How to Kill a Rock Star (28 page)

Somehow Loring managed to keep me from completely fal ing apart. As a friend, his attention to detail was flawless. He went running with me, checked up on me at work, made sure I ate, and on weekends he would eclipse the bounds of compassion and pathos by inviting me to Vermont with his family.

I never went to Vermont. Between Loring’s explanation to his relatives and my own evasiveness, what the Blackmans knew of the situation was highly skewed and, I figured, would only produce
Three’s Company
-like confusion.

Everyone knew Loring had feelings for me. They knew Paul and I had split up. And they knew Loring was the supposed catalyst for the split—a rumor he was under strict orders not to deny. Lastly, they knew I was bunking at Loring’s apartment. But the situation was incomprehensible to al except Sean and Walker. They were the only ones who got straight answers.

“Daddy,” Sean said, “does Eliza live here now?”

“She’s staying for a while.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s a friend and she needs a place to live. And that’s what friends do, they help each other out.”

“She doesn’t have a house?”

“Not right now.”

“What happened to it?”

“Someone else is living there.”

“Who?” Walker asked, suddenly interested in the conversation. “The boy with the shiny belt?” It’s amazing what kids remember, I thought.

“That boy’s name is Paul,” Loring told his son.

“Paul!” Walker yel ed the name with a series of energetic nods.

“Where’s Paul?” Sean said.

Loring picked Sean up and kissed his head. “Paul’s getting ready to go on tour.”

I waited for Loring to explain what “going on tour” meant. Then I realized Sean and Walker already knew.

They’d spent half their little lives on tour.

The Friday before Bananafish was scheduled to depart for San Francisco, Vera cal ed me at work and asked me to meet her for lunch.

I’d been avoiding Vera. I was afraid of al the questions.

But I missed her. And earlier that day Lucy had gotten wind of my new living situation. She’d stopped me in the hal and said, “I heard you and Junior final y came out of the closet,” and I knew if I didn’t take time to see my friend, I was apt to murder Lucy before the clock struck twelve.

Putting on a happy face, I met Vera at a diner on Ninth Avenue that smel ed like retro coffee—what coffee used to smel like before it got hip.

“This place stinks like Folgers,” Vera said when she walked in.

The next three words out of her mouth were: “So, how’s Lori?”

“Fine. Good. Great.” I tried to sound normal, and I was obscuring my face with the menu so Vera wouldn’t be able How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08

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24to read my expressions. “I mean, wel , he’s going to Vermont tonight. With the boys. But he’s great.” While we waited for a server, Vera pul ed a package of peanut M&Ms from her purse, poured half the bag into her palm and offered me the rest.

“Start talking,” she said.

I turned down the candy and went on about work. “I’m final y getting some good assignments. Lucy stil hates me, of course. But Terry thinks I’ve got a voice. That’s what he said. He likes my voice. I might get to interview David Bowie in April.”

I thought that would distract Vera. David Bowie was one of her favorites. Or maybe I was trying to spark my own interest. A year earlier I would’ve been doing cartwheels over the chance to interview David Bowie. But, talking about it with Vera, I felt nothing.

Maybe it was true what Paul said about dreams. When they come true in reality, they never feel the same as they do when you imagine them.

“I don’t mean
work
,” Vera said.

Tel ing Vera what she wanted to hear turned out to be easier than I’d anticipated. I made up an elaborate, off-the-cuff story about how I’d been confused, that between the wedding, the tour, and then Loring’s wooing, it was al too much and I just cracked.

Two at a time, Vera ate her peanut M&Ms. Except for the red ones. These, she al eged, were made from the guts of dead bugs. She put the red ones in a pile next to the salt shaker. “I’m not here to judge you, you know that. I love you no matter what happens. I just want to make sure you’re making the right decision.” Vera accidental y put a red candy in her mouth. She didn’t notice and I didn’t know whether to tel her.

“I am,” I said. “Anyway, al is fair in love and war, right?”
It was, by far, the dumbest cliché I had ever uttered. It was an insult to love and an inadmissible exoneration of war.

And certainly history proves that there’s nothing fair about either one.

Sliding my hand across the table, I squeezed Vera’s hand.

I wanted Vera to know things she couldn’t know. I wanted her to know the truth.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing. Just thanks, that’s al .”

I tried to arrange Vera’s red M&Ms into the shape of a P but there weren’t enough. The closest I could get was a lowercase l, or maybe it was a capital I. Either way I took it as a devastating omen.

“Have you seen him?” I asked.

“Paul? I saw him last night. I see him every night.”

“Is he al right?”

Vera laughed glibly. “Hmm.
No
.”
Forget that stupid saying about it being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at al . Letting Paul go felt like the end of the world, and there were nights when I wished I’d never met him.

The day my twenty-eighth birthday rol ed around, I would have been content to let it slip by in abeyance, but Michael and Vera insisted I celebrate with them, and the three of us met at a Mexican restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue for an agonizing meal.

Because Michael was getting ready to leave, he and Vera were in a lovey-dovey mood, holding hands and feeding each other tastes of this and that, sharing margaritas. I wanted to push them both into a deep manhole and close the lid.

And Michael had taken to pretending Paul didn’t exist.

Al he talked about was how he and Vera were going to get a dog as soon as he got back from the tour, and how they couldn’t decide what kind to get, as Michael wanted something smal , conducive to apartment living, whereas Vera wanted a “real” dog.

“If it’s less than twenty pounds, it’s a rodent,” she said.

Vera talked about the weather in Brooklyn as if it were a continent away, and then spent the remainder of dinner tel ing me about a corporate law test she’d been studying for al week.

I asked the waitress for a box of crayons and tried to do
the maze on the back of the children’s menu, but I kept hitting dead ends.

Dinner ended without one mention of Paul or Loring.

Later that night, while I was trying to beat Walker’s high score on
Sonic the Hedgehog
, Loring cal ed from Vermont.

“The boys want to tel you something,” he said.

Walker got on first and sang a mangled version of

“Happy Birthday” while Sean mumbled in the background, sounding just like his father. After Walker gave his brother the phone, Sean told me about the walkie-talkies he got for his last birthday. Then he said, “We’re making popcorn.

Here’s my dad okay bye.”

“How did you know it was my birthday?”

“I have my ways,” Loring said. “Hey, would you mind looking up a phone number for me? My book is in the nightstand, left side of my bed.”

The nightstands on either side of Loring’s bed were two square cubes made of burnished oak, with little mesh doors that opened in front.

I checked the first cube. “It’s empty,” I said, staring at a bare shelf.

“Are you sure you’re on the left side of the bed?”

“Wel , it’s the left side if you’re in the bed. You know, facing the TV.”

He laughed. “Try the other left side.” Instead of crawling across the mattress and messing it up, I walked around. There were a few books inside the cube, along with a pair of broken glasses, a toy car, and a notebook-sized box wrapped in white tissue paper.

“Happy Birthday,” he said.

I shook my head even though no one could see me.

“Loring, I can’t.”

“You have to. It took me hours to find it. You’l hurt my
24feelings if you don’t at least open it.” I sat down on the floor, turned the gift over a few times, and shook it. Nothing rattled. “What is it?”

“
Open
it.”

The extent to which I was touched by Loring’s gesture surprised me. I tore the paper along the seam where it had been taped together. Underneath the wrapping I felt glass, and I could see the back of a frame on the other side. I lifted it up and turned it around. A tear fel down my cheek and splashed over the word
sky
.

In my hands, under the glass, was a piece of paper containing the handwritten words to “The Day I Became a Ghost.” The paper had been torn out of a spiral notebook and stil had the frayed ends on the left side. Phrases had been crossed out here and there, new ones written on top of old ones, and there were thin lines drawn through a never-before-seen verse that hadn’t made the final cut.

“I know that’s your favorite song,” Loring said. “Those are the original lyrics.”

I sniffled.

“Eliza, are you crying?”

“No.”

“Yes, you are. Shit, I’m sorry. I was only trying to cheer you up.”

“You did. It’s just that, wel , sometimes happiness hurts.” A little before midnight the doorman buzzed me.

“There’s a Mr. Hudson looking for you.”

“
What
?” I said. “He’s
here
?”

“Should I send him up?”

“No! Tel him I’m not answering.”

But I heard Paul shout, “I’m not leaving until I see her!” Then, sounding like he’d set his lips right on top of the mouthpiece: “Tel your fucking boyfriend to cal the goddamn police if he wants! They’l have to drag me out kicking and screaming!”

He was obviously drunk, and bordering on disorderly.

“I’l be right down.”

Paul was standing near the reception desk, examining the doorman’s pen as if he’d never seen a writing instrument.

As soon as he heard the elevator he turned around. He was glassy-eyed and off-balance, and al I wanted to do was put my hand on his heart, drag him upstairs, and show him that the original opening line to “The Day I Became a Ghost” wasn’t
I was only a child when I learned how to fly
but the more applicable
All I ever wanted was to be able to fly
.

I led Paul out the door, and neither of us said a word while we crossed the street. Once we made it to the other side, Paul stopped to stare at the building. He was babbling incoherently. The only words I caught were “fucking uptown” and “pancreas.” He stil had the doorman’s pen in his hand.

“Are you in
love
with him?” he said, his head lifted to the sky, his pronunciation of the word
love
like a tennis bal he’d just lobbed into the air.

I bit the sides of my cheeks and kept walking until we were at the entrance to the park. Paul stopped when I did, landing under a street lamp that cast a heavenly yel ow nim-bus around his head. The pen was gone. He’d either put it in his pocket or dropped it.

“How long this has been going on?” he said. “Since the tour? The interview?” He tried to kick a garbage can but missed by a foot. “When did you start
fucking
him, Eliza?” I didn’t reply, and he seized me, not roughly, but desperately. “How about showing a little remorse then, huh? How about pretending that at some point over the last year and a half you actual y gave a damn about me?” I could smel something hot and cinnamony on his breath. Big Red. He was chewing gum and I wanted to open
25his mouth and take the gum and keep it under my tongue until he got back from the tour.

He grabbed my hand and slammed it palm-down into his chest. “
Can you feel that
?”

I didn’t know what he was al uding to, but I couldn’t feel anything through his coat—it was as though his heart had stopped—and it threatened to break me down while I twisted out of his arms.

“Don’t do this to me, Eliza. Please. I
need
you.” I looked at Paul. He was crying.

“You don’t need me,” I said, wondering whether or not I believed it.

He gripped my face and kissed me. But it was a hard, painful kiss. A severe and bitter kiss. A kiss that seemed so black, so final, it was like death.

“Happy fucking Birthday.”

He spit his Big Red into the trash and then disappeared into the park. As soon as he was out of sight I tried to find the gum but it was too dark, there were too many liquids spil ing out over the garbage, and as usual I just gave up.

I convinced myself it was a victory. But Loring cal ed it a pyrrhic victory, won at too great a cost.

“They teach you that word at Yale?” I said during what had become our nightly chess game.

“Whether or not your sacrifice is worth the price remains to be seen. And unless you tel him the truth now, you could be waiting a long time to find out.”

“You act like I have a choice.”

“Do you real y think you don’t?”

What I had was hope and denial, and sustaining just the right amount of these devices is what had enabled me to endure the days leading up to Bananafish’s departure. “Once Paul is gone,” I said, “it’l get easier.” Loring took one of my knights. “How long do you plan on keeping up this charade?”

“Just until July.”

“July,” he said. “
July
?”

Deciding whether to move my rook to take one of his pawns, or to sacrifice my knight to take his bishop, I explained my plan: I would wait until Paul returned in July, tel him everything then, and hope for the best. Although, according to Vera, there was talk of a European tour in the fal , which could complicate things al over again.

“Eliza,” Loring sighed,“don’t you see how ridiculous this is?”

“You don’t understand,” I said, choosing to eliminate the
25bishop. “Someday Paul wil thank me for saving him.”

“That’s pathetic. Not to mention self-righteous.”

“There’s nothing self-righteous about offering up my happiness so that Paul can realize his dreams.”

“That’s even more pathetic,” he said. “Besides, are they his dreams or yours?”