The Hour of the Innocents

by Robert Paston

  She laughed. Knowingly.

  “You’re married. Aren’t you?” She paused for one breath. “High school sweetheart?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  She didn’t speak. But she didn’t hang up.

  “I’m sorry…”

  “Oh, shut up.” She laughed again. The sound was not as fierce as I had expected. “Men are never sorry for what they do. They’re only sorry when they get caught doing it. I should’ve known. No guy’s as sweet as you were if he isn’t cheating. Tell you what, Mr. Innocent Married Man. Call me sometime when you’re not married.” She laughed a last time, still without evident spite. “I guess I got my money’s worth, anyway.”

  I expected her to hang up, but she didn’t.

  “Another thing: Tell that dick lead singer of yours to stop calling me. It isn’t going to happen.”

  * * *

  Later that week, I picked up Laura after a rehearsal, but my mind was on a new song that had sparked in my head as I drove. When we got to the apartment, I told her I needed a couple of minutes with the twelve-string. God only knows where songs come from, but the hook riff, one verse, and a bridge had appeared fully formed in my head. I sat down and played the guitar line, then shifted to chords as I sang:

  Black Jane unlucky … Black Jane unlucky …

  Black Jane unlucky … lucky girl …

  Gipsy downtown read it in her cards,

  Said that she could see us in her ball …

  Witches whispered: I’ve been in your stars,

  Janie, you get me—or you don’t get no man at all …

  I needed to lock in the melody. It was almost there. But the bridge wanted a tryout, too. I shifted from the home chord to the fourth:

  You were such … a good girl for so long,

  You half believed that you could fool the world.

  Then I kissed you … and damn to right or wrong …

  You knew with that first kiss that you were just that kind of girl …

  Laura yawned. The drama of it was worthy of Bette Davis.

  I stopped playing.

  “It’s humbling,” she told me. “Here I am, ready, willing, and anxious to go to bed with you … and you’d rather play your guitar.”

  “Oh, come on. I just didn’t want to lose this.”

  “I’m jealous, though. How can I not be? If you think about it, you spend a lot more of your waking hours holding a guitar than you do holding me.”

  “Well, you’re not here. You’re either at class, or you’re studying. Though God knows what you’re studying for. Partially housebroken chimpanzees could ace the exams down there.”

  That only annoyed her more. “You don’t take things seriously.”

  “That’s not true. I take you seriously. I love you. And I take music seriously.”

  “I wonder if you don’t love your music more, though? I mean, if you had to choose between us?”

  “That’s not fair. And it’s not a rational proposition.”

  “I don’t want you to be rational. I want you to be passionate. About me. The way you are about music.”

  “I’m not?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “And last night?”

  “Last night’s gone. It’s always tonight that matters. For us. Not last night. Not tomorrow night.”

  “That sounds like a line from a French film.”

  “It isn’t. It’s the truth. Nothing exists but right now. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring.”

  “I thought you were reading Kierkegaard. That sounds more like Kerouac jerking off.” I put down the guitar. “All right. If nothing exists but right now, let’s not waste any more time.”

  She knew she had been unfair. She made it up to me.

  * * *

  “You’re on the Pill, right?” I had never thought to ask her.

  “No. But I’m careful about counting the days.”

  * * *

  My mother wore her old Chanel suit, an extravagance committed for her by my father back when Jackie Kennedy ruled the fashion roost and our family finances held promise. Her lawyer, Barry Levenger, had the documents ready for our signatures in his office, which smelled of cigarettes and furniture polish. There was a small trust fund in my name. My father had specified that the money could not be touched until I turned twenty-one. My mother’s lawyer, a family acquaintance whom I did not like, had found a way to break the trust, as long as I was willing to sign it away. I didn’t mind. The $31,000 in the fund would keep my mother in her house for another year or two. And I didn’t want anything from my father. Besides, I was confident that the Innocents would be making serious money soon.

  Leaving the Thompson Building on that sharp November day, my mother pulled on her gloves—black kid—and asked, “How’s Laura?”

  “Why ask, if you don’t care?”

  “But I do care. Of course I care. I’m your mother. And you’re enamored of the girl.”

  “I’m in love with her.”

  My mother gave up her attempt at social niceties. “You’re just like your father. You need a woman who’s flawed.”

  * * *

  Does any mother like to see her son with a woman who might be her equal? To be fair, I don’t think my mother ever realized how lonely I had been. It wasn’t the only-child nonsense from the quizzes in Psych 101. I had always drawn people who wanted to make friends—if not always the friends I wanted to make. In Little League and Midget League football, then after a screwed-up knee confirmed my vocation with the guitar, I always had people around me. But I never had anyone I could talk to about the things that started to matter. Elsewhere, people talked about books and music and films in a wonderfully sophisticated manner, their lives a constant exchange of profound views about existence, I was sure. And all I had were the fading streets of Pottsville.

  In high school, I subscribed to Evergreen Review and mail-order books from Grove Press—not just the gents’ porn, but books by authors whose very names were portents: Gombrowicz, Robbe-Grillet, Duras, Goytisolo. I did not enjoy a single one of their novels, but I dutifully read them through to the last page. I spent a great deal of painfully husbanded money on those books before I belatedly began to suspect that the problem might lie with the authors and not just with me. I had no guide. My mother had read, but she read no longer, and her remembered tastes dead-ended at Proust. My high school English teachers were sincere, but their horizons barely reached Steinbeck. After I saved up to buy the boxed recordings of Maria Callas singing Carmen, the music teacher told me she couldn’t sing. She adored Kirsten Flagstad.

  Laura was the woman of my dreams. Brilliant, beautiful, decorous in public, and lascivious in private, she was the smartest human being of any age or sex that I had ever met. She’d read everything, memorizing half of it. When she got beyond her quick-draw cleverness, her judgments possessed an integrity that marked them as her own. I never caught her repeating a critic’s view—a sin of which I often had been guilty. If that made her eccentric, or flawed, or whatever it was my mother believed she detected, then I was flawed, too.

  I did have a sense of irony. Without one, you couldn’t survive with the north-of-the-mountain crowd. I long had mocked myself for “living in the someday me,” instead of draining everything from the moment, as rock musicians were supposed to do. With Laura, someday had arrived.

  She was the only girl or woman I had ever dreaded losing.

  * * *

  A good day ended badly. It began well, with a call from Stosh that I almost missed. I had been listening, with headphones, to the new Steve Miller Band album right up to the minute I had to dash out the door to drive down to class: “Quicksilver Girl” was the greatest American love song ever written to a hooker.

  Stosh, who could be almost as stoic as Matty offstage, sounded as wired as a kid on Christmas morning. Word of our gig at Lancelot’s Lair had circulated. Fast. The Electric Factory in Philly wanted us to open on a Wednesday night just before Christmas, just six weeks
away. A no-frills hall near the city’s heart, the Electric Factory was the most important showcase for new bands in Pennsylvania.

  The dream was coming true.

  “There’s no national name on the bill,” Stosh told me, “but they’ve got two breakout Philly bands playing.”

  “Sounds like it could draw talent scouts.”

  “You read my mind.”

  “That’s great, man. Really.”

  “Word’s getting around. I’m getting calls for dates we already got booked.”

  That reminded me of something: “I just wish we didn’t have Frankie’s Rocktop bullshit next week.”

  Stosh agreed. “We should’ve done the Harrisburg arena. That could’ve been a break, too.”

  “Ever figure out what Frankie was thinking?”

  “I’m still stumped. But the Pit of the Poconos it is. For four nights, anyway.”

  “Well, we’ve got Lehigh this Saturday. That should be good. If they got the word out, we’ll pull in the Lancelot’s Lair crowd. Hey, I have to get on the road. Classes.”

  “Big Man on Campus,” Stosh said. His sneering had grown more good-natured over the months.

  “How’s Red, by the way?”

  “Great, man, she’s just great. Good things come to the guy who waits, you know?”

  Days of dull rain had given way to Indian summer. With copper-colored leaves sweeping over the walks, the campus looked almost like a college catalog. The ROTC cadets were drilling as I walked from the parking lot. Hoping Vietnam would be over before they graduated, I figured. To the extent we bothered thinking about it, we expected Nixon to nuke North Vietnam the day after his inauguration.

  My spirits were soaring, despite the state of the world. Who really cared, anyway? Music mattered more than any election.

  Passing a pair of unplucked girls in duffel coats, I recited to myself, “‘Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail.…’”

  That day, few women lacked a trace of beauty.

  After a sleeping-pill lecture on the schism between the churches of Rome and Byzantium, I strolled over to the office of the young instructor responsible for my psych class. Dr. Kessler was popular, since he graded in the spirit of the gentler Christian saints, redeeming the most wretched. He never had trouble filling up his classroom, whether for his Introduction to Psychology courses or for the sociology sessions that filled out his galley-slave schedule. Since I would miss two classes during the Poconos gig, I needed to get the readings and any additional coursework in advance. I was scrupulous about going through the motions, less so about the work. The poor guy always acted surprised when a student took him seriously.

  Frail, earnest, and virginal, he invited me to sit down.

  Before I could speak, a colleague of his leaned in around the door frame.

  “John, you have a call on my line.”

  Kessler didn’t even merit his own office phone. He apologized for the interruption and told me he’d be right back.

  I stood up and looked outside. At least they gave him a window. A marvelous gust swept between the buildings. Talking to a boy on a bench, a girl brushed a golden leaf from lofting brown hair. Every minute spent indoors was wasted.

  Turning away, I noticed a paper misaligned halfway down a stack of midterms. It bore a circled red F with an exclamation point.

  Nobody got an F in one of his classes. It was physically impossible in a Newtonian universe.

  I listened for footsteps and heard none. I couldn’t resist looking to see who was stupid enough to fail one of his courses. I reached across the desk and peeled back the papers above the one graded a failure.

  Filled out in a child’s scrawl, the paper showed a carnage of red ink. The name at the upper-left corner was “Laura Saunders.”

  * * *

  That Saturday, Matty and I drove down to Allentown a few hours early for the Lehigh gig. He wanted to stop at a music store that carried Ernie Ball strings, and I was due for a visit to a nearby head shop, just up the street from Hess’s, that carried hard-to-find albums issued by minor labels. Most of the music was disappointing, but the shop had introduced me to Pearls Before Swine and H. P. Lovecraft. The latter’s version of “Wayfaring Stranger” updated Christianity to the fascist era.

  The salesman in the music store knew Matty and convinced him to try out a Gibson L-5 that had just come in. While Matty conjured the ghosts of Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, I wandered down the block to the head shop. It was one of those days when I couldn’t bear to listen to him, when the ease with which he played out-of-thin-air wonders chipped at my confidence. I still dreamed that, eventually, I’d break the code and play as well as he did. I practiced until I had to soak my fingers in hot water. But the dream was growing harder to sustain.

  You could smell the incense out on the sidewalk. I climbed the stairs to the shop.

  Joan stood leafing through a rack of record albums. She smiled when she saw me. It struck me for the first time that she had old-fashioned posture. As my mother did. Joan was no Swarthmore girl, of course. Not even a Smithie. But, straight and lean, she had a model’s lines and a courtesan’s charm.

  “You bastard,” she said. Still smiling.

  “I never thought I’d run into you here.” It was an idiotic thing to say.

  Mistress of the situation, she laughed. “You probably never thought you’d run into me anywhere. Girls are just supposed to disappear, right? Like disposable diapers?”

  “No … I’m glad to see you. I mean it. Really.”

  “You’re a terrible liar. Like your line about being married. Or did you forget your wedding ring again?”

  I looked down at my hand. It was a stupid thing to do.

  “It’s your other hand. If you were married for five minutes, you’d know that much. Will … it’s all right. You’re not going to catch me peeking in your window. Okay? But please tell me one thing honestly. Just for my peace of mind. You’re in love with somebody, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I was just a test to see if she was really magic? Was that it?”

  “There was a lot more to it.”

  She had a wistful smile that deserved to be photographed. “I wish I’d meet just one man who wasn’t predictable.”

  “It was more than that. Honestly. I looked down from the stage and saw you—”

  “And I was bewitching. I know. Please don’t worry. I’m not mad. Disappointed. But not mad. I got what I wanted when I wanted it. Two sides to every story. Okay?” Her smile bloomed again. “You’re so sweet. You didn’t even realize you didn’t have to lie.”

  “I never intended to lie to you. That’s the truth. Things just happened.”

  “Didn’t you think I might have the least bit of curiosity?” Bemused by the human race, she shook her head. “Well, you got away with it this time. The Wicked Witch won’t haunt you and your Snow White.”

  I didn’t know how to end the situation, but Joan did. She stepped against me and kissed me full on the mouth, wet and delicious.

  “Call me sometime when you’re not in love,” she told me.

  She walked out, passing Matty by the front counter.

  I made a show of inspecting the ranks of albums, then bought one that I didn’t really want.

  On the way to the parking lot, Matty said, “That was the girl from Lancelot’s Lair. Wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t expect to run into her.”

  We walked a few more steps.

  “Don’t try to be Frankie,” Matty told me. “You’re not him. You wouldn’t want to be him.”

  “I never wanted to be Frankie,” I said. That was one ambition I truly had never felt.

  Matty wasn’t listening. He was thinking and talking.

  “If you love someone,” he said, “and they love you, don’t mess it up.”

  * * *

  The next week, before we drove up to the Poconos, I wrote a song for Laura.

  TWELVE

&
nbsp; That Wednesday afternoon, I crammed my two guitar cases, a small suitcase, and a clutch of clothes on hangers into the Corvair. Heading for the Rocktop Club in the eastern Poconos and four nights of playing for drunks. My attitude didn’t improve when, one street from my apartment, a state police car pulled up behind me.

  Any male with long hair in Schuylkill County in 1968 was paranoid around cops. I was clean and my car was clean, but it got my attention when the Statie turned left at the intersection with 61 and followed me over the ridge to St. Clair. He didn’t turn on his bubble-gum machine, though. And I stayed under the speed limit.

  The cop closed up behind me at every red light in St. Clair. Then he trailed me up the Frackville grade and onto the newly opened stretch of interstate. Whenever I checked the rearview mirror, he was there, a couple of car lengths back.

  I told myself that I had nothing to worry about—then wondered if I did. Had something come out of the mess at Buzzy’s farm back in October? Was Joey still dealing on the sly, tainting me and the band by association? Every girl in my life was over eighteen … although that wasn’t a major concern in the county, where things started early and people just closed their eyes.

  I kept my speed down, didn’t pass anyone, and took great care not to swerve.

  On a lonely stretch of ridge between ravaged coal valleys, the Statie finally turned on his siren and lights.

  I pulled over.

  He got out of the car: a big guy, all shoulders and chest. I fished my paperwork out of the dashboard pocket and rolled down the window.

  With a slab of face and temples all but shaved below his cap, he looked like Mussolini after a bodybuilding course. His name tag read “Tomczik,” but I didn’t need to see it. The family resemblance to Matty was unmistakable. Would life sculpt Matty into a monster, too?

  “License, registration, and proof of insurance.”

  I handed him the documents.

  “Put your hands on the steering wheel and keep them there.”

  I did as told.

  “William Barker Cross,” he said, “the Third. From behind, I thought you were a girl.”

  “What was the problem, Officer?”