Tempo Change Read online

  After a while my eyes adjusted and I could see Redmond standing in the audience, watching us with his arms crossed. I tried to smile at him but I wasn’t sure he was looking at me. Anybody with any sense was looking at Viv But then my eyes floated across the crowd, past my mother, who was smiling, and Ed the Guitar Guy, who had his arm draped across her shoulders, and the fancy school parents, who looked alarmed or sad, and finally they landed on Jeff. He raised his hand in a subtle wave and he was watching me with something in his eyes I wasn’t sure I’d seen before and I didn’t know what to do with it.

  I looked down at my guitar and played it like it wouldn’t behave and when I looked back up, the number was over and people were going nuts. Before we even started the next number, I knew we had won.

  Only we hadn’t won.

  We had tied. With the Clauses.

  The announcer called us up onstage and everyone clapped.

  The announcer said it had been such a close call the decision was that we both qualified for the Unsigned Competition at Coachella and we were going to split a three-hundred-dollar award.

  Redmond Dwayne and I shook hands and then he put his arm around me, just to upstage me. Jeff was watching. My mother was staring, her mouth in the shape of a little o. I had no idea which part was making her look that way. My news about my father, us winning Whisky, or Redmond “Sunglasses Inside” Dwayne throwing his arm around me. I suspected it was just the powerful cocktail of all of it. Ed’s expression didn’t change. He smiled at me the way he smiled at the world in general.

  By the time we had broken down our stuff and come outside, most of the audience had cleared out. Mom gave me a stifling hug and tried to hide the fact that she was crying.

  “Do you want to do the Coachella thing?” she asked.

  She and Ed exchanged a look, as if this had been discussed in my absence.

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then I think you should. I wish you could promise me that you won’t fall in love with the whole thing. You’ll keep your options open. Will you?”

  “She can’t promise a thing like that,” Ed the Guitar Guy said.

  “It’s not even me,” I said to reassure her. “It’s Viv they’re responding to.”

  “But they’re your songs,” Mom said. “The songwriter is everything.”

  “I wish you’d figure out where you stand on this,” I said.

  “I wish I would, too,” she admitted with a smile.

  “You know the richest people in the music industry are people you can’t see. The songwriters. Diane Warren, people like that,” Ed said.

  “This isn’t about getting rich,” I told them.

  “Well, that’s mostly true,” Ed the Guitar Guy said, “of every artist. But sometimes it happens and you have to run with it.”

  I was about to engage in that bizarre discussion when I saw Jeff lingering by the door.

  “Excuse me for a minute,” I said to them.

  “It’s your night,” my mother said, making a sweeping gesture.

  Jeff watched me walk toward him with a smug expression.

  When I arrived he bowed and said, “What can I say?”

  “You can say congratulations.”

  “Well, that,” he said.

  “What else?”

  “You were inspiring.”

  “Who did we inspire? Everybody who lost got pissed and left.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You weren’t in the game.”

  “Of course I was. I was your roadie and I inspired your song.”

  “Look at you, trying to lap up the spotlight.”

  “Might as well. Given how much you hate it.”

  “I don’t hate it,” I said, turning my face away from him, to hide how much I was blushing.

  “Good. You should be proud.”

  “Pride goeth before a fall,” I said.

  “No. Pride goeth before a burger. If you’ll join me for one.”

  I laughed. “I can’t. I have to go home.”

  “Why?”

  “I have to study. I’m a student. Music is a hobby. I’m not really an artist.”

  “Like hell you aren’t.”

  He made me feel happy and I stopped myself from tickling his chin, which was suddenly a weird thing I wanted to do.

  “What do you know about it? It’s all numbers in your universe.”

  “Numbers are art,” he said. “Let me correct your false impression, Street. Numbers are language. And it’s not the language I love, it’s the system they represent.”

  “Thanks, Teacher.”

  “Sure you don’t want that hamburger?”

  “Well, I do but I can’t. My mom. You know.”

  “Okay. Next time, rock star. Go with your mom. I’ll take your stuff back to Peace. It’ll be safe there.”

  “Thanks, Jeff.”

  “Your loyal roadie. See you in the salt mines,” he said, and he leaned in and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I turned red and wanted to faint. In front of all those people.

  I walked toward my gear and I saw Redmond in the very back of the room next to our stuff.

  He was engaged in talking to Viv.

  I said, “Excuse me,” and started winding cable.

  Viv giggled and they moved aside.

  “See you at Coachella,” Redmond said.

  “Don’t lose any sleep over it,” I suggested.

  I could have sworn he winked.

  Winter Breakdown

  SCHOOL LET OUT FOR WINTER BREAK.

  Mom and ETG had talked about crazy stuff like going skiing or to Vegas but that fit of craziness passed when Mom realized she had to put in more hours at Biscuit. Louise had fallen apart because Married Man had decided not to leave his wife (again).

  “Right here at the holidays,” Mom said. “Couldn’t she pick another time to fall apart?”

  “Everybody does it at the holidays,” Ed said. “It’s a tradition.”

  All these hours at the store left me and Ed kicking it at home, eating macaroni and cheese and watching reality programs.

  “Do you have a place, Ed, or do you live here now?”

  “I have an apartment. But I like to be here when Diane comes home.”

  “You don’t stay over.”

  “Right.”

  “Because of me?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Because you think I don’t know you’re having sex?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, Blanche, my sex life is none of your business.”

  I got quiet and stared at the television.

  “Is this about Coachella?” he asked. “Performance jitters again or actual hostility?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He said, “Nothing’s going to interfere with you being famous, Blanche, if that’s what you want. Don’t worry. Nothing can interfere with what people want.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Well, big things. Wars.”

  “What about my mother? Didn’t something interfere with what she wanted?”

  He put pepper on his mac and cheese and swirled it around. “I don’t think so. She has you. She has a store. She has friends, has the program, has me.”

  “It’s not the life she imagined for herself.”

  “Did you ever ask her what she imagined for herself?”

  “I don’t have to. I lived it.”

  “What are you so mad about?”

  “Where do you wanna start?”

  “You’re mad at her because he left? That doesn’t make much sense.”

  “Not that anymore. I’m mad at her for giving up after he left.”

  “Being happy with the small stuff is your idea of giving up? Something for you to think about, Blanche.”

  I didn’t answer. We were quiet for another long spell.

  Then he said, “You know, I once opened for your dad.”

  I felt the air leaking out of my lungs.

  “Opened what?” I finally asked.

  He
said, “Troubadour. I was friends with the booker there. We used to drink together. Anyway, the booker said to me, come open for this guy, Duncan Kelly. He’s the next big thing.”

  I looked at him. “Did you do it?”

  “Sure, of course I did.”

  I forgot about breathing.

  “Did you talk to my dad?”

  He shrugged. “I think we said hello backstage. Your mother might have even been there. We’ve talked about that.”

  I tried to wrap my head around it. While I was thinking he said, “We weren’t anything special. My band, the Listless, we were called. We were kind of Eagles Light.”

  “Eagles Light? Isn’t that like Skimmed Milk Light?”

  He laughed. “The Eagles had some pretty tough guitar playing if you’re willing to listen.”

  I said, “Did you really use the word ‘tough’ in relation to the Eagles?”

  He laughed again.

  “How’s Coachella going?” he asked.

  “We got confirmation the other day. We’re the sixth slot out of ten. There are bands from all over, including England and Norway.”

  “That’s great,” he said. “Is your dad coming?”

  I looked at him.

  “What?”

  “Well, I figured that would have crossed your mind. You mentioned that you e-mailed with him.”

  I stared at him, at his sleepy blue eyes, and I imagined that ETG could see through me, could see all my crazy plans and secret thoughts. Maybe could see the volumes of songs I had under my mattress. He was making me very uncomfortable. Because I hadn’t said a word to anyone about my real motivation behind this band thing. That if I became a musician, if I got my band into Coachella, I’d replace that thing my father had taken out of the house when he went away.

  And he’d have a reason to come back. I thought if anything in the world could get him back here, it would be to see me in my own band.

  This was a far dirtier secret than the notebooks under my mattress. So you can imagine how I felt about Ed the Guitar Guy getting a clue.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said to him.

  “Okay.”

  Ed had a way of doing that. He had a way of deflating all my big ideas with his calm acceptance of them. How could I work with a guy like that?

  I had more to say on the subject but the door opened and my mother came in. She was energized and happy, talking about all the coats and sweaters and bangles they had sold. Ed the Guitar Guy watched and listened as if he’d never heard a story so good, or seen anyone so enchanting. Without looking at me he stood and went to my mother and they hugged, and over his shoulder, she looked at me as if to say, Sorry for hugging a guy who isn’t your father.

  “I’m tired, so, good night,” I said.

  I went to my room and for a long time I tried to read or play the guitar or write in my journal so I could pretend I wasn’t going to do what I was always going to do.

  I started the e-mail:

  Hello Pater,

  We won the concert at the Whisky. Well, tied, actually. But now we’re going to play in the Unsigned Competition at Coachella. If Hawaii gets boring, think about checking it out. I don’t know if they had it when you were here but it’s the most famous music festival in the country. And the Fringers, my band, are on the bill.

  If you can’t, I’ll e-mail pictures but it would be awesome to see you.

  It’s in late April so you have lots of time to plan.

  I sent it and then I sat still for a long time and tried to feel that idea moving halfway around the globe. In the next room, Mom was laughing and Ed was talking in his nasally Midwestern tones.

  I didn’t tell my father anything about the prayer box or my confusion over being an artist. I still wasn’t one, as far as I was concerned. I was just a critic playing around in the sandbox of creativity.

  I knew what he’d say to me.

  He’d say that being an artist was nothing to fool around with.

  But I knew something else he had never told me. Wanting to be an artist didn’t have to be a prescription for your demise.

  Owning it was something else.

  It made me sleepy to think about it all so I lay down on my bed, still in my clothes, and gave in to the dreams that were banging at the door behind my eyes. It’s what you do when you run out of options.

  Christmas Eve

  MY MOTHER DRAGGED US TO MIDNIGHT MASS. EVEN though she wasn’t a traditional believer, and Ed was a lapsed Catholic, she said she’d always wanted to go and she was a big fan of ritual and hymns and people getting together to think good thoughts.

  I’d been in a Catholic church twice before. Once at a wedding and once when my mother was exploring world religions. She took me to a Mass and a Buddhist temple and a prayer circle and to see some whirling dervishes at UCLA and I don’t know what all. They eventually ran together for me. It all looked like a bunch of people being incredibly excited about something invisible. So even though I’d seen a Mass before, when we went on Christmas Eve, there was something different about it. Maybe it was that I was in the grips of my dreams, the excitement surrounding Coachella, the songs that were bouncing around in my head, waiting to be written, and the hope of hearing back from my father. He hadn’t answered my e-mail yet but I imagined that was because he was just thinking of something to say. The point was, the world felt all swollen with possibility and magic didn’t seem that far off.

  The church was lit entirely by candles and the organ music filled it, somber and beautiful, and the incantations that all the people said together had an effect on me. I stood in the pew next to my mother and Ed the Guitar Guy, and I looked at all the people around us and the priest in his robe and the altar boys holding candles on long sticks and all the haunting, scary but strangely beautiful statues around and something stirred in me. I won’t tell you that I became a believer. But in that moment, I was thinking, What if it’s true? What if the thing they are talking about isn’t entirely invisible but just circulating and moving and pulsating in a place our eyes simply aren’t trained to see? What if it’s like sound waves, the things that came out of my guitar and Gigi’s bass and Ella’s drums and Viv’s voice, these great vibrations that didn’t exist and suddenly did, and then they floated away and kept on living somewhere, if only in the memories of the people who heard them?

  What if it was all part of the invisible system Jeff talked about?

  Synergy, he called it. A silver network of threads holding it together, creating meaning and purpose. X’s and O’s.

  I felt my forehead to see if I had a fever. These kinds of thoughts were not like me at all.

  Another thing that happened was that I looked at Mom and Ed and they seemed kind of right together, as if they’d known each other a very long time, like in another life. And they had finally found each other. I saw a different quality in my mother’s face and her body language. There was a peacefulness to her, a settling, or a calm, like when the ocean glasses over.

  Ed had put his arm across her shoulders and she leaned her head against him.

  It wasn’t sexual. It was friendly and united.

  What was I supposed to do with that?

  The thing about Santa Claus came into my brain and I told myself that this was no different. This was just a beautiful myth for adults to believe in but it was all the same thing. It was not a reality. Standing there, listening to the organ and feeling all the belief around me, I just wanted it to be true. Then I was ashamed of wanting it to be true because I couldn’t imagine what my father would say about that. I couldn’t imagine where he was this Christmas, how he dealt with the whole holiday. Did he spend it alone and ignore it completely? Or did he go out to Christmas luaus in Hawaii? Did he ever think of us?

  I watched the people going up to take Communion. I was moved by it. It made me smile and at the same time it made tears well up. Tears that I fought back with everything I had because there was no way I was going to cry about people
standing in a long line to participate in a ritual that shouldn’t make any sense at all. If Jesus had been the son of God and he’d been born to spare everybody their sins, why did everyone still suffer and why did pretending to eat him in a cracker ease their suffering? Now it was a conversation I wanted to have but I had no idea who to have it with. I stared at the serious face of the priest and couldn’t imagine having it with him. I looked at my mother and I knew I’d never bring up anything so difficult with her. I looked at Ed and was shocked when I realized I could have that conversation with him.

  I watched as he walked up to take Communion. When he came back to the seat he was chewing the cracker. He winked at me before lowering the prayer bench and getting on his knees. My mother didn’t kneel but stood very tall and straight beside him. And that impressed me. She didn’t need to do what he was doing. She was her own person—not buying in to his Catholic tradition but not rejecting it, either.

  I thought we might have a conversation when we got home but I didn’t know how to bring it up. We sat in the living room and Mom made hot chocolate. We sipped and they talked about how well Biscuit was doing and how well Ed the Guitar Guy’s shop was doing and that meant we might actually be able to go skiing or something in January and then Mom said, Oh, wouldn’t it be nice to have some music?—Ed could borrow my guitar, and I said yes. He started playing some old songs that I happened to know so I provided harmony and Mom just sat there watching as if everything were turning out the way she’d always dreamed but never planned. It annoyed me and pleased me at the same time and I was resisting, with everything in me, the way I resisted the tears in church, feeling that this was all a good thing. Then Ed gave me presents and I opened them. He gave me some picks and some songbooks—collections of the eighties and nineties, and we looked at the chords and talked about the ones I knew and the ones I’d have to learn. I thanked him and didn’t know if I should show how much I actually liked it all. Because secretly I did.

  Finally Ed left. My mother and I watched the end of A Christmas Carol before going to bed and that was the last normal moment I had for a really long time.

  My overhead light popped on around two a.m. and I said, “Mom, come on, Christmas can wait.” She often got excited about things like that and couldn’t resist waking me up early. “The presents will be just as much fun in two hours.”