Eddie came out alone.
The music stopped. The crowd quieted.
He looked right at June, lifted a finger to the horn player, and swiveled his hip in time to the one long horn note—the exact note, the exact swivel, of the first instant that she had seen Eddie Knox four years earlier.
Her whole body leaped.
And then he stood, silent, the horn silent, the room silent, still looking at June.
And she knew. She knew right that minute.
She loved Eddie Knox. She was in love with him, had been in love with him, would always be in love with him. She was doomed. Eddie Knox was not the man to love.
But it was total, and it was absolute, and the only thing that was notable was that she had kept it from herself for so long.
He was singing now.
A little bebop song, lips into the mike, flirting with a row of women in the right front.
He didn’t look at her again.
She barely heard the show.
He was great. She could hear that. He was Eddie at his best. Not Eddie of the bloodshot eyes, not Eddie rail thin, not Eddie puking into a toilet. But Eddie as he had been, and Eddie as he was, with everything he’d learned in four years of carrying a nightclub, carrying a casino, carrying a whole certain kind of dream, night after night after night.
He was better than they’d even known.
And he sang and sang. He brought up some women to dance with him. He let an old man croon three verses into the mike. For a while, he sang from a booth on the other side of the room. And the audience knew it was a special night. They were all with him, pulling with him, hanging on his every note; they would talk about this night for years.
When it was over, nobody in the room got up to leave. They just sat there, waiting, watching. June could feel the longing. She caught Leo’s eye, and he walked her out the door at the back. Her body was trembling, and she did not dare see Eddie.
Leo had a security guard drive her home; said he knew Del was working late and that she would not want to wait for him. June let him tell her what to do. She couldn’t think about her husband; she didn’t want to see him. Had they actually been on the dining room floor that night? Had Marshall been sitting on Eddie’s lap that day? Her world spun and spun, and all these ordinary parts of it, these things that had made perfect sense, did not make sense at all. What was she doing? And what would she do now?
She didn’t get the news until late afternoon the next day.
Del told her. Came home from work early again. Came in and put his arms around her and told her that Eddie had been beaten the night before; that it was bad, that it had happened behind the El Capitan. He was in the hospital, and he would probably make it, but he looked real bad.
7
They’d taken Eddie to Las Vegas Hospital on Eighth. He was at the back, in a room with six beds, and the nurse who showed June where to go mentioned that there wouldn’t be much privacy. It was hard to tell what she was thinking. Perhaps she disapproved, perhaps she wanted June to say who she was, perhaps she was just a fan of Eddie Knox.
June said nothing. She wore heels and a narrow skirt and a jacket with wide lapels that she had ordered from the Bloomingdale’s catalog. Eddie’s bed was in the corner, and it was the only one partially obscured by curtains.
“Hey, Eddie.”
He looked at her, one eye fully shut, the other open just enough for her to see his pupil rotate toward her. He looked worse than she had thought he would. As bad as she had imagined, it was worse. There was no way to tell he was Eddie, his face was so swollen, and his mouth caved in a bit where his teeth were gone. She had meant to be cheerful, but it was all she could do to hold back the shock, to keep the tears in. She sat on the small green chair next to the bed, placed her fingers oh so gently on his arm, leaned her head near his face, but did not touch. He did not move or make a sound, and it was a few minutes before she could speak.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
He mumbled then, and she strained to hear him. “Go away. Stay away from me.”
“I’m not going away. I’d never go away.”
“This is my doing, June. Please. You can’t help me.”
“I can help you. I can. Del can.”
Eddie made a sound then, when she said Del’s name, but she didn’t know what it meant. She couldn’t tell if he agreed that Del could help or not.
“Have they given you enough pain medicine? Can you eat?”
Eddie didn’t answer.
June didn’t try to keep talking. She laid her head on the pillow near him, her body bent awkwardly from the chair, and she stayed there, quiet, inhaling Eddie’s hospital smells: antiseptic and gauze and sweat and something it took a minute to recognize as blood. Eddie didn’t move to push her away, he didn’t protest. They lay there, head near head, silently, a long time.
June heard someone, a nurse, an orderly, pass nearby. There was the sound of breathing, a sharper step, a slowing step. She didn’t care. She didn’t care what they thought, didn’t care what they said, didn’t care what happened next. She had been na?ve about all of it, about what Eddie was up against. She hadn’t spoken out when she should have, and it wouldn’t have made a difference, and still, she had sat silently at lunch with her friends, she had picked this town, she had seen the Westside, she had gone to all the big shows, many times. She knew as much as anybody could know. And she had known nothing.
She had been too stupid even to know what she felt.
But this was the man she loved, and if he were lying here, in pain, in this bed, in this place where not even Del could get him a room on the second floor, then she would lie here too, and they could all say anything they wanted. She didn’t care.
The nurse’s voice was brusque.
“He needs rest. And he doesn’t need someone laying on his pillow.”
June sat up. The nurse glared. June had given birth to Marshall in this hospital. She had a private room with a window that looked out over downtown and toward the mountains. The nurses brought her apple juice with ice chips every time she asked, and they brought the baby in too. He slept in the nursery, and every three hours or so, he came in to nurse, and afterward, Del would sit in the chair and hold his boy. The sun would stream in, and the white of the bed covers and the white of the baby clothes and the blue of the sky out that window fused in her mind, and felt like happiness manifest. Until today, June had loved this little hospital with its adobe walls and its red stucco roof, and she had loved that her son was born here, in Nevada, in the West.