It would have been easier to swallow, he suspected, if Pat had crashed and burned, as they all expected (hoped) he would. But years later Pat is still out there in Los Angeles, winning Grammys and sleeping with movie stars, and Silver’s only consolation is the shrinking residual check he still gets every month for “Rest in Pieces,” which sadly remains his greatest source of income, his orchestra gigs and professional masturbation notwithstanding. Publicly, Danny and Silver wish Pat well. Quietly though, at gigs, when they’ve had enough from the open bar to loosen their tongues, they are not above expressing the sincere hope that Pat is, right at that moment, snorting that fatal cut of blow off some model’s ass, or sliding the business end of a shotgun past his pouty, front-man lips to the back of his throat. If Pat did kill himself, they’d both find it in themselves to say generous things when the VH1 film crew showed up.
* * *
Tonight he is playing a wedding with the Scott Key Orchestra. Silver slaps away at his kit, pretty much on autopilot, ignoring the one or two drum geeks that always stand on the side to watch. Every so often at these things, someone figures out who he is and he draws a slightly bigger crowd, but after a while they all come to realize that there’s nothing any more exciting about watching a once-famous drummer than any other drummer, and they go back to their arugula salads and filet mignon entrees.
They are seven pieces and two backup singers tonight. You do this long enough, it isn’t even music anymore, just trained monkeys being put through their paces. Scott stands at the mike, singing “The Way You Look Tonight” with too much lounge lizard lilt in his voice, compressing the lyrics and stretching the odd vowel for effect, and you just have to be thankful that Sinatra isn’t alive to hear it. Baptiste grins at Silver and rolls his eyes. Silver nods back and tosses in an offbeat fill that throws Scott, who misses his mark. Scott turns to glare at Silver, who smiles vacantly, playing dumb. Baptiste laughs. We are all losers, Silver thinks, each in his own way.
* * *
Once in a while, after a gig, he can get laid. If he hasn’t sweated too much, if he is wearing the larger tux, the one that manages to streamline his gut, if they’ve played a good set and the energy is up and there has been ample time for bar breaks, so that everyone in the band is feeling happier than their personal realities would normally dictate, if all of that has happened, then there are backup singers, dance motivators, waitresses. It all turns on a complex sliding scale of how badly everyone doesn’t want to go home.
Dana is one of the backup singers. It takes Silver three trips to load his drums into the back of Jack’s car, and when he’s done, Dana is still smoking in the parking lot. She is thirty-five or so, and a knockout at fifty feet; slender, with great legs and a luxurious mane of auburn hair. Only up close do you see how tired her eyes are, and a hardness in her features that has set in over time as life failed to live up to her expectations. One of life’s unassailable truths is that no one sets out to be a backup singer.
She takes off her shoes in his car. She’s been standing and swaying in six-inch heels for six hours. As he wordlessly steers them to the Versailles, she puts her feet up on the dash and cracks the window, her hair fluttering wildly around her. He can see in her profile the cheerleader she once was, the homecoming queen. There was a time when she had the world on a string; friends, the quarterback, and whatnot. Now she is going home with the fat marching-band geek just to feel alive, or at least less lonely. Maybe she doesn’t see it that way though, because if she did, she’d wait until the car had gathered enough speed, then throw open the door and hurl herself onto the thundering blacktop.
Once in his apartment, Silver rejoices invisibly. He has not had sex in quite some time, and getting them through the door is half the battle. He takes a quick shower, tending to his nethers with a bit more care than usual. Once out, he overapplies his deodorant and attempts to make sense of his untamable mess of hair. When he emerges, in boxers and T-shirt, she is lying on his bed, still in her short black dress, aimlessly channel surfing. She takes slow sips of the whiskey she’s poured herself, absently sucking the lone ice cube into her mouth then dropping it back into her drink again. In the blue light of the television she is beautiful again, and he experiences a surge of affection that has no place in these utilitarian proceedings. Although he’s known her for a while, he knows nothing about her. For instance, he made up the part about her being a cheerleader. For all he knows, she wore a scoliosis brace and stuttered.
She rolls into him as he lies down beside her, either voluntarily or because the mattress has shifted under his weight, and rests her head on his shoulder, her hair tickling his chin. He closes his eyes to inhale her shampoo, falling briefly but deeply in love even as he knows that tomorrow, in the light of day, he will have trouble making eye contact with her.
“You smell nice,” she says, her sung-out voice just above a whisper. “Like autumn.”
“Irish Spring.”
He watches her chest rise and fall with her breath, the soft roundness of her breasts gathering at the top of her dress, and he can feel things starting to stir down below. Then she turns her head to look up at him, and he could cry from the desolation in her eyes.
“Is it okay if we just lie here for a bit?” she says.
Not really, no. “Sure.”
Teenage vampires skulk on cable. Outside, a truck horn blares. He watches Dana’s toes as they curl against his comforter and experiences what might be best described as homesickness, but he’ll be damned if he knows what or where it is that he’s missing. Tomorrow morning, with the skies still pink from the inevitability of sunrise, he will drive her back to the catering hall, where her small car will be sitting marooned in the vast empty lot like something lost, waiting to be claimed. The sight of it will sadden both of them in ways they couldn’t begin to explain.
CHAPTER 8
“When was the last time you emptied this fridge?” his mother, Elaine, says, holding a plastic covered tin of what looks like congealed brain at arm’s length.
“I don’t know, last week maybe?”
“I don’t think so,” she says, tossing the container into the garbage. Once the fridge is cleaned to her satisfaction, she will fill it with fruits and vegetables that will slowly go bad until her next visit.
“Please, Mom, you don’t have to do that.”
“I don’t mind.”
Elaine disappears into the fridge, leaving his father and him to make small talk.
“You getting enough gigs?” his father says.
“Yeah.”
“That’s good.”
“How are things at the temple?”
“The God business is pretty much recession-proof.”
“If it wasn’t, that would raise some pretty interesting theological questions.”
“Would it?”
Someday his father will be gone, and Silver will still be able to have these conversations, word for word, from memory.
* * *
His father, Ruben Silver, is the rabbi of Temple B’nai Israel. When Silver was a boy, he and his younger brother, Chuck, would sit up on the stage with their father during the Sabbath services, facing the congregation. Silver would pretend that his father was their king, and he and Chuck their esteemed princes. Ruben would sing along with the cantor—he had a gruff but melodic voice—and he would put his arm around his boys, pointing to random Hebrew words in the siddur, which they would dutifully read aloud to him. At some point, as his encroaching maturity bred a certain self-consciousness, Silver stopped sitting up there with them, he can’t remember exactly when. It wasn’t something they ever talked about. It was just one of those things you quietly outgrow and only realize it after the fact.
* * *
His father whistles “Penny Lane.”
“Whistling,” Elaine says unconsciously. He stops. They’ve been married for forty-seven years.
* * *
They come by every other Sunday, Elaine and Ruben, because he is their son and they love him, and because they think he’s lonely. These visits kill him, because he loves them too, and because he knows his sad little life hurts them, maybe even more profoundly than it sometimes hurts him, which means these visits probably kill them too. So every other weekend they spend an hour or so together that leaves them all depressed and depleted, but they never miss it, and if that’s not the best definition of family, then he doesn’t know what is.
“So,” his father says, somewhat awkwardly, while Elaine is out in the hall on her third or fourth trip to the incinerator. Silver generally refrigerates his Chinese leftovers and subsequently forgets about them until they’ve congealed into something beyond the help of his microwave. “Any women worth writing home about?”
“Have you gotten any letters from me?” Silver says.
His father shrugs, ignoring his sarcasm. “You should come to temple.”
“Dad.”
Ruben raises his hands defensively. “I’m not selling. I’m just saying, plenty of single women.”
“Are you really pitching temple as a dating service?”
“Best one there is. Do you really think all those people are coming to pray? I pray. The cantor prays. They mingle. Welcome to organized religion.”
“And what about God?”
“God doesn’t want you to be alone any more than I do.”
“I’m trying, Dad.”
Ruben nods. “If that’s true, I’d hate to see what happens when you stop.”
Silver is about to retort, something unnecessarily biting, and so he is relieved when his mother reenters, cutting off the conversation. She looks at them inquisitively, Silver sprawled on the couch, his father perched on the edge of the kitchen table, and can tell she’s interrupted something. “What are you boys talking about?”
“Women,” Ruben says.
Elaine nods meaningfully. “Any worth writing home about?”
* * *
When his parents leave here, they’ll swing by Chuck’s house for a barbecue. There, amid the aroma of homemade marinade, the shouting of boys and pissing of babies and dogs, life will reassert itself around them, and they will be whole again.
When they leave here, Silver will go down to the Blitz and drink himself numb, then fall asleep in front of the comforting flicker of his television. Hopefully, he’ll remember to take off his shoes. There’s nothing more depressing than waking up in your shoes.
CHAPTER 9
The Lockwoods had been Casey and Denise’s neighbors for about ten years. Denise and Valerie played tennis together twice a week, and once Rich arrived on the scene, he and Steve Lockwood would sometimes sit out in the backyard in the evenings and have a scotch together. Casey, who had lettered in swim, was given carte blanche to swim her laps in the Lockwoods’ pool whenever she wanted, which was what she’d been doing on the night in question. She was feeling anxious about Princeton, and she’d always found something soothing about night swimming.
Around fifteen laps in, she realized she was no longer alone. She looked up to see Jeremy Lockwood sitting on one of the lounge chairs, drinking from a silver flask as he watched her swim.
“Hey,” he said when she stopped, waving to her with the flask. “Don’t stop on my account.”
He was two years older, had just gotten back from Emory to work at his dad’s firm for the summer.
“I heard you were back,” she said, climbing out of the pool. With anyone else, she might have been self-conscious in her bikini, but she’d known Jeremy long enough to have dared each other to show their privates in his basement back in second grade, and so the rules were different.
Casey grabbed a towel and sat down at the foot of his chair. He leaned over to kiss her cheek, a method of greeting he’d picked up in college that still felt a little strange to her. “Look at you,” he said appreciatively.
“What?”
“You got hot.”
“Shut up.”
“I heard you got into Princeton.”
“I heard you changed your major.”
“I heard you were valedictorian.”
“I heard you broke up with Hailey.”
“Hadley.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?”
Jeremy smiled and took a sip from the flask. “With moms like ours, who needs Facebook?”
“I know, right?”
He offered her the flask, and she took a sip. He had filled it with some of his father’s scotch. The good stuff, Steve called it, even though to Casey it tasted like acid, burning her throat but warming her belly. When she handed it back, Jeremy took another long swallow.
“She broke up with me, actually.”
She looked at his face, trying to determine if he was starting a conversation or just stating a fact. In all the years their families had been friendly, she and Jeremy had never had a serious talk. They were more like cousins than friends.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He shrugged. “It was just sex, anyway. And not even that good, really.”
Something in the offhanded way he talked about sex thrilled her. In the booze, the sex talk, the kiss on the cheek, she sensed the ways in which her world would be expanding in a few months. When he passed her the flask, she drank two swallows.
“Easy there, tiger,” he said, grinning.
It was, quite suddenly, and for no real reason, a sexy grin.
Jeremy had always been good-looking in a bland, generic way—tall, lean, with thick dark hair that he wore short and unbrushed. Handsome, Casey thought, rather than hot. But now there was an edge to him, something a little darker and jaded, and it occurred to her that if they were strangers, she’d be checking him out. And the steam was rising off the water and swirling in the glow of the pool lights, and the moon was full and low, and Jeremy was giving her this look, maybe, over his whiskey flask, and the whiskey was making her feel flushed and tingly, and suddenly, everything felt electric.
Jeremy told her about his breakup, and Casey told him about hers, and then he showed her Hadley’s Facebook page on his iPhone. She wasn’t exactly pretty, Hadley, but you could see why guys would think she was hot. Hadley had updated her status to read “blissfully single,” and had posted photos of herself partying with all these greasy Jersey Shore–looking guys. Jeremy thought the “blissfully” was uncalled for, so they went to Jeremy’s page and changed his status to read “Free at last.” It was Casey’s idea to add a picture of him and her canoodling. Hadley and Jeremy were still Facebook friends, and she’d have no idea that Casey was just his neighbor. So they started clowning around, doing a whole photo shoot with his phone, and somewhere in there Jeremy took off his shirt, and his skin was hot against hers, like the scotch in her stomach, and a few minutes later they were making out like there was no tomorrow. And somewhere in there, when they were coming up for air, gasping and grinding against each other, he mentioned that his parents were away for the weekend.
And the moon, the hot summer air, this boy she’d known for her entire life, it all just felt right to her. And so, when the moment of decision arrived and he pulled back a little to say Are you sure, she reached down decisively, sliding her hand between the slick wetness of their crotches, grabbed hold of him, and guided him into her.
Afterward they skinny-dipped and horsed around in the pool, the moonlight bathing them in a silvery hue, and she thought to herself that she couldn’t have planned a better way to lose her virginity if she’d tried.
CHAPTER 10
Sad Todd is in the lobby, trying to get his twin boys to simmer down. They are five-year-old terrors with flaming red hair and plastic lightsabers, which they are swinging wildly as they jump on and off one of the leather lobby couches. They have spent the weekend mainlining all the sugared crap that is forbidden in their mother’s house, the cereals and ice cream and soda and candy that Sad Todd stocks his shelves with so that they’ll love him back. And so now they run circles around their hapless dad, performing dropkicks off the couch, clambering up and down the two stairs that bisect the lobby into two levels, caroming off passersby, and knocking over the potted ficus trees that grudgingly stand in every unfurnished corner. They bounce frenetically around the room like a couple of Jedi houseflies, standing still only long enough for everyone to see their unbrushed hair, mismatched shirts, and the white stains on their faces that Todd will try to pass off to his ex-wife as milk, but which are obviously the remnants of the boxful of powdered doughnuts they had for dinner.
They call him Sad Todd because he has been living in the Versailles for more than two years and no one has ever seen him smile. He has still not bought a stick of furniture or hung a picture in his apartment, has not been on a date or made a friend. He suffers from what Jack refers to as Little Orphan Annie syndrome. He still believes his family is going to come for him one day, so there’s no point in getting comfortable.
It’s Sunday evening, and Sad Todd looks like something so much more than exhausted. He is unshaven, unkempt, and borderline suicidal. He has brought the twins down to the lobby well in advance of their mandated pickup time, probably because they’ve already laid waste to his apartment and he didn’t know what else to do.
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