Then Evie sang. Just one syllable, the first syllable of a lyric line that was only seven syllables long but which she had dreamed up as a kind of endurance test, a marathon, an event—
“No…”
—she sang, and it was a D, not a harmony or even an octave up, but the exact same low D that anchored the chord that was still ringing out unceasing, a spell begging to be broken—
“…body…”
And lo she had made a word, that one word nobody a three-note melody lolling upon a spectral pillow of drop D, and her band at last began to come in behind her: drums first, that longed-for single snare hit and then a second, putting in a waltz time but slow, so slow, with such intervals between snare hits that it was not a rhythm at all yet, just a hint, an invisible time signature, a reminder that such a thing as rhythm existed—and then another guitar, Aimee’s Strat slashing in another D chord to join Evie’s—and then Evie sang the next word,
“feels”
And the chord resolved, gloriously, from D to G, shifting from the five to the one like everyone had been dying in their bones for it to do, whether they knew it or not, and the song had been joined in earnest, and it moved in a slow and stately roll, the drums still all snare, the waltz time a guaranteed fact now as Bernie’s bass came in, a loop, a circle of notes climbing up and down a six-note lattice connecting D and G, and Evie finished the line,
“any pain…”
And the world exploded at the release, the arrival, and Evie sang it again, finding the real full golden melody, the ancient Bob Dylan melody she’d stolen and made her own.
“Nobody feels any pain…”
And the band was speeding up now, falling into time, and once more she sang it:
“Nobody feels any pain…”
This was the song, this was all of it, again and again forever. She would never move to the second line of the Dylan song, she would sing nobody feels any pain forever. The crowd caught on and began to sing it along with her, all her invisible lovers out in the darkness, everyone chanting the melody together while the band churned along on the rails it had built.
“Nobody! Feels! Any pain!”
“Nobody! Feels! Any pain!”
And now Evie stopped singing and turned away, for she had given it unto the crowd and they gave it back to her:
“Nobody! Feels! Any pain!”
After which Evie—Evie the Elusive—Evie the Good—Evie in her wings gritted her teeth and tilted her head up toward the lights and felt the heat in all of her bones.
It was a new song for her, only a couple of weeks old, a cover but not really a cover. The Dylan song was long a favorite, it was a ray of light, a slow forest fire, but neither could Evie in good conscience embrace it, not as canon, this story of a strong woman who is built up and built up only to be melted down on every chorus. So Evie the Sly—Evie the Conjurer—had, at a show a few weeks ago, found a way to do it, to swipe it and swap it out, strip it down and rebuild it. She made the opening line a song in and of itself, she just sank into the cool beauty of the four words, of her own voice singing them low and clear, and now her loves came with her, singing, chanting:
“Nobody feels any pain!”
The crowd was in motion as they sang, surging back and forth, leaping up and down, moving as a unit, a wave.
“Nobody feels any pain!”
The guitars and the bass and organ rising together like high water, the drums like the rattling of a hundred doors, the four-word melody transformed into an incantation, the incantation into an exhortation, a battle cry, a howl—and though she was at the center of it, the swelling in Evie’s heart was the same as felt all over the room, the swelling of love and the unbearable ache—
—and you might have thought that in this crash and wash of noise, Evie Keener with her back to the crowd, she would never have heard, amid the massed voices of that room, one particular voice saying two words—and not only hear the voice but make out the words and know exactly who it was.
“Holy shit,” said the quiet, calm voice, and Evie stopped playing. She turned slowly around to face the crowd again.
The band fell away: the drums first fell out of rhythm and then disappeared after firing a few final shots; and then Aimee laid her hand flat against the strings of her guitar to silence it; and then the organ, too, and only the bass was left: Bernie playing a half measure alone before he noticed that everyone else had stopped.
Evie scanned the crowd, holding her breath, searching.
Later, people who’d been in the crowd that night remembered being scared that it had happened to her now, too, what had happened to her brother all those years ago. Because that was part of Evie’s story, of her persona: her burgeoning celebrity flecked with the grit of tragedy, whispered from fan to fan, elaborated on Twitter and the websites: It’s fucking crazy, when she was a kid…have you heard, her brother…
And now here she was, frozen with her pick hand in the air, her eyes moving as if automatically over the audience, her mouth half-open, mute.
But then the spell broke. Evie gave a small, quick cantering laugh of surprise and said, “Ruben?”
2.
“What I flat-out fucking refuse to do is be one of these people who is like, why me? Like—my life is so hard, I can’t believe this is happening to me. I seriously refuse to be that person.”
Evie Keener, in the dim dressing-room light, shook her head with angry annoyance at this self-pitying version of herself she had conjured. Ruben just gazed at her, nodding quietly. He hadn’t said much, not yet, dizzy and dazzled as he was to be in her presence after the long passage of years. He’d hardly taken a breath since coming into the dressing room, since sitting down on the wobbly stool Evie had pointed to, across from herself at the big hot-light vanity table with mirror attached.
“You gotta know how lucky you are. Right?” As she spoke, Evie peeled off the wings of lace and wire she’d been wearing to perform, tugging them off her shoulders one strap at a time. “A lot of people have suffered a lot worse.”
“I suppose that’s true.” Ruben’s voice came out as a murmur.
“It is, dude. It is a hundred percent true.” Under the wings, Evie wore a camisole, sheer and tight as a stocking. “The universe does not revolve around me. Oh my God, Ruben—your finger. What happened?”
“Oh. What? Nothing.”
He looked down at his hand. His circumcised forefinger, the tip still bundled in its cap of white gauze. “It’s fine. I cut it with a knife.” And then, hurriedly, lest she think—well, who knows?—“It was an accident. At work. I’m fine.”
It was probably long past time for Ruben to take off the bandage. See what was going on. But he was frankly afraid of whatever horror show was happening underneath. So he had been showering with one hand held out of the stream of the water, changing clothes carefully so as to not disturb the bulge of casing.
Ruben said he was fine again and glanced at Evie, then looked away, awestruck. It wasn’t just the stage lights, the tight jeans and the camisole and the costume wings. She was hot. This was a fact. She had grown up to be very hot.
Reading his mind, Evie intercepted the compliment and reversed it. “It’s good to see you,” she said. “You look really good.”
Ruben winced. He was not interested in pretending that he looked good, even to the extent of acknowledging the kind words. He reached up, brushed a knuckle against his stupid, messed-up ear. He looked down at his wounded hand. There were flecks of carrot skin under his thumbnails. His palms were stained the melancholy purple of beet juice.
“Thanks,” he murmured at last.
Other people filtered into the room, fussing with their phones or talking in soft voices, as if, after the loudness of the stage, the balance of the universe required a library hush in the dressing room. Evie’s lanky bass player settled down on a couch, still wearing his instrument, and arranged a beer bottle between his feet. There was a pair of other friends, in the dim corner by the rear door,
both of them fashionably gender fluid, short hair and flat chests, delicate eyes and cheekbones.
Ruben of course had never been anywhere like this, not even close. Evie Keener was not quite a rock star, not exactly, but she was a certified indie darling, her star ascendant. Her first album had been released in the fall, self-titled and with an enigmatic sidelong portrait on the cover, and he had started to see her picture around. Online, mostly, but also in a short Los Angeles magazine profile and once, to his astonishment, on a row of posters along a Western Avenue construction site, a series of Evies plastered on the street-level scaffolding. The posters reproduced the art from the album cover: Evie Keener in profile, her hair dyed platinum white and slicked to her scalp, wearing the diaphanous angel wings that were one of her trademarks. Her eyes tilted upward, as if looking for solace or praying for rain. Ruben as he drove past had felt a distant swell of pride at Evie’s rise. Like one might feel for the astronauts, looking into the darkness of space, knowing they’re up there somewhere.
Now here he was, right next to her in the backstage dressing room, a room lined with scuffed and stickered mirrors, with posters from old shows, with pen-scratch graffiti and the smudged remnants of cigarettes stubbed out on the walls. The room was close and dark, lit by multicolored coils of Christmas lights and a single humming overhead bulb. The air had the salty-sweet tang of BO and beer and marijuana smoke.
“I was onstage when it happened. I checked the time later, when I found out.” Evie had turned to herself in the mirror and was scouring the caked layers of stage makeup from her cheeks, clouds of glittered mascara from her eyelids. “There I was, the very moment he’s—he’s in this crisis. He’s doing this horrible thing. I get offstage and I’ve got a call from my dad’s friend, that this had—that he’d done this.”
“You couldn’t have known,” said Ruben, and Evie hissed at herself in the mirror. She scrubbed brutally at her face with a balled-up cloth, watching the pink of her flesh glowing where it emerged, grimacing at the pain.
“Still. Big shot. Fucking Evie the Magnificent. Oblivious.”
“That was an amazing show,” murmured the bass player, from the sofa, entirely missing her point. “It was wild. Remember?”
“Jesus, Bernie,” she said to the bassist, giving him a quick look.
“What? No. It was. You forgot your wings, and you were wearing that cape thing and it was like, swirling, kind of? The crowd was bananas. It was like—yeah. It was awesome.”
“Literally the opposite of what I’m saying, Bernie. But thank you.”
Bernie went silent and looked down, filled the embarrassed silence with a series of Chili Peppers–style slap-pop fills, watching his hands do their thing.
He’s in love with her, thought Ruben. Well, of course he is.
“It was the same thing, with Wesley. When Wesley happened. Me in my own world. Did I ever tell you that?”
“You did, yeah.” He remembered. He had been thinking about it. “You were drawing a horse.”
“I was drawing a stupid horse.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, and tears slipped out, one from each eye. Ruben reached out, very carefully, to touch her leg reassuringly, but just as he was about to, her eyes opened, and he withdrew his hand.
“Fucking Ruben,” she said fondly. “Ruben Shenk.”
He smiled. “I really just wanted to see if you were OK.”
Evie’s smile was stark and sad. Her makeup was streaked around her eyes where she had wiped it away.
“Oh sure,” she said. “I’m great. Why do you ask?”
Then she laughed, and he laughed too, and they were kids again, just for a moment. Time punched through, past to present. An old circuit lit back up.
“You heard about this mess from your dad, I’m guessing?” Evie said.
“Yeah,” said Ruben stiffly. “He actually wanted me to help—he thought I could, but…”
Ruben couldn’t bear to get into it, not with Evie. How Jay had thought he was a detective. How he was, in fact, a line cook at what wasn’t even a real restaurant. The awkwardness of rehashing it all would be too much to bear. Ruben took his glasses off, squinted at the floor. He was aware of the others in the room, studying him in silence. The bass player and the supercool friends and Evie herself. And who the fuck was he? An outsider. In a rock club, backstage, the glamorous squalor of it, the low cloud of pot smoke in the middle of the night.
He felt a lurching need to change the subject.
“And how is Wesley? He’s the same?”
Evie shrugged. “The same. Absolutely the same.”
She held out one palm and walked two fingers of the other hand along it. Ruben looked away and saw Bernie staring at them now, experiencing some kind of sadness of his own.
“And what about your mom?”
Evie made a quick, sour face, as if unhappy even to be reminded of her mom’s existence. “She’s OK, I guess. She’s—I mean, she’s nuts, frankly. Still. She’ll call doctors, new doctors. She still has it in her head that some kind of miracle cure will come through. Lately it’s some crazy French dude, some electromagnetic thing.”
“Yeah, I saw that.”
“What? Where?”
“In an article about you. In the—I forget where it was.”
Ruben blushed, bright red. He hadn’t told her he’d been reading her press. Evie had mentioned it to an interviewer, about her mother, about Wes, on some rock-and-roll website.
“Right. Basically, she read this study, in some European medical journal, and cold-called the author and tried to get him to come and do this electric exorcism or whatever it is. The problem is, her French is pretty shaky, plus when she’s manic like that she forgets about how time works. So my dad will find her at 2 a.m., having these, like, insane conversations…”
“Oy,” said Ruben.
“Exactly.” Evie’s laugh again, a short little joyful sparkle. “But then most of the time, she’s the other way.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Well.” Evie smiled bitterly. “They don’t call it manic-depression because you’re manic all the time.”
“Ah,” said Ruben. “Got it.”
“Anyway,” said Evie. “It’s amazing to see you. Under any circumstance.”
She stood up, yawned, and stretched, and the gesture rippled through the room like an unspoken announcement: time to go. The hip friends moved toward the door. Bernie slid out from under the bass strap, laid the instrument into the velvet coffin of its case.
But Ruben just sat there. Something had struck him, and he blinked slowly in the dimness of the Christmas lights.
“Hey, Evie?”
“Yeah?”
“What about your father?”
Evie had been gathering herself, tossing her makeup bag and the folded-up lace wings into a slouchy backpack. Now she stopped. “What about him?”
“Is he also—like you said about your mom, about Beth. Is he—like—crazy? At all?”
Evie set the backpack down on the vanity table. Ruben slipped his glasses back onto his nose.
“No.” She paused. “Although—I mean, no, he’s not.”
“You kind of hesitated, though.”
“Yeah.”
She hesitated again. Ruben hunched forward on the stool, his head tilted, feeling curiously alert. “Evie?”
“Well, you know it was ten years in November. November twelfth of last year. Did you know that?”
“No, I guess I didn’t. Right.” He did the math in his head, 2008 to 2018. Ten years since Wesley. Since the accident, the surgery. Ten years of Wesley walking.
“My mom wanted to do something, with the four of us. I met them out in the desert and we had a—I don’t know. A commemoration, I guess. We talked about Wesley. I played a song. He walked around. It wasn’t a party. We didn’t like tie balloons to him or anything.”
Bernie, still hanging around, feet up on his bass case, scowled at this joke.
“But anyway
, my dad got super upset.”
“Upset?”
“Yeah. It was weird, man. He would just not stop crying. Like—inconsolable. My boy, my son, oh God oh God. I remember it because it was pretty frightening. I’ve never really heard him cry like that before.”
Ruben pictured the scene. Massive Richard on his knees like a felled tree. Poor cracked Beth trying to comfort him. Evie, guitar still strapped on, standing uncertainly. Wesley walking. Wearing balloons.
“But that was it,” Evie concluded. “By morning he was fine.”
“As far as you know.”
“What?”
Ruben found that he had stood up. He stood all day, at work, and he was most comfortable standing. He clenched his hands behind his back, bowed his head slightly forward.
“You don’t know for certain that that was the extent of it. This breakdown he had.”
“No, I—” Evie considered Ruben carefully. “I do not.”
“It could have been only the beginning. Of a more serious event, a—a—” He raised one hand, like an actor, conjuring words. “A mental and emotional upheaval. A decade of suppressed grief and anger exploding out of him.”
The Quiet Boy Page 10