The Hour of the Innocents Read online

  “She’s a nice girl, Mom.”

  “Won’t that be a change? All right. Thursday, seven?”

  “Seven.”

  “Do you know, Will … that this is the first time you’ve ever asked to bring a girl home to dinner?”

  * * *

  I drove to the bus terminal, impatient to see Laura. When she stepped down to the sidewalk, tired yet bright, I hugged her shamelessly.

  She pushed me back a few inches, making a face.

  “You smell like a shooting gallery. And your breath stinks of onions.” Then she smiled. “Nonetheless, I have decided that I love you.”

  To the chagrin of an old woman lurking on a bench, I lifted Laura in my arms and carried her to the Corvair. There are no sterner arbiters of morals than the aging poor.

  Upon reaching the apartment, our routine was to paw off each other’s clothes as soon as we got inside, making it as close to the bedroom as we could before collapsing in a tangle. Even if we were apart for only one night, Laura made love as if, at any moment, she might be prevented from doing so ever again. No girl in my past had ever taken to sex with such audacity. Her urgency could be almost masculine until she felt me inside her. She broke the rules.

  That night, I needed things to be different for a little while. Inside the door, I kissed her but then asked her to sit on the sofa. I took a chair facing her.

  “I just need to look at the miracle of you for a minute,” I told her.

  She mulled that over. “Well, I’ve never been a miracle before … but I suppose I can live with the responsibilities.” She drew in her eyebrows. “You must have had an interesting day. Did an old girlfriend show up? With a gun? And a bag of onions?”

  “Laura … I want to apologize about something. A while ago, you said you wished we could stay in bed forever and hide from the world, just be with each other. Remember? I made a joke about it, I was an ass.” I looked at her, at this beautiful, earnest, ravishing human being who had descended from unknown heights into my life. “I wanted you to know that I understand. I wish we could just lock the door and never come out of the bedroom, just hold each other forever.”

  “We’d get bedsores,” she said.

  * * *

  Before any clothes flew off, heavy footsteps climbed the stairs. Matty called my name and knocked on the door.

  I let him in. He looked distraught. Or as much so as his chunk-of-wood face allowed. He glanced at Laura, jarred by her presence. I don’t know what he had expected. I wasn’t living in a monastery.

  “What’s up, man?” I asked.

  He nodded to Laura, then focused on me.

  “I had some trouble at home. I need to let things calm down. I’m sorry for intruding. I just thought … maybe I could stay in that back bedroom of yours? Just for a night or two.”

  “Sure. Of course. What happened?”

  He sat down, heavily, in the chair I had occupied while trying to reach Laura.

  “I did something stupid,” he said. “I don’t know what else I could’ve done, though.”

  “Would you like some coffee?” Laura asked. I sensed it was a means to leave us alone. Symbolically, at least. The kitchenette was only a few feet away.

  Matty shrugged and said, “Thanks.” It was unclear whether that meant yes or no, but Laura got up and disappeared from his view.

  “I have this uncle,” Matty told me. “Uncle Johnny. He’s a state cop. He’s always been a bully. Thinks he runs the whole family. Tough guy, started out as a prison guard. Anyways, he and my old man are there when I get home. With my mother crying her eyes out. Johnny and my pop were drunk. They thought they were going to give me a haircut.”

  Even after three and a half months home, Matty’s hair was hardly the pride of Haight-Ashbury.

  “I decked him. Uncle Johnny. I told him to knock it off. But he wouldn’t listen. He grabbed my hair and tried to use the scissors. I put him out. I didn’t beat him up or anything. Just put him out cold. One punch, that was all.” He grimaced, but with more sorrow than disgust. “My old man ran halfway up the stairs. Scared of me. My mother was afraid I killed Johnny.”

  “You sure you didn’t?”

  He tested his right hand. The knuckles were a mess. Matty had been through a busy day.

  “He’ll be all right. He’ll be angry, he’s used to everybody backing down and taking everything he dishes out. But he’ll be all right.”

  I thought of Bronc, of his face like a Jersey tomato struck with a baseball bat. When Matty showed up at the door, my first thought had been that the police were after him. But Buzzy would never go to the police. And Bronc certainly wouldn’t. As for the girl who caught part of a shotgun blast in her foot, they would have concocted some story by the time they reached the emergency room. Given the refreshments at Buzzy’s party, she probably wouldn’t remember what actually happened.

  When I failed to speak, Matty repeated his request: “I’m sorry to ask, to barge in like this. But do you mind if I bunk here? Just for a day or two?”

  “Stay as long as you like. Until things calm down.”

  “I’ll find a place,” he said. “I don’t need much. But I can’t stay at home anymore. There’d just be more trouble.”

  “Just stay as long as you like,” I repeated insincerely. Nothing against Matty, but I valued my privacy with Laura. With other girls I hadn’t given a damn, but I didn’t want any other man listening to our lovemaking.

  “I’m sorry to intrude.” He glanced toward the kitchen. Laura was stretching to reach the coffee mugs in the cupboard. “Just black for me, please.”

  Laura smiled through the archway. I could tell she wasn’t happy, but I didn’t sense the depth of her mood until Matty went down to his car to fetch his guitar and a bag of clothes.

  Hugging me in his absence, she said, “Please … take me back to the dorm.”

  “It’ll be all right,” I said. “We don’t have to do anything. We’ll be quiet.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “He scares me.”

  * * *

  In two days, Matty was gone. He rented a room on Market Street, just above Garfield Square. Before he left, he took the old sheets from his bed and washed them at the Laundromat. No trace of his presence remained behind, not one cigarette butt or a single blond hair in the bathroom. Maybe that was a Vietnam habit, too.

  I was glad when he left, although he had been no trouble. It wasn’t only that I longed to be together—noisily—with Laura. I also needed privacy to write, to work through the embarrassing, faltering melodies and stupid rhymes that drag on until, out of nowhere, the magic returns. I was having unprecedented difficulty, at least when I tried to write a song for Laura. I could not produce anything worthy of her. In the past, I had been able to knock out songs for new girlfriends within a day of meeting them … although I was not above recycling songs in which the descriptions of the flesh and its circumstances were not overly specific. But every effort I made to capture Laura in words and music came to nothing. I could write about imaginary women with ease. Once I even caught myself cobbling together a song that reeked of Angela. But I wasn’t going to be this Laura’s Petrarch with a guitar.

  With Laura herself, life seemed all passion and wonder. That Tuesday, waiting out Matty, we skipped a campus rally to raise money for Czechoslovak refugees and drove south through the perishing autumn under a bright, cold sun. On a back road, on impulse, I pulled over by a field of cornstalks. Without a word, as if she already knew what was to come and welcomed it, Laura followed me into the field until, barely out of sight of the road, I laid her down in a rasping world. She wore a short brown corduroy skirt, which I pushed up around her waist.

  She didn’t come along for the gig in Wilkes-Barre. Our music still did not move her and, to my amusement, she took studying for each minor quiz as seriously as a final exam at med school. She was utterly brilliant and surprisingly lacking in confidence. Unwilling to be convin
ced that she could get A’s without opening a book, she was the most earnest human being I had ever met. Except, perhaps, for my father.

  It was just as well that she skipped Wilkes-Barre. That night felt like a setback. Nothing dreadful happened, but not much good did, either. Frankie, who had put off replacing his old Vox amp, blew a speaker during the first set. And for the first time, Matty just went through the motions, his mind elsewhere. Out-of-sync strobes from an amateur light show fought against the beat. The kids in the crowd were all right, and the two guys who booked the hall had no complaints, but the spark just had not been there. We were just another band, and it alarmed me. For the first time, I wondered if it was possible that we might fail.

  By the next morning, my confidence was back. Every band had off nights, and every musician knew it. Matty had been through a crazy patch—Buzzy had phoned me, worried that Matty was going to report a rape to the police—but he loved to play so much that I was confident he would be over it by the weekend gigs. And Frankie broke down and shelled out for a new amplifier, a heavy-duty Ampeg.

  Even the dinner with my mother went well. She and Laura chattered about French literature, leaving me behind. And Laura looked radiant. I had been jarred when I picked her up. Her tumbling hair, which I loved, had been shorn away. Angela had driven down to the dorm, taken her back to Frackville, and treated her to a styling. My dismay lasted only a moment, though. Against what I would have expected, Angela had done amazing work, framing Laura’s perfect bones with a cut that fell somewhere between Edie Sedgwick and a Carnaby Street Ava Gardner. The new hairstyle made Laura look impossibly glamorous, as if she must take for granted the silver place settings my mother had laid out. I could not wait to drive her back to the apartment.

  It seemed that Angela had made her peace with Laura and me. I was glad of it. And a little disappointed, too.

  * * *

  On Friday afternoon, as I was changing clothes for a gig in Reading, my mother called again. After minimal pleasantries, she got to the point.

  “Will … there’s something wrong with that girl.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Mom…”

  “I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something seriously wrong with her. Call it a mother’s instinct. For want of anything more definite.”

  “You never like any girl I’m with.”

  “That’s not true. I didn’t say I didn’t like her. I do. She’s charming. And very bright. Well brought up, whoever her people may be. But something isn’t right about her.”

  “Well, she’s right for me,” I said. Letting my frustration show.

  “I hope so,” my mother said. “Please be careful.”

  TEN

  My mother had an insidious way of sowing doubt. Despite myself, I scrutinized Laura’s minor actions in between our bouts of fuck-and-talk. Unless I counted a woeful inability to cook, I could find nothing wrong with Laura Saunders at all. On the contrary, I could not imagine how things could be more right.

  The cooking incident veered between touching and hilarious. Laura even burned coffee, but one day after class, she sneaked up on the bus, stopped at the Acme to buy the ingredients listed on a recipe for quiche Lorraine, and had already turned the kitchenette into an apocalyptic landscape by the time I came home. She took me to task for having an incomplete set of measuring cups. I had never seen anyone expend such concentration near a stove or fight so hard to mask wrath at inanimate objects. Laura combined ingredients with minute care, only to discard them and start again. I had to turn off the stereo so she could concentrate. Dinnertime passed and the evening marched on toward the hour of a society supper. At last, she produced something faintly resembling a casserole. Or a quiche as refined by Picasso. The top was scorched in patches the color of coal dirt.

  “We can’t eat this,” she said, tears bursting from her eyes as we sat at the table.

  I was glad that she said it.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have tried something so hard?” I said, hoping to comfort her.

  Laura leapt to her feet, eyes hating me and the universe. It was jarring, unlike her.

  “What do you know about what’s hard? What do you know about anything?”

  She locked herself in the bathroom for an hour. When she came back out, she had gotten over things. I made us Campbell’s soup and toast, then we went into the bedroom, where all things could be repaired.

  * * *

  Stymied in my attempts to produce the song Laura deserved, I read to her from the poems Petrarch wrote to his Laura. I had gotten the book from Penn State, on an interlibrary loan. It took a month. Petrarch was, to say the least, unfashionable. Nor were many of the poems appropriate to us. But I selected those that might apply and read them aloud in the fortress of our bedroom:

  I bless the spot, the day, the very moment

  when my eyes, finding you, did dare to lift,

  and I say, “Soul of mine, be humbly grateful

  that fortune honored you with such a gift.”

  “He must be better in the original Italian,” Laura said, nuzzling closer. “Don’t you think he was lucky, though? That she died? He never had to be disillusioned.”

  “I’m not sure she felt very lucky. Dying of the Black Plague.”

  “But the poems aren’t about her. Not really. They’re about him, don’t you think? I suppose all love poems are really about the poet.”

  “You don’t believe he felt the lightning bolt? When he first saw Laura?”

  She rubbed against me. Seeking warmth, not sex. “He was probably looking for the lightning bolt. She just happened to be standing there. On that bridge. She was convenient.”

  “I felt a lightning bolt. When I first saw you,” I told her.

  “Are you sure you weren’t looking for one yourself?”

  “You said—I’ll never forget what you said—you told me that, when you saw me, you’d never wanted anything else so much.”

  “That’s different. Women know what they want. When they finally see it. Men just want what they see.”

  “Cleverness precludes depth. According to Aristotle.”

  “Aristotle was a menace. Look at all the damage he did.”

  “And Petrarch?”

  “He was a fool,” she said. “A lucky fool. He fooled himself and made a great success of it. I mean, don’t you think he chose to venerate a married woman on purpose? Because he knew he couldn’t have her? That way, he wouldn’t have to be disappointed, if the sex turned out to be a mess. Or if she smelled or had bad breath. For all we know, she might have been as stupid as a washerwoman. Where does he say a word about her intelligence? His Laura’s not a real person. She’s just an object, an empty vessel filled with his own visions. The Black Death did him a favor. He could mourn her forever, without risking anything. There’s something perverted about poets, don’t you think?”

  “I thought you loved poetry?”

  She thought about that, then said, “Maybe I’m perverted, too.”

  * * *

  I slept with another girl. The Saturday before Halloween, we played Lancelot’s Lair outside of Quakertown. It was one of the best rock clubs in eastern Pennsylvania, with a serious audience. We opened for a New York band, Humanity, that had an album coming out the following week.

  We blew them away. It was costume night and the audience was giddy over itself before we played a note. A black-lit crowd of gypsies, pirates, tarts, cavaliers, space aliens, and freaks with head-shop wardrobes wanted to be excited, to go on a rave, as if playing dress-up released them from their usual constraints. They fed us energy as we tuned our instruments.

  We kicked off with “Angeline.” The song’s cascades of guitar riffs grabbed the room. After that, we roared through a set of all-original material: “Hideaway,” “Glass Slipper,” “America: Speed Limit 90,” and a half-dozen others. A girl dressed as a sultry witch planted herself in front of my side of the stage and never moved from the spot. She was a dead ringer for Grace Slick of the Jefferso
n Airplane.

  Energized, I danced over to Frankie with jagged steps and we played off each other, keeping the visuals lively while Matty soloed in the background. The two of us had a preening contest, singing into the same mike, call-and-response, for the “Garbage Landscape” section of “America: Speed Limit 90.” We faked a fencing match with our instruments, never quite letting the necks touch. During his drum solo, Stosh went so wild he knocked over a cymbal—which further electrified the crowd. Perhaps they longed for destruction.

  When we sliced off the last, mad, cacophonous ending, the crowd roared. We didn’t even get offstage before it was clear that we had to play an encore.

  Frankie knew how to read an audience better than any front man who wasn’t already a headliner. Instead of calling for another original, he gathered us in by Stosh’s drum kit and said, “‘Bristol Stomp.’”

  The choice took me aback. The old Dovells’ doo-wop number was something we did as a gag in coal-town bars to get the beehive-hairdo holdouts dancing. Then I grasped what Frankie was up to: It was all about the beat, the rhythm, now. “Bristol Stomp” had a get-dirty beat that we powered up into a sexual war dance. Nobody could hold still after two bars. Lyrics and sophistication were irrelevant. The crowd needed music for a tribal ritual.

  Frankie’s instincts were dead-on. The audience wasn’t as cool and hip as it believed itself to be. Everybody ached to be part of the show, to bounce around like idiots and yell, Communards at the let’s-fuck barricades.

  With the mob wonderfully raucous, Frankie repositioned his bass across his hips, strode to the lead mike, and cried, “Time for a party!”

  Stosh counted us off. And the room exploded. Even Grace Slick’s kid sister turned from the stage to dance with a big, plain girlfriend.

  Frankie, Stosh, and Matty had grown up on doo-wop, last-date, wreck-the-car, feel-her-up-at-the-malt-shop harmonies. The music was louder and far more polished now, but vocally, they reverted to their Famous Flames days. Frankie’s long red hair could have been a ducktail.