“In a hotel? What did you order?”
“You've got to be kidding,” I said. But Paul didn't look like he was kidding. “I had an omelet with artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes, and mozzarella cheese. Loring had soup and a sandwich. Our waitress's uniform was the color of throw-up and there's no Chinese food on the menu. Call the restaurant right now if you don't believe me.”
“What kind of goddamn soup?”
“Don't be gay.”
He moved in so he was practically in my lap. “I'm only going to ask you this once,” he said, his eyes glistening with panic. “And I swear over my life I'm going to believe whatever you say. Do you understand? With my whole goddamn heart and soul I'm going to believe you so please don't lie to me because I would never get over it.”
“No,” I said before he even asked the question. “Nothing happened between me and Loring. Not last night, not ever.”
“Look me in the eyes and tell me he never made one pass at you, never tried to kiss you or told you shit like, ‘I only invited your goddamn fool of a fiancé on this tour because I'm fucking in love with you and I want to kiss your earrings and fuck your goddamn brains out.’”
I took his face in my hands and said, “I mean it. I had no idea.”
Paul's jaw was still pulsing. “Well, what if he had? What if he walked on this bus right now and begged you to run off with him? What would you do?”
“Paul, I'm not interested in Loring.”
“You expect me to believe you're not attracted to him?”
This required tact. The honest reply was that only a blind woman wouldn't be attracted to him—a blind woman who couldn't get close enough to smell his green, peppery, sex-on-the-grass cologne.
And then there was the matter of the song. I was touched and flattered by the song, and for a moment, at least, I would have to consider that. I would discard it, for sure. But a swift, internal maelstrom of contemplation would come first.
“Eliza, please answer me.”
“What are you asking? If I think he's cute? He's a very good-looking guy. So what?”
“He's more than just a good-looking guy and you know it.”
But, I thought, he doesn't have flashlight eyes or a cocky-bastard smile that can boil water or a voice from the heavens and most of all he says things like, It's only rock ‘n’ roll.
“Corn chowder,” I said.
“What?”
“The soup of the day.”
Paul kissed my palm and then pressed it against his heart. “Please come on the tour with me. Come to San Francisco. At least say you'll try.”
“I'll try,” I said. And I meant it. I always meant it. But deep down I knew I was never going to get on that plane.
We sat like that for a while, until Michael boarded the bus with Angelo, Burke, and the rest of the crew behind him.
“All right,” Judo said. “Everybody present and accounted for?”
Michael approached the couch. He was looking at me suspiciously. “Loring wants to know if he can have a word with you before we leave.”
Paul shot up out of his seat. “I think she's heard enough of his goddamn words.” He rushed to the front of the bus, looked at the driver, and said, “Go.”
The voice on the other end of the line said, “Meet me at Kiev in an hour.”
I was filled with instant dread. “Feldman?”
“Just be there.”
“I don't have time.”
“Make time.”
It had already been a bad week. Loring kept leaving messages for me, asking for a chance to explain. Paul was fighting the inclination to call Loring back and tell him off, and I was working hard to convince my fiancé that the prudent course of action was to just drop it. I was uncomfortable enough, and the last thing I wanted was to have to face the guy.
When I called Vera to discuss the whole fiasco, she said, “I knew he liked you. I knew it in Toronto. I didn't say anything then, but now—Jesus, Eliza, how do you feel about him?”
“What is this, psychotherapy all of a sudden?”
“It was obvious you guys were getting along. I saw it.”
“Saw what? Vera, I'm going to tell you the same thing I told Paul—I'm not interested in Loring Blackman. That's it. End of discussion.”
On top of everything else, Paul was acting weird. He was unduly cheerful, despite wanting to confront Loring. And he hadn't said a word about the Drones tour since that night on the bus. I didn't know if this meant he was resigned to the fact that I wouldn't be joining him, or he just assumed I would be, but every time I tried to bring it up he said, “We'll talk about it after the wedding.”
The wedding was another predicament. Paul and I wanted to get married ASAP, but the city of New York and Lucy Enfield were refusing to cooperate.
“You just missed two weeks,” Lucy said. “You can't skip any more days.”
“But I'm getting married.”
“I don't care if you're being canonized. Work it out on your own time.”
This meant all the preparations had to be made after seven, but the clerk's office closed at five, it was the only place to get a marriage license, and both the bride and groom had to be present.
I hated going above Lucy's head. It made me feel like the loser on the playground who needed her big brother to fight her battles, but in a way that's exactly what I was at Sonica. And I considered marrying Paul a noble enough cause so I took the matter to Terry. He congratulated me and gave me Friday off. Paul and I would get the license then, there would be a twenty-four-hour waiting period, and on Saturday we would be married by a municipal judge in City Hall, with Vera and Michael as our witnesses, and Loring's silly love song nothing more than a story to tell Rex and Spike someday.
“This better be good.” I startled Feldman by tossing my purse into the booth a moment before my butt hit the seat. “I only have half an hour.”
Kiev was a nondescript Eastern European diner in the East Village offering a three course meal for twelve dollars. When I arrived, Feldman already had a cup of coffee in his hand and a large order of potato latkes on a plate in front of him. It was rude, I thought, inviting someone to a restaurant and ordering before they got there.
The waitress walked over and I asked for the first thing I saw on the menu. “A Coke,” I said. I was pretty sure I'd never in my life ordered a Coke, but the frown on Feldman's face and the waitress's eager smile made me act on impulse.
Feldman waited until the waitress brought me my soda, then he let out a rhonchus snort and said, “He told me to turn it down.”
“Who?”
“Who? That asshole you're marrying. Who do you think I'm talking about?”
Chewing on my straw, I said, “He told you to turn what down?”
Feldman smeared sour cream over a latke and then took a bite. It was hard to watch him consume food. He ate like a giant two-year-old.
“The tour,” he said, as if he couldn't understand how I could be so dense. “The fucking Drones?”
A sharp pain throbbed in my head like an aneurysm about to explode.
Feldman took hold of my wrist. His fingers were sticky, as if he'd dipped them in syrup. “It's because of you. He doesn't want to leave you.”
I pulled free and let my face fall into my hands so that I didn't have to look at Feldman's pink cheeks.
“You can't let him do it,” Feldman said, much louder than necessary. “Are you listening to me? I've put a lot of time, effort, and money into his fucking career, and if you care one iota for him you won't let him throw it down the drain.”
I hated Feldman. Hated him with a fear. Hated him almost as much as I hated visions of single-engine prop planes on stormy nights. But I lifted my head and nodded because I knew he was right.
“Radio's not playing the single,” he said. “No surprise there. The video was in moderate rotation for about a minute, the marketing campaign has been minimal at best. And I'll tell you something, Paul's attitude has a lot to do with i
t—Winkle's not trying to ruin his life, Eliza. He's not trying to exploit Paul Hudson. He just wants to sell music.” Feldman exhaled like an exploding balloon. “Do you have an idea how many records they've sold? I'll tell you—about nine thousand, which is a small but respectable amount under the circumstances. But I'd bet my ass ninety-eight percent of the people who bought it are either relatives of the Michaels or—and this is a big or—they saw the Blackman tour. Am I making sense or do you think this is a game? ‘Cause for all I know you might like stringing him around by his dick. Maybe you want him to fall flat on his face, but I'm not going to let some—”
“Stop!”
I started rubbing a pressure point in my palm, a spot someone once told me made headaches go away. It didn't work.
“Why didn't he tell me?” I said, blinking rapidly.
“The asshole thinks you won't marry him if you know, that's why.”
“Please stop calling Paul an asshole.”
“He made me promise not to say anything until after the wedding.”
“Well it's nice to see you're a man of your word.”
“Don't give me that high-horse shit now. Just tell me what you're going to do.”
“I don't know what I can do. When Paul makes up his mind—”
Feldman grabbed my arm again, squeezing so hard I felt like I was having my blood pressure taken. “Do you know what Winkle went through to get him on this tour? The promises, the wheeling-and-dealing, the ass-kissing? Do you know what will happen if Paul Hudson just up and decides he wants to stay home with his wife? It's career fucking suicide. They're already booked. The contracts have been signed, reservations have been made. Paul's relationship with Winkle, what's left of it, and with the agents and promoters, it would all be caput. So unless you want to be personally responsible for destroying his life, you better think of something in the next forty-eight hours. After that it'll be too late. Do you get what I'm saying, Peepers?”
I got it, all right. In ways Feldman would never understand. And it wasn't just about Paul. There was Michael to think about, too.
In an odd way, knowing all this calmed me down.
There was something reassuring about knowing things.
Knowing things allowed me to feel like the one in control.
It would be the last time I would wake up next to Paul in the apartment. I didn't know it then, otherwise I would have sat on the window ledge a little longer, gazing at his face while the advent of daylight played tricks with his hair. I would have tried to take mental photos of the way he lay with the sheet covering his naked body from the ilium down, his arms splayed out to the sides, his head tilted to the left.
A very crucifixian pose.
I would have remembered the good stuff.
Nobody ever remembers the good stuff.
The night before, we'd gone to bed a little after midnight and had intense, quiet sex lying on our sides like two spoons in a drawer. Then I'd asked Paul if we could talk, he said he was tired and went to sleep, and I stared at the ceiling for the rest of the night.
The situation was simple, really. I loved Paul, I loved my brother, and I understood in a very rational way that I had to do whatever it took to make sure they were on that plane to San Francisco in March.
Paul was scheduled to do a live performance on a local public radio show that morning, and I asked him to come home as soon as he finished. I told him there was something we needed to discuss before we went to get the marriage license.
“I'm going to see Winkle at ten,” he said. “How about we meet for coffee near the clerk's office around eleven?”
I couldn't let him see Winkle. That much I knew. “Can you stop back here first?”
Paul was in the doorway. He cocked his head to the side, suggesting he found my request fishy, and I considered having it out with him then, but he was already running late, and I could barely keep my eyes open. I needed to get some rest, and I needed to collect a decent amount of ammo before I would be armed enough to win this battle.
“You're not getting cold feet, are you?”
I assured him that was not the problem. “Just promise you'll come here before you see Winkle.”
He agreed. After he left I took a long shower, wrapped myself in my robe, and curled up on the couch. Maybe a minute later, maybe an hour, the buzz of the door shook me back to consciousness.
“Who is it?” I said into the intercom, and immediately recognized the low-pitched mumble on the other end.
“Eliza,” Loring said. “Can I come up?”
“It's not a good time.”
I took my hand off the button so that I couldn't hear his retort, but in the time it took me to brush my teeth and splash my face with water there was a knock on the door.
I opened it and barked, “How did you get in here?” But I knew how he got in. He was Loring Blackman and virtually any of the budding artists, students, and junkies in the building would recognize him and gladly let him walk right on through.
“Five minutes,” he said, his hands in the air as if I were holding him at gunpoint.
I stepped back and Loring entered the apartment apprehensively. Either he couldn't believe the squalor Paul and I lived in, or he could sense something was amiss, something that had nothing to do with his arrival.
“Eliza, are you all right?”
He wasn't just asking to ask. He was genuinely worried about me and that made me feel terrible for being rude. “I'm sorry, Loring. I have a lot going on right now. Please say what you have to say and then we can get on with our lives and pretend this never happened.”
He chuckled like he wished it could be that easy. “First,” he said, leaning against the back of the couch, kicking at the floor. “I didn't think it was going to be so obvious. The song, I mean. Not to mention I didn't even know you were still there.”
I felt my face flush. “This is really uncomfortable.”
“How do you think I feel?”
“For what it's worth, it's a beautiful song, I mean it. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't extremely touched, but—”
“Don't.”
“No, look, Loring, if I did anything at all that made you think—”
“You didn't do anything, Eliza. That's one of the things I came here to say. Not just to you, but probably even more so to Paul. I want to make this clear to both of you—I didn't write that song to try and win you over, or to steal you away from him. I wrote it because I knew I never could.”
I didn't want to listen to any more, but I didn't have the heart to kick Loring out after a statement like that.
“There's something I need to ask you.” He scratched his temple, and it occurred to me that the only time he ever resembled Doug was when he scratched his temple. “Say we'd met that night in Cleveland…If I'd come to my dad's room instead of going to sleep…” He hesitated. “I guess what I really want to know is, under different circumstances, would I have had a chance?”
I sighed. “Why does that matter?”
“It just does,” he said. “Think of it as a period at the end of a sentence. Necessary to move on and start a new paragraph.”
So much of love is in the timing, I thought. And back then the possible existence of Paul Hudson was nothing more than wishful thinking. Loring probably would have swept me off my feet.
“Without a doubt,” I said, because it was the truth, and because Loring deserved to hear it. But I could tell he didn't know whether to be pleased or pained by the hypothetical nature of what would go down in the history books under the chapter titled “What Might Have Been.”
“Eliza, are you sure you're okay?”
Loring had the most sympathetic eyes—soft, brown, velvet havens where you could stash secrets and know they'd be safe, and I was a moment away from unloading the whole Drones dilemma into them. I even thought about asking Loring to call Doug. If anyone could talk some sense into Paul, it would be Doug.
Then I heard the sounds.
Like punches.
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Fists colliding with jaws.
And that's when I decided, or, more precisely, it was the moment I chose not to decide, to just act. Because in that split second it seemed like the only for-sure solution.
“Kiss me,” I said.
Loring's eyes widened.
“Kiss me,” I said again, with more urgency.
He wasn't cooperating. He remained motionless, still leaning against the back of the couch and clearly confused beyond all reason.
I reached out and caught my finger in the top buttonhole of his jacket. Dragging myself in, I stepped between his legs and pressed my lips to his.
It only took a moment for Loring to open his mouth to me. A second later his hands found the sides of my face and I felt the tips of his fingers in my hair.
I was hyper-aware of every detail: Loring's height, the softness of his tongue in my mouth, the warmth of his palms on my cheeks, the metal rivets on his jacket pressing against my chest, the sexy green smell.
And above it all, the punches.
I counted them down like a song about to begin.
Four—
Three—
Two—
Paul didn't make a sound upon entering the room. Or, if he had, I never heard it. I never heard a thing until he whispered my name with a question mark chasing after the last vowel, as if holding on to the possibility that he'd walked into the wrong apartment.
“Liar,” he spat. “Fucking whore.”
But I could forget that. I could put all words out of my mind. It was the expression on his face that threatened to crush me. The look in his eyes that would remain.
This is for your own good, I wanted to tell him.
In the instantaneous daydream I'd had, the one that had compelled me to kiss Loring, I had imagined our lips touching, and then the movie in my head cut directly to Paul and the band en route to San Francisco. I had failed to consider all the scenes that might happen in between—the way Paul's face turned from enchanted to fossilized in a second, or the way his white-blue eyes became the color of dirty dishwater and echoed with the ancient history of his soul— a soul that suddenly seemed resigned to the fact that what it had been searching for, what it believed it had found, was impossible to find.