“Sure,” she said. “Martini. Hold everything but the water and the olives.”
He must've looked confounded because a second later she said, “Tell John the Baptist it's for me. He'll know.”
“Who?”
She shot him a smile that could have charmed a wall. “The bartender.”
“Two martinis,” Loring told the bartender, whose name, apparently, was John the Baptist. “The way she likes them.”
As soon as the band began clanging around the stage, Eliza touched Loring's arm and said, “Come on, you can't miss the first song.”
Following her up the stairs, Loring was more than a little disconcerted by the thoughts in his head, yet still unable to take his eyes off the way she moved. Like gossamer lace in the wind, he thought. The girl doesn't walk, she breezes.
Eliza walked to a corner table where Tab was already sitting beside a girl Loring remembered from the picnic.
“I found the math teacher, “Tab said. “Vera. She's married to Eliza's brother.” Tab looked at Vera. “Did I get that right?”
“Well done, Pepsi.” Vera turned to Eliza and said, “Wow. You went for a glass of water and came back with him. How did that happen?”
Loring sat to Eliza's right and took surreptitious glances at her while she watched Paul approach the stage. She looked like someone under hypnosis and he told himself, for the tenth time, he shouldn't have come.
The first song was an intense listening experience, like riding the world's highest roller coaster. The second song was even better—a slower, evocative tune that communicated so perfectly what Loring was feeling in that moment, it caused him physical pain, particularly when he conceded that his feelings were for the girl about whom the song was surely written.
Loring recalled Paul as a gifted singer and songwriter, but he and Paul had been young and inexperienced back in the Emperor's Lounge days. And those shows were always acoustic. Loring had only seen the “unplugged” version of Paul. With electricity, a little maturity, and a driving rhythm section behind him, the guy belonged to a realm of manifest talent that was visionary and yet completely accessible.
It's that “it” people always talk about. Whatever “it” is, Paul Hudson had it in spades.
During the encore break, Tab leaned over and said, “Hey, Lori, I think you have some admirers.”
To his right, Loring saw three girls staring at him. He bowed his head and focused on the table, wondering if it was made of pine or maple. Soon thereafter he felt a tap on the shoulder.
Girl number one requested an autograph, which he gave her. Girl number two suggested he might like to buy her a drink, which he declined. Girl number three, who seemed higher than the moon and couldn't have been a day over seventeen, put her hand in his pocket and tried to grab his dick.
He felt like a deer in headlights, probably looked like one too, judging from the way Eliza stood up and said, “Let's get you out of here,” just as Bananafish commenced their last song.
Backstage, there was an elfin girl on the floor painting her toenails. Eliza called her Queenie, and Loring shook her hand.
“Wow. You are a hottie,” Queenie said.
Ordinarily, a comment like that would have sent Loring running for the nearest exit, but Queenie had an irreverent, ironic tone that told him she was not only innocuous, she might very well be mocking him. What's more, Queenie's statement implied that she'd been told he was, to use her word, a hottie. Loring hoped but doubted it had been Eliza who had given Queenie the report.
Loring sat on the edge of the couch and tuned in to Paul's voice as it bled through the walls. “Damn, he's good, isn't he?”
Eliza nodded in a way that would indicate, even to the most insensitive person, how much she adored the guy. She plopped down sideways beside Loring, her knee touching his leg, and said, “You knew him before I did. Give me some dirt.”
Laughing, Loring said, “I'll tell you a story that sticks in my mind. Right before I got married, Paul was the one who warned me—and I quote—marriage is an institution best suited for morons and eunuchs. You've obviously been a positive influence.”
“Oh, I can't wait to throw that one back at him.”
“Throw what back at me?” Paul had just sauntered in and wrapped a sweaty towel around Eliza's neck.
“A plus B equals C,” she said, her hand reaching behind her, looking to touch any place on Paul's body that she could find. “If marriage is for morons and eunuchs, and I know you're not a eunuch, ergo you must be a moron.”
“Hold it.” Paul sat down on the arm of the couch. “The waitresses at Emperor's Lounge paid me to say that. They all had crushes on Sam here, and there was a hundred bucks in it for me if I put a stop to his goddamn wedding.”
The room began to fill, and Paul was summoned by one of the record company reps to brownnose a local concert promoter. He thanked Loring for showing up and suggested they all get together for dinner sometime.
“Yeah, let's do that,” Loring said.
Toying with Eliza's necklace, Paul murmured, “In two minutes, come over and pretend you need me for some kind of emergency.”
After Paul walked away, Eliza leaned in and said, “Did your dad really use the word stalk?”
Loring decided it was this way Eliza had of looking and listening that made her so attractive. The girl really knew how to focus her attention on the person with whom she was engaged in conversation. It was no wonder his dad had spilled his guts to her.
“Well, did he?”
“Yes,” Loring teased. “But he meant it in a good way. He was very impressed with you.”
Now she was glowing. She was one of them. One of those Doug Blackman worshippers.
“You know, I was there that night, in Cleveland,” Loring said. “I'd done a show in St. Louis a few hours earlier, and I had the next two days off so I flew in to spend the weekend with my dad. He'd left me a message telling me to stop by his room. He wanted me to meet you.”
“Why didn't you?”
Loring had been asking himself the same question all week. “It was late. I was tired, I guess. I went to bed.”
“Wow. So we missed crossing paths by that much.” She held her thumb and index finger a centimeter apart. Sadly, she didn't seem to find the brush with destiny as catastrophic as he did.
“I think it's been two minutes,” Loring said.
Eliza told Loring to have a drink, that she and Paul would be right back. But after trying unsuccessfully to locate Tab, and after watching the way Eliza and Paul fooled around in the corner, Loring put his hat on, snuck out the back door, and decided it would be in his best interest if he and Eliza Caelum did not cross paths again.
Monday morning, Terry North called me into his office. He had a headset on like an operator, and he waved his hands when he saw me.
“Mags!” he said. “Sit. Sit!”
Lucy was standing behind Terry, a little off to the side. Her arms were crossed, and her lips were bent into a bitter pucker that made her look like she was holding a tablespoon of vinegar in her mouth.
If Terry hadn't looked so excited I would have assumed I was in trouble.
“Do you want to tell her or should I?” Terry asked Lucy.
“First Daddy and now Junior,” Lucy said, barely moving her lips. “You must give one hell of a blow job.”
I had no idea what was going on, but I'd had it with Lucy treating me like a whore. I glared at her and then shifted to Terry. “What is she talking about?”
“The guy's been blowing us off for a whole year,” Terry said. “He even took the time to write a letter to get us off his back. Then all of a sudden his manager calls up and says he'll let us do the story, but on one condition—Eliza Caelum has to write it.”
“What?” I said.
“Cheers, Mags.” Terry handed me a note with a date, time, and address on it. “You just scored your first cover piece. And you're getting a raise.”
Last Tuesday, I woke up with the most intense goddamn hard-
on. The clock went off early and I'd been in the middle of a dream where I was back at the Gap thanklessly folding mass-produced American classics dyed the color of dead tree trunks. I would set out a pair of pants and a customer would come in and mess them up, and I'd straighten them and another customer would come in and mess them again. After about ten messy customers, Eliza walked in and coaxed me into a dressing room.
Just as the dream was getting good, the clock radio began blaring the sax intro to “Baker Street” at a volume designed to get my betrothed out of bed for her morning run.
I rolled over, pressed my dick into her leg and begged her to pretend it was Monday. She doesn't run on Mondays. On Mondays she stays in bed and tends to my needs.
She kissed me on the shoulder and whispered, “It's Tuesday,” using a voice that was way too seductive for someone about to get out of bed. But then she said, “Hold that thought. The minute I get home I promise it'll be Monday.”
I went back to sleep. Less than an hour later the front door slammed open and I heard Eliza screaming my name all frantic, with the one syllable lasting for too many seconds. The clock radio had been off for a while but Gerry Rafferty was still in my head: “Another year and then you'd be happy. Just one more year and then you'll be happy…”
I was already sitting up when Eliza collapsed into the room. Her eyes were wet and her chest was going in and out like mad. I immediately felt her head, her face, her arms. Even though I was still in that purgatory between sleep and wake-fulness, she seemed to be all in one piece, but her shirt was blotchy with what looked like puke.
“What happened?” I said. “Are you sick?”
She tried to explain but she was talking too fast. Something about running down Broadway, about how she stopped and watched because she knew, even before it happened. I couldn't make sense out of it. And you know what's kind of twisted? I remember thinking how beautiful she looked. Her eyelashes were all shiny from her tears, each of them individually defined like they'd been combed.
I asked her to slow down, take a deep breath, and start at the beginning, and I managed to pick out a few key phrases. Things like “too low” and “too fast,” but her voice was doing that stuttering, hiccupy thing kids' voices do when they've been crying really hard and it was impossible to put everything together.
Finally she swallowed and said, “A plane.”
She swore she'd seen a plane crash.
Sensing my doubt, she squeezed my shoulders and shook me, rambling about how she really and truly saw it, and how she thought to herself: That plane looks like it's going to crash. “And then it did!” she screamed. “It did!”
I still wasn't taking her seriously. Whenever she sees a plane above her she stops and stares at it, and she always thinks it's is about to drop out of the sky and onto her head.
“I saw it,” she said for the zillionth time. I'd never seen anyone so terrified in my whole goddamn life. She told me I didn't understand, that it “hit one of those big buildings.” She said she thought it was a 757 but couldn't tell for sure because it was going too fast, and it crashed straight-on like it was aiming.
She was starting to freak me out. She seemed so in shock I wondered if I was going to have to take her to a doctor or something. But before I could get any more information from her, she bolted from the room.
I threw on some pants and ran after her. By that time she was already on the floor, inches from the TV. Not a good idea. About a year ago, when a DC-10 went down off the coast of California, she'd watched the coverage of the accident for hours and didn't sleep for days. There was no way I was going to allow a replay of that.
I was about to turn the TV off when I looked at the screen. I guess it goes without saying I wasn't prepared for what I saw. I knelt down next to her and tried to process what even at the time I knew was some pretty bad shit going down.
That's when I noticed the sirens. The city was screaming outside our window, and you wanna know my first thought? I needed a cigarette. How pitiful is that? Manhattan was under attack and all I could think about was nicotine—I'd smoked my last one the night before, figured I'd buy some in the morning, and was screwed.
I remember blinking to make sure I was seeing things right. And I remember pulling Eliza's head down and covering her eyes right before a second plane smashed like a rocket-shaped wrecking ball into the tower next to the one already on fire.
Inside our little room, with the window open and the TV on, we thought we heard screams in stereo. We felt it. Then we watched the nightmare unfold. We saw fire, smoke. We saw people falling out of sky-high windows. And some of them fell like they were already dead. But some of them flapped their arms, you could tell they wanted to live, and there was a weird reverence in Eliza's voice when she said, “They're trying to fly, Paul.”
I was crying by then. My tears were dripping into Eliza's hair. Her head was soaked.
At some point during all this drama she screamed her brother's name, dove on top of the phone, dialed Michael and Vera in Brooklyn, and then freaked out because no one answered right away. When Michael finally picked up, Eliza yelled something like how could he sleep at a time like this. But once she confirmed that Michael and Vera were nowhere near lower Manhattan, she threw the phone in my lap.
“What the hell is wrong with her?” Michael said.
I told him to put on his television. Michael made me promise not to leave Eliza alone, not even for a second, and I swore she wouldn't piss without my hand in hers.
After the second tower collapsed, Eliza and I could taste the dust and smoke in our apartment. Even after we shut the windows, the place was asphyxiating. And the whole building was silent. Like either everyone had fled or they'd been scared into seclusion too.
We didn't leave the apartment for three days. We sat in front of the TV, ate in front of the TV, slept in front of the TV, made love with a be-all, end-all frenzy in front of the TV, we cried in front of the TV, and we wondered, in front of the goddamn TV, if the world was about to end.
It was the longest I'd gone without a cigarette in eight years. By the second day I had the shakes and a headache that wouldn't go away no matter how many Advil I popped, but Eliza was still too terrified to go out, and I couldn't leave her like that.
We spent a lot of time pondering the meanings of all the things we hold sacred. The record, the single, all my self-righteous integrity. It suddenly feels so stupid to me.
Only time will tell, I guess.
One thing's for sure: the events of last week did not bode well for Eliza as a future airline passenger of the world.
This is Paul saying goodbye. And God bless.
Over.
The streets were practically deserted when I left for Loring Blackman's apartment. A few merchants were hosing down their storefront sidewalks, a couple dour-faced people were walking dogs, but there wasn't a soul on the subway car that took me uptown.
The city was always quiet on Sunday morning, and normally this had a calming effect, but I didn't feel safe outside yet. I didn't feel safe anywhere except in the apartment with Paul. The hush of the city was still too dark, the air still smelled like a funeral pyre, and every sound made me jump.
For the last two weeks I had gone to work, hurried home, and made few additional excursions beyond Ludlow Street. Going any farther downtown was out of the question, as Ground Zero was maybe two miles southwest of where we lived.
It was supposed to be a big deal. A cover story. I'd been waiting over a year for an assignment that would promote me to feature-writer status and potentially garner me some respect with Lucy. But there I was, on my way to the interview, and it didn't seem to matter. Regardless of how badly I wanted it to matter.
The inimitable characteristics of New York City—the skyscrapers, the subways, the people, the barrage of art and culture—had all been turned into memento mori. Excitement had been replaced with fear, certainty replaced with doubt. Hopes and dreams replaced with a basic instinct to survive.
r /> I studied the few faces I passed near the park. They were sallow and afraid. They were the faces of orphans. There were orphans all over the city, just like Paul and I were orphans.
Loring lived on 77th between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, on the top floor of a charming prewar building across from the Museum of Natural History. The bald, droopy-eyed doorman knew who I was as soon as I walked in. He greeted me by name and escorted me to the elevator, where the press of a button and the turn of a key took us directly into Loring's living room, the backdrop of which was two walls of windows affording views of the museum and the park.
“Mr. Blackman will be back in a few minutes,” the doorman, a spitting image of Uncle Fester from The Addams Family, told me. “He says make yourself at home.”
The first thing I noticed was the central air-conditioning. After walking in the warm sun, Loring's apartment felt like December in Cleveland.
Uncle Fester left, and I wandered around the apartment. Despite being furnished in shades of blue and gray, the place was luminescent with natural light. And it had a comfortable, lived-in feel, due in part to the occasional presence of kids—Loring had twin sons, evidence of which was scattered around in the form of toys and the cutest little pair of Doc Martens.
Making my way into the master bedroom, I was sure Loring had a housekeeper. His bed had been made in that plush, perfectly neat, five-star-hotel style that looks inviting and untouchable at the same time.
I played detective in Loring's bathroom: gray slate floor, ecru marble sink, beige towels, and a three-headed shower. The only drugs I could find were Ibuprofen and children's chewable vitamins. Loring wore alluring cologne that smelled green and peppery, used waxed dental floss, a Gillette razor, cheap drugstore shampoo, and had Mark Twain's Roughing It next to the toilet.
The room across the hall from Loring's was a sparsely furnished guestroom that also served as a storage space for platinum records, instruments, and other various music-related paraphernalia. The other bedroom had a set of bunk beds, two small desks, two high-end desktop computers, and a glow-in-the-dark solar system on the ceiling.