Preview

June 20, 2002 - 9:30 a.m.

     Cole walked up the front steps leading to the entrance of the Edna P. Slate Women’s Center and stepped into the shade of the expansive porch. He stepped back as painters exited the building carrying a ladder and bucket past him down the steps and around the side of the building. He opened the door and entered the cool vestibule where it was as hushed as a library. In Jewell’s room, he imagined she would be fidgeting with her wedding ring and looking out the window. Perhaps she was sitting on her bed clutching her empty cigarette pack in one hand and pressing the fingertips of the other hand to her hot, swollen eyelids. 

     Her eyes were her best feature, a clear, pale blue, but today they would be bloodshot from the crying jag that had started last Saturday afternoon and continued almost without a break until he’d brought her here on Monday near dinnertime. 

     A young woman had met them just inside the entrance and had ushered them into a small conference room where she took Jewell’s hand and assured her that she would feel better soon and led her down a quiet hallway. Cole had filled out paperwork and produced his health insurance cardwithout letting on that it had been canceled five months before, along with nearly every other amenity of modern life. For five months, Cole and Jewell had lived in a world without phones or electricity, without TV or stereo or refrigeration or air-conditioning. They washed their clothes in the bathtub, taking turns stomping on blue jeans, underwear, shirts and sheets in cold water, wringing them by hand, and spreading them across the kitchen countertops or hanging them from doorknobs. They heated their food, including coffee water, on the little charcoal brazier they had been given twelve years ago when Jewell and Cole had married. Until this year, they’d used it only twice. 

     Their Chevy truck and their minivan had been repossessed and now they drove a shambling, faded blue Mustang that Cole had been meaning to fix up since he’d bought it four years before, when he still had a life before forming The Sweetbird Guitar Company. That was the name that Jewell had suggested, a name he had really liked but had been talked into changing - actually coerced into changing - by Peter and Gary when they had come onboard as investors. Now it was known as The Heartbreak Guitar Company, which Peter had argued would get more attention. Jewell had complained more than once about the renaming and said that she felt pushed out of the business. It had come up again amid her tears last Saturday. Today, Cole would avoid even mentioning Heartbreak…unless she was feeling better. He fervently hoped for that. 

      Cole walked from the vestibule across a thick oriental carpet in the lobby. Large windows on the far wall looked onto a courtyard, but despite them, the light didn’t penetrate well, or perhaps it was repelled by the dark carpet and heavy, dark furniture of the kind he remembered in his grandmother’s house in Atlanta. It denoted an era of relative calm, of sensible and orderly lives.

One shouldn’t be walking into this stately room contemplating the murder of his company’s investors, whether or not they were deserving of it.  But Cole didn’t have a violent bone in his body. Even when he’d been picked on in middle school, he’d simply put his head down on his desk and refused to acknowledge anyone, including the teachers. He’d spent much of his time banished to the library, and though he hadn’t learned algebra or Spanish or history, he’d read nearly every book in the library and even today could quote Shakespeare, with slight modifications, when the appropriate occasion arose. Truthfully, Cole wasn’t actually contemplating murder. He was simply mulling over the deliciousness of the idea. 

     No one was in the lobby, and Cole waited at the check-in counter, a large, boxy cabinet with a poorly made countertop that sat at odds with the careful ornamental woodwork around the windows and doorways, and the imposing furniture. The seams of the countertop were discolored, a circumstance that was completely avoidable, Cole knew, since he had built hundreds of countertops himself. He had built his last one, he hoped, when he quit working for his brother-in-law to devote all of his time and energies to perfecting his guitars. 

     He heard the brisk clip of shoes on tile, and a diminutive woman wearing a daintily flowered dress walked down a hallway toward him and stood on the other side of the desk, with only her shoulders, neck and head visible above the countertop. “May I help you?” She jutted her chin forward, and peered at him through her eyeglasses.

     “I’m here to see my wife. They said I could visit after forty-eight hours. Jewell Luce?”

The woman let slip a fleeting smile, reached below the counter, pulled out a ledger, and settled her eyeglasses firmly on the bridge of her nose while she slowly perused a page marked with a paperclip.

     “Is she okay?” Cole asked. “No one has told me anything. Our phone isn’t working and I tried to call from…”

     The woman looked at him through the large lenses of her glasses, then removed them and seemed to study him. Cole realized that he should have cleaned up, taken a cold shower and dressed in clean clothes instead of dashing up the stairs from his shop in the basement and rushing out the door without even combing his hair or shaving his five-day beard. Here he stood in his dusty, wrinkled black T-shirt and his cut-off blue jeans. His tennis shoe laces and the tops of his socks were repositories for fine maple shavings. His wispy, dark blonde hair floated like a dandelion tuft in the faint breeze from the slowly turning ceiling fan. Because of the stares he would receive on a windy day, he rarely went out in public without his baseball cap. But today, in the rush to visit Jewell, he’d forgotten it.  He smoothed his hair and tucked it behind his ears. “She was fine, and then…I mean, we’ve been under a lot of stress. She’s probably just exhausted?”

The woman put her glasses back on and closed the ledger. “Room 14. Just down that hallway, take a right.” She held up her hand, a delicate but arresting gesture as if she were to bestow on Cole a universal truth. “Your wife needs complete calm.” 

     He walked down the corridor and entered Jewell’s room. Jewell was lying on the bed on her side, facing away from him. He stood for a moment just inside the doorway. “To be or not to be: that is the question,” he declared. “Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous investors, or to take arms against a sea of them and by opposing them, end them!” 

She rolled onto her back and looked at him dully. He continued to stand in the doorway studying her until she sat up and threw her empty cigarette pack at him and lay back down. 

     “I brought you something.” He tossed two packs of cigarettes and a Peppermint Patty on the bed. 

     Jewell sat up slowly, looking exhausted. Her short, blonde hair was mashed against her head on one side and the dark roots were showing. “Whatever you do, don’t say the “G” word,” she said. 

     Cole sat in a preformed plastic chair he pulled next to the bed and propped his feet against the bedframe. “Okay, no ‘G’ word. How about electric stringed instruments?” No response. “Hey, I understand. We can’t keep living like this,” he said, picking up on the conversation they’d had on Saturday, before the crying jag had started. “It’s just that my electric stringed instruments are almost ready for prime time.”

     He reached across the bed and took her hand and rubbed his thumb against her palm.  She continued to stare at the ceiling, and then rolled onto her side to face Cole.  “Peter and Gary have your guitar dream wrapped tight in their sweaty little fists. They stuck to your contract for about – what – maybe five months? They don’t give a shit about you or anything you do.”  They’d discussed many times making one more appeal to Peter and Gary to come and look at the newer guitar models and see how important it was to continue to support the prototyping shop.  Gary had come once and walked away with one of Cole’s best prototype models to date, which Cole had named “Desire” - a small tele-style electric that ran on batteries. You could use it almost anywhere, but it was not light enough. 

     Cole had yet to finesse his inflatable guitar design despite its simplicity…basically one long, wood guitar neck and a small – very small – wood body embedded with electronics and inserted into an inflatable cushion. It had a tiny clip-to-your-belt amp and speaker, and was run off batteries, so no outside power source was needed. If you lived in a cardboard box, you could still use the Inflatable, as long as you could panhandle some batteries and had enough breath to blow up the inflatable body.

     “I don’t want to talk about them anymore,” she said, “except to say that you’re better off without them. I wish you’d never met them.” Before Peter and Gary, Jewell had been enthusiastic about the inflatable guitars. She had watched Cole build both acoustic and electric guitars over the years. This new design, an inflatable body guitar, struck her as fun, different, and interesting.  

Cole’s friend, Constantine, had a completely different response. It had become Cole’s mission to satisfy Constantine, a most difficult connoisseur of electric musical sound. If Constantine approved, anyone would.

     Cole was haunted by the humiliation of his first inflatable guitar unveiling, when Constantine had exploded into laughter, slumped to the floor and rolled around, clutching his stomach. The fact that Constantine still was not convinced that the world needed an inflatable electric guitar only meant that the product needed more refinement. After all, Constantine only knew what he liked. He was not aware of the whimsical nature of the guitar world, a subculture unlike any other in its simultaneous drive for novelty and retrogression. Cole felt that he had satisfied this dual nature of the guitar playing public by outfitting the inflatable electrics with classic Telecaster electronics, and offering it with an optional tremolo, while pushing, of course, the novelty of the new “feel” of the guitar – light, sleek, melodious as a songbird - and its portability when deflated.

     Jewell continued, “Seriously, I know you can make guitars, and maybe you can even sell them, but not with Peter and Gary. I’d be just fine never hearing from them or anything about them,” 

Cole tapped his foot against the bed frame and watched maple shavings drift to the floor. 

     “Not to worry. We have no phone, remember? So, no communication with the boys?” In fact, he’d attempted periodically to call Gary from Constantine’s apartment and leave invitations on voice mail to meet over coffee, though he couldn’t tell Jewell that.  Gary played in a garage band on weekends with his Prudential rep and the owner of Fast Copy, and Cole felt that if it were up to Gary alone, an actual guitar player, things would be very different. His dream would be on the verge of fruition. But Jewell did not see it that way. In her view, Gary was a manipulator and simply told Cole what he wanted to hear. In her view, Peter, whose money was predominantly funding the venture, had shown from the beginning that he was unwaveringly cheap, without vision and thoroughly difficult. Thus, he was the straight arrow.

     Cole lightly stroked Jewell’s hand and then sat back in his chair. She was not crying, Cole observed. Not even close, though she was clearly depressed. Hadn’t she every reason to be depressed, considering the circumstances? 

     “How’s Frankie?” she asked, still staring at the ceiling. 

     “Frankie’s great,” he said. “Though he misses you. I come home and he’s all over me to get petted. Then he parks himself on the back of the loveseat looking out the window, waiting for you to come home. It always amazes me that he can even get up in the window. He may be small, but his heart is not.” Cole chuckled. “Neither are his ears.”

     “Give him a hug for me,” Jewell said softly. Cole looked for tears - this would be the time - but there were none. 

     There was a rustling at the window. Cole and Jewell watched as painters stood outside and papered over her one large window, blocking the view of the large oak trees, and beyond them, a line of cars stopped behind a city bus.

     “Richard will take you back,” she said. “Just for a while.” Cole had built kitchen countertops for over ten years - first for his own business and then after he had sold it to his brother-in-law.  Richard was a businessman and Cole was not…that was clear to just about everyone.  Cole was already building guitars at night, so when Richard offered to buy the business, Cole was ecstatic.

     Richard had expanded the countertop business to employ nearly a dozen shop workers. He needed Cole to stay on and run the shop, and so Cole had worked for Richard, training new employees, supervising the fabricators, and building the more difficult tops from complicated templates…until two years ago, when Cole had quit to devote all of his energy to Sweetbird Guitars...now of course, Heartbreak Guitars. 

     “You could work with Richard during the day, maybe part-time,” Jewell said. “And still build guitars at night, like you did before.”

     Cole could go back to solid surface work - part-time like Jewell said – until he got some guitar sales. It was hard to imagine how to make it work when he did everything by hand, without money, and now without power tools, electricity or help. He often worked fourteen hours a day as it was. Still, he might be able to squeeze in a few small kitchen or bathroom countertops, if he pushed it. But he’d had nightmares already, in which every countertop he built took days to install while the customer complained about the inconvenience and the dust. 

     Cole had gotten up yesterday and written half a song about it before his first cup of coffee. “I’m writing a new song,” he said. Jewell didn’t move. “A blues song.” 

     She sighed. “Don’t tell me - I think, therefore I jam.” She stared at the ceiling, as if reading words only visible to her that were written on the high, smooth surface. “No, no, that requires too much effort...I blink, therefore I jam.” She sighed and looked at him, but he refused to be offended. She wasn’t feeling well, after all. 

     He started tapping his foot. “It’s called “Solid Surface Man”, he said.

“I don’t sit around and worry or think,

‘cause thinking will bring a man to drink,

With me you know just where you stand

‘cause I’m a solid surface man.”

She turned onto her side and looked at him. There was a hint of a smile.  “Wait a minute, there’s more.” He hummed a few bars until the words came to him.

“My neighbor’s asking for a helping hand

‘cause her old man is just a vegetarian,

And Lady, I’ll fix it as fast as I can

‘cause I’m a solid surface man.”

     Jewell’s smile drew tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She closed her eyes, still smiling. With horror, he realized she might think he was singing an anthem to solid surface work. That he was going to fix things by going back to working for Richard building countertops.  He could think of nothing to say.