“Do two people even qualify as a group?” she asked.
“Oh, sure. A group, sure,” Judd said.
— to Joshua and Judd, because Gordon and Steinberg sounded like a law firm. Judd thought maybe she was right, not because he thought it sounded like a law firm, but only because it was too close to Simon and Garfunkel, whom they were frankly imitating. Lissie didn’t think Gordon and Steinberg sounded the slightest bit like Simon and Garfunkel—
“You mean the way we play?”
“Well, no.”
“Then what?”
“The name.”
— but if they were considering a name change, anyway, then why not use Joshua and Judd which she thought had a nice ring to it. Judd said he would consider it, and maybe mention it to Steinberg. He told her later that he’d never considered it for more than ten seconds, and certainly had never mentioned it to Steinberg, simply because the name Joshua and Judd gave his partner top billing. When Lissie mentioned that the lead guitarist should get top billing, Judd said, “But I write all the songs.” All the songs, as it turned out, were half a dozen Judd had composed since leaving Harvard.
Safe from the draft because of a slight heart murmur, Judd had felt no qualms about dropping out of school and losing his student classification. But he identified completely with other kids his own age who were being called up every day to get themselves shot to death in some stupid fucking rice paddy. It was Judd who insisted that Lissie accompany him to Washington for the November 15 Moratorium on Vietnam. She simply went with him, not even telephoning her parents to say she’d be out of Boston that weekend. The following week, when the My Lai stories began getting full-scale treatment in all the Boston papers, Judd organized a protest outside the Mugar Memorial Library, and although only 150 students showed up to march, he felt he had focused something more than media attention on a situation of pressing moral concern to all Americans.
Most of the time, Lissie and Judd had the Commonwealth Avenue apartment to themselves because Steinberg was dating a twenty-one-year-old Catholic girl from Simmons who steadfastly refused to consummate their relationship until they got married, an unlikely prospect in that his widowed mother was an Orthodox Jew and Eileen’s parents were practicing Catholics who still refused to eat meat on Fridays, although it was now permitted by the church. Steinberg and Eileen spent a lot of time walking along the Charles together, torturing each other with a great deal of hand play.
Judd was rather a marathon lover, quick to climax (“They don’t call me Flash Gordon for nothing, lady”), but equally quick to regenerate and begin again after a bottle of beer or a cream cheese sandwich. He loved to eat in bed, and the sheets were littered with cracker crumbs and bits of cheese and salami. Since the apartment was virtually theirs to roam at will, they made love not only in the delicatessen bed, but also on the battered living room couch, and in the old-fashioned claw-footed bathtub, and once on the enamel-topped kitchen table.
She told her parents nothing at all about Judd. One thing she had learned since Woodstock was that you didn’t ask your parents beforehand and you didn’t tell them afterward. When she’d called the Vineyard from Rutledge that August day almost three months earlier, she hadn’t asked if she could go up to Woodstock with Rusty, she’d simply said she was going, knowing damn well there wasn’t any way they could stop her. And even though her mother had made some feeble noises about making sure Rusty had permission to use the family car, Lissie knew she’d won a major victory that day, and had gained as well an important insight into what was to be her future relationship with her parents.
Besides, she wasn’t too sure how long this thing with Judd would last, and she saw no reason for bringing her parents into her personal life if this turned out to be a romance of short duration. She had, by early December, heard Gordon and Steinberg in concert at a bar in West Newton, and had calculated that the odds against their ever achieving success as rock musicians were, generously, about ten million to one; she suspected that before long Judd would pack his guitar case and head home to Sarasota, perhaps to attend the University of South Florida where he could major in basket weaving at his father’s expense.
She hadn’t even known where Sarasota was at first. She’d thought Judd had said Saratoga. “One of these days,” Judd told her, “I’m going to write a novel, and there are going to be two hookers in it, a Greek hooker and a Japanese hooker. I’ll call the Greek hooker Sara Toga, and the Japanese hooker Sara Sota.” Lissie still didn’t know which was which until she studied an atlas at the school library, and pinpointed each town, and decided she’d never care to live in either, thanks. “One of these days” was one of Judd’s favorite expressions. “One of these days, when Steinberg and I get a recording contract...” or “One of these days, when I get that little Porsche I’ve got my eye on...” or “One of these days, I’m going to paint this whole apartment red, the floors, the ceiling, the toilet bowl...”
One of these days, Lissie thought, you’re going to get tired of playing one-night stands in sleazy bars for crackers and beer, and you’re going to head south where Mommy and Daddy will welcome you with open arms. I’ll press you in my memory book, Judd, together with my senior prom corsage and my autographed picture of Elvis. Had she ever swooned over Elvis? Had she truly been to Henderson’s senior prom with a pimply-faced boy whose name she couldn’t even remember now? David? Daniel? Had she ever really been that young?
In just a few weeks, she would be eighteen.
Oddly, the promise of the Christmas break — the return to Rutledge and what she supposed was still her home, the living room hung with her photographs, the lighted tree in the far corner of the room, the familiar rush of the river beyond — left her feeling only indifferent. She imagined herself going back to school again on the fifth of January, and settling once more into a now familiar and, yes, dull routine. The year would have gone by like a whisper, leaving not an echo of itself, and, more depressingly, causing very little real change in the person who was Lissie Croft, a person she no longer thought of as a kid, but could not yet truly consider a woman.
As she packed her duffel to head for home, she wondered bleakly if anything as exciting as Woodstock would ever in her entire life happen to her again.
1970
7
The name and return address on the envelope were unfamiliar to Jamie. Someone named Carol Steinberg in Chicago, Illinois. He tore open the envelope flap. The handwritten letter read: