Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

“Cliché?” she asked.

“Absurd,” I said, with a mouth full of disdain. “That’s like saying your favorite movie is Revenge of the Nerds II . It’s just not appropriate. Phil Collins himself would slap you for saying that.”

She looked defensive. “It’s a matter of opinion.”

“Not always.”

Ask her what her favorite Beatles song was and she’d say “If I Were a Rich Man” from Magical Mystery Tour . But “If I Were a Rich Man” isn’t on Magical Mystery Tour . It’s on Fiddler on the Roof . Who cares if she meant “Baby, You’re a Rich Man?” That’s not the point. This is the greatest band in the history of the universe. Know the fucking song title.

On top of everything else, I sensed she was leading me down the path of sexual apathy. She acquiesced, rarely initiated, and during the act itself, her face registered never excitement or lust but rather impatience and frequently discomfort. The fact that I was hanging out with musicians who seemed to have far more adventurous partners only fueled my dissatisfaction. I deserved better. Didn’t I?

The end finally came when she caught me at a Phoenix hotel with Mackenzie. My luck being what it was, I’d never touched the bass player before that day. Tremble had a show that evening, so the afternoon found me setting off on one of my get-lost drives. These were essentially the vehicular version of a get-lost hike: I’d borrow a car, steer it out onto the road, and discover America. It was the only time I had to myself.

On my get-lost drive that day, my head full of dark thoughts about what was shaping up to be a disappointing tour, three things happened that had never happened before. First, Mackenzie joined me. Totally spur of the moment. She’d hopped into the car when I caught her sitting on the parking lot curb with a copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles , and I seduced her with my aim of finding the perfect southwestern sunset. Second, this particular get-lost drive somehow became a get-lost, run-out-of-gas drive, stranding us on the side of an Arizona highway like two characters in a John Denver song. We waited to be rescued on a gorgeous stretch of road with mountains and cacti and the buzzing of insects. I kissed her. I know it took her by surprise, but after an initial recoil, she had a change of heart and kissed me back. Extremely back. When the tow truck deposited us at the hotel, we went straight for my room.

And that’s when the third thing that had never happened before happened: Lucy showed up unannounced. She’d decided to surprise me on tour. And surprise me she did. She knocked on the door hours before the show, and upon seeing I wasn’t alone, she picked up her bag, fled the hotel, and didn’t speak to me until a week or two later when a break in the tour allowed me a few days at home.

Then she flipped. Fucking attacked me. And it wasn’t one of those chick-flick tantrums that starts with wild swatting and screaming and eventually collapses into a weepy embrace—I hate you! I hate you! I . . . love you!—and then there’s sex on the ottoman. No sir. Shit got thrown—plates, not pillows. We trashed the place. Rather, she trashed it; I deflected flying candy dishes and ducked behind furniture. In retrospect, that mad scene was probably the closest I’ve ever felt to being a true rock star.

She left me practically the next day, and I remember respecting her for it. Over the years, mutual friends have told me that she’s still bitter. You’d have thought she’d be over it by now. I’m nothing special. Ask anyone.

Something also shifted in Mackenzie after Phoenix, although less dramatically. No fights, tiffs, hostility, or even serious talks. She just became quietly inaccessible to me. Even when standing next to her on stage, I had the sensation of looking at her through a telescope, as if she were drifting farther and farther into the wings.

When Sara moved in with me, life couldn’t have been more different than life with Lucy. We acted the part of a couple in many ways. We ate, we argued, we shared a bed. We hiked the Canadian Rockies together. We had friends with whom we took in the new Asian fusion restaurant or the new Wes Anderson movie. She tolerated my hypersensitivity to the smell of trash—I made trips to the chute nightly, no matter how full the bag—and I put up with her insistence that we remain in the movie theater until the very last of the credits had drifted up the screen. I personally didn’t see any reason to hang around and catch the Dolby logo ten minutes after the movie had ended, but she enjoyed the dreamy blanket of the movie experience and was in no hurry for it to end. And apparently, assistants to the key grip are people too.

There was no imbalance of power in our home because she was neither impressed with nor affronted by my fleeting fame. As far as she was concerned, I was just an irritable, disagreeable lawyer, a little too arrogant for my station and possibly bitter about having thrown in the towel too soon. Her frighteningly precise memory prevented me from having to worry about her not remembering the correct name of a Beatles song. And while most days she was a Joni Mitchell kind of gal, she brought her own copy of Bitches Brew to the relationship, and her number-one favorite song of all time was actually by Mötley Crüe, a lovable gem of a detail that suggests we don’t know everything we think we do about Sara Rome.

Our relationship did have more empty rooms than most, and every so often, in the long quiet of a Sunday afternoon, they troubled me. We were not confidants. Sara was only sporadically curious about my previous life, and even then, only superficially. I got the sense that there was something about Mackenzie that made Sara uncomfortable. Maybe it was the fact that when I spoke of the band, I never spoke of Mack. That I seemed to keep her to myself like a secret of mixed quality. That unlike Jumbo and Warren, there was nothing to ridicule or deride about Mackenzie. That unlike Jumbo and Warren, I had slept with Mackenzie.

And we never talked about Drew. Not almost never; never. Sara had always acted as if the horrific experience was something she could just move away from, like a school district. It was as if she’d packed up all her stuff, moved it into my apartment, and closed the door on her past. Locked it out, simply and definitively, much like the returning GI who trembles in front of his house and forbids his nightmares from crossing over the doormat with him.

Though the time never seemed quite right to ask, I always wondered whether things like that were really capable of being left out on the lawn.

It is the lunch hour and once again I am shifting into my coat and moving hurriedly past the secretary station, past the confined cubbyholes where youthful lawyers are shelved away until they emerge old and rumpled three decades later.

Past conference room four, in which seven indistinguishable men (not a skirt among them today) sit and contort their faces into what they think true listening should look like, and at least two of them battle the undertow of bladder pressure because it is way too soon to get up and take yet another piss.

Past Barbara Mitnik (partner, late forties, stout) sipping water from that synagogue mug adorned with Hebrew lettering, smiling at her computer monitor, surely drafting another one of those insipid parenting columns for some suburban magazine. I was at my Rachel’s soccer game last weekend and found myself thinking, Cherish every moment, it really does go by so fast. When she’s not busy composing tripe, Barbara enjoys a preoccupation with her gluten allergy.

Past Spencer Kipling, who winks at me in the hall and for once doesn’t mention Death Cab for Cutie. Eighteen months ago we shared an elevator ride during which I happened to have been listening to the one Death Cab song I have on my iPod. “Didn’t take you for a Death Cab guy,” he remarked. And I’m not—hence, only the one song—but since then, Spencer has been operating under the misimpression that we share a passion. Articles are forwarded to me, visits are made to my office. What do I think of the new album? How psyched am I that they’re back in the studio? If only I’d had the presence of mind that day to tell him I was listening to Olivia Newton-John.