Vexation Lullaby (9 page)

The men shook hands for the third time.

Peter followed the attorney through the revolving door and into that cool, damp air. “What do I do if someone wants to talk with me?”

“What do you think you should do?”

“Tell them to talk with you.”

“Perfect.” The attorney tilted his head toward a black town car idling at the curb. “That's me.”

17

I'm sitting on the porch when Gene pulls in.

He aims a finger pistol at me.
Bang!

“Gene Machine!” I say. He's put on weight. It's the first thing I notice. He must have packed on fifty pounds. He's fat!

He grabs the rail and climbs a few stairs, but then he stops. “Get down here,” he says, “you skinny fuck.”

We hug and he pounds me on the back. His soft body is warm and moist. It's kind of shocking.

I tell him I like the new apartment.

“We haven't seen each other in a while,” he says. “I don't want you to think I'm depressed. Corinne got fat, too. Last winter we went on this cruise. It was ten days and they treat you like veal calves. They don't let you do anything for yourselves and they stuff you with food. But, frankly, we're a lot happier. We're middle-aged and it was getting to be such a battle to count calories and work out. Anyway it's a big change—har har—and I don't want you to feel like you have to ignore it. If anything, you might have to tell me to stop talking about it, because I'm sort of evangelical.”

I tell him I think it's great—what else can I say?

“And don't think I eat out of a trough now. I don't stuff myself, just a lot of smaller meals and snacks. Here's my deal—if I'm hungry for something or, you know, curious, I don't worry about it. You and I haven't talked about our parents much, but mine did a job on me. I internalized a lot of that Calvinist shit our generation was weaned on: clean your plate, babies are starving in Africa, no peas, no dessert. Cory and I had enough of it.”

“Well, there you have it,” I say.

He wraps me in his arms again and almost lifts me off the ground. He tells me how happy he is to see me. “Let's go inside,” he says. “I want to sit down.”

When I turn to climb the stairs, Gene says, “I invited you into my home. Where are you going? You're like a stray that doesn't think it belongs inside.”

Maybe there's some truth to what he said. I can feel a bit trapped inside a house.

Gene takes a casserole out of the fridge and slides it in the oven, then he pours a bag of chips into a bowl. It feels like school just got out and I rode the bus to a friend's.

Gene hands me a bottle of wine and asks me what I think. For a moment I'm afraid that he's mistaken me for one of those people who can't let a penny pass between their fingers without pronouncing it good or bad. I confess that I don't know much about wine.

He spins the bottle in my hand and taps a finger on the label: Bottled in Chaseburg, Wisconsin.

Chaseburg's most famous export is a five-foot-eight musical genius.

“I've never seen this before.”

“Don't get too excited,” Gene says. “It's terrible. I saw it online and bought two bottles. Cory and I drank a little from the first bottle before tossing it, but I saved this. I wanted to drink it with you.”

“You think it'll give us special powers?”

Gene takes the bottle from me, cuts the foil, and uncorks it. He splashes a little into two glasses. “Is a wrinkled nose a special power?”

I make a toast to thoughtful gestures. We drink. We laugh some. The wine is terrible. We ought to pour it out, but we drink some more.

Gene explains that the Greeks believed wine helped artists get in touch with the muse.

“The muse of hangovers,” I say.

“The muse of living the life you want to live.”

“The muse of getting fat and happy.”

“Speaking of . . .” Gene pulls an ice cream sandwich out of the freezer. “Care to join me?”

I say, “I get my sustenance from music and conversation.”

“Spreading it on thick.”

“And love.”

Gene wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “Since you brought it up, is that what keeps you out there? Are you boffing groupies?”

“Most of Jimmy's groupies are past their boffing days.”

“Cory has a whole theory worked out.”

“Don't tell me your wife wonders about my love life?”

Gene walks over to the counter and tosses out the wrapper from his ice cream sandwich. “Forget I said anything.”

Here's the thing: even with the wine and the food, there's a voice telling me to get back in my car and drive. There's nowhere for me to go, but I feel the urge all the same. “Where is Cory?”

“I'm the one that brought her up, but let's not talk about her.” He turns to fiddle with the oven.

I say, “If you wanted to talk about something, I'm just saying . . .”

He raises a hand to let me know I've said enough.

“You okay?”

He presses the palms of his hands against his eyes and holds them there. “I'm good. I'm okay.” After a moment, he says, “You found the place all right.”

We stand at the kitchen counter, drinking the miserable wine. A timer goes off and Gene smacks his hand to turn it off. “Shit,” he says, “I think I broke it.” He pulls out a trash bin and drops the alarm in. “Chinese piece of crap,” he says. “Tell me about last night's show. You said he looked lost.”

“It happens. He retreats into himself sometimes.”

“I heard he stopped playing—he was sort of catatonic.”

I close my eyes and try to remember. Cross had worn the narrow black suit with silver cord embroidered on the lapels.
¹³
He'd opened playing keyboards on “Big River” and “Crow Alley,” then he'd covered “Jolene” and “When I'm Sixty-four.” He strapped on his battered Gibson to lead the band on a quick shuffle through “Rumpelstiltskin Delicatessen Blues.” Then the boys sat on their hands while he plumbed the depths of “Delilah on 7th Avenue.”
¹⁴
He'd wavered at the edge of the stage. His harmonica hung around his neck like a millstone. How long had he stood there?

“Did I say he stopped playing?”

“That's what they said on CrossTracks.”

Maybe Gene read the look on my face. “I go there for a different perspective,” he said.

I don't ask how some kid pasting Jimmy's face onto a llama is a “perspective.”

“Don't take it personal.”

Some people, if a red car drives by they say, “Red car.” They can't help themselves. It's always taken me a long time to cut one idea from the herd. Maybe that's why Gene looks surprised when I blurt out that a doctor visited Jimmy's hotel last night.

“You serious?”

I aim a finger at my face.

He pours the last of the wine into my glass. “You think it could be related to that business on stage?”

Is this the question I've been avoiding? All day I'd assumed my uneasiness was rooted in the break in the tour, but maybe it was the specter of the tour reaching an absolute end. “You want to see his picture?”

Gene points a finger at his own face and winks.

I get my camera, then we sit on the living room sofa, studying the images on the camera's three-inch screen.

“You're certain he's a doctor?”

“That's what I was told.”

Gene has me zoom in on the knapsack sitting on the passenger seat. He pulls up a browser on his phone and does a quick search. “That's a European backpack,” he confirms. “You think he's European doctor?”

I finish my wine. “Like a specialist?”

“He looks a bit like Jimmy.”

“At one time or another Jimmy has looked like everyone.”

“You got more pictures on that camera?”

“A man needs to have secrets.”

The oven beeps.

“I hope you're hungry.”

I tell Gene I'm always hungry.

“Yet you never eat.”

“Maybe I like to stay hungry.” I never talk this much. It must be the wine.

18

Peg had specified that the meeting was to remain confidential, but if it was a secret, then it was an open secret. When Peter came around a corner the staff dispersed; he felt as popular as a shark. Even Martin kept his distance. The only person to address him was Eduardo, from housekeeping, who saw everything and nothing. Eduardo said, “You looking a little worn out today, Dr. Peter.”

At six, after s
pending five hours ordering X-rays and blood work, prescribing antibiotics and ibuprofen, Peter visited his last patient: a blank-faced fifteen-year-old boy with crispy blond hair. Though the boy sat next to his mother, his whole body curved away from her, like a parenthesis. The mother said the boy had been experiencing vertigo—the kid's loose jaw looked incapable of forming words.

Peter noted the gray sweatshirt that identified the boy as a varsity swimmer. He spoke to the kid, “You have an ear infection.”

The mother growled.

“I never get ear infections,” mumbled the boy.

“He doesn't get ear infections.” The mother's voice built upon itself. Something inside her, a governor, had snapped. “We waited an hour to see you. You didn't even look at his ear.”

Peter imagined Ogata shaking his head.
Tsk, tsk
.

With one hand holding the boy's leaden chin, Peter grabbed his otoscope and thumbed on the light. He checked the tympanic membranes. Both sides were red and irritated. He asked the mother to take a peek.

“It's not about me looking,” she said, shaking her phone from her purse—was she going to call someone, the boy's father, the police? “It's about you looking.”

Even after Peter assured her that they could treat the condition, that her son would feel better, probably within twenty-four hours, the boy's mother managed to stay furious.

A
S SOON AS
he was safely in his car, he dialed Judith.

When his mother answered, Peter said, “You almost got me fired.”

“Just ‘almost.' I'll try harder next time.” There was no echo to her voice; he'd probably caught her fussing in the terraced garden Rolf built for her fiftieth.

“I was with lawyers all morning.”

“Don't kid your mother.”

He told her he wasn't, that the hospital had wanted to fire him, but it was all a big misunderstanding; his lawyer was in the process of clearing things up. Peter would know more tomorrow.

“Since when do you have a lawyer?” Her voice let him know that she'd become “concerned.” Was that the reason he'd called? Did he want her to worry about him? If anything, he was supposed to worry about her, his aging, hippie mother.

“I met Jim Cross last night.”

Judith's silence (she usually hemorrhaged words) caught him by surprise.

“The musician,” he added.

He thought he heard songbirds and the whining big rigs worming their way down those steep canyon roads.

“I don't understand. Did he come into the hospital?”

“He played a show here last night. Afterward, he called me and asked me to stop by his hotel.” Peter said, “You gave him my number.”

He heard a door close. Judith had gone inside. “Why would I give him your number?”

Peter wasn't sure if he understood the story he was telling. “I guess because I'm a doctor. He
is
a friend of yours, right?”

“You've caught me a bit off guard.”

“Tony Ogata is his personal doctor. Do you have any idea how famous he is?”

“Your mother isn't a rube, honey.”

“So why didn't you tell me you knew Cross? He said you stayed at his farm.”

“Don't call it a farm.”

It sounded like Judith was trying to trap him. She should have been a spy. “He called it a farm.”

“Farms raise food, Peter. There was a blue Rolls-Royce in the driveway, which someone had encircled with a moat. I don't mean the moat went around the driveway, I mean it went around the car, all the way around it.”

“He gave me a picture of your Sunbeam Tiger.”

Judith laughed. “Where would I have gotten the money for a British sports car?”

“He implied it was your car.”

“What's going on with him? Is he dying, or something?”

“Why would he be dying?”

“I got an email from him this spring. I guess he tracked me down through my website—he asked me what I'd been up to for the past thirty years. Rolf got a kick out of it, but it left me sort of sad. The guy's got all the money in the world, all that fame and success, and he's tracking down women he knew half a lifetime ago. I didn't want to seem impolite or bitter, so I wrote back. He asked what you were up to. He was impressed that you'd become a doctor. ‘William Carlos Williams was a doctor,' he said. ‘And Chekhov.' I told him about my garden. I told him Rolf was a carpenter. I said, ‘Like Jesus.' I was trying to be funny. He said he'd been to Jerusalem and it was full of masons, but he hadn't seen any carpenters. I ought to forward you the messages. I wouldn't have given him your number.”

“He called my cell.”

“He has people whose job is to bring him what he wants. It's always been that way.”

“He offered me a job.”

“I guess you weren't kidding about the lawyers.”

A black truck crowded Peter's tail, but even when he slowed the truck wouldn't pass. It loomed there, filling his rearview mirror.

“When I met him, he'd quit music. Did he mention that?”

When Peter stopped for a light, the guy in the pickup revved his engine until Peter's car shook.

“How long did you stick around for?”

“The only reason he let me use that car was because you liked to sleep with your bassinet wedged between the seats.”