Know Your Beholder: A Novel (20 page)

He’d seen Sheila Anne.

I was stunned.

My throat made a strange dry clucking noise. I clucked three or four times. I could feel my tongue contorting into a garden slug.

I asked him if he made contact and he said he called out to her but that she was wearing headphones, that she didn’t even see him, that she was walking really, really, really, really, really fast like they do in New York. I imagined Sheila Anne’s hip flexors getting really, really, really, really, really supple and defined.

Then Glose said, “But you know what was weird?”

Of course I bit and said, “What?” and he went on to say that, despite all the East Village noise—that purported grinding cacophony of First Avenue—he could’ve sworn she was listening to the Third Policeman’s
Argon Lights
. Not at all far-fetched if you’ve spent countless hours recording, mixing, and listening to your own music. The melodies and moments float in your unconscious like the pains and joys of adolescence.

“Track two,” he said, “‘Know Your Beholder.’”

“Wow,” is all I could muster. A beautiful warmth passed through my body. It started in my stomach and radiated outward.

“Know Your fucking Beholder,” Glose repeated. “How ’bout that?”

The highest note I’ve ever made escaped my mouth, a sound birthed from some tender abscess in my heart. I asked Glose how she looked and he said “fucking amazing,” that it was July, that it was hot as lion’s breath, that the streets were baking and smelled like an odor he couldn’t even describe, that she was dressed for work, that she was wearing a skirt and a blouse, with nice shoes.

“Heels?” I said.

“I think so,” Glose replied.

I imagined her calves, their faint, lovely clefts.

“I guess I shoulda ran after her,” he said, “but my sign was pretty big.”

Sheila Anne probably would’ve taken him in. She always liked Glose, despite his antics. Whenever I would express my frustrations about him, she would say, “How can you be mad at Glose? That’s like being mad at a big dumb dog.”

When the instrumental track “Mammagamma” began we were quiet. I’ve always thought it to be the most underrated song in the Alan Parsons Project catalog. The layered synth is incredible. I let it mingle with the unexpected warmth I was feeling.

Hearing that Sheila Anne was still listening to our music as recently as last July, more than a year after she’d left, gave me hope. I sang the lead vocal on “Know Your Beholder.” In spite of everything, she was still spending time with my voice in her headphones.

About halfway through “Mammagamma” I said, “What if I helped you buy another drum kit?”

“You would do that?” Glose said.

I told him I wouldn’t even ask him to pay me back.

“Hardware and everything?”

“Cymbals, hardware, everything,” I said.

Glose rubbed at the halo of eczema around his mouth and said, “Maybe like a little jazz kit.”

“A jazz kit, sure.”

“Where would I set up? In the basement?”

I told him I couldn’t do that to my tenants.

“The garage?”

“It’s too full. Besides, it’s not soundproofed. You’d have to rent studio space. But you could afford that if you got a job. And you could give lessons on the side, which would easily cover your overhead.”

Glose thought for a moment and said, “That seems pretty complicated.”

I told him that it might take some getting used to. “But look at me,” I said. “I never thought I’d wind up being a landlord. And I’m pretty good at it.”

The Eye in the Sky
ended. I didn’t bother taking the record off the turntable. I just let the needle float in the gutter and the tonearm eventually returned to its first position.

You could suddenly hear music drifting up through the acoustic vinyl of Harriet Gumm’s unit on the second floor, just below us. She was playing Angela Bofill’s R&B dance-pop classic
Too Tough
.

Glose said, “I could help you too, Francis.”

“In what way?”

“With your issues.”

“
My
issues?” I sort of barked and snickered—an extended snicker, actually, demonic-sounding. I was snickering so hard I almost banged my head against the granite inlay top of my kitchen island.

Glose asked me why I was laughing.

“Because it’s funny,” I cried.

“What’s funny?”

“You telling me I have issues. I mean, you’re the one who’s been lying on my bearskin, like not leaving it in some sort of John and Yoko protest way.” I had to take a breath. The words were tumbling out too fast. “And I’d greatly appreciate it if you started wearing clothes,” I continued. “This isn’t some old-world bathhouse.” I laughed yet again. “And when was the last time you showered?” I added. “You’re enacting some bizarre first-person ethnology study on my living room floor and you’re trying to tell me
I
have issues?”

“You do, Francis.”

“Don’t call me Francis, Rodney.”

He said, “I’ve always called you Francis, Francis. You have issues.”

I told him to name exactly one.

“You like to use big words,” he replied. “You just did in fact.”

“What big word did I just use?”

“Ethanol.”

“
Ethnology
?”

“I mean ethnology.”

“That’s not a big word!” I said. “It’s not big at all!”

“It’s like a word out of a crossword puzzle, Francis. Don’t get mad.”

“Don’t call me Francis!”

“You’re shouting.”

“I am not!”

In some childish act of defiance Glose removed his Girl Scouts of America T-shirt and tossed it over his shoulder, revealing his hairy pectorals, which drooped in the manner of listless, flea-bitten spaniel ears. He was sitting Indian-style now.

“Great,” I said. “That’s just great. Now you’re actually fully nude. Did you go away and become a fucking
nudist
?”

Glose said, “Did you not go anywhere and become a
thermalist
?”

It was the first cruel thing he’d said since his arrival. It was cruel and surprisingly witty and it stung. That was the thing about Glose. He was never cruel to anyone, except for Kent, of course. And to other bands’ bassists, when he’d head-butt them for no reason. But that was somehow sort of fun-spirited, or at least he thought it was. He was inexplicably, carelessly, boyishly sweet, even during his most idiotic moments.

I took a breath. “Did you lose your clothes, Glose?”

He didn’t answer.

“Rodney?”

He scratched petulantly at his chest, refusing to make eye contact with me. A big sad half-man, a kind of forlorn, imperfect, nutritionally challenged Sasquatch.

I gave him a moment and said, “Do you have any belongings at all?”

Finally the story began to emerge. Glose said that after he managed to get out of New York he’d been hitching rides west, with the hope of returning to Pollard. He’d fallen asleep at a rest stop in western Pennsylvania—one of the huge ones where you can take showers and have indoor picnics and traipse around in video game arcades and whatnot—and someone took his duffel bag, which had everything in it: his wallet, his ID, his clothes, his phone, the last few bucks he’d scrounged together on the streets of the East Village, everything. And then, farther west, he got caught stealing a taco, one measly taco from a truck-stop Taco Bell. An undercover cop caught him wolfing it down and displayed zero sympathy for the no-doubt itinerant, slightly suspicious-looking creature we know as Glose, who then had to spend the night in a highly impersonal little mint-colored cinder-block jail cell outside Terre Haute, Indiana, that smelled like balls and stale sperm and chewing tobacco.

It was a terribly sad story and I believed it. Part of me subscribes to the notion of karmic whiplash, the folksy logic that Glose was being punished not for the taco theft, but for the havoc he’d wreaked on Fat Judy.

We fell quiet. The house made a sound. It wasn’t the heat and it wasn’t the plumbing. It was deeper, sadder. A brief, almost human measure of grief that had been trapped in the floorboards. A sorrowful groan released into the wintry night.

And then again, it might have been my intestines.

“What’s with all the snowman drawings?” Glose said. “There’s like a thousand snowman drawings all around your desk.”

I told him that my desk was my private area. I said, “Why are you looking in my shit, Rodney?” I was suddenly paranoid that he was looking in my notebook too, which I’d been especially careful to hide after each use.

“As far as I can tell those snowman drawings are on public display,” he said.

“Well they’re not.”

“Then don’t Scotch tape them to the wall.”

I looked over at my desk and he was right. There were snowman drawings everywhere. It looked insane.

“You’ve been crying in your sleep too,” Glose added.

“I have?”

“Two nights in a row now. Full-blown crying.”

I tried to imagine the sounds I was making in my sleep. Were they whimpers? Sobs? Were they similar to the noise I just heard the house make? Were these little fits of anguish getting recycled into the floorboards? I couldn’t even remotely go there. Instead I glanced away and said, “You got thrown in jail for stealing a taco?”

“Look at me, Francis.”

I turned back to face Glose.

“You cry in your sleep like a battered woman on food stamps,” he said. “So don’t try to pretend that I’m the only one here with issues.”

I removed my cell phone from the minifridge and went into the bathroom and called Sheila Anne. My teeth were chattering so intensely I could feel my beard oscillating. I tried to dial her number three times but I couldn’t because the teeth-chattering problem started spreading throughout my whole body. I skeletally trembled for a solid minute. Then I started yawning. I sat on the toilet seat and yawned until my jaw was legitimately fatigued. After several deep breaths I managed to dial successfully.

Her phone rang four times and went to voice mail. Which probably meant that she watched it ring and actually watched my name come up on her cell phone screen and thought about it, but maybe Dennis Church walked into the room in banana-colored bikini underwear with like a foamy toothbrush in his mouth or maybe she was alone and she simply got nervous, which is okay because her getting nervous means that she still has something for me no matter how small, even if that something’s as infinitesimal as a grasshopper’s eye, there’s still a piece of me lost in her, some microscopic particle floating around in her bloodstream.

Again, her voice all but cleansed my soul.

I didn’t stammer. I told her that I hadn’t yet checked on Bradley, but that I would, and that she shouldn’t worry too much about him, that from our limited contact he seemed busy and well. I even lied and told her that lately he’d been surprisingly friendly, that once we even fist-bumped after I’d handed him some of his mail that had been accidentally mixed in with mine, and that he’d thanked me and said, “Good lookin’ out, bro.” And I told her that she should feel free to call me back if she wanted, that it would be nice to speak with her live. I told her that I hoped things were great with her and that New York, New York, Big City of Dreams, was giving her everything she needed (yes, New York, New York, Big City of Dreams, conspicuously the city itself and
not Dennis Church
). Idiotic and about as transparent as a wolf made of gossamer, I know, but there you have it.

And then, after swallowing hard and holding my breath and flexing my larger muscle groups, I lost all control and told her that I missed and loved her and that I thought about her all the time and that
FOREVER
is a word that keeps lighting my long sleepless nights like the HOLLYWOOD sign itself and I wished we could eat vegetarian lasagna and drink Maker’s Mark out of kooky ceramic gift mugs and listen to questionable Fleetwood Mac records, even the ones that were made before Stevie New York Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham Palace joined the band, and laugh while making uncomplicated but prestigious missionary-style love like in the Olden Golden Days of Fran and Sheila Anne, and just as I was about to keep unraveling like so much yarn thrown from the window of a speeding train her voice mail beeped and the cruel God of Digital Limitations cut me off.

I thought of erasing the message and starting over, but I figured all I would do is skip all the stuff about Bradley and just say how much I missed and loved her and thought about her all the time in as many clever ways as I could fit into her three-minute incoming message allotment.

And then I would do it again.

And again.

And again and again and again and again and again until my cell phone would run out of battery power and I’d have to start scrambling around looking for the charger.

After I hung up, I flushed the toilet, emerged from the bathroom, sat at my kitchen island, and pretended to read the
New York Times
. Glose was still nude, but he’d been considerate enough to pull part of the bearskin up through his legs so that it covered his crotch, diaper-like.

I repeatedly glanced over at my phone—which was no less than six inches away from my right hand—waiting for the screen to light up. Sheila Anne never called back and I had an impulse to take a hammer to my cell phone, the kitchen island, and at least two walls’ worth of attic Sheetrock, but I didn’t. Instead I just sat there for a while, my fingers stained with unread newspaper ink, and watched Glose sleep.

I happened upon Baylor Phebe on the back porch. I’d been down in the laundry room, transcribing the work from my notebook. He was wearing a beige broadcloth suit and brown wing tips, along with a white shirt and navy tie. In one hand he held a classic leather briefcase and in the other a brown fedora, which was perched on the outermost concavity of his tremendous stomach. He was pacing back and forth, muttering to himself. He seemed emotionally distraught and overwhelmed, at once sad and enraged.

For a moment I thought I’d managed to rent an apartment to a lunatic. He didn’t hear me behind him. When he turned, his face was flush and glistening.