Dan Woessner

String Theory

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2022: VOL. 37.

Lena was raised on violin lessons and minimal parental supervision. Her father drove a big rig, her mother jockeyed slot machines over at the riverboat casino, and the violin lessons were paid for by her Great Aunt Edith.

“A cold woman,” Lena said, stabbing at a lettuce leaf with her fork, “I think she wanted to salvage some thread from our branch of the family.”

“Well, it worked,” I quipped with maybe the lamest line I’d used since junior high.

The opening salvos of our first date established this dynamic for our relationship going forward. Lena delivering brute honesty and me deflecting the intensity of her words with glib retorts and cliched advice. Lena’s family stuff was news, the violin business wasn’t. Everyone in Jordan knew of the violin prodigy, Lena Pruitt. With her recitals at fancy theaters in Chicago at ten, scholarship offers at thirteen, and the sad business with Lyle Hess. She was two years behind me in school and I remember seeing her from a distance always wearing black dresses, thick white stockings, and with her hair smartly lined with ribbons, normally black but sometimes red or white, as if she was perpetually only minutes from her next performance.

“My father always wanted me to play when he was off the road, which was next to never,” she continued with the stem of her wine glass clenched between the fingers of her strong hand. She never acknowledged my comment.

“And your mother?” I asked.

“I don’t know if she’s ever heard me play. Loved the settlement money from the school, I’ll tell you that, she went straight to the casino after the judgement, and I didn’t see her for two weeks.” The settlement payment was the only indirect reference to Lyle Hess that night and I hated that I was waiting for the topic to arrive organically. I didn’t want to be that guy, the one fishing for the inside details of a scandal. I would never spread those details to my friends, I didn’t have time for friends, but I wanted to know the details nonetheless. To turn them over in my head, analyze them, and draw some sort of conclusion for why she did what she did when they took Hess away.

“It must have been tough,” I cast a line.

She pinched her thin shoulders together in a pose I read as a shrug. Her shoulder blades pointed sharply below the straps of her summer dress, reminding me of the bow she would have once glided so majestically across strings. Her hair was cut short and curled in tight loops, the natural color probably brown but it looked like she had added a hint of red recently. Her eyes were dark, maybe brown also, but the lighting of the room was such that it was hard to discern colors. I imagined we were in a black-and-white movie, leaving my mind to assume the real-world shades.

The restaurant had standard American fare, the finest we could get in this dilapidated midwestern town. She ordered a salad, a baked salmon that looked neither baked nor like salmon, and a dish of rice pudding for dessert. I had chicken tenders and French fries; my food tastes stopped developing at fourteen. She ate half of everything, asked for a doggy bag, and when we were finished, she hugged me with her good arm in the parking lot.

I probably should have left it at that.

Max plucked at an acoustic guitar on our front porch while June bugs fluttered around the light and a can of soda rested next to his bare foot. He wore nothing but a pair of basketball shorts, his hairless chest tanned behind the wood of the guitar. He was sixteen, still able to pull off the no-shirt look without it being intimidating or conceited, and I said a silent prayer of thanks that he’d made it this far without a kid of his own out there somewhere. He’d made it longer than his old man.

“You swap spit with her?” Max asked and then struck a series of chords as if he was constructing a new song around the question.

I shrugged my shoulders, ducking into the house to retrieve a beer. Max continued to strum a mixture of chords that nearly fit together into something I recognized. The July air was thick, the sky not yet dark even though it was approaching nine, and somewhere a dog barked. We were a country song, one that Max probably could piece together in ten minutes. He had a talent for stringed instruments, the guitar being his latest venture.

“Swung and missed then.”

“There’s really nothing to tell. We talked. We ate. We wished each other a good night.”

“Yeah, because it’s weird, right?”

“Weird?”

“Come on,” he lifted the guitar strap over his unruly long and layered hair. The excess hair irked me because, at thirty-one, I was nearly empty on the top of my skull while Max would never have to worry about sun burning his dome. “It’s weird. She was my violin teacher. Were you thinking about her like that all that time? It’s just gross, dude.”

Sipping my beer, I tried to remember when Lena first interested me. When the lessons started, I was dating Molly, a real piece of small-town trailer trash, so my mind was preoccupied in her latest drama. Dating Molly was a whirlwind of raging emotions and drunken episodes that lasted too long. I swore off women for at least a year after it was over. Maybe it was then that I fixated on Lena, but I didn’t think so. The truth was that long before Max went for lessons, Lena Pruitt was a question mark in the back of my mind. Not sexually, necessarily. Just a casual fixation, a curiosity that struck a chord in me.

“It’s just something that happened, Max.” His blue eyes, his mother’s eyes, remained on me. “I saw her at the store the other day and thought it might be fun. You got along with her fine.”

“Sure, old claw hand was a hoot.” He mimicked Lena’s damaged right hand, curved almost like a hook except for the pinky that remained permanently straight.

“Max.”

“Sorry,” he said, not meaning it. He still boiled everyone down to appearance in his head without even realizing he was doing it. A car sped by, going too fast for the residential street. Kids, no doubt. Probably friends of Max if he had friends. It was always hard to tell. Prying into Max’s love life was even more difficult. He was clearly an attractive boy, but he never mentioned girls much less brought any by to meet his pops.

“Listen, she never touched you, did she?”

Max’s eyebrow raised.

“What, with her claw?” He mimicked the deformity again. “Cut that out, you know what I mean.”

“Jesus, kind of late to worry about that, ain’t it? I haven’t gone to

her for lessons in two years.”

“Yeah, yeah, I should have asked back then.”

“So why would you ask now?” Max stood, the muscles of his chest and stomach defying gravity. I rubbed the paunch protruding from under my polo shirt. Somewhere in the neighborhood, bottle rockets cracked the air, driving more dogs frantic. Max retreated to the house and his bedroom, and it was only later that I realized he had avoided answering the question.

Lena found her father slumped against the steering wheel of his semi when she was nineteen. Bud Pruitt had a wad of chew in his cheek when his heart gave out and the juice bled down his chin, freezing to his skin that January morning and sending him to the grave with a stained face. He died right after he’d pulled the rig into their gravel lane the night before, shutting off his heart at about the same time as he killed the engine. Lena’s mother played slots all night, hitting it big about two in the morning and the casino comped her a room so she could wake early and lose it all back. Lena climbed into bed by eight and she slumbered fitfully, rising before sunrise and seeing her papa’s big rig in the lane but no sign of the only man other than Lyle Hess who she loved.

“His eyes were open,” Lena said. “It was the first time he’d looked at me since they’d arrested Lyle three years earlier. Course, Dad didn’t have much of a choice about it, his eyes were frozen open after all, it was barely above zero.”

“He blamed you?”

“No. ...maybe,” Lena stopped, watching four ducks floating along the water’s edge.

We were walking on a bike path that ran along the river, a second date, of sorts. She had called me at work and asked about meeting for lunch. I agreed, even taking personal time for the rest of the afternoon in case lunch turned into more.

“I don’t think Dad knew what to say to me. He was never a big talker to begin with, and he’d rather hear me play than talk. Since I couldn’t play, what could he do?”

She rescued a cigarette from her pocketbook and propped it between her thin lips that were painted a dark red. I offered a light, and she waved me away. The ducks splashed some water, and she pulled the cigarette from her mouth.

“I’m trying to quit,” she smirked. “Sometimes just touching the filter to my lips is enough.”

“Yeah, I’ve quit three times.” Showing her the pack I kept in my back pocket. We continued down the path, the shade from nearby trees hiding us from the sweltering sun. She’d revealed more to me than I ever could have dreamt on a second date, but I worried that I wasn’t offering the insight she craved from her revelations. While I’d dated quite a bit over the years, most of those dates happened in bars and bowling alleys where alcohol and the din of others suffocated quiet moments. All those women were into flirting or complaining about work. Lena could swing from painful stories to deafening silence in the matter of seconds, and I wasn’t trained like a good drummer to close the gaps with appropriate fills.

The path curved away from the river and ahead a woman walked two tiny dogs. My father would call them ankle biters. I had told my father on a Thursday night when I was fifteen that I was going to be a father. He crushed a half-full beer can in his hand and Mom sobbed. Come to think of it, they never really looked at me the same after that either.

“Parents just struggle when it comes to facing the fact that their kids are having sex.”

“You know from experience?”

“Shit,” I said and apologized. Swearing felt wrong around a violin tutor. “My parents went through the roof with me. Then Max arrived and they had a grandchild. Of course, it was different for me.”

“How so?”

“Well, I did it with a girl about my age.”

“Oh.”

Silence followed. The path inclined toward the parking lot, and this date was ending without much potential for another. Before we reached the lot, she stopped.

“I guess I didn’t burden my dad with a kid,” she replied.

I wanted to tell her that my parents were never burdened by Max, but that wasn’t true either. They had shouldered a lot of the financial load those early years, but I was his father and Max was never a burden to me, even when his mother skipped town without so much as a forwarding address, leaving me to raise a child on my own.

“Your dad probably just felt like he let you down by not protecting you, it’s easy to feel that way when you’re a parent.”

She brushed the hair off her forehead with her good hand and then grabbed my hand, intertwining her long, thin fingers in my stubby digits. At her car, she kissed my cheek, and sank into the front seat. Before shutting the door, she locked her eyes on mine.

“I want you to know that I was never a victim.”

By the time the nightly news finished, nothing flashing on the screen could hold my attention. I paced from the living room to the kitchen to the entryway. I climbed the steps, opened Max’s bedroom door, its emptiness hitting me harder than the smell. Teenagers stink. I don’t remember smelling at that age, but I almost certainly did. Running, sweating, eating whatever I wanted, I no doubt reeked, but I never knew it until Max turned thirteen and his odor permeated everywhere. Max’s scattered clothes were gathered in discarded islands around his bed and desk, a rich pungency fermented in the molecules of air. Sweat and skin and gas all blended with the sour remnants of a spray deodorant. I opened his window, a weak warm breeze fought to penetrate the wall of boy stench inside. The whispers of the lonely old man I would become warned in the far reaches of my mind to not let even this smell go. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Back down the stairs I went, out the front door, onto the porch. The neighborhood was quiet save for the sound of a radio playing a baseball game somewhere a block or two away. The street glowed orange and pink under the lights, cars were sporadically parked on both sides. Ordinarily I would have been in bed snoring while Max strummed away for hours in his room. But Max wasn’t home. On a Tuesday. And it was late, I hadn’t a clue where he was.

I touched his name in my phone’s contact list. A ring. A second ring. A third. Voicemail.

“Hey, it’s Max, I’m probably jamming and can’t hear you. Leave a message or send me a text.”

I soaked in the sound of his voice, the worries of a parent pulsating with the quickening of my heart. He was never gone, not without a note or a call and never out late. Who were his friends?

“Max, it’s late. Call me and then get home.” I tried not to sound frantic or angry, and the combination produced a wavering tremble undermining my attempt to sound normal. I dialed again. No answer. I hung up.

Doubling over, I pressed my head into the wood railing. I didn’t have anything without Max. Just stuff. Useless stuff, and my parents. A mother who rarely talked and a father with a mind filled with conspiracy theories. God, they would laugh to see me in such a twist. I’d been a latchkey kid to get away from their eyes, their worries, and their grief. My older sister, Lucy, had been an angel, right up to the point that her car stalled on those train tracks when I was seven. Why she didn’t get out when the train horn blared, we’ll never know. Except maybe we did know, but just didn’t want to admit it to ourselves.

My parents cracked down after her death. No staying up late. Constant checking in. Dropped off at the school door and picked up promptly after the last bell. No weekend afternoons in the park with my friends. The front and back doors were closed. The windows were closed, even in the summer heat. They planned on storing me away. By the time I was twelve, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I snuck out, using a rope to descend from my bedroom window to go play ball or meet by friends at the movie theater. My dad found out and nailed the window shut, so I found other means until I just started barging out the door before either of them could stop me. Dad would hit me when I came home. Never that hard. Mom cried. Or just kept crying. It was hard to tell.

Then Mallory Chapman followed me down the hall one day in high school when I was fourteen. She was three grades ahead of me, her tiny top stretched to the limits by her breasts and her hair dyed three different colors.

“Want to go for a ride after school?” she whispered in my ear.

I never stood a chance. I liked to blame my parents. If only they hadn’t sheltered me so much. My mind raced back to that afternoon on some gravel road west of town. She talked about music and drinking and sex. I nodded, terrified by everything she said. As exhilarating as she was, I wanted to go home more than anything else.

The squeal of brakes before the house woke me from my trance, and my anxiety turned to anger as Max emerged from the passenger seat of an old muscle car, some model of Chevy from the 1960s, I think.

“Where the hell have you been?” I shouted.

“What?” Max stopped, a scared animal caught in headlights. “Where have you been?”

“Oh, well I met Kev,” a greasy looking guy held up a peace sign behind the wheel. The guy needed to invest in shampoo and a comb. “Yeah.”

“He has a band, he’s the singer, and I told him I played guitar.” Max pulled his guitar from the back seat. “We’ve been jamming for a few hours, just lost track of time.”

Max wasn’t a good liar, so some of what he said seemed true. He wasn’t telling me everything, that was obvious, but prying into what else was going on seemed a bit much for the curb in front of the house.

“Don’t forget about Saturday,” Kev called before pulling away, his voice nasally. I couldn’t imagine the guy being able to sing.

“For sure, man.” Max waved and headed to the house. I followed. “Saturday?”

“Yeah, I made the band, we’re practicing at Kev’s place. It’ll be cool.”

“Kev’s place? How old is this guy?”

“I dunno, twenty-two, maybe.”

“Twenty-two.”

“Yeah, hey sorry, my phone died,” he tried a smile, but his eyes were too tired to pull it off. “It’s late, I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.” Max climbed the stairs, his guitar still in hand, and he never told me more.

Lena scheduled her sex like she did her violin lessons. A timeslot on a Friday afternoon, a day when no kid wanted to be kept inside practicing violin and no parent wanted to fight with them about it. I arrived at her house at four, telling Max that I’d be home later in the evening. He didn’t ask any questions. The conversations between the two of us had been stunted since I told him that I wasn’t going to allow him to be in a band with a bunch of grown men. Stuff like that led to booze and drugs and sex and unexpected babies. I’d never restricted him in such a way before, and neither of us really knew how to respond. When Lena called, I was grateful for the break from being a prison guard.

She lived in her parents’ farmhouse, surrounded by fields, crumbling barns, and sheds and quiet. Her mother still gambled, her debts likely massive and unknown to Lena, who for her part, didn’t seem to care about money. Her father had rescued a sizeable share from the settlement and whisked it into an account away from his wife’s sticky fingers. Otherwise, Lena lived on her lessons, charging each pupil fifty dollars a month.

The floors were hardwood, the walls plaster, and the windows rattled in rotting wooden frames. She held her lessons in the parlor, which was fashioned with furniture from the forties. A piano sat in the corner, even though no one had ever played it, and a music stand never left the center of the room. A violin box rested atop the piano, covered in dust and context.

We had sex in her bedroom, the only one she’d ever had. She never made a peep, kept her eyes closed, and shivered any time my fingertips touched her skin. When she climbed atop me, she held her bad hand in front of her and played an invisible violin with her other arm. Behind her eyes, deep inside, a song played so loud that I imagined I could even hear it. I came fast. She opened her eyes, her expression never changing, and rolled off.

“Was the time you created Max your first?” she asked minutes later, her pale frail body nestled beside mine.

“Yes.”

“How old?”

“Fourteen.”

“Were you good?”

I’d never been asked that one before.

“Probably not, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. Max’s mother really instigated the whole thing, I would never have had the nerve to do it otherwise.”

I hoped she’d mention that I’d improved or learned a few tricks since then, but she didn’t respond. Raindrops smacked against the window.

“Go ahead and ask; you want to know,” she said.

I wanted to not understand what she meant, that it hadn’t crossed my mind as soon as she asked about my first time.

“How old were you when he started in on you?”

“Nine, and he didn’t start in on me,” she said. “He was my teacher. He used the touching to connect to the music. It wasn’t sex for a long time. Just touching, the kind that brings goosepimples to the skin. That’s the energy, the feeling the greats need to become the music. We didn’t have sex until I was thirteen, and I was good at it the first time.”

She said the last part with a sad sense of pride. I didn’t know if anyone should be proud of being good at sex at thirteen, especially when that sex was really rape by a forty-year-old violin instructor.

“I’m sorry.”

“For what? I’m not. I wanted to be the best. I was the best. He brought that out in me.”

“He groomed you.”

She bolted upright, slapped me and scrambled for her clothes.

“I loved the violin, and I loved him.”

“I’m sorry, but you teach kids, would you ever do that? Max was good, did you ever touch him?”

She slid her panties over her bony legs, stopped and eyed me. Her purple nipples pointed from her small breasts as she pinched her shoulders together. I once thought that movement was a shrug, but it was something else. A tic, or something more. If it they were playing poker, it’d be a tell. She knew all of it had been wrong, she just couldn’t admit it to herself.

“Max was never serious about the violin.”

“Jesus.” I knew Max was probably the best pupil she ever had. “He was damn good.”

“Yes, but he never cared about being good. Besides, my touch would never have motivated Max.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You’ll know when he knows,” she said.

I got out of bed and found my boxers; an anger brewed inside.

First, she deludes herself into thinking she wasn’t molested, and now she assumes to know things about my son that I don’t know.

“Why did you pursue me, Jack?”

My jeans were on and I tried to find my sneakers under a tangled quilt they had thrown on the floor minutes earlier.

“That’s a damn good question.”

“I think you thought I was victim, and you wanted to be with another victim.”

“You’re crazy.”

“That’s it, and that’s why you’ll come back next Friday and the Friday after that. When they took Mr. Hess away, I took a butcher’s knife and severed all the tendons in my wrist. I did it. Without Mr. Hess, I could never play the same again, so I wouldn’t play at all. My hand is my reminder. Max is your reminder.”

“Don’t say his name.”

“You’re more of a victim than I ever was. The world and you just don’t want to see it that way.”

Max was raised on music lessons and by a father who was a child himself. Max’s mother didn’t equate sex to pregnancy or giving birth to motherhood. She split. That’s all I can say. She sends a card on his birthday on the years that she remembers, and her parents take Max to lunch on Sundays. As for his father, me, I’ve struggled, but always took full responsibility for my actions. Never once considering that when I got in that girl’s car when I was fourteen that I could say no, that I should say no. Guys, don’t do that, right?

Lena was right about a lot of things. She knew I’d keep a standing appointment with her on Friday afternoons. We didn’t talk much. She disappears into the remaining echoes of the music she once so elegantly produced. I never told her, because I knew she wouldn’t listen, but that music didn’t happen because of Mr. Hess, it came entirely from her. He was a predator, and he certainly didn’t just do it to a prodigy like Lena. He molested dozens of kids over the years, the ones most vulnerable to the extra attention. Girls with daddies who were always on the road, and mothers who loved gambling more than their daughters. That’s why she got a settlement. The school knew about Lyle Hess, but they had hired him anyways. It was a different time, people like to say. My guess is that times aren’t so different. Lena would never listen to any of that though. The other kids lied, and he had only loved her because she was special. He’s up for parole in about forty years.

Lena escaped into music when we screwed, and I searched for something, anything in this act that brought me joy. All I ever found was obligation. I was still that boy in the car, who thought he had to go along when a girl took off her top and reached for the zipper of his jeans. I was still the young man with a crappy job who dated dodgy women because he didn’t think he deserved any better. The only appeal that Lena still held for me was that she made it an appointment. Something I committed to keeping. She wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t caring. She didn’t love me, and I didn’t love her.

Max proved to be a stubborn teenager just like any other. He found ways to meet with his band of twenty-somethings, particularly this guy known as Kev, this unkempt, brooding young man who maybe had a job and maybe didn’t. I fought the relationship as much as any parent fights to keep their kids from the wrong crowd, but the more I tried to pull Max away it only pushed him closer. They’d be gone for hours, and Max’s guitar would still be propped against the wall in his bedroom.

One afternoon, Kev pulled his muscle car to the curb and honked twice, just like those old TV shows where greasers in leather jackets would swing by a cheerleader’s house for a date. Max bounded down the stairs from his room, taking the steps two at a time, but I caught him by the elbow at the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Just out with Kev.” His jaw was set, clearly thinking the stage of me denying the friendship was over.

“Out? Aren’t you even going to take your guitar?”

“My guitar?”

“Yeah to practice with the band.”

“Ah shit, Dad, the band fell through. The only one that could play was me. Kev can sing a little, so we might try again sometime.”

“So, if there isn’t a band, why are you hanging out with this guy?

Can’t you make friends your own age?”

I tried to imagine that Max didn’t blush at this question.

“Guys my age are either meathead jocks or dorks. I’ll be back by ten, I promise.”

He hugged me before leaving, startling me so much that I couldn’t even object anymore. Maybe that’s why he did it, to distract me momentarily, but that didn’t feel true. It felt like a spontaneous action on his part, as if he was trying to say something with the hug that he couldn’t admit with his mouth yet. I watched him leave, so fast he was almost skipping to the car. He jumped into the passenger’s seat and met eyes with this Kev, they leaned toward each other ever so slightly. One of those moments that hang in memories like posters on a wall. Kev revved the car’s engine and squealed away from the curb before I could observe anything else.

I try not to imagine the worse. That this Kev is feeding my teenage son booze and cigarettes and drugs, and looking for fast women, women who are ready for the kind of things Max might not be ready for. I am a father, and I do assume the worst. That this friendship is going to hurt my son in some way that I can’t even fathom. 

Maybe what I fear most, though, is that there is more to the relationship than I want to accept, and that this is just the first of many relationships for Max that I have no control over. Sooner or later, Max might find love, and when he finds love, he will leave me alone. My obligation will be over.

I spend most of my time worrying about things like that now. It’s what I think about when I am with Lena. I had never thought much about love or being alone or being a victim until I dated Lena Pruitt, who was raised on violin lessons and minimal parental supervision.