by Teddy Wayne
I went inside a stall and peed and waited inside for Walter while holding my breath because it smelled like crap and piss. The room’s door swung open, and before I called out Walter’s name I heard Rog’s voice. He was talking on his phone at the urinal.
“I know,” he was saying. “It’s awful timing. Except the Super Bowl’s tomorrow, right? So that’ll take away some of the attention.” He uh-huhed a few times while he zipped up. “Yeah, I’m handling the press on this, I don’t trust anyone at the label.” He washed his hands and left. In another minute or so Walter came in and called for me.
“Let’s find Rog,” he said, and we saw him still on the phone in the conference room.
Rog covered his phone for a second. “I’m staying here tonight.” He looked right at me. “Hey. You doing okay?” I was doing okay before he asked, but now with Rog being so concerned about how I was, too, I didn’t feel so hot.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Call me at the hotel if anything changes.”
He told me he would. I was a little more relaxed knowing Rog was handling it. He knew how to do this stuff. Walter wasn’t media-savvy.
CHAPTER 17
Cleveland (Second Day)
I watched TV as I ate breakfast and Walter waited in his room. Some morning show was running down entertainment news, and the host said, “We have word that Jane Valentine, the mother and manager of pop star Jonny Valentine, was hospitalized last night in Cleveland after suffering an anaphylactic reaction related to a severe peanut allergy. We’ll let you know more when we do. In the meantime, our thoughts are with the Valentines.”
Yeah, sure, I almost said out loud. Last week your thoughts were a character assassination slamming Jane for being a bad mother. Your thoughts are whatever boosts your ratings, you vultures.
Jane probably would get rushed to the emergency room if she ate peanuts, but she’s super-careful about making sure anything she orders doesn’t have it as an ingredient. It was a good story, whoever came up with it, because if we needed to, we could get a doctor in L.A. to confirm she’s allergic, and if the venue staff leaked to the press, we now had a reason for why she collapsed. People believe anything once it’s in the media as long as it’s the first story.
Nadine came by a little later to give me my final. “You feeling okay?” she asked.
“Jane’s the one who ate peanuts and got sick.”
Nadine looked at me like she wasn’t sure if she knew I knew that was a lie. I don’t know if she knew, either. But neither of us could say anything about it. We were sort of like the criminals in the logic question, guessing what was going on in the other guy’s head.
“Well,” she said, “given the circumstances, I’ve decided we should delay your final exam. I’ll give you the question, but you don’t have to finish it until my vacation ends next week and you’re back in L.A. You can just play video games now if you like.” She handed me a piece of paper.
Final Exam: History and Language/Reading
Write an essay of approximately 1,000 words in response to this prompt: What does it mean to be the property of another person, and what does it mean to be free? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each position? Make sure you have a beginning, middle, and end, and cite at least three primary sources.
Nadine always asked strange questions like this. They were never simple, like, “Why did America start the Revolutionary War?” She’d be like, “How might a Loyalist in America feel during the Revolutionary War?” and since I never have any clue, I’m always saying, “He’d feel ambivalent.” Ambivalent was Nadine’s favorite word to describe anyone in history’s feelings, like, “Abraham Lincoln felt ambivalent about freeing the slaves,” or her other favorite word was complex, like, “The causes of any historical event are always complex and cannot be reduced to a single explanation.” But by now it had become a joke between us, so I couldn’t use either one anymore.
Unless the answer was the obvious one, that when you’re a slave you don’t get to do what you want but everything’s taken care of for you, and when you’re free you get to do what you want but that means finding your own food and shelter and clothes, I didn’t know what Nadine wanted. It was a good thing she’d given me the extra week, or else I probably would have gotten a C or a D. I’m crap at history.
Someone knocked at the door, and it wasn’t Jane’s knock or Walter’s. “That must be Jason,” Nadine said as she got up. “He’s meeting me here.”
“Who’s Jason?” I asked.
“My boyfriend,” she said. “I’ve mentioned him, haven’t I?”
She had, though I doubted she’d ever told me his name, because I always pay attention to Jason since it’s one of my fake IDs for hotels, but she already had the door open. This young guy in a suit stood there with a goofy grin and his luggage. He pulled a bouquet of flowers out from behind his back.
“Happy anniversary,” he said, and Nadine hugged him and kissed him on the lips. After they, like, rubbed each other’s backs, she said, “Jason, you’ve never met Jonny before, have you?”
“Nope.” He barged right into my room to shake my hand. “Jason McKnight.”
His hand felt sweaty and cold at the same time. “Hi,” I said.
We all stood there. I didn’t know if this guy thought he was going to move his stuff into my room or something, but Nadine said, “I’ll be done in five minutes. Here’s my card, 1933.”
He took the card and said, “Nineteen thirty-three, good year,” and she said, “Except for the Depression,” and he said, “And the rise of the Third Reich,” and they laughed and kissed again and he left.
“Sorry for the interruption. Where were we?” Nadine said.
“Why is he here?” I asked.
“Jason? He had to go to Cleveland for business, so we planned to meet up while I was in town, then we’re going to Paris.”
“I thought you were going back to L.A. for our break.”
“I was, but Jason surprised me with this trip, and we realized it was our one-year anniversary, so . . . Anyway, I wanted to talk—”
“What’s he do? In business?”
“He’s a consultant for an investment bank.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means—I’ll explain another time. I wanted to ask you a question before I left,” she said. “I know you’ve got a lot going on, but I was wondering if you’d made a decision about what you’re going to do in terms of school. Jane said she’d pay me either way this semester, and I’d be helping you out after school, but it’d be good to know so I could start my job search. If I need to find one, I mean.” She seemed uncomfortable, like she didn’t want to have to ask this.
Then leave, Nadine. That’s what you want to do. Everyone wants to do what’s good for them and they don’t care how it affects anyone else. Just leave. Tell the police I’m guilty and watch out for yourself.
“I’m thinking about going back to school,” I said, but I still didn’t really know. Maybe she’d feel sorry she brought it up.
“You are?”
“Yeah. I should probably have a bunch of different teachers who each know a subject instead of just one.”
“Right. Right.” She nodded a few times. “Almost forgot,” she said, and took a greeting card out of a folder. It was a get-well-soon card, and she’d gotten everyone in the crew to sign it for Jane and was saving me for last. I picked up a pen, but because I was imagining Nadine teaching in a real school, with all these other students who weren’t me, I wasn’t concentrating and wrote a big loopy “Songs, Smiles, and ♥ JV” on the card. Everyone else just wrote their name or “Feel better!” or something like that. If I crossed it out it’d look worse, so I left it like it was.
When I handed it back to Nadine, I turned my head like I was distracted and kept my hand going forward until it touched one of her breasts. She doesn’t have big breasts, like one-tenth of Sharon’s, and I didn’t feel much, but they were still soft and like super-nice chub. She made t
his quick gasping sound, but I think she couldn’t tell if it was an accident or not, so she didn’t say anything. She gathered her stuff real fast and didn’t hug me like she usually does when she leaves on vacation. When she walked out she let the door close on its own, and hotel doors always swing shut hard so that you don’t accidentally leave them open, and it was like a hard bass beat that closes out a song.
The hotel shut down the gym for forty minutes so me and Walter could sneak in a workout. Walter has me spot him even though he doesn’t need the help, and he lets me lift the five-pound dumbbells. He doesn’t push me on the cardio the way Jane and Rog do, he just tells me to go for it, but it’s funny, I usually end up working out harder with him.
Walter had a voice mail from Rog, who said Jane was ready for visitors but was staying in the hospital at least another night to play it safe, and we could see her tonight after dinner. It was supposed to be Walter’s day off, so I told him I’d hole up in my room. I was on Level 98 now anyway, and I wanted to finish bad.
I had a hard time focusing on the game because I was wondering what I’d say to Jane. Like, should I tell her it was stupid to drink so much without eating? Or did she already know that and she didn’t need to get yelled at? I hate it when Rog criticizes a vocal glitch in a concert that I knew about, or when Jane says I shouldn’t have answered an interview question the way I did when I already realized I messed up. When you mess up, if you’ve got any brains, you know it and you don’t need someone reminding you. It almost makes me want to mess up again. So I wouldn’t say it to Jane, in case she was like me that way. But if I didn’t say anything, she’d think I was okay with it. Maybe the best thing to do would be not to go. Then she’d be wondering what I thought, and she’d be so embarrassed and sorry she wouldn’t do it again.
I screamed through Level 98 in a few hours and had no trouble at all with the minion at the end. I wish Nadine tested me in Zenon instead of history. It was like working out with Walter. No one made me do it, so I was good at it. I wish I did more stuff like that, where no one else cared but me.
I ordered room service for dinner, pad Thai with mashed potatoes on the side, and didn’t care that it was a double-carber because of my good workout with Walter and also since Jane was in the hospital and Rog never checked up on me in person, except he was calling every hour now to make sure I was all right. I even found a jar of mayo in the minibar and smeared a glob on the mashed potatoes to make it like potato salad. I watched a TV channel playing songs while I ate, but they weren’t any of mine, only derivative pop.
Walter knocked on my door at six o’clock and said, “You ready to go, brother?” I was about to tell him, “I’m really tired, I think I’ll stay in tonight and see her when she gets out.”
But the channel with songs was still on, and I heard the first few notes of the track Rog convinced Jane to leave off my first album because it didn’t fit organically, “Baby, Please Don’t Ever Leave Me,” where the piano quietly tinkles up a little like raindrops on a roof and then my voice drops in like sunshine through the rain. I should sing it more in concert. It’s an underrated song in my library.
All of a sudden I got worried that Jane might have to stay two more nights in the hospital and she’d miss my concert in Detroit. She’d never missed a concert once. I grabbed a Detroit Tigers hat. “Let’s go,” I said to Walter.
Rog had arranged it so a hospital rep met us and took us straight to Jane’s room. She had a room on a floor with all private rooms. There were concierges in the halls, and it even looked like a hotel, and the food coming into a few rooms was room-service caliber. If I had to go to a hospital, I’d want it to be a place like this. Definitely not the children’s hospital. That was like a bad school where you don’t even get to stay at home if you’re sick. Walter told me he’d wait outside and said, “Unless you want me to go in.”
“No, you can wait,” I said. I don’t know why he thought I’d need crowd buffer inside a private hospital room.
I thought the private rooms would get prettier nurses, but Jane’s was around fifty and shaped like a snowman. She reminded me I could only talk to her for a few minutes, and opened the door and softly called inside, “You have a visitor.”
Jane was in bed, watching network entertainment news. She didn’t look all that bad. Her face was like she’d been putting on not moisturizers, but de-moisturizers. I’d seen worse hangovers on her, though.
She tried to smile, but could barely lift up the sides of her mouth. She muted the TV and said, “Hi.” Her voice was pretty weak.
“Hi.” I walked up to her bed, and didn’t know if I should sit on it or if I should let her hug me or if she even could hug me, so I stopped about a foot from the edge. It was as awkward as it was with Dana after she gave me the blow job. I bet even Zack wouldn’t know how to handle this situation.
I nodded at the TV. “Anything about you on that?”
“No. Thank God.”
Her voice was super-weak, like it was filtered and the decibel level was cut by seventy-five percent.
“You getting out tomorrow?” I asked.
“I hope so,” she said. “The doctors haven’t cleared me yet.”
I didn’t ask how she’d catch up to us when we drove to Detroit if she didn’t get out in the morning. I hadn’t really thought about telling her about my father emailing me before, but this could’ve been the time to do it. She owed me, and she didn’t have the energy to fight, and there was a chance she’d say it was okay. I could tell her I wanted to see him on my own when we traveled to New York, and if it went good, I wanted the two of them to meet again, and maybe when she saw him she’d change her mind. I bet she never even talked to him on the phone.
But it would be stupid. She’d get upset and say no and have her lawyers make him stop. I couldn’t risk it.
We watched the entertainment show on mute. I think Jane didn’t want to unmute it, since we’d be admitting we didn’t know what to say to each other. It didn’t really matter. You could sort of guess at what they were saying without hearing them.
When it cut to commercial, she said, “Will you sing me a song, baby?”
I couldn’t always talk, but I could always sing. But it was the same problem with the children’s hospital. None of my songs would fit here.
“Please, Jonathan?” she asked again. “It’s all I’ve wanted the whole day.”
I still didn’t do anything for a few seconds, but I’d figured out what I was going to do. After I’d made her wait long enough, I sang
Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry
Go to sleepy, little baby
Go to sleepy, little baby
When you wake, you shall have
All the pretty little horses
All the pretty little horses
I ended after the first verse. “I have to go,” I said. “You’re supposed to be resting.”
She looked more beat-up than she did at the start, with bags under her eyes and her skin pasty and uneven without any makeup. I got this image in my head of Jane in a hospital bed, like she was now, only she was holding a baby to her chest. And the baby’s face was mine. Probably from that stupid drawing in the New York Times, or maybe I’d seen her in the hospital when she’d had the other baby, after all, and that was why I felt like I’d been in the room with the premature babies before. If she didn’t look like such crap right then, maybe I even would’ve asked her about it.
Before I could open the door, she said, “I’m sorry,” quieter than before.
I didn’t ask what she was sorry about. I didn’t answer or nod or turn or anything. I just stopped, to let her know I’d heard it, and said, “How are presales?”
“They’re . . . good,” she said. That pause meant they weren’t. “Better than before.”
I left. Walter dropped me off at my hotel room and made plans for when to wake me up the next day. He said me and him and Rog would get Jane at the hospital in the morning. I figured they wanted me there in case any
paparazzi were around when she got out.
I turned on the second half of the Super Bowl. It was a blowout, and I didn’t care about the teams, but I kept it on anyway. My hotel room felt huge, like a football stadium, with me the only fan inside it that no one could see.
Tyler Beats starred in a big soda commercial. It was a sixty-second spot, and it was funny, and he even got to promote his new single during it. My commercials so far have all had crap production values for crap products.
I double-locked the door and dug out the glossy I’d packed in L.A. from the bottom of a suitcase. That seemed like forever ago. I turned up the volume of the game and found the FIT AND OVER 40! spread. My hand rubbed over my jeans, and I unzipped them and reached inside my underwear, and once I was hard I slid out of my jeans completely. I was still wearing my black track sweater, but I didn’t want to take it off and lose my boner. It felt like a strong one. Except I didn’t have any sunscreen on me to use.
I opened up the minibar. The mayo jar was still there. I unscrewed it and scooped out a big glob and spread it over me. It felt slick and like the inside of Dana’s mouth, but cool instead of warm. I kept the jar open in case I needed more, but I stored it in the minibar, with the door open so I could get to it easily, since you’re not supposed to ever leave mayo out.
I went back to get the glossy and put it next to the minibar and stood there, with the cold air washing over me and the pictures of all the actresses, and I kept pumping harder and slathering on more mayo, and it felt like I was disappearing inside the mayo, surrounding myself in all this greasy whiteness.
I shut my eyes and imagined Lisa Pinto coming to my hotel room, hanging a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the knob and closing the door behind herself and locking it with those swinging hotel-door locks, and I opened my eyes again at the actress doing yoga in the glossy and I said out loud, “You like being my little slut, don’t you?” and there was this tingly click inside my penis, and I knew it was happening for real this time, and the middle of my body felt like the most super-intense massage ever, like someone had punched me except the punch made you feel amazing, and there was a huge buildup like the silence in the middle of the third verse of “Breathtaking” before I belt out the words, “Yeah, take away my breath,” and I comed.