Vexation Lullaby (20 page)

Cyril took my ticket to let me know he knows my habits, too. Ours is not a cat and mouse game. It's cat and cat.

S
INCE SCALPERS DON
't take credit cards, I head off in search of an ATM. A few blocks away, I spot one in a Subway restaurant. After grabbing some cash, I decide to get a sandwich, since the juice wasn't exactly filling.

I always get the same thing at Subway, a turkey sub on whole wheat with spinach, tomatoes, green peppers, black olives; I avoid salt, mayo, and cheese because coronary disease killed my father and, indirectly, my uncle. I ask for olive oil and vinegar (every so often my body craves vinegar). The sandwich artist hands me my bagged food and I carry it over to one of their anti-ergonomic booths—they could make the seats more comfortable, but they don't want people to loiter.

I start feeling blue, which could be the booth design's real intention, since so many people use food to self-soothe. If I wasn't so aware, I might try to comfort myself with one of their peanut butter cookies.

When Gabby felt down—the smallest things used to set her off, a shoelace breaking, if you put catsup on her fries as opposed to next to them—Patricia used to throw a pity party. We'd make a box cake and sing “It's a pity for you” to the tune of “Happy Birthday.” It worked like a charm. I'm not sure what Patricia did as Gabby got older. A pity party probably wouldn't help ease heartbreak or being ostracized, or feeling like you'd been abandoned.

This woman comes over and puts her hands on the edge of my table, like she wants to borrow the last chair at my table. She smiles, but there's a general thinness to her face, lips, and fingers, like she's never eaten dessert. The roots of her hair are darker than the tips, but in a way that looks intentional. I can't decide if she looks good for sixty, or if she's seen forty rough years.

“Artie?”

I shake my head.

“I can't believe it,” she says. “Artie, it's me, Mindy Vinter.”

Both of our mouths hang open.

Mindy Vinter! She'd been a neighbor when we were both sophomores at a yellow-brick high school in Thornbrook, Illinois. Sometimes at night, I would take the screen out of my window so I could stick my head out and stare at the pink curtain of her bedroom window. Forty years ago I had vivid fantasies where her house caught on fire and I saved her. One day, watching her practice with a hula hoop in her yard, I got up the courage and kissed her. When I stopped, Mindy stood there looking at me, the hula hoop on the ground, and said, “Artie, I thought you were going to punch me.” For a few weeks, whenever she went outside to walk her parents' dog we'd rendezvous at the center of a cluster of pine trees and kiss until the dog (Rascal, I remember!) began to whimper.

“How'd you ever recognize me?”

She shakes her head. “You still do that thing where you loom over your food. Right, you basically eat down.”

“I eat ‘down'?”

“Wait,” Mindy says, “are you in Pittsburgh?”

“I am tonight,” I say, which sounds preposterous coming out of my mouth, so I add, “Remember Rascal?”

“Poor Rascal.” She pouts. “Not a dignified end.”

“Are you married?” I ask.

Mindy says she's married, which surprises me because she's not wearing a ring. Not wearing a ring seems to suggest that, at the very least, she's not entirely married.

“How long?” I ask, which comes out sounding a bit aggressive, like I'm trying to catch her in a lie.

She says, “It seems like forever.” Really, what kind of answer is that? “And you?”

I tell her I've been divorced for almost twenty years and that I have a thirty-year-old daughter. Mindy tells me that she has three sons and two daughters. Five kids with this invisible husband! I say how that's fantastic and how no one would ever guess (which is an acceptable thing to say to a woman, but has always seemed really odd to me).

“Are you here on business?”

I say, “Business and pleasure.” And then I tell her, as briefly as possible, about JimCrossCompendium. Sometimes when I start talking about JCC (and this is especially true when I'm talking with a woman), I fail to recognize the point at which real interest is replaced by rote nodding.

Mindy punches me in the shoulder. “I can't believe you're a blogger,” she says. “My girlfriend and I are going to his show.”

Just when it
seems we've run out of things to catch up on, a woman walks up to us, a fleshier version of Mindy—the same under-siege blond hair, but face, lips, and fingers all buttery. “Min, honey,” she says, shaking a ticket in the air, “I can't sell it. I feel
too
conspicuous.”

They've got an extra ticket! I mean it's right out of “Paris in Winter.”
³²

Mindy's friend goes by Robinson. And, when I tell them my problem, they insist I join them for the show. Mindy and Robinson used to work together, along with a Claire, and the three of them still try to get together once a month. Luckily for me, Claire twisted her ankle on an escalator and didn't feel like coming out.

I say, “It looks like my luck is turning.”

And Robinson, who is also not wearing a wedding band, pinches the lapel of my coat and says, “Are you a bad boy, Artie?”

And Mindy says, “We have time to get a drink, don't we?”

T
HE THREE OF
us go across the street to one of those faux Irish bars where everything is authentic, mullioned glass, dark wood, and brass, but inside it's lit like a museum. My companions don't seem to mind. They get white wines while I have a Guinness. Robinson lifts her glass and says, “I never drink.”

“You never drink a little,” Mindy laughs.

These two women put on a play for me: they are attention-
starved sisters and I'm the traveling salesman who's been invited to supper. Robinson says she can't believe Mindy never mentioned me before. And Mindy tells her friend that I used to throw stones at her bedroom window (I have no recollection of this).

“How come we never slept together?” Mindy asks me.

It's like asking Wilbur Wright why he never flew to the moon.

“You wanted to,” Mindy says, “so bad.”

I pick up the bill. “Ladies,” I say, “the concert awaits.”

As we're leaving the bar, Robinson turns to me and says, “I hear this could be his last tour.”

I could tell her that it's all one tour, but I'm smart enough to keep my trap shut.

44

Lucy used to call Peter “mama's boy,” when he rolled his socks into tidy balls, for instance. She'd wander into the kitchen, naked, stand before the open refrigerator, and retrieve one of “his” yogurts from the bottom row. “I'm stealing this,” she'd say, peeling back the foil, still not closing the door, her skin goosebumping. “You're letting all the cold air out.” “Mama's boy,” she said, licking the spoon. It happened more than once.

They met in a Laundromat during his first year of medical school. He'd gone to study while his clothes drowned. She'd wandered in to get change to feed a parking meter. She interrupted him, asked him what he was reading. He showed her the cover of his workbook. She said, “Is that any good?” then winked. Women didn't usually approach him—he was long-limbed, gawky, too tall to be slight, but too thin to have presence. They never winked. He had the presence of mind to ask for her number. For their first date, he took her to an Italian place that someone had claimed was romantic. He discovered she was earning her master's in early childhood development. “You must have lots of patience,” he said. She said, “Try me.”

He told Lucy he didn't have time to date. Then he said he didn't have time for a girlfriend. In both cases, he may have been giving himself an alibi for when she lost interest in him. He fell for her quickly and completely.

After a month, she suggested he invite her to move in. Not only would they save money, but he'd get to see her every night. He asked and she told him she'd have to think about it. She waited two months before she agreed.

It was heaven. They liked to lie in bed and scan catalogs together. They were both gung ho on the future. She said he was the first serious person she'd dated, not the first person she'd dated seriously. He kept a Formica table at the foot of his bed and oftentimes he'd be at the table studying when she woke. He loved hearing her breathing change as she awoke.

She had a younger brother, a laid-back tech rep who lived an hour north of Miami; Peter marveled at their easy friendship, their chummy affection. Peter realized he wanted to have two kids with her, which was not a rejection of his own childhood, or not simply. They visited her brother a few times, usually when winters in Rochester got to be too much. The brother had a condo that looked west, across a brown-black canal, toward the Everglades and the setting sun.

And later, yes, Peter caught Lucy browsing studio apartments online. That was what led him to talk with a real estate agent and a mortgage broker, brought him to the place he was now, an accidental property owner.

“Mama's boy,” Lucy said, when he insisted she separate the salad forks from the dinner forks. But hadn't it been affectionate?

45

Countless times, I've found myself sandwiched between the unusually large, the drunk, the belligerent, the unwashed. Those sorts of indignities are easy to forget when I am near the stage, when I can see, for example, a dry cleaner's tag on the hem of Cross's pant leg. The only nice thing I can say about Claire's seat is that it's close to the exit.

The difference between seats and great seats is almost not worth mentioning, but since I've given the subject some thought, I'll say a bit more. A competent sound guy
³³
will monitor the levels throughout the hall. However, since an empty hall and a hall packed with sound-absorbing bodies are entirely different things, there are really only two places to sit. You should either be close to the stage, to hear what the performers hear, or sit near the soundboard, since the sound engineer will tweak the levels so that things sound right to him or her.

Everyone knows that sound and light travel at different speeds, but that's not something one is usually reminded of while at a concert. Yet, in Pittsburgh, I can see Jimmy's fingers make a run on the keyboard before I hear that run. And when he tilts his head back and belts out something heartfelt, I have to wait an eternity before I find out where he's taking us.

At least the company is excellent! Mindy and Robinson both seize my arm when Jimmy first walks on stage (what had they expected?). Likewise, when he launches into a rote version of “Long Gone,” they're in awe. They sing along when they know the tune, and when Cross plays something more obscure I feed them the title and locate it in his discography. “You could rent yourself out,” Mindy says. “A concert gigolo,” Robinson says. My stock peaks when I correctly predict Cross will follow “Alabaster Ragout” with “Tennis Shoe Blues.”

It feels like a magical night. Cross tears through “Ripcord”(!), jumps into “Bomb Shelter Romance” (!!), reassures the casual fans with “Absolutely Nowhere,” before covering the Talking Heads' “Psycho Killer” (@?$%), doing that whole
ba-ba-ba-baaaa-ba
,
ba-ba-ba-baaaa-ba
on the harp! Robinson grips my thigh, which is thrilling, and then she moves her hand and—it's probably an accident—squeezes my penis through the fabric of my pants (my decorum is protected by my duster).

But I am eternally Arthur Pennyman—which means that nothing can go right unless something else goes wrong. My brain receives an urgent message from my gut: that horrid juice is wrecking havoc on my gastrointestinal system.

I unlatch Robinson's electrifying grip to slide past Mindy. As I turn up the aisle, I want to shoot Robinson a look to let her know I'll be back, but she's following me! Does she think that we're making our escape, that I'll ravish her in the parking lot? I wait for her, trying to think of a quick excuse. Then she says, “I have to tinkle.” Which is a relief, obviously.

We reach the lobby and I dart off to the men's room.

T
HERE ARE A
limited number of situations where a duster causes an inconvenience; the restroom is undoubtedly the chief example. My fingers have to do the fine work with my belt and zipper, while my core muscles clench. I'm praying that I can complete the operation and only suffer a close call as opposed to a humiliation. When my pants puddle around my legs, I flip the tail of my coat over my head and drop onto the seat. In short order, internal pressure and external pressure equalize. Like a summer storm, there is thunder and wind; the temperature in the stall drops twenty degrees in about five seconds—or so it seems. I don't remember sweating, yet all at once I'm aware of sweat cooling, on my scalp, near my kidneys, behind my knees.

I stagger to the sink. I want torrents of glacial runoff, but the faucet is one of those water misers; I have to punch it a hundred times. As soon as I'm clean, it's time for round two. At last, hollowed out like a flute, I leave the stall. Rip Van Winkle stares back at me from the mirror.

Impossibly, I find Robinson waiting for me in the lobby.

“I was beginning to think you'd gone out a window.”

I don't say, “I nearly went down the drain.”

She hands me a scrap of paper. Snippets of lyrics from four songs: “Minister of Moonshine” (!!), “Rothko's Circus” (!!), “Evaline,” and “When You Wash (Your Hair)” (!).
³⁴

It's an amazingly thoughtful gesture and I tell her so.

“You want to get out of here?” she asks.

I do. But wanting is fleeting. Besides, leaving early—regardless of the circumstances—would only feed ammunition to my detractors. A life is defined through a million opportunities to abandon principles.