Once, I saw a hypnotist perform at a bachelor party. When he told his subjects that they couldn’t get out of their chairs, they really couldn’t. They struggled with all their might—teeth gritting, muscles tightening—but not one of them got out of the chair. I was commanding myself to get up. And I was also commanding myself not to.
There were a hundred reasons to let her go, yet I felt locked to my chair. It wasn’t only the fear that she’d tell. I still believed in Nolan, and in myself. Believed that we’d find a way out of this with our lives more or less whole. I didn’t believe this completely. Just enough to cause me to hesitate, until Jeffrey appeared in the control room’s doorway, a big wad of paper towel pressed to his face. As he stepped into the room, the big box of untapped courage inside of me snapped shut.
“How’s the tooth?” I asked.
I felt chilled, looking at him. His fat lip curved upward like a grotesque grin.
“It’s still in my mouth.” He sat down on the sofa. “You smell like smoke.”
I removed the cigarette pack and lighter from my pants pocket and handed them to him. Then I watched him try to hold a cigarette in his busted lips.
“Why did you say earlier that Nolan was a snake?” I asked. We obviously weren’t going to make a move until Nolan returned, and I wanted to get to the bottom of something.
He lit the cigarette and took a long draw, like he’d been waiting all his life for that jolt of tar and nicotine. He exhaled and handed me back the pack and lighter. “Oh, pick your reason.”
“No, I’m serious. Tell me why you said it.”
“You’re telling me that you disagree with the assessment?”
“Yes, frankly, I do.”
Another draw of the cigarette. He shut his eyes in bliss, or maybe pain, and exhaled a stream of smoke. “After all these years, Will, your na?veté continues to astound me.”
12
It all went back to Nolan’s first political campaign.
Before then, I’d never traveled west of the Mississippi River. A year earlier, with my band stagnating and love life nonexistent, I’d have gladly traded the callous streets of New York for twenty million acres of corn and soybean, for wide autumn skies unspoiled by smog. For four weeks, that would’ve been a real treat.
By the summer of 1996, though, High Noon was performing in better venues and beginning to generate a little attention. Low men on various music-industry totem poles were starting to make vague promises. When Nolan called and asked for my help, I knew that the rest of the band wouldn’t take well to my leaving.
But it’d always been my conviction that nothing trumped loyalty to a friend. So I begged the band for their understanding—and if not that, their forgiveness—and I agreed to fly to Missouri in early October and stay there through the election.
Then Cynthia came into the picture.
When I met her, she was a senior editor at Center Magazine, a Manhattan arts and culture weekly. One night she happened to catch the band’s set, and afterward she came up to us and asked for an interview. Even the low-wattage room didn’t dim her intelligent blue gaze. I liked looking at her. A red beret capped her head like a cherry on a sundae, and a small stud pierced her nose. Her smile was friendly and unguarded. She looked like the girl next door if the girl next door had spent a year in Europe.
She plucked a golf pencil from behind her ear, and in the little notebook she was carrying she scribbled down the date and time when we would meet. She thanked us repeatedly, as if we were the ones doing the favor.
We all met up later that week at an Irish pub near the NYU campus. Cynthia set a tape recorder on the table, and for the next two hours she ordered pitchers of McSorley’s and asked us questions. I liked that she talked about music as if it mattered, but not as if it mattered more than it actually did. And I liked her vocabulary, such as when she asked the band if we thought that grunge was here for good or “evanescent.” This turned me on.
When the interview was over, she stopped the tape and my bandmates all made polite excuses and left. Only much later, when our relationship was secure, would I reveal to Cynthia the secret behind those quick exits. It’d all been prearranged. I don’t ask for much, I’d said to my bandmates before the interview, hand on heart. Please—give me this chance alone with her. The guys, romantic fools the lot of them, agreed.
Alone with Cynthia, over the next two hours I fell in love little by little.