The Wishbones (11 page)

BY THE WAY

 

Cresting the Verrazano,
a bridge he'd never crossed at night, Dave was astonished by the beauty of Brooklyn spread out below, a vast carpet of darkness dotted by an infinitude of lights, a galaxy of earthbound stars.

“I had no idea,” he muttered.

“Look.” She directed his gaze along the serpentine coastline, past a range of high-rise apartment buildings to a Ferris wheel spinning slowly through the night. “You can see all the way to Coney Island.”

Dave understood that he was hurtling toward uncharted territory, and this knowledge filled him with exhilaration. His head felt clear; his body hummed with the alertness of a second wind.

“I can't believe I ate the blueberry pie
and
the chocolate mousse cake,” she groaned. “I haven't had the munchies like that since high school.”

“It's an occupational hazard. Before I started playing weddings,
I used to have a washboard stomach,” he lied, patting himself sadly on the cummerbund.

The reception had concluded with a dessert buffet of memorable proportions, and the maitre d’ kindly invited the Wishbones to partake of the leftovers after they'd played the last dance. Dave was busy assembling his plate of goodies when Gretchen appeared at his side and asked if there was any chance of her bumming a ride to the train station in Elizabeth.

“Now?” Dave knew the Elizabeth station; it wasn't a place you'd expect to see a lone bridesmaid at this time of night.

“Whenever,” she said. “No hurry. If you can't do it, I guess I can call a cab or something.”

“You live in the city?”

“Brooklyn. Park Slope.”

“You're really gonna take the train back to Brooklyn tonight?”

She licked blueberry filling off her fingertip and leaned in close to him. She smelled like a vague, pleasant memory he couldn't quite identify.

“I'm supposed to stay at Heidi's, but the whole wedding party's going back there to watch the video of the ceremony. I think I'd be a lot happier waking up in my own bed tomorrow.”

He looked past her to the opposite end of the buffet table, where Buzzy was performing surgery on a whole pineapple with a Swiss army knife. Dave couldn't see any reason why someone else couldn't give him a ride home for a change.

“Forget the train,” he told her. “I can drive you to Brooklyn.”

He expected her to argue, to say she wouldn't dream of imposing on him like that, but all she did was smile with relief

“Great. I'll go get my bag.”

Gretchen didn't drive much and wasn't sure how to get from the Verrazano to Park Slope, though she was certain it could be done. She was impressed by Dave's ability to negotiate the maze of
highways branching off from the bridge and his rudimentary knowledge of Brooklyn geography, which got them close enough to her neighborhood that she was able to direct him the rest of the way.

“That's amazing,” she said. “The last time I tried that we ended up in East New York.”

“I'm a courier. I do a lot of driving around the city.”

“Really? How convenient.”

“Convenient?”

“Make a left up here. I'm four blocks up on the right.”

He didn't press her. He knew exactly what she meant by “convenient,” and would even have agreed with her, if not for the inconvenient fact that he was engaged to be married in three months. Somehow or other, he'd neglected to apprise her of this important biographical note. All through the drive he kept waiting for the right opportunity, and it kept not appearing.

“If you see a space, grab it,” she told him.

Park Slope didn't look like Dave's idea of Brooklyn. The streets were lush and tree lined, almost suburban, except that the houses were attached brownstones, set back from the sidewalk, with wrought-iron fences and imposing front stoops. The people walking by looked young and prosperous, able to afford high rents. He found a spot about halfway up the block, on the opposite side of the street. It was a tight squeeze, with maybe two inches to spare on each bumper.

“So what about you?” he asked, yanking on the emergency brake as if trying to rip it out by the roots. “What do you do for a living?”

She rolled up the window and groped blindly for the door handle. He reached across the car to pop it for her, his arm brushing across the staticky fabric of her skirt.

“Freelance copy editor,” she said, pushing the door open on its dry, protesting hinge. “By night I'm a poet.”

Her third-floor apartment was bigger than Dave expected, and fully furnished. On the stark white walls of the living room hung numerous black-and-white framed photographs of stingray bicycles.

“I used to have one of those,” he said.

“My roommate's boyfriend takes them. He calls it his Banana Seat Series. A couple of galleries were interested last year, but nothing really came of it.”

“You have a roommate?”

“The perfect kind,” said Gretchen. “She's almost never home. She basically lives with Dex in Williamsburg.”

She got him a beer, put Shawn Colvin—not one of Dave's favorites—on the CD player, and excused herself to get out of the dress. He wandered around the room, taking a closer look at the photographs. All of the bikes were leaning against the same chain-link fence, with a litter-strewn vacant lot in the background. Most of them were rusty and beat-up, with flat tires or ripped seats or missing pedals, though one was in mint condition, with horse-tail streamers shooting out from the handlebar grips. There was something desolate about the pictures, as though the real subjects weren't the bikes at all, but the kids who'd lost or outgrown or forgotten all about them.

Gretchen emerged from her bedroom wearing a short, silky gray robe, and sat down on the couch. Without thinking, Dave took the chair by the TV, making an effort to appear unfazed by the fact that she'd actually “slipped into something more comfortable,” a tactic he'd only witnessed in old movies. He felt himself at a disadvantage, an overdressed suburbanite on alien turf, surrounded by depressing folk music and sad pictures of bicycles.

“So tell me,” he said. “What does a copy editor do?”

She lit up a Parliament and exhaled in his direction, as though
that were a reply in itself. There seemed to be a lot less of her now that she'd escaped from the puffy dress. She was slender, verging on slight, her body lost inside the shimmery robe.

“Spelling, punctuation, house style,” she said with a bored shrug. “All the crap nobody else wants to deal with.”

“Pay okay?”

“Compared to what?”

He nodded, as if she'd said something profound. She took a long drag from her cigarette, then leaned forward to stub it out in a saucer resting atop some books on the coffee table.

“You know,” she said, sitting up straight and smoothing the robe over her thighs, “it's kind of hard to kiss you from across the room.”

Dave was vaguely aware of standing up and moving toward the couch. She stood up, too, holding out her arms as if to catch him. Her body felt warm through the silk, thrillingly unfamiliar. Her mouth reminded him of something.

“I can't believe this,” she whispered. Her glasses were crooked on her face; one lens had fogged over. “I don't even know you.”

They kissed again. She wrapped one leg around him as if preparing for a judo throw, making throaty murmurs of encouragement as he slipped one hand into the robe and found her breast. Her mouth tasted of tobacco on top of alcohol, a combination he hadn't experienced since Julie quit smoking five years earlier, mainly to get him to stop bugging her about it. She'd done it cold turkey, chewing gum like a demon, biting her nails until they bled, sometimes crying out of sheer desperation. Gretchen did something with her leg, and the next thing Dave knew he was flat on his back. She kneeled over him, straddling his waist as she went to work on the buttons of his ruffled shirt. For the first time in hours, Julie was a vivid presence in his mind.

“I'm engaged,” he said, reaching up to grab hold of Gretchen's wrist.

“What?”

“To be married.”

She took it pretty well, allowing her face to register only the briefest flicker of surprise before prying his fingers from her arm and undoing the belt of her robe.

“Congratulations,” she said, closing her eyes and rubbing against him in a way that interfered with his ability to continue the conversation. “Who's the lucky girl?”

CARLOS AND STEVIE RAY

 

For two and a half weeks
he had somehow kept himself from calling her, even during his runs into the city, even when his pockets were filled with quarters and there seemed to be an unoccupied phone booth on every other corner. They'd had their fun and he wasn't sorry about it. But he couldn't allow himself to get tangled up in an affair just a few months before his wedding. He wasn't going to be that stupid.

That evening, though, the phone had rung during dinner. His mother picked it up. Right away, Dave knew who it was.

“Yes he is,” she said, handing him the phone across the table, her eyes narrowing with suspicion. He stood up, turned his back on his parents, and moved as close to the hallway as the cord would allow.

“I know you can't talk,” she said. “Come to my apartment tomorrow night. There's something I want to show you.”

Dave didn't hesitate. “Okay.”

“Seven o'clock.”

“Okay.”

“Pretend this is a solicitation. Say, ‘Sorry, I'm not interested.’ “

“Sorry, I'm not interested.”

“Bye, Dave.”

“Bye now.”

Both his parents were watching him as he hung up the phone.

“Replacement windows,” he reported, shaking his head. “They seem to think I'm head of the household.”

His father raised one finger while he finished chewing.

“All they have to do,” he said cheerfully, “is take one phone solicitor out to the town square, stand him up in front of a firing squad, and blow his brains out.” He looked around, apparently expecting an objection. “You think I'm kidding?”

They returned to their meal, a nameless concoction of egg noodles, ground beef, and cream of mushroom soup that Dave's mother had discovered in a women's magazine in the early eighties and had been serving on a weekly basis ever since. Amazingly, Dave still wasn't tired of it. He stared down at his plate, unable to look up for fear that his face would give everything away—his guilt and excitement, his utter, paralyzing relief.

The silence deepened around him. He moved some noodles around with his fork. He hadn't felt this self-conscious in years, not since the days in high school when he used to come home stoned and had to monitor his every move at the dinner table to make sure he wasn't doing something really strange, like staring at a brussels sprout for a suspicious length of time, or saying the word “potato” over and over again until he dissolved with laughter.

“I'm going over to Glenn's tonight,” he announced, his voice cracking from the strain.

“Take ‘em out and shoot ‘em,” his father repeated. “Put it on national television. That's when people in this country will finally be able to eat in peace.”

Glenn Stella's parents had retired to a planned community in North Carolina with an eighteen-hole golf course and state-of-the-art health facility. Instead of selling their house in Darwin, they allowed Glenn to keep living there on his own, with the stipulation that he pay the property taxes, keep the place in good working order, and not mess with the decor. This arrangement was fine with their son, who made a more-than-adequate living as a computer programmer, had no interest in redecorating, and liked to be left alone.

For the past year or so, Dave had found himself vaguely depressed by his periodic visits with Glenn, even though they did the exact same things they'd been doing since they were twelve—listen to records, talk about music, and play guitar in the basement. There was a static quality to their friendship that had become eerie rather than comforting now that they were over thirty, at least for Dave. Glenn didn't seem to notice, just as he seemed oblivious to the fact that he wasn't going to meet any women if he never left his house, or that a healthy diet included foods other than Campbell's Tomato Rice Soup, Weaver's Zesty Wings, and Mr. Salty Pretzels.

Not long ago, Julie asked Dave if Glenn had ever considered seeing a therapist.

“I don't know. I never asked him.”

“He must be so unhappy.”

“You'd think so,” said Dave. “But actually he seems okay. Not happy. Just okay. Same as always.”

“Isn't he lonely?”

“He never complains about it.”

“What about women? Does he go on dates?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Don't you ask?”

“I figure he'd tell me if anything important came up.”

“I don't understand,” Julie told him. “How can you guys be friends and not talk about this stuff?”

Looking at it through her eyes, Dave saw that there was something lacking in his interaction with Glenn. But it never really seemed that way when they were together. For the most part, they found enough to talk about without venturing anywhere in the vicinity of dangerous subjects like women or loneliness or maybe going to a therapist. And if words failed them, guitars never did.

Dave Walked through a wall of Hendrix into a living room full of needlepoint samplers and the dusty porcelain figurines—milkmaids, shepherds, angels, dogs—that were supposedly Mrs. Stella's prize possessions, though she seemed to be doing just fine without them in her condo overlooking the seventh hole. Glenn lowered the volume on the stereo and turned around, dressed in faded green gym shorts and a pink button-down shirt. He had thinning blond hair and the same gold aviator glasses he'd been wearing since he was twelve.

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“Sure.”

“Dr. Pepper okay?”

Dave nodded, wishing he'd remembered to bring a six-pack. Glenn was a person with intense food loyalties, and had long ago cast his lot with Dr. Pepper. There was never any other beverage in the house except for the obligatory half-empty jar of Sanka moldering away in the cupboard. A smell wafted out of the refrigerator when he opened it and lingered in the air long after it was closed. Dave took a seat at the kitchen table and tried not to think too hard about what had produced the odor. Glenn popped the pop top and slid the can across the table like a bartender.

“So how's it going with the wedding plans?”

“Not bad. There's a lot of stuff to take care of, though.”

“I still can't believe you're taking the plunge.”

“Me neither.”

Glenn saluted Dave with his soda. “You're a lucky guy. I never understood what took you so long.”

“Strategy,” Dave explained. “I wanted to make her sweat a little.”

Glenn shook his head. His expression was thoughtful, a bit melancholy.

“Julie's the best. I mean that.”

“She's pretty great,” Dave agreed.

“The best,” Glenn repeated.

Dave looked past his friend to the trucking company magnets stuck on the refrigerator door. Glenn was right, of course. Any man in his right mind would have been thrilled by the prospect of watching Julie march down the aisle to pledge her lifelong love and kiss him in front of a churchful of people. But Dave, apparently, was not in his right mind. All he seemed to be able to think about was Gretchen. The Verrazano Bridge. Her skin under silk. The taste of her mouth. He forced himself to look back at Glenn.

“Speaking of best,” he said, “I wonder if you'd consider being my Best Man.”

Glenn looked skeptical. He rolled the Dr. Pepper can back and forth across his forehead like a construction worker who'd been laboring for hours in the midday sun. Whatever he was imagining seemed to be giving him a headache.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Just don't make me deliver the fucking toast.”

Dave nodded. He felt an emotion something like love swell up in his chest. It was right that Glenn would be standing up there next to him.

“You sure about this?” he asked.

Glenn shrugged. “My shrink says it's time for me to start confronting my fears.”

“You have a shrink?”

Now it was Glenn's turn to look surprised. “You didn't know?” “You never told me.”

“A nut like me?” Glenn laughed. “I'd be crazy
not
to have one.”

His pale blue Stratocaster tucked under one arm, Glenn called up a directory on his basement computer and skimmed through the contents.

“Let's see,” he said. “You want to be Carlos?”

“I'm surprised you even have to ask.”

Glenn clicked the mouse a few times and the distinctive sound of Santana began to fill the room like a fine mist. Not the familiar Latin percussion of “Evil Ways,” the tune Dave had expected, but something softer and spacier, watery organ chords quivering on a spare background of bass and drums.

“‘ Song of the Wind’?” guessed Dave.

“You got it. From
Caravanserai.
Remember that picture of the moon on the album cover?”

Glenn spent a lot of time re-creating his favorite songs on a multitrack synthesizer, laying down all the instruments except lead guitar and vocals so he'd be able to jam with a full band behind him anytime he felt like it. His arranging skills seemed miraculous to Dave, as did his ability to simulate the trademark sounds of individual musicians—Clarence Clemons's sax, say, or Bill Wyman's bass —using only a small electronic keyboard hooked up to a Macintosh computer.

“Song of the Wind” wasn't so much a song as a five-minute excuse for a guitar solo. Dave hit a note on Glenn's red SG (his second-best guitar) and held it, startled and exhilarated by the raw purity of tone and unflagging sustain that had somehow been programmed
into the synthesizer. For a moment, it was possible to believe that he'd gotten his hands not only on Carlos's custom-made axe, but on his mortal soul as well. He milked this illusion for all it was worth, tilting his face toward heaven, grimacing as though it hurt to play such ecstatic music, as though every riff pierced him through the heart. Gretchen came to him as he played, her eyes locked on his as they made love, never blinking, not even when she cried out the same note over and over for what seemed to Dave like an extraordinary length of time, a note he found he could nearly reproduce on the SG in Glenn's basement, in the exquisite and wrenching tone of one of the greatest guitar players of all time.

Hot as it sounded, Dave was careful not to kid himself. He understood all too well the difference between sounding like a genius and actually being one. It wasn't that hard, in 1995, if you set your mind to it and invested in the right gizmos, to fool people for a couple of minutes into thinking you were Eric Clapton or Eddie Van Halen or even Jimi Hendrix. But where did that get you? The real trick was creating your own sound, the mysterious signature that belonged to you and no one else. It wasn't a matter of hardware or even necessarily of technique. It was about taking the instrument and technology you had and making them your own, teaching them to say something no one else had thought to say before, in a voice no one had heard.

Dave wasn't there yet. He didn't think he'd ever be. This knowledge didn't torment him; it was just a fact he lived with: that greatness would always be out of reach, that he was what he was—a pretty good guitar player, another face in the crowd, a guy who could do a mean fucking imitation of Carlos Santana.

Clenn was further along on the path to musical enlightenment. He put his own mark on “The Sky Is Crying,” transforming it from an almost exuberant bellow of pain to something more muted
and matter-of-fact, as though, in his world, the crying of the sky were the ordinary state of things rather than a strange and sinister change in the weather. His voice was less gruffly expressive than Stevie Ray Vaughan's, his licks more furtive, less self-assured; instead of wild anguish you felt a dull pain motivating the song, an ache that wouldn't go away when the sun came out. Glenn was Stevie Ray without the swagger and the cowboy hat, and these were the blues the dead man might have known if, instead of being a famous guitar hero, he'd been a lonely guy in green gym shorts who hadn't gotten laid in a long time and didn't expect the future to deliver anything better than the shrunken-down life he already had.

Glenn was one of the few guitarists Dave knew who didn't make big faces when he soloed; he just hunched down over his Strat and went to work. Every once in a while he looked up, squinting in mild perplexity, his fingers spider-walking over the fret board as though directed by an entirely separate intelligence. Watching him, Dave thought of “Bobby Jean,” Bruce Springsteen's tribute to Steve Van Zandt, his musical soul mate from high school all the way through the glory days of the E Street Band. If things had worked out the way they were supposed to, he and Glenn might have had a similar trajectory, instead of a story that began and ended on a single night.

All through their sophomore year of high school, they had had their sights set on the Talent Show. Anonymous underclassmen, they had plotted a musical ambush, a surprise attack on the three-chord simpletons and heavy-metal posers who dominated Har-ding's rock scene in the late seventies. They'd spent months learning “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” a jazzy and haunting instrumental by the Allman Brothers, teasing out the intricate lead guitar harmonies, playing the song over and over until it seemed
less like a duet than the work of a single four-handed musician. Then they went out, scrounged up a keyboardist and drummer competent enough to back them (no spare bass players were available), and signed up for the Talent Show at the last minute as the Allmost Brothers.

They watched the show from backstage, their confidence growing with each addition to the program, every Barbra Streisand imitator, every nerdy juggler and one-trick magician and hat-waving tap dancer, every out-of-tune garage band hacking its way through “Locomotive Breath” and “Smoke on the Water.” The Allmost Brothers took the stage late in the evening, believing the show was theirs to lose.

Standing in front of an audience for the first time, guitar in hand, Dave felt a surge of adrenaline unlike anything he'd ever known. This was
it
—the destination he and Glenn had been dreaming about for three years as they'd done the private work of learning their instruments, note by note, chord by chord, song by song. Now that they had arrived, Dave felt loose and ready, almost giddy with power. He turned to Glenn, eager to share the sensation.