Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

“Something else in your favor, Teddy,” he added in a brandy-bathed whisper. “I find your agent deathly sexy. I’ll thank you not to tell Mackenzie.”

“I’d keep my distance from Alaina,” I counseled. “She’ll make you do things you don’t want to do.”

“Oh, but I like that. I want to do things I don’t want to do.”

I looked over at our agent, anchoring the rotation of the table, each faceless A&R soldier taking a turn to fawn over her when, by all accounts, it should’ve been the other way around. Colin was then drawn into another conversation, so I seized an empty chair next to her.

“You seem like you’re having a good time,” I said to her.

She was chewing on a sliver of orange peel that had served as garnish for her martini. “If this were an orgy, it’d be off to a slow start, but all things considered . . .”

“By the way, you do know that Mackenzie is in remission.”

“Completely in remission?”

I scratched at the back of my head. “Is it a continuum? I thought remission was like virginity: it’s either all there or all gone.”

Alaina hoisted her glass and took a sip. “Well, that’s the best news of the night.”

“I would agree, except it’s not news to some of us. We’ve known she’s been out of the woods for a while now.”

“Well, Ted, I suppose it’s just another act of friendship on your part that you kept that from me.”

“It also means that she probably doesn’t need you to sit on her lap.”

She gave me an Arctic once-over. “I’ll sit wherever the fuck I want.”

“I’m just saying she’s okay. If you were showering her with undue quantities of attention to make her feel better, it’s touching but, as it happens, unnecessary.”

“When I need advice on how to handle my personal relationships, yours will be the first number I’ll lose.”

It was a fair point.

“You can go and sit on her lap too if you want,” she added, tweaking me with an exaggerated frown.

“Anyway,” I said, changing the subject. “Since I have you to myself for the moment, I just want to say that whatever you had to do to make all this happen, I don’t want to know about it, but I’m grateful.”

She tilted her head. “You don’t have to sit in my lap either. We all know who did the heavy lifting here.”

“I didn’t know you did modesty.”

“And I didn’t know you did false modesty. There’s some great stuff on this record. ‘Whereabouts’ kicks ass. That could be our single. That ‘Warmth of Disease’ tune is a soundtrack-ready weepy. I don’t know why you felt compelled to write a song called ‘The Inevitable Pivot,’ but I guess it’s never too late to be an English major. It’s a winner, my little pound cake, and everyone knows it. Mature but not dated, fresh but not pathetically trend-chasing, tasteful but never overly restrained.”

Her compliments were bringing to mind the notion of contours, as if this time out it was our job to walk some sort of line. To be this one thing over here, but not be too much of this other thing over there. That smelled rather unlike art to me.

“Are we really going with Trans Am with Electric Eel ?” Alaina asked.

I’d managed to talk everyone into naming the album after that painting I’d been introduced to by the semisuicidal Duncan. Nothing I could put my finger on; it was just where my head was at that time. Somewhere out on that highway, in the backseat of that convertible, breezing into the open.

“You don’t like it?”

Alaina’s face registered indifference. “It meets my criteria: no masturbation references and no roman numerals.”

“I doubt it’ll matter,” I muttered. “It won’t be the title that keeps it out of the top ten.”

She turned and faced me. “You really are amazing. Can’t you just enjoy the moment?”

“I am,” I insisted. “Seriously. This is me enjoying the moment. This is how I enjoy moments.”

“And yet you still look a little bit like someone peed in your Wheaties. Even on the night you get a fucking record deal. These things happen every day in my world, but this is you. Haggard, old, thirty-six-inch-waist, in-bed-by-eleven-after- Laverne & Shirley -reruns you.”

“I’m a thirty-four, and during the week I can sometimes make it down to thirty-three.” I stared at her, waiting for the innuendo. Something suggestive, vulgar, taboo even. “Nothing? We’re talking about my pants here. This is where you insert some seedy proposition that goes way over the line and makes me uncomfortable.”

She flipped her bangs and crossed her legs. “Isn’t it time you grew up? You’ve got a girlfriend, for the love of Pete. Go get your dirty talk from her.”

The about-face leveled me. Battling her perfunctory come-ons had been a staple of any conversation with Alaina for as long as there’d been an Alaina. She couldn’t be going soft. The universe wouldn’t stand for it.

Then I realized she wasn’t going soft at all. She was looking out for us—for me, for Sara, Mack, the whole ragged lot. Now that I thought about it, there’d never been a time when Alaina Farber wasn’t looking out for us.

The respite of fresh air beckoned. I leaned into my agent’s ear and whispered, “I’m a whole mess of proud of you.”

“Eat me,” she said through a schoolyard sneer.

Although it felt like dawn should’ve been upon us by now, it was somehow still night. Outside the Plum, I kicked gray pebbles off the sidewalk and out into the street, contemplating the aspects of my life that were now going to change, assuming everything went according to Alaina’s design—which it usually did. I’d had less to account for and less to lose the first time around. Since then, I’d evolved, or at least changed in ways that now felt immutable. I had no desire to live the wild and turbulent life of Colin Stone; I was too old for that. (So was he.) Nor would I indulge that empty need to be on top. I’d been up there before, and the thin air can mess with your judgment as sure as a bluegrass band can hold off winter.

I called Sara. She didn’t pick up, so I left a message. “Hey. Some good news. Give me a call, or I’ll see you at home later tonight.”

When I looked up, I saw that Mackenzie had joined me. Folding her arms tightly over her breath-mint-green sweater, she complained about one of Colin’s young oily-headed cronies who kept overusing her first name. “When somebody says your name too often, you become hyperaware of how it sounds, of what a silly and random combination of syllables it is. Especially a name like mine. Mackenzie, Mackenzie, Mackenzie. Sounds like a hiccup.”

Side by side on the curb, our eyes drifted across the medley of apartment windows looming across the street, taking in the lights and silhouettes within. I thought of the beginning.

“Do you remember the first time we played together?” I asked her. “I mean, the first time ever.”

A faraway smile bloomed. “You posted a flyer in the campus record store. I was there with a friend. We were each going to buy a different Replacements album and share them. I ripped the number off the flyer and called.”

“I remember.”

“First of all, can I just say how pretentious it was to make me audition? Who did you think you were?”

“I’ve never had a convincing answer to that question.”

“You had me run through a bunch of Steve Miller Band and Tom Petty tunes. And you had your baseball hat on backwards.”

“You were smooth with the Petty, but you absolutely killed it on ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again.’ I do remember being concerned that Jumbo would scare you off. That’s why I offered you a Rolling Rock.”