Checker and the Derailleurs

by Lionel Shriver

  Caldwell can go on record, then, as Checker’s friend and fan from the vantage point of obscurity, and loyalty in someone’s shadow sheds a certain soft gray light of its own.

  J.K.’s lot was easier, for he took a fortunate turn right about the Ten-Year Week: J.K. has decided his life is ordinary, and that’s the way he likes it. Checker doesn’t approve of the word “ordinary,” but Checker is now in little danger of using it. J.K. doesn’t have any problem with the term at all. J.K. finds his life relaxing. He wouldn’t actually want to be a professional rock musician, so often on the road and keeping long, odd hours. He likes to sleep in. He likes sitting on the stoop and tossing a ball with his daughter, making her chase it when he misses. He doesn’t mind schlepping mail sacks for the post office as long as he gets to quit at 4:30; he looks forward to his pension. He loves leaning over the rail in the park and listening to NEW on his box, shooting the breeze with Caldwell and making plans to go on exotic vacations they will neither of them take, thank God. Those excursions pass the time under Hell Gate great, but to get on a plane sounds exhausting. Why go to Hawaii when the best corned beef is up the street?

  For J.K. is actually better suited to the small-town Astoria life, with its slight passivity and complacency, than Check. He likes to eat and sit and stroke heavy, luxurious chords on his bass. He likes being an amateur musician, for he savors smallness for its real size, evenings that rest in his hand. Checker always had to expand Astoria into something huge and incomprehensible—he made the colors gorge and the bridges talk and, Jesus, the place couldn’t have taken much more pumping up. This is Queens, for Christ’s sake. Much more of Check’s effusion and the whole neighborhood would explode.

  Once he could ask for a three-pack of TDK’s at Uncle Steve’s instead of just pointing at the shelf, Carl’s mother decided he wasn’t hopeless, after all, and sent him to a speech therapist. Checker has promised that when Carl is ready he can arrange for Carl to interview him on Danno’s Late Show. Q.C. is still so determined to be a disc jockey that in preparation for his debut he will talk to anyone, at length, so that everyone agrees that if there’s a problem now it’s that Quiet Carl never shuts up.

  Of course, the only way to find an identity is to realize you have one already—“identity crises” resemble those frantic searches for keys when the ring has been in your back pocket the whole time. So Howard has decided not to fight but to join himself. He wears clashing plaids and fey pastels, Bermuda shorts and dark glasses with bright yellow frames. And as Checker Secretti’s most fervid admirer, Howard has turned idolizing into a full-time job.

  One that pays handsomely. Howard is a good manager. He makes CBS cough up the kind of money that he himself would shell out for Checker, pulling off historically unprecedented contracts. When Sidestroke flaps into CBS offices in his ungainly plaids, executives groan and clutch their wallets, wishing they’d taken a longer lunch.

  Now that Rachel’s greeting-card business is off the ground, she has less time for music, but her children brush their teeth quickly if she promises to sing them Checker’s still unrecorded “In the Pocket” before they go to sleep. Rachel sings at weddings, around the piano at Christmas, and at Fourth of July picnics in Astoria Park; she’s sometimes done guest appearances at Plato’s with Caldwell and J.K.’s latest band. She sings over the dishes and in laundromats, and belts out “Too Much Trouble” walking down Ditmars past Checker’s house. Music itself requires no contract, and all the former Derailleurs have appropriated it for their own purposes, whether for selling out Madison Square Garden or vacuuming the carpet on the stairs.

  Most of all, she likes to tune in WNEW while making dinner with her husband, Lyndon, and between the Shadow Traffic reports from the “Blaupunkt R-E System” she’ll point out, “That’s your Uncle Check, boys.” She sings along, Lyndon bruising garlic cloves with such simmering jealousy that he crushes them to pulp with the flat of his knife. Rachel will always have a thing for Checker, but she enjoys that now, even if Lyndon doesn’t. She does sometimes think of Check when making love to Lyndon, and that bothered her when she was first married, but not anymore. She figures that when you marry someone, you embrace every man you’ve ever loved. It makes sense that the others visit from time to time.

  Sometimes Check comes to dinner when he’s in town and plays with the kids. She loves to watch him on the floor, because he doesn’t humor the boys—he really enjoys rolling the trucks along the carpet, constructing a city with skyscrapers like the one he’s just come from. They are the same for him, the big maple rectangles in Rachel’s living room and the long, tinted windows at CBS; he gets every bit as involved in blocks as in buildings and doesn’t come to the table until the food is cold. His attention never wanders but instead gets too acute, so that the kids’ only complaint later is that Uncle Check always takes over.

  Rachel has heard he’s the same way with his own children, only worse; they’ve got three now. He obviously gets a lot of song ideas from them, like the last album, Die, Daddy, Die. It’s still a little hard for her to see those kids, and Syria—but, boy, he pays for that woman, so they must have something. Everyone is waiting for her to mellow out, but Checker claims (rather proudly) that she’s more likely to burn up than burn out. Rachel wonders where they get all that energy.

  There was a time, too, when it looked as if they were really going to split, and sometimes Rachel secretly hoped it would happen. But Check was so wrecked then, sleeping on her couch or staying up all night in the studio in Manhattan or sacking out at Caldwell’s, that she ended up rooting for them with a surprising sincerity. It seemed like such an impasse—Syria wouldn’t take care of the kids while Check was on tour, but Check, who’d been raised, or not raised, dawdling by himself on the floor and ordering take-out Chinese at the age of four, wanted his kids to have a real mother. Furthermore, Syria still had no interest in ordinary domesticity, and though he’d warned her he wouldn’t, Checker ended up doing most of the cooking and cleaning just to avoid a life of wall-to-wall sweaty green work shirts and crusts of pizza; besides, she was so pissed off all the time, and the whole business was about to crack until Rahim Abdul showed up last year.

  He’d gone to cooking school and had been through the restaurant scene in several cities, and wanted to start his own catering business. He needed time to build a clientele and space to work. Everyone said the setup was insane, with their history, but the kids adored Rahim, and his cooking had only improved. Since Check and Syria now owned a whole brownstone, they installed a larger kitchen for Rahim and gave him a room on the top floor. They’re happy as clams, say the neighbors, who should know, since they’ve only called the police twice this year, and claim that not a single window has been smashed all summer.

  It must be nice, Rachel imagines, with a caterer around, always big salads and cakes left over, so that Check can easily invite his band over without Syria shattering her last year’s work over the distance of two floors.

  Evidently Rahim has become quite a ladies’ man, with no sign of settling down. Every weekend it’s a different dark little dancer skittering up the stairs, trying not to wake the kids. Little wonder, too; he’s turned into a real jewel, that pearly smile matured with a tiny sinister glimmer—all style, of course, he’s a complete sweetheart. He always was, and people “don’t change,” says Checker, “they just get more and more the same.”

  Frankly, there are evenings when her business has been edging toward the red and the kids take forever getting ready for bed that Rachel is actually relieved she didn’t marry Checker Secretti. She doesn’t have the constitution for it. Sometimes all she wants is to lie in front of the TV and watch something stupid, munching greasy popcorn. Lyndon is good for that, for around him she never feels, as she always has with Checker, the compunction to be spectacular, even if in the old days all she could muster was being spectacularly morose.

  And she definitely couldn’t have taken the “B Side,” as Checker calls it. Check says his “siesta
s” are milder now, but his stories from the Derailleur days are harrowing—like the time he lay down on a Central Park bench and didn’t move for five days, with wind, rain, and no food. When he and Syria were first married, she actually locked him in the apartment until it was over. Rachel will never forget last year, knocking on a door that usually led to a living room, which suddenly journeyed to the center of the earth. She’d looked in Checker’s eyes and seen nothing but lurching magma, black rock, the shifting of continental plates, Checker’s bright mantle from the underside. Screeching, she’d run down the stairs, like a little girl afraid of the dark.

  Furthermore, as a professional, Check can’t disappear right before a gig at the Omni in Atlanta, and he sometimes gives a concert of a different hue—encores of “A Cappella in the Underpass,” midnight blues. Besides, “Power is power,” as Tyrone told him long ago, and Check has begun to discover that he is less Jekyll and Hyde than a coin with its flip side, heads or tails, hard currency. More and more at his best, too, Checker brings his knives together, blades meeting and clicking, pleasure and pain finally, somehow, the same emotion. For while Checker watches undulating crowds at the Omni, Lena is developing inoperable cataracts, living in a fog no longer of her own choosing, as one generation’s vision literally gives over to another’s—increasingly one that melds the glee of careening forward with the sorrow of looking back, a bittersweetness less a result of getting older than of getting more intelligent.

  Every once in a while, someone in Plato’s wonders out loud, “Whatever happened to Eaton Striker?” No one seems to know for sure. Maybe Eaton’s found a band his speed to do small clubs and weddings, resolutely settling down to a less elaborate success than he might once have hoped for. Maybe he’s a drum instructor. Or maybe he went to law school, realizing he wouldn’t make his mark in rock and roll, and finding a better use for his talents. Maybe he’s found a girl who admires him and makes him feel so important that he no longer needs the approbation of several million fans. Maybe he’s quietly disappointed about the drumming, but sees it as what he did when he was young and remembers his nights in Plato’s warmly, recalling the parking meter incident with distress. Maybe he’s followed Checker’s career, giving the albums to his friends as Christmas presents. Maybe he has his own little boy now, who comes down to the basement in Eaton’s suburban split-level to watch his father knock around on the old set, Eaton playing along with the radio, smiling when “Hundred-Dollar Peanuts” comes on, noting he still can’t keep up with the guy. What amazing subtlety. What playfulness—

  “You know, Checker Secretti was a friend of mine,” he might confide to his son, whose jaw would drop.

  “Bull,” says the little boy.

  “No bull. In fact, I discovered him,” says Eaton shyly.

  “Bull,” says the little boy.

  “Bull,” says Caldwell.

  “Bullshit,” says J.K.

  Pretty much everyone says, “Bull.” Pretty much everyone thinks that’s not what happened to Eaton Striker.

  There have been times, though, that Check’s been reminded of his old friend, like when he talked to a musician who recorded in the studio next door. The man had used a new session man once or twice, though the drummer hadn’t meshed and they found someone else. “But the guy went blooey, Check. Like a neutron bomb. Took down the whole band, no human life remained. No joke, like, only the mics were still standing. This is gonna cost thousands in therapy. My people are mangled, man. Guitars, shit, they can’t even pick their noses without bursting into tears—”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Man, I don’t even remember. Wish I did, actually. Cause there should be warnings on that package. Somebody should hang a bell around his neck.”

  Later, there was a reviewer in Rolling Stone who gave Check the most scathing criticism of his career. Die, Daddy, Die was “treacly with mindless positivism. Gushy and gaga with a childishness we are explicitly instructed to admire, Secretti once more oozes self-congratulation and star-struck awe at finding himself on stage. Appalled by Secretti’s paucity of sophistication, this reviewer is just as incredulous.” The byline read “Wylie Powers,” and he’s never appeared in the magazine again.

  Likewise, there are countless trails of kicked cats and censured children and waitresses who had to take back turkey sandwiches because the customer had asked for Russian on the side. But very likely, none of these people has been Eaton Striker.

  There was one morning not long ago, about five—Check had been rehearsing all night and asked his driver to let him out a few blocks from home. It was an interesting time of day, with that eerie indeterminate light, grainy like photographs blown up too many times. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but the neighborhood was newly visible anyway, as if the brownstones and rose gardens glowed of their own accord. Check turned into the all-night bagelry that had so cheered Rachel years before at about this time of morning, when suddenly Checker’s chest stabbed and vaulted; swallowing, he pivoted on his heel and kept on walking, fast, until, safely at the corner, he broke into a run. He didn’t pick up any breakfast but went straight home, closing the door behind him with both hands and panting with his back against the door, his palms flat on its wood as if to continually confirm that it was closed. Syria had recently come home; she walked into the hall still in her drenched work shirt and stopped. “You look green. What happened?”

  Checker’s heart was still pounding, and he didn’t reply right away because he was so puzzled. “Why should I be afraid of him?”

  “Who?”

  “At the bagelry, I thought—I thought I saw Eaton Striker.”

  Syria slipped her long, scarred fingers around his neck. “And he frightened you?”

  “I don’t know if it was him. But he gave me a terrible look. Whoever it was, he recognized me. And on his face, there was this flat—blank—hatred. His eyes were black, but dead, you know? It was dead hatred, I don’t know how else to describe it.” He shivered, and Syria took him to bed.

  Dead hatred. There comes a point when even dissatisfaction is dissatisfying. Maybe that wasn’t Eaton Striker, but no matter—there are a lot of Eaton Strikers walking around, stopping at all-night bagelries at five in the morning. They are dangerous, and they should frighten you. Actually, they’re insane. But there are varieties of dementia we have to permit on the street, because we can’t lock up half the country.

  Dead hatred. When Eaton was nineteen he had bite, as Check said; his eyes glittered; he loved rock and roll. He was young and still sustained by his own resentments. Close enough to a few bright moments in high school, he could still maintain a version of himself as a member of the ascendancy—being young is like that, you can do anything because you’ve done nothing, and it’s wonderful; pure potential is a beautiful thing. So at nineteen Eaton had energy and he was naïve. But over time there’s no fun left in scorning songs on the radio, and the joylessness of envy feeds it. Wherever Eaton is, he is likely still sealed in Checker’s plastic bag; its sides are streaked like the walls of subway bathrooms; the air is fetid now, and dark.

  So the Fire Queen is living with a rock star. Journalists ask only about her husband. Lately she’s decided: I tested him; now he tests me. It’s fair.

  For after she married Checker, Syria’s bones grew more attenuated and translucent; many of them shattered. Their suggestion of mortality didn’t cheer the glass market, with a taste for pretty things. Exquisite but gruesome, her slides came back from galleries overnight by return mail.

  Anyway, that whole showdown over taking care of the kids and cooking—that’s what they told their friends it was about. But the real problem was believing what other people said. Check started acting put-upon when she asked him to pick up some boxes for goblets, as if that was too trivial for Mr. MTV …And then she’d get another rejection from a glass show, in Portland, of all places…Well, it’s true, both acceptance and rejection are traps, and Syria is now amazed that Checker sensed this as young as nineteen. Bu
t together with Rahim they once more built a separate kingdom, where even such an absurd threesome is possible, and there is only music and color and glass; talk and baklava and children.

  If you haven’t heard of Syria Pyramus, that’s all right. She still loves the late nights when Checker is through with a gig and, exhausted, drops by the studio while she’s just finishing a piece. Then she shows him the one from the night before, now out of the annealer, and he sits on the bench and turns it in his hands, holding it up to the light of the furnace with his eyes glistening, running his finger down the curved crimson femur. He sets it down on the bench with care, and kisses her. Along with the loyal roar of the gas, the shine of fire in her own sweat, the languid droop of melted sand, their regular vacations to volcanoes, and the spectacular arguments she sometimes stages just to keep her edges honed, Syria is happy.

  For gradually they will all stop making fun of happiness. The Derailleurs’ disbandment, the Triborough—only the first pebbles in an avalanche of disappointment and despair. One by one their parents will die, their uncles, their sisters, their best friends from high school they’ll have been meaning to write to for ages and now cannot. J.K.’s daughter will come down with leukemia at fourteen. Caldwell will develop a drinking problem. Howard, later managing a whole stable of musicians, will finally get in over his head, and Checker will have to manufacture an album in six weeks, like Dostoevsky writing The Gambler just to get his friend out of hock. The United States will be suddenly and dangerously at war in an obscure corner of the world before anyone outside Princeton can spell the place correctly and newscasters are still stressing the wrong syllable of the word.