I Knew You'd Be Lovely (17 page)

“Allow me to declare this a disaster in advance.” Zeb is standing in the entrance to the Oak Bar at the Hermitage Hotel, holding a guitar case and a carry-on. I rise from my chair, abandoning a laptop, a highball, and the plans I've been making to cover the following contingencies: Zeb misses his flight, Zeb shows up with a showgirl, Zeb shows up drunk, Zeb shows up with a drunk showgirl, Zeb sends a man dressed as a singing gorilla to take his place. His glance has a sideways cast, and I know he's looking for Debra-Lynn.

“She's already up in the room,” I say. “I thought it might be best if you and I had ourselves a cocktail first.”

“I'm telling you, Walt, this whole idea is a mistake,” he says. “She will sabotage any project she's associated with. Her only joy is the misery of others. The woman has a tabloid heart.”

I pull out a chair, and he sits. “That attitude isn't going to make things any easier,” I say.

“Easier? Nothing in heaven, hell, or anywhere in between is going to make this any easier,” he says, picking up the cocktail menu. He takes out his glasses, and I can't help but wonder how much of my predicament shows on my face. I haven't had a hit song since 1998, and I'm on the most-wanted list of seven different collection agents, not to mention my possibly mob-affiliated landlord. But that's not the best part, the new part.

“I wasn't going to tell you this,” I say.

“You always say that whenever you're about to tell me something anyway.”

“Catherine's pregnant.”

Zeb whumps the table. “Well, what do you know. How did that happen?”

“So her tapped-out credit cards and my puny honorariums aren't going to cut it anymore.”

“Honorariums?” he says. “You get those?” While I'm trying to get him to pay attention, his only concern is flagging down the waitress. Before he and Deb got hitched, whenever we finished a set, his first words were always the same: “Where is the booze and where are the women?”

I take his hand and look him in the eye. “We're on a mission here,” I say. “A very important mission.”

Back when I used to do the festival circuit with Zeb and Deb, as their opening act—back when everything they touched turned platinum—they promised they'd collaborate with me on a song. So now, even though they haven't spoken to each other in over two years, even though it's
practically a violation of a restraining order for them to be in the same state, I'm calling in my chits, asking for the favor. Maybe it's insanity, but maybe it's my only hope.

Zeb gives up on the waitress and finishes my highball for me. “Did I ever tell you about the time she convinced herself I was cheating on her, and cut the crotch out of every pair of pants I owned?”

“Let's try to stay focused,” I say. “We don't have time to wallow in the past.”

“I have more fun there,” he says. He slaps a pack of cigarettes on the table so they'll be ready when he needs them. “Perhaps we should discuss my fee,” he says. We hadn't discussed his fee because I hadn't considered paying him a fee. Springing for a weekend at the toniest hotel in Nashville seemed fee enough.

“I'll be paying you in gin and tonics,” I say, and finally catch the eye of Sally, a bare-armed brunette with a honeysuckle voice.

“Not even an honorarium?” he says. A slow smile spreads across his face. “My fee is that you name the kid after me.”

I have no idea if he's serious. Zebulon got his name not from the Bible, nor from Zebulon Pike—who never actually reached the summit of Pikes Peak—but from a poker game. His mother, eight months pregnant, was standing at his father's elbow when his father lost a final hand to a pair of nines, held by a man named Zebulon Smith. This was the nadir of a long losing streak, during which the young couple had mortgaged nearly everything they owned. The victor, perhaps in a moment of pity, had
agreed to let them off the hook on one condition: The unborn child would bear his name.

“You're joking,” I say.

“I am serious as whiskers on a shark.”

“Zeb, remember, the pregnancy's a secret,” I say. “No one's supposed to know. And I'm having a lot of trouble with the whole marriage idea.” When I first told Catherine I saw conventional life, the standard white-picket-fence thing—marriage—as a bit of a trap, she said: “Have you ever considered that the unmarried, unconventional life is
also
a trap?”

“Just name the kid after me, and I'll give this my best shot,” Zeb says. “No—I will
deliver.
”

In the old days, back when they were the barn-burning, show-stopping success story of the lower forty-eight, the mighty duo could whip off an award-winning song in their sleep. Zebulon and Debra-Lynn were the top of the heap. They'd played everywhere, from the Louisiana Hayride to the Grand Ole Opry herself. Their love songs, and their love story, were legendary; there wasn't a waitress in all of Nashville who hadn't heard of Zeb & Deb. High school sweethearts, separated by fate, reunited in a guitar shop on Nashville's Lower Broadway. For a while everything seemed perfect, like the sappy ending to a country love song. Marital bliss, material success, fame from bridge to bridge. Then came the kind of divorce you read about in gossip magazines, with a mean-spiritedness as outlandish as the love it had replaced. Recording-studio vendettas, pet custody battles, even an alleged poisoning attempt. It was payback for every corny love song they'd ever written. No: It was
as if they were atoning for every hack lyricist since someone first rhymed
moon
and
June
. After breaking up their act, neither one had succeeded in bottling the lightning solo. Gradually they retreated from the public eye, and appeared to have quit writing altogether. Until now. I hoped.

In the elevator, Zeb stares at his boots.

“I realize you haven't seen each other in a while,” I say.

“Buddy, I'm way ahead of you. I brought my airsick bag from the plane.” He pulls a neat, square bag out of his back pocket, and I feel a bizarre surge of nausea.

“I'm telling you,” he says. “If she pulls any of her funny business, I can't be held—”

“She won't. She won't, I promise. In fact, she told me she's sorry—for everything that happened. At the end.”

“You're lying.”

“Okay, I'm lying,” I say. “But please—
please
. Let's just try to get through the next forty-eight hours as painlessly as we can.”

“I don't think that's possible,” he says. “I don't mind telling you, I think the entire cosmos is against us here.”

When we get to the door to the room, we both just stand there. It took a titanic amount of wheedling to make this reunion happen, but now that the hour has arrived, I want to run. I force myself to give a single rap with my middle knuckle.

“Deb?” No answer. Zeb eyeballs the room-service tray she's left on the floor, where there's a linen napkin with a triangle of steak peeking out.

“See? Carnivore,” he whispers, just as Deb opens the door. She's wearing a silky green dress, and her lips have that magazine-ad sheen. Deb's pushing fifty but could pass for thirty-five. Zeb's pushing fifty but could pass for sixty.

“Well, hello,” she says to me. She doesn't look at Zeb.

“Hello, beauty,” I say. We kiss each other on the cheek as I enter, and the door shuts behind us, leaving Zeb out in the hallway. I squeeze Deb's hands. “Hold that thought,” I say.

Zeb is frozen where I left him. “I can't do it,” he says. “She's too toxic. I don't think I can be in the same room with her.”

I am a grown man, thirty-nine years old, from a seventh-generation Southern family. But I am not proud. I drop to my knees and gaze up at him.

“You promised me you would deliver,” I say.

Zeb reaches into his coat pocket, pulls out one of those miniature booze bottles they give you on airplanes, and tilts it back. Then he lifts me by my armpits, and we go in.

The three of us settle around a coffee table where Deb has set out a ceramic pot and two teacups. No one says anything; Zeb and Deb have yet to make eye contact. From my backpack I pull out some sheets of paper and hand each of them a pencil.

“So,” I say. I hold my pencil purposefully, as if to set an example. I've never been much of a leader—“Born Follower” was my hit song from 1998—but I know I'm the captain of this doomed misadventure. Captain McGlue.

“I thought we'd try to write something hysterically
funny, but also heartbreaking, with some unexpected tenderness, maybe toward the end. But not at all maudlin. That rhymes.”

“Jumping Jesus!” says Zeb. His face has an expression of such profound disappointment that for a second, he reminds me of my father. I flip over the page on which I've written:
Exact nature of hilarity yet to be determined
.

“What you need to do at the outset is try to write the worst horseshit you possibly can,” he says.

Debra-Lynn lifts her bone white teacup and takes a sip. “And you just might succeed,” she says. Her lips form a perfect polite-society smile.

Zeb glares at me. His face says mutiny. My face says mercy. It says:
Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me
. It says:
All right, I'll name the kid Zebulon
.

“Some people build entire careers,” Zeb says, “out of inventing new clichés. Scarce few are truly original.” He's looking at me, but speaking to Deb.

Deb sets down her teacup. “Originality is just a sign of not enough information,” she says. She's also looking at me. They have yet to look at each other.

“They can say what they want about me,” says Zeb, “but they'll never say I pandered to the marketplace.”

“Ha!” says Deb. “This from the man who wrote ‘An Oddness of Ducks' and a song about a graveyard for roadkill?”

“Are you suggesting that a children's song about interesting plural nouns was pandering to the marketplace?” Now he's looking at her.

She looks at him, too. “I'm saying that in some cases,
originality is hard to come by. Not much rhymes with
flaccid
.”

“As usual, my cherub, you are fantastically misinformed.
Acid, placid, Hasid
. And that's just off the top of my head—”

“Okay!” I say, slapping my thighs. “Good that we're thinking about rhymes. That's an excellent place to start.” But the floodgates have been opened, and Deb cuts me off.

“Walt, do you know the moment I realized the enormity of my misjudgment in marrying Zeb? It was on our honeymoon. We were in Mexico, out to dinner at a four-star restaurant, and in between the entrée and dessert, over candlelight, the man seated to your right told me how much better the world would be if women weren't allowed to vote. You may think I'm kidding. I am not. That's the sort of thing this man—if we can even call him that—thinks is appropriate to say to his new bride. I should have up and left right then.”

Zeb hops to his feet. “You always take that out of context! I was trying to make a point about rationality. Women let their emotions cloud things. That's all I was saying.”

“On our honeymoon,”
Deb repeats. She's moving her hand in a flurried way that suggests she'd be holding a cigarette, if she hadn't given up smoking ten years ago.

Zeb pulls out his Pall Malls. He never gave up smoking. Deb turns to him in disgust. “You know you can't smoke those in here.”

Zeb lights up, takes a drag. “Darling, if you give up
smoking, drinking, and loving, you don't actually live longer. You just feel like you do.”

“Make him stop,” she says to me, “or I'll leave.”

“Let her go!” Zeb cries. “I wrote all the songs. She mixed the drinks. Go on, ask her. She'll tell you.” He takes another Smirnoff out of his pocket—it's as if he has a clown car of them in there—and swallows its contents in one swig. Deb stares at me as he begins listing songs. “ ‘Crazy in the Good Way'—mine. ‘Gin and Tonic for the Soul'—mine. ‘Lame Duck Boyfriend'—mine. ‘The Big Bang of My Life.' ‘Born to Be Kissed.' ‘The Last Ice Cube in Hell.' ‘Everything But Married.' Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.”

Deb stands up. “I'm leaving,” she says. She turns to Zeb. “Way to come through for your friend.”

I'm about to formulate a plea involving the souls of my dead ancestors when I have an idea. “Which one of you wrote ‘Mistake'?” I say. Neither of them answers. Zeb stubs out his cigarette; Deb stands where she is. “You don't remember? Your most popular song, and you don't know which one of you wrote it?” I open Zeb's guitar case, take out his Gibson, and for lack of any better ideas, start to sing.

I stop. “Now, can either of you stand there and honestly say you wish you'd never met?”

“Yes,” they answer in unison.

Zeb squints at me incredulously. “You don't think we actually believed the crap we wrote, do you?”

Deb is standing by the door. “I did,” she says. “Some of it, anyway. It wasn't all a lie for me, like it was for you.”

“Oh, for God's sake, it wasn't all a lie for me! You just love to start in, don't you? You got so hysterical at the end, and I never knew where it came from.”

“Well, your being a messed-up impossibly arrogant raving lunatic may have been a factor.”