I watch his reaction, but there’s nothing unusual about it. “Funny coincidence,” he says, smiling. He steps a little closer, looks into the glass. “I don’t use any of it very often, but I like having it around. It reminds me of my mum.”
I smile, willing myself to calm down. “I don’t really use mine either. But it seems wrong to just get rid of it. I doubt Milo’s ever going to want it.”
He looks at me thoughtfully. “You never know. We all need something that reminds us of our mothers.” And that brings up a whole lot of questions I’m not ready to consider.
Roland points at the envelope I’m still carrying. “Is that something you need to mail?” he asks.
I look down at the package, the tiny hole where the point of a key has begun to poke through the paper. “No. These are the keys to Milo’s house. I’m taking care of some things for him over there.” On an impulse, I say, “Is it far from here? I thought I might go over this afternoon.” I hadn’t been planning to go until Monday, but I’m suddenly both restless and curious, and it looks like Milo’s going to be busy for a few hours.
“Not far at all. I’d be happy to drop you there after lunch, if you like.” He stops abruptly and gestures toward the kitchen. “Right, lunch. That was what I came in to tell you—God, my mind is going. Danielle’s put a few things out, if you’re hungry. Come on in, if you’d like to join me.”
“Thank you,” I say. “I’ll be right there.”
He turns and walks back to the kitchen. After he’s gone, I look into the china cabinet again, taking a quick inventory. I see piles of dinner plates, teacups, saucers. Two serving bowls, a covered butter dish. A creamer. But no sugar bowl.
Chapter Thirteen
I join Roland in the kitchen. The lunch that Danielle has set out is simple and lovely—salad, cold roasted chicken, fresh rolls, all so pretty and carefully arranged it could be the work of a caterer. I wonder if it’s nice to have this all the time, all these artfully prepared meals, or if it starts to feel like a dinner party that never ends.
I feel on edge, as if I’ve been presented with an opportunity that I know I might accidentally squander. I think of the games Milo and Rosemary used to play, Jenga and Operation and pick-up sticks, games where everything depends on keeping your hand steady. I never understood the appeal: satisfaction and anxiety laced so tightly.
“I think we may have an acquaintance in common,” I say finally. “I mean, besides the obvious.”
Roland looks up from his plate, blandly interested. “Oh, really? Who?”
“Lisette Freyn.” This is a guess. Lisette hasn’t said in so many words that she knows Roland, but it certainly sounds like they’ve spent considerable time in the same circles.
“Lisette,” he says, with a grin so pleased and wolfish that I’m suddenly certain they’ve slept together. “I’ve known Lisette since she was a young thing. She traveled with us for a while.” He’s lost for a moment in some haze of rock-and-roll memory before he pulls himself back. “How do you know her?”
“We went to school together. I ran into her the other day.”
His expression turns somber. “Right. I’m sure she mentioned that she and Kathy Moffett are friends.”
“Yeah. We didn’t get a chance to talk very much, but it sounds like they’ve known each other a long time.” I let it be a question, if he chooses to answer.
He takes a bite of his chicken, nods as he swallows. “Kathy’s younger, of course, but they overlapped for a bit.”
Overlapped. “So Kathy was a …” I pause. Is “groupie” a disrespectful term? Is there some empowering new-millennium phrase for women who trail along behind tour buses, giving blow jobs and doing laundry? “She traveled with the band, too,” I finish.
“Right,” he says.
“So you must have known Bettina her whole life.”
I watch as something rolls through his body, some pulse of sorrow or regret. He sighs. “Yes. I’m lucky enough to say that I did.”
“I’m sorry.” I reach out to put a hand on his arm, hesitating for a second because … why? Because he’s famous, I suppose; because he’s not quite real to me. But of course his arm, when I do touch it, is as solid as my own. “It sounds like you were very close. She must have been almost like a daughter to you.” I wait to see if I’ve gone too far, if I’ve added one block too many to the precarious stack.
He smiles weakly. “Very much so. I actually spent several years thinking she was my daughter. But that’s a saga best left for another time.”
He balances his fork and knife on the edge of his plate and looks to see if I’m finished eating. “Ready to get going?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say. “Just give me a minute to grab my bag.”
There are two cars in the garage, the silver one that Milo drove last night and a black sedan of a make I’ve never heard of, sleek and curved like a jungle cat. Roland unlocks the black car, and we both get in.
We ride past the photographers in silence. “This will be the first time I’ve seen Milo’s house,” I say after we’ve turned the corner. I don’t know how much Milo has told him about our history.
Roland fumbles above his head, pulls a pair of sunglasses from a case clipped to the sun visor. “Kids need a chance to break away,” he says after a minute. “Show their independence.”
“Yes, they do.” That’s not really it. But it’s nice of him to say.
“So can we expect a new album anytime soon?” I ask after a few minutes.
He turns to look at me briefly, amused. “Are you a fan?” he asks.
I feel myself blush. I’m not sure how to answer. “Sure,” I say. “Who isn’t?”
“Ah,” he says, nodding. “A ‘who isn’t?’ fan.” He stops at a red light and turns to look at me, smiling like he finds this all very entertaining.
“I’m just not that familiar with your music,” I say. There’s a tartness in my voice I didn’t entirely intend. “Which album should I start with?”
He laughs, throwing his head back. “Fair enough.” The light turns green, and he drives on. “To answer your question, I’m not sure when there’ll be a new album. I’ve been talking to my old bandmates about recording a new version of Underneath, but I don’t know if it’ll actually happen.” He glances at me uncertainly. “That’s an old Misters album from the seventies,” he adds.
“I do know that much,” I say. I feel suddenly wary, like he knows more about me than I think he does. I haven’t mentioned The Nobodies Album to anyone since I got to California, and the coincidence makes me uneasy. “What made you think about redoing it?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Oh, I don’t know. Getting older, looking back. What would you do differently if you could—that sort of thing.”
We reach the top of a steep hill, and I catch my breath as we go over.
“I’ve thought about doing something similar,” I say, still cautious. “With books.”
He glances at me. His expression is friendly, interested. “Really? I don’t quite see how it would work with books, but that’s probably just my own lack of imagination.”
I don’t answer right away. “I’ve thought it might be interesting to change the endings,” I say. “Find out how things might have worked out differently for the characters.”
“Hmm,” he says. He slows to let a dog walker cross the street, five animals of different sizes and colors pulling her forward, leashes tangling.
“What does ‘hmm’ mean?” I ask.
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t read as much as I should, but I always thought part of the appeal is that books never change. You know, that I can read Great Expectations or whatever, and it’s exactly the same story people were reading a hundred years ago. There’s some continuity there.”
“That’s an interesting example,” I say, seeing an opportunity. “Dickens actually did write two endings for Great Expectations. When he finished the novel, he showed the manuscript to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Bulwer-Lytton tho
ught the ending was too bleak. Dickens ended up changing it so that it’s more ambiguous; if you want to read a happy ending into it, you can.”
“He changed it before or after it was published?” Roland asks.
“Before. The first ending was never published in Dickens’s lifetime, but now they’re both available. Scholars have all kinds of”—here I wave my hand in the air, though I’m not sure if I mean to be dismissive or not—“spirited debates about which one is better.”
“Oh, that’s lovely,” Roland says. “So after he died, people went through his papers and published the stuff he’d decided wasn’t good enough. You know what that is, when you write something and show it to your friends and get some feedback and then change it? That’s called revision. It’s like when you watch a DVD, and they’ve got all the deleted scenes from the movie. Usually, it’s not hard to see why those scenes were deleted in the first place.”
I don’t say anything. I’m trying to figure out a rebuttal, but I keep getting tangled in the threads. I’ve never been very good at debating.
Roland shakes his head. “I don’t like it. I want answers—does the boy get the girl, did the butler do it, whatever. That’s your job—you’re telling me a story, I want to hear a story. I don’t want to get interested and get all the way to the end and find out you’re not going to tell me what happens. It’s like when someone tells you a joke but they can’t remember the punch line.”
This conversation is bothering me more than it should. “But there’s also a personal side to it,” I say. “We’re all submerged in our work, you know? I’m in my books, you’re in your songs. And if I’ve changed since I wrote those books, if the way I see my life events is different, and the way I approach relationships is different …” I think about how to say this. It’s important, but I don’t feel like I’m articulating it right. “If I were writing any of those books now, they wouldn’t be the same books. I want to change the way I put myself in them.”
He shrugs. “You’re getting into some kind of Dr. Who time-travel thing now. The only way you got here, to the point you’re at now, is by writing those books the way you did …” He pauses, then shakes his head and smiles ruefully. “I don’t know, you’ve kind of lost me. I guess I’d just say that if you want to do something new, do something new. And whoever you are now, whatever ways you’ve changed, that’s going to show up in the new work without your even trying.”
I look at him, his face in profile as he drives. Already he’s familiar to me in a different way than he was when we met. It’s a little bit like fleshing out a character in fiction; you start off knowing the most basic things about them, but it’s only by spending time with them, getting inside their heads, that you learn who they really are. “Well, okay,” I say. “But how is this any different from what you’re talking about doing with Underneath?”
He thinks about it, tapping two fingers on the steering wheel, then laughs. He looks surprised. “I was going to say, music is just a different beast, and it’s always interesting to hear an old song played in a new way. But you know what? I think you may have just talked me out of it.”
My mouth opens several seconds before I actually say anything. If I were trying to describe it in writing, I’d probably use the word “sputter.” “And how did I do that? I’m on the pro side of this, remember?”
“Yeah, but you’ve made me think about it a different way. People have known these songs for thirty-odd years, yeah? And they’ve sung along in their cars and played them at parties and all that. I think if we redo them, we run the risk of having people say, ‘Why mess with a good thing?’ Or even ‘Look at those pathetic old bastards trying to cash in on their past glories.’” He laughs. “We’ve got our place in rock history, such as it is, and our biggest job now is not to embarrass ourselves before we die.”
Roland turns a corner, and I realize we’re on Milo’s street. I recognize it from the Turf Wars segment, and I feel suddenly anxious. Milo’s house stands out prominently among its neighbors, the front yard wrapped in yellow crime-scene tape, broken and fluttering. There’s no one outside the house at the moment, no reporters or murder groupies, but the grass and surrounding sidewalk are covered with trash and flattened debris, like a fairground after the carnival moves on. As we get closer, I can see that the driveway contains a makeshift shrine where people have left a strange mixture of artifacts: stuffed animals and bottles of tequila, black lace lingerie and signs that read JUSTICE FOR BETTINA. I guess there’s no consensus yet on what Bettina’s legacy will be: will she land on the side of rock-and-roll icon or victim on the milk carton?
Roland pulls up next to the curb and stops. “You all right?” he asks, and I realize that I’ve been sitting here looking at the scene instead of opening the door. “You want me to come in with you?”
I shake my head. “That’s okay. Thanks for the ride.”
He nods. “I’m going to run some errands, but it won’t take me long. Just give a ring when you’re ready to go.” He asks for my phone—punches his number right in, which wouldn’t have occurred to me—then watches as I get out of the car and walk up the front steps, waiting to see that the keys work before he drives away.
There’s a chiming sound as I open the front door, a feature of the house’s alarm system that lets inhabitants know when someone new comes in, even when the alarm isn’t turned on. I remember this being mentioned in one of the news stories I read, though it didn’t sound as if investigators found this detail to be particularly relevant or enlightening.
I step inside, and I’m in the turquoise-painted foyer I remember from the video. The air feels heavy, the way it does when you return home after a long trip. The ceramic-tiled floor is dirty, smeared with dark footprints, and I think of all the people who must have been tramping in and out over the past week, the detectives and forensics experts and whoever else is granted access to the site of a violent death.
I feel vaguely unsettled, maybe just from being here or maybe from the conversation with Roland, and as I close the door behind me, I feel scared. Not scared for my safety—nothing that tangible. But afraid of being here, afraid of entering this house, which no longer has the evolving-organism, blank-slate potential of most spaces where people live. It’s been frozen at a single moment, its symbolism fixed and monolithic. And I don’t want to walk in far enough to become part of the tableau.
I let the feeling pass through me, like a chill, and then I’m ready to move on. I walk through the velvet-red dining room and into the kitchen, my eyes landing on the counter where the ghost of Bettina might as well still stand, slicing mangoes. It’s strange having seen these rooms without ever having been inside them; it’s like visiting the empty set of a dream.
If I’m here for any reason other than snooping around, it’s to find out the extent of the damage in the master bedroom, but I’m going to need a little time to prepare myself for that. I wander through a doorway into a space that I would probably call a den but that I believe Milo referred to as a “media room.” At the time of the Turf Wars tour, there were layers of pillows strewn artfully over the floor in a gesture that seemed to mean something like “Why sit on a couch when the whole room can be a couch?” But now the cushions have been tossed into a messy heap, revealing dull off-white carpeting underneath. There’s a crack in the face of the TV mounted on the wall, and I wonder if it’s something that happened during the investigation.
Walking through the house afterward, I’m thinking, it was impossible to separate the cumulative ruin into different strands: how much had been caused by the murder, how much by the police, how much by the day-to-day effects of a relationship that, depending on who you asked, was either loving and warm or fierce and treacherous. This isn’t unusual for me, this kind of narration; most of the time, I hardly notice I’m doing it. But now, as I draw back to listen to myself, I’m surprised enough that I stop and stand still. I see what I’m doing: I’m crafting the kind of sentences that might appear in a memoir.
“Write what you know” has always seemed unnecessarily limiting to me. I prefer instead, “Know what you write.” You want to inhabit a character who’s a banshee or a soil scientist or a Mesopotamian slave girl? Fine. Just make sure you get it right. Make it real; make it true; find the details to convince me.
But it’s impossible, isn’t it, to escape writing what you know? That slave girl may be able to pickle locusts and read omens in animal entrails, but she also knows how it feels to kiss your husband in the dark. When her hair is shorn so that her forehead can be branded, she will cry your twenty-first-century tears. And if she has a child, he will have your son’s eyes and his heartbreaking capacity for worry.
I can’t avoid it; that’s what I’m saying. I can’t not write about Milo, because he’s there, in every story I try to tell. What I can do is look at the two of us as clearly as I can. Give myself time to sort, and distance, and disguise. Set my own rules for privacy; decide what to keep to myself.
I walk past a bathroom that wasn’t on the video—it’s nicely appointed, but if it has any particular theme, it’s too subtle for me to identify—and into Milo’s practice room. It’s spare and fairly empty, with a stage at one end, set up with various pieces of equipment: amplifiers, microphones, a selection of guitars arranged on stands. There are no windows in the room, and the walls are lined with fabric-covered squares that I think must be soundproofing panels. If a writer had been plotting her murder, Bettina probably would have died in here.
There’s one other doorway in the room, and it leads to Milo’s office. In the Turf Wars clip, it had seemed as if the entire room were papered with fan letters, but I see now that it’s only the back wall. Amazing to see, all these things that strangers feel compelled to give my son. There are poems and drawings, photos of topless girls who look barely old enough to be in high school. Love notes and hate mail. An e-mail from a father whose teenage son died in a car accident, telling Milo that they’d played Pareidolia songs at the funeral. A child’s letter, written in crayon, asking Milo to come to his birthday party.
The Nobodies Album Page 23
