I Think I Love You

by Allison Pearson

  “Rubbish. How can you say that?”

  “It’s true. She’s better and she’s happier.” Petra sipped her vodka. “Better because she’s happier.”

  “Is that how it works?”

  “Oh yes. People always say, oh, do good and it’ll make you happy, but that’s the wrong way round, isn’t it? Contented people are just more likely to do good, they’re more … equipped for it. They don’t have to work themselves up to it, it just comes naturally. I mean, look at her. Look at them.”

  The attendant had departed, deeply bewildered by the in-depth discussion of salmon roulade, and Sharon was talking, with great animation, to the couple across the aisle. They were matching human beings: outsized but cheery, the bulk of them overflowing the seats, even these larger ones in business class. Both wore shirts of a deafening loudness, as if they were already in Las Vegas, not nine hours away. Both were drinking small bottles of champagne, their second bottle each. Their free hands, the ones not holding their drinks, were clasped together on the armrest.

  “I think they might be married,” Bill said.

  “Noooo!” said the woman to Sharon. She turned to her husband. “Hear that, Mr. J?”

  “There you go,” said Bill quietly. “She’s Mrs. J.” Petra stifled a laugh.

  “Guess what this lady’s doing in Vegas. You’ll never guess.”

  “Gamblin’,” said Mr. J, and shook merrily at his own wit.

  “No, silly, much better than that. Guess who she’s going to meet, her and her friends here.”

  “Give up,” said the husband, instantly.

  “Only David Cassidy, in’t it? David bloody Cassidy. I love that little fella.”

  “Number fifty-three,” said Mr. J.

  “Is it really? Fifty-three? Well, there you go, then. He’s coming back up. Well, I never.”

  It was Petra’s turn to lean across. “Excuse me, but I couldn’t help overhearing. Who’s number fifty-three?”

  “David is. Sorry, love, sounds a bit mysteeerious, don’t it?” The woman had an audience now. Half the cabin was listening intently, and the other half had no choice. “My husband here, he’s, well, he’s in the ringtone sector. You know, like on mobiles. ‘King of the Ringtones,’ that’s what the local paper said. And we have a chart, like, which songs are people choosing this week to put on their phones. And Mr. J was just saying that your David Cassidy, he’s up to fifty-three this week. Not bad, eh? I mean, especially seeing how old he must be. Wearing well, is he?”

  “Bloody well hope so,” said Sharon, opening a packet of pretzels. “Not going all that way to see someone who looks like my grandad, are we?”

  “Which song is it?” Petra asked. “In your chart.”

  “ ‘I Think I Love You.’ Obvious, really,” said Mr. J.

  “Completely,” said Petra. “Great song. Never dates.”

  “Mind you,” he went on, “someone told me this funny thing at the office last week. Happened to a friend of his, his wife, right? Big Cassidy fan, all the way back. Anyway, she’s at the doctor’s, okay? Not just any old doctor’s, either. Gyny whatnot.”

  “Mr. J!”

  “So, she takes off her togs, puts her handbag down, with the phone in it, not switched off, and the gyny fella’s got his little, what do they call it? Speculation?”

  “Speculum,” said Petra, who knew it well.

  “That’s the job. Anyway, he’s got his speculum, right, and he’s having a proper feel, like you do—no, Marjorie, they got to hear this, let me finish—and he’s just saying, ‘Does it hurt,’ you know, ‘I do hope you’re not feeling any pain,’ all polite, and at that moment …” Mr. J paused to wipe his eyes, already overcome. “At that exact moment her phone, the one in her bag, starts going, ‘I think I love you’ …” Mr. J sang it to them, in a strong bass. “And this bird, she hears this ringtone, right, number fifty-three, and it’s just so wrong, for where she is, that she laughs, like really, really loud. And the poor doc, he gets shot out of her backwards, like a cork out of a bottle, she says, and his speculator comes flying out, too, and he bangs his head on the door. And she says, quick as a flash, ‘I do …’ ” Mr. J was uncontrolled by now, quivering in every corner of his frame, his wife beside him doing the same. “She says, all polite like, ‘I do hope you’re not feeling any pain.’ I mean, you’ve got to laugh, an’t you?”

  Sharon was spraying pretzels over the aisle. Petra sat back.

  “I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to hear that song in quite the same way again.”

  Bill looked at her and said, “All things considered, I don’t think we should tell David Cassidy what happened to his song.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He might be thrilled. He always wanted to reach out to his fans. Just not into them.” Petra had finished her drink, both bottles. Her tongue felt loose. She rattled the ice. “Anyway, what’s the plan when we get there?”

  “Well, tonight, just as your body wants to go to sleep, your spirit has to get up and go and see David sing.”

  “Oh, I think I can manage that.”

  “And then tomorrow morning, at eleven thirty, depending on whether or not we can drag Sharon away from her all-night blackjack session, we go and meet David. Meet and greet, take a few snaps, sign autographs, that kind of thing. We won’t have that long with him, I suspect, but still. The good news is he’s staying at the same hotel as us.”

  Petra closes her eyes. A quarter of a century ago, the news that she would be spending the night in the same hotel as David Cassidy would have made her faint clean away.

  “Tonight is a special,” Bill was saying. “One-man show, I guess; he stands there and belts out all the golden oldies.”

  “You mean to all the golden oldies.”

  “That’s us. Most nights he’s in some stage show called, wait for it, EFX.”

  “Effects?”

  “No, spelled out, like E-F-X. Lots of dry ice and lasers and new songs. That’s why we timed the trip to coincide with the show he’s doing tonight. More your thing.”

  “Very good of you.”

  “Oh no, purely selfish. Gives me more to write about.”

  The meals had arrived. Sharon had already dropped half a roll and was trying to open a sachet of salad dressing.

  “Take cover,” said Petra to Bill.

  Across the aisle, Mr. and Mrs. J were clinking glasses and proposing a toast to the assembled company.

  “To David Cassidy.”

  “To David Cassidy,” said Petra, raising her empty glass. “Bill?”

  Bill gave a long sigh, as if suffering from an old wound, and lifted his tomato juice.

  “To David Cassidy,” he said. “And Zelda, who art in heaven.”

  Petra smiled, and touched her glass to his. “To Zelda.”

  19

  He is five minutes late. Five minutes and twenty-four years. The Welshwomen, for the second time in their lives, are surrounded by their love rivals. It’s not as big a crowd as turned out for David at White City in 1974, maybe only a few hundred, and there are no screams tonight, just the occasional shriek, as if someone had seen a mouse, followed by gales of embarrassed womanly laughter. Looking round the audience, Petra is surprised at how emotional she feels. Jet lag may be making her feel a bit weepy, but it’s more than that. Many of the women here look like survivors. She can see at least two whose tufted baldness shows that they have had cancer, and may still have it. All of the Cassidy girls have entered the age of grief, that time when life’s losses start to stack up. Few will have been spared. Count yourself lucky if you get to your mid-thirties without knowing death, divorce or other species of grief.

  Some of the fans have brought their daughters along, and Petra suddenly wishes Molly were by her side. When they spoke on the phone earlier, Mol reported happily that Carrie had made her waffles and maple syrup for breakfast. She loves anything American because it brings her closer to Leo DiCaprio.

  “Love you, Mum,” Molly said. It was worth flying t
housands of miles just to hear that. Petra thinks of emotion recollected in tranquillity, of all the women like her in this auditorium who are looking back on their thirteen-year-old selves, on the pressure of all that yearning. Wanting to be loved so badly. That was the great engine of life, revving up back then, if only they’d known it. And how many are thinking of what happened, and what didn’t happen, in the years between then and now?

  “Where is he?” she asks. “Why isn’t he here yet?”

  “Oh, he’ll be here,” said Sharon. “Don’t you worry.”

  “Oh, I’m not worried. He’s a grown-up, he can take care of himself. D’you think any men are really grown up?”

  Sharon thinks about it. “Well, I thought my dad was, but then I caught him on the PlayStation with David—”

  “Your David. Not this one.”

  “My David, yeah. We don’t really get David Cassidy coming round too often to play Donkey Kong. Funny, that.”

  “Marcus never came to any of my recitals. I mean, what else is he doing with his life? What’s so important that he couldn’t come and listen to a thirty-year-old Welshwoman playing Debussy on a Tuesday lunchtime? In a crypt?”

  “Too busy with his Donkey Kong, that’s what I heard.” One of the best things about Sharon, Petra had long thought, was that she genuinely found her own jokes more appealing than anyone else’s. There was no ill will toward other people, not a trace of selfishness; in her eyes, she was just funnier. She laughed now, and the sound of it—clear as a bell, dirty as a rugby match—turned heads all along their row.

  “Shh now, everyone’s looking at us,” said Petra.

  “Pet, this is Las Vegas. There are lions in the lobby. Real live ones. No one’s gonna look at us, are they?”

  “They’re not in the lobby. Not like chatting to the concierge.”

  “No, but did you see them in that bit with the glass ceiling? Got the shock of my life, I did, when I looked up. Like bloody Daktari in here it is.”

  “It’s because it’s MGM.”

  “What?”

  “You know, like the lion that roars at the start of the films? That’s why they have them here.”

  “Oh, right you are,” said Sharon. “Tell you what—lucky it isn’t J. Arthur Rank, eh? Look up and see some nudie bloke in a nappy banging his gong.”

  “I’m sure it can be arranged, ma’am.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the MGM Grand Las Vegas is proud to present …” As the voice boomed, the lights died down.

  “Where is he?” Petra said again.

  “Just coming, isn’t he? Just getting into his catsuit. Probably a bit tight these days. Needs a shoehorn.”

  “Not him. Bill.”

  Sharon considered her friend through the gloom. “Get you.”

  Bill was lost. That put him one step further down the line than most of the people around him, who were merely losing. Some were losing their savings, their mortgages, their plans for the future; others were losing twenty dollars and calling it a night, although night and day had no purchase in this place, no meaning at all. Some were just losing their shirts, and, it had to be said, most of the shirts were worth losing. “The size of four football fields,” the brochure had said, and, indeed, the greensward of baize, table after table, stretched out to a horizon that you would never reach; was there one lonely guy, somewhere over there, peacefully playing craps against a wall? At least in football there were time restrictions, but here there was no end of play; no midfield, no defense, no more than the illusion of a win, just one damn loss after another. Everyone was having a fine time.

  Just to add to the confusion, Bill had left his watch in the room. He was due to meet Petra and Sharon at seven thirty, for the start of the concert. They had checked in, left their bags in the room and headed straight out, Sharon having announced that she would be dining out on the next two days for the rest of her life and that, not unreasonably, she would not be wasting a second of them, certainly not on anything dull and wasteful as sleep. Bill, meanwhile, had collapsed on his bed and lain there, hands by his sides, eyes closed, as if in a well-appointed morgue.

  Flying drained him, but it was more than that. He hadn’t quite understood his own reasons for coming on this trip; there was no need for him here, he didn’t have to write a piece, there was a decent writer already lined up. Now he knew the reasons. You drift along, he told himself, into the doldrums of your mid-forties, with a job you like but could never love; with a loud, distracting marriage behind you, a marriage that ran down like a radio; with an address book of old girlfriends whom you think about and very occasionally call, but who, you can be fairly sure, hardly ever think of you at all (listen to their voices when they hear yours, surprised without joy); with everything to live on and precious little to live for; with more of a life, in short, than millions have, and to claim otherwise would be ungrateful, and yet … It wasn’t the life, was it, for which you had hoped, and of which the old songs sang? And then, out of nowhere—

  “I beg your pardon, sir. Coming by!” A waitress sailed past with a tray of drinks. Bill stopped her.

  “I’m so sorry, do you by any chance have the time?”

  “Are you British? You are so British.” She said this with good humor, no scorn in her tone at all, despite having identified him as a joke. And England was a joke, wasn’t it? Sport that went on for five days without a result, separate hot and cold taps, hotels without lions …

  “It’s a quarter of eight,” she said, pointing out the large clock ten yards away, above a dealer’s head. She didn’t get why Bill hadn’t noticed it; was this British guy trying to pick her up? He looked kinda nice. Jeff Bridges before Jeff took to hiding that gorgeous face of his behind weirdo beards. Another time. He thanked her, she thanked him back and sailed on.

  Christ, he was late. Where did the time go? You could buy most things in this town; maybe you could buy back time here, too, stake everything you had on retrieving that all-important twenty minutes … You could get married in twenty minutes here and regret it for twenty years. Or never regret it. He turned and ran—not too fast, he didn’t want to be collared and stopped for stealing chips. A security guard blocked his path.

  “Sir? May I help you.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. The Cassidy concert, I’m late. I’m meeting my, my friends there. Is it far?”

  “Okay, you want to go past KÀ.”

  “Past a car?”

  “KÀ, sir. Our world-famous effects extravaganza by Cirque du Soleil, exclusive to MGM Grand.”

  “Fine, where is … car?” Bill found it hard to speak at moments like this.

  “You want to make a left past those doors, then a hundred yards down, past KÀ, like I say, then follow the signs. Our automated walkway will assist you—”

  “Thanks, bye,” said Bill, in one breath, and took off. He found the entrance to the concert, and was told to wait at the back until the next break in the songs. After the dazzle of the gaming floor and the permanent noon of the hotel corridors, it felt like midnight in here, and Bill was glad for the rest, not wanting to grope his way through the dark as if newly blind. David was onstage, under a couple of spotlights, with a band half hidden behind him. He was singing something that Bill hadn’t listened to, intentionally, for twenty-four years.

  You don’t know how many times

  I wished that I could hold you.

  You don’t know how many times

  I wished that I could mold you …

  Not bad. The voice was in good shape. Taken the melody down at one or two, perhaps, so as not to risk a strain or a crack on the peak of “hold you, mold you.” Never the best rhyme in the world, that one: made girls sound like pots. Bill looked at David’s audience. How many men out there? A couple of dozen, among the hundreds of women? Who was it, which bunch of guys had landed on an island populated by women only? Something in the furthest nook of Bill’s memory turned up the word Argonauts. That was it: Jason and the boys, landing on Lemnos, outnumbered
by the other sex but unable to hang around, having to move on. There was a golden fleece to find … How many guys had accompanied women to see David Cassidy down the years in the faint hope that some of that cherishing might come their way? Crumbs off the love god’s table. Crumbs would be okay, no shame in crumbs if you were famished.

  Where was she? He couldn’t find Petra. Petra and Sharon, that is. Must be there somewhere. They wouldn’t have been late like him, not after waiting this long. At last he picked them out, half visible beside a row of five large ladies in matching green T-shirts. He sidled a yard down the aisle for a better angle, so that he could see Petra from the side. She was gazing at the stage with gleaming eyes, hands in her lap, swaying gently. He couldn’t see her feet, but he guessed they were tapping up and down. Sharon’s, too, most likely, but she was leaning farther forward, half out of her seat, hands clasped tightly together at her breast, like a young girl at her First Communion. She wore a smile of unmistakable rapture. As the song closed, the two of them, together with the rest of the crowd, took to their feet as if springs had gone off underneath them—hands over their heads, a blur of clapping right across the room. The singer took it well, his gratitude uncomplicated, nothing wistful about it; what did David’s expression look like, right now? It looked like Sharon’s.

  With a glance at the usher, who nodded, Bill set off. He passed through the cheers, plowing a path down the aisle between waves of adoring women; none were looking at him, or were even aware of his passing, but yet, for a fraction of a second, he had a fraction of a sense of what it must be like—how it was, to be among the wants of the world. The only people who sneered at acclaim, he thought, were those who had had it and lost it, or grown too old and weary to enjoy it; or shy souls who shrank from the very thought of being known by more people than they knew. The ones you never heard from were the figures at the heart of the applause, the ones who could have told you, not in retrospect or hope, but face-to-face, with the fans going nuts: Look at me being loved. Be honest now; tell me you do not want this madness for yourself.