I Love the 80s

by Megan Crane

  ‘You could say that.’ The creases next to his eyes deepened. ‘Also,’ he said after a moment, ‘there’s no one else to talk to. Anyone in the band might tell Duncan, if they thought it would help them out. And there’s no one outside the band I can trust. That’s what happens when you sell out everyone you know to become a big star. Behold my success.’

  ‘So,’ she said briskly, not caring to discuss her groupieness any further, or his evident loneliness, because both made her chest ache and there was nothing to be done about it, anyway. ‘Duncan going ballistic because you’re leaving the band makes sense, given, you know, Duncan’s personality. But what makes you think he’d kill you rather than lose you?’

  ‘I don’t know that I do think that.’ Tommy watched her carefully, his head cocked to one side. ‘It’s been a weird thought, that’s all. But then you didn’t laugh it off.’

  ‘You can’t be basing it on that.’ Jenna shook her head. ‘You must have other reasons to think it, right?’

  ‘There’s Eugenia.’ His expression got very distant, as if he was remembering something. ‘She’s been much friendlier lately. Which is terrifying.’ He smirked. ‘She’s normally vicious.’

  ‘And yet you asked her to marry you,’ Jenna couldn’t help but point out. His eyes flashed.

  ‘Or Duncan announced our engagement so he could keep his piece of ass available at all times, without his very jealous and very connected wife any the wiser,’ Tommy retorted. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read. Or even part of it.’

  ‘You used to date her,’ Jenna replied, feeling defensive.

  Tommy sighed. He raked his dark hair back from his face with an impatient hand. ‘Eugenia Wentworth is a failed model with a very large trust fund, and can tell people at parties that she’s one hundred and sixty-seventh in line for the British throne. She’s exactly who I should have dated when I was twenty-two and in love with myself and our first single hit the top ten.’ He tipped his head back against the brick wall, and sighed. ‘And then, years later, she was still hanging around. So I dated her again, except this time it was perfectly clear that she wasn’t what I was looking for, but it was too late because I finally realized I was trapped and she was banging the guy who put me in the cage.’ He let out a small laugh then. ‘That’s how I ended up engaged to Eugenia Fucking Wentworth.’

  He said engaged as if it was in quotation marks, and also as if the very word sickened him. Jenna could relate.

  ‘That’s a terrible story.’ More than that, it made her want to reach out and soothe him, comfort him, but she didn’t dare.

  ‘Yes,’ Tommy agreed. He shifted on the bench. ‘The thing about Eugenia is that she has no filter between her emotions and her mouth. And I know she hates my guts.’

  ‘She told me you can be cruel,’ Jenna added helpfully. She did not add that she already knew that from firsthand experience.

  ‘She’s right.’ Tommy shrugged, as if cruelty was of no matter to him. ‘Her being friendly disturbs me. Deeply.’

  ‘Okay, sure,’ Jenna said, rocking back on her heels as she considered the situation. She crossed her arms over her chest and frowned. ‘But that still doesn’t add up to her conspiring to do anything but mess with your head.’

  ‘The only way to get out from under Duncan’s thumb is to get out of the band,’ Tommy said, looking away again. ‘And he isn’t the kind of guy to give up his power.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You want proof,’ he said, interrupting her. ‘I don’t have any. I just have a feeling. It’s not like he ever saw me as more than a means to an end, but lately, I don’t know, there’s something different in the way he looks at me. I can’t explain it, but I think he has a big plan.’

  ‘Which isn’t the same thing as planning a murder,’ Jenna argued. Tommy shook his head.

  ‘Duncan Paradis is a thug,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘That story he tells about his loving family and his poor childhood in the Bronx is a lie. There was no loving family. There were foster homes and sealed juvenile records. He lies about everything, he pays people off to help tell the lies, and he really only cares about money. Believe me, I know. I’m his biggest investment. I can’t imagine he’s going to let that change.’

  ‘I believe you,’ Jenna said. ‘I think he’s a creep. I just think it would make more sense for him to force you to make more albums, and therefore make more money …’ But even as she said it, she realized that idols who died tragically and at the height of their glory raked in far more money, and for far longer, than bands of once-great heights whose follow-up albums lost listeners. Kurt Cobain versus Simon Le Bon, for example.

  ‘Dead singers make a whole lot more money,’ Tommy said softly, as if he could read her mind. ‘Indefinitely. To say nothing of the cults that spring up around them. The greatest-hits compilations. The loving tributes and concerts. It’s big business.’

  Jenna’s mind raced. Tommy Seer’s body had never been recovered. Theoretically, anyone could have crashed his car through the guard rail and sent it spinning into the Hudson river. She’d seen it done in enough movies, at any rate, to know that it was possible. And if someone had done that deliberately, it made sense that they’d also done away with him. Because everything he’d just said with that bitter twist to his mouth had come to pass. Tommy Seer was a legend. Cut down in his prime, his death had been one of the most shocking events of not just Jenna’s young life, but of the lives of her contemporaries. Years later, when Kurt Cobain died, they’d all hugged themselves and wondered why the voices of their generation all seemed to die before their time.

  There was no evidence that it had been anything but an unfortunate accident. But there had always been the suspicion – or hope – amongst the fans that it had been an elaborate set-up and Tommy Seer still lived. Kind of like in that wonderful early-Eighties movie, Eddie and the Cruisers. The fact that there was no body kept the suspicion stoked no matter what official-sounding statements were made to the contrary.

  But it could also mean that someone else had set the whole thing up. And if there was anyone Jenna thought might be not only capable of such an act, but gunning for it, that would be Duncan Paradis.

  ‘It’s only a feeling,’ Tommy said again.

  ‘I understand where you’re coming from,’ Jenna said slowly, her mind still spinning through all the reams and reams of news articles she’d read about Tommy’s death, the documentaries with the news footage, her own more recent and exhaustive search through everything she could find that vaguely related to Tommy’s life in those last months … She shook herself slightly, aware that he was still watching her closely. Heaven forbid he see zombie eyes when she was just thinking things through. ‘So what do we do? Wait to see if he tries to shoot you one day?’

  Tommy’s mouth pulled to one side, and his eyes warmed.

  ‘That’s not the best plan I’ve ever heard,’ he said. ‘The trouble is, I can’t think of any reason Duncan would share his plans with me. Or anyone else.’

  ‘He thinks I’m an idiot,’ Jenna said, pulling on her bottom lip with her fingers as she thought it over. ‘If that.’

  They looked at each other, in perfect accord. Tommy smirked and Jenna smiled. And at the same time, they said her name.

  ‘Eugenia.’

  As it turned out, Jenna did not have to look very far for the other woman, because she was thoughtfully lying in wait when Tommy and Jenna returned to the house. She sneered as they walked in the glass doors from the garden.

  ‘A little early for a nooner, isn’t it?’ she asked snidely.

  Tommy ignored her completely, the way he always did. He walked past her as if the room was empty, as if she was not arrayed across the couch with that spiteful look on her face. Jenna made as if to do the same, and hid her smile when Eugenia barked out her name. Not that she thought Eugenia was likely to spill Duncan’s plot at the drop of a hat, but every conversation was an opportunity to get a little bit closer to that possibility.
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  ‘What?’ she asked. ‘I have to be up in the studio.’

  ‘A few minutes in the garden with Tommy and suddenly you think highly of yourself,’ Eugenia murmured. ‘You shouldn’t be so naïve, Jenna.’

  ‘I didn’t think I was,’ Jenna replied, crossing her arms as she stared down at Eugenia’s awful little rat face. ‘I thought I was doing my job.’

  ‘Is that what he told you?’ Eugenia let out a trill of laughter. ‘He certainly has slipped. Used to be, he didn’t have to tell his groupies that it was part of the job – they did it for free.’

  Jenna hated that word, groupies. She particularly hated it coming from Eugenia’s nasty mouth.

  ‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you fall all over yourself in the kitchen earlier to tell me what an asshole you think Tommy is? Why would you care what he does?’

  ‘I don’t,’ Eugenia retorted. She crossed her legs, and let them slide against each other, as if performing for someone who cared. ‘But don’t you think you’re fooling yourself?’ She smiled. It was a brittle thing. ‘You’re not exactly his type, are you?’

  Jenna knew perfectly well that Eugenia was trying to hurt her feelings. She also knew that this conversation was absurd at best, because she knew Tommy had less than no feelings about her. Not to mention she thought there were many other matters she could be talking about with Eugenia.

  But, ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, instead of all the reasonable things she should have said. Eugenia’s smile sharpened.

  ‘Well, look at you,’ she said, waving a languid hand at Jenna. ‘Tommy is one of the most famous men in the world. Sure, he’d sleep with anything, including a garden hose, but it’s not like he’d be seen in public with a poor little secretary like you, now would he?’

  It was ridiculous to let that hurt her. For one thing, it was true. And for another, it was irrelevant, because he wasn’t sleeping with her. So there was absolutely no rational explanation for the stab of pain that bloomed under her breastplate, much less her sudden, violent urge to leap across the coffee table and punch Eugenia Wentworth in the face.

  Eugenia uncoiled herself from the sofa like a cobra. She closed the distance between them with one long-legged stride. ‘Oh,’ she said then, ‘I almost forgot. Your boss called. He needs you back at the office.’

  ‘Ken called?’ Jenna asked.

  ‘That’s what I said.’ Eugenia sniffed, and raked Jenna from head to foot with her piercing eyes. ‘It must be painful to have such a crush on a man who will never, ever notice you. I almost pity you.’

  But her gales of laughter as she sauntered away said different.

  Jenna wanted to throw the lamp after her, possibly braining her, but restrained herself. After all, this was the plan. Convince Eugenia that Jenna yearned hopelessly after Tommy, and she would be less territorial over Duncan, which might – might – allow for some bonding down the road. Jenna and Tommy had agreed that it was the best – and, really, only – plan they had at the moment.

  The downside being, of course, that it was only the fact that Jenna really did yearn after Tommy that made her believe she could tolerate Eugenia long enough to pretend to bond in the first place.

  12

  Times Square looked sketchy and frightening in the late-morning sun, and Jenna ran from the cab to the door of the office building as if the homeless drug addicts were likely to pursue her if she slowed down. Inside, she ran into the still-snarly Princess-Diana-Haired receptionist in the elevator, and wondered, briefly, why every female she encountered in the Eighties hated her on sight.

  She was used to being the kind of woman other women liked. She had primarily female friends, back in her own life. She wasn’t one of those alien women who avoided females like the plague and concentrated her emotional energy on men. She had, in fact, long maintained that such women had severe problems of their own, even as she envied them their ease with members of the opposite sex. So what was going on?

  As she headed down the lush, opulent hallway on the fancy executive floor, hurrying to do Ken Dollimore’s bidding, Jenna suddenly realized that her New Jenna Project life actually resembled her sad and pathetic Former Jenna life. More than it should. Sure, she was stuck over twenty years in the past, but she still spent all her waking hours consumed with the Wild Boys. She still worked at Video TV, even if she hadn’t spent much time in the office lately. She still spent her nights alone in a small Manhattan apartment, with too much Tommy in her head.

  You could take the girl out of her time, but you couldn’t take the way she spent her time out of the girl. What did that say about her, that she could be catapulted into a different era and still continue doing the exact same things? On the one hand, maybe that spoke of her strength of character, that it stood the test of time, rigorously. On the other hand, maybe she should accept that she was the world’s biggest loser, as witnessed across several decades.

  On that cheery note, she stepped into her office and found Ken Dollimore in a tizzy. He was scowling into the telephone, and didn’t glance up as she walked in and stood in front of his desk. Today his outfit once again brought to mind the character of Ducky in Pretty in Pink, with the oversized yellow blazer, complete with rolled-up sleeves and FRANKIE SAYS RELAX T-Shirt underneath. He was a bright eyesore.

  ‘Finally!’ he cried when he saw her, rising to a half-crouch above his desk, which was piled high with precarious stacks of paper. ‘This place is a disaster without you, Jen.’

  Jenna murmured something vague and hopefully soothing, but Ken was on a roll.

  ‘I have no idea what I’m doing,’ he told her in frenzied tones. ‘My calendar is a disaster and I keep missing appointments. I never miss appointments! Gigi Unger called me today and became hysterical – I missed the entire exhibit! How could this happen?’ When he saw Jenna’s blank stare, he threw his hands in the air, theatrically. ‘Gigi Unger? The art broker? She manages three different downtown artists whose work was finally getting some respect, and I missed the exhibit.’

  The slightest trickle of a memory teased at the edges of Jenna’s brain then. She had the vaguest recollection of the name Gigi, and the word installation, and she was almost certain she’d spoken to this person in the three minutes she had been impersonating her far-better-organized aunt before Duncan Paradis had spirited her away. She felt guilty, but not guilty enough to confess.

  ‘Gigi Unger is always hysterical,’ Jenna claimed authoritatively, as if she had any idea. She based that assertion entirely on her faint memory, and what Ken had just said. ‘And artists generally show their work again, especially if they’re up and coming. They have to. I hope you told her to relax.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, I know it’s not the end of the world,’ Ken said with a groan, and flopped back in his chair. He sighed in a great gust. ‘Tell me what you’re doing over there in Wild Boy heaven, as Duncan Paradis’s little seeing-eye dog.’

  Jenna blinked. ‘What a delightful description.’

  ‘He’s a delightful guy,’ Ken said drily. He made a face. ‘He’s a bully, to put it mildly, and I wish there was some other way, but if I want Video TV to have an exclusive relationship with the Wild Boys …’ He shrugged. ‘There it is. Those bastards at MTV wet themselves when they saw that live show of yours. Brilliant idea.’

  ‘It’s going well,’ Jenna said. ‘I mean, I guess it is. I just sit there. The band doesn’t pay any attention to me. Most of the time I read magazines.’

  ‘Money in the bank,’ Ken said with a shrug. He ran a hand over his chin, thoughtfully. ‘See if you can figure out what they think the first single will be from the new album. If I can get some creative people working on it now, I’m pretty sure I can wow them and get the world premiere. MTV can eat my dust.’

  Jenna looked at him for a moment. Once again, loyalty to her employer compelled her to answer.

  ‘“Misery Loves Company”,’ she said, ‘That’s the first single. I think they’re planning to release it next week.’
/>   ‘You are a goddess,’ Ken breathed. He pointed at her. ‘Stay right there. I have to make a few calls.’

  Jenna eased down into one of the bright blue and red beanbag chairs that served as visitor seating in Ken’s office, and perched there gingerly, her butt making the beans crunch as they compressed.

  She couldn’t help going over the events of the day in her mind. She’d spent a month doing absolutely nothing – fending off Duncan’s rants, exchanging barbs with Eugenia – and today, suddenly, Tommy had talked to her like she was another person and not just another annoyance.

  She knew that it had as much to do with the topic they’d discussed as it had to do with the fact that she’d stopped seeing him as the imaginary creature she’d made up. She didn’t know what this new, complicated Tommy might do or say. She didn’t know him at all. But she wanted to.

  And more than anything, she wanted to keep him from dying in a few short weeks.

  How, she wondered, as that thought crashed through her with sudden force, had she managed to put that fact out of her mind? Whether Duncan Paradis murdered him or he got drunk and did it himself, he was still going to die. That was what happened. She knew, because she’d already lived through 1987 once before. So how had she let herself think about anything else?

  Oh, she knew that Tommy Seer, the legendary singer died on a certain date at a certain time, but in the past month, if she’d thought about it seriously, it had been in the abstract. Only now, sitting on a beanbag listening to Ken light fires under the behinds of numerous creative professionals, did it dawn on Jenna that this Tommy was the one who would die. Not the legend she’d made up in her own mind, the one who had been like a teddy bear or a comforter to soothe her as she’d needed over the years. That one would die too, but this Tommy was the one with bare feet and a slight smile. This Tommy told bad jokes and hummed at the ceiling. This Tommy didn’t bother to dress in anything but the most casual jeans and T-shirts, and he sometimes went without his morning shower too, turning up in the studio with a day or two of beard growth, and could still look so adorable while he made eggs for everyone. This Tommy had to be saved.