The Leavers(88)

“What was that about?’ Amber asked.

“That dude was losing hard. I wanted to help.” Daniel had looked for the guy after class, but lost him in the shuffle to leave Peterson Hall.

“A bunch of us are getting drinks on Saturday at the Black Cat,” Amber said, in her shaggy but upbeat voice. She still lived at home, still hung out with the same friends she’d had in high school, and was taking summer classes so she could finish college in three years.

“That sounds fun.” On Saturdays, Daniel would join Amber, Kelsey Ortman, and their other friends for beers at one of the two animal-named bars on Main Street in Littletown, down the hill from the Carlough campus: the Black Cat and the Spotted Cow. One week, there’d been an off-campus party, a near-duplicate of the parties he had gone to at Potsdam, white people dancing badly to corny hip-hop in a ramshackle house, beer bongs and screaming guys in baseball caps, someone barfing on the front lawn.

“They have an Open Mic there on Thursdays. Didn’t you used to be into music in high school, with Roland Fuentes?” Amber pronounced it Fen-Teez. “Wasn’t he, like a little off in high school, with the green hair? He wore eyeliner.”

“I used to play guitar. We had a few bands back then.”

Amber’s white-blonde hair was almost transparent in the sun. “A bunch of us should check out the Open Mic one night.”

“Sure, that sounds good,” Daniel said, though he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do less.

“HARRY’S CLASS WILL BE a good entrée for you into the world of economics,” Peter said at dinner, “a solid foundation for your future. There are so many ways that knowing economic theory can help enrich your life, from tracking your budget to knowing how to manage your stock portfolio. If only they made it a required class for all undergraduates.”

Kay asked him how Melissa’s class was today. Melissa was Professor Schenkmann, a heavyset woman who wore long dresses in eighties prints, geometric overlapping shapes in hot pinks and lavenders. Daniel remembered going to her house as a kid, summer barbecues with other faculty families.

“Good,” Daniel said. Professor Schenkmann always made it a point to call on him, as if she was doing a favor to Kay, ensuring he got his tuition’s worth.

They were having broccoli and chicken Parmesan. At least Kay had ceased her efforts to cook Chinese food. These efforts flared up periodically, once after they’d visited the Hennings and Elaine had given her a cookbook, and another time after he’d gone to a weeklong camp for Chinese adoptees, where the college-aged counselors, also adoptees, talked with such bare emotion that he felt embarrassed for them. Angel had learned how to make oddly sweet won tons that summer, but he was the only kid there who had been adopted past the age of infancy, who remembered anything about his birth mother.

Kay had become careful around him, overly solicitous. He knew she worried when he went out for drinks, so he made sure to be home by midnight, which wasn’t hard; there was only so much time he could stand being around Amber and her friends. He could see how it reassured her. All it took to make her and Peter happy was to come home and go to Carlough, say he was going to GA meetings.

After dinner, Peter called Daniel upstairs to the study, where he was kneeling on the carpet with a mess of computer cables, whistling softly. “Where does this go?” Peter peered over his reading glasses.

“Here, let me.” Daniel took the cord and tried several slots before a green light flashed on the speakers.

“Aha. Take a seat.” Peter cleared some old bills from a folding chair, typed in a website address and pulled up a YouTube screen. “Look at that, you can get all kinds of music for free online. The other day, I watched footage from a concert I attended in 1978. Aerosmith at the War Memorial Arena in Syracuse. I was twenty-one—your age. Can you imagine, a concert you go to today, seeing it online in forty years?”

This was the most Peter had said to him in months that wasn’t lecture-based. “Is that what we’re going to watch now? Did you see yourself in the audience?”

“No, you can only see the stage, and barely even that. Video technology was primitive back then.” Peter pressed play. “But here, listen to that.”

It was video footage of an actual record spinning as it played Jimi Hendrix’s “1983 . . . (A Merman I Should Turn to Be).” Daniel and Peter sat in their chairs and listened as the track slowed to a break and picked up again. Creeping, plodding. “That backwards tape, it’s a slow burn,” Peter said. “They didn’t need computers to make good music in those days.”

“It’s a good track, Dad. One of his best.”

“I used to listen to this song when I was a kid. The age you were when you came to live with us in Ridgeborough. I had a few of my older brother’s records that he left behind when he took off for college. We used to share a room, and after he left I’d sit on his bed and listen to his records. That’s where I got my music taste from, your Uncle Phil. They say you always maintain a fondness for the first records you listened to. Like you and Hendrix.”

“I listened to music before Hendrix.” There’d been music in the city, plenty of it, and even Hendrix seemed kind of childish to him now.

The song transitioned into red-tipped sparkles, feedback and clanging bells. A shift in keys felt like the sun peeking through the clouds. “I’m working on some new music,” Daniel said. “Trying to, at least. You’d like it, it’s just vocals and guitar, no computers. It’s really different from what Roland and I were doing.”