Thank You, Goodnight

by Andy Abramowitz

  “So you understand then?”

  “Sure I understand. I just think it’s stupid. What have you got to be ashamed of ? You went where just about every kid with a guitar dreams of going. You’re not allowed to get older? You’re not allowed to sit in a restaurant and eat a goddamn taco? You’re even part Tex-Mex, aren’t you?”

  “That’s a cuisine, not a nationality.”

  “Whatever. Leave me alone.”

  We sat in the gymnasium, polished in sweat and hazy from the booze. It didn’t seem like twenty years since I’d banged around the walls of a high school gym. Memory does that sometimes, jumbles things up, messes with your sense of chronology. Some moments linger in sharp focus, reminding us that they happened, reluctant to drift away because they suspect we need them.

  Warren asked, “How’s Sara?”

  “She’s good.”

  Even if that was true, I wasn’t in much of a position to know for sure. We’d both been rather preoccupied lately.

  “She’s been hanging out with her ex-husband,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. He came out of the woodwork and asked for a divorce.”

  “Well, that’s probably a good thing, right? Closure for them, closure for you two.”

  The fact was, it hadn’t felt like anything was closing. It was more of a rattling of hinges. “I don’t know. I haven’t been around much. And she tends toward tight lips anyway.”

  “That’s gotta be hard for her though,” Warren said.

  “Sometimes it feels like I live with a ghost,” I said. “She’s like this presence I observe through dishes in the sink or impressions on a pillow. I won’t see her, but I’ll know she was there because of a blouse slung over a chair.”

  “Maybe she’d say the same about you. Except for the blouse. Or maybe not except for the blouse.”

  “I hate to say it, but she may just be happy to have me out of the house.”

  “Well, it sounds like you’re being the supportive fellow I would’ve expected,” he said, slapping my back.

  I forced myself to my feet. The dizzying disconnect between my senses and my brain’s processing of them was now fully pronounced.

  I staggered toward a red rubber dodge ball sitting in a far corner of the gym. It took forever to get there, what with the whiskey pushing the wall further and further away. When I’d finally retrieved it, I trudged back toward Warren and stood over him. Then I pulled the ball back behind my shoulder, poised to release it into his face.

  “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” he yelled, holding up his hands defensively.

  “Join the band or you get it in the nose!”

  “You throw that at me and I will kick your ass!”

  “Warren War-ren!” I stood firm, ready to heave the ball at point-blank range. “I need you, damnit! We can do this!”

  “Screw you, man! I have a goddamn life. Go get one yourself.”

  My throwing arm quivered. “Don’t make me bring the heat.”

  “I promise I will kill you. You will die.”

  “Join me, young Skywalker. Together we can rule the galaxy!”

  “You need therapy.”

  “And that stupid strip of a beard makes your chin look like it’s swinging in a hammock. You have a fucking hammock on your face.”

  In a sudden blast of motion, he sprang up from the bench and hurtled himself at me like a linebacker. With a wallop not dissimilar to the one delivered by Heinz-Peter back in Shangri-La, Warren tackled the shit out of me. As I came down on my back under his weight, I learned why they call it hardwood. I didn’t come close to getting off a throw.

  “Get the fuck off !” I yelled, struggling against his lean network of muscles. The tussle only ended when he finally rolled over and writhed in inebriated laughter. The alcohol did little to cushion the cracking of my spine against the floor, and for a few searing seconds I thought I might need a stretcher. But soon we were both lying there, catching our breath, staring up at the artificial incandescence of the ceiling.

  And then Warren started singing. In a low register and an unrelenting operatic vibrato, he began to belt out “It Feels like a Lie.”

  “Shut up,” I whispered, as his gratingly tremulous baritone boomed up to the pennants.

  The sound of that song was pure mockery, a symbol of my years of creative bankruptcy, a sonic taunt that practically dared me back into the ring. But on he sang in this new and intolerable vibrato. He sounded like a goat.

  As I gazed up into the fuzzy gymnasium lights, it was all starting to seem familiar. I was flat on my back, I was drunk, the room was spinning, and I’d had some sort of physical altercation.

  “You know what I think?” I began, once the last echo of Warren’s voice had faded. “I think that on the day you die, you regret all the things you wanted to do but didn’t try hard enough at.” I sat up and looked at him. “Do you know what I mean?”

  Warren grunted without so much as lifting his head. “I think on the day you die, you regret all the homeless people you walked past and didn’t buy a sandwich for.” He frowned at me sideways. “Self-centered dickhead.”

  * * *

  Moments or hours later, we were sitting in my car. We’d staggered out of the building to fill our lungs with fresh air, and I’d shepherded us toward the visitors’ parking lot. My car was the only one around, yet it still seemed like a minor miracle that we found it.

  Like zombies, we sat in the front seat with the windows down, the stereo casting my rough demos out into the sleeping world. Warren rubbed his beard and looked faintly troubled but substantially drunk. After three songs, I shut off the radio. Just when I thought Warren might’ve passed out, he up and spoke, his voice a slow, drained grumble. “You’re putting me in a difficult spot, Teddy.”

  “Yeah? How so?”

  “Well, for one thing, those might be the best three songs you’ve ever written. They blow everything else away, even the hit.”

  “I never liked ‘It Feels like a Lie,’ ” I admitted. “The song itself felt like a lie. It wasn’t me at all. I would’ve flat-out refused to play it, but I had a band to feed.”

  He pointed at the dashboard radio. “If you’d written songs like this ten years ago, I wouldn’t be teaching music to the tone-deaf way the hell and gone in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It wouldn’t have mattered that you told the Junction to go fuck themselves, that you sent us out on tour on our own, headlining with about a quarter hour’s worth of decent material. But hey, that’s the smoke of a distant fire.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  “But . . .” He breathed deeply. “But I’m thirty-five now and . . . Look, it just doesn’t matter how good the songs are. You have to know that. We weren’t an act that absolutely demanded to be heard. We were just a good little rock band that rode the wave of one irritating four-minute jangle that you just know they’re gonna play at your funeral. Come on, man, look at us. We’re well beyond our sell-by date. The industry won’t take us seriously.”

  “Why are you so obsessed with age? There’s plenty of music being made by people who look like absolute shit. You tell me when Ric Ocasek was ever cute. Sonic Youth—everybody in that band looks like a Microsoft employee. Nobody really cares about the ages of these people.”

  Warren shifted in his seat. “I’m not obsessed with age. If anybody’s obsessed with anything, it’s you—about the past. You know, man, you talk like there’s this place you’ve got to climb back up to. But it isn’t so. Shame on you if you’ve got a chip on your shoulder, especially after all this time.”

  I let my hand drop out the window and land with a smack on the side panel. We sat for a languid spell under the dim interior car light, the one sign of life in the whole ink-black parking lot.

  “Teddy, when I come home at night, I like what’s waiting for me.”

&nbs
p; I said, “I’m not here to sweep you out of your life and away from Lauren and your kid. But come on, Warren, I know you. You love everything about making music. You may say you have no interest in doing a record with me, but whatever you decide, however this ends, we both know that’s not true.”

  He let that claim hang unanswered as we continued our silent contemplation of the night. Out past a line of trees, I was just barely able to make out the lonely risers of the football field. Given our condition, it was entirely possible that we’d still be sitting here when dawn broke over those bleachers. And that would be just fine. I’d enjoy watching the window of morning slowly push open the sky.

  “You play these songs for anyone else?” came Warren’s low voice. “Other than that dipshit?”

  “I played them for Sonny.”

  Warren turned. “Sonny Rivers? He still talks to you?”

  “Reluctantly.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He told me to go make a record. If you want to get technical about it, he said ‘Go make a record, motherfucker.’ ”

  Warren humphed.

  “And if you can believe this, he wants to produce and he wants to help shop it around.”

  My passenger was shaking his head now, staring out into the darkness as his fingers explored his facial hair. There had to be an answer to all this out there somewhere—or somewhere deep in that beard.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You get Mackenzie on board and I’ll think about it. That’s not a commitment. You understand me, you annoying pain in the ass?”

  “Okay,” I said, containing the edges of my grin.

  “Don’t smile, you bane of my existence. You haven’t reeled me in. I am merely agreeing to give it further thought. That’s it. And believe me, I’m not doing anything that takes me away from my family. Get that through that tiny, irritating, narcissistic, desperate, delusional head of yours.”

  “Message received,” I said, somehow smug about this now. That was all the mistake I needed him to make. Just one measly error in judgment. From the barest flame abounds the all-consuming blaze.

  Warren sighed a deep, defeated breath and reclined into the seat back. His eyes folded closed and he seemed on the verge of sleep. “If you’d mentioned Sonny two hours ago, you could’ve saved us both a bitch of a hangover.”

  “Look at it this way. If this all works out, you can resurrect Clark, the brother you never had.” I slapped him on the chest. “I know you loved doing that twins thing.”

  He let out a listless grunt. “You do know that to normal guys that means something completely different.”

  * * *

  I regained consciousness under a blanket smelling of cedar. It was like awakening in the woods among the oaks, pines, and Rocky Mountain Douglas firs, the scent of a fire wafting from a nearby cabin. The rustic peace was soon obliterated by the pounding on my skull. I had a vague recollection of Lauren pulling into the school parking lot and glowering at me as her husband and I slumped into the backseat of her car. Someone had left a glass of water and two maroon ibuprofen tablets on the table. Being served painkillers in strange houses was developing into a pastime of mine.

  I slipped out before anyone else had stirred, but not before finding a pen and a stray piece of paper. “Thanks—and sorry in advance,” I scribbled.

  Squinting into the early-morning light, I took in the Warrens’ row house on this quiet tree-lined street on the outskirts of Lambertville. The neighborhood seemed very aware of itself as a choice for a specific type of living, a town for people who’d gone looking for simplicity in the form of food fairs and antique shops.

  Hoping to be reunited with my car, I set out in the direction that I guessed the high school to be. In town, I bought a cup of coffee in a little corner bakery, the kindly graying woman asking if I needed a nice lemon muffin to accompany it. I croaked out a thanks but no thanks, the first words of the day sounding as if they were spoken by me plus fifty years, and shouldered on.

  I left Sara a voice mail as I sailed down the highway toward home. She hadn’t responded to the text I sent letting her know I wasn’t going to make it home last night. Nor did I hear from her as I sloped from one room of the condo to the next during the balance of the morning, dragging my headache with me into the afternoon.

  Ravi Chatterjee had left another message on our home line, yet again trying to locate Sara without sounding threatening or overly concerned. It hardly comforted me that I wasn’t the only one trying to track her down. She could’ve been up at Josie’s studio, ducking the universe, or she could’ve been with Billy, sifting through the particles of an old universe. Something could have set her off in some other direction. It could’ve been the estranged husband who’d reappeared out of auld lang syne, or the longtime boyfriend who’d dematerialized into a fantasy of his own creation, or something else I didn’t know about. What else, I wondered, did I not know about Sara Rome?

  Worry mounted as the afternoon limped by. When evening descended, there was still no trace of her.

  To distract myself, I considered the next order of business in my own jigsaw—that being the making contact with and recruitment of Mackenzie. Mackenzie Highsider. There was nothing about that name that didn’t rattle my nerves.

  For years I’d been playing out the scene where we met again, older and wiser. Seasons upon seasons of pondering the abstraction of our reunion had only allowed the fantasy to flower. I pictured her catching sight of me across the street or in a restaurant, and with a double take, her jaw would drop and she’d pause with hands on hips. We’d hug and she’d tell me I looked the same. She’d tell me she’d missed me and that she hated the way things ended between us, that she’d finally let go of her anger.

  But the truth was, I was terrified. I could only assume that one inglorious deed of ours in that Phoenix hotel had stayed with her over the years. What I didn’t know was whether she’d spent all this time thinking of me the way she did in the minutes just before we were discovered in that hotel room, or the way she did in the minutes just after.

  I switched on the table lamps to illuminate what was feeling like a grippingly empty apartment. For further distraction—one that involved less dread and queasiness—I revisited some unfinished songs. I picked up my guitar and positioned myself on the sofa, pages of quatrains fanned out in front of me on yellow legal paper. But my eyes kept gravitating toward my phone. My ears kept hallucinating the sound of a key in the door.

  I recalled a manila folder of abandoned lyrics that still sat buried in a closet. Maybe it would provide inspiration. I had no compunction about stealing outright from my younger, more vital self, so I walked down the hall to the office, opened the closet door, and rifled behind a curtain of Sara’s dresses, outfits only invited out of the house on the rare formal occasion. Also hidden away against the closet wall, behind the veil of hanging clothes, was a collection of Sara’s mosaics. I’d seen some of them before, but only accidentally, when they were being transported from Josie’s studio. Their life cycle was concise and uneventful: they were created, they were carried home, and they were sent directly to storage.

  I allowed my eyes to wander over these heavy decorative mirrors of Sara’s creation. The broken glass and colored stones were arranged in impressionistic fashion, elusive and abstract. You weren’t quite sure what you were seeing in the disjointed tiles, but they spooled you into a swirl of motion until you had to turn away. As a mirror of their creator, they were beautiful, absorbing, unsettling.

  Then I made another discovery. Urged deep into the back corner of the closet was a globe constructed of a crinkly material that sounded like tissue paper. Gripping a string at one of its poles, I hoisted it out into the light. It was a paper lantern, a purple sphere with green and yellow flowers pasted onto it like continents. I hadn’t known Sara to venture outside the genre of mosaics, and I pondered whether her indulg
ence in the cabal of paper lanterns was a onetime thing, an outlier, some wild experiment that had erupted in the hot chaos of Josie’s studio, or if it signaled a transition. She’d perhaps entered her paper lantern period. I twirled the string between my thumb and index finger and watched the globe spin smoothly and efficiently, the tight tissue paper making the faint rustle of an April breeze.

  A sharp voice behind me pierced the air. “What are you doing?”

  I turned. “Sara. Jesus.”

  “What are you doing?” She looked horrified, as if snooping through my own closet was a violation of her privacy.

  “Where the hell have you been all day?” I demanded.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been calling you, Ravi’s been calling, everybody’s been trying to track you down.”

  She marched at me and snatched the lantern string from my hand, then set about carefully returning the globe to the closet.

  I proceeded to lecture the back of her head. “You can’t just fall off the face of the earth, Sara. I didn’t know where you were. I was worried. Look, if you’re going to go hide out at Josie’s, you’ve gotta let somebody know, for chrissakes. And if you were with Billy again, all I can say is—”

  It came out of nowhere. She turned abruptly and her open hand slapped hard against my cheek. Her ring landed on my upper lip, stinging my tooth and snapping my head to the side. Before I could react to the shock of violence delivered by someone who’d never shown the slightest capacity for it, her voice came at me through gritted teeth—low, seething, desolate.

  “Where am I every year on my son’s birthday? Sitting in a field of tombstones, you selfish piece of shit.”

  She left me there, holding my battered cheek, her words stinging just as harshly as the blow, my face reddening in a rush of shame. I hadn’t budged when she returned a few minutes later with a napkin wrapped around two pieces of ice.