Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

Mackenzie fumbled for words and fidgeted with the buttons on her overcoat. “Your timing is not ideal, I’ll say that much.”

“Come on, Mack. You were the one in the band that I could most relate to. You had to have known that.”

“And yet you came to me last.”

“You also happen to be the only one in the band who terrifies me. For obvious reasons.”

She started to laugh. “So, you’re going around foisting your midlife crisis on people you haven’t seen in years? That’s what Teddy Tremble has come to?”

“Why does everybody keep calling this a midlife crisis? I’m thirty-eight.”

“You know, it’s funny. Every day, people come into my office to deal with issues in their relationships. They come in, they sit down, and say things like ‘My wife isn’t interested anymore’ or ‘Once a week just isn’t doing it for me.’ That’s what the majority come to me for. Not sex addiction, not curing them of some shame-inducing practice that appalls their partner, but improving the connection with the man or woman in their lives. For most of these people, helping them involves little more than a recalibration of their expectations. ‘Your wife isn’t twenty-five anymore, she’s fifty, so no, the mere sight of her naked body may not bring you to your knees.’ Or ‘Wouldn’t once a week be okay if it knocked your socks off ?’ More often than not, I’m just slowly helping people accept reality.”

“So the key to happiness is low expectations?”

“No, but the key to unhappiness is definitely unreasonable expectations.”

“I’m not unhappy. That’s not why I’m doing this. And to be honest, my expectations feel more reasonable the deeper I go.”

“The hallmark of a delusional mind.” She rocked forward onto her toes. “I can’t help you, my friend. I’m a sex therapist, not an everything therapist. You need an everything therapist.”

“You’re a bass player, Mackenzie. That’s what you are.”

In a better world, that remark would’ve awakened something inside her and she would’ve started to nod slowly, the momentum building within, her thoughts racing, an inner voice thumping Fuck yeah! That’s exactly what I am! A bass player! and she’d be swept away into the current of the bold, burnished future. Instead, she was peering at me over her glasses with a look that rendered me utterly defenseless.

“Before you say no, do me a favor. Don’t say no,” I pleaded.

With hands stuffed into the pockets of her jacket and her mouth agape, she looked everywhere for help—the passing cars, the row of restaurants and closed shops up and down the block, the night sky circling above. Her toe tapped the asphalt.

Then I remembered my glove compartment. It was the path to a place where the memories could flood like the falls, where I could turn her mind’s camera back to the glory days and seduce her with the ecstatic shiver of those times returning.

I heard myself say, “Look, I have a bag of weed in my car. It’s not mine and I can’t vouch for the quality.”

She froze, horror flowering amid bewilderment. I’d just compounded all my other offenses by proposing we do some drugs. Music and pot. How old was I?

“Bad idea,” I said, retreating. It was my second in as many minutes. “Forget I mentioned it.”

She sighed, already wearying of me. Then she tilted her head down the block. “Come on. Let’s get your stash. I live around the corner.”

Mackenzie must’ve considered herself dirtier than most people, or maybe her profession inspired the desire to come home and get clean, for at every turn in her old red Victorian, which loomed munificently over the hushed street, a carefully arranged dish displayed some type of designer bathing product. Soap blocks, soap shells, soap bombs, soap flowers, even little containers of body butter lay about the place in every direction. Their names swept you away into a tranquil land of exotica: bonsai deodorant, buttermilk bath bomb, citrus sage shampoo bar, French chocolate bath melt.

Mack took genuine delight in my misadventures in Europe. The tale inspired convulsions of silent laughter, her torso swaying back and forth but never quite toppling as a densely packed joint was passed between our pinched fingers. We were sitting on the living room rug, our backs against the sofa in a room illuminated only by a Tiffany dragonfly lamp.

“We really have a lost legion of fans in Switzerland?” she asked, bemused and incredulous.

“And not even casual fans,” I said. “They wanted to know where your solo albums were. They asked where they could find bootlegs of our shows. I was signing ticket stubs!”

“That must have been a blast.”

“I was too busy trying to escape to enjoy it.”

“Why am I not surprised?” she said. “The rest of us would’ve eaten it up, you know.”

Mack placed the joint, now a shrunken stub, in a soap dish that she’d brought onto the floor, and remarked, “I have to say, I think it’s pretty cool that one little photograph could get you writing songs again.”

“I had no choice. That picture reduced me to a joke. I couldn’t go to my grave as an object of ridicule.”

“A photograph catches one moment, Teddy, and you have had plenty of good ones.”

“And yet when I die, people will think of me and laugh.”

“Who cares? You’ll be dead.”

“I wouldn’t have given my legacy a second thought were it not for Warren calling me about that exhibit. Ignorance would’ve been such bliss.”

Mack looked doubtful. “Other than Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Hitler, I really don’t know what a legacy is or who has one. I’m just saying that if you’re really lucky, you get one miracle in this life. Seems awfully presumptuous to be asking for seconds.”

“All I want is to go out on my own terms, to not see a chump every morning in the mirror. You may think that our band’s legacy doesn’t matter, but it’s different for me. I was the one up there, front and center.”

“So, the bass player doesn’t get a legacy.”

“The band bore my name, Mack.”

“You’re breaking my heart.”

“The point is, nobody took a picture of you drooling over Doritos.”

Dizzy and mellow from the smoky haze and soapy aromas wafting together, I let my head drop backward onto the womb of the carpet.

“I’ve got to do this now. If I don’t, this thing will follow me into old age and I’ll spend the next forty years pining for something that will continue to move further and further out of reach. Time flies, Mack, and the next thing you know, you’re eighty-two and you don’t have much more of it left. We get old in a hurry, and pretty soon the music is too loud, the winter too cold, and we’re using words like ‘gorgeous’ to describe a salad instead of a woman. I need to act before the whole thing moves beyond my grasp.”

Mackenzie groaned. “Well done—pretentious and corny. But good luck organizing the world the way you want it. Stories tend to tell themselves.”

“Come on, Mack. How much fun would it be to play again?”

“Fun? This is the first I’m hearing of fun. This whole thing sounds like a grudge match. Teddy Tremble getting back at the world for premature neglect.”

I sat up and studied her, searching for traces of longing behind the scaffold of her features, for empty spaces in need of filling. “It’d be fun if you were there. That would be fun for me.”

I watched her tilt her head to the ceiling, her eyes fluttering closed.

“Don’t you miss it?” I asked.

“Clearly not as much as you have.”

“There are things I miss, but that’s not why I’m doing this. If this were just about reliving fond memories, I could probably move on. I certainly wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of scaring up Jumbo. I’m doing this because there are some things I want to change, things I want to make right.”