“Depends how you look at it, I guess.”
Julie seemed disappointed by this answer. “Depends on what? It seems pretty straightforward to me. The woman gives up her one and only chance at true love because she can't bring herself to abandon her husband and family. Happiness or duty? Which do you choose?”
“It's not that simple. If you hate yourself you can't be happy. And she would've hated herself for leaving her family. So happiness wasn't in the cards for her either way. It's a false choice.”
“No it's not,” she said, annoyed by his logic. “They loved each other. I mean, what would you do five years from now if you met someone and fell madly in love with her? Would you stay with me just because it was your duty?”
Dave pretended to consider this scenario, but his mind was pretty much empty except for a growing sense of dread. This was not a conversation that could do anyone any good.
“It's too hypothetical,” he said. “I need to know the details. Do we have kids? Are we getting along?”
“I can't believe you're so wishy-washy.”
“Well, what about you?” he shot back. “What would you do if you fell in love with someone five years from now?”
“Me?” She laughed triumphantly. “I'd dump you in a minute.”
“Thanks,” he said, not quite sure if she was teasing him or not. “It's good to know these things in advance.”
“In a heartbeat,” she continued, in a needlessly emphatic tone. “Robert Kincaid shows up and I'm out of here in a heartbeat.”
“Great. And I'm left alone to change the diapers and slop the hogs.”
“You know it, buddy. And in a couple of weeks, those hogs are gonna be lookin’ mighty good to you.”
As soon as they began kissing in the rec room, Dave experienced for the first time the full force of his infidelity, the sadness and shame generated by the act of touching one woman while desperately wanting to be touching another. It was a low-down, hollow feeling, complicated by a powerful surge of tenderness for Julie, a desire to protect her from the humiliating reality of the situation.
It occurred to him, while worming his hand under her tight shirt to massage her full, almost watery, breasts—so different from Gretchen's, so utterly different—that this deception would have been easier to live with if he'd resented Julie or felt somehow betrayed by her. But that wasn't the case at all. He loved Julie. That was an indisputable fact. The problem was, he wanted Gretchen, and that, at least at the moment, was more than a fact—it was a low-grade fever, a physical truth, the news his blood kept bringing him as it sloshed through his body.
Still he plowed on, stroking Julie's hair, kissing her mouth and neck, grinding against her in a halfhearted simulation of urgency. It was disheartening to notice how ritualized their lovemaking had become, how easy it was to coax her along the worn path from sitting to lying down, from fast breathing to slow purring to suddenly squirming out from under him with a move that would have made any Olympic wrestler proud and landing with a thud on the floor—
“Wait!” she gasped. “We need to talk.”
“Huh?” He peeled his face off of the couch and sat up, trying to look puzzled instead of alarmed. “Did I do something wrong?”
She arranged herself in lotus position on the floor. Her face and neck were flushed a deep pink, the color of desire and embarrassment.
“It's not you,” she said, still breathing hard. “It's us.”
“What about us?” He spoke carefully, keeping his voice calm and neutral.
She brushed her hair out of her face and looked up at him. Her expression grew shy and hopeful.
“It's just—I've been thinking about something for a while now. A kind of experiment.”
“Yeah?”
She shifted her gaze to her right knee, causing her hair to fall back in her face. She looked sexy like that, he'd always thought so.
“I want our wedding night to be special,” she said.
“Me too.” He made a conscious effort to look open-minded and agreeable. “Are you worried it won't be?”
“I'm not talking about the ceremony,” she said. “I'm talking about afterward, when it's just the two of us in the hotel room. That's what I'm worried about.”
“We'll manage. That's the one part we've never had any trouble with.”
She peered at him through the curtain of hair, twisting her engagement ring around and around her finger. She toyed with it constantly these days, often staring at it for long intervals, sometimes rubbing the tiny diamond back and forth across her lips.
“Remember how it used to be? When nothing even came close?”
In spite of himself, Dave thought not of Julie but of Gretchen, the ecstatic look on her face as she'd sucked his toes the night before.
“Yeah,” he said. “So what's the big experiment?”
Julie took a deep breath. Her expression turned skeptical, as though she harbored grave doubts about the proposition she was about to make.
“I don't think we should have sex again until our wedding night. Let's be virgins for a while.”
She paused, waiting for him to protest. For the second time that night, Dave felt as though life had granted him a reprieve. Out of courtesy, though, he forced himself to seem less than enthusiastic.
“I'm not sure I can last that long.”
“Me neither,” she confessed. “But I'd really like to try.”
“Okay.” They smiled at each other for a few seconds. When it got awkward, Dave glanced at the door. “I guess I better go then.”
“I guess so,” she said, working her bottom lip into a pouty expression, as though she were already having second thoughts about the experiment.
Dave stood up and drummed a little nonsense rhythm on his thighs. The tune of “Like a Virgin” echoed in his head; Phil Hart collapsed again on the stage. Julie's ankles cracked as she rose from the floor. She kissed him good night, as chastely as possible, and led him upstairs with an air of cheerful regret.
When he got home, Dave found a manila envelope with his name on it resting on the welcome mat outside the front door. As soon as he saw it, his heart began to speed. Without even thinking, he knew it was from Gretchen. There was no other possibility. Somehow she'd made the trip in from Brooklyn, found his house, and dropped off the envelope.
The house was dark when he stepped inside. Curious as he was, Dave knew better than to open it downstairs. His mother had ambushed him too many times over the years, springing like a ghost from the shadows of the front hall, for him to be so careless.
He tiptoed to the bathroom, locked the door, and tore open the flap, his mind swarming with possibilities. Nude pictures? Poems? Airplane tickets?
What would he do then?
It was a false alarm, though. The envelope turned out to contain only a cassette tape, marked Bill Evans Tribute/Randy by Starlight, and a brief note scrawled on a piece of Rockin’ Randy letterhead.
“Dave,” it said. “Enjoy.”
SHINY ANGELS
For about the fifth time, Zelack brought the cheeseburger to his mouth, then pulled it away at the last second. He just held it there in front of his chin, a perfect circle, like some kind of oversized communion wafer. Sunlight streamed through the window behind him, igniting a blond aura around his head.
“I know what you're thinking,” he said, “and I can't say I blame you. It's exactly what I was thinking when Mitch presented the idea to me.”
Dave speared a forkful of crinkle-cut fries and shoveled them into his mouth. There was only one bite left of his hamburger, and he didn't want to scarf the whole thing down before Zelack had even begun eating. He wondered if this was how women lived all the time, keeping score at the table, trying not to look too hungry.
“What you need to understand,” Zelack continued, “is that we're talking about the ground floor here, a real growth industry. This is the time to get on board. It's like I'm offering you stock in this new soft drink nobody's ever heard of—somet
hing called Coca-Cola.”
“I wish,” Dave muttered, bending forward to take a sip of his Coke.
Zelack watched him intently, eyes like pool water.
“I'm telling you, Dave, Christian rock is the next hot thing. Amy Grant is just the tip of the iceberg. She's Bill Haley and the Comets. The Christian Elvis and Chuck Berry and Little Richard haven't even happened yet. Think about it. We could be the Christian Beatles.”
If anyone else had made this pronouncement, Dave would have had to stop himself from laughing out loud, but Zelack was different—he had a track record. The Misty Mountain Revue had toured up and down the East Coast for years, drawing big crowds wherever they went. Sparkle was offered more jobs than they could handle, and their asking price was almost double that of the Wishbones. For a long time now, Dave had harbored the resentful suspicion that Zelack was going places, and now, out of the blue, he was being asked to come along for the ride. The destination could have been more appealing, but he was flattered nonetheless.
“Tell me a little more about your concept,” he said.
“Right now it's just a name. Shiny Angels.”
“Hmm.” Dave tried it out in his mind as he swallowed the last of his burger. “Shiny Angels. Not bad.”
“Angels are hot right now,” Zelack assured him. “Mitch thinks we should try to ride every wave we possibly can. He's envisioning a kind of Bon Jovi arena-type thing. Power ballads. Tight pants. Extended guitar solos. The whole mid-seventies rock star trip. He says these Christian kids eat it up.”
Mitch was a lawyer/talent agent from Nashville, the brother-in-law of Zelack's hot new girlfriend. He'd seen Sparkle play at a wedding and had instantly pegged Zelack as potential star material for the rapidly expanding Christian market.
4'So what do you think?” Zelack asked. “Are you with us?”
Shiny Angels, Dave thought. He imagined sidling up to a beautiful woman, offering his hand. Hi, I'm Dave. Lead guitarist for Shiny Angels.
“Is it the Shiny Angels? Or just Shiny Angels?”
“Just Shiny. It's better that way. Punchier.”
The booths at the Bayway Diner had individual jukeboxes built into the wall, an amenity that Dave had thought extremely cool as a teenager, but that recently had begun to strike him, for reasons he couldn't quite identify, as old-fashioned, vaguely embarrassing. Idly, he twisted the selection knob. Page after page of hit songs floated by, four decades of popular music indiscriminately jumbled on pale pink paper.
“So why me?” he asked, unable to suppress the question any longer. “There must be lots of younger, better-looking guys you could ask. Guys who look like rock stars.”
If Zelack heard the faint undertone of bitterness in Dave's voice, or remembered the incident that had produced it, he did a good job of seeming not to.
“That's the great thing, Dave. Image doesn't count as much with the Christian audience. We're just looking for the best players we can find.” Zelack looked away, frowning in the direction of the lunch counter. “I mean, you could always start going to the gym or something.”
Zelack's cheeseburger languished on his plate, apparently forgotten, soaking in a puddle of its own greasy perspiration. Dave pondered it for a few seconds, trying to imagine himself as a Shiny Angel.
“There's only one problem,” he said. “I'm not religious.”
“Why's that a problem?”
“I don't know. I just figure if you're in a Christian band—”
“Mitch and I talked about this,” Zelack assured him. “We don't think it matters. Neither one of us is particularly religious either.”
“But aren't people gonna ask? The minute you say you're in a band like this, it'll be, ‘Hey, when did you get religion?’ What are we supposed to say then? That we're just in it for the money?”
Zelack smiled. “Just say you're born-again. Who's to say you're not, right? Think of it as your professional identity. I mean, do you really think those heavy-metal guys are Satan worshipers?”
“Some of them.”
“Right. And everyone in Aerosmith has a ten-inch cock.”
“It's not just that. We still have to play the music. You can't do it right if your heart's not in it.”
“What? You think my heart's in ‘Stairway to Heaven’?” Zelack scoffed. “I must have sung that thing six thousand times and I still don't have a clue what the fuck it means.”
“But that's a cover. I assume we'd have to write new material for Shiny Angels.”
“That's the cool thing about Christian rock,” Zelack explained. “You write a regular love song and let people think it's about Jesus. Just toss in a couple of lines like ‘You're my guiding light’ or ‘my helping hand’ or some crap like that. Mitch's been sending me some tapes. A lot of this stuff, if somebody didn't tell you it was Christian, you wouldn't even know. I've got about twenty songs sitting in my drawer right now. With a little tinkering, they'll do just fine.”
Dave couldn't say he wasn't intrigued. It had been a long time since he'd allowed himself to seriously fantasize about being a rock star, standing onstage in a leather vest and no shirt underneath, gazing out on a sea of rapt faces and pumping fists as he performed his guitar heroics.
“It's kinda sad, though,” he mused. “I can't imagine these Christian girls are deep into the groupie scene.”
Zelack rolled his eyes. “Dave, Dave, Dave. Aren't you getting married in a couple of months?”
“I keep forgetting and people keep reminding me.”
All at once, reality washed over him. The image of himself soloing on his knees in front of a stadium full of squeaky-clean teenagers lingered in his mind, but now he just looked foolish, like one of the guys in Spinal Tap.
“So what do you think?” Zelack asked again. “Mitch and I are hot to get this thing up and running.”
“I'll have to talk to Julie. I don't think she'll be too crazy about the idea.”
“The Christian Beatles,” Zelack reminded him. “Coca-Cola.”
“I'll let you know.”
Later that afternoon, after making three deliveries in lower Manhattan, Dave lay beside Gretchen atop her folded-out futon, their damp skin cooling in the breeze from an oscillating fan. It was such a luxury, being naked in the daylight, having the opportunity to admire her body for as long as he wanted without fear of interruption. She was like a whole new world, slopes and angles and hollows unknown in his native land. Her smell was different too— spicier, less cloudlike and engulfing.
“You know what happened to me today?” he asked, watching the top joint of his index finger disappear into the void of her navel. “I got asked to join a Christian rock band.”
She rolled lazily onto her side, parts of her chest and neck still flushed from sex. The splotches were large and oddly formed, pink continents floating on a pale ocean.
“Christian rock,” she said. “Now there's an oxymoron for you.”
Dave felt an impulse to defend the genre, but no plausible defenses occurred to him. The fan breeze swept across the bed, momentarily displacing his thoughts along with the humid air. Gretchen poked him in the sternum.
“You're not a Christian, are you?”
“Not really. I was raised Catholic, but it never really took. All I ever wanted to do on Sunday morning was eat donuts and read the funnies.”
“Christian rock is big business these days,” she informed him, absentmindedly plucking at her pubic hair, which was dark and silky, disconcertingly similar to the hair on her head. “I read an article about it in the Times. It was so depressing. All these kids taking pledges of chastity and blabbing about their personal relationship with Jesus. Teenagers! I mean, whatever happened to sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll?”
Dave couldn't say; it was something he often wondered about himself. The question hung in the air above them until the fan blew it away. He considered telling her about his and Julie's vow of short-term chastity, but then thought better of it.
“The guy who
asked me is one of the best singers around. I have a feeling this band of his could really go somewhere.”
She propped her head in her hand and peered down at him with a certain amount of interest. With her glasses off, her face had a vague, unfinished quality he found strangely endearing.
“You really gonna do it?”
He sighed. “I don't think so. It's a good opportunity, but I don't think I'm that much of a hypocrite.”
Gretchen scooted herself into sitting position. She withdrew the scrunched-up pillow from behind her back and spread it out carefully in her lap. Dave watched from below, delighted by his new angle on her body as she ran her hand over the pillowcase, as though making a serious effort to iron out the wrinkles. Her small, sweetly upcurved breasts quivered in sympathy with the motion, somehow enhancing the effect of deep concentration.
“You're not?” she asked.
“Not what?”
“That much of a hypocrite.” There was a flatness in her voice, all the teasing squeezed out.
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“It's pretty obvious,” she said, not looking up, still doggedly petting the pillow. “You're here, aren't you?”
Dave groaned to himself, struggling to raise himself up to her level. His arms felt like jelly.
“I am here,” he conceded, gazing around the tiny, suddenly unfamiliar room, the fog of post-orgasmic well-being lifting inside his head. “I thought you invited me.”
“Invited you?” She made a face. “You called at two o'clock and said you'd be here at four.”
“I asked if you were busy,” he reminded her. “I thought you were happy to see me.”
She looked up at the ceiling and exhaled like a smoker trying to be polite.
“I was. I am. This is just really hard for me. I mean, you get to breeze in and breeze out of here whenever you please, and I'm the one left holding the bag.”
“The bag?” He spoke gently, placing a hand on her clammy, girlish shoulder. “What bag is that?”
Her voice was small, a little sheepish. “The bag of feelings.”
“The bag of feelings?” He couldn't help smiling. “That sounds like one of your poems.”