The Wishbones (6 page)

“Hey,” he said. “Talk about coincidences. What are you guys doing here?”

“Engagement ring,” said Dave.

Ian looked at Julie's hand. Julie shook her head.

“We just picked out the stone. The actual ring won't be ready for a week or so.”

“Well, congratulations,” he told her. “You're marrying one of the finest rock trivia minds in the Tri-State area.”

“I know,” Julie said. “All the other girls are jealous.”

“What about you?” asked Dave. “Since when are you such a big
Star Trek
fan?”

“I'm not. I was just shopping for some summer clothes. But then I saw the line and thought, what the hell? Might as well meet Scotty.”

“He's not showing up for another couple of hours,” Julie warned him. “That's a long time to wait.”

Ian shrugged. “I didn't really have anything planned for this afternoon anyway. It's either this or help my dad clean out the gutters.”

“It's a beautiful day,” she told him. “We're thinking of having a picnic up at Watchung.”

She said this as though extending a tacit, no-pressure invitation for Ian to tag along, but he didn't seem to notice the offer.

“I've got to get out of that house,” he said, more to himself than to Dave or Julie. “My parents are driving me nuts.”

“Join the club,” said Dave.

“Tell me about it,” said Julie.

“Yeah,” said Ian, “but you guys can at least see the light at the end of the tunnel. I don't even think I'm inside the tunnel yet.”

Dave patted him on the arm and said he'd see him at the wedding that night.

“Five o'clock at the Westview, right?”

Dave nodded.

“See you then,” said Ian. “Have a good picnic.”

“Say hi to Scotty,” Julie told him.

On the way out of the mall, Dave saw that Mr. Spock had been knocked over and trampled, probably by some unruly teenagers. He lay flat on his back, still smiling gamely despite the waffles of dirt that covered his face and body with a thoroughness that could only have been intentional. Dave thought about propping him up, but decided it was none of his business.

“Do you think he's gay?” Julie asked, as they exited the parking lot, merging with the traffic on Route 1.

For a split second, he thought she was referring to Leonard
Nimoy, who seemed more asexual than anything else, at least on
Star Trek.
But then the fog cleared.

“Who?” he said. “Ian?”

“No.” She rolled her eyes. “Leonard Nimoy.”

Dave ignored her sarcasm and pondered the question. He wanted to say, “Of course not,” but realized the moment he thought about it that he didn't know very much about Ian's personal life. In the two years they'd been Wishbones together, Ian had mentioned a couple of ex-girlfriends. He didn't seem to be actively searching for a new one, though, nor was he more than mildly flattered by the number of women who came on to him at weddings (including the legendary mother-of-the-bride). Dave had always assumed that this was because he was used to the attention and accepted it as his due, the way a beautiful woman got used to being stared at every time she walked down the street. But now he wondered.

“I don't know,” he said. “Do you think he might be?”

She shrugged. “He's just so different from the rest of you.”

“How so?”

“Well, for one thing, he's really handsome. And he's got such good taste in clothes.”

“Thanks a lot.”

She patted his knee. “You know what I mean.”

Dave didn't argue. He knew exactly what she meant. Ian
was
better-looking than the rest of the Wishbones. That was why he was the front man. Generally speaking, people didn't go for ugly singers. The rest of the band could look like a bunch of space aliens and burn victims for all anyone cared, but the singer had to meet certain minimum standards of attractiveness.

“It doesn't matter to me one way or the other,” she assured him, “but if he's not gay and he's not going out with anyone, I'm wondering if he might hit it off with Tammi.”

“Ian and Tammi?”

“It's just an idea. She hasn't gone out with anyone for a long time now. I think she's ready for someone new.”

Dave liked Tammi a lot, but he couldn't quite see her with Ian. Tammi was funny and cute in a tomboyish sort of way, the kind of person who knew how to make a joke at her own expense. The longer Dave knew her the more attractive she had come to seem to him, but her appeal was subtle, often lost on people meeting her for the first time. Dave figured Ian to go for someone a little more eye-catchingly glamorous, more like Zelack's new girlfriend, Monica.

“It's never a good idea to fix up your friends,” he pointed out. “Somebody always ends up with hurt feelings.”

“We just have to find some natural way to introduce them,” she mused. “That's the trick with these things. It can't feel like a blind date or it's doomed from the start.”

He pulled up to a tollbooth on the Parkway entrance ramp and tossed in thirty-five cents. The exact-change basket was plastered with decals for local bands he had never heard of—the Eggheads, Screaming Willie, Storm Drain. They just kept popping up, these bands, mushrooms of suburbia. Everyone and his brother chasing after the same old dream.

“You know what you could do?” She smiled at the beauty of what had just occurred to her. “You could ask him to be your Best Man. Then they'd have to sit at the same table and dance together and all that. They wouldn't even know they were being fixed up.”

“I told you,” he said, “if I ask anyone in the band to stand up for me, it'll be Buzzy.”

“No way.” She was adamant. “Buzzy is
not
going to be your Best Man. Not unless he gets a haircut.”

“I can't ask him to do that.”

“Why not?”

“It's just not done.”

“Well, I don't want the first toast of our married life to be
delivered by a forty-year-old man with a ponytail. That's not how I envision my wedding.”

Dave sighed. “It doesn't matter. I'll probably just ask my brother.”

“You and your brother don't even talk to each other.”

“We don't have to. We're brothers.”

“If I were you, I'd pick Glenn before I picked your brother.”

“Me too,” he said. “I'd pick Glenn in a minute if I thought he'd be willing to do it.”

“He'd do it. He wouldn't say no.”

“I know. But he'd probably hate every minute of it.”

“Well, you better make up your mind,” she advised him. “September's going to be here before you know it.”

Dave felt a headache coming on. Faster than he'd ever imagined, the wedding had installed itself as a dominant presence in his life, this giant looming cloud of unmade decisions. It turned out to be far more pressing and complicated than the smaller cloud it had displaced, the one emblazoned with the single, no-longer-eternal question:
Marriage?

“You know what?” she said. “I bet Leonard Nimoy
is
gay.”

“Really?”

“Who knows?” She held her left hand in front of her face, as if trying to imagine the ring onto her finger. “After a few years in a spaceship, we'd probably all start rethinking our options.”

Dave Couldn't remember the last time they'd spent an afternoon like this—a picnic on a blanket in the shade by a lake, Julie stretched out beside him, eyes closed, maybe sleeping, maybe not, nothing unpleasant hanging over their heads, no fights or disappointments or lurking grievances. It almost seemed to him that they'd managed to return to an earlier time in their relationship, as if they themselves had been rejuvenated.

He sat up on the blanket and looked around. Over in the parking area, shirtless teenage boys were waxing muscle cars while girls in tight jeans looked on, smoking with the squinty-eyed concentration of beginners. In a grassy clearing nearby, three teenage boys with flannel shirts tied around their waists were showing off with a Frisbee, catching it between their legs and behind their backs, popping it in the air over and over again with one finger. On a picnic table to their right, a couple of high-school kids were making out as though their faces had been stuck together with Krazy Glue, and they were trying every trick they could think of to pull them apart. In the lake, a black lab with a blue bandana collar swam regally toward shore, a fat stick jutting from its mouth. Somewhere across the water, “Sugar Magnolia” was blaring from a radio.

It really could have been 1979, he thought, except that he and Julie would have been the teenagers with adhesive faces rather than the adults who had just spent more than they could afford on an engagement ring. There were days when a realization like that would have struck him with sadness, days when he ached to be sixteen again, but today wasn't one of them. Today he felt richer for possessing a past, maybe even a little wiser. They had had their moment; they hadn't let it pass. That was the most anyone could say.

He looked down at her, the halo of dark outspread hair fanned out around her peaceful face. She wasn't seventeen anymore, but she was still beautiful. He thought about Phil Hart and his wife, the fact that they'd managed to stick it out for more than a half century. Did he look at her on the morning of his death and think,
Well, she's not sixty-five anymore, but she's still beautiful?
Was that a way it could happen?

“Heads up, dude!”

Dave turned toward the voice, just in time to see an orange Frisbee slicing toward his face. Reacting with the grace born of
self-preservation, he ducked out of the way while simultaneously reaching up with his right hand to snag the errant disc. In a surprisingly fluid motion, he rose to his feet and zipped the Frisbee back to the long-haired Chinese kid who had yelled out the warning, not with the cumbersome cross-body discus hurl of the neophyte, but with the precise, economical flick of the wrist he had perfected during countless lazy spring days like this when he was flunking out of college.

Acknowledging Dave's membership in the elite, wrist-flicking fraternity, the kid jumped up and caught the Frisbee between his outscissored legs, then fired it off to one of his friends before his feet even touched the ground.

“Thanks, dude.”

“No problem,” said Dave. He felt deeply pleased, as though he'd just proven something important to himself and the world.

Julie was stirring when he sat back down. She yawned and opened her eyes, blinking a few times to readjust to the brightness of the day. Then she rolled easily onto her side and smiled at him.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

She poked a finger into his thigh. “You know what I want to do?”

“What?”

She pushed herself up from the ground into sitting position and glanced around to make sure no one was within listening range.

“I want to go to a motel.”

“Right now?”

She nodded slowly, biting her bottom lip, her face flushed with color.

“This very minute,” she said.

Dave's blood began to celebrate; a giddy torrent of ideas flooded his brain. Aside from a few hurried, mostly clothed interludes
on the rec room couch, they hadn't really made love in well over a month, not since her parents’ ill-fated jaunt to Atlantic City. He wanted to watch her undress slowly, one article of clothing at a time. He wanted to reacquaint himself with her body.

“It's quarter to three,” he said, glancing quickly at his watch. “That gives us almost an hour and a half.”

Her expression changed. Her teeth let go of her lip.

“Shit,” she said.

“What?”

“You have a wedding.” She made it sound like an awful thing —a disease, something to be ashamed of.

“I'm sure I told you.”

“I forgot. We were having such a nice day, I guess I pushed it out of my mind.”

“An hour and a half is enough. We've done it in a lot less time than that.”

“I'm sick of hurrying.” To illustrate this point, she reached up with both hands and gathered her loose hair into a ponytail with exquisite, painstaking care. “I just want to have a nice quiet Saturday alone with you for once.”

“Sorry. I'm not the one who schedules the gigs.”

She grabbed her shoes from the corner of the blanket and slipped them on her feet. Just like that, he realized, their picnic had been canceled. She pulled the laces tight and stared at him.

“How much longer do you plan on doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“The Wishbones.”

Dave felt shell-shocked. On the blanket, a black ant was struggling with an enormous bread crumb, bigger than its own head. The ant kept lifting it, staggering forward, dropping it, then lifting it again.

“Are you asking me to quit the band?”

Her voice softened. “Haven't you thought about it?”

“It never even occurred to me.”

“Well, I don't feel like spending the rest of my life alone on Saturday night while my husband's out having a good time.”

“It's not a good time,” he said, still reeling from the suddenness of her attack. “It's a job. A good one. I wouldn't be making a living without it.”

“You're not planning on being a courier for the rest of your life, are you?”

“No,” he said. “But it's not like I've got lots of other prospects at the moment.”

“You should start thinking about it. I'd like to start a family in the next couple of years.”

“Me, too. What does that have to do with the band?”

She stood up and grabbed two corners of the blanket. “Come on. Help me fold this.”

Obediently, Dave rose to his feet, still trying to figure out how they'd moved from talking about checking into a motel to talking about him quitting the band.

“Heads up!”

This time Dave was ready. He turned and poised himself for the catch, waiting with his hands up as the Frisbee drifted toward him at a dreamy velocity, a vibrating curve of neon. At the very last second, though, it took a freak hop, jumping right over his hands and striking him smack in the middle of his forehead, much harder than he'd expected, more like a dinner plate than a flimsy piece of molded plastic. Fireworks of pain exploded on the inside of his eyelids.

“Sorry, dude,” the kid called out.

“No problem.”

Smiling through his discomfort, Dave bent down and picked up the Frisbee. He flicked his wrist to return it, but something
slipped. It wobbled feebly through the air and died like a duck at the kid's feet. He turned sheepishly to Julie, rubbing at the sore spot between his eyebrows.