A Slipping-Down Life

12

Then one Saturday at the Unicorn, Drum got into an argument. Not a fist fight, this time; just a shouting quarrel. It was almost midnight. Evie was splitting a burnt-out match into tiny slivers of paper while she waited for the evening to end, and the crowd had thinned enough so that she heard clearly when Drum’s voice rose in the back room. “The hell you say. What you trying to pull, Zack?” She looked up, first toward the back room and then at the people sharing her table — three couples, talking softly over empty beer mugs, separated from other couples by a jungle of vacant chairs. None of them paid any attention. “Ah, don’t give me that,” Drum said. Evie rose and pushed through the chairs and behind the band platform. When she reached the back room she squinted in through layers of smoke. There was Drum, facing the proprietor and holding his guitar by the neck. David stood beside him. “… to be sensible about this, Drum,” he was saying. Nearest Evie were Joseph Ballew and Joseph’s bass player. “I don’t see Joseph getting treated so light,” Drum said.

“Joseph’s our lead player,” the proprietor told him. “You know that.”

“Have you got some method to tell who draws in what people? No. All you got is—”

“Look, Drum, you’ll still play on Saturdays. But Fridays, face it, there ain’t all that big a crowd nowadays. You want me to lose money?”

“What’s going on?” Evie asked.

They looked at her and then turned away again, not answering. Finally David said, “Zack was just saying how—”

“I been cut back to one night a week,” said Drum. “There was a full house tonight and it’s almost Christmas and now Zack here decides he’s losing money.”

“Now, Drum, if I could see my way clear you know I’d—” Zack said. He looked fatter than ever and very sad, with sweat running down the sides of his face like tears. “Spring, of course, we could see about having you for both nights again. It all goes by seasons, don’t you see.”

“He’s right,” said Joseph.

“You can talk,” Drum told him. “How would you feel to get cut back without no warning?”

“Sure, I know how—”

“Ah, forget it,” Drum said. “Where’s my coat?”

“It’s right behind you,” Evie said.

But Drum went on stamping through the room, shoving chairs aside and looking under instrument cases. When finally he found the coat he said, “Another thing. You can forget Saturdays too, from now on. I ain’t coming back here. You’ll have to get along without me.”

“Now, Drum, wait,” said David.

“Do you want a ride or don’t you?”

He pushed his way out of the room, right past Evie, and David looked at the others for a minute and then shrugged and followed him. Evie had to run to catch up with them.

Outside, the air was crackling with a sharp dry cold that made her ears tighten. She stumbled after Drum and David, struggling into her coat on the way. Their car was haloed with frost. While Drum unlocked the door Evie shifted from one foot to the other to keep warm, but Drum didn’t look cold at all. He pulled the key out of the handle and then just stood there a minute, staring out over the icy roofs of other cars. “Hop in,” David told Evie. “Let me sit up front. I’ll talk to him.”

Evie perched on the edge of the narrow back seat. One knee rested against Drum’s guitar, which had kept some of the warmth from the Unicorn. While Drum was backing out no one spoke, but then on the highway Drum said, “Damn fat fool.”

“He’s just having to look out for his business,” David said.

“What, over Christmas? School’s letting out, the place’ll be jammed. And how about Joseph, now? How does he get to stay?”

“Zack told you. Joseph is the—”

“All right, all right. The lead player. Who don’t even have a sense of rhythm. I tell you, we’re well out of that place. Got to find us something lively now.”

“Well, where, Drum? Do you think you can pick up a new job just by snapping your fingers? I can’t even find us private parties nowadays, and here it is Christmas time and I have sent ads all over town.”

“Something will turn up.”

“Nothing will turn up. Tomorrow I’m calling Zack. I’ll tell him we’ll be there next Saturday same as usual. You were just a mite put out, I’ll tell him. He’ll understand.”

“No, he won’t, because I ain’t showing. Me and Evie are going to the movies.”

“Suit yourself, then,” David said. And he was quiet for the rest of the ride, although he whistled under his breath.

When they dropped David off at his house, Drum jerked his chin toward the front seat. “Come up here and sit,” he said.

“What for?”

“Come talk to me.”

She looked at his face in the rear-view mirror. It was pale and shadowed. And after she had settled herself beside him he said, “I made a fool out of myself, didn’t I?”

“Oh, no.”

“Seems like I am just going through one of those low periods. Last Christmas we played at three different parties; this Christmas they forgot all about us.”

“Maybe you need more publicity,” Evie said.

“I don’t see how I can get any more. Oh, pretty soon he will fire me for Saturdays too, I can feel it coming. I will have to play at those free things he has on Sunday afternoons, everybody drinking coffee. That’s how low I’ll come to.”

“You just need a good night’s sleep,” Evie told him. “Things will look different in the morning.”

“Oh, sure, I know.”

When they got home, he pulled off his shirt and jeans and then climbed into bed with a jelly glass half full of bourbon. He watched Evie while she moved around the room straightening up. She folded his clothes and laid them in a chair, she changed into her seersucker nightgown and then stood before a mirror to curl her hair. From one of her drawers she took a plastic barrette and pinned her bangs back. They would have to be trained that way. She planned to leave her forehead bare again, showing Drum and all the rest of the world what his music was worth to her.

“This business about Saturdays,” Drum told her. “I ain’t going to change my mind; I meant it. I don’t want to play there at all any more. Why should I go where I’m not appreciated? I would like to find me something new, switch over. Now, are you going to side with David and start beating me down about this?”

“You know I wouldn’t,” Evie said.

“Well, I was just wondering.”

He set the empty jelly glass on the window sill, and by the time Evie had put the lights out he was asleep.

But Evie stayed awake, long after she had gone to bed. She lay on her back, stiff and still, watching how the cold moonlight frosted the rim of the jelly glass. That had been the last of the bourbon. It was a reckless purchase one weekend when they had extra money, and for two months the bottle had sat in the kitchen cupboard growing sticky and fingerprinted, brought down rarely and measured out carefully. Now how long would it be before they bought more? Their money came in dribbles — five dollars here, fifteen there, sometimes a little from her father who said, “This is for a sweater,” or for books, or a new hairdo, making it too explicit for Evie to object, although she never spent it on what he suggested. What they had they kept in billfolds; it wasn’t enough for a bank. And it was paid out in dribbles, too, so that the dimestore budget book with its headings—”Mortgage,” “Insurance,” “Transportation”—seemed unrelated to their lives. They spent it on cigarettes or records, or on a can of artichoke hearts which Drum said he wanted to try just once before he died. When they were poorest they ate stale saltines and spaghetti in dented tins, reduced for quick sale. They turned out coat pockets and dug between sofa cushions. And in the end, more money always dribbled in again.

But now their only income would be from the A & P and the filling station. It wasn’t much. If she didn’t want Drum pumping gas all day she would have to find a job, and she even knew where: at the public library. Her father had told her about a position there, intending it for Drum. (Money was something her father worried about. Money and balanced diets.) But how would Drum ever endure a library? He would sit behind a circulation desk in spurred boots and a black denim jacket, sinking lower every time he jabbed a rubber stamp against an ink pad. It would have to be Evie who did it, afternoons when school was out. She even thought she might like it. She pictured herself in a blue smock, calm and competent, going through a set of crisp motions with catalogue drawers. When she finally slept she dreamed she walked up to the Unicorn’s band platform with a stack of historical romances, and one by one she laid them in Drum’s lap. “Thank you,” said Drum, strumming his guitar. “It’s what I always wanted.”

But in the morning Drum turned out to be against the idea. He heard it with his eyes on something far above the bed, his face smooth and blank and patient. Then at her first pause he said, “No.”

“But don’t you see?” Evie asked. “It works out so well. You would never be pressed into doing some job you hated; you would know you had me to fall back on.”

“I don’t like it,” said Drum.

“Well, Drum, I never. Are you one of those people that doesn’t like working wives?”

“No. Well, no, of course not. But it wouldn’t look good. People will say I must have got cut back at the Unicorn.”

“You have,” Evie wanted to say, but she didn’t. She had read in Family Circle about how wives needed tact at times like this.

On Monday afternoon, she passed the library twice very slowly and then made up her mind and walked in. All she wanted to do was satisfy her curiosity. She smelled the familiar library smells, paste and buckram and polished wood, and she saw how the cheerful yellow curtains framed narrow rectangles of winter light. Behind the desk sat Miss Simmons, red-haired and spectacled, sliding pencils into an orange-juice can some child had painted for her. “Why, Evie,” Miss Simmons said. “How nice to see you.”

“I only came by for a minute,” Evie said. She shifted the heap of books she held against her chest.

“Was there something I could help you with?”

“Oh, no. Well, I was curious, is all; my father said you had a job open.”

“That’s right, Naomi’s job. She got married. I hated to lose her. Are you interested?”

“Well, I don’t know. There’s my, Drum, he doesn’t — but it sounded like something I’d like.”

“It’s after school hours, you know. No problem there.”

“Yes, I know, but—”

“Dollar and a half an hour.”

“Would it take up any evenings?”

“Evenings, no, we’re not open evenings. Three to six every afternoon; you’d be home in time for supper. Won’t you think about it? I’d love to have someone I knew.”

Miss Simmons had a wide, lopsided smile that changed the shape of her face, making her look young and hopeful. When she smiled Evie said, “Oh well, all right. I think I’d like to,” without even planning it. Drum was in some far unlighted corner of her mind. She wouldn’t think about him until later. She followed Miss Simmons into the workroom behind the desk, still carrying her books, listening carefully while the job was explained to her. “Could you start today?” Miss Simmons asked. “There are all these cards piled up. Oh, I hope you like it. Some people get the fidgets in libraries. It’s the importance of details that bothers them.”

But to Evie, importance of details seemed peaceful and lulling. She settled herself on a high stool in the workroom, with an electric heater warming her cold stockinged feet and a mug of cocoa at her elbow. For three solid hours she alphabetized Library of Congress Cards and stacked them in neat little piles. Abbott, Anson, Arden — the cards snapped crisply under her fingers, and when she had finished with the A’s she evened up the corners, slipped a rubber band around them, and moved smoothly into the B’s. “Are you getting tired?” Miss Simmons called. “Do you want to take a break? I know this must seem tedious.” But Evie didn’t get tired all afternoon. At six o’clock, when Miss Simmons moved around the reading room closing blinds and straightening magazines, Evie was sorry to have to go.

Drum was lying on the couch at home with an old copy of Billboard. “What took you so long?” he asked.

“I stopped by the library.”

“Oh,” Drum said.

“Do you — shall I open up some chili?”

“Sure, I reckon.”

He never asked what she had been doing at the library.

She went to work every day that week. Although Miss Simmons kept up a steady patter of tea-party talk Evie stayed silent, soaking up the words and the warmth from the heater as she filled out overdue-reminders. Sometimes she wandered through the reading room with a trolley of books to shelve, and the memorized classification numbers hummed peacefully through her head while she searched for shelf-space. Or she sat behind the circulation desk, swiveling in a wheeled metal chair and stamping first books and then cards — thump-tap, thump-tap — until she was lulled into a trance. People rarely spoke to her. If Violet came by and said, “Hi, Evie. Evie?” Evie looked up with a blank smile for several seconds before she realized who it was.

“Oh, aren’t you just bored out of your mind?” Violet asked. “I don’t see how you stand it here.”

“It’s all right,” Evie said.

She kept preparing explanations for Drum — how Miss Simmons was desperate, how the job was only temporary — but she didn’t have to use them. Drum asked no questions at all. On Friday he said, “It’s my late night at the A & P. Can you come early so I can have the car?”

“I have to stay at the library till six,” Evie told him.

“Well, I’ll come pick you up and take you home, then. That all right?”

“I guess so.”

At six o’clock she looked up from the desk to find him leaning in the doorway, looking sleepy. “I’m ready any time you are,” he told her. She had never thought it would be so easy. She wondered if he were just waiting till they were alone to say, “Hey. What’s this? I thought I said I didn’t want you working.” But even after they had left the building, he kept quiet. She had him drop her by the bank to cash her paycheck, and when she returned to the car she handed him the money. “Good, I’m out of cigarettes,” he said. She was relieved, but she had a let-down feeling too.

Meanwhile nothing seemed to have been settled with the Unicorn. Friday night David stopped by the house and said, “I wanted Drum, but maybe you could tell me. What am I supposed to do about this Unicorn business? I been letting it ride; I never thought he’d go this far. Now tomorrow is Saturday and we still don’t know if Drum will change his mind and play there.”

“He hasn’t mentioned it,” Evie said.

“Shall I just go on and say we’ll show? I thought of it. But then Drum could always make a liar of me, and that’s bad for business.” He sat down on the edge of the couch. He was still wearing the suit he sold insurance in, gray wool with a pinstripe. It made him look unusually straight-edged and sure of himself. “You’re around him all week,” he said. “And you know he likes the Unicorn. Even I am sure of that much. So what should I do? You must have some idea.”

“David, I don’t. Really.”

“But if you don’t take the decision out of his hands he might just say no from pride. You know how he is.”

“Well,” Evie said.

“Shall I do it?”

“He is proud.”

“So shouldn’t I go and tell Zack he’s coming?”

“Well, I don’t know. I guess you could.”

“Good enough,” David said. “It’ll work out. You’ll see.”

And it did. On Saturday night she talked Drum into his singing clothes, polished his boots and set them beside the door, followed him around holding his guitar out level, like a tray, until he grew nervous about its safety and yanked it away from her. “Why are you doing this to me?” he asked.

“I’m not doing anything to you, I’m saving you from making a mistake. You’ll be sorry later if you throw this job away.”

“Don’t you care how I feel about it?”

“Of course I do, that’s why I’m telling you to go.”

“Well, I won’t,” said Drum. He sat down sharply and laid his guitar on the couch. Already he was almost late. Evie kept sliding her eyes toward her watch, on which time seemed to pass with a hurried, grating motion that she could feel against her skin. “Drum,” she said, “I stuck my neck out for you, I and David both. I got him to patch things up with Zack. Now what will Zack say when you don’t show up?”

“Well, you had no business doing that,” said Drum.

“What else could I do? You always used to like the Unicorn.”

“I got a right to change my mind, ain’t I?”

“Not when there’s nothing to change to.”

Drum was quiet. She thought that she had lost, and already her mind was rearranging itself to accept the defeat when Drum said, “All right. All right.”

“You’re going?”

“I don’t see I have much choice.”

At the Unicorn he played heavily, for once overcoming the drums behind him. He did his speaking out without ceasing to twang the guitar strings, so that his voice fought out from beneath the notes like a swimmer beneath the peaks of waves.

“How did it gray?

“When were they pink?

“They’ve made him a major.

“How long did it take?”

His audience kept silent.

School stopped over the Christmas holidays, but Evie hardly noticed. She went less and less often now. When she did go the sharp rhythm of electric bells and the herding from class to class seemed misted and foreign. Her teachers spoke in loud, evenly paced voices, emphasizing the names of authors and the dates of wars; students scribbled frantically in looseleaf notebooks, taking down every word, but what Evie wrote trailed off in mid-sentence. She often stared into space for long periods of time without a thought in her head. When she collected herself, whole minutes might have passed. There was not even an echo of what the teacher had said, and her classmates, still bent over their notebooks, seemed to have ridden away from her on their scurrying ball-point pens. “Please excuse Evie D. Casey,” Drum wrote in his notes to the principal. “She was not feeling well and couldn’t come to school ‘Wednesday,’ ‘Thursday,’ and ‘Friday.’ Sincerely Bertram O. Casey.” Mr. Harrison put on his clear-rimmed glasses and puzzled out the penciled words, bunchy and downward-sloping. The notes were an embarrassment to him. To have her husband write them seemed a mockery, yet her father could not logically be asked to do it instead.

For Christmas, Evie gave her father a pair of gloves and Drum a sweater. Drum gave her a bottle of perfume—“My Sin,” which pleased her. She put up a little tree and they had Christmas dinner at the Caseys. Then the next day she went back to work in the library. Miss Simmons had offered her a week’s vacation, but Evie felt they couldn’t give up the money.

Evenings, when she came home, the house would be filled with the clutter of Drum’s day — overflowing ash trays, empty record jackets, stray dishes in the sink. “Were you practicing?” she asked him, but he rarely had been. “I don’t know, I just can’t get started right,” he said. “Seems like I am messing around all the time. My fingers forget what they was doing.” He talked more now. His voice tugged constantly on the hem of Evie’s mind, so that she almost forgot how it had been in the old days when he never talked at all. “What is the point in me sitting here strumming? I’ll never get anywhere. I ain’t but nineteen years old and already leading a slipping-down life, and hard rock is fading so pretty soon nobody won’t want it.”

“That’s not true,” Evie said.

“Well, it feels like it is. Feels like I have hit my peak and passed it. I was just a fool to ever hope to be famous.”

“Will you stop that?” Evie said.

She wanted to get pregnant. She had latched on to the idea out of the blue, flying in the face of all logical objections: her job, their lack of money, the countless times that Drum had whispered, in the dark, “Is it safe?” The thought of a baby sent a shaft of yellow light through her mind, like a door opening. Yet getting pregnant was turning out to be easier said than done. Drum in this new mood of his often drifted into sleep while listening to the radio, a weighted, formless figure face-down on the living room couch. “Drum,” she would say, “aren’t you coming to bed?” Then he would stagger up and into the bedroom, where he fell asleep again with all his clothes on. She tugged at his boots, working against the dead heaviness of his legs. She put on her nightgown, and in her mirror the bathroom light lit up her silhouette almost as wide as the billowing gown, a blurred stocky figure broadening at the hips and not narrowing below them. She thought of crash diets, exercycles, charm school. When she lay down, Drum would be snoring. She stayed awake for hours with all her muscles tensed, as if she were afraid to trust her weight to the darkness she rested on.