Sway

by Zachary Lazar

  He would start with speed and liquor, then take a tranquilizer to calm himself down, then more speed to give him energy, then more liquor to relax. It would usually take several hours of these arduous switchbacks before he finally reached the summit of clarity, the buoyant sense of who he was, high above the petty, nagging fears of his isolation.

  At the beginning of 1966, he met in Munich a nineteen-year-old girl with straight blond hair just like his. She had been traveling around Europe for more than a year, working in films and on model shoots. She was sophisticated in a way he knew nothing about and so would never understand.

  “What is the matter?” she said.

  He stared at her, unsurprised, vacant, the only color in his face in his lips. In the light of the dressing room, his hair was not so much blond as white. Onstage, in a turtleneck sweater and plaid slacks, he had looked otherworldly, almost albino, and now the impression was even stronger because he appeared to be on the verge of collapsing.

  “They sent you in here, didn’t they?” he said.

  “Who?”

  He smirked a little, as if to echo her question. As if she were a spy.

  She decided it couldn’t be real. One of the things Anita liked to do was to insist on contradicting other people’s emotions, particularly when they were self-indulgent. “I have a hotel room,” she said. “Do you speak German? Kannst du Deutsch? Ich habe ein Zimmer auf dem Bayerplatz.”

  The dressing room had mirrors and lights, and the lights made his hair look like a wig and his face like a mask. Perhaps what made her stay was that he was so abstracted and strange and yet looked so much like her.

  Three days later, when his house was still besieged by photographers, Keith drove to their flat in Earl’s Court. He had been practically living there when he wasn’t at his house in Sussex. It was Anita’s flat, and she had made it a kind of group headquarters. Keith had brought a stack of the tabloids with him in his car. He was trying to think of it all as a joke, and this was easier in the company of others. Perhaps the worst part of the bust was when everyone had gone home, retreating to their private lives, and for the first time, by way of memory, he’d had to experience in full the blunt stupidity of his hours alone in the police station: the deliberately pointless waiting, the detectives’ neutral voices, the drab ceremony of showing his driving license and having his fingerprints taken in the dim room.

  He had changed in the last few months. Even his body looked different now, lean instead of scrawny, his black hair hacked off at different lengths so that it stuck up on the top of his head and fell down over his ears and the back of his neck. He was still quiet and sarcastic, but he was also the one who could be serious without it seeming like an affectation. He could see the others emulating him sometimes, stepping back from the world to process it in their minds. Even Anita, who mostly teased him, had started to do this. There was some secret attentiveness between them now that made him feel an odd generosity toward Brian.

  He knocked on their door, then he let himself in with his own key. The floor in the living room was piled with clothes, the rug at a slant from the sofa. Anita was standing in the kitchen in a silk kimono, brewing something on the stove.

  “You’re home,” she said.

  The ironic glint in her eyes and her faint German accent still made whatever attention she paid him seem rare and empathic, a gift he somehow deserved without knowing why.

  He shut the door behind him. Upstairs in the loft, he saw Brian wrestling with some woman he had never seen before, both of them laughing. The woman had nothing on but a pair of black panties, her breasts hanging sideways above Brian’s hands. Her lipstick, when she turned to him, was as dark as the skin of a plum.

  Anita put her arm around him. She held him for a long time and he could feel her breathing behind his ear. “We’ve hardly left,” she said. “There were photographers everywhere. Are they still out there?”

  “I didn’t see any.”

  “They’ve just been waiting for us. But they seem to have kept the cops away. That’s the theory anyway.”

  He looked up at Brian, who was making a face at him, turning up his nostrils with two fingers.

  “I thought you were going to tell him to cool it,” he said.

  “I did.”

  He looked at the mess on the floor, the ashtray full of cigarettes butts and the twisted ends of joints. “Right,” he said. “Well, then do you have anything to smoke?”

  He watched them from the couch as they made a show of helping the other woman find her clothes. Brian threw a shirt at him over the railing of the loft. He brushed it off, dragging from his joint, then went over to pick up the guitar that was leaning on the wall. He wasn’t sure anymore why he’d come here. There was something between them all that went back to childhood, the part of childhood that no one remembered, the secrecy and plotting and divisiveness. When he got stoned with them in the loft upstairs, surrounded by candles and tapestries and religious trinkets, there was sometimes a strange suspense in watching things go right instead of wrong. It was easy to think that they were all just friends. In the glow of their flattery, which was constantly aimed at him, it was easy to dismiss all the times he’d seen them screaming at each other, slapping each other, grappling spastically in hallways like two people struggling over a gun.

  A little later, Mick showed up with Robert Fraser. He frowned down at Keith and brushed his silk scarf with his fingers, as if testing its quality. There was a tension in the room now that no one wanted to acknowledge, as if they’d all been caught acting foolish.

  “Where are the cops?” Mick said, turning toward Brian and Anita.

  She stood by Brian’s side, sharing his cigarette. “You just missed them,” she said. “We were all fucking on the floor when they came in. You missed that too.”

  He licked his lips. “Ah, but someday,” he said, raising his chin. “Someday there’ll be that special someday.”

  “Is that a new song?” said Fraser, sitting on the floor.

  “Lovely to see you, Mick,” said Brian. It was as if he’d just noticed his entrance, as if they were the only two in the room. He had put on a strange kind of costume: pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, a woman’s white hat and a flouncy velvet jacket. He looked good even in that. In a way it was like a challenge or a threat to everyone else. But when he glanced up into the light, his eyes were alarmingly vague, as if you were seeing him through a slightly unfocused lens.

  Keith drew a map on the side of a brown paper bag. He scratched out the geography of the U.K. in green blobs with a felt-tip pen, then parts of Europe, then the coastline of North Africa. He made sure not to look at Anita while he was doing this. He was being reckless — he was being himself — but if he thought about her watching him, then he would feel he was performing.

  He wanted to get out of England, he said, away from the scandal. His idea was that they all go to Morocco. They could drive there, in a kind of motorcade. It would be more fun to drive than to fly. In the process they could make a spectacle of their limousines, acting like the spoiled pop stars they were about to be put on trial for being.

  “You get the ferry to what is it, Calais? Then it’s a straight shot through France to Spain. You get a look at the scenery, see the change. Valencia, Almería — that’s where they film the cowboy movies. Then there’s another ferry at Málaga, and you’re in Tangier.”

  It seemed fanciful and unlikely. No one knew how seriously to take it, except Mick, who was studying the map.

  “I don’t know if Marianne will go for it,” he said.

  He looked down at the floor. If what he really meant was that he didn’t want to go, he would have been smiling at them. Instead, it now sank in with everybody that Marianne wasn’t there.

  “It’s been bad for her,” Mick said. “It’s been bad for all of us, but now it’s like she’s at the center of it all.”

  Though her actual name had been kept out of the papers, there was no question that Marianne was the �
�NAKED GIRL FOUND UPSTAIRS.” She was a pop star herself, a singer of love ballads and folk songs, but unlike them she was a woman. Her career was almost certainly over.

  “We’ll fly,” said Mick. “We’ll meet you over there somewhere.”

  Keith raised his chin at him. “So you’re doing it. You’re coming.”

  “Of course we’re coming.”

  Later, Fraser took a photograph of them all. It shows the room littered with clothes and newspapers, a message scrawled on the wall in felt-tip pen in Keith’s handwriting: CALL YOU tomorrow. On the left, Anita is reclining in a chair with a cigarette held near her ear. Across from her, Keith is sitting on the arm of the couch reading one of the tabloids. Anita’s crossed legs are resting on his knee. From the other side of the couch, Mick is looking at her with bored aversion. Large paper sunflowers droop from the wall behind him. On the right, Brian is standing in front of the couch, drinking a mug of beer. He’s still dressed in his odd, clownish array of clothes. Whatever is going on in this picture, he is oblivious to it, unable to see it from behind his upturned glass.

  Three weeks later, they met up in Marrakech. Nothing had gone as planned. The only people who ended up going by car were Brian, Anita, and Keith, chauffeured by the band’s assistant, Tom Keylock, in Keith’s Bentley. On the first day, Brian started coughing in the back of the car, a wheezing asthmatic gasp that got worse and worse, until he couldn’t breathe. It was much worse than his usual attacks — they had to check him into a hospital in the south of France when he started coughing blood. When the doctors insisted he stay there for five days, to be safe, there was an awkward few hours by his bedside, no one sure what to say. Eventually, he was so ashamed that he told Anita and Keith to go ahead without him, that he’d meet them in Morocco.

  They were staying at a modern hotel outside the old city of Marrakech, its beige front hidden by palm trees. He arrived at night and took a cab from the airport. In the room, Anita’s bags were opened on the foldout stand and there was a candle burning on the dresser, casting a bronze glow on the bedsheets that had been neatly turned down by the maid. They had five rooms on the tenth floor, all in a row, but he hadn’t heard any sound coming from down the hall. The more he thought about it, the more difficult it was to reason with himself that they were just in town, enjoying their holiday.

  He went out onto the balcony and breathed in the strange, thick air. Then he saw a few small lanterns burning on tables by the pool. He could just barely make out their forms in the darkness and hear the timbres of their different laughs: Anita and Mick and possibly Robert Fraser. He heard the muffled, out-of-phase sound of an acoustic guitar.

  He went inside and poured some whiskey into a glass. On the bathroom mirror, he now discovered, there was a message scrawled in red lipstick, written in Keith’s handwriting: COME DOWN to the pool! His face looked absurd behind the lipsticked words, tired and pale from a day of traveling. It was his asthma, his weak, ridiculous body, that had kept him away these five days, and now he told himself to be buoyant and relaxed, but the letters on the mirror were garish and somehow overexcited and he took a Mandrax tablet with the rest of the whiskey before going downstairs.

  It was cooler by the pool, and the air felt good on his face, along with the first flush from the drink. In the darkness, Anita was sitting next to Keith on a lounge chair, smoking a cigarette while she watched him leaning over his guitar. Across from them, Mick and Marianne were sitting in a similar arrangement, wrapped up in a blanket. When she saw Brian, Anita gave him the wry smile of a hostess, embracing her knees in her arms. She seemed weirdly proud of him, or proud of herself for arranging this poolside greeting, but it was Marianne who stood up and gave him a kiss, asking him how his trip was.

  “Look at the sky,” she said. “The moon. It’s perfect.”

  He looked up and saw what she meant. In the dark sky was a crescent moon that sat high above the silhouettes of distant minarets. It was a view you couldn’t look at without admiring the fact that you were in Morocco.

  “Come here,” said Anita.

  She wore a man’s purple caftan and a single bead on a leather thong around her neck. She reached her hands out to him, leaning into her knees and almost falling forward out of the lounge chair. He grabbed her by the fingertips and held her up.

  “Was it all right?” she said, looking up at him.

  “What?”

  “The flight. Everything. We’ve been worried about you.”

  “Yes. Fine.”

  She leaned into Keith and he barely moved. He was playing a B7 chord, filling in the bass line with his little finger, a difficult maneuver he kept attempting without getting it to come out cleanly.

  “I’m feeling much better,” Brian said.

  “Good.”

  Mick rearranged the blanket around his feet as Marianne sat down beside him. “There’s a pack of journalists arriving tomorrow for a press conference,” he said.

  He let go of Anita’s hands and folded his arms across his chest. “Are you kidding?”

  Keith finished with his chord and smirked up at him in welcome. “Why don’t you have something to smoke?” he said.

  Brian scratched at the corner of his eyebrow with his forefinger. “A little joke,” he said.

  “Yeah, right, a little joke,” said Mick. “Just catching you up, sweetheart. Anyway, I thought you liked talking to the press. Rambling to the press.”

  “I like it when you stop poncing around long enough that I can get a word in.”

  There were bottles of wine on the pool deck. He picked one up and took a sip and then held it in his hands. Anita watched him, then burst out laughing. She put her hand on Keith’s shoulder and pressed her face to his sleeve. Keith turned his head toward her and put his hand in her hair.

  “I’m glad you’re having fun,” said Brian.

  She smiled at him from behind her bangs. “I am having fun.”

  “I’m sorry I’ve been away for five days missing all this fun.”

  He took another sip of the wine and licked his lips. No one said anything. Finally Tom Keylock leaned forward in his chair and tossed him a joint. He caught it awkwardly in his cupped hand and looked down to make sure that it was there, then he took another sip of the wine and reached into his hip pocket for the lighter.

  He lit the joint and took a long, slow drag. There was nowhere obvious to sit, so he took the wine bottle and found a seat at one of the tables where a lantern burned beneath the folded-up umbrella. Keith had gone back to playing his guitar. Anita leaned her shoulder against the chair back, holding her knees to her chest, looking thoughtfully out at the swimming pool.

  In their room, she sat on the edge of the bed and spoke calmly, reasonably, with the self-assurance of someone who took Pleasure in confrontation. They were just having fun, she said. He knew that they were friends, and he and Keith were friends, so why was he making things up in his mind? They weren’t old people who based their whole lives on appearances. She wanted them to get along, like they did before, but he kept making it harder and harder when he was so jealous and paranoid and strange.

  He poured himself another glass of whiskey and went into the bathroom. There was the lipsticked message — COME DOWN to the pool! — the letters slanted and thick in the light from the yellow bulb. He added some bottled water to his glass and now he could picture the two of them laughing together, Keith fumbling in her bag for the lipstick, the two of them exaggerating their enthusiasm, or maybe not exaggerating it at all because he wasn’t there.

  “You’re not telling me what’s really going on,” he said.

  She turned to him, exasperated. “What do you want to believe is going on?”

  “I want to know whether or not you’re fucking him.”

  She stood up from the bed. She crossed her arms over her chest, slowly massaging her elbow.

  “You’re making accusations, but you’re not thinking about what they mean. You’ve been away for five days and then you come
back and expect everything to be exactly the same as it was.”

  He put his glass of whiskey down on the dresser. “I was sick.”

  “You were sick and it’s not easy. I know. I know it’s not your fault. But you’re always sick and then you’re always wasted and now you want to make rules for me that I don’t believe in and that you would never follow yourself.”

  He hit her so hard that she stayed on the floor, her leg bent strangely at the knee, as if she had broken it. When she finally breathed, it was with a sudden high-pitched wheeze, as if she had just then caught her breath. She didn’t move. Her head hung down from her shoulders, her purple caftan twisted around her back. He grabbed her arm and hit her again, leaning over her body, unable to get a response. It was the first time he’d ever been afraid of what he’d done.

  It was overcast and hot the next morning. On the pool deck, some of the band’s entourage read newspapers or sipped drinks from tall, narrow glasses like tubes. The sky was a diffuse silver haze that seemed to rise higher than the sky in London. In the shade of an umbrella, Brian was sitting with Tom Keylock while a photographer circled around him, crouched in the sunlight, taking his picture.

  The air had a faint sourness, an edge of yeast. It brought on a brief shallowness of breath, a slow flipping-over sensation in his heart. For a moment, his heart seemed to be sputtering to a stop, weighted down with blood, and with its last lazy thud came a sense of abandonment, then of release.

  Anita was at the far corner of the pool, moving slowly through the water, her hands sweeping in front of her half-submerged chin. She was looking ahead at Keith, who was on the other side of the deck, his shirt off and his eyes closed.