Winnie
I was so happy for Miranda when she told me about her date with Tom. She needed someone to love, who’d love her back, who wasn’t already a member of her family. I told her to show some leg on her date and to call me the next morning.
“Two is almost three hours away,” I said, nodding at his untouched tuna sandwich and pickle.
“I know. I’m just…let’s go to the park now.”
So we went. The band had planned to meet at Golden Gate Park at one thirty, and to tune Lincoln’s portable radio to the station so they could hear it together.
Everyone was as antsy as Lincoln, though, because we all wound up there around noon.
Lincoln and the other guys had so much loose, jangly energy, they actually tossed a football around for a while.
Greta and her girlfriend and I chatted about nothing in the shade of a really lovely fall day.
By two forty-five we were all slightly stoned, then finally, at 3:10, after an ad break, the DJ came on and said with great fanfare, “And I have a new track by a brand-new San Francisco band that is far out and going to go far. You heard it here first! Allow me to introduce to you The Cards, with their first single ‘Wiiiiiiiiiild Maaaaaaan.’ ”
Someone turned the volume all the way up, and we stood up and cheered as the first strums of Lincoln’s guitar came through, then was joined by the drums, and bass, and then his voice.
Oh my god, what a rush, like liquid joy burst from a bomb in my heart and circulated through my whole body. Lincoln hugged me and cried. I’d never seen him cry before. “I can’t believe it,” he kept saying.
I was so happy for him, so proud of him. I could believe it. I’d always believed in him. In us—two kids who’d had to struggle against our parents to become artists, who brought out a talent and passion in each other we never could have cultivated alone—or so I thought back then.
Suddenly they were a regular opening act at the Fillmore, and the EP started to sell nationally as the single played on rock stations all the way to Chicago and New York. Lincoln was able to quit his teaching job. Well, he had to quit his teaching job in order to go on tour.
I was desperately afraid of his going on tour without me, and I couldn’t afford to go with him because my copyediting salary alone was now paying our rent.
I’d been immersed in the world of bands long enough to know what happened to good-looking guys like Lincoln on tour.
And I couldn’t help but think to myself that his track record for fidelity wasn’t great.
I started having feverish dreams about what he might do with groupies in bathrooms and tour buses.
I wanted so much to tell him my fears, but I didn’t want to seem uncool or unsupportive, so I kept my mouth shut.
Our relationship had been going so well.
You have to trust him, I told myself. What is a relationship without trust?
But I didn’t trust him. Deep down, in a place I had long ago turned the lights out on, I knew the truth.
Lincoln had been on tour a few weeks, and Bernard was walking me back from the precipice of fear most days while I was fielding worried calls from Lincoln’s mother, Sylvia, about her son’s whereabouts, which only increased my own anxiety, when I got a letter from the poetry editor of City of Lights Review.
They had (at last, after so many tries!) published a poem of mine in their fall issue.
The editor wrote that although he was not aware of popular music himself, he’d received “several disturbing inquiries” from readers about a stanza from my poem also appearing in the hit single by The Cards.
Disturbing inquiries.
They thought I, the woman poet, had plagiarized the song written by a newly famous man.
I’m sure it never even occurred to them that the truth might have been the other way around.
My poem had been written more than a year before the song.
And Lincoln hadn’t plagiarized, either.
Not exactly.
My poem “Bacchus” and their song “Wild Man” shared these words:
The withering began
At the tips
Leaves curling and burning
So that by morning,
No sun could feed the root.
How was I supposed to explain to the editor the free flow of words between me and Lincoln?
We read each other’s notebooks all the time, and we constantly drew inspiration from one another’s drafts.
Certain images or turns of phrase Lincoln played with would spark something in me, though I never used his exact words.
Lincoln had asked me if he could use the words from “Bacchus,” before the poem found a home, and before the song was recorded.
By the time City of Lights Review accepted my poem, I’d forgotten that Lincoln had used some of my poem in his song…until a few months later when the song hit the airwaves. It made me blush with pride every time I heard my words in his voice, paired with that bluesy guitar melody.
When I got the letter from the poetry editor, I left Lincoln something like seven messages with his tour manager before he finally called me from a hotel room in Phoenix.
“Hey, baby,” he said, and I could tell right away he was drunk or high or both.
Maybe it was the coke he’d recently started doing “only with the guys.” I couldn’t blame him.
I’d found myself drinking more, too, especially with him gone.
I preferred wine to weed, it turned out.
Somehow with wine, I felt more in control.
And closer to Mom and Miranda, whom I missed in spite of everything.
I loved seeing Hartley bottles on restaurant wine lists, and prominently featured in local liquor stores.
Having the same bottles in my own kitchen reminded me of my link to something bigger than myself.
Plus, I couldn’t help feeling like I’d played a small role in the vineyard’s success.
“Hey there, I miss you,” I said, clutching the receiver of our bedroom phone to my ear.
“I miss you, too.” I clung to the note of warmth in his voice, like the elusive hint of plum in a Hartley Chardonnay.
“So listen, this is an expensive call, so I’ll keep it short.” I hated asking anything of him, especially now when he was living his dream, but this had to be done. “Believe it or not, readers of City of Lights Review have been asking why my poem has a stanza from your song in it.”
“You’re kidding! That’s great!”
“Well, yeah, from one perspective. But I got a letter from the poetry editor today basically asking if I’d plagiarized it. So I was wondering…Would you call or write him and explain?”
“What, that I plagiarized it?”
“No, of course not. Explain that we share ideas. And that my poem was written first and I gave you permission to use those lines.”
“Why can’t you tell him that?”
“Because…because it’ll mean more coming from you. You’re a man, for one thing. And for another, you can vouch for the fact that I wrote the poem first.”
He didn’t answer right away.
“Sure, I’ll tell him as soon as I get back home.”
“When is that?”
“A month, maybe? Dates keep getting added.”
I wanted to say that was great, that the tour should keep going.
And a part of me did feel that way. But another growing part of me needed to see him, to feel the reassurance of his hands on my body, his mouth on mine.
I needed to hear him call this poetry editor and laugh with him on the phone about the misunderstanding.
Couldn’t you just call him tomorrow? “Okay,” I said. “Maybe you can come back for a short visit? I miss you so much.”
“I miss you too,” he said, and this time I couldn’t find that warmth.
“Okay, I’ll let you go. I love you.”
“I love you too.” It sounded perfunctory. I’d asked for too much. Maybe I’d even reminded him of his mother.
I got off the phone feeling unmoored.
In the fridge was a third of a bottle of a Mondavi zinfandel, which I felt traitorous drinking, but it had been so cheap and money was especially tight without Lincoln’s teaching salary.
Then my eye caught the fifth of Jameson that Lincoln had started drinking before he left.
Knowing it would hit me fastest, I got out a heavy cut glass tumbler that made me feel fancy even though we’d just picked up the set at a garage sale in Marin, and I gave myself a healthy pour.
Didn’t people put ice in hard liquor? Cocktails had always been for straights, so I’d never investigated much.
Did we even have ice?
We did. Some almost-evaporated cubes in two blue plastic trays. I popped them all out and put them in the glass and listened to them clink against each other merrily as I swirled the liquid around.
I felt a kind of sophistication with this heavy, cold glass in my hand. And I liked the immediate relief it brought.
I thought, maybe it was time I grew up.
I started drinking the Jameson every night, and I finished the bottle quickly.
When I went to buy another, bigger bottle, I also picked up gin, vodka, and tonic water.
Now I always had fresh ice in the fridge.
I experimented with different concoctions every night, and had people over for what I slyly called Prohibition Parties and served G&Ts, screwdrivers, Manhattans, and gimlets.
I tried to convince Miranda to come down for one of my gatherings, but she was having too good a time with Tom.
I tried not to be jealous that she was falling in love while I was worried about what Lincoln was doing on tour.
When it became clear Lincoln wasn’t going to be calling City of Lights Review anytime soon, I made myself a strong drink and hand drafted a letter, then typed it out on my Smith Corona.
Dear Mr. Willard,
Please accept my apologies for the delay in writing you. I had hoped Lincoln Salyer, lead songwriter for The Cards and my boyfriend of five years, would be home to write you himself but as you perhaps have heard, the band’s tour has been indefinitely extended.