But the deep thrill of these old songs lay, for Bennie, in the rapturous surges of sixteen-year-old-ness they induced; Bennie and his high school gang—Scotty and Alice, Jocelyn and Rhea—none of whom he’d seen in decades (except for a disturbing encounter with Scotty in his office years ago), yet still half believed he’d find waiting in line outside the Mabuhay Gardens (long defunct), in San Francisco, green-haired and safety-pinned, if he happened to show up there one Saturday night.
And then, as Jello Biafra was thrashing his way through “Too Drunk to Fuck,” Bennie’s mind drifted to an awards ceremony a few years ago where he’d tried to introduce a jazz pianist as “incomparable” and ended up calling her “incompetent” before an audience of twenty-five hundred. He should never have tried for “incomparable”—wasn’t his word, too fancy; it stuck in his mouth every time he’d practiced his speech for Stephanie. But it suited the pianist, who had miles of shiny gold hair and had also (she’d let slip) graduated from Harvard. Bennie had cherished a rash dream of getting her into bed, feeling that hair sliding over his shoulders and chest.
He idled now in front of Christopher’s school, waiting for the memory spasm to pass. Driving in, he’d glimpsed his son crossing the athletic field with his friends. Chris had been skipping a little—actually skipping—tossing a ball in the air, but by the time he slumped into Bennie’s yellow Porsche, any inkling of lightness was gone. Why? Did Chris somehow know about the botched awards ceremony? Bennie told himself this was nuts, yet was moved by an urge to confess the malapropism to his fourth grader. The Will to Divulge, Dr. Beet called this impulse, and had exhorted Bennie to write down the things he wanted to confide, rather than burden his son with them. Bennie did this now, scribbling incompetent on the back of a parking ticket he’d received the day before. Then, recalling the earlier humiliation, he added to the list kissing Mother Superior.
“So, boss,” he said. “Whatcha feel like doing?”
“Don’t know.”
“Any particular wishes?”
“Not really.”
Bennie looked helplessly out the window. A couple of months ago, Chris had asked if they could skip their weekly appointment with Dr. Beet and spend the afternoon “doing whatever” instead. They hadn’t gone back, a decision that Bennie now regretted; “doing whatever” had led to desultory afternoons, often cut short by Chris’s announcement that he had homework.
“How about some coffee?” Bennie suggested.
A spark of smile. “Can I get a Frappuccino?”
“Don’t tell your mother.”
Stephanie didn’t approve of Chris drinking coffee—reasonable, given that the kid was nine—but Bennie couldn’t resist the exquisite connection that came of defying his ex-wife in unison. Betrayal Bonding, Dr. Beet called this, and like the Will to Divulge, it was on the list of no-no’s.
They got their coffees and returned to the Porsche to drink them. Chris sucked greedily at his Frappuccino. Bennie took out his red enameled box, pinched a few gold flakes, and slipped them under the plastic lid of his cup.
“What’s that?” Chris asked.
Bennie started. The gold was becoming so routine that he’d stopped being clandestine about it. “Medicine,” he said, after a moment.
“For what?”
“Some symptoms I’ve been having.” Or not having, he added mentally.
“What symptoms?”
Was this the Frappuccino kicking in? Chris had shifted out of his slump and now sat upright, regarding Bennie with his wide, dark, frankly beautiful eyes. “Headaches,” Bennie said.
“Can I see it?” Chris asked. “The medicine? In that red thing?”
Bennie handed over the tiny box. Within a couple of seconds, the kid had figured out the tricky latch and popped it open. “Whoa, Dad,” he said. “What is this stuff?”
“I told you.”
“It looks like gold. Flakes of gold.”
“It has a flaky consistency.”
“Can I taste one?”
“Son. You don’t—”
“Just one?”
Bennie sighed. “One.”
The boy carefully removed a gold flake and placed it on his tongue. “What does it taste like?” Bennie couldn’t help asking. He’d only consumed the gold in his coffee, where it had no discernible flavor.
“Like metal,” Chris said. “It’s awesome. Can I have another one?”
Bennie started the car. Was there something obviously sham about the medicine story? Clearly the kid wasn’t buying it. “One more,” he said. “And that’s it.”
His son took a fat pinch of gold flakes and put them on his tongue. Bennie tried not to think of the money. The truth was, he’d spent eight thousand dollars on gold in the past two months. A coke habit would have cost him less.
Chris sucked on the gold and closed his eyes. “Dad,” he said. “It’s, like, waking me up from the inside.”
“Interesting,” Bennie mused. “That’s exactly what it’s supposed to do.”
“Is it working?”
“Sounds like it is.”
“But on you,” Chris said.
Bennie was fairly certain his son had asked him more questions in the past ten minutes than in the prior year and a half since he and Stephanie had split. Could this be a side effect of the gold: curiosity?
“I’ve still got the headaches,” he said.
He was driving aimlessly among the Crandale mansions (“doing whatever” involved a lot of aimless driving), every one of which seemed to have four or five blond children in Ralph Lauren playing out front. Seeing these kids, it was clearer than ever to Bennie that he hadn’t had a chance of lasting in this place, swarthy and unkempt-looking as he was even when freshly showered and shaved. Stephanie, meanwhile, had ascended to the club’s number one doubles team.
“Chris,” Bennie said. “There’s a musical group I need to visit—a pair of young sisters. Well, youngish sisters. I was planning to go later on, but if you’re interested, we could—”
“Sure.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Did “sure” and “yeah” mean that Chris was giving in to please Bennie, as Dr. Beet had noted he often did? Or had the gold-incited curiosity extended to a new interest in Bennie’s work? Chris had grown up around rock groups, of course, but he was part of the postpiracy generation, for whom things like “copyright” and “creative ownership” didn’t exist. Bennie didn’t blame Chris, of course; the dismantlers who had murdered the music business were a generation beyond his son, adults now. Still, he’d heeded Dr. Beet’s advice to stop hectoring (Beet’s word) Chris about the industry’s decline and focus instead on enjoying music they both liked—Pearl Jam, for example, which Bennie blasted all the way to Mount Vernon.
The Stop/Go sisters still lived with their parents in a sprawling, run-down house under bushy suburban trees. Bennie had been here two or three years ago when he’d first discovered them, before he’d entrusted the sisters to the first in a series of executives who had failed to accomplish a blessed thing. As he and Chris left the car, the memory of his last visit provoked a convulsion of anger in Bennie that made heat roll up toward his head—why the fuck hadn’t anything happened in all this time?
He found Sasha waiting at the door; she’d caught the train at Grand Central after Bennie called and had somehow beaten him here.
“Hiya Crisco,” Sasha said, mussing his son’s hair. She had known Chris all his life; she’d run out to Duane Reade to buy him pacifiers and diapers. Bennie glanced at her breasts; nothing. Or nothing sexual—he did feel a swell of gratitude and appreciation for his assistant, as opposed to the murderous rage he felt toward the rest of his staff.
There was a pause. Yellow light scissored through the leaves. Bennie lifted his gaze from Sasha’s breasts to her face. She had high cheekbones and narrow green eyes, wavy hair that ranged from reddish to purplish, depending on the month. Today it was red. She was smiling at Chris, but Bennie dete
cted worry somewhere in the smile. He rarely thought of Sasha as an independent person, and beyond a vague awareness of boyfriends coming and going (vague first out of respect for her privacy, lately out of indifference), he knew few specifics of her life. But seeing her outside this family home, Bennie experienced a flare of curiosity: Sasha had still been at NYU when he’d first met her at a Conduits gig at the Pyramid Club; that put her in her thirties now. Why hadn’t she married? Did she want kids? She seemed suddenly older, or was it just that Bennie seldom looked directly at her face?
“What,” she said, feeling his stare.
“Nothing.”
“You okay?”
“Better than okay,” Bennie said, and gave the door a sharp knock.
The sisters looked fantastic—if not right out of high school, then at least right out of college, especially if they’d taken a year or two off or maybe transferred a couple of times. They wore their dark hair pulled back from their faces, and their eyes were glittering, and they had a whole fucking book full of new material—look at this! Bennie’s fury at his team intensified, but it was pleasurable, motivating fury. The sisters’ nervous excitement jittered up the house; they knew his visit was their last, best hope. Chandra was the older one, Louisa the younger. Louisa’s daughter, Olivia, had been riding a trike in the driveway on Bennie’s last visit, but now she wore skintight jeans and a jeweled tiara that seemed to be a fashion choice, not a costume. Bennie felt Chris snap to attention when Olivia entered the room, as if a charmed snake had risen from its basket inside him.
They went single file down a narrow flight of stairs to the sisters’ basement recording studio. Their father had built it for them years ago. It was tiny, with orange shag covering the floor, ceiling, and walls. Bennie took the only seat, noting with approval a cowbell by the keyboard.
“Coffee?” Sasha asked him. Chandra led her upstairs to make it. Louisa sat at the keyboard teasing out melodies. Olivia took up a set of bongo drums and began loosely accompanying her mother. She handed Chris a tambourine, and to Bennie’s astonishment, his son settled in beating the thing in perfect time. Nice, he thought. Very nice. The day had swerved unexpectedly into good. The almost-teenage daughter wasn’t a problem, he decided; she could join the group as a younger sister or a cousin, strengthen the tween angle. Maybe Chris could be part of it, too, although he and Olivia would have to switch instruments. A boy on a tambourine…
Sasha brought his coffee, and Bennie took out his red enameled box and dropped in a pinch of flakes. As he sipped, a sensation of pleasure filled his whole torso the way a snowfall fills up a sky. Jesus, he felt good. He’d been delegating too much. Hearing the music get made, that was the thing: people and instruments and beaten-looking equipment aligning abruptly into a single structure of sound, flexible and alive. The sisters were at the keyboard arranging their music, and Bennie experienced a bump of anticipation; something was going to happen here. He knew it. Felt it pricking his arms and chest.
“You’ve got Pro Tools on there, right?” he asked, indicating the laptop on a table amid the instruments. “Is everything miked? Can we lay down some tracks right now?”
The sisters nodded and checked the laptop; they were ready to record. “Vocals, too?” Chandra asked.
“Absolutely,” Bennie said. “Let’s do it all at once. Let’s blow the roof off your fucking house.”
Sasha was standing to Bennie’s right. So many bodies had heated up the little room, lifting off her skin a perfume she’d been wearing for years—or was it a lotion?—that smelled like apricots; not just the sweet part but that slight bitterness around the pit. And as Bennie breathed in Sasha’s lotion smell, his prick roused itself suddenly like an old hound getting a swift kick. He almost jumped out of his seat in startled amazement, but he kept his cool. Don’t push things, just let it happen. Don’t scare it away.
Then the sisters began to sing. Oh, the raw, almost-threadbare sound of their voices mixed with the clash of instruments—these sensations met with a faculty deeper in Bennie than judgment or even pleasure; they communed directly with his body, whose shivering, bursting reply made him dizzy. And here was his first erection in months—prompted by Sasha, who had been too near Bennie all these years for him to really see her, like in those nineteenth-century novels he’d read in secret because only girls were supposed to like them. He seized the cowbell and stick and began whacking at it with zealous blows. He felt the music in his mouth, his ears, his ribs—or was that his own pulse? He was on fire!
And from this zenith of lusty, devouring joy, he recalled opening an e-mail he’d been inadvertently copied on between two colleagues and finding himself referred to as a “hairball.” God, what a feeling of liquid shame had pooled in Bennie when he’d read that word. He hadn’t been sure what it meant: That he was hairy? (True.) Unclean? (False!) Or was it literal, as in: he clogged people’s throats and made them gag, the way Stephanie’s cat, Sylph, occasionally vomited hair onto the carpet? Bennie had gone for a haircut that very day and seriously considered having his back and upper arms waxed, until Stephanie talked him out of it, running her cool hands over his shoulders that night in bed, telling him she loved him hairy—that the last thing the world needed was another waxed guy.
Music. Bennie was listening to music. The sisters were screaming, the tiny room imploding from their sound, and Bennie tried to find again the deep contentment he’d felt just a minute ago. But “hairball” had unsettled him. The room felt uncomfortably small. Bennie set down his cowbell and slipped the parking ticket from his pocket. He scribbled hairball in hopes of exorcising the memory. He took a slow inhale and rested his eyes on Chris, who was flailing the tambourine trying to match the sisters’ erratic tempo, and right away it happened again: taking his son for a haircut a couple of years ago, having his longtime barber, Stu, put down his scissors and pull Bennie aside. “There’s a problem with your son’s hair,” he’d said.
“A problem!”
Stu walked Bennie over to Chris in the chair and parted his hair to reveal some tan little creatures the size of poppy seeds moving around on his scalp. Bennie felt himself grow faint. “Lice,” the barber whispered. “They get it at school.”
“But he goes to private school!” Bennie had blurted. “In Crandale, New York!”
Chris’s eyes had gone wide with fear: “What is it, Daddy?” Other people were staring, and Bennie had felt responsible, with his own riotous head of hair, to the point where he sprayed OFF! in his armpits every morning to this day, and kept an extra can at the office—crazy! He knew it! Getting their coats while everyone watched, Bennie with a burning face; God, it hurt him to think of this now—hurt him physically, as if the memory were raking over him and leaving gashes. He hid his face in his hands. He wanted to cover his ears, block out the cacophony of Stop/Go, but he concentrated on Sasha, just to his right, her sweet-bitter smell, and found himself remembering a girl he’d chased at a party when he first came to New York and was selling vinyl on the Lower East Side a hundred years ago, some delicious blonde—Abby, was it? In the course of keeping tabs on Abby, Bennie had done several lines of coke and been stricken with a severe instantaneous need to empty his bowels. He’d been relieving himself on the can in what must have been (although Bennie’s brain ached to recall this) a miasma of annihilating stink, when the unlockable bathroom door had jumped open, and there was Abby, staring down at him. There’d been a horrible, bottomless instant when their eyes met; then she’d shut the door.
Bennie had left the party with someone else—there was always someone else—and their night of fun, which he felt comfortable presuming, had erased the confrontation with Abby. But now it was back—oh, it was back, bringing waves of shame so immense they seemed to engulf whole parts of Bennie’s life and drag them away: achievements, successes, moments of pride, all of it razed to the point where there was nothing—he was nothing—a guy on a john looking up at the nauseated face of a woman he’d wanted to impress.
; Bennie leaped from his stool, squashing the cowbell under one foot. Sweat stung his eyes. His hair engaged palpably with the ceiling shag.
“You okay?” Sasha asked, alarmed.
“I’m sorry,” Bennie panted, mopping his brow. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Back upstairs, he stood outside the front door, pulling fresh air into his lungs. The Stop/Go sisters and daughter clustered around him, apologizing for the airlessness of the recording studio, their father’s ongoing failure to vent it properly, reminding one another in spirited tones of the many times they themselves had grown faint, trying to work there.
“We can hum the tunes,” they said, and they did, in harmony, Olivia too, all of them standing not far from Bennie’s face, desperation quivering their smiles. A gray cat made a figure eight around Bennie’s shins, nudging him rapturously with its bony head. It was a relief to get back in the car.
He was driving Sasha to the city, but he had to get Chris home first. His son hunched in the backseat, facing the open window. It seemed to Bennie that his lark of an idea for the afternoon had gone awry. He fended off the longing to look at Sasha’s breasts, waiting to calm down, regain his equilibrium before putting himself to the test. Finally, at a red light, he glanced slowly, casually in her direction, not even focusing at first, then peering intently. Nothing. He was clobbered by loss so severe that it took physical effort not to howl. He’d had it, he’d had it! But where had it gone?
“Dad, green light,” Chris said.
Driving again, Bennie forced himself to ask his son, “So, boss. What did you think?”
The kid didn’t answer. Maybe he was pretending not to hear, or maybe the wind was too loud in his face. Bennie glanced at Sasha. “What about you?”
“Oh,” she said, “they’re awful.”
Bennie blinked, stung. He felt a gust of anger at Sasha that passed a few seconds later, leaving odd relief. Of course. They were awful. That was the problem.