Jonathan Tropper Read online

  There’s another verse to the song, but Matt doesn’t sing it. Instead, he takes a scorching guitar break, his body bending and contorting as he coaxes higher and higher notes out of the Gibson, and then, just as he hits the climax of the guitar solo, he stops playing, and lets the guitar hang loose against his hips as he cradles the mike with both hands. Sam keeps the bass line going while Otto softens the beat, and Matt sings the chorus again with his eyes closed, this time slowly, his voice dripping with venom. When he’s done, he steps back, out of the spotlight and into the shadows, leaving Sam and Otto to finish out the song with a slow fade. Then there’s a moment, a crystalline instant of perfect silence, when the music has stopped and the audience hasn’t reacted yet, and it feels like the entire club has been stunned into silence. And then, all at once, the applause comes, not mounting gradually, but already up there, a surging wave of clapping and cheering that reverberates through the room like a storm. And at the forefront of this wave of sound is Norm, who has gotten to his feet and is shouting and cheering as he claps demonstratively, almost comically, his arms sweeping widely as if he’s trying to signal Matt, which of course he is. I wonder if it’s actually possible that he’s missed the point of the song, that he’s obstinate enough to have willfully overlooked it, but then the sweeping stage lights flash into the audience and I can see that even as he hoots and claps, his face is unmistakably streaked with tears that continue to stream from his eyes even now. And when I see his tears, I can feel my own, hot against my flushed skin.

  The applause lasts for well over a minute, and then Matt launches into “Bring Your Sister,” a hard-rocking, up-tempo number about teenaged lovers that actually got some radio play on the college stations last year, and the audience jumps to their feet, clapping and dancing, pointed fingers and fists waving in the air, punctuating the music. Matt doesn’t allow his glance to wander to our side of the room, and after a moment, Norm nods to himself, wipes his face with his sleeve, and turns to leave.

  “I’ll see you, Zack,” he says, straining to be heard above the music.

  “You’re leaving now?” I say. As I look at him, I notice for the first time that his remaining strands of hair are grouped together in a symmetrical network of rows, like on a doll’s head, the unmistakable grid of a failed hair transplant. That Norm went to extreme measures to try to reverse his baldness is hardly surprising, but it’s the fact that I can look down at his scalp that throws me for a loop. I didn’t notice before that I am actually taller than him. I wonder how old I might have been when that happened.

  “I think I’ve seen what I came to see,” he says.

  “He’s angry,” I say, following him toward the exit, upset with myself, even as I say it, feeling the need to explain, or excuse Matt. “You had to know he’d be angry. That we’d all be.”

  “I knew,” he says. He’s still somewhat shell-shocked from the musical assault, and he’s eyeing that exit door like a drowning man eyeing the distant shore. He takes a few more steps, and then turns to look back at the stage, the lights dancing in the wet flesh of his cheeks, and his moist eyes meet mine knowingly. “He’s something else, though, isn’t he?” he says.

  I nod. “That he is.”

  “Goddamn,” he says, shaking his head in wonder. “And how is he otherwise?”

  I consider the question, wondering how much I want to share with him, how much he’s entitled to know, and whether I want the information to hurt him or not. “Otherwise,” I say, “he’s a big, fucking mess.”

  Norm nods sadly as we step out of the club and onto the street. “Well, you tell him that I was proud of him tonight, okay? That I’ve never been prouder.”

  “I’m not sure that’s what he wants to hear.”

  “Just tell him for me,” Norm says. “Will you do that?”

  Our eyes meet. “Sure,” I say.

  “Thanks, Zack.”

  I watch him as he walks down the street, head down, shoulders stooped against the cold, and I can feel things quivering inside me, emotions, as yet unrecognizable, messing with my blood, diving at random into the slipstream of my consciousness, fucking with me. It’s been a long day; it feels like weeks ago that I woke up and pissed a red thread into the toilet. I can feel my last reserves of strength fading, but as I watch my father being swallowed up into the darkness of the Village, hunched over in his blazer for warmth, the strange thing is that despite my inability to discern how I feel about anything these days, I’m pretty sure that I’m sorry to see him go.

  Chapter 12

  Only when I climb into the cab does it hit me that I’ve forgotten to tell Matt about vomiting in the van. I turn on my cell phone and dial Jed’s, but even if his is still on, he’ll never hear it ring in the club. Sure enough, I get his voice mail and hang up. My own voice mail icon is blinking, so I dial up my messages. There’s only one, from Hope.

  “Hi, Zack. Sorry I couldn’t call you earlier. I was stuck in meetings until after nine. I did try you earlier in the day at work and then at your apartment. Where did you go? You’re usually so reachable. I know you’re at Matt’s show now, so call me when you head home. I’ll keep my ringer on, even if I’m sleeping, so I can at least say good night to you. I love you, babe, ’bye.”

  Her voice opens the floodgates, and the guilt comes pouring in like a tidal wave. What the hell is wrong with me? What is it that’s driving me to screw up my relationship with this beautiful, bright, passionate woman who has defied the natural order of things by unaccountably falling for me? A few years ago I was your average single man, a jaded member of the Upper West Side infantry, hitting the bars in teams of two and three, scanning, scoping, and on occasion engaging. More often than not, I found myself targeting slightly flawed women, big boned or slightly pudgy, women with smaller chests or imperfect complexions. Basically, decently attractive women who wouldn’t have that resigned look in their eye, that exhaustion born of being too beautiful and hit on too often. If the beautiful women didn’t want the attention, then why did they come out to the bars? The inescapable conclusion, of course, was that they were looking to meet someone too. I just knew intuitively that that someone wasn’t me. If a woman was too good-looking, I always felt that any approach was too obvious, that to concede my intentions would result in instantaneous rejection. And even with nothing to lose, I pathologically avoided that rejection, concealing my intentions by ignoring them, which worked great, except I didn’t get laid very often at all.

  Hope, though, is a once-in-a-lifetime score. She’s the embodiment of that molten perfection I’d always viewed wistfully from afar, the kind of girl who, if anything, would want to be friends and talk to me about her boyfriends. And I would take that unintentional abuse, because there’s a whole other kind of love out there exercised by the sexual middle class, guys like me who tolerate such one-sided relationships, because we’re either blind optimists or merely idiots, needing to be close to that kind of woman, even platonically, to feed the ugly, deformed thing in us, the hunchback in our bell tower that lives to experience that beauty on any level we’ll be allowed. But now I’ve lived the dream; I’ve risen above my sexual station and landed a woman just like that, who actually loves me back. I’d have to be certifiable to put it at risk.

  I’ve always known that infidelity is in my blood, enmeshed somewhere in the strands of my DNA, and I’ve dedicated my life, more consciously than I would care to admit, to doing everything in my power to not be like Norm. Yet here I am, engaged to one woman, obsessing about another, and, for reasons still unclear to me, getting hot and tawdry with a college girl in the back of a van. It’s as if his very proximity is accelerating the genetic fate I’ve been fighting my whole life.

  I dial Hope on my cell. “Hey,” she says, her voice husky with sleep, and I can picture her perfectly in her high four-poster bed, curled up under her floral-patterned comforter in a sheer nightshirt from Victoria’s Secret, her fresh, cool linens smelling faintly of lilac, her face scrubbed and Ivory clea
n, her sandy-colored hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, her bare legs freshly shaved and moisturized, her body warm with sleep. I can feel myself growing stiff just thinking about it.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “I miss you,” she murmurs. “Where are you?”

  “In a cab.”

  She yawns, and I can see the feline arc of her back as she stretches. “Mmm,” she says. “I wish you were here with me now.”

  “I can tell the driver.”

  She giggles. “No. I need to sleep. I have an early meeting.”

  “Oh, well,” I say.

  “It’s not that I don’t want you in my bed, because I do.”

  “I know,” I say. I can’t get her bed out of my mind now, everything clean and smooth and fragrant. Ever since the first time I slept with Hope in her bed, the smell of freshly laundered sheets gets me aroused. “I love you, Hope.”

  “I love you too, babe,” she whispers, and I can tell she’s falling back asleep.

  “I’m lucky to have you,” I whisper, a bit self-conscious about the cabdriver, even though odds are he doesn’t understand a word I’m saying.

  “You’re sweet,” she says. “I think I’ll keep you.”

  “I’ll speak to you in the morning.”

  “Good night, babe.”

  I can fix this, I think desperately as I flip the phone closed. It’s within my grasp. All I have to do is rededicate myself to Hope, establish some healthy distance from Tamara, and make sure I avoid any more unfortunate lapses like the one tonight. In other words, live my life the way it’s set up to be lived. Be the anti-Norm.

  But then I think of Tamara’s wide, sensual eyes glistening with ethereal tenderness and understanding and wisdom and pain and—I’m pretty sure about this—passion. Not passion for me, of course, but for life, for love, for a party to be named later. And when I think of that party being anyone other than me, when I think of those lips, moist and plump as grapes, kissing someone other than me, of her leaning her head on anyone else’s shoulder, of some other man’s leg rocking her porch swing, things inside me start to wither and fall away.

  I stare at myself in the taxi window, watching as the lighted signs from storefronts pass through the sad, amorphous ghost of my reflection, and the ghost makes me think about Rael, and I wonder if he’s looking down at all of this, if he’s concerned or pissed or just laughing his ass off because he knows now that none of it really matters anyway.

  Outside, a woman walks a Labrador puppy, who tugs eagerly at his leash, tearing back and forth frenetically along the sidewalk, thrilled beyond measure to be a dog. As I watch the dog urinate into my reflection, I wonder how I can be in such an abject state of misery when just a few days ago everything was fine. It occurs to me, just before I pass out, that maybe I was miserable before, but things were going too well for me to notice it.

  Chapter 13

  I wake up Tuesday morning with swollen eyes, my throat parched and sore, and a world-class hangover like a spike through my brain. I lie paralyzed, trying to slip under the radar of the spectacular pain in my head while disjointed images from last night flicker through my mind in reverse order. I vaguely recall the rough shoves and curry smell of the cabdriver, muttering at me in an indecipherable accent as he woke me up in the backseat, the ride uptown in semiconscious delirium, the taste and smell of the college girl in the van. Try as I might, I cannot remember paying the driver, making my way into the brownstone or up the stairs to my bedroom. Nor do I recall vomiting again, but the stinking evidence, hard and crusty on my chest and sheets, is indisputable. Daylight pours through my window, illuminating a galaxy of floating spores. In my stupor last night, I didn’t think to lower the blinds, an omission that probably has cost me a few more hours of blessed oblivion. The light creeps up my bed like nuclear fallout, and when it reaches my face, my eyeballs throb like bruised testicles. The pain is a blanket, thick and suffocating.

  This is what cancer feels like all the time, I think.

  Gradually, I become aware of an insistent pulse in the depths of my groin, and even though I know it’s just an overflowing bladder, I picture that little dark spot inside me, pulsating malevolently like a black heart, devouring and assimilating cells wantonly as it grows. I crawl to the bathroom and pee with my eyes closed, cradling my head in my hands. When I stumble back into bed, the blood-colored, oversized digits on my clock radio catch my eye, and I’m surprised to see that it’s past nine. I should call the office, but I can’t muster up the strength to find the phone. My cell phone lies on the floor near my bed, but to turn it on will be to unleash hell. I picture my empty cubicle, the e-mails stacking up like Tetris bricks on my monitor, my phone ringing off the wall, my voice mailbox filled with increasingly frantic messages from Craig Hodges about the impossibility of purple swooshes. I open my mouth and whisper the word “swoosh.” The sound, blowing through my rubber cheeks, somehow soothes my headache, so I spend the next few minutes swooshing quietly. Eventually, I fall back asleep.

  I wake up again, a little after ten, to the muffled sounds of enthusiastic sex coming through the ceiling above me. Apparently, Jed brought someone home from the club last night. I listen to them for a moment, the muted squeals of the anonymous girl, the rhythmic shifting and groaning of bedsprings, and the light banging of the headboard against the wall. From where I lie, it sounds awfully strenuous, and I can’t imagine ever having the strength to have sex again.

  My hangover seems to have been downgraded to a dull headache, so I slowly get out of bed, pop too many Excedrins, and take a hot shower. I seem to be doing everything at half speed, as if rehearsing for the real thing. I find myself staring at the stream of my shower, the splay of my toes on the tiles, the little hairs on my stomach as I wash myself. I consider sweatpants, but then throw on some chinos and a sweater, a grudging acknowledgment that I’m not going to call in sick. I have to be downtown later for my cystoscopy anyway. It takes me over an hour from when I woke up until I head downstairs to hydrate myself.

  “He’s alive!” Jed declares as I come slowly down the stairs. He’s on the living room floor in a pair of boxers and nothing else, doing crunches while he watches Judge Judy.

  “Not so loud, please,” I say with a groan.

  “That bad, huh?” he says, sitting up and transferring himself to the couch.

  “You have no idea.” I go to the kitchen and fill a beer mug from the water cooler.

  Jed nods and begins channel surfing. “Your boss called here looking for you.”

  “My boss?”

  “Some guy named Bill?”

  “That would be him,” I say, a sinking feeling in my stomach. “What’d you tell him?”

  “I told him there was a family situation.”

  “That’s good,” I say approvingly. “Do you think he bought it?”

  Jed shrugs. “He might have. He didn’t strike me as the sharpest crayon in the box. Either way, he’d like you to call him at your earliest convenience concerning an urgent and timely matter, and I believe those were his exact words.”

  It sounds like the Nike shit has hit the Spandler fan. I sip thoughtfully at my water, a palpable unease growing in my belly. “Speaking of family situations,” Jed says. “That was your dad at the gig last night, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, what’s going on there?”

  “Nothing. He’s just a sad, lonely old man,” I say, surprised at the harshness in my voice.

  Jed studies my face for a moment. “No crime in that,” he says.

  The offices of the Spandler Corporation look exactly like the place where you will not write your award-winning screenplay should look. The walls are an off-white that looks old right out of the can, the carpets a defeatist shit brown to preempt the midtown dirt we track in every day. The account executives are all men in their late twenties or early thirties who wear cheap suits and brandish their PDAs, laptops, and cell phones ardently, in the fervent hope of being mistaken for investment ban
kers. There’s not a whiff of creativity, a hint of color, to be found in these halls, only the base grit of commerce as it exists in its lowest incorporated form.

  Rael and I had this great idea for a screenplay. But he was working as a salesman in his father’s paper company and I was here, and even though we could talk our asses off about it, about characters and scenes and plot twists, there was no way it was going to happen. So we made a pact. We were going to wait until the end of the year, at which point we would quit our jobs, set up shop in the brownstone, and write the damn thing. Jed, who liked the idea but had no patience for writing, promised us he would take it upon himself to shop it around Hollywood when the time came, or else put up the money to produce it independently if it came to that. It was a great plan, and when the three of us got together, we spoke of little else. Even if we failed, Rael said, it would be a worthwhile exercise. But then he got himself killed, and, worthwhile or not, the dream seems to have died with him.

  I sit down at my desk, banging a quick hello to Tommy Pender on the other side of my cubicle wall.

  “King!” he yells from behind the wall.

  “Pender!”

  “Bill’s in the production meeting. He wants you there.”

  “Swell.”

  My voice mail light is flashing, but I can’t bring myself to play the messages. I have 130 new e-mails. At least half of them are nothing more than solicitations to buy toner, membership to various porn sites, or generic Viagra. I picture a gargantuan warehouse, somewhere in Middle America, stocked with nothing but ink cartridges, erection pills, and porn. The rest of the e-mails are primarily from clients, checking on projects, demanding updates, presuming that I have nothing else to worry about other than answering their petty inquiries, holding their hands, and letting them know everything’s on time. How the hell have I done this for so long? It’s just after noon, and my doctor’s appointment isn’t until four. I decide to skip the production meeting and see if I can make any headway on the Nike problem before I see Bill.