Start Without Me

by Joshua Max Feldman

  When she looked up at last, something frantically apologetic was happening in Adam’s face, his hands flapping like he was shaking them dry. “Sorry, I have a real talent for saying the wrong thing. Seriously, I am the Art Tatum of randomly insulting people.”

  She was crying—felt now the warm liquid leaking down the sides of her nose. She grabbed the napkin, sending the fork and knife inside clattering across the table.

  “I was just making conversation, y’know, just vamping, so to speak, and if you don’t want to talk about your, um—”

  “No, it’s not . . . ,” Marissa said, wiping her eyes. “Jesus, no, it’s not you, it’s not that, it must be the . . .” She was about to say “hormones”—but dear God, could that already be true?

  “No, no, I get it,” he said encouragingly. “It’s just the holidays.”

  She studied him. “Right,” she said.

  “Fucking holidays,” he affirmed, with a smile.

  She asked pointlessly, “What’s this song?” He looked up at the ceiling, maybe to listen, maybe to give her the opportunity to pull herself together.

  “This is ‘Santa Baby,’” he told her as she dabbed with the napkin where she imagined the mascara stains must be. By the time he looked back at her, she felt she’d regained something like self-possession. “I don’t know who the vocalist is, but Auto-Tune gets most of the credit. She must be really good looking, put it that way.”

  “So you’re really into music?”

  “Not as much as I used to be.” He began nodding, as if to encourage himself now. “Actually, I used to be a musician,” he continued. “I played keys. Y’know, piano, synth, anything with a keyboard. I can play almost any other instrument, too, but that was really where I made my bones. Playing keys . . .” He chuckled uncomfortably. She was ready to ask something else, happy to keep to topics she considered mutually harmless, when he continued, “Yeah, I first started taking piano lessons when I was a little kid.”

  “Were you a prodigy?”

  If she thought this was harmless, it appeared she was wrong: He winced in a gut-punched way, pushed himself up in his chair. “That’s a—that’s a loaded word, that’s really not, a, so that’s not a term you should just throw around, I don’t think. I was . . . I had a knack, when I was a kid, that’s all.”

  “Sorry.”

  He forced another unconvincing chuckle. “That’s okay, it’s just a weird thing to say about a kid, and I think people should realize that. It’s like telling a kid he’s a Jedi knight or something.”

  “Right . . . Sorry.”

  He settled in the chair, leaning on his left elbow, and it looked like this was going to be the end of it, but then he started talking again. “So yeah, I started out when I was a kid playing classical, but it’s a pretty miserable existence, especially for a kid, practicing every second you’re not in school, and then the competitions. Anyway, I eventually got into rock, and after I dropped out of college, I joined this band called the Deployers. Our sound was pretty punk, but there was always this push-and-pull with the other guys, because they wanted to do the big, guitars-attack thing, and I wanted to do more than just play loud. I was listening to a lot of prog rock then, so, you can see there were going to be problems.” Marissa nodded, not really following. “Anyway, after the Deployers broke up, I sorta bounced around for a while, and then I started a band with this girl, this woman, Kiss and Kill. And that was pretty good, we did some real things.” His right hand had gotten to work, lifting his straw halfway from the soda, dropping it in again—like a kid at a dinner of adults, she thought, lifting, dropping. “Yeah, Kiss and Kill, we achieved, I’d say, the minimum level of indie success that can look like success to the outside world.” He’d pulled the straw from the soda, was bending it into a triangle. “We played what the label called experimental pop, and I guess that’s not too, too far off. But it was more about meeting people halfway, musically, without compromising who you are. That’s harder than it sounds. But anyway, Johanna could really play guitar, and I could really play keys, so—so, yeah, we did some things. We only put out one record, though, in the end.” He’d begun squeezing one end of the straw so it could fit inside the other. “I think if we’d had a permanent drummer, that might have helped. Drummers are always the diplomats in a band. But the truth is, it would’ve taken a pretty great fucking drummer to save Kiss and Kill.” He laughed, hoarse, unmerry. “Whatever, long story short, things fell apart for about a million reasons, then I was sorta at sea. The biggest thing people don’t get about playing music is that you don’t make one fucking dime doing it, so it’s not like I could go sit by my pool in the Hollywood Hills for eighteen months and figure shit out.” He started spinning the straw triangle around his pointer finger. “And by then I was having some personal issues, there’s no point getting into it, except I—oops.” The triangle had spun off his finger onto the floor. He looked at it, appeared uncertain whether he ought to pick it up, didn’t, and continued, “I ended up playing at the kind of bar where you’re only there so the manager can gouge anybody who comes in for a beer with a cover, and if anyone listens, it’s only long enough to shout ‘Freebird’ at you.” Abruptly, he fixed her with his eyes, his face so earnest he had to be kidding, only he wasn’t. “We talked before about not hitting the call button on the airplane, and, well, hand to God”—and he went so far as to raise his right hand—“I will never touch that button again. But you have to promise me you’ll never, ever shout ‘Freebird’ at some poor bastard playing ‘Rocket Man’ for the thousandth time for whatever people put in the fishbowl on top of his piano. You might as well throw rocks at the dancing bears in the circus.” He began to smile but gave up halfway through the attempt. “Anyway, that’s the back-of-the-milk-carton version of Adam Warshaw’s musical career. I don’t play at all anymore, and that was definitely the right decision, I think, and I’d say I’m doing pretty well now. Like I said, I work at that bank, so.” He finished off the last watery half sip of soda. “‘Freebird,’” he said, putting the glass down. “‘Freebird, Freebird, Freebird.’”

  “I promise,” Marissa said.

  “Promise?”

  “I won’t yell that at anyone.”

  He snickered, like he’d forgotten what he’d asked. “That’s cool of you. Like, sincerely. That means a lot.”

  “Fucking holidays, right?” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Adam. “Yeah, fucking holidays.”

  The waitress walked over, picked up Adam’s glass, reached for Marissa’s cup of coffee. “I’m still drinking that, thanks,” Marissa told her.

  She let the saucer drop back onto the table.

  Adam sat up in his chair. “Y’know, we’re all in this together here.”

  The waitress bunched her lips into a scowl. “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, it is Thanksgiving. And I feel like you’re going out of your way to be shitty to our table.”

  “I don’t appreciate cursing. If you’re not having anything else, why don’t you pay the bill and go?”

  “You can see my friend is in the service industry,” Adam continued. “As it happens, I work in a customer-facing role at a bank myself. So we all know what dicks people can be all the time. We can at least be nice to each other.”

  The waitress gave him a thin, mean smile. “Oh, sure, I bet she’s the type who’d be nice to just about anybody.”

  Marissa’s temper had a velocity such that she only knew she’d lost it about the same time everyone else did. “What the fuck is your problem?” she heard herself demanding.

  “I think you better leave,” the waitress shot back.

  “Yeah, I think I better.” Marissa stood up, knocking her chair over, and rather than walking across the restaurant she kicked over the stanchion and tramped across the lobby.

  “Man, okay, I think we all got a little heated. Let’s all take a beat,” she heard Adam saying as she stomped away.

  She stopped beside a standee printed with the d
eparture times for the airport shuttle. She resisted the urge to lift this up and slam it against the floor a few times. At least there was no danger of crying again. In these moments, an iciness took hold of her—an alarming detachment that made her capable of just about anything. During a lacrosse game sophomore year of college, after a girl yanked her ponytail for the hundredth time, she threw her stick down and smacked the girl in the face so hard the girl fell on her back. Marissa’s teammates were stunned and then laughing as they dragged her away—this was Saint Marissa, after all. But it was such a fucking stupid thing to do. She could have gotten kicked off the team, lost her scholarship. And then where would she be? Back in Boston, waitressing. In the simplest terms, that was the destiny she’d been fighting her whole life, the one her Cavano temper and everything else Cavano in her urged her toward: dead-ended in Dorchester or wherever the fuck.

  She looked back over to the restaurant. Adam was still speaking with the waitress, making broad, conciliatory gestures. She watched him right the stanchion; to her astonishment, she watched him and the waitress hug.

  “You’re hugging that bitch?” she said as Adam approached, pulling her rollaboard behind him.

  “She lost her Mom last week,” he explained. “She’s totally devastated about not spending Thanksgiving with her. That’s the only reason she’s working. Don’t even take it personally.”

  “She picked the wrong day to call me a skank,” Marissa muttered.

  “No, no, she was totally shitty. I’m saying I don’t think it had anything to do with you.” He put the rollaboard on the floor beside her. “That’s the problem, people are hard to figure. You’ve basically got to forgive them for everything.”

  She couldn’t decide whether this was real insight or if he was maybe not a smart guy. But it occurred to her she’d like to believe what he’d said was true. “Thanks for . . .” She gestured vaguely to the bag.

  “No worries.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  He nodded equivocally, watching her face. “Congratulations?” he tried.

  “This isn’t the kind of pregnancy you say congratulations about. This is the other kind.”

  “Oh. Yikes.” Then he shrugged. “If it makes you feel better, I just ran out on the first family gathering I got invited to in more than a year.”

  “Why would that make me feel better?”

  “I dunno.” He looked troubled that she wasn’t more amused. “I guess it’s like I was saying, we all make mistakes.”

  “It just sounds like a waste to me.”

  For a moment, he appeared on the verge of defensiveness, or anger, but in the next instant, his features went slack, and he rubbed his cheek with his palm. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know anything about it. I’m still pissed about . . .”

  “Nah, it’s cool,” he replied, shrugging under the oversize coat.

  For several moments, neither of them spoke; he had a distracted look, rubbed the knobs of his knuckles with his thumb. A poppy Christmas song had started playing, something he’d probably recognize, but she didn’t feel like asking. And so, Marissa concluded, that’s that. They’d shared a cup of coffee and a Diet Coke, and now they’d drift out of each other’s lives, the same way they’d drifted in. Maybe that was the final comfort of strangers: It was never too long before you said goodbye.

  “So what’ll you do now?” she asked.

  “San Francisco!” he answered. “Back to San Francisco . . . What about you?”

  “I have to drive up to Vermont. They’re waiting for me.”

  “You’ll take ninety-one?”

  She pushed stray curls of hair behind her ears. “Whatever Google tells me.”

  “Yeah, you’ll take ninety-one, I’m from here, so . . .”

  She extended her hand, and they shook, quick, formal; she was not a hugger. His fingers were long and slender, like his limbs. “Good luck!” he told her.

  “Good luck,” she replied. It was strange to know you’d never see someone again, she thought; but then, it was the most ordinary thing in the world. Most people you saw, you’d never see again.

  In a jokey, half-crooning voice, he said, “‘And have yourself a very little . . .’” He smiled awkwardly.

  “Right,” she answered. “Same to you.”

  She turned and pulled her bag over to the nearby bank of elevators, pressed the down button for the garage. A few seconds later, the doors opened. She got on, the doors closed behind her, and the elevator began a moaning trip downward.

  She hadn’t even had time to wash her hair.

  [ 4 ]

  Out Front

  Adam walked through the revolving doors at the front of the hotel lobby. Wind howled across the sidewalk, seemed to gather beneath the concrete portico over the drive before the hotel, come back at him in rising gusts. There was a metal bench to his left, next to some skimpy box hedges. He sat down, waiting for the shuttle to the airport to appear. Stupidly, he heard a reedy “Leaving on a Jet Plane” in his head.

  He was aware there were people who felt great in these moments, who could identify a type of freedom in knowing there were no more backdoors, no more off-ramps or escape hatches, that the only path left was dead ahead. But Adam was not one of those people. He loved escape hatches.

  But he’d returned his rental car, absorbing a fifty-dollar “early return fee” plus whatever they’d charge him for not filling up the gas tank. He’d killed time by hopping on a shuttle from the car rental place to this hotel, because sitting around a lobby seemed preferable to wandering around an airport terminal. He’d had a soda he hadn’t really wanted, he’d met a flight attendant who was more interesting than he might have expected. Now, though, there were no more ways he could think of to delay the inevitable. There was nowhere else to go but to the airport, to pay whatever he needed to change his ticket, and fly back to where he’d started the day before.

  He felt the dull daily ache of missing Johanna, like an indentation at the bottom of his stomach. It’d started during the conversation with Marissa. There was no good reason for it. Marissa didn’t look like Johanna, didn’t act much like her, except when Marissa exploded with anger and stormed out of the restaurant. But even the most conventional women reminded him of Johanna, sooner or later—because they held their lips an inch apart when they were listening, or didn’t; because they covered their whole faces with their hands when they laughed hard, or didn’t; because they had the finest gold-blond hair on their lower backs, or didn’t. Even now, he could catch himself convinced he saw her pulling the door of a car closed, bending down for her purse in a coffee shop window. Drinking had once been his solution to all this. The alcohol would muddy up his senses enough that he’d stop seeing her ghost. In the sharpness of sobriety, though, Johanna was everywhere.

  A Gibson in his head now, plus a sharp harmonica moan: “Visions of Johanna,” for fuck’s sake. God, he hated that song. He hated Dylan, too, and no one had ever been able to badger him into appreciation, either. The wry smirk in every chord change: What kind of a spiritual voice-of-the-people was that supposed to be? “Desire” was pretty cool, though, the Christian stuff was actually pretty cool, too; at least Dylan seemed to mean it at the time. Adam had to remind himself that his opinions about this stuff didn’t matter to anyone anymore.

  He pulled his shoulders together, tucked his chin into his collar against the cold. Now that it was certain he wouldn’t be seeing his family, he found he had the audacity to miss them. But he couldn’t help it. He missed the chaos and kindness of his nieces and nephews; he missed Kristen’s dry humor, he missed Jack’s grumbling displays of competence—fitting a dozen suitcases in a trunk, getting the Reagan-era refrigerator in the garage to work again. And he missed his parents: his father’s winking self-effacement, his unbreakable good humor apart from unaltering grimness about the bottom of the Red Sox roster; his mother’s inevitable “Aw, jeez!” as her carefully laid plans fo
r the day unraveled. They were an unremarkable family, just like every other, but something about their familiarity made them exquisite to him. He wished he could tell them—he’d even planned on it, maybe—that it wasn’t their fault he’d gotten so drunk all those times he saw them. It wasn’t because he didn’t like them, it wasn’t because he didn’t like being with them. It was more that he got so drunk because he did like them, and he couldn’t stand it.

  And because he was sitting out there all by himself in the cold (no accident, of course; he sought these situations, they taught him at Stone Manor), he indulged the feeling of missing everybody now, anybody: his brother-in-law, Dan, his sister-in-law, Lizzy; Hank and Michael and Bruno, his bandmates in the Deployers; his high school crew, his few college friends; all the characters from the scene in New York; and Marissa, too, because sure, why not? Most randos weren’t nearly that cool, and if there was a little crazy mixed in there, all the better.

  A taxi pulled up to the curb—a beefy-faced man in a hooded down jacket over a suit got out. He had a neatly trimmed goatee and a red widow’s peak, a shoulder bag dangling from one arm and a Bluetooth earpiece in his ear, a wry grin on his lips. “. . . as a witch’s tits here,” he was saying, presumably to someone via the Bluetooth. “Connecticut, I think . . . Ha! Exactly! . . . Half the time I don’t remember until the stewardess says what the weather’s like where we’re landing.” The cabdriver had gotten out, handed the man a receipt, which he tucked into his wallet. “Thanks,” the man said, addressing the driver, patting him on the shoulder. “Good talking to ya . . . Yeah, I’ll dial in from the business center before my two fifteen . . . No, to meet Cindy and the girls, it’ll be two days with her folks, then Disney.” He chuckled. “It’s called having daughters. I might fly right from Orlando to meet—” He disappeared through the revolving door inside the hotel.