“Hey!” she said. “I’ll call you right back.”
“You don’t have to,” he said. There was a strange tone in his voice.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“Listen,” he said, dragging the word along. And then he didn’t say anything.
“Listening,” Nina said.
“We have to talk.”
“Okay.”
“There’s something …” He exhaled loudly.
“Something?”
“Something’s come up. There’s a … Something’s happened.”
“What?” Nina said worriedly. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, it’s …”
In that second Nina knew that this thing was about her—and it was something she wouldn’t like. As evil as this made her feel, she was kind of hoping he was about to say something like, “My mom has cancer.” Something outside of them.
“I know this is a bad time to be doing this,” he said. “I know this makes me the biggest dick in the universe ….”
Nina reached out and touched the colorful edges of the Post-its that popped out of the side of a nearby stack of books. She took a deep breath, but she couldn’t hold it.
Another loud exhale.
“I’ve kind of started seeing someone here,” he said. “Her name is Diane. She’s in Earth Share with me.”
Dead air for a good thirty seconds. Nina concentrated on the Post-its. They looked like tails of little tropical fishes hiding themselves in a reef.
“She kind of reminds me of you,” Steve said. He sounded a little desperate. “She kind of wears her hair the same way.”
“Don’t tell me this,” Nina said.
“Okay.”
He had to have something to add. He couldn’t just be calling her to tell her this—as awful as this was.
“Steve …” she said, her voice trembling a little.
“I still care about you so much. It was just hard being so far apart, you know?”
He was calling to tell her this. Just this. She sank down to the floor and sat with her legs apart, like a dropped rag doll.
“I managed,” she said.
Her voice was hard now. She couldn’t disguise it even if she wanted to. She felt herself trembling and steadied herself by taking a deep breath from her abdomen.
“So what are we going to do?” she said. “What does this mean?”
“I guess … I guess we’re breaking up.”
The conversation ended shortly after that. Nina couldn’t even remember what she said. It wasn’t angry. It was vague, a baffled and hasty goodbye.
Immediately after hanging up, she knew she had to call him back. She had to pin him down and make him talk because he would see that this made no sense, that it couldn’t be real. This Diane with the kind of similar hair was not who he wanted. This was just a phase, a little problem, and they could work it out.
His phone was busy. It was still busy five minutes later. And an hour after that.
Nina didn’t sleep that night. She didn’t even put on her pajamas. She sat on the floor and thought about the fact that nothing changes when the boyfriend who was never there suddenly goes away. It wasn’t like she had to go out of her way to avoid him or distance herself to forget him. She had all the distance she’d ever need.
She opened up her windows and let the freezing air come into her warm room until she couldn’t stop shivering. There was a dull pain in her head that she suspected would never leave her.
The next morning, her eyes red and puffy from the all-nighter, Nina got in her car and drove over to her hair salon on Broadway. They managed to find her an empty space in the schedule and took her right back. She yanked out the bands that held up her Princess Leias. Her hair sprang out on either side of her head in two slowly unfurling corkscrews.
“What are we doing here today?” the stylist asked, coming over and taking the curls in her hands.
“Cut it,” Nina said. “Change everything.”
33
Dating Gaz was pretty much the complete opposite of dating Mel—in more than just the obvious male versus female way. For someone who didn’t like having long relationship talks, it should have been a dream come true. There were no heavy conversations about where their relationship was going. They rehearsed together, and if Avery felt like it, she stayed late and messed around with Gaz on the basement couch. They both kind of knew they were together, and that was enough.
Except … that it wasn’t. She still wasn’t feeling anything particularly strong for Gaz, outside of the physical attraction. That would have been okay, except that Gaz’s easygoing manner was starting to get to her, especially when it came to the band.
Somehow since New Year’s, Angry Maxwell had acquired three new members. Avery didn’t really even know where they came from—they each just showed up one day. Two of them, Rob and Dan, were guitarists. The third was a girl named Lizzy who didn’t actually play anything. She said that she was Wiccan and that she channeled pure energy. Her talent consisted of spinning around, making shrieking noises, and falling down. She frequently fell into the keyboard. She would have been kicked out immediately if Avery had anything to say about it, but Hareth liked her, so she remained. Rehearsals, which used to be pleasant wastes of time, now turned into irritating ones. There were endless debates about what kind of sound they were shooting for.
After a few days with her new bandmates, Avery made an important discovery: It’s easy to form a band. You just get a bunch of people together and voilà: band. But the big step is to move out of the basement and into a place where people have actually paid you to play—not offered to pay you to stop. One was the golden number. Once you got one paying gig, you were professional.
Avery was going to get that paying gig. Someone had to do something useful.
On Saturday morning she went to Philadelphia Avenue. This was the central meeting place of all Saratoga musicians. It always reminded Avery of pictures of medieval European streets. It was narrow, with hanging signs and brightly colored restaurants and bars. There was a wooden notice board at the top of the street, which had all the names of the local businesses painted by hand in funky white print. Next to that, there was a notice board jammed full of flyers for gigs and guitar lessons and Pilates classes.
Checking through the ads, Avery saw that there were plenty of places to play open mike, but that didn’t pay. In fact, most open mikes required the bands to fork over some cash to get in. There was only one thing to do—she would just go from bar to bar, asking around to see if anyone was willing to hire them.
She walked through most of downtown that day, hitting about twelve bars, before she finally got someone to say more than just “no.” One pub owner, a man in his fifties with a sharp white goatee, let her talk a bit while he smoked and unloaded a crate of liquor and stocked the well.
“You guys have a tape?” he asked.
“No …” Avery said. A tape would have been useful.
“Who do you play?”
Who do you play was a way of saying, “We don’t want to hear any of your original crap. If you play here, play something we know.”
“A normal mix,” Avery said. “What do other bands play here?”
“Our customers like pretty regular stuff. U2, Van Morrison, REM, Jimmy Buffett. Stuff like that.”
Middle-aged beer music, Avery thought.
“We do a bunch of U2 and REM,” she lied. “We just did a whole set of music like that at Skidmore last week.”
“Yeah?” The guy didn’t look wildly intrigued, but at least he was still talking. “No tape, huh?” he said. “Not much I can do without a tape.”
Avery looked around, trying to figure out a way to keep the conversation going. Over in a corner of the stage was a piano. She hadn’t exactly prepared for this contingency, but …
“How about I play you something?” she asked.
“Like what?”
The only thing she could think of at that moment was
“Piano Man,” by Billy Joel, which had to be number one on her list of Songs to Be Stricken from the Musical Record. It was a song she despised so much that she knew it perfectly, note for note, just so that she could hate it in detail. She knew it in her head, anyway. She’d never tried to play it. But to get this gig, she was prepared to do the unthinkable.
She pointed to the piano.
“Can I show you?” she asked.
“Sure.” The man shrugged. “Go ahead.”
Avery had a fairly well developed ear. This was still a gamble, but she thought she could pull it off. After running through the song mentally for half a minute, she started to play. Her version was dead-on. It actually creeped her out. She had talents she really didn’t want to know she had.
The man stopped her after a minute or so.
“You like Billy Joel?” he asked.
“Um … yeah.”
“I don’t,” he replied. “But that was pretty good. I’ll tell you what….”
He turned around and pulled a calendar off the wall next to the cash register. He pinched his bottom lip and pulled it out, moving it from side to side as he flipped back and forth between two pages. Avery could see that his bottom teeth were deeply yellow. She looked at the pack of Marlboro Reds that sat on the counter and wondered about the ashy taste in her own mouth.
“I can use someone to fill some time on the fifteenth of February. I’ve got a forty-five-minute slot that’s empty. You’ll get a third of the door. That would probably be about fifty bucks or so.”
“Definitely. We’ll do it.”
“What’s your band’s name?”
“Angry Maxwell.”
She felt ridiculous identifying herself as part of “Angry Maxwell,” yet she knew that all band names sounded asinine until the band got famous. At that point there was a magical transformation, and even the most ill-conceived names took on a veneer of cool.
“Angry … Maxwell …” He wrote it into a calendar square in pencil. “Contact name and number?”
Avery provided hers.
“Okay. So you’ll go on from seven until quarter of eight. Get here about an hour ahead of time to set up. And no ‘Piano Man,’ all right?”
“No ‘Piano Man,”’ she said. “Promise.”
Avery lit a cigarette and triumphantly walked back toward Broadway, already putting a song list together in her mind.
Just as she came to the Army and Navy, Nina stepped out of a store just a few doors down. It took Avery a moment to register that it was Nina because her hair, which had always either been up in the buns or pigtails, was free. Not just free—shorter. The strands were about four or five inches long, and they flew loose around her head like a lion’s mane. It was diva hair.
They both stopped and looked at each other. It was the first time they’d really come face-to-face in almost four weeks. Avery hadn’t counted the time until now. Four weeks. That was unbelievably strange, but it was right.
“Your hair,” she sputtered. Not the brightest comment, but really all that needed to be said.
“I just cut it,” Nina replied, without much enthusiasm.
“It’s incredible,” Avery said. “I wish I had hair that could do things like that.”
“Thanks.”
“How’s life?”
“Good. Busy”
“You want to get a coffee or something?” Avery asked brightly. Suddenly, seeing Nina in front of her, she realized how much she missed her. Except it wasn’t like she was realizing something new but finally naming some kind of nagging ache that had been bothering her for a long time.
“Sorry,” Nina said quickly. “I have to go.”
“Are you okay?”
“Fine,” Nina said distractedly. She clearly wasn’t okay. Her eyes were red, and she kept looking away. Avery had known that things were messed up—they hadn’t even spent Christmas or New Year’s together. Avery had been so deep in her own head that she hadn’t known what to say to Nina. But now she wanted Nina to tell her what was going on. She wanted to sit down with her, to give her a hug, to do all of the normal things.
“Neen?” she said. “What’s up?”
Nina hit a button on her key chain and turned off the alarm of her car. She hesitated for a moment, as if she was going to explain, and then she just shook her head.
“I have to go,” she said again, “I’ll see you later.”
As she watched Nina get in her car and drive off, Avery felt a terrible sinking feeling. It wiped out any happiness that getting the gig had provided. Somewhere in her head, she’d always thought that even though they’d fought, things couldn’t really be big-time bad between her and Nina. But they were big-time bad. In fact, Avery realized, they might even be over.
That was so unthinkable that she had to sit down because her legs had begun to shake.
34
Friday night marked the start of something else new and horrible at P.J. Mortimer’s: Irish nachos. They were just normal nachos, except the chips were green and the chili topping was made with (big surprise) Guinness, which made it a very deep brown. They were topped with a white jack cheese and an orange cheddar cheese to reflect the colors of the Irish flag. The result was so nauseating that Mel couldn’t look down when she took them out to people’s tables.
It was crowded, as most Friday nights were. Unfortunately, both the kitchen and the floor were understaffed because of a flu outbreak. There were no pauses to even talk to other people for a minute. She and Parker brushed past each other a dozen times or more, barely noticing the other’s presence.
“I wish I got the flu,” Mel grumbled as they met up for a moment in the pantry.
Parker, nodded grimly. He was struggling with a large canister of pickles, which was almost entirely empty. He cringed as he plunged his arm into the pickle liquid and fished around for the last remaining spear. When he pulled it out, his arm was completely dripping with greenish juice.
“Tonight’s one of those nights,” he said. “It’s only going to get worse. I can feel it.”
About an hour later Parker was proven right.
As Mel was taking an order from a particularly large office party, there was a loud noise—a massive intake of breath. She turned around to see a strange sight. Parker appeared to be flying through the air, his tray whizzing in front of him like a Frisbee. Three Cokes hung in the air at once, side by side, before plunging down. The nacho baskets skidded across the floor. The hamburgers and buns escaped the scene by rolling under chairs and tables. People yelped as they were hit with soda and ice and food.
It was so catastrophic that it brought all of P. J. Mortimer’s to a standstill.
When the last plate had stopped spinning and there was a suitable pause, applause broke out at some tables. Parker got up stiffly. He made a short bow to the people who were cheering, but he didn’t smile. At first he bent down like he was going to start cleaning up, but he just grabbed his tray and walked slowly back toward the pantry.
When Mel got there, he was at the sink, peeling hot cheese and beans from his arms as he ran them under water.
“Are you burned?” Mel asked.
“No,” he growled.
“What happened?”
“I got tripped.”
He turned up the water for a moment, wiping down his arms hard. Mel handed him a few paper towels. Bob appeared in the pantry doorway.
“What the hell happened?” he said.
“I got tripped.”
“Shit, Parker …”
“I know…. I know….”
Mel wondered if Bob was actually going to ask how Parker was. That would have been nice.
“You can’t go out on the floor like that,” he said instead.
“Yeah, no kidding.”
“Someone’s going to have to take your tables.”
Parker leaned against the black-and-white tiles on the pantry walls as if the wind had been kicked out of him a second time.
“Just do your side work,�
�� Bob said. “Mel, take 25.”
“Side work?” Parker said incredulously.
“It has to be done.” Bob shrugged an apology that didn’t seem very sincere. “Sorry.”
“I can’t close out my tables and get my tips, but I can sit back here and roll silverware,” Parker said as Bob headed back out to the floor. “Great …”
He sank down onto an overturned pickle canister and pulled a few green nacho chips off his shirt. Mel stood there next to him, not sure how to help.
“Just do me a favor,” he said.
“What?”
“Don’t tell Nina this happened.”
Mel had never seen Parker embarrassed or agitated before. His face was flushed a deep red, and he looked small and young. She wanted to wrap him in a huge hug, but that didn’t seem like the right thing to do. Not to Parker, anyway. He would know that it was pity, and maybe pity wasn’t good. She leaned against the wall near him and flicked a piece of food out of his thick hair.
“This is good,” he said, trying to recover. “I can say I was in a fight. It was kind of a fight, right? Makes me look manly. Strong like bull.”
Mel smiled weakly. She wished he didn’t feel like he had to keep up a good face in front of her.
Maybe a tiny hug. No.
“Go on,” he said, nodding at the pantry door. “It’s fine. Go get the damage report, soldier.”
When Mel went back out on the floor, she found that the whole restaurant was in a heightened state. The crash made people louder, had customers chatting to their neighbors at other tables. None of Mel’s customers had been physically affected by the flying objects, so she helped some other waiters get their customers cleaned up. Bob was jogging from table to table, spooning out apologies and comps.
“Bring some seltzer here,” he snapped at her as she passed him.
“Okay …”
Mel headed for the bar. As she did so, she passed the spot where Parker had fallen. The busboys were all over it, like a containment team. Right next to them was a table full of guys who were laughing hysterically. Mel felt her fury rising and made sure to keep her eyes averted.
“Hey,” one of them called.
The Bermudez Triangle Page 19
