Thank You, Goodnight (36 page)

“I’ve had enough of them for a while,” I said. “You and I are going to celebrate.”

She paused, taken aback perhaps at the invitation, probably raking through her Rolodex of excuses; they were never far out of reach, and they seemed to be multiplying of late.

Then she simply said, “Okay.” She even sounded pleased.

But later that afternoon, en route to Bristol & Bristol Interior Design, with thoughts of snatching Sara away for happy hour at the rooftop bar of a nearby hotel, I got a call from her. Something had come up.

“I’m so sorry, Teddy. I really can’t miss this meeting.”

“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’ll meet you at home later,” she said, and hung up.

Standing downwind of an abrupt ditch, I licked my wounds and remobilized. It was still today, the day without worries, the day on which Teddy did not do his Teddy thing where he went looking for woe.

Gripping my phone like a four-seam fastball, I pondered my next pitch. I didn’t like where my thoughts were leading me. Market Street foot traffic freewheeled past this once and future musician. Knowing I probably shouldn’t, I dialed.

“Have you left town yet?” I asked.

“Still loading up,” Mackenzie replied. “As much as I like to consider myself someone who packs light, I might not actually be that person.”

I offered to help, and she had no real reason to refuse. Twenty minutes later, I was knocking on an open door on the second story of
a row house on Second Street, just north of Arch. There was exactly one piece of furniture in the center of the vast studio apartment—a bed—and Mackenzie was sitting on it, face in hands.

“You all right?” I asked.

She lifted her head and smiled heavily at me. “A little tired, I have to admit.”

“Yeah, you look pale. And wan.”

“You had to say wan, didn’t you? I couldn’t just be pale.”

Two suitcases sat agape on the floor in front of her. These were no weekend travel bags; they were true pieces of luggage, made from some sort of coated polyester, hardy things with latches and locks, and they were stuffed high with neatly folded clothes.

“You sure you’re okay?” I asked. “Does this have something to do with your medication?”

“Strangely queasy,” she said. “Not once in that brick oven of a studio the entire summer, and yet the second Sonny sets us free, I go back to being me.”

“I could check my glove compartment for more of Jumbo’s ganja.”

Mack laughed, then swept the hair off her forehead with both hands. “You really didn’t need to come over here. I can get these into the car myself.”

“If you were just pale, maybe I’d let you. But since you’re also wan . . .”

“In that case, I’m going to do something for you that I haven’t done for a man in a long time.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’m going to take you to the store across the street and buy you a grape soda.”

“A grape soda.”

“Fanta, my friend. When’s the last time you had a Fanta grape soda?”

I squinted fondly at a stain up on the ceiling. “It was, I believe, the summer of ’eighty-four.”

Insisting she was up to it, we walked over to a tiny, unnamed con
venience store wedged between a women’s clothing shop and a place that sold candles and stationery. A metal-toothed fan beat down on the Hispanic gentleman sloped over the counter. His graying mustache smiled lifelessly at us as we entered.

The dim and dusty establishment exhibited an air of indifference toward inventory, as there was gum in the front, a refrigerator in the back, and a wasteland in between featuring lonely bottles of mouthwash and aged boxes of cherry Jell-O. Mack found two cans of Fanta in the fridge next to a plastic container of cheesecake, and we drank them outside on a bench beside an ancient church. The color had returned to her cheeks.

“This is such a nice city,” she observed. “I really like Philadelphia.”

I nodded in agreement, realizing I’d never really lived anywhere else.

“I might have stayed after college if the band hadn’t happened,” Mack said.

I remembered those days of feeling as though you could live anywhere, that you would live anywhere. As a kid, I accepted it as inevitable that there’d be a chapter in my life where I lived in a small town, some place with a Main Street and a family-run hardware store. There would also be a suburban chapter, a life lived on driveways and garages and lawns, and a European chapter with Vespas and an unaccountable fluency in some other language. I never viewed these episodes as connected to each other or to any kind of ordered path, as in a board game where your piece makes its gradual, inexorable way to an end. These chapters would simply happen. Somehow I’d live in Prague for a while. The world would just carry me there.

“Do you think you’re here for good?” Mack asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

For good sounded so final. But you reached a point in life where you needed a good reason to move, where your wandering blood settled into something that craved familiarity. Mack’s question somehow led me to Sara. I would move for her, I supposed, and she for me. At least I thought so. We would follow each other, wouldn’t we?

As Mack and I continued to slurp our grape soda and engage in meaningless, comfortable small talk, my thoughts kept returning to Sara. Not so long ago, Sara and I had opened up our high school yearbook for no other purpose than to cringe at the devastation that time had wreaked. I howled in grim amusement at my feathered hair, at the full cheeks that the years had hollowed, at the immaculate cluelessness in my sneer. But for Sara, seeing the brimming optimism of her teenage self, the hope in a young girl’s eyes flowing over—it did not strike her as funny, not even ruefully so. There’d been too much road between there and here.

Here I was, deliberately trying to tunnel back into my past with the implied threat of leaving everything behind in my vapor trail of freedom. Meanwhile, Sara struggled daily just to come to grips with her past. Freedom was something Sara would never know—freedom from her memories, freedom from all those cries and whispers that pierced the universe circling around her. They were everywhere. Look, Sara, look at the family playing Uno in a restaurant booth. Look at Josie and Wynne and their new baby. Isn’t that wonderful? Everyone could change, move on, escape. Everyone except her.

When Sara looked at that yearbook, her mind saw pictures her eyes would never see. Her son with a girlfriend by the Grand Canyon, with a wife by the Eiffel Tower, in line at Space Mountain with his own peach-faced children. What would he look like in those photographs, standing by the world, gradually growing older? How many times must Sara have found herself walking down a busy street, on her way to some appointment, and been leveled once again by the realization that life really does go on? It had gone on. Here I am, living the ordinary moments of my life, but something awful has happened and there’s no one to take my grievance to! Every day those familiar fears sprang up again. The fear of open spaces, the fear of being buried alive, of being swallowed alive, of stray bullets, of everyone being able to read her mind. The fear that every thing and every person in the world exists for no other reason than to certify the darkness. In the
end, that’s what it all came down to. No matter how many sleepless nights or endless winter Sundays, they all added up to an absence, an unmistakable echo. That echo was the sound of her son telling her that where he’d gone she could not follow.

I found myself wondering why Sara had bailed on me this afternoon, how an unmissable meeting could materialize out of nowhere from one hour to the next. Was this a meeting with Billy? I was letting my suspicions get the better of me. All these thoughts sounded like jealousy, like possessiveness. Sara and Billy were divorced now, at liberty to be with whomever they chose—even each other. The idea of Sara being officially unchained had terrified me before, as I knew it could bear a fresh set of expectations for me at a critical time, a time when I had fresh expectations of myself. But all that changed when I realized that those expectations had been there all along. No one had twisted my arm to move in with Sara or to stay with her all these years. These were expectations I’d willingly submitted to, had had a hand in creating. I must have wanted them there all along. They’d inhabited me, propped me up, defined me when music no longer did—precisely what Sara had been doing for me all this time.

Who was I kidding? We were already married.

When Mack and I had drunk our soda cans clean, I lugged the suitcases down the steps while she pulled her Beetle around and edged it onto the sidewalk. She popped the trunk, then, with the driver-side door open, she kissed me on the cheek and said, “This was fun. Really.”

“You know, even if it turns out that we’ve made a terrible album that nobody wants to release, I’m glad we got to spend all this time together. I hope you have no regrets if that’s the way this ends.”

She patted me twice on the chest and smiled. “It’s a fantastic album,” she said, and slid behind the wheel.

I watched the Beetle zip up Second Street. Then I went to hunt down my ever-untraceable girlfriend.

CHAPTER 23

T
he hostess looked as though she were spitting up on her onesie the last time Tremble rollicked through an evening here, but younger faces aside, the Mirabelle Plum seemed to have been preserved in tree sap since the days of our prime. Jumbo had insisted that this meeting be held here. As he would have it, success was simply a matter of replicating the past, finding our way back to our old selves.

It was an hour past the reservation time, and the three of us who had shown up so far had done no more than order from the bar and victimize the bread basket. Our waitress was nobly masking her ire at our monopolization of her table without running up much of a tab. After checking in with us for the tenth time, she politely suggested we wave her down when we were ready, and then carried her angular features, horselike ponytail, and mirthless smile away from our table.

Warren, Mack, and I were waiting for Alaina, who was off attending a late-afternoon meeting at MCA with Colin Stone and other senior execs, but she hadn’t been heard from in hours. Contentious meetings typically lasted longer than harmonious ones, and there was nothing encouraging about the thought of agent and label duking it out in a conference room over us. Alaina had insisted that I stay away. “Go eat gnocchi and let me do my job,” she’d said. “Shoo!”

The front door of the restaurant swung open and in sailed our guitar player aboard a big chunky grin.

“I’m with the band,” he majestically informed the hostess. In loose-fitting jeans and a navy sweatshirt that zippered up the middle, Jumbo circumnavigated the table and distributed high fives to each of us like he’d just hit a game-winning three-pointer. He was fresh from a birthing workshop in White Plains, some convention needed to maintain his midwifery certification.

Our stress level already in the red zone, Mack was the only one who could bear to make eye contact with him. “How was your seminar?” she asked.

Jumbo winked. “Kobe beef sliders.”

That was the sum of his ambition: the convention’s hors d’oeuvres.

“No Alaina yet?” he asked the table.

I shook my head.

Unconcerned, Jumbo grabbed the arm of a passing waitress and leaned in with a devious twinkle. “A little SoCo, if I may.”

The waitress stiffly regarded the hairy hand on her forearm. “Excuse me?”

“Southern Comfort. Please.”

“I’ll let your waitress know,” she said, and scooted away.

But not even a snappish server could dampen the beam on Jumbo’s face. His eyes feasted on every aspect of the room—the dusty light fixtures, the rich red carpeting pockmarked with food smudges, the ceiling stains that looked almost artistically rendered. “I’ve missed this place,” he gushed. Then, jostling me with an elbow, he proclaimed, “You really can go home again.”

I had no doubt that Jumbo could go home again, especially if home was synonymous with consuming a half-dozen glasses of hard liquor, then making a late-night snack run to a convenience store where he would mistake a box of tampons for a pack of Charleston Chews. But to his credit, since committing to this enterprise, Jumbo’s behavior had exceeded our pathetically low expectations. He hadn’t
hitchhiked or stumbled through a glass window, and though he did put himself out of commission for one studio day through overuse of Tabasco sauce, he claimed to have recently begun working out again. (Although to Jumbo Jett, exercise could’ve meant beer pong or Skee-Ball at the local arcade.)

Edgy impatience flooded my limbs. Somewhere in the city the fate of my band was being debated and bargained over, and I was here, watching the focaccia grease twinkle on my drummer’s face.

“You’re caressing your temples again,” Warren informed me.

Mackenzie pointed to the side of my head. “It’s leaving a mark.”

Jumbo reached over to massage my neck. “Relax, Mingus.”

I locked eyes with him. “Don’t tell me to relax. And take your hands off me.”

“Colin will always do right by us,” Mack assured us. “Plus, he’s helpless against Alaina.”

I’d been trying to access a state of peace over these past weeks, and had occasionally attained it, sometimes even for as long as a quarter hour. But from where I sat, there was no shortage of concerns over which to stew. There was the highly suspect sellability of the band as a commodity. Our image, or lack thereof. The fact that in most circles, the mention of our name prompted distant chuckles. The fact that the new record offered nothing quite as catchy as “It Feels like a Lie,” even if, song for song, this was probably the best record of our career. (It was, to be fair, only the third record of our career, so the distinction was akin to being crowned the handsomest member of ZZ Top.)

“Why is Sonny at this meeting with Alaina and not us?” Jumbo wanted to know.

“Politics,” I said. “He’s Sonny. And Colin basically wants to fellate him.”

“Hey!” Mack snapped her napkin at my head. “You’re talking about my ex-husband!”

“Maybe that’s why he’s your ex-husband,” Warren suggested.