“And now,” Sara was saying, “as a reward, I get to go to the writing lab and work all night on my Shakespeare paper. How fun for me.”
“When’s it due?” I asked.
“Monday.”
The solution seemed obvious. “Put it off,” I said. “Come with me to the city and hang out.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Come on, it’ll be good for you.”
She bit her lip. “You really wouldn’t mind?”
I assured her that I could use a friendly face. “Anyway, our set’s only an hour long. I’ll have you home by midnight.”
But at midnight we were still at the bar, still part of the electric cloud of urgent talk and meaningful glances and cigarette haze and sweaty bodies dancing to a jukebox strained to the limit, all of which came together in a great surge of energy that seemed to power this large city. I imagined that right now, a quiet home in some Jersey suburb was experiencing an unexpected burst of light and heat because of what was being generated in this small music club way down in Greenwich Village.
Sara and I were at a table in the corner with Fred and his girlfriend, Eve. Fred had just invited us for a drink at their apartment a few blocks away.
I looked over at Sara, who for several hours now had been on a steady diet of rum and Cokes. She looked back at me and shrugged. “It’s your night, big guy. Whatever you want.”
“You sure Shakespeare can wait?” I asked.
She cocked an eyebrow.
“Because scholars everywhere are probably on pins and needles waiting to hear what you have to say.”
She lifted her hand and shared with me the international sign for I’m not amused.
“Okay,” I said to Fred. “Maybe for just a little while.”
A half hour later, my drums were moving up flight after flight of stairs, carried by the three members of High Noon, Fred’s girlfriend, three other friends, Sara, and myself. Drums left in a car are asking to be stolen, so we carried and climbed our way up four stories to Fred’s apartment, one of many old buildings lining Sixth Street like a smile of dirty crooked teeth.
We collapsed on the floor. Fred put on a couple of dim lamps and went to change his shirt.
The apartment was old and worn-out, a typical rattrap, yet not without the charm that comes from old construction. High ceilings, wood floors. Eve pointed out the view of a small brick church through the bay window. “You can’t see it now,” she said, “but there’s some grass behind the church where they have outdoor weddings. It’s nice.”
A frantic beagle came running out of the bedroom, followed by Fred. “Ignore Garfunkel—I don’t want him pissing in here.” He handed Pete, the rhythm guitarist, a bowl and lighter and then clipped a leash on the dog and left the apartment.
Eve put on a CD. Jimi Hendrix began quietly playing as the bowl and lighter got passed around the room.
The gig had gone well. Grunge music had been infiltrating nearly every nook and cranny of America, but in the West Village alternative rock still mattered. I’d have been happy to play the gig under any circumstances, but I found myself truly liking High Noon’s songs. This, I couldn’t help thinking, was a band with a future. After the first song, once it became clear to the other guys that they didn’t need to worry about me missing cues or rushing tempos, everyone seemed to relax.
“There’s a chance,” Fred said to me afterward, amid the hand-shaking and back-slapping, “that Ian will stay in California permanently. So if things work out for all of us this summer . . .”
“That’d be great,” I said.
“No guarantee, though.”
“Sure,” I’d said. “I understand.”
When Fred returned to the apartment, he carried the dog back to his bedroom, explaining that Pete was deathly afraid of small dogs.
“Dude, I’m allergic,” Pete said.
For the next hour we talked, the nine of us. We smoked, and we drank the beer that was in the refrigerator, and we ate slices of the pizza that I don’t recall anybody ordering, and Mark, the bassist, his face freckled and hair in dreadlocks, made an impassioned defense of pineapple as a topping until someone pelted him with a napkin.
Our conversations involved the whole group but also smaller numbers, and we talked not like strangers but with the warm, easy feeling of old friends.
Sara exhaled a stream of smoke, her body shrinking into a deep sigh. As far as Jeffrey knew, she was in the computer lab working on her Shakespeare paper. She caught my eye and winked. One of her Texas gestures. Before leaving for the city, she had changed into a tighter pair of blue jeans and a black tank top, cut just low enough. She had stood at the rear of the bar at first and watched us play a couple of songs. But eventually she merged with a group dancing closer to the stage, the day’s annoyances appearing to have slid away.
She sat on the floor now, leaning against the sofa, boots kicked off, her hands clasped around her legs and her eyes closed. I took a good look at her and wondered if after three years, Jeffrey still felt the pleasure of arriving someplace with a woman who lit up a room. Like looking at an optical illusion, I could still see the Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, but I could also see the young woman I’d come to know. Somebody who wasn’t larger than life. Just a friend with a red bug bite on her ankle and fingernails bitten down to the quick.
I asked her if I might make an observation.
“Shoot,” she said, without opening her eyes.
“I don’t think that anything your teacher said means that she doesn’t think you’ll be a great writer someday.”
“Thanks, Will,” she said.
“Maybe you just need more experience. And in the meantime, she’s offered to help you make some contacts. I’ll bet you she doesn’t make that offer to too many of her students.”
“Maybe.”
“I’m guessing like one or two a year, if that.”
The hint of a grin. “Possibly.”
“So she probably thinks you’re talented, and she’s doing what she thinks is best for your career.”
She opened one eye and looked at me. “I’ve always liked you, Will.”
I assured her that the feeling was mutual.
Our numbers dwindled as the Hendrix CD ended and a Black Crowes CD began. The pizza was gone, and yawning became contagious. Gradually, people peeled themselves off the floor, bade farewell, and descended the stairs to whichever part of Manhattan or Brooklyn they called home. “See you soon,” they all said. I liked that.
Then it was just the four of us: Fred, Eve, Sara, and I. Fred let Garfunkel out of the bedroom. The dog clicked its way over to us and flopped onto its back so we could scratch its belly. We fussed over the dog for a while, and I looked at my watch.
“You two should stay,” Fred said. “I’ve got plenty of room.” His sister shared the two-bedroom apartment, but she was in DC visiting her boyfriend.
I thanked him but declined.
“We can at least help you carry your drums downstairs,” Eve said, and yawned.
“Go to bed,” Sara said. “We’ll just stay for a couple more songs, sober up a little, and get going.”
“All right,” Fred said. “But feel free to change your mind.” He stood up. “Will, great job tonight. We’ll talk next week. And Sara, pleasure to meet you.” He slung an arm around his girlfriend. “Okay, it’s bedtime.” He slapped his thigh, and Garfunkel, tail wagging, followed them into their bedroom.
My sobriety was in question; my wish to prolong the evening was not. I went over to the stereo and made the music quieter, which had the effect of releasing the sounds from outside: a police siren wailing, then fading in a Doppler decrescendo. A horn. Another. I sat beside Sara again, and we got to talking about her writing—the sort of things she wrote about, and why. The authors she loved (Woolf, Márquez, and, of course, Mahoney) and those
she didn’t (Hemingway, London, “all those tough-guy macho assholes”). She spoke of her multiple drafts, all the rewriting, and I came to see my own naïveté about how literature got made. It seemed natural to me that mastering a musical instrument would take years of practice, yet I had never really questioned my assumption that writers were more or less born with their talents fully formed.
“Sometimes I’ll read the stories I wrote a year or two ago,” she said. “I thought they were good at the time, but . . . yikes.”
I began to sense that when I’d seen Sara earlier in the afternoon, she already understood that her teacher knew best. That was why she’d been so upset—not because she’d been told she had no talent, but because her own suspicions about all the work that still lay ahead had been confirmed.
She wasn’t upset now, though. Hadn’t been since we left campus on our small adventure. A number of guys I knew seemed to prefer women who were perpetually gloomy. Those men believed in the stereotype of the brooding romantic, forgetting that it also meant you had to be with that person. I preferred happiness and took it on faith that such preference made neither me nor the object of my affection shallow or boring. I liked making Sara happy tonight, and felt a stab of jealousy—not the first time—toward Jeffrey for having that role full-time.
We listened to a couple of songs—an Elvis Costello album was playing—and then she said, “It’s my turn to make an observation.”
“Shoot,” I said.
“It’s actually a secret I feel like telling you.”
“Why me?” I asked.
“Because you don’t seem to have any of your own.”
“You’re right. I don’t.” Most of the time my uncomplicated life suited me well, but sometimes I envied those whose lives made secrecy necessary.
“That’s probably a good thing,” she said. “Secrets are hard to keep. Seems like they’re always getting out, one way or the other.”
“I can keep a secret,” I said.
“I know you can.” She scrunched up her nose. “I’m drunk, though. And a little high. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying stuff right now.”
“It’s up to you.”
“How about you tell me something first. A secret of your own.”
“You just said I don’t have any secrets.”
“Oh, right. Well, think of one anyway,” she said. “Or make it up.”
“I’m actually next in line for the British throne.”
“No, don’t make it up. Tell me something real.”
My heart rate quickened. I, too, was drunk and a little high. I feared my own confession.
“I’m not sure you want that,” I said.
She looked at me severely, studying me, and I was forced to look away.
“Wow,” she said.
“What?”
Her face softened. “I think you just told me everything.”
The bedroom was small and simply furnished: bed, dresser, mirror, night table. A few framed photographs of Fred’s sister and her boyfriend on what appeared to be various vacations. Hiking amid pine trees. Standing on a beach.
The bed was soft and comfortable. I could smell the smoke from Sara’s hair and a trace of scented soap or maybe shampoo. And sweat, too. She had danced hard, and I had drummed harder. Underneath the covers and with the lights off, we had stripped to our underwear. I pretended this was no big deal. We were adults, and friends, and therefore supposedly above adolescent titillation. I lay on my side, facing the window, for what seemed like a long time, and had assumed from Sara’s steady breathing that she had already fallen asleep.
“Can I spell a word on your back?” she asked.
A radiator rattled somewhere else in the apartment.
“Um, okay,” I said. Then I felt a fingernail. A straight line, down the center. Then another. Then a horizontal line. An H.
Then an I.
“Hi,” I said.
Then she wrote, “I had fun tonight.”
“So did I,” I said.
She wrote, “You are a good drummer.”
“Thanks,” I said, to the compliment as well as to her method of communication. The delicate tracing of letters felt wonderful on my back, soothing and sensual, and yet it was also putting me to sleep. I was already seeing the outlines of dreams, and then the fingernail stopped its work and her hand came to rest on the bed, just barely grazing my back, or perhaps I was only imagining this.
“We should go to sleep,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind that.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t mind.”
“We’re both drunk,” she said. “I don’t want to go to sleep.” She sighed deeply. “But we’re drunk. We need to be good.”
“I know,” I said.
“We’re good people, aren’t we, Will?”
I agreed that we were.
“I’m glad to hear it,” she said.
“I just remembered something,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“You never told me your secret.”
She sighed. “Yeah, I did.”
My heartbeat quickened, and I lay there in silence, fighting the urge to say: Passion isn’t always bad, you know. Finally, I said, “Can I make one more observation?”
“I don’t know. Okay.”
“I’m sure you already know this, but there’s no better place in the world for publishing than New York City.”
Her hand, against my back, pulled away.
“Sorry,” I said. “I just meant . . .”
She shushed me. “Good night, Will,” she whispered.
“Really?”
“Really.” Another sigh. “Good night.”
“Spell it.”
She waited a moment, then spelled it on my back, thirteen perfect letters.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Now go to sleep.”
“Okay.”
One of the songs we’d played tonight was in my head. It was called “Renegade” and had a ska rhythm that I’d worked all week trying to master. But I had, in the end, mastered it, and the song had gone over well. It was the song that’d gotten Sara and others up and dancing. I listened to it in my head for a while.
“Will?” she whispered.
Once again, I’d assumed she had fallen asleep. “Hmm?”
“Thanks.”
She shifted in bed, pulling covers, resettling. Four stories below, a motorcycle went by. A few cars. I looked over at Sara, at her beautiful form, and in that instant I felt a deep longing and yet, simultaneously, an overwhelming sense of peace. Like I was exactly where I belonged. This, I thought, is how it could be. But I knew it couldn’t. And so I turned my pillow over to the cool side, closed my eyes, and dreamed this night again.
Sometime after sunrise, only a few hours after we’d gone to sleep, there were church bells and a bright slant of sunlight filling the room from the large east-facing window. Only a sheet covered us. The blanket had been kicked to the foot of the bed. I got up, shut the shades, pulled up the blanket a little, and went back to bed. I awoke again sometime later to the steady stream of traffic sounds four stories below.
I looked at the clock on the nightstand: 8:15. Sara lay on her stomach. Her shoulders were exposed, and part of her back. I put on my clothes and then touched her lightly on the shoulder, waking her, and went into the bathroom so she could get dressed in private. We carried my drums out of the quiet apartment and downstairs to the car. Three endless trips. Then we drove home, saying little to each other, listening to the sound of the New Jersey Turnpike rushing underneath my tires. When we arrived at the dorm at ten o’clock, it felt as if we’d been away longer than a single night. We found street parking by the dorm, and she helped me unload the car.
Standing in my doorway, wearing yesterday’s clothes, she said, “That was f
un.” She said it sadly.
I nodded. “Listen, Sara—”
“Don’t. I mean it.”
“But you don’t know what—”
“Just don’t say anything. Say good night.”
“It’s morning.”
“Then say good morning.”
“Good morning, Sara,” I said.
“Good morning, Will,” she said, and left me alone with my drums.
I sat on the bed a minute, then changed into shorts and a T-shirt. Went down the hall to the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face. I was behind in my senior thesis. There was plenty to do, here at Princeton, in the few weeks until graduation. The gig was done, my night with Sara was now in the past. Shake it off. A couple more hours of sleep in my own bed, so the day wouldn’t be wasted. Then I’d get to work.
When I returned from the bathroom, she was sitting in the hallway, on the carpet outside my door.
“This’ll all be okay, you know,” she said. “There’s absolutely nothing to worry about.”
Her smile was a question.
I opened the door, my answer.
We went inside and spent the next two days there.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Catherine Pierce, Felice Kardos, Christopher Coake, Michael Piafsky, Becky Hagenston, Josh Kutchai, and James Mardock for discussing this book with me at its conception, reading parts or all of it while in manuscript form, and helping me to make it better. Thanks to Jody Klein for her generosity and wisdom, and to Otto Penzler for making the new guy feel welcome. Finally, one more thanks to Katie, and to Sam, too. You both make me happy.
Read on for an excerpt from Michael Kardos’s new novel
Bluff
available April 2018 in hardcover and ebook
“A masterly exercise in narrative sleight of hand. This is suspense in its purest form—character-driven, immersive and hopelessly addictive. Prepare to be taken.”—Megan Abbott
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