Keep Dancing (26 page)

“Oh!” I’d forgotten about my concert attire. “I’ve got a party right after this.”

Ted just nodded as we all took our seats, and Dermot began talking. And talking. And talking. He seemed to have forgotten his carefully composed speech as he began thanking his great-aunt; his parents; his fourth grade teacher who’d encouraged him to write. I looked at my watch—10:50.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I whispered to Ted.

I bolted out of my seat. The elevator seemed to take ages. Finally I hit the lobby and ran out to the street: no cabs in sight. In desperation I started walking. Every few yards I turned around to see if anything was coming, but no such luck. I broke into a jog, but was hampered by the silvery heels. Finally I took off my shoes and ran the rest of the way in my shredded stockings.

“Back again?” the guard said as I whizzed by.

Just as I reached for the heavy arena doors, they flew open and a flood of jabbering people poured out.

I grabbed a guy’s arm. “What’s happened? Why are you leaving?” I shouted over the current of fans flooding past.

“Concert’s over, man. It was outra-a-a-geous.” The guy’s bloodshot eyes focused on me.

“But it’s only…10:50?” I said, holding up my watch.

“Looks like it’s stopped.” The guy tapped the watch face and sauntered off.

Shit, shit, shit!
I ran to the backstage entrance, where a bunch of teenage girls were arguing with the guards. Finally I got one of the men to look at my pass. He escorted me through the echoing hallway to where a crowd of people was milling around, laughing, chattering, pressing flesh. Frantically I scanned the room for Jack.

Mary Jo came up beside me. “Well, you missed a nice dedication. I guess your work obligations took precedence.”

She smirked and went toward Sammy and Mark. I waved at them, but they just gave me a strange look. Vicky rushed over.

“I can’t believe you missed it!” she said, drawing me away from the others.

Tears sprang to my eyes. “I can’t either. Where is Jack? Was the song really good?”

Vicky’s sympathetic gaze made me dread what she was going to say. “Julia, he dedicated it to you. He dragged out a stool and sat there with his acoustic guitar. He made this amazing speech about how his life had changed because of one particular person. He was looking in the direction of your seat the whole time; he couldn’t see because of the stage lights. Then just as he finished, the whole place went dark and a spotlight shone down. Right onto your empty seat.”

I gulped, and Vicky gripped my arm.

“Brace yourself. It was awful. The whole arena started laughing. They thought it was all a big joke. But you should have seen the look on his face when he saw that you weren’t there. It was…I’ve never seen such an awful expression.”

“Oh my god.” My knees buckled and I slumped against the wall.

“Of course after that, he couldn’t do his song. A roadie came out and removed the chair, and Patrick said, ‘You’ll have to excuse Jack; he’s tripping.’” Then Mark and Sammy flew into the next number. Jack didn’t get to do his song at all.”

My heart was hammering in my chest; I felt like I couldn’t breathe. “Oh god, this is a nightmare! I had to stay there for Dermot’s stupid speech! What am I going to do?” I cringed at the thought of the audience’s shrieks of laughter, picturing the look on Jack’s face when he realized he’d been talking to no one.

Vicky grimaced. “If I were you, I’d try to find Jack. Want me to ask Sammy if he knows where he went?”

Wiping my eyes, I nodded. But when Vicky came back to me, she wasn’t any the wiser.

“Why don’t you go home and wait for him? Maybe he’ll cool off; realize it wasn’t your fault,” she said as she escorted me out. We shared a cab, and she dropped me off with a hug.

By five a.m., Jack still wasn’t home. Muddy followed at my heels as I paced around the loft. When the phone rang, I ran to it, dread twisting my guts. But instead of Jack, it was his manager.

“Hello Julia,” Mary Jo said. “He’s in pretty bad shape.”

I started crying again. “Can I talk to him?” I sobbed, hating that she had this power over me.

Mary Jo covered the receiver with her hand, and her muffled voice asked a question. She came back on the line. “I think you’d better just go.”

I sat down hard. “What do you mean, ‘go’?”

“It’s best for everyone if you vacate the premises.”

“But—” My mind was spinning.
He’s breaking up with me over this? And he doesn’t even have the nerve to tell me himself?
“Did he
say
that?”

Mary Jo sighed. “Just be out of the house by the time he gets back.”

Knowing what I had to do, I went in the closet and did it. Once my things were packed, I put on my coat. Choking back great sucking sobs, I held Muddy for a long, long time, telling him I would miss him. Then I went out the door and caught a cab back to my cold, lonely apartment on Broome Street.

Shattered

The next morning I dragged myself out to a deli to pick up some coffee and milk. Feeling like I could never eat again, I didn’t bother with food for my bare fridge. As I stood in line, my eye fell upon the
Post
headline in the stack of newspapers:

KIPLING DEDICATES SONG TO PHANTOM GIRL

My stomach lurched as I read:

Was Jack Kipling so high that he hallucinated a girlfriend during The Floor’s Madison Square Garden concert last night? But no matter—it turned out to be a prank. As usual the fans ate it up, along with the rest of the evening’s incredible mix of current and past hits.

I threw down the paper, paid for my items, and stumbled back to my empty loft.

All day my chest had a hollow ache, as if my heart had been clawed out, chewed up, and discarded. I was in a state of shock; I couldn’t believe that Jack had gone from saying he loved me and wanted to have a child with me, to having his manager evict me.

I tried putting myself in his place: sitting there onstage with thousands of fans laughing and pointing at the empty seat in the middle of the front row. Jack would have later realized they thought he was playing a joke, but at the time it must have been scalding. And although I’d never heard his new song, I knew how hard he’d been working on it. Suddenly I recalled Patrick’s snide comment the day he’d been over our place. Having been so eager to put down Jack’s solo efforts, he must have crowed about the fact that the acoustic piece didn’t get its world premiere. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the song didn’t get its commercial launch, either. Thousands of people who might have gone out and bought the single or requested it on the radio, now merely thought of it as a joke.

Then I recalled the piece in the
Post
. Any tidbits about The Floor usually got picked up in newspapers all over the country; over the years, the band’s wild lifestyle had made them gossip magnets. The snippet about Jack’s song was probably being reprinted all over—perhaps even internationally. I wondered if Jack had spoken to his mother and sister; I could just imagine their shock and dismay that I’d turned out to be such a traitor. I remembered Maggie’s comment about my being a career girl. This would prove that her reservations about me had been right.

But even as the horror of what I’d done hit me over and over again, I still wanted Jack to love me enough to understand that I couldn’t have missed seeing Dermot win. Ted and Perry would have had a fit if I hadn’t made it back to the Awards; as it was, I dreaded their questions on Monday about why I’d vamoosed before his speech was over. I’d have to tell them I’d felt sick and had to leave. But instead of taking all that into consideration—that my job really was on the line—Jack had decided I wasn’t worth it. Even with the crowd’s laughter, the humiliating article, Patrick’s crowing over his flop—I still would have expected him to forgive me. Or at the very least, to hear me out before he kicked me out.

All day, my mind whirled as I practiced speeches I wanted make to Jack, when I got up enough nerve to call him. I ran them through my mind as I alternated between crying on my couch and pacing my threadbare rug. My cold, narrow room seemed so bare and ugly to me now, after the vast expanse of Jack’s penthouse. My pathetic milk-crate kitchen “table”. The nails I’d driven into the walls to hang up my sparse second-hand wardrobe, since my bare-bones loft didn’t come with a closet. My lumpy futon, contrasted with Jack’s feathery king-sized bed. The wooden crates that held my books and records, which had once seemed so precious to me. I started to thumb through The Floor’s albums that I kept in a special box of my favorites, but then covered it back with the scarf, realizing it would only make me feel worse.

Vicky came over to my apartment that night. We sat drinking beer as we played blues on my stereo. I lay on the couch and talked to her for hours, tears streaming down my face. Only now did I truly understand what the musicians were singing about.

Later that week Suzanne called me from London, where she’d been staying with her mother ever since she left Mark. “Mary Jo told me you and Jack broke up,” she said after I’d asked how she was doing. “What happened?”

I described the MSG fiasco. Although she was sympathetic, I could also tell that she couldn’t believe I’d missed the song’s debut. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “He’s probably just feeling burned. It must have been a real blow when the crowd started laughing, even if they thought he was in on the joke. And not to have you there, when he’d set it all up in advance…”

“I know.” My voice crumbled. “But I still can’t believe he broke up with me like that.”

“I know he really loves you, Julia. Just hold on; I imagine he’ll come around. By the way, Mark’s flying here next week. He wants to get back together.”

“Are you going to?” I was surprised, given her speech to me at the hotel.

Suzanne paused. “It’s complicated. I’ve missed him so much, and also I feel like, ‘Who am I, if I’m not married to him?’ I put my salon work aside to be the wife of one of The Floor. Who knows if my painting will ever take off? And—” She paused, and I heard the flick of her lighter. “I think he really needs me.”

“Let me know how it goes. I’ll be thinking of you too,” I said.

“If Mark wants me back, he’s going to have to work for it. And you hang in there. I’m sure that deep down, Jack knows it wasn’t your fault. He just has to get over himself.”

For the next few weeks I cried myself to sleep on my futon every night, and lived on toast and tea when I managed to get anything down. Over and over I had picked up the phone to call Jack, but each time I stopped myself. The humiliation of being told to leave his apartment—as if I was some clingy hanger-on that he’d ejected—stung my pride like peroxide on an open wound. I kept trying to imagine what I would have done if I’d been in his situation. No matter how angry I’d been, I was sure I would have at least listened to his side of the story. But the fact that he didn’t do me the justice of breaking up in person, made me think twice about calling him. I could just imagine the coldness in his voice when he heard it was me on the line. I could picture him cutting me off midway through my explanation about Dermot’s speech.
I’m not going to beg
, I told myself yet again as I laid down the phone halfway through dialing his number.

I dove into work, trying to distract myself. My disappearance at the Awards didn’t seem to have attracted much notice; everyone was so thrilled about Dermot’s big win that my lame excuse about feeling sick went over fine.

But every single moment that I wasn’t setting up dates with literary agents, sitting in meetings, or plowing through proposals, I was haunted by memories of Jack: his sexy British voice, his riotous head-thrown-back laughter, his sensual touch. At night in my lonely loft I spent hours recalling conversations, reliving intimate scenes. His ghost seduced me in my sleep, making every morning an awful new awakening to the fact that he was no longer part of my life. My third-floor walkup seemed so spartan after living in Jack’s spacious loft, but it suited my dark mood. I had returned to a monastic lifestyle devoid of pleasure, existing only to work.

As a distraction, one Saturday Vicky suggested we go to the Pyramid Club, a nightspot we liked despite its threatening location. The East Village was one big crack den, which meant you were taking your life in your hands by venturing there. Yet nowhere else in town could you find such cutting-edge entertainment. And since the Pyramid’s clientele was largely gay, I knew no one would hit on us—which justified the riskiness of entering Alphabet City after dark.

That night, I almost called Vicky to cancel. I hadn’t washed my hair in two days, nor could I be bothered with putting on makeup. But after going back and forth, I decided that a change of scenery might do me good. I put on my tattered leather skirt that I’d scored for a few bucks at Trash and Vaudeville, and a ripped Ramones tee-shirt. I dug twenty black rubber bracelets out of the top drawer of my three-legged dresser, the missing leg propped up with a brick, and scooched them up my arms. Then I stepped into my scuffed low-cut boots.

I locked up and walked north to Eighth Street, where I was meeting Vicky. St. Mark’s Place was heavy with the dusky scent of clove cigarettes, the street dealers hissing “sens, sensimilla” to passersby; everyone from drunken NYU students to punks in chains to leftover hippies roaming around in search of a good time. Slouching in his doorway, the owner of the Music Exchange said hello as I passed. I was hit with a huge pang of sadness, remembering the last time I’d been there with Jack, rummaging through the stacks of vintage 45s.
Don’t think about it now,
I told myself.
Try to take your mind off him, for a change.

Vicky was waiting on the corner in a short skirt and jean jacket. She threw her arms around me and gave me a big hug. “I was getting worried you’d flaked out on me. We’ll have fun tonight; you’ll see. Just like old times.”

“Thanks, Vick. It’s good to be out,” I said half-heartedly.