by Liz Moore
The girls wait. Four of them look at Tia, who stands uncertainly. She is not sure how she has become the leader, but she likes her new role. Never before has she felt more powerful.
“Come on,” she hisses behind her at the other four. Reluctantly, Kira stands, and then Janelle, and then Ravenne and Linette. Then Tia realizes that the pitch pipe is in her father’s pocket and that her father is outside the office. She looks about desperately and then sees a keyboard in the corner of Theo’s office.
“Can I?” she asks Theo.
“Please,” he says.
Paul is sitting down by the ficus tree when, on the other side of the door, he hears the girls begin to sing. His body tenses perceptibly. He sits up, leans forward. It takes all his willpower to stop himself from rushing to Theo’s office door and pressing his ear to it.
The secretary returns with a cup of coffee.
“I forgot to ask about milk and sugar,” she says.
“Shhhhh,” says Paul, pressing a finger to his lips. “That’s them,” he whispers. “That’s my daughter.”
“Oh,” whispers the secretary, confused. “Okay.” She places the coffee on the table in front of Paul, backs away from him slowly, and returns to her desk.
Paul can hear only faint strains of music, but he thinks to himself that the girls are really very good, that their training has paid off. He wishes he could be in there with them. He wants to see them; it feels as if he is missing the ninth inning of a close baseball game. He wonders how Tia is doing.
And then something goes wrong: the song has only just started, and they go silent.
“Stop,” says Theo. He cannot hear them: they are dancing and singing a cappella, and the song is lost. “Stop dancing, Okay? Just sing.”
Tia is relieved. She had been on the verge of breathlessness before Theo’s command, and the song had just started.
Enjoying her new role as leader, Tia turns to the other girls. “Ready?” she asks. The other four nod, and once more Tia walks to the keyboard and plays a C.
They break into song: “Isn’t it, isn’t it, isn’t it over now?”
Since she isn’t thinking about her dance moves, Tia is able to focus on the song. She makes sure to hit the note she always sings flat. She smiles at Ravenne when Ravenne takes her solo on the bridge. Even Kira hits her note on “boy, it’s over.” More than anything, though, there is an excitement to their singing that Tia can feel, and she feels certain that Theo Brigham must feel it too. She feels proud of her bandmates—even proud of herself.
When they finish, Theo is smiling.
“That was great,” he says.
It was. Theo is delighted. They are actually good. He appreciates this band for the smallest things: something as simple as being able to find a C on a keyboard. Something as simple as graciousness, humility: Theo is touched and relieved, somehow, that he can still recognize these qualities in others and appreciate them.
It has been so long since he has been interested in the well-being of the bands he sees every day; this one is different. He likes them and he thinks others will like them. They are likable.
He wants them. He opens the door.
Outside the office, Tia’s father sits on a bench in the lobby. He has worn his best suit: a dark one with pinstripes. It fits him nicely through the shoulders. For a moment, seeing her father through the door, Tia lets herself imagine what it would be like to be him, and she lets herself feel bad for disappointing him, for being too fat, for being a terrible dancer. For being the only child. Now, for the first time, she has done as her father hoped she would do, and she has never felt worse.
My life is over, she thinks, and gazes sadly out the window of the office to the street below, at the thin and lovely women of New York City—some of whom have husbands and boyfriends who have forgotten their loveliness—and remembers, distantly, distantly, a song her father used to sing when she was younger. It was a lullaby. It was the only song she’s ever heard him sing.
12.
JEFFREY THE GREAT
Before all of this ever went down
In another place, another town,
You were just another face in the crowd
—TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS, “A Face in the Crowd”
I.
She was too young, Jeff thinks, waking up once again beside someone he does not know. Too young, too young. Again. The hotel room is littered with clothes and magazines. Things come into focus in quick succession: the dizzying abstract print on the wall above the television; the flowers that came with the room, beginning now to wilt; his Strat, out of its case and propped up against the wall (bad! thinks Jeff, knowing he should care for his instruments better). The room itself is dim, the air inside it stale. The curtains are drawn across the wall-to-wall windows that look out over a parking lot in Colorado. Beyond the parking lot are mountains. Beyond the mountains is the state west of Colorado, which Jeff tries now to think of but cannot.
He can barely bring himself to look to his right. When he does he sees a bare shoulder and a brown ponytail. The rest of the girl is turned away from him, under the hotel bedspread. An old girlfriend once told him never to touch hotel bedspreads. “People have sex on them!” she had said, laughing. “You think anyone washes those things?” This had given Jeff pause. But I have sex on them, he had thought. I am that person. Still, he avoided them after that, and he wants now to pull the bedspread away from the girl’s face—but more than that, he wants to avoid waking her up while he decides upon a course of action.
He tries to remember last night. They played at Red Rocks. Tom has his wife and kids with him on this tour, so they went back to the hotel early, right after the show ended. Kai, Jeff, and Jordan had hung out backstage after the show. All three of them had been drinking since before the show started. Jeff had a thermos of bourbon and Coke onstage with him. When he drinks he gets rowdy. He remembers telling one of the security guys to find them girls, remembers the guy coming back with four or five of them, all of them friends. What happened next?
The girl stirs a bit but does not turn over. Jeff holds his breath and then slowly, slowly sits up. He swings first his left foot, then his right, over the side of the bed. He tiptoes to the window and pulls one edge of the floor-length drape back the tiniest bit. Outside it is broad daylight. It might be noon. He holds his wrist up to the light and sees by his watch that it is eleven-thirty. What now? He looks back at the bed, at the girl in it. He has been in this situation before. He is constantly in this situation, and he never seems to improve at it. Sometimes, if he is feeling particularly cowardly, he simply leaves, packing up so quietly that he barely breathes, camping out in Jordan or Kai’s room until the bus is nearly pulling out of the parking lot, then sprinting.
But he just doesn’t feel like doing that today. He is feeling generous. Maybe even tender. He pulls open the shade a tiny bit, enough to see by, and walks over to the other side of the bed. He sits down on it. The girl is still asleep. If he squints at her, he can believe that she’s twenty. She has a lovely profile: a nose that is strong and slightly convex; full lips; dark, well-formed brow. Tiny shell-like ears. Brown smooth hair pulled back in a rubber band. He almost wants to touch her neck: it looks so soft, and a blue vein runs the length of it, pulsing minutely. Against his will, Jeff’s mind flashes forward over the years and he imagines having a relationship with this one; marrying her; having kids. Like Tom. Jeff admires Tom for his family. He is nearly in love with Camilla, and when no one is looking he likes to make googly faces at their daughters and watch their baby faces break into smiles.
The girl turns onto her back.
“Hey,” says Jeff, very quietly, so as not to frighten her. “Good morning.”
Then something terrible happens: the girl’s hand comes up from beneath the blanket and she rubs her eyes, taking in a sleepy breath and holding it, blinking in the dim light.
“Mom?” she says.
Crap, thinks Jeff. Mom?
Sudd
enly the girl is very awake, sitting up, clutching at the blanket, pulling it over herself and terribly embarrassed. “Oh, God,” she says. “Hi. Good morning.”
“Good morning,” Jeff says again, dumbly. “How are you today?”
“Um, fine,” says the girl. “Can I use your phone?”
“Sure, of course. Of course.” Jeff stands up and gets the phone from the other bed table, brings it around to her, and holds it out stiffly. “I’m just gonna—” He makes a lame pointing motion with his right hand and the girl nods, pressing the receiver into her shoulder with her ear, dialing the phone shakily.
Jeff backs out of the room and shuts the door behind him. Realizes next that his key is still inside. Runs down the hall, his heart hammering, and pounds on Jordan’s door. He will hide until it is time to leave. Maybe he can pay a maid to pack up his things for him.
II.
This is the last leg of their tour. They will go home to New York in a week, Tommy Mays and his band and his family. Tom and Camilla have their own bus. Tom asked her abruptly one day, not long before they were to leave, if she didn’t think the girls were old enough to come along this time. She had said she agreed. With the girls along, it was impossible not to have a bus to themselves, and the band has been selling records, so Titan was happy to oblige. They are waiting in the lobby of the hotel for the roadies to load up and for the drivers to be ready to go.
Alice is walking now but still cannot talk. In this way she is the opposite of her sister, Clara, who spoke early and often and now has a vocabulary that belies her three years on earth. Already, though, Alice has taken over: she is in charge, the force of the two.
“Bah. Bah. Bah,” says Alice, standing with her hands on the knees of her mother, bouncing up and down on her baby toes.
“‘Papa’?” says Camilla hopefully. “Is that your papa, Alice?”
“Bah!” says Alice, looking cross.
Tom scoops her up and is then accosted by two high-schoolers who want his autograph.
“We saw you guys last night!” says one girl, nearly shouting. “Oh my God, you guys were awesome!”
Her friend nods in solemn agreement. Tom hands Alice to Camilla, signing the backs of the receipts the girls have proffered.
“Thanks,” says Tom, and still the fans stare at him, not wanting to leave.
“Bah! Bah!” says Alice insistently, and Clara says imperiously, “Use words, Alice,” which she herself is often told midtantrum.
Out of the corner of his eye, Tom sees a figure slinking along the wall from the elevator into the lobby. He turns to see Jeff scanning the lobby nervously before coming over to them.
“Hi,” says Jeff, shifty-eyed, feigning nonchalance. “We’re leaving now, right?”
“They went to find a gas station. Filling up the buses,” says Tom, tossing Alice up in the air, thrilling her so she shrieks happily.
“Cool,” says Jeff, swearing in his mind. Can he hide behind a plant? He opts instead to walk outside and find a tree to stand near, so he can duck behind it if he sees the girl from this morning. “See you guys out there.”
The two fans have watched this whole exchange as if it were a movie. Finally they take the hint and leave. “You were awesome,” the one girl says one last time, with conviction, over her shoulder. “Awesome.”
“Thank you,” says Tom.
“Bye,” says Camilla.
“Bus,” says Alice, toddling quickly after the girls.
Camilla runs after her and picks her up. “What did you say, Alice?”
“Bus,” says Alice, and yawns.
III.
Jeff, Kai, and Jordan sit on the bus behind Tom and his family’s bus as they drive south. They have two nights before they are scheduled to appear in Austin, Texas, Jeff’s hometown. Over the course of the next two and a half days, they will fight about who is using all the goddamn paper towels; switch beds because Kai is taller than Jordan and demands the longer one; sing along with an entire Tom Petty album, pointing and laughing when they catch Jeff clumsily mouthing words he does not know; stop at three truck stops, four roadside diners, and one Radio Shack (Kai has misplaced his cell phone charger); blow twenty-seven spitballs and nearly three hundred bubbles with the supersize pack of watermelon Bubble Yum chewing gum that Jordan will delightedly buy at one of the truck stops; cruelly quiz Junior, their old and unmarried driver, about his love life; develop a system of racing one another to the fore and aft of the bus at red lights; silence themselves suddenly at Kai’s confession that he does not like the Beatles, and then worry the issue to pieces for the rest of the drive.
Jeff feels as he always does, approaching Austin: a sense of regret and mild amazement, a sort of marveling at his life. He has not told his family he would be in town, though they may have seen it in the papers—Jeff’s father and younger sister follow the band, keep a little scrapbook in the family’s living room with press clippings and advertisements—for he does not like to know that they are in the audience. It’s an agreement they’ve worked out. He feels he cannot be himself (his unself, his stage self, he thinks sometimes) onstage if he knows his parents and his little sister are around. He leaves ten tickets and backstage passes for them and their guests at the box office, and they know to check there. After the show he will call them and invite them backstage if they are there—and they always are. They have not yet missed an Austin show. His sister, Celeste, brings a friend or two, though she does not like to play up his fame and is quiet and very rational herself.
As Jeff’s superstition about his family is his one folly, the scrapbook is hers: she likes to feel close to her brother, likes to imagine that she knows where he is and what he is doing on a given day. She checks the Tommy Mays Web site with some frequency, keeping track of their tour, reading the guestbook and the discussion boards and seeing what everyone has to say about her big brother Jeff. She is especially amused by the postings of girls her own age who proclaim their undying love for him. She is fifteen, but wise. Today, as her brother and his band make their way toward Austin in two imposing black buses, she is baking cookies for her brother and debating with herself about whether bringing cookies for a band is too cute. She is, after all, a feminist, and has recently cut short and dyed black her fine hair, which used to hang down her back in a shiny brown sheet. In the end, she decides that baking cookies for a loved one is not entirely incompatible with feminism, and besides, they are Jeff’s favorite—chocolate chocolate chip—and she knows he will take them from her hands gratefully and gobble them up until he is sick.
IV.
They turn off the highway toward Austin in the early hours of the morning, when it is still dark. Jeff wakes with a flutter of excitement in his gut. He can smell Austin even in the air of the bus. He can see it in the red light that crosses the ceiling. Jordan and Kai are still asleep: he can hear their heavy solemn breathing, and spends these moments thinking of all he has done wrong in the last year. It has been a bad one for Jeff. The girls—mostly the girls. He has had two dreams about the girl who woke up in his bed most recently, she of the ponytail and bare shoulder. “Mom?” she had said. It echoes in his ears: it was so innocent, so casual and unaffected. Mom? He had wished in that moment to be her mother, to see her waking up in a childish bedroom, frosted with pink; to touch the vein in her neck innocently, as a mother would.
“Fuck,” he says aloud, very quietly. He often has the compulsion to curse aloud to relieve tension. “Shit.”
His mind flashes over the other girls he has slept with this year, and stops, as it always does, at one he wishes most he could forget, the one he met almost a year ago in New Jersey: the one who cried.
“Fuck,” he says again, a bit louder, and Jordan, across the bus, flops over in his sleep. “Goddamn it all to hell.”
He feels like Humbert Humbert. He can remember reading Lolita in high school, in the English class instructed by young Ms. Murphy, who taught the relatively racy book against the wishes of the PTA because sh
e loved it for its writing. He remembers feeling disgusted with both its protagonist and with Nabokov himself. He could not see it as satire; he simply felt the impulse to rescue young Lolita from the clutch of the snobbish narrator. But I am no better than he is, thinks Jeff. He remembers Ms. Murphy at the head of the classroom, probing her students for their reactions: “Who likes Humbert? Who likes Charlotte Haze? Who likes Lolita?” He had raised his hand quite high when asked about Charlotte Haze, whom he pitied for her cluelessness and for whom he felt endless empathy.
“But Jeffrey,” Ms. Murphy had said, “are we meant to like her?” He had shrugged. He had liked Ms. Murphy. She was young (how old, in retrospect? twenty-five? thirty?) when he had her, and had very blond hair, and touched her lower lip when she spoke, and called him “Jeffrey” as a rule. She was unmarried then. At one point she had been Jeff’s favorite teacher. He had never liked English—at sixteen or seventeen, he was already interested nearly exclusively in music—but for Ms. Murphy he read voraciously, neglecting his other homework. He read everything she told him to, and though he was too shy to join the large and doting group of students who stayed after for extra help, and too susceptible to peer pressure to participate in the drama club Ms. Murphy advised, he found other ways to show her he appreciated her. He did not, for example, sleep in her class the way he did in others. With a sturdy and delinquent student who had called her a bitch in class, he had nearly gotten into a fistfight, reports of which had surely made their way back to lovely Ms. Murphy (he hoped). Just before graduation, he had written her a love note, and had carried it with him beneath his graduation robes, envisioning himself thrusting it into Ms. Murphy’s hands just before they left and never seeing her again. Fortunately or unfortunately, he had not seen Ms. Murphy at all, as she had caught a cold and was bedridden on the day of the ceremony.
Just as the bus pulls up to the hotel, Jeff has a brief burst of inspiration. He checks his watch. It is five A.M. I will call Ms. Murphy, he thinks, halfway into the morning. It is a Saturday. She will be up, perhaps grading papers. She will be sitting at home, wherever that is, perhaps petting a cat, perhaps grading papers. She will be holding a cup of tea in her hands—she always had one in class, the little paper dangling off the end of its string distractingly—and when I call she will get up to answer the phone, sending the cat and the papers flying. I will invite her to coffee, thinks Jeff, because I am uncertain about whether she drinks. Or maybe we should go someplace with coffee and drinks. Yes: “for coffee or a drink,” Jeff will say. He can ask the hotel staff for a recommendation. Surely she will have heard about him through the grapevine of students at his high school. Surely, because Celeste goes there now. Maybe she even likes his music! But this seems unlikely to Jeff. He wants urgently to call Celeste and ask her about Ms. Murphy, but he is superstitious by nature and refuses to break the tradition he has of speaking to his family only after his shows. He is in agony. He wishes for the clock to speed up, but they are signing in to the hotel now and it is only five-fifteen A.M. He will sleep for a few hours in his hotel bed, making sure to turn down the bedspread first.
