Thank You, Goodnight (42 page)

Nor does the man’s unfinished thought plague me anymore. My contentment with this record, with my choices, with the people in my life—it all testifies to the irrelevance of that secret.

It has only stoked the embers of intrigue that the band broke up before the album ever hit stores. It was the stuff of dazzling tragic mystery: legendary producer and vanished rock outfit meet over the course of a summer to stir up one last farewell, and then one immediately dies and the other vaporizes in a sudden parting of the ways. Mackenzie once said that stories tell themselves. This one ginned up with quite an ending.

“I wasn’t all that jazzed about living off a hotel minibar anyway,” Warren reflected when I told him I wanted out.

We’d met at a Lambertville bar one afternoon, one where Warren was something of a regular. In the wake of the fire, we’d all retreated to our own corners of the earth to process, to sort through our emotions, to wait for Alaina and the record label to plot our course across the next ten or twelve months. Warren, of course, had gone home to hunker down with his family.

“Being away from Lauren and Patrick for long stretches was kind of making me anxious. I like you, Teddy, but I like them better.”

He was taking my decision well, massaging his beard with an aspect of returning peace.

“Stop coming here though, will you?” he said. “Every time you show up, everything changes directions.”

Two men floated around the pool table near us, rubbing chalk on the ends of their sticks, sizing up the trajectories of their shots. Over at the bar, a trio of young women ordered drinks and sporadically twisted their necks toward our table.

“You know, I never meant to throw your world into upheaval when I called you about the Tate,” Warren confided.

“Now you tell me.”

“Had I known it would cause you to flip out and hassle everyone into quitting their jobs, I really would’ve just kept my mouth shut. I just thought it was funny, that’s all. Everything that came after, that’s all on you.”

I smiled. “You’re welcome.”

“And you know, the only reason I let you talk me into this was to see if we had one more in us. You’re not the only one who’s entitled to a midlife crisis.”

“So tell me—what did you learn on your midlife crisis?”

He pointed a finger revolver at me and grinned. “That we very much indeed had one more in us.”

“At least one,” I said.

“At least one.”

“It’s never the right time to walk away,” I said. “It’s always either too soon or too late.”

“Like dying,” Warren mused.

“Like dying.”

He rocked back in his chair. “You still think that photograph says something about your legacy?”

“If it says something about mine, it says something about yours,” I told him.

“Nah. You’re on your own when it comes to those things. My legacy lives in my house. He’s got bucked teeth, eats too many Oreos, and is either going to be a centerfielder or an astronaut.” He took a swig from his glass. “You speak to Mack and Jumbo yet?”

I shook my head.

He spun his glass on the table between two long fingers. “Mack will be fine, but Jumbo won’t be happy,” he decided. “He’s going to have to go back to doing whatever it was he did before all of this.”

“That’ll be easy, because it wasn’t much of anything.”

“He was a stewardess, right?”

“I thought he was a ballerina.”

Warren dropped one of his signature cackles. “Isn’t that a gender-specific term? What do you call a male ballerina? Ballerino? Balle-roon?”

Jumbo may not go back to living in his ex-wife’s basement, but there was no doubt he’d go and do something else equally absurd. That’s just what Jumbo did. His whole life was sauntering into the spine center and passing out Hula-Hoops.

I said, “Whatever he is, at least he’ll be able to afford his own place.”

I got up and started for the bar. “One more, Square.”

Warren issued a halfhearted protest, the kind that begs to be ignored.

I leaned toward the bartender. “What do you have in the way of bourbon?”

He winked. “I do have a little something I keep for your friend over there.” He was a big guy with pallid Slavic features and a KGB accent. “Special occasions.”

Warren was already shaking his head when I set the glasses down on the table, one in front of each of us. He surveyed the gasoline-brown liquid, instantly recognizing the Eagle Rare, the nightmare you go to sleep hoping will return. “Jesus, man. I used to trust you.”

I held up my glass. “You’ll know better next time.”

He threw back a healthy swallow, savoring what tasted to me like jet fuel.

“Not everything goes to hell with age,” he concluded, admiring the shimmering glass.

Other than the crack of billiard balls and a Smashing Pumpkins tune playing low on the jukebox, the bar was quiet. I couldn’t say what my problem had been all this time, whether it was that the afterparty never died down or that it never really kicked in in the first place. But now, sitting right there in that bar with my old friend, I knew that this was the kind of revelry that suited me best.

Warren looked across the table at me. “I didn’t mean it, by the way. When I told you to stop coming here.”

That was a while ago now. These days, I’m full-time here at the El Farolito. I’ve still got the condo in Philly—that’s where the royalty checks are sent—but the casita in this island paradise is pretty much home and the Flamingo Wing is the office. With four or five shows a week, I suppose I qualify as the house band, if you call me and my acoustic a band. Artist in residence would be even more of a stretch.

I play “It Feels like a Lie” at every show—you have to dance with the girl who brung you—but I also do plenty of new songs, and no one seems to mind. I toss in covers because the Tremble catalog is neither bounteous nor terribly exciting. And who doesn’t welcome the innocent bounce of “Brown-Eyed Girl” or the naked romance of “Wonderful Tonight” while lounging under a palm tree, the sweet aromas of tropical fruit and coconut sunscreen drifting through it all? When I start busting out “Kokomo” and “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” the manager will probably stuff me into the ferry for the mainland. But until then, I’m on the website. I look like shit in the picture, but at least I wasn’t eating nachos.

There’s a nice little town nearby, a crossbreed of a Banana Republic and Palo Alto. Good restaurants thumping with local fare and staffed by tanned young locals who grew up in the neighborhood. The preschool is a quick drive down the main road, little more than a mile. Sometimes I drop Phoebe off, sometimes the three of us go together. Nothing of more importance beckons.

Now I move slowly across the dry sand, Phoebe’s tiny fingers enveloped in mine. She looks down at her feet as she steps. It could take an hour for her to cross the beach, what with the constant distraction of seashells, every variety of which seizes her attention. We saw a tiny sand crab four days ago and she hasn’t stopped talking about it. Does it like to swim? Does it have a mommy and daddy? What does it like to eat? And I relish the challenge of inventing answers, a task that forces me to recall Alaina’s words: it’s not the little things that matter, it’s the big things. In the life I wake up to these days, I am finding that they are very much one and the same.

Sara is backlit by the late-afternoon sun dipping behind her. She loves the beach at this hour. It’s a good time to face the tide, she says; the sea relaxes her at the end of a long day. She has always dreamed of living by the water, and I’m happy for her that she made it, that we made it. It is never hard to pick her out among the languid flock of beachgoers, her long bony legs folded at the knee so they don’t dangle over the edge of her chaise. The flow of her body is easily detectable to me even when she’s still and reclining by the tide. That’s how it is with people who’ve been together so long. We even know each other’s shadows.

Phoebe and I are now fifty or so yards away and I notice Sara checking her watch, then closing her book and sitting up. Spotting us right on time, she waves eagerly, with all the joy and gratitude in the world, like she’s been waiting forever to see us. It’s the way I imagine Alaina’s grandfather waved to her at the airport when she made it back to Shanghai. It’s the way I felt the first time Mackenzie showed up at my apartment with her bass, drawing me into a two-decade entanglement during which I confused the way I felt about making music with the way I felt about her. I suppose the world will have to end and kick in again before these moments return and offer everyone a second chance.

With a gleeful shriek, Phoebe detaches herself from my hand and starts sprinting ahead to her mother. Then she breaks her stride and pivots back toward me, interrupting herself with her own scattered thoughts. With a randomness that never fails to delight and enchant me, to make me right, to make me young, she asks how that baby crab from the other day learns to swim. Who teaches a crab to swim? she wants to know.

I’m going to have to go deep on this one. I’ll tell her about the things that are inside us, who we’re born to be, what we’re born to do, and how sometimes we never have a say in the matter, never even understand why. Like the rest of us, she’ll find that most of her life will pass before she grasps what I really mean. And I hope that of all the moments I’ve had, it will be this one—right here with her on this beach, in the irrepressible blush of a sinking sun—that returns to comfort me one day when the end comes.

The singularity of this hour staggers me. One day I’ll die, and this will be one of the things I did with my time.

Her question posed, Phoebe is hanging on my answer, her eyes expectant and wide, like the mouth of a river. Open to everything flowing toward her, but like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
’m enormously grateful for the efforts of so many people whose contributions to this book cannot be overstated.

My agent, Caryn Karmatz Rudy of DeFiore and Company, for her tireless efforts on the many, many drafts, for her guidance, support, and encouragement for much longer than justified, and for all the terrific ideas that made their way into this book. And also for the Jell-O shots.

Sally Kim, my editor, for her truly amazing insights that made this book infinitely better, for her wells of enthusiasm, and for her guidance throughout this process. Heartfelt thanks to you.

Also to the rest of the team at Touchstone—Etinosa Agbonlahor, Susan Moldow, David Falk, Brian Belfiglio, Meredith Vilarello, Jessica Roth, Wendy Sheanin—thank you for your hard work and creativity.

Simon & Schuster for such tremendous, generous support.

David Small, for his novels that continue to be a source of inspiration, and for his workshop at Franklin & Marshall College, which demystified for me the process of creative writing.

Leslie and Ferne Abramowitz, my parents, two wonderful people whose love of books, music, and all other arts set this project in motion. I’m eternally grateful for that, and for so much more.

I got very lucky in the family department: Michelle (and Mitch) and Jon (and Stacy) (and their kids), siblings of mine that I’m fortunate enough to call friends, and my in-laws, Terry and Elliott.

My friends at Spector Roseman Kodroff & Willis, good lawyers and great people, and a firm that is, fortunately, quite unlike the one depicted in these pages.

Melissa, Jon, Amy, and Rich, for all their support early on, and for their friendship.

Chloe and Chelsea, two of the three most beautiful faces on the planet, and the people who show me every day just how lucky I am.

And most of all, my beautiful wife Caryn, with all my love, admiration, and gratitude. Our stories are my favorites.

TOUCHSTONE READING GROUP GUIDE

Thank You, Goodnight

T
eddy Tremble is nearing forty and has settled into a comfortable groove, working at a stuffy law firm and living in a downtown apartment with a woman he thinks he might love. Sure, his days aren’t as exciting as the time he spent as the lead singer of Tremble, the rock band known for its mega-hit “It Feels like a Lie,” but that life has long since passed its sell-by date.

But when Teddy gets a cryptic call from an old friend, he’s catapulted into contemplating the unthinkable: reuniting Tremble for one last shot at rewriting history. Never mind that the band members haven’t spoken in ten years, that they left the music scene in a blazing cloud of indifference, and that the only fans who seem to miss them reside in an obscure little town in Switzerland—can Teddy manage to snooker his bandmates out of their adult lives and find his way back to the top of the charts?

FOR DISCUSSION

1. What motivates Teddy to return Warren’s call and visit the Tate Modern museum in the first place, instead of ignoring it? How do Teddy’s motivations change throughout the course of the novel?

2. How appropriate is the title of Heinz-Peter’s exhibit, “Faded Glory: Where Do They Go When They Have Nowhere to Go?” Consider how the novel portrays Teddy’s idea of legacy and our societal fascination with the cult of celebrity.