Thank You, Goodnight (35 page)

Sara opened a door and flicked on a light. We stood atop a rickety staircase.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

A finger to her lips, she pulled the door closed behind us and led me down the steps. The cellar was furnished with a sprawling old mushroom of a sofa, presumably deposited there to live out the end of its life in peace, and was floored with a red Persian rug that fueled the illusion that the entire basement could levitate as if on a magic carpet.

My attention was instantly hooked by a pearly iridescence under track lighting at the back of the room. I looked over and beheld an array of mosaics suspended across the walls. They were gorgeous, mesmerizing creations, some ovoid, some rectangular, one shaped like a
starfish, another the female form. Each consisted of hundreds of glass tiles bursting with color, exploding with light.

“Did Josie do all these?” I asked, marveling.

“And Wynne. They were reluctant to hang them, but I insisted.”

I watched Sara adore her friends’ art, her lips pursed in placid wonder.

“They’re amazing,” I said.

“Get closer. The detail is staggering. You can really lose yourself in them.” She pointed to a large rectangular piece farther down the wall. “I think that one’s my favorite.”

It was a silhouette of a solitary tree on a hill, the evening sky behind it rendered in swirling layers of orange, yellow, pink, and purple. A circular mirror was positioned high in the right corner to signify the moon.

“This is what you do when you’re hanging out at their studio,” I said, as much to myself as to her.

Sara nodded weakly. “Sort of. They do it much better, obviously.”

It wasn’t obvious to me. I’d seen her mosaics and had always felt some kind of power emanating from them. I’d seen my reflection in the tiny mirrors, I’d been swept into the meticulously ordered randomness of the tiles. For someone who’d always had to pretend to love art, it came surprisingly easy to me to love Sara’s.

“You’re a good artist, Sara. And I really like that I live with one.”

A concealed smile glowed just beneath her cheeks. “Me too.”

We hung around the party for another half hour or so, and Sara didn’t let go of my hand the entire time. As we were leaving, Wynne walked us to the door and said, “I sure hope the rest of these jackasses follow your lead. We’re trying to get Miguel on a fucking sleep schedule here.”

Having consumed two glasses of wine, Sara declared herself unfit for the wheel and decided to drive home with me. We strolled down the street to where my car sat cradled under a curbside beech tree. Before I could turn the ignition, Sara reached out, gripped my face with two hands, and pulled me into a long kiss. The taste of her mouth, so eager, so present, was almost unrecognizable to me.

Her hands disappeared, and soon I felt the button of my jeans unhook and my zipper being yanked down.

“Whoa,” I blurted out. “Here?”

She looked at me, wild and slinky through her mane of black hair.

“We’re at a baby shower,” I said.

She leaned over and I felt her tongue in my ear. “It’s not a baby shower.”

As she probed for the fly of my boxers, I peered through the windows. “I don’t know about this. Half your office will be coming through that door in five minutes.”

“So?” came her defiant reply. And just as I scolded myself—What kind of musician are you?—I realized it was too late to unshame her. With a sigh, she fell back into the passenger seat, a blend of depletion and bewilderment on her face. She was the bull on hind legs in the painting.
Okay, tell me again how I ended up here.

“I don’t know what you want us to be,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t know
if
you want us to be.”

For most of the drive, she sat in silence with her elbow angled against the door. Passing fits of light swept through the car and corrupted the darkness inside. As we exited the highway and glided through the city streets, which were now hissing under us with a smoky sheen of light rain, she spoke quietly to the window. “I got divorced today.”

I felt a sudden clenching in my chest.

“Jesus. Are you okay?”

She said nothing and leaned her forehead against the cool glass, oblivious to the high-rises, brownstones, and occasional late-night dog walkers gliding past. As for me, I didn’t know exactly what I was feeling. Fear. Relief. The disquiet of a belated revelation.

“You should’ve told me,” I said. “I could’ve come with you.”

I, who in her eyes didn’t know what I wanted us to be, didn’t know
if
I wanted us to be.

“It’s okay,” she said, her breath shaky but rising with hopefulness. Her mind was drifting back to the lawyer’s office where they’d signed the papers today. Drifting to Billy and away from me.

CHAPTER 22

“L
isten—it’s not enough to be good. We have an obligation to be interesting, to not be obvious.”

That afternoon, Sonny was all up in Jumbo’s grill. It was validating whenever another human being reprimanded or otherwise lost his or her patience with our guitar player.

“We know you’re technically proficient,” Sonny went on, as Jumbo blinked out at him from the recording booth. “Who cares? Technical proficiency does nothing for me. You’re in my studio because of your ability to make choices with that there Strat, because of this instinct of yours about what should be done, not just what can be done. I’m not hearing that decision making on this song. You’re boring the shit out of me. What you’re playing me I can find in any old McDonald’s.” He pronounced it
MacDonald’s
. “Don’t bring fast food into my studio. I want a Moroccan market at midnight! Take me to an outdoor churrascaria on the beaches of Rio and serve me something that sizzles!”

Jumbo began to nod, his fleshy face ballooning into a cocksure grin. “I totally get it now. You’re looking for a Latin vibe.”

Warren and I decided that was a good time for a walk.

“Any word from Mack?” he asked, as we stood at the counter of the coffee shop down the street. Our bass player had traveled back to Pittsburgh for a follow-up visit with her oncologist.

“Not yet,” I said. “But she wasn’t worried. She says she’s been feeling like a million bucks.”

I knocked twice on the counter and Warren held up two crossed fingers.

“Look, I can’t believe you talked any of us into doing this,” Warren said. “But Mack? She had the best reason to pass.”

“Or maybe the best reason not to,” I suggested.

We dropped into the chrome fifties-era diner chairs and creaked backward from the Formica table. The dull murmurs from the two or three other patrons afforded our eardrums a much-needed respite. We lazed at the table, staring out the window.

“Going well so far, wouldn’t you say?” Warren ventured.

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” I said tepidly. Confidence was an emotion well out of reach for someone of my particular station.

“You’re aware of the irony here, right? Your optimism is always cautious, your enthusiasm always guarded. Yet you’re the songwriter, the one we rely on for passion, for fire!”

“I got fired up over my so-called legacy, did I not?”

“A colossal abuse of the word, I admit, but I’m clearly overpaying my penance for that phone call.”

He took a slow sip of coffee, then leaned back professorially. “You ever hear of Henri Rousseau?”

“Sure. The French artist. The guy who painted jungles.”

“I teach my students about him. We study a lot of his work—
The Dream
,
Tiger in a Tropical Storm
,
Eve and the Serpent
—and we talk about primitivism, painting in the naïve style. Rousseau takes you into the forest through a child’s eyes. It’s dense and exotic, there are wild animals and fleshy naked women, all painted with bold colors, all seductive and fantastical.”

I sipped as the art teacher evangelized.

“Here’s my question to you,” he said. “Do you know which actual jungles he was painting? Which jungles Rousseau visited for inspiration?”

I shook my head.

“Not a one,” Warren answered. “Henri never left France. This man, famous for painting the world’s lush jungles, never actually saw one. The botanical gardens in Paris were probably the closest he ever got.”

“What are you trying to say? What’s the big lesson here, teach?”

“I’m just talking, Teddy. I’m not trying to teach you anything,” he said with an oblique deadpan. “But sometimes there’s a lot of real estate between a man and his legacy—wouldn’t you say?”

“That’s a terrible example, Square. Rousseau had the opposite problem. His legacy exceeded his experience. He had nothing to correct—wouldn’t
you
say?”

“So what’s more important—the way you spend your days on this earth or the way posterity views it?” Warren posed. “Your life or your legacy?”

“One of them is around a lot longer.”

“They both die, dummy.”

I reclined and kicked my heel onto a neighboring chair. “See? You are trying to teach me something.”

“I couldn’t if I tried.”

*       *       *

Then one morning, with an unvarnished lack of ceremony, Sonny brought down the curtain. A prelunch sluggishness had set in. Warren and Mack had just returned from a bakery, and we were all milling about near the mushy banana of a sofa while Sonny frowned under his headphones, listening, concentrating, occasionally adjusting volume levels. Eventually, he stood and faced us.

“That’ll do it.”

“What’s next?” I asked.

“Nothing’s next.” He broke off a corner of Warren’s lemon poppy seed scone. “Pack up. We’re done.”

We all exchanged uneasy glances. Despite weeks of hard labor, abuse of both the verbal and physical varieties, I hadn’t quite arrived at a place where any of this felt complete.

“Done, as in finished?” Warren asked.

“You’re happy with it?” I ventured.

The producer shot me a cool look, as if the state of his happiness was any of my goddamn business.

The tracks still needed to be mixed, mastered, and otherwise tamed into something that sounded complete. But now it was Alaina’s show. Her long fingers tapping together in a Bond villain power triangle, she’d concoct the ultimate scheme for world domination, which, in this instance, entailed channeling our product into the crowded bay of musical relevancy. She would know the variables that dictated in whose lap to park the tapes—or park herself, if need be. She would know that signing with one record company meant that only the younger demographic would hear about us and that signing with another ensured that they never would. While examining her nails, Alaina would stoke her own fires of cunning invention. She’d first dangle the masterpiece in front of Colin Stone at MCA; he’d earned it, having cohabitated with the bassist. If Colin passed, there was George Glick, the big fat windbag at Interscope who hit on her at Bonnaroo last year and apparently thought her standards dropped whenever she entered Tennessee airspace. If George passed, there was the Weasel, Clay Hapgood, who was still at Capitol, still making mountains of misjudgments, and who would do anything Alaina asked because he still regretted passing on Regina Spektor.

That was for another day. For now, no further instruments or voices were required to realize the dozen or so songs that would become Tremble’s comeback album. Our anticlimactic ending was upon us. Mackenzie was the first to start gathering her gear.

“I’m sure going to miss this place,” Jumbo said mawkishly.

Sonny stared at him. “Not everything is worthy of sentimentality.”

Within a few hours, we’d sleeved our cables, committed our guitars and drums to their cases, and loaded up our cars. The afternoon was thick with all the promise and ambivalence of a college graduation.

Outside, I slammed Mack’s trunk shut and dusted off my hands.
She was headed downtown to empty out her Old City sublet and hoped to be heading westward through a turnpike tollbooth by rush hour. As she squinted up at me, I suddenly felt that this was all over too soon.

“The next few months could be quiet, what with Alaina working her tawdry magic,” I said. “In the meantime, we’ll probably have to start thinking about our live show. I guess that means we’ll be seeing more of each other.”

Mack smiled down at her blue suede Adidases. “That was the idea, wasn’t it?”

“I’m really glad you were here.”

“I’m glad you asked me.”

I leaned in and hugged her, indulging my senses in the essence of her cheek and neck. The twitch of muscle memory bade me to hold on to her, this thing I’d craved for years of my life, for fear I’d never get close enough again to smell the notes of heather and jasmine in the tangle of her hair. Like the girl on the train station platform. The one who gets away. I didn’t know if I was ready.

I hauled my gear back to the condo and dropped it all in the living room. Standing there in the midday vacancy of the apartment, a commotion rose up inside me. My first thought was to call Sara.

“You did it,” she said, sounding just as surprised as the band members. “I’m proud of you.”

“It’s a strange feeling,” I said meditatively.

“You made an album. You made a fucking album!” Complications loomed—for me, for the band, for her—but they were not part of this moment, and the purity of Sara’s joy in this moment justified the profanity. “I can’t wait to hear it. Are you happy?”

I hadn’t moved a muscle. My knees were locked, my hand quaking around the phone. Happy hadn’t occurred to me. “I don’t know.”

“Please don’t do that Teddy thing you do where you go looking for woe. You know you can always find it. You made an album with Sonny Rivers, and you basically did it all on a dare.”

“I wouldn’t put it in quite those terms.”

“That photographer dared you to do this. He didn’t mean to, but he did. Right now, you should feel nothing but satisfaction. Worry about everything that warrants worrying tomorrow. Are you all going out to celebrate?”

Only Jumbo had proposed it, but his suggestion had been roundly ignored, and not just because it was he who had suggested it. The walls of East Side Studios had grown high and imposing, and the bodies and souls that had invaded it for the summer had grown increasingly in need of ventilation.