Vigil for a Stranger Read Free Page B

joys was to harmonize Everly Brothers songs with Pierce—something the two of them used to do on those nights when we were all sitting around Pierce’s room (Pierce always managed to get himself a single) and Pierce was getting fed up with Charlie. Pierce’s way of coping with occasions like that, when someone bugged him, was to come up with a way out of it that included the person: he’d reach out to, say, Charlie, and draw him in instead of trying to get rid of him. I admired that in Pierce, and when I sensed the tension building up with Charlie, I learned to wait peacefully, suppressing my own irritation with Charlie’s stodgy thick-headedness and babyish insistence on his own way, knowing that Pierce would smooth things out, that in a short time all would be well again with the three of us. It was at times like those that Pierce and Charlie would sing. “Bye Bye Love,” “Dream,” “Devoted to You,” and “I Wonder If I Care as Much”—they did them all, but those were their best numbers, the straightforward love songs. They had a gimmick. They were both very musical, with a real gift for close harmony, and what one of them would do, after they had sung straight for a while, was suddenly switch parts, tenor to baritone (Don to Phil), and the other would have to do the same without losing the harmony and without missing a note. They would do this endlessly, switching sometimes in the course of one phrase—Charlie’s lighter, slightly tinny but very pleasant voice (he took lessons at the Conservatory on the side, and sang with the Gilbert & Sullivan Society) barging in on Pierce’s rougher, deeper one—so that there would be a hiccupy quality to their singing, a strangely looping sound, as if someone were fooling around with the treble/bass switches on a stereo. I used to wait nervously for them to slip up, for a failure of attention or a lapse of technique from either of them—as if I were witnessing some complicated maneuver on which our lives depended. But once they got the hang of it, they were unable to throw each other off, and though sometimes when they sang their voices were wobbly with suppressed laughter, though they glared at each other across the room or gave each other the finger when a particularly difficult challenge had been met, neither of them, over the years, ever failed, that I recall.
    Charlie was on the West Coast, working for the Los Angeles branch of a big New York literary agency. When I got off the train that day at Grand Central, I was tempted to call his agency on the off-chance that he was in New York. I felt that I needed to talk to someone about my experience on the train—my non-experience, my moment of crazy hope followed by a desolation that was like Pierce dying all over again.
    But I did nothing. I had learned ways over the years to protect myself from looking foolish. And I didn’t really want to see Charlie. He had become bitter in middle age, the old earnest seriousness turned to high anxiety. His life had gone off the rails over and over; it was like one of the blues records he hated: trouble with women, trouble with jobs, trouble with money. And in his thirties he’d developed chronic asthma that laid him low, it seemed, every time he especially needed to be up for something.
    There was a period when he called me a lot, when for several months both of us spent a lot of money we didn’t have on coast-to-coast phone calls that were designed mainly to see him through a rough time (he was trying to pay child support out of his unemployment checks) but that also worked the other way (this was not long after Emile left me), and I was still troubled by some of the confessions I had made to him. He talked a lot about our getting together when he was in New York, but we never did. Neither of us really, really wanted to make the doomed effort to reactivate what was once between us—not only the good