am not a model!”
“You’re skinny and you have clothes like a model.”
“Joe, I swear to you, man, she’s Trixie and you’re Speed Racer. She’s your one true love.”
“I wouldn’t fuck her for practice!”
“Who taught you to talk like that?”
“He’s quoting me,” Daniel said. “I was being ironic.”
“What the fuck, Daniel! Why pick on Eloise?”
“She’s the scenester babe I always thought I would end up with. She’s my bête noire, man.”
“I want to be your bête noire man,” Joe sang, to the tune of “Whole Lotta Love.”
THE FAMILY WENT TO RACINE FOR CHRISTMAS. PAM GAINED WEIGHT AND UNDERSTOOD why Daniel was so tall. They stayed at a motel because there wasn’t room in the house for five families of giants, but they ate with his parents. Every meal was like the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. Pie pans were in constant rotation. Meat from the deep freeze in the basement was thawing continuously on every countertop.
At first there was no conflict or even especial curiosity about her. No one had time to listen to anything she said. They sized her up and decided that she required a succession of big, bland meals. They lauded the chubbiness of Flora. Daniel talked with his relatives about people and places she had never heard of. It was hard to keep track, even after he explained. Only one topic addressed her directly. At the midday meal on Christmas Eve, Daniel’s much older sister Debra advanced the theory that Princess Stéphanie of Monaco had a haircut similar to hers.
That evening, she begged to be excused from going to church.
“Are you sick?” Daniel’s mother asked.
Stupidly, she didn’t say yes. She said instead that she wasn’t a Christian, and technically neither was Flora, because she hadn’t been christened, so if nobody minded they would just go on back to the motel and rest up.
A doctrinal dispute erupted that shocked even Daniel. He had managed to put out of his mind how seriously his family took religion. They thought Pam’s notion of infant baptism was sacrilege and that her ungrateful soul was bound for hell. Soon nine adults were tag-teaming her to yell about Jesus, drunk on Baileys and a blueberry dessert wine they pretended was festive rather than alcoholic. Flora was crying and they didn’t care, because all the children were crying.
No non-Christian person had ever been invited to their home before. Even Daniel had originally appeared uninvited, so to speak. Nobody ever asked him what he believed, and he usually knew better than to talk about it. On this occasion, the role model provided by Pam herself—a person whose openness with her parents had produced a rupture she clearly felt was preferable to living a lie, or at least preferable to going to church—prompted him to come to her defense with solidarity. He said, “I don’t believe in God or Jesus either, but it doesn’t matter!”
FOR PRESENTS, HE HAD BOUGHT EVERYONE IN HIS FAMILY SOME INDIVIDUALIZED ITEM of exotic Asian strangeness from Chinatown, a figurine or odd snack. He and Pam were due to receive many socks and fruitcakes, and Flora was getting hand-knit baby booties.
On Christmas morning, he took the Asian presents to his parents’ front porch and tried to negotiate. It became clear that alone, without Pam and Flora—without evidence that he had his disobedient wife well in hand—he would not be welcomed, and that they would credit no personal profession of his faith. He would have to attend church with them and set an example by coming forward to be saved.
His heart sank because he knew he would never do it. Seeing that he was expected to be a patriarch, to rule over Pam, alienated him as nothing ever had before.
Flora didn’t care about missing Christmas. She wasn’t even two yet, nor entirely clear on which of those strangers had been Grandma and Grandpa.
Their return flight was postponed by thirty hours due to typical Wisconsin winter weather. The likelihood that they would return for a second holiday season in Racine diminished to a vanishing smallness.
JOE’S NEXT SHOW WAS BY INVITATION OF SIMON, WHO HAD STUMBLED INTO ENVIABLE gigs reviewing classic rock LPs for the new website Amazon and heavy metal for the magazine Thrasher. Dumb luck and connections had lent him the aura of success, and some indie rock band was trying to siphon it off by getting him to book opening acts for their CD release party at a storefront on Stanton Street called House of Candles.
The band members had their own label, the way Joe had Lion’s Den, so they had no label-mates to pack the bill with. They were from Albany, so they had no fan base in tow except their girlfriends. They were paying rent for the venue, so they wanted bands with social circles, but not party bands that would steal the show.
Being something of an asshole, Simon invited bands that would help cement his professional position as a critic. He added Joe as an afterthought, to make sure Pam knew he could have booked Marmalade Sky and didn’t. He told the indie rock band that Joe was an outsider singer-songwriter with a loyal following, which was true.
She stayed home with Flora. Joe was promised no share of the door but granted permission to sell merchandise. Simon encouraged him to skip the sound check, because he couldn’t have cared less how he sounded. Thus Joe and Daniel didn’t head over until eight o’clock, as the first band was starting. Daniel carried twenty-eight singles in a box labeled “$3.”
Daniel set it down on a table in the back and looked around for Eloise. But she never showed that night, because there had been no publicity for anyone but the headliners. He stayed near the merchandise to make sure no one stole it.
Joe sat in the front row, bass on his lap, playing along quietly with the opening act, billed as Broad Spectrum. It consisted of a woman singer, a scared-looking boy playing tenor recorder, a sequencer that wasn’t working right, and a keyboard player holding a tambourine. The keyboardist was responsible for the sequencer. She kept jabbing at it, shaking the tambourine at random, and alternating between two chords on the keyboard with her left hand. You could hear that she was right-handed. The woodwind looked frustrated, trying for low notes and getting overtones. The singer’s dance moves kept taking her away from the microphone. Her voice could be heard when she stood still for the chorus, but it remained incomprehensible, because she cupped the mic with both hands, looking very earnest and sexy while it was practically inside her mouth and kept feeding back. The group performed as though they not only hadn’t rehearsed, but had won the gig in a raffle, earlier in the day, before they founded the band.
After their first number subsided, the singer nudged the keyboardist aside and fiddled with the sequencer. The setup began to play “Sussudio” by Phil Collins. She returned to the mic, glared at Joe for singing along, and said, “It’s a borrowed keyboard. Give us a minute.” Three minutes later, the band continued its set with four-finger organ, tambourine duties devolving on the singer. The woodwind took a rest. The singer’s yawping teetered on the edge of feedback until Simon, the soundman, rendered the mic inaudible. The whole thing was pathetic, and when it was done, everybody clapped for a long time.
Daniel thought, The name kind of fits, assuming they meant “broad” as in “woman” and the autism “spectrum.” Also, in his opinion, their conceptual project didn’t stand a chance against the art of music. Joe had craft, not a concept. He could hear himself play—he could really listen—and when he wasn’t sounding good, he took steps to fix it.
He played
