“So we’re out of jobs, basically?”
“Not that simple, buddy. That’s why Gilbert’s been so anxious lately about our client base, because he needs to keep it together to make the sale worthwhile to Glennis. But Jason”—a go-getter colleague of ours—“well, Glennis loves him, he’s been ClickEver’s account guy forever, so they’ve been talking about getting around Jason’s non-compete, but they don’t realize that as soon as our contract with ClickEver is up in a couple months, Jason’s going independent and taking ClickEver with him. And no offense, Charlie, but Jason is the only reason they’ve stuck with us.”
“So what you’re saying is Gilbert has nothing to sell once Glennis finds out they don’t get ClickEver?”
“Bingo, baby. Which means we’ll have no choice but to keep on limping along independently, which means that unless we lose another account, we keep our jobs, I guess, for a while longer.”
And so I left for Hawaii with a clear conscience.
There must have been something real to Alisa’s fears, because, in the security line at the airport, I went to hold her hand and found it was gripped tightly around a small plastic bottle of Xanax, and when I went to grab her other hand instead, I discovered that she was clutching, along with her boarding pass and driver’s license, a single thin, salmon-colored, ovoid pill, also Xanax, that the heat of her skin had partially melted into a pinkish smear. No matter; she no doubt had plenty more where that one came from.
It all seemed a little childish to me, though I knew as well as anyone about childish fears, so I let it go. Once we got settled into our seats, she stuck her boarding pass in her purse because she liked to save souvenirs of her trips, and I couldn’t help but notice that the salmon-colored stain had smeared the word “Honolulu,” so that all that was left was “lulu.” Pathetic, I thought. She popped her first pill and then, after we’d hit cruising altitude (I wasn’t around in the ’70s, but something about the phrase “cruising altitude” made me think of discos and cocaine), she ordered a child’s-size bottle of vodka, and then another, and later on a bottle of Campari, the one with “Bitter” in florid golden script on the label, to help her level off.
And then she reached into her purse for wintergreen Altoids and one more Xanax, and for a few suspenseful moments all of the chemicals made her affectionate, and we had a trembly wet kiss in the middle of a cloud, which was wonderful. But then we pierced through all that fluff and we were suddenly over the ocean, and that clearly wasn’t going to work for her, so she slipped back into her alprazolam mist and, for the remainder of the flight, slept deeply.
Life is not for amateurs, as Alisa herself once instructed me in a different and, for her, less subordinate situation, so I understand that we all do whatever we can to cope with our various terrors. But after the airport, I dragged her in a semi-comatose state into a taxi, while steering our luggage at the same time, and then into the Eva Waikiki Hotel, where the club was, and then to our bedroom, and by the time I’d pulled off most of her clothes and gotten her straightened out into a position that roughly conformed to the shape of the bed, I wasn’t quite so understanding any more. She woke up once to take a pee and laughed in a wheezing kind of way at how badly overdosed she was, and then she collapsed back into bed. After about an hour of listening to her rattling snores, I went downstairs to explore the club, which was called Palmyra and had a slightly incongruous oasis theme, but it was only 3:00 p.m. local time and the place wasn’t open yet; the one wall I could see had a dramatic, diorama-like camel caravan fashioned out of what looked like hammered copper and a bright but bleak orange light behind it to simulate the setting desert sun. It was spooky-looking in the otherwise blackened room, and a bit lonely.
So I walked down Kuhio Avenue by myself for a simple poke dinner and a beer and then came back to Palmyra at 6:30, as Bowen had arranged, to meet the house band and run through my set list for the next night’s first performance. The room was much more inviting with the house lights up; I didn’t understand how an oasis theme fit in with a lush tropical island like Oahu, but it looked contemporary, like the owners had thrown a few bucks at the project.
I always played solo at Berto’s and had rarely worked with a backing band, so I was eager to do a bit of rehearsal, but that wasn’t in the cards. One of the two side guys, a burly, middle-aged bass player wearing a sweatshirt with ragged sleeves to show off his biceps and a brown leather cap with a little button on top that looked like a miniature hassock, said, “We do this all the time, Mr. Allesandro.”
“Charles. Charlie.”
“Charles, Charlie. Gotcha. Okay if we stick with Charlie and keep things loose?”
“And I didn’t catch your name?”
“Don. The drummer’s eating dinner. He might stop by later. Old friend of mine, Zach. We’ve played it all, you name it. Toured with Leon, Gregg, Neil, all of the big guys.”
“So when do we get started?”
“Tonight? We get started and finished at the same time. All’s we do is fart around for a half hour, alright? We go through your set list, you give us the keys and the chords, bing, bam, we’re outta here. Zach and me got another gig tonight. Tomorrow’s when the rubber hits the road.”
“I’ve got some originals.”
“No problem. Originals, all’s we do is follow you and make you look good. All’s you need’s a clean finish, and everything else is forgiven, am I right? Covers we got covered, lemme see the list.”
I showed him my handwritten set list. “Okay, you got Garcia, that Garcia solo album is the bomb, nobody remembers that one; Richard Buckner, that’s a good one; Willie Nelson, can’t go wrong; Joseph Arthur; that one Jeb Loy Nichols, okay; plus some good old honky-tonk, we know alla these so no worries. Might have to brush up on the Buckner.”
“When?”
“All in good time, my man. And then these originals, what kinda style would you say they are, like, druggy country, same as the covers?”
“Well, I don’t know if ‘druggy country’ is right, but kinda country soul or folk soul, with a little psychedelic feel to them, mostly in my singing.”
“ ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is.’ Is that the standard? You say original here on your list.”
“It’s mine, just the same title, but a different song.”
“The White Stripes got one too. But that song, the standard I mean, always left me hanging. It starts out, ‘You don’t know what love is, until…’ You know, ‘Until you know the meaning of the blues.’ I fuckin’ hate that ‘until,’ because up until that point, you think the guy’s gonna really get it in the ball sack like he deserves—‘you don’t know what love is’…period, dick. Because you just…don’t…get it. Am I right? I’ve known a lot of women, probably should a said something like that to me ’cause I deserved it. That was before I grew up and learned to act like a man.” He took his hat off and scratched his scalp for a moment. “I hope your version’s better.”
“Well, I don’t know about better, but it’s definitely more along the lines like you said of just not knowing what love is, period.”
“Okay, and ‘It’s Time to Not Try,’ ‘Everyone But Me,’ ‘In Tears Everywhere,’ ‘How Many Summers?,’ ‘Someone Just Like You,’ minor key stuff, lonely feel, I get it, I hope you’re happier in real life.”
“Pretty much.”
“You don’t look happy. If I could observe. Right now.”
“I’m just nervous. I usually play solo, and I’ve never played out of stage, I mean, out of state, or in front of an audience I haven’t, you know, recruited.”
“Relax, my good man. Smoke something illegal. We’ve got all the chords, so let’s just run through one so you can hear how fucking good we are.” He peered into the darkness at the back of the club. “Chad, my man, you there? The drums await!”
“Chad? I thought you said your drummer was named
, what’s his name, now I forgot it, but I don’t think it was Chad.”
“Zach? You mean Zach?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Isn’t that the name you told me? Zach?”
“Zach’s not here tonight. I told you, I’ve got the gig with Zach. So Chad’ll help us out. Relax your mind, drummer’s only got to get the time. And Zach’s way smarter and more talented than Chad, right Chad?”
Chad, stepping up on to the stage, laughed and said, “Whatever you say, my man.”
“So you’ll kick ass tomorrow, Charlie. I guar-an-tee it. We’ll run through a honky-tonk progression, then one of your minor-key masterpieces, I’m not being a smart-ass either, I think they’re gonna be great, and we’ll be good to go for tomorrow, okay?”
“I guess. I’ll follow your lead.”
“No, tomorrow night we follow yours, remember? Just go back to your room and save your creativity for your girlfriend. Alright, my man?”
I shrugged, not entirely convinced, but if these guys—Don and, apparently, Zach—were good enough for Leon Russell and Gregg Allman, they were good enough for me.
So I wandered out of there and explored Kuhio for a little longer, but suddenly I felt terribly fatigued, so I did a little loop on the sidewalk, went back up to our room, and discovered that Alisa was still sleeping. So I brushed my teeth and then slipped under the covers and joined her. It was only 8:00 p.m., but from the sound of it, she was down for the duration.
15
The next morning, Alisa felt fine and refreshed, and she put on a brown and gold bikini (I know that combination sounds strange, but it looked spectacular on her, and it did a neat override on my fantasies about a white bikini bottom) and we walked down to the beach at about 11:00. My show wasn’t until 8:30 that evening, so we had all day for her to lie around and get as brown and gold as her bikini, and for me to stay pale and worried about Don and Zach and Gilbert and everyone else.
We only lasted for about ninety minutes in the midday sun, as it turned out. We didn’t talk much, and I spent a lot of time looking down the curve of the shore into the distance at Diamond Head, which was at the opposite end of the beach from the low-budget Eva Hotel, and sifting the sand through my fingers. It was really marvelous sand, consisting of very fine, evenly sized bits of poppy-seed black and dusty-rose colored sand mixed in with other grains that looked like very tiny sesame seeds and white bits of shell. I couldn’t stop playing with it and stirring it around with my fingers and pouring it onto our thick turquoise L.L.Bean beach towel and onto Alisa’s belly and silky brown bikini bottom with the raised gold striping. She was wearing a big, bulgy tigereye lune ring with tiny brown diamonds and yellow gold that she’d picked up for a song at a consignment shop, and she grumbled a bit when some of the sand got on the ring.
I was starting to be afraid that this would be our entire trip—Alisa sleeping, me analyzing sand. And in fact, at just this moment, Alisa stirred and said, “Man, I guess I slept a lot yesterday.”
“Yeah, you did. Basically from the plane ride all the way through to this morning.”
“Listen, I know you don’t want a complete drunken slut of a girlfriend after your parents and everything, but I want you to understand that all that pills and booze on the plane wasn’t just about the water.”
“Oh?” I said this rather neutrally and, I’ll admit, a bit coolly. “So, then, what was it about?”
She picked at her brown tigereye ring for one moment with one pink fingernail, and I noticed that there was a single rosy grain of sand clinging pluckily to her nail; I was reluctant to look at her fully in the face. Then she said, “I think you know what it’s about, Cha’. Frank. It’s bad.”
“I know. You told me.”
“No, I really didn’t tell you.” She closed her eyes for a second, and then seemed to gather her resolve. I found it easier to look her in the face, now that I at least knew the subject matter. “He’s got this thing where he lays out these, I don’t know, scenarios. And they’re all in the subjunctive tense, if you know what that means.”
“Yes, sweetie, I know what that means.”
“So, in other words, he’ll whisper to me, ‘If I were to meet you at the Candlewood Suites today after work, and I were to spend the entire time—I mean, the entire time—going down on you, I mean, how could you possibly object? I mean, I wouldn’t ask anything of myself’—oh, he’s so fucking self-sacrificing, that prick—‘it would all be for you and only for you. So if I were to do something like that, I mean, could you possibly say no?’ ”
“So he was saying this in this sub rosa…”
“Subjunctive.”
“Yeah, but I mean, I actually meant ‘sub rosa,’ or, I mean, I don’t know, suggestive, but you know, in a sneaky way.”’
“Nice save, Charlie.”
“No, really.” It was frustrating to have a bigger vocabulary than someone while pretending in fact that it was smaller. “But, anyway, I mean, really sleazy, too. Because he thinks that somehow it’s more enticing?”
“No, dumb shit, he’s saying it that way because he thinks it somehow protects him from litigation if I were to ever sue his ass for sexual harassment. ‘Hey, it was only a hypothetical situation, we were only speculating, it was only idle talk.’ ”
“Goddamn it, Alisa, don’t you think you should have told me this was going on?”
“What do you think I’m doing now?” She said this so softly, so plaintively, that I felt myself melting a bit under the slowly setting sun.
“Is this just one example?”
“Oh, yeah, he’ll come up behind me at work and be like, ‘What would you do if I were to accidentally brush my hard dick against your ass like it was an accident?’ Again, all hypothetical.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And so did he walk past your desk and brush his dick against you?”
For some strange reason, I expected Alisa to laugh at this question, but instead she said, “Yeah. He did. Once or twice.”
“And how did you feel about this?”
“How did I feel about this? What are you, a fucking psychiatrist? I felt violated and humiliated is how I felt! He was acting like he could get away with anything, because everything he did came with plausible deniability. He even said that once! He said, ‘I could fuck you for three hours straight, and you’d love every minute of it, but if you did some typical female thing later and changed your mind and complained to Diane or management or something, I have two different buddies—two—who would both claim I was with them the whole time, playing poker or reading Socrates or shit. That’s plausible deniability, baby!’ He actually said it that way, with the ‘baby.’ Disgusting. It made me feel totally powerless.”
“You don’t have to be powerless. You’re telling me now. You could tell Diane and she’d probably believe you, because Frank has probably done this sort of thing before.”
“Yeah, I guess. I’d hate to burst her bubble, though.”
“You’re an athlete, for God’s sake. You’re a winner. You don’t have to take shit from some frustrated would-be college professor prick just because you don’t want to hurt Diane. Do something!”
“I’m planning on doing something. When we get back from Hawaii and Frank gets back from Cleveland, I’m going to sit down with management and tell them everything.”
“What’s Frank doing in Cleveland?”
“I don’t know. Business trip.”
“Okay, whatever. The thing is, you’re doing something, right?” Then I had a thought. “So do something now.”
“What, call?”
“No, I mean, do something with me now. You’re going to fight back, that’s great. But show me you’re strong. Show me you can overcome your fears. Get in the water.”
“The water?”
&
nbsp; “The water.”
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“It has to do with the fact that I’ve never seen you weak, and now you’re being weak about two different things at once, so show me I’m wrong. Show me you can actually walk into the water. That’s all I’m asking, walk into the water with me and show me you trust me.” I opened my mouth to say something else, but stopped myself.
“You were going to say, ‘Because I’m trusting you right now about Frank,’ am I right? You were going to say that you trust me that I’m not going to let anything happen with Frank.”
That was exactly what I was about to say. And I could tell she saw it in my face.
She sighed theatrically and started collecting her suntan lotion, sandals, snacks, and the other odds and ends we had collected after a day on the beach. Then she carefully wrapped them up in our towel. I really couldn’t tell at first if she was planning to stalk off with this bundle, which reminded me of the kind that children prepare when they’re planning to run away from home, and head back to the Eva Hotel, or whether she just wanted to keep our possessions in sight while she edged her way toward the ocean. It turned out to be the latter—she walked toward the water in a slow and sidewise fashion and left the bundle just outside the darker and smoother arc of sand that marked the farthest extent of the waves.
Then, taking my hand, she walked into the shallow water.
Her hand was dry and warm. It contained no hidden pills, and it did not tremble.
We waded in to the warm water up to our waists and stopped, me facing out toward the ocean and Alisa, of course, facing the shore and the long line of white hotels. I looked into her eyes, which were steady and calm. She said, softly, “Everything I just said was true. About Frank, I mean.”
Everything Solid has a Shadow Page 10