This Is How It Really Sounds (39 page)

It was Pete being most himself: intuitive, impulsive, ridiculous, and weirdly brilliant. Ira proposed six months later, and she got him a job as a book agent at the L.A. headquarters of Creative Artists Agency. They invited Pete to the wedding, though she asked him not to make a toast, and he became a casual dinner guest and family friend over the years. She built her company into one of the most powerful boutique publicity agencies in the business, and with the help of a nanny, a cook, a housekeeper, a pool boy, and a gardener, she and Ira raised their two children, who loved the musician like a big brother. Pete performed briefly at her son's bar mitzvah party, though most of the kids didn't know who he was.

She liked having Pete on the periphery of her world. In a quietly mystical way, she had come to recognize that whatever disaster he'd unleashed in her life had changed its course for the better, and he remained a sort of cosmic clown for her, silly and self-involved but, with his innocence and his childish optimism, somehow able to defy the ponderous forces that ultimately pulled so many others to earth.

Which is why, when Bobby had called her that night and told her Pete was going off the deep end, she'd hurried over. Of course she'd tried to talk him out of his “epic” revenge plan, knowing all the time that asking Pete to listen to reason simply goaded him on to further insanity. After he screamed “fuck you!” and slammed the door to his bedroom, she sat there with Bobby trying to figure out what they could do for him.

Pete had had a great run: four or five years as major act fronting the DreamKrushers, then a successful solo album that reached number 4 on the pop chart, and then a Greatest Hits compilation and a couple of solo releases that had done decently just by selling to his fan base. So, ten years of success, and after that he could have retired gracefully and produced other artists, kept his hand in, stayed current enough to slip in a hit later on, like Robert Plant or John Fogerty did years after their bands had split up. He had a certain second-tier “classic rock” status he could have parlayed.

But that wasn't Pete. He'd kept flogging it long after it had gotten sad. First with the New DreamKrushers, then, after the lawsuit over the name DreamKrushers, with a fairly desperate succession of styles: ska, reggae, techno. Finally that rap album, so brutally bad that the late-night television shows ran the unaltered promotional video as parody. And now she and Bobby were sitting silently in Pete's soon-to-be-foreclosed-on house with his last “fuck you!” hanging in the air.

“What are we going to do?” she asked Bobby.

The manager tossed his head to the side. “We'll pay Lev to get his financial shit in order, get a bankruptcy lawyer, hire someone to sell his stuff and move him into a new place. After that? Try and get him back into rehab.”

“What about this tour?”

Bobby grimaced. “I'm not sure the word ‘tour' applies here, Beth. We've got a confirmed gig in Elko, Nevada, some interest at Harrah's in Reno, and a probable date in Anchorage, Alaska. That's it.”

She wondered how hard Bobby was pushing that tour, but, at the same time, she knew firsthand the dispiriting sensation of whipping a dead horse. Pete had heard the noise, and the noise had been deafening. But now the noise was gone. The arena was empty. “So there's nothing you can do?”

Bobby pronounced his verdict with weary professionalism. “It's over, Beth.”

She sat with the depressing news, trying to imagine Pete pulling himself together, but not really believing it. She knew where he was headed, and it wasn't a pretty place: another drunken, drug-addled Peter Pan with dyed hair and wrinkles flunking out of rehab that some desperate family member had paid for. Pete was almost there already. He probably knew it himself, and that's why he'd tried to throw this absurd hero scheme up between himself and the inevitable.

“He's right, you know,” Bobby said at last. “About wanting to beat that guy down. The fucker deserves it. If Pete ever really does that, I definitely want to see the video.”

“Yeah,” she said absently. She heard the words and let them pass, and then circled back around and heard the words again, but suddenly they were different. She saw the image of that video in her mind, and then that image multiplied and opened suddenly into a myriad of images that went shooting in a hundred directions, so that in the space of five seconds it lay clear in front of her like fireworks dazzling and disappearing in the sky. What had Pete said?
I'm going to beat this guy down … and the whole world's going to stand up and cheer!
“Oh my God!”

“What is it?”

“He's right!” She laughed softly, then shook her head. “He's right! Bankers are as popular as dogshit on a dinner plate, and they're completely untouchable. Right?” She laughed again, excited. “Listen! Say Pete goes and clocks this guy. And, Bobby, that in itself would make him a national hero. But hey! Somebody got it on a cell phone! Hey, it's on YouTube! Hey! It turns out there's a video, and it's all over the Internet! Wow! Some fan takes the footage and turns it into a music video of Pete's new song, and it goes viral! And then the gods really smile on us and the victim presses charges! This is a guy who ripped off … how many people? And Pete's on the front of every tabloid in the country for decking him in broad daylight? Bobby, you can call it ‘epic' or ‘hero shit' or ‘assault,' or whatever, but tracking down a widely hated financial operator and punching him in the face is what we in the business call a ‘publicizable moment.' And that, my friend, is golden!”

Bobby had perked up. “You're a very bad woman, Beth.”

“This is it, Bobby! Pete decks this guy, and he's living out the fantasies of three hundred million people! And not just screwing groupies and trashing hotel rooms, but knocking the crap out of an elite criminal who ripped his victims off and then laughed at them. Pete was right: this
is
epic-heroic! If he does this, I can make it huge! I can get him
Late Night.
I can get him radio station breaks. I can get him a million places he probably couldn't touch even in his best days! He
will
be an American hero! And that, Bobby, is when you take him on tour!”

Bobby nodded, excited. “He played me a few lines of his song! It actually sounds pretty good!”

She wasn't listening to him—she was seeing. Get him to the right parties, red-carpet him at some awards shows, a few stunt dates … Maybe a slightly older actress, someone that still had some juice and maybe had just ended a stable relationship and could use some “bad boy” credibility to show she was back in the mix. He could be Mr. Wrong. Or maybe an up-and-coming starlet, someone sexy. Or both. At the same time. You'd want him on the big gossip blogs, and you'd want to get him ambushed by a camera crew someplace hip, like the front row at a Lakers game or announcing an MMA cage fight. He could catch a second wave, get the old songs on some younger iPods, placement in a hot video game, and, with a little luck and the right backing, get one of his new songs into heavy rotation. Down the line, they could start pitching reality shows.

Of course, there were certain things Pete was and wasn't capable of. Punching the banker out: he could do that. He was reckless enough. Writing songs and performing: it hadn't really happened in a while, but she still had faith that he could reach deep down one more time and pull out whatever had made him successful before.

But Pete would never do this as a publicity stunt. As a messianic quest, no problem, but as a self-serving ploy to jump-start his stalled career—he'd never agree to do it, and even if he agreed, he'd never be able to cover it up. Pete didn't know how to lie. And while the story of a man looking for justice was powerful, the story of a man looking for free media coverage was one of the most tawdry narratives around. The slightest hint of that and the world would revile him as quickly as it had lifted him up. He'd be a laughingstock, and she'd be responsible.

So that other part—getting the video footage, managing the media exposure, initiating a long-term career strategy that built on his past, above all, keeping the whole thing secret—that would have to fall to her and Bobby, and Pete could never know.

Which was why when Bobby showed up at her office without an appointment and asked to see her right away, she'd felt a deep uneasiness.

“We've got problems.”

“What do you mean?”

“Today Pete asked me if we were behind those videos. Frankie Lang interviewed him this morning and accused him of setting the whole thing up as a publicity stunt. Pete wasn't cool about it.”

“I told Pete to ignore those questions.”

“Why didn't you send a minder with him?”

“Frankie Lang does fluff! He was supposed to talk up the new songs and the tour. How bad is it? What'd Pete tell them?”

“I think the phrase ‘fucking witch hunt' came up. But that was probably
after
Pete accused him of being a huckster for sexual lubricants.”

She raised her eyebrows. “I'll call Frankie and try to get the whole thing pulled. What got Pete thinking about this? Could Charlie have tipped him off somehow?”

“I highly doubt Charlie would have said anything. In fact, if someone does find out, I suggest we hire Charlie to kill them.”

Beth rolled her eyes. “I love Charlie, too, but we've still got a problem. What made Pete think we were behind this?”

“He's been seeing this crap on the Internet and I guess he started to wonder. Also”—Bobby looked down—“when he first got back, I accidentally asked him if he'd gotten any footage. I tried to play it off, but he keeps coming back to that.”

She gave a long sigh. People made mistakes. It didn't matter now. “So what was the upshot of your conversation today? Did you tell him?”

“That depends. Do you mean literally?”

“Bobby—!”

“I didn't
not
tell him.” Bobby could see she wasn't happy with the answer, but he pressed on. “He wants to meet with both of us, tonight.”

“So this is it.” She leaned back in her chair. The screen saver on her computer had come on and a picture of her and Ira and their two children in Saint Barth's was floating across the screen. Damn! This wasn't just about telling Pete. The first problem was that she'd have to tell Ira. “If this gets out, Pete's finished. Forever.”

“It's not going to make us look too good either.”

“Yes, but it will
destroy
Pete. In every way you can destroy a person in this town, except death. And the ironic thing will be that he's the one who's actually innocent.” She closed her eyes to shut out the world, then opened them again. “I should have left him alone.”

“No. We both knew where that went. You tried to help him, Beth. We both did. That's not wrong.”

“Be that as it may, I can't keep lying to him. And if I don't lie to him, he won't be able to keep lying to everybody else.”

“We'll just tell Pete to say ‘no comment' whenever it comes up.”

“Yeah, Pete's always exercised a lot of restraint. Like in China, when he made that announcement about Tiananmen Square.”

“We took that one all the way to the bank!”

“Hear me, Bobby: this one doesn't end at the bank!”

“So what do you want to tell him?” Bobby asked.

“The truth. I don't see what else we can tell him. It's up to him now. He's going to have to stick to his lines. And that's something he's never been very good at.”

Bobby looked pretty down, in a genuine way, not in the usual
I guess I'd better look sad about this
way. “Let's do this, Bobby: let's all meet at my house after dinner. Ira can be there: he's a stabilizing influence on Pete. I haven't told him anything, but I'll talk with him this afternoon. Call Pete and tell him seven thirty.”

Bobby stood up, holding his porkpie hat. “We're doing our best, Beth.”

“God, I hope so.”

Bobby left, and she stayed at her desk, staring absently at the computer. It all depended on Pete now. He'd have to decide.

The screen saver filled her monitor with another photo, and at this moment, with the whole complicated problem with Pete that she had created hanging over her, the simplicity of the image sent a pang through her.

It was of a small stone house with a peaked wooden roof. There were icicles hanging from the eaves and behind it the sky was full of clouds that glowed on the screen as if with some secret meaning. Beth remembered the sound of the goats that she never saw, and the possessions of the family all neatly in their places, and the stairway that disappeared into the upper floor. The picture showed all of that without showing any of it, while outside the frame, in a photograph visible only in Beth's memory, the Swiss woman was standing and staring expectantly at the mountains as the snow blew in. In all these years, Beth Blackman had never stopped wondering what that woman was waiting for.

 

8

Blue Winter Light

When she woke up
the blue winter light hung like enamel inlays in the gray walls of the house. The comforter had slipped off her shoulder, and the cool touch of the night reminded her that the house was cold. Her husband lay there, partly awake, unsettled by the fresh snow that had fallen outside, the way he always was on mornings like this. She reached for her robe and pulled down the soft mass of darkness from the wall, fit her feet into the fuzzy charcoal islands on the floor beside her bed, and closed the door behind her. The wooden stairway creaked with her footsteps, like ice on a frozen lake.

She loved this time of morning in the winter. The rooms of the house were boxes of shadow, and in each box was the twilight version of all the things in her life: her son's snowboard, her daughter's sweater flung over the couch, the woodstove, her husband's boots. These were all her things, her possessions, and she felt as close to them as she did her own body. A wonderful body made of other people's lives.