There was a great misery she was not sharing with him. Doomed or blessed — he couldn’t know — he froze at the mirror until she looked over at him in the reflection and saw him in his own grief. Ross felt through the centuries for all chipper wives having to meet their in-laws. Holy damn, the strain. She was such a little lady, revealed. He smiled at her and she seemed to catch his gratitude instantly. Oops, slam the mirror. Nice there was nothing ugly here. I won’t have a bad day, I won’t. This was the best of it, and later he thanked the highway rushing in front of him for it.
• • •
The place was a converted warehouse rank with college vomit, beer in AstroTurf, a disinfectant thrown contemptuously over it. The spirit of everywhere: spend your money, thanks, fuck you. Chickenyard hippies, already stunned by beer, living for somebody right out of suburban nullity like them, “twisted” on his guitar stroking: “He don’t give a damn.” Couple of them so skinny they looked bent over by the weight of their cocks. Ivy had quit beaming. Since the mirror there had been an honest despair between them.
Newt and his truly miserable band came on, tuning forever as the talentless grim do. Ross was sorry he was so experienced, old. He could look at the face and bald pate of the drummer, comprehending instantly his dope years and pubic sorriness, pushed on till damned near forty, no better on drums than any medical doctor on a given Sunday afternoon with the guys. Then came Bimmer, a snob in overalls, fooling with his microphone like some goon on an airport PA system. Then a short bassman so ugly he had to go public. The sax man could play, but he was like some required afterthought in a dismal riot of geeks. Then there was a skinny man near seven feet tall who just danced, male go-go. What an appalling idea. Then Newt, not contented with the damage he’d done on backup guitar, began singing. He was drunk and fierce, of course. The point seemed to be anger that music was ever invented. It was one of the ugliest episodes Ross had ever witnessed. He smiled weakly at poor Ivy, who was not even tapping her foot. She looked injured.
At the stage, Ross saw the chicken-yard hippies and a couple of their gruesome painted hags, hateful deaf little twats who might have once made the long trip to Birmingham. They loved Newt and egged him on. This was true revolt. Ross wondered why the band had bothered to tune.
He had had dreadful insights too, too often nowadays, waking up in a faraway hotel with his work sitting there, waiting for him to limn another life. The whole race was numb and bad, walking on thin skin over a cesspool. Democracy and Christianity were all wrong: nobody much was worth a shit. And almost everybody was going to the doctor.
“Professional help” for Newt flashed across his mind, but he kicked it away, seeing another long line, hordes, at the mental health clinic, bright-eyed group addicts who couldn’t find better work waiting inside. Ross had known a few. One, a pudgy solipsist from Memphis, had no other point to his life except the fact he had quit cigarettes. A worthless loquacious busybody, he’d never had a day of honest labor in his life. What did he do? He “house sat” for people. But the fellow could talk about “life” all day.
Then things really got mean.
Newt, between sets, red-eyed, hoarse, angrily drunk, drew up a chair ten feet away from Ivy and his father, muttering something and bearing on them like some poleaxed diagnostician. Ross at last made out that Newt was disgusted by his blazer, his shoes, his “rehearsal to be above this place.”
“This place is the whole world, sad Ross-daddy. You won’t even open your eyes. There’s nowhere else to go but here! No gas, no wheels, no—” He almost vomited. Then he walked his chair over to them, still in it, heaving like a cripple. He was right in their faces, sweat all over him.
“Good-looking pair, you two. Did you get an old touch of her, Pops?” He reached around and placed his hand over Ivy’s right breast. “But I tell you. Might as well not try. You can’t make Ivy come, no sir. She ain’t gon come for you. Might as well be humping a rock, Rosser!”
Crazy, mean, unfinished, he laid his head on the table between them. The sweat coming out of his prickly head made Ross almost gag. Then he rose up. His eyes were black, mad. He couldn’t evict the words, seemed to be almost choking.
Ross handed over the endorsed check and stood to leave.
“What are you going to do for work, son?”
“S’all that bitch outside says. Job, job, job.”
“Well, bounced checks, bounced checks, bounced checks is not your sweetest path either.” He hated Newt. An image of Newt, literally booted out the window by an Auburn official, rose up and pleased him.
“Shut up, you old fuck,” said Newt. “Get home to Mama. And remember, remember. .”
“What? Be decent, goddamnit.”
“Let the big dog eat. Always fill up with supreme.”
Ross looked with pity at Ivy. Given the tragedy, he could not even offer to drive her home.
Outside the turn at the Old Spanish Fort, Ross knew he would lie to Nabby. All was well in Auburn. Save Nabby, God, he asked. She was a fine golfer, in trim, but all those days in the sun had suddenly assaulted her. Almost overnight, she was wrinkled and the skin of her underchin had folds. The mirror scared her and made her very sad. Ross, for all his desk work and Kools, and without significant exercise, was a man near commercially handsome, though not vain. There was something wrong with the picture of a pretty fifty-two-year-old fellow in a Riviera, anyway. In the mirror, he often saw the jerk who’d got eleven young men mortared over there — a surviving untouched dandy. A quality in all of Ross apologized and begged people to look elsewhere.
Newt, by the way, had married somebody much like his mother. Small, bosomy, with slender legs agreeable in the calf. Probably he wouldn’t kill Ivy. Ross would make a good day of this one, be damned. It was only midnight. Nabby was up.
He caressed her, desperate and pitiful, wishing long sorrowful love into her. She cried out, delighted. As if, Ross thought, he were putting a whole new son in Nabby and she was making him now, with deep pleasure.
Newt had left some books in the house a while back. Ross wanted to see what made his son. He picked up the thing by Kundera with the unburdening thesis that life is an experiment only run once. We get no second run, unlike experience of every other regard. Everything mistaken and foul is forever there and that is you, the mouse cannot start the maze again; once, even missing the bull’s-eye by miles, is all you got. It is unique and hugely unfair. No wonder the look you see on most people — wary, deflected, puzzled—“What the hell is happening?” Guy at a restaurant, gets out of his car and creeps in as on the surface of the moon. Ross liked this and stopped reading. There would be no Newt ever again, and whatever he’d left out, fathering the boy, it was just botched forever, having had the single run. Forgiven, too, like a lab assistant first day on the job. And then Ann, not a waver, twice as content as Ross was, almost alarmingly happy. She was the one run too. He could call Ann this instant and experience such mutual love it almost made him choke. There was the greedy Mormon, her husband, but so what? You didn’t pick her bedmate out of a catalog.
The old hack suing E. Dan Ross backed off, unable to face the prospect of any further revelations on himself the trial might bring. He called up Ross himself, moaning. He was a wreck, but a man of honor too, a First Amendment champion after all. Ross, who’d never even hired a lawyer, felt sorry for what the erupting truth had brought to both of them. He feared for his future credit with clients. But the hack was invited on television, in view of his new explosion of hackery, a photo album valentine to every celebrity he’d let a fart off near. He became a wealthy man, able to buy a chauffeur who took him far and wide, smelling up the privacy of others.