Anne Tyler - A Slipping-Down Life

“Can you read music? Do you believe in drugs? What was it got you started playing?”

“Course I read music, what do you think I am,” said Drum, following a passing car with his eyes. “Marijuana gives me headaches. I won a talent show, that’s how I started.”

Oh, questions were the only way to grab his attention. She had tried, at first, declarative sentences: laying her life before him neatly and in chronological order, setting out minute facts about herself as if it were important he should know. Drum seemed not to hear. But she had only to say, “Is all your family musical?” for him to wade up from his silence and start framing an answer. “None of them’s musical, they just admire it a whole lot. My mama said she would give every cent she had into seeing me be a singer.”

“Doesn’t she come to hear you play?”

“At the rock show she did. All my family did.”

“Did I see them? What do they look like?”

“Nothing extra. Just a parcel of brothers and her and him.”

“Him? Oh, your father. What does your father do?”

“What have you got up there,” Drum said, “a questionnaire?” David, taking him literally for a second, glanced sideways into Evie’s lap. But then Drum said, “He works in a filling station. I help him out some.”

“I bet he’s proud of you. Isn’t he?”

“Oh, well.”

“He would have to be,” said Evie. “Anybody that plays like you, his family must just die of pride.”

His eyes would flick over to her, as sudden and as startling as the appearance of someone in a vacant win dow. If she spoke about his music he would listen all day, but what would he answer?

“Oh, well, I don’t know.”

She entered the Unicorn alone and went to her table, keeping her head erect, holding her stomach in. Eyes lit on her back. Whispers flitted across tables. “Oh, it’s you,” the proprietor said. “Budweiser?”

“Yes, please, Zack. Have you got a match for my candle?”

She thought of herself as a bait-and-switch ad. People came out of curiosity, bored by the long summer days. They figured they might as well go stare at the girl who had ruined her face. But after two minutes of that, there was nothing left to do but concentrate on the singer who had caused it all. Even Drum had to see that. People who returned came for the music alone; Evie was only a fixed character to be pointed out knowingly to new customers. “Will you be waiting?” Drum called. “Where will you be waiting?” Customers who were used to his speaking out began answering. “Yeah, man! Here!” A reviewer commented on him in the Avalice and Farinia Weekly . “Rock music of his own making, leaning toward a country sound, original at first although he tends to get repetitious.” Evie was not mentioned, any more than the color of his clothes or the brand of his guitar.

Evie always had to hang around for awhile before the ride back. The wait was nerve-wracking. It sometimes stretched on till after one o’clock in the morning, while at home her father might be telephoning Violet at any moment. She watched the customers gather their belongings and leave. The proprietor washed his glass mugs. The dance platform was dark and empty, and all she heard of Drum was fits of music in the back room. “David,” she would say, catching his sleeve as he hurried by, “are we going now? What’s taking so long?”

“Be just a moment,” David always said. But he would be carrying in a new pitcher of beer and a fistful of mugs. Eventually Evie gave up. She tucked her purse under her arm and left, sidling between vacant chairs and crossing the dim-lit, hollow-sounding floor to the door. Outside, the darkness would be cool and transparent. She took several deep breaths before she curled up in the back seat of the Jeep.

The slick surface of Drum’s guitar would jog her awake. “Move over,” he would say. “Here we are.”

“What time is it?”

“I don’t know.”

Until she looked at her watch she always had a lost, sinking feeling. Her sleep had been troubled and filled with muddled dreams; it might have lasted for minutes or for hours. Had her father called the police yet? She pressed forward in her seat, as if that would help them get home faster. Every pickup truck dawdling in front of them made her angry. Then she remembered Drum. On the rides home he sat beside her, with only the guitar between them. “Did you think it went well?” she asked him.

“Mmm.”

“They liked the Carolina Trailways song.”

No answer. David took over for him. “I thought so too. Why always that one? The walking song is a hell of a lot harder to do.”

He was kind-hearted, David was. Or maybe he just wanted to keep Evie’s good will. During Drum’s silences he picked up the tail of the conversation and moved smoothly on with it, rescuing her. For a while they would shoot sentences back and forth—”Oh, well, the walking song takes getting used to.” “Not if they had ears it wouldn’t”—but there was always the consciousness of Drum’s silence, which they played to like actors on a stage. Questions, that was the only way. Questions.

“What is your favorite song, Drum? Drum?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Don’t you have a favorite?”

“Not for all time I don’t. The one about the blue jeans, maybe.”

“Why don’t you have regular titles?”

“Never had no need for them.”

“You will when you make a record,” Evie said.

His eyes flicked over to her again; she felt them in the dark. She moved his guitar slightly so as to speak straight at him. “Someone is going to make a record of you that will sell a million copies,” she told him. “What will they put on that little center label? You’ve got to think up some titles.”

“She’s right,” David said.

“What’s so hard about that?” said Drum. “I’ll name them what I call them—’The Walking Song.’ ‘The Blue Jeans Song,’ nothing to it. Wait till they ask me, first.”

“You think they won’t ask you?”

“They haven’t yet, have they? I been sitting in that dump for seven months now. Haven’t got nowhere.”

“You will,” Evie said.

“How? When? You seen any talent scouts around?”

After a show he was always like that. She had seen girls clustering around him three deep at the end of a set, paying him compliments and brushing bits of nothing off his shoulder while Evie frowned fiercely into her beer and thought, “Now he’ll find out; they’ll show him he’s too good for Pulqua and the Unicorn and me”—although she had always counted on his becoming famous. But when the girls left he would only seem more uncertain. His proud cold envelope of air temporarily left him. “You sound better than anyone I hear on the radio,” Evie would tell him, and he would stun her by turning on her suddenly and saying, “You think so? Is that what you think? Ah, but what do you know?”

“I know if it sounds good.”

“ I don’t know that. How do you know?”

Those were the only times they met face to face. They were the only times Evie lost the feeling that she was tugging at Drum’s sleeve while he stood with his back to her, gazing outwards toward something she couldn’t see.

Early in July, the Unicorn began hiring Drum for Fridays as well. People were asking for him, the proprietor said. Joseph Ballew was no longer enough. But Fridays Drum worked late in the A & P, bagging groceries. “The only solution,” said David, sitting in the Jeep with one of his lists on the steering wheel, “is for me to pick you up first, Evie. Then we’ll get Drum at the very last minute. Even then it’ll be close. Does that suit you?”