The Big Rewind

by Libby Cudmore

  By the time Lauren announced my presence, I was sure I was going to black out from anxiety. Maybe I should be flattered, I thought, that someone thinks me pretty, easy, and enough of a corporate climber to be willing to sleep with me. Or maybe, more likely, I would simply do.

  Philip Hartford was that kind of clean-shaven, middle-aged handsome that Mad Men tries to convince us is common when in reality, most middle-aged office guys look more like a sitcom dad. He wore black suspenders and a blue shirt, a mute-patterned tie and a serious, quiet expression.

  “Thank you, Lauren,” he said in a voice that betrayed no familiarity or comfort. I swallowed so hard I’m sure he must have heard the saliva hit my stomach.

  “Jett Bennett,” he said, as though reading an imaginary file on all my comings and goings. He gestured for me to sit in a leather office chair waiting at the front of his desk. “How long have you been working here?”

  “Six months,” I answered, my mouth dry.

  “You like it here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re good,” he said. “Lauren says you’re always on time, your work is clean, and you get along with the others. That’s important in this line of work.”

  Was I being fired? Promoted? Propositioned? My palms were starting to sweat, leaving rings of gross on his nice chair.

  “I need to know that what I tell you—regardless of whether or not you decide to accept my offer—will stay between us. Can I count on your confidentiality?”

  Oh God, it was a proposition. But he was handsome, and it had been a while since I’d gotten laid. I imagined myself sauntering into the Hartford lobby in a trench coat with a red lace negligee underneath, stiletto heels clicking on the marble tile, the envious stares of Birdie and Lauren. It wasn’t my hottest fantasy—that was the one about eating barbecue naked with Jack McBrayer—but it would work. There were worse guys to bone on my way up the corporate ladder. Helen Gurley Brown was smiling down on me from heaven.

  When I nodded, he smiled. “Good to hear.” He reached into his wallet and pulled out a Victoria’s Secret charge card, placing it on the desk between us. A good sign. At least he would be paying for my red lace negligee.

  “I wear a large, an extra-large in camisoles, and I prefer bikinis, not the string kind,” he said. “I like blues and greens, no reds.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Surely, this had to be a joke. I looked for any traces of jest, a visible panty line, a hint that if I said yes, I might be fired for being a pervert, a weirdo, or just plain dense.

  Mistaking my curiosity for interest, he continued, strolling behind me at a pace that almost made me squirm. “You’ll be required to pick up and launder the dirty ones, replacing them with a fresh set. I’ll leave you some of my laundry soap; it’s a nice lavender-basil scent, you’re welcome to try a little out on your own delicates. But you cannot say a word to anyone, do you understand?”

  “Of course,” I murmured.

  He stopped and turned to me, smiling placidly. “When Susan calls, she’ll tell you to bring in the documents,” he explained. “You switch out the laundered ones with the dirty ones and I’ll leave a check in the envelope, plus three hours on your time card to avoid suspicion at the agency. No proofreading, just in and out and you get paid, guaranteed at least twice a week. How does that sound?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to say no. I’d rather have risked humiliating myself than insulting him. I could deal with everyone laughing, but offending him would surely end up with me looking for another job. I couldn’t deal with a murdered neighbor and getting fired from an enviable temp gig in the span of two weeks.

  He leaned down, reaching over the arm of my chair to pull the card across the desk toward us. “Go on, take it,” he said. “And when you go out, pick yourself up something nice. A matching set, a nightie, whatever you want. Don’t worry, I won’t ask to see.”

  I picked up the card, still waiting for him to burst out laughing, tell me he was joking, and send me back downstairs. Instead, he handed me an office key on a black leather fob and put on his overcoat. “Retrieve the documents before you leave tonight,” he said. “Come on, I’ll walk you back downstairs.”

  He escorted me back to the temp lounge, where my latte and Danish were waiting. I was alone and someone had left the TV tuned to The Big Bang Theory. I watched him leave out the front door and clicked off the TV. There wasn’t any work to do, so I stretched out on the couch with my headphones on, pondering the strangeness of what had just happened. The first lesson we got at MetroReaders was to never seek out the higher-ups at any agency we worked at. I wondered what Susan would say if she knew I was not only interacting with Philip but picking out his lingerie.

  It was too much to comprehend at midnight. Between this and KitKat’s murder, my life was quickly turning surreal, and I turned instead to something that made sense: music. I dug out my headphones and hit shuffle.

  I played a little game with myself whenever I put my songs on random, trusting the chance and math of the shuffle feature to dictate the mood of the room. I would follow the path as if it were a tarot deck, predicting my future and peering deep into my soul. It wasn’t always accurate, but it was always kind of fun.

  But tonight, perhaps inspired by KitKat’s box of tapes, every song reminded me of some great lost love—driving with William under the endless autumn sky to the mournful wail of October Project’s “Bury My Lovely”; New Year’s Eve hanging around Mikey’s Pizza in Loring with Jay as he filled a hundred drunken orders and gave me a quick, shy midnight kiss to the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight,” like we were ringing in 1996 instead of 2006. It had been a long time since I’d let a new song remind me of anyone, but like KitKat, I still had an archive of every tape and CD all my boyfriends had made me.

  But the aching nostalgia really kicked in with July for Kings’ “Champagne” and all of a sudden I was back in college, sprawled out on the floor with my vintage red cocktail dress pushed up around my waist and Catch’s arms around me, tie abandoned, jacket thrown over my chair, shirt unbuttoned. It was so real I could almost taste the stolen champagne on his lips as he leaned in close, half-proposing marriage in between breathy kisses. We’d swiped the bottle from the department reception for our senior recital. We’d been performing together for about a year by then, and we had arranged a jazz version of Warren Zevon’s “Searching for a Heart,” his trumpet muted and mournful, my vocals smoky and deliberate. It was the hit of the show, and when we’d reached the peak of giddy adulation at the after-party we’d grabbed the champagne and retreated to his dorm room. It was not the first time we’d made out on his floor, but whether it was the champagne or the high of performance, kisses had quickly turned to eager hands, and soon we couldn’t get each other’s clothes off fast enough.

  My phone buzzed, jolting me out of my daydream. Have I got a story to tell you, Sid wrote. I loved that he typed out his text messages in full, no stray 2 or u like Prince. Brunch tomorrow?

  Can’t wait to hear it, I wrote back. 11?

  See you then. Good night, darlin’.

  I played the song again, trying to will myself back into the beautiful memory, but nothing came except for the reminder that Catch, like his own apparition, was long gone.

  Chapter 8

  THE BOYFRIEND BOX

  Baldrick was asleep on my bed when I got home just after three A.M. For the first time since I’d gone off to college, I felt guilty coming in late. I flicked on the light, and he ran to his bowl and sat there waiting even though he had plenty of food. I poured in a little more just to appease him and went into my room. I’d do Philip’s laundry tomorrow.

  Back in college, I made friends with Reese, a genuine Jersey boy with black hair and thick lips and bottomless eyes who now lived in Portland and reviewed video games for a living. But back then, he lived in the corner suite on my dorm floor, and it was in that room, watching Sealab 2021, that I started to get over my freshman-year breakup wi
th William, who had dumped me by getting engaged to someone else when he transferred to Dartmouth. Reese was many things—brutally funny, an early adopter of low-fi indie music, and always in the mood to order a pizza—but he wasn’t good at dealing with a crying girl he’d met just over a month ago. In an effort to cheer me up, he put the Mr. T Experience’s “The Boyfriend Box” on a mix he made me, titled Hardcore Pining, possibly in hopes that it would help me get over William. Instead, it had prompted me to compile every token of lost love—all the letters, stuffed animals, bad poetry, and mix CDs—in one place. They weren’t organized with any nostalgia, as KitKat’s mix tapes and track lists were; everything was shoved in there like cursed pirate treasure. The box had traveled, unopened, with me every time I moved. As long as it was there, I didn’t have to think about it—like it was the Dorian Gray picture of my heart.

  I put on the Blondie T-shirt and checkered flannel lounge pants that served as my pajamas and wrestled the box out of the closet. Seeing all of KitKat’s old tapes had awoken my own anxieties about my romantic past, the boys I’d left behind, the ones who’d broken my heart.

  Taking a deep breath, I pulled off the lid. Just one item, I told myself. Just one thing to satisfy your curiosity.

  I pulled out a CD from Jeremy, titled Bright Lights, Little City, the track-list collage like a soccer mom’s scrapbook page—red sequins along the outer edge of the paper, torn-up scraps of sheet music, all surrounding a backstage picture of us in too much makeup with overexuberant grins and demon-red eyes reflecting the shoddy flash of a disposable camera. The curtain must have just come down. There is no moment so happy as the end of the opening-night show, the relief that, despite hell week and sore throats, tongue-twister lines and terrifying solos, it had all come together in two glorious hours of song and dance.

  Jeremy and I had dated very briefly in our freshman year of high school, during that strange vortex of stage time when you’re spending every minute together and it develops somehow into love. The show was Annie; he was Rooster and I was Lily St. Regis. I should have been Miss Hannigan and he should have been Daddy Warbucks, but those roles—surprise, surprise—both went to upperclassmen. On opening night, during “Easy Street,” he’d slapped me on the ass just after my solo and kissed me for the first time during intermission.

  He made me this CD just after the show ended and three weeks before our monthlong love affair ended. He didn’t date anyone else for a while, so we’d stayed friendly until the divergences of class schedules and new social groups drifted us apart. He went on to play Billy Crocker in our sophomore production of Anything Goes while I was stuck as one of the Angels; then he was Curly in Oklahoma! while I was Ado Annie Carnes. Senior year, he played Danny Zuko in Grease. I skipped out because I’d always thought the eponymous line in “You’re the One That I Want,” which the director added in over the curtain call, was the musical equivalent of cockroaches skittering up your arm. After graduation, Jeremy was accepted into the musical-theater program at Carnegie Mellon and, as far as I knew, had never returned to Loring.

  It was the first mix CD anyone had ever made me. His dad was a lawyer and made good enough money that he had a stereo system with tape-to-tape transfer and a CD burner built in that, more often than not, would tack on the last song three or four times before the CD ran out of space. Jeremy started a CD-burning business for our classmates, which, at ten dollars a pop, paid for more than one date at the one-screen movie theater two blocks from his house.

  I opened the case and took out the track list. It was almost all show tunes: “If Ever I Would Leave You” from Camelot; “I’ve Never Been in Love Before” from Guys and Dolls; Jeremy singing “All Through the Night” from Anything Goes, his soulful, beautiful tenor distant and obscured by poor recording equipment. But he’d thrown a handful of pop songs on there, too, because it was the late nineties: the gag-worthy “Truly Madly Deeply,” by Savage Garden; Faith Hill’s dippy “This Kiss”; the 10,000 Maniacs version of “Because the Night”; and “2 Become 1” because he’d had an irrational love for all things Spice Girls. Once, I spent all night by the phone, trying to be caller ninety-seven at Sweet 97.7 to win us tickets to see the Spiceworld tour at Madison Square Garden. I never got the tickets, and anyway, we’d broken up by their July tour date.

  Of all the musical-theater nerds in the J. C. Kevlin High School drama club, Jeremy was the most likely to have really made it onstage. I hoped he had. I slid the CD into my laptop and hummed along as I searched for him online. And sure enough, there he was, starring as Amos Hart in Chicago. He was there, in my city, doing what he loved. He’d made it. And maybe, I thought as I yawned and closed my laptop, he might even want to see an old friend.

  Chapter 9

  EVERYDAY IS LIKE SUNDAY

  I was still drying my hair with a Batman beach towel when I answered the door to a starry-eyed Sid, one earbud dangling loose.

  “Listen,” he said, pressing it to my ear. “Doesn’t that just sound like love? Right there, that jangly guitar right before the first verse, that’s what it sounds like when you’re walking back from a party and you’ve just met the love of your life; you’ve got a few drinks on your brain and her number on your phone and it’s just the happiest goddamn feeling in the whole world. Bernard Sumner captured that feeling and distilled it down to six minutes and fifty-nine seconds of pure magic.”

  I loved the narratives Sid created for his music. It was never just, “I like this song”; he always had an elaborate scene to describe how it made him feel.

  “What is it?” I asked. I wasn’t as up on my eighties music as I probably should have been, especially for being friends with Sid.

  “New Order, ‘Temptation,’” he said, putting one arm around my waist and waltzing me in a circle. “Just hearing it makes my heart swell—I’ve listened to it twice since I got off the subway.”

  I wished I shared his early-morning musical enthusiasm. I hadn’t gotten much sleep after Facebook-stalking Jeremy; Baldrick had woken me up by ramming his hard fluffy head into mine around nine, and it hadn’t seemed worth it to go back to sleep if we were going to Egg School at eleven. I had barely put together a decent brunch outfit—a black pleated cheerleader skirt, vintage plaid double-breasted jacket, fourteen-eyelet Doc Martens with rose-print knee socks poking out like I was an extra from Clueless—while Sid had on an effortless ensemble of dark blue jeans with the cuffs turned up and a tucked-in flannel shirt in purple and gray check. Anyone else trying to pull it off would have looked like a hipster lumberjack, but Sid carried it off with a cool, straight-backed elegance. He only wore his black-rimmed glasses on Sunday. Natalie had once remarked to me that he looked like a cowboy Morrissey. If she had been thinking of making him the next entry on her blog, she’d never actually made the move.

  “You look cute,” he said, wrapping his headphones around his phone. “Like Winona Ryder in Heathers.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “So what’s this story you’ve got to tell me?”

  He flopped down on the couch. “Jett, you’re not even going to believe me if I tell you,” he said, grinning.

  “Try me,” I said. “It’ll keep me entertained while I do my hair.”

  “All right, so Terry takes me to this strip club, called Fairy Tales,” he began. Already I wasn’t interested, but I still had most of my head to braid. “It’s insanely tacky, all these women dressed in these skimpy princess costumes, like the damn village on Halloween, only you have to slip them a twenty instead of an eight-dollar shot. Terry’s got the hots for this one girl, Tinker Bell, but they got in some kind of row and he ended up getting kicked out of the club while I was in the Rose Room getting a lap dance from Cinderella.”

  “You went into the Rose Room?”

  “Terry made me,” he said, getting a little red in the cheeks. “But that’s not even the best part—so here I am, all alone at this club I’ve never been to, in a part of town I didn’t even know existed, with this girl, Cinderella, and we g
et talking. Turns out she’s a misplaced southerner too, a Georgia girl, goes to church with her grandmother on Sundays. And before I know it, it’s two A.M. When I leave, she follows me out to the parking lot and gives me this little kiss on the cheek.” He gestured to the spot on his face like it was sacred.

  “Sid,” I said, trying to twist my frown into some semblance of an ironic smile. “She probably does that to all the guys—it’s her job.”

  “I know that, but this was different,” he said insistently. “I saw how she acted with all the other guys, and I know this was something else. Think I might go back to see her later tonight.”

  Out of nowhere, I pictured Amanda, the girl Catch left me for, in that little Cinderella costume. Jealousy bubbled up inside me like a poisoned well, and I tried to fight it back. This isn’t Amanda, this is just some stranger, I told myself. She’s not trying to steal your man because Sid isn’t yours to steal. That made me feel worse, and before I could stop myself, I spit out, “You think she’s going to remember your lap over the hundred other guys she’s serviced this week?”

  All the blush drained from his face. “Forget it,” he said, standing up.

  “Sid . . .” There was an apology tacked in there somewhere, but I couldn’t wrangle it out of my throat.

  “No, you’re probably right.” He wouldn’t look at me, just fiddled with his phone. “Come on—we’ve got to motor if we don’t want them to give our table away.”

  BRONCO WASN’T AT Egg School, but his name was. The cops had picked him up the night before for KitKat’s murder and every tabloid had the headline. They’d gotten a partial fingerprint from the rolling pin, and another neighbor had seen him entering the apartment just hours before she was killed. As everyone waded through the story, I tried not to think about the tape on my table, the motive in my head. I wanted to believe he was innocent, I wanted to believe that someone I knew wasn’t capable of this kind of brutality. But I knew Bronco even less than I knew KitKat, and these days, you just don’t know. After brunch, I told myself. After brunch I would call the cops and turn over the tape.