Consider, for example, his reaction to the quiet hours.
“The quiet hours?” Greg’s face had the expression of someone ready to be told of a new party game.
All four of them were in the living room on the first night of the visit. Jane considered grabbing the marble ashtray on the coffee table and beating herself senseless with it.
“Jane can explain what it is,” Robert said. “She has grown up with our quiet hours.”
“Oh, Dad,” she hissed.
“Jane,” Dorothy whispered, perched on the edge of her armchair.
The small decorative cushions crowded Jane where she sat next to Greg on the two-seater sofa. The spotless, moss-green carpet was a quagmire about to swallow her tennis sock–clad feet.
Dorothy’s eyes somehow showed that her jaw muscles had tightened beneath her plump cheeks.
Robert turned to Greg. “It’s simple. We have agreed to be completely at rest between five and seven in the afternoon.”
Jane had an urge to add that this was in consideration of her mother’s state of mind, and that the quiet hours had actually been advised by a psychotherapist, but realized that the information would hardly help to normalize the family ritual.
Greg looked from one to the other, then raised his index finger and said, “I truly get this. People don’t take the time off just to be anymore. Everyone seems to have forgotten the importance of… contemplation. How much space do we give it nowadays?”
She saw her father look appraisingly at Greg and allocate him to the category “self-important college kid.” She noticed how Greg’s slightly hooked, lovable Lincoln nose seemed larger from the side and wanted to pull him back on the sofa and out of the danger zone. But he avoided looking at her and, with a big smile on his face, addressed Dorothy.
“And besides, it’s good to chill now and then.”
Unbelievably, this made her parents burst out laughing.
Greg glanced at the clock.
“But there are still six more minutes to go before the quiet hours begin,” he said. “Now, how shall we pass the time?”
He was teasing them. He was the first person in history to tease anyone inside the Ashland family house. But it seemed to work all right.
“Jane tells me you play in a rock band,” Robert said.
Dorothy rose to tidy away their juice glasses and the crumb-filled platter that had held their tuna melts.
Greg replied, “I play lead guitar.” And went on explaining, as if it would interest her father in the slightest—her dad, whose music recordings amounted to two Kris Kristofferson cassettes for respectively the car and the workshop: “Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t call it lead because I’m the band’s only guitarist.”
The rectangular shadow of the mailman’s van rumbled past on the snowy road at the end of their drive. It reached the stop sign and its brake lights cast a red glow between the curtains.
“Are you Jewish, Gregory?”
“Not that I know of. Now and then people ask me, though.”
“Jane tells us that you’re a socialist,” her father continued.
“Guilty as charged,” Greg said loudly and put his hand up.
Dorothy’s tidying took on the darting speed of a reptile. Jane clutched Greg’s hand and glanced at her father only to find that his face didn’t look as she had expected. His bluish jowls shuddered like a basset hound’s and his eyes were rimmed with moist resignation.
“To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never met a socialist before.”
The next day, Greg was entrusted with spray-painting the silver tree. Jane stood in the garage doorway and watched. Robert held the tree at arm’s length; Greg wore a face mask and carried out his painting task with easy, almost dancing movements.
“Suppose you’ve had experience with all the graffiti,” Robert said.
Greg even managed to encourage her mother into uttering more than two or three sentences at a time. He praised the stuffing for the goose and paid attention when she told him about the classic recipe by James Beard and the critical balance to be struck between prunes and Madeira.
“She can be quite interesting, don’t you think?” was how Greg put it when they were alone in Jane’s room. “She has an artistic soul.”
“But no artistic talent.”
“Could be.”
They didn’t make love in Jane’s old room but she felt as if they had, as if she had returned inside a different body, desecrated her childhood home, and then rejected it (like an ex-prisoner spending the night, just as a joke, in the old, now-abandoned prison—this was the best metaphor the aspiring writer could come up with). Just being there with Greg and thinking never again; never again the absolute stillness of the Sunday mornings, never again her mother’s half hour of pretend-reading the same double-page spread in the Milwaukee Journal. Never again the feeling that love was a limited commodity that had to be rationed.
At night, she lay with Greg and held him tightly until she sensed her grip on him slip as sleep came. Then she dreamed that Greg was not there and that she was Jane alone, in Jane’s bed. And Jane was not a student of literature with her own home address on Broome Street, New York City—only Jane. Alone.
The whole spring semester had felt like only a few days. They were young, in love, full of hope, and living in the place better suited to such people than anywhere else in the world (eight years later, they made a honeymoon trip to Paris, a city they agreed afterward to be a great deal sadder and shabbier than New York). They wrote. They read. They hung out with Greg’s friends in the band and frequented small, smoke-filled music bars. Until the band dropped him.
Jane had never played an instrument but it became obvious even to her that Greg was not a great guitarist. Listening to the others speaking about him, especially toward the end, opened her eyes. She suspected he had been asked to join them because of his alternative-style persona, the way he dressed, how he wore his hair, and, not least, his easy charm. But, seemingly, he lacked the crucial thing.
“Am I a bit out?”
“Dude, listen, you’ve been waltzing right through. Wrong beat.”
“Oops, it wasn’t syncopated then?”
“Yeah… the last tune was.”
It was almost impossible to understand, especially when you saw Greg move. She could lie in the bed alcove in the small apartment, full of delight as she watched him making coffee: his hands had such perfect awareness of space and distance and he handled everything without fumbling. He seemed at ease in the present. Was that not also a kind of musicality?
Whatever, they did not want him in The Hard Stains.
Jane did her best to create a version of events that could be lived with.
“Of course, they totally lack direction.”
“Do you think so?” Greg said.
“Sure, all their new songs are stuffed with over-technical rhythmic notations.”
“Yeah?”
“I mean, there was a clear trend toward progressive metal.” She said this with her upper lip curled to indicate a musical expertise. Meanwhile, she suppressed the thought that it had only been a few months since she had said goodbye at last not only to stone-washed jeans with high waistbands but to all her glam metal rock mixtapes.
They had even more time to be together. Her belongings increasingly ended up in his Brooklyn place, which was a few square feet larger than hers and less full of oppressive student clutter. There they would sit, each on a kitchen chair, looking past the edge of the window-mounted air conditioning unit to catch glimpses of New Jersey. They smoked too much and talked until the early morning, about lecturers and their quirks, about form and content in the novel. They would speculate about news stories like the one about the elderly Palestinian teacher who had, in February, shot wildly in all directions from the top of the Empire State Building and murdered—out of all the innocent people on the observation deck—a promising Danish musician, whom Greg had met several times. Another musician, a band member and friend of the dead man, was shot in the head but survived. Like Mayor Giuliani, Jane and Greg joined the many-hundred-strong crowd that went to the Bellevue Hospital where a separate room had been set aside for visitors.