This Is How It Really Sounds (42 page)

“Hey! You're the star at this table. I'm just hoping some paparazzi ambushes us:
Pete Harrington Seen with Super-Hot Mystery Babe!
My buzz will skyrocket!”

She laughed and looked at Charlie, who shook his head at her. “I told you!”

“So how do you two know each other?” Pete asked.

“We met in Shanghai after the war,” the woman explained. “Then we didn't see each other for sixty-four years.”

“Which is a long time to wait for a second date,” Charlie threw in.

Shanghai …
Pete looked at one, and then at the other. He could tell he was riding the surface of a very deep swell.

The waitress came over and they hurriedly scanned the menus. He put on his Gucci reading glasses.

“What are you having?” Charlie asked him. “They've got a pretty good clubhouse sandwich here.”

Pete started to order it, then stopped and looked at the old man. “Forget it! You're just trying to see if you can get me to order the clubhouse! I am so on to you.” Charlie started laughing as Pete turned to the waitress. “I'll have the bacon cheeseburger, thank you.” Then, “Beware, Anna. This man
will
play you!”

“Thank you, Mr. Harrington, but I think I can handle Charlie.” They finished ordering, and she stood up. “Excuse me, gentlemen. I'll be right back.”

Pete watched her walk away, unable to keep himself from checking out her shape. This was how Charlie saw her, how he'd seen her sixty-four years ago. Pete slid into her side of the booth, then leaned across the table. “So … Charlie … What's up, my man?” Charlie grinned back at him. “This is, like, some Shanghai situation. I thought it was the waitress at Canter's!”

“You never have been too quick on the uptake when it comes to women.”

He opened his mouth wide. “Whoa! No! You
cannot
groin kick me about women!”

“Your ex? She's a piece of work.”

“Beth is a fucking
Charlie,
Charlie! No! Beth's the person Charlie reports to, which is even more badass. Besides, that was a learning experience. Let's talk about you. And Anna.
Anna!
And, by the way, I heard you call her ‘Maier,' trying to remind her how single she is. Believe me, you will never come up with a play that I haven't already thought of”—he raised his eyebrows—“
or tried
.” He shrugged. “Successfully or unsuccessfully.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Seriously, brief me on the Anna situation.”

“Well, you remember I told you I had some loose ends to tie up in Shanghai.” And with that the old man teed off on the whole incredible story, with the Jewish refugee and the ex-Nazi and the shifty black-market dude and that whole lost city that Pete wished he'd known to ask him about when they were there. He heard the entire story then he just sat back. “
Wow!
You actually shanked him? That's fucking
intense
! How did you find Anna again?”

“After you left, I went to the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum and checked their records. She was here the whole time! Right under my nose. I just never made the effort.”

“Why not?”

He tilted his head. “Oh, Pete. I'd had a whole life. I thought it wasn't important anymore. When I found out your job was in Shanghai, it got me thinking.” He leaned in, astonishment in his voice. “Sixty-four years, Pete! It's a miracle.” He leaned back, nodding his head. “And this has all happened because of you and your crazy idea about getting even with Peter Harrington. You know, I went back there to prove to myself that I still had it, but what I found out was, it didn't matter. I already had it. I always had it.”

“What do you mean?”

But then Charlie's gaze shifted and his face lit up again, and Pete knew that Anna had come back.

They had a long, relaxed lunch, talking about his upcoming tour and the music business and the events of the long years that had gone by since they had met. After a while it was time for Pete to go back to preparing for his departure.

Charlie stood up. “It's good to see you, my friend. When are you getting back to Los Angeles?”

“Two months. Three months. Not sure. They keep adding dates. But I'll call you. I still want you to teach me that Chin Chin stuff.”

“Chin-na. You want to learn it?”

“Yeah.”

“You know what kind of teacher I am.”

“I know, dude: a crazy one! Let's do it!”

“Good!” Charlie clapped him on the shoulder, his old eyes gleaming. “I'm retired now, you know.”

“You are? Why?”

“I don't need it anymore!” Charlie stood there silently with his hand on Pete's arm, as if he couldn't quite figure out exactly what words to hang on his thought. Finally he spoke in a voice so soft that only Pete could hear: “You already have it. Remember that.”

Pete nodded, not knowing how else to answer. He threw a fifty-dollar bill onto the table. “It's my treat, kids. Anna, it's been a pleasure. I hope I'll see you again before too long, and in the meantime, take my advice: if paparazzi get in your face and you have to deck one, try not to break the camera, because they charge you extra for that in court.”

She smiled a sweet old-lady smile. “I'll certainly remember that.”

He turned back and looked at them before he left. They were leaning slightly forward over the table, chatting like any two very old people that he might see in any restaurant, people that had survived the war, the one-sided unwinnable war where everything was taken away—mothers, wives, children, friends—and nevertheless they were smiling, laughing; they were reaching for the sugar or the cream. There was something noble about that, that you could be so very old and still be open to the magic, not some marquee, reality-show version but something more hidden, quieter, more resonant. He wanted to write about it, and since it was about old people it should theoretically be a sad song, but what he really wanted was something miraculous, something awesome and moving and magical, that told everything about Shanghai and time and lost years and the things that were right in front of you if you just knew how to recognize them. But he knew he'd never find a name for it, and he had no idea how it should sound.

He stepped out into the relentless sunshine of Los Angeles. The street felt parched and arid. He'd leased a BMW and it was parked a block away. People recognized him as he walked, but he returned their greetings with an empty nod and didn't break pace. He had a song at number 4 on the pop charts and a string of sold-out tour dates, but he felt empty and alone. No wife, no girlfriend he'd been loyal to for more than a year, no kids of his own to give advice to. Even his music felt empty right now, like it had been written by another person, and that person would shortly be on tour, performing, while he looked on from the outside.

 

11

Alaska Coastal Airlines

The strange thing
was, Pete Harrington wasn't supposed to be in Juneau at all. It was a mistake; he was headed somewhere else and instead ended up pinned between the sea and the ice fields in some end-of-the-world town. He and the band were on their way to the concert in Anchorage, a place they'd played years ago, before they got big. They'd left Seattle at some ridiculous hour of the morning and he'd listened in the dark as the pilot announced places he'd never heard of: Prince Rupert, Ketchikan, Sitka. Just past Sitka, strange sounds started coming from one of the engines, and the flight attendants nervously picked up the drinks. A few minutes later they were plunging out of the clouds toward the steep, ragged mountains of the coast. Snow began whipping past his window, curving off into the dim morning.

From above, it was a hostile-looking place. The mountains were sharp and steep at their tops, dropping down in thick black forest all the way to the ocean. Shreds of cloud were trapped across some of the ridges, and the scene looked like twilight, even though it was seven in the morning. There were long white glaciers creeping out of a vast ice field behind the town, crawling toward the dark sea. It was a world of white and black and gray.

The plane banked so steeply that it threw him to the side of his seat; then the engines roared louder than he'd ever heard before. They swooped down, and there was a bump and a loud bang, then another bump, and then they were rolling down the runway with the flaps up and that forward lean of deceleration. A cheer went up, and then a round of applause, and then the pilot came on and welcomed everyone to Juneau. Alaska Airlines personnel would be waiting to arrange their connecting flights at the ticket counter.

The upshot was that they weren't going anywhere. The planes weren't landing because of the snow, so there were no planes to take anyone onward. They might get out the next day. It depended on the weather. Bobby booked them a hotel in the city's center.

He stepped outside. The air was cold and fresh. Nothing was flat except some marshes and the narrow strip of ocean bounded on the far side by a giant island. In every direction, the mountains rose abruptly out of the water, and they were covered with snow-crusted trees that gave way to perfect white heights. On the land side, a blue-white glacier rose out of a gap in the wall of peaks and climbed to the horizon.

They couldn't all fit into one taxi, so he sent the band ahead in the first van and said he'd wait. Duffy offered to hang with him, but he wanted to be alone, anyway. The first round of taxis had already left, and he stood there shivering for fifteen minutes in a baseball jacket until another taxi arrived.

The driver was a heavyset man with dark skin and wide cheekbones who didn't recognize him. At first Pete thought he was Japanese, and then he noticed the tribal insignia on the man's ball cap—some sort of stylized whale—and the
TLINGIT POWER
bumper sticker. The driver asked him if he was on the flight to Anchorage that got forced down. “Lucky you guys could land,” he said. “Nobody's gotten in or out for the last two days 'cause of the snow.” The snow was piled up in huge berms everywhere he looked. The parking lot had a mound twenty feet high, and along the short highway giant plows were hustling here and there, grinding their blades.

By the time he reached the hotel, it was eight in the morning, but there was no visible sun and the landscape was still dim. The hotel room was the same kind of anonymous place he was used to, distinguished only by the totemic artwork and the window filled with the faint outlines of ocean and mountains. He was hungry, and he asked the desk clerk for a good place to eat. She was Indian, too, he guessed, around his age, heavy, no-nonsense. She looked sleepy, like she was finishing up the night shift. She didn't recognize him, though she must have suspected he was someone because she'd seen the rest of the band. Maybe in this town, everybody was someone.

She recommended a restaurant across the street and he ordered coffee with bacon and eggs; then he canceled the bacon and ordered oatmeal, like,
Yeah, healthy choices
. He looked out the window at the wintry sea and the black-green mountains that rose out of it. The waitress was a young woman with a pierced nose, kind of that Seattle/Portland vibe but rougher. No makeup, no color in her hair. She was pretty, in a careless way, a way someone who had grown up in this town would home in on and fall into completely, and he had a strange urge to say,
Hey, I'm Pete Harrington and my plane broke down on the way to Anchorage,
but he wasn't sure why he would say it and what he would ask her for. A couple of older men were sitting at a booth with a pot of coffee between them, talking something over in serious tones. One had on blue coveralls that said
ALASKA COASTAL AIRLINES
and his name in a little oval on the front, and the other was dressed in the kind of plaid shirt his grandfather used to wear, as if Gramps had somehow gotten here, to this little town.

The waitress brought him his bowl of oatmeal and his coffee and gave him a smile that made him look at her again, thinking
maybe
 … He started to flash on the possibilities, but he stopped himself. She was way too young for him. He was forty-five years old, and if all the pieces were going to suddenly fall into place, the way they had for Charlie, a twenty-year-old probably wasn't going to be one of them.

Something about that thought put him at ease. He ate his breakfast and left ten dollars on the table and went out onto the street. The sky had gotten light and the place suddenly seemed mysterious and beckoning. He had the distinct feeling that somewhere in this town, somewhere in those clusters of little wooden houses perched above on the side of the mountain, there were possibilities so unlikely and gorgeous that even though he couldn't admit to hoping for them, he couldn't let them go. He no longer cared about the next flight to Anchorage, where Pete Harrington was scheduled to play. He was where he was, in this little town on the coast of Alaska, which he'd never foreseen but that felt entirely familiar. It wasn't like the “Vanity Fair” song he'd written at all. It was more like the song he'd never been able to write, the one about the house, and his grandfather, and the girl, and the light in the window. As ludicrous as it was, he had the strange conviction that he could stay here his whole life and be happy.

He started to walk up the hill. He went two blocks, past a health food store and a barbershop and a bank, then turned toward the mountain and kept going. It must have snowed like crazy the night before because the snow was nearly a foot deep and still untracked in the early morning. He could feel it filtering in at the ankles of his tennis shoes, but he didn't care. It had been so long since he'd walked in snow like this. So long. Probably since he'd been a kid. He and Cody, sledding.

There were only houses now, neat little dwellings, each in their own lot, with bags of salt and snow shovels leaning up against their porch railings. The street ended here and became a stairway that continued up the mountain. He walked to the bottom of it and looked at the long succession of metal treads that climbed higher and higher through a tunnel of overhanging branches. He couldn't make out what was at the top. Far away he heard a voice call out, then a child's voice answer back, and then a door shut. He held perfectly still. The whole world seemed to vibrate around him.