Thank You, Goodnight (37 page)

“Is
fellate
really a verb?” asked Jumbo.

“Ask the sex therapist.”

The muscles in Mack’s face tensed with sympathy. “Sorry, guys, but for men at your station in life, it’s pretty much a past-tense verb.”

*       *       *

At about ten fifteen, a pair of violet stilettos carried Alaina into the Plum like a bayonet and deposited her straight onto Mackenzie’s lap. She kissed Mack on the cheek and announced that she wouldn’t be needing her own chair tonight.

“Thanks for showing up,” Warren grunted, sponging up olive oil with yet another rosemary roll.

Alaina surveyed the scene. “You cats ate without me.”

By this point, the table was littered with plates: a battlefield of bloody red-sauce stains and chicken bones, ricotta cheese oozing out of sliced lasagna like the innards of the dead.

I was hoping our agent’s nonchalance foretold good things.

“So?” I asked impatiently.

Alaina looked past me as Charles, the Plum’s manager, appeared at the table and delivered a regal bow. “So nice to see everybody,” he said. “Miss Farber, you look radiant as always.”

“Sorry, Charlie. I think I’m gay tonight.”

“Of course.”

“Can you blame me?” Her fingers glided over Mackenzie’s cheek. “I hope you got a good look at this before she sat down. It’s the stuff of college dorms. The nerve at her age.”

Charlie struggled to not look uncomfortable. This was Alaina’s new thing around Mack. An over-the-top display of lust was her rather odd way of expressing concern. People go all sorts of crazy when there’s a terminal illness in the room. They sit around and speak of weighty themes in dirgelike tones. Hysterical laughter zaps into hysterical crying. Someone puts on the Righteous Brothers until someone else censures them—Really? At a time like this?—so they put on Squeeze and everybody starts telling stories. I’d have understood it if Mack’s condi
tion was perilous. But Mack was as close to death as the rest of us—less so, in fact; her cells had just been given the Clorox treatment—which made Alaina’s hammy display of sham carnality uncalled-for and, frankly, weird.

“As always, dear friends, my staff and I are at your service.” Charlie offered a fussy dip and carried his Greenwich, Connecticut, coif to the next table.

Alaina said, “I know somebody ordered me an appletini.”

I looked sharply at her. “I’m going to start beating it out of you in two seconds.”

“Ooh. Promise?” She permitted a cruel little smirk to scheme its way over the southern hemisphere of her face, then, at last, she broke down. “Okay, kids, they love it. They came in their tacky houndstooth pants.”

“I knew it!” Jumbo hooted, pounding the table. “Did I not call this?”

The rest of us sat there with an idiot’s gape.

“Seriously?” I said.

“Are you really doubting me, sugar packet? That’s adorable. No lie—they love it.”

“Exactly how much do they love it?”

“A lot much. All kinds of ideas in those greedy little heads of theirs. They want to release it, they want to promo the hell out of it, and then they want to send you little boys and girls on a trip to play in all sorts of exotic locations. Like Houston and Cincinnati. You’ll bring me back snow globes.”

We were all blanketed in bewilderment. I needed the comfort of details. “Say more.”

“Here’s the deal,” Alaina began. “We’re reintroducing the world to an old friend. You took a few years off, you grew up, and now you’re back with something fresh to say to the world. Like
Tunnel of Love
by Springsteen or . . . pretty much every Springsteen album after that. The point, people, is that this is happening. All questions and sad
little insecurities can be directed to Colin. The Dire Wolf himself is on his way over.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “You just played them the music and they jumped on it? MCA hears our album and immediately signs us?”

“They don’t look at it as just getting into bed with you—which would be a tough sell with this band, except as regards the exquisite Miss Highsider. They see it as getting into bed with Sonny too. It just happens to be our stroke of luck that our producer is the guy everyone wants to stroke. Even the CEO, that Maxwell LaRusso guy. Two songs in and his prom dress was already on the floor, and believe me, that’s saying a lot. He’s an intense fellow for a guy with a ponytail.”

“Didn’t anybody want to talk about terms?” Mack asked, still pinned under Alaina’s ass. “I’ve been off the grid awhile, but there used to be these little things called record contracts.”

Alaina tossed an arm around Mackenzie’s neck. “We did talk terms. I don’t accept first offers as a matter of reputation, and I’m certain I could get a bidding war going. But we all decided, did we not, that because of his history with the band and having had the world-class pleasure of matrimony with Mack here, Colin is the one we can trust to show this band some love. And I don’t know about the rest of you, but I like love.”

There fell upon our table a thick moment of mute absorption while the restaurant clamored around us. Despite the long, sordid chain of events that had brought us to that moment—from those heinously defamatory photos all the way up to the summer spent germinating in Bic’s petri dish of a studio—success felt sudden. Unearned. Unreal.

“Look, it’s precious that you hayseeds are so dismayed by your own victory,” Alaina said to our unbendable deadpans. “But this meeting was like good sex: somebody else did all the work, and there was a cookie platter. Honestly, I barely opened my mouth, and you know how hard it is for me to keep it shut. I felt practically ornamental.”

Warren stared thoughtfully at her. “I thought we’re calling you Asians now.”

At that point, Jumbo hoisted his ungainly body out of his chair and, beaming like a cartoon sun, circled the table administering hugs, neck squeezes, slobbery kisses, and other unwelcome currencies of affection. And yet it all seemed so improbable. How could we be the newest entry in a major record company’s roster? We who had all the chic edginess of a PTA meeting?

Just as miraculous as the news imparted to us was the fact that, for this one instant in time, I allowed myself to live in the land of the far-fetched.

None of tomorrow’s battles bothered me now. Maybe zero copies of our new album would ever leave the shelves. Maybe zero oily teenagers would double-click on our new tracks. We’d finally gotten our legitimacy back, validated by the same music business that had dismissed us. The label seemed intent on showing the world what I’d been pretty sure of all along—that our exile had been premature, unfair, unwarranted. Back then, the industry was wrong, the fans were wrong, my father was wrong. But now, through the punishing miracle of delayed gratification, we’d been taken seriously again.

I wondered if that was all I ever wanted.

*       *       *

Colin’s arrival, with a flock of label cohorts in tow, jacked up the noise coefficient by degrees. He announced that the party—it was now officially a party—would be on him, and the floodgates opened. Shameful amounts of food were ordered. Bottles of wine collected at the center of the table like the Hong Kong skyline in miniature. Glasses were hoisted, toasts were proposed, and an unremitting game of musical chairs ensued as each person sought out, or avoided, a few moments in whisper proximity to another. Mackenzie even got her lap back.

As I was about to duck out to call Sara and share the good news, a firm hand gripped my shoulder. It was Colin. He gave my hand a robust shake.

“Thanks for making all this happen,” I said. “I’ll bet you thought you’d kicked the habit a long time ago.”

“I was quite happy to fall off the wagon.” He leaned back on the heels of his double monk-strap loafers. “The new material is just great, Teddy.”

“Even so, you must’ve stuck your neck out for us because of our history together, and I just want you to know that I appreciate it.”

“It’s more than history. You’ve also stacked your band with ex-wives of mine, an underhanded move but a convincing one.” He laughed grandly. “All that aside, I like you guys, always did. Your guitar player’s a mess, but whose isn’t?”

“I know you haven’t kept your job all these years just by signing people you like.”

Colin picked up his brandy with one hand and pushed back the jacket of his Armani suit to place his other hand on his hip. “To do what I do, you must understand that people form deeply personal attachments to artists and the songs they sing. I’m probably insulting you with the obviousness of that statement, but let me put it in the starkest of terms. If you asked the average schmuck on the street to imagine a world without his wife and then imagine a world without his favorite five songs, which do you think he’d find it harder to envision? We both know what he would say out loud, but what would he really feel?” His eyebrows leapt at the question. “Perhaps that says something appalling about humanity and perhaps it says something wonderful about art.”

“I think it says something wonderful about humanity that we’re adept at burying the truth,” I interjected.

“But in the end, we always try to find it and dig it up, don’t we? Look, I think I’ve held on to my job for as long as I have because I know who I work for. I work for that twiggy neurotic in junior high who’s searching for a rudder to steer her through the channels of emotional imbalance. I work for the forty-three-year-old ninny with thinning hair whose music collection is all he has to animate the myth
that deep down where it counts—where it really counts—he’s not like everyone else at that drab prison of an office. You see the dichotomy there. Young people choose music that helps them fit in; older people choose music that sets them apart. The entanglement of music and identity is one of the things that makes my job fascinating. I take my responsibilities very seriously, my friend.” He flashed a blizzard of a grin, at once mischievous and genial. “Even if I happen to look like I’m only in it for the high-end sushi.”

I grunted in reverence. “I’ll tell you what, Colin. I know you deliver that speech seven nights a week and a matinee on Sunday, but you still sell it like the dire wolf you are.” I tapped his glass with mine.

He chuckled at the invocation of his enduring and rather confounding nickname. The liner notes of countless albums released over the past three decades extolled appreciation upon Colin “Dire Wolf” Stone. Its genesis was anyone’s guess; there was nothing even slightly wolfish about the man. When asked, Colin was ever the artful dodger, rolling his eyes with weary joy and saying something elusive like “A question best directed to David Bowie, I’m afraid.”

“Something else in your favor, Teddy,” he added in a brandy-bathed whisper. “I find your agent deathly sexy. I’ll thank you not to tell Mackenzie.”

“I’d keep my distance from Alaina,” I counseled. “She’ll make you do things you don’t want to do.”

“Oh, but I like that. I want to do things I don’t want to do.”

I looked over at our agent, anchoring the rotation of the table, each faceless A&R soldier taking a turn to fawn over her when, by all accounts, it should’ve been the other way around. Colin was then drawn into another conversation, so I seized an empty chair next to her.

“You seem like you’re having a good time,” I said to her.

She was chewing on a sliver of orange peel that had served as garnish for her martini. “If this were an orgy, it’d be off to a slow start, but all things considered . . .”

“By the way, you do know that Mackenzie is in remission.”

“Completely in remission?”

I scratched at the back of my head. “Is it a continuum? I thought remission was like virginity: it’s either all there or all gone.”

Alaina hoisted her glass and took a sip. “Well, that’s the best news of the night.”

“I would agree, except it’s not news to some of us. We’ve known she’s been out of the woods for a while now.”

“Well, Ted, I suppose it’s just another act of friendship on your part that you kept that from me.”

“It also means that she probably doesn’t need you to sit on her lap.”

She gave me an Arctic once-over. “I’ll sit wherever the fuck I want.”

“I’m just saying she’s okay. If you were showering her with undue quantities of attention to make her feel better, it’s touching but, as it happens, unnecessary.”

“When I need advice on how to handle my personal relationships, yours will be the first number I’ll lose.”

It was a fair point.

“You can go and sit on her lap too if you want,” she added, tweaking me with an exaggerated frown.

“Anyway,” I said, changing the subject. “Since I have you to myself for the moment, I just want to say that whatever you had to do to make all this happen, I don’t want to know about it, but I’m grateful.”

She tilted her head. “You don’t have to sit in my lap either. We all know who did the heavy lifting here.”

“I didn’t know you did modesty.”

“And I didn’t know you did false modesty. There’s some great stuff on this record. ‘Whereabouts’ kicks ass. That could be our single. That ‘Warmth of Disease’ tune is a soundtrack-ready weepy. I don’t know why you felt compelled to write a song called ‘The Inevitable Pivot,’ but I guess it’s never too late to be an English major. It’s a winner, my little pound cake, and everyone knows it. Mature but not dated, fresh but not pathetically trend-chasing, tasteful but never overly restrained.”

Her compliments were bringing to mind the notion of contours, as if this time out it was our job to walk some sort of line. To be this one thing over here, but not be too much of this other thing over there. That smelled rather unlike art to me.

“Are we really going with
Trans Am with Electric Eel
?” Alaina asked.

I’d managed to talk everyone into naming the album after that painting I’d been introduced to by the semisuicidal Duncan. Nothing I could put my finger on; it was just where my head was at that time. Somewhere out on that highway, in the backseat of that convertible, breezing into the open.

“You don’t like it?”

Alaina’s face registered indifference. “It meets my criteria: no masturbation references and no roman numerals.”