Vexation Lullaby Read Online Free Page A

coffee. She wouldn’t drink it, so I brought her a glass of milk. She finished it in one gulp. She was just a kid.”
    The world had to be full of bushy-browed Judiths.
    â€œYou know why she wouldn’t drink the coffee?”
    Cross stared at Peter hard, tried to will an idea into his head.
    It worked. “She was pregnant.”
    Cross leveled a finger at Peter’s heart. Bingo.
    Peter didn’t feel like he’d hit a jackpot. “Did you call me out here because you weren’t feeling well, or . . .”
    The singer patted the air in front of him. “Maybe I went about this the wrong way.”
    â€œI don’t know what this is,” Peter said. “I should have sent you straight to the hospital.”
    â€œI’ve never been a big fan of those places.”
    Peter held the long end of the lever. He’d gained the upper hand. “ Those places happen to be where we keep the cool machines. If you’re having cognitive lapses, you need to get that looked at. Bluto mentioned you were off for a few days.”
    â€œHe was talking about the tour, not about me. The roadies don’t pack me with the gear.”
    â€œYou can’t spare an hour to get checked out?”
    â€œWe just spent my last free hour talking.”
    Had an hour passed?
    â€œIf you were my patient, I’d tell you to make it a priority.”
    Cross said, “There’s room on the bird. When I first started, the label paid a voice coach to shadow me. A doctor would probably be more valuable now.”
    Had Cross asked if a doctor was more valuable than a voice coach? Was that a question? “What bird?”
    â€œThe plane, man. What do you think I’m talking about?”
    It was an unanswerable question. Their conversation didn’t make any sense. “Are you offering me a job?”
    â€œMaybe I am.”
    Peter wasn’t some shade-tree mechanic. He had a mortgage to service and a ficus that needed watering. Would anyone drop everything to hop on a plane with a hallucinating recording star? “I’ve already got a job.”
    Cross smiled. How would Peter describe the expression to Martin? A fox’s smile? A pickpocket’s? “It was nice seeing you again.”
    He’d been dismissed. Peter tucked the photo into his backpack—he needed a proper bag, something dignified. He tried to come up with something else to say; he wanted to have the last word, but Cross already held the room phone to his ear and was stabbing buttons with the middle finger of his left hand.

5
    The major rock magazines used to send someone out every year to take Cross’s pulse, but he’s fallen out of fashion or outlived it. The baby-faced smart aleck with the shoelace guitar strap is gone. At best, he’s a haggard stand-in for the counterculture icon who melded Nostradamus and James Dean.
    Plus, Cross has a track record of making those magazines look foolish.
    In ’76, after he’d stopped performing music for almost a decade, Rock Fan decided to poke his corpse with a stick. They gave their lead critic twenty thousand words to bury Cross. He challenged the myth that Cross was “the poet of his generation” or the “Bard of Greenwich Village.” If Cross is lucky, the writer predicted, he’d wind up in Vegas, doing two-a-days at the Golden Nugget, blowing an oversize chrome harmonica that would dazzle like the crown jewels. In a final insult, the article concluded with one of Cross’s lyrics: “ the dirty pigeons whisper / on the shoulders of the general / that his past is but a wasteland / and his name is lost to history. ” 3
    Eight months later Cross released Midnight at the Bazaa r 4 to universal acclaim. The critics crawled all over one another trying to praise him—they said he’d put away his childish things and finally found a canvas vast enough for his prodigious talents. Cross ended his exile and went back on