I tell him I think it’s great—what else can I say?
“And don’t think I eat out of a trough now. I don’t stuff myself, just a lot of smaller meals and snacks. Here’s my deal—if I’m hungry for something or, you know, curious, I don’t worry about it. You and I haven’t talked about our parents much, but mine did a job on me. I internalized a lot of that Calvinist shit our generation was weaned on: clean your plate, babies are starving in Africa, no peas, no dessert. Cory and I had enough of it.”
“Well, there you have it,” I say.
He wraps me in his arms again and almost lifts me off the ground. He tells me how happy he is to see me. “Let’s go inside,” he says. “I want to sit down.”
When I turn to climb the stairs, Gene says, “I invited you into my home. Where are you going? You’re like a stray that doesn’t think it belongs inside.”
Maybe there’s some truth to what he said. I can feel a bit trapped inside a house.
Gene takes a casserole out of the fridge and slides it in the oven, then he pours a bag of chips into a bowl. It feels like school just got out and I rode the bus to a friend’s.
Gene hands me a bottle of wine and asks me what I think. For a moment I’m afraid that he’s mistaken me for one of those people who can’t let a penny pass between their fingers without pronouncing it good or bad. I confess that I don’t know much about wine.
He spins the bottle in my hand and taps a finger on the label: Bottled in Chaseburg, Wisconsin.
Chaseburg’s most famous export is a five-foot-eight musical genius.
“I’ve never seen this before.”
“Don’t get too excited,” Gene says. “It’s terrible. I saw it online and bought two bottles. Cory and I drank a little from the first bottle before tossing it, but I saved this. I wanted to drink it with you.”
“You think it’ll give us special powers?”
Gene takes the bottle from me, cuts the foil, and uncorks it. He splashes a little into two glasses. “Is a wrinkled nose a special power?”
I make a toast to thoughtful gestures. We drink. We laugh some. The wine is terrible. We ought to pour it out, but we drink some more.
Gene explains that the Greeks believed wine helped artists get in touch with the muse.
“The muse of hangovers,” I say.
“The muse of living the life you want to live.”
“The muse of getting fat and happy.”
“Speaking of . . .” Gene pulls an ice cream sandwich out of the freezer. “Care to join me?”
I say, “I get my sustenance from music and conversation.”
“Spreading it on thick.”
“And love.”
Gene wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “Since you brought it up, is that what keeps you out there? Are you boffing groupies?”
“Most of Jimmy’s groupies are past their boffing days.”
“Cory has a whole theory worked out.”
“Don’t tell me your wife wonders about my love life?”
Gene walks over to the counter and tosses out the wrapper from his ice cream sandwich. “Forget I said anything.”
Here’s the thing: even with the wine and the food, there’s a voice telling me to get back in my car and drive. There’s nowhere for me to go, but I feel the urge all the same. “Where is Cory?”
“I’m the one that brought her up, but let’s not talk about her.” He turns to fiddle with the oven.
I say, “If you wanted to talk about something, I’m just saying . . .”
He raises a hand to let me know I’ve said enough.
“You okay?”
He presses the palms of his hands against his eyes and holds them there. “I’m good. I’m okay.” After a moment, he says, “You found the place all right.”
We stand at the kitchen counter, drinking the miserable wine. A timer goes off and Gene smacks his hand to turn it off. “Shit,” he says, “I think I broke it.” He pulls out a trash bin and drops the alarm in. “Chinese piece of crap,” he says. “Tell me about last night’s show. You said he looked lost.”
“It happens. He retreats into himself sometimes.”
“I heard he stopped playing—he was sort of catatonic.”
I close my eyes and try to remember. Cross had worn the narrow black suit with silver cord embroidered on the lapels.13 He’d opened playing keyboards on “Big River” and “Crow Alley,” then he’d covered “Jolene” and “When I’m Sixty-four.” He strapped on his battered Gibson to lead the band on a quick shuffle through “Rumpelstiltskin Delicatessen Blues.” Then the boys sat on their hands while he plumbed the depths of “Delilah on 7th Avenue.”14 He’d wavered at the edge of the stage. His harmonica hung around his neck like a millstone. How long had he stood there?
“Did I say he stopped playing?”
“That’s what they said on CrossTracks.”
Maybe Gene read the look on my face. “I go there for a different perspective,” he said.
I don’t ask how some kid pasting Jimmy’s face onto a llama is a “perspective.”
“Don’t take it personal.”
Some people, if a red car drives by they say, “Red car.” They can’t help themselves. It’s always taken me a long time to cut one idea from the herd. Maybe that’s why Gene looks surprised when I blurt out that a doctor visited Jimmy’s hotel last night.
“You serious?”
I aim a finger at my face.
He pours the last of the wine into my glass. “You think it could be related to that business on stage?”
Is this the question I’ve been avoiding? All day I’d assumed my uneasiness was rooted in the break in the tour, but maybe it was the specter of the tour reaching an absolute end. “You want to see his picture?”
Gene points a finger at his own face and winks.
I get my camera, then we sit on the living room sofa, studying the images on the camera’s three-inch screen.
“You’re certain he’s a doctor?”
“That’s what I was told.”
Gene has me zoom in on the knapsack sitting on the passenger seat. He pulls up a browser on his phone and does a quick search. “That’s a European backpack,” he confirms. “You think he’s European doctor?”
I finish my wine. “Like a specialist?”
“He looks a bit like Jimmy.”
“At one time or another Jimmy has looked like everyone.”
“You got more pictures on that camera?”
“A man needs to have secrets.”
The oven beeps.
“I hope you’re hungry.”
I tell Gene I’m always hungry.
“Yet you never eat.”
“Maybe I like to stay hungry.” I never talk this much. It must be the wine.
18
Peg had specified that the meeting was to remain confidential, but if it was a secret, then it was an open secret. When Peter came around a corner the staff dispersed; he felt as popular as a shark. Even Martin kept his distance. The only person to address him was Eduardo, from housekeeping, who saw everything and nothing. Eduardo said, “You looking a little worn out today, Dr. Peter.”
At six, after spending five hours ordering X-rays and blood work, prescribing antibiotics and ibuprofen, Peter visited his last patient: a blank-faced fifteen-year-old boy with crispy blond hair. Though the boy sat next to his mother, his whole body curved away from her, like a parenthesis. The mother said the boy had been experiencing vertigo—the kid’s loose jaw looked incapable of forming words.
Peter noted the gray sweatshirt that identified the boy as a varsity swimmer. He spoke to the kid, “You have an ear infection.”
The mother growled.
“I never get ear infections,” mumbled the boy.
“He doesn’t get ear infections.” The mother’s voice built upon itself. Something inside her, a governor, had snapped. “We waited an hour to see you. You didn’t e
ven look at his ear.”
Peter imagined Ogata shaking his head. Tsk, tsk.
With one hand holding the boy’s leaden chin, Peter grabbed his otoscope and thumbed on the light. He checked the tympanic membranes. Both sides were red and irritated. He asked the mother to take a peek.
“It’s not about me looking,” she said, shaking her phone from her purse—was she going to call someone, the boy’s father, the police? “It’s about you looking.”
Even after Peter assured her that they could treat the condition, that her son would feel better, probably within twenty-four hours, the boy’s mother managed to stay furious.
AS SOON AS he was safely in his car, he dialed Judith.
When his mother answered, Peter said, “You almost got me fired.”
“Just ‘almost.’ I’ll try harder next time.” There was no echo to her voice; he’d probably caught her fussing in the terraced garden Rolf built for her fiftieth.
“I was with lawyers all morning.”
“Don’t kid your mother.”
He told her he wasn’t, that the hospital had wanted to fire him, but it was all a big misunderstanding; his lawyer was in the process of clearing things up. Peter would know more tomorrow.
“Since when do you have a lawyer?” Her voice let him know that she’d become “concerned.” Was that the reason he’d called? Did he want her to worry about him? If anything, he was supposed to worry about her, his aging, hippie mother.
“I met Jim Cross last night.”
Judith’s silence (she usually hemorrhaged words) caught him by surprise.
“The musician,” he added.
He thought he heard songbirds and the whining big rigs worming their way down those steep canyon roads.
“I don’t understand. Did he come into the hospital?”
“He played a show here last night. Afterward, he called me and asked me to stop by his hotel.” Peter said, “You gave him my number.”
He heard a door close. Judith had gone inside. “Why would I give him your number?”
Peter wasn’t sure if he understood the story he was telling. “I guess because I’m a doctor. He is a friend of yours, right?”
“You’ve caught me a bit off guard.”
“Tony Ogata is his personal doctor. Do you have any idea how famous he is?”
“Your mother isn’t a rube, honey.”
“So why didn’t you tell me you knew Cross? He said you stayed at his farm.”
“Don’t call it a farm.”
It sounded like Judith was trying to trap him. She should have been a spy. “He called it a farm.”
“Farms raise food, Peter. There was a blue Rolls-Royce in the driveway, which someone had encircled with a moat. I don’t mean the moat went around the driveway, I mean it went around the car, all the way around it.”
“He gave me a picture of your Sunbeam Tiger.”
Judith laughed. “Where would I have gotten the money for a British sports car?”
“He implied it was your car.”
“What’s going on with him? Is he dying, or something?”
“Why would he be dying?”
“I got an email from him this spring. I guess he tracked me down through my website—he asked me what I’d been up to for the past thirty years. Rolf got a kick out of it, but it left me sort of sad. The guy’s got all the money in the world, all that fame and success, and he’s tracking down women he knew half a lifetime ago. I didn’t want to seem impolite or bitter, so I wrote back. He asked what you were up to. He was impressed that you’d become a doctor. ‘William Carlos Williams was a doctor,’ he said. ‘And Chekhov.’ I told him about my garden. I told him Rolf was a carpenter. I said, ‘Like Jesus.’ I was trying to be funny. He said he’d been to Jerusalem and it was full of masons, but he hadn’t seen any carpenters. I ought to forward you the messages. I wouldn’t have given him your number.”
“He called my cell.”
“He has people whose job is to bring him what he wants. It’s always been that way.”
“He offered me a job.”
“I guess you weren’t kidding about the lawyers.”
A black truck crowded Peter’s tail, but even when he slowed the truck wouldn’t pass. It loomed there, filling his rearview mirror.
“When I met him, he’d quit music. Did he mention that?”
When Peter stopped for a light, the guy in the pickup revved his engine until Peter’s car shook.
“How long did you stick around for?”
“The only reason he let me use that car was because you liked to sleep with your bassinet wedged between the seats.”
“He said he’d met me before.”
“He was fascinated with you, honey.”
The traffic light was taking forever.
“Then what happened?”
“He became a musician again. He released that album and then he was gone.”
“Which album?”
“I don’t know the name. You’d recognize it. There’s a picture of him sitting behind a table covered with junk, like a yard sale.”
Peter knew which album she was talking about—the table was beneath a streetlamp. Pinched between his thumb and forefinger, Cross held a doll-sized American flag.
Peter’s jealousy returned. “Were you in love with him?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“An obvious one.”
“I was in awe of him. I used to like his music, but being around him spoiled it. All those songs about women with perfect flaws are really about him. He’s always only been in love with some version of himself.”
When the stoplight turned green, the truck shot past. Peter felt spared.
“He might be a good person for me to know. He’s friends with Tony Ogata.”
His mother’s silence made Peter check the connection; the call counter kept tallying the seconds.
Finally Judith spoke: “You sound excited; I can hear it in your voice. I certainly don’t want to take that away from you.”
“But?”
“Don’t expect him to be human.”
Peter laughed, though he knew Judith wasn’t joking.
“It’s a shame that I’m a human doctor.”
“Maybe he’s not looking for a doctor. The important question is, What are you looking for?”
The truth: he hadn’t been looking; he’d been waiting. He’d been waiting so long he wasn’t sure if he was waiting for Lucy or if he was waiting to feel again like he had before she left.
Peter said, “I’ve got everything I want.” He didn’t see the point in upsetting his mother.
19
Gene has set the dining room table with cloth napkins, two forks, a knife, and a spoon. A photograph of a three-masted schooner hangs beside the table—it’s the sort of thing one encounters in the bathroom of a naval history museum. While I look around the room, Gene opens another bottle of wine, a red from California, swapping out our old glasses so the Wisconsin wine won’t contaminate the good stuff. The new bottle doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Jimmy.
He delivers the casserole to the table.
“What do you think,” Gene says, “shall we do this?”
It’s been months since I had a home-cooked meal. I eat beyond all reason.
When I push back from the table, Gene asks, “You ready for the salad?”
“I never would have pegged you as one of those salad-after-dinner kind of guys.”
As he heads back to the kitchen, he says, “It cleans the palate.”
When he returns, I stare at the salad: red lettuce, sliced red cabbage, paper-thin radish discs, and pomegranate seeds, all dressed with balsamic vinaigrette. “Is it an allusion to some lyric or something?”
“What do you mean?”
“Everything’s pink. Is that on purpose?”
“Hmm,” he says. “Did I tell you I’m color-blind?”
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I feel embarrassed for both of us—me, because I’d tried to read meaning into a salad, and, in Gene’s case, that he can’t tell red from green.
Gene asks if I want to stick with wine or if I’d prefer fifteen-year-old scotch. I say he’s the boss. He comes back with a crystal decanter and two Baccarat rocks glasses.
“No cigars?” I ask.
He winks at me and disappears into the family room. When he comes back he’s carrying two aluminum cigar tubes.
I feel a guest’s responsibility to play along with him.
I start gathering the dirty dishes. I pile the plates and forks and knives, leaving the clean spoons on the table.
Gene looks at me. “There’s an apple and raisin tart in the fridge. That’s what the spoons are for.”
“I can’t do it.”
“You give up?” My friend puts his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry. I told you, this is a guilt-free house.”
WE CARRY THE scotch and the cigars outside. The autumn air is brisk, and after the food and the wine, I’m grateful. We climb the stairs to the little porch off the garage. He reaches a hand inside the apartment and flicks on the porch light, then turns it off again.
“You okay with the dark?”
I tell him I am.
He finishes his drink and pours another. “My head isn’t here.” He pats his pockets down, finds a lighter, and fires up the cigars. He hands me one.
“Care to talk about it?” All I want is to do is brush my teeth, slip into my borrowed bed—it’s almost a carnal urge.
At the end of his driveway a neighbor walks past with a dog.
Gene tilts his head back so that the cigar points directly above us. “Cory’s staying at a hotel.”
“Oh,” I say. “Is she alone?”
Gene leans over and spills more booze into my glass.
“She’s my wife. Of course she’s alone.”
“She could be with a sister. That’s all I meant.”
He drinks a little more from his glass. “We never went to bed angry—that’s the kiss of death.”
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