The Wishbones

by Tom Perrotta

  She was beautiful, he thought, lapsing into poetry again, a flower in the subway, and her beauty was only enhanced by her sudden vulnerability. Ever since they'd met, he'd been secretly worried that he didn't really belong in her league, that she'd somehow misjudged him as being smarter, hipper, and more talented than he actually was. But now he saw that he'd done the same thing to her, and this knowledge moved him in an unexpected way. He took her face in his hands and kissed her firmly on the mouth.

  “You were the best of the bunch,” he said.

  “Really?” She stepped away from him, her pleasure diluted by suspicion. “You mean it?”

  “It's a matter of taste,” he said. “I can only give you my own opinion.”

  She looked down at the tracks, the rails shining dully. Someone's expensive sneaker floated in a puddle of dirty, trash-speckled water.

  “I didn't get much applause, though.”

  “It sounded like a lot from where I sat.”

  “As much as the red-haired girl?”

  “About the same amount.”

  The train announced itself as a distant rumble. Dave leaned toward the edge of the platform and peered down the tunnel. A star of light flickered in the darkness, growing larger as it approached.

  “Did you like her stuff?” Gretchen asked, raising her voice to compete with the onrushing train.

  “Who?”

  ‘The redhead.”

  By that point the rumble had intensified into a clattering roar, which dissolved into a mind-bending screech of metal on metal as the train jerked to a stop in front of them. Dave unclenched his teeth as the doors slid open, inviting them into the fluorescent brightness of the car. He followed her inside, sat down beside her on an orange plastic seat.

  “She was okay,” he said, rotating his hand in a way that suggested he could take her or leave her. “A little predictable.”

  Ian tucked the cassette into the tape deck and looked at Tammi, overcome by a sudden wave of doubt. She sat cross-legged on the maroon carpeting, her back to the beige corduroy couch, the only piece of furniture in the basement music room that had become his primary living space over the past couple of years. She's a stranger, he thought. I hardly even know her.

  “You look tired,” he said.

  “Not at all,” she said, trying to smile and swallow a yawn at the same time. “I just got my second wind.”

  “We don't have to do this, you know. We could just sit and talk for a while. Or I could take you home. I know you've had a long day.”

  “I'm fine,” she insisted. “Really.”

  He thought about kissing her, trying to distract her that way. He knew she would let him. And he did want to kiss her. But right now they had this other thing to get beyond.

  “You sure?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Play the tape, Ian.”

  “I will. But let me explain a few things first.”

  Ian took a deep breath. With a profound and demoralizing certainty, he understood that he was about to make a terrible mistake. The tape wasn't ready. Half the songs needed to be remixed. One of them needed to be scrapped entirely. He'd worked too hard on the musical to unveil it now, before it was finished.

  “Okay,” she said. “Start explaining.”

  Something in her voice steadied his nerves. She was a sweet and generous and intelligent woman. For a long time now— though he hadn't really admitted it to himself—he'd been waiting to meet someone like her. Even if the tape wasn't perfect, he had a feeling she'd understand what he was trying to do.

  And besides, he'd been in hiding too long. It was time to crawl out into the light, even if that meant risking injury to his self-esteem. Art was about risk. It was one of those things he had to keep telling himself. Not taking risks was how he'd ended up in a wedding band, singing “You Are So Beautiful” to half the female population of New Jersey.

  “What this is,” he said, “is a musical I've been working on for the past year and a half It's called The Grassy Knoll. It's about the Kennedy assassination.”

  “A musical?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  She smiled slyly, as though they were sharing an inside joke.

  “Come on.”

  “I'm serious,” he assured her.

  “A musical about the Kennedy assassination?”

  “The musical's a more serious form than people give it credit for. I mean, Jesus Christ Superstar, for God's sake. You can't get more serious than that. Miss Saigon. 1776. Even Oklahoma! was about politics, when you think about it.”

  “Still,” she said. “A musical about the Kennedy assassination. It's kind of a downer.”

  “Listen to it first,” he said. “You might change your mind.” Her eyes narrowed. “You're not putting me on?” “No,” he said, trying to conceal the hurt in his voice. He'd expected to encounter some resistance about the subject, but he hadn't expected her to treat it like a joke. “I'm dead serious about this. The Kennedy assassination is the most important event in twentieth-century American history, and the musical is a completely indigenous twentieth-century American art form. It's a natural combination.”

  She bobbed her head from side to side, looking thoughtful. “Okay,” she said. “Maybe you've got a point.” “You're going to have to use your imagination,” he warned her. “The show opens with JFK and Jackie waking up in the White House on the morning of November 22, 1963. Jackie gets out of bed, pulls open the curtains, and sunlight comes streaming into the bedroom. Then she turns to Jack and starts singing the first song, ‘Let's Not Go to Dallas.’ It's this sweet romantic fantasy about being normal people for once, rather than the president and First Lady. ‘Let's not go to Dallas/Let's stay home instead/Let's dispense with Texas/How ‘bout breakfast in bed?’ At first Jack protests, but then he gets into the spirit. They sing the last chorus together, dancing around the bedroom in their pajamas. Then they share this long, passionate kiss, which is interrupted when a valet knocks on the door. ‘Mr. President,’ he says. ‘Time to go to Dallas.’ “

  “Okay,” said Tammi, still looking a little skeptical, “I think I'm getting the picture.”

  Ian put his finger on the play button.

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “One more thing. I'm singing both parts on the tape, so it might not sound like a duet.”

  Something was wrong, Dave thought. Gretchen had been wild and athletic their first night together, grunting and yowling like Monica Seles in the throes of a tiebreaker, but now she seemed strangely subdued. She lay beneath him, limp and contemplative, watching him the way she might watch a television.

  His own concentration was beginning to drift, too. Instead of attending to the here and now, he kept returning to that moment in Gretchen's poem when the woman opens the box and finds the liver inside. She pulls it out—” a slick slab of meat, dull and floppy” —and hugs it to her chest. “This is the test,” she thinks. “To love even this sad gift, simply because it has been given.”

  Dave couldn't pinpoint exactly what it was that bothered him about the poem. Was it just that it was disgusting to imagine someone hugging a liver? Or did it have something to do with the cryptic nature of those concluding lines, the idea that love could be some sort of test? Or was his uneasiness somehow related to his awareness of Gretchen's hands on his lower back, somewhere in the neighborhood of his own liver?

  He closed his eyes and without any conscious effort, found himself thinking of Julie and the sudden turn his life had taken. Just a few weeks ago, they'd gone shopping for an engagement ring, and now here he was, in a bedroom in Brooklyn, making love to a woman who called herself Marlene Fragment and wrote poems he wouldn't be able to understand if he lived to be a hundred. Instead of guilt, he felt an electric surge of power hum through his body.

  “Marlene,” he whispered, opening his eyes.

  “Yes,” replied Gretchen. Her legs tightened around his waist.

  “Marlene,” he whispered again, moving with a new urgency. “Marlene Fragment.�
��

  “Yes,” she repeated, again and again and again.

  Ian considered the last song of The Grassy Knoll to be his masterpiece, potentially on a par with “The Impossible Dream” or “Tonight, Tonight.” He imagined people streaming out of the theater, wiping tears from their eyes, yet feeling somehow enlightened and purified by their sadness.

  He wanted it to be staged like the Zapruder-film sequences in JFK, a black convertible parked onstage against a grainy black-and-white freeze-frame of Dealey Plaza. A lone cello would introduce the song, repeating the main theme over and over in a frail, mournful tone as Jack and Jackie and the Connallys waved in slow motion from inside the car. The freeze-frame would advance every few seconds to provide the illusion of movement toward the Book Depository and the inevitable tragedy.

  When the suspense had reached an almost unbearable level, the cello would fall silent. A blinding flash of light would paralyze Jackie and the Connallys in mid-wave. Only Jack would be spared. He would climb out of the car, walk up to the edge of the stage, and break into the final number.

  When Ian first hit upon this device, he'd assumed that the song would have to be about JFK. The first version he wrote was called “I'm No Hero,” a lackluster anthem in which the dead president acknowledged his faults and errors (ambition, lust, Bay of Pigs), and expressed disapproval of his elevation to the status of modern-day martyr:

  I'm no hero

  No saint carved out of wood

  Just a man who lived and loved and bled

  I did the best I could

  The breakthrough came when Ian realized the song could move in an entirely different direction—instead of being about JFK, it could be about the audience. Once he had this insight, the lyrics pretty much wrote themselves. The song was called “Where You Were,” and Ian conceived of it as a kind of posthumous thank-you note from John F. Kennedy to the country that had mourned him:

  They say that you remember

  The moment when I died

  They say a cloud blocked out the sun

  And millions of you cried

  He goes on to reflect upon the tragedies of the sixties (Vietnam, the other assassinations, cities on fire, parents at war with their children), as well as the triumphs (civil rights, Neil Armstrong's giant step), then loops back to the beginning of the song:

  Just know that I'll remember, too

  I know just where you are

  All of you

  —America—

  You're with me in the car

  All of you

  —America—

  You're with me in the car

  When the music stops, the soon-to-be-murdered president turns around and walks back to the convertible. As soon as he takes his seat, his wife and the Connallys begin waving again. The freeze-frame advances. Then the lights go out. We hear gunshots. The picture of Dealey Plaza is replaced by a rapid series of images —the president's grieving widow, Oswald taking his own bullet, little John-John saluting the flag-draped coffin, the eternal flame at Arlington Cemetery. Then the president himself, smiling that unforgettable smile.

  Of course, Tammi had no way of knowing all this. All she knew of The Grassy Knoll were the songs themselves, a dozen of them, sung by Ian and recorded on his woefully inadequate eight-track system. But it seemed to be enough. When he turned to her, she was staring at him in openmouthed wonder.

  “So,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “My God,” she said. Her eyes were shining with admiration and disbelief. “You wrote that?”

  Ian felt a hard-earned pride swell up behind his rib cage.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I did.”

  RANDY BY STARLIGHT

  “So I hear It went pretty well.” Julie told him over dinner at the Stock Exchange.

  “Huh?” Dave tore his gaze away from the last slice of his pepperoni-and-roasted-pepper personal-size pizza, which he'd been eyeing with an emotion that verged on longing. He'd decided to start dieting the night before, a few seconds after Gretchen poked her finger into his spare tire and affectionately addressed him as my little doughboy. “What's that?”

  “The big date. Ian and Tammi.”

  “Oh, right. They hit it off?”

  “Apparently so.” Julie grinned, the owner of good information. “Tammi called me at work. She didn't get home until four in the morning.”

  “Four in the morning? Does that mean what I think it means?”

  “You'll have to draw your own conclusions. I'm sworn to secrecy.”

  “Unbelievable.” Dave shook his head, registering the quick pang of jealousy that accompanied the news of anyone else's sexual triumph. This reaction was completely irrational, rooted in powerful feelings of early adolescent deprivation. It made no difference that he'd been out until two-thirty the same morning enjoying his own sexual adventure.

  “By the way,” she said. “Did you know that Ian wrote a musical?”

  “Yeah. He told me the other night.”

  “Did he tell you what it was about?”

  “We didn't get that far.”

  “The Kennedy assassination,” she informed him. “Ian wrote a musical about the Kennedy assassination.”

  “Come on.” Dave laughed. “He did not.”

  “He did too. Tammi listened to the whole thing.”

  “You can't write a musical about that,” he explained. “It's not allowed.”

  “It sounds weird,” Julie agreed, “but Tammi says it's incredible. Good enough to be on Broadway.”

  Dave began humming “Springtime for Hitler,” feeling slightly guilty as he did so. It wasn't right to be making fun of Ian behind his back. Maybe his musical was better than it sounded. It was possible that Dave's contempt for the genre was interfering with his judgment.

  “All done?” the waitress inquired, swooping down on them from out of nowhere. Like all the employees at the Stock Exchange, she wore a white apron with dollar signs on the front, a pink Oxford shirt with a black bow tie, and a visor with a green eyeshade.

  Feeling virtuous but ambivalent, Dave pushed the pizza pan toward the edge of the table. Julie looked at him in amazement. In all the years they'd known each other, he'd never left a slice uneaten.

  “So,” said the waitress. “How about some dessert?”

  “Not for me,” Julie said.

  The waitress turned her attention to Dave, the eyeshade casting an eerie green glow on her forehead.

  “I recommend the Death by Chocolate. It's my all-time absolute favorite.”

  Dave felt his willpower start to erode. He thought of the luscious chocolate mousse cake he and Gretchen had shared at the end of the Lambrusco wedding, the creamy morsel she'd fed him, like a bride, from the tip of her own plastic fork. His diet could wait another day.

  “Bring it on,” he said.

  The waitress was delighted.

  “Excellent,” she said. “One Death by Chocolate.”

  “You can't,” Julie cut in. “We don't have time.”

  “Why not? The movie doesn't start till nine.”

  “We have an eight o'clock appointment with that DJ.”

  “Excuse me?” This was the first Dave had heard about a DJ.

  “I'm sure I told you. We're supposed to meet with that guy my father works with. Rockin’ Randy.”

  “Rockin’ Randy?” the waitress exclaimed. “He's the coolest.”

  Dave shot her an unencouraging look. Her face went blank; she slipped her pad and pencil into her apron pocket.

  “I'll give you guys a few more minutes to decide,” she said, retreating as she spoke.

  “Sorry,” Julie told him. “I can't believe I forgot to tell you. There's so much to keep track of these days.”

  Dave felt blindsided, but decided not to make too big a deal about it. Given his own transgressions, he figured he owed Julie a little slack. On the other hand, he thought he'd already cut her quite a bit of slack simply by agreeing to see The Bridges of Madison County instead of
the new Batman.

  “You know how I feel about DJs,” he told her.

  “I know,” she said. “But he works with my father. And he's offering us a really good deal.”

  Dave closed his eyes and massaged the center of his forehead. The image of Rockin’ Randy leading the conga line through the lobby of the Westview lingered unpleasantly in his mind.

  “Listen,” he said, “that guy could shine my shoes and give me a blow job and it still wouldn't be a good deal.”

  Julie stared at him, unamused. Although she had no objection to oral sex as a practice, she disapproved of the term blow job.

  “Sometimes you have to say it,” he explained, reaching out to rescue the last slice of pizza as the busboy lifted the pan off the table. “Sometimes no other word will do.”

  Julie Opted for the silent treatment in the car, gazing morosely out the window at the familiar landscape of houses and drought-stricken lawns. Dave marveled at her ability to seize the offensive when she was clearly in the wrong, to sulk as though she were the one being dragged on a disagreeable errand that had been sprung on her at the last minute, an errand, moreover, that violated one of her most deeply held principles.

  “The thing about DJs,” he said, “is that they're parasites. You might as well pay someone to come to your house and change the channels on your TV.”

  “He'll give us four hours of music for five hundred dollars. What would the Wishbones charge?”

  “It's not the same thing. There are five of us. We actually make the music.”

  “That's not the point, Dave. My parents aren't rich. If we can save a couple of thousand dollars by hiring a DJ, then I can't see how we can afford not to do it.”

  Dave understood the math; there was no getting around it. But there was also no getting around the fact that he was not going to have a DJ at his wedding. No way in hell.