by Jo Raven
“I told him to order you some cosmo’s,” Elfie said. “At least come drink your cocktails.”
“He doesn’t have to do that.”
“You should let him,” Elfie said.
“How much could a professional scuba diver make?” Lara asked. “I mean, he looks ripped, but he’s probably strapped, too.”
Lara and Mia stood in front of her, their hands on their voluptuous hips. Reflected in the mirror, four gorgeous, tall blondes stared down at Elfie in the bathroom, which was how outclassed she felt. Tryp had looked perfectly at home dancing with the two of them, like a rock star.
“He’s not a professional scuba diver,” Elfie said.
“Yeah,” Mia said. “No kidding. What the fuck would a professional scuba diver do, anyway?”
Elfie pulled her phone out of her purse and pulled up the Rolling Stone cover from a couple months ago on the browser. She glanced around the bathroom, and three of the other stall doors were shut. “Don’t squeal.”
“Why would we—” Lara squinted at the phone. “No shit.”
“Yeah,” Elfie said. “I put stage make-up on him. He’s wearing a fake nose.”
“That’s—what’s his name—Tryp? The drummer?” Mia looked up at Elfie over the top of the phone, her brown eyes angry. “And you’ve got some sort of an arrangement? Like an open relationship?”
“No,” Elfie insisted. “I’m the pyrotechnics engineer. I’m a—” she couldn’t believe that she was going to say the much-despised word, “roadie. I’m just making sure he doesn’t get into too much trouble, partying like a rock star. I’m nothing to him.”
Lara looked at Mia, and the twins in the mirror faced each other, too. Lara said, “Something’s wrong with this.”
“Yep. Would have been nice to fuck a drummer, but there is something messed up here.”
Elfie sighed and put her phone away. “There are two overpriced cosmopolitans out there with your names on them. Come have a drink with the sexy rock star before you turn him down, okay?”
They followed Elfie over to the table, where Tryp sat with their drinks plus two empty shot glasses and a squat, manly drink with ice cubes in front of him.
Elfie caught Left Blonde and Right Blonde staring at him, mentally stripping off the make-up, and then nodding to each other. They slugged down the cocktails, and Elfie saw a psychic signal pass between them.
Selfie attack!
They jammed their heads up next to Tryp’s face. Flash. They kissed him on each cheek. Flash. They giggled, and Tryp kissed each of their cheeks while their phone flashbulbs pasted them with silver light.
They bid “Tryfon” a very good night and left Tryp and Elfie sitting at the table together.
The DJ put on Semisonic’s “Closing Time,” and everyone on the dance floor groaned at the last call.
“So you told them,” he said.
“Yeah. They were going to ditch us earlier if I hadn’t.”
Tryp chuckled. “People are starting to stare, and it’s late. We might as well head out.” He texted the car to come pick them up.
Elfie mashed the lemon wedge into her Diet Coke ice. “I’m sorry, Tryp.”
“Don’t be.” He reached over and covered her hand with his. Warmth seeped into her bones. He grinned. “I’m a fucking rock star. If I want to bust a nut, I’ll pick someone up.”
“That doesn’t seem to be working out for you, or else I’m the worst wing woman ever.”
“It’s fine.” He kept holding her hand as he stood and then switched his fingers under hers to help her down off the high stool. “I had a good time. You’re a good dancer.”
“After twelve years of lessons, I should hope so.”
“Twelve years, huh?”
“Three to five times a week, depending on the season.”
Tryp shoved a path through the crowd for them to the alley where their driver was waiting with the car. “You crump well.”
“Great. I can crump, but those eight years on pointe? All wasted.”
“I’m sure your ballet is very nice. If we go to a ballet bar, you can dance for me.”
“Hah. Ballet barre. That’s funny.”
He laughed at her joke, and it was embarrassing how stupidly proud she was that she made him laugh. He said, “I used to play the piano for my mom when she taught ballet class.”
“Wow. Live piano. Must have been an advanced class. Was it with a company?”
“No. Other reasons.”
The driver opened her car door for her, and she scooted in. Tryp gathered himself and stepped in the other side.
“Back to the hotel?” the driver asked as he slammed his own door.
Elfie was trying to hide a yawn behind her hand, but it got away from her and her jaw popped. When she managed to open her eyes, Tryp was watching her, his dark eyes laughing.
“Yeah,” he told the driver without looking to the front seat. “I think we should go back to the hotel. Does this thing have a privacy screen?”
“No, sir. It’s just a town car.”
The car pulled into the night. The long streets were almost empty of other vehicles except for the couple dozen leaving the nightclub parking lot and scattering into the dim night.
Tryp turned in the seat so that his knee was touching her thigh. “So you took ballet, huh?”
“Yep, standard middle-class upbringing. Mother. Step-father. Nothing out of the ordinary. You?” A dull ache was radiating from her temples down the back of her neck, and she rubbed the side of her face, trying to dispel it.
Tryp glanced at the driver, who appeared to be concentrating on the road pointing to the horizon far ahead of the car. “I had a step-father, too. Absolutely normal. Just like you. Normal.”
His flat tone rang false in Elfie’s ears. She examined his face in the shifting planes of lights from the streetlights flowing past the car, but his expression was so still, so blank, that she couldn’t read anything except that he was lying his ass off. His deadpan look was so obvious that she kind of suspected he wanted her to know it.
Elfie’s braid pulled on the top of her head. She grabbed her hair and shook it to confuse the nerves and relieve the pressure, but the tension squeezed harder around her temples.
Tryp sat back a little. “But that’s just history. I had a good time tonight,” he said again, for at least the second time.
Elfie shook off the weirdness. “You know, you look good when you’ve taken a shower and you don’t reek of whiskey and stuff.”
“I’m not a rock star tonight. If I’d’ve gone in there as myself and grungy from the show, the girls would have been climbing all over me. Chicks dig the dirty rocker. When some actress wants a date with me, I get in the bottom of my suitcase and drag out a pair of leather pants that haven’t been cleaned in months and a ripped-up tee shirt that shows off the tatts, then I put on some chains and shit.” Anger rasped in his voice. “They don’t want a person. They want someone who is so far gone into sex, drugs, and rock and roll that they pulverize societal norms. They want a hard, dirty fuck, so that’s what I give them.”
He looked so dejected that she almost wanted to hug him, but he would probably shake her off. She pressed her fists to her temples instead and pushed, trying to mash the headache out of her head. “That’s pretty gross, Tryp.”
He was watching her as she rubbed her head. “If I showed up in an ironed shirt and clean hair, they wouldn’t know what to do. They’d think I was a sellout. Are you okay?”
“I’m just getting a headache. Too much caffeine late at night.”
“It’s your hair.” He picked up the end of her braid and rolled the elastic off the end. “Your hair is so thick that your braid is too heavy. My sisters used to say that they had a hair-ache.”
“I’m fine,” she protested, but he was already working his fingers through her hair, combing the plaits out. When his hands reached the back of her neck, the tight band around her temples eased, and the gentle pressure from him combing h
er hair with his fingers chased the pain further.
“Your hair is all the way down to your waist,” he said, holding the ends taut.
“I never have time to get it cut off. Sometimes I think about attacking it with fingernail clippers.”
He lifted her hair, smoothing it down her back. “Don’t do that. My sisters all had long, long hair. I didn’t realize how much I missed it.”
“You miss your sisters’ hair?”
“Seeing girls who look like girls.” His tone lightened, but he kept stroking her hair, running his fingers over her temples and down the back of her neck. “It’s just what I was used to.”
This was all weird. Tryp was weird. Maybe she was so used to how he was when he was wasted that she didn’t know what he was really like. “How many sisters do you have?”
“A lot.”
“You lost count?”
“Something like that.”
His dad must have gotten around or something. He probably wouldn’t want to talk about that.
“That fake nose must itch,” she said and turned on the cramped car seat. His hands fell away from her hair. “Here, let me pull it off.”
He leaned toward her and seemed to take up three-quarters of the back seat with his long legs and broad shoulders. She reached over and scratched between his eyes, lifting the edge of the putty with her fingernails. It stretched like rubber cement as she pulled.
Tryp closed his eyes, and his dark eyelashes brushed his cheekbones. Almost all the pale mascara had flaked off, and in the darkness, she couldn’t see if any of the guyliner was still there.
When he opened his eyes again—those dark, dark eyes like falling into space—he seemed even closer, like their lips were closer.
Elfie’s breathing felt light in her chest, like she couldn’t get enough air.
The nightclub had been only a few blocks from the hotel in San Jose, and the car pulled under the lit awning by the lobby doors. The driver got out to walk around and open their doors.
Tryp said to her, still gazing into her eyes like he was trying to telepathically force something into her head, “Come to the hotel bar with me for a few minutes.”
Everything that Lara and Mia said rang in her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“It’ll be empty at this time of night. There’s a piano there. I wrote a song. I haven’t shown it to anyone.” The car door opened behind him, but Tryp didn’t move.
“All right, Tryfon,” Elfie said, still breathless. “Just for a few minutes.”
At the Piano Bar
In the dark and deserted hotel bar, Tryp sat down at the piano and interlaced his fingers. Pops crackled through his joints, and he stretched his hands back, forward, and around. His anxious hands felt naked without drumsticks to twiddle, but twirling drumsticks around his knuckles like a majorette would have messed with his disguise at the bar.
The bar’s instrument was a Steinway Model S Baby Grand with an East Indian Rosewood veneer. He had almost sold one of these when he worked in the music store when he was a teenager, but the lady had gone with a cheaper piano instead. Gloria, the owner, had pretended to sob about it, pounding her fist on top of the piano, just to make him laugh.
This was a beautiful instrument, far too nice for a piano bar.
He touched a few keys, an easy C-minor scale that rang with melancholy. The piano had been kept in tune pretty well for a bar piano. No use playing a song for the first time on a jangling piece-of-shit piano.
His hands looked leggy and wide on the keys, too big, like the radioactive-mutant tarantulas in the movie he had watched with Rhiannon on the tour bus last week. There was still some part of him that was used to seeing his own little-kid hands on a piano keyboard. He still worked on the piano whenever he got the chance, but since he was fourteen, he had been practicing the drums every spare second, hours per day, every day. Calluses ridged his hands where he held his sticks.
“Are you okay, Tryp?” Elfie asked.
His throat felt raw, probably from the smoke and whiskey in the bar. “I haven’t played this for anyone yet.”
“You co-wrote a couple of the songs on the last album though, right?”
“I came up with some of the hooks, but Xan put them together. He gave us all songwriting credits to spread the radio money around, but he writes ninety percent of the lyrics, and he and Cadell write the music.”
Elfie sat beside him on the piano bench, and her feminine little body felt like a sparrow had alighted beside him. Her long, blond hair, wavy from the braid, fell on his black sleeve.
She whispered, “Show me.”
She might laugh, she might hate it, and she might not give a shit about it or me, but once his fingers found the keys, the music flowed.
When Tryp had written the words, first on a cocktail napkin stained with whiskey rings, then a later draft on hotel stationery, it felt like he was tearing the veins and then the muscles out of his forearms. Every word hurt.
Set me on the open road, was the refrain.
He hadn’t been able to write a literal story, his history, so he crafted a narrative of a woman loved and lost, one who had told him to leave.
That was true, too, but the real truth cut deeper.
He sang it softly to Elfie, wanting to tell her more, wanting someone to know and tell him that he wasn’t crazy, but a few people still loitered in the lobby beyond the ajar glass doors of the closed bar. He could barely sing it under his breath for her.
His voice didn’t crack while he sang it for Elfie, and he was perversely proud that he made it through.
He couldn’t sing it for anyone else, though.
The last chord sustained and dwindled under his fingers, and he lifted his fingers from the keys.
Elfie leaned against him, pressing her slight body down his side. Shaking fluttered in her, and her hair wafted the scent of that hotel rosemary-mint shampoo to him.
She asked, “Oh, my God, Tryp. What happened to you?”
“What did you think of the song?” he asked.
“I think that if you play it again, I’m going to cry.”
“It was that bad?” He looked away from the keys and to her.
Tears filmed the lower lids of Elfie’s blue eyes, and she swallowed hard. “I ran away from home. That’s how it feels, like I’ve been lost and lonely, and I didn’t know how to say it.”
She wound her arms around his waist, pressing herself to him, and Tryp raised his hands, unsure how to react.
She whispered, “People don’t usually get a chance to tell musicians that they needed a song, that they feel heard for the first time. Thank you.”
Tryp lowered his hands, letting his fingers skim her back to her waist.
“Are you going to record it?” she asked.
“It’s too raw.”
“Are you going to sing it, or is Xan?”
“I can’t play it for Xan and those guys.”
It might take years before he ground down the sharp edges so that it didn’t cut him, which probably meant that Xan wouldn’t ever sing it. Tryp couldn’t imagine Killer Valentine lasting years, not at the murderous pace that Xan was setting with tours and recording sessions. Someone was going to snap.
Maybe all of them would snap.
When Tryp thought of the schedule Xan had posted in the back of the tour bus, constantly updated with added dates and shuffled venues, he was tempted by the bottles of liquor behind the bar. He needed to sleep, hard. He needed unconscious sleep, not nightmares.
The nightmares had been worse since this song had begun to rip its way out of his chest. Maybe, if he let it go, the dreams would fly away, too.
In his arms, Elfie’s slight body drew his thoughts. When she moved against him, the silk of her dress sliding over his shirt, he could almost taste those few moments of connection that she could give him.
It was selfish, but he craved it.
He had fucked a lot of women the last few years, desperate for thos
e few moments. He couldn’t remember any of their faces, not even the ones who had filmed videos that Rade and Grayson had found on the internet later, several of them, that the guys had then brutally critiqued. How the hell did those women manage to set up their phones without Tryp seeing them? And why the hell didn’t those flimsy phones fall over when he pounded the bed into the walls so hard that he sometimes cracked the plaster?
He had probably been so wasted for every last one of them that he hadn’t seen the women plant a tripod in the corner. Maybe they had had a cameraman there, too, and Tryp had been too blind-drunk to notice.
But now, he wasn’t drunk, not nearly drunk enough. His chest hurt, and his body quivered, longing to touch her. A pale lock of Elfie’s hair snagged on his black shirt like golden Northern lights floating in the night.
Out in the lobby, people milled beyond the glass doors, people who would watch, maybe people who would take advantage and snap a picture of an intimate moment like a first kiss and sell it.
He whispered, “I need to talk about something.”
And he did. Tryp needed to tell someone what that song meant and to be heard, but he couldn’t. He wore his wildly beating heart on his sleeve about everything else: when he’d fallen in blind love with Lynda and his fathomless despair when she had refused to see him or take his calls after the miscarriage, manic nights with girls in nightclubs and hotels and then weeks of drawing the curtain on his bunk on the tour bus and living in the dark, and holidays spent gambling and debauched in Vegas or in some shitty hotel room, alone, reading bleak poetry, instead of going home to his empty house.
About all that: he spoke, he screamed, he wrote songs, he detailed during interviews.
Except this. Except the road.
When he was sixteen and had entered the performing arts high school, a bright line had drawn itself on the ground behind him. Before that day, Tryp Areleous did not exist. He had never looked back.
Not when he was awake, anyway.
Elfie touched his arm and said, “I’m listening.”
She was listening. His throat clenched. “Not here. There are people out there. People have cameras. It’ll be all over the internet tomorrow.”