Doxology

by Nell Zink

  A few weeks before the tour began, Joe called Daniel to say he wanted a rider on his contract. To wit, he could no longer play a live show without four unopened quart bottles in the dressing room: gin, rum, bourbon, and tequila.

  “Did the guys ask for this?” Daniel asked, disappointed.

  “No,” Joe said. “Gwen told me I can put anything I want in the rider, and they have to give it to me.”

  “Huh? Since when do you want a gallon of schnapps?”

  “Her friends can’t afford drinks at bars. She said if I put it in the rider, it’s free.”

  “Tell her no. Musicians get free drinks when they’re playing. Tell her to drink your drinks.”

  “But if I’m in love with her, I give her what she wants.”

  “No, you don’t,” Daniel said. “When you love a woman, you give her what she needs. That’s plenty enough to keep you busy.”

  “She gives me what I need, because she loves me,” Joe said, dangerously close to logic.

  “But you don’t need her,” Daniel said. “I bet any girl could give you what you get from her. Just saying.”

  THAT AFTERNOON, JOE GOT INTO A TUSSLE WITH A STRANGER AFTER TOUCHING HER waist at a crosswalk. His woeful attempt to explain saved him from disfiguration by passersby.

  He came over in the evening, and he and Daniel walked out on the Manhattan Bridge. Daniel administered an urgent talking-to that was the opposite of the birds and the bees. It addressed a mandate to confine sexuality to the imagination. Beyond the principle of the thing, he felt that Joe should be prepared for civil liability. Any girl he offended would surely sue, he said, the second she found out he was rich.

  Joe objected that rich guys get girls.

  “Sure they do,” Daniel said. “But then the girl hands them the check and says, ‘That’ll be ten thousand dollars, please.’”

  “Like prostitutes.”

  “You got it. Never pay for sex. With girls it’s not ‘You break it, you bought it.’ It’s the golden rule. Repeat after me. Never pay for sex.”

  “Never pay for sex. But what if the girl needs money?”

  “Girls need sex, or they need money, but never both at the same time. It’s not sex unless it’s free. It’s not sex unless the girl’s so into it, she’s paying you!” Daniel could hardly believe the asinine things he was saying, but he felt the situation demanded more than honesty.

  “Gwen never needs money,” Joe asserted.

  “And that’s the one good thing about her—no, let’s be real.”

  He meant to correct himself and label her Joe’s doxy. But something clicked in his mind first. Joe was right; she never needed money. She bartered sex for other things. What kept her from pursuing an arrangement in which Joe paid her rent was that her father paid it. She didn’t accept checks from anybody but her dad, and that made her a nice girl, in theory.

  He said, “Gwen’s a barnacle. You’re a ship on the ocean of life, and she’s along for the ride.”

  “Stuck to my underside,” Joe said approvingly.

  JOE PLAYED A SHORT ACOUSTIC SET AT A LOFT IN SOHO, A PRIVATE BENEFIT FOR A FILMMAKER with cancer whose wife knew Daktari. There he premiered a song about his discovery that there are no limits on fantasy. Daniel stayed home with Flora, but Pam heard it live, to her dismay. The tune was excessively catchy. Joe sang:

  This song is a letter

  From my pants to your sweater

  You make me feel better, and better, and better

  You blow me for an hour

  I wash off in the shower

  Still feeling the power, the power, the power

  [etc.]

  Pam felt that any self-respecting woman now would leave the room. Instead of leaving, she looked around to see who else was leaving. Gwen, for better or worse, was beaming beatifically, hands clasped to her chest, swaying on a stool to Joe’s left. She didn’t seem to know she was onstage. When the song ended, she teetered over to him and gave him a big, smacking kiss.

  “You looked great up there,” Pam said to her afterward, both of them standing by the table with the free white wine.

  “Avoid!” Gwen said modestly. “When I was ugly, nobody cared, but I have glowing skin now. You—you should get it.” She hiccuped.

  “‘Glowing skin’?”

  “Duh, Pam! My skin?” She turned her head from side to side. “Are you looking?”

  “It’s incredible,” Pam said. “I can’t believe it. Can you excuse me a second?” She turned her back and walked away to try to meet a well-known sculptor.

  Meanwhile Joe stood out on the sidewalk below the venue, smoking a cigarette and holding forth on his recent discovery of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. He was singing the closing movement as “laa-laa-laa, la-la-la-la-la-laa,” and so on. No one interrupted him. A half-circle of young people eyed one another cautiously as they listened, struggling to make out whether he was high or being ironic.

  “I’d be into getting dinner,” a woman ventured, wondering whether he’d offer to take them out.

  Instantly he stopped singing and smiled at her. “Me too! Let’s go get crackers!”

  “This guy’s a trip,” someone said. The crowd of nine began to move, surrounding him and leading him. He didn’t know which direction it was to the nearest grocery store, but the purposeful movement of informed participants swept them all away at the proper angle.

  Joe said at the entrance, “I like crackers because they’re crisp.” He charged down the center aisle and looked around in bewilderment, saying, “Do you see crackers?” He didn’t see crackers. It was an unfamiliar store.

  The others brought him products to review and reject while he stood his ground, waiting for crackers. A mood of hilarity took hold as they competed to find out which product would elicit the most troubling poetry. It turned out to be a bag of apples. “Don’t curdle my blood with tree fruits,” he said. “They’re replete with earwigs.”

  Nobody brought him any crackers. Eventually he paid for two sixes of beer and returned to the gallery alone. Years later, the others were still telling the story about the time Joe Harris bought them beer on acid. They said you had to be there.

  THE TOUR WAS A SOLD-OUT TRIUMPH, WITH EPIC AFTER-PARTIES. GWEN HAD FLEETING sex, of a kind, with Sebastian, Kevin, and John, but only before it came to her attention that she would have no access to drugs unless groupies were to bring them. Her new dealer, Kenneth, had a network, but it didn’t extend past Tenafly. For drugs to happen, she had to hang back, even from Joe.

  Possessiveness would have been beneath her dignity as common-law wife. That’s how she saw herself, though he never stopped calling her “my girlfriend.”

  He still used the term “rock star” loosely to mean anyone in a band. A “groupie” was any woman or girl in his hotel room. “My girlfriend” played the part of groupie wrangler, ensuring that access to his room was limited to those with dissolute good looks and the appearance of money. Once a party established itself in a hotel room, it was only a matter of time before one of the groupies called a local supplier and ordered in. Most of them were old enough to have legal sex but too young to buy legal alcohol, so they knew where to find drugs.

  The press said he was spiraling out of control. But his wishes corresponded to the innocent desires of a fun-loving adult. He was used to having fun, and he saw no reason to cut back just because his being a rock star raised the number of people who cared.

  Most stars, however dim their astral radiance, are at first surprised, soon perturbed, and ultimately warped as social beings by the ease and pleasure habitually bestowed on success. No sycophancy is necessary for corruption. Anyone accustomed to normal life—particularly in New York—can succumb to delusions of grandeur when faced with mild helpfulness and a willingness to ignore slights. Even without a retinue of paid handlers, much less true fame of the inconveniencing kind, Joe lived as he always had, trusting everyone, assuming the benefit of the doubt, surrounded by friends—if anything growing more fr
olicsome as decisions were taken out of his hands. The transition to life among toadies barely registered.

  Life among groupies, however, got his attention majorly. He liked everything about them, even the way condoms slowed them down.

  He liked to drink, but he rejected competing modes of self-medication. Downers reminded him that he appreciated himself the way he was. LSD made him hide under a blanket. He tried cocaine and ecstasy and didn’t notice any effects. He could learn from experiences with pills and powders because he didn’t automatically trust them. They weren’t other selves, the way people were. They were more like speeding cars.

  His life as a libertine sybarite amused Pam and Daniel. They felt that anything was better than exclusive commitment to Gwen. His wedding to her was a worst-case nightmare scenario they made jokes about. When Flora was around, they kept quiet about his adventures, and so did he. He knew which of his stories were rated PG-13 and which were R and X.

  VIII.

  Pam, Daniel, and Joe bought bricklike cell phones so that they could coordinate picking Flora up from kindergarten. One pretty spring afternoon—it was Daniel’s day to pick her up—she emerged wanting to know whether she was gay.

  “Why do you ask?” he said as they walked, holding hands. “It’s your choice. Do you feel gay?”

  “Haejin asked me if Joe is my dad. I said no, but he takes care of me. And she goes, ‘You have two dads, so you’re gay.’”

  “Tell her he’s your friend. Isn’t he your friend?”

  “That’s what I said! And she said I don’t have any grandma to take care of me and that’s why I’m adopted and gay.”

  “Whoa,” Daniel said. “That’s normative in so many ways, it makes my head hurt! Does it make your head hurt?”

  She touched her head cautiously. “No. My head’s okay.”

  “Being gay is nice,” he said by way of general information. “But only for gay people. It has to do with sex, so it’s very grown up—except on Halloween, when we go to the gay parade.”

  “Are rainbows gay?”

  “No,” Daniel said. “The rainbow stands for ultimate evil.”

  “It does not!”

  “Do you know about Noah’s ark?”

  “Kind of. There’s animals.”

  “In the Bible, it says that a long time ago, God killed almost everybody in the whole world, and almost all the animals, using a big flood to drown them. When it was over, the only survivors were on a boat, Noah’s ark, and God said to them, ‘You know what? I’m going to put this rainbow up every time it rains now, to remind myself not to drown you guys ever again, because you’re perfectly good at killing each other without my help.’”

  “That is not in the Bible!”

  “Check it and see. Genesis, chapter eight, verse twenty-one. And the Lord said in his heart, the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth, and the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea, and surely your blood of your lives I will require. It’s the curse of the evil rainbow!”

  “It is not!”

  “God drowned every single unicorn, and you know why?”

  “They aren’t evil!”

  “You don’t even want to know. What do you think they do with that horn?”

  “I don’t know—kill stuff? Like, put it on their horn?”

  “You got it! You stay away from those bad boys!”

  THAT NIGHT IN BED HE SAID TO PAM, “FLORA’S GETTING TEASED BECAUSE SHE HAS NO grandparents. Are you sure you couldn’t take the plunge?”

  “It would be weird, after all these years.”

  “It can only get weirder,” Daniel said. “You just have to take a deep breath and jump. I bet your mom will be happy no matter what. Flora’s her only grandchild. The first one always gets their attention.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Not to get Christian on you or anything, but did you ever think about how your mother feels? I mean, not whether she has a right to feel that way, but just how it must feel to her having an only child and not even knowing whether she’s alive? I mean, I’m not close to my parents, but at least they know where I am.”

  “She can look me up. I’m sure she already has. She’s not stupid.”

  “How would she find you, even if she knew you were in New York? You had your number on Bleecker disconnected, and you married me and changed your name to Svoboda before RIACD got a website. Be real. Call her. Tell her she has a five-year-old granddaughter and see how fast she turns around.”

  PAM DIDN’T CALL HOME RIGHT AWAY. THE POSSIBILITY OF MAKING SUCH A MOMENTOUS change with so little effort induced vertigo. The call would take her all of thirty seconds, and it would bring her parents back into her life. She waffled. She didn’t want to hear her mother’s reaction, but more important, she didn’t want anyone to hear her cry.

  At heart, she was sorry. She pitied her parents. Now that she had a daughter, she didn’t want to know how it must have felt to have one out alone in 1980s downtown Washington nightlife. When she thought about it, it didn’t surprise her that her parents had yelled at her. It was more surprising that they hadn’t locked her up in a psychiatric ward in the interest of saving her life.

  She sent a postcard with the return address of RIACD’s post office box.

  Dear Mom and Dad, long time no see. I hope you’re well. I’m well and happy and still in New York. My husband, Daniel, and I have a daughter, Flora. She’s five now. She asked about you. You were always saying I shouldn’t burn my bridges. Well, write back! And please forgive me.

  Love, Pam

  Two days later, at five thirty in the afternoon, she got a call from the receptionist, saying her parents were at the office.

  “Pass my dad the phone,” Pam said. “Hey, Dad.”

  “Pam,” he said. “It’s good to hear your voice. Where do you live?”

  She gave him the address on Chrystie Street. Then she summoned Daniel and Flora to the kitchen table for an announcement.

  SHE WENT DOWNSTAIRS TO THE STREET TO WAIT. MEETING HER MOTHER IN PUBLIC would surely lead to some kind of awkward public display, but it wouldn’t be as embarrassing as having her parents hunt around for a doorbell until Victor or Margie showed them the narrow plywood door equipped with a hasp and padlock behind the beverage coolers.

  A blue Chrysler LeBaron pulled up, and Ginger sprang from the passenger seat into Pam’s arms. “I’m going to find parking!” Edgar called out, easing the car away.

  “Oh, Mom, I can’t believe it,” Pam said.

  She was, in fact, straining to believe what she saw. Her straitlaced mother had turned from a prematurely middle-aged conservative prep with gold door-knocker earrings and a perm into a hippie earth mother with wavy gray locks. Instead of a white turtleneck, she was wearing an Indian print top. Her face hadn’t changed, at least not the important parts. Her eyes were the single most familiar and persuasive thing Pam had ever known. They were the original definition of trustworthiness, and her smile was the paradigm of all affection. She hadn’t seen anything like them since she was twelve.

  Her mother held her tight while Pam whimpered. She said, “Boy, am I glad Daniel and Flora can’t see this. They’d be so freaked.”

  “You probably told them we’re monsters,” Ginger said, retreating to see her reaction.

  She wiped her eyes. “I never mentioned you to my daughter. I know it’s crazy. But at least you’re starting off with a clean slate. She didn’t figure out something was missing until somebody told her about grandparents in kindergarten the other day.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Cute. Pretty. You’re going to go nuts. I’m never going to get you out of here.”

  “Is she smart?”

  “More like quirky?”

  “I can’t wait. What’s keeping your father?”

  “I should have told him there’s a g
arage on Essex.”

  “He’ll find something.”

  “So”—Pam hesitated—“are you guys healthy? Are things okay?”

  “Except for that untraceable daughter bit that broke my heart into little pieces, it’s been a fairly smooth journey. Ed’s almost to retirement. That’s another thing I can’t wait for.”

  “You look so different.”

  “Did you really expect losing a daughter not to change me?” She bit her lip. “I went through some serious down time there. I was at an ashram in New Mexico off and on for two years. I was in the hospital for depression, twice.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I found out a lot of things about myself. Parts of myself that I’d wanted you to become, because I wasn’t becoming them myself. You know? I got to know my boundaries a little better and acknowledged that it was all me. You were my vicarious vessel. So I changed.”

  “I kind of know what you mean,” Pam said. “Maybe.”

  “The world you came into didn’t inspire you to be what I wanted for myself. I was inspired differently when I was young. It was a different time. I hope you’ve been able to live in tune with your inspirations.”

  Pam said, “I’m doing okay.” Her mother’s affirmation of creativity and self-realization as valid life goals embarrassed her deeply. An unpleasant suspicion arose in her mind. Punk rock and New Age esotericism had both arisen in the seventies. Could they be more similar than she liked to think?

  “Here comes Ed,” Ginger said, indicating her husband, who was approaching them with long, lively strides, one hand in his pocket, holding his wallet to deter pickpockets.