He had called her Sunday to see if she would come out. She was still off balance, disoriented; she could not. His voice didn’t sound quite right, but she couldn’t put her finger on why. There was a feeling of distance in it, distance you couldn’t measure in miles. You’re not drinking are you? she asked him. There’d been a pause, as if he’d looked to see was he drinking or not. No, no, he said. I’m not drinking. I thought I might mix up some mortar, lay a few rocks.
A teacher came in and stood watching her. Waiting perhaps for the phone. She hung it up. She wondered how long she had let it ring, but she really didn’t want to know. She didn’t look at her watch. She wondered what she was going to do.
YOUR BUDDY Robert Vandaveer’s going to be at the school, she told Charles. This had been almost exactly a year ago.
Say he is? What in the world for?
He’s supposed to address one of the English classes on creativity. On poetry, the process of converting experience into a poem.
My question remains unanswered, Charles said.
Well, he is a songwriter. A poet. A long time ago he was almost famous, in a fifteen-minute kind of way. The superintendent heard there was a poet living in the wilds of Buffalo River and figured the English class might benefit from hearing him talk and asking him questions.
I have a question of my own, Charles said. How much money is the county pissing away on this?
They’re not paying him, she said.
She had a free period that day, and she thought she might just see this semifamous Vandaveer. When the lecture was over and the students had filed out of the classroom, she was standing in the hallway. She’d stood aside to let them pass, and when Vandaveer went by he nodded to her. She nodded in return, and that should have been that, except she heard herself say: My husband, Charles, told me about meeting you.
He paused and turned to study her. I knew you the moment I saw you, he said.
You what? How could you do that?
Your husband showed me your photograph.
She wondered why Charles was going around showing strange men her picture. She wondered if he’d had a leer on his face to show them what hot,stuff she was.
How did he come to show you my photograph?
It was my fault, Vandaveer said. I led him into it. I just had a feeling he had a photograph I wanted to see. I thought it might be you, and as it turned out I was right.
Then why did you nod and just walk on past me without speaking? She figured to let him know she could play word games as well as he could.
He smiled. Because I was sure you’d speak to me.
Vangie was trying to relate the aging hippie before her to the young man whose photograph was on the back of the album sleeve. A young man with anarchic hair, firebrand eyes, an impatient look of arrogance on his face. Vandaveer looked about fifty, like a man salvaged weatherworn but intact from the ’60s. He had a gray-brown ponytail, and he was wearing an old black sport coat over a white shirt. His jeans were faded, and his shoes were spotted with what looked like dried brick mortar. There seemed little of the revolutionary left in Vandaveer’s face, and his eyes were the most changed feature of alclass="underline" There was an enormous stillness to them. There were depths, blank spaces, burnt landscapes. They seemed to say that they had seen all the world had to show them and there was nothing they could do about it.
I have a recording you made, she said. Some of your own songs. She knew he was going to ask her which songs, and she had the titles ready, even the lines that she had liked best. He didn’t, though.
Do you like music? he asked.
I like it very much.
There’s a thing, a folk music part of the arts and crafts fair. Some pretty good guitar players and songwriters are going to be there. Would you like to go?
She was confused. You mean with you?
That’s what I mean.
Well, you know my husband. Charles. If I have a husband, it follows I’m married.
It was just to listen to music, he said. Bring the boy. He was in the picture, too. Bring Charles, it’s just a family thing. Folks show up from all over, campers full of families.
Charles doesn’t even like music, she said. He hates crowds, too.
Then I wouldn’t bring him. This pretty much consists of crowds listening to music.
I’d have to tell him.
I would imagine so.
It really might be fun. There’s a lot of questions I’d like to ask you about music, anyway.
He had unpocketed a cigarette. He lit it with a thin gold lighter. There was engraving on the side, but she couldn’t read what it said.
You can’t smoke in here.
He didn’t seem to hear. Oh hell, he said. I forgot. I’m sorry I even brought it up. The transmission’s out of my truck, and it might not be ready.
That was another place when that should have been that, but she said: Stephen and I will pick you up if you’ll give me directions.
He told her where the road turned off and which fork to follow to the river. Just drive ’til you run out of road, he said.
When he’d turned to go, she said: I really am happily married.
He looked surprised she’d bring it up. That’s cool, he said. I’ve been there a few times myself.
IF THEY HAD NOT LOST Stephen that night, she would not have gone to bed with him. That was what she told herself later, but she did not believe it. If they had not lost Stephen, they would have lost something else. It was fated, Robert had said, and she believed him. Fated was a word Robert was fond of. Fated and flee. We are fated to flee.
Though before that happened, a year had passed and they had fallen into the habit of going places together. First to the music festival, then to a music store Robert knew about in Nashville that sold hard-to-find records on obscure labels. To art galleries, musty-smelling bookstores. To other places beyond reproach. Once, he took her and Stephen to a Mexican restaurant in Franklin. Stephen was always along, nothing was going to happen with Stephen along. Stephen seemed to have fallen in love with Vandaveer. Robert talked to him the way he might talk with another adult. When he took Stephen fishing, Vangie sipped a Corona and watched but would only let Stephen fish from the riverbank. She would not allow Robert to take him out in the boat.
Of course she knew this was crazy. Each time when the days ended — they ended too fast, like events rushing in fast-forward — she told herself how crazy it was. They were just comfortable together, they had grown too fond of each other. They seemed to fit. Something about him affected her the way medicine might. She thought she affected him the same way, but she didn’t ask. They didn’t talk about it. Maybe comfort was just another kind of medicine. She’d be all right a week or two, and then the need for the comfort would tighten her nerves, tighten his nerves, and one of them would call.
Partly it was the music, but it was not entirely the music. When she pestered him hard enough, he’d laugh and tell stories about people who were just names on record labels, names in the pages of Rolling Stone. Once in the early ’70s he’d been playing the Fifth Peg in Chicago’s Old Town with John Prine and they had gotten drunk and stolen shopping carts from a supermarket parking lot and raced them in the streets, and he told her about getting in a fight with Townes Van Zandt in a Texas honky-tonk so rough the stage was chicken-wired to deflect the beer bottles and Van Zandt had hit him in the corner of the eye with a metal wastebasket. He showed her the scar.
These stories with their names familiar to her did not seem to be told to impress her. The names he dropped were just names, and he did not tell stories that made him look good. They were just things that had happened to him, and in time the most sordid of them became very dear to her.