddie Van Halen or even Jimi Hendrix. But where did that get you? The real trick was creating your own sound, the mysterious signature that belonged to you and no one else. It wasn't a matter of hardware or even necessarily of technique. It was about taking the instrument and technology you had and making them your own, teaching them to say something no one else had thought to say before, in a voice no one had heard.

  Dave wasn't there yet. He didn't think he'd ever be. This knowledge didn't torment him; it was just a fact he lived with: that greatness would always be out of reach, that he was what he was—a pretty good guitar player, another face in the crowd, a guy who could do a mean fucking imitation of Carlos Santana.

  Clenn was further along on the path to musical enlightenment. He put his own mark on “The Sky Is Crying,” transforming it from an almost exuberant bellow of pain to something more muted and matter-of-fact, as though, in his world, the crying of the sky were the ordinary state of things rather than a strange and sinister change in the weather. His voice was less gruffly expressive than Stevie Ray Vaughan's, his licks more furtive, less self-assured; instead of wild anguish you felt a dull pain motivating the song, an ache that wouldn't go away when the sun came out. Glenn was Stevie Ray without the swagger and the cowboy hat, and these were the blues the dead man might have known if, instead of being a famous guitar hero, he'd been a lonely guy in green gym shorts who hadn't gotten laid in a long time and didn't expect the future to deliver anything better than the shrunken-down life he already had.

  Glenn was one of the few guitarists Dave knew who didn't make big faces when he soloed; he just hunched down over his Strat and went to work. Every once in a while he looked up, squinting in mild perplexity, his fingers spider-walking over the fret board as though directed by an entirely separate intelligence. Watching him, Dave thought of “Bobby Jean,” Bruce Springsteen's tribute to Steve Van Zandt, his musical soul mate from high school all the way through the glory days of the E Street Band. If things had worked out the way they were supposed to, he and Glenn might have had a similar trajectory, instead of a story that began and ended on a single night.

  All through their sophomore year of high school, they had had their sights set on the Talent Show. Anonymous underclassmen, they had plotted a musical ambush, a surprise attack on the three-chord simpletons and heavy-metal posers who dominated Har-ding's rock scene in the late seventies. They'd spent months learning “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” a jazzy and haunting instrumental by the Allman Brothers, teasing out the intricat
e lead guitar harmonies, playing the song over and over until it seemed less like a duet than the work of a single four-handed musician. Then they went out, scrounged up a keyboardist and drummer competent enough to back them (no spare bass players were available), and signed up for the Talent Show at the last minute as the Allmost Brothers.

  They watched the show from backstage, their confidence growing with each addition to the program, every Barbra Streisand imitator, every nerdy juggler and one-trick magician and hat-waving tap dancer, every out-of-tune garage band hacking its way through “Locomotive Breath” and “Smoke on the Water.” The Allmost Brothers took the stage late in the evening, believing the show was theirs to lose.

  Standing in front of an audience for the first time, guitar in hand, Dave felt a surge of adrenaline unlike anything he'd ever known. This was it—the destination he and Glenn had been dreaming about for three years as they'd done the private work of learning their instruments, note by note, chord by chord, song by song. Now that they had arrived, Dave felt loose and ready, almost giddy with power. He turned to Glenn, eager to share the sensation.

  The strangeness of what he saw still hadn't faded from his memory. Glenn was frozen. There was no other word for it. He was standing near the edge of the stage, trapped in the blazing glare of the footlights, surveying the darkness with an expression of wide-eyed, openmouthed awe, as if he'd just been offered a glimpse of a horror beyond human understanding. His left hand was where it belonged, wrapped around the neck of his guitar, but his right hand was on top of his head, tugging on a handful of his long, blond, Gregg-Allmanesque hair. Dave walked across the stage and touched him on the shoulder.

  “Glenn,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Let go of your hair.”

  I can't.

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I can't.”

  “Come on, man. Quit fucking around.”

  “I'm not.”

  “We're standing up here in front of five hundred fucking people.”

  “I realize that.”

  “Well, let go of your hair then. We've got a song to play.”

  “I can't move,” Glenn said miserably. “I think I'm paralyzed.”

  Some hecklers started shouting at them to shut up and play some music. The MC, a Spanish teacher named Mr. Garcia, approached the stage to ask if there was some kind of problem. Dave shooed him away, then grabbed hold of Glenn's arm, just above the elbow, digging his fingers into the flesh.

  “You gonna play or not?”

  “I can't.”

  “Then get the fuck off the stage. We'll do it without you.”

  Glenn's face relaxed, as if he'd been granted a reprieve. He let go of his hair and dropped his hand to his side. Then he unplugged his guitar and walked offstage, disappearing behind the velvet curtain. Dave returned to his side of the stage and nodded to the drummer, who clapped his sticks together four times, just like they'd planned.

  He was surprised by how good they sounded, how well the song came off with only one guitar. His fingers did exactly what he'd taught them, never stumbling once, not even on the fastest and most complicated section of the song. The drummer and keyboardist were right there with him, pushing him forward, lifting him up. His solo took him into a corner of the tune he hadn't explored before, into the whole mystery of Elizabeth Reed, why a song dedicated to her memory needed to be so bright and bouncy in some parts, so slow and moody in others. It wasn't until after it was over, after the first ovation of his life had stopped ringing in his ears, that he allowed himself to think about Glenn and what he might do to console him. But when he got backstage, Glenn was gone.

  Despite his absence, the Allmost Brothers took third prize in the show, behind a band called Sunrise Highway and the baton-twirling DeRocco Sisters (there were four of them). A week later, the singer in Sunrise Highway called and asked Dave if he wanted to be their lead guitarist. Without hesitating, Dave said yes (soon afterward, Sunrise Highway changed its name to Exit 36). In the fifteen years that followed, he and Glenn had never stopped being friends or playing music together. In all that time, though, except for a brief, muttered exchange of apologies the next day, they'd never really spoken about what had happened that night, or where they might have gone together if it hadn't.

  Glenn followed him out to his car. It was after ten and the world was deathly quiet, as though a curfew were in effect. Dave looked left and right as he fumbled with his keys, an outlaw on the deserted street.

  “Thanks a lot,” Glenn told him. Playing music made him look the way other people looked after sex or a good workout—like someone had taken an eraser and rubbed the tension from his face.

  “For what?”

  “It's an honor.”

  Dave picked at his top front teeth with the tip of his car key. Sincere moments like this made him nervous.

  “I'll feel a lot better having you up there next to me.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “Yeah. I'm just not sure of what.”

  Glenn nodded. “I'm like that all the time.”

  “I'm glad you're seeing someone,” Dave said, addressing this comment to his friend's pale feet on the blacktop. “The shrink, I mean.”

  Just then a car turned the corner at the near end of the block and began moving toward them at five, maybe ten miles an hour. Dave raised one hand in front of his face to fend off the dazzle of the headlights. He had a bad moment as the car rolled to a stop right in front of him, its windows all the way down, as if in preparation for a drive-by shooting. Four kids were inside, jocky teenage guys in backwards baseball caps, looking strangely subdued.

  Without a word to his buddies, one of the kids climbed out of the backseat, shut the door, and trudged up the front walk of the house across the street from Glenn's. Once he was safely inside, the car drove off, maintaining its funereal pace. Dave and Glenn looked at each other and shrugged.

  “I was kidding about not making the toast,” Glenn informed him. “Just don't expect the Gettysburg Address, okay?”

  Dave couldn't help laughing, considering some of the asinine toasts he'd heard over the past couple of years. One guy talked for five minutes about what a stud the groom had been, how he used to pick up women in bars, go home with them, and never call them back. “All that changed when he met Maggie,” the Best Man assured the wedding guests. “She was the first one he ever called back.”

  “Don't worry,” Dave said, clapping Glenn on the shoulder. “Just make it short, sweet, and from the heart.”

  He got in his car and pulled away, tooting softly on the horn. At the corner stop sign he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a barefoot guy in a pink shirt standing with his arms crossed in the middle of an empty street, his oldest friend in the world.

  On the way home he listened to R.E.M.'s Monster and thought about how good he felt. He was excited about seeing Gretchen again—it had to happen, he realized that now—as well as deeply pleased by the way things had gone with Glenn. Dave hadn't expected him to agree so easily, nor had he expected to feel so proud and grateful that he did. Glenn was his Best Man. Anyone else—his brother, or even Buzzy—would have been a substitute.

  There was an obvious tension between the two things that were making him happy, but he preferred not to spoil his good mood by dwelling on it. His strategy for the time being was to keep his real life in one compartment and Gretchen in another. She was a fantasy, a stroke of good luck, an opportunity that had fallen into his lap, something he had to get out of his system. He could explain her in any number of ways, but there really wasn't any point in explaining, not even to himself. There was something she wanted to show him, and he wanted to find out what it was.

  Michael Stipe would have understood, Dave was pretty sure of that. If there was one message R.E.M. had sent to the world, it was that standing still got you nowhere. They'd never been afraid of changing directions or taking risks. Even Dave was having trouble getting used to Monste
r, all the raw feedback and distortion, the glaring absence of the sensitivity and subtlety that had been the band's hallmarks for more than a decade. It was like they woke up one morning, looked in the mirror, and said, “Fuck it, man. We're tired of being ourselves. Let's be someone else for a while.” If Stipe had been in the car, Dave would have told him that he knew the feeling.

  There Was 3 note on the kitchen table telling him to call Julie if he got home before eleven. Dave thought about letting it slide, but his conscience got the better of him. She was his fiancée; the least he could do was return her phone calls.

  “Well?” she said. “What happened?”

  Dave blanked out for a second.

  “What happened when?” he asked cautiously.

  “With Glenn. You went over there tonight, didn't you?”

  “Oh yeah. He said yes. I didn't have to bug him or anything. He seems to really want to do it.”

  “That's great, Dave. I'm really happy for both of you.”

  “He says he's seeing a shrink now. I guess it's doing him some good.”

  “It's about time.”

  “The next step is to find him a girlfriend.”

  “That reminds me,” she said. “Tammi just called. She and Ian are going out to dinner tomorrow night. She sounds really excited.”

  “That's great. I hope it works out for them.”

  “God, Dave, I feel like I haven't seen you in ages. Are we still on for the movies on Friday?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Anything you want to see?”

  “Whatever you want,” he assured her.

  THIS SAD GIFT

  From Cretchen's apartment they took the F train to Second Avenue on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood Dave rarely visited on his courier runs. An exhilarating sense of anonymity washed over him as they walked the gritty streets past urine-stinking doorways, fruit stands, and displays of stolen goods set out for sale right on the sidewalks. No one here —not the fierce-looking men in turbans or the girls with pierced eyebrows or the Chinese deliverymen on bicycles or the homeless guys with their matted beards or the emaciated, jittery women with their ravenous eyes—knew that the woman he was holding hands with was not the woman he was engaged to marry, and he had a pretty strong hunch that, had they known, none of them would have mustered the energy or interest to care.