by Liz Moore
A moment later she emerges, sunglasses on, cigarette in hand, and takes a long slow drag. It feels good. She holds the smoke in while she addresses Cynthia.
“Give it to me straight, Cynthia.” She always says that. She thinks it sounds punchy and cinematic.
Cynthia reaches for the planner—it’s the only thing on her desk besides a phone and computer—and opens it to the page marked “Jax Powers-Kline.” She says, “You have a lunch date with James at one-thirty at Haru. A three-thirty meeting with Mr. Romero, a five o’clock manicure. And the Burn is having their drop party at the Bowery tonight.”
Jax exhales. “Cynthia,” she says.
“Yes, Jax?”
“Cynthia, who in the fuck is James?”
Yesterday, Jax had yelled from her office to Cynthia that she was meeting James for lunch at Haru at one-thirty. Cynthia had gotten up from her chair and walked to Jax’s door.
“James who?” she had asked.
“James! James! You know James,” Jax had said, using her cigarette for punctuation. She had been on the phone.
But Cynthia does not remind Jax of this now, only says, “I don’t know, Jax.”
V.
Cynthia and Lenore met when they were on the same bill one night at Arlene’s Grocery. Five years ago, Cynthia drummed for a singer named Drake who—Cynthia realizes now—really couldn’t sing at all. But back then he had the look. Hipsters had taken over New York and Drake had better vintage T-shirts than anyone.
He also had one of the nastiest smack habits Cynthia had ever witnessed. The night she met Lenore, he was still floating ten minutes before the show. Cynthia took him into the bathroom and hit his face and hit his arms and splashed his face with water, trying to get him up and get him out. But he was smiling; he was somewhere else. His head lolled onto his chest and his eyes looked up at her from far away.
The door opened and Lenore came in, before she was Lenore, when she was just some woman—practically a teenager back then—in the hideous bathroom of a rock club.
“Check him out,” said Lenore. Drake was still smiling, eyes closed now.
Cynthia said nothing. She was contemplating leaving Drake where he was and walking out. He had done this same thing two or three times before. Always, the clubs’ employees took it out on her because she was the sober one. But something about Lenore made her want to stay. Something about Lenore made her heartbeat quicken.
“We’re on in ten,” said Cynthia. “Supposed to be, I mean.”
“What’s his name?” Lenore asked.
“Drake.”
“Drake,” said Lenore. She put a hand—long-fingered, red-nailed—on his forehead. Cynthia thought it must have been cold. It looked cool, comfortable. She wanted it on her forehead too.
“Drake,” said Lenore again, and from her back pocket she pulled out a small clear bag. She waved it back and forth in front of his lazy gaze. “You want some of this, Drake?” Inside the bag was fine white powder. Lenore took out a mirror, cut four fat lines out, rolled a dollar bill. She did two. Then she held it under Drake’s nose.
“Do it,” she said to Drake. But she was looking at Cynthia. Drake emerged momentarily from his coma and obeyed. In a minute he was up, and in ten they were on.
That’s how Cynthia met Lenore, and that’s how Drake died. Not that night, of course. Later. Last year. Cynthia went to his funeral and stood in the back and the worst part was that she only really went because Drake was responsible, in some strange way, for Lenore.
They played “Stairway to Heaven” at his funeral. No one cried except Drake’s mother, who wore a black dress and a black veil and wailed like an electric guitar.
VI.
The phone rings.
“Titan,” says Cynthia.
“Cynthia,” says Theo. “It’s Theo.”
“Yo!” says Cynthia. Theo is the only person at Titan that she likes. Last fall he bought her a bottle of champagne—it was for her thirty-second birthday—and she was so touched that she didn’t even tell him she was allergic. She was still with Lenore at the time and she brought it home and handed it to her. Lenore had popped the cork out the window and drunk the whole bottle in one sitting. All of this flashes through Cynthia’s mind in the second it takes Theo to go on.
“I need to ask you a favor,” he says.
“No,” says Cynthia.
“Please?”
“Okay.”
“Make sure Jax is coming to the Burn’s show at the Bowery tonight,” says Theo.
“She knows,” says Cynthia. “It’s on her schedule.”
Both Cynthia and Theo know this means nothing, and Cynthia can almost hear him roll his eyes on the other end of the phone.
“Cynthia,” says Theo. “You’re killing me here.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Tell her Madonna called and she’ll be there,” says Theo. “I don’t know. Help.”
“I’ll try,” says Cynthia.
Cynthia knows what Theo is doing. He needs the whole company to be on board to ensure the Burn’s success. They’ve just come off a tour opening for Tommy Mays, Titan’s biggest act. Their album is out this month. If Jax doesn’t care about them—if she lets them fall into the abyss of bands Titan signs and forgets about—they’re doomed. Big labels tend to get behind only one or two new acts a year, and right now it looks like Lenore is monopolizing the attention of the highest-ups.
Of course she is, thinks Cynthia, and vows to do everything she can to help the Burn.
VII.
Cynthia and Lenore started the band because Lenore’s drummer moved to California and she decided she wanted an all-girl band anyway. She was like that. She would decide on things frantically, frenetically, and then she could not be convinced of the existence of any other way but her own. In this way she chose Cynthia as her drummer. Later, as her girlfriend. Last, as her ex-girlfriend, her ex-bandmate. Cynthia does not now recall being part of these decisions. She thinks of them as if they were natural disasters: unstoppable, unswerving. Predestined.
“I liked your show at Arlene’s. We can rehearse next Thursday,” said Lenore, the first time she called, a week after she and Cynthia met. As if it were natural that they would—back then, before they knew each other at all.
“How did you get this number?” asked Cynthia, more out of curiosity than anything.
“White pages,” said Lenore. “So Thursday?”
They found a guitarist and a bassist, but they never mattered. Their names were Sheila and Jo-Jo, respectively, and they did as they were told because they were grateful and they weren’t that good. Their rehearsals were strained. Lenore gave them no advice at all. “That rocked,” she would say, if a song did. “That sucked,” she would say, if a song did. It was up to Cynthia to fix things, to make things work. She stayed up late at night writing guitar parts that she would record to cassette and give to Sheila to learn, note by note. She built bass lines on the four bottom strings of her electric guitar and met with Jo-Jo separately to teach them to her before each rehearsal. Lenore wrote songs in G, mostly, and sometimes in E. They were predictable. Some were bad, even. But she made up for it onstage.
Cynthia had never seen Lenore perform before their first show together. Based on their rehearsals, she had always gone on the assumption that Lenore must be good onstage, the way one might look at a woman and guess at her skill in bed. She was intense when she rehearsed, staring at herself in the mirrored wall opposite the band in the room they rented at Ultrasound, turning and gazing coolly at her bandmates when she felt like it. But their first gig showed Cynthia a part of Lenore she had only guessed at—the lustful part, the dangerous part. She thinks of it now as the first time she was hurt by Lenore, or the first time she realized she would be hurt eventually by Lenore.
Because everyone wanted her. It was a communal need, almost a surprising need: everyone in the room hungered for Lenore, and Lenore hungered for herself, and the music was hardly important at al
l.
Lenore pulsed with an unnatural intensity, like her veins were outside her skin, like she would be cool to the touch even in a spotlight, even sweating as she did. And Cynthia wanted to touch her very much. More than that, she wanted to be touched by Lenore with a nearly religious fervor. It was all she could think about. She watched her from behind and lusted and lusted and felt like she would never want anyone again the way she wanted Lenore at their first show: Lenore, who leaned into the microphone and said, “Hello, New York,” as if it were the most natural phrase in the world; Lenore, almost astonishingly tall; Lenore, who shook out hair that might not have been washed in a week and started Cynthia’s pulse racing.
When Lenore took Cynthia home with her that night, it was like drinking water after a drought—it was like the sudden gracious fulfilling of a need that had been part of Cynthia for her whole life, a need she had not known was there until that night. After they had come together violently and then fallen apart again, Cynthia did not sleep, but watched Lenore asleep. She was the stillest sleeper Cynthia had ever seen; her face was almost corpselike. She lay perfectly flat on her back, her arms by her sides, her legs stretched out endlessly toward the foot of the bed.
“Lenore,” said Cynthia soundlessly. She mouthed the word as if she were invoking something, and became frightened there in the dim quiet of Lenore’s room. “Lenore,” she said aloud.
Lenore’s eyes opened and she turned toward Cynthia, as alert as if she had been awake for hours.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing,” said Cynthia. “Just seeing if you were okay.”
VIII.
Jax returns from lunch at Haru and tries to cross the lobby unmolested by the secretary, but fails.
“Jax,” the secretary is saying. “I have a message for you.”
“Not now,” says Jax, and shuts the door.
Inside her office, the shades are half drawn, as she likes them. The large room has been done in shades of deep red and brown. These are the colors of the house she grew up in. Her parents have not ever seen her office—she has not ever invited them—but should they ever have the chance to, they’d be surprised at the similarities to their own home in Brooklyn Heights.
She hears a timid knock on the door and ignores it. It’s bound to be Cynthia, the godforsaken secretary, whose professed and proven interest in music landed her a job that should have gone to someone much younger and—let’s face it—much more attractive than she. Since Corporate switched her to department secretary, she has been the first person their guests see upon exiting the elevator; she’s the de facto face of Titan. It is only Jax’s unwillingness to invest training time in a new secretary that prevents her from firing Cynthia based on her awful short haircut alone. Recently Cynthia has been ducking out early too, and coming in late. No dedication, thinks Jax. This must change. Jax’s personal assistant, Mimi, is a sweet young thing with aspirations to be just like Jax. Mimi follows Jax to concerts and events after work, asking for advice on everything from clothes to makeup to her career. As annoying as Jax finds her, there’s still something nice about her overt admiration. Come to think of it, isn’t it part of Cynthia’s duties to come to a concert or two now and again—to show her support for Titan artists, as an employee of Titan? For such a music buff, she doesn’t seem to really like music.
The knocking starts again.
“Go away,” says Jax. “I’m on the phone.”
A pause.
“I can see when you’re on the phone,” says Cynthia through the door. “I can see everyone’s lines from my desk.” Normally she would not be so bold, but this is for Theo.
“I’m on my cell phone,” says Jax. “Seriously, I’ll talk to you later.”
“Okay, I’ll just wait outside here,” says Cynthia.
The nerve. Jax walks to the door and throws it open, looking at Cynthia incredulously.
“Yes?” she hisses.
“Just wanted to remind you about the concert tonight.”
“What concert tonight?” asks Jax.
“The Burn’s. At the Bowery. It’s on your schedule.”
“Oh,” says Jax. In fact, she had had no intention of going to that concert. The Burn is some midlevel band that Theo has a hard-on for. They don’t fit in at Titan, not really; she signed them to please Theo, gave them some speech about greatness—her standard. If they sell twenty thousand records she’ll be surprised. Everyone’s focusing on Lenore Lamont now anyway. “Something came up,” she says. “Do me a favor and tell Theo?” She starts to shut the door.
“Um,” says Cynthia. “I’ve heard they’re really good.”
“Of course they are,” says Jax. “They’re a Titan band, aren’t they?”
Cynthia makes sympathetic eye contact with the Elvis cutout briefly before the door slams shut. She contemplates knocking again, then decides she needs more ammunition.
Before she can move, the door opens again abruptly. “You should go, though,” says Jax, who has just had a moment of inspiration: a new way she can torture the secretary. “New company initiative. Everyone’s gotta go see one show a month. Today’s April thirtieth. Have you seen a show yet?”
She isn’t kidding. Cynthia, who had planned on meeting her friend Bernie for a drink after work, must now call him and cancel. She would invite him to the show, but she does not like to mix work with her social life; she is partially embarrassed of the people she works with, and partially embarrassed of her friends. Bernie acts huffy and then settles down.
“Quit your job—it sucks,” he says, before hanging up.
Cynthia knows this. When she accepted the job as Jax’s personal assistant, she had fantasies of moving up through the ranks, maybe eventually doing A&R, if music didn’t work out. Then she was still with Lenore, still in a band, and she felt hopeful—thought possibly that the connections she made through Titan would be useful when the band was ready to be signed. Now she is thirty-two, and bandless, and in music, thirty-two is ancient. She knows this more than ever from working here, so really, she should be focusing on her professional career. But the fact is that Cynthia doesn’t have a college degree. She went to secretarial school after high school because her parents had sensed that she would never make it through four years of higher education—they had barely coaxed her through high school—and they wanted her to have some way of sustaining herself. It’s true that not everyone at Titan has a college degree, but the vast majority of them do, and, frankly, Cynthia’s attitude is often poor. She knows this. Her effort is minimal. Other candidates are more likely to gain entry into a different part of the company. She knows she will probably spend most of her adult life behind a desk, and she has almost resigned herself to this fate. Always, her mind circles back to one final reason to stay—Cynthia is something of a hypochondriac, and Titan has wonderful benefits—and then she nods to herself and settles back into work.
IX.
Lenore and Cynthia moved in together nearly as abruptly as they started a band together.
“I’m being evicted,” said Lenore, after she hadn’t paid her rent in two months. “Can I bring my stuff over tomorrow afternoon?”
“Yes,” said Cynthia reflexively, too surprised to think. She had learned already that Lenore was skilled at surprising people into things with her bluntness. And even though Cynthia was wary because she had not lived with anyone in five years, she was excited because it was Lenore, and Cynthia was desperately in love with her and wanted her nearby as much as possible.
So they moved in together, and Cynthia became a bad person. She really thought she was. “I am a bad person,” she said to herself out loud from time to time. What she meant was this: she became sneaky. Lenore was penetrable to her all at once. All of her things within easy reach, and Lenore out so much.
Cynthia began with the photo album. It was the second day after Lenore moved in. A year before, maybe more—before they were sleeping together anyway—Lenore had flipped through it with her casually,
brushing past pages of pictures of herself with different women and men. “This was Hannah. This was Graham,” she said, pointing to one picture at a time, always using the past tense. At the time, Cynthia hadn’t paid particularly close attention. She remembered one or two. One was of a woman (nearly a girl! nearly a girl!) sitting next to Lenore on the subway and angling for a kiss. Lenore was laughingly fending her off. Who took that photo? wondered Cynthia, in retrospect. Was it one of Lenore’s friends that Cynthia knew? The question overwhelmed her.
Lenore’s photo album occupied a good deal of her thoughts before she and Lenore moved in together. She was desperate to see it again; she dreaded seeing it again. She imagined Lenore with every one of her past loves, and felt somehow that the photo album was the key to them. She tried to remember how Lenore acted in the pictures, whether the look in her eyes was more loving, more compassionate, than it was for her. Or was she exhibiting some behavior that she withheld from Cynthia? Like putting her hand on Cynthia’s knee, or her arm around Cynthia’s shoulders. These were things that Lenore had never done and Cynthia had always wondered about: simple acts of love and possession and pride that Lenore seemed to reject implicitly. Suddenly, the photo album became the answer to all of these questions, and Cynthia found herself wishing that she could remember it better. She had seen it so early on—it was almost a conversation starter; it was early enough in their friendship that they were awkward together, or Cynthia was awkward with Lenore. Later, it was all she could do to stop herself from asking Lenore to see it again, which was unthinkable.
When they moved in together, it became so available. She looked at it whenever she knew Lenore would be out for a long time. It brought her incredible pain. She imagined Lenore making love to every person in every picture—the men and the women, the young and the old. She imagined them crying out her name. She imagined them laughing late at night in bed.
