Thank You, Goodnight (25 page)

I looked at Mack. “How have you been?”

“Fine.” Then she added, “How are you?”

“I’m okay. But since you asked, I guess I’m a little curious as to why you hate my guts.”

“I don’t hate your guts.”

“So, then what? You’re just kind of a bitch now?”

Her jaw tightened, then slowly came an uncomfortable chuckle. I remembered this habit of hers, laughing lightly during moments of confrontation. “I’m not a bitch, Teddy. And I’d rather you didn’t speak to me like that in my own office.”

I stared deep into her. “You’d rather I didn’t speak to you like that in your own office? Jesus, Mack, who are you? It’s me. Remember?”

This Mackenzie was so unlike the Mackenzie I’d known that I was
almost worried. Where was the Mack who traded paperbacks and rewatched eighties movies with me on those endless bus rides? The one who sat and talked mindlessly with me at the bar for hours on end while our drummer and guitar player drank down aquariums of crude whisky? The one who got up at a reasonable hour and met me in the hotel lobby for scones?

It didn’t take a person of great perceptiveness to see that this woman was not going to join my band. She wanted nothing to do with me.

“Is this about Arizona?” I asked, seeing no reason not to cut to the heart of it.

“Is what about Arizona?”

“This!”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

I felt a sudden need to tell her now what I’d never gotten a chance to say. That I understood the bitterness. That nothing was her fault. That I didn’t handle things well with her because it was
her
. Things got weird because
I
got weird. We should’ve talked.

“All these years, Mack. You’ve carried around bad feelings about me all these years because of one night? The glory days, the music, the world travels, everything we did together—all of that means nothing to you because of one unfortunate incident?”

“Teddy, you’re showing up out of the blue and putting a lot of words into my mouth.”

I shook my head slowly. “I see the way you’re looking at me.”

She fell silent.

“I cared about you, Mackenzie. I always have.”

“I didn’t think it would be this strange to look you in the eye,” she said. “Looking at you is like looking through a keyhole into a house I used to live in.”

She stared into her lap. The air in the room grew heavy.

“I know things got complicated between us, but surely you don’t hate me,” I said softly. “Do you?”

“Of course I don’t hate you.” She sighed. “Things just ended on a down note and—”

“No,” I interrupted. “Let’s try it again.
Surely
, you don’t hate me.”

She squinted quizzically at me for a moment, then a smile bloomed. “I don’t hate you. And don’t call me Shirley.”

“Thank you. That’s all I was looking for. You can’t hate someone with whom you’ve watched
Airplane!
a thousand times.”

At last she graced me with that easy laugh, the one I’d been waiting a lifetime to hear, all the tension in the room drained away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve got a lot on my mind at the moment.”

“You don’t owe me any apologies.”

“I didn’t know what you were up to in coming here, especially this stunt of trying to surprise me at my office. I mean, why didn’t you just call and talk to me?”

“I was scared. You’re scary.”

“Maybe this
is
all because of Arizona. I’ve always wondered if somehow our episode there brought everything to an end. Your marriage, the band. It’s irrational, I know, but the whole operation did seem to fall apart after that.”

If only she knew what it really was. It was the handy truth that
Atomic Somersault
was thirteen tracks of who cares because it conveniently explained the empty auditoriums, the universal deterioration of interest in our music, and ultimately, the decision to walk away. It also cloaked the other truth: that we might’ve been rescued from our middling, pedestrian album if I hadn’t steered us away from a prime opportunity.

But that was why I was here. To make all of it right.

“Mack, the band didn’t end because you and I slept together. You should know that because you’re a sex therapist. The band ended because our luck ran out. You should know
that
because you’re a musician.”

We then dove into small talk, compressing into bullet points the notable events, or nonevents, of our lives since Tremble’s fizzle. She told me she was happy. She had neither a spouse nor kids and offered
no good explanation for how she found herself in this line of work. “Nothing else appealed to me,” she said, still mystified by her own choice. “Maybe it was that heavy diet of Jane Austen and the whole scandalousness of sexual repression.”

As for me, I told her that, all in all, I had little to complain about and that I was more or less the same son of a bitch I was ten years ago.

“Are you still with Sara?” she asked.

“I am.”

“That’s terrific, Teddy.” She seemed genuinely pleased. “Did you guys get married?”

“No. Not married.”

“What’s wrong with you? Sara’s a catch. You should marry that girl.”

“What kind of therapist says, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ”

“You’re not my patient.”

Then I made a crude two-handed air bass and asked if she still played. She nodded. Late at night, weekend afternoons with the windows open—those were her favorite times to jam. “I still know all our songs,” she bragged. “And I haven’t lost a step with
Disraeli Gears
and
Physical Graffiti
.”

I grinned inwardly. At least that puzzle piece was wedged into place.

“How about you?” she asked. “Are you still at it?”

“For a long time, no,” I replied, averting my eyes. “I decided the healthier course of action was to move on.”

“That’s surprising. Maybe you shouldn’t have given up so easily. Maybe none of us should have.”

There was such promise in that sentiment. Maybe she too had regrets, unfinished business ripe for revisiting. Yet at the same time, I hoped she hadn’t spent the years pining for a past that I’d single-handedly derailed. There was an elephant in the room, and as usual, it was me. I always seemed to be the elephant these days. I would’ve so much preferred to have been a giraffe. The elephant remembers; the giraffe lifts his head and forgets.

Mack regarded the clock on the wall and said, “How long are you in town for?” Before I could formulate a response consistent with this ruse of a visit, she added, “Maybe we can have dinner tonight. It’d be nice to catch up a little more. I’m unexpectedly not nauseated by the sight of you.”

“I doubt I’ll get a better dinner invitation than that one.”

I stood. “It’s so good to see you, Mack, and I’m relieved that your memories of our adventures together, that your memories of me, aren’t totally unpleasant.”

She rocked her head in contemplation. “Look, maybe you’ve been a bit of a sore subject in my mind all this time, but the band never has been. I wish what happened between us hadn’t happened. We shouldn’t have done that to each other, and to your wife. But you did invite me into your spectacularly successful rock band. You were a little self-important and you took rock ’n’ roll a tad too seriously for my taste, but what kind of a brat would I be if I didn’t look back at that time as being pretty special? I got lucky and I know it.”

“I invited you into a band that was playing fraternity formals. We went nowhere until we were a foursome. We all got lucky.”

Mack said she had some work to finish up, but would make a dinner reservation and text me the particulars. I was practically out the door when I remembered I hadn’t come alone.

“By the way,” I said, pivoting. “Just as a warning, I might have a surprise with me later on.” And the surprise’s father.

She eyed me warily. “I hate surprises.”

“Yeah. So do I. You’ll hate this one too.”

*       *       *

“How’d it go?” Jumbo asked.

I was in the passenger seat, catching my breath and taming my temper over the fact that Jumbo had just nearly run me over with my own car. They were late coming back—they’d stopped into a drugstore for some antifungal cream to quell the itchy business in Jumbo’s
nether regions, then purportedly had a celebrity sighting at Dunkin’ Donuts (I lacked the energy to explain how unlikely it was that they’d seen the actor who played Captain Kangaroo, he being dead and all)—and came howling through the parking lot right at me. Only a last-second swerve saved me from being swallowed by the front tire.

“It went fine,” I said.

“Is she in?”

“We didn’t get that far. Let’s just focus on the task at hand.”

That being the dispiriting process of hotel hunting amid deserts of drab commercial sprawl.

“So, what’s the plan, Mingus? How are we going to land her?”

“We’re having dinner tonight. I’ll raise it then. But honestly, I’m not optimistic. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing she’s going to go for.”

“What did you tell her?”

“About the band? Nothing yet. It’s kind of a delicate subject.”

“But you told her about me.”

“Not exactly.”

“You didn’t tell her I’m out here with you?”

“Exactly.”

I’d come to Pittsburgh on business, so went the lie. Why would I have brought along the guitar player from my long-defunct band? Or his father, who had jumped in the car to honor a custody arrangement that had expired sometime in the eighties?

“That hurts, man. You’ve got your biggest selling point eating doughnuts just down the street, and you don’t even tell her.”

“It was a judgment call,” I said, though it was nothing of the sort.

Jumbo maneuvered through the late-afternoon traffic, grunting with approval or rejection and sometimes fascination at the Five Guys and the Famous Dave’s, at the Outback, Hooters, and Pei Wei that lined the road like crooked teeth.

“Where are we all going for dinner?” he asked.

I looked over at him. “I assumed you guys were heading back to Dunkin’ Donuts, hoping to run into Mr. Rogers.”

“You’re not letting us come to dinner?”

“Don’t start, James. I told you back in Philly that you could ride out here with me if you wanted, but a seat in my car didn’t get you an invite to every item on the itinerary.”

Jumbo and his old man could unwrap chimichangas in front of the TV, for all I cared.

“You know, you don’t own Mackenzie,” Jumbo stated with reflection. “She was my friend too.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what. When you drive out here to talk her into joining Jumbo Jett and His Ragamuffin Daffodil Band or whatever the hell you call yourselves—”

“It’s Ragtag Honeysuckle. Get it right.”

“—then I’ll stay out of it.”

If, by some miracle, Mack did not walk out on me when I revealed my grand plans, then maybe—maybe—Jumbo would get the nod to come out and say a brief hello. It would be like the dinner party hosts who allow their pajama-clad children to flurry down the steps to greet their guests and steal a spring roll before scampering back up to watch another video.

But we weren’t going to get that far. Mackenzie was not going to think re-forming the band was a good idea. It certainly didn’t sound like a good idea. She was going to stare across the table at me tonight like a guidance counselor weary of the sixth-year senior. Is this really what you want to be doing at this stage of your life? her pitying look would say. And my answer would be the same one I was once accustomed to dispensing, the answer with which people like me must always be equipped.

Let’s not talk. Let me just show you.

CHAPTER 16

A
s the evening sky splashed out all kinds of blues and pinks, Elmer celebrated the splendor of it all with another coughing fit, this one of greater intensity than the first. Jumbo seemed to have the matter in hand, so I left them in the Best Western parking lot and lugged my overnight bag inside to see about rooms.

There wasn’t much to the lobby. A reception counter to the right, a pair of functional chairs to the left, all lit by the unforgiving kind of fluorescence that makes every zit and every wagging nose hair visible from twenty yards out. The fraying chairs were occupied by two guys who stared dumbly into the distance, as if awaiting a ride to anywhere.

Dropping my bag onto the linoleum tile, I requested two rooms. The girl behind the counter typed and clicked and every so often emitted a soft, drawn-out “Ooooo-kay.” She was cute but in a way that tended not to last. She should bask in the bounty of her youth, for the lustrous hair and flawless complexion would soon lose interest in her and move on to another canvas, leaving her to run out the clock with a chips-with-lunch type of body.

Nonsmoking rooms ran $109 each, a price that hardly foretold opulence and luxury. I handed her a credit card.

“Dad’s fine,” Jumbo announced, parading through the automatic sliding front doors. “Just catching his breath.”

“One oh nine plus tax,” I told him.

He bellied up to the desk and proceeded to rifle through a fistful of fives and tens. I shook my head at my companion’s piggybank payment method, anticipating all the new hotel memories Jumbo would manufacture to go with my old ones. The trash can urinations. The complaints about the “broken” shower that was not broken at all but merely beyond his technical grasp. The insistent sliding of his key into room 2270 at the Marriott when his things were down the street in room 2270 at the Westin.

The young woman accepted payment and returned to typing and clicking. A dot matrix printer somewhere behind her sprang to life with a robotic buzz.

“So, what’s her deal? Is she married?” Jumbo asked.

“Who? Her?” I pointed to the young hotel employee, who looked up skittishly.

“Mack,” Jumbo clarified.

“No, she’s not.”

“That’s interesting,” Jumbo mused.

“Why? You’re not married. I’m not married.”

“True, true. But Mack was different. I always pictured her with a husband and a bunch of kids.” Somehow that lifestyle earned Jumbo’s designation as “different.”