“Holy shit. Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
“When was earlier?”
Four months ago, while applying deodorant after a shower, she noticed a lump in her armpit. She would’ve ignored it, constitutionally hardwired as she was with an inability to panic, but having lost her mother six years ago to Hodgkin’s, she read the genetic writing on the wall. Within ten days, she’d undergone a mastectomy. Her most recent round of chemo had been earlier that week.
“I just assumed you had access to my medical records, showing up here with a stash of antinausea,” she said with a coy twinkle.
“Jesus, Mack.” I felt ashamed, prattling on all night about the need to be taken seriously as an artist, bitching about bad photographs of me eating Mexican food. “You must’ve wanted to slap me all night.”
She didn’t speak up to say otherwise.
“Are you okay? Who’s taking care of you?”
“I’m no recluse, Teddy. I’ve got friends. Really good ones, it turns out.”
There was, she assured me, no shortage of people populating her fridge with Tupperwared meals she was too nauseated to eat, soothing her with six-packs of Canada Dry ginger ale. For the time being, she was still tethered to the treatments every few weeks, but the end of that vicious battery was approaching, and her doctors were optimistic that she would soon have her forehead stamped with the words In Remission, that sought-after designation that somehow still sounded ominous.
For a long moment, the only sound was the high constant hum of the amp.
“I also have an ex-husband checking in on me,” she volunteered.
I flinched in surprise.
“Remember Colin Stone?”
“The Sony rep? Sure. The Dire Wolf. What about him?”
“He’s at MCA now, but . . .”
My jaw went slack. “You married Colin fucking Stone?”
And who wouldn’t? Colin was a lifer in the music business, a gregarious, distinguished-looking record exec with dense hedges of gray hair and an enveloping grin. He had a really enthusiastic handshake—he swung you a bit, he was so damn happy to see you, he might just pull you right into his suit jacket—and was always either on his way to a leisurely, lubricated meal or just returning from one. He was our main point of contact when Sony signed us, and he brimmed with encouragement at every meeting, even later on when we couldn’t catch a cold. Colin was a good bit older than us, so it often felt as though someone had brought a dad to our Mirabelle Plum marathons, but a dad who went out more nights a week than we did and who drank all of us under the table in passing.
As a member of the band, Mack had never viewed him in a romantic light. But a few years later, she told me, when she was in her graduate program in New York, they ran into each other on an elevator and realized they lived in the same building. Right then and there, he invited her to tag along at a dinner with the Flaming Lips (regular people have dinner; Colin always had a dinner), and in an aberrant move, she accepted. Another invitation followed, and soon she was accompanying him to record release parties and on visits to his ailing mother (an impossibly ancient Czech woman who made a mean mushroom soup). They even got into a rather delightful minor car accident together.
The marriage lasted just over two years, and it didn’t take nearly that long for Mack to realize she’d made a mistake. She wanted to be done with the music business, and that included not being the child bride of one of its most enduring characters. The inevitable end brought relief and friendship. She decided to start over in a new city, and Pittsburgh had felt like home ever since.
“Colin and I were never right for each other,” Mack concluded. “I think we both knew that all along. He’s a sweet guy and the life of every party, but I’m not really one for parties.”
“I thought I was going to be the one with all the surprises,” I said. “But you’ve got me beat. You married Colin Stone, you got breast cancer, you dined with the Flaming Lips. I’m dealing with a lot of stuff here.”
She playfully knocked my shoulder with hers. “I find this proposition of yours rather fascinating. Outlandish, fraught with the potential to backfire and visit upon you even more embarrassment than you’ve already been through. That’s just irresistible. Besides, if you’re really willing to risk your reputation and dive back into the fray, these new songs of yours must be pretty damn good.”
“You overestimate me.”
“A mistake we’ve all made before.”
She buried her head in her hands and made weird little noises while kneading the flesh of her face. Then she popped up. “Screw it. I’m in.”
I eyed her like I hadn’t quite heard correctly.
“It was the bridge of ‘New Morning Azalea’ that sold me,” she said. “I always loved that song.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just now, when we were playing ‘Azalea,’ it hit me. This is fun. I miss this.”
“Are you fucking with me? Are you just really high?”
“My practice can wait. There will always be sex and there will always be people all twisted up about it.”
“You’re coming to this too quickly.” No pun was intended. “Just to be clear, you have cancer.”
“But the goal is to not have it for very long. You kick it out or it kicks you out.”
Assuming things progressed as expected, she had to endure only a handful more chemo treatments. She’d managed to keep her office open throughout this ordeal, although she admitted that there were occasional midsession sprints to the bathroom that she hoped didn’t leave her patients with the impression that their sexual messiness made her sick. So, except for the days when she had to be available for the IV, and the few days thereafter when she had to be available to puke at a moment’s notice, she could probably swing a stint in a band.
“Let’s be honest—in any given week, Jumbo barfs more times than I do anyway,” she posited.
I stared at her, floored. “Mackenzie Highsider, how is it that, as long as I’ve known you, your next move is always a mystery to me?”
“You know my deal,” she cautioned. “You know who I am now, what I’m going through. You know my reasons; they’re not the same as yours. If you still want me, I’m in.”
In the end, that was the root of it for her. Mackenzie’s bass line. She didn’t care about any of the untidy complexity. She just wanted to play music like it didn’t matter what came next. So what if we all needed to dab on some antiwrinkle cream before bedtime? So what if we should all go a little easier on the carbs? So what? Fuck the label and the agent. Fuck the street team and the tour manager. Fuck the Nielsen SoundScan numbers and the whores at the radio stations and the creatively bankrupt sellouts in A&R. Fuck them all. This wasn’t a space shuttle launch. Let’s just play the damn thing.
I curled her hand beneath mine. “For the record, we both know you’ve already read the collected works of Dumas.”
* * *
We strolled across her dew-drizzled lawn toward my car. The cool night air felt good against my face, reviving me with the desire to move. I knew that sleep would remain at bay for hours, so I decided I’d drive home now and arrive before morning.
Mack offered to speak with Colin and get him high on these mad plans of ours. Colin was not only still an A&R muckety-muck at MCA, but he was still tight with Sonny Rivers and, like everyone else on the planet, accepted Sonny’s word as gospel. With Sonny and Alaina having boarded the Tremble train, Colin didn’t stand a chance. This beat-up old gaggle of has-beens just might get a hard look from a major record company. We hadn’t even all been in the same room yet.
I unlocked the car and faced Mackenzie, and as I stared into the eyes in which I knew lay my rescue, I thought of the night so long ago in New York, our fateful collision with that lout from the Junction.
“Did you know Simon Weathers had a thing for
you?” I said.
“What?”
“Simon Weathers. He totally dug you.”
“He did not.”
“He said so himself. Think of it, Mack. If I’d let him anywhere near you, you could be leading a totally different life now, a kept woman in the LA party scene, and doing much better drugs than the sad stash I plucked from my glove compartment.”
There was a pause. Then, “What do you mean, if you’d let him near me?”
“My band was not for the pillaging,” I told her. “You date him, the next thing you know, you’re playing bass for him.”
She yawned, shivered, and pocketed her hands. “I wouldn’t have touched that guy with a ten-foot pole. And you know I hate parties.”
“That’s something I never really got about you,” I said. “You could’ve had a different guy every night.”
She scoffed. “You’re projecting your own stereotypical male fantasy. A different guy every night doesn’t sound interesting to me. It sounds like an awful lot of work.”
“You know what I mean.”
What I meant was, I was right there all along. Could it possibly have been that she’d passed up a parade of rich and famous musicians because of secret, uncomfortable feelings for the guy standing two microphones over on the same stage? Was that anywhere near the truth?”
“That just wasn’t my thing,” she said. “For a guy, the coolest thing about being in a rock band is scoring with women. For me, the coolest thing about being in a rock band was being in a rock band. I loved my instrument and the wonderful sounds that came out of it when we all played together. I loved your songs and I loved how people gave up their evenings and their money to hear us play them. I loved seeing our records in stores. I loved hearing us on the radio. I loved going to Hamburg. I loved waking up in a strange town with the rhythms of life beating all around me while I looked on as an outsider, like a bird on a wire.” Her mouth curved knowingly. “That’s what it was for me. I was happy I did it, and I was fine when it was over. I wasn’t going to run off with Simon Weathers. I wasn’t going to run off with anybody.”
My eyes dropped to the wet blades of grass encircling my shoes. The realization hit me: Mack was not homesick for the Tremble years. She regarded her past with a pleasant nostalgia, an attic of memories best kept as such. She knew what the past was and what it wasn’t.
But worse, Mack wasn’t homesick for me, and that discovery filled me with a horrible emptiness. The torture, the regret, the reverie that I’d lugged with me from year to year because of what happened with this band, because of what happened with Mack—she, wherever in the world she’d been, had never felt it.
I’d seen one flower and invented a jungle.
As I guided my car out of the sleeping neighborhood, past the rows of dark windows and the angular jungle of rooftops, I thought of that afternoon in Arizona, still as fresh to me as if it had happened a week ago. I remembered the two of us waiting for the tow truck, how she sat cross-legged on the hood while I leaned next to her with my arms folded, both of us gazing out at the pink wallpaper sky, a dusty desert wind breathing sand against our clothes. When I turned and placed a hand on each of her legs, gently pulling her toward me by the bend in her knees—and I will never know what fortified me with the courage to do it—there was the briefest resistance, a jolt of surprise in the buckling of her eyebrows. But then her mouth fell into mine. She tilted her head to kiss me, cupping my face in her hands as my arms snaked under her shirt to feel the skin of her hips.
The ride in the tow truck cab was quiet, each of us squinting through the open car window. At the hotel, we stole through a side entrance, making quickly for my room. I remembered the confident way she pulled me across the suite and onto the bed. I remembered the jagged slant of light slicing her midsection as she straddled me and pulled her shirt over her head. I remembered how neither one of us spoke a word. I remembered the rhythmic pulse of her body, how her eyes seemed full of stars.
And I remembered the knock on the door.
Everything changed that night. Distances mushroomed between us and remained there straight on to the end. In losing her in just that way, I gained a fantasy, a delusion that had been my troublesome companion ever since.
I swung by the Best Western to gather my bag and check out. Grabbing a coffee from the burner in the lobby and a pile of shrink-wrapped empty calories from the vending machine, I took to the turnpike feeling like a darkening sky.
With the city lights drifting behind, the land around me became a blindfold, a ribbon of nothingness upon which stark, weather-beaten truths projected themselves. You never know where things are headed, where the veering road will ferry you, the things and people that slip through your fingers when you’re not looking, sometimes even when you are. One minute you’re a young, stupid kid with nothing but time, everything within your control. You have a girlfriend, a beautiful one with Pacific-blue eyes and a glistening mouth. You kiss her on the train platform as she leaves for home. You hold her close and absorb the smell of her cheek, and you watch her waving to you through the window as the train pulls away. But you don’t think to hold on to that moment, to capture the juicy sweetness of her lips and keep it inside you forever, even though she’s leaving for a four-week study program in France. Because you don’t contemplate the guy from San Francisco who takes the seat next to her on the first day of class. They’ll get to talking, he’ll tell her of his plans to explore some cozy town in Brittany with ruins and a winery, and he’ll invite her along. And then, just a brisk four weeks later, she’ll tell you she doesn’t think it’s such a good idea for you to pick her up at the airport.
The next thing you know, you’re calling a strange city your home and you’re calling a grad student your fiancée. You occasionally reflect on the winter weekends with that girl from the train platform, those snug swells of hours, those days when you never got dressed except to venture out into the peppermint cold for pizza and six-dollar bottles of red wine.
The next thing you know, you’ve heard through the grapevine that she has three kids and is living in West Hartford. You imagine that she’s in a book club and all her old friends have been displaced by ones she met at her kids’ schools. One day in November, a song you hear on your morning run makes you think of that last moment when you let her get onto that train and out of your grasp forever, and you wonder if any of those feelings, those tastes and smells, alive and true as they once felt, ever meant anything at all. You imagine that she thinks of you too every now and again, probably as she’s making lunches or gauging the fit of her sweater in her walk-in closet mirror. You’ll never see each other again—never—for the rest of your lives. But for one night, twenty-six years after she left, you’ll both sleep in the same Marriott in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You’ll spend the night four rooms apart and never know it.
The ache you feel, alone on an empty highway after midnight, is the pull of everything forever moving away from you.
There is a danger in pining for people, in pining for things, in confusing who you are with what you want. You lose yourself in it. You lose yourself.
* * *
Somewhere deep in Pennsylvania, I sent a text to Sara’s phone, knowing that by the time she read it, it would be moot:
“Change of plans. Coming home tonight. Too late to call. Really wanted to hear your voice.”
I was surprised to consider those words and realize how true they felt.
In the face of all the changes being hurled in her direction, Sara had not buried her face in her pillow and hidden from the world. She seemed instead to be learning how to move on. I didn’t know how far she was capable of moving, or in what direction. But maybe in that singular way, each of us hot and sweaty with the power to change, the will to weigh our anchors and sail on, Sara and I were more alike now than ever.
CHAPTER 18
The next few days were like walkin
g through a low-lying cloud that refused to lift. I was unable to think about music or the band or any of my fellow travelers without seeing it all in stale, washed-out tones. The vibrancy had drained from the music, and I no longer saw the point in any of it. Someone else could do this.
I moped around the condo. I bought a container of Laughing Cow cheese at the convenience store across the street and consumed all eight wedges while watching the second half of The Shawshank Redemption on AMC. I tagged along with Sara to a market in North Philly that sold some type of Tunisian olive oil she’d read about. I spackled a hole in the bathroom wall where a towel hook had come loose. I got thirty pages into a John le Carré novel, then realized I’d read it before. I caught the first half of The Shawshank Redemption on AMC. I tagged along with Sara to the tailor to have some pants altered. Every time the band seeped into my thoughts, I avoided it by emptying the dishwasher or spraying cleanser on the balcony furniture.
What a profound letdown: to face the realization that someone who had entangled you for so many years and for so many reasons hadn’t suffered a moment’s entanglement by you.
Finally, I boarded a train for New York.
Coiled in her leather chair and rising over her desk like a cobra, Alaina Farber waited. She waited to hear how I’d gone about conscripting my three old soldiers. She waited for me to hand her another disc with yet more songs that would render her awestruck. She waited to share with me her plan for conquering the world.
“I’m not so sure I want to do this,” I told her.
“Not so sure you want to do what?”
“This. This whole thing. Tremble.”
“What are you talking about?”
Sinking deeper into my chair, I crossed my legs and took note of a fresh scuff that pushed my shoe past charmingly distressed and into the territory of vagrantly worn. “I might have made a mistake.”
“What’s going on? The pressures of fame getting to you? Is it all too much? You miss your anonymity, the ability to sit down in a Bertucci’s for a nice leisurely pie without being badgered?”
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