Glimpses

by Lewis Shiner

  I thought, if she asks how my day went, I’ll say something. She picked up the remote control and turned the TV on to CNN. Somebody was talking about president-elect Bush and the antidrug hysteria the whole campaign had caused.

  “What a day,” she said. “This one kid, Mikey?”

  I walked over and sat on the stairs. “You told me about Mikey before.”

  “Yeah. Well, today he herded about six of the girls under the slide and charged the boys a quarter apiece to go under there with them. Of course his father’s the stockbroker, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it breeds true.”

  I was too woozy to manage a laugh. “You want a drink?”

  “Not right now. I need a new job, is what I need.” She’s talked about quitting since her first year in the school system and I don’t take her seriously anymore. I went back to the kitchen and cracked a Bud, my first of the day. It didn’t do much for the headache right away, but these things take time.

  That night I had another nightmare about my father. I go to this huge shed to rent scuba gear for him. The floor is like the deck of a ship and rolls under my weight. I don’t see anything but these weird, bell-shaped tanks and I tell the guy I need the big aluminum ones. I’m pleased that I wasn’t taken in by such obviously bogus tanks. He goes to get the right kind and I follow. The floor starts to really roll and then sinks. The suction of the sinking floor pulls me under. My shoes and wet clothes are too heavy. I can’t get to the surface and I start to panic. I know that I know how to swim and this should all be okay, only it isn’t. I start yelling.

  I was still yelling when Elizabeth managed to wake me up. She made sure I was okay and then she turned over and went back to sleep. It’s a talent she has. I myself lay there for a long time, trying to clear all the shit and nonsense out of my head. It’s like the Zen business where you’re supposed to not think about a white horse, only it’s impossible, you can’t not think about something. My father used to tell me that story, now it’s my father I can’t get rid of. He’s right there, floating face down in the blue-green water, the regulator hanging out of his mouth and leaking a thin stream of bubbles.

  I tried to think about the thing that happened with the Beatles song. That was just as scary. So I finally pictured a wiring diagram for an amplifier and made myself an electron, and I followed my way through the gates and resistors and capacitors like I was walking a garden maze and that finally did the trick.

  The last time I talked to my father we got in an argument over cameras. You’d think after thirty-some-odd years I would have learned to keep it from happening. Not a chance. He could always find some way, if he kept at me long enough, to get me to fight back. It was my mom that called, of course. At the end she made him get on the phone with me, and somehow he ended up trying to tell me that no camera in the world had an f-stop larger than f-4. “I’m looking at my camera right here,” I said. “I have it in my hands. It goes f-4, then f-2.8, then f-1.8.”

  “It must be some kind of Russian camera.”

  “Dad, it’s a fucking Nikon.”

  “Well, it’s the only one like it ever made.”

  By that point even I could see that it was time to cut my losses. Like the guy that goes to the doctor and says, “It hurts when I bend over,” and the doctor says, “Don’t bend over.” For the first time in my life I knew, I could see without question, that my old man would never change.

  Elizabeth has this friend named Sandra that we see at parties. She’s in Al-Anon, for people with alcoholic parents. The whole co-dependent twelve-step thing. They tell her you have to quit trying to change them. It’s not your fault. Change yourself to where you can get clear of it.

  So that was what I did. I said, “Yeah, Dad, right Dad, good-bye Dad.” That was in August, the last words I ever said to him, and in November he was dead.

  It was hard to walk away from an argument with him, to not try to win. Sometimes not doing something is the hardest thing there is. Not thinking about that damned white horse. Not taking that one last drink that you know will make you throw up. Not making a pass at the divorcée with the antique eight-track who would happily pay with something other than cash.

  So when I got this letter from my mother in October that told me how disappointed she was that I wouldn’t talk to my father, that I wouldn’t even apologize, I lost my temper. I was so mad it was like shock. I sat for an hour trying to work and couldn’t move my hands. So I wrote her back, told her everything I could remember that he’d done to piss me off or fuck me up. I didn’t hold back on the cheap shots or the whining or the guilt.

  Elizabeth came home while I was reading it over and for some reason I handed her my mother’s letter, and then mine. I told her, “I’m not going to send it, of course.”

  She read both of them and said, “No, you’re right. You shouldn’t send this.” I felt weirdly let down for half a second, then she said, “You should make it stronger. She said she doesn’t feel welcome in our house. Tell her the truth. Tell her she’s welcome, but he’s not. Tell her he doesn’t know how to behave around decent people. Tell her the way he treats you. Go ahead and tell her.”

  “I thought…”

  “What?”

  “I always thought you blamed me. For the way things are between us. That you wanted me to somehow make up with him.”

  “I never said that. I didn’t say anything like that. What I wanted was for you to write a letter like this, but I didn’t want to push.” She was standing there with her arms folded, cold and solid, like an iceberg. I liked having that chill directed at somebody else for a change.

  So I wrote the letter. I told my mother how, when he played games with me as a kid, he would tear up the cards if I started to win. How whenever Elizabeth or I cooked for him, he would look at the plate and say, “What is this shit?” like it was supposed to be funny. How when I was in high school and he couldn’t find anything to punish me for, he would ground me for my “attitude.” It ran to four pages. I mailed it before I could change my mind.

  I got this apologetic letter back from my mother. Eventually she talked to my father about some of the things I’d said and he told her, “He’ll get over it.”

  That was the week before they went to Cozumel.

  So my father is dead, and Alex is married with two kids somewhere in Austin. But there is this other lost thing, this Beatles song, and maybe I can have that back.

  Elizabeth was off to work by 7:30 the next morning. I did the breakfast dishes and went upstairs. I had a couple of easy jobs that I was supposed to get out by lunch—new belts on a turntable, an amp with a short in the power supply. I couldn’t make myself look at them. Instead I got out a new Maxell XLII60 and put it in the Nakamichi. I powered it up and fast-forwarded the tape all the way through, then rewound it to get the tension right. I cued it up past the leader. Then I sat down on the couch with the remote.

  I laid it all out in my head like before. The control booth, the four Beatles, the sound stage outside the window. George Martin with his chin in his hand, Geoff Emerick rewinding the tape. Martin nods to Emerick. I turned on the Nakamichi.

  The song played right through to the final “yeah yeah yeah yeah.” After that was the squeak of the piano stool, the click of the intercom, and Martin’s voice from the tape saying, “Come on up, fellows, let’s listen to that one.” Then silence.

  My hands and my forehead were sweating. I pried my eyes open. November sunshine, digital readouts on the stereo, the spools of the cassette still turning. I rewound the tape and dropped the remote on the couch next to me.

  I was exhausted. I went downstairs and washed my face, poured a fresh cup of coffee. Either there was something on the tape or there wasn’t. Either way I didn’t know what to do about it.

  I fought my way through the two repair jobs and called the customers. Then I took a nap for an hour. I was still tired when I woke up, but my nerves wouldn’t let me sleep any longer. I went upstairs and played the tape.

/>   I was waiting for Elizabeth when she got home. She stopped in her tracks when she saw me and said, “What’s wrong?”

  I said, “I want you to come upstairs and listen to something.”

  “Right now?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  She dumped her purse and her books and sighed theatrically as she climbed the stairs. She sat on the couch and listened to the tape all the way through. “The Beatles, right?”

  “Did you notice anything different about it?”

  “I guess. It sounded faster maybe.”

  “It’s a totally different version.”

  “One of those bootlegs or something?”

  “Unh uh. It’s not like that at all.” I got up and went over to the deck and shut it down. “I made it,” I said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either.” I turned around and faced her, leaning back against the counter top. “I know this sounds completely crazy. I was trying to imagine the song, I mean the Beatles playing it this way, and it started coming out of the speakers. So I, like, did it again, with the recorder on, and I got a tape of it.”

  Elizabeth sat there for a long time, looking at me. The sun behind her made it hard to read her expression. She was perched on the very edge of the sofa, like she didn’t mean to stay. A half-smile on her face came and went, like a rheostat dimming and raising the lights. Finally she said, “This is some kind of joke, right?”

  “It’s not a joke.”

  “I don’t understand. What is it you want me to say?”

  “You heard the tape. It is something different.”

  “I can’t authenticate a Beatles record for you. I mean, come on. I can tell you that yes, you sound pretty crazy.”

  “I can do it again.”

  “Ray, listen to yourself. Do you really expect me to believe this is some kind of, I don’t know, psychic phenomenon? I’m worried about you. I know this business with your father has been hard. You’re not sleeping, you’re having all these nightmares. Maybe you ought to get some help.”

  “I can do it again. I’ll show you.” I was dead tired, and it was hard to concentrate with her in the room. But I did, and a few seconds of music came out of the speakers.

  Elizabeth stood up. “It’s not funny, Ray. If you want to tell me what’s really going on, fine, I’ll be downstairs. I can’t handle this right now. I need a hot shower and a little peace and quiet.”

  She went downstairs. I lay down on the couch in a band of warm sunlight and went to sleep.

  That night I had another dream. My father is kneeling in front of me. He says something, daring me, I think, and I start to hit him in the face. I hit him until my arms get tired and then I realize out of nowhere that I might be hurting him. I start to put my arms around him, to apologize. He takes it the same way he took the beating, deadpan, no emotion, doesn’t say a word.

  When I woke up I wondered if Elizabeth was right. Maybe I was playing tricks on myself, maybe I was worse off than I realized. The house was cool and I felt like I was a million miles away from anybody. Elizabeth slept on the far side of the queen-size bed, her back to me, a mound of covers over her and Dude on top of the covers, staring at me with eyes that glowed like LEDs.

  Elizabeth is thirty-one to my thirty-seven, six years younger than me. We met when she was waitressing, before she went back to school and got her teaching certificate. Fall of 1978. I’d gone into the Lemmon Avenue Bar and Grill on crutches, ankle sprained from Sunday’s full-contact racquetball game. I used to hang out there a lot because of a sort of house policy where the waitresses would sit across from you and talk to you when they took your order. The food was good too. I didn’t remember seeing Elizabeth before that night: medium height, slightly on the heavy side of average, that multicolored golden hair, a smile that made me wish she’d let me in on the joke. She made me put my sunglasses on before she would show me my prime rib, which she thought was too rare. She brought me a second beer without me asking and forgot to charge me for it. When I pointed it out she looked at me like I was a complete idiot, which I guess I was.

  I didn’t ask her out for another two weeks. By then I was eating there almost every night and always asking for her station. When I finally did she said, “I was wondering when you’d get around to it.” It took me years to realize that there was a big difference between expecting it and actually looking forward to it.

  The thing I liked best was the way I was around her. I always wore a sport coat when I went over to her place, always brought a bottle of wine or some flowers. We went to plays and museums and French movies with subtitles. It was romantic. I was playing way over my head. She had a roommate who thought I was terrific and said so to Elizabeth all the time. Maybe too much. It made Elizabeth dig her heels in, refuse to be impressed.

  Still she must have felt something, even from the first. The first time I asked her name she said “Elizabeth” right off, though I found out later she’d always gone by Beth up till then. It was what her roommate and all her friends still called her. I think both of us had the idea we could pull ourselves by our bootstraps into a Hollywood love affair, with violins in the sex scenes.

  Instead it was an uphill fight. She was so young, only twenty-one when we started dating. She was nervous about sex, and put me off for weeks. We kissed some, and that was awkward too. She finally admitted she’d never been crazy about kissing. I still can’t believe I married a woman who doesn’t like to kiss. When she finally gave in and went to bed with me I was all over her, waking her up in the night for more.

  I think about that more than anything. That first couple of months, when you walk around with the smell of sex ground permanently into your hands and crotch and face. It never lasts. Why is that? The times I’ve come close to having an affair, that was what I thought about, how it would be to feel that way again, even if it was only for a while.

  I ask myself why we’re still together, and I never get a good answer. She can always make me laugh if she wants to. This August, right before school started, we spent the weekend at my friend Pete’s lake house and it had started off like a second honeymoon. We made love twice the first day, held hands in the restaurant, walked by the lake that night. As I went to sleep I thought, this is the reason. I made a stand to keep my marriage together and now it’s working again. But by Sunday afternoon she had a stack of magazines in front of the TV and I was icing down another six-pack.

  Now there are entire months again where we don’t make love at all, days where we don’t even talk except the menial household minimum, times when I know she’s ready to kill me and I’m ready to kill her and we sit and suffer in separate rooms so we don’t have to look at each other.

  Most of my friends are record collectors or dealers. On weekends we hit a few stores, a couple of times a year we’ll go out of town for a big convention.

  It’s like men and women have their own languages. There are some of the same words in both of them, but they still come out differently. Some things men don’t really have words for. I know my friends worry about me, and I even know why. They know how it was between my father and me, they know I should be feeling something. Only they don’t have the words to ask and I wouldn’t have the words to answer if they did.

  So we talk around it. Like my friend Pete called on some pretext or other and then asked about Beth. I know he has a bit of a thing for her and suddenly I wanted to know why.

  “Well, she has a lot of good qualities. She’s smart, she’s funny, she’s attractive…”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “…and underneath that icy exterior I think there’s a genuinely caring and concerned human being who’s simply scared out of her mind.”

  “By what?”

  “By life, old buddy. By you.”

  “Me?”

  “Look at you. Not even forty, and you retired to start your own business. And you made it work from day one. You drink all the time, and yet I’ve never seen you drunk. You
just handle it. Shit happens, and you handle it. Your father dies, and what happened?”

  “I handled it.”

  “You handled it. Don’t you think that’s a little scary?”

  “I’d think it would be comforting.”

  “Then you don’t know women very well.”

  “Hey, fuck you.” Women share secrets, men insult each other. It’s how we know we’re friends. There was a moment where I could have said something about the Beatles tape, could have asked him to listen to it and tell me if I was crazy. Only I didn’t have the words.

  I thought about it the rest of the day. The thing is, if there’s something wrong with me, I’m not sure I want it to get better.

  Pete’s right about my handling things. Back in 1979, when I was burned out on Dallas and Elizabeth wanted to go to UT for her teacher’s certificate, I made sure I had a design job in Austin before I quit Warrex. And I kept that job even after I started the repair business, working nights until I was sure I could make a go of it full-time.

  Elizabeth calls me Captain Sensible. Which is really the name of the bass player from the Damned, not that she cares. She says it in a way that is supposed to make me understand that she kind of admires it and even counts on it, but that it pisses her off too.

  It was almost nine. Elizabeth and Dude were watching Dynasty. I went upstairs and thought maybe I was a little tired of being Captain Sensible myself. That I could either erase this Beatles tape and let the whole thing go, or I could keep pushing and see where it led.

  I called Southwest Airlines, who said they could put me on a plane to LA the next day, round trip, for $198. Then I called a woman named Peggy who I used to work with at Warrex. She quit the same time as me, moved to New York and went to work for Marvel Comics. I knew she sent comics to Graham Hudson at Carnival Dog Records and he sent her CDs. Hudson is the guy that does their remastering, the brains behind those sixties compilations, Glimpses. I had all three volumes: great lost and overlooked cuts by major bands, by national acts that died on the vine, by local acts that never made it big. “Desiree” by the Left Banke, “William Jr.” by the Novas, “Go Back” by Crabby Appleton, “Think About It” by the Yardbirds.