What he couldn’t believe was Carolyn. The breathless rush of words, the big gestures. Total intensity, not that flash of piss that disappeared as fast as it came.
Passion. He hadn’t thought she had it in her. Had she believed all that before or after she was flying off to interviews every other minute?
Carolyn shrugged. “You want to hear my First Amendment speech?”
“Oh, hell yeah. But not without a tape recorder.”
She smiled — huge — as she looked at him, then away. Then back for a second, before she bit her bottom lip, the smile still at the corners of her mouth as she cut her eyes away.
Christ. There it was again, that same … what the hell was that? Like he couldn’t quite breathe. He felt his teeth hard on his lip as he shoved his hands into his pockets. The street seemed to come back to life, the whole damn city rushing in like a thunderstorm after driving under a freeway overpass.
“Well, thanks for not thinking I’m psychotic.”
She laughed. “Oh, I’m not convinced yet.”
“Ah, me neither.”
Carolyn gave him a look, maybe she thought he meant her.
The walking was slower, which should have bothered him; the farther he got from the notebook in his hotel room, the longer it’d take to get back. He didn’t know what time it was, or how much time he had left. Maybe he needed that down-to-the-wire shit to really make it work.
“I did have a reason,” he said, without meaning to at all.
“Oh, no! I wasn’t asking. Really. I wasn’t.”
He looked at her and she meant it. All of her, the voice, her face, the shake of her head. It was the second time she’d mentioned it.
“Why did you love it?” Damn. He hadn’t meant to say that either.
“I loved it because it saved me.”
He could hardly process what she’d said much less find the words to ask how that was even possible.
“I know it sounds crazy. This guy, some DJ at the U of A —Akron — radio station, he loved underground rap. They don’t play it, they play the same songs every Clear Channel station plays, but he talked about it. I never heard him much, he was on really late. One night, though, he said hey, you gotta hear this. It’s called ‘Payback.’” She shrugged. “I called him up and could not get off the phone. All I wanted to know was who was that? And he kept going on about all these people I never heard of. I can’t remember … Slug? Is there somebody called Slug?”
Rick almost tripped over a break in the sidewalk. He caught himself and stared at Carolyn, who might be the only person in the world who knew him but didn’t know Slug.
“Maybe not,” she said, “My memory is awful.”
“Ah … no, you … yeah. From Minneapolis. They’re called Atmosphere, Slug’s the rapper.”
“Well, I don’t think the DJ noticed how ignorant I was either,” she said. “I didn’t care, anyway, I just wanted to … ”
She didn’t finish, and Rick was sure whatever was bothering her had nothing to do with underground rappers from Minnesota or anywhere else. He wanted to know why she didn’t want to explain. He really wanted to know if she would anyway. So he waited, all the way to the light, all the way through the cross walk.
She started talking again when she stepped up on the curb. “I was up so late that night because I was in the middle of this severe case of heartbreak. Julius.”
She made it sound like his last name might be ‘cocksucker.’ Rick held back a grin.
“I’d just found out — again — that he cheated on me. First time he was all ‘I’m so sorry — it was an accident, I didn’t mean to.’” She snorted. “Didn’t mean to — what? Get in the way of another girl who slipped and fell on his — ”
She didn’t say ‘dick,’ she said, “Sorry.” For mimicking Eminem’s Slim Shady voice to go with the ‘Guilty Conscience’ line. Almost.
“You misquoted it anyway.”
“My roommate and her CDs moved to California after graduation, I’ve forgotten a lot. I felt like such an idiot. Then somebody told me that this wasn’t the second time. Do they think you wouldn’t have wanted to know that before?”
That was rhetorical, she didn’t wait for him to answer.
“So I was up, crying over it. And that song comes blasting out of my speakers and you know, I’m like — ”
She gave him a jaw drop, which was funny. She wouldn’t even be making that face at him right now, except for one cocksucker and one DJ. At just the right time.
Rick shook his head. “I still can’t believe that was on the radio.”
“Oh, he got fired. I was so glad he played it though, because after the initial shock, I was mad as hell. I just thought, Goddamn it. I don’t deserve this. Am I really going to keep crying over it?” She shrugged. “I’d been thinking if I was somebody different, somebody else. Then I heard that song and I was like, forget it. It broke, this ridiculous feeling that I wasn’t good enough for him, when the reality was that he didn’t deserve me.”
Who the hell could deserve you? Rick cleared his throat. “Well … ”
Carolyn’s mouth twisted. “I don’t mean it like that, like I’m all … whatever. I didn’t even tell him, just listened to him leave messages on the machine. ‘Oh, Baby, I love you’ blah blah blah. And I’d think, ‘I can’t fucking believe this shit, don’t even tell me you’re sorry for this.’ I was quoting.”
His stomach tightened. “I know.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” she said. “I mean, it is. I can hardly listen to it — ”
— me either —
“ — but maybe that was it, how awful it was. I think — I hope — I would have woken up sooner or later.” She smiled. “But it sure felt good waking up mad like that.”
He really did want a tape recorder. Rick examined the feeling for a second, uncertain that anything about that song could ever feel — good? — was even possible. She felt good waking up like that. He’d been the alarm clock.
That felt good. “So … Julius?”
She grinned at the way he said the name. Like she had.
“Where’d you meet a guy who was blind, deaf and dumb?”
Carolyn smiled so wide that the city disappeared again, and Rick was sure Julius was the biggest dick on the planet. She looked away, but not before he saw the pleasure in her …
… and there it was.
It stopped him dead on the sidewalk, like he’d run headlong into a sliding glass door, stunned by the impact and not understanding how he could have slammed into it like that.
His left shoulder was immediately knocked all to hell because his glass door was in a traffic pattern that fed into a descending staircase. He moved around the green painted railings guarding the subway entrance, still watching the sign hanging over the middle of the next block. If he hadn’t looked up, he’d have walked right under it. No way he could make himself go forward now, so he didn’t cross the street, he turned right at the corner.
He wished he’d turned left. Left would have taken him away.
It hadn’t looked like this five years ago. Maybe the time of day, the sun hitting it from the west. Today, the thing glowed. He was in the same place, or close enough, except now he kept walking, on the opposite side of the street, unable to keep looking at it, because of the glare from the sun.
Rick glanced over his left shoulder when he reached the corner. From here, the sun lit the curves head on, the glow was the same warm gold as Carolyn’s eyes.
He jerked to a stop at the traffic light and turned, like maybe she’d disappeared on him. She hadn’t. She was right there, and for a second her eyes locked on his, then the light changed, and the few people collected at the corner started across the street.
Carolyn didn’t move. Her gaze flicked over his shoulder to the arena at Madison Square Garden. Then she met his eyes again.
Rick nodded toward the green light and headed for the curb. “The Rangers play hockey there, that’s a real sport.”
&
nbsp; She smiled faintly and followed him across the street. They reached the corner, and he figured they should probably turn right to head back up north. He shifted to his left, just enough to look across the diagonal of the intersection of West 33rd Street and Eighth Avenue.
But Carolyn started to cross Thirty-Third, putting them right across the street from the Theater entrance. He seemed to be following her now. A few yards down, the sidewalk widened to eight feet, and she veered toward the low rising steps that stretched the length of the block. She sat down, on the fifth step up.
He didn’t know why he counted that.
She rested her elbows behind her and stretched out her legs. “You mind if we sit for a minute?”
Too late to be asking, and he minded a lot, but he didn’t have any good reason to say no. So he sat, checking the view on either side of them. She’d picked an empty stretch, nobody else within twenty yards.
He glanced over to Carolyn. He didn’t like the look in her eyes, and he didn’t like the way she kept shifting her gaze between him and the building across the street.
“You know when they do a concert in there — ” he lifted his chin toward the arena “ — they lay this shit down right over the ice? So if you got floor seats, you’re actually standing on the ice.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Rick leaned back on his elbows. The marble was warmer than the air. “They can’t melt it and refreeze it every time. There’s like two thousand seats on the floor. Right on the ice.” He looked at the golden glow of the circle across the street. It had changed. It was a fortress now. “The whole place holds like fifty.”
Fifty thousand. Christ.
His ass started vibrating, and he turned to see if Carolyn noticed the steps were shaking. It was the damn subway running underneath this colossal building on top of the tunnels. She didn’t even blink.
“I had a reason.” The words felt tighter in his throat this time, and he sat up, shifted his elbows to his knees. “I didn’t say it in the song, because I never told nobody.”
She wouldn’t ask. But after all these years, he didn’t want anything more than to find out if there was somebody else in the world who might understand. Or at least tell him he was still fucked up for no reason at all.
Rick scanned the curve of the arena. “She got pregnant. Two weeks before we started recording the first album. And she tells me I’m having a baby. And all I can think is … damn.”
He could still feel it. He looked back at Carolyn. “You ever felt like that? Like you just got handed everything, all at once? And you never even thought to ask for half of it?”
She didn’t respond, didn’t move. She just watched him. Rick stretched his legs out and leaned back on his elbows. Breathing seemed a little easier that way.
“It was true, ‘Don’t Forget.’ They pulled Jesse right away from me, and I had to stand there in the courtroom and tell him it was gonna be all right. Because he was only four.”
Carolyn made a noise, and it sounded like pain.
“Thirteen years ago,” Rick said. “He calls me every damn day now. Working on that song, though, seemed like it happened yesterday. Then she tells me I’m having a baby … and it felt like … like I was getting back something I lost a long time ago.”
He didn’t know if he’d ever put together before why it was that intense.
He shrugged. “And I had a deal.”
Carolyn matched his smile.
“I mean it wasn’t a great deal, but Christ, I was twenty-one and an actual god wanted to produce me. I mean, come on.” He flipped his hand toward the Garden — Knicks this time, and an easy jump shot. “I’m on top of the world.”
Her eyes narrowed. Probably knowing — no shit — that top of the world only meant one way to go.
“I was all over the place — I got signed, I’m a be a daddy — anybody else want to hear it? Who ain’t sick of hearing it yet?”
Carolyn smiled, but it faded fast.
He looked back at the board running the electronic letters. “She starts talking, making no sense — no sense — about how she don’t want to get stuck, and I’m like what the fuck? Then it’s all this shit about Kale joining the electrician’s union.” He felt his shoulders pull up. “I’m like what? Me? Hold up — look here.”
When he sat up, Carolyn did too. “This is a recording contract. And this name, on this producer’s agreement here — you see that? Zachariah Rawlins? You know who that is? That’s Zeus. He wants to — no, he’s going to — produce me. Zeus — you know, like with the lightning bolts? That’s electricity, right there.”
Rick shook his head. Hell, three albums later, he still couldn’t believe it. Carolyn looked up from the empty hand he’d held in front of her, following the mime of the invisible papers with the invisible signatures.
She knew. She had the same look on her face, as if the name really was written across his empty palm.
“Mary didn’t care. She hates this shit. Zeus ain’t nobody but Hercules’s daddy in a Disney movie. All I can say is, trust me, it’s big. Still, I’m hearing this electrician game. Like there’s some kinda alternate universe where I’m pulling wire through walls for the next fifty years — in between unemployment checks? No fucking way. I got a ticket to Miami in my pocket. Third airplane trip in a year and a half. Third airplane trip ever. Christ.”
Even now, it still felt amazing. He glanced over to Carolyn, wondering if he really was psychotic.
I wouldn’t tell anyone. Ever.
“She said … she said it again. She wasn’t going to get left behind. Didn’t have no problems with me going down to redo my demo with him the winter before, so I don’t know what’s going on. Whatever, though, come with me. We’ll buy another ticket.
“No. She didn’t mean six weeks in Miami. She meant she wasn’t gonna get left in fucking Cleveland with a baby to take care of. Alone. I don’t even know what she’s talking about. I mean, yeah, there’s gonna be tours, I hope, but babies are portable.”
Rick blew out a lungful of air. “That ain’t what she meant. She meant she thought I was gonna go off to Miami and never come back. Me. My kid. No fucking way. ‘I can’t fucking believe this shit.’ I’m quoting.”
He shoved himself off the steps and paced down two of the low risers. His foot bumped an empty pop can, not as hard as he wanted to. It hovered a foot away, on the edge of the same step. He waited to see if it would go over as the pulse faded in his neck. The can didn’t fall.
“She says so prove it. Cancel the contract.” His anger spiked, like it was yesterday. “Never mind that I been proving it, every goddamn Saturday for the past eight years. Two buses and a fucking train, and if I didn’t have the fare, I stole it, and if I couldn’t, I hitched. I walked. I stole bicycles, I changed a goddamn clutch at three o’clock in the fucking morning so I could get my ass out to Shaker Heights to see Jesse the next day. I don’t gotta prove shit. I already done proved it.”
The empty can smashed under his foot. “She knew that. But she wants me to prove it. By throwing away everything I ever — ”
He choked on the word and looked across Eighth Avenue, willing down the rage. A mural covered the side of a building; it looked like an aerial view of the spot he was standing on. Except the Eiffel tower was planted there, so he couldn’t figure out what it was a picture of.
“She had an abortion,” Carolyn said.
The mural was just an airline advertisement. All the places you could go. “I was in Miami. She called me up the next day, I think she was still at the clinic. I hung up, put my fist through the wall. Zeus’s wall. On my way out of his house, I ran into the engineer who always sounded like he had a cold.”
Carolyn’s eyes widened.
“Real bad timing. Just did a couple lines … and I wrote that song. I know it sounds psychotic. Most evil thing I could think of … but … I just … ”
He turned and caught the surface of the curves glittering in the sun. It wasn’t real, it w
as Pyrite. He couldn’t look anymore. When he turned around, Carolyn’s head was down and her arms were wrapped around her waist.
When he sat down, she didn’t move or speak. He looked at the smashed can for a minute, then quit wondering what she was thinking and turned to ask.
Her eyes were locked on him. Filled. He swallowed twice, just for a second afraid that he might join her. He watched the lines the tears trailed across her face. This guidance counselor had told him in eighth grade that crying was good, it released toxins, you felt better. Jerk didn’t have a clue how you’d be feeling if somebody caught you doing it.
He never said how you might feel if someone else did it for you.
Rick watched her swallow, her eyes closed for a second, and he reached for her. His hand nearly covered her cheek as he laid his thumb along the side of her nose and swept it across her face, feeling her tears under his skin. His fingers reached her hairline, warmer, like her hair had soaked in the sun as they’d walked and held onto the heat.
She didn’t move as he traced the line of her cheek, down to her chin with his palm. His thumb grazed her lip, leaving a trail of moisture on the softer skin there.
Another train rumbled beneath him, and he let out a breath as he slid his hand from her chin and looked back to the arena.
“She always threatened to do shit she never did. But the day I left, she tells me either I renege on the contract and never get another shot or else … ” Rick’s throat tightened. He could still hear Mary saying it, but he couldn’t repeat it. “I didn’t believe her. I couldn’t. I was going to record my first album, I had a fucking god producing it for me, and after that … ”
Carolyn spoke so softly that he almost didn’t hear her.
“Madison Square Garden.”
Rick looked up and saw her face as gentle as the words had been. He glanced across the street one more time. Fool’s gold.
“No doubt.”
* * *
Carolyn’s throat clenched at his sarcasm. Her mind kept running the song in the background as if it wasn’t enough to hear the pain and see it and feel it live. It didn’t sound anything like it used to. The layers of condemnation had doubled. He’d blamed himself, she could hear it now.
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