Sway (11 page)

“Yes. Fine.”

She leaned into Keith and he barely moved. He was playing a B7 chord, filling in the bass line with his little finger, a difficult
maneuver he kept attempting without getting it to come out cleanly.

“I’m feeling much better,” Brian said.

“Good.”

Mick rearranged the blanket around his feet as Marianne sat down beside him. “There’s a pack of journalists arriving tomorrow
for a press conference,” he said.

He let go of Anita’s hands and folded his arms across his chest. “Are you kidding?”

Keith finished with his chord and smirked up at him in welcome. “Why don’t you have something to smoke?” he said.

Brian scratched at the corner of his eyebrow with his forefinger. “A little joke,” he said.

“Yeah, right, a little joke,” said Mick. “Just catching you up, sweetheart. Anyway, I thought you liked talking to the press.
Rambling to the press.”

“I like it when you stop poncing around long enough that I can get a word in.”

There were bottles of wine on the pool deck. He picked one up and took a sip and then held it in his hands. Anita watched
him, then burst out laughing. She put her hand on Keith’s shoulder and pressed her face to his sleeve. Keith turned his head
toward her and put his hand in her hair.

“I’m glad you’re having fun,” said Brian.

She smiled at him from behind her bangs. “I am having fun.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been away for five days missing all this fun.”

He took another sip of the wine and licked his lips. No one said anything. Finally Tom Keylock leaned forward in his chair
and tossed him a joint. He caught it awkwardly in his cupped hand and looked down to make sure that it was there, then he
took another sip of the wine and reached into his hip pocket for the lighter.

He lit the joint and took a long, slow drag. There was nowhere obvious to sit, so he took the wine bottle and found a seat
at one of the tables where a lantern burned beneath the folded-up umbrella. Keith had gone back to playing his guitar. Anita
leaned her shoulder against the chair back, holding her knees to her chest, looking thoughtfully out at the swimming pool.

In their room, she sat on the edge of the bed and spoke calmly, reasonably, with the self-assurance of someone who took Pleasure
in confrontation. They were just having fun, she said. He knew that they were friends, and he and Keith were friends, so why
was he making things up in his mind? They weren’t old people who based their whole lives on appearances. She wanted them to
get along, like they did before, but he kept making it harder and harder when he was so jealous and paranoid and strange.

He poured himself another glass of whiskey and went into the bathroom. There was the lipsticked message —
COME DOWN to the pool!
— the letters slanted and thick in the light from the yellow bulb. He added some bottled water to his glass and now he could
picture the two of them laughing together, Keith fumbling in her bag for the lipstick, the two of them exaggerating their
enthusiasm, or maybe not exaggerating it at all because he wasn’t there.

“You’re not telling me what’s really going on,” he said.

She turned to him, exasperated. “What do you want to believe is going on?”

“I want to know whether or not you’re fucking him.”

She stood up from the bed. She crossed her arms over her chest, slowly massaging her elbow.

“You’re making accusations, but you’re not thinking about what they mean. You’ve been away for five days and then you come
back and expect everything to be exactly the same as it was.”

He put his glass of whiskey down on the dresser. “I was sick.”

“You were sick and it’s not easy. I know. I know it’s not your fault. But you’re always sick and then you’re always wasted
and now you want to make rules for me that I don’t believe in and that you would never follow yourself.”

He hit her so hard that she stayed on the floor, her leg bent strangely at the knee, as if she had broken it. When she finally
breathed, it was with a sudden high-pitched wheeze, as if she had just then caught her breath. She didn’t move. Her head hung
down from her shoulders, her purple caftan twisted around her back. He grabbed her arm and hit her again, leaning over her
body, unable to get a response. It was the first time he’d ever been afraid of what he’d done.

It was overcast and hot the next morning. On the pool deck, some of the band’s entourage read newspapers or sipped drinks
from tall, narrow glasses like tubes. The sky was a diffuse silver haze that seemed to rise higher than the sky in London.
In the shade of an umbrella, Brian was sitting with Tom Keylock while a photographer circled around him, crouched in the sunlight,
taking his picture.

The air had a faint sourness, an edge of yeast. It brought on a brief shallowness of breath, a slow flipping-over sensation
in his heart. For a moment, his heart seemed to be sputtering to a stop, weighted down with blood, and with its last lazy
thud came a sense of abandonment, then of release.

Anita was at the far corner of the pool, moving slowly through the water, her hands sweeping in front of her half-submerged
chin. She was looking ahead at Keith, who was on the other side of the deck, his shirt off and his eyes closed.

The water sparkled around her like a swirl of giant fish scales, pale green and white. A few palm fronds, yellowed and sere,
floated on the surface behind her. The photographer took Brian’s picture, and he pretended to ignore him, or assumed the pose
of ignoring him, going back to the newspaper that he had spread in front of him.

She kept looking at Keith. Brian knew that everyone around the pool could sense what was going on inside him.

The elevator had mirrored walls that were mostly obscured by intricate sandalwood screens. When Keith came out into the hallway,
he found Mick quietly closing his door. He was pale and hadn’t showered and his face looked pressed together toward the center.

“What happened last night?” Mick said, flipping his key in his hand.

Keith kept walking down the hallway. His T-shirt hung over his bare shoulders like a scarf and he tugged at the twisted ends.
“That’s the big mystery, isn’t it?”

“I told Tom to keep an eye on him. Make sure he keeps it together.”

“Sort of like sending the dealer out to mind the junkie, isn’t it?”

“This is brilliant timing. We’re going to need him. You keep forgetting that. Unless we’re just going to pack it in.”

Keith scratched his shoulder. “Well, that’s up to Brian, isn’t it? I mean, either he’ll look after himself or he won’t.”

Keith went into his room and tossed his shirt on the bed. Lined up against the walls was the equipment that had been brought
up for him on the day they’d arrived — the microphones, the tape machine, the acoustic and electric guitars, all the tangled
gray cords. He stared at it for a moment, then went out on the balcony and looked down at the pool.

He could see her moving through the water, her brown arms pushing down toward her sides. She kicked her legs so that her back
and shoulders rose up above the surface, her wet hair seeping down her neck.

He went back inside and switched on the TV without any sound and lit up a joint. He could feel it starting to gather in the
back of his mind, but it had been almost a month since he’d written a new song and he also felt lethargic. It would either
come in a flash, which was rare, or it would come out of trial and error. Either way it wouldn’t be a song until it went through
hours of plodding and revision, drudgery and repetition, the exact opposite of the sound that only sometimes, inexplicably,
emerged.

The last time they’d recorded, he’d spent five days in the studio with just Brian, working out the song. They’d added piano,
cello, flute, recorder — small harmonic lines that pushed the song slowly outward until it was something you could listen
to many times and still want to hear again. He’d watched Brian pick up instruments he’d never played before and just start
playing them, doing it while he was so stoned he seemed hardly awake. Without Brian, the song would have been nothing more
than some Baroque guitar studies he’d been tinkering around with by himself — Bach, Vivaldi — but together they’d managed
to smooth away the worst part of that and fuse it to the simple, three-chord music they were known for. The song was about
Anita — even Brian must have realized it. It was about the runaway girl who couldn’t be tamed, the girl you would have to
share if you wanted to be with her at all.

What was amazing then was that it seemed as if Brian were going to pull it together, be a true part of the band again. That’s
what she had done for him at first. But on the drive down to France, it was obvious what was happening, and Brian hadn’t even
noticed. He’d just made it easier and easier for Anita to forget about him when he finally broke down. He kept changing the
music and insisting that this was the way the band should go, back to the blues, the old songs they used to cover when it
was still fun to play and everyone got along. He would be sentimental, then angry, then half-asleep, vague with liquor and
pills, and he had been like that so often that it was not upsetting, just irritating, familiar. Still, they had never seen
him cough up blood before: thin red drips that spotted his chin and a darker kind that rimmed one of his nostrils. Suddenly
they were speeding through Toulouse, looking for a hospital, thinking he might die. He’d wanted Anita to stay there at his
bedside, but she’d felt worn down by then. He had stopped coughing. It had already started to seem like another one of his
games.

They left him there after the first night. It was a cold thing to do, but he’d told them to go. They got back in the Bentley
with Tom Keylock and headed south toward the border town of Port-Bou. It was a sunny day and they crossed the Pyrenees into
Spain, where they could see cactuses and yuccas growing between the rocks on the sides of the road. They smoked some hash
and listened to the reel-to-reel tape player, and their lives — even Brian’s — suddenly seemed funny in a way they hadn’t
seemed since leaving London. She was laughing the first time she kissed him, and he could hardly concentrate on her body,
her tan thighs spread across his hips, her breasts, which he felt for the first time through the thin fabric of her acrylic
shirt. It had happened so fast that only afterward did it really sink in, the reality of this girl who was so beautiful he
used to keep sneaking glances at her to make sure he wasn’t exaggerating it.

Brian stood up and walked over to the edge of the pool. She looked up at him, wiping some water off the side of her face.

“We’re going to go hear some music,” he said. He turned back toward the table, where Tom Keylock was still sitting. “He’s
going to take me into town.”

She rested her arm on the glazed tile, looking down at her fingers. “I think it’s a good idea,” she said.

“I’d like to find some instruments to bring back to London. Something different.”

“I think we should just cool off for a while, don’t you? I mean, just for the day. I think it will be good for us.”

He looked away. For a moment, everything that had happened last night — the calmness of her voice, the tight soreness in the
bones of his hand — came back, jumbled together with the sunlight on the patio, the green and white reflections on the swimming
pool, the coarse gray bark of the palm trees.

“You should go and hear the music,” she said. “Try not to think about everything so much.”

He nodded. Across the pool, there was a waiter in a white jacket and a white fez clearing glasses from one of the empty tables.
Anita smiled, touching his bare ankle with her wet hand.

“It’s just for one day,” she said. “Not even a whole day. Everything’s going to be fine.”

He had never felt like this. Jealousy, fear, hopeless antici- pation — these were familiar feelings, but he had never felt
them with such claustrophobic intensity. It made his pulse thick and prolonged, worse the more he tried not to think about
it. Everything he didn’t want to believe about himself was once again suddenly, explicitly true. Could he go for one day —
not even a whole day — knowing that she was out of his control? It was like deciding that nothing between them had ever mattered.

An hour later, she and the others were in a tiny carpet shop owned by a man named Hassan, sampling different kinds of hash
while they listened to Moroccan music on the radio. The walls were an even, vibrant blue that made it difficult to remember
what time of day it was. Keith leaned back against the wall on a pile of carpets, his eyes closed. She was curled up beside
him, her arm entwined with his. She wore white boots, her legs bare and tan, and beneath her straight blond hair she had a
feather boa wrapped tightly around her neck like a scarf. Mick and Marianne and Robert Fraser were on their right, looking
at a book of Arabic calligraphy. As usual, someone was taking pictures, and so the last hour had been full of vivid reactions
to minor events, canny smiles and thoughtful stares and a minimum of talk.

“It’s better now, isn’t it?” she said.

“Yes. It’s always good to have a smoke.”

“I want to go for a walk later in the market. I want to buy something for Brian. Something to cheer him up.” Her smile was
the smile of someone who never felt any difference between acting and being herself. “Don’t be solemn,” she said.

“I wouldn’t dream of being solemn.”

“We’re all friends. It’s a simple idea, but no one seems to understand it anymore.”

“We are friends.”

“Not if everyone’s going to be so solemn about it.”

Someone took their picture. Keith closed his eyes, nodding off slightly to the music. It was trancelike and insistent, a syncopated
weave of oboes and violins backed by drums. Each note pointed to a shape without making it too obvious, each note a surprise
but also a logical next step. It was like looking at a dark sky and gradually making out constellations in what had been a
scrim of random stars.

Her hand felt embarrassingly alive in his. It was long and firm with a pair of rings beneath the first knuckle of her middle
finger. He knew that the rings had nothing to do with him and that her hand in his meant nothing, but it made him not care
about Brian, or about the band, or about the possibility of spending ten years in jail. It made him want to see what would
happen. He kept noticing the faint, greenish bruise on the edge of her cheekbone.