The Wishbones (13 page)

As soon as she uttered the first line, Dave realized she was the one. It happened sooner or later at every open mike he'd ever been to. Somebody got up and reminded you of what the whole thing was about. In the poem she was a kid at the seashore, lying with her face to the hot sun while her older sister covered her from the neck down with bucket after bucket of wet sand, erasing her body one part at a time. It wasn't the story, though—it was the words she told it with. Dave could almost see them emerging from her mouth, little bubbles of language, the individual letters glowing on the air for a fraction of a second as though written by the hot tip of a sparkler.

That sweet girl is gone, Jenny
Lost like those sunburn summers.
You buried her
And dug me up instead.

 

The applause that followed was spontaneous and enthusiastic, and the poet blushed with pride and embarrassment. Dave looked
at Gretchen, eager to get her reaction, but her face was pinched, a bit too purposefully blank. He forced himself to stop clapping. When the ovation died down, Pat wandered over to the microphone and said, “Our next reader is Marlene Fragment.”

Dave figured he must have counted wrong, until he noticed most of the heads in the room turning in the direction of their table. Gretchen rose unsteadily from her chair, her teeth clenched in a determined smile.

“Marlene Fragment?” he whispered.

She reached down to retrieve her composition book, and answered him with a small, helpless shrug.

“I gotta tell you,” Tammi said, threading her arm easily through his as they left the restaurant, “you are one cute man.”

Normally, Ian didn't appreciate it when women referred to him as “cute”— it was a compliment they paid him with annoying regularity—but he decided to let it pass. This date was working out much better than he expected. There were women—perfectly desirable women—who had precisely the opposite effect on him. A half hour in their presence and he'd find himself drained and muddled, tongue thick, head full of cobwebs. All he could do was chalk it up to chemistry.

“You're pretty cute yourself,” he said.

“Ha.” Her laughter was loud and jarring. “Liar.”

“I mean it.”

“I used to be cute,” she told him. “Then I turned eleven.”

She reported this as though it were an amusing biographical fact, but Ian heard the pain beneath the quip. His own good looks had announced themselves early, as had his musical talent, and he'd felt himself throughout his teens and twenties to be a powerful and magnetic presence in the world. Only lately, as he sensed his own
luster beginning to dim, had he realized how lucky he'd been not to have grown up with his self-confidence already shattered beyond repair.

“Maybe
cute
isn't the right word,” he conceded. “What do you think of
appealing?”

“I'd prefer
ravishing
if you want to know the truth. But these days I take my compliments where I can find them.”

They climbed into his car and looked at each other. Their plans had only gone as far as dinner, and now dinner was over. It wasn't even nine o'clock.

“So,” said Ian. “Where to?”

Tammi's hands curled into fists and uncurled into hands again. She seemed suddenly shy, tentative.

“I don't know,” she said. “Whatever.”

“Your call.”

She stared down at her lap, rubbing the hem of her skirt between her thumb and forefinger. Then she looked up.

“You like going to malls?”

“Sure,” he said, starting the car.

“I know it's not the most exciting place in the world, but sometimes it's nice just to walk around with someone.”

“I like malls,” he said, releasing the emergency brake and shifting into reverse.

“Not everyone does,” she informed him, in a solemn, almost melancholy voice.

She bought a sleeveless denim top at the Gap. He bought a Van Morrison CD at Sam Goody and a cinnamon bun that they ate together sitting on a bench. Without asking, she took his hand as they browsed the upper level. She told him about her work as a delivery room nurse, the odd privilege of sharing a sacred moment with people who were pretty much complete strangers.

“Most of the time you don't know where they live, what they do, or even if they're nice people. But there you are, wiping the brow of this suffering woman, waiting for this little life to come squirting out.”

Ian stopped in front of a store called Exclusively Shirts that was holding a “3 for $10 Sale!!!” Judging from the merchandise in the window, though, even that didn't qualify as a bargain. He thought about footage he'd seen of babies entering the world, the shocking size of the head, the torrent of fluids that accompanied the birth. It seemed so messy and low-tech, out of synch with the rest of late twentieth-century America.

“You know,” he observed, “it's a lot like playing weddings.”

The air inside the Second Avenue station was dank and stuffy. Breathing it, Dave thought, was a lot like inhaling despair, an idea that never would have occurred to him if he hadn't just attended a poetry reading.

“Come on,” Gretchen said impatiently. “Could you at least try to be a little more specific?”

“I liked it. You have a way with words.”

“A way with words?” she repeated. “Is that the best you can do?”

“I don't know much about poetry, Gretchen. I'm not the best person to judge.”

“I'm not asking for an expert opinion. I just want to know if you liked my poems.”

Dave rubbed his finger over the thick red paint on the support beam he was leaning against and tried to think of something honest and complimentary to say. It was hard, though, because he hadn't really understood her poems. She had said they were love poems, but they weren't like any love poems he had ever come across.
Instead of flowers and moonlight, Gretchen wrote about pus and tumors, warts and organs. In one poem, a woman receives a package in the mail on her thirtieth birthday, a box containing a human liver. In another, a woman pops a blood blister on her finger, only to have her body deflate and crumple to the ground at her lover's feet “like a balloon from yesterday's carnival.”

He thought about telling her the truth, saying that her poems baffled him, asking her to explain her purpose in writing them, but he had a feeling that this wasn't the reaction she wanted. She was watching him closely, biting her bottom lip, looking anxious and expectant.

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.”