Voodoo Heart (24 page)

I even owned my own apartment, a small duplex in a renovated factory building. Everything about the place was brand-new; the walls were moon white, the counters were made of brushed steel. The bedroom windows stood five feet tall—huge, industrial panels that afforded a perfect view of midtown Manhattan. In fact, if I slid our bookcase out and squeezed myself into the corner of the room, I could just make out my own office building.

Sometimes, if I couldn’t sleep, I would climb out of bed and press myself into the corner and look out over the moonlit river until I found my building, then my office, and finally my window. There, I’d think. You fit there. And after a while a soothing fatigue would come over me, and I’d climb back into bed.

Then, one day in January, Pearl came into the den with a strange look on her face.

“What is it?” I said.

“You almost ready to go?”

“Ready to go where?”

“To see that guy I told you about? The one performing in the East Village,” she said. “I’ve been going to see him sing every night this week. You promised you’d come tonight.”

I looked down at the papers in front of me—part of a proposal by a company that manufactured high-end synthetic plants, everything from desk plants to full-size trees. Our client was hoping we might help it court a major home improvement retailer, one that had giant warehouse-like stores all across the country. This was the biggest deal I’d been handed so far. Our client had sent along an artificial fern as a sample of its work, along with a real fern. I had both pots next to each other on my desk.

“Here, try to tell the difference.” I gestured for Pearl to touch the ferns.

“Max, I want you to come. It’s important to me.”

“Just feel.”

She sighed and rubbed a leaf from each plant between her fingers. “Wow.”

“Feels real, doesn’t it?” I said. “They’re a good company. Now smell.”

She squinted at me as though I were suddenly very hard to see. “Max…”

“Fine. Okay.” I closed my binder and got up. “Who is this guy again?”

“He’s a country singer,” said Pearl. “His name’s Dick Doyle.”

As soon as we entered the club, I could tell something strange was going on. Usually the artists Pearl got excited about—the musicians and painters and writers and such—were up-and-comers: they’d been written up in magazines and had some sort of buzz around them. And the people who went to see them perform were like us; they were in our crowd. But as we made our way toward the stage, I saw that Dick Doyle’s audience wasn’t our crowd at all. The people filing in were bikers and construction workers, security guards. Jeans and boots and even a little leather. It had been a long time since I’d felt overdressed in a button-down.

At ten o’clock sharp, an old cowgirl came out from behind the curtain to offer an introduction to Dick’s show. She was dressed in cowboy boots and a denim shirt with fringe hanging off the sleeves. When she reached the center of the stage, she took off her hat and held it over her chest.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she began, “there is a story behind the man you are about to see here tonight. A story that has become an inspiration to many…”

I looked around at the crowd, expecting smirks and snickers, but everybody was just standing with their faces turned up toward the stage, listening. Even Pearl. I felt like checking outside just to make sure I was still in Manhattan.

“The story begins in Florida,” the old woman continued, “with a man named Dick Doyle.”

The audience erupted in cheers, clapping and stomping and whistling.

The old woman smiled and patted down the noise. “I know, I know,” she said. “But back then, Dick Doyle wasn’t anyone special, really,” she said. “He was just your average country singer. Living and playing around town. Singing his songs at birthday parties and weddings. At the derby on Thursday nights…”

I wondered why she was talking about Dick Doyle as though the man were dead. Wasn’t Dick backstage, waiting to come on? The band was already setting up.

“Oh, Dick was a real jokester, too,” she said, smiling wistfully. “In between songs, he liked to poke fun at the audience, tease them a little, you know. Rib them.”

The stage lights dimmed, but the spotlight on the old woman grew brighter.

“Except this one night, see,” said the cowgirl, looking around at all of us, her face becoming grave. “Someone in the audience didn’t take kindly to Dick’s jokes. A man. He didn’t like the way Dick was teasing him about his hair, which was long, you know, in a ponytail? And so, after the show was over, he waited for Dick outside the bar in his truck, and when Dick came out, this man…well, he ran Dick down.”

He ran Dick down. I couldn’t help a laugh from bubbling up. Pearl shot me a cold look.

The cowgirl went on to explain that Dick had spent two months recovering in the ICU at Orlando Memorial. He had some broken bones, a few busted ribs, a fractured wrist. But worst of all—and here she let out a long, sad sigh—the doctors discovered that Dick had brain damage.

“Hemorrhage-induced catatonia. That’s what the docs called Dick’s condition,” she said. “The way I think of it, though, is like a trance that Dick’s stuck in. The accident knocked Dick into a lifelong trance that he never wakes up from. Like one of those people that gets voodoo done on them.”

“A zombie!” someone yelled from the audience.

“A zombie. Right,” she said. “Except that in real life, zombies never wake up from their trances…” she said, putting her cowboy hat back on. “But…the amazing thing about Dick…is that on certain occasions, under very special circumstances, Dick can wake up from his trance.

“Circumstances, ladies and gentlemen, such as these here tonight. Because if there’s one thing that Dick reacts to, one thing that can part those clouds sitting on his brain, it’s the power of music…”

And here the woman took a deep bow, and then began backing away, off the stage. A moment later she returned with two men, both of them helping a fourth person onto the stage. This fourth person was a man about six feet tall, my height, average build, with a big trucker’s mustache. He was wearing a string tie and a cowboy hat. His suit was bright purple, covered with musical notes made of glittering rhinestones. The crew stood Dick in the center of the stage and brushed him off.

I leaned over to Pearl. “That suit’s giving me…
brain damage,
” I said.

“Shh,” she said.

The two assistants slung a guitar around Dick’s neck and then adjusted the microphone so that it came right up to his mouth, which was hanging open slightly. His eyes stared out at nothing.

I glanced at my watch. It was already ten thirty. I felt a rumbling of agitation.

Country music started up from the back of the stage: a fiddle and a banjo, a slide guitar with that sad, watery echo.

“Look,” said Pearl. “Look at Dick. Watch.”

So I looked at him. He was just as I’d left him. Standing with his string tie too tight around his neck, gazing vacantly out into the darkness. But then, slowly, he began to show signs of life. His mustache twitched once, twice. He started blinking rapidly.

I would have laughed out loud, if I hadn’t paid twenty dollars to see the show. To me, it all looked like bad acting. He scanned the crowd then, seemingly coming out of his daze. Where am I? Who are all these people? I couldn’t help thinking of some of the student actors in Pearl’s graduate program.

The crowd began clapping along to the music, cheering Dick on.

“Go, Dick, go!” they yelled. “Go, Dick, go!”

Dick’s shaking hands slowly felt their way over the guitar, crawling over the body, the neck, eventually finding positions on the strings and frets. His playing was clumsy and lurching at first, but after a moment it smoothed out, became passable.

I glanced at Pearl; she was rapt, clapping and chanting, and I felt a creeping disdain for her. I spent the better part of my day assessing value—enumerating the attractive qualities of companies, making cases for or against them. I could not for the life of me see a case to be made for Dick Doyle. More than this, though, I couldn’t see any benefit in a match between Dick Doyle’s performance and my evening.

Pearl nudged me.

“Go, Dick,” I said.

Dick leaned into the mic and started singing. His voice was nothing to crow about—nasal and whiny, typical country. The song sounded like a stock tearjerker to me, too; it was about a man who gets struck by a power line, finds himself a different person afterward, unable to fit his own life. Sniffle, sniffle.

I headed to the back to get a drink. The bartender was an older fellow. He looked reasonable enough.

“Can you believe this?” I said, when he brought me my beer.

He shook his head. It was hard to hear over the clapping.

I pointed a thumb over my shoulder at the stage. “That guy can’t act for shit, huh?”

The bartender scowled, then took away my beer.

Late that night, I woke up to the sounds of Pearl crying. I got out of bed and found her dragging a suitcase down the spiral staircase.

“I’m leaving, Max,” she said.

“Jesus. Wait a second,” I said, trying to gauge the situation. “What’s wrong?”

“Please don’t try to stop me.” She was already halfway down the stairs, so that only her shoulders and head were visible from my vantage point.

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and checked my watch: two thirty in the morning. “Pearl. Come up here and talk to me.”

She lugged the suitcase down another step. “No. We don’t make each other happy. I’m not what you want.”

“What are you talking about? Of course you’re what I want. I want you all the time. More than I’ve ever wanted anyone. I’m all over you. Constantly.”

She stopped to wipe her face. “I mean you don’t want
me,
who I am. You don’t have any interest in me as a person.”

“I have a great interest in you. I’m marrying you, for Christ’s sake,” I said.

“But you don’t have any interest in what I’m doing with my life. In what my goals are.”

“Could you please just come up to the second floor, please?”

“You’re always making fun of the theater, making fun of my friends. You don’t take any of it seriously.”

To be honest, I’m not a big fan of the theater. I have trouble losing myself in the action of a play. The actors always seem hysterical to me, scurrying around the bright box of the stage, screaming and crying and clawing at each other. Watching a play, I always feel like part of some team of psychiatrists that’s been called in to observe a group of out-of-control mental patients.

“I come to the plays, don’t I?” I said. “I hang out with you and your classmates.”

“Name three of my friends from playwriting school. In fact, just name three of my friends.”

“This is ridiculous. Of course I can—”

“Name two.”

“Bonnie and Pat.”

“Pat’s my sister.”

“The girl you went out with the other night. The flat-chested one. Her name starts with a
D
. Debbie?”

She proceeded to name all my friends from work, some I might have forgotten myself. Everyone in my department.

“What’s the title of the play I’m working on right now?” she said.

It was on the tip of my tongue. It had “dirt” or “mud” in the title. Something mud.

She leaned her head against the iron banister and closed her eyes. A ribbon of hair fell across her cheek. The sight reminded me of how she looked in the mornings, just before waking up. Her expression so serious, brow furrowed in concentration as she swam up from that last dream.

“That singer tonight,” she said, her eyes still closed. “Dick Doyle. All week I’ve been telling you about him, about how much I loved his songs. I must have spent twenty minutes just two days ago going on about how deeply his music spoke to me.”

I tried to recall these conversations, but all I could hear of them were vague echoes. A few words here and there.
Trance. Stage. Dream.

“I brought you tonight because I’d hoped that you might hear in those songs what I hear in them. I thought Dick’s performance might affect you. But you didn’t pay any attention.”

“Do you have his CD? Give his record to me now. I’ll listen to it. I promise.”