The One-in-a-Million Boy (25 page)

. . .

Quite the opposite. Oho, Louise presented her books with the innocence of a candy cane. She had on this swirly red skirt and a bright white blouse with cap sleeves. Her shoes matched: red, with white piping. I haven't thought of those shoes for years: they practically
talked.

“I'm considering these,” she says to Dr. Valentine, “and these, and these, and these. Subject to approval.”

Now, Dr. Valentine was handsome in his way, but a trifle gawky. Loosely jointed. He leaned over one stack, plucked up a book, leaned over another—like one of those long-necked birds you see in roadside marshes stabbing at tadpoles.

. . .

Not as funny as it sounds.

. . .

Because Dr. Valentine had elegance. So, we've got books on six chairs and Dr. Valentine is thoroughly flummoxed. Plus, Louise freighted the deck with such obvious outrages that her actual choices looked maidenly by comparison.

. . .

Dime-store paperbacks. Some Communist screeds. An account of a seventeenth-century lady of the night. In other words, some of her real choices slipped through unread.

. . .

You don't miss much, do you? It was
exactly
like watching a trick—a midway flimflam where you show the mark a talking magpie and pick his pocket while he's teaching the bird to say “Cincinnati.”

. . .

You're right! Everything reminds me of birds today. Watch the window. I had a junco earlier. You might get number fifteen. In another couple of weeks you'll have your twenty and then some.

. . .

Thirty's not out of the question. You might get thirty.

. . .

Well, it took poor Dr. Valentine two weeks to poke through all the stacks. He missed “Désirée's Baby” and some other good ones, but he caught a book called
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf, who wasn't even American. That one he brought home for his wife to read.

. . .

It's about a lady who goes out to buy flowers for a dinner party. Which she didn't have to do.

. . .

Because she had plenty of money. She could have sent someone. Or had them delivered.

. . .

You know, I just recalled Dr. Valentine's wife's name. Sadie. She also gave dinner parties.

. . .

I was never invited. But Louise, she went to all of them. Sadie Valentine turned out to be a thorough reader, since she found the scene in
Mrs. Dalloway
where one lady kisses another lady, and she had to read quite a bit of the book to get to that part.

. . .

No, the dinner party happens at the end. The whole story takes place in one day; Louise made a big deal over that. The lady who's giving the party, she lives her whole wrong life, plus her other life that she might have had, in that one day.

. . .

Oh, no, Louise taught it anyway. I don't think Dr. Valentine ever found out. It's not a long book. Not my cup of tea, exactly, but Louise was a wonderful teacher. I hadn't studied with such ardor since I was a girl.

. . .

It
was!
It was
wonderful!
The truth is, people are replaceable.

. . .

They are. If you live a long time, you discover this. It took more than thirty-five years for Maud-Lucy's place to fill, but fill it did, with Louise, another brilliant woman willing to take on the burden of my education.

. . .

I'm no good at summaries. I suppose you'd have to say—if you had to, in one sentence—that the book is about being unthinkably lonely. Oops, there's your junco. That's fifteen.

 

MARRIED

1. Longest engagement. 67 years. Octavio Guillien and Adriana Martinez. Married at age 82. Country of Mexico.
   

2. Most times married to same person. 66 and counting. Lauren and David Blair. Country of USA.
   

3. Highest marriage rate. 35.1 per 1,000. Country of US Virgin Islands.
   

4. Largest wedding cake. 15,032 pounds. Country of USA.
   

5. Longest marriage. 86 years (1743–1829). Lazarus and Molly Rowe. Country of USA.
   

6. Most couples married in one wedding ceremony. 35,000. Country of South Korea.
   

7. Largest TV audience for a wedding. 750 million. Prince Charles and Lady Diana. Country of UK.
   

8. Longest train on wedding dress. 2,545 feet. Country of Netherlands.
   

9. City to hold most wedding ceremonies. Las Vegas. 280 per day. Country of USA.
   

10. Longest kiss. 30 hours and 59 minutes and 27 seconds. Louisa Almedovar and Rich Langley. Country of USA.
    

According to the second hand on Quinn's watch, the ceremony—conducted in a beige second-floor office of the Granyard Town Hall—took six minutes and twenty-two seconds. The newlyweds headed homeward in Ted's freshly vacuumed van. Quinn bundled Ona into the Reliant and took the wheel. For about twenty miles the two couples caravanned, then Quinn lost patience, passed Ted's poky Windstar, and gunned the engine, Ona's matron-of-honor bouquet discharging festive clouds of lily pollen.

The wedding had given them much to ponder, so they didn't talk much. The drive was pleasant, the weather cooler, and he had the boy on his mind. During his five years away, Quinn had often felt as if he were orbiting the earth as real life went on far below him, barely visible. Upon reentry into the home atmosphere, he'd experienced a sweet sense of approach, and for months he cleaved to that feeling by force of will. The inevitable crash landing came in midwinter during a father-son “bonding” experiment embedded in a brief series of guitar lessons.

He'd taken a second day job teaching at a music store on Forest Avenue—Stanhope Music Company, the site of his future friend's past—and found himself an awkward teacher. The store owner deemed him “intimidatingly overeager,” adding that many of the students (admittedly, the ones with no aptitude) didn't like him.

“This is different,” Belle had assured him. He could still remember the way her lips formed the words. “He's your son.”

For lesson six, Quinn once again invited the boy into the heated comfort of Belle's roomy garage, currently cleared out for renovation. He arranged two facing chairs and neatened up a short, thoughtfully chosen stack of CDs.

“The longest distance marched by a marching band,” said the boy, “was forty-six-point-seven miles.”

Quinn plugged in two guitars. Belle jaunted in, left snacks, patted them both on the head, and retreated.

The boy took a single Oreo off a plate, a single parsimonious sip of ginger ale. “They marched from the town of Assen, country of Netherlands,” he said, “to the town of Marum, country of Netherlands, on May 9, 1992.”

Quinn presumed there was a manner in which one answered such conversational gambits; it's just that he could never think of one. He urged the boy to notice the salvaged soundproofing, installed since the last lesson, and the neatly assembled stash of equipment he'd scored from a local studio going under.

“It took thirteen hours and fifty minutes,” the boy said. “Sixty marchers started and fifty-two marchers finished.”

The floor problem—fissured concrete—remained unsolved, possibly unsolvable without overspending their budget. But giddy hope was the flavor of the season in his newly tooled household, so Quinn retained the mulish expectation that he'd have a studio up and running by spring.

“It was your mother's idea,” he told the boy. “We'll bump out that wall, replace the doors, and rent out rehearsal space.” He smiled zealously. “Plus recording services.”

He said “we” to include the boy, to whom he'd already demonstrated his newly acquired setup—what boy didn't love machines?—but so far the boy had bared not a jot of interest. “I'll be the session player by day,” Quinn said, patting the guitar in his lap, “and keep the home fires burning at night.”

In response to the boy's stillness, Quinn added, “Do you know what
compromise
means?”

After another moment of solemn consideration, the boy said, “I don't think that will work.”

What he meant was anyone's guess, so Quinn asked him to imagine the control booth beyond the wall, the performance space in front of him, a floating mic above his head, an open appointment book crammed with names, a humming empire that the boy, who had difficulty with spatial perception, could not envision.

“Never mind,” Quinn said. “You'll see it for real soon enough. Did you listen to the songs I gave you?”

“Yes.”

“Three times, like I asked?”

“Plus seven more times. Ten times.” The boy looked terrified.

“This isn't a test. Try to relax. What did you think?”

“The songs have too many notes.”

A terrible, unwanted thought crashed through the ceiling of Quinn's meticulously constructed caution, and not for the first time: this child couldn't be his. He just couldn't.

“They were supposed to inspire you,” Quinn said. Physically, the boy was all Belle: all open-faced, belly-up innocence. The part that wasn't Belle—the part that resembled a secretive, burrow-dwelling animal—reminded him of his own father, who rarely spoke except to deliver pronouncements.

“Okay,” the boy said, seeming to absorb Quinn's every unfatherly thought. How could he know? He did, though; Quinn felt cornered, caught, made to pay for his five-year absence. But he decided to take what was coming to him—not just now but forever.

You boys have to be men now,
his father had once said.
Your mother's dead and that's all there is to it.

The boy had put on his Scout uniform for the lesson, the logic of which surpassed Quinn's powers of deduction. Quinn regarded the costume's precise creases and attendant frippery, patches for everything except music. He placed a guitar—a Les Paul junior knockoff Belle had bought on sale—into the boy's arms and led him through a profoundly unsuccessful scale. “Don't think,” he said. “Feel.”

“Feel what?” said the boy.

Crying won't bring her back.
Now let's get these things into the truck.

“Maybe ten times is too many times,” the boy suggested. In his arms the guitar looked radioactive. Quinn wondered if it was possible for a human being to actually dislike music.

“Here,” he said, arranging the boy's fingers into a first-position G. “We're going to try the one-four-five progression from last week, just to remind you what it sounds like. Then we'll review the other scale I taught you—remember the blues box?”

The boy's mouth made a perceptible downturn.

“Okay, then. Great. By the time you get back to school on Monday you'll have girls lining up to carry your books.”

“I don't know any girls.”

“You will if you play the blues.”

“You said this was rock.”

Quinn let out his breath, long and silent. “What is the foundation of rock-and-roll, the heart and core of all modern popular music?”

“Blues,” the boy recited glumly.

“And what is the best blues solo ever produced by a nonblack guy, ever?” Quinn was getting heated up now and tried to hide it.

“‘Sleepy Time Time,' by Eric Chapman.”

Eric Chapman was Belle's across-the-street neighbor who washed his car every day and dried it with a leaf blower. Eric Chapman had once informed Quinn, from the wide-bottom seat of his lawn mower, that a man without a man's job had no business procreating.

“
Clapton,
” Quinn said to his son, for the fiftieth time. “Eric
Clapton.
Clapton, Clapton, Clapton.” He removed the guitar from the boy's narrow lap and laid it on the floor. “How about if we just listen?”

“I can listen,” the boy said, apparently relieved to be divested of the guitar's metaphorical weight. Quinn was aware of the father-son dance he was conducting but helpless to improve his footwork.

It's time you pulled your own weight around here, mister. You want me to break that thing in half?

“Just relax your ears,” Quinn said, cueing the music. He turned the balance all the way to the right; Clapton's notes rang through one speaker with the rhythm pulled into the background. The boy's huge, moonlike eyes took in either everything, or nothing. Who could tell? As the song engaged its reliable momentum, Quinn anticipated the arrival of Clapton's virtuosity, for the first time in his life, with dread. His head throbbed.

“You hear the solo coming in now?” he said, trying mightily to feel some way other than the way he felt. “Listen to that call and response.” He shook his head in wonderment, as he always did, but it felt, again for the first time, like a learned gesture, and he was beginning to blame the boy for ruining one of his most trustworthy sources of bliss. “It's a conversation he's having with himself. You hear that? It's like something rising out of the goddamn
sea.
Just listen.”

You sound just like the record, honey,
his mother had marveled, standing at his bedroom door. One lasting memory: her gaunt fingers tapping on the doorjamb, keeping time. Her fingernails yellowing with illness. His mother, who loved music. Any music. But especially his.

The boy turned his head, at long last, toward the speakers, as the room filled with melodious joy. He appeared to be in physical pain, panting through parted teeth. Quinn stared into the ancient country of his son's unmoving eyes. Wrong song, wrong band, he realized. There was too much to hear, too many twining treasures, especially for a boy who didn't tap his feet or bob his head or otherwise betray the remotest affinity for musical rapture.

“Try to
receive
it,” Quinn said now, referring to the sublime phrasing of Eric Clapton-Clapton-Clapton. “You hear the notes he's
not
playing? You hear that building pressure, building-building-building, and then
whammo,
he's off to some other spectacular place, but you hear the notes he left
unplayed?
” He hit
STOP
. “Those are ghost notes,” he said. “You hear them, but they aren't there. It should take your breath away.”