Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 (24 page)

“You don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “Honest.”

“Huh?”

“So how talented is this Stanky? Give me an example.”

“What do you mean, I don’t have to worry about you?”

“Never mind. Now come on! Give me some Stanky.”

“You want me to sing?”

“You were a singer, weren’t you? A pretty good one, as I recall.”

“Yeah, but I can’t do what he does.”

She sat expectantly, hands folded on the tabletop.

“All right,” I said. I did a verse of “Devil’s Blues,” beginning with the lines:

I sailed on through to the chorus, getting into the vocal:

A bald guy popped his head over the top of an adjacent booth and looked at me, then ducked back down. I heard laughter.

“That’s enough,” I said to Andrea.

“Interesting,” she said. “Not my cup of tea, but I wouldn’t mind hearing him.”

“He’s playing the Crucible next weekend.”

“Is that an invitation?”

“Sure. If you’ll come.”

“I have to see how things develop at the office. Is a tentative yes okay?”

“Way better than a firm no,” I said.

We ordered from the grill and, after we had eaten, Andrea called her office and told them she was taking the rest of the day. We switched from martinis to red wine, and we talked, we laughed, we got silly, we got drunk. The sounds of the bar folded around us and I started to remember how it felt to be in love with her. We wobbled out of McGuigan’s around four o’clock. The sun was lowering behind the Bittersmiths, but shed a rich golden light; it was still warm enough for people to be sitting in sweaters and shirts on park benches under the orange leaves.

Andrea lived around the corner from the bar, so I walked her home. She was weaving a little and kept bumping into me. “You better take a cab home,” she said, and I said, “I’m not the one who’s walking funny,” which earned me a punch in the arm. When we came to her door, she turned to me, gripping her briefcase with both hands, and said, “I’ll see you next weekend, maybe.”

“That’d be great.”

She hovered there a second longer and then she kissed me. Flung her arms about my neck, clocking me with the briefcase, and gave me a one-hundred-percent all-Andrea kiss that, if I were a cartoon character, would have rolled my socks up and down and levitated my hat. She buried her face in my neck and said, “Sorry. I’m sorry.” I was going to say, For what?, but she pulled away in a hurry, appearing panicked, and fled up the stairs.

I nearly hit a parked car on the drive home, not because I was drunk, but because thinking about the kiss and her reaction afterward impaired my concentration. What was she sorry about? The kiss? Flirting? The divorce? I couldn’t work it out, and I couldn’t work out, either, what I was feeling. Lust, certainly. Having her body pressed against mine had fully engaged my senses. But there was more. Considerably more. I decided it stood a chance of becoming a mental health issue and did my best to put it from mind.

Kiwanda was busy in the office. She had the computers networking and was going through prehistoric paper files on the floor. I asked what was up and she told me she had devised a more efficient filing system. She had never been much of an innovator, so this unnerved me, but I let it pass and asked if she’d had any problems with my boy Stanky.

“Not so you’d notice,” she said tersely.

From this, I deduced that there
had
been a problem, but I let that pass as well and went upstairs to the apartment. Walls papered with flyers and band photographs; a grouping of newish, ultra-functional Swedish furniture—I realized I had liked the apartment better when Andrea did the decorating, this despite the fact that interior design had been one of our bones of contention. The walls, in particular, annoyed me. I was being stared at by young men with shaved heads and flowing locks in arrogant poses, stupid with tattoos, by five or six bands that had tried to stiff me, by a few hundred bad-to-indifferent memories and a dozen good ones. Maybe a dozen. I sat on a leather and chrome couch (it was a showy piece, but uncomfortable) and watched the early news. George Bush, Iraq, the price of gasoline . . . Fuck! Restless, I went down to the basement.

Stanky was watching Comedy Central.
Mad TV
. Another of his passions. He was slumped on the couch, remote in hand, and had a Coke and a cigarette working, an ice pack clamped to his cheek. I had the idea the ice pack was for my benefit, so I didn’t ask about it, but knew it must be connected to Kiwanda’s attitude. He barely acknowledged my presence, just sat there and pouted. I took a chair and watched with him. At last he said, “I need a rhythm guitar player.”

“I’m not going to hire another musician this late in the game.”

He set down the ice pack. His cheek was red, but that might have been from the ice pack itself . . . although I thought I detected a slight puffiness. “I seriously need him,” he said.

“Don’t push me on this.”

“It’s important, man! For this one song, anyway.”

“What song?”

“A new one.”

I waited and then said, “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

“It needs a rhythm guitar.”

This tubby little madman recumbent on my couch was making demands—it felt good to reject him, but he persisted.

“It’s just one song, man,” he said in full-on wheedle. “Please! It’s a surprise.”

“I don’t like surprises.”

“Come on! You’ll like this one, I promise.”

I told him I’d see what I could do, had a talk with him about Jerry, and the atmosphere lightened. He sat up straight, chortling at
Mad TV
, now and then saying, “Decent!” his ultimate accolade. The skits were funny and I laughed, too.

“I did my horoscope today,” he said as the show went to commercial.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re a Cancer.”

He didn’t like that, but maintained an upbeat air. “I don’t mean astrology, man. I use the
Guide.
” He slid the
TV Guide
across the coffee table, pointing out an entry with a grimy finger, a black-rimmed nail. I snatched it up and read:

“Decent, huh!” said Stanky. “You try it. Close your eyes and stick your finger in on a random page and see what you get. I use the movie section in back, but some people use the whole programming section.”

“Other people do this? Not just you?”

“Go ahead.”

I did as instructed and landed on another movie:

Half-believing, I tried to understand what the entry portended for me and Andrea.

“What did you get?” asked Stanky.

I tossed the
Guide
back to him and said, “It didn’t work for me.”

 

I thought about calling Andrea, but business got in the way—I suppose I allowed it to get in the way, due to certain anxieties relating to our divorce. There was publicity to do, Kiwanda’s new filing system to master (she kept on tweaking it), recording (we laid down two tracks for Stanky’s first EP), and a variety of other duties. And so the days went quickly. Stanky began going to the library after every practice, walking without a limp; he said he was doing research. He didn’t have enough money to get into trouble and I had too much else on my plate to stress over it. The night before he played the Crucible, I was in the office, going over everything in my mind, wondering what I had overlooked, thinking I had accomplished an impossible amount of work that week, when the doorbell rang. I opened the door and there on the stoop was Andrea, dressed in jeans and a bulky sweater, cheeks rosy from the night air. An overnight bag rested at her feet. “Hi,” she said, and gave a chipper smile, like a tired Girl Scout determined to keep pimping her cookies.

Taken aback, I said, “Hi,” and ushered her in.

She went into the office and sat in the wooden chair beside my desk. I followed her in, hesitated, and took a seat in my swivel chair.

“You look . . . rattled,” she said.

“That about covers it. Good rattled. But rattled, nonetheless.”

“I am, too. Sorta.” She glanced around the office, as if noticing the changes. I could hear every ticking clock, every digital hum, all the discrete noises of the house.

She drew in breath, exhaled, clasped her hands in her lap. “I thought we could try,” she said quietly. “We could do a trial period or something. Some days, a week. See how that goes.” She paused. “The last few times I’ve seen you, I’ve wanted to be with you. And I think you’ve wanted to be with me. So . . .” She made a flippy gesture, as if she were trying to shade things toward the casual. “This seemed like an opportunity.”

You would have thought, even given the passage of time, after all the recriminations and ugliness of divorce, some measure of negativity would have cropped up in my thoughts; but it did not and I said, “I think you’re right.”

“Whew!” Andrea pretended to wipe sweat from her brow and grinned.

An awkward silence; the grin flickered and died.

“Could I maybe go upstairs,” she asked.

“Oh! Sure. I’m sorry.” I had the urge to run up before her and rip down the crapfest on the wall, chuck all the furniture out the window, except for a mattress and candles.

“You’re still rattled,” she said. “Maybe we should have a drink before anything.” She stretched out a hand to me. “Let’s get good and drunk.”

As it happened, we barely got the drinks poured before we found our groove and got busy. It was like old times, cozy and familiar, and yet it was like we were doing it for the first time, too. Every touch, every sensation, carried that odd
frisson
. We woke late, with the frost almost melted from the panes, golden light chuting through the high east windows, leaving the bed in a bluish shadow. We lay there, too sleepy to make love, playing a little, talking, her telling me how she had plotted her approach, me telling her how I was oblivious until that day at lunch when I noticed her loneliness, and what an idiot I had been not to see what was happening. . . . Trivial matters, but they stained a few brain cells, committing those moments to memory and marking them as Important, a red pin on life’s map. And then we did make love, as gently as that violence can be made. Afterward, we showered and fixed breakfast. Watching her move about the kitchen in sweats and a T-shirt, I couldn’t stop thinking how great this was, and I wanted to stop, to quit footnoting every second. I mentioned this as we ate and she said, “I guess that means you’re happy.”

“Yeah! Of course.”

“Me, too.” She stabbed a piece of egg with her fork, tipped her head to the side as if to get a better angle on me. “I don’t know when it was I started to be able to read you so well. Not that you were that hard to read to begin with. It just seems there’s nothing hidden in your face anymore.”

“Maybe it’s a case of heightened senses.”

“No, really. At times it’s like I know what you’re about to say.”

“You mean I don’t have to speak?”

She adopted the manner of a legal professional. “Unfortunately, no. You have to speak. Otherwise, it would be difficult to catch you in a lie.”

“Maybe we should test this,” I said. “You ask my name, and I’ll say Helmut or Torin.”

She shook her head. “I’m an organic machine, not a lie detector. We have different ways. Different needs.”

“Organic. So that would make you . . . softer than your basic machine? Possibly more compliant?”

“Very much so,” she said.

“You know, I think I may be reading you pretty well myself.” I leaned across the table, grabbed a sloppy kiss, and, as I sat back down, I remembered something. “Damn!” I said, and rapped my forehead with my knuckles.

“What is it?”

“I forgot to take Stanky for his haircut.”

“Can’t he take care of it himself?”

“Probably not. You want to go with us? You might as well meet him. Get it over with.”

She popped egg into her mouth and chewed. “Do we have to do it now?”

“No, he won’t even be up for a couple of hours.”

“Good,” she said.

 

The Crucible, a concrete block structure on the edge of Black William, off beyond the row houses, had once been a dress outlet store. We had put a cafeteria in the front, where we served breakfast and lunch—we did a brisk business because of the mill. Separate from the cafeteria, the back half of the building was given over to a bar with a few ratty booths, rickety chairs, and tables. We had turned a high-school artist loose on the walls and she had painted murals that resembled scenes from J. R. R. Tolkien’s lost labor-union novel. An immense crucible adorned the wall behind the stage; it appeared, thanks to the artist’s inept use of perspective, to be spilling a flood of molten steel down upon an army of orclike workers.

There was a full house that night, attracted by local legends the Swimming Holes, a girl band who had migrated to Pittsburgh, achieving a degree of national renown, and I had packed the audience with Friends of Vernon whom I had enjoined to applaud and shout wildly for Stanky. A haze of smoke fogged the stage lights and milling about were fake punks, the odd goth, hippies from Garnant College in Waterford, fifteen miles away: the desperate wannabe counterculture of the western Pennsylvania barrens. I went into the dressing rooms, gave each Swimming Hole a welcome-home hug, and checked in on Stanky. Jerry, a skinny guy with buzzcut red hair, was plunking on his bass, and Geno was playing fills on the back of a chair; Ian, the rhythm guitarist, was making a cell call in the head. Stanky was on the couch, smoking a Camel, drinking a Coke, and watching the SciFi Channel. I asked if he felt all right. He said he could use a beer. He seemed calm, supremely confident, which I would not have predicted and did not trust. But it was too late for concern and I left him to God.