Vexation Lullaby (37 page)

“I didn't save your life.”

“You didn't save my life
when
?”

Peter reached out a hand and took back his bag. He pushed past the singer and out into the hall. The doors of the elevator yawned open in perfect choreography and he stepped inside. He felt free.

Before the doors closed, Cross slid in beside him. “Are you just going to go back to Buffalo?”

“Rochester.”

The car descended in its track.

“Did you ever love Judith?” Peter asked.

Cross paused. “That's harder to say.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“It's strange how I can remember you, but you can't remember me. I wish I could give you something that could make you remember.”

“I promised someone I wouldn't take anything from you.”

The trip was nearly over.

Cross said, “Why are you smiling?”

The elevator halted. A chime sounded in the ceiling, then the doors slid open.

At a glance Peter saw twenty or thirty people, ordinary folks who wore faces that were rarely recognized. They'd reached the lobby.

Cross said, “It was nice seeing you again.”

Peter didn't even turn around.

79

The Waffle House sign looms above the downtown.

I get out of the car and wait for Rosalyn. When she gets out, I take her hand and we walk, our fingers interlaced, across the parking lot. I feel knitted together, and not merely with her—I feel more resilient and engaged than I have in a long time. I raise my chin and Rosalyn and I march toward our reflection in the plate-glass picture window. Between our growing faces, on the other side of the glass, I see a hand shaking—my daughter's waving to us. I see myself smiling as I wave back.

When we get inside, Gabby stands beside her booth, waiting. Her hair is long and pulled back behind her shoulders. Her face is pink—she looks tentatively happy. We hug. I kiss her ear. Then, letting go with one hand, I introduce Rosalyn.

Gabby steps forward.

Rosalyn says, “I hope you don't mind my tagging along.”

“I dragged her here,” I say. “I'm sorry we're late.”

“No. No.”

Rosalyn and I slide in on one side of the booth.

“You're beautiful,” Rosalyn says, to Gabby, and I think, Yes, she is and, yes, it's a surprise that I have a beautiful daughter.

“So,” I say, “where's this fellow?”

Gabby actually blushes. “It's going to be a while,” she says.

“You look great,” I tell her.

A waitress comes by and takes our drink orders.

Gabby turns in the booth and roots through her pocketbook. She hands over a banded-together sheaf of white office paper.

The first thing I think of is Patricia serving me with divorce papers when I was sitting poolside at a motel in Mexico City and happy, it seemed, for the first time in my life. That's what I told myself then, but there was another voice inside me telling me that I'd been happy before. I wouldn't have felt conflicted about getting served if I'd never been happy with Patricia. In fact, if I was unhappy about anything, it was that the divorce was real and the marriage, such as it was, was done.

Rosalyn flips through the pages, which, to me, look like a series of Rorschach tests. “Oh my god, Arthur, you're going to be a grandfather.”

I am.

Deeper in the stacks we find pictures that show his ancient scrunched face, his bandy frog legs.

“How far along are you?” Rosalyn asks.

“I'm at seventeen weeks. I just finished my first trimester.” Gabby stands up again, pulls her shirt above her smooth stomach. “Can you even tell? I've still got six months to go. The doctor says April 6, that's my due date.”

“It'll be over before you know it,” Rosalyn says.

The waitress delivers a tall orange juice for Gabby. She fills our coffee cups. We're all too excited to eat, even Gabby, who tells us she's been hungry all the time.

“Have you been feeling okay, honey?” I ask.

I'm not sure I've ever heard Gabby talk with such enthusiasm about anything. She tells us that peaches make her salivate and raisins make her gag. For a month, she says, she had to avoid the dairy case at the grocery because some of the smells put her over the edge. No pickles, but she can't get enough sauerkraut. She's eating smoked kipper snacks that she gets from the Walmart twenty miles away.

“What about peanut butter?” Rosalyn asks.

“I can't get it down. It makes me gag.”

“I've had friends who say that.”

“Do you have kids?” Gabby asks.

“No, no kids.”

“So when do I get to meet the father?”

“He's a pre-med student,” Gabby says. “And tall. Get this: he's a runner.”

I look over my shoulder, because it seems like she's saying these things for someone else's benefit.

“Sounds like quite a catch,” Rosalyn says.

Gabby shuffles through the pictures.

“So, is he coming here?” I ask.

“We're not really . . .” It takes her a couple tries to get the words out. “We're not really talking.”

I reach out and put my hand on top of hers. I will myself to do what Rosalyn did for me, to give her strength. “That sounds hard. Are you doing okay, baby?”

Gabby sucks on her lips.

I feel sad, for Gabby, for her baby—even, I guess, for this missing guy. I can't help it. “Things will work out.”

First Gabby pulls her hand from under mine, then she rolls her shoulders back. “I'm doing okay.”

“I wish you'd let me help.”

She lifts her chin and locks her eyes on me, putting me in her crosshairs. “You haven't offered to help. I had to beg you to see me.”

I hold her eyes. “That's true, but I can do better.”

Gabby blinks a few times before looking away. She lifts her juice and takes a sip.

“This is very exciting,” Rosalyn says.

“I'm proud of you,” I say.

For a moment I think Gabby is going to be mad at me. It feels like we're on the verge of a fight.

“Why?” she asks me.

“Why?” I don't have to backpedal or buy time. I know why. “First of all because you've made a life for yourself here. You have a place of your own. You have a job. You pay taxes, don't you.”

Maybe she doesn't know me as well as she thinks she does.

“And now you're going to have this beautiful, healthy baby. You're going to make such a good mother.” I could say more, but I stop there, which is probably a good thing.

Rosalyn waves the waitress over so Gabby can order. She gets a waffle, hash browns, and a sausage egg and cheese melt. When she asks us if we're going to get anything, Rosalyn and I shake our heads.

The waitress walks off.

“Okay,” Gabby says.

That's enough. It's probably more than I deserve.

“Have you thought about names?” Rosalyn asks.

“I think I have to meet him first.”

“You have to meet them first, you're right.”

“I can't wait to meet him,” I say.

My daughter looks me straight in the face. “I know.”

Acknowledgments

I never would have finished this book if not for the early support of the Lannan Foundation. Thanks to Tim Johnson at the Marfa Book Company. Thanks to Dr. John Hatzenbuehler and Dr. Ross Wadland for their medical expertise—everything I got right is because of them, while any mistakes are due to my own malpractice.

Thanks to Bill Clegg, Pat Strachan, Jennifer Abel Kovitz, Trent Duffy, and everyone at Catapult.

This is as close as I'll come to writing an album. My parents got me a recorder when I was eight, but I never figured out how to play it.

About the Author

Justin Tussing is the author of the Ken Kesey Award–winning novel
The Best People in the World
, and his short fiction has appeared in
The New Yorker
,
TriQuarterly
, and
A Public Space
, among other periodicals. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently directs the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast MFA Program in Portland, Maine.

 
¹
  “
In a sky as dark as a new parking lot / I'm a tin can zinging / past places and people. / This pinging heart is my Sputnik signal. / I'm a run-down robot. / I'm pirate radio. / Press me to your warm ear. / Whisper ‘Hello.
'
”

 
²
  Despite changes to musical direction and personnel, and despite the fact that he usually takes four or five months off each winter, Cross insists that all of these dates be viewed not as a series of annual tours, but as one continuous tour, his
Guernica
, his
Lord of the Rings
.

 
³
  From “Bronze.”

 
⁴
  Fans tend to refer to three stages of Cross's career as the Early Work (
Byway Rumors
—'62;
Runaway
—'63; and
Knock Out
—'67); the Renaissance (
Midnight at the Bazaar
—'77;
Hit and Run
—'77; and
Double Ditz
—'79); and the last thirty years are referred to as his Christ and Cowboy era or, less respectfully, his
Moses period. Many argue the last thirty years of Cross's career have been
misguided and misdirected, but I believe time will vindicate him (and me).

 
⁵
  I drive a '96 Toyota Corolla Wagon. I'm closing in on three hundred thousand miles on the original engine. Besides regular oil changes and brake pads, the only maintenance the car requires is an occasional Freon shot for the air conditioner. Previous to this car, I had a Ford Ranger with a fiberglass camper trailer—if you're in a camper when some drunk kids start pelting the cap with beer bottles the only thing you can do is wait them out, but in a wagon you can slide into the front seat and drive off. I've made a few modifications to my vehicle. I picked up a portable desk (they're marketed ambitiously as “executive travel organizers”), which usually rides in the passenger seat. I also paid a cabinetmaker to build a flat storage unit in back that doubles as a platform for my air mattress—when I need to, I fill the mattress with a compressor that plugs into the cigarette lighter. My build thread on
CarCamping.org
earned 5 stars.

 
⁶
  Credit goes to Greg Harvey's
Excel for Windows 95 for Dummies
.

 
⁷
  With my annotations (at first, I called them “reports”), I try to capture the mood of the show. Sometimes I engage in the very sort of interpretation and theorizing that I condemned earlier.

 
⁸
  It wasn't as sinister as I imagined: Cross had dined with
NYT
columnist (and notorious glutton) R. W. Apple Jr. (now deceased).

 
⁹
  So that you don't imagine a schoolteacher forgoing a hot breakfast so that she can send her ne'er-do-well nephew a few nickels, my aunt Liddy's biggest challenge was trying to spend the dividend checks from her second husband's holdings in Goodyear, Coca-Cola, and GE. (I have been much more successful with this task, unfortunately.)

¹⁰
  I've discovered that I have better memory for email addresses than for faces.

¹¹
  When JCC first took off, I was uncomfortable with strangers knowing my name, so I signed everything “Restless One.” There's a precedent for choosing a tour name. Your old name, your original name, was a gift from your parents, but the tour is a choice, so it only makes sense that you choose a name to represent who you really are. People assumed I lifted “Restless One” from a lyric, but I came up with it on my own. “Restless One” has a couple of meanings. First, a tour is restless, and therefore, as a follower of the tour, I am restless. And then, taking a step back, there's the Oneness of the tour and also the Oneness of the individual. I was part of the Restless One and I was
the
Restless One. More recently I've been signing everything Arthur Pennyman.

¹²
  Frederick Tate and Moses Colchester.

¹³
  Like a cross between a bullfighter's
traje de luces
and a Nudie suit. He gets them from a Mexican tailor in LA.

¹⁴
  How does a man who has everything know so much about a person who has nothing, a girl who “
divided by zero the sum of her days / in cardboard high heels and a petroleum dres
s
”?

¹⁵
  When I used to go backstage, I didn't need a pass. I had something better than a pass, a familiar face. Security and roadies recognized me and I recognized them. I used to tell Jimmy to break a leg when he was making his way to the stage. “Break a leg” is a traditional way to wish a performer well. Everyone knows that, but in Toronto I said, “Break a leg, Jimmy,” and he stopped in his tracks and said, “You'd like that!” It was only the second time he's ever spoken to me. Then he said, “Get this old goat out of my sight.” Old goat! And he's more than ten years my senior! I haven't been backstage since. Everyone knows I'm blackballed.

¹⁶
  She's a librarian. Though she would never admit it, no occupation has more in common with what I do.

¹⁷
  I think women are sadder than men because the world is harder for women. Their bodies, which, like uranium, have a half-life, are valued more than their minds, which, like cement, continue to grow stronger.

¹⁸
  I think women are sadder than men because the world is harder for women. Their bodies, which, like uranium, have a half-life, are valued more than their minds, which, like cement, continue to grow stronger.