Zachary Lazar - Sway

He went inside and poured some whiskey into a glass. On the bathroom mirror, he now discovered, there was a message scrawled in red lipstick, written in Keith’s handwriting: COME DOWN to the pool! His face looked absurd behind the lipsticked words, tired and pale from a day of traveling. It was his asthma, his weak, ridiculous body, that had kept him away these five days, and now he told himself to be buoyant and relaxed, but the letters on the mirror were garish and somehow overexcited and he took a Mandrax tablet with the rest of the whiskey before going downstairs.

It was cooler by the pool, and the air felt good on his face, along with the first flush from the drink. In the darkness, Anita was sitting next to Keith on a lounge chair, smoking a cigarette while she watched him leaning over his guitar. Across from them, Mick and Marianne were sitting in a similar arrangement, wrapped up in a blanket. When she saw Brian, Anita gave him the wry smile of a hostess, embracing her knees in her arms. She seemed weirdly proud of him, or proud of herself for arranging this poolside greeting, but it was Marianne who stood up and gave him a kiss, asking him how his trip was.

“Look at the sky,” she said. “The moon. It’s perfect.”

He looked up and saw what she meant. In the dark sky was a crescent moon that sat high above the silhouettes of distant minarets. It was a view you couldn’t look at without admiring the fact that you were in Morocco.

“Come here,” said Anita.

She wore a man’s purple caftan and a single bead on a leather thong around her neck. She reached her hands out to him, leaning into her knees and almost falling forward out of the lounge chair. He grabbed her by the fingertips and held her up.

“Was it all right?” she said, looking up at him.

“What?”

“The flight. Everything. We’ve been worried about you.”

“Yes. Fine.”

She leaned into Keith and he barely moved. He was playing a B7 chord, filling in the bass line with his little finger, a difficult maneuver he kept attempting without getting it to come out cleanly.

“I’m feeling much better,” Brian said.

“Good.”

Mick rearranged the blanket around his feet as Marianne sat down beside him. “There’s a pack of journalists arriving tomorrow for a press conference,” he said.

He let go of Anita’s hands and folded his arms across his chest. “Are you kidding?”

Keith finished with his chord and smirked up at him in welcome. “Why don’t you have something to smoke?” he said.

Brian scratched at the corner of his eyebrow with his forefinger. “A little joke,” he said.

“Yeah, right, a little joke,” said Mick. “Just catching you up, sweetheart. Anyway, I thought you liked talking to the press. Rambling to the press.”

“I like it when you stop poncing around long enough that I can get a word in.”

There were bottles of wine on the pool deck. He picked one up and took a sip and then held it in his hands. Anita watched him, then burst out laughing. She put her hand on Keith’s shoulder and pressed her face to his sleeve. Keith turned his head toward her and put his hand in her hair.

“I’m glad you’re having fun,” said Brian.

She smiled at him from behind her bangs. “I am having fun.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been away for five days missing all this fun.”

He took another sip of the wine and licked his lips. No one said anything. Finally Tom Keylock leaned forward in his chair and tossed him a joint. He caught it awkwardly in his cupped hand and looked down to make sure that it was there, then he took another sip of the wine and reached into his hip pocket for the lighter.

He lit the joint and took a long, slow drag. There was nowhere obvious to sit, so he took the wine bottle and found a seat at one of the tables where a lantern burned beneath the folded-up umbrella. Keith had gone back to playing his guitar. Anita leaned her shoulder against the chair back, holding her knees to her chest, looking thoughtfully out at the swimming pool.

In their room, she sat on the edge of the bed and spoke calmly, reasonably, with the self-assurance of someone who took Pleasure in confrontation. They were just having fun, she said. He knew that they were friends, and he and Keith were friends, so why was he making things up in his mind? They weren’t old people who based their whole lives on appearances. She wanted them to get along, like they did before, but he kept making it harder and harder when he was so jealous and paranoid and strange.

He poured himself another glass of whiskey and went into the bathroom. There was the lipsticked message — COME DOWN to the pool! — the letters slanted and thick in the light from the yellow bulb. He added some bottled water to his glass and now he could picture the two of them laughing together, Keith fumbling in her bag for the lipstick, the two of them exaggerating their enthusiasm, or maybe not exaggerating it at all because he wasn’t there.

“You’re not telling me what’s really going on,” he said.

She turned to him, exasperated. “What do you want to believe is going on?”

“I want to know whether or not you’re fucking him.”

She stood up from the bed. She crossed her arms over her chest, slowly massaging her elbow.

“You’re making accusations, but you’re not thinking about what they mean. You’ve been away for five days and then you come back and expect everything to be exactly the same as it was.”

He put his glass of whiskey down on the dresser. “I was sick.”

“You were sick and it’s not easy. I know. I know it’s not your fault. But you’re always sick and then you’re always wasted and now you want to make rules for me that I don’t believe in and that you would never follow yourself.”

He hit her so hard that she stayed on the floor, her leg bent strangely at the knee, as if she had broken it. When she finally breathed, it was with a sudden high-pitched wheeze, as if she had just then caught her breath. She didn’t move. Her head hung down from her shoulders, her purple caftan twisted around her back. He grabbed her arm and hit her again, leaning over her body, unable to get a response. It was the first time he’d ever been afraid of what he’d done.

It was overcast and hot the next morning. On the pool deck, some of the band’s entourage read newspapers or sipped drinks from tall, narrow glasses like tubes. The sky was a diffuse silver haze that seemed to rise higher than the sky in London. In the shade of an umbrella, Brian was sitting with Tom Keylock while a photographer circled around him, crouched in the sunlight, taking his picture.

The air had a faint sourness, an edge of yeast. It brought on a brief shallowness of breath, a slow flipping-over sensation in his heart. For a moment, his heart seemed to be sputtering to a stop, weighted down with blood, and with its last lazy thud came a sense of abandonment, then of release.

Anita was at the far corner of the pool, moving slowly through the water, her hands sweeping in front of her half-submerged chin. She was looking ahead at Keith, who was on the other side of the deck, his shirt off and his eyes closed.

The water sparkled around her like a swirl of giant fish scales, pale green and white. A few palm fronds, yellowed and sere, floated on the surface behind her. The photographer took Brian’s picture, and he pretended to ignore him, or assumed the pose of ignoring him, going back to the newspaper that he had spread in front of him.

She kept looking at Keith. Brian knew that everyone around the pool could sense what was going on inside him.

The elevator had mirrored walls that were mostly obscured by intricate sandalwood screens. When Keith came out into the hallway, he found Mick quietly closing his door. He was pale and hadn’t showered and his face looked pressed together toward the center.