From Thank You, Goodnight by Andy Abramowitz. Copyright © 2015 by Andy Abramowitz. Reprinted by permission of Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Chapter One
You don’t need eight words to set someone’s life on fire. One seems like more than enough. But in my case, it was eight.
The cryptic text pinged from Sara’s phone onto mine just as I was taking to the sky. The flight attendants, annoyed at us before we’d even taken off, had just commanded us through harsh smiles to neuter our electronic devices. Concealing my phone beneath a vomit bag, I reread the message.
“Your legacy is hanging in the Tate Modern.”
Instantly irritated, I fired back a pageant of question marks. Sara’s timing meant eight hours of me staring out at the blackness of the North Atlantic, ruminating on this distracting message from my girlfriend instead of the work that awaited me in Dublin. I could never sleep on planes, certainly not while sharing an armrest with some decrepit bag of bones who was either dead or sleeping with one eye open, and now here was something else to keep me awake. When I landed, it would still be the middle of the night back in Philadelphia, which meant more hours of waiting to find out what Sara meant.
My legacy was hanging in the Tate Modern. Jesus fucking Christ.
In my previous line of work, a lifetime ago if not longer, I’d found Dublin to be hospitable, even welcoming of the happy ruckus that always accompanied me. Back then everyone welcomed me. Those were different times. Now I was almost completely someone else. Better rested perhaps, although the mirror in the airplane bathroom reflected otherwise—a miserable ghost, with bags of defeat hanging under my eyes. If I was any whiter I’d have been Mexican folk art.
* * *
The labyrinthine highways of life had somehow made a lawyer out of me. I’d never been particularly happy about it. To add insult to injury, for my latest assignment, I’d been dispatched to Ireland to take the deposition of some credit manager for a bank. I didn’t know what that meant other than that over the course of one interminable day, I was to sit in a conference room, a videographer’s microphone clipped to my bourgeois Brooks Brothers tie, and quiz some poor knucklehead about securitized financing transactions that neither he nor I had the vaguest interest in. This required preparation. What I needed to do upon landing was hunker down and immerse myself in loan agreements, guarantees, credit default swaps, a rotting forest of e-mails, and other documents of financial audacity, and then gin up several hours’ worth of questions to hurl at this paper pusher who, as far as I could tell, had committed the unpardonable sin of doing his job.
But here’s the thing: preparing for a deposition is about as exciting as my washer’s rinse cycle. After about a half hour in my hotel room, I slid into a sweater and headed out.
A comfortable chill hung in the Dublin air, fresh and restorative, good weather to lose myself in the dense blocks of timeworn Georgian buildings. I joined the midday flow of bodies coursing through the streets. I ate a salmon sandwich on a bridge arching over the Liffey. I sipped rich, black coffee outside the shops on Grafton Street. I bought Sara a book on Celtic mosaics that, despite being colorful—brightly colored art always feels like it’s trying to meet me halfway, kind of like poetry that rhymes—didn’t move me in the slightest. I waited to call her at just past dawn her time, hoping to catch her en route to her morning workout. “So, about that text,” I told her prerecorded voice. “Call me. The dep isn’t till tomorrow.”
I wandered into the maze of tourists bobbing and weaving through Temple Bar and found myself outside a lively little pub that beckoned me in with the sound of Irish music just beyond its rugged wooden door. Having always considered business to be an incidental component of a business trip, I barely paused before heading in.
The bartender raised his eyebrows solicitously, and I pointed to the Toucan Guinness tap. Soon I was savoring the dry stout, its creamy head on my upper lip, while a flute, guitar, and violin stirred the room into an accelerating whirl. A buxom young woman got up and began to bounce in place to the music. She was wearing pink jeans, a tight white button-down shirt, and a sloppy-drunk grin. The clapping and foot stomping spiked to a crescendo, and I overheard two frat boys with backpacks loudly admiring the buoyant girl’s “cans.”
A man down the bar was eyeing me. This still happened on occasion. He had unshorn hair urging toward dreadlocks and he sported those smoothly intellectual black-rimmed frames that sniffed of Clapton Unplugged. I was soon to learn he was a software salesman from Los Angeles. He peered at me for ten minutes—it was a little creepy—before coming over and telling me I looked familiar. He knew me from somewhere, he claimed, wagging his finger. I shrugged.
In declarative bursts over the music, he bitched about the rigors of business travel and whined about missing his kids. Yet when I coughed up the politeness to ask the ages of the aforementioned children, he was all stammers. He forgot how old his kids were. I didn’t think you did that. That said, there was a better-than-average chance that my own father could only offer an educated guess as to his boys’ ages. “Whoa, you kind of caught me off guard here,” the software salesman admitted with an embarrassed grimace. I couldn’t help but smile and feel a little bit like a happy man trapped in a bitter man’s body.
One day I’ll die, I thought to myself, and this will be one of the things I did with my time.
The Angeleno cocked his head. “Why is it you look so familiar? I know you from somewhere and I just can’t place it.” Since he’d found it difficult to place key statistics regarding his children, maybe remembering stuff just wasn’t his bag. “Are you in show business or something?” Show business. Like I’m waving jazz hands in a revival of Guys and Dolls.
The next thing I knew the conversation had careened off into all sorts of directions. He told me I should plan a trip to Polynesia. Why Polynesia? Because Tia Carrere—you know, that babe from Wayne’s World—is from Polynesia and that’s what all the women look like there. I asked him if he was really saying that every girl in this fabled land called Polynesia—which I don’t think is even a country—looks like Tia Carrere, and he gave me an ardent nod and said yeah, that’s right, that’s what I’m telling you. American men are considered exotic over there, he insisted, and those Tia Carrere look-alikes eat guys like us up. I told him I knew for a fact there’s no place in the world where they eat guys like us up. He sipped at his Bible-black beer, wiped his mouth, and said, “Trust me.”
A few moments later, as I stood absorbed in the wild soloing of a redheaded violinist, my new friend snapped and pointed at me. “Eight and ten!”
I stepped out of the bar three pints later. Shadows draped the narrow streets and the late-afternoon air had grown aggressively chilly. This day had been a poor excuse for a bender. The benders I used to have would eat this bender for breakfast.
I glanced at my phone and noticed I’d missed Sara’s call.
* * *
It looked quieter by the river, so I drifted through the stone alleys to the relative seclusion of a bridge. She answered in her office voice, soft and clandestine. It was close quarters at Bristol & Bristol Interior Design, which meant everyone could hear everything, and it was primarily populated with women, which meant everyone was listening.
“What’s with the text?” I asked, my voice raised against the breeze.
“Is that like, ‘Hey, I miss you, how are you?’ ”
“It’s just like that. What’s with the text?”
“There’s my Teddy,” she said. “So, you want to laugh?” The question was rhetorical—who doesn’t want to laugh?—and yet it’s usually a prelude to something manifestly unfunny. “Warren called.”
“Warren who?”
“Warren Warren.”
My eyebrows furrowed. I hadn’t heard from the man in years.
“And he said—get this—you need to go to the Tate Modern so you can see your legacy.”
“He what?”
“He said you should go to the Tate Modern. In London.”
“I know where the Tate Modern is. I’m not following you.”
“His exact words were that your legacy is hanging in the Tate Modern, second floor. If you’re interested in your legacy, there’s an exhibit you absolutely must see.”
“An art exhibit?”
“Seems like a sensible guess, it being an art museum and all.”
As I stood there with rigid confusion, I had a vision of Warren, my drummer once upon a time. He was watching me receive this information and cackling like a fool, his neck snapping back, his mouth open as if to drink the rain.
“Sara,” I said, trying to remain calm, “did you happen to ask him what the fuck he was talking about?”
“I’m just telling you what he said.” I imagined her hunched forward with both elbows on her desk, one hand holding the phone to her ear, the other toying with strands of her long black hair.
“What kind of exhibit? And in fucking London? He wants me to go to London? Did you tell him I was in Dublin?”
“I told him nothing. It was a short conversation and I’m simply relaying it to you, as I promised I would.” I heard a slurp. Presumably coffee, though Malbec couldn’t be ruled out.
Clearly, some celestial eclipse had shifted and blanketed my memory. There had to be a recent incident, inaccessible to me now, that had caused our paths to cross, Warren and me. I was blocking it out for some reason, but something had happened that made Warren’s message make sense. Something that, since I was jet-lagged and buzzed on Guinness, was slipping my mind.
“So let me get this straight. Warren Warren calls me out of the fucking blue and tells me I have to go to London. He doesn’t know that I’m already in Europe, but he tells me I have to get to London, to the Tate Modern, to see some fucking exhibit on the—what?—second floor. I have to do this if I give a fuck about my legacy.”
A short, gray-haired tour guide in a green vest led a cluster of families past me on the bridge. “And then the Vikings come and run amok,” I overheard him say. Roon amook through his thick Irish brogue.
Over the cellular airwaves and across the cold miles, Sara shipped me one of her patented sighs. “Teddy, you do know that using the word fuck six times in a single sentence makes you sound like an unhappy person.”
“Fuck,” I said thoughtfully. I lifted my hand through my windblown, airplane-oily hair and noticed I needed a shower. “You’re sure that’s all he said?”
“Yes,” she replied flatly. “It was a quick call, there was a lot of noise in the background. It sounded like he was in a crowd. Maybe a crowded museum. Maybe—oh, I don’t know—a crowded museum in London.”
I was standing on the bridge trying to process this acid trip of a phone call. One of the three of us—Sara, Warren, or me—had lost it. At least one.
“I don’t get it either,” Sara offered, “but the thing is, Warren isn’t God and you’re not Noah. You can ignore him. You actually have a knack for ignoring people.”
I didn’t see how that was possible. Something was slung up onto a wall in a gallery just across the Irish Sea, something so extraordinary that it prompted Warren to do something he hadn’t done in over a decade: make contact with me. I hadn’t spoken to anyone from that period in my life in years. In most instances, space between people grows like mold, neglected just long enough to be noticed. You intend to wipe it clean, but the more of it there is, the more daunting a task it becomes to erase it. Not so with me and the band. I’d discontinued those people as if they were a premium cable channel that I’d finally realized was broadcasting nothing I wanted to watch. With all there was between us, things my bandmates knew about and things they didn’t, it was better to just turn off the lights and lock myself out of that haunted house.
“I’ll just call the idiot. Do you have his number?”
“He didn’t leave it. I probably should’ve asked.”
“Caller ID?”
“Blocked.”
The pints of dark beer pooled with sleep deprivation made for a woozy goulash, and yet there was no time to rest. Even the bare minimum preparation for tomorrow’s deposition entailed a time investment.
“Fuck that guy. I don’t have time for this bullshit.”
Through all the clatter in my head, Sara’s weary goodbye barely registered.
* * *
I used to love record stores. Back when it was all undiscovered country, there was always the chance I might stumble upon Van Halen’s 1984 or the Cure’s Pornography and for a month or two I’d walk around on fire. These days, record stores were jungles of mockery and bad memories, given who I used to be. And now, fate—because fate is a bully—couldn’t resist depositing a record store directly in my path on my walk back to the hotel. Another time I might not have even taken note, but the return of Warren had me drifting uneasily into the past, bothering me with emotions I’d long thought dead and buried. I went in.
Bristling with disdain, I perused the racks of chartbusters near the door. This was the safe area, the place where the storefront neon showcased the music that the kids were buying, the prefab radio-ready pop acts fronted by slinky, nearly naked twenty-two-year-olds or boy bands with youths of indeterminate gender. None of these people had ever held an instrument.
Past the bunny slopes and into the belly of the beast I went, submitting to the store’s thumping electronica. I flipped through the T discs in Rock/Pop. Nothing. I wended my way over to Alternative, a section which used to house dark, unapproachable artists whose fans had scary tattoos and genital piercings but whose edges had eroded over time such that the moniker had evolved into a catchall of sorts. Basically, if you’re an artist that gives a fuck and you’re not jazz or country, you’re alternative. Again I scrolled through T. Again nothing.
I found the cheapies bin way back at the rear of the store, territory unlikely to have been trodden even by the store’s employees. The discount selection was downright offensive. Beck’s Odelay? The Foo Fighters’ debut? Billy Joel’s Turnstiles? Surely, these albums deserved a more dignified resting place. I wanted to speak to the manager.
And there it was. One copy. Pristine, sullied by neither fingerprint nor weight of an eye. I stared despairingly at it, noting how cheesy and dated the cover art looked. The Queen Kills the King. A brief swell of fond memories sparred with the raw indignity of the discount rack. I suffered a flash fantasy about crushing the thing under my heel.
Then I fled. I stormed out and stomped my way up Grafton, feeling myself sliding into that familiar chasm of obsession. This time, it was Warren’s oblique communiqué that took center stage. I wanted to know what his message was all about, but more than that, I wanted to waterboard the motherfucker for forcing himself back into my consciousness.
Streams of Guinness were still sailing through my veins when the hotel elevator door parted and I marched down the hall, past the ornate sconces, past the portraits of humorless men with monocles, every one of them looking a little bit like the Count from Sesame Street. I could track down Warren’s number and call him now, but I knew that would just be an even greater time suck. I needed to let this go for the time being, to calm myself, to put first things first. Work tomorrow, waterboard the day after.
And yet, in my sleekly decorated room, all burgundies and beiges, the smell of recently vacuumed carpet in the air, I neglected the manila folders and redwells that Metcalf, my sweaty associate, had dutifully prepared for me. Instead, I googled “Tate Modern.” With the deep, dull haze that comes from thirty-six consecutive sleepless hours, I surfed the museum’s web page, darting in and out of the links to permanent collections and featured exhibits. The hours vanished and brought me no closer to a clue.
If only he hadn’t used that word.
Legacy.
I wondered how long that CD had been tucked away back there in the darkest corner of the record store. That’s what they do with music nobody cares about anymore. They can’t just throw it away—that would be bad for the environment or something. So it just sits there, fading further into irrelevance with every passing moment. Just like the lead singers of those bands. Guys like me. Guys who once had it all, but now have what everybody else has. Nothing.
The night stretched on. Sleep remained elusive, as though I were still crammed into the middle seat on that 777. It was with almost desperate relief that I finally watched the sun tickle the windows of my room.
I’d have to wing the deposition.
Probably would’ve done that anyway.
* * *
Some lawyers will say that, unlike being shelved in an office all day, staring at a computer screen and feeling your ass widen, depositions are “where the action is.” This is only true if your idea of action is eight hours of watching ice melt in a water glass. The bank dweeb took an oath to tell the truth, but it was the most dry, monotonous truth you could imagine. His lawyer, an irritating little goober in his own right, sat next to him and did little more than look smug.
I was also never one for protocol, and what scant decorum I have tends to spoil in the oppressive pit of boredom.
“I’m handing you an exhibit—” I began, passing around a document I’d barely reviewed, when I noticed a short, squiggly hair dangling over the top page. “I’m handing you an exhibit that appears to have a pube on it.”
Gags of horrified laughter filled the room. I blew a short breath at the hair. It sailed off in the direction of the witness, who gasped and shifted out of the way.
“Objection,” said his lawyer.
That kind of thing might get someone else complained about or fired, but people at my shop tended to cut me a little slack, given who I am. Or who I was.
When my work with the witness was done, I handed him off to another lawyer with her own battery of questions. I could now sit back, zone out, mentally leave the building. I could scarf down twenty sugar cookies and fifteen cups of coffee.
I perused the Irish Times. There was a story about a member of the British Parliament charged with groping a young woman. A photo depicted him on the courthouse steps hand in hand with a sturdy, matronly lady. “Throughout all of this,” the disgraced politician was quoted as saying, “my wife has been an absolute brick.” What every woman yearns to be called.
The witness droned on about credit default swaps. I read the sticker on my banana.
He sermonized about political risk insurance. I tried to fantasize about the hottest person in the room. It was me. By a mile.
My thoughts kept returning to Warren’s message like a tongue to a mouth ulcer. There was a time when I was accustomed to his good-natured shenanigans. This was, after all, a guy who used to amuse himself by pretending he was his own identical twin. But last I heard, he was now a teacher, a legitimate member of the community. If inciting me to drop everything and rush to an art exhibit on another continent was his idea of a practical joke after a decade of radio silence, it seemed out of proportion. Was he kidding? Was he drunk? Was he sending a coded message from a hostage situation?
I decided I’d try to call him at the end of the day, even though I suspected he would be disinclined to divulge details. He didn’t seem to want to tell me about the Tate; he just wanted me to go there. And if he found out that I was actually in Dublin, a temptingly short trip from London, he’d be even less forthcoming. What a hilarious little caper he’d constructed.
The fact was, I could go. My firm was hardly holding its breath for the return of its favorite malcontent. Morris & Roberts would be there for me whenever I got back, with its bloated files and its nimrods down the hall, like Don Yoshida and his riveting tales of his dog’s escapades.
Sara too would survive a few extra nights on her own. She’d trudge into the condo, splash some Spanish wine into a glass, and concoct an unnecessarily elaborate dinner. Langostinos in a red sauce, or a chickpea curry with spinach. Afterward, she’d drape herself in a T-shirt three sizes too large and sink into the couch for the guilty displeasure of reality TV—the selection of a wedding dress by someone too ugly to get married, the perusal of a new house by a couple who’d only end up divorcing and fighting over it. She’d eventually lose interest, her eyes would drift down to the book in her lap, and she’d fade into worlds puppeteered by Jhumpa Lahiri or Meg Wolitzer. She’d get through a dozen or so pages before passing out, waking up an hour later, and shuffling into the bedroom. If I were there with her, the scene would unfold almost exactly the same, except my legs might be crisscrossed with hers on the sofa or she’d talk me into a few rounds of Boggle or her sister in Sacramento would call and Sara would wave frantically at me while mouthing I’m in the shower, I’m in the shower.
Sara might actually applaud my absconding to London under the circumstances. For her, any day spent in the company of paintings, etchings, sculptures, or mundanely arranged soup cans was a good one. She bought in to the whole art racket with an uncharacteristic lack of cynicism. At how many galleries and museums had I watched her standing there, nodding in accord with the voice in the headset, her long, wispy limbs ideally suited for poses of artistic engagement?
Sara was more than an interested spectator in that word; she was something of a covert art hobbyist herself. For years now, she’d been scurrying up to her friend Josie’s studio in Northern Liberties to let the hours float by in the service of her medium of choice: mosaic mirrors. This studio was a place where she and other mosaicists, both professional and aspiring, would—and this is just an outsider’s perspective here—basically break shit up into little pieces and arrange them in weird patterns. Josie’s commune was inhabited by a pack of breezy yet intimidating women who sipped wine, spoke caustically about everything, and set out to push the boundaries of expression. (If they failed at that, they at least succeeded at pushing the boundaries of fashion.) They accepted Sara as one of their own even though she’s not gay, has the gumption to let her hair grow beyond her ears, and has a job that doesn’t begin with the word freelance. But they took her in, Sara, their stray cat.
I, by loud contrast, had spent a lifetime nurturing a deep suspicion of art as an enterprise. An odd trait for a musician, I admit. I accompanied Sara to all the latest openings, but once there, I had a tendency to retch over the pontification about an artist’s ability to transform the ordin’ry into the exquisite. Notice the eyelash. There’s something slightly audacious, scandalous perhaps, about the way in which the paint is applied. In that one simple brushstroke, Akerblom subverts everything we know about contemporary portraiture. While Sara pursed her lips at a canvas smothered corner to corner in bronze paint and curiously titled Three Trees, I stared mistrustfully at it and thought to myself, I don’t see trees, I don’t feel trees, nothing about this painting is bringing a tree to my senses, much less three of them.
The point was this: I could go to London if I wanted. If I was stupidly obsessed, or let’s say I just wanted to sleep again, I could scoot on over and settle this. And who wouldn’t want to lay eyes on his legacy? Even when you knew your legacy had all the esteem of a cornflake smudge.
“I have nothing further,” I heard the questioner say. He hunched over the table and peered all the way down to where I was sitting—in person, if not in spirit. “Mr. Tremble, do you rest?”
“Hardly.” I snickered.
With a yawn, I stood and embraced the end of what I could’ve sworn was an endless day. But I’d used this period of immobility and repeated caffeination to its fullest meditative potential. All factors pointed in one direction. That direction was east.
