“She could be dangerous.”
“Takes one to know one, eh?”
“Not nice,” Jules said.
In the Volvo, Stephanie slipped an advance copy of Bosco’s new album, A to B, into the CD player out of some sense that in doing so she was strengthening her alibi. Bosco’s recent albums consisted of gnarled little ditties accompanied by a ukulele. It was only out of friendship that Bennie still released them.
“Can I please turn this off?” Jules asked after two songs, then did so before Stephanie had answered. “This is who we’re going to see?”
“We? I thought you were hitching a ride.”
“Can I come with you?” Jules asked. “Please?”
He sounded humble and plaintive: a man with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Stephanie wanted to scream; was this some kind of punishment for lying to Bennie? In the past thirty minutes she’d been forced to cancel a tennis game she was dying to play, piss Kathy off, embark on an invented errand to visit a person who was sure to be unconscious, and now bring her rudderless, hypercritical brother along to witness the demise of her alibi. “I’m not sure how much fun it’ll be,” she said.
“That’s okay,” Jules said. “I’m used to not-fun.”
He watched nervously as Stephanie maneuvered from the Hutch onto the Cross Bronx Expressway; being in the car seemed to worry him. When they had fully entered the flow of traffic, he asked, “Are you having an affair?”
Stephanie stared at him. “You’re out of your mind.”
“Watch the road!”
“Why are you asking me that?”
“You seem jumpy. You and Bennie both. Not like I remember you guys.”
Stephanie was stricken. “Bennie seems jumpy?” The old fear rose in her so quickly, like a hand at her throat, despite Bennie’s promise two years ago, when he turned forty, and the fact that she had no reason to doubt him.
“You seem, I don’t know. Polite.”
“Compared to people in prison?”
Jules smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe it’s just the place. Crandale, New York,” he said, elongating the words. “I’ll bet it’s crawling with Republicans.”
“About half and half.”
Jules turned to her, incredulous. “Do you socialize with Republicans?”
“It happens, Jules.”
“You and Bennie? Hanging out with Republicans?”
“Are you aware that you’re shouting?”
“Watch the road!” Jules bellowed.
Stephanie did, her hands shaking on the wheel. She felt like turning around and taking her brother back home, but that would involve missing her nonexistent meeting.
“I go away for a few years and the whole fucking world is upside down,” Jules said angrily. “Buildings are missing. You get strip-searched every time you go to someone’s office. Everybody sounds stoned, because they’re e-mailing people the whole time they’re talking to you. Tom and Nicole are with different people.…And now my rock-and-roll sister and her husband are hanging around with Republicans. What the fuck!”
Stephanie took a long, calming breath. “What are your plans, Jules?”
“I told you. I want to come with you and meet this—”
“I mean what are you going to do.”
There was a long pause. Finally Jules said, “I have no idea.”
Stephanie glanced at him. They’d turned onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, and Jules was looking at the river, his face devoid of energy or hope. She felt a contraction of fear around her heart. “When you first came to New York,” she said, “all those years ago, you were full of ideas.”
Jules snorted. “Who isn’t, at twenty-four?”
“I mean you had a direction.”
He’d graduated from the University of Michigan a couple of years before. One of Stephanie’s freshman suitemates at NYU had left school for treatment of anorexia, and Jules had occupied the girl’s room for three months, wandering the city with a notebook, crashing parties at the Paris Review. By the time the anorexic returned, he’d gotten himself a job at Harper’s, an apartment on Eighty-first and York, and three roommates—two of whom now edited magazines. The third had won a Pulitzer.
“I don’t get it, Jules,” Stephanie said. “I don’t get what happened to you.”
Jules stared at the glittering skyline of Lower Manhattan without recognition. “I’m like America,” he said.
Stephanie swung around to look at him, unnerved. “What are you talking about?” she said. “Are you off your meds?”
“Our hands are dirty,” Jules said.
IV
Stephanie parked in a lot on Sixth Avenue, and she and Jules picked their way into Soho through crowds of shoppers holding room-sized bags from Crate and Barrel. “So. Who the hell is this Bosco person?” Jules asked.
“Remember the Conduits? He was the guitarist.”
Jules stopped walking. “That’s who we’re going to see? Bosco from the Conduits? The skinny redhead?”
“Yeah, well. He’s changed a little.”
They turned south on Wooster, heading for Canal. Sunlight skipped off the cobblestones, releasing in Stephanie’s mind a pale balloon of memory: shooting the Conduits’ first album cover on this very street, laughing, jittery, Bosco powdering his freckles while the photographer fiddled. The memory mooned her as she rang Bosco’s bell and waited, praying silently: Please don’t be home please don’t answer please. Then at least the charade part of the day would be over.
No voice on the intercom, just a buzz. Stephanie pushed open the door with a disoriented sense that maybe she had arranged to meet Bosco at ten. Or had she pressed the wrong bell?
They went in and called for the elevator. It took a long time to descend, grinding inside its tube. “Is that thing healthy?” Jules asked.
“You’re welcome to wait down here.”
“Quit trying to get rid of me.”
Bosco was unrecognizable as the scrawny, stovepipe-panted practitioner of a late-eighties sound somewhere between punk and ska, a hive of redheaded mania who had made Iggy Pop look indolent onstage. More than once, club owners had called 911 during Conduits shows, convinced that Bosco was having a seizure.
Nowadays he was huge—from medications, he claimed, both post-cancer and antidepressant—but a glance into his trash can nearly always revealed an empty gallon box of Dreyer’s Rocky Road ice cream. His red hair had devolved into a stringy gray ponytail. An unsuccessful hip replacement had left him with the lurching, belly-hoisting walk of a refrigerator on a hand truck. Still, he was awake, dressed—even shaven. The blinds of his loft were up and a tinge of shower humidity hung in the air, pleasantly cut by the smell of brewing coffee.
“I was expecting you at three,” Bosco said.
“I thought we said ten,” Stephanie said, looking inside her purse to avoid his gaze. “Did I get the time wrong?”
Bosco was no fool; he knew she was lying. But he was curious, and his curiosity fell naturally on Jules. Stephanie introduced them.
“It’s an honor,” Jules said gravely.
Bosco scrutinized him for signs of irony before shaking his hand.
Stephanie perched on a folding chair near the black leather recliner where Bosco spent the bulk of his time. It was positioned by a dusty window through which the Hudson River and even a bit of Hoboken were visible. Bosco brought Stephanie coffee and then began a juddering immersion into his chair, which suctioned around him in a gelatinous grip. They were meeting to discuss PR for A to B. Now that Bennie had corporate bosses to answer to, he couldn’t spend a dime on Bosco beyond the cost of producing and shipping his CD. So Bosco paid Stephanie by the hour to act as his publicist and booking agent. These were mostly symbolic titles; he’d been too sick to do much of anything for the last two albums, and his lassitude had been roughly matched by the world’s indifference toward him.
“Whole different story this time,” Bosco began. “I’m going to make you work, Stephi-babe. This album
is going to be my comeback.”
Stephanie assumed he was joking. But he met her gaze evenly from within the folds of black leather.
“Comeback?” she asked.
Jules had been wandering the loft, eyeing the framed gold and platinum Conduit albums paving the walls, the few guitars Bosco hadn’t sold off, and his collection of pre-Columbian artifacts, which he hoarded in pristine glass cases and refused to sell. At the word “comeback,” Stephanie felt her brother’s attention suddenly engage.
“The album’s called A to B, right?” Bosco said. “And that’s the question I want to hit straight on: how did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about? Let’s not pretend it didn’t happen.”
Stephanie was too startled to respond.
“I want interviews, features, you name it,” Bosco went on. “Fill up my life with that shit. Let’s document every fucking humiliation. This is reality, right? You don’t look good anymore twenty years later, especially when you’ve had half your guts removed. Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?”
Jules had drifted over from across the room. “I’ve never heard that,” he said. “‘Time is a goon’?”
“Would you disagree?” Bosco said, a little challengingly.
There was a pause. “No,” Jules said.
“Look,” Stephanie said, “I love your honesty, Bosco—”
“Don’t give me ‘I love your honesty, Bosco,’” he said. “Don’t get all PR-y on me.”
“I’m your publicist,” Stephanie reminded him.
“Yeah, but don’t start believing that shit,” Bosco said. “You’re too old.”
“I was trying to be tactful,” Stephanie said. “The bottom line is, no one cares that your life has gone to hell, Bosco. It’s a joke that you think this is interesting. If you were still a rock star, it might be, but you aren’t a rock star—you’re a relic.”
“That is harsh,” Jules said.
Bosco laughed. “She’s pissed that I called her old.”
“True,” Stephanie admitted.
Jules looked from one to the other, uneasy. Any sort of conflict seemed to rattle him.
“Look,” Stephanie said, “I can tell you this is a great, innovative idea and let it die on its own, or I can level with you: It’s a ridiculous idea. Nobody cares.”
“You haven’t heard the idea yet,” Bosco said.
Jules carried over a folding chair and sat down. “I want to tour,” Bosco said. “Like I used to, doing all the same stuff onstage. I’m going to move like I moved before, only more so.”
Stephanie put down her cup. She wished Bennie were here; only Bennie could appreciate the depth of self-delusion she was witnessing. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You want to do a lot of interviews and press around the fact that you’re an ailing and decrepit shadow of your former self. And then you want to do a tour—”
“A national tour.”
“A national tour, performing as if you were that former self.”
“Bingo.”
Stephanie took a deep breath. “I see a few problems, Bosco.”
“I thought you might,” he said, winking at Jules. “Shoot.”
“Well, number one, getting a writer interested in this is going to be tough.”
“I’m interested,” Jules said, “and I’m a writer.”
God help me, Stephanie almost said, but restrained herself. She hadn’t heard her brother call himself a writer in many years.
“Okay, so you’ve got one writer interested—”
“He gets everything,” Bosco said. He turned to Jules. “You get everything. Total access. You can watch me take a shit if you want to.”
Jules swallowed. “I’ll think about it.”
“I’m just saying, there are no limits.”
“Okay,” Stephanie began again, “so you’ve—”
“You can film me, too,” Bosco told Jules. “You can make a documentary, if you’re interested.”
Jules was starting to look afraid.
“Can I finish a fucking sentence, here?” Stephanie asked. “You’ve got a writer for this story that will be of no interest to anyone—”
“Can you believe this is my publicist?” Bosco asked Jules. “Should I fire her?”
“Good luck finding someone else,” Stephanie said. “Now, about the tour.”
Bosco was grinning, sealed inside his glutinous chair that for anyone else would have qualified as a couch. She felt sudden pity for him. “Getting bookings isn’t going to be easy,” she said gently. “I mean, you haven’t toured in a while, you’re not…You say you want to perform like before, but…” Bosco was laughing in her face, but Stephanie soldiered on. “Physically, you aren’t—I mean, your health…” She was dancing around the fact that Bosco wasn’t remotely capable of performing in his old manner, and that trying to do so would kill him—probably sooner rather than later.
“Don’t you get it, Steph?” Bosco finally exploded. “That’s the whole point. We know the outcome, but we don’t know when, or where, or who will be there when it finally happens. It’s a Suicide Tour.”
Stephanie started to laugh. The idea struck her as inexplicably funny. But Bosco was abruptly serious. “I’m done,” he said. “I’m old, I’m sad—that’s on a good day. I want out of this mess. But I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away—I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art. Now, Lady PR,” he said, gathering up his drooping flesh and leaning toward her, eyes glittering in his overblown head, “you try to tell me no one’s going to be interested in that. Reality TV, hell—it doesn’t get any realer than this. Suicide is a weapon; that we all know. But what about an art?”
He watched Stephanie anxiously: a big, ailing man with one bold idea left, ablaze with hope that she would like it. There was a long pause while Stephanie tried to assemble her thoughts.
Jules spoke first: “It’s genius.”
Bosco eyed him tenderly, moved by his own speech and moved to find that Jules was also moved.
“Look, guys,” Stephanie said. She was aware of a perverse flicker of thought in herself: If this idea did, somehow, have legs (which it almost certainly did not—it was crazy, maybe illegal, unsavory to the point of grotesqueness), then she’d want to get a real writer on it.
“Uh nuh nuh nuh,” Bosco told her, wagging a finger as if she’d spoken this rogue qualm aloud. With sighs and groans and refusals of their offers of help, he heaved himself from his chair, which made small whimpering noises of release, and staggered across the room. He reached a cluttered desk and leaned against it, panting audibly. Then he rummaged for paper and pen.
“What’s your name again?” he called.
“Jules. Jules Jones.”
Bosco wrote for several minutes.
“Okay,” he said, then made his laborious return and handed the paper to Jules. Jules read it aloud: “I, Bosco, of sound mind and body, hereby grant to you, Jules Jones, sole and exclusive media rights to cover the story of my decline and Suicide Tour.”
Bosco’s exertions had left him spent. He sagged against his chair, reeling in breath, his eyes closed. Bosco the demented scarecrow performer appeared spectrally, naughtily in Stephanie’s mind, disowning the morose behemoth before them. A wave of sadness felled her.
Bosco opened his eyes and looked at Jules. “There,” he said. “It’s yours.”
At lunch in MoMA’s sculpture garden, Jules was a man reborn: jazzed, juiced, riffing his thoughts on the newly renovated museum. He’d gone straight to the gift shop and bought a datebook and pen (both covered with Magritte clouds) to record his appointment with Bosco at ten the next morning.
Stephanie ate her turkey wrap and gazed at Picasso’s She-Goat,” wishing she could share her brother’s elation. It felt impossible, as if Jules’s excitement were being siphoned from inside her, leaving Stephanie drained to the exact degree that he was invigorated. She found herself wishing, inanely, that
she hadn’t missed her tennis game.
“What’s the matter?” Jules finally asked, chugging his third cranberry and soda. “You seem down.”
“I don’t know,” Stephanie said.
He leaned toward her, her big brother, and Stephanie had a flash of how they’d been as kids, an almost-physical sense of Jules as her protector, her watchdog, coming to her tennis matches and massaging her calves when they cramped. That feeling had been buried under Jules’s chaotic intervening years, but now it pushed back up, warm and vital, sending tears into Stephanie’s eyes.
Her brother looked stunned. “Steph,” he said, taking her hand, “what’s wrong?”
“I feel like everything is ending,” she said.
She was thinking of the old days, as she and Bennie now called them—not just pre-Crandale but premarriage, preparenthood, pre-money, pre–hard drug renunciation, preresponsibility of any kind, when they were still kicking around the Lower East Side with Bosco, going to bed after sunrise, turning up at strangers’ apartments, having sex in quasi public, engaging in daring acts that had more than once included (for her) shooting heroin, because none of it was serious. They were young and lucky and strong—what did they have to worry about? If they didn’t like the result, they could go back and start again. And now Bosco was sick, hardly able to move, feverishly planning his death. Was this outcome a freak aberration from natural laws, or was it normal—a thing they should have seen coming? Had they somehow brought it on?
Jules put his arm around her. “If you’d asked me this morning, I would have said we were finished,” he said. “All of us, the whole country—the fucking world. But now I feel the opposite.”
Stephanie knew. She could practically hear the hope sluicing through her brother. “So what’s the answer?” she asked.
“Sure, everything is ending,” Jules said, “but not yet.”
V
Stephanie got through her next meeting, with a designer of small patent-leather purses; then ignored a warning instinct and stopped by the office. Her boss, La Doll, was on the phone, as always, but she muted the call and yelled from her office, “What’s wrong?”