Thank You, Goodnight (34 page)

“I don’t know. They’re a little out there. I guess I liked them originally, but now they’re sounding lame.” My eyes drifted to the lower half of the lyric sheet. “Now that I look at it, I don’t know what’s going on in the second verse. I was obviously shooting for a double entendre with the word
infectious
, but maybe that’s too clinical. Yeah, you’re right. The lyrics need work.”

“No, they don’t,” he said with monastic certitude. He took a sip of his coffee, which he’d been consuming in frightening quantities, having swapped a nicotine addiction for a caffeine one. “You’ve got some lyrics here that knock the goddamn wind out of me, man, and they’re carried upon one of the most natural melodies I’ve ever heard
from you. I’ve awakened in the middle of the night and heard this song in my head. I feel like I’ve known this song my whole life. My mother could have rocked me to sleep with this song before I even knew what music was. But I swear on my empty grave, if you sing it the way you did on those practice takes, I’m going to cut it from this record and go to court to get you permanently barred from ever playing it again.”

He banged his fist on the table, startling me and sending a tiny brown splash over the brim of his cup. “If we’re going to make an awful album, it’s going to be boldly awful. We will not make one that limps into awfulness, that isn’t even sure if it’s awful.”

Then he pointed at me, a strong finger jutting out of an autocratic fist. “This song deserves better than what I’ve been hearing. You’re not going after it. Go after it! Deliver this song the way it wants to be delivered. Picture something in your head, something you want more than anything else in this life. Some person. Some dream. Some place. You decide, but think about it, hold it right before your eyes. Then sing as if you’re telling that thing how much you want it. You need to convince that thing that you want so bad to give itself to you. You know what that feels like, Teddy, I know you do. There isn’t a beating heart out there that doesn’t, and it’s your job to access that frequency, that cosmic longing that puts all of us in the same leaky goddamn canoe. For the rest of my life—the rest of my life!—I want that desire to drip out of the air every time I hear this song. I’ll hear that desire, I’ll know you speak my language, and I’ll feel a little less alone in this life because of it.”

After that, nothing moved but the ceiling fan, its wood-plastic blades clicking over the control room. At that moment, the isolation booth had never felt more isolating.

Then the music began to flow into the headphones. As I waited to sing, my eyes found Mackenzie sitting on the back of the sofa in brown capri pants and a light-blue shirt with a scoop neckline, her bare feet up on the cushion.

I closed my eyes and pondered Sonny’s words. What was my dream? No simple question for a man about to begin his fifth decade on the planet, an age by which most people had surrendered or at least downsized their ambitions.

When the faces of my bandmates swept through my head, I found myself wondering if this, right here, was it, if this was the thing I wanted more than anything else the world could offer. And I considered what it was that had brought each of my old friends here to sweat out the summer in this dilapidated room. Why had they allowed me to scare them up out of the afternoon of their lives?

With my eyes tightly shut, my neck craned toward the silver microphone, a look of twisted struggle on my face, a voice unknown to me sailed out of my mouth, and I realized that what I wanted more than anything was the wisdom to know what it was I wanted.

In a split second, the song was over. Red-cheeked and drenched, I hazarded a look out into the control room. Warren and Mack stared back at me inscrutably. Jumbo ruptured the stillness by pumping his fist, pointing a fat finger at me, and mouthing “You!”

Sonny was reclining in his chair, his browning coffee cup held to his mouth, his eyes closed. All at once, he wiped his upper lip and leaned into the mic. “You’re done.”

CHAPTER 21

S
onny couldn’t always sermonize competency out of us. When we took up our instruments and played him “Painless Days,” which we all thought was the song most likely to end up under a DJ’s needle, Sonny listened with a doubtful scowl and said, “I don’t see what all the fuss is about.” Decreeing the composition “undercooked,” he ordered me to write him a bridge. I took to the piano and attempted to cure it right then and there. I proceeded to improvise, and Sonny proceeded to shout out words of discouragement like “derivative,” “uninspired,” “beneath you,” and “cut that out,” until it became abundantly clear that my efforts would not soon produce anything that anyone should have to listen to. “It must not be a song yet,” our producer declared, and sent everyone home early.

“Except you,” he said, pointing at me. “Stay and fix it. Bic is gonna want this yeast infection of a studio back eventually.”

As the people I thought were my friends filed out and abandoned me, I cracked open a Snapple from the mini-fridge and started riffing. I tried everything. A twangy little bounce that got too cozy with Conway Twitty. Analog synths that gave sorry birth to a cheeseball “Uh-oh, it’s magic” outtake. Even a jaunty piano that was too much Elton circa ’88 and not enough Elton circa ’73.

A few futile hours later, I threw in the towel. “Must not be a song yet,” I grumbled in my best impression of our leader.

As I locked up, I remembered that Sara had planned on visiting Josie and Wynne’s house that night, as friends were gathering there to welcome their new baby. The couple had recently traveled to Ethiopia to claim their eleven-month-old son, and since they’d been back but a week, Sara had only met the kid through e-mailed photos from Addis Ababa. In all the pictures, the new mothers looked disheveled and thrilled, while the little tyke’s startlingly wide eyes conveyed how deeply confused, but not altogether uncharmed, he was by all this. I decided to meet Sara out there.

The profusion of cars buffering the house forced me to park down the block in the wooded Mount Airy neighborhood. It was a community where people settled and took up residence for generations, where the wishfully hippie or bohemian middle class could live affordably with a front porch and an undersized lawn and still deflect accusations of having moved to the suburbs.

Wynne opened the door and laid eyes upon the scuzzball of dried sweat that stood before her. “Well, holy fucking shit. Look who it is,” she exclaimed.

“Congratulations,” I said. “How’s motherhood?”

“Great so far,” Wynne replied, her flowing fountain of curly blond locks bouncing in step with her head. She was tall and big-boned and seemed to go out of her way to downplay her naturally pretty facial features, as if being conventionally beautiful was somehow sexist—and conventional. “It’s real exciting shit, Teddy.” She cuffed me on the shoulder and added, “You should try it some time.”

As she shuttled me through the house, I spotted decorating choices that betrayed Sara’s thumbprint, like the sconce that was a close cousin of the one in our condo, or the slender vase that had become her trademark.

“Teddy!” I heard Josie’s raspy croak before I saw her step out of the pack of guests congregating in the living room. She held an almond-
skinned baby. “Sara didn’t tell me you were coming.” She smeared an affectionate kiss onto my cheek, then tilted her head of spiky hair at the baby. “This is Miguel.”

Miguel. If there was a reason for that gratuitous conversation piece of a name, I didn’t want to hear it. Miguel fixed a serious look on me, the whites of his eyes hypnotically watchful.

I looked at the child. “Good luck, Miguel. You’re going to need it.”

A cursory scan of the room revealed no trace of Sara.

“He’s really cute, Josie,” I said. The remark felt hollow without a more human display, so I pinched the kid’s cheek.

“He is cute, isn’t he?” Josie gushed with a grin that wrapped all the way around her trendy maroon spectacles. “I guess Sara’s coming later?”

“I guess,” I said, pulling out my phone and thumbing a quick text.

“I’m so glad you’re here, Teddy,” Josie said, petting my chest to show me just how glad.

The trip, she told me, had been a blissfully exhausting ordeal. Initially, Miguel was less than overjoyed to be handed to this pair of ghosts, and he spent the first couple of days bawling his way from one nap to the next. But holed up in a hotel room for a week with these new mommies of his, he soon got to thinking they weren’t half bad, wooing him as they were with Elmo puppets, Cheerios, toy phones, and unreasonable quantities of love. The jet lag, sleep deprivation, and capsized routines could have taken a harsher toll on Josie and Wynne, who were in their late forties and thus somewhat less elastic than most new parents, but what they lacked in youth they made up for in zest. They were the happiest fucking mess you ever did see.

“Sara told me the big news,” Josie said. She was smiling at the baby, so much so that I thought maybe Miguel was the one with the news. “The band? The album?”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see how it goes.”

“That’s huge. Huge,” Josie affirmed. “I’m so proud of you.”

“You are?”

“It takes serious guts to commit to something you love.” She
slapped my cheek lightly with her one free hand. “You’ll never regret it.”

And yet regret was the emotion that was most prominent in the mix these days.

Wynne sauntered up to me. “Where’s Sara?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I thought she’d be here.” I consulted the phone in my palm but saw no response to my text.

Ravi, from Sara’s office, was there, his connection to the proceedings unclear. Next to him, and already as tall, was his twelve-year-old son, Pritham. Despite shuffling with embarrassment at the fact of his father’s existence, to say nothing of the unique shade of his old man’s sport coat—it was the color of poorly applied spray tan—the kid never ventured away from his dad’s side.

“Have you seen Sara?” I asked Ravi.

He shook his head. “By the time I left the office, she was already gone.” He touched his son’s forearm. “You know, Pritham, this man used to be in a very famous band. In the mideighties, right, Teddy?”

I winced. “Thanks, Ravi.”

Pritham bobbed mechanically. “Cool beans.” Then, at his dad’s prodding, he proceeded to regale me with captivating tales of soccer camp.

A little while later, both concerned and suspicious about Sara’s whereabouts, I decided to call her. I stood in a quiet corner of the living room beside a sketch of a bull standing on its hind legs, a lonely lightbulb dangling over the bull’s head. The animal stared back at me with wry self-awareness, as if he understood just how out of place he was in this drawing. It struck me that every single human being who took in that arresting little sketch must have felt an instant connection to it, thinking, Okay, tell me again how I ended up here.

Before my phone had reached across the airwaves and rung Sara’s, I heard Wynne’s voice lilting behind me. “Teddy, look what the cat dragged in.”

I spun around and saw Sara. She was elegantly dressed in a long brown leather skirt and a white blouse unbuttoned at the top. Either
she’d already been equipped with a glass of white or she’d driven over with it in her hand.

“Teddy.” Sara gaped at me like I was an obsessed extramarital one-night stand who’d started showing up at her kid’s Little League games. “I had no idea you were coming.”

“Apparently,” I said.

“Well, ain’t this a kick in the ass,” Wynne hooted. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you two in the same room. I was beginning to think you were the same person, like maybe Sara was Teddy in drag or something.”

I pulled back the edges of my mouth. “I’d rather you leave me out of your weird little fantasies, if it’s all the same to you.”

Sara looked at me and collapsed her forehead into the bridge of her nose. This was code for
What gives?

“We finished up early at the studio, so I figured I’d surprise you,” I explained. “Where were you?”

“At a client’s,” she said. “You should’ve told me you were coming.”

I eyed her carefully, sussing out clues of deception. Josie and Wynne’s studio was obviously unavailable to her as an alibi tonight. The only other place she could’ve been was with Billy, of whom she spoke only in the most elliptical of terms. My periodic inquiries into the status of the divorce had been met with shallow nonanswers, unremitting evasiveness. Something else that was none of my fucking business.

We were joined by Josie, who was leading her mother over by the wrist. “You met Teddy, Mom, but this,” our hostess said grandly, “is Sara. Sara Rome.”

Josie’s mother, a peppy little dumpling, practically exploded. “Of course! The interior designer. Aren’t you adorable!”

“Congratulations,” Sara said. “Miguel’s beautiful.”

The little round woman clutched her heart with great theater. “Is he not the most precious thing you’ve ever seen?”

Then she proceeded to catalog all her favorite decorative strokes around the house that Sara had authored. Sara modestly accepted the
compliments, though she did point to the painting above the fireplace, a blighted wintry street scene, and remarked, “I still think the Vincenzo goes there.”

“I know I’ve said this a zillion times to Josephine, but I’m getting your number tonight. Mel and I haven’t updated in thirty years.”

When Josie’s mother scooted away to attend to her suddenly irritable grandson, I noticed Sara staring at something over my shoulder, something drawing her attention between her increasingly aggressive sips of wine. Finally, when her furtive glances had elevated to the point of obviousness, I turned and followed her eyes, discovering that the object of her absorption was Pritham, Ravi’s twelve-year-old. It didn’t take long for me to realize why.

“I didn’t know Ravi had a son,” I said to her carefully.

“Yes, you did. And he has three.”

“Anyway. You look really pretty tonight.”

She smiled at me as if finally buying into the suitability of my presence there.

Then, a strange look overtook her face, and she snatched my hand and tugged me out of the room. Toward the back of the house we moved hurriedly, past the island in the kitchen where a stack of dirty plates leaned precariously by the sink.