21.

In the fall of 1965, I went back to college covered by the gauzy folds of my grief. Jenny and I went on dates and held hands as we walked around campus, but I felt as though I was an actor in the staged version of Rick Ryan, reading someone else’s lines. Only when Jenny sang some of the folk songs with the anguish of their terrible solitude did the inmost core of my soul reply.

Four strong winds that blow lonely . . .

I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way.

“What ever happened to Eurydice? Who remembers Eurydice?” a professor asked in one of my English literature classes. “The precious stone of her life lost, tumbling down and down. Lost. Irretrievably lost.”

One strange little bright spot that fall was the Student Talent Show. My God, were we ever so innocent that we put on a talent show? Is it possible, living as we did in the eddying streams of irony, that we could take a skinny white boy with an unbuttoned button-down shirt singing “Ol’ Man River” seriously? Or how about the pale girl singing “The hills are alive with the sound of music,” her fingers grappling with the air in front of her as if she were turning knobs the audience couldn’t see. Or maybe this was the beginning of irony—as we recognized how talentless most of us really were, maybe this was the moment when we decided to make fun of everything. Maybe this was the moment when irony became the only value.

But here came this mop-headed boy, his hair dark brown and his grin infectious, playing the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass song, “The Lonely Bull,” bending into the notes as if looking for the air of his music in every nook of his body. What pleasure he got from our applause and look at how he spun the trumpet like a six-shooter and then blew across the mouthpiece. A gunfighter, finishing up after shooting. Grimes Poznik, the new gun in town.