The Hour of the Innocents

by Robert Paston

  Matty and I usually had a good time trading guitar licks on “Moneymaker,” but that night the voltage was missing. We both kept glancing at Frankie and Darlene. It was embarrassing. The other go-go girl had gotten so angry, she barely moved.

  The crowd loved it, though. Shamokin was that kind of town.

  When the break came, Frankie jumped down to talk to Darlene. She was even smaller standing in front of him than she seemed on the platform. Her teeth were shockingly white. I wondered if they were dentures.

  She smiled at Frankie, then traipsed off toward the door that led to the rooms upstairs. Officially, the Athena was a hotel, but I never knew anyone who stayed there beyond the dancers, who were the Greek’s temporary property.

  Frankie climbed back up on the stage. I had broken a B string and was kneeling to change it. The stage was tight and Stosh had to hand his floor tom over the cymbals so he could escape from behind the drum kit. Before anyone else could speak, Stosh looked at Frankie and said:

  “Don’t do it, man.”

  Frankie laughed.

  After what he deemed a polite delay, Frankie walked around the bar, then disappeared through the door Darlene had exited.

  “He better wear a rubber,” Stosh said.

  We were used to Frankie’s appetites when Angela wasn’t around, but we all sensed that this was not going to end well.

  It didn’t. The last set dragged, with Frankie faking energy he no longer had. He hammed up “When a Man Loves a Woman” so pathetically that we could have passed for a lounge act on the skids. The new string I’d put on wouldn’t stay in tune. The crowd thinned. We did what we had to do and were glad to finish.

  Our gear was almost all loaded in the van when Stosh went over to get our money from Spiro. The Greek handed him some folded bills. Stosh counted them.

  He looked up. Surprised. And not pleasantly.

  “The contract’s for a hundred and sixty. This is only a hundred and twenty.”

  “When I booked yous, there was an organ player. Now there’s no organ player. So I took out the organ player’s pay.”

  “Spiro … hey … there’s still four of us … we been playing this club for years.…”

  The Greek’s top bouncer stepped up beside his boss. Short and thick, with slit eyes, he looked faintly Oriental.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” the Greek said. “One, two, three, four. I can count. And I hope to see the four of yous back on my stage sometime. In the meantime, tell Frankie not to bother the girls on my payroll. Hear me?”

  Stosh heard him. I heard him. He spoke loudly enough for Frankie to hear him from the doorway to the street.

  Crowded into the front of the van, we rode in silence all the way to Ashland. Then Stosh said, “That forty bucks was your cut, Frankie. No ‘share and share alike’ this time.”

  “She was worth it,” Frankie said.

  * * *

  I was sitting by the window fan in cutoffs, practicing scales, when a woman’s footsteps clacked up the stairs outside. It was Angela, wrapped in a drugstore version of Hollywood sunglasses. She tapped on the screen door, shimmering in the light.

  “Anybody home?” she said.

  She knew I was home. She would have heard my playing, even though I wasn’t plugged into an amplifier. Mrs. Dietrich, my landlady and downstairs neighbor, didn’t mind girls but wouldn’t tolerate noise. Her rules were fine with me, since it gave me an excuse to keep stoners from turning my rooms into a party pad. I wasn’t big on humanity that year.

  I rested the Les Paul against the lip of a chair and walked toward the figure gauzed by the screen door. When I opened it, Angela seemed startled, unusually diffident.

  “It’s my half holiday at the salon,” she began stiffly, reciting a prepared speech, “and I needed something to do, I just felt like I had a lot of extra energy … I thought maybe your place could use a cleaning up.…”

  I pushed the door wide, welcoming her. “I didn’t know you knew where I was living.”

  “We dropped you off. After the block party. Remember?” She stood in the room’s August torpor, taking off her sunglasses to scan my world.

  “Have a seat.”

  “One of your girlfriends clean up after you or something?” She walked over to the kitchenette, peered into the sink, then recrossed the sitting room and prowled into the first of the two tiny bedrooms. My sheets were rumpled, but everything else was in order. Disappointed, she inspected the bath before returning to the main room, where the only mess was a litter of album covers on the floor by the stereo.

  “Have a seat,” I repeated.

  “I can press shirts, if you need any done,” she said. She glanced at the guitar. “I mean, I could be doing stuff while you practice, I don’t want to bother you. Can I smoke in here?”

  I got her an ashtray I kept under the sink. “Like a glass of wine?”

  “I thought you people didn’t drink until five? I read that somewhere.”

  “Five in the morning, maybe. People are all the same, Angela.”

  Head-shop earrings dangled chips of turquoise as she leaned into her lighter. “You don’t believe that for a minute.”

  I opened a bottle of Yago sangria from the fridge and poured two tumblers.

  Accepting her glass, she said, “I guess you know all about wines, ain’t?”

  I looked down at a strangely earnest face framed by pale hair lightened by the sun. She wore a peasant blouse with scarlet stitching. A small gold cross had escaped the neckline.

  “You must be hot in those jeans,” I said.

  She laughed. “Well, that’s a line, if ever I heard one.”

  It had been no more than a clumsy, unfiltered remark. I felt idiotic.

  She got through her glass of sangria with north-of-the-mountain speed. Elbow on the arm of the chair, cigarette held high, she demanded, “Tell me about wine. Tell me how rich people drink.”

  The rich people I’d known before our country club membership lapsed drank highballs as fast as they could. As for wine, I only knew what I’d read in A Moveable Feast.

  I poured her a refill. “Tell me before you come over next time and I’ll get something really good for us to drink.”

  She considered the glass in her hand. “Isn’t this good?”

  “It’s all right.”

  I put Filles de Kilimanjaro on the stereo, low enough to keep the neighbors calm. Angela studied the walls, the reprinted concert posters promoting San Francisco bands and two reproductions of paintings I thought I should like. Neither of us knew what to do next.

  “Did you know Joyce moved to Philly with that guy?”

  “Who?”

  “That guy from the Warlocks.”

  I shrugged.

  “She was always a little slutty,” Angela said. She shifted her body, unsatisfied with the chair. Miles blew junkie slow. The electric piano flirted around his trumpet line.

  “You really think the band’s going to work out?” she asked. “That we’ll all get out of here?”

  “Sure. Yeah.”

  “Frankie thinks so. Frankie thinks you’re the meal ticket. You and your songs. You and Matty.”

  “We all need each other.”

  “You don’t need anybody. You could just leave and go anywhere you wanted. You’re not stuck like the rest of us.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Our Lady of the Sorrows, Angela shook her head. “He’ll break your heart. You need to know that. Just when things get going really good, Frankie’ll fuck it up. He fucks everything up.”

  She finished her second glass of wine and drew her knees together like a good Catholic schoolgirl. “Would you do something nice for me?”

  “Depends on what it is.”

  “I’d like to see the inside of your house. Where you live.”

  “I live here.”

  “Please. I’ve never been inside a house like that. I’d just like to see what it’s like. It’d be a trip.”

  “It’s not t
hat fancy. It’s not even that big. You all have this crazy idea about my life.”

  “I know how big your house is. I’ve seen it. From the outside. It’s the one that looks Spanish or Mexican or something.”

  “Built in the 1920s,” I said. “When replacing terra-cotta roof tiles was considerably cheaper. It’s the ugliest house on the street. It doesn’t fit in.”

  “I think it’s beautiful. I’d really like to see inside it. Just once.”

  It was Angela’s lucky day. My mother had card club on Wednesday afternoons. Anyway, I wanted to fetch some books.

  “You’ll be disappointed. The furniture’s old.” North-of-the-mountain people liked shiny, new, and brightly colored things, the bolder the patterns, the better.

  Angela offered to drive. She had a white Pontiac Firebird with a red interior. It was the family car by default, since Frankie’s MG was usually in for repairs.

  I insisted on taking my Corvair.

  “I don’t see why you want to live over here,” Angela said, settling into the front seat of my rattletrap.

  “Privacy,” I said. But there was more to it than that. I didn’t like to go home even for a visit. My mother, who was not old, had started drinking after my father’s death. Or perhaps she just started drinking more. After a few months, old friends of my father’s began to drop by in the middle of the day. Then there were men I didn’t know.

  As I drove across town, the air sucked through the windows was too dead to lift Angela’s hair. Each red light drew a wave of sweat. Climbing Mahantongo Street, we passed the coal baron mansions and I parked on a middling block where an optimistic professional class had built their homes back in my grandfather’s time.

  I let us in the front door with my key. The house was stuffy and still. Angela examined the furnishings as if struggling to interpret a foreign language. In her world, wall-to-wall carpeting, not old rugs, signaled luxury. Timid at first, she soon began to touch things: cracked leather on chair arms, the silver frames presenting our edited history. Confronted with paintings, she found nothing to hold her interest and passed into the room that had been my father’s study. It had not been dusted in weeks. Mrs. McClatchy no longer appeared, and only certain rooms earned my mother’s attention.

  Angela felt more comfortable in the kitchen. Appliances were appliances. She ignored the dirty dishes in the sink.

  “Can we see upstairs?”

  I looked at my watch. “Sure. I want to get some books, anyway.”

  “You have more books?”

  I chose a cardboard box from the second pantry and we went upstairs. I let Angela roam while I foraged among the colored spines insulating my old bedroom. I had recently matured from reading Sartre to science fiction.

  Angela rested her hand on my shoulder. I had not heard her approach.

  “I’d love to have a bedroom like your mother’s,” she said. “It’s like in a movie. Do you think she’d mind if I used the bathroom?”

  “I’ll meet you downstairs,” I told her.

  I dropped the box of books by the front door and went back to my father’s study. People lied about him. The viciousness that followed his death had knocked the wind out of me. My father wasn’t a thief. He was just a fool. And a weakling.

  I heard the front door open. I met my mother in the living room, by the foot of the stairs.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Just getting some of my books,” I told her. I pointed at the box.

  Upstairs, the toilet flushed.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Just a friend. She came along with me.”

  My mother smelled of breath mints, which was never good.

  Angela came down the stairs, half humming, half singing. She stopped on the fourth step from the bottom.

  “Mom, this is Angela.”

  Angela looked like a deer caught in the headlights. She stumbled down the last few steps, brightening desperately, and said, “Mrs. Cross, you have such a beautiful home, I’ve never seen such a beautiful home … it’s like, like, I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s got so much class, it’s so, so…”

  A blemish of white powder stood out under Angela’s right nostril.

  “I’m glad you like it, dear,” my mother said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me?”

  Back in the car, Angela asked, “Did I do something wrong?”

  “She’s always like that. We’re not getting along right now.”

  “Bummer. But your house is really classy.”

  “It’s not my house. It may not be hers much longer.”

  I almost reached over and dusted under Angela’s nose, then realized she’d be mortified.

  I drove back to my rooms in Jalapa, a faded neighborhood in a fading town. I parked the car.

  “Can I have another glass of wine?” Angela asked. “I need one.”

  I carried up the books, eyes at the level of Angela’s ass. For the first time, I felt genuinely sorry for her in a way that didn’t involve Frankie’s antics. She knew there was more. She just didn’t know what it was. Or that it was far from perfect.

  My guitar and the stereo were still there. That was always a relief. It really was the rougher side of town.

  Angela kicked off her sandals while I got the wine. I had left Miles on the turntable and she turned the music back on. When I came back from the kitchenette, her earrings and the gold cross lay by the stereo.

  She drank her wine halfway to the bottom, then set down the glass. Looking at me, then turning slightly away, she said, “You were right. I really am too hot in these jeans.”

  She took them off.

  Angela stood there for one perfect moment. Slender legs, slightly bowed, rose to light blue panties. The hot breeze from the fan fluttered her blouse. As her expression dissolved from boldness to doubt, I stepped against her.

  She was lighter than I expected. I had set the mattress and box springs on the floor, to spare my landlady the drama. Angela and I dropped heavily, awkward for a moment, until our lips rejoined. Kissing someone you thought you knew is one of life’s great shocks. Others are so different from what we expect.

  Angela kissed brutally. Her lips and tongue craved too much. She held my head with both hands, pulling my hair toward her. Our teeth met. And she bit.

  The rest of her body held still.

  I pushed up her blouse. She wore no bra. I touched her. I tasted blood, unsure of whose it was.

  She moaned the instant I escaped her lips. I slipped down, kissing her neck and shoulders. The salt on her flesh stung. My kisses left flecks of blood.

  Her body remained tense, her responses abrupt and confusing. When I touched her through her panties, she almost convulsed.

  She pushed me away.

  “Please,” she said. “No.”

  I broke the splendid contact of our flesh. Angela sat up hard and pulled down her blouse, drawing her knees against her.

  “I can’t,” she said, shaking. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.”

  I rested my hand against the small of her back, fingers touching cloth, palm on her flesh. My lack of anger surprised me. Perhaps I was relieved.

  The music ended. The needle complained, waiting to be lifted.

  Low on her back, she had a birthmark the size and shape of a peach pit. I grazed it with my thumb until I realized she was crying. I never connected Angela with tears.

  “I wasn’t being a cock teaser,” she said. “Please believe that.”

  “I know,” I told her. For once, I actually grasped what I claimed to understand. What had almost happened was something we both wanted and something neither of us wanted.

  I took my hand away. Touching her, even in human solidarity, kept desire awkwardly alive.

  “I wanted to fuck you so bad,” she said, “and I just couldn’t.” She had stopped crying. “Would you get me my cigarettes? Please? My purse?”

  I retrieved her bag and stood over her, staring down. The powder spot under her nos
e had been rubbed away. With her eyes pinked by tears and her arms locked over her knees, she looked like a punished kid.

  “Angela?”

  She raised her eyes.

  “I’ve never seen you look more beautiful than you do right now.”

  She twisted up her mouth. “You’re full of shit. My eyes are all red.” She was Angela-in-armor again. After lighting a cigarette, she let it dangle from her lips as she went out to pull on her jeans.

  I followed and watched her.

  “I better go,” she said while fussing with her earrings. “Thanks for showing me your mom’s house.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I just got to go and make dinner for Frankie.” But she didn’t move toward the door. She glanced around the room a last time, settling her attention on my books.

  “Would you give me something to read? Something you think I’d like? I’ll give it back to you.”

  “Sure … what kind of stuff do you like to read?”

  “I liked Valley of the Dolls.”

  I pulled out a paperback of From the Terrace. Her hometown, Frackville, was in it under another name.

  “It looks long,” she said.

  “It’s a fast read. If you don’t like it, I’ll think of something else.”

  She accepted the book, still doubtful.

  “Keep it,” I told her.

  In a surprise attack, she kissed me on the cheek—that electric fallen-angel kiss of hers—and clutched the handle of the screen door.

  I listened to her sandals on the steps.

  When the sound of her car faded, I tried to pick up practicing where I’d left off, repeating scales in alternate fingerings. But Angela left a demanding ghost behind. I could smell her, taste her.

  My mother phoned in the middle of the A-minor scale.

  “Don’t you ever bring a tramp like that into my house again.”

  * * *

  Across the nation, cities were still smoldering. Vietnam led the evening news. Headlines warned of trouble at the upcoming convention in Chicago.

  We didn’t care. The band delighted us. Maybe it was Matty, the previously missing chemical compound, but each of us played better and tighter, newly aware of what we brought to each song. The Destroyerz had been four musicians playing at the same time. The Innocents played together. Each burst of progress was a high. Except for occasional protest lyrics in the songs we covered, we had no politics.