This gesture only fueled me, however, only gave shape to my thoughts, and I played better than I had ever played before. We sounded like professionals, and I was lucky that the drummer and singer were skilled. There is no better gift to a boy alone in the world with a guitar in his hand, that I can promise you. So, I set the volume at ten and let my hair hang over my eyes. Kids sang every word in robust chorus as they beat their leather shoes on the stairway banister and played air guitar with their dates. I saw Randy peek his head around the corner of the kitchen and salute me with a bottle of rum. I looked back at the drummer, who smiled, the bassist, who nodded, and, as the window to the backyard became crowded with harkening faces, I collapsed inside of myself for the solo.
In the place I found there, in the world I imagined, Lindy was filling up with wonder about me. How had the boy she had known as so meek and so shy in her neighborhood grown into this man now before her, playing a song that she loved? How had she neglected the obvious similarities between them? How had she not noticed that he could be all things to her, dangerous if she wanted him to be, sweet-hearted when she needed him?
Even more so, how had she been so foolish as to let other men know her, when the one that knew her first had not wavered? How? I saw her wonder about herself in this place. Why?
Why not?
This was my fantasy.
The reality is that when I opened my eyes, the house was rocking. Kids were hopping up and down in place as the singer began unleashing Axl Rose’s trademark lamentations over the song’s swelling composition: Where do we go? Axl sang. Where do we go now?
At that age, it was the best question we’d ever heard.
So I stood firm on the plush carpet and delivered to my peers what they wanted. I flexed every muscle I had. Finally, as the song was coming to a close, I saw Lindy dancing by herself, her date now disappeared as if I had driven him off my land, and I urged the band to play one more measure, for good measure.
They understood my desire and we rocked it.
God, yes.
This is Romance. This is Memory. This is the good stuff.
It did not last long.
21.
After the song, I spent a short time as a hero.
People came up to me and shook my hand. They poured me warm shots of vodka and tequila, which I drank. I’d become a mark of the evening, it seemed, a signpost, as in my bravery I had boldly proclaimed into the microphone that every Rolling Rock in that house was now mine and that only the foolish would try to stop me. As the evening progressed, kids asked me what number beer I was on and the answer bloated. I ended up in the second-floor game room, playing pool with a girl I had never seen before and constructing a pyramid of green bottles on the top of a pinball machine. It was well past two a.m. at this point and the lot of handsome young boys at the dance had aged into exhausted-looking businessmen, their ties loose around their necks, their hair skewed. I was legitimately drunk, for the first time in my life, and wondered how I’d ever been satisfied with anything else.
Back downstairs, the band had finally quit playing and the atmosphere was now a jumble of things: a drunkard banging on the drums that had been left there, a girl screaming at her date, and the blare of a Michael Jackson record. Kids had long ago begun to smoke cigarettes in the house as well, ashing into porcelain vases, and so the upstairs game room had the feel of a bar. Four or five guys played Nintendo on the large projection-style television on the far wall, and Trent Wilkes, a heavyset boy who played offensive tackle, was passed out underneath the pool table. Every once in a while I’d hear someone howl for no reason. It was that kind of night. Things felt great up there.
Then Lindy walked in and everything changed.
She stood in the doorway of the game room and steadied herself.
I had no idea what had passed in her life since I played my song for her, since I’d become a man on the scene, as I’d done all I could to act tough and ignore her. Still, I had the feeling that it hadn’t gone well. My evidence to this effect was that her dress was now covered in stains where liquor had been spilled—J?germeister, maybe, or some thick and brown beer. A black smudge of mascara beneath her eye now lent her the look of an athlete. She scanned the large room as if she’d forgotten why she’d come up there, and then, finally, she looked at me. She smiled.
I smiled back.
“Hey, you,” she said, and there it was, the end of my loneliest year.
I’ll spare you from all flights of fancy that you can assume took charge of me at that moment: our heartfelt confessions, our long conversations about star-crossed love and epic misunderstandings, how we’d wasted so much time without talking. None of those possibilities came true.
Instead I will only give you the words:
“Hey, Lindy,” I said.
She took a long time to respond.
“Look who it is,” she said, and walked toward me. Her combat boots were untied. She gave me a hug and I felt her falling into me, pressing herself against my chest for balance, and I inhaled a scent I did not recognize as of yet. It was a scent I would later come to know in college: the syrupy breath of a drunken girl, the not yet ashen smell of a freshly smoked cigarette. At the time, however, this scent was a rich mystery, and I enjoyed it.
I helped her gain her balance, and looked into her eyes for the first time in a long time.
Unfortunately, I saw little there.
Lindy was present, undoubtedly, standing right there before me, but nothing in her countenance attested to this fact. Her eyes, instead, scanned my face benignly, as if considering a child’s drawing held up by a magnet on the fridge. She smiled, sure, but I had no idea at what. When I think back about her now, she reminds me of so many other women I would know only briefly in life, only drunkenly, and I suppose this night is the reason I never ventured to know them any longer. Because when I later saw this same look in other women—pitiful, vulnerable, immediately attainable—I knew there would be no future between us.
As for Lindy, she stumbled, caught her balance, and squeezed my arm.
I flexed my biceps like an idiot in love.
“Look at the rock star,” she said.
“Who, me?” I smiled and, behind me, I heard someone say, “Please.”
I turned around to see the girl I’d been playing pool with rolling her eyes at Lindy and waiting for me to take my turn. This gesture seemed impossibly crude, grossly ignorant, but it was just one of many vulgarities the kids in that room offered forth. The guys on the sofas were watching us, too, I realized, and also making fun of Lindy. She was a mess, there was no doubt. In hindsight, I suppose I should have taken this as a sign that I should be escorting her to the bathroom, washing her face with a warm cloth, and caring for her. Instead I wanted only to talk with her, to be with her, and I wanted this desperately. As such, I made numerous mistakes.
I said the first thing that came to mind.
“Where’s cool guy?” I asked her. “Where’s Matt?”
Lindy screwed up her face like she didn’t know who I was talking about. She then twisted her body around to scratch some sort of itch on her back and stumbled forward again. She pushed me against the pool table and spilled red juice on my shirt. She held my arms again and we laughed.
“I know you,” she said.
“I know,” I smiled. “I know you, too.”
“No,” she said, and took a low tone. “I mean, I know what you do.”
I felt panicked as to what this could mean. Still, I acted coy about it all. I tried to be flirtatious. “You know what I do?” I said.
Lindy nodded.
“What’s that?” I asked.