“What do you mean, nobody gave you any orders?” he asked me. “Everything’s printed out on the sheet I gave your mother. Didn’t you bother to read it?”
“I read it. I guess I didn’t understand it.”
“Didn’t understand it,” he said in a crabby tone.
“I didn’t!” I protested.
“I heard you.”
I walked behind him for a while. He wasn’t at all what I’d expected. He was taller and somehow more dignified and well-spoken. There were silver streaks through his thick black hair, and his jeans were pressed and creased. He had on a black T-shirt and black leather thong sandals, and the only jewelry was a large gold watch with a black face. I did some fast addition. He was forty-two. He looked older. He had a tan and the wrinkles around his eyes that go with people who spend a lot of time outdoors.
He turned around and waited for me to catch up with him.
Plato was tugging hard on the lead, but the other two chows heeled nicely, stopped when he did, looked up at him, waiting for the next move.
“What are you doing down on the beach at seven in the morning?” he asked me.
“Walking. Reading.” I had always gotten up early in New York, just as soon as the garbage men began rattling the cans outside our apartment windows.
“What are you reading?” he asked me.
“Just some novels.”
“What are they?”
“One is a book by Edmund White,” I said. “The other one’s by Truman Capote.” I wished I had butchier reading material: an Elmore Leonard, or even a Stephen King. But I was trying to read stuff Alex liked. He was a big reader, and I was trying to catch up with him.
“Capote?” Nevada said.
“Yes.”
“A fairy.”
“Yes.”
I waited for him to vent, wisecrack, whatever.
He said, “Like Elton John.”
“Yeah.”
“He wrote one song I wished I’d written. ‘Yellow Brick Road.’ You know that song?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t keep saying ‘Yes, sir.’ You can say ‘Yes, Mr. Nevada.’”
“All right…Mr. Nevada.”
We walked along while the fog began lifting, showing more of Roundelay.
I asked him why he’d named his house that.
“Don’t you know what a roundelay is?” he said.
“Not really.”
“It’s a simple song, with a phrase or a line repeated.”
“My mother thought it was a dance.”
“It is. That too,” he said.
The chows trotted along beside us, Plato still struggling to go faster.
Nevada said, “If you had to describe yourself using only one word, what would that word be?”
“What?” I’d heard him, but the question was so out of the blue, it threw me.
He repeated it, looking down at me with his dark-blue eyes, frowning.
I thought of Alex. I thought of the way he smelled of patchouli sometimes first thing in the morning. I thought of Brittany, too, of how she’d complain, “You don’t know how to kiss, do you?”
I said, “Torn.”
“Torn?” he bellowed.
“Sometimes.”
“Torn between what and what?” he demanded.
“Torn between comfort and conformity.”
What was I doing spilling out my guts to him?
He said, “My father used to say, ‘First do what is expected of you! Then enjoy the surprise of finding out you like it.’”
“Uh-huh.”
“They fuck us up!” he said.
“What?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.
“Parents,” he said. “That’s from a poem by Philip Larkin.”
He stopped in his tracks, tossed his head back, and quoted the whole thing.
It was a real blast against family.
Later, I would learn he liked to quote from Shakespeare, the Bible, Yeats, Auden—all writers you wouldn’t figure he’d ever read.
Later, I would come to know he regretted never going to college, never having a decent education.
It was his Achilles’ heel.
But that hot, muggy day in June, with the sun already making us both perspire, I just kept trying to put this man together with the fellow in black leather, on his knees, leaning so far back you wondered how anyone could bend a body like that, thrusting his pelvis skyward while the drums and bass played the same lick over and over, and the audience almost crazy.
“That poem is called ‘This Be the Verse,’” he said.
I vaguely remembered he had some quarrel with his father, that it was all through his music. Something about his old man never letting go of him, always controlling him.
We walked along silently with the chows until Roundelay stretched before us in all its glory.
There was a fork in the path.
He stopped long enough to take Plato’s lead from me.
“I don’t want to see you on my beach again, Lane,” he said.
“It’s Lang, Mr. Nevada.”
He gave me a little two-fingered salute, no smile.
He headed toward Roundelay and I took the other path.
THREE
“HOW’S EVERYTHING AT MANDERLEY?” Alex asked. That’s what he called Roundelay. It was the name of the house in Rebecca, an old movie we both liked, with Judith Anderson playing the evil Mrs. Danvers.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again—that was the opening line.
I told him I’d met Ben Nevada, and how he’d asked me to describe myself in one word.
I didn’t tell Alex I’d answered “torn.” I told him I’d said “content.”
“How would you describe yourself in one word?” I said.
“Envious.”
I laughed. “I’ll probably never see him again.”
“If you do, ask him why Cali always said, ‘Pain over!’ at the end of every song.”
“Oh, sure. I’m going to bring her name up!”
“It’s been years since she died.”
“Fourteen years exactly,” I said.
Right after my encounter with Nevada that morning, I went down to the library. I did a little research with the help of the computer there, surfing through old news stories. One I printed out.
EX-ROCK SINGER DEAD IN CRASH: CALI COSS, AGE 26
CALI COSS WAS AMONG the dead in yesterday’s crash of the Boeing 707, along with her husband, Leonard Haun. After skyrocketing to fame with Ben Nevada’s band, then plummeting into a life of drug abuse, she recovered in her two-year marriage to Haun, an insurance executive.
There was more about her upbringing in a poor family in Kentucky, and
