“I don’t think I’m turning into anything,” she said. “I’m just watching this, you know?”
“I’m sorry, kitten. And I interrupted. Why don’t we—Well, I guess we can’t wind it back.” He meant the movie.
Eyes Wide Shut might ordinarily have been depressing, since it was about sex. But the jeweled mask on the pillow: that was so genius. It was totally totally Richard. Though let’s be fair: totally totally her too. A suspicion made itself known in the upper left front of her mind that if she wasn’t high she would think it was heavy-handed.
When she saw her father had fallen asleep, with the plastic glass of ice cubes on his—whatever you called it between chest and stomach—she reached for the remote and sneaked the volume down, got up and turned off his light, then lifted the glass away.
The phone rang. As Paige brought it to her chin, she had time to see her father raise his head, time to hear him say “What’s—” and time to understand that it must be Abigail.
“Hello?” She said it deeper and softer than her real voice, her tongue up and back to roll the ls.
“Who is this?” Abigail said.
“Well, who is this?” Paige said, in the same happy-birthday-Mr.-President voice.
“Who is it?” her father said.
“They hung up,” Paige said.
On the screen, people were silently interrogating silent Tom Hanks. Tom Cruise, rather.
The phone rang again. Paige picked it up and said, in the same voice, “Hello?”
“Who the hell keeps calling?” Her father coughed and rolled on his side, his back to her.
She pinched the little tab on the phone plug and pulled out the cord, the last thing linking them to earth, and snapped off the remote. Let him sleep. She would be their sentinel tonight, her eyes drilling into the dark.
A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me
The name Paul Thompson won’t mean any more to you than mine would, but if you’d been around the bluegrass scene in New York some thirty years ago, you would’ve heard the stories. Jimmy Martin had wanted to make him a Sunny Mountain Boy, but he’d refused to cut his hair. He’d turned Kenny Baker on to pot at Bean Blossom and played a show with Tony Trischka while tripping on acid. Easy to believe such bullshit back then. The first time I actually saw him he was onstage, wearing a full-length plaster cast on his—give me a second to visualize this—on his left leg, a crutch in each armpit, playing mandolin with only his forearms moving; someone had Magic-Markered the bottom of the cast to look like an elephantine tooled-leather cowboy boot. This was at an outdoor contest in Roxbury, Connecticut, in 1977, the summer I turned eighteen. The band I’d come with had finished its two numbers, and we were behind the stage putting instruments back in cases when Paul kicked off “Rawhide.” I heard our mandolin player say, “Okay, we’re fucked.”
His band—older longhairs, except the fiddle player, a scary guy with a Marine buzz cut—won first prize, as they had the year before. But we placed second, and he lurched over to me on his crutches and said he’d liked how I’d sung “Over in the Gloryland.” It was Paul Thompson saying this. I suppose I was a good singer for a kid just out of high school; I thought of Christian songs simply as genre pieces in those days, but I had the accent down. I said, “Thanks, man,” and refrained from embarrassing myself by complimenting him back. We ended up singing a few songs together out by the cars—I remember him braced up against somebody’s fender—and I think it surprised him that I knew so much Louvin Brothers stuff: “Too Late,” “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow,” “Are You Afraid to Die?” I let him sing Ira’s tenor parts; now that he’d stopped smoking, he said, he could get up there in the real keys. He was taller than me, and his cheekbones made him look like a hard-luck refugee in a Dust Bowl photograph; he had white hairs in his sideburns, though he must only have been in his thirties. He told me he’d broken the leg playing squash; naturally, I thought it was a joke.
We’d both come up from the city that afternoon, me in a van with my banjo player and his wife and kids, Paul driven by his girlfriend. He asked me how I was getting back and could I drive stick. The girlfriend was pissed at him, he said, and had gone off on the back of somebody’s motorcycle, and now he was up here in East Buttfuck, Connecticut, with no idea how to get home. His car, an old TR6, had so much clutter behind the seats we had to tie my guitar to the luggage rack with bungee cords; all the way back to New York he played the Stanley Brothers on ninety-minute cassettes he’d dubbed from his LP collection. We didn’t talk much—I had to wake him up to ask directions once we hit the West Side Highway—but I did note that he said mandolin, not mandolin, and I’ve taken care to say mandolin ever since.
He lived in a big old building on West End around Eighty-Sixth; because it was Saturday night I had no trouble finding a space on his block. He said he’d figure out what to do with the car on Monday. Did I want to come up, have a few more tunes, smoke some dope? He hadn’t given that up. But it was late to be taking my guitar on the subway, and I already had enough of a Paul Thompson story to tell.
—
Most of us were just weekend pickers, and only little by little did you learn about other people’s real lives. Our banjo player taught calculus at Brooklyn College; the fiddler in Paul’s band (the one native southerner I ever ran across in New York) managed a fuel-oil business in Bay Ridge; another guy you saw around, good dobro player, was a public defender. I was working in a bookstore that summer before starting NYU, where I planned to major in English. And Paul Thompson turned out to be a science writer at U.S. News & World Report. One day I saw him in the subway at Rockefeller Center, and I had to think a minute to remember where I knew him from: he was wearing a blue oxford shirt and a seersucker blazer, with jeans and cowboy boots. Somebody told me he’d published a novel when he was in his twenties, which you could still find at the Strand.
A couple of years later, Paul brought me into his band when their lead singer moved to California, and we also played some coffeehouses as a duet, calling ourselves the Twofer Brothers. I went to the University of Connecticut for graduate school but drove down to the city a couple of times a month, and every so often Paul would put the band back together for some party where they’d pile hay bales around the room. After these gigs we’d go up to his place, get high and listen to music, or drink and talk books. He told me he loved “Jimmy Hank,” and gave me a copy of The Ambassadors from his collection of pristine old Signet paperbacks; it had a price of fifty cents. By then I’d decided to specialize in the nineteenth century, and I resented Jimmy Hank for his review of Our Mutual Friend—“poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion.” I’ve still got that book: the cover illustration shows a top-hatted gent seen from behind in a café chair, with wineglass and cane. I suppose it’ll be on my shelves, still unread, when I die.
While I was finishing my dissertation, I got married to the first woman I’d ever lasted with for more than a month. Diane, I might as well admit, was my student when I was a TA, and why bother trying to extenuate it, all these years later, by telling you that we started sleeping together only after the semester was over? Or that in our History of Us conversations, we could never decide who’d made the first move? She’d go to festivals and parties with me to be the cool girlfriend with the cutoff jeans, and we promised each other that once we got out of married-student housing we’d live in the country somewhere, in a house full of books, no TV, and raise our own food.