Amateurs (30 page)

“Jeez.”

“One of the most riveting country-blues records ever made. And no one's even heard of Arkansas Bob! Before, I mean. The kid, record-label kid, asks around. Nothing. A complete unknown. They think maybe it's one of the major cats recording under a different name, 'cause that happened for contract reasons ‘n' that. But who? Sound like Patton? No. Sound like Broonzy? No. Guy's one of a kind. So the label kid makes ‘One-Sided Love' the leadoff cut on his next
comp, and a thousand, whatever it is, two thousand blues junkies like Wade used to work at Jazz Town go nuts for it. I call him up, I say, ‘Man, I gotta get my hands on more o' this Arkansas Bob shit.' Yeah, well, good luck.”

“Just that one record?”

“Naw, it's better. A blues professor from down South somewhere—”

Alabama.

“—hears something hinky about the record. The hisses and pops seem to be—what's the word?—looped. It's like the outer groove on a bunch o' old records was digitally fused together, but then they start to repeat. So he asks, the scholar asks, to examine the record itself. Finds more anomalies.”

“Okay.”

“Turns out Arkansas Bob's really Tyler Russell—”

Russell Taylor.

“—the grandson who donated the collection.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, Russell's been making this throwback stuff for years, in private, though, and never to his satisfaction. Born at the wrong time. No matter how good he is, it always sounds to him kind of, I don't know . . .”

“Ersatz.”

“
Ersatz
is exactly the word Bondarenko uses! You gotta read this thing. I'll find it for you. What happened was Russell heard about a pressing plant in Germany that still made 78s. Vinyl's back, right? So he cooks up his scheme, prints the labels himself. He told Bondarenko he just wanted people to really
hear
the shit, you know? Without baggage, without, whatever,
Is it authentic?
”

“Right. It seems, though,” Sara said, “that before the hoax was revealed, people would be listening with lots of historical baggage. Maybe Arkansas Bob's record sounded rawer, more nakedly emotive,
because that's what people look for in blues records from that period. Or it sounded especially impressive because it had gone so long undiscovered.”

Shawn wasn't visibly swayed. “Yeah, maybe,” he said. He stood up, picked up his rag. “Bondarenko didn't get into any o' that.”

Of course he did!

“I should help with lunch. To me, the important thing is—the who, what, why, when, how, none o' that matters when you listen.”

“Yeah.”

“It's a beautiful record.”

“I see what you mean.”

“It just is. ‘One-Sided Love.' Google it.”

July 2011

In the otherwise empty pool, Lucas and Maxwell competed in a series of races, beginning with freestyle, proceeding to a hybrid form that Maxwell incorrectly dubbed the crawl, finally to hopping, running, and various so-called rematches in which Lucas was saddled with an insurmountable handicap. They were both unlessoned swimmers, flailing around with their heads above water, their splashes reverberating in the high-ceilinged, half-glass room. Lucas's cutoffs exerted a strong drag on his swimming and didn't decently cover his ass. Breathless at the edge of the pool, he looked through the partially steamed window-wall at the Friday night traffic, the hotel sign, the silhouette of an evergreen, trying to remember the Kool G Rap couplet that rhymed “silhouette” with “pillow wet.” The water was warmer than the air, and he bent his knees to submerge his shoulders while Maxwell dived for a penny.

There was a moment of relative peace as Maxwell searched underwater, bubbles popping around his legs, his hair sticking up like those troll doll pencil toppers. A nineties MOR hit with religious
overtones played on wall-mounted speakers, taking on a layer of pathos that Lucas figured was mainly situational. The industrial sadness of piped-in music was most pronounced in uncrowded places built for fun, he thought, the fast songs like empty seats at a kid's birthday party, the ballads like wrinkled balloons dropping from the ceiling a week later. This particular ballad was one Lucas's mother liked. He remembered her humming along with it in the second truck, the glove box held shut with duct tape. Hearing it with Maxwell, he felt homesick for the home he couldn't return to in Thomas Wolfe's terms and the one he hadn't jointly established in any. The water lapped his chin. Maxwell breached during the song's go-for-broke key change, a penny between his thumb and middle finger. Lucas had brought the penny for that purpose and was happy to see his instincts affirmed. “You got a lot of lung power,” he said.

“In Cancun once I held my breath for five minutes.”

“Come on.”

“It was thousand-one time 'cause my dad lost his watch.” Maxwell cupped his hands and poured water on his forearms.

“What's his name again,” Lucas asked, “your dad's?”

“Jason. What's yours's?”

“His name was Gary.”

“Oh.” He looked at Lucas. “Is he dead?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry.”

Some of Lucas's friends had children—mostly babies, toddlers, and preschoolers—and he tried to tousle their hair, take an interest in their rumored talents, remember their names. If nothing else he tried to hide his irritation over the screaming, shrieking, and whining, the interruptions and distractions that obliged him to take three shifts to finish a thought whose resumption was never solicited by the parents. He hoped to sustain relations with his procreative friends just enough to permit a renaissance when the kids were old
enough to be off in their rooms quietly sexting. Maxwell, though, was older than the other kids on the fringes of Lucas's life and easy to warm to: kindhearted, quick to laugh, somewhat precocious but not smug or dweeby, except maybe about the Free Parking kitty. It was a relief, too, to be around someone who didn't care that Lucas wasn't currently in possession of health insurance, a working car, or respectable swim trunks, though Karyn didn't seem put off by those absences either.

Maxwell butterflied, in a way, to the other side of the pool and back. He was rapping the chorus to “Flava in Ya Ear.”

“You can have that mix from the car if you want,” Lucas said. He felt bad for the kid, having to endure the Insufferable String Band and the rest of his mother's Ren Fest music.

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“It's cool with no one else here,” Maxwell said. “Like having our own pool.”

“Or our own hotel chain.”

“Can you do the penny thing again?”

When the pool was about to close, Lucas taught Maxwell how to air-dry by flapping one's towel, touching it only with one's fingers and thus eliminating the need to launder it more than annually. Then he escorted him back to Karyn's room. It seemed overdone to say goodnight to Karyn at close range, so he lingered by an ice machine till she opened the door. When she poked her head out, he gave her the Air Force One wave while walking backwards to the elevator. She smiled. “See you tomorrow.”

Back in his room, the prospect of the Adult Adventures channel birthed some tiny wingbeats of excitement, but of course he couldn't make such charges as Karyn's guest, and he was trying to cut down on porn. Particularly in these time-teeming years of his joblessness, it was important to manage the habit, not to impose unrealistic Lents
of abstinence, but to stick to the liberated DVDs available for rent at the local woman-owned sex shop, or to the campy Jessica Rabbit site on which he was a leading pen-named commenter. When he was troubled by his porn consumption, he couldn't determine whether his concerns were mainly feminist and ethical (which concerns he wanted to take seriously) or mainly puritanical (which concerns he wanted to overcome). Maybe what bothered him most was the idea that something as seemingly personal as sexual proclivity—personal beyond the biologically determined or influenced fundamentals, that is—might be so lacking in autonomy, so historically shaped (a gay male friend's reaction to this theory: “Gee, you think?”), and what's more that some of his primary sexual influences were depraved misogynists. (Although hadn't he learned to kiss, in part, from Hollywood? The search for autonomy and independence in these matters was in two senses vain.) At any rate, he was trying to watch in moderation, often as a carrot for finishing an arduous task, or an easy one.

Because it seemed appropriate to reward his forbearance with another sensual thing, he started running water for a bath. It wasn't much of a treat; he found baths dull and uncomfortable unless he was sick or chilled, usually stayed in for less time than it had taken to fill the tub. Tonight he got in when the water was just a few inches deep, easing his back against the cold, suctioning fiberglass, and as the water crept up his legs he started thinking again about Karyn. A year ago he would have said that he'd only been in love twice: with his first girlfriend, who was also the first girl he'd kissed (confirmation retreat, fishing dock), and with Gemma. But that reckoning, he now believed, was too conservative. There'd been an unrequited love from high school that was short-lived at full strength but that still lingered, and an only briefly requited love from college, and a love he suspected was requited but unspoken on both sides, and maybe one other that he wouldn't admit to because it ended so badly. And
he knew he loved Karyn. There was something mysterious and pheromonal about her that had hit him from the start and was getting to him more and more, along with things easier to identify: her quarter-smile wit, her variegated hair, her steely intelligence, her easy manner with Maxwell, her ass in those bike shorts. He expanded on that last thought for a few minutes, and before long the bathwater seemed poorly constituted for a lingering soak.

He dried off in the regular manner, moved to the bed, and picked up the galley of
The Second Stranger.
He had started the book mostly on Karyn's account and to confirm his revived suspicion that Archer was a soulless charlatan. So far, unfortunately, he hadn't found much evidence in that line, save for a few irritating word choices and an interloping passage comparing clitoral with vaginal orgasms. All in all the book was pretty well done. Not to say that he liked it any more than the black-and-white photos that paddingly illustrated it; it was slow, meandering, sometimes primpingly belletristic, the sort of book he used to admire and abandon back when he took on and abandoned admirable books. But it was the work of someone who more or less knew what he was doing. Archer's competence never failed to infuriate Lucas, no matter how many times he discovered it. He set the book down on the unoccupied side of his enormous bed and tried to fall asleep, but after an alert forty minutes, part of which he spent draping sheets and other ad hoc shrouds over the room's static light show of digital clocks, TVs, phones, smoke detectors, and DVD players, he returned to the book, mostly with hopes of sleep inducement.

The next section—there were no proper chapters but many breaths of white space—was a long flashback about an epistolary romance between two kids separated by seventy miles of Idaho interstate and county road. The section confused Lucas, both because it wasn't clearly germane to, or as good as, the rest of the book, and because it seemed familiar. His first thought, illogical but typical, was that
he had dreamed the events depicted in the flashback. Déjà vu for him was always the feeling of experiencing something previously dreamed, which mostly made him regret that he never dreamed anything prophetic or psychologically instructive.

As he read on, he came to the less paranormal conclusion that he had read the chapter before—under a different author's name. Not just a run-of-the-mill charlatan, then, a plagiarist! A dumb one at that, since if Archer was stealing from texts familiar to Lucas, he couldn't be digging into the deepest stratum of esoterica. Lucas tried to step back from these accusations, thinking he'd skimmed the excerpt in that “20 Under 40” circle jerk and had later suffered some sort of literary amnesia, which wouldn't be unusual, considering that—

Then he laughed out loud, not sure if he was laughing with or at Sara and her lazy brilliance.