In Stereo Where Available (28 page)

Zane folded his phone back up and stuck it in his pocket. “We’ve got to run, Grace,” he said.

“Why?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

“Quentin Tarantino’s just walked into the back room down at Angst. We’ve got to get down there.”

“Oh, crap,” she said. She stood up, tugging her skirt down and fluffing her hair back from her face. “We’ll be back, Fee.”

“What? No.” I struggled to get up from the depths of the sofa. “No, I’ll come, too.”

“We’ll be right back,” said Zane. “You can just hang out here. You mind, C. J.?”

“Not at all,” he smiled.

“Mmmmwah.” Madison blew me a kiss. “See you in a few.”

Madison’s heels clicked against the polished cement floor as she followed Zane out the heavy door. I looked after them in a half panic, then over at C. J. beside me on the sofa. He had one of his ankles crossed over his knee, bouncing his foot up and down, his arm stretched out over the top of the sofa.

“So,” he said.

I took a long drink of my Long Island Iced Tea. The room was starting to get a little foggy under the citronella-colored high-hung lights. Maybe I’d drunk more of my first one than I’d realized. I’d sort of lost track after the love of my preteen life had appeared and planted his cologne-scented body within sniffing distance of me.

“So,” I echoed. I cleared my throat. “Do you ever see any of the old NYC Boyz guys?”

“Now and then. Couple of them are married. José’s got a daughter. I still hang out with Clint once in a while. We’ve talked about doing a reunion tour. Can you see that?” He laughed and got up from the sofa, walking back over to the bar. His foot caught on the rail that ran around the base of it and he hopped to stop himself from tripping. “All five of us up onstage with thirteen-year-old girls throwing their panties at us.
Not
. At seventeen you can still do that. Not at thirty-five.”

“I guess that’d be kind of creepy, now that you mention it.”

He poured himself a whiskey, then made it a double and sat back down beside me, half a foot closer this time. “Be pretty cool, though. Who knows? Probably fall back into the groove of it pretty quick. But
not
as a nostalgia thing.” He pointed a finger unsteadily toward me. “Top 40. Right? No goddamn Retro Lounge segment of some mix station. Write some new stuff. It’s not that hard.”

“My fiancé writes poetry,” I said. Mostly I just wanted to point out the fact that I
had
a fiancé. I could almost hear my thirteen-year-old self screaming in indignation.

“Does he? That’s sweet. I co-wrote a couple of the songs on my solo album. And I bet we could all still do the dancing. You think I could still get my thirty-five-year-old ass into some of those costumes?”

“Um…probably?”

“Bet you’re right. Hang tight a sec.” He finished the rest of his drink in a single swallow, swished it around in his mouth, and got up from the sofa again. “I think I got one back in my closet.”

I gazed over at the door, praying that it would open and Madison would walk back through, preferably with Zane close by her. I’d left my watch at home; it was probably only about ten-ish, but it could be later. I searched around for my purse, hoping I could get my cell phone out before C. J. returned. His bedroom door was still open.

“Nope. Can’t do it.”

I spun my head around and looked over my shoulder. C. J. was standing just outside the bedroom door with a pair of black leather pants pulled up to around the middle of his thighs. Other than that, he wasn’t wearing anything but a pair of Fruit of the Loom tighty-whities. I spun back around and put my forehead against my hand, my hair falling over my face like a curtain.

“Happens to everybody, I suppose. Oh, well. Doesn’t matter. Still got the—whatchacallit—muscle memory. You know what I mean?”

I peeked up at him. “What?”

“Muscle memory. You know, the way you can remember how to do stuff you haven’t done in years.” He was stepping out of the leather pants, walking across the cement floor in his underwear. “Like riding a bike and stuff. I still know all the dance moves for all those songs. “‘Only the Memories’—that was a slow one. But ‘Dancin’ after Midnight’—God, we did that one
so
many times.”

“I bet.”

“Your momma said you better be a good girl, that you got no reason to be late
.” He started doing a little late-eighties Janet Jackson routine over by the dining table, his shoulders shifting up and down in that semi-robot move. He spun on his heel and turned his back to me; there was a patch of hair right above the elastic of his jockey shorts, on the small of his back. He swayed his hips back and forth, singing.
“But you and me are stayin’ till it’s over, and I bet you that your daddy can relate
.”

I gnawed on the knuckle of my index finger, my other hand clutched around my purse. I remembered this routine. A bunch of the girls at my middle school had done it for the Spring Talent Show, complete with the triple backflip that José did in the middle of the second verse. Thank God Madison hadn’t hooked us up with José.

C. J. spun back around and put his fists together at chin level, then jerked his elbows out straight, one at a time. Holding his fists up, he pumped his hips back and forth wildly.
“We’re dancin’—after midnight—
”

I stood up and started edging toward the bathroom. “I’ll, uh—I’ll be right back, okay?”

He wasn’t paying attention to me. He just tucked his hands behind his head and did that hip-swaying thing again. “We’re
dancin’—until three—
”

I stumbled into the bathroom in my high heels and locked the door behind me. There were mirrors all over the textured cement walls, a gigantic bathtub, and one of those Japanese toilets with buttons and dials all over it. I unzipped my purse and dug out on my cell phone, terrified that I wouldn’t be able to get a signal with all that cement all over the place.

“We’re dancin’—after midnight—you and meeee…”

“Hello?”

“Jerry,” I whispered into the phone, curled up in the corner between the tub and the locked bathroom door. “Jerry, you’ve got to come get me.”

“Fee? I can’t hear you. Speak up.”

“Jerry. I’m at the Omni Hotel, okay? In DC. You’ve got to come get me
now.”

“The Omni Hotel? Why are you there? I thought you and Madison were going to be—”

“Listen, I’m calling you from the bathroom, okay? I don’t have a lot of time. I’m in a hotel room with C. J. Anastasio, and he’s doing dance routines in his underwear out in the living room.
Please
come get me.”

“What?” Jerry laughed. “Seriously, Fee, where are you? I can get you if you want. Just let me jump in the shower real quick and I’ll be right over. I stink. I was on the treadmill for the whole second half of
Lost
.”

“No. I don’t care if you stink. Come get me
now
. I’m in room 602, okay? At the Omni. In Northwest.”

“With C. J. Anastasio? Is Kim Basinger there, too? Man, you and I could have a hell of a night on our hands.”

“I’m
not kidding
, Jerry. Madison ran off and left me for Quentin Tarantino. Don’t even stop to pee, okay? Just get in the car.”

Jerry laughed again. “Yes, ma’am. And hey, no funny business with C. J. Tell him I’ll tie him up with those L.A. Gear shoelaces if he touches you.” Over the phone I could hear the creak of the front door opening. “Okay, I’m on my way. You want me to stop and pick up Vin Diesel so we can both kick his ass?”

Antonia’s hand bumped against mine as we both dipped our slices of bread into the bowl of bruschetta that sat in the middle of the table. Beside me Jerry was looking a little annoyed; the music in the restaurant was turned up several notches too loud, and Jerry didn’t like having to raise his voice to be heard. He did it all day long at work.

“I could hardly believe it,” he was saying to Carl, Antonia’s husband. “Here Madison’s supposedly taking her to some club called Schadenfreude or something—”

“Angst,” I corrected.

“—and she calls me and tells me she’s alone in a hotel room with C. J. Anastasio. Yeah,
right
. And I’m having a beer with the Dalai Lama. So I show up where she tells me to, and it turns out she actually
is
alone in a hotel room with C. J. Anastasio. If she hadn’t physically stopped me, I would have knocked those porcelain veneers right through the roof of his mouth.”

Carl stirred his straw around in his Coke. “She physically stopped you?”

“She grabbed me by the wrist. Lucky for her I can’t make a fist with my left hand since my motorcycle accident. Lucky for
him
, I mean. If he’d still been in his underwear, I probably would have tried to do it anyway.”

“Man, you’re pretty scrappy for an English teacher.”

“I’m not
scrappy
. What would
you
do if you walked in on Toni and some guy alone in a hotel room together? Shake his hand?”

Carl gave an acknowledging nod. “Shake his spine out, maybe. Like you used to be able to do in Mortal Kombat.”

Jerry nodded seriously, his arms folded against the table in front of him. “That’d be cool. I could probably do
that
with my left hand.”

“Oh, stop it, you two.” Antonia wiped her fingers on her napkin and crumpled it beside her plate. “That’s just what Phoebe needs, is
more
appearances in the tabloids.”

I finished my piece of bread and tapped Jerry on the arm. “Yours is a lot better.”

“My what?”

“Your bruschetta. This doesn’t have enough garlic.”

Antonia laced her fingers through Carl’s and sat back in her chair. “By the way, are you guys living together now?”

“Mostly,” said Jerry. “She’s hardly got anything left over at her apartment. It turns out she’s moving out just in time. Her roommate’s got some Indian guy over there twenty-four hours a day.”

“Jerry’s finally going to meet my parents,” I added. “My dad and stepmom, anyway. Madison’s bringing Rhett over tomorrow to meet everybody. It’s kind of scary, you know? Both fiancés meeting the parents at the same time.”

Carl grinned at Jerry across the table. “You intimidated, man?”

Jerry shrugged. “Kind of. I don’t think anybody looks forward to meeting their girlfriend’s father. ‘Hello, sir. I’m the guy who’s sleeping with your daughter. Nice to meet you.’ It was probably easier a hundred years ago.”

“No, I mean because of Rhett,” said Carl. “Coming up next to some celebrity guy who’s all charming and slick. I think
I’d
be intimidated.”

“Who says
I’m
not charming and slick?” asked Jerry.

Antonia giggled. “I think you’re very charming, Jerry.”

Carl grinned, letting go of Antonia’s hand and stretching his arms back behind his head. “I think you’re kind of a geek.”

“
Kind of a geek?”
Jerry shot him a dirty look and sat back as the waitress started setting our plates down. “Ask C. J. Anastasio. I’m a wolf in geek’s clothing.”

On the morning of the big meet-the-parents gathering, there was a layer of snow as fine as baby powder over the yard, dusting the tomato cages and the tricycle and setting a firm gentle chill along every windowsill in the old house. Pepper shook it off in a delicate oblong shape that melted almost instantly into the green tile of the kitchen floor. On the way to my father’s house, we compromised on Jerry’s Blue Öyster Cult CD after I vetoed his Stryper album.

“No heavy metal when we’re in my car,” I reminded him.

“It’s Christian heavy metal,” he insisted. “Headbanging for Jesus.”

“Forget it.”

“I think it’s kind of inspirational.”

“I think Amy Grant is inspirational, but you don’t see me foisting it on you just because I’m the one driving.”

He grimaced and slid the Blue Öyster Cult CD into the player. “Point taken.”

“Now,” I said as the music began, “there are a few things you need to know about my dad and stepmom. They’re a little odd.”

“Great. I hadn’t picked up on that from having your sister in my class.”

“Very funny. Now, about my stepmom. She’s one of the other professors in my dad’s department, and my dad left my mom for her. My mother still insists on calling her a secretary. She’s a not a secretary. She’s got a Ph.D. in English. But whatever you do, when you meet the rest of my family, don’t talk about her around my mother.”

“Okay, got it. Don’t talk about the mistress around the ex-wife.”

“Right. Now, the next thing is, my father thinks my mother is a psycho. He tries to keep it to himself, but it comes out every now and then. I don’t pay any attention to it anymore. He’s also got kind of a dirty sense of humor. Whatever you do, don’t talk about religion with my dad
or
my stepmom. My dad doesn’t like organized religion, and my stepmother’s got some kind of New Age spiritual thing going. If you try to listen for too long, your head explodes. So tune it out.”

Jerry slowed for a stoplight, slumping a little in his seat. “You know, we’re only ten minutes from home. I don’t mind at all if you’d rather do this some other time.”

“You’ve got to meet these people, Jer. You’re going to be related to them by this time next year.”