Black Elvis (15 page)

She launched into something lively and Irish sounding, her eyes closed, her head tilted thoughtfully to one side. I maintained my position as her entire audience until I was joined by a few skinny Parisian teenagers in black clothes, generating their own weather system of Gauloises smoke and attending to the music as if it were a philosophy lecture. When she finished, I tossed a few of my coins into her case to set an example, but it didn't make much of an impression on my associates, who moved quickly on down the line toward the guy who was walking on broken glass and eating fire. That bastard always had the crowd, and it had crossed my mind more than once to think up something a little more dangerous for myself, too. I didn't know how he did it. The glass was real, jagged and sharp—I'd checked it out.

"I know some bluegrass," I said to her, when it was just the two of us. "You want to play together? We'll double our income."

"You do? What do you know?"

I knew exactly four tunes, all of them learned to help out my college roommate with his senior thesis, "The Dave Katz Project." Katz had completed a music major without developing facility with any instrument, bravely working his way through the trumpet, the piano, and the upright bass, before finally settling on the banjo.

"'Sally Goodin'?" I said. "'Rocky Top?'" I didn't want to give her all four at once.

"'Sally Goodin'."

She came over to my spot and stood beside me as I slid my guitar back on. It was a midseventies model in a particularly ugly color called "Antigua," a kind of puke-and-cigarette-ash sunburst. I'd picked it up cheap from a guy I met in a record store who claimed he wanted to get rid of all his worldly possessions. It had a sawn-in-half baseball bat neck, and gouged into the back of the body was the legend "Satin Lives"—the work of some former owner with either poor spelling or a shiny wardrobe. I turned off my distortion and tried to get the cleanest, most mountain-pure sound I could. A few minutes earlier, I'd been blasting nuclear holocaust through that runt speaker. Now I wanted pine trees, moonshine whiskey, cold running streams. "There," I said, strumming a bright, open G.

"Wendy," she said, meeting my eyes briefly, without much interest. "I like to go fast." She stomped her foot three times.

Playing with The Dave Katz Project had always left me slightly depressed, since we never went fast—it was like sitting for the
SAT
s. But Wendy took off like a bottle rocket. I thumped along, careful not to be too loud, trying to emphasize the bass notes and not let the pace drag. The Parisian teenagers came back. A small crowd began to gather.

The money rained in, copper, silver, even some notes. I asked her where she'd learned to play like that.

"Suzuki method. How about 'Cotton-eyed Joe'? It's just A-E-A."

When we'd done all we could to that one, a man with a bad hairpiece asked us if we wanted a job. He wore a suit and seemed reasonably believable when he said he could offer us 750 francs to play for the night, plus room and board. Wendy's French was slightly better than mine, and between the three of us we managed to clarify that the place we were going to was a sort of retreat for
les travaileurs
of the Renault automobile company. "They like very much the American music," he assured us. "John Denver."

In the van, I let my hand rest against Wendy's leg, which she didn't seem to notice. "I'm Phil," I said. She was staring out the window, so I did, too. The day had started out sunny and warm, but had been disintegrating since noon, and now it looked like rain. Jean, our host, drove us first to my hotel, where I grabbed my pack from the front desk—I'd checked out after breakfast and hadn't made any plan yet for tonight—then on to the youth hostel, where Wendy had her things. I'd learned she was from Baltimore, but that was about it. She seemed intent on not sharing much. I thought about what I might say to make myself seem interesting.

"How do you like France?"

"It's
OK
," she said. "I'm running out of money."

"We could make a killing together. We're eclectic."

"That's what that thing is? An eclectic guitar?" Her eyes were light green, almost feline. "I'm getting married in December."

"Good for you. Where is he, now?"

"Back home. Mad at me for being here."

"He should have come along. Does he play anything?"

"No. He doesn't really like music."

"And you want to marry him? Have you thought this thing through?"

She smiled, one side of her mouth going up higher than the other. "He voted for Reagan, too," she said. "It's sort of a problem."

It took about an hour to get where we were going, which was out in the country, and to the south. What we passed through to get there confirmed my suspicions that much of Europe was just an extension of the New Jersey Turnpike. Train tracks, concrete bunker-style warehouses, power lines, freight yards, and ratty fields where they appeared to be raising weeds. Eventually we slid off into prettier territory, with farmhouses and trees. Then we were getting out in front of a big white house. Jean took us upstairs and showed us to our room.

We explored our quarters—twin beds with orange spreads on them, a sink in the room, a small bathroom off it with a toilet, tub (no bidet). I had found out a few things: she was twenty-four. She smoked Marlboros, lighting them with a World War II–vintage stainless steel Zippo. She had been traveling three weeks on an Inter-Rail Pass in France and Italy, busking infrequently, and with mixed success.

"They think we're together," she said, sitting on the edge of one bed.

I sat down beside her, but she got right up, went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth.

In the time we had before dinner, she showed me three more songs. I kept trying to rock-and-roll around underneath her traditional melodies, but she was having none of it. "Straight," she warned me. "Please, just keep the beat and hit the right chords."

Dinner was five courses of cafeteria-quality food, served to us at a table downstairs by a tiny blonde girl in a white jacket. I took it that this, the main house, was where Jean himself lived. Perhaps the girl was his daughter. It was meat, potatoes, green beans the color of army fatigues, cheese, fruit, and wine that tasted the way our family basement smelled, back before we'd had it fixed up and the carpeting installed. But it also wasn't pâté out of a can, and I paid attention, thinking I might live to tell someone about it sometime.
A five-course French meal!

A path ran alongside the house and back to three one-story, concrete dormitories, as well as a central recreation building. They had a stage for us, with lights, even a small sound system. I gathered from a poster on the wall that we were the last-minute replacement for a ventriloquist who had canceled. Maybe Jean figured the broken-glass guy was too much of a fire hazard. Our crowd was so drunk we could have been playing in different keys and they wouldn't have minded. There were about fifty of them, men and women, on foldout metal seats. Dress was casual. We played close to an hour.

Jean paid us in cash and told us when he'd take us back to the city in the morning. "I return you to the Beaubourg, yes?" he asked.

After he left us, Wendy grabbed my arm. "Come on," she said. "Let me show you something."

There was a phone booth in the courtyard. She took the receiver off and held her thumb over the button that turned the phone on and off. "You have to get it just right," she said. "
OK
. Who do you want to talk to?"

"No one."

"Don't you have a girlfriend or something?"

"No, not just now."

"Well, there must be someone you want to call. Give me a number." I told her my mother's. Keeping her thumb over the button, she used the forefinger of her other hand to tap sharply on it. "It's all in the rhythm," she said. She must have tapped fifty times. "Yes! Take it—it's ringing."

I huddled up next to her. The answering machine came on, and I left a cheery message—I was
OK
, I was making money, I'd write soon. Then I nodded and Wendy let up her thumb. "How does that work?"

"You can only do it with this kind of phone, but they have them all over. You keep the button out just far enough to get a dial tone, then tap the numbers. It takes some practice, but if you get the rhythm right, you can call anyplace for free."

She showed me, and for the next few minutes, I tried unsuccessfully to call my own number in Brooklyn. She told me to think in triplets—a nine was just a series of three threes—and that helped, but I eventually gave up. The whole business just reminded me that I had no one to talk to anyway. I'd illegally sublet my place to a guy named Clem who was a video technician down at
CBS-TV
, in charge of making sure the right tapes ran between 2:00
A.M.
and 6:00
A.M.
, when it was all just prerecorded programming. His bald head reminded me of a mushroom, and his dilated pupils and oddly timed way of speaking made me suspect he did a lot of hallucinogens, but he was the only person who had responded to my ad, and he'd paid cash in advance.

Back in the room, we smoked cigarettes by the window, the cool air bathing our hot faces, our bodies inches from each other. I told her about trying to be a musician in New York. I told her about how the house I'd grown up in, in New Jersey, was now for sale. My mom was moving in with Re-Pete, a bearded guy she'd met on the tennis courts, and my dad—Original Pete—had a new apartment.

"This friend of mine I knew from high school, Adam Gordon, comes in to this place where I'm waiting tables," I said. "He'd just spent a year playing his way around Europe. Paid for his whole trip. He gave me his map." I dug it out to show her. It was a Michelin one, with the good money towns circled in red, and it had been folded and refolded so often that it had the integrity of a laundered Kleenex.

"Been there," she said, studying it. "There, too. Want to go there, there, and there."

I thought about what else to tell her. My life seemed deeply uninteresting. This, right now, was probably the high point. My best friend might as well have been married—I never saw him anymore. I had one guy I hung out with back home, a Vietnam vet named Doggie John who washed dishes at the cafe. He and I would get stoned, go to Prospect Park, and throw the Frisbee to his Doberman pinscher, Ralph. Ralph had an inoperable brain tumor that made him blind in one eye, and as often as not, the Frisbee smacked him right in the side of the head.

"
Original Pete
," she said. "That's pretty funny."

"Not to him it isn't."

"No, I guess not."

"I'm glad we met," I said.

"I might go to law school. That's the other thing I'm thinking over. This is my thinking summer. Do you like martinis?"

"Not so much. I'm more of a shot-and-a-beer guy." I thought this might be the kind of thing a girl from Baltimore would like to hear.

"I love how they look. I love how the word sounds. And I've never had one. I'm not sure I want to. Then I'd have nothing to look forward to."

"There might be other things," I said.

"You understand that I couldn't possibly have sex with you?"

The moon was descending from a cloud, a big silver coin. I could feel the weather clearing. "What's he do? Your fiancé."

"Artist."

"Like a painter? A sculptor?"

"Yeah, like that."

"Does he at least have a name?"

"Tomislav."

"That sounds made up. Did he make it up?

"No, it's real. He's Serbian. From Yugoslavia."

"Ah," I said. "And votes Republican and hates music."

"He doesn't hate it. It's just not something he notices. It's funny when you think about it, because he's a gifted artist."

I stared at my boot, the toe of which had begun to come apart from the sole, and thought about how much I hated the word
gifted
.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"You can tell me." She reached out and touched my knee. "We ought to get to know each other."

"I'm not looking for sympathy."

"No one said you were."

"So, forget it."

"Forget what?"

"I'm not going to say."

"Sure you are." She exhaled through the screen. "Otherwise, I'm going to tickle you."

There was a bulge in the plaster where it had been resealed and painted over. The scar ran diagonally from the ceiling to the bottom of the window. "I have a tumor on the brain," I said, and then added, "inoperable."

"Are you serious? You're joking, aren't you?"

An uptown bus of a moment passed by, but I didn't get on. "You're right," I said. "I'm joking."

"Oh, my God." She took my hand. "You
aren't
joking. I knew a girl that happened to, back home, but they were able to operate. She was okay after the surgery. No hair, though." She touched mine, which hadn't been cut in a while, and was looking fairly wild. I hadn't shaved in a week. In general, I was pleased with how disreputable I looked. "Does it hurt?"

"Not usually. I feel like it's focused me, though."

"I'll bet."

"Sometimes I have visions. Brief ones."

"I get migraines, and right before, everything takes on an aura. Is it like that, or do you actually see things?"

"More like that."

"Brains are weird."

"Yes," I agreed. "They are."

"I'm really sorry about your head." She stood up, pushed her hair back behind her ears. "I'm going to take a bath."

"Knock yourself out." This was something Katz and I used to say.

She proceeded to take off all her clothes, right in front of me, then went into the bathroom and closed the door. I listened to the water as it fell into the tub, watched the light on my little amp in the corner where I'd plugged it in to recharge.

I'm ashamed to say that what followed was not a period of regret, or self-loathing, or anything like that—I found the role of dying musician fit me well. I almost began to believe it myself. Life took on a heightened quality—individual moments seemed artificially lit and oversaturated with color, like in a fifties musical. Occasionally I caught my own reflection in something—a bus window, the side-view mirror of a parked car—and noticed with satisfaction how nobly I seemed to be bearing up.