Thank You, Goodnight (24 page)

“Teddy fucking Tremble!”

I turned and saw Simon Weathers, lead singer of the Junction, sauntering over. His hair was cut in jagged spikes, and he was clad in
a black leather jacket with black leather pants and black leather shoes, as the world had seen him countless times on the cover of
People
, and in a mug shot or two for some drunk and disorderlies.

Simon strode up to us and pumped my hand. “What in the fuck are you guys doing here?”

“Hey, Simon.” I’d met God’s gift once or twice before, having shared the stage at a music festival. We also shared a record label at the time. “We’re just in town finishing our new record.”

“Good for you, man, good for you.”

I reacquainted him with my cohorts, and he nodded at each of them, sizing them up one at a time.

“What brings you here?” I asked.

He scratched his head with practiced weariness. “We’re doing a couple shows at the Garden starting tomorrow night.” The Junction purveyed a sixties-inflected form of brash Brit rock, despite being a quartet of Ohioans.

“Nice,” I said.

“You like playing MSG?” Jumbo jumped in with a critical lean. “See, I’m not a big fan. I get this weird vibration on the stage there.
Wah! Wah! Wah!
It’s very distracting. I’ve complained. You ever get that?
Wah! Wah!
”

“Anyway,” Simon said, turning to Mackenzie, “what are you playing these days? I remember seeing you with a Fender jazz bass at South by Southwest. Do I have that right?”

“The sunburst one,” Mack said, smiling coquettishly.

Simon nodded in approval. “A Geddy Lee special. Rocked my world, baby. I remember wondering what in the fuck the bassist for Tremble was doing with an instrument like that. You know what I mean? You don’t do jazz, you don’t do prog—like, what do you need that for? But you made it work, baby. You dug a deep-ass groove with that thing.”

“Thank you.” Mack blushed. For all her glorious ascension in the world, the woman still blushed.

“Next round’s on me,” Simon declared with a wink.

“I have to pass,” Mack said. “I’m wiped. I’m going to call it a night.”

“Boo!” Simon heckled. “Really? The night is so young.”

“Not for some of us,” Mack said, and with a wave, she bid us all goodnight. “Nice seeing you, Simon.”

“Likewise. Likewise indeed.”

Simon summoned the bartender with an open-handed smack on the bar. “Ketel One, rocks for me”—he drew circles in the air with his index finger, a cowboy closing in on a steer—“and another round of whatever my friends are drinking.”

Simon then proceeded to ponder the vacant doorway through which Mack had just exited. “What is it about her?”

I shrugged. “What do you mean?”

“She’s fantastic.”

“Mack? Yeah, she’s great.”

“There’s something about her. Every time I run into her, she lingers in my mind for days. I can’t explain it. There’s something very real, very tangible about her.” He was impressed with himself for using the word
tangible
. He turned his head to me. “You ever hit that?”

“No, Simon, I have not hit that.” I raised the finger with my wedding band (though I wanted to raise the one next to it).

He grinned. “Ah. Gotcha.”

Could it be that Simon Weathers was tiring of the dull parade of starlets and Victoria’s Secret models? That as he lay awake in bed, a Brazilian goddess in angelic repose six inches to his left, he pined for something more, something meaningful, for someone with whom he could trade erudite barbs, with whom he could pass a slow Sunday morning on the veranda with coffee and the
New York Times
? Please.

He suddenly gave my shoulder an epiphanic pounding. “Here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to bring Tremble on tour with us.”

“What?”

“It’s perfect! We’ve both got new music on the way. We’ll hit the road together. It’ll be huge. Six months ought to be enough time for Mackenzie to develop, shall we say, an appreciation for me, right?” He
snickered in a way that everyone else in the world must have thought was magnetic.

I stared at him. “You want to do a Junction/Tremble tour so that you can seduce my bass player?”

“Isn’t that the whole point of everything, man? Seduction. It’s the reason we write songs and the reason we sing them out loud. Disagree with me. I dare you.”

“I disagree with you.”

“You’re full of shit,” he said, laughing. “And anyway, who fucking cares? Do you have any idea the kind of scratch you make playing to sold-out stadiums?”

“I have some idea,” I said tightly. “We did eighteen months of them.”

He took three gulps of his vodka in rapid succession while I glared at him, a lean fury flaring up inside me. Did this lout actually think we needed his charity? Did he really expect that we’d allow ourselves to get hauled from one city to the next as his opening act, diluting our brand, warming up the stage for him?

And did he really think Mack was up for grabs?

“Maybe you should come open for us,” I suggested, grinning without joy.

“You never know. Stranger things have happened.” Then he emptied the glass down his craned gullet.

I was confident his proposal would be forgotten in the brine of Ketel Ones. Oh, but I was wrong. A few months later, Alaina called and relayed what she considered the best news in the history of news.

“I’m not going on tour with the Junction,” I told her, indignant and a little whiny.

“I’m sorry—what did you just say?”

“It’s a terrible idea, Alaina.”

“Theodore. Are you baked?”

“Weathers is insufferable. They break up twice a year. It’s fucking toxic.”

“Maybe I’m not being clear. They don’t want you to join their band. They’re just going to let you play in front of their infinite crowds.”

“We can’t go from headliner to opening act just like that. Don’t you think it cheapens us?”

“It would cheapen you to open for Scritti Politti. It would cheapen you to open for Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam.”

“It doesn’t sit well with me,” I said. “It’s not what we’re all about.”

“Let me break this down for you. You’ve had one hit. A strong, well-received album, but one hit. One hit doth not a career make. Do you want a career? Do you want lifelong fans? Because that’s what you build on tour, the kind of fans who keep coming back, who wet themselves when you release a new album because they know that it means you’re coming to town. The kind of fans who will pay a babysitter fifteen bucks an hour for the privilege of paying a hundred bucks a ticket, who will see you play twenty years from now when you look like shit, sound like shit, and can’t write for shit.”

“I’m not worried,” I countered to her Allen Ginsbergesque parataxis. “We may never hit the jackpot like we did with ‘Lie,’ but I think we’ll stick around. You’ve heard the new album.”

Alaina laughed like an ice-covered sidewalk. “I thought you were different, Teddy. I really did. I knew you had an ego, but to turn down an opportunity to share billing with the Junction—to benefit from that vast promotional machine—all because you think you deserve more? That is a rare level of ego indeed.”

It wasn’t a concert tour; it was a charade in the name of bagging Mackenzie.

“Call it what you want, Alaina. I’m not hitting the road with Simon Weathers. That’s not who we are.”

“Fine,” Alaina said. “You can explain that to your bandmates when they’re ringing up your fries at the truck stop two years from now.”

All these years later, it still shamed me to think about the selfishness, the myopia, the dictatorial disregard for the livelihoods of people who counted on me. The possessiveness over things that didn’t belong to me. As Simon Weathers might’ve said, Who in the fuck did I think I was?

CHAPTER 15

T
he receptionist was fussy, dumpy, and bumbershooted in a floral muumuu, and I almost laughed in her face when she asked if I had insurance, never imagining that the unseemly afflictions that sent one to a sex therapist could be covered by a health plan.

She smiled me over to the lobby, which was a sea of royal blue from the upholstery on the chairs down to the carpeting. I stood under the constellation of floodlights and peered out the windows into the parking lot. Mack’s office was located in a squat three-story building set back a ways from a busily commercial avenue outside the city. I’d turned the car over to my traveling companions and dispatched them to a bookstore, coffee shop, pet mart, anywhere, to get them out of sight. I would’ve tasked Jumbo with finding us a hotel but he and I held widely differing views on what constituted acceptable lodging.

Here I stood, ablaze with nerves, even more so than on the night I played for Sonny in my apartment living room. Right here was where I would make it right again. This was where Mack accepted my apology, so long in the making, and we moved into the future together, which is to say that we could go back. We could stand next to each other again, night after night, our instruments alive in our hands, doing what we were meant to do with our time on earth. We had no business sequestering ourselves away in offices, disguising
ourselves as professionals, going through the motions of ordinary relationships when our significant others knew, had always known, we belonged somewhere else. Mackenzie knew this; she just needed to be reminded. Then everything would be right, my sin of pride and greed with the Junction finally wiped clean.

“Teddy.” I turned my head and there she was.

“Mackenzie.” Seeing her after all these years sent volts of electricity down my suddenly unsteady legs.

We stepped toward each other with a measure of cautiousness. I crossed my arms over her back, pulling her into me. It was a sensation of wonderful familiarity. She’d had the decency to stay the same height, to inhabit the same proportions, to keep her hair and skin an ambrosia of Arcadian scents, as if all for the benefit of my homesickness.

She wasn’t really hugging me back. She administered a few obligatory pats on my shoulder blade as if I were an unpleasant distant cousin she’d run into at a wedding.

“You look great, Mack. You really do.”

She issued a half smile. “I don’t know about that.”

Then she led me down the hall in this familiar ritual where I played the role of intruder into the lives of people I used to know. I was the corruptive Sunday school troublemaker inciting my assiduous classmates to abscond through the bathroom window.

Her office was spacious and airy. It had a seating area with a sofa and love seat of reddish-brown leather and an espresso-finished trunk coffee table between them. The room seemed to be draped in a muted autumn of soft greens, yellows, and browns, all of it coaxing comfort, assuring you that this environment could do you no harm. Even the fresh soapy scent in the air—was that bubble bath?—conveyed the message that this was a place where you could divulge your dirtiest secrets free of threat and judgment. Be calm, said the arrangement of the furniture. Be at ease, said the air.

Alone together in her office, I could finally take Mack in. She was
still beautiful, all the more so by not having struggled against time’s advancement. The short shag haircut and boyish outfits had been supplanted by butter-yellow pants and a brown sweater, longer sandy-highlighted locks that framed a warm, earthy face behind 1950s cat-eyed frames. She’d become more womanly, the mom you suddenly noticed after a year of carpool, but seemed to have held on to that athletic ease of motion, her genetic bounty. Her father had been a power-hitting centerfielder up and down the minor leagues before becoming a scout in the Cincinnati Reds organization. Her mother owned every swimming record at her high school. Naturally, the child of those two parents would pursue a vampiric career playing bass in the stale-beer air of dingy bars, swathed in blue light. But Mack had always resisted the physical drag of our lifestyle. She constantly sought out opportunities to move, exploring on foot the blocks of each new town, rising early for a dip in the hotel pool, even once saving a man who’d bumped his head while doing laps.

Before offering me a seat, she shut the door and turned to me. “So. To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”

“I was in the area and decided a visit was long overdue,” I said.

She tilted her head. “Do you have an issue you want to discuss?”

I stared blankly.

“A sexual problem?”

“Uh, no.”

“Well, you made an appointment, so I didn’t know what to think.”

“Well, don’t think that.”

“Hmm.” She was looking at me, nodding without warmth.

“I’m out here for work and just thought I’d stop by.” The repetition of my lie sounded to my own ears like a stammer, like protesting too much.

Mack folded her arms.

“It’s just a visit, Mack. Sue me. Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Yes. Of course.” She continued assaulting me with a keenly inhospitable smile, a smile that erected walls.

“Can we sit down?” I finally suggested, tugging at my collar. “I’m getting a bit of an Abu Ghraib vibe here.”

She gestured to the couch and lowered herself onto the love seat opposite me, at which point I was reminded of my one brief sojourn on a psychologist’s couch. It was during the band years. The pressures were walling up around me and my moods were vacillating between combative and withdrawn. (I know, poor me.) The day Alaina observed a preconcert tantrum—something about my shirt looking like a woman’s “top”—she connected me with a flaky “shrink to the stars” who, at my first visit, made the mistake of encouraging me to lie down on his sofa, a heavenly velvet recliner. At first, I was worried that this was going to go
Ordinary People
or, worse,
What About Bob?
(The doctor did have a passing resemblance to Richard Dreyfuss.) But lying snug in the stillness of that office, lulled by the watercolor of a tomato patch and the pastoral enchantment of a wooden owl, I started thinking that a fair percentage of patients must fall asleep. Next thing I knew, the minute hand had completed a lap around the clock and my cheek was stained with drool. As for the psychiatrist, he was lights out in his chair, notepad and pen resting on his turtleneck. I quietly let myself out and declared myself cured.