Louder Than Love

by Topper, Jessica

  13 de Agosto

  August rolled in, oppressive and long. Abbey was enjoying summer camp during the weekdays, but we were always at a loss with ourselves come the weekend. My sweet girl no longer asked to watch Maxwell MacGillikitty. And she no longer asked about Adrian. I must’ve worked through my stages of grief from sadness to anger. Because any time I thought of him, I wanted to burn the second floor of my house down, eliminating all evidence of my loss.

  “Come to the city, doll.” Liz was insistent. Luke and Kimon were taking Abbey to Cape May for the weekend to give me some “me” time, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them I wasn’t very good company to myself. I was grateful for Liz and her plan to find a cozy Irish bar for us to relax in and have a few drinks.

  We ended up at a dance club in Washington Heights after meeting some Argentinean soccer players with really nice legs at the Irish bar. Clubbing was the last thing I was in the mood for, and I knew it was a mistake the moment we walked in to the pulsating lights and pumping pop music. Liz tried to sway me, pointing out one cute guy after another. I didn’t want to hit on anyone or be hit upon. I was rude to any member of the male tribe who came near and gave fake names to anyone who asked. “Your friend Ingeborg needs to lighten up,” one guy informed Liz as I laughed from behind my drink.

  “Tree, come on. Let’s have some fun. Dance with me.” Liz pulled on my hand, shaking her rump and trying to sway me out onto the dance floor.

  “Let’s dance with that guy.” I pointed to a dark-haired guy wearing a Corroded Corpse T-shirt.

  “Oh, come on. He’s barely legal. And I am sure he is wearing that shirt to be ironic. Oh, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs! I love this band!” She started swinging her arms to the Latin rock beat and, not surprisingly, she had a fabuloso dance partner in no time.

  “Miz Katrina! You come dancing here?” It was Ana. Adrian’s cleaning girl had traded in her sweats and flip-flops for a cute dress and crazy-high heels. The only thing I recognized on her was the little cross of gold at her neck. She explained she was here celebrating her brother’s birthday, and proceeded to point out every friend and relative, including the birthday boy himself, Santino, Liz’s current dance partner. Whistles and drums and trumpets were blaring, and people were partying like it was Carnival in Rio.

  “How is he?” She was my only lifeline to Adrian, and I needed to know.

  “Senhor Graves, he been in a bad mood. I worry for him . . . He drinking a lot.” Her thick arched brow furrowed. “For a time he only come out of the bedroom when I do the cleaning of it, but now, he no even let me in the room to clean it. He stay in there now, most time.” Her hands fluttered anxiously as she continued in the best English she could. “Yesterday I see a man let himself out the big door as I come in, man with tattoos all over . . . Oh, he even had his head tattooed, looking like he want to swallow me whole and he carrying plastic baggie full of needles and I scared for Senhor Graves. I knock on door of bedroom, he not answer. I hear the loud music he plays, he turn it on and off, so I know he alive in there. But he no want to talk to anyone. Is so sad, Miz Katrina. I scared for him. You can’t talk to him?”

  “Ana, I tried. He won’t speak to me.”

  The young girl shook her head and said something in her native tongue. She crossed herself. “I know sound silly. But I put broom behind the front door, keep away bad visits. Old trick in my country, superstição—how you say that?”

  “Superstition?”

  “Yes. I try not to think of him alone today. 13 de Agosto.” Her full lips quivered with the words. I realized what she meant—it was Friday the Thirteenth. “This month, August. Agosto, like desgosto. Your word is, I think, sorrow, no? Unluckiest.”

  We hugged each other because there was nothing else left to do or say. I saw Ana’s brother and Liz looking at us quizzically from the dance floor and motioning for us to join them. I wasn’t quite sure how or if we should explain how we knew each other.

  “‘El Matador’!” Ana brightened. “Is my favorite song. Come!”

  She introduced her brother to me over the loud music, and he grinned, arms around Liz’s waist as he swayed her to the trumpets and the “hey, hey” chorus. I danced, eyes closed, allowing myself to get lost in the unfamiliar tongue and beats. Keeping me from thinking about desgosto. Sorrow. I saw myself down at the shore of the lake. I heard him sing.

  Lures me to her like a matador . . .

  “Oh Tree, I know you don’t want to be here. I don’t, either. This sucks.” Liz and I tumbled out of the club as the next song cued. “Come on, let’s go. Anywhere, your choice. We can go home; I’ve got a whole box of Beard Papa at my place. Or we can go to Junior’s. Anywhere you want.”

  “I don’t want cream puffs, I don’t want cheesecake. I just want Adrian.”

  “Tree, don’t do this to yourself . . . please, don’t. Look. What he did was cruel and cowardly.” We had a stare-down on 125th Street. “Nothing you did—or didn’t do—deserved such treatment. Let him hide in his fancy penthouse, or behind whatever facade his stupid stage name has built back up. It’s time to move on.”

  I had no reserves with which to protest. She was right.

  ***

  I wanted to sleep without end, yet I was scared to close my eyes. Each morning I awoke feeling beaten up, as if I had been trying to wrestle myself out of a straitjacket. Or perhaps into one. My arms felt dislocated, like I had been hugging myself hard through the night to keep myself grounded to the bed.

  My dreams were horrible. They even had sound tracks.

  The latest one started out innocent enough. Abbey and I were in the car, singing along to the radio. Abbey was the Pips to my Gladys Knight as I sang about a man going back to find what was left of the world he left behind. My dreaming self smiled up into the rearview mirror. Abbey and Adrian were sitting in back, holding hands.

  Suddenly, Pete was riding shotgun, dressed in his Washington interview suit that never made it out of the garment bag that day. He was smiling at me and tapping his fingers on the window and singing along with our chorus about leaving on midnight trains.

  My dream shifted. Adrian was now next to me in the front of the Mini, dressed as if he’d stepped right off the walls of my brother’s bedroom. I sang a warning about superstars who didn’t get far as he lay prone against the seat like he had after his allergic reaction. Instead of an EpiPen, a syringe was dangling out of his arm.

  Pete and Abbey were back again, sitting side by side in the backseat. Abbey her current age, Pete looking like the day I met him. She was holding his available hand. The other, along with the arm it was normally attached to, was gone. I screamed the silent scream of dreams, trying to wake myself up.

  I woke in a pool of sweat, knowing what I had to do. If I couldn’t have him in my world, I needed to go find him in his.

  Come to Blows

  With Abbey, Brina, and Joey off at summer camp every day, Marissa and I were free to shop. Today we were conquering the grocery store. Karen had joined us, too, with Jasper riding safely ensconced in a nest of organic cotton that protected him from yucky supermarket cart germs.

  If carts were places, Marissa’s would be Las Vegas. Or as Abbey would say, Large Vegas. Everything was supersize and over-the-top, in shiny boxes and shimmering plastic. Decadent and not very healthy. Karen’s cart was a Buddhist temple; sparse and containing only what was necessary to survive. Organic, macrobiotic, and natural, in minimal packaging. And my cart was Switzerland. I stayed neutral as they peered into each other’s carts with disdain.

  I turned on my own down the magazine aisle and found myself staring at the rock magazines. A headline and byline caught my eye: HEAVY METAL MASTERS—WHERE ARE THEY NOW? By Alexander Floyd. In the corner was a small inset picture of Digger and Riff, circa 1983. That tinny refrain from my dream played in my head again. Could I try to live in his world since he refused to be in mine?

 
; I picked up the magazine and flipped to the feature. It was entitled IS IT TIME TO PUT OUR BELOVED CORPSE TO REST? and featured a bevy of photographs from their humble beginnings to the most recent—a blurry capture of Adrian onstage at the Hammerstein and a candid photograph of Rick’s profile taken at LAX. He looked nothing like his pictures of old, with a shaved head, a beard, and a T-shirt that sported GO GANG GREEN across his midsection. The article opened with the rumors of Digger’s return to the stage. My eyes skimmed to the last sentence eloquently penned by Mr. Alexander Floyd. “Until I see a death certificate for one of them, I will remain ever-hopeful the Lennon-McCartney of the metal world will resurface.”

  “Find anything good?”

  Marissa was bearing down on me from the opposite end of the aisle. Her cart was positively brimming.

  “Just a magazine for Kev. He told me to be on the lookout for it.” I tossed it into my cart on top of Abbey’s yogurt. “Where’s Karen?”

  “I lost her as I passed the Nature’s Marketplace section.” She shivered.

  “One woman’s hell is another woman’s sanctuary,” I joked.

  “Ah, the Lauder Lake Ladies of Leisure!” Grant had turned up the aisle behind me. If his cart was a place, it would be backwoods Pennsyltucky: beer, beef jerky, and scratchy toilet paper. “What’s shaking, ladies?”

  He peered into my cart. “What, no spotted dick? No beans on toast? I heard your Cuppa Tea made tracks. And I don’t mean the ones on his arms, covered by all those tattoos.”

  I couldn’t think, couldn’t move. Certainly couldn’t speak. If I hadn’t been holding on to the cart, I think I would have slid underneath it.

  Marissa’s voice broke through my meltdown, crisp and clear. “Grant, you’d better get your ass out of here before I use your face for a cleanup on aisle four!” She looked like she wanted to pull an Evel Knievel right over me and the top of my cart in order to run him over with hers.

  He pasted a look of faux innocence and indignation on his face as he backed his cart up and out of our aisle, but I could see he was holding back a smile.

  “My God. Does the whole town know the widow got dumped?”

  Marissa made a face. “Please. Grant’s no longer got a football team to hoist him on their shoulders or cheerleaders waiting to give him victory blow jobs. He’s a legend in his own mind here in Lauder Lake.”

  “Great. I get to see the legend again at karate class in an hour.”

  “Do you want me to take Abbey there today?”

  I shook my head. “It’s my battle, I can take him.”

  ***

  “What is our goal?”

  “BLACK BELT EXCELLENCE, SENSEI.”

  “What is our quest?”

  “TO BE OUR BEST.”

  Abbey could now recite the martial arts student creed as automatically and precisely as she could a Maxwell MacGillikitty episode. As the kids, barefoot and in uniform, broke line to begin warm-ups, I saw Jake Overhill come scrambling onto the dojo floor. The smell of Drakkar cologne told me his father wasn’t far behind.

  Right behind my chair, as a matter of fact.

  Thanks to alphabetical seating arrangements since fifth grade, I had fallen in love with the back of Grant’s neck, watching it go from scrawny and giraffelike to toned and tanned. Now, as he began to breathe down the back of mine, I felt my skin crawl.

  “Underwood.” He cooed my maiden name like a filthy pigeon. “No hard feelings, right?”

  “Right.” I crossed my arms and kept my gaze straight ahead. “I have no feelings for you at all, Grant. Hard or otherwise.”

  “Come on now, Tree. Just ’cause he pulled a runner doesn’t mean you have to take it out on me.” He chortled. “You’re better off anyway.”

  I concentrated on Abbey, who was swiftly swiping the air in unison with the other students, first left, then right. Tiger claws. How I wished I could tiger claw Poster Boy’s face.

  “Lauder Lake is no place for a washed-up junkie has-been trying to reinvent himself,” he continued loftily.

  “Is that what you said to him at the school?” Grant received a lash by my hair as I swung to finally face him. “And why he hit you?”

  “Did he really think he could come to that pancake breakfast and pass for Mr. Normal? I don’t care how much he spends on wine or suits. Once a loser—”

  “You don’t know—”

  “I know plenty. Surprised?” He practically spit. “He was. Till I told him he wasn’t the only guy you’ve had up in your attic bedroom. Maybe you’ll think twice next time before you let the riffraff in.” His cruel laugh was laced with the scent of beef jerky.

  I felt sick.

  “He’s like that stupid cat he sings about,” Grant continued. “He lands on his feet and moves on. Let’s see.” He ticked off his examples on his fingers. “He left one life up there in your brother’s room, then he walked out on the life he faked in your bedroom . . . I’m sure he’s on to the next dumb groupie’s bedroom by now.”

  Could I hit him? I wanted him down for the count. Let the bodies hit the floor.

  A murmured gasp rippled from the seating area. But it wasn’t our drama the other adults were focused on. Abbey had delivered a spinning crescent kick, freakishly powerful for her age and belt level. Knocked on his ass and scowling, Jake looked unhurt except perhaps for his pride.

  “Tree, you totally missed it! Abbey nailed that kick!” Brian Jensen, a friend of Kevin’s whose kids were purple belts in the class, crowed from the back row of seats. “Wow!”

  “Shut up, Jensen! She’s supposed to nail the pad, not my kid.”

  “Chill, Overhill. Your kid needs to learn about personal space.”

  “Gentlemen . . .” Hanshi Steve, the owner of the school, pointed in warning toward the door. Before he turned back to the class, I saw his eyebrow arch in impressed amusement, and he gave me a wink.

  Information Dissemination

  Grant’s bomb sat ticking in my chest as I sat in my living room, surrounded by the ticking of time.

  Washed-up junkie. Has-been. Not the only one.

  Bad enough Adrian had had to endure Grant’s barbs and misleading sexual rumor-mongering that day; he had had to come home to my neuroses. For every time he opened himself to me, I had rattled my cages shut. No wonder he let our relationship give up the ghost . . . because I hadn’t trusted it enough to let my ghosts go.

  I stared at the magazine and at the picture of Rick. I remembered my promise to Adrian, how I would try to find his childhood friend. It was time to step into his world.

  Rick Rottenberg, aka Riff Rotten, consider yourself researched.

  I worked fervently through the evening, one hand scrolling through LexisNexis while the other scrawled as many leads as I could find on a legal pad. It turned out Rick’s paper trail was far easier to find and follow than Adrian’s had been. Then again, Adrian had given me a lot of fuel to find Rick.

  “Go Gang Green” was a slogan for the Oregon Ducks. Why would an aging rock star wear a college team’s T-shirt . . . unless his kid went to school there?

  Son Paul = Natalie’s age (twenty)

  No Rick, Richard, Paul, or Simone Rottenberg in the Oregon directories. (It would have been ironic had my brother’s idol been living mere miles from him.)

  Maybe they’re listed under Simone’s maiden name?

  1982 New York Times wedding announcements: Simone Banquet

  Nothing under the name Banquet. Divorced?

  I turned back to the magazine to see if I could spot a wedding band on Rick and reread the last line: Until I see a death certificate for one of them . . .

  Simone: Twenty in 1982, DOB 1962. Adrian said she was American. Check Social Security Death Index.

  Oh, poor Simone.

  It had to be her. Died in 1994. Last known address: Hanalei, K
auai, HI 96714

  No Rottenbergs listed in Hawaii directories. No Banquets.

  I had hit a dead end. Back to the Oregon Trail.

  U of O student directory: Paul Banquet, junior. Major: Nanoscience.

  Could it be? Only one way to find out. I shot an e-mail off to him.

  “Mommy, I found these.”

  Abbey was clutching her Father’s Day crafts in her fists. Someone had been snooping in my room. Adrian didn’t take them that day. He also never cashed the check from the library, according to the inquisitive phone message Gwen had left earlier that day.

  “I know, sweetie. He forgot them when he rode his bike to the station.” I fingered the paper tie that proclaimed her acrostic poem for him.

  “Doesn’t he want them?”

  “I think deep down . . . he does.”

  “Can we mail them?” Her look was so genuine and so hopeful that nodding was all I could do to keep from crying.

  Date: Thursday, August 19, 2004 2:05 p.m.

  From: pabanquet@uoregon.edu

  Subject: Re: Friend of Digger Graves

  To: bibliomama@gmail.com

  My dad is the Rick Rottenberg you are looking for. He doesn’t believe in e-mail. But I speak with him daily, and depending on his mood, he may be receptive to talking to you. I will pass along your number.

  PB

  The call did come, but not exactly as I had expected. I picked up the phone during dinner with Abbey and got an earful of Cockney curses. “How dare you harass my son and track him down at school? If I had a dollar for every reporter who tried to worm their way in—”