David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

“What are you, running a museum?” he said. “Look, I liked Diane. Your mother had her opinion, fine. Me, I think you were crazy to let her go. But you made your choice, right?”

“You could call it that.”

“And you still got all her hair shit in there.” He flipped his thumb in the direction of the bathroom, where Diane had left behind half-empty bottles of conditioners, moisturizers and lotions.

“Don’t think I don’t see what you’re up to.”

“What, throw you off your game? You fucked yourself two moves back.” I looked the board over again, then got up and put another couple of logs in the stove.

“What I’d do?” he said. “Find some sucker who wants to be—who’m I trying to think of? Thoreau. Then buy yourself a nice little place in town where you don’t have to do that nine months a year. You want to be living like this when you’re my age?”

“I seem to recall you couldn’t wait to get out of the city.”

“Not to live like a sharecropper. You even get cable up here?”

“We don’t have a TV.” I sat down again and took another look at the board.

“Interesting,” he said. “And who’s the ‘we’?”

“Yeah, okay. I get it.”

“Anyway, now your mother’s gone and I’m staring at trees all day. You could have a life. You meeting anybody?”

I laid my king on its side. “Pop. It’s been a month.”

“That’s my point.” He looked out the window. “These trees are gonna kill you.”

—

By the time Janna moved in, I’d been living in New Hampshire for longer than I had in the city, though I still wasn’t fooling the locals any. You could see another house by then: an A-frame up on the rise catty-corner across the road. Diane and I could have bought that parcel along with the land on this side, but we hadn’t been able to come up with the extra ten thousand dollars. I hated to look over there.

Janna worked at Century 21, near my college in the old downtown. Yes, I met her at the bar where I’d started going after classes. She’d gotten her job just by walking in and asking for it, and her boss liked the tricks she’d picked up on some website: putting bowls of lemons and Granny Smith apples on kitchen counters, fanning out copies of Country Journal on coffee tables. I thought she was too bright to have ended up here: she had an M.A. in political science from Tufts. But she said she’d found her place in the world. I suppose I had too.

She told me right from the beginning that she didn’t want to be the Second Wife, and she’d put a bumper sticker on her Land Cruiser reading COPULATE DON’T POPULATE.

Her apartment had track lighting, Turkish rugs and a gas fireplace, but she seemed to feel at home in my house. Aside from repainting the living room—a yellow she said would feel warmer than the white Diane and I had gone with—all she did was move the sofa over to where the armchair had been and find us a pine blanket chest for a coffee table. She was fine with dial-up and no TV—she’d let corporate media waste too much of her time already, she said—and she even claimed the rooster didn’t wake her, though she refused to go into the henhouse herself. After five years, we still had sex more days than not: I’d made peace with her chubby knees, as she’d presumably made peace with my loose belly and my too-small hands.

Janna played guitar—another point in her favor—and we sang together once in a while. I’d back her up on her songs—Ani DiFranco, Michelle Shocked, the Indigo Girls, some of it not as bad as you might think—and she knew “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” and the usual stuff by Emmylou Harris. I tried to teach her a couple of Porter and Dolly songs, though she didn’t have much of a range and we could never hit on the right key for her. It was Janna, in fact, who talked me into having the music parties again. She hated to cook, so we’d lay in beer and whiskey and chips and tell people to bring whatever. She hung back most of the time and let the bluegrass guys do their insidebaseball thing—“Yeah, ‘Rank Strangers.’ Who’s gonna do Ralph’s part?”—but late at night I could sometimes get her to step into a circle of pickers and sing “Sin City.”

“We could probably make this work,” she’d told me when we’d been together for a month. “If neither of us turns into an asshole.”

“How likely is that?” I said.

“Well,” she said, “if people aren’t willing to change. I mean when things call for it.”

“But you’re happy now .”

“You would’ve heard,” she said.

—

When I sent the notice out for the party that last summer—we were having it early, since we were going to Yorkshire in July, to see the Brontë country—Paul emailed back that he’d taken a buyout from U.S. News and was “living on Uneasy Street” but would try to make it. He was working on a book proposal, he said, about mountaintop removal. It should get him some time in eastern Kentucky, where maybe he’d be able to play some music too, if he didn’t show up in a car with New York plates.

The Friday night of the party, he rolled into the dooryard just after dark, in a Jeep Wrangler, with a woman at the wheel. She looked to be Janna’s age and not quite up to Paul’s standards—maybe too much nose and too little chin—but with a slender body and straight, dyed-black hair down to her shoulders. He got out, stretched and looked off at the hills. “Shee- it! ” he said to the woman. “Just smell the air. I ever tell you? This is my favorite place in the world.”

“Several times,” she said.

“I want y’all to meet Simone,” he said. He always talked more southern when he was around the music. “My last and best.”

“Until the rest of the ass parade comes around the corner.”

“Never happen,” Paul said. He looked even lankier than usual, and when he turned to me I saw dark pouches pulling his eyelids down, exposing some red below his eyeballs. “Hey, listen, we gotta do ‘Hit Parade of Love.’ But first off—what do you say?” He opened his mandolin case and took out a pipe and a plastic bag of buds.

After one hit, I knew I’d had plenty, and that a beer might help and might not; even Paul stopped at three. He kicked off “Hit Parade of Love,” and somehow I found myself singing the first verse, whose words I thought until the last instant wouldn’t come to me —From what I been a-hearin’, dear, you really got it made —but when we got to the chorus, with the tenor part, his voice cracked on the word “top,” and he asked if we could take it down to A. Well, hell, he had to be what, pushing seventy by now? If I was fifty-one?

He gave up before midnight—he said the drive had done him in—and we put him and Simone in the big guest room at the far end of the hall. When the music petered out around two thirty and people retired to their tents and RVs, Janna and I came upstairs and saw their light was still on; Janna thought she heard him coughing. The rooster woke me for a few seconds as the windows began to show gray, and I hoped that if Paul was hearing it too he’d fall back safe asleep.

In the morning I put on one of the knee-length white aprons Diane had left behind, cooked up enough scrambled eggs, along with kale from the garden, to fill the turkey-roasting pan, set out paper plates and plastic forks and clanged the triangle she’d always used to get the party guests in. Paul and Simone didn’t come down until the others were finishing up. “You sleep okay?” I said.

“Never better,” he said. The pouches under his eyes looked darker in daylight. “Once I got my nightly obligations taken care of.” He put a hand on Simone’s ass and squeezed. “This is the one that’s gonna be the death of me.”