Radiant Days (26 page)

“Hey, are you sure you’re okay?”

I looked up and saw David staring at me in concern. “Yeah,” I said, and forced a smile. “Just kind of wrung out, that’s all.”

He nodded. “I got a check today. C’mon, let’s get something to eat. I’ll pay.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, absolutely. Anywhere you want, you name it.”

I stood, pulled on my bomber jacket, stuffed the book into a pocket, and followed him to the front door. “Pied du Cochon?”

“Perfect.” He grinned, linking his arm through mine, and we walked out into the night.

Washington, D.C.

OCTOBER 14, 1978

THE FUNERAL WAS
in Northeast, at the Cathedral of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine. David went with me. We got there early, but even so the place was packed.

“How does Ted rate a funeral here?” I asked, staring at the vast and dementedly ornate building that loomed above us.

David shrugged. “I guess he had friends in high places. Or high friends in other places.”

As we stepped inside, a man handed us each a memorial booklet.

On the cover was my drawing.

“Holy shit.” I winced in apology as the man frowned, then whispered, “David! Look—that’s my portrait!”

“Wow.” He stared at the cover. “That’s
fantastic
, Merle.”

Despite my sorrow I felt a kind of happiness I’d never experienced before. Seeing my drawing like that, professionally printed—it made my work look
real
. Not student work, not graffiti painted in a rush before the cops arrived, but a portrait by a real artist. Something beautiful; something that would last.

We found a pew near the middle of the cathedral and squeezed in. There were a lot of folks my father’s age, but some were older—Ted’s relatives, I assumed, or neighbors from when he and Rob were growing up. But I was surprised by how many people were my age.

“Jeez. How did all these people know him?” I asked David.

“Fans,” said David. “The Raisins had a huge cult following. Hey, look—” He gestured excitedly at someone who’d been on the cover of
Rolling Stone
a few months earlier. I glanced back, then turned my attention to the altar. There was no coffin, no sign of his fishing pole or guitar. David whispered that Ted had been cremated, his ashes scattered along the Potomac River. “But don’t tell the priest that. Catholics say you have to be buried in sacred ground.”

“I think the river was sacred to Ted,” I said.

“No kidding. His fishing pole, too.”

Propped around the altar were blown-up photos. Ted as a kid with Rob and their parents, wearing a cowboy outfit; pictures of him with the band in their heyday. The PA played rock music as people continued to file in, and I vaguely recognized some of the songs that David had played for me in the studio. None of the music sounded anything like what Ted had sung for me.

Finally the service started. A priest came out and gave a brief invocation. After that it was all people who knew Ted—friends and family, the surviving members of the Deadly Rays. David whispered the names of those he recognized, and pointed out Ted’s ex-wife and three of his old girlfriends, which surprised me.

But of course he hadn’t always been homeless or old. The photos showed a man who wasn’t handsome, exactly, but someone you might fall in love with, especially if he had ever sung to you alone.

The service went on for a while. So many of the stories were funny that it was hard to tell if people were crying from laughter or sorrow. Finally, Rob Kampfert stood up, and the room fell silent.

He talked about how he and Ted grew up in the Maryland suburbs; how they had been altar boys and constantly in trouble. When I shut my eyes, I could almost imagine it was Ted speaking. Rob Kampfert told some great stories, stories I couldn’t imagine telling in a church, let alone a cathedral.

“I have to be honest,” he finally said. “I was always afraid of something like this happening. Every time the phone rang in the middle of the night—and you know, he had a couple of really close calls. But he always came back, so he thought he was fucking immortal. After a while, I started to think he was immortal, too. But he wasn’t.”

He wiped his eyes. “My big brother’s gone. He’s fishing up there somewhere….”

He looked up into the cathedral’s vaulted ceiling. For the first
time I noticed a narrow balcony above the altar, to one side, with a small pipe organ but no people. “He’s up there fishing, and I sure as hell hope they’re biting.”

He stepped back from the lectern. People rustled in their pews, uncertain whether this was the end of the service.

Then a recorded song began to play, a sweet cascade of notes from an acoustic guitar. I sat bolt upright, and so did everyone else. People let out small cries, of sorrow or recognition or delight.

It was the song Ted had played the night before on the canalboat, the song I thought he’d made up just for me. Now, seeing the reactions around me, I realized that everyone felt that way. David was weeping openly. The woman on my other side grabbed my arm.

“Oh, this song,” she whispered, tears streaming down her cheeks. “My God, this song.”

On the tape, Ted’s voice chimed in with the guitar, that same gravelly tone but softer, younger. And while I hadn’t been able to remember the words before, I remembered them now, the way that, sometimes, something in your waking life summons back a dream you’d forgotten.

He sang about how he’d once stood on a bridge, and fallen in love with a woman he saw walking beside the river below. Day after day he returned, hoping he’d see her again.

But he never did. He roamed the city, searching every place he thought he might find her. She was never there.

And so he returned home; and one day as he walked along the river, he looked up and saw her, high above him on the bridge.
He stood and watched as she walked away, and then she was gone forever.

It’s the saddest song I have ever heard. Though now, I know there is something far sadder than never meeting someone you’ve only glimpsed from far away.

And that is to meet someone just once, and not know until afterward that it was the most important night of your entire life, and that it will never happen again.

Crying uncontrollably, I looked above the altar, at the small balcony with the pipe organ.

A man stood there. Even at that distance I recognized his face, his worn flannel shirt and black T-shirt, the grooves along his mouth and his deep-set eyes. He stared down at the crowd in the cathedral, his expression sorrowful, almost pitying; then lifted his head slightly and stared right at me. His eyes flared from amber to emerald as he raised his hand, holding up something in a gesture of farewell. His guitar, I thought, until it blurred into something else: a bone-white crescent strung with silver. I gasped and stood on tiptoe, struggling to see.

The balcony was empty. The last echoes of Ted’s voice and guitar trembled in the air and faded. For a minute, the cathedral was silent.

Then people began to move again, quietly at first. Soon they began to talk, turning to greet old friends and hug one another. Slowly, in ones and twos, we walked into the aisles and began to file out of the cathedral, back to where the October sun shone in a cloudless sky and the chilly air smelled of burning leaves and chrysanthemums and woodsmoke.

David held my hand and drew me through the crowd, greeting people he knew and stopping to introduce me to John Waters. We passed Rob Kampfert in the middle of a tight knot of people, smoking a cigarette.

“Hey,” he called. “Merle, come here.”

We walked over, David for once saying nothing. “This is the girl who did that portrait of Ted,” Rob said, and pulled me toward him. “Merle—what’s your last name?”

“Tappitt,” I said.

“Merle Tappitt.” He dropped his cigarette and ground it out. “Sorry I didn’t ask if I could use that drawing, but I didn’t know how to get in touch with you. You got a phone number?”

I gave him David’s number. Somebody made a crack about him robbing the cradle, and Rob shook his head. “Nah. Like I said, this is one kick-ass artist. Maybe someday I can use you.” He copied the number onto the back of one of the memorial booklets. “Okay, thanks. See you….”

He turned, and David and I headed toward the Metro station.

“Fucking A, Merle,” he said when we were out of earshot. “I can’t believe you just gave Rob Kampfert your phone number!”

“He’s not going to ask me for a date, you idiot. Plus, he’s not my type.”

“Yeah, well, he could be mine.”

From the station came the hum of an approaching train. We ran to catch it, neither of us casting a backward glance at the mourners who remained outside the cathedral.

Washington, D.C., New York City, and London

1978–1984

“HEARING FOOTSTEPS.” THAT’S
a saying my father used when I was a kid and he’d be knocking back a case of Miller while watching the Redskins on TV. It’s what happens when the player running with the football gets so spooked at the thought of someone coming up behind to tackle him that he drops the ball.

I quickly realized that I couldn’t listen for Arthur Rimbaud’s footsteps. If I did, the sound would drown out everything around me, until I was deafened. Still, I spent weeks, then months and finally years, learning to live with the memory of that night. Not just the long shadow cast by the knowledge of Arthur’s genius, but what it all meant—Arthur and Ted and myself, meeting then losing one another within the space of twenty-four hours. That’s one of the things you never read about in books—what happens after the magic ends, and life goes back to normal?

Ultimately I simply accepted it. I had the fish-bone key and a
century-old French coin to prove it had not been a dream. The key I had made into a pendant that I wear around my neck; the coin is in my pocket, always. No matter how broke I was, I never sold it. I knew that I had been given a great gift: the ability to see, for a moment, that place where art and love and desire and loss all come together like the bands of color in a rainbow.

And what makes a rainbow so beautiful is that it can’t last. In the end, that night was only one night out of my entire life.

Still, there was one thing that made my memories of Arthur almost unbearably sad; also mysterious, even unbelievable.

How could he have stopped writing poetry when he was only nineteen?
Why
did he stop writing?

Nobody knew. Nobody knows.

D
AVID HAD A FRIEND WHO WORKED AT THE ATLANTIS, A PUNK CLUB
in D.C.’s old downtown. She said they were looking for a part-time waitress, so I went to a vintage clothing store and bought a pair of red alligator cowboy boots, some button-front jeans, and a bunch of 1950s bowling shirts. I combed my hair into a modified ducktail, went to the club, and got the job. I worked only three days a week at first, but since I had no distractions besides drawing, I was able to focus on being a really good waitress, which is harder than it seems. After a few months I was given the highly desirable weekend shift, which meant more money in tips. By the following spring, I was spelling the bartender and had saved enough money to get my own apartment in Adams Morgan.