One Day the Wind Changed by Tracy Daugherty Page B

I looked up. There, above us, leaning against the balcony railing, wearing the man’s white shirt, was my neighbor. The beauty. She didn’t acknowledge me in any way. She began to unbutton the shirt. Then she turned and slipped inside her apartment.
    â€œI think. … I’m beyond it all,” Suzi whispered.
    â€œNo,” I said. What did she mean? I helped her up. The gash on her forehead seemed minor. It stopped bleeding. We walked the six or seven blocks to the Greenfield Pub. On the way, Suzi let me hold her. Then she shook off my arm. The cut opened again. By the time we reached the pub, blood smeared her left cheek. We stood in the doorway. The room went quiet. Billy was singing “Diamonds and Rust.” He faltered, quit. A lifetime’s worth of expressions crossed his face; I saw him as an old man. Finally, all his emotions—panic, fear, exhaustion?—merged into a slow, sad smile. “Darlin’,” he said into the mike. Suzi ran to the stage. I felt naked and dumb. I couldn’t blend into the crowd. As I turned to go, I caught a glance from Billy: a generous smirk? Is there such a look? How had the evening gone so wrong? I walked away wondering what I’d missed that could have forced a different ending.
    For a week after that, it seemed as though my life had been rolled up like a newspaper, fastened with a rubber band, and tossed into the bushes, where it lay hidden, the headlines soon forgotten.
    I concentrated on finals. The end of spring term meant the end of my coursework. All that remained was my thesis—something on Melville, I thought—and mailing out PhD applications.
    â€œMelville? There’s an original topic,” said my thesis adviser. He stroked his sparse red beard. Postcards of famous American writers lined his walls. Ralph Ellison. Flannery O’Connor. Dead lions. What purpose did their work serve, finally? Sociologically, historically, spiritually? Books, drawing dust. I thought of Gary.
    The old prof opened a paper packet with his teeth and sprinkled salt over a lox and bagel on his desk. I noticed a trail of salt on the floor. Thirty years of lunches in this drab office? Didn’t they have janitors in this building? I had the queasy impression I was walking on the remains of mediocre students.
    â€œYou’re sure about Melville?” my adviser asked me.
    â€œI guess. I mean, I think so.”
    â€œWell. Get started. Check with me again in about six months.”
    It occurred to me I should get another adviser.
    Gary had been right about the summer. One late Tuesday night in mid-June, when Finches was nearly empty, two Puerto Rican teenagers stuck pistols in his face and got away with four hundred dollars in cash. “In the old days I would’ve chased those bastards, and caught them too,” he told me later. “Now—”
    The incident shook him so much he quit and took a job in the school library reshelving books. In the hour or so before the library closed each night, I’d walk up and find him in the sixth-floor stacks. We’d chat and flip through the art books on his cart. Rembrandt. Caravaggio. That lovely nut job, Picasso. I’d run thesis ideas past Gary—“Ahab and the Advent of Autism in Nineteenth-Century American Novels,” “Whale as Id”—but his head was still in the ghettos of Houston.
    One night, on my way home from campus, I bumped into Billy. He’d waited for me around the corner from my apartment. He sat on a curb with a tattered guitar case. As I approached, he stood and weaved a little. He’d gained weight. “First of all,” he slurred. “I’m only doing this for Suzi. I wouldn’t have come on my own.”
    I didn’t respond.
    â€œI want you to forgive me,” Billy said.
    â€œWhat for?”
    â€œHell if I know. Suzi thinks we should beg your goddamn mercy.” He pulled a cardboard pack from his shirt