Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

The marriage lasted just over two years, and it didn’t take nearly that long for Mack to realize she’d made a mistake. She wanted to be done with the music business, and that included not being the child bride of one of its most enduring characters. The inevitable end brought relief and friendship. She decided to start over in a new city, and Pittsburgh had felt like home ever since.

“Colin and I were never right for each other,” Mack concluded. “I think we both knew that all along. He’s a sweet guy and the life of every party, but I’m not really one for parties.”

“I thought I was going to be the one with all the surprises,” I said. “But you’ve got me beat. You married Colin Stone, you got breast cancer, you dined with the Flaming Lips. I’m dealing with a lot of stuff here.”

She playfully knocked my shoulder with hers. “I find this proposition of yours rather fascinating. Outlandish, fraught with the potential to backfire and visit upon you even more embarrassment than you’ve already been through. That’s just irresistible. Besides, if you’re really willing to risk your reputation and dive back into the fray, these new songs of yours must be pretty damn good.”

“You overestimate me.”

“A mistake we’ve all made before.”

She buried her head in her hands and made weird little noises while kneading the flesh of her face. Then she popped up. “Screw it. I’m in.”

I eyed her like I hadn’t quite heard correctly.

“It was the bridge of ‘New Morning Azalea’ that sold me,” she said. “I always loved that song.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just now, when we were playing ‘Azalea,’ it hit me. This is fun. I miss this.”

“Are you fucking with me? Are you just really high?”

“My practice can wait. There will always be sex and there will always be people all twisted up about it.”

“You’re coming to this too quickly.” No pun was intended. “Just to be clear, you have cancer.”

“But the goal is to not have it for very long. You kick it out or it kicks you out.”

Assuming things progressed as expected, she had to endure only a handful more chemo treatments. She’d managed to keep her office open throughout this ordeal, although she admitted that there were occasional midsession sprints to the bathroom that she hoped didn’t leave her patients with the impression that their sexual messiness made her sick. So, except for the days when she had to be available for the IV, and the few days thereafter when she had to be available to puke at a moment’s notice, she could probably swing a stint in a band.

“Let’s be honest—in any given week, Jumbo barfs more times than I do anyway,” she posited.

I stared at her, floored. “Mackenzie Highsider, how is it that, as long as I’ve known you, your next move is always a mystery to me?”

“You know my deal,” she cautioned. “You know who I am now, what I’m going through. You know my reasons; they’re not the same as yours. If you still want me, I’m in.”

In the end, that was the root of it for her. Mackenzie’s bass line. She didn’t care about any of the untidy complexity. She just wanted to play music like it didn’t matter what came next. So what if we all needed to dab on some antiwrinkle cream before bedtime? So what if we should all go a little easier on the carbs? So what? Fuck the label and the agent. Fuck the street team and the tour manager. Fuck the Nielsen SoundScan numbers and the whores at the radio stations and the creatively bankrupt sellouts in A&R. Fuck them all. This wasn’t a space shuttle launch. Let’s just play the damn thing.

I curled her hand beneath mine. “For the record, we both know you’ve already read the collected works of Dumas.”

We strolled across her dew-drizzled lawn toward my car. The cool night air felt good against my face, reviving me with the desire to move. I knew that sleep would remain at bay for hours, so I decided I’d drive home now and arrive before morning.

Mack offered to speak with Colin and get him high on these mad plans of ours. Colin was not only still an A&R muckety-muck at MCA, but he was still tight with Sonny Rivers and, like everyone else on the planet, accepted Sonny’s word as gospel. With Sonny and Alaina having boarded the Tremble train, Colin didn’t stand a chance. This beat-up old gaggle of has-beens just might get a hard look from a major record company. We hadn’t even all been in the same room yet.

I unlocked the car and faced Mackenzie, and as I stared into the eyes in which I knew lay my rescue, I thought of the night so long ago in New York, our fateful collision with that lout from the Junction.

“Did you know Simon Weathers had a thing for you?” I said.

“What?”

“Simon Weathers. He totally dug you.”

“He did not.”

“He said so himself. Think of it, Mack. If I’d let him anywhere near you, you could be leading a totally different life now, a kept woman in the LA party scene, and doing much better drugs than the sad stash I plucked from my glove compartment.”

There was a pause. Then, “What do you mean, if you’d let him near me?”

“My band was not for the pillaging,” I told her. “You date him, the next thing you know, you’re playing bass for him.”

She yawned, shivered, and pocketed her hands. “I wouldn’t have touched that guy with a ten-foot pole. And you know I hate parties.”

“That’s something I never really got about you,” I said. “You could’ve had a different guy every night.”

She scoffed. “You’re projecting your own stereotypical male fantasy. A different guy every night doesn’t sound interesting to me. It sounds like an awful lot of work.”

“You know what I mean.”

What I meant was, I was right there all along. Could it possibly have been that she’d passed up a parade of rich and famous musicians because of secret, uncomfortable feelings for the guy standing two microphones over on the same stage? Was that anywhere near the truth?”

“That just wasn’t my thing,” she said. “For a guy, the coolest thing about being in a rock band is scoring with women. For me, the coolest thing about being in a rock band was being in a rock band. I loved my instrument and the wonderful sounds that came out of it when we all played together. I loved your songs and I loved how people gave up their evenings and their money to hear us play them. I loved seeing our records in stores. I loved hearing us on the radio. I loved going to Hamburg. I loved waking up in a strange town with the rhythms of life beating all around me while I looked on as an outsider, like a bird on a wire.” Her mouth curved knowingly. “That’s what it was for me. I was happy I did it, and I was fine when it was over. I wasn’t going to run off with Simon Weathers. I wasn’t going to run off with anybody.”

My eyes dropped to the wet blades of grass encircling my shoes. The realization hit me: Mack was not homesick for the Tremble years. She regarded her past with a pleasant nostalgia, an attic of memories best kept as such. She knew what the past was and what it wasn’t.

But worse, Mack wasn’t homesick for me, and that discovery filled me with a horrible emptiness. The torture, the regret, the reverie that I’d lugged with me from year to year because of what happened with this band, because of what happened with Mack—she, wherever in the world she’d been, had never felt it.

I’d seen one flower and invented a jungle.

As I guided my car out of the sleeping neighborhood, past the rows of dark windows and the angular jungle of rooftops, I thought of that afternoon in Arizona, still as fresh to me as if it had happened a week ago. I remembered the two of us waiting for the tow truck, how she sat cross-legged on the hood while I leaned next to her with my arms folded, both of us gazing out at the pink wallpaper sky, a dusty desert wind breathing sand against our clothes. When I turned and placed a hand on each of her legs, gently pulling her toward me by the bend in her knees—and I will never know what fortified me with the courage to do it—there was the briefest resistance, a jolt of surprise in the buckling of her eyebrows. But then her mouth fell into mine. She tilted her head to kiss me, cupping my face in her hands as my arms snaked under her shirt to feel the skin of her hips.