“Shh,” she said.
The two assistants slung a guitar around Dick’s neck and then adjusted the microphone so that it came right up to his mouth, which was hanging open slightly. His eyes stared out at nothing.
I glanced at my watch. It was already ten thirty. I felt a rumbling of agitation.
Country music started up from the back of the stage: a fiddle and a banjo, a slide guitar with that sad, watery echo.
“Look,” said Pearl. “Look at Dick. Watch.”
So I looked at him. He was just as I’d left him. Standing with his string tie too tight around his neck, gazing vacantly out into the darkness. But then, slowly, he began to show signs of life. His mustache twitched once, twice. He started blinking rapidly.
I would have laughed out loud, if I hadn’t paid twenty dollars to see the show. To me, it all looked like bad acting. He scanned the crowd then, seemingly coming out of his daze. Where am I? Who are all these people? I couldn’t help thinking of some of the student actors in Pearl’s graduate program.
The crowd began clapping along to the music, cheering Dick on.
“Go, Dick, go!” they yelled. “Go, Dick, go!”
Dick’s shaking hands slowly felt their way over the guitar, crawling over the body, the neck, eventually finding positions on the strings and frets. His playing was clumsy and lurching at first, but after a moment it smoothed out, became passable.
I glanced at Pearl; she was rapt, clapping and chanting, and I felt a creeping disdain for her. I spent the better part of my day assessing value—enumerating the attractive qualities of companies, making cases for or against them. I could not for the life of me see a case to be made for Dick Doyle. More than this, though, I couldn’t see any benefit in a match between Dick Doyle’s performance and my evening.
Pearl nudged me.
“Go, Dick,” I said.
Dick leaned into the mic and started singing. His voice was nothing to crow about—nasal and whiny, typical country. The song sounded like a stock tearjerker to me, too; it was about a man who gets struck by a power line, finds himself a different person afterward, unable to fit his own life. Sniffle, sniffle.
I headed to the back to get a drink. The bartender was an older fellow. He looked reasonable enough.
“Can you believe this?” I said, when he brought me my beer.
He shook his head. It was hard to hear over the clapping.
I pointed a thumb over my shoulder at the stage. “That guy can’t act for shit, huh?”
The bartender scowled, then took away my beer.
Late that night, I woke up to the sounds of Pearl crying. I got out of bed and found her dragging a suitcase down the spiral staircase.
“I’m leaving, Max,” she said.
“Jesus. Wait a second,” I said, trying to gauge the situation. “What’s wrong?”
“Please don’t try to stop me.” She was already halfway down the stairs, so that only her shoulders and head were visible from my vantage point.
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and checked my watch: two thirty in the morning. “Pearl. Come up here and talk to me.”
She lugged the suitcase down another step. “No. We don’t make each other happy. I’m not what you want.”
“What are you talking about? Of course you’re what I want. I want you all the time. More than I’ve ever wanted anyone. I’m all over you. Constantly.”
She stopped to wipe her face. “I mean you don’t want
“I have a great interest in you. I’m marrying you, for Christ’s sake,” I said.
“But you don’t have any interest in what I’m doing with my life. In what my goals are.”
“Could you please just come up to the second floor, please?”
“You’re always making fun of the theater, making fun of my friends. You don’t take any of it seriously.”
To be honest, I’m not a big fan of the theater. I have trouble losing myself in the action of a play. The actors always seem hysterical to me, scurrying around the bright box of the stage, screaming and crying and clawing at each other. Watching a play, I always feel like part of some team of psychiatrists that’s been called in to observe a group of out-of-control mental patients.
“I come to the plays, don’t I?” I said. “I hang out with you and your classmates.”
“Name three of my friends from playwriting school. In fact, just name three of my friends.”
“This is ridiculous. Of course I can—”
“Name two.”
“Bonnie and Pat.”
“Pat’s my sister.”
“The girl you went out with the other night. The flat-chested one. Her name starts with a
She proceeded to name all my friends from work, some I might have forgotten myself. Everyone in my department.
“What’s the title of the play I’m working on right now?” she said.
It was on the tip of my tongue. It had “dirt” or “mud” in the title. Something mud.
She leaned her head against the iron banister and closed her eyes. A ribbon of hair fell across her cheek. The sight reminded me of how she looked in the mornings, just before waking up. Her expression so serious, brow furrowed in concentration as she swam up from that last dream.
“That singer tonight,” she said, her eyes still closed. “Dick Doyle. All week I’ve been telling you about him, about how much I loved his songs. I must have spent twenty minutes just two days ago going on about how deeply his music spoke to me.”
I tried to recall these conversations, but all I could hear of them were vague echoes. A few words here and there.
“I brought you tonight because I’d hoped that you might hear in those songs what I hear in them. I thought Dick’s performance might affect you. But you didn’t pay any attention.”
“Do you have his CD? Give his record to me now. I’ll listen to it. I promise.”
She picked up her suitcase and continued down the steps. “I spoke to Belle, the woman who introduces Dick onstage. They’re headed back to Florida in a couple of days. I want to go with them.”
“Are you out of your mind?” I said, coming to the railing. “What are you, fucking brainwashed? We’re getting married in six months. You’re acting like a teenage groupie. You’re twenty-five years old.”
“If you need me I’ll be at Pat’s. I left my ring on the night table. I’m sorry, Max.” Then she disappeared from view.
“Pearl…If you walk out that door, that’s it. I’m locking you out! Pearl!”
The door shut.
I stood on the landing in my boxers, staring down into the vortex of our staircase. I was sure Pearl would come back.
“She’s just going through something,” I told my friends.
Two weeks later I was driving south on 95, toward Kwimper County, Florida.
Part Two: The Swampy Bottom
IT WAS EARLY MORNING BY THE TIME I REACHED MY MOTEL. I’D been up all night guarding the dumpster—awake for over twenty-four hours—but I wasn’t tired in the least. In fact, climbing the steps to my room, I felt completely alert, almost hyper. The encounter with the old man had upset me more than I’d expected—all that talk of Dick Doyle. Still, I tried to get some rest. I took a sleeping pill. I shut the blinds against
