Riggs Park (15 page)

A few years after that she said to him, “Competent, yes. Talent, yes. Staying power, that’s another story. We might not know for a decade.” So he went to college, even though Penny begged him to remain in D.C. When he decided he’d better drop out before he failed everything, he consulted Essie first. His parents would be disappointed, he told her, but book-learning leaked from his brain like water and left behind only his music. What else could he be but a musician?

“You won’t be satisfied with just good, it’s genius you want?” Essie tried to stare him down, but Steve knew a few things by then and stared back at her. “Well then, you better be strong for it,” she told him. “Genius has a black bottom to it.”

Puzzled, Steve scratched a pimple at the end of his nose. He was twenty-two years old and still had pimples. They never covered his whole face, just appeared large and red in strategic places. He thought: red nose, black bottom—the lyrical possibilities. But coming from Essie, a black bottom was a dark, eerie, unfathomable place, and maybe he’d better not take it lightly.

Essie told him she had visited the Black Bottom of Her Soul once as a young woman. “Believe you me, even thinking back on it now still gives me the shivers.”

Steve didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about. Until years later, when he heard the story of the coyote, he didn’t know what personal experience might have provoked such terror in Essie, and he certainly didn’t know what any of it had to do with genius. Essie didn’t offer any details. Yet the discussion armed Steve for everything. Having recovered from her own experience, Essie said, she was in a position to warn him. Imagination could take its flights; did he think the trip was always into the stratosphere? It could with equal ease dip into the depths of blackness, and only the very strong would recover. She was utterly serious. Steve nodded, baffled, and wondered what the hell was going on.

Then she’d said, “So sing your songs, Steve. With your grades…you think God has some other plan in mind for you?”

That day in Detroit in 1983, talk-show hostess Sonya Friedman had come into the dressing room while they’d been doing Steve’s makeup. He recognized her from the tapes Waldman had sent. He always had Waldman send a couple of tapes so he could get a feel for the show before his interview. The truth was, he got a lot of his information from television. It was from a TV talk show that he’d first learned he couldn’t read because he had a condition called dyslexia. Transfixed, he’d listened to a psychology professor explain exactly what happened every time he looked at a printed page. The professor described the dislocation of letters and words so matter-of-factly that it might have been a common experience, when Steve had always thought he was the only one. “It’s very frightening,” the professor said, “to look at a puzzle everyone else has figured out and not be able to make heads or tails of it.”

Amen,
Steve thought. He had been drinking coffee at the time, and he raised his cup to toast the TV. Dyslexia research was just beginning to unravel the tricks that could be played by the human brain, the professor said. “Some dyslexics can actually learn to read pretty easily. For others it’s harder, but even then there’s a lot of help we didn’t have before.”

Ah—help. Steve was beyond it. Penny had been too confused to care if he could read, and his sister and Barbara always kept it a secret, but his parents and fans and maybe even Waldman believed he was normal. He wasn’t going to spoil a good thing by getting help. He dumped out the rest of his coffee and took a long shower to get himself back together.

As to
The Sonya Show
he’d seen last week—he’d liked it. Sonya Friedman was a cool, attractive psychologist, with a no-nonsense approach that reminded him of Essie. Walking into the makeup room to say hello to him, Sonya looked brisk and capable and, physically, much the same as she had on tape. That was in her favor. So many of them looked worse. She was wearing a red blouse and dark skirt that accented her thinness. She smiled, all confidence. “I’m Sonya Friedman,” she said. The hand she offered him was cold as ice.

So were Kimberly O’Connor’s hands, when she showed up ten minutes early for the rehearsal, looking beautiful but terrified. She calmed down a little when Steve sat at the piano, maybe because they’d gone through that part of the routine earlier. Penny, too, had always calmed down when he started playing. What was wrong with these beauties? In high school Penny was so good-looking you’d have thought she’d go through life strutting like a lioness. He knew Kimberly O’Connor must have her own share of admirers. And still she stood by the piano practically trembling, rubbing her hands together for warmth.

Then she started to sing. She sounded stronger than before, and her voice was sweet. But her looks were too flashy for a backup singer; there was a jittery quality about her that drew the eye. She made Carole and Francie look dim; she was like a fire burning between the two of them. Steve saw no possibility of toning her down, just as he’d never seen such a possibility with Penny. Both women had the whitest skin, the longest legs, the roundest breasts—and hands as cold as ice.

The routine ended. Kimberly O’Connor kept standing by the piano. There was no way Steve could use her, considering.

“You know, we’re traveling the next couple of weeks and interviewing some other girls,” he said. Kimberly stood still. Steve put a hand on her shoulder to guide her off the soundstage. Best to let her down easy, let Waldman give her the definite no. She walked with Steve to the waiting room, the green room, at the end of the corridor.

No windows here, just intense fluorescent lights and bright modern furniture. TV monitors on both end tables showed the soundstage outside. Francie and Carole stayed outside in the hall drinking Cokes, but Steve motioned Kimberly in. She sat on the royal-blue couch he indicated, following the motion of his hand like an obedient animal. It frightened him. He thought of Penny in her passive mode, waiting for instruction.

He began talking to her as idiotically as he once had talked to Penny, saying inconsequential things about his tour. Next to him, Kimberly O’Connor’s body tensed into a knot. “We won’t make an immediate decision on another backup,” he said finally. “Not for a couple of weeks.”

“A couple of weeks…I see.” She stood up, a wooden soldier, ready to go.

“You might as well stay for the taping, now that you’re here. You could watch from back here or go up front with the studio audience.” He couldn’t make himself stop talking. “You ever see this show taped before?”

“No.” She sat back down, stiffly.

“We’re on last,” he said. Sonya’s audience would wait for Steven Simple, hang on through a diet expert, a couple of commercials, a
Reader’s Digest
author. He was grateful. A month from now, a year from now, they might not give him the spot reserved for the star.

“Detroit your home?” he asked.

“No. Chicago. I’ve only been here a year.”

She watched him closely, not at all unfocused now. “I saw you a long time ago in Chicago,” she said. “It was before you got so famous. You had a whole different kind of style.”

“I thought I was America’s answer to the Beatles.”

She laughed. Loosening up. He felt better.

“You must have been a little kid,” he said.

“No, I’m twenty-eight.” He was relieved that she was older than he’d thought. At the end, Penny had been—for a second he couldn’t remember. Twenty-two? Twenty-three?

“I wrote a lot of my songs pretending to be a Beatle,” he said. “Unfortunately, they didn’t get an audience until I went solo, with just the piano. Did you know that?”

“Yes.” Animated now, a little mischievous. “I do my research.”

Francie and Carole came back in, shot him questioning glances, wondered why he’d invited the girl to stay. Good-mannered, they talked to Kimberly and at the same time watched the show on the monitor, which had started a few minutes before. “You married?” Francie asked.

“Was.” A wry smile.

Steve kept his eyes on the TV, but listened to Kimberly’s every word. She’d gone to Northwestern, majored in drama. Then the marriage. No kids. The divorce.

“I didn’t do much with my singing until late.” She spoke to Francie, to Carole, but kept her eyes on Steve. The girls were princesses and he was the king, the power source. He knew the look.

An assistant producer stuck her head into the door. “You’re up next.”

“Come watch us from out front,” Steve told Kimberly. It would be more prudent to leave and come back to find her gone, but he couldn’t bear it. “After the show we’re all going to get something to eat,” he said. “You can come with us.”

“Thanks.”

The princesses raised their eyebrows. Steve never did this.

Kimberly O’Connor fell into step beside him as they walked down the hall to the soundstage. He wasn’t touching her, but he wanted to. He wanted to feel her relax, to tell her all his secrets.

He liked the sensation of standing backstage in a TV studio, on cold concrete, anticipating what would come next. The curtain in front of him hung from two stories high, chilly to the touch because of the air-conditioning that kept the cameras cool. In a moment, on cue, he’d step into the light of the stage, into heat, into brightness, and it would be like being born.

“Tell us about Steven Simple the person,” Sonya Friedman had said. Usually in his mind it was clear what he’d answer, but Kimberly O’Connor was sitting in the studio audience and he felt reckless. He could give them more than the dumb-kid-who-makes-good story. He could tell them about his dyslexia.

Sonya was talking about the
Penny
album. A singer who’d gotten famous writing about a doomed young love made good patter. But Penny had been gone eighteen years, and Steve had been talking about her for ten, and the talk-show hosts had covered all the angles.

Of the
Penny
album he always said, “Well, she was a nice Jewish girl and I was a nice Jewish boy, but it didn’t work out except that I wrote a lot of songs about her.” Steve never said Penny slept with almost every male who asked her, or that she had instant, genuine amnesia about the acts they performed. He never hinted that Penny was not just disturbed but literally mad. He also never mentioned that he finally ran away from her with his band because the demands of her illness threatened to suck the music right out of him.

The talk-show hosts believed Steve wrote his songs out of grief. But Sonya Friedman was not going the sympathy route; she was after the shock tactic. “It’s not many people who turn a real-life note into a song,” she said.

“And not many people who write notes like that.” He did not say he could never help the songs he wrote; he wrote what he heard in his head. He was sorry Penny’s note had set itself to music, but it had.

I’m falling through the hole

At the bottom of my soul

And there ain’t nobody to catch me.

Their friends had thought it a cryptic note, but Essie had understood at once. “You told her what I said to you that day, about the black bottom. I recognized it right away.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“I knew you might tell her. But who could predict she would find a hole at the bottom of her soul and not a shallow pit?” Essie put her hand on top of his and squeezed it. “Steve, a pit you can climb out of. A hole you can only fall through. It’s not your fault.”

But it was. If he’d stayed in D.C. and taken care of her, instead of going off to school, she might have been all right. For the next ten years, on the road with his various bands, Penny the person disappeared, and Penny the myth was born. Steve began to think about her coldly, from a distance, the same way he thought about the other bald fact—he still couldn’t read. About the time all the heat was drawn out of him, he got his chance to make the
Penny
album, with “Bus Ride” the second cut. “Bus Ride” made him famous. And that was that.

Kimberly O’Connor was looking at him. Staring worshipfully, as if he possessed something transcendent and had the power to impart it. Penny had given him that same look when she asked him to stay in D.C. and make her sane. He was tired of being worshiped. The truth was, all he could actually give Kimberly O’Connor was a job. If he were going to start something more, she would have to know all about him.

“Steven Simple the human being,” Sonya was saying, stalling for time. “What makes Steven Simple run?”

He thought again of making a clean breast of it.
I can hardly read, even now.
Think of the youngsters he could save.

He opened his mouth, because Kimberly O’Connor’s eyes were bearing down on him and Sonya Friedman was wishing the hell he’d get on with it. He wasn’t sure he had the courage.

He cleared his throat, trying to dislodge the words that had been stuck there most of his life. Finally he said to several million people, “What makes Steven Simple run is that he could never learn to read. He can’t read now.” He cleared his throat once more and told the rest. His voice had been clear as glass.

I
raised a hand to fend off a plate of pastries Bernie was pushing in my direction. Marilyn stood, carried her soup bowl to the sink, then stretched and yawned. “Well, guys, this has been terrific. But now I think I’ll go watch the tapes procured for me by a major Hollywood pooh-bah.” She kissed Steve on the cheek. “Thanks for coming, Mr. Celebrity.”

“I’m not leaving just yet. I expect you to entertain me in the morning.”

“Count on it,” Marilyn said.

Not wanting to be accused of mothering her too much, Bernie let Marilyn leave the room solo, but a moment later excused himself to see her safely tucked into bed. Steve and I rose to clear the table. If Bernie returned quickly, I wouldn’t get to say a private word to Steve, so I spoke less tactfully than I meant to. “Marilyn told me the whole story about Essie Berman saying Penny had a baby. Marilyn’s determined to track it down. What’s going on, Steve? Why this big confession all of a sudden?”

Bemused, or maybe just surprised, Steve set a stack of plates on the counter and stared at me. “Oh, sweetie, I wish I knew.” He stood agape for long seconds. “I wonder about it myself. I could hardly believe Marilyn was sick again. It seemed so impossible. We were both upset. It brought the whole baby thing back to mind—I don’t know why. After all this time, maybe I figured there was no harm in telling.”

“No harm? Did you know Essie Berman is still alive?”

“She’s alive?” He looked bewildered. “I thought she’d been dead for years.”

“I went to see her today,” I said.

Slowly, Steve opened a cabinet drawer, rummaged until he came up with a roll of plastic wrap. In a low, controlled voice, he said, “And—?”

“She got a little disoriented while I was there. Fell asleep, actually. She has diabetes. But she did tell me one thing. Did you know the baby was a girl?”

“A girl,” Steve repeated. With great deliberation, he carried the plastic wrap to the table and began making neat packages of leftover Swiss cheese and roast beef. “I never knew. I always wondered.”

“Penny named her Vera. I didn’t tell any of this to Marilyn,” I said. “Essie wouldn’t say who the father was. She says if Marilyn wants to know, she should come with me to find out. I don’t think she’s up for the trip.”

“No, of course not.” Steve opened the refrigerator, nestled the wrapped cheese and meat inside, then said abruptly, “Essie told me about the baby on the condition that I didn’t ask any questions.”

“Marilyn told me.”

“I think I could have asked anyway, but I didn’t. Maybe it was just a good excuse not to know.”

“You were just a kid yourself, Steve.”

He pulled a plastic container from the cupboard and filled it with leftover soup. “Penny was always careful about birth control,” he said. “Obsessive, even. Remember? I thought the only way she’d ever get pregnant was if she meant to.”

“And even if it had been an accident and Penny was in a bad state mentally, her family would have told you, don’t you think?”

Setting the soup inside the refrigerator, Steve turned to me with a sad, wistful smile. “Oh, no, sweetie. They thought I was a bad influence. I probably was.”

I began loading the dishwasher. “None of it was your fault, Steve.”

“The baby might have been,” he said. “But at the time, I was traveling with my band. I knew something was wrong when Penny dropped out of sight. But something was always wrong, and it was easier not knowing. Then, later, what struck me was the time frame. The way Penny went incommunicado just when she did. And the time frame between the bus ride and the end.” He picked up the plastic wrap, replaced it in the drawer. “So I bugged Essie until she told me about the baby, and then I let her make it easy for me by agreeing not to ask any more questions.”

“And you’ve been stewing over it all this time?”

“Only at first. I’d think how Penny had just time to have a baby and give it up and not be able to handle the fact that she’d given it away. Which was pretty much how Penny would react. It might even account for the grand finale. Although I’m not sure how.” There was a cold clarity in his eyes, like a nub of melting ice.

“Steve, listen. If she got pregnant on that trip, it could have been the other guy’s. It might not have been yours.”

“I know that. But you know what? I never cared.” After a long pause he added, “That bus ride—It was me she was coming to see.”

I felt my throat close, my eyes burn, but I made myself focus and swallow. After more than forty years, Steve still sounded like the boy of fourteen who’d been left breathless by Penny’s shy manner and red hair, like the young man of twenty still lovestruck in spite of the arc of destruction Penny had set out upon, and now the man of sixty still nostalgic in spite of Kimberly and their grown children. I knew something about the durability of first loves, myself. Maybe, whatever he learned from Essie, it would be better than nothing.

I crossed the kitchen, took his arm. “Let’s go see Essie and find out what happened the weekend of that bus ride, Steve,” I said. “We could go in the morning. What do you say?”

After a long, mute minute, Steve said softly, “Sweetie, I thought you’d never ask.”

The next morning, after escaping from Marilyn on the pretext that Steve had to replace a pair of glasses, I drove south on New Hampshire Avenue once again, with Steve’s famous “Bus Ride” lyrics playing over and over in my head: “Traveling, traveling…the Penny girl was traveling”—until I had to turn on the radio to make them stop.

“Bus Ride” had done so well, Steve always liked to say, because it had come out when Vietnam was ending and the country yearned to embrace the antithesis of a political icon—a song so sad and personal that it echoed the national mood without actually referring to it in any way. People liked that “Bus Ride” was a puzzle of a song. They hummed its sweet melody. They were bewitched by lyrics as vague and mysterious as Penny herself. And whether or not Steve’s theory made any sense, it was certainly true that in 1975 his song fixed itself on the American consciousness as indelibly as another image had five years before, of a screaming, long-haired girl at Kent State keening over the fallen body of a classmate who’d been gunned down.

“Bus Ride” stayed at number one for twelve weeks, five weeks longer than it took “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to create the Beatlemania craze in 1964. When a radio station in Ohio held a contest for the best explanation of the events of that bus ride, and how they explained what happened to Penny later, twenty thousand entries poured in from all over the country. Like everyone else, I had always believed my own version of the story was the truth.

In the passenger seat beside me, Steve sat mute until south of University Boulevard, where the aging buildings must have begun to look familiar.

“I’m beginning to feel like someone in the twilight zone,” he said.

“Nervous?”

“A little.” He looked away from me, out the window at strips of tumbledown shops. “You know, I talked about Penny so much in the seventies and eighties that after a while it was like talking about somebody else. Somebody not real.”

“Is that why you never told us about her having a baby?”

“Maybe. For a long time, it was as if she didn’t exist, except in that surreal way. And the baby, too. Sounds like one of Penny’s own tricks, doesn’t it?”

“I can see you wanting to forget,” I said.

“You know when I started thinking about it again? After I adopted my own kids. When you’re young you don’t have any sense kids are going to mean anything to you.”

“And then you see that your children are going to be the best thing you’ve got.”

“Exactly.” Steve hunkered lower in his seat. “But I always felt a little guilty about the ‘Bus Ride’ story. Seems kind of mean-spirited to tell everyone in the country about it when you’re not really sure what happened.”

“You can’t really have regrets. Not after all this time. You wouldn’t have had your career. You wouldn’t have drawn attention to how people can learn to read. You wouldn’t—”

“Even before that bus ride,” Steve said, “Penny used to tell me she didn’t remember what she did with guys. I never believed her.”

“And after?”

“I think it was true. She started remembering things on that trip and later remembered more. Not just what happened to her in the bus station. Things from way back in high school. Maybe even before that. It spooked me.”

“Who knows what was going on in her head by then?” I said softly. “You had a right to be spooked.”

Steve squeezed the bridge of his nose, then took his hand away from his face and smiled wryly. “Sometimes I think if she’d ever heard ‘Bus Ride’ she would have been furious.”

“She would have been honored,” I told him. For a long while, Steve had repeated obsessively the events of Penny’s real-life bus ride every time the two of us had spent more than half an hour together. “But I didn’t understand what was going on until later, after she’d wrote that note,” he always said. “The note was the catalyst.”

He had needed a long time to filter the events of those years through his mind. And then he had written his song. Like everyone else in the country, I had invented the story that went behind it. But unlike most of Steve’s fans, I had known Penny and loved her, and I was pretty sure, even now, that my version was actually true.

Traveling, traveling…Penny Weinberg had been traveling without the knowledge of her parents or anyone else…traveling west, on a Trailways bus, to Morgantown, West Virginia, where Steve had been going to college. “That was the kicker,” Steve always said. “I should have invited her. She shouldn’t have felt she needed to surprise me. If only I’d known she was coming.”

Three hours before, Penny had stepped out of her English class at the University of Maryland, the school she’d transferred to after she’d quit George Washington University. She stepped onto a campus of April-green grass and saw through the color into the idea behind it, the idea that green was the color of wellness. Penny would see Steve and be well. She started to walk into College Park to the bus station when a boy from the English class beeped at her from his car.

“You need a ride?” He looked at her with an expression in his eyes that meant he wanted to touch her, so she asked if he’d drive her to the Trailways station, and he did.

Pretty soon, she was on a bus speeding through the countryside, and a man was staring at her. Sitting across the aisle at the opposite window, he was only a couple of years older than she was, midtwenties maybe, wearing a short-sleeved shirt that showed muscular arms. His arms were suntanned; she could see that without moving her head. She didn’t look at his eyes because Steve said not to; men’s eyes would always be kind at first. Even Allan Kessler’s eyes had been kind, all those years ago, before he’d called her a tramp and gotten her blackballed from the sorority.

Penny smoothed her skirt over her knees: a tan, perfectly ordinary skirt. She was perfectly ordinary.

Shifting away from the window, the man scooted across the aisle in a swift motion and sat down next to Penny. “How far you going?” he asked. She turned from the window. It would be impolite not to look at him now, not to meet his eyes. His face was smooth-shaved and open, with plain brown eyes like Steve’s. “Morgantown,” she answered.

“I bet you got a boyfriend at the university. Me, I’m going home for the weekend. I work construction in D.C. during the week, but I live in Cumberland.” He was proud of that, she could tell. “Danny Sowers,” he said, thrusting his long tanned hand out to shake hers.

She felt him touch her, noticing that her own hand was smaller and whiter than his, feeling their two hands move up and down together. Her eyes might have been a camera. She saw the pale brown freckles on her own, smaller hand, marring its whiteness. She took her hand away. “I’m Penny,” she said.

“Nice to meet you, Jenny.”

She could have explained it was Penny, not Jenny, but she was too ashamed of her hands. Outside the window, the light was fading. In another hour it would be dark.

They pulled off the highway and headed into a town. The streets grew narrow, lined by old brick buildings. People sat on the steps in front of the buildings. Most of the people were fat. “Cumberland,” Danny Sowers said. The driver made a hard left into the bus terminal, pulled into a parking place. “Thirty-minute stop here,” he said. “You got to change buses here, don’t you?”

“I think so.”

“You wanna have dinner with me before you go?” Danny asked.

Penny thought of the fat people on the steps of the buildings. This was a place where people got fat. Men were complete in themselves, but women were half, so they had to stay thin. Steve said there was no danger of Penny gaining weight, the way she picked at food, but she didn’t like men to see her eat.

“I’m not that hungry,” she said.

“Come on, at least have a cup of coffee. I know a place just up the street.”

They got off the bus together. No one was staying on the bus during the long stop. In the parking lot next to the terminal, the light had gone gray and colorless. Only a little patch of grass out by the street had the last of the sun on it and was still bright green. Penny remembered she was going to Morgantown because of the greenness, the color of healing.

Danny had a duffel bag in his hand. His arm beckoned her, its thick, tanned muscles rippling. “Come on.”

She moved toward him. He touched a handful of her hair where it met her neck. Steve did that sometimes. “Your hair is some kind of red.” In the dusk, everything had gone black and white except Danny’s blue shirt and brown eyes like Steve’s. He was the only thing in color. Penny let him lead her away from the bus station.

“Just let me drop my bag at my place.” At the end of the block, he stopped beside one of the drab old buildings.

“Go ahead,” she told him.

He said, “Come on up for a minute.”

They climbed a wide wooden staircase that smelled of cooking. At the top, Danny opened a door into a small apartment. It had wood floors, but no rugs, and a few pieces of furniture that did not make it look less empty. It might have been a set for a movie.