Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

“I’m sorry—what did you just say?”

“It’s a terrible idea, Alaina.”

“Theodore. Are you baked?”

“Weathers is insufferable. They break up twice a year. It’s fucking toxic.”

“Maybe I’m not being clear. They don’t want you to join their band. They’re just going to let you play in front of their infinite crowds.”

“We can’t go from headliner to opening act just like that. Don’t you think it cheapens us?”

“It would cheapen you to open for Scritti Politti. It would cheapen you to open for Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam.”

“It doesn’t sit well with me,” I said. “It’s not what we’re all about.”

“Let me break this down for you. You’ve had one hit. A strong, well-received album, but one hit. One hit doth not a career make. Do you want a career? Do you want lifelong fans? Because that’s what you build on tour, the kind of fans who keep coming back, who wet themselves when you release a new album because they know that it means you’re coming to town. The kind of fans who will pay a babysitter fifteen bucks an hour for the privilege of paying a hundred bucks a ticket, who will see you play twenty years from now when you look like shit, sound like shit, and can’t write for shit.”

“I’m not worried,” I countered to her Allen Ginsbergesque parataxis. “We may never hit the jackpot like we did with ‘Lie,’ but I think we’ll stick around. You’ve heard the new album.”

Alaina laughed like an ice-covered sidewalk. “I thought you were different, Teddy. I really did. I knew you had an ego, but to turn down an opportunity to share billing with the Junction—to benefit from that vast promotional machine—all because you think you deserve more? That is a rare level of ego indeed.”

It wasn’t a concert tour; it was a charade in the name of bagging Mackenzie.

“Call it what you want, Alaina. I’m not hitting the road with Simon Weathers. That’s not who we are.”

“Fine,” Alaina said. “You can explain that to your bandmates when they’re ringing up your fries at the truck stop two years from now.”

All these years later, it still shamed me to think about the selfishness, the myopia, the dictatorial disregard for the livelihoods of people who counted on me. The possessiveness over things that didn’t belong to me. As Simon Weathers might’ve said, Who in the fuck did I think I was?

The receptionist was fussy, dumpy, and bumbershooted in a floral muumuu, and I almost laughed in her face when she asked if I had insurance, never imagining that the unseemly afflictions that sent one to a sex therapist could be covered by a health plan.

She smiled me over to the lobby, which was a sea of royal blue from the upholstery on the chairs down to the carpeting. I stood under the constellation of floodlights and peered out the windows into the parking lot. Mack’s office was located in a squat three-story building set back a ways from a busily commercial avenue outside the city. I’d turned the car over to my traveling companions and dispatched them to a bookstore, coffee shop, pet mart, anywhere, to get them out of sight. I would’ve tasked Jumbo with finding us a hotel but he and I held widely differing views on what constituted acceptable lodging.

Here I stood, ablaze with nerves, even more so than on the night I played for Sonny in my apartment living room. Right here was where I would make it right again. This was where Mack accepted my apology, so long in the making, and we moved into the future together, which is to say that we could go back. We could stand next to each other again, night after night, our instruments alive in our hands, doing what we were meant to do with our time on earth. We had no business sequestering ourselves away in offices, disguising ourselves as professionals, going through the motions of ordinary relationships when our significant others knew, had always known, we belonged somewhere else. Mackenzie knew this; she just needed to be reminded. Then everything would be right, my sin of pride and greed with the Junction finally wiped clean.

“Teddy.” I turned my head and there she was.

“Mackenzie.” Seeing her after all these years sent volts of electricity down my suddenly unsteady legs.

We stepped toward each other with a measure of cautiousness. I crossed my arms over her back, pulling her into me. It was a sensation of wonderful familiarity. She’d had the decency to stay the same height, to inhabit the same proportions, to keep her hair and skin an ambrosia of Arcadian scents, as if all for the benefit of my homesickness.

She wasn’t really hugging me back. She administered a few obligatory pats on my shoulder blade as if I were an unpleasant distant cousin she’d run into at a wedding.

“You look great, Mack. You really do.”

She issued a half smile. “I don’t know about that.”

Then she led me down the hall in this familiar ritual where I played the role of intruder into the lives of people I used to know. I was the corruptive Sunday school troublemaker inciting my assiduous classmates to abscond through the bathroom window.

Her office was spacious and airy. It had a seating area with a sofa and love seat of reddish-brown leather and an espresso-finished trunk coffee table between them. The room seemed to be draped in a muted autumn of soft greens, yellows, and browns, all of it coaxing comfort, assuring you that this environment could do you no harm. Even the fresh soapy scent in the air—was that bubble bath?—conveyed the message that this was a place where you could divulge your dirtiest secrets free of threat and judgment. Be calm, said the arrangement of the furniture. Be at ease, said the air.

Alone together in her office, I could finally take Mack in. She was still beautiful, all the more so by not having struggled against time’s advancement. The short shag haircut and boyish outfits had been supplanted by butter-yellow pants and a brown sweater, longer sandy-highlighted locks that framed a warm, earthy face behind 1950s cat-eyed frames. She’d become more womanly, the mom you suddenly noticed after a year of carpool, but seemed to have held on to that athletic ease of motion, her genetic bounty. Her father had been a power-hitting centerfielder up and down the minor leagues before becoming a scout in the Cincinnati Reds organization. Her mother owned every swimming record at her high school. Naturally, the child of those two parents would pursue a vampiric career playing bass in the stale-beer air of dingy bars, swathed in blue light. But Mack had always resisted the physical drag of our lifestyle. She constantly sought out opportunities to move, exploring on foot the blocks of each new town, rising early for a dip in the hotel pool, even once saving a man who’d bumped his head while doing laps.

Before offering me a seat, she shut the door and turned to me. “So. To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”

“I was in the area and decided a visit was long overdue,” I said.

She tilted her head. “Do you have an issue you want to discuss?”

I stared blankly.

“A sexual problem?”

“Uh, no.”

“Well, you made an appointment, so I didn’t know what to think.”

“Well, don’t think that.”

“Hmm.” She was looking at me, nodding without warmth.

“I’m out here for work and just thought I’d stop by.” The repetition of my lie sounded to my own ears like a stammer, like protesting too much.

Mack folded her arms.

“It’s just a visit, Mack. Sue me. Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Yes. Of course.” She continued assaulting me with a keenly inhospitable smile, a smile that erected walls.

“Can we sit down?” I finally suggested, tugging at my collar. “I’m getting a bit of an Abu Ghraib vibe here.”