“I did my horoscope today,” he said as the show went to commercial.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re a Cancer.”
He didn’t like that, but maintained an upbeat air. “I don’t mean astrology, man. I use the Guide.” He slid the TV Guide across the coffee table, pointing out an entry with a grimy finger, a black-rimmed nail. I snatched it up and read:
“King Creole: *** Based on a Harold Robbins novel. A young man (Elvis Presley) with a gang background rises from the streets to become a rock-and-roll star. Vic Morrow. 1:30.”
“Decent, huh!” said Stanky. “You try it. Close your eyes and stick your finger in on a random page and see what you get. I use the movie section in back, but some people use the whole programming section.”
“Other people do this? Not just you?”
“Go ahead.”
I did as instructed and landed on another movie:
“A Man and a Woman: **** A widow and a widower meet on holiday and are attracted to one another, but the woman backs off because memories of her dead husband are still too strong. Jean-Louis Trintignant, Anouk Aimée. 1:40.”
Half-believing, I tried to understand what the entry portended for me and Andrea.
“What did you get?” asked Stanky.
I tossed the Guide back to him and said, “It didn’t work for me.”
I thought about calling Andrea, but business got in the way—I suppose I allowed it to get in the way, due to certain anxieties relating to our divorce. There was publicity to do, Kiwanda’s new filing system to master (she kept on tweaking it), recording (we laid down two tracks for Stanky’s first EP), and a variety of other duties. And so the days went quickly. Stanky began going to the library after every practice, walking without a limp; he said he was doing research. He didn’t have enough money to get into trouble and I had too much else on my plate to stress over it. The night before he played the Crucible, I was in the office, going over everything in my mind, wondering what I had overlooked, thinking I had accomplished an impossible amount of work that week, when the doorbell rang. I opened the door and there on the stoop was Andrea, dressed in jeans and a bulky sweater, cheeks rosy from the night air. An overnight bag rested at her feet. “Hi,” she said, and gave a chipper smile, like a tired Girl Scout determined to keep pimping her cookies.
Taken aback, I said, “Hi,” and ushered her in.
She went into the office and sat in the wooden chair beside my desk. I followed her in, hesitated, and took a seat in my swivel chair.
“You look… rattled,” she said.
“That about covers it. Good rattled. But rattled, nonetheless.”
“I am, too. Sorta.” She glanced around the office, as if noticing the changes. I could hear every ticking clock, every digital hum, all the discrete noises of the house.
She drew in breath, exhaled, clasped her hands in her lap. “I thought we could try,” she said quietly. “We could do a trial period or something. Some days, a week. See how that goes.” She paused. “The last few times I’ve seen you, I’ve wanted to be with you. And I think you’ve wanted to be with me. So…” She made a flippy gesture, as if she were trying to shade things toward the casual. “This seemed like an opportunity.”
You would have thought, even given the passage of time, after all the recriminations and ugliness of divorce, some measure of negativity would have cropped up in my thoughts; but it did not and I said, “I think you’re right.”
“Whew!” Andrea pretended to wipe sweat from her brow and grinned.
An awkward silence; the grin flickered and died.
“Could I maybe go upstairs,” she asked.
“Oh! Sure. I’m sorry.” I had the urge to run up before her and rip down the crapfest on the wall, chuck all the furniture out the window, except for a mattress and candles.
“You’re still rattled,” she said. “Maybe we should have a drink before anything.” She stretched out a hand to me. “Let’s get good and drunk.”
As it happened, we barely got the drinks poured before we found our groove and got busy. It was like old times, cozy and familiar, and yet it was like we were doing it for the first time, too. Every touch, every sensation, carried that odd frisson. We woke late, with the frost almost melted from the panes, golden light chuting through the high east windows, leaving the bed in a bluish shadow. We lay there, too sleepy to make love, playing a little, talking, her telling me how she had plotted her approach, me telling her how I was oblivious until that day at lunch when I noticed her loneliness, and what an idiot I had been not to see what was happening… Trivial matters, but they stained a few brain cells, committing those moments to memory and marking them as Important, a red pin on life’s map. And then we did make love, as gently as that violence can be made. Afterward, we showered and fixed breakfast. Watching her move about the kitchen in sweats and a T-shirt, I couldn’t stop thinking how great this was, and I wanted to stop, to quit footnoting every second. I mentioned this as we ate and she said, “I guess that means you’re happy.”
“Yeah! Of course.”
“Me, too.” She stabbed a piece of egg with her fork, tipped her head to the side as if to get a better angle on me. “I don’t know when it was I started to be able to read you so well. Not that you were that hard to read to begin with. It just seems there’s nothing hidden in your face anymore.”
“Maybe it’s a case of heightened senses.”
“No, really. At times it’s like I know what you’re about to say.”
“You mean I don’t have to speak?”
She adopted the manner of a legal professional. “Unfortunately, no. You have to speak. Otherwise, it would be difficult to catch you in a lie.”
“Maybe we should test this,” I said. “You ask my name, and I’ll say Helmut or Torin.”
She shook her head. “I’m an organic machine, not a lie detector. We have different ways. Different needs.”
“Organic. So that would make you… softer than your basic machine? Possibly more compliant?”
“Very much so,” she said.
“You know, I think I may be reading you pretty well myself.” I leaned across the table, grabbed a sloppy kiss, and, as I sat back down, I remembered something. “Damn!” I said, and rapped my forehead with my knuckles.
“What is it?”
“I forgot to take Stanky for his haircut.”
“Can’t he take care of it himself?”
“Probably not. You want to go with us? You might as well meet him. Get it over with.”
She popped egg into her mouth and chewed. “Do we have to do it now?”
“No, he won’t even be up for a couple of hours.”
“Good,” she said.
The Crucible, a concrete block structure on the edge of Black William, off beyond the row houses, had once been a dress outlet store. We had put a cafeteria in the front, where we served breakfast and lunch—we did a brisk business because of the mill. Separate from the cafeteria, the back half of the building was given over to a bar with a few ratty booths, rickety chairs, and tables. We had turned a high-school artist loose on the walls and she had painted murals that resembled scenes from J. R. R. Tolkien’s lost labor-union novel. An immense crucible adorned the wall behind the stage; it appeared, thanks to the artist’s inept use of perspective, to be spilling a flood of molten steel down upon an army of orc-like workers.
There was a full house that night, attracted by local legends The Swimming Holes, a girl band who had migrated to Pittsburgh, achieving a degree of national renown, and I had packed the audience with Friends of Vernon whom I had enjoined to applaud and shout wildly for Stanky. A haze of smoke fogged the stage lights and milling about were fake punks, the odd goth, hippies from Garnant College in Waterford, fifteen miles away: the desperate wannabe counter-culture of the western Pennsylvania barrens. I went into the dressing rooms, gave each Swimming Hole a welcome-home hug, and checked in on Stanky. Jerry, a skinny guy with buzzcut red hair, was plunking on his bass, and Geno was playing fills on the back of a chair; Ian, the rhythm guitarist, was making a cell call in the head. Stanky was on the couch, smoking a Camel, drinking a Coke, and watching the SciFi Channel. I asked if he felt all right. He said he could use a beer. He seemed calm, supremely confident, which I would not have predicted and did not trust. But it was too late for concern and I left him to God.