How to Kill a Rock Star (24 page)

“Anyone ever say you look like him? In the dark, anyway.”

“They usual y say he’s better looking.” Whoever
they
are, they’re right, I thought. The guy was a mutant Loring. His features were the same shape, but the sizes were off. Smal er eyes. Bigger teeth. Fifteen extra pounds. And his hair was a drab version of Loring’s thick, shiny-bronze locks.

I started walking away, and mutant Loring, who was eying the laminated pass around my neck, said, “Ten bucks says your name’s Eliza.”

I froze, not sure whether to be amused or spooked.

Mutant Loring extended his hand. “Leith Blackman.”

“Oh.” I nodded. “The only Blackman I haven’t met yet.” Leith and I chatted outside the bus for a few minutes.

Or rather, Loring’s brother chatted and I listened while he
20fil ed me in on al the details of his life. He was four years younger than Loring, single, and in town cutting a documen-tary on the Smithsonian.

Leith may not have had Loring’s looks, but he certainly annunciated better. “By the way,” he said. “I caught some of your boyfriend’s show.

Impressive.” He opened the pizza box and offered me a slice.

“No, thanks. I was just on my way to back to the bus. It was nice meeting you.”

“You, too,” Leith said. “I’m sure I’l see you around.”

“Paul, I threw up on a skycap’s shoes! Just
thinking
about a forty-five-minute flight from Cleveland to New York and I spil ed my cookies al over the man’s loafers. Imagine what would happen if I had to fly every day. I’d have a heart attack.

I’d
die
.”

“Holy Hel , you won’t die.”

Paul was sitting on the bus, in Angelo’s bunk, his hands tearing through his hair. Standing above him, I could see his white-blue eyes pointing up at me, reminding me, as they often did, of flashlights. Aligned with the severe angle of his nose, the effect was one of a man possessed.

“You
promised
,” he said with the crushed disappointment of a child.

I hadn’t wanted to have this conversation until we got back to New York, but my brother had to offer his unwelcome opinion. “Dream on,” I’d heard Michael say as he and Paul boarded the bus. “There’s no way you’l get my sister on that plane.”

Angelo had run off with a leggy brunette he’d met backstage, and Michael and Burke were waiting for Paul to finish up with me so we could al go celebrate. I shut the curtain that separated the bus’s living quarters from its sleeping quarters and said, “We’l be home tomorrow. Can we talk about
this when we have more privacy?”

“I don’t care who hears me,” Paul shouted. “I have no intention of spending the first half of my year as a newly-wed away from my wife. What’s the point of being together if we’re going to live separate lives? You know what Loring told me? He told me it’s impossible to maintain a relationship like that. You
have
to get on the plane.”

“You can’t make me get on a plane. Besides, I have a job, remember? I can’t just take off for four months.” Paul said, “This has nothing to do with your job and you know it.”

I knelt down and rested my chin on his lap. “You won’t be leaving for almost six weeks. We’l spend every second together until then, I promise.”

“Not acceptable.” He stood up, looking like he wanted to pace, but there was no room. “Eliza, you can’t go through life like this. Do you know that on an annual basis, donkeys kil more people than planes?”

“Oh, yeah? Wel , do you know that between 1975 and 1981, more than ten percent of the toxicological tests on pilots were positive for alcohol?”

He rol ed his head in a circle. “Jesus,
where
do you get this shit?” He made a growling noise that meant his patience was shot. “Listen, I don’t want to demean what happened to your parents, and I know I could never begin to imagine what it was like to lose them like that, but Michael stil flies.

He’s okay, right?”

It wasn’t just my parents’ il -fated flight holding me back.

What was also swirling through my mind was the terror I’d felt standing on the corner of Broadway and Houston Street watching American Airlines flight 11 aim for the World Trade Center.

Both horrifying events pointed to an unpredictable world where terrible things are completely out of a person’s control, How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08 5:00 PM Page 208

20and I didn’t know how to surrender to that.

Paul must have seen what the conversation was doing to the little equanimity I had. He pul ed me up from the floor, held me, and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” kissing the crown of my head in between each apology. “I just want us to be together. You know that, right?” Sure, I knew. But I didn’t think Paul understood fear.

Fear, to Paul, was an occasional lapse of cocky-bastard confidence—it was subway grates and sel ing out. For me, fear was fettering, but it also afforded a strange, almost placid consolation, and a belief that the trauma was too deep to ever have to be faced, which, at times, created a zone of comfort around me, one I obviously didn’t have the power or the guts to relinquish.

“Drugs!” Paul cried. “Just this once, Eliza. A couple of pil s and a Bloody Mary and I swear to God you won’t know the difference between flying on a plane and riding the merry-go-round in Central Park.”

I felt trapped by the bus, by Paul, and by my anxiety. I couldn’t catch a good breath and was afraid that if I didn’t get outside I was going to start hyperventilating.

This is what it would feel like to be inside a 737, I thought. My hands were shaking as I hurried to put on my shoes.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Paul snapped.

I grabbed my coat and Paul, in turn, pushed past me as if we were in a race to see who could get off the bus the quickest. He split the curtain in half and made his way down the aisle, muttering, “goddamn this” and “goddamn that” and “goddamn” something about his pancreas.

“Let’s go celebrate,” he barked at the Michaels, both of whom got up and fol owed him like disciples. By the time I limped down the steps on my stil -sore ankle, the three of them were halfway across the parking lot.

Outside, the cold air was a relief. Thinking I should stay close to the bus, I sat about ten yards away, on the hood of a dirty Camaro, and watched a man in the window of the hotel across the street. For distraction I invented a life for the stranger: He worked in banking, had a wife and two kids at home, drank scotch, liked to watch dirty movies when he was out of town but lied and told his wife he didn’t, and he’d read every book Tom Clancy had ever written.

Eventual y the man’s failure to do anything but remove his tie caused me to lose interest, and for diversion I turned to the soggy Chinese takeout menu someone had left on the Camaro’s windshield, but that only made me hungry, so I closed my eyes, bowed my head, and prayed for strength and courage and some kind of baffling
Star Trek
miracle of flight that would al ow me to move quickly through space and time without having to put al my faith in a five-hundred-thousand-pound hunk of metal.

Loring didn’t know if he should approach her. Her eyes were closed, her head was down, and she didn’t look like she wanted company. But he had to walk past her to get to the bus.

It would be rude not to say hel o. And he questioned her safety, sitting alone in the middle of an empty parking lot.

He stepped closer and she looked up. Her dark eyes were tired and watery, and she only pretended to smile.

“Everything al right?” Loring said.

She nodded, using the edge of her sleeve to wipe her cheek.

“I heard about the Drones gig,” he said. “Paul must be ecstatic.”

“Oh, he’s ecstatic al right.” Her voice was a double layer of caustic overtones and discordant tumult.

“This probably isn’t the safest place for you to be hanging out.” Loring looked at his watch and then pointed to the hotel. “I’m meeting my brother in the coffee shop…”

“I met your brother.”

“I know, he told me.” Loring scratched his temple. “Why don’t you come and eat with us?”

She started to shake her head, but then dropped her chin and bit her lip—a gesture that struck Loring as saturnine.

“Actual y, I am hungry.”

On their way to the hotel, Eliza held onto Loring’s arm; he felt a rising tension in his jeans and began trying to recite How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08

5:00 PM Page 211

America’s capital cities to himself, listing them in alphabet-ical order by state, hoping it would help move the blood back up to his brain.

Alabama, Montgomery. Arizona, Phoenix. Arkansas, Little Rock.

They walked through the lobby of the hotel and straight into the almost-empty restaurant, where everything was a different, depressing shade of orange: carotene seat cush-ions, pumpkin wal paper, apricot-and-bile menus.

Leith was seated at a table in the farthest corner of the room. He stood up and put on his coat when he saw Eliza.

“Was it something I said?” she joked.

“I already ate. The pizza, remember? I only agreed to come over here so
he,”
Leith jerked his head at Loring, “didn’t have to eat alone. I’l catch you guys later.” A young waitress dropped off menus and Eliza said,

“What are the chances you have anything Chinese? Sweet and sour chicken? Fried rice?”

The waitress, whose hair color came close to matching the wal s, seemed to think she was being gibed at. “We have
regular
rice. Like, the
white
kind. And I can bring you some soy sauce.” But then she recognized Loring and her attitude did an about-face. “Actual y, I could ask the cook and maybe—”

“Forget it,” Eliza said. “What’s the soup of the day?”

“Corn chowder.”

She settled on the Roman omelet with rye toast and no butter. Loring ordered a club sandwich and a bowl of the soup, and no sooner did the waitress bring the chowder than a pretty girl and her not-nearly-as-attractive friend appeared.

They told Loring they’d driven in from Richmond to see his show and were staying the night in the hotel. They wanted him to sign their shirts.

“Right here,” the pretty girl said, pointing to a spot that
21was probably her nipple.

Eliza exhaled loudly and with contempt, and Loring tried not to laugh as he reluctantly obliged the girl’s request, only he scribbled his signature on her sleeve, hoping she and her friend would then have the decency to go away. He resented the discontinuity brought on by the girls’ arrival. The tour ended in a day and who knew when or if he’d see Eliza again. Al he wanted was to sit across from her without interruption. They didn’t even have to talk. He just wanted to
be
with her.

The girls lingered at the table, the pretty one doing a lot of chattering. She told Loring that her sister’s boyfriend had been a junior at Yale when he was a freshman, as if this somehow formed a bond between them.

“Brady Meltzer. He says he knew you.” Loring shrugged. The name didn’t ring a bel .

The girl slid a smal piece of paper under the salt shaker, prompting Eliza to sit up and lean across the table. And then she did exactly what Loring had a feeling she was going to do—she reached down and seized the note.

“Christy and Janis,” Eliza read aloud. “Room 271. Is this a take-your-pick kind of offer or a two-for-one special?” Loring buried his mouth in his fist; Christy’s face went ashen. She grabbed the note out of Eliza’s hand and stormed away, her friend fol owing like a puppy behind her.

“Sorry,” Eliza said. “I hope you didn’t want that. I’m not in a very patient mood.”

Loring shook his head, wishing he could have attributed her umbrage to a secret crush, rather than what was clearly repulsion with those less reverent than she.

“That happens a lot, doesn’t it? Girls offering themselves to you?” She waited for Loring to nod. “I mean real y, you could be sitting here trying to have a nice, quiet meal with your girlfriend, and they stil have the nerve to proposition
you like that. Are they stupid or just downright mean?” Loring decided that for the remainder of the meal he was going to pretend Eliza was his girlfriend.

“Dover,” he said, although he hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Delaware.”

She set her elbow on the table, rested her chin on top of her fist, and stared at his bowl of soup while he ate. It was the kind of look that, had he taken the bowl away and asked her to describe what the soup looked like, she never could have done it. He knew she was thinking about Paul and for the first time in his life he experienced a malignant envy that felt like a saber-tooth tiger gnawing on the inside of his torso and was so intense, malice seemed like the only con-ceivable relief.

Back in the Stone Age, Loring could have instigated some kind of Darwinian, alpha-male showdown with Paul.

He was older, tal er, stronger, and survival of the fittest might have given him the advantage. But here, in the middle of D.C., he was powerless against his unwitting opponent. That he actual y liked Paul only made it worse.

Loring needed to get Eliza Caelum out of his system. He needed to throw in the towel, step out of the ring, and accept defeat. This meal is a farewel dinner, he told himself. A Last Supper in this rotting tangerine of a room. Enjoy it now because after tomorrow it’s al over. After tomorrow you wil never contact her again.

“Loring?” she said quietly, knocking him out of his internal diatribe. “Have you ever said yes to any of those girls?” The question seemed to contain a subtext Loring couldn’t decipher. He shook his head. “You know what I cal that?

Herpes on a stick.”

“Did you ever cheat on Justine?”

21He set his spoon down and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Do you ask everyone such personal questions, or do you just like to pick on me?”

She gave him a coy smile that disappeared as fast as it came. “Are you going to answer me?”

Of course he was going to answer her. He would have given her his ATM code if she’d asked for it. “No. I never cheated on Justine.”

“Not even a little kiss?”