Thank You, Goodnight (29 page)

I unlocked the car and faced Mackenzie, and as I stared into the eyes in which I knew lay my rescue, I thought of the night so long ago in New York, our fateful collision with that lout from the Junction.

“Did you know Simon Weathers had a thing for you?” I said.

“What?”

“Simon Weathers. He totally dug you.”

“He did not.”

“He said so himself. Think of it, Mack. If I’d let him anywhere near you, you could be leading a totally different life now, a kept woman in the LA party scene, and doing much better drugs than the sad stash I plucked from my glove compartment.”

There was a pause. Then, “What do you mean, if you’d let him near me?”

“My band was not for the pillaging,” I told her. “You date him, the next thing you know, you’re playing bass for him.”

She yawned, shivered, and pocketed her hands. “I wouldn’t have touched that guy with a ten-foot pole. And you know I hate parties.”

“That’s something I never really got about you,” I said. “You could’ve had a different guy every night.”

She scoffed. “You’re projecting your own stereotypical male fantasy. A different guy every night doesn’t sound interesting to me. It sounds like an awful lot of work.”

“You know what I mean.”

What I meant was, I was right there all along. Could it possibly have been that she’d passed up a parade of rich and famous musicians because of secret, uncomfortable feelings for the guy standing two microphones over on the same stage? Was that anywhere near the truth?”

“That just wasn’t my thing,” she said. “For a guy, the coolest thing about being in a rock band is scoring with women. For me, the coolest thing about being in a rock band was being in a rock band. I loved my instrument and the wonderful sounds that came out of it when we all played together. I loved your songs and I loved how people gave up their evenings and their money to hear us play them. I loved seeing our records in stores. I loved hearing us on the radio. I loved going to Hamburg. I loved waking up in a strange town with the rhythms of life beating all around me while I looked on as an outsider, like a bird on a wire.” Her mouth curved knowingly. “That’s what it was for me. I was happy I did it, and I was fine when it was over. I wasn’t going to run off with Simon Weathers. I wasn’t going to run off with anybody.”

My eyes dropped to the wet blades of grass encircling my shoes. The realization hit me: Mack was not homesick for the Tremble years. She regarded her past with a pleasant nostalgia, an attic of memories best kept as such. She knew what the past was and what it wasn’t.

But worse, Mack wasn’t homesick for me, and that discovery filled
me with a horrible emptiness. The torture, the regret, the reverie that I’d lugged with me from year to year because of what happened with this band, because of what happened with Mack—she, wherever in the world she’d been, had never felt it.

I’d seen one flower and invented a jungle.

As I guided my car out of the sleeping neighborhood, past the rows of dark windows and the angular jungle of rooftops, I thought of that afternoon in Arizona, still as fresh to me as if it had happened a week ago. I remembered the two of us waiting for the tow truck, how she sat cross-legged on the hood while I leaned next to her with my arms folded, both of us gazing out at the pink wallpaper sky, a dusty desert wind breathing sand against our clothes. When I turned and placed a hand on each of her legs, gently pulling her toward me by the bend in her knees—and I will never know what fortified me with the courage to do it—there was the briefest resistance, a jolt of surprise in the buckling of her eyebrows. But then her mouth fell into mine. She tilted her head to kiss me, cupping my face in her hands as my arms snaked under her shirt to feel the skin of her hips.

The ride in the tow truck cab was quiet, each of us squinting through the open car window. At the hotel, we stole through a side entrance, making quickly for my room. I remembered the confident way she pulled me across the suite and onto the bed. I remembered the jagged slant of light slicing her midsection as she straddled me and pulled her shirt over her head. I remembered how neither one of us spoke a word. I remembered the rhythmic pulse of her body, how her eyes seemed full of stars.

And I remembered the knock on the door.

Everything changed that night. Distances mushroomed between us and remained there straight on to the end. In losing her in just that way, I gained a fantasy, a delusion that had been my troublesome companion ever since.

I swung by the Best Western to gather my bag and check out. Grabbing a coffee from the burner in the lobby and a pile of shrink-
wrapped empty calories from the vending machine, I took to the turnpike feeling like a darkening sky.

With the city lights drifting behind, the land around me became a blindfold, a ribbon of nothingness upon which stark, weather-beaten truths projected themselves. You never know where things are headed, where the veering road will ferry you, the things and people that slip through your fingers when you’re not looking, sometimes even when you are. One minute you’re a young, stupid kid with nothing but time, everything within your control. You have a girlfriend, a beautiful one with Pacific-blue eyes and a glistening mouth. You kiss her on the train platform as she leaves for home. You hold her close and absorb the smell of her cheek, and you watch her waving to you through the window as the train pulls away. But you don’t think to hold on to that moment, to capture the juicy sweetness of her lips and keep it inside you forever, even though she’s leaving for a four-week study program in France. Because you don’t contemplate the guy from San Francisco who takes the seat next to her on the first day of class. They’ll get to talking, he’ll tell her of his plans to explore some cozy town in Brittany with ruins and a winery, and he’ll invite her along. And then, just a brisk four weeks later, she’ll tell you she doesn’t think it’s such a good idea for you to pick her up at the airport.

The next thing you know, you’re calling a strange city your home and you’re calling a grad student your fiancée. You occasionally reflect on the winter weekends with that girl from the train platform, those snug swells of hours, those days when you never got dressed except to venture out into the peppermint cold for pizza and six-dollar bottles of red wine.

The next thing you know, you’ve heard through the grapevine that she has three kids and is living in West Hartford. You imagine that she’s in a book club and all her old friends have been displaced by ones she met at her kids’ schools. One day in November, a song you hear on your morning run makes you think of that last moment when you let her get onto that train and out of your grasp forever, and
you wonder if any of those feelings, those tastes and smells, alive and true as they once felt, ever meant anything at all. You imagine that she thinks of you too every now and again, probably as she’s making lunches or gauging the fit of her sweater in her walk-in closet mirror. You’ll never see each other again—never—for the rest of your lives. But for one night, twenty-six years after she left, you’ll both sleep in the same Marriott in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You’ll spend the night four rooms apart and never know it.

The ache you feel, alone on an empty highway after midnight, is the pull of everything forever moving away from you.

There is a danger in pining for people, in pining for things, in confusing who you are with what you want. You lose yourself in it. You lose yourself.

*       *       *

Somewhere deep in Pennsylvania, I sent a text to Sara’s phone, knowing that by the time she read it, it would be moot:

“Change of plans. Coming home tonight. Too late to call. Really wanted to hear your voice.”

I was surprised to consider those words and realize how true they felt.

In the face of all the changes being hurled in her direction, Sara had not buried her face in her pillow and hidden from the world. She seemed instead to be learning how to move on. I didn’t know how far she was capable of moving, or in what direction. But maybe in that singular way, each of us hot and sweaty with the power to change, the will to weigh our anchors and sail on, Sara and I were more alike now than ever.

CHAPTER 18

T
he next few days were like walking through a low-lying cloud that refused to lift. I was unable to think about music or the band or any of my fellow travelers without seeing it all in stale, washed-out tones. The vibrancy had drained from the music, and I no longer saw the point in any of it. Someone else could do this.

I moped around the condo. I bought a container of Laughing Cow cheese at the convenience store across the street and consumed all eight wedges while watching the second half of
The Shawshank Redemption
on AMC. I tagged along with Sara to a market in North Philly that sold some type of Tunisian olive oil she’d read about. I spackled a hole in the bathroom wall where a towel hook had come loose. I got thirty pages into a John le Carré novel, then realized I’d read it before. I caught the first half of
The Shawshank Redemption
on AMC. I tagged along with Sara to the tailor to have some pants altered. Every time the band seeped into my thoughts, I avoided it by emptying the dishwasher or spraying cleanser on the balcony furniture.

What a profound letdown: to face the realization that someone who had entangled you for so many years and for so many reasons hadn’t suffered a moment’s entanglement by you.

Finally, I boarded a train for New York.

Coiled in her leather chair and rising over her desk like a cobra, Alaina Farber waited. She waited to hear how I’d gone about con
scripting my three old soldiers. She waited for me to hand her another disc with yet more songs that would render her awestruck. She waited to share with me her plan for conquering the world.

“I’m not so sure I want to do this,” I told her.

“Not so sure you want to do what?”

“This. This whole thing. Tremble.”

“What are you talking about?”

Sinking deeper into my chair, I crossed my legs and took note of a fresh scuff that pushed my shoe past charmingly distressed and into the territory of vagrantly worn. “I might have made a mistake.”

“What’s going on? The pressures of fame getting to you? Is it all too much? You miss your anonymity, the ability to sit down in a Bertucci’s for a nice leisurely pie without being badgered?”

“Knock it off, Alaina.”

She turned serious. “I’m not exactly sure what it is you’re saying.”

“I don’t know. I’m just feeling a little lost about this now.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning. . . maybe this isn’t what I want after all.”

“God, you’re a fucking mess!” she exploded. “You’re a little lost? I thought you were lost before you started back up with this. I thought this was how you were going to get found!”

“So did I,” I said, as baffled as she was. “So did I.”

“Theodore, have you really come here to tell me that after your highly public flogging in an art gallery in London, then being introduced to a legion of diehard fans in the fucking Alps, and having that set you off in a burdensome tizzy of songwriting that, against all probability, is actually quite good, and having that earn you the support of the world’s best producer and New York’s most powerful and seductive agent, and having
that
set you off gathering up your three amigos and convincing them to quit their day jobs—that after all that, upon further reflection, maybe you don’t want to play rock star after all?”

I stared back at her. “So, I think maybe you’re oversimplifying it, but yeah, that’s the gist of it.”

Alaina raised her arms to the ceiling. Touchdown! “What am I going to do with you?”

All the charged particles boomeranging around my head lifted me out of the chair and sent me pacing. “I don’t know what to say. I think I just had this realization that playing in a band again isn’t the answer. Whatever those days were, they’re gone and I’m not ever going to be able to find them. I was wrong to go looking.”

Alaina was incredulous. “Are you dumb, Teddy? Seriously—like, did you even graduate from college? Have you ever heard a musician say that making music brought them peace and happiness? Because I know an awful lot of musicians, and you know what? They are all miserable human beings. Miserable, tortured souls, suffering for what they’ve convinced themselves is art—suffering in vain, by the way, because what most of them make doesn’t come close to art, but I suppose self-delusion is some kind of Darwinian device that keeps you mental cases alive. Regardless—there is no way you could’ve reasonably thought that ginning up the band again and diving back into this fucked-up world was going to help you achieve nirvana. Case in point: Nirvana!”

Facing her window, my eyes drifted far over the skyline, past the collective cabin fever that raged through the city, afflicting all, diagnosed by none. And that, I understood at that very moment, was precisely what I’d learned: there really was no escape from any of this.

“What happened?” Alaina’s voice was now jarringly gentle.

“I don’t know,” I said with all the rock star grievousness in the world.

“Did something happen with Mackenzie? Is she out?”

“No, she’s in.”

“Did she not accept your Facebook friend request or something?”

“She’s in,” I repeated, fumbling for words. “I just don’t know if she’s
in
. You know what I mean?”

Alaina’s face was a thicket of disbelief. “Not even a little bit.”

“She doesn’t need this. None of them do. Shit, Jumbo doesn’t even need this.”

Alaina grabbed an apple off her desk and hurled it at me. It struck me in the chest.

“Ow!” I yelped.

“Of course they don’t need this! If they needed this, you would’ve heard from them at some point in the current millennium.
You
need this because it was your band. It’s your heinous mug up in that London gallery looking like a slob. And it’s you—and only you—who has the power to change your legacy. To the extent you have one. And to the extent it needs changing.”