Thank You, Goodnight (12 page)

“You’re a musician, Teddy. That was your life until your luck ran
out. And then you evolved. I hope you haven’t been unhappy all these years, but by the same token, it would be perfectly natural to fantasize about going back to that world, especially since you would’ve preferred not to have left it in the first place.”

I tossed the microphone cable toward my trusted old bag of gear. It was blue and faded and the fabric was unraveling on the sides where the boxlike tuners and guitar pedals pressed against it. It was the same bag I’d lugged around to gigs in college. It used to smell of stale beer. Now it smelled like the back of my shoe closet.

I took a seat next to her on the sofa. “Have you ever wanted to do something different?” I asked her, exploring the weary curve of her spine. “Have you ever felt the itch to change?”

She tilted her head downward, peering at me over a pair of invisible spectacles. “I’m not restless like you. When I feel the urge to change, I explore a new design style or I buy myself a new outfit, or we plan a trip and disappear off the face of the earth for a week. That’s probably as much redefinition as I’ve got in me at this point.”

I didn’t say anything. As she stared at me, I knew she wanted to ask me if she was one of the things I wanted to change. She had to be wondering what it was in my life, or absent from it, that was leading me down this path.

“Speaking of change.” She slapped a hand on each of her thighs, something people tended to do before standing. But she didn’t move. “Sometimes it comes looking for
you
, not the other way around.”

I had the notion she was speaking of present tenses, and I felt the air in the room thicken.

“There’s something I want to tell you,” she said.

“Okay.”

I waited in the pregnant silence as she gathered herself.

“Billy called me.”

“Billy. Your Billy?”

“Yeah.” She looked away. “He wants a divorce.”

That, I did not see coming. But somebody should have. Sara and
Billy didn’t last very long after the accident, the marriage falling into a slow, methodical disintegration. One detail left unattended in their mutual flight, however, was their marital status. Over the years I’d wondered just how accidental that was, if maybe, on a subconscious level, a divorce would’ve been the final hammer swing on the life they once shared, and neither of them had it in them to do it.

Her being married never factored into our relationship because I never threatened to make Sara a bigamist (my starter marriage having been an event I wasn’t keen on replicating) and Sara, for her part, seemed preoccupied with just making it through the day. It was a perverse sort of equilibrium, mutually assured purgatory.

Sara and I spoke of marriage exactly once. It was on a Sunday morning, a year after she’d moved in. As I pounded a ketchup bottle over an omelet, I offhandedly asked if she thought we’d ever get married. It wasn’t a proposal; it was for discussion purposes only. I merely wanted to know where her head was on the issue, like if she thought we’d ever sail the Strait of Magellan or if she reckoned Puerto Rico might one day become a state. She looked out the window for a long moment. Then she asked if that was something I really wanted to discuss. I took it as a rebuke, but have since wondered if she was truly posing a question. I honestly can’t remember it ever coming up again.

“Why now?” I asked her.

“I don’t know. He may be involved with someone and . . . I don’t know.” The thought dissolved into the air between us.

“Is he getting remarried?”

She shook her head slowly. “I don’t think that’s what’s driving this.”

“Wow, Sara.” I stared at her, weighing the many questions I could’ve asked. “So, what was it like, speaking to him after all these years?” I assumed it had been years, although there really was so much about Sara Rome I didn’t know.

“It was strange. Needless to say, his call caught me off guard. Just hearing the sound of his voice knocked me a little. We kept it
superficial—our jobs, our families, things like that. Then he said he thinks we need to, you know, make it official because of how long it’s been. And one day one of us might want to get married again.”

She didn’t personalize it. The remarrying didn’t necessarily involve me.

“How are you with all that?”

She shrugged with a woman’s natural pragmatism. “It makes sense.”

“Yeah,” I agreed softly. “I suppose it does.”

Sara never talked about Billy and I never inquired, assuming any thought of him would carry her to thoughts of Drew, a topic strictly off-limits. But now that I thought about it, there had been one instance. Late one night, soon after she’d moved in, I sensed an emptiness in the bed and, half-asleep, went looking for her in the predawn chill. I found her crumpled on the kitchen floor, the phone to her ear, sobbing to Billy. When her wet, puffy eyes flickered my way, it was only to convey that I wasn’t part of this. This didn’t involve me.

“So, what do we do now?” I said to her. “Drink to our mutual upheaval?”

“A drink is a good idea.” She got up and dewrinkled those invisible creases in her pants. “But this divorce thing is not upheaval. It’s the opposite. It’s a settling down.”

She carried herself heavily into the kitchen. I continued to disassemble the room to the sound of a wine bottle being smoothly violated by a corkscrew.

As leisurely paced as this divorce might have been, it was sure to change things between us. It was a step in the direction of finality, of bringing to a close a chapter in her life. And endings tended to deposit you at the doorstep of some other beginning. What would Sara want to begin? This was something I’d never before needed to consider. I didn’t want Sara’s situation to push her away from me, but at the moment, given the left turn my life was potentially about to take, I wasn’t so sure I wanted it to nudge her much closer either.

This divorce
was
upheaval. It was upheaval precisely because it was a settling down.

She returned to the room cupping two stemless glasses, and held one out to me.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked her.

“I’m fine.” She looked battered. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Okay.” I reached out to tap my wineglass to hers.

“We’re drinking to you tonight, Teddy,” she said.

I wasn’t so sure. “I think we’re just drinking.”

CHAPTER 6

I
stood outside the house and pondered the consequences. There would be many. A blizzard of them, most of them unwelcome. Suddenly, a simple knock seemed a dire, drastic step. I’d come this far, I told myself, though really it hadn’t been very far at all.

Screw it.

I rapped twice on the door and a symphony of muted noises erupted behind it. Kitchen chairs skidded, skirmishing children trampled down carpeted steps. Finally, the door blew open and there I was, staring at Jumbo Jett.

We looked at each other, and his face, puffier than I’d remembered it, ballooned into a bulky smile. “Mingus.”

“Hello, Jumbo.”

He glanced over his shoulder, then scooted furtively out onto the porch, pulling the door closed behind him. Throwing an arm over my shoulder, he began guiding me back down the walk toward the street.

“Man, it’s so great to see you,” he said, even as he seemed to be escorting me off the property. Then he produced a white envelope out of the front pocket of his jeans. “Dude, would you mind keeping this in your car for a little while?”

“What?” I looked at the little package. “What is that?”

“It’s nothing.”

“What sort of nothing?”

“It’s just some pot. No big deal. Sandy and Israel caught me smoking again. Personally, I don’t see the problem. The kids were at school. They know I’d never do it with them around. But they can be real tightasses—you know how it is. And it is their basement, after all. So, if you could just hang on to it for a little bit until this all blows over.”

I stopped walking. “Hold on a second. What the hell are you talking about?”

He looked at me as if everything that had just come pouring out of his mouth made perfect sense. Like this was an eminently reasonable way to greet each other after ten years.

“Start over,” I demanded. “Sandy and . . .”

“Israel.”

“Sandy and Israel. And who the fuck are these people?”

“Sandy’s my ex.”

“Ex what?”

“Ex-wife. Israel’s her husband. They’re not real big into the whole marijuana scene, even for medicinal needs—and I’ve got plenty of those—and moving out of the house isn’t really the best move for me right now, you know, financially. So, I gotta bite the bullet on this one. Their way or the highway. You know how it is.”

He stole a peek back at the house and continued ushering me down the driveway.

“I have a lot of questions,” I said. “But let’s start with this one: You live with your ex-wife and her husband?”

“And their two kids.”

“I see.”

“They’re good kids.” Somehow that was relevant. “They really like me.”

I was already sorry I’d come. “Jumbo, I don’t mean to be rude, but what the fuck?”

“I recognize it’s not all that common of an arrangement.”

We’d reached the end of the driveway and were standing next to my aging Lexus coupe. “Dude, unlock it. Nice car, by the way. Gray totally works for you. Mysterious.”

“It’s silver,” I said, clicking the doors unlocked.

I watched uncomfortably as Jumbo slid into the passenger seat and began rifling through my glove compartment. He removed a stack of CDs to make room for his envelope, which he concealed like a master spy inside the vehicle owner’s manual. We’d been together thirty seconds and Jumbo had already made me an accessory to a felony.

Slamming the glove box shut, he started flipping through the discs. “The new Oasis. Nice.” He turned it over and studied the track listing. “How is it?”

“Come out of there.”

He shimmied his ungainly frame out of the car and closed the door behind him. “Thanks, Mingus,” he said through an exhale of relief. “I owe you.”

“Don’t forget that that’s in there,” I said. Lecturing Jumbo was like riding a bike. “I’m not driving home with that in my car.” We were not off to a good start, Jumbo Jett and I.

Then, for the first time, I had a moment to take him in—the faded daddy jeans, the doughy physique, the lawless hair one frizz away from electric socket bedlam. There was something strangely heartening about Jumbo in chaos. He was just as I’d left him.

“It’s been a long time,” he said. “I’m super glad you called.”

Then, with an abrupt lurch forward, he locked a suffocating hug around my torso. It was like being absorbed into one of Maurice Sendak’s wild things. He held on for a while, too long actually, and when I detected a subtle rocking, I patted him twice on the back to indicate it was time for the hug to be over.

“I’ve missed you, man,” he said.

“Yeah. Listen, I was hoping there’d be somewhere we could talk, but I guess it’s not going to be the house.”

Jumbo frowned at the Pepsi-blue split-level perched atop the driveway in all its aluminum siding glory.

“Screw that,” Jumbo said defiantly. “I pay rent.”

*       *       *

The way Jumbo smuggled me into the basement made me feel like a truant twelve-year-old sneaking over for an afternoon of PlayStation. Unfinished and gloomy, the cellar was a dank, low-lit space with exposed cinder block everywhere except for the places where Jumbo had seen fit to hang a tapestry, a photograph, or a Tremble album jacket. There was a bed, in a way—two mattresses stacked on the cement floor. An ancient tan sofa with decomposing upholstery lined one of the walls, a generic wooden chair sat stranded in the middle of the room, and that about did it for furniture. Clothes hung like battle corpses over the sides of plastic college dorm crates, and a few cardboard boxes were put to work as nightstands. It smelled like basement down there, a mix of new car and wet dog. The most uplifting aspect of the place was the pounding of footsteps overhead, which signaled life of a mainstream variety somewhere close by.

“What do you think of my pad?”

How does one sugarcoat cinder block and cement? “It’s fine. Maybe a little too ‘It puts the lotion in the basket.’ ”

After warning me that the sofa was missing a leg, Jumbo lit a stick of incense on one of the highly flammable cardboard night tables and offered me a beer. I declined, it being ten o’clock on a Saturday morning.

Jumbo settled onto the bed and fixed me with an outsized smile. “Jeez, Mingus, look at us, together again.”

Jumbo always called me Mingus. I guess at one point I knew why.

“You and I were buddies, man,” he went on. “Since we were little kids. I never thought we’d go ten years without talking.”

It was the raw truth that, with the exception of the last decade—a respite I’d earned many times over—I’d been along for the whole bumpy ride that was Jumbo Jett’s life. I’d witnessed the good stuff: his ascent to revered yet volatile guitar god, the affable ruffian who chewed up the scenery onstage and who made for an entertaining if not always comprehensible interview. But I’d also had a front-row seat to a mélange
of horrors I would’ve loved to unremember. The runny nose he sported K through 12. His unfortunate hobby of shaking people’s hands with a buzzer. His unbecoming sports illiteracy (the year the band was invited to the Super Bowl, he nagged me to leave at “intermission”).

“As you can see, I’m still playing.” He gestured proudly toward a squadron of guitars up against the wall.

That information was the first positive thing about my visit.

Whereas Warren, Mack, and I opted not to outstay our welcome in an industry that didn’t seem to want us anymore, Jumbo had pressed on, instrument in hand, albeit on a slightly smaller scale. Scaring up a few weekend warriors from the neighborhood and a shaggy high school student or two, he formed Jumbo Jett and His Ragtag Honey-suckle Band, which had since endured countless Menudo-like personnel changes but still loitered around the Mid-Atlantic, looking for love. Recent venues included the parking lot of Whole Foods, a harvest festival at a pumpkin patch, and an eight-year-old’s birthday party.