Anne Tyler - A Slipping-Down Life

Drumstrings Casey leaned against the doorframe, crossed one boot, and removed his sunglasses. His face lost its smoothness. He had, after all, the narrow brown eyes that Evie expected, so straight-edged that each seemed formed from a pair of parallel lines. The slant of hair was not greased down today; he ruffled it through his fingers, stroking his forehead with the same motion. “It’s the newspaper lady,” he said.

“No,” said Evie. She meant no, she was not from the newspaper at all and had told him so before; but Casey, misunderstanding, said, “Well, you sure do look like her.”

“More reaction, Casey,” the photographer said. Casey stretched his mouth wide into a wide straight line. “Will you turn this way, miss?” Evie turned, focusing her eyes upon a drawer-pull for as long as she felt Casey watching. The photographer clicked the shutter. “Now, Casey, put your arm around her. Smile. Don’t you know how to smile?” But Casey only stared fixedly at the bottom half of Evie’s face. Every now and then his eyes darted up to her forehead and then down again, as if they had run away with him for a second. Across Evie’s shoulders his arm was limp and motionless, the hand falling open off the edge of her sleeve. He had the pleasantly bitter smell of marigolds. Even this close, he seemed filmed by cold air.

The camera clicked again. For the first time, Evie remembered that the purse she had left at the Unicorn contained her snapshot of Drumstrings Casey. “Oh—” she said, but when the two men turned, she went back to staring at the drawer-pull. The snapshot had come out dappled by tiny pools of light, glinting for no apparent reason on the edges of his dark clothes and on his face, which was tilted slightly up, the veiled eyes turned in her direction.

“Now, it’s Evie, that right? Evie Decker,” said the photographer. He was writing on a scrap of paper with bitten-looking edges. “Age?”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen. Really? Occupation?”

“I go to school.”

“I thought you were older,” the photographer said. “Now. Could you tell me what end you had in mind?”

“End?”

“What your goal was in doing this?”

“Oh,” said Evie.

“Your reason, then. Could you tell me your reason?”

Drumstrings Casey shifted his weight, his fingers hooked in his back pockets.

“Let’s put it this way,” the photographer said. “We’ll say you’re just a music fan. You dig rock, especially Casey’s rock. That sound about right?”

“Oh, well, I guess so.”

“We’ll put it in quotes, then. Now, would you mind telling what you did it with?”

“I don’t remember,” said Evie, suddenly tired.

“Was it all of a sudden? Had you planned it?”

“It’s hard to say.”

“Well, I suppose that’s enough,” the photographer said. “It’s only going to be a caption.”

Drumstrings Casey straightened up. “A caption, what’s that?” he asked.

“The writing under a photo. You know.”

“Couldn’t you give it more?”

“It’s not me that says, boy, it’s the boss.”

“Well, God almighty,” Casey said.

“What now?”

“Wasn’t it you that was waking me at seven this morning? Shouting about publicity? I don’t see what that was all about. Little old grainy newspaper picture, heap of gray dots nobody’ll recognize.”

“Don’t talk to me, talk to your drummer,” said the photographer. “He’s the one called me . Well, thanks, folks.” And out he walked, leaving the two of them alone in the middle of the room.

“Well,” said Casey. He slipped his dark glasses back on and jammed his shirt down tighter into his pants. Then he turned toward Evie. Behind the glasses it was hard to tell where he was looking. “What’d you go and cut it backwards for?” he asked her.

“It just worked out that way,” said Evie.

“Worked out that way, how do you mean?”

“I don’t know, that’s just the way it happened. Can’t you read it?”

“Sure, I can read it.”

“Now I can see that it’s uneven,” Evie said. “I know that’s going to bother me. Every time I look in a mirror I’ll think, why did I let the Y droop? Why did I shake on the C?”

“Why did you make it ‘Casey’?” Casey said.

She stared, mistaking his meaning. She thought he had asked the only question she minded answering.

“Why not my first name?” he asked. “There’re thousands of Caseys around.”

“What, Drumstrings? I don’t have that big of a forehead.”

“Drum,” he said. “Nobody says the whole thing, for Lord’s sake.”

“They call you Drum?” asked Evie.

“That’s right.”

“Well, I certainly wish I’d of known.”

“Yeah, I suppose it’s too late now,” he said.

He was teetering on his heels, his hands in his back pockets again, plainly thinking of going. Evie pressed her palms together and said, “You are going to be famous someday.”

He raised his sunglasses to stare at her. His eyes were bleached-looking in the sudden light. “It’s funny,” he said finally. “I would never have took you for a rock fan at all.” Evie held still under his gaze, until he dropped the glasses and turned toward the door. “Certainly was a peculiar feeling,” he said to nobody special. “Feels like meeting up with your own face somewhere.” He was halfway out the door now, but still with no good-byes, no summing up, no rounding off of the conversation before he left. “Almost like something you would dream in bed at night,” he said, but by then he was out of sight. His voice was sliding away and his boots were ambling down the hall. Evie remained where she was for several minutes, staring out the open doorway. She was used to definite endings. When Drum Casey left he trailed bits of conversation like wisps from a cotton ball, clouding the air behind him. His voice remained in the hall, disembodied. His heel-taps clicked for a long time without seeming to get farther away. The doctor when he came found Evie alone in the middle of her room, surveying the insides of her wrists, and he shook his head and signed her discharge papers in silence.

Messes rose up wherever she sat; that was the kind of mood she was in. For days after she came home from the hospital, she stayed in a draggled bathrobe, as if she were truly an invalid, while clutter collected magically in an oval around her chair. Flakes of lint speckled the rug. Candy papers overflowed the ash trays. The slipcover sagged on the chair cushion and grew creased and dingy. Yet from morning to night Evie hardly moved, just sat on the back of her neck with her arms limp at her sides and an open magazine in her lap. Clotelia, passing through the living room, jabbed a broom under Evie’s legs. “Excuse, please. Move,” she said. Evie frowned at the broom and picked a chocolate out of the box at her elbow.

People called to ask about her. Not classmates, but friends of her father’s. “You talk to them,” Evie told Clotelia. She heard conversations from outdoors, at twilight, while her father was sprinkling the lawn. “Evening, Sam. Is Evie, I hear she had a little accident. Or rather—” “Go on now,” someone said, “they tell me that girl of yours has slashed her wrists with a movie star’s initials. Is that true?” “Forehead,” said her father. “A singer. His full last name.” When he came in, his face would be pouched and sagging. Grownups wearing that expression usually said, when asked, “No, not angry. Just disappointed.” Only Evie never asked and her father never said it, not out loud.

She covered her forehead with gauze from the medicine cabinet and taped it at both ends, the way the doctor had. Her hair, which she still had not washed, remained stiff with blood in front and limp and damp-looking behind. She wore a bathrobe faded from sky blue to gray, grayer along the edges, and her slippers were gray too, a matted pile that had started out white. Even without the mysterious clutter around her, any corner she inhabited would still have seemed untidy. “You are a sight,” Clotelia said. “You constituting a mess all by your lone self.” Evie only stared at her and turned a page of her magazine.