All husbands and wives should love each other so, I think.
I count my blessings each morning, Abby, and pray quietly in the night, and leave this as a record, in case I’ve been wrong.
For now, however, I’ll believe in love, and check my hands for cuts each night before bed—my skin is so thin, now—and cover any open wounds with two band-aids in the shape of a cross, so as not to excite her senses any more than my nearness already may be doing.
I mean, there’s a difference in loving your wife and suicide, right?
Please share this with your readers, if you think it suitable. As for me, I’m off to nap now, in preparation of night, and in hope of morning, always.
—‘Old Meat,’ Eugene, OR
NEARER TO THEE
This is how it ends.
A concert in the park at the end of July, so the town can recycle some of its red white and blue decorations before the real heat of August arrives. Twenty years ago, the concert was the end of Founders’ Day. It used to start with a parade at ten in the morning, followed with a barbecue and street games. But now the town’s growing old and it’s just the concert at dusk, a group of orchestral musicians culled from the classifieds of three cities less than a day’s drive away, so there’ll be no hotel expenses involved. It’s their first time to play together. They’re all supposed to have experience, though. Millicent from the events committee vetted them, guarantees they’re quality, and a bargain to boot.
As for the town, the three cities half a day away, even, they’re all as deep inland as possible, the heart of the heart of the country, as it were.
As for Dex, dragged to the park by his mother, he’s thirty-four, on the rebound from his second real shot at life on his own. His long-term plans before he got evicted, cited, and finally arrested had been to make a circuit of all the trivia-based game shows, dominate them, and then sign endorsement deals for board games, return for the occasional championship tournament. It’s a plan he came up with when he was fourteen, and it was more than enough to carry him through high school, to make him a local celebrity—he even won at bingo once, to everyone’s consternation—but lately, pushing his mother’s basket for her at the grocery store, nodding at the cartoon cereal he still prefers when possible, his mother’s friends purse their lips at his presence;
their
sons, while not lawyers or doctors, are nevertheless stable, and already providing grandchildren.
Dex smiles, seeing all the old biddies on their blankets at the park, now. What he could do, he knows, is ask after his old classmates, as if he just wants to get a drink, catch up, relive a few old times. But it wouldn’t be because he wanted to see any of them, really. It would be to watch their mothers’ faces as they tried to come up with excuses to keep Dex from possibly infecting their children with his failure. His—though nobody knows this but him—
apparent
failure. His temporary setback.
What Dex has learned, though, learned the hard way, is that in game show contestant pools, the sole criterion isn’t a well-indexed store of facts. No, you also need, at least in Dex’s case, perhaps some legitimate grey in your hair. Otherwise the studio audience will suspect that you’re a plant, a shill, working for the production company, keeping the winnings in-house. Nobody only thirty-four could have access to
that
wealth of data, could they? That wit.
But it’s happening already now, the grey.
Just from being back in this town, Dex thinks. Another week here and he’ll be a senior citizen too.
Until the next audition season, though, it’s here or nowhere, he knows.
And, while he’s here, may as well take in the sights, right? Re-experience the social milieu, for whatever it’s worth. Remind himself why he needs to catalogue more facts, and more on top of that.
And who knows, there may even be some trivia squirreled away in the least likely place. Old people know stuff, after all, even if they don’t know they know it. When did automobile windshields go from two-pane to single? What side of the presidential nominees do potential first ladies tend to stand on? How much currency is supposed to be in circulation in any ten-year period?
Not that Dex doesn’t already have all this on tap, but talking about it with people who have been there will dredge up related facts—the trivia not written down in books. In addition, their withered faces will, if they humor him enough, serve as his mnemonic device. Never mind that it’ll show them he’s still got it. Show his mother, at least, so maybe she won’t have to bring up the awkward issue of rent again over dinner.
This make-do orchestra, however—Dex has been listening to them tune their instruments and make introductions among themselves, run their hands over their pomaded hair and study the sky.
He’s not expecting much.
Most of them, he’s pretty sure, are younger than him, even. In this crowd, that means they’re absolute children, and probably don’t even have a glimmer of the history of whatever old standards the events committee’s foisted on them this year. The polkas, the anthems, the Sousa.
For all intents and purposes, they may as well be a player piano, each of them a single pneumatic striker, activated by a notched roll.
Player piano. First exhibited 1876 by John McTammanny, though brought into production two years later by the Aeolian company. The source of many and grievous anachronisms in the bar scenes of scores of westerns.
Dex smiles, hides it with his hand like he’s learned to do.
“Dexter?” his mother says, pulling his arm down, because he shouldn’t hide his pretty face like that.
“Nothing, Mom,” Dex says, and peels his eyes away from the stage, scans the crowd a bit.
Founders’ Day
, he wants to ask each of them.
Can you name any of the founders? The year, even?
Yet they each attend, with their blankets and their strollers and their buckets of food. Their troughs.
Again, Dex has to hide his mouth.
Best to sit down, appear docile. Not inflict himself on their evening.
He doesn’t want to start paying rent, after all.
Still two months until the new season starts culling contestants. Two more months of this.
“Dear?” Dex’s mother says, as if from far away, and Dex tunes in to the plastic cup of wine she’s offering across the quilted expanse of their blanket. It’s her new thing, treating him like an adult.
Dex takes the cup, salutes her, and chokes a swallow of it down, sets the cup on the grass by the blanket, where it can spill if it needs to. Alcohol dulls the mind. Dex might miss something, never know he missed it.
“Do you remember the time—?” his mother starts in, and the story she goes on with is about Dex being at this same concert at nine, or eleven, or twelve, or all of the other years. It was always the only time of the year that the trophies given out—for throwing cow chips, for catching eggs, for eating jalapeños, for spitting pumpkin seeds—weren’t given out to him. Growing up, the park was no academic arena, no student assembly.
“Yeah, yes already,” Dex says, rubbing the spot above his eyebrow he knows he shouldn’t, as it makes him look unsure of his next answer. To deflect, he holds that hand up to his mom, raises the night’s program close to his face, as if there’s not enough light to read. As if he’s really studying this, can’t be bothered with remembering when he was nine, thanks.
His mother keeps her face exactly the same—he doesn’t have to look to know—and tilts the plane of her attention away, to the
marvelous
band, and whatever magic they’re going to be introducing shortly.
Let the willing believe, Dex says to himself.
It sounds better in its native French.
Idioms of the world for four hundred, please
.
The violinist pulls his bow across the strings, effectively cutting the evening in two: the time before the band was making noise and the time after. The sound straightens Dex’s back, grinds his teeth together.
He snaps the program down, studies this violinist and his string accompaniment, and decides he might have cause to
really
read the program now, thank you.
‘Violinist, J. Law.’
Johnny Law, ha.
You caught me, Sheriff. Red-handed, a term most likely originating in Scotland—
Macbeth
’s setting, yes? anyone?—and referring to murderers, blood still on their hands.
Dex doesn’t even cover his mouth this time, just watches the band ascend to their seats, narrows his eyes as the expectant silence washes across the crowd.
At least their suits match, more or less.
Something to look into, actually—Founder’s Day doesn’t have be a total wash, anyway. Do orchestras tend to wear tuxedo variants, or suits? History of? Reason for?
Dex writes it all down in his head, nods with Johnny Law’s shiny black shoe, already keeping time, like he can’t help it.
And then, like every year: Millicent Brown.
“Healthy as a horse, that one,” Dex’s mother whispers, and Dex remembers: Mrs. Brown’s survived three husbands and two bouts of cancer so far. A hero for the geriatric set. What they all aspire to.
Dex shakes his head in disgust.
Millicent
. Its diminutive being . . . what? Mildred? No.
Another note to scratch down in his head.
Names no longer in circulation, shortened forms
.
Unlikely, but you never know.
The microphone screeches in anticipation of Millicent Brown’s voice, and she draws back, her hand to her throat, aghast, insulted by this technology. From the front row a twenty-something grandkid—beholden to the events committee in some way, presumably—rises to the occasion, steps up, grips the microphone to adjust the gain but jumps back. It’s hot, electric, would have fried an old bat like Millicent.
Excuse me, Dex says inside: horse. An old
horse
like Millicent.
“Lucky,” Dex’s mother says, in her best thee-not-me voice.
Dex shrugs, the microphone’s swapped, and—screw it: Dex takes another drink of his unspilled wine, feels his mother watching him, stares straight ahead instead of acknowledging her approval.
“Tonight, we’re lucky to have the . . . the”—Millicent stumbles, reading from a slip of paper—“Winston Family Orchestra, formed just now, as I understand, and possibly breaking up after tonight’s show as well. Lucky for us then. A historic performance to be sure.”
Genial laughter from the crowd. Understanding laughter.
Dex has to close and open his eyes three deliberate times to swallow this. They’re making fun of their own inability to secure a real group of musicians. Like they’re all in on the joke, and think it’s a funny joke, and not about themselves at all.
The band’s even grinning, trying not to.
Dexter drinks down the rest of his wine, scans the program for how long this will last this time. It’ll be a challenge, remembering the duration of each piece—provided they keep to the standard arrangement, of course, or in the neighborhood at least—working up a TRT,
total run-time, thank you, next
.
And it’s then that Dex sees it, as if peripherally. Or, not even sees it so much as
hears
it: Law, Brown.
He huffs air out of his nose: impossible.
It can’t be.
And then it comes to him, the diminutive of Millicent.
“Dexter?” his mother says, her fingertips to his forearm.
Dex shrugs her off, makes her wine splash onto the blanket.
Yes . . . yes. But it can’t be. Can it?
Dex is smiling now like the final round.
Law,
J.
Law,
John
Law, often called ‘Jock,’ at least in the early part of the century. Ten years before . . . what? King Tut’s Tomb? The Lincoln Memorial?
Ulysses
,
Nosferatu
, the last Barbary Lion? Bea Arthur, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.?
Listed below him like providence, somebody Preston, a Wesley something or another, a Henry, a Ronald Marie—two names at once!—and even a Cornelius. And that’s the final blow, as far as Dex is concerned: Cornelius.
“Mom,” Dex says.
She hears it in his voice, stops pushing her now-red napkin into the blanket. Turns to him like he
is
nine years old again.
“They—they can’t,” Dex says then, flinging his hand to the stage, at the orchestra about to launch into the event committee’s first song. “It would be—it would be . . . ”
“Shhh, honey,” Dex’s mother says, patting his wrist now, “they’re just children, now. Milly says they’re actually quite good.”
Milly
, no.
But close.
This is really and truly and actually happening.
“Mom,” he says, not so much whispering anymore at all, so that now people—neighbors, ex-teachers—are swiveling on their blankets, taking notice, “Mom, listen. These, this band, they’re, the names,
look
.”
She does, they all do, and then settle their bovine eyes back on Dex.
He looks at them with disbelief, the first chords of the initial song already happening all around them,
to
them.
“Nineteen twelve,” Dex pleads, and his old math teacher shrugs, and now Dex’s mom is actually pulling him by the wrist.
Dex rips his arm away this time, stands from the blankets, and the way his mother gasps he knows she doesn’t want another episode. But this can’t be allowed to pass unacknowledged, either. Dex simply cannot
not
say it, the final answer to tonight’s blaring question: “
Titanic
.”
Instead of gasps from everyone now, and perhaps applause, followed by fear, which they should be feeling, four of the nine people listening to Dex turn away, to the stage, to the song coming together.
No need to embarrass poor Charlotte any more than she already is. Dex knows that’s what they’re thinking.
“
No!”
he yells, his hands fists by his pockets. “Brown,
Molly
Brown, the unsinkable, get it? Jock Law, violinist, Teddy Ronald, pianist, Percy
Cornelius
, freaking cello! Don’t you see it? What this means?”