Boarded Windows (21 page)

“Oh, that’s the wrong photo. Here,” he said, replacing the shot of the National Farmers’ Bank with one of Bolling, his bearish right arm around a woman’s shoulders. They were in a skuzzy dressing room, just a few spots of black wall showing under the posters and graffiti. The woman did seem to be Martha. Her hair was permed and dyed a wheaty blond. She was wearing a yellow skirted suit with a broad-shouldered jacket, a silk blouse, and a pearl necklace. I compared the older and more recent Polaroids. It was the same face. In the later picture, Martha’s clothes and the Lone Justice poster over her head fixed the date at no earlier than 1985. “I took two photos like this,” Wade said. “One to give to Martha, and another for me. She’d come to the club from work. She’d been working late.”

“Where’d she work?” I said.

“I can’t remember. Some company.”

I studied the pictures a bit more and then put them in my jacket pocket before Wade could take them back. It was hard to tell when he was telling the truth, as I said before, but this time I felt strongly that the essence of his story was true, even if some of the details were fabricated.

“The main thing Marleen stressed when she told me the story was how much she loved you,” Wade said, “how Martha’s vision must have been true. You know how I told you about the girlfriend who believed in booksong, that you have to develop a ‘mystic’s ear’ for which book is calling to you?”

“Yeah.”

“That was Martha. I made fun of her spiritual leanings, you know, and I wondered why she was sometimes called by what I took to be inferior books. But she really did have that mystical quality.”

Wade was still holding my sweating hand across the table.

“I resisted her booksong idea for a long time. But then one day—this was after Martha and I broke up—I was at the library, and I was stopped in my tracks by the spine of Augustine’s
Confessions.
It was an unassuming spine, nothing eye-grabbing in itself. I borrowed it, read it over the next few days, felt the whole time that my senses were amplified, that every stubbed toe and steak sandwich held a poetic germ, that I was living both in the book’s world and in the real world and that the book’s world was making the real world absurdly interesting. Schopenhauer said that life and dreams are leaves of one and the same book, and I agree with that, but the way I see it, even though the words on the real-life pages are different from those on the dream pages, you can sometimes get the words to overlay, and then they can’t be read but can be understood. What’s important is that I knew through booksong that
Confessions
was what I’d been meant to read that week. The weird thing is that the spine that called to me from the stacks wasn’t Augustine’s
Confessions
at all, or even Rousseau’s
Confessions,
or
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
or
The Confessions of Nat Turner,
or
Augie March,
or a book of Confucius, or any title that on peripheral glance might have brought Augustine’s
Confessions
to mind. The book that double-took me was
Thirty Plays Hath November.
By the drama critic Walter Kerr. And yet the second I touched
Thirty Plays,
I knew that Kerr was a go-between, that Augustine’s book had sounded the call. Isn’t that weird? So I think it was true what Martha said to Marleen on the phone, that you were born for Marleen and that Martha somehow knew that.”

“Why did you tell me this?” I said. “What good can it do me?”

Wade paused for several seconds. His expression was raw and earnest, like when he sang Joni Mitchell’s song that night over pizza. “People should know the truth about their origins. You have to know where you’re from to know where you’re at and where you’re going.”

“That doesn’t sound at all like something you’d believe,” I said.

“No, it is.”

“Are you saying you’re my dad?”

“Almost certainly I’m not,” Wade said.

“You’re not
saying
that? Or you’re
not
my dad?”

“Martha and I were probably still together when you were conceived, although my dates are a little fuzzy. But even if we were, we were pretty estranged by that point.”

“You weren’t having sex, you mean.”

“Not that I recall.”

We looked at each other.

“We don’t resemble each other in the slightest, you and me,” Wade said.

“But you know when we were at the vegetarian restaurant a couple weeks ago and we ran into that friend of mine from high school. She started to laugh ’cause we were standing by her booth in the same pose.”

“Was it an unusual pose?” Wade said.

“I don’t know, but I know that’s why she laughed, ’cause later I talked to her by the bathrooms and she said we were like two peas in a pod.”

“She seemed like a ditz.”

“She’s not a ditz.”

“‘Two peas in a pod’: it’s such a dumb thing to say.”

“I’ve always felt something, that we were connected.”

“You might be Tauber’s kid. You probably saw from the author bio that he’s teaching at Grinnell now, if that interests you. They have a nice bank down there. You might want to do some sightseeing and just see what happens.”

“But she never said anything about me being Tauber’s kid, right?”

“No, no. It’s just a possibility. That’s why I wanted you to have a signed copy of his book. It might open a door. If nothing else it gives you a souvenir. Did you notice anything about his inscription?”

“He didn’t say much.”

“Well, I don’t know if handwriting has a genetic component or not, but you might study it, see if you spot a family resemblance. Another possibility is the pedal steel player from the Seed Sacks. They broke up years ago, but he’s probably still around. I could get you the name if you want.”

I shook my head no. I was burping pizza but had a worse taste in my mouth. I felt that Wade was contaminating my air and wished he would stay at a motel for the night, but at the same time I wanted badly to go with him to Berlin.

“Don’t dwell on the three thousand dollars,” he said. “It was a grassroots adoption. Marleen didn’t have any money to get you two settled.”

I tried to clear my head by analyzing the pain in my stomach. I felt a cold coming on.

Wade patted my hand twice, put his coat back on, and nodded for us to leave.

O
NE AFTERNOON IN THE SPRING OF 1987, I WALKED two or three intermittently seedy miles from my high school to a record store I sometimes visited and where that afternoon I bought a used LP,
Hope Springs Eternal,
by the jazz pianist Elmo Hope. From the store I walked another two or three miles to our apartment, the smaller unit of a duplex in a quiet middle-class neighborhood. It wasn’t a hot day—probably only in the midseventies—but I’d jogged part of the way home, holding my backpack’s straps to stop its textbook-heavy bounce, and when I got home I was sweaty under my jean jacket. I wiped a damp washcloth up and down my nape, grabbed a budget-brand soda from the fridge, put Hope’s record on my mother’s stereo, and took a seat on the sofa. On the end table to my right was a silky, often-flowering mammillary cactus that I sometimes teased or studied, but that afternoon I mostly studied my new album, whose previous owner had written his name, Grady McGill, in neat script in the upper right corner of the jacket’s verso and on the A-side’s prosaically designed label. I particularly liked the tail of Grady’s
y
and the ligature of his
Gr
and
Gi.
I stared at the script as I listened to Hope’s trio, then read the album’s liner notes, endearingly bad I see now. During the second side, my mother came home through the back door. “I love how jazz sounds from another room,” she said while passing through the dining room to the living room. “There’s something sirenical about it. I like how it sounds in the room where it’s playing too,” she clarified, maybe so I wouldn’t think she was insulting my record, “but I especially like it from another room.” We talked about that, and she brought up Sonny Stitt’s show at the Plugged Nickel, recalled how emotive Stitt’s horn had sounded from the women’s room. Then we went into the kitchen to make a taco salad, and that was one of the times she told me about Martha Dickson.

A few months after I bought the Hope LP, I bought a used Wayne Shorter album that had also belonged to Grady McGill, and then, maybe a year after that, another album exiled from his collection, this one by the then-popular R&B singer Gregory Abbott. I’d taken McGill for a hardcore jazz collector, a type normally dismissive of modern pop, so his ownership, however short term, of Abbott’s album surprised me. On the Shorter album,
Schizophrenia,
he’d checked his two favorite cuts; on the Abbott, he’d written the words “As will I” next to the album’s closer, “I’ll Find a Way.”

Years later, probably in 1996, I met Grady at a birthday party thrown for a locally notable tenor saxophonist. I knew it was Grady McGill even before I learned his surname. Grady isn’t a common name and it was a jazz crowd, so I can’t be credited with much clairvoyance there, but for a few minutes I felt the excitement of knowing more than I was assumed to know. He was a tall, large-framed, slouchy, mostly bald computer programmer, but for all that not bad looking. Taking in Grady’s size—he must have been six foot seven—I recalled the two checked cuts on
Schizophrenia
, “Playground” and “Tom Thumb,” both by a man named Shorter, and wondered if some sort of wish-fulfillment psychology had been at work or in play. We chatted comfortably about jazz for ten minutes or so. He was elegant, relaxed, melancholy. When our conversation began to lose steam, I said, “You must be Grady
McGill
.
”
By then I had six of his old records, and named each one. Grady was flattered by my secret admiration, if that’s what it was, and from the party we drove in separate cars to the studio where he kept most of his records, some twenty thousand jazz, blues, R&B, and pop LPs, plus about a thousand forty-fives, a few hundred seventy-eights, and two or three stacks of CDs.

Grady had two old floor lamps in the studio space, but ignored them in favor of unpleasant fluorescent overheads, chosen, I guess, to best illuminate my browsing. It was the kind of light Wanda liked to fuck in, I thought, risking with the thought a noticeable erection that might have misled Grady. I hate to fuck in the dark, mostly because it leaves me with so few images to return to the next day, but severe light is perhaps worse even than puritan darkness; I doubt Wanda’s subsequent partners have tolerated it. “There’s a stack of duplicates and some other things I’m ready to sell over there,” Grady said, “if you want to look them over.”

“I probably won’t buy anything tonight,” I said.

“That’s fine,” he said, standing on a stepladder to see if he could stop one of the fluorescent light tubes from buzzing (he couldn’t), then resting on the concave seat of a brown recliner, in reach of which was a stereo system that probably received good marks in some early sixties issue of
HiFi Review.

“Do you keep your favorites at home?” I said, turning away from the record shelves to look at him.

“Not exactly,” Grady said. For several minutes he didn’t elaborate. As I was getting to the jazz
D
’s, he said, “I spend every Sunday here, listening to my buys from the previous week. Then I stack them up in order of preference and bring home the top five or six. I listen to those at home until I feel I know them well, if they do after all seem to deserve that, to be known well. I try to bring home only deserving records, but sometimes I misjudge. My ears get tired by the end of the day.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Isn’t that the challenge,” he said, “to spend time only with things that deserve to be known well?”

“That might be.”

“I mean people too, even though they’re not things. That’s why people move to new places.”

He had some highly valuable records.

“Or for a job,” Grady said. “For a lot of reasons, I guess.”

“Yeah.”

“But in my experience people are the same everywhere, so moving doesn’t help.”

I said, “That reminds me of something Werther said.”

“A friend of yours?”

“No, from a book.”

“A man in a book?”

“Yeah, a young man in a book,” I said.

“Is that what interests you, young men in books?”

“No.”

“So what did he say?”

“What you said:
What are people like here? Like everywhere!”

“Yes, that’s right,” Grady said.

“Or it’s something like that. I can’t quote it verbatim,” I said.

“Verbatim. Do you speak Latin?”

“No.”

“I had to study it as a boy, but I’ve forgotten everything. It’s horrible how much one forgets. You’ll see. Even the albums I say I love: I pull them out sometimes to look at them, and I stare at the titles, try to remember the tunes, and there’s nothing, often there’s nothing. So every February I bring home fifty or sixty of my favorite albums, and just savor those. I really do, I savor them, and I don’t bother at all with my recent acquisitions. So I should change the answer to your earlier question and say that yes, I do keep my favorites at home, but only in February.”

“Maybe you should pick one of the longer months for that,” I said.

“No, I need it to be February. I’m in rough straits by then.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking over at him. He blew his nose and put the hanky back in his khakis. I asked if he collected any country records.

“Not really. I have a Hank Garland, a few by Willie Nelson, one by Bill Wills.”

“Bob
Wills?”

“Bob, right. And you, you like country?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh.”

“I love it.”

“Ha, that’s good,” he said. “
I love it.
Did you make that up?”

“No.”

“Maybe I’ll use that.”

“Do you like jazz?” I said.

“Beg pardon?”

“Do you like jazz?”

“Oh, right. No … that’s good. I love it.”