by M. M. Mayle
“This is Colin Elliot.” She gives them a mock-disdainful look and they give each other looks of total what-the-fuck astonishment.
“Jeez, Laurel, you coulda warned us or something.” Ben, the older one, has Laurel’s dignity and reserved look about him when his jaw’s not dropped.
“Yeah, Laur, I mean—holy crap—you of all people hangin’ out with a heavy-duty rock star . . . What is that?” The other brother, Michael, bears the family resemblance with none of the reserve.
“I did warn you, Ben. And you, Michael. Didn’t I tell you less than five minutes ago that I came here today with Colin Elliot, with whom I have a working relationship and—”
“Yeah, but we thought you were goofin’ on us, makin’ one of your infamous lame jokes and we’d come down to the foyer and find you’d hooked a ride with Elmer Fudd or somethin’,” Ben says.
“I’ve been called a lot of things, but never Elmer Fudd.” Colin offers his hand to each brother in turn, if only to humorously remind them he’s still in the room. With that reminder the atmosphere is only a bit less strained because, by attracting their attention, he’s subjecting himself to their scrutiny. Like their big sister, neither of these blokes is faintly overawed by his celebrity. What he mistook earlier for a touch of idolatry was only surprise that Laurel agreed to be seen in his company. With surprise out of the way, they now have no compunctions about interrogating him right on the spot. Their polite questions are brief, to the point and mainly fielded by Laurel, who’s the better one to define a working relationship. Nevertheless, when goodbyes are done with, he retreats with the unnerving sensation he’s just been raked over the coals.
“Is it fair to say your brothers have you pegged as an arch-conservative career spinster and intend to keep you that way?” He grins as they drive away.
“Oh, you noticed.” Laurel laughs. “Not much I can do about that. They’ve been defending my so-called honor since they were little guys and I don’t see them ever changing. I’m sorry if they made you uncomfortable.”
“Don’t be. I’m delighted they made me uncomfortable, actually. Shows they’re tuned in to what I’m about and mindful that you should be looked after.”
“Oh please. You’re taking them way too seriously and they’re no better than the tabloids for assuming you and I are an . . . an item.” She breaks the conversational thread to give directions to their next destination.
Emily Chandler lives on campus at New Haven University. He leaves Laurel near the entrance to her sister’s residence hall and sets out to find a parking spot. When he does discover one, it’s quite a ways from the residence—a distance sparsely populated this time of day, so he figures to take his chances. Whatever happens will be his doing; there’s no one else to blame if his independent streak culminates in a mob scene, and no one to summon who wouldn’t call him a fuckwit and say I told you so. He wishes he were camouflaged in the coat he had on yesterday, the one that still smells like Laurel and was left behind for that very reason—to preserve her scent. Then again, he more closely resembles a student, albeit an older one, dressed as he is in jeans and leather jacket.
Head down, shoulders hunched, he’s just another campus bloke unworthy of a second glance till he’s up the steps and into the residence where a shriek immediately rings out.
“Omigod-omigod-omigod you weren’t shitting me!” The girl blocking his way is doing a spot-on impression of a famous painting that calls for widened eyes, hands clapped either side of head, and mouth stretched into an exaggerated oval.
Laurel is just behind the impressionist, the picture of smug amusement. “This is my sister, Emily, another nonbeliever.” Laurel leads the way into an adjoining reception area that’s blessedly unoccupied.
They sit at a round table in one corner of the room where no one person is at advantage or compelled to maintain eye contact with another. This is just as well because little sister is not the iconoclast her brothers and Laurel are; she’s definitely having a time of it adjusting to his presence, and if she looks at him at all, it’s with the glazed-over expression of worshipfulness he last saw on the giddy girls at the museum.
When not wide-eyed and openmouthed, Emily is the unfinished image of Laurel. She is softly pretty, but lacking the sculptured definition and intrigue of her older sister. Right now, Emily resembles the sort the roadies would try to keep for themselves, therefore the sort that doesn’t interest him anymore. Oddly enough, the maturity that’s absent from her face reveals itself in her demeanor once Laurel starts in about the trust fund. At a moment when it would be most understandable for the girl to slip back into dazed and amazed mode, she displays only the self-possession that apparently infects all the Chandler siblings to some degree.
With episode three of his self-imposed indoctrination into Laurel’s family winding down, he has nothing but admiration for the way they complement each other’s strengths. He could even envy them, if not for knowing the circumstances that brought those strengths into being. He muses on all this as Laurel concludes with a review of the restrictions attached to Emily’s trust fund. He wouldn’t have to pay close attention to know they don’t faintly resemble any of the conditions imposed on Laurel when she was a young girl. They are stated as requests instead of requirements, and Emily doesn’t wince or blink at any of them.
When Laurel finishes, she excuses herself to go to the loo and he’s left alone with Emily, who appears to have relapsed into tongue-tied state. But not for long.
“Do you love her?” she blurts, her forthrightness near toppling him from his chair. “I’ve been watching you watch her and you better not just be playing around.” Little sister says what the brothers only implied.
“Bleedin’ Jesus . . . Emily, it is . . . I don’t know what to say.”
“Well, do you? You sure as hell look like you do.”
“Yeh, I do. I do love her. At first sight it was, and I don’t know what to do about it because first sight was less than a week ago.”
“You’re afraid she won’t take you seriously.”
“Yeh, and then I’ve got the problem of her insisting ours is strictly a working arrangement that can’t be compromised by her seeing me socially. But every now and then I get these little hints that maybe she wishes that didn’t have to be.”
“How much do you know about her? About our family?”
“She’s told me the whole story.”
“Wow, she did? That’s something right there.”
“I’ve been hoping it was.”
“Then you know she had to deny herself certain things for a very long time. She still denies herself, only now it’s in another form. She flat-out won’t let herself see stuff that could turn into a problem. Good example is her pretending she’s not going through the empty-nest syndrome thing. And if she knew I told you that she’d kill me ’cause it makes her sound like some fat old matron with hot flashes.”
“I caught on to that this morning, actually. When I saw the way she keeps your house, as though you’ll all be coming home any minute.”
“You were in our house?”
“Yeh, she invited me there for breakfast and made that apple pancake extravaganza she says you all enjoy. Then we went to see your dad, and after that I drove her here to see you and your brothers.”
“Holy . . . But she won’t see you socially.” Emily breaks into a fit of giggles and only stops when Laurel reappears and shoots them both quizzical looks that ask what sort of mischief they’ve been up to.
When it occurs, the leave-taking is more drawn out than with the brothers. Laurel looks like she could well up a bit when she hugs and kisses Emily goodbye. Emily, on the other hand, has no problem about spilling over, except she’s doing it at his expense; those are tears of merriment he sees leaking out the corners of her eyes, and that’s a great teasing grin playing at the corners of her pretty mouth.
In the interest of preserving image and reputation, he grabs hold of Emily and plants one on her none of them w
ill ever forget. Something else for the lore, along with his having fallen asleep on yesterday’s boat ride. He leaves Emily the way he found her, wide-eyed, openmouthed, hands clapped either side of her head.
THIRTY-NINE
Afternoon, April 5, 1987
Laurel is given no chance to respond to his impulsive behavior as he hustles her along the pavement leading to the carpark. More students are out and about now and several recognize him. High fives are offered and a sprinkling of rocker catchphrases, but it’s mostly double takes that answer to his ego needs. Laurel turns more than a few heads and draws admiring glances, and this too responds to his ego. Inside the car he’s about to start the engine when she puts a hand on his arm.
“What you did back there . . . that was inspired.”
“Sorry?”
“Kissing Emily. She can have a hard time with goodbyes. You must have noticed she was about to break up, and catching her off guard like that was funny and sweet and eased some of the strain. Thank you.”
A quick check of her expression establishes that she’s not having him on; she really means it, except she’s a bit mixed up about which sister it is that has a hard time with goodbyes. Nothing more is said till they’re back on the motorway and she brings out pen and paper from the satchel that’s now wedged between her feet.
“Leaving the press out of it for now,” she says, “eliminating the press—that’s a separate issue—and starting with colleagues and old friends you ran into in L.A., passengers encountered on the flight to New York, bystanders at the hotel, gawkers on Fifth Avenue, followers in the museum, tourists on the Circle Liner, and the assortment of students and faculty just now. . . .”
She pauses for breath and he’s holding his because he’s unclear where this is leading.
“At any time during any of that scrutiny did you have the feeling you were being evaluated for soundness of mind and body?” She looks at him from the corner of her eye. “Did you think any of those interested parties were looking for signs of infirmity, signs of failure?”
“Shit, it’s more than a feeling. It’s a bloody actuality and strongest amongst my own people, it is. You saw the way the lot regarded me the day they set out to rebrand me and offer me up as some sort of adulterated product. You were first to speak out against ’em—which I’ll not forget anytime soon—and now you’ve got me keen to know where you’re goin’ with this.”
“I don’t know that I’m going anywhere with it, it just occurred to me that maybe the general public has more faith in your abilities than your own people. Maybe it’s only your handlers who need to be brought up to speed, and that shouldn’t require more than a strongly worded memo.”
Is she backing out of the book deal? Is this her way of saying the story may not need telling at all, other than to a few professional skeptics? He tightens his grip on the steering wheel. Is her personal self halfway out the door with her professional self?
“Gibby Lester, the bloke just found dead in New York, was my late wife’s drug dealer,” he announces right out of nowhere in the interest of retaining at least the professional Laurel. “I had a bit of aggro with him, roughed him up some and relieved him of his truck the day she was killed. I’m told he never brought charges against me because he would’ve incriminated himself.”
There, that has to be a start in the right direction.
“My manager’s always maintained the Lester fuckbag was in league with Cliff Grant—another fuckbag that just happened to get whacked recently,” he plunges on. “This, because Grant allegedly did a bit of low-level drug dealing and also had in common with Lester an interest in porn distribution—hard core variety—but nothing’s ever been proved. As I said when you told me about Lester yesterday, nothing’s ever stuck to either blighter for very long except my name—notoriety by association.”
“I see,” she says in her inscrutable way.
“There’s good to come of this, though,” he says, undiscouraged. “Because if Nate gets stirred up about their commonalities again—especially now that both are homicides—that’ll give me a bit extra breathin’ space. Blessing I might wanna call that.”
She says nothing, inscrutable or otherwise, and he can’t read her expression; her head’s bowed, her profile’s blocked by the thick lock of hair that’s escaped the loosely tied scarf at the nape of her neck. An educated guess at what she’s writing braces him for questions about the possible relationship between Grant and Lester, about the drug and porn supply lines, and most dreaded of all, about the late wife.
They don’t come. Instead, she asks if he had adequate opportunity to look over the site of his first American gig and hands him the opening he wants like he’s just ordered up from room service.
Exactly as planned, he starts at the American beginning with a story calculated to have her asking for more.
“So, it’s 1977 and after a hard five-year slog through the Home Counties and grungier bits of the Continent, we’ve won a spot on the bill at Newt’s Place with a rough demo tape and some sketchy recommendations from promoters in the UK. We’re dying with excitement and anxiety well before we manage to fly to New York steerage class, purchase a fifth-hand van with a hundred thirty thousand miles on it, and find our way to New Haven. The day arrives, the hour approaches, the minute draws near, and what do you think? Our big entrance is delayed ninety fucking minutes because the patrons cannot be pried away from the telly that’s showing a championship hockey game gone into overtime! Gave all new meaning to the term ‘performance anxiety,’ it did.”
Her reaction is exactly what he wants—a moment of dismay followed by amusement. He elicits more of the same with similar stories of the often-hilarious indignities suffered as opening act to fading headliners. Sensing overkill, he leaves off after the fourth or fifth example and begins a new thread.
“We called the band Verge without deciding if that meant we were on the edge of a breakthrough or stalled on the edge of the road. Early on we were categorized heavy metal and that didn’t work because we weren’t loud enough, sullen enough, and couldn’t afford studded leather costumes. Then it was teeth metal they called us because we smiled when we should’ve been sneering. After that, the metal appellation got dropped altogether and some coked-up promoter called us a punk band and that sat about as well as if he’d called us disco queens. Finally, someone got it somewhat right by classifying us pop rock. That always worked for me, even though some consider it synonymous with pussy rock, and I say what’s wrong with that when one of the main reasons any lad has for gettin’ behind a guitar and into a band is to score chicks—the other reasons being to party and challenge the system.
“It was a wonderful and frightening time. We were immature because we could be. There was no good reason not to be. We didn’t make decisions, we made surprises. It’s a bleedin’ wonder we survived ourselves, and we wouldn’t have if Nate Isaacs hadn’t arrived the scene and caught us midair, so to speak. Whilst he’s good at a lot of things, he’s truly brilliant at artist management—even when he’s overdoin’ it. He was the right man for the job and for the time. This was the seventies, when managers were infamous for bludgeoning the way for their clients and personally carting off the gate receipts—sometimes to the detriment of the clients. Nate was at the forefront of the movement towards more civilized management techniques that depended on shrewdness over force and cookin’ the books over outright thievery.”
“Nate never. . . .”
“No, never. Back in those days the proceeds from some of our concerts wouldn’t have amounted to pocket change for him. He had better and more efficient ways of makin’ money than by dodgy means.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, I was explaining that Nate took us on at a critical point. Although he wasn’t that long out of business school and only a year or two older than the eldest amongst us—that bein’ me—he could’ve been of another generation. All grown up, he was. Excruciatingly grown up and bloody eager to prove it with a band
who were wasting time, talent, and money for lack of direction.
“We came together with Nate in Vancouver, with its abundance of recording studios and strip clubs, where he supplied purpose as well as direction. The first album produced under his aegis broke in Japan and eventually sold thirty million copies worldwide. We toured behind it to fifteen different countries, two hundred shows in all, and made obscene amounts of money by givin’ people what they were conditioned to want instead of what we wanted them to want.”
“I haven’t forgotten what you said about bowing to the god of commercialism ahead of the god of artistic endeavor. Was this the initial concession?” Laurel says.
“You could say. Nate cut us an amazing record deal for a young band still strugglin’ to find its ultimate sound. Brilliant, it was. He flogged us as capable of everything from ‘caveman stomp’ to ‘reggae-inflected fusion,’ with intervals of ‘scorching metal meltdown’ and ‘power balladeering’ . . . Unquote.”
Laurel laughs. “That sounds like four different directions to me.”
“It wasn’t, actually, but it was a masterful mix of hyperbole and fact that got the job done and our collective feet in the door of the Pinnacle recording studios, where we made a name for ourselves by putting out what Saul Kingsolver, head toff of the label, wanted put out. At first this didn’t bother any of us in the band, and it never did bother Nate. He still caters to the masses—ever the merchant, never the artist. Good example of that is his arguing against the title of my Icon-winning tune. He thought the word ‘revenant’ wouldn’t be understood by the common folk and it turned out it was the uncommon folk, such as the organizers of the award gig, that were unable to grasp the contextual meaning.
“Sorry, I’m wandering. I was talking about the compromises and provisional sellouts made along the way. I was sayin’ how this wasn’t a bother with the first flush of fame, but with the second and third album releases we were startin’ to feel like a cover band, like we were playing someone else’s music—which we were in a sense—and we started agitating against it. Because we won numerous Grammys and BRIT awards, got massive radio play, charted four number one singles in a row, and individual album sales averaged between fifteen and nineteen million units at initial release, the label cut us loose to do one on our own. It remains the best thing we ever did and ever will do. Epic, it was. We didn’t eliminate any of the power that characterized our first three albums, but another sensibility was there—refinement, I wanna say.
