Flings (12 page)

Angie eases the Saab into the exit lane. They pass below the monorail track, looking for a decent place to park. There's something ominous about downtown Miami, an abandoned feeling even on streets where the city's renaissance (Angie calls it “gentrification”) is in full swing. Not that this, where they are now, is one of those streets. Nobody's on the sidewalk; a streetlight's out. All the stores have Spanish signage and their metal gates down. Angie sees an open spot but Mike says to keep going.

They end up paying twenty-eight dollars to park in the garage at the Bayside Mall, conveniently adjacent to the arena, though Ken says they've got to “scope the lot scene” before they go inside.

Grilled cheese and veggie burritos cooking up on portable griddles set on truck beds and station wagon gates. Dread-headed guys in hoodies all over the place; Ken says half of them are cops. He's on the lookout for a friend of his—this guy Adam from their high school, doesn't Angie remember, he was in her grade—still nothing? Oh well.

A minute later a voice says, “Hey, whoa, meet the Becksteins!”

“Adam! Dude!” Ken and the guy embrace. Mike and Angie watch. Adam gives Angie a quick hug during which her arms remain firmly at her sides; then he shakes Mike's hand. The kid's wearing brown cargo shorts and skateboard shoes and an old holey T-shirt that identifies him as a staff member of a JCC youth camp in the summer of 1998, the same year as the “Mike's Song” they listened to in the car, which Ken—staunch believer in omens—will certainly take for a promising sign if he notices.

“Hey, we'll be right back,” Ken says. “Adam's got some, uh, bootlegs in his car I want to see.”

“Right,” Angie says. “We'll be over there.” She points down the row of parked cars to where two guys with guitars and a girl with a tambourine are giving an impromptu performance, playing acoustic covers of songs they're hoping to hear tonight. Mike and Angie stand near enough to hear them but not so close as to make eye contact, perchance to be obliged to throw a bill into the guitar case open like a mouth at the players' feet. Mike taps his own foot in time with the music, steals a glance at his phone.

Should he send Lori another message? He'd like to. But how many sweet nothings should you have to whisper before you get one back? He puts the phone away. It hasn't been that long. Better to play it cool.
Get it together, Mike, you fucking pussy
. That's what Barry would say.

Ken comes back empty-handed.

“Nothing you liked?” Mike asks. At first his son doesn't seem to have understood the question, but then he snaps to something like attention.

“Oh yeah, well, I heard all those shows before.”

Angie guffaws. Everyone in the lot seems to be selling something: stickers, T-shirts, necklaces, glass pipes packed in custom foam cases or laid out loose on black cloths in the dirt. They can hear the hiss of a nitrous tank somewhere nearby but out of sight. A wide-eyed girl with hairy armpits and acne around her mouth walks past them, mumbling in singsong, “Goo balls, goo balls.”

Ken looks at his family. “I'd split one,” he says, in a tone perfectly calibrated to make it unclear which one of them he's talking to or whether he's even serious.

“Your friend didn't want to walk in with us?” Angie asks.

“He doesn't have a ticket.”

“No ticket? Gee, then what's he doing here?”

“Waiting for a miracle, I guess.”

They leave the lot and head inside, make their way through the bottleneck at security, then get in an all-things-considered-not-too-terribly-bad line to buy foamy beers that cost eleven dollars apiece. Their seats are down on the floor, twenty rows back from the stage. You wouldn't believe what these tickets cost. And the ones for New Year's Eve? Forget it. A roar sweeps the audience as the house lights go down.

They open with a song Mike recognizes but can't name. It's got slowish verses that build toward this quasi-anthemic chorus that the whole crowd shouts along with. Ken produces a joint from somewhere on his person, lights it, puffs twice, then offers it to his sister. Mike is determined to be unsurprised no matter what his daughter does, but he doesn't try to hide his curiosity—he's staring at her, waiting to see. She only takes one toke, but it's a good toke, then offers the joint to Mike. She's holding her hand out but avoiding looking him in the eye—apparently unsure herself about what reaction to expect, but Mike made his decision about this earlier and so takes it without hesitation. Miranda will shit fire if she ever finds out—which fact he will remind his kids of, if and when he ever feels the need to play a card. Mike makes sure his toke is as long as his daughter's. He hacks into his fist, then tokes again.

Songs come and go. One opens with this long, sinuous guitar part that feels like walking through a curving tunnel and suspecting that the trail is doubling back on itself but not being sure. Then in a later part of the same song—he thinks it's the same song, at any rate—there are these intervals where the band stops playing for two beats while the whole audience does these handclaps and then there's this kind of chanting-wailing part—who knows what babble the lyrics are?—but then the lead singer's voice is suddenly clear as a bell and he's asking, hardly singing now, more like shouting, “Was it for this my life I sought?” and twenty-some-odd thousand people shout back at him, “Maybe so and maybe not!” Mike watches Ken, fist pumping in rhythm with the chant, screaming with what seems to be conviction. Mike can't remember the last time he saw his son so excited about anything. Figures that the one thing that does it for him would be a declaration of existential uncertainty.

The guitar solo takes off like a bird, no, like a flock of birds, and Mike's mind is adrift in the music, then away from it, the remainder of the set passing by as he thinks about a leather couch he saw at West Elm that he's going to get for the condo he's going to get after he unloads the house. Lori went with him and helped pick it out—the couch that is, though she's also gone with him to see a number of properties. He's almost made up his mind. Lori. Her downy face, wet eyes the same warm brown as the roots she lets show beneath her shock-blond hair. She likes smock blouses and matchstick jeans. Her favorite color is aquamarine. They met at a party on Mike's friend's yacht. She was pale in her bikini, somebody's wife's niece, drinking a screwdriver and standing alone. He imagines her in his new condo, a high-rise on the beach or pretty near it: A marble breakfast bar separates the living room from the kitchen, the leather couch they picked out sitting opposite a wall-mounted flat-panel TV. She's in the kitchen in the morning in her panties and an unbuttoned shirt of his, rinsing the dregs of last night's wine from a long-stemmed glass.

The ending of a song snaps him back to reality. The band starts up a new song but then they interrupt themselves a minute in so the lead singer can tell some kind of story while the drummer climbs out from behind his kit. It is revealed that the drummer is going to “play” a vacuum cleaner by sticking his face up to the hose part and letting it suck on his lips. Mike remembers teenage Ken raving about how cool it was that they did stuff like this; Mike himself always thought it sounded like second-rate Zappa gags and, seeing it live, now feels retroactively validated. The drummer is wearing a sleeveless polka-dot muumuu. The vacuum makes a sound like a dentist's drill. When it's over they play a couple more normal songs to close out the set.

The house lights go up and Angie says she's going to go find the bathroom. Mike gives her forty bucks and tells her to pick up another round of beers on her way back. Mike watches Ken staring glassy-eyed at the empty stage. Christ, Ken. His long hair's in a tight ponytail, fixed with an elastic band he borrowed from his sister; his pupils are like pits in the earth. Mike can see that Ken's hair is starting to thin in front. Soon enough it'll start to pull back. Mike's never had much cause to think about this sort of thing. The men in his family do not, as a rule, go bald. This is the opposite of Miranda's family—her father, her brother, all her uncles bare up top like someone reached in with an ice cream scoop. “Scalped,” Miranda's brother, Derek, used to say with a laugh. Probably still says—just not to Mike. And baldness travels on the maternal gene, so that'll be Ken before his thirtieth birthday, and it's all his wife's fault, and for once he'd like to say that out loud, fucking scream it, as if volume were the arbiter of truth, which, come to think of it, always has been the secret message of rock and roll. That and, of course, Never get old.

“Hey, Ken,” Mike says. “Can I ask you something?” No response. He tries again: “Ken.”

“Oh, hey, Dad, sorry, spaced there. Wassup?”

“Nothing, nothing. I just, well, I was wondering, do you know why Angie got so upset when you mentioned Brad?”

“Yeah, sorry, I shouldn't have done that.”

“But why? He was
your
friend, wasn't he?”

“I mean I guess so. But he tried to kiss her once, like not that long before he, you know.”

“I never knew that.”

“Well, duh, of course not. You're the
dad
, Dad. I shouldn't have said anything. I mean I wouldn't have, normally, but I'm pretty—” He stops himself short, looks away from Mike, and wiggles his fingers stageward; this gesture, apparently, meant to complete the sentence.

“Hey, guys.” Angie's back with the beers. She hands Mike his drink, which he takes, and his change, seven bucks, which he refuses. He tells her to put some gas in the car on the thirty-first. She shrugs and pockets the money. Ken raises his cup up and the other two move to meet his cheers.

“But what are we drinking to?” Ken asks.

“It's your cheers,” Angie says.

“Shit, I dunno.”

“To new beginnings in the new year,” offers Mike.

“Sláinte!” Ken says, happy, his unsteady hand sloshing foam onto the floor. Angie stops her cup a moment shy of contact, deftly reverses course, takes a long drink instead. Mike feels his jaw clench. The house lights, mercifully, go down.

First song of the second set it happens: the guitar serves up that signature volley of notes that they heard in the car. Mike can almost see the smooth lines arcing through the air, like when you're signing a contract and it feels like the pen has your name coiled up inside it and all you need to do is set it free. The stage lights turn the whole arena ocean-green and Ken's on his feet, tiptoes even, doing a double fist pump, his instincts and faith in the world affirmed. Angie leans over, her rebuke to him from a moment ago already ancient history, forgotten; she's wearing a grin about a mile wide now, shouting into Mike's ear, “Dad! It's your song, it's your song!” Then she's out of her chair also, arms and hips asway.

“Mike's Song” blurs into the next song and then the next. Mike might be the only person in the whole arena still sitting in his seat. His beer's in one hand, the other hand's in his pocket, tracing a fingertip around the tiny rim of the camera lens built into his phone. He takes his phone out and looks at it. There are three texts from Lori. Three! He thought he'd set the thing to vibrate, but he hadn't, and obviously he wouldn't have heard the incoming-message bleep over the music.

The first message was sent fifteen minutes ago. It says, “hell yea come over im tipsy and undressed.”

The second one, sent thirty seconds after the first, says, “Hey shit sorry that was 4 jess. She's with this girl dena we went to school with. Gotta get dressed now obvs hehe. Talk tmrw.”

Then, four minutes later: “Hope yr have gr8 nite with yr kids.”

Mike closes his fist around the phone, gets out of his seat, makes his way down the row, then the aisle, steps into the hallway, calls her—straight to voicemail. He hangs up on the outgoing message, wishing there were some way to delete the record of his missed call from her log. He goes back inside.

With the encore, set two ends up running about an hour and a half. So the whole show? Let's say three hours. Mike, though long since bored with the music, is impressed by the value the Phish give for the money. He can see why they're so popular; if this was your idea of a great night you'd probably feel like you got everything you came for and more. It's late now. Angie offers to drive home but this time doesn't insist. She lets her brother ride shotgun on account of its being “his turn” but really because she wants to stretch out in the backseat and fall asleep. Ken reclines his own seat, lolls his head back, and soon enough is sleeping, too. They're back on the highway, northbound, the miles rolling by.

Glancing over at his sleeping son, Mike notices the white cap of a prescription canister peeking out of Ken's pocket. He understands immediately that this is what that preshow meet-up with the high school buddy was about. Mike's hands are tight on the steering wheel. He's way over the speed limit. A bead of sweat draws a wet line down the back of his neck. For some reason, Brad Rosen's face appears in his mind then, bright as a firework, clear as a dream: a sallow, sad kid with bad mustache down walking through his mirror-world version of Mike's house, easing the sliding glass door open and slipping out into the yard. He loves Mike's daughter so much he almost hates her. The knife blade catches moonlight when he raises it and there's the red line blooming across his throat, unretractable, blood pouring onto the grass.

Tomorrow Lori will tell him about how good it was to see her old girlfriends; she will roll her eyes while using the word “appletini”; she will be lying to him or telling the truth. He will believe her or not believe her. They will celebrate New Year's Eve. She will lie with her head hanging off the side of the bed so he can watch her finger herself while he fucks her mouth upside down. He'll tell Barry about it and Barry will clap him on the back and tell him next time he ought to take a picture. A few hours later Barry will text him, “was serious btw. got a great little library going. plenty to trade.”