I Love the 80s

by Megan Crane

  ‘A different kind of rock star,’ Ken said with a weary sort of sigh. ‘A more corporate version.’ His mouth curved. ‘I know you know already. I’m talking about Chuck, of course.’

  ‘Chuck,’ Jenna repeated, confused but trying not to show it. And then she understood, and suddenly everything fell into place. Ken Dollimore and Chuck Arendt’s famous partnership and even more famous falling-out made a lot more sense if it was romantic. A romance explained the ferocious fights the two of them were known for. The bitterness of it all. ‘But doesn’t he … ?’

  ‘Have a wife and kids in Greenwich?’ Ken asked with some bite. ‘Of course he does.’ He shook his head, his lips pressed into a thin line. ‘And that’s part of the problem.’ He pulled his fedora from his head with one hand, and ran his other hand through his hair. ‘It’s the fucking 1980s, not the 1950s, but Chuck can’t handle it.’ Ken made a noise in the back of his throat. ‘I’ve been out since I was sixteen years old, and sure, sometimes that sucked, but I did it. But now it’s 1987 and half of my friends are dying or dead, and the other half are HIV-positive or soon to be HIV-positive, and I’m trying to have a relationship with some closeted, married guy?’ He rolled his eyes. ‘I couldn’t do it any more. He can’t admit who he really is – not because he’s afraid, mind you, but because he thinks admitting it would be giving up his power. And Chuck will never love anyone as much as he loves his power.’

  ‘If that’s true, I’m sorry for him,’ Jenna said. She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t sound like any way to live.’

  ‘I’m not telling you this to make you feel sorry for Chuck,’ Ken said. ‘Or, hell, even me. But you’ve always been here for me. You were totally cool about the sexual harassment thing—’

  ‘The what?’ Jenna practically yelped.

  ‘It’s not every secretary who would let her boss pretend to sexually harass her, just to confuse co-workers about his sexual preferences,’ Ken said with a laugh. ‘That was the best idea you’ve ever had. I’m pretty sure half the people who thought they knew what happened between Chuck and me now doubt the whole thing. It’s rad.’

  ‘That’s me,’ Jenna agreed with a weak sort of smile. ‘I’m rad.’ But at least she now knew why her gay boss spent so much time in her personal space. And the truth was, she suddenly – retroactively – forgave him for all the inappropriateness. Jenna had always drawn a line between gay space and straight space. Gay men could cross boundaries that she would slug straight men for looking at funny. Go Aunt Jen, she thought, admiringly.

  ‘That’s only one of the reasons I don’t want to see you heartbroken over this guy,’ Ken said, far too kindly. ‘And heartbroken is where you’re heading. Believe me, I know.’

  ‘Ken …’ But Jenna didn’t know what to say. She looked down, and noticed to her surprise that her hands were clenched into fists on her lap. She uncurled her fingers, let them spread wide. ‘My eyes are open,’ she said simply.

  ‘How could they be?’ Ken asked, in that same, kind tone that made Jenna want to cry. ‘He’s Tommy Seer. He’s already a myth. Who prepares for a myth?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jenna said. ‘But I know who I am, too. I do.’

  Ken smiled at her, then slapped his hands against his knees. ‘I hope so,’ he said in his usual brisk voice. He got to his feet, and Jenna knew the moment between them was over. She straightened. ‘Don’t you have a rock star to shadow?’ Ken asked, walking towards his office. ‘That bottom-feeder Duncan Paradis apparently feels that you are not providing him with enough information, just so you know. He claimed he was on the warpath.’

  ‘He’s mad because I can’t give him details on a conspiracy that exists only in his head,’ Jenna said with some heat. ‘What am I supposed to do? Make something up?’

  ‘Be careful,’ Ken advised her, pausing at the door to his office. It wasn’t clear whether he meant with Duncan, or with Tommy. Or both. He gave Jenna a wry sort of smile. ‘I warn because I care.’

  There was, Tommy thought as he walked through Central Park, heading north-west towards his apartment building, a huge difference between knowing that you were going to die some day and having a near-death experience today – especially one that had clearly been engineered by someone looking to hasten some day along.

  How had Jenna known? He bent his head against the bite of the wind, and scowled at the ground. He knew that he’d set her on the path, with his half-formed suspicions about Duncan, but she was so certain. She had been waiting for him outside his apartment the night the car had nearly hit him – almost as if, he thought now, she had been anticipating the car. And she’d been the only one to see that steel cage start to fall …

  But that was impossible. Even if he believed that she’d been somehow involved in both, the fire in the dressing room exonerated her.

  Because Tommy had been the one to stop what they’d been doing, and Tommy had been the one to sniff the air and announce that there was smoke and maybe they should do something about it. Jenna had been lost in need, making those killer little moans of hers and writhing beneath him. He’d had to demand she get up, and she hadn’t wanted to. He remembered how much she hadn’t wanted to. She’d very reluctantly opened her eyes, and only then had she smelled the smoke herself. He’d watched the panic flood through her, and he didn’t think she was a good enough actress to fake the wild, raw fear. Tommy couldn’t imagine anyone with an assassination agenda putting herself in harm’s way like that.

  Then again, he wouldn’t be the first guy in the world to get played by a woman.

  Tommy hissed out a breath, and shoved his hands in his pockets. His body ached, he thought he was bleeding from hitting the road and skidding into the gutter, and thinking about Jenna betraying him was definitely not making any of it any better.

  The trouble was, he had no idea who it could be otherwise. Tripping him into the path of a bus did not seem like a Duncan Paradis move. Duncan was about flash and show. Tommy could see Duncan orchestrating the steel-cage incident – that seemed far more up his alley. It had flourish and a certain irony. And while Eugenia would certainly not be above shoving Tommy off a busy sidewalk, she didn’t drive, which meant she couldn’t have been the driver of the car that had almost hit him. And one of the only things Tommy remembered about that car was the fact there was only one person in it.

  It had to be someone close to him, he reasoned, because they’d had access to the set and his dressing room. While Tommy supposed that could make it any one of the numerous crew members, make-up artists, or various support personnel, he had the feeling that whoever wanted him dead had a very personal reason for it. Wasn’t that what the mystery novels he devoured on tour always told him? That murder was personal? And personal in his case meant the band.

  Except Tommy’s mind baulked at the idea. His band mates were his brothers. The only family he had left – the only family he would claim, anyway. They’d been through so much shit – how could one of them be capable of killing and Tommy hadn’t known it, all this time? How could he have that kind of history with someone who now wanted to kill him?

  None of it made sense.

  Except, in an awful way, it did. He hated himself for how easily his mind turned – how quickly he went from not being able to imagine one of his band mates wanting to kill him to understanding how one of them could.

  Even though he felt the faintest trickle of fear in the recesses of his mind at what wanting to hold her at a moment like this might mean, all Tommy wanted was Jenna.

  For no reason that made any sense, or that he would allow himself to consider, he knew that if he could see her, he would feel better.

  So he turned on his heel, and headed east, away from his apartment. And towards hers.

  23

  When Jenna had left the Video TV building, she’d pushed Ken’s dire warnings out of her mind, and she’d headed to West 57th Street instead of further uptown and east towards her apartment. She’d found Eugenia where she’d expected to find her – where, i
n fact, she’d heard her claim to one of her vapid model friends that she always went in the evenings – the Russian Tea Room.

  Jenna had entered the famous restaurant exactly once before – at the insistence of her mother and grandmother, who thought the place was the height of elegance. Though Jenna had spent about two weeks at NYU before concluding that it was, in fact, the height of tacky, there was no telling her Indiana relatives that all those years later. It had been early 2000, if she remembered correctly, and a lot had changed in New York by then.

  Tonight, however, it was 1987. She thought she remembered reading somewhere that earlier in the Eighties, or maybe the late Seventies, Madonna had worked as a coat-check girl at the Russian Tea Room, and Jenna figured there couldn’t be a better arbiter of cool than Madonna in the Eighties. Too bad that would change so drastically as time went on.

  Jenna had wrapped her scarf over her hair, slunk inside trying to exude don’t look at me from every pore, then made her way to the bar. It had taken a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim, golden light in the famously opulent restaurant, and then a few moments more to locate Eugenia sitting in one of the plush red booths facing the bar. Eugenia was nursing a Martini and, as far as Jenna could tell, was practising her version of come-hither looks on a tableful of businessmen nearby.

  ‘I don’t know why you recognize me,’ Eugenia had cooed, loud enough to be heard clear across the room. Jenna had expected to hear the clatter of her batting eyelashes next, but Eugenia had settled for flipping her hair over one bony shoulder, then the other. ‘Have we met somewhere, do you think?’ she trilled, clearly mugging for an imaginary camera, and just as clearly waiting for one of the men to get the hint.

  As the last magazine she had graced in furtherance of her own career – rather than as Tommy Seer’s significant other – had disappeared from news-stands shortly before Reagan won a second term in office in the November 1984 elections, Jenna did not anticipate that anyone would take that hint.

  Jenna had ordered her own Martini, and settled in for a long night.

  That had been nearly two hours ago.

  Stalking someone had to be the most boring thing Jenna had ever done. Waiting for Tommy hadn’t been so bad, but Eugenia kept trying desperately to make herself the centre of other diners’ attention, even though they were attempting to eat and/or enjoy their own parties, and that tried the nerves. She had even left her table several times to parade through the restaurant, ostensibly to hit the bathroom, though Jenna suspected it was actually to pretend she was on some kind of catwalk. Needless to say, Eugenia did not receive the kind of attention she was looking for – except from the staff, who all but salaamed at her feet.

  ‘No doubt why she comes here every damn night,’ Jenna muttered, not realizing she’d spoken aloud until the bartender smiled at her.

  ‘That one?’ he asked, pointing his chin at Eugenia’s latest stroll-by. ‘Every single night without fail. Sometimes with her boyfriend or some girlfriends. But mostly by herself.’

  ‘How sad,’ Jenna murmured, insincerely.

  ‘Women like that,’ the bartender told her, ‘make a man’s life a misery. Too beautiful to be kind. Not pretty enough to be worth it.’

  Translated: even the bartender thought Eugenia was high-maintenance and annoying. Jenna was getting cranky, though she was wise enough not to be getting drunk at the same time. She’d switched to soda after the first Martini, and any buzz she might have had had long since dissipated. She thought of all the detective novels she’d read over the years, and how they always seemed to gloss over the extreme boredom that accompanied surveillance. Or maybe Jenna had skipped over those parts when she’d read them. Either way, watching a spectacularly boring person spend an evening alone was, unsurprisingly, also spectacularly boring.

  Jenna wasn’t sure what she’d expected. Eugenia to hold up a sign, perhaps, announcing her murderous intentions? Duncan to appear in a black cloak, twirling a sudden handlebar moustache? Even if Eugenia wanted to kill Tommy, it was unlikely that she’d proclaim that plan to the Russian Tea Room in the middle of a dinner service.

  Jenna kept her back to Eugenia, though she was banking on the other woman’s self-involvement to keep her from being seen. If you don’t want to call attention to yourself, she told herself acidly, you should stop drinking all this soda, since it’s making you fidget like a hyperactive five-year-old.

  She heard a commotion behind her, and the next time she dared to look, Eugenia was wreathed in smiles and practically humming with pleasure. That was something different. Seconds later, she saw what had Eugenia all excited as Duncan Paradis slid into the booth with her.

  Jenna didn’t worry about them seeing her – they never broke eye contact. Not even for the merest second, as if they were drinking each other in and couldn’t bear to glance away. She had the sense that the Russian Tea Room could explode and the two of them would hardly notice. Duncan picked up Eugenia’s hand, and stroked it between his palms. She coloured with delight. He actually looked … tender.

  Jenna bit back her urge to descend into hysterical laughter at the thought of Duncan Paradis exhibiting tenderness of any kind. She reminded herself that she had also seen quite a bit of Duncan snapping Eugenia’s head off – hardly tender at all. She waited for the real Duncan to pop up and do his damage.

  But as the illicit lovers smiled at each other and snuggled close in the lush red booth, giggling and touching and doing God knew what beneath the table, Jenna was forced to entertain the possibility that Duncan and Eugenia really did care about each other.

  It boggled the mind.

  She’d been so certain they were only using each other. Because that was what made sense. That was who they were – a thug with pimp-like ambitions and a woman willing to play fiancée in order to stay close to her married lover. But this was something else entirely.

  On some level, maybe it made sense, Jenna thought then, trying to rationalize. Maybe they were a cosmic sort of balance for each other. They gazed at each other as if no one else existed, and she couldn’t shake the notion that if that was true, then they were hardly likely to spend their stolen time together stalking around Manhattan setting up accidents for Tommy to stumble into.

  That wasn’t proof, exactly. But her gut feelings hadn’t steered her wrong yet. She turned back to the bar, and stared at her drink. She wanted it to be Duncan and Eugenia. They were both so loathsome. Duncan was the bottom-feeder Ken thought he was, if not something worse, and Eugenia was a nasty piece of work from her clothes-hanger frame to her hey-look-at-me designer shoes. But wanting didn’t make it so. Maybe their very hideousness made them the perfect match for each other. They looked at each other like they were the stars of a romantic movie – like there ought to be swelling music and not a dry eye in the house.

  Feeling chastened, somehow, Jenna paid her bill, and then headed back out into the night. She felt unsettled. She wanted to blame the large quantities of soda she’d consumed on an empty stomach, but she knew better. She thought about Duncan and Eugenia, what they would gain from Tommy’s death and what they would lose. And realized that the problem with her conclusions about the pair of them was that if she was right, that meant she had no idea who was trying to kill Tommy. She bent into the October wind and trudged across 57th Street towards the 6 train. Meanwhile, she’d wasted all this time thinking it was Duncan and Eugenia while the real culprit was off somewhere plotting. She was furious with herself.

  On the subway, she brooded over how to tell Tommy what she knew. Or suspected, anyway. The minute she told him her suspicions, he’d use it as reason to blow off the whole thing. It wasn’t as if he’d accepted the fact that someone was trying to hurt him. He still thought it had all been a series of coincidental accidents.

  Another problem was that Jenna hated the fact she wasn’t being honest with him. How could she be in love with him and hide things from him? Hadn’t that, on some level, been the entire problem with her relationship with Adam?
She’d thought Adam was almost the right one. He’d almost married her. She’d almost loved him the way she should have. But what if they’d been honest with each other from the start? Didn’t she owe Tommy the truth – no matter what it cost her to tell him, and no matter what he did as a result?

  She was a coward. The way she’d always been a coward. Too afraid to break up with Adam when she should have, years ago, long before he’d met any aspiring yogis. Too scared to admit that she was keeping herself at arm’s length from her entire life for years, and too chicken to figure out why. She climbed the stairs out of the subway and started the long walk east towards her apartment, trying to face the ugly truth about herself as she moved. She had hidden away with her fantasies of Tommy Seer for years, and now that she had something good with the real Tommy, she was taking the easy way out once again. It wasn’t as simple as her fear that he wouldn’t believe her – of course he wouldn’t believe her. Who would believe such an insane story? That wasn’t why she didn’t want to tell him.

  She didn’t want to tell him because he would leave her. Of course he would. He would think she was the lunatic groupie he’d originally believed her to be. He would hear only insanity, and he would wash his hands of her. Who could blame him? And she was so selfish, so desperately in love with him, and she didn’t think she could bear it.

  But he was going to die. She knew he was going to die, unless they stopped it somehow, and Jenna knew that if she was any kind of person at all – any kind of human being – she would find a way to tell him. Even if she lost him in the process.

  Better to bear losing him personally, she told herself, than to lose him altogether.

  Tommy saw her coming from far down the street. She had her head down, bent against the cutting wind, and a bright scarf wrapped around her neck, but he would know her anywhere. He straightened in her building’s doorway, and enjoyed watching her without her knowledge.