Boarded Windows (12 page)

The beautiful woman in the red leather jacket wasn’t an especially gifted improvisational actor, but she was better than her colleagues. (Irrespective of her superiority, I was more embarrassed for her than for the others.) One of the sketches was set at a driving range—I lightly slapped Wanda’s arm—until the woman came onstage as an NBC producer and the scene became an audition for Johnny Carson’s replacement. In another sketch, her character unsheathed a ridiculous, piercing laugh, a true cackle, that itself drew the biggest laugh of the night.

“Well, I didn’t mind the ass on the gal,” Wade said when the set ended. He wasn’t shy about making lecherous remarks around Wanda, who I think endorsed his boycott of false gentility. “I’d like to be around her
with
a paddle,” he added. “Is that a big thing for you, paddles?” Wanda said. They discussed that further while I played with my napkin. We would have left, but the club’s manager was stalling to pay Wanda her twenty-five bucks. She was about to ask again when the woman from Without a Paddle approached our table. “Shucks?” she said, and started praising Wanda’s set, first generically, then in more detail, repeating a few punch lines and making a flattering reference to a reasonably well-known performance artist. She’d grabbed a seat from another table while delivering this long compliment. There were two tomato seeds stuck to the left sleeve of her sweater, one seed stuck to each side of the elbow like fish eyes. Her name was Marianne. She’d seen Wanda perform before, had recommended her for the opening slot.

“When I first saw Marianne Faithfull’s name, I thought it was pronounced like
marine,
” I said. “Isn’t that dumb?”

“My name’s spelled with a
y,”
Maryanne said.

“Oh,” I said.

“But not like the
Gilligan’s Island
chick; it’s one word like Marianne Faithfull’s, but with a
y.”

“Wanda and I are big Marianne Faithfull fans,” I said. “We listen to
Broken English
all the time.”

“Well, we’ve listened to it a couple times,” Wanda said.

“But we both like it,” I said. “We each have a copy.”

“They’ll probably never make love to either copy,” Wade said, “on account of it being for the most part rhythmically straightforward.”

“To be honest, I’ve never heard Marianne Faithfull,” Maryanne said. “She’s just a name to me.”

“Like Pete?” I said.

“Yeah, or Larry,” Maryanne said. “I know she used to go with Mick Jagger.”
Go with Mick Jagger,
I liked that. She was taking big sips of her clear cocktail, probably a gin and tonic. We all talked about Marianne Faithfull, and then our Maryanne, waving toward the stage, said, “I don’t think I’ll work with these guys anymore. It’s”—she shook her head searching for a word—“asinine.” It didn’t seem like the word she wanted. “Every time we finish,” she said, “I feel my dignity get carried off on a stretcher.” I was about to contradict her. “Improv is tough,” Wanda said, and she and Wanda talked about the form and its difficulties, Wade and I chiming in about jazz and bluegrass. “Yeah, that was my last Without a Paddle show,” Maryanne said.

“Probably you could do better,” Wanda said.

“Well, I thought you guys were pretty good,” I said.

Maryanne shrugged and, mostly to Wanda, said, “I just wanted you to know that
I
know how stupid the stuff was tonight. These guys, their first ideas are always, I don’t know …”

“Hard even to summon the energy for further critique,” Wade said in too harsh a tone. At the ebb of his high, Wade got irritable. Wanda gave him a chastening look, then to Maryanne said, “But
you
were good, you almost saved them.”

“That Carson bit was spot-on,” I said.

“Thanks.”

“Have you heard the Beach Boys song about Johnny Carson?” I said.

“No.”

The waitress came around for an early last call, and I learned that Maryanne drank vodka tonics, not gin ands. She was an overnight baker, she told us, or had been at least; a few weeks earlier she’d been fired (coolly, and by telephone, she said), and was now living off her dwindling overdraft account. Soon she’d have to sell her motorcycle. She was taking one class, on the history of erotic art (among Wade’s areas of expertise, he slickly conveyed), but her plans to enter a film program in St. Paul were on hold, and from there the three of us raced through our favorite movies, most of them unknown to Wade, a few of Maryanne’s unknown to me. The waitress returned with the drinks and Maryanne nearly chugged the vodka tonic and got up to squeeze in an order for one more. Her voice got louder and stagier. She started talking about an idea she had for a movie, and about a large sculpture she was going to make out of cough drops. I began to think that too much of the group’s conversation was being devoted to Maryanne’s future achievements. After Wanda collected her money, Maryanne suggested we all go to a late-night family restaurant not far from our apartment, but Wade said he needed to turn in for the night and I followed his lead. As we were all standing outside the club, Maryanne wondered aloud if a family restaurant that stayed open so late had been misclassified, or if it stopped being a family restaurant at a certain hour, such as nine p.m. As she pursued this fruitless riff, once cracking herself up (the jarring laugh that so charmed Without a Paddle’s audience was closely patterned on Maryanne’s normal laugh), I applauded myself for declining to join her and Wanda. Moments later, however, when they drove off on Maryanne’s Japanese motorcycle, I regretted my decision, and felt guilty about my private dismissal of Maryanne’s harmless joking and unselfconscious, one might say defiant, laugh.

On their way to the restaurant, Wanda and Maryanne hit a patch of gravel and dumped the motorcycle. No one was hurt beyond some skin abrasions, but the bike came out badly positioned for sale. My drive home with Wade was less eventful, mostly silent. “You think we should meet them after all?” I said as we were approaching home. “No, they want to be alone,” he said. “That’s why I said I was tired.”

“Seemed like you really were tired.”

“I am tired,” he said. Then after a pause, “Wanda was good tonight. She’s the real thing. The stuff she’s doing now, it’s not quite there, but she’s on to something, just you wait.” I took his words seriously, and several times during those last months of ’91, even as I felt Wanda and I breaking up, I imagined myself as her lifelong aide-de-camp, doing mundane things for her that would make her art possible, leading the ovation when she merited one, leading it more commandingly when she didn’t, getting teary when her name was called at some local awards ceremony. Though in truth I’m a tagalong not a votary, and I doubt I could ever play such a role, even for someone more talented than Wanda.

O
N HALLOWEEN AFTERNOON IT STARTED TO SNOW heavily and continued through the night. I had to work the next morning, a Friday. Wade didn’t stir on the sofa as I ate my cereal in the kitchen, or when I put on my rustly parka and pulled on my galoshes with some grunting difficulty. When I stepped outside, there were, as I recall, eighteen and a half inches of snow on the ground. All over the city, stems from the larger pumpkins barely emerged from the snow like snorkels round a touristy reef (I did a bit of traveling during my two-year affair [mid-’01–late-’03] with an ad-agency noncreative), but most of the pumpkins were submerged altogether, along with ashcans, oilcans, leaf piles, Tonka trucks, and some of the smaller grills and Coleman stoves.

Considering the size and prematurity of the storm, I was surprised when my bus arrived more or less on time, though after a while I realized that it wasn’t my bus at all, but a much-delayed earlier bus, explaining why many of the passengers looked unfamiliar and more professional than those of us who didn’t need to make it downtown till just past nine. The bus got stuck near Franklin Avenue, and about a dozen of its more spirited and sacrificing riders got out to push—against Metropolitan Transit Commission regs, repeated the gregarious driver. We managed to loose the wheels (one of them spewed grime on my pants), and I high-fived the thin glove of a fellow pusher wearing a stiff glen-plaid suit under his promotional letter jacket, the suit’s wide trousers only grazing his pinchy wingtips. My ankle-boot galoshes weren’t built for the task either, especially since the left galosh had a nickel-sized hole on its heel.

Timid or lazy stay-at-homes had given downtown a cheery holiday sparseness, and after I got off the bus I lingered awhile in the snow-global scene in front of the record store, even though my arrival at the store was recorded by two machines and I was often scolded for tardiness. Sometimes the wind would blow a cluster of flakes into curved feathers. When, a bit later, I got back from the bank in time to open the store, I was met by a somewhat mentally handicapped woman who came in every few weeks to ask after the same discontinued Bolling Greene cassette,
Hosses,
which had helped her through a hard time, she’d once explained. I unlocked the doors and she followed me into the store, stamping her boots on the welcome mat. “It’s snow joke,” she said, and we had our recurrent conversation about Bolling and the fickleness of the record industry, the decline of the cassette. After she left, no customers came in for several hours. I took a seat on the ledge of the store’s plate-glass windows and watched the snow fall, listening to a Kentucky Headhunters tape at a higher volume than was usual for the store, until their music started to seem properly genial but improperly prosaic for the occasion, and I put on Joni Mitchell’s latest, which I later brought home for Wade, not much taken with it. None of my coworkers made it in. I understood why Wade sought out nearly solitary straight jobs—filling up vending machines, watching over parking lots. At about four o’clock the district manager called to say that all the stores in his ambit were closing for the rest of the day.

After locking up, I went to the hipper record store across the street, where a party had sprung up. Maryanne was there, taking crouching hits off a one-hitter behind the imports rack, or so I thought for a moment, but it was just someone who looked vaguely like her. She and Wanda’s friendship had developed quickly like a Polaroid, and now they saw or at least talked to each other every day: they took long afternoon constitutionals leading to the earliest happy hours; sat on opposite ends of our sofa, reading in silence save for explanations of hmms and chuckles; browsed the books from Maryanne’s erotic-art class while I sat on the floor trying to fix a wah-wah pedal; chatted on the phone while watching TV; talked at the Formica table about dentists from their girlhoods (the dentist from Maryanne’s childhood was kind but big-fingered and hairy-handed, the one from Wanda’s gruff with his assistant, who did all the work).

I spent about an hour and a half at the party before calling home. Wade picked up. “It’s really snowing,” I said. By then the snowfall was getting closer to its ultimate twenty-eight inches (it looked like thirty). “What’s this
it”
? he said. I told him I’d be home in about an hour, maybe longer since I planned to walk and it’d be slow trudging. Wanda’s shift at the call center had been canceled too, he told me. “Listen,” he said, “if there’s a video shop still open, could you pick up some movies? Stuff from the past ten years.” I asked if he could be more specific. “Good stuff from the past ten or eleven years,” he said.

“But I need more direction.”

“Try to get a dozen or so. Anything you get, I won’t have seen. I have to catch up on film before my expatriation. No one reads anymore, even in Germany, is my understanding, so I’ll need to hold my own on cinema if I want to be taken seriously.”

“I thought you said the idea was not to be taken seriously,” I said.

“People have to take you seriously before you can convince them not to.”

“So should I be getting German movies?”

“It doesn’t matter. Cosmopolitan.”

“But art movies?” I said.

“Highbrow or low, just nothing in the middle.”

The walk home was dark and windy, strange and slippery—no, first crepuscular, then dark, I now remember. When I think of that walk, I don’t recall any of the discomfort I must have felt from the cold and the wind and the hole in my left galosh; I just remember a pacific dreaminess or nonmaniacal euphoria, the show-biz flakes in the streetlamp beams, how the Marxian snow leveled the parked cars (though you could still gauge their ages and values by their shapes), how the snowbanks were like the giant wave in Hokusai’s endlessly reproduced woodblock print, though that’s silly: they would have been nowhere near that size. The sidewalks were hard to navigate, so for most of the trip I walked in the tire ruts in the middle of the street, including the city’s busiest street, like a lonesome protest marcher. Once in a while I had to step aside for a slow-moving car or truck, but no one got angry, even the honks were Samaritan little pips. Three or four times I helped someone push into an alley or out of a parking spot. Part of me wanted to walk the city all night pushing cars.

(I feel obliged to add here that people were hurt by the storm: there were meals lost to undelivered AFDC checks, fingers lost to snowblowers, shovel-clutching grandparents lost to driveways.)

The independent video store was still open and doing good business, so I spent an hour picking out a dozen movies from the eighties and incipient nineties. When I got home, Wanda was reading
Z
magazine and playing a Scrawl album too quietly for it to do its work. She was sitting in the sand-brown wing chair Wade had rescued from an alley and set among his record boxes in the living room. He was dozing on the couch, an open library copy of
The Ashley Book of Knots
resting like a cottage roof on his chest, his cream cowboy shirt (new, I think) mostly unsnapped. Without opening his eyes, he pantomimed knob-turning and made other gestures till I gathered he wanted me to turn up the stereo. “Certain volumes are an insult to music and to silence,” he said hoarsely.