“Yeah, well, we’ll see how it goes.”
“That’s huge. Huge,” Josie affirmed. “I’m so proud of you.”
“You are?”
“It takes serious guts to commit to something you love.” She slapped my cheek lightly with her one free hand. “You’ll never regret it.”
And yet regret was the emotion that was most prominent in the mix these days.
Wynne sauntered up to me. “Where’s Sara?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I thought she’d be here.” I consulted the phone in my palm but saw no response to my text.
Ravi, from Sara’s office, was there, his connection to the proceedings unclear. Next to him, and already as tall, was his twelve-year-old son, Pritham. Despite shuffling with embarrassment at the fact of his father’s existence, to say nothing of the unique shade of his old man’s sport coat—it was the color of poorly applied spray tan—the kid never ventured away from his dad’s side.
“Have you seen Sara?” I asked Ravi.
He shook his head. “By the time I left the office, she was already gone.” He touched his son’s forearm. “You know, Pritham, this man used to be in a very famous band. In the mideighties, right, Teddy?”
I winced. “Thanks, Ravi.”
Pritham bobbed mechanically. “Cool beans.” Then, at his dad’s prodding, he proceeded to regale me with captivating tales of soccer camp.
A little while later, both concerned and suspicious about Sara’s whereabouts, I decided to call her. I stood in a quiet corner of the living room beside a sketch of a bull standing on its hind legs, a lonely lightbulb dangling over the bull’s head. The animal stared back at me with wry self-awareness, as if he understood just how out of place he was in this drawing. It struck me that every single human being who took in that arresting little sketch must have felt an instant connection to it, thinking, Okay, tell me again how I ended up here.
Before my phone had reached across the airwaves and rung Sara’s, I heard Wynne’s voice lilting behind me. “Teddy, look what the cat dragged in.”
I spun around and saw Sara. She was elegantly dressed in a long brown leather skirt and a white blouse unbuttoned at the top. Either she’d already been equipped with a glass of white or she’d driven over with it in her hand.
“Teddy.” Sara gaped at me like I was an obsessed extramarital one-night stand who’d started showing up at her kid’s Little League games. “I had no idea you were coming.”
“Apparently,” I said.
“Well, ain’t this a kick in the ass,” Wynne hooted. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you two in the same room. I was beginning to think you were the same person, like maybe Sara was Teddy in drag or something.”
I pulled back the edges of my mouth. “I’d rather you leave me out of your weird little fantasies, if it’s all the same to you.”
Sara looked at me and collapsed her forehead into the bridge of her nose. This was code for What gives?
“We finished up early at the studio, so I figured I’d surprise you,” I explained. “Where were you?”
“At a client’s,” she said. “You should’ve told me you were coming.”
I eyed her carefully, sussing out clues of deception. Josie and Wynne’s studio was obviously unavailable to her as an alibi tonight. The only other place she could’ve been was with Billy, of whom she spoke only in the most elliptical of terms. My periodic inquiries into the status of the divorce had been met with shallow nonanswers, unremitting evasiveness. Something else that was none of my fucking business.
We were joined by Josie, who was leading her mother over by the wrist. “You met Teddy, Mom, but this,” our hostess said grandly, “is Sara. Sara Rome.”
Josie’s mother, a peppy little dumpling, practically exploded. “Of course! The interior designer. Aren’t you adorable!”
“Congratulations,” Sara said. “Miguel’s beautiful.”
The little round woman clutched her heart with great theater. “Is he not the most precious thing you’ve ever seen?”
Then she proceeded to catalog all her favorite decorative strokes around the house that Sara had authored. Sara modestly accepted the compliments, though she did point to the painting above the fireplace, a blighted wintry street scene, and remarked, “I still think the Vincenzo goes there.”
“I know I’ve said this a zillion times to Josephine, but I’m getting your number tonight. Mel and I haven’t updated in thirty years.”
When Josie’s mother scooted away to attend to her suddenly irritable grandson, I noticed Sara staring at something over my shoulder, something drawing her attention between her increasingly aggressive sips of wine. Finally, when her furtive glances had elevated to the point of obviousness, I turned and followed her eyes, discovering that the object of her absorption was Pritham, Ravi’s twelve-year-old. It didn’t take long for me to realize why.
“I didn’t know Ravi had a son,” I said to her carefully.
“Yes, you did. And he has three.”
“Anyway. You look really pretty tonight.”
She smiled at me as if finally buying into the suitability of my presence there.
Then, a strange look overtook her face, and she snatched my hand and tugged me out of the room. Toward the back of the house we moved hurriedly, past the island in the kitchen where a stack of dirty plates leaned precariously by the sink.
Sara opened a door and flicked on a light. We stood atop a rickety staircase.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
A finger to her lips, she pulled the door closed behind us and led me down the steps. The cellar was furnished with a sprawling old mushroom of a sofa, presumably deposited there to live out the end of its life in peace, and was floored with a red Persian rug that fueled the illusion that the entire basement could levitate as if on a magic carpet.
My attention was instantly hooked by a pearly iridescence under track lighting at the back of the room. I looked over and beheld an array of mosaics suspended across the walls. They were gorgeous, mesmerizing creations, some ovoid, some rectangular, one shaped like a starfish, another the female form. Each consisted of hundreds of glass tiles bursting with color, exploding with light.
“Did Josie do all these?” I asked, marveling.
“And Wynne. They were reluctant to hang them, but I insisted.”
I watched Sara adore her friends’ art, her lips pursed in placid wonder.
“They’re amazing,” I said.
“Get closer. The detail is staggering. You can really lose yourself in them.” She pointed to a large rectangular piece farther down the wall. “I think that one’s my favorite.”
It was a silhouette of a solitary tree on a hill, the evening sky behind it rendered in swirling layers of orange, yellow, pink, and purple. A circular mirror was positioned high in the right corner to signify the moon.
“This is what you do when you’re hanging out at their studio,” I said, as much to myself as to her.
Sara nodded weakly. “Sort of. They do it much better, obviously.”
It wasn’t obvious to me. I’d seen her mosaics and had always felt some kind of power emanating from them. I’d seen my reflection in the tiny mirrors, I’d been swept into the meticulously ordered randomness of the tiles. For someone who’d always had to pretend to love art, it came surprisingly easy to me to love Sara’s.
“You’re a good artist, Sara. And I really like that I live with one.”
A concealed smile glowed just beneath her cheeks. “Me too.”
We hung around the party for another half hour or so, and Sara didn’t let go of my hand the entire time. As we were leaving, Wynne walked us to the door and said, “I sure hope the rest of these jackasses follow your lead. We’re trying to get Miguel on a fucking sleep schedule here.”
Having consumed two glasses o
f wine, Sara declared herself unfit for the wheel and decided to drive home with me. We strolled down the street to where my car sat cradled under a curbside beech tree. Before I could turn the ignition, Sara reached out, gripped my face with two hands, and pulled me into a long kiss. The taste of her mouth, so eager, so present, was almost unrecognizable to me.
Her hands disappeared, and soon I felt the button of my jeans unhook and my zipper being yanked down.
“Whoa,” I blurted out. “Here?”
She looked at me, wild and slinky through her mane of black hair.
“We’re at a baby shower,” I said.
She leaned over and I felt her tongue in my ear. “It’s not a baby shower.”
As she probed for the fly of my boxers, I peered through the windows. “I don’t know about this. Half your office will be coming through that door in five minutes.”
“So?” came her defiant reply. And just as I scolded myself—What kind of musician are you?—I realized it was too late to unshame her. With a sigh, she fell back into the passenger seat, a blend of depletion and bewilderment on her face. She was the bull on hind legs in the painting. Okay, tell me again how I ended up here.
“I don’t know what you want us to be,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t know if you want us to be.”
For most of the drive, she sat in silence with her elbow angled against the door. Passing fits of light swept through the car and corrupted the darkness inside. As we exited the highway and glided through the city streets, which were now hissing under us with a smoky sheen of light rain, she spoke quietly to the window. “I got divorced today.”
I felt a sudden clenching in my chest.
“Jesus. Are you okay?”
She said nothing and leaned her forehead against the cool glass, oblivious to the high-rises, brownstones, and occasional late-night dog walkers gliding past. As for me, I didn’t know exactly what I was feeling. Fear. Relief. The disquiet of a belated revelation.
“You should’ve told me,” I said. “I could’ve come with you.”
I, who in her eyes didn’t know what I wanted us to be, didn’t know if I wanted us to be.
“It’s okay,” she said, her breath shaky but rising with hopefulness. Her mind was drifting back to the lawyer’s office where they’d signed the papers today. Drifting to Billy and away from me.
CHAPTER 22
“Listen—it’s not enough to be good. We have an obligation to be interesting, to not be obvious.”
That afternoon, Sonny was all up in Jumbo’s grill. It was validating whenever another human being reprimanded or otherwise lost his or her patience with our guitar player.
“We know you’re technically proficient,” Sonny went on, as Jumbo blinked out at him from the recording booth. “Who cares? Technical proficiency does nothing for me. You’re in my studio because of your ability to make choices with that there Strat, because of this instinct of yours about what should be done, not just what can be done. I’m not hearing that decision making on this song. You’re boring the shit out of me. What you’re playing me I can find in any old McDonald’s.” He pronounced it MacDonald’s. “Don’t bring fast food into my studio. I want a Moroccan market at midnight! Take me to an outdoor churrascaria on the beaches of Rio and serve me something that sizzles!”
Jumbo began to nod, his fleshy face ballooning into a cocksure grin. “I totally get it now. You’re looking for a Latin vibe.”
Warren and I decided that was a good time for a walk.
“Any word from Mack?” he asked, as we stood at the counter of the coffee shop down the street. Our bass player had traveled back to Pittsburgh for a follow-up visit with her oncologist.
“Not yet,” I said. “But she wasn’t worried. She says she’s been feeling like a million bucks.”
I knocked twice on the counter and Warren held up two crossed fingers.
“Look, I can’t believe you talked any of us into doing this,” Warren said. “But Mack? She had the best reason to pass.”
“Or maybe the best reason not to,” I suggested.
We dropped into the chrome fifties-era diner chairs and creaked backward from the Formica table. The dull murmurs from the two or three other patrons afforded our eardrums a much-needed respite. We lazed at the table, staring out the window.
“Going well so far, wouldn’t you say?” Warren ventured.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” I said tepidly. Confidence was an emotion well out of reach for someone of my particular station.
“You’re aware of the irony here, right? Your optimism is always cautious, your enthusiasm always guarded. Yet you’re the songwriter, the one we rely on for passion, for fire!”
“I got fired up over my so-called legacy, did I not?”
“A colossal abuse of the word, I admit, but I’m clearly overpaying my penance for that phone call.”
He took a slow sip of coffee, then leaned back professorially. “You ever hear of Henri Rousseau?”
“Sure. The French artist. The guy who painted jungles.”
“I teach my students about him. We study a lot of his work—The Dream, Tiger in a Tropical Storm, Eve and the Serpent—and we talk about primitivism, painting in the naïve style. Rousseau takes you into the forest through a child’s eyes. It’s dense and exotic, there are wild animals and fleshy naked women, all painted with bold colors, all seductive and fantastical.”
I sipped as the art teacher evangelized.
“Here’s my question to you,” he said. “Do you know which actual jungles he was painting? Which jungles Rousseau visited for inspiration?”
I shook my head.
“Not a one,” Warren answered. “Henri never left France. This man, famous for painting the world’s lush jungles, never actually saw one. The botanical gardens in Paris were probably the closest he ever got.”
“What are you trying to say? What’s the big lesson here, teach?”
“I’m just talking, Teddy. I’m not trying to teach you anything,” he said with an oblique deadpan. “But sometimes there’s a lot of real estate between a man and his legacy—wouldn’t you say?”
“That’s a terrible example, Square. Rousseau had the opposite problem. His legacy exceeded his experience. He had nothing to correct—wouldn’t you say?”
“So what’s more important—the way you spend your days on this earth or the way posterity views it?” Warren posed. “Your life or your legacy?”
“One of them is around a lot longer.”
“They both die, dummy.”
I reclined and kicked my heel onto a neighboring chair. “See? You are trying to teach me something.”
“I couldn’t if I tried.”
* * *
Then one morning, with an unvarnished lack of ceremony, Sonny brought down the curtain. A prelunch sluggishness had set in. Warren and Mack had just returned from a bakery, and we were all milling about near the mushy banana of a sofa while Sonny frowned under his headphones, listening, concentrating, occasionally adjusting volume levels. Eventually, he stood and faced us.
“That’ll do it.”
“What’s next?” I asked.
“Nothing’s next.” He broke off a corner of Warren’s lemon poppy seed scone. “Pack up. We’re done.”
We all exchanged uneasy glances. Despite weeks of hard labor, abuse of both the verbal and physical varieties, I hadn’t quite arrived at a place where any of this felt complete.
“Done, as in finished?” Warren asked.
“You’re happy with it?” I ventured.
The producer shot me a cool look, as if the state of his happiness was any of my goddamn business.
The tracks still needed to be mixed, mastered, and otherwise tamed into something that sounded complete. But now it was Alaina’s show. Her long fingers tapping together in a Bond villain power
triangle, she’d concoct the ultimate scheme for world domination, which, in this instance, entailed channeling our product into the crowded bay of musical relevancy. She would know the variables that dictated in whose lap to park the tapes—or park herself, if need be. She would know that signing with one record company meant that only the younger demographic would hear about us and that signing with another ensured that they never would. While examining her nails, Alaina would stoke her own fires of cunning invention. She’d first dangle the masterpiece in front of Colin Stone at MCA; he’d earned it, having cohabitated with the bassist. If Colin passed, there was George Glick, the big fat windbag at Interscope who hit on her at Bonnaroo last year and apparently thought her standards dropped whenever she entered Tennessee airspace. If George passed, there was the Weasel, Clay Hapgood, who was still at Capitol, still making mountains of misjudgments, and who would do anything Alaina asked because he still regretted passing on Regina Spektor.
That was for another day. For now, no further instruments or voices were required to realize the dozen or so songs that would become Tremble’s comeback album. Our anticlimactic ending was upon us. Mackenzie was the first to start gathering her gear.
“I’m sure going to miss this place,” Jumbo said mawkishly.
Sonny stared at him. “Not everything is worthy of sentimentality.”
Within a few hours, we’d sleeved our cables, committed our guitars and drums to their cases, and loaded up our cars. The afternoon was thick with all the promise and ambivalence of a college graduation.
Outside, I slammed Mack’s trunk shut and dusted off my hands. She was headed downtown to empty out her Old City sublet and hoped to be heading westward through a turnpike tollbooth by rush hour. As she squinted up at me, I suddenly felt that this was all over too soon.
“The next few months could be quiet, what with Alaina working her tawdry magic,” I said. “In the meantime, we’ll probably have to start thinking about our live show. I guess that means we’ll be seeing more of each other.”
Mack smiled down at her blue suede Adidases. “That was the idea, wasn’t it?”
Thank You, Goodnight Page 28