Anne Tyler - A Slipping-Down Life

“What do you know,” said Drum. He didn’t look up from the magazine he was leafing through. “Anything I hate, it’s indecision. I wish Zack would just fire me for good and get it over with.”

“When are you going to be satisfied? You got your Saturday nights back, didn’t you?”

“Sure. I guess so.” Then Drum turned another page of his magazine.

What he had said to Evie at the Tabernacle was buried now, not erased but buried beneath the new grave courtesy he showed toward her. He had never apologized. For several days he treated her very gently, helping her with the dishes and listening with extreme, watchful stillness whenever she spoke to him. It was the most he could do, Evie figured. She shoved down the Tabernacle memory every time it floated up in her mind; yet evenings, when they sat doing separate things in the lamplight, she sometimes wanted to leap up and ask, “What you said, did you mean it? You must have or you would never have thought it. But did you mean it for all time, or just for that moment? Are you sorry you married me? Why did you marry me?” None of the questions were ones Drum would answer. She kept quiet, and only watched him from across the room until he looked up and raised his eyebrows. Then the questions began to occur to her less frequently. Whole days passed without her remembering, and gradually she and Drum drifted back to the way they had been before.

Drum returned to his Saturdays at the Unicorn without a word, played his songs and came home as soon as his last set was over. He never went without Evie. She felt that her hold on her school work was slipping, and sometimes she suggested that he go alone while she studied, but Drum said, “Nah, you can study some other time. You’re so smart, one night won’t hurt you.” Yet while he played he stared over her head, never directly at her.

“We went two-ing on the one .

“We went circling on the square .

“We went adding on the divide.”

Evie listened without changing expression, clutching her coat around her for warmth.

She thought she might be pregnant. She pictured her stomach as a thin, swelling shell, like a balloon, and since something so fragile had to be guarded with a half-drawn breath, she put off going to the doctor and she said nothing to Drum. It was too early yet, she told herself; and then, as she reached the end of the second month, it was too late. How could she explain keeping it a secret so long? What held her back was this thin-skinned feeling. The baby, she thought, was a boy, still and grave and level-eyed like Drum, and the picture of those eyes in such a small face made it seem necessary to protect him in fierce silence every second of the day. She made a circle of herself, folding more and more inward. She carried herself like a bowl of water. At moments when she opened her mouth to say, “Drum? Guess what,” the sense of something spilling or breaking always changed her mind.

In department stores she picked up free magazines for expectant mothers and studied every word. Babies, it seemed, nested in vast jungles of equipment, wheeled and decaled and safety-railed and vinyl-covered. She had never been exposed to babies before, and she was not sure how much of the equipment was essential. Would it take a Jolly Jumper to keep him happy? Was it true that babies needed to ride their mothers’ backs in canvas carriers in order to feel secure? And if so, how would she ever buy it all? She put her name in a drawing for an English pram, and she clipped a newspaper coupon for a free week of germ-proofed diaper service. Like a mother cat, she wandered through the house counting up bureau drawers and staring for long periods of time into corner cupboards. She hung over the toilet bowl in the mornings, sick and dizzy, and worried about finding the money for a tip-proof high chair with a snap-on tray and safety straps.

Meanwhile Drum sat in the bedroom chair with his feet slung over one of its arms, and for hours on end he played his guitar. He sang very softly, reaching for notes deep on the scale. Even Evie could tell the songs weren’t rock. “St. James Infirmary” he sang, and “Trouble in Mind,” and something called “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” The words slid about more, the beat was not as clear, and the tunes were sadder. Evie said, “Did you make these things up?”

“Shoot, no,” said Drum.

“They’re not rock, are they?”

“Shoot, no.”

It had been weeks since he had written any rock music. At the Unicorn he did the same pieces he always did, but at home he played nothing but these new ones. Evie began to recognize them. She could pick out the patterns, the verses that recurred with only slight variations from song to song. The parts that she liked she sang alone in the kitchen, with the tunes all wrong:

One morning you’ll wake to an empty bed ,

You’ll bury your eyes and bow your head .

But she never told Drum she liked them. If he started playing those things in the Unicorn it would be the end of him. How could people dance to “Nobody Knows You”?

“You never write any songs these days,” she said.

“I’m getting weary of them.”

“What will you do, then?”

“Ah, I don’t know. Seems like I am always pushing to lift something I don’t have the muscles for. Every song I wrote, I thought, ‘This is it. This is something singular,’ I thought, but later I see how it is no different from anyone else’s except maybe worse. Little old crabbed, stunted lines. Nothing new. Same old beat. Now, why would I want to write more of them?”

His lashes cut across his eyes, straight and even; his pupils seemed pricked by tiny points of gold. Evie touched the hand that lay nearest her on the couch. “Everything will work out,” she said. “This is just a low period. What you need is publicity.”

“Publicity. Huh.”

“Let me think about it a while.”

“Forget it, I tell you.”

“Well, it’s for your own good, Drum.”

“Not for my own good, no ma’am,” Drum said. “I hate it.”

“How will you get ahead, then, if nobody knows your name?”

“That’s my business.”

“It’s mine too. It was me you were complaining to.”

“I wasn’t complaining, I was talking,” said Drum. “And you weren’t listening. You were thinking about publicity, which makes me tired. And I am tired too of getting nagged at all the time and having to face that nagging forehead of yours. I don’t know why you don’t wear bangs anymore.”

“I don’t wear bangs because I don’t back down on things I have done,” said Evie. “And I have never said a nagging word to you in my life.”

“All right, all right.”

“Have I?”

“No, forget it. I was just talking. Evie,” he said, “where has my luck gone? When am I going to rise above all this? Am I going to grow old just waiting?”

But Evie couldn’t answer that. All she could do was sit quiet, leaning gently toward him as if that would do what words could not, watching him run his fingers through the slant of his hair.

That Sunday David came over for lunch. While Drum was in the kitchen opening beers, Evie said, “Listen, David. What would you think of Drum getting kidnapped?”

“Huh?”

“For publicity.”

“Evie. You couldn’t even fool a traffic cop with a stunt like that.”

“I know we couldn’t,” Evie said. She looked toward the kitchen, checking on Drum, and then she came to sit beside David on the couch. “But listen to what I have in mind. It wouldn’t be a serious kidnapping, nothing to call in the FBI for. He would be spirited away by fans, that’s all, just for a couple of hours. What would be the harm? And still the newspapers would pick it up.”