The Wishbones

by Tom Perrotta

  “You know what?” she said. “I bet Leonard Nimoy is gay.”

  “Really?”

  “Who knows?” She held her left hand in front of her face, as if trying to imagine the ring onto her finger. “After a few years in a spaceship, we'd probably all start rethinking our options.”

  Dave Couldn't remember the last time they'd spent an afternoon like this—a picnic on a blanket in the shade by a lake, Julie stretched out beside him, eyes closed, maybe sleeping, maybe not, nothing unpleasant hanging over their heads, no fights or disappointments or lurking grievances. It almost seemed to him that they'd managed to return to an earlier time in their relationship, as if they themselves had been rejuvenated.

  He sat up on the blanket and looked around. Over in the parking area, shirtless teenage boys were waxing muscle cars while girls in tight jeans looked on, smoking with the squinty-eyed concentration of beginners. In a grassy clearing nearby, three teenage boys with flannel shirts tied around their waists were showing off with a Frisbee, catching it between their legs and behind their backs, popping it in the air over and over again with one finger. On a picnic table to their right, a couple of high-school kids were making out as though their faces had been stuck together with Krazy Glue, and they were trying every trick they could think of to pull them apart. In the lake, a black lab with a blue bandana collar swam regally toward shore, a fat stick jutting from its mouth. Somewhere across the water, “Sugar Magnolia” was blaring from a radio.

  It really could have been 1979, he thought, except that he and Julie would have been the teenagers with adhesive faces rather than the adults who had just spent more than they could afford on an engagement ring. There were days when a realization like that would have struck him with sadness, days when he ached to be sixteen again, but today wasn't one of them. Today he felt richer for possessing a past, maybe even a little wiser. They had had their moment; they hadn't let it pass. That was the most anyone could say.

  He looked down at her, the halo of dark outspread hair fanned out around her peaceful face. She wasn't seventeen anymore, but she was still beautiful. He thought about Phil Hart and his wife, the fact that they'd managed to stick it out for more than a half century. Did he look at her on the morning of his death and think, Well, she's not sixty-five anymore, but she's still beautiful? Was that a way it could happen?

  “Heads up, dude!”

  Dave turned toward the voice, just in time to see an orange Frisbee slicing toward his face. Reacting with the grace born of self-preservation, he ducked out of the way while simultaneously reaching up with his right hand to snag the errant disc. In a surprisingly fluid motion, he rose to his feet and zipped the Frisbee back to the long-haired Chinese kid who had yelled out the warning, not with the cumbersome cross-body discus hurl of the neophyte, but with the precise, economical flick of the wrist he had perfected during countless lazy spring days like this when he was flunking out of college.

  Acknowledging Dave's membership in the elite, wrist-flicking fraternity, the kid jumped up and caught the Frisbee between his outscissored legs, then fired it off to one of his friends before his feet even touched the ground.

  “Thanks, dude.”

  “No problem,” said Dave. He felt deeply pleased, as though he'd just proven something important to himself and the world.

  Julie was stirring when he sat back down. She yawned and opened her eyes, blinking a few times to readjust to the brightness of the day. Then she rolled easily onto her side and smiled at him.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  She poked a finger into his thigh. “You know what I want to do?”

  “What?”

  She pushed herself up from the ground into sitting position and glanced around to make sure no one was within listening range.

  “I want to go to a motel.”

  “Right now?”

  She nodded slowly, biting her bottom lip, her face flushed with color.

  “This very minute,” she said.

  Dave's blood began to celebrate; a giddy torrent of ideas flooded his brain. Aside from a few hurried, mostly clothed interludes on the rec room couch, they hadn't really made love in well over a month, not since her parents’ ill-fated jaunt to Atlantic City. He wanted to watch her undress slowly, one article of clothing at a time. He wanted to reacquaint himself with her body.

  “It's quarter to three,” he said, glancing quickly at his watch. “That gives us almost an hour and a half.”

  Her expression changed. Her teeth let go of her lip.

  “Shit,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You have a wedding.” She made it sound like an awful thing —a disease, something to be ashamed of.

  “I'm sure I told you.”

  “I forgot. We were having such a nice day, I guess I pushed it out of my mind.”

  “An hour and a half is enough. We've done it in a lot less time than that.”

  “I'm sick of hurrying.” To illustrate this point, she reached up with both hands and gathered her loose hair into a ponytail with exquisite, painstaking care. “I just want to have a nice quiet Saturday alone with you for once.”

  “Sorry. I'm not the one who schedules the gigs.”

  She grabbed her shoes from the corner of the blanket and slipped them on her feet. Just like that, he realized, their picnic had been canceled. She pulled the laces tight and stared at him.

  “How much longer do you plan on doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “The Wishbones.”

  Dave felt shell-shocked. On the blanket, a black ant was struggling with an enormous bread crumb, bigger than its own head. The ant kept lifting it, staggering forward, dropping it, then lifting it again.

  “Are you asking me to quit the band?”

  Her voice softened. “Haven't you thought about it?”

  “It never even occurred to me.”

  “Well, I don't feel like spending the rest of my life alone on Saturday night while my husband's out having a good time.”

  “It's not a good time,” he said, still reeling from the suddenness of her attack. “It's a job. A good one. I wouldn't be making a living without it.”

  “You're not planning on being a courier for the rest of your life, are you?”

  “No,” he said. “But it's not like I've got lots of other prospects at the moment.”

  “You should start thinking about it. I'd like to start a family in the next couple of years.”

  “Me, too. What does that have to do with the band?”

  She stood up and grabbed two corners of the blanket. “Come on. Help me fold this.”

  Obediently, Dave rose to his feet, still trying to figure out how they'd moved from talking about checking into a motel to talking about him quitting the band.

  “Heads up!”

  This time Dave was ready. He turned and poised himself for the catch, waiting with his hands up as the Frisbee drifted toward him at a dreamy velocity, a vibrating curve of neon. At the very last second, though, it took a freak hop, jumping right over his hands and striking him smack in the middle of his forehead, much harder than he'd expected, more like a dinner plate than a flimsy piece of molded plastic. Fireworks of pain exploded on the inside of his eyelids.

  “Sorry, dude,” the kid called out.

  “No problem.”

  Smiling through his discomfort, Dave bent down and picked up the Frisbee. He flicked his wrist to return it, but something slipped. It wobbled feebly through the air and died like a duck at the kid's feet. He turned sheepishly to Julie, rubbing at the sore spot between his eyebrows.

  “I guess I'm a bit rusty.”

  She ignored the comment, frowning pointedly at the limp blanket. Dave grabbed the two corners on his end and they pulled it taut between them, flapping it up and down to clean it off. He thought about the ant with the bread crumb, all that hard work gone to waste.

  “I just want a normal life,” she said, almost plead
ing with him. “Is that too much to ask?”

  A RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

  “She what?” Buzzy slurped at the foam erupting like lava from the top of his can. “What did you tell her?”

  “Nothing. I was in a state of shock.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I mean, we're just sitting there, having this great afternoon, and Bam!”

  Dave was indignant. She had no right to ask him to quit the band. Playing music wasn't just some stupid sideline; it was what he did with his life. If he'd been a doctor, she wouldn't have asked him to quit performing surgery. She wouldn't have asked a cop to turn in his badge. It signified a lack of respect, not only for his chosen profession, but for him—her future husband—as an individual.

  “What was her reasoning?” Buzzy had his head thrown back like Popeye, mouth wide open to receive the last precious drops of Meister Bräu dribbling out of his upended can. He could drain a beer faster than anyone Dave had ever known.

  “Saturday night. She doesn't want to be stuck home alone while I'm out playing a gig.”

  “It's a problem,” said Buzzy. “Just ask Stan.”

  “What am I supposed to do? People don't get married on Tuesday.”

  Buzzy dropped his can on the floor and produced a full one from the side pocket of his tuxedo jacket. He popped the top and vacuumed off the foam with fishily puckered lips.

  “You wanna know the solution?”

  “What?”

  “Kids.”

  “Please,” said Dave. “Just getting married is scary enough. Don't start tossing kids into the mix.”

  “I'm serious,” Buzzy insisted. “Once you got kids, having fun on Saturday night isn't even an option. The whole argument is moot.”

  “Kids are a long ways off,” Dave assured him. “A vague rumor from a distant galaxy.”

  Buzzy shrugged. “It worked for us. Before Jo Ann got pregnant, she was into that whole death metal thing—the spike bracelets, the white makeup, the whole nine yards. Her idea of a balanced meal was a Diet Coke to wash down her speed. Now she's the only mother in the PTA who can name all the guys in Anthrax.”

  Dave had only met JoAnn once, but she'd made an impression. She was a skinny, tired-looking woman with stringy, dishwater blond hair and pants so tight—they were some sort of spandex/denim blend that zipped up in the back—you had to worry about her circulation. No matter what anyone said, her expression remained fixed somewhere between boredom and indifference. Dave didn't think she was in danger of being elected president of the PTA anytime soon.

  “Did she ever bug you about quitting the band?” he asked.

  Buzzy shook his head. “Only thing like that, she made me sell my bike.”

  “Bicycle bike? Or motorcycle?”

  “Motor,” Buzzy replied, pausing mid-chug to see if Dave was putting him on. “I had me a beautiful Harley.”

  “I didn't know that.”

  “Oh yeah. Jo loved to ride it too. We had matching helmets and everything. Used to ride all over the place with this club I was in, stoned out of our minds. Amazing I'm even here to tell about it.”

  “So what happened?”

  “This guy we knew wiped out in a rainstorm one night. Billy Farell. He was in a coma for three months.”

  “He came out?”

  “Yeah. Seems okay too. He was a little off to begin with, so you can't really tell the difference. After that, though, Jo said she'd leave me if I didn't get rid of the bike.”

  “You miss it?”

  Buzzy polished off the second beer and deposited the empty on the floor, which Dave used as a storage area for cassettes and their boxes, separate entities he kept meaning to reunite. He wanted to ask Buzzy to stop treating his car like a garbage can, but didn't want to come across as one of those neat freaks who act like their vehicle is some sort of sacred space, not to be defiled by evidence of human habitation, burger wrappers or the odd plastic fork.

  “I dream about it,” Buzzy said. “Every night. Before I fall asleep.”

  Dave's car was stopped at a red light. Buzzy grabbed a pair of imaginary handlebars and pulled back on the throttle. Except for the tuxedo, he looked a little like Dennis Hopper. The expression on his face was pure ecstasy, sexual transport.

  “Every night,” he repeated, as Dave shifted into first and eased up on the clutch of his Metro. “Nothing else even comes close.”

  The Westview Manor was an enormous, windowless banquet complex on Route 22 that could—and often did—accommodate as many as four different receptions at the same time. Despite the congested feel of the place and the less-than-soundproof dividers that separated bands in adjoining rooms, the Wishbones considered it a decent venue. Unlike some of the snootier halls in the area, which required musicians to enter through the kitchen and generally went out of their way to make them feel like gate-crashers, the Westview treated “the entertainment” with a certain amount of respect. The Wishbones could arrive through the front door like normal human beings, relax in a conference room during their breaks, and grab an occasional beer or soda from the bar without feeling like criminals. One way or another, they usually managed to get themselves fed, an occupational perk once taken for granted by wedding musicians, but currently optional-at-best in the general atmosphere of belt-tightening and stinginess that had overtaken the country.

  Dave and Buzzy stopped in the lobby to check the directory. It was a classy touch, removable white letters on a field of black velvet, the kind of thing you might find by the elevator in a building full of doctors.

  “There we are,” said Buzzy. “Lambrusco-DiNardo. Black Forest Room, Second Floor.”

  Except for Artie and a couple of waitresses tucking crown-shaped napkins into the water glasses, the Black Forest Room was empty. An expectant hush hung over the dais, the bar, the stage, the dance floor, the twenty or so round tables draped in starched white cloths, loaded down with plates and baskets of bread and water pitchers and floral centerpieces, the whole shebang ready and waiting. Dave wished he could describe for Julie the subtle thrill he felt entering a room like this in his crisply pressed (thanks, Mom) tuxedo, and walking straight over to the bandstand like he owned it.

  Artie glanced up from the charts he was writing to acknowledge their arrival. Whatever else people might say about him, Artie was on top of things. In his two years with the band, Dave had yet to arrive at a gig before Artie, or even before Artie had singlehandedly managed to set up the entire sound system—amps, PA, monitors, mikes, soundboard—all of which he stored in his garage and transported in his van to avoid screwups. The individual Wishbones were responsible solely for their uniforms and instruments.

  Reverently, Dave lifted his sunburst Les Paul out of its lush, coffinlike case, double-checking to make sure he'd remembered to bring an extra set of strings and half a dozen picks. He plugged into a battery-operated tuning gizmo and tuned up quickly and silently, a vast improvement over the bad old days of loud public tuning. Without turning on his amp, he ran through a few blues scales and jazz progressions to limber up, then unhooked the tooled leather strap Julie had given him for Christmas a couple of years before, and set the Les Paul carefully in its metal tripod stand, stepping back for a moment to admire its classic beauty.

  Without a doubt, it was the most versatile, sweetest-sounding guitar he'd ever owned. The Wishbones played a dizzying variety of music—everything from “Havah Nagilah” to “Louie Louie,” as Artie liked to say—and the Les Paul was the only guitar Dave knew of that could handle the whole range without breaking a sweat. It wouldn't make sense, owning a top-flight instrument like that and not being able to play it loud for an audience. He might as well sell it at a loss and buy some chintzy Hagstrom to plunk in his bedroom like a three-chord teenage amateur.

  He checked his watch. It was five-fifteen, forty-five minutes before cocktail hour. Buzzy had wandered off somewhere and Artie was flirting with one of the waitresses. Dave thought he might head downstairs and give Julie a ca
ll from the pay phone. Their afternoon had ended on a sour note, and it seemed to him they still had some talking to do.

  One of the downstairs weddings was just getting under way. Dave stood at the base of the stairs and watched the guests drift through the lobby, dressed up and smiling, some of them bearing gifts. There were jobs, he thought—dentist, prison guard, clerk at the DMV—that brought you into daily contact with a clientele that was angry, bitter, or scared. It had to take a toll, strain your faith in humanity. But playing in a wedding band exposed you to the other side. It was hard to imagine that the festive crowd in the Westview Manor that Saturday evening had anything to do with the shuffling, muttering malcontents you might see on line at the DMV, though, obviously, there had to be some overlap.

  On the way to the phone, he heard the soft strains of cocktail music and ducked his head into the Birnam Wood Room to see who was providing the entertainment. Instead of a bandstand, there was a card table full of stereo equipment set up at the far end of the dais, flanked by two unreasonably large speaker columns. A banner strung across the edge of the table read:

  ROCKIN’ RANDY PRODUCTIONS

  The DJ Who Comes to Play

  Presiding over the table was Rockin’ Randy himself, a cocky young guy in a sharkskin suit (it was a shade of metallic blue Dave associated with new Toyotas), wearing state-of-the-art square headphones and swaying his head and shoulders to the languid rhythms of Anita Baker. His eyes were closed; his hair looked like it had been marinated in Valvoline. Dave felt irritated and superior at the same time, the way he always did in the presence of DJs. They were a revolting breed, scam artists who'd somehow managed to convince the world that it took talent to remove CDs from a plastic case while simultaneously babbling into a microphone.

  Rockin’ Randy, he thought. Why do I know that name?