I stared into my wine, wishing I could dive in and dissolve into the scarlet.
“Mingus here has decided that the time is right to bring Tremble back to the world. He’s written a bunch of new songs—awesome fucking tunes—and he played them for me at an open mic tonight. They frickin’ rock! I’ve always said this guy is like the reincarnation of Bob Dylan.”
“Well, Bob Dylan is still alive,” Israel pointed out, “so technically, Jim—”
“This is him, right here! Bob Dylan reincarnated. In the flesh!”
I shook my head at Israel. “Don’t bother.”
“I’m telling you guys, we are so back,” Jumbo blathered on, unheeded. “We’ll round up Warren and Mackenzie, head back into the studio, and cut a record worthy of the Tremble name.” He grinned like he’d just won the lottery.
I gave my hosts a feeble wince. “We really don’t know what we’re doing just yet. It’s all very preliminary. Jumbo is overstating it. Talking out of turn. Like he tends to do.”
The clod took a loud slurp of SoCo and refueled his mouth with things he shouldn’t say. “After a decade, Mingus here has had this amazing creative storm. Trust me, I have an ear for these things.” He touched his ear, showing us where his ears were. “And I’ve obviously still got it, so, you know, sky’s the limit!”
A speechless Sandy gazed out from behind her dated eyewear.
Israel pointed to me with a confused look. “Why does he keep calling you Mingus?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know.
“Well,” Sandy said, crossing her legs with aristocratic reserve, “that certainly sounds very exciting. Jim, maybe this will give you that boost you’ve needed, the direction you’ve been looking for.”
“Fuck yeah!” Jumbo said, erecting another double-decker gouda-and-melba sandwich. “I always knew we had more left in the tank. If you ask me, we gave up way too quickly.”
We gave up when we delivered a record that didn’t sell and I compounded the sin by insisting we promote it all alone, instead of, say, sharing the stage with a band people actually wanted to see. We gave up when the world had given up on us.
As Jumbo applied a disintegrating chomp to his cracker concoction—a spot-on metaphor for the day—my head shook with paroxysms of doubt. He’d gotten worse. There had to be thousands of desperate guitar players out there. All I needed was one. What was I doing here in this house with these people?
“What about your job?” Israel asked his housemate-slash-wife’s-ex-husband. “The midwife thing?”
“Music has always been my first love. You know that, Is.”
Sandy, sensing many a devil in the details, retreated to generalized benediction. “Well, I, for one, wish you two the best of luck. Jim, you know you’re always welcome in our house, but I know this isn’t what you want.”
“Things are changing for me,” he said, frothing with cockiness and sporting a bumptious grin. “I can feel it.”
With that, he threw his arm around my shoulder and shook me, forcing a swirl of red wine out of my glass and onto my slacks. And the rug.
“Nice, Jumbo,” I said, frowning at the fresh stains.
“Oh, did I get you?”
It looked like I’d been shot. Felt that way too. “Yeah, you did.”
“Oh, don’t worry, that’ll come right out,” he assured everyone, as Sandy scampered off in search of a rag.
One day I’ll die, I thought to myself, and this will be one of the things I did with my time.
I set my glass down on the table and thanked everyone for a lovely evening. The creeping bloodred blotch on my pants served as a reminder that Jumbo was a lot harder to appreciate when he didn’t have a musical instrument in his hands. I shook hands with his landlords and made for the exit.
“What are you so pissy about?” he called after me as I evaded his attempt to escort me down the driveway.
“You’re a fucking embarrassment. How could I have forgotten that?” I spun around and faced him, my finger brandished in anger. “What did I just say to you before we came upstairs?”
“I don’t know. You gave up SoCo? Sandy looks like Tootsie?”
“I told you to keep your mouth shut. It’s way too early to let people know what we’re up to. At this point, we’ll just look like a couple of delusional dimwits. I’m sure the hard liquor and ganja have killed your memory, but we did not exactly leave the business on our own terms.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We got dropped by our label.”
“Sales don’t mean anything.”
“Attendance at our shows was paltry.”
“What do you mean? Like there were chickens there?”
“We have to handle this delicately. Don’t you get that? How could you go and announce that we’re back in business? We’re still a punch line on VH1.”
“I don’t care what people think, Mingus. You know that about me.”
“I hate that about you. I always have.” I was suddenly aware that I was yelling. We were two guys in their late thirties bickering on a suburban driveway. “I’m out of here, man. I’ll be in touch.”
He followed me to the curb. “Dude, I got news for you. The whole point of making music is to get people to pay attention. If they don’t pay attention, they can’t very well listen, can they? Think about that.”
“There’s nothing to pay attention to. We haven’t made any music yet. Think about that.”
I reached for the car door. I needed to be away from this mess—a mess I’d made, unmade, and then moronically remade ten years later.
“So, what next?” Jumbo asked.
“Here’s what’s next,” I said, struggling for composure. “I’m going to think about whether I still want to go through with this after being reacquainted with your unshuttable mouth. But assuming a cooler head prevails, I’m going to get in touch with Warren and Mack and . . . continue the process of eating my pride.”
“Mack, huh?” Jumbo was grinning now.
“Yeah, Mack.”
Jumbo just stood there with a stupid smile on his mug.
I glared at him. “Is there something you want to say?”
“Nope. Just that I wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall at that meeting.”
“Frankly, James, I would’ve preferred it if you’d been a fly on the wall at this meeting.”
I gave the door a fervent yank and enclosed myself in the pleasant hollow of a vacuum. Jumbo leaned down and tapped the glass. The big meatball wasn’t quite done with me.
I rolled down the window. “What?”
With a guilty glance up and down the street, he said, “Want to drive out to the beach and shroom?”
“My answer to that question is the same as when you asked it in 1995.” I raised the window and let out a towering sigh. Idiot. And what beach was he even talking about?
I sped away, forgetting that Jumbo’s envelope of weed was still squirreled in my glove compartment.
* * *
I could barely keep myself conscious. The huge yawns that swelled forth must have looked like silent, anguished screams to the night owls driving past me on the highway. Leaning against the cold frame of my car, I stared vacantly at the gasoline nozzle. It was getting late and I’d decided against another ration of caffeine. After the day I’d had, you’re either awake or you’re not, and more coffee just meant more time staring into a rest stop urinal.
The deep growl of a bus overtook the station, and the enormous vehicle hissed to a stop at the next fueling island. The door cleaved open and a man and woman staggered down the steps toward the mini-mart. He wore a mugger’s skullcap, boots, and a jacket of oily leather. She was a leggy platinum blonde in a skintight tube top, click-clacking precariously in hooker’s heels. Given the glam cargo, it was not out of the realm of possibility that this was some ty
pe of tour bus making its way up the Eastern Seaboard. I remembered how those coaches were like living rooms and motels to us. There would be rowdy chatter and self-congratulation as we pulled away from the venue. Soon, the mostly empty bus would become a mobile pew of peaceful seclusion. Warren would crossword puzzle his way over the miles, his tray table down, his hand snooping automatically around his family-size bag of trail mix. Mackenzie would curl up against the window with a paperback, her canvas sneakers jutting into the aisle. Jumbo would be conked out somewhere, invisible until we arrived at wherever the tour was taking us next, at which point he’d pop up from the back, disoriented and parched, reminding us all of his existence. I might stretch my legs and park myself across the aisle from Mack, coaxing her into a game of backgammon or enticing her to put on a movie with me. We’d watch Airplane! and laugh—too loud, because of the headphones—at every stupidly hilarious gag we’d seen a thousand times, or The Deer Hunter, which, according to Mack, was back when Christopher Walken was “pretty.” Sometimes, late at night, she’d pass out on my shoulder.
If she could be talked back onto the bus, talked down from all the resentment that she may well have been hauling through the years, I would enjoy more travels with Mackenzie Highsider.
With the steady rush of gasoline flooding into my car’s tank, I texted Sara. “On my way. Be home in an hour or so.”
She immediately wrote me back. “I’m still up. How’d it go?”
I decided to call. The highway was a lonely place, lonelier still at this refueling oasis. I found myself wanting to hear Sara’s voice.
“What are you doing up?” I asked.
“I’m not tired,” she complained with soft frustration. She wasn’t lacking for things to invade her sleep.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Fine. How’d it go today?”
“It went. Jumbo hasn’t changed a lick.”
“I guess that’s good in some ways and bad in others?”
“It’s bad in every conceivable way. But he’s on board.”
“You weren’t really concerned about that though.”
“No,” I said. “I have a great many concerns about Jumbo, but his availability for harebrained schemes on a moment’s notice is not one of them.”
Instead of laughing in allegiance, Sara went quiet. “I saw Billy today,” she said.
I swallowed. “You saw him?”
“Yeah. We met for coffee. On a bench in Rittenhouse Square.”
“Oh.”
Though Billy had shown up from the past, he hadn’t actually shown up yet—to my knowledge anyway. Until now, he’d been a voice on the phone.
“How was it seeing him?”
I heard the crackle of a slow breath being blown through pursed lips. “Difficult. It’s been a long time. He’s not a kid anymore, and I’m clearly not either. We’ve lived a quarter of our lives since we last saw each other.”
As she said it, the thought seemed to mystify her, as if she was wondering, How could so much time have passed? Shouldn’t I be getting better? Is this what better feels like?
“I don’t know what to say, Sara. That must have been hard. You should’ve told me.”
“I guess I didn’t want to talk about it.”
This wasn’t how I’d imagined the reunion. I’d envisioned the inevitable meeting between Sara and Billy taking place in some lawyer’s narcoleptically sleek conference room. They’d be separated by a table, a safe expanse of antique cherry or Madagascar rosewood. They’d meet at the head of the table, embrace in a way that felt so familiar and so weird that it would send them each back to their respective chairs.
“Did you talk about the divorce?”
“Yeah,” Sara said. “We talked about a lot of things.”
A lot of things could’ve meant a lot of things, and a protective impulse surged upward in me, a visceral reaction to my girlfriend of ten years meeting up with her estranged husband without so much as a heads-up. And yet this wasn’t some ex-boyfriend or office crush; it was the man she’d taken vows with, gotten pregnant with, shared the worst kind of tragedy with. I couldn’t be so selfish and petty as to take issue with a heart-to-heart so many years in the making. Especially when I was busy exhuming my own ancient history.
The echoing tap of heels on asphalt hooked my attention as the blonde in the tight elastic shirt came teetering out of the mini-mart with her companion’s arm cradled possessively over her neck. For a passing instant, I fantasized about dropping the phone where I stood and scrambling onto that bus with them.
“What can I do, Sara?” I asked.
“Do? Nothing. There’s nothing to do.”
She was right.
“I can come home,” I finally said.
She let out a long, lilting release of a laugh that soared high, then tumbled in descending rungs back down to her pillow. “Yes, Teddy. You can come home.”
I replaced the nozzle and screwed on the gas cap. Behind me, the bus doors squeaked closed and the huge monstrosity rumbled away. I stared after it, watching the red taillights glide down the highway, carrying some other poor fucker’s demons on its rude haunches.
CHAPTER 8
From the last row of a high school auditorium, I listened to labored cacophony, the hummable melody of “Morning Mood” just barely discernible through the clamor of lawless instruments. At long last, this composition, Suite 1 from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt, a melody of pacific beauty, the official soundtrack to a rising sun, made me smile.
The piece had appeared in one of my early piano books, and my mangled interpretation of it would cause my teacher, poor old Mr. Green, to cower in the chair next to the piano, cursing me under his breath. My parents had suggested I take up an instrument, but they couldn’t have been heartened by my lack of progress or by the checks they wrote week after futile week, which Old Man Green sourly accepted before he made for the door. In the wake of each dispiriting lesson, my dad would appear at the top of the steps and offer his own brand of encouragement: “You don’t have to do this anymore if you don’t want to.” I wasn’t very good back in those days, so when I became a professional musician, the joke was on everyone who’d doubted me. When the band went to hell because, frankly, we weren’t very good, the joke was back on me again. Where it has remained for a good long while.
Since those demeaning hours on my parents’ piano bench, the seasons have spun around and the years have turned over and over, but it turned out that kids were still butchering the very same music.
At first, all I could see of him were arms waving in the flow of the sound, imploring the players to respect pitch and tempo. As the piece wore on, the limbs betrayed just the faintest touches of frustration, then resignation, and finally failure. When the noise stopped, there came the voice.
“Well, it needs some work, guys. Right? Julie, you’ve got to play the right notes. It’s not like just any notes will do. You’ve got to play the ones on the sheet. And Kenny, your timing today is a huge improvement over last time, so good for you, but it’s still terrible. Tap your foot, count under your breath, do something. Friends, we’ve all got to play the same song and we’ve all got to play it at the same speed. This is not a hard piece. You’re making it sound like ‘Giant Steps,’ but trust me, this is an easy one . . . I’m seeing blank stares. Don’t tell me you don’t know ‘Giant Steps.’ Nobody here knows ‘Giant Steps’ by John Coltrane? How am I supposed to work under these conditions? Go home tonight and tell your parents they have failed you!
“Back to Grieg. So—we’re going to practice and practice and it’s going to get better and better. It just has to. Do any of you practice, by the way? I’ll take your word for it, but . . .” Then I heard the laugh, an injection of levity into the criticism. “All right, my friends. Let’s call it a day.”
The stage burst into a symphony of squeaking chairs, rustling papers,
and chattering teenagers.
“Go on home,” he bade them. “Practice your instruments. Get ‘Giant Steps’ from wherever it is you steal music these days.”
Collecting themselves and their gear, the students emptied the stage and staggered past me out the back of the auditorium. A plucky, pint-sized, ponytailed blonde, whom Warren had addressed as Julie and who’d Sweeney Todded the hell out of Peer Gynt with her violin, was the last to leave, loitering by the stage. I began a slow shuffle down the aisle. Plucky, pint-sized, ponytailed blondes were always the last to leave the classroom. Class itself was never enough. It was too diluted, not sufficiently tailored to their own individualized needs. It was after class that the real schooling happened. I made my way toward them undetected.
“But Mr. Warren”—the panic was spurting forth like a mortal wound—“I’ve been practicing for, like, three hours every night. I’m really nervous that I’m never going to get it right and the concert is only a few weeks away and I’m going to blow it for everybody. Do you think maybe I should get a tutor?”
“A tutor? For concert band?” He laughed wearily as he gathered up his papers, his sloped shoulders speaking volumes about the tiresome frequency of Julie’s visits. “You’ve got to not let yourself get all whipped up into a tizzy. You’re very tense when you’re playing. We’ve discussed that. You can’t be tense when you’re playing ‘Morning Mood.’ That’s about as chill a piece of music as there is. Have you actually listened to the piece? Grieg is taking you somewhere very calm, very peaceful. It’s early morning. There’s a sunrise, maybe some butterflies. Nothing has come along yet to stress you out. Can you access that?”
“But Mr. Warren, I’m just worried that everybody else is getting better and even though I’ve been practicing like crazy, I’m still messing it up.”
“I wouldn’t say everyone else is getting better. No, I wouldn’t say that at all.” He was stuffing papers into his satchel, probably contemplating dinner.
By this point, I had almost joined their conversation. I stood just outside the spotlight ring that encircled teacher and student. His eyes flashed briefly in my direction, but he kept at it with the squeaky violinist.
Thank You, Goodnight Page 12
