Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  “Sure,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  “Nope,” Cole said.

  They escaped into the corridor and Cole randomly picked a staircase that took them down into the cavernous space under the stage. Air ducts and work lights hanging from the raw wood of the ceiling. Music stands, scaffolding, lengths of pvc pipe, plywood floor. Cole leaned against the wall and Teresa gently touched his arm. “Want some of this?” she asked, offering the wine glass, and Cole shook his head. “What happened up there?”

  “It’s a long story,” Cole said. “I just figured out that somebody I trusted with my life has been lying to me.”

  “I don’t have to be anywhere. If you want to talk about it.”

  How was it that total strangers were capable of such kindness, and the people you loved and depended on were capable of such immense betrayal? Was it all just a matter of expectations?

  “Could you hold me for a minute?” he said.

  She set her wineglass down and slipped into his arms, where she fit perfectly. He allowed himself a brief fantasy. He would go awol from the tour, let Teresa take him home, spend a couple of weeks making love with this very sweet, very desirable woman before slinking away to Austin. Sallie would notice he was gone, but the audience wouldn’t care, particularly. And it would read the last rites over the final, pathetic gasp of his career.

  “I’ve never been a groupie before,” Teresa said. “I’m a little nervous.”

  “Don’t be,” Cole said. “The sad truth is that I have a bus to catch.”

  *

  Cole was the first on board, and he managed to doze for a few minutes before Sallie rapped on the side of his bunk and said, “Talk to me, Cole.”

  Cole followed her to the front of the bus, where the empty, predawn highway was already rolling up under their wheels. He stretched out on the couch and Sallie sat cross-legged facing him. “What happened to you tonight? One minute you were fine and then you just walked away. Alex was so disappointed. Is this about you and me?”

  “I figured it out,” Cole said.

  “Figured what?” The quaver in her voice told him he was right.

  “I figured out that Alex was the ‘anonymous industry entrepreneurs’ who were supposedly funding Official Records. You two obviously knew each other and were pretending you hadn’t met. It’s the only explanation.”

  He didn’t bother to look at her and she didn’t try to tell him he was mistaken.

  “I should have known,” he said, “that nobody who was really in the music business would shell out for a Jeff Cole record.”

  “I told them this was wrong,” Sallie said. “I told them they needed to tell you what was going on.”

  “You told them that, but you didn’t tell me.”

  “No,” Sallie said. “I didn’t tell you.”

  Cole finally looked at her. She was crying, the tears running untouched down either side of her nose.

  “I don’t know why it matters who paid for it,” she said. “It’s a brilliant record. Dave says he’s as proud of it as any record he ever made. And he says he didn’t do anything, that you did it all.”

  “It does matter,” Cole said. “It makes me a charity case.”

  “Alex said you’d say that. But that’s just as true of me. Dave made it a condition of the deal that I was one of the artists he signed.”

  “Oh, please. Who were all those people lined up to talk to tonight?”

  “Tracy Chapman, mostly. And the ones who were there for me were there because of an album that’s thirty years old.”

  Cole stood up.

  “Cole? You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?”

  “Like ditch the tour? Like throw myself under the bus? Don’t worry. I won’t spoil things.”

  Back in his bunk, he thought about how he had changed over the years. In the seventies, when he’d first suspected that his life was not going to work out, the thought had required booze or dope or smack to be put down. What he’d learned was how to go numb without external aid, to drain the panic from the dire voices in his head, to put one foot in front of the other no matter how desperate he felt, no matter how futile it seemed. It was all a matter of practice.

  2001

  On March 5, the Ninth Circuit Court out of San Francisco ruled that Napster was liable for copyright infringement and the brief era of commercial file sharing software was over. After the ma7 debacle, followed by the reluctance of the major labels to license their catalogs to his subscription service, Alex had moved Mariachi into the file sharing space. His father had always told him that you had to be agile, that nobody ended up with the business model they started with. In the wake of the Napster verdict, the company stock, which had been riding high on the Internet boom, dropped from 143 to 5 in the course of one agonizing week, and agility was no longer an option. Mariachi filed for bankruptcy and Alex, who had been rich on paper the week before, was wiped out.

  Official Records had scored a modest hit with Sallie Rachel’s Second Bloom. It wasn’t enough to support the rest of the list, which had been well-received critically but needed career-building over time to earn out. Without Mariachi, nobody was left to write the checks to buy that time. The company folded and the cds went out of print, except for Second Bloom, which Sony picked up when they signed Sallie to a three-record deal. Dave had tried to interest them in Cole, and the head of A&R had said, “It’s great stuff, but I don’t hear dollar signs.”

  Alex had put off telling Cole. After the fuckup in LA, Cole had not returned any of his calls, and the letter he’d sent was returned unopened. Sallie had been really pissed off about ending up in the middle, and he understood that. He also knew that without the subterfuge, none of it would have happened—not Cole’s record or Sallie’s, no tour, no Sony deal for her. That was why he was in business and she was an artist. Without people like Alex, she was the proverbial falling tree in the deserted forest.

  When Cole again ignored his phone messages, Alex called the local indie weekly, the Austin Chronicle, and they told him that Cole was booked at La Zona Rosa Café on Saturday. The Villa Capri was long gone, turned into a football practice field, so he reserved a room at the Motel 6 north of town, a better fit for his current budget.

  That next morning he reluctantly told Madelyn he was going. She was always after him to miraculously make things all right with Cole, and sometimes Alex resented Cole’s ever-present shadow over their marriage.

  Back in Palo Alto, at Madelyn’s graduation, Alex had felt the first stirrings of attraction to her, and immediately put them aside because of Cole. Likewise, when she used to drop Ava off for babysitting, and Alex, in his loneliness, couldn’t help but notice the way her beauty shone through her exhaustion and stained sweat clothes, he was always aware of Cole brooding in Austin. Not until Ava’s trip to Mexico, when Cole was deep into his obsession with Susan, did the two of them have room to let a few sparks fly. That the sparks ignited a comfortable, living-room-fireplace blaze rather than a roaring inferno was okay with Alex. He did wonder sometimes what it would have been like to have her beside him on the front lines of the Kent State protests, or supporting him in his fight for independence from his father, how different both of their lives might have been.

  She was, predictably, happy about the Austin trip. Then she said the most bizarre thing.

  “You’re in love with him, you know.” She was gathering her books and notes for her summer session class on Myth and Allegory and Alex was finishing his morning coffee over the sink.

  “What?”

  “It’s perfectly all right. I suppose in my own way I’m still a bit in love with him myself.”

  “You’re saying I’m gay? When you have every reason to know otherwise?”

  “It’s not about sex. You can be in love with someone without wanting to have sex with them. I think you were in love with him at first sight, from the way you talk about it. I think it’s part of the reason you married me.”

  Alex was so
dumbfounded that he couldn’t summon the anger that the moment deserved. “I think you’re completely out of your mind.”

  “I know you do. And yet every once in a while I do manage to get through to you.” She kissed him lightly on the lips and walked away.

  His mind kept circling back to that conversation as he drove. It was like not being able to remember if he’d closed the kitchen window before he left the house.

  He checked into the motel before seven pm and ate a late dinner at Dirty’s, ordering the turkey burger and denying himself the onion rings as a concession to his cholesterol. By the time he got to the Zona Rosa, which was a restaurant on one side and a cavernous performance space on the other, Cole was starting his first set. He had the same young black drummer and fashion disaster of a string bass player that he’d had in LA, minus the keyboards. He went back and forth between a beat-up Martin acoustic and the same beat-up Strat that he’d played in The Chevelles. Alex didn’t see any signs of backsliding into booze or drugs. Cole drank nothing but bottled water, and he was fully present at the microphone, almost scarily so, joking and casual between numbers and then nakedly emotional when he sang. The crowd loved him, and why not? He had passed from feverish youth to craggy maturity without losing his looks or, the bastard, putting on weight. The Lennon-esque roughness of his teenage voice had smoothed out and gained gravitas. He had all the pieces of stardom and yet had somehow failed to pull them together.

  He wrapped up the set with “Already the End,” and Alex had to fight back tears. He nearly walked out then, thinking, better to drive back to Dallas than to deliver more bad news. Instead he asked a waitress how to get backstage. She used her professional skills to assess the thread count in his shirt and the label inside his sport coat and pointed him the way, getting herself a five-dollar tip for her trouble.

  In the dressing room, Cole was talking to a rough-looking blonde in big, tight jeans and a leather jacket, his eyes searching for an escape. The bass player and drummer played cribbage in the corner. Alex got close enough for Cole to notice him, and Cole excused himself and walked over. He folded his arms and said, “I guess taking hints is not your strong point these days.”

  Fuck this, Alex thought, and fuck Madelyn and my being in love with this asshole. Drop the bomb and go. “I had to do this in person. Mariachi went under, and it took Official Records with it. I’m sorry.”

  “You think I didn’t already know that? Sallie told me a month ago. Did you drive all the way down here just for that?”

  “Mostly. But as long as I’m here, I guess maybe I am curious as to what exactly you’re so pissed off about.”

  “You lied to me, man. You sold me a record deal under false pretenses. You made me believe there was somebody who actually gave a shit about my career.”

  “There is,” Alex said.

  They stared at each other for a good five seconds without anybody blinking, then Cole went back to the blonde.

  Alex followed him. “Why is it that I don’t count?” He nodded to the blonde to acknowledge that he was interrupting her. “Why is everybody else’s opinion worth more than mine? What does it matter where the money came from when the result was a brilliant fucking record?”

  “The end justifies the means?” Cole said. “I expected better from you. That’s what put us in Vietnam. That’s Reagan pushing dope to fund the Contras.”

  Alex flashed back to the Battle of the Bands in Richardson, to Cole taunting Gary until Gary physically attacked him. Alex felt like taking a swing at Cole himself. “So, let me get this straight, you’re sorry you got to make the record, is that what you’re saying?”

  “I love that record,” the blonde said.

  “Me too,” Alex said.

  “I’m not sorry I made it,” Cole said. “That’s not the fucking point, and you know it.” And then Alex saw Cole’s armor of resentment fall away and his shoulders drop. “I’m just… disappointed, that’s all. One more disappointment in a lifetime of disappointments.” He looked at Alex. “And what about you? What happens to you, now?”

  Alex fought to keep his own emotions from showing. “Back to work for my father. I convinced him he needs his own it department and I’m going to run it for him.”

  “cio, in other words.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t know you spoke corporate.”

  “Know the enemy. When you were in college, did you ever think you would end up like this?”

  “Wearing a suit? Working for my father? It was my worst nightmare. But I didn’t know shit back then.”

  “I think we knew a lot. I think we look smarter with every year that goes by. But I would never have predicted I’d end up like this. You want a beer?”

  “Sure.”

  Cole pointed to a green plastic trash can. “It’s Heineken. I asked for Bohemia, but…” Cole fished a bottle of water out of a second barrel and asked the blonde, “Do you want anything?”

  “Heinie’s good,” she said, and Alex held one out to her. “Could you open it for me? I don’t have a lot of strength in my hands.”

  “Sure,” Alex said. A little kindness all around. Why not?

  “How’s Madelyn?” Cole asked. “I sent her a note last year when her mother died. That must have been tough, so soon after her dad.”

  “Yeah. She’s been kind of lost in her work the last few years. At least she got something out of it. Columbia University published her Defiance book and it got reviewed in the mainstream media. She’s got tenure now and she delivered the keynote address at mla last year.”

  “She’s the one of us all that got what she wanted.”

  Alex didn’t say the first thing that came to mind, how hard she’d worked with absolute single-mindedness and dedication to get where she was, raising two kids in the process, despite two worthless husbands, then nursing her sister and father and mother in one city while teaching a full load in another. “She earned it,” he said.

  He filled Cole in on the rest of the family, his father seeming invulnerable and getting richer by the day, Gwyn graduating from unc medical school in two weeks, Ethan starting his sophomore year at smu in the fall, probably headed for an English major, Ava still working at Half Price Books, unable to figure out her next step.

  “Ava I knew about,” Cole said. “I try to see her when I’m up there with my mom. Poor kid seems to have inherited my fuckup gene.”

  Alex was tired of listening to Cole beat himself up. “She’s not a fuckup. And neither are you.”

  “No,” Cole said, “I still don’t know how I ended up here. Some are born to failure, some achieve failure, and some have failure thrust upon them.”

  “Greatness,” the blonde said. “It’s greatness, as you well know. ‘Thy fates open their hands. Let thy blood and spirit embrace them.’” Cole stared at her in shock and Alex didn’t hide his surprise much better. “Maybe you should embrace your own greatness for a change,” she said. She chugged the rest of the beer, set the empty gently into a recycle bin, and walked out.

  The bass player in the unfortunate pork pie hat said, “Time, Cole.”

  “Be right there,” Cole said.

  “Are we all right?” Alex said.

  “I’m not all right,” Cole said. “And it sounds like you could be doing better yourself. But I guess I’ll return your phone calls, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You should write some more songs, you know. With Tupelo or without him.”

  Alex watched Cole stop himself before asking why. “I’ll think about it,” Cole said.

  *

  Dave and Sallie watched the World Trade Center burn on cnn. Dave’s first instinct was to flee, and Sallie, as usual, had the cooler head. She reminded him that traffic was impassible and every seat on every form of transportation out of the city was booked for days.

  It was, Dave thought, an inauspicious way to start a new century. First Bush the Younger stole the presidency in broad daylight, and now the vultures of US policy in the Mideast had come home to
roost. Life was suddenly precarious and music irrelevant. The future was too monstrous to contemplate and the past was irrevocably out of reach.

  Sallie shut herself in the bedroom for a while. When she came out, she said, “Dave, you’ve got to turn it off.”

  He started to argue with her, and then he thought, what is it I’m so afraid of missing?

  She put some matzo and cheese on the coffee table and they picked at it for a while. From the street came nothing but sirens, relentless, sawing at Dave’s nerves. He was about to put the tv on again, just to block the awful noise, when Sallie abruptly got up and put Ahmad Jamal’s At the Pershing, Volume 2 on the turntable. The room filled up with piano, bass, and drums.

  The sound hit him at first as a shock, as hideously inappropriate. Then, slowly, he understood it for the act of pure kindness that it was. Dave reached out to her, and as she moved toward him he saw that they would get through it somehow. Through the coming days and the coming years, somehow.

  2010

  Alex had lost the distinction between work and not-work years ago. He rarely went into the office. Instead he spent 12 to 14 hours a day at the computer in his study, most of it running the various businesses, some of it in personal email, and at least an hour a day on Facebook.

  He wished he’d thought of it. Not just because he could have used a billion dollars, but because he would have done such a vastly better job with the interface.

  Still, what a maker of miracles it was, and this morning’s miracle was Denise Glover Polonskaya of Brooklyn, who worked as a Russian translator in Manhattan.

  “I’ve only been on fb for three days,” she wrote. “I can’t believe you found me already.”

  Her messages were clotted with smiley faces and exclamation points. She’d moved to New York on impulse in 1978 with a girlfriend from teacher’s college, failed to make the cut as a un translator, lived on the verge of starvation for a year or so after her friend moved back to Texas in despair, then met a socially awkward arbitrage banker at a Peter Tosh concert in Central Park, married him, and through him found a job in an international law office translating contracts.