Opening Act (35 page)

       
But toppled by the blow of your abandonment.

Holy shit,
Shay thought.
This girl is really throwing down the heavy.
And while the audience applauded, he thought,
Wait—was that about me? I hope that wasn't about me.
Then a moment later he thought,
Jesus, how wicked cool would it be if that
was
about me?

Loni, looking stupefyingly cerebral in all black—black turtleneck with the sleeves rolled up, black jeans, black-framed glasses—turned a page and continued.

“This is the oldest poem in the book,” she said, “but at the same time, also one of the newest. I started it years ago, struggled…grappled with it, the way one does…and only recently did I get it into a choke hold.” There was a ripple of mild laughter. “I call it, ‘Fracture.' ” Then she turned her eyes to the page and read.

       
A hairsbreadth divide that does not divine—meaning

       
gutters when division uncouples a nullity—

       
Constant ever, yet aspect alters:

       
Your face in starlight—enchantment—

       
Your face in daylight—error

There was a little stir in the crowd. No one seemed to know exactly how to react to it. Someone started applauding, almost, it seemed, as a courtesy, and everyone else joined in, but it was tentative. Loni, seeming a little flustered, said, “Thanks—I know that's a strange one. And brief, for all the years it took to get it out. But trust me, it's exactly what it needs to be.” The clapping grew a little more resonant after that, but it still came as a relief when someone accidentally knocked over a cardboard display of
Harry Potter
.

Once the laughter over that had subsided, Loni began the next poem. Shay tried to listen, but his mind kept wandering to his game plan.
I'll just wait till she's signing copies,
he thought.
I'll just stand in line and wait my turn, and when I reach her I'll say, “Make it out to Shay,” and then she'll look up and meet my eyes, and then I'll smile, and I'll turn and go. I'll just go, and leave that seed planted for a while. Yeah, that's it.

He was liking this plan, liking it so much that he didn't notice when someone sidled up and wedged between him and Jonah. And when Loni finished the poem and the audience was responding, this interloper—a young skateboard-dude type—turned to Jonah and said, “Hey, you're the guy!”

“I certainly am,” said Jonah, his eyes crazy bright.

“You're the guy on TV! The guy with the skinny chick—Noah and the Wail!”

“Jonah and the Wail,” he corrected him. “It's all right this once. Don't let it happen again.”

“The next poem,” Loni said, “is a lighter one.”

“I seen you on TV!” Skateboard Dude continued. “You were on, like, three channels!”

“Brother, I'm on every goddamn channel you can name, right at this moment.”

“Ssh,”
said a woman in front of them, over her shoulder.

“Didn't you, like, walk out on a gig or something?”

“Your bravery in battle is your willingness to go,”
said Loni.

“I didn't walk,” said Jonah. “I
ran
out.”

Skateboard Dude laughed. “Yeah! I totally saw that!
Radical
, man!”

“Ssssh!”
said someone else.

“Mine is mine to let you,”
Loni continued.
“To arm you by retracting arms…”

“Man, I'm only here 'cause my girlfriend dragged me,” Skateboard Dude said. “Hell're
you
doing here?”

“Dying a slow death,” Jonah said.

Skateboard Dude laughed.

A few more people shushed them—Shay included—and then someone appeared right in front of them, an older guy with glasses and a receding hairline and a face blazing righteous anger, blocking their view of Loni, who continued reciting, as if blissfully unaware.

“Do you mind shutting the hell up?” the guy in the glasses said.

“Are you talking to me?” said Jonah.

“Yes, you. Will you please shut your goddamn mouth?”

“You could always shut it for me,” said Jonah mock-seductively, “with a kiss.”

Some kind of animal rage roared up behind the older guy's eyes. He drew back his arm in what Shay knew was the windup to a punch, and Shay, not wanting Loni's reading to be interrupted by violence, stepped in between them—

—and ended up taking the punch himself, hard, on the side of his jaw.

“Oh, fuck—
ohhhh
,” he groaned—as quietly as possible, despite the searing pain. He was still thinking of Loni, whose reverberating voice was even now sounding over the crowd, though more than a few heads had turned away from her to see what was the disturbance was.

“Get me out of here,”
Shay commanded Jonah with as much urgency as he could muster from his wobbly jaw. He was desperate that Loni shouldn't see
him
at the center of this ridiculous scene.

Jonah was only too glad to go, so much so that Shay might have suspected him of causing the whole scene just for that purpose. The older guy in glasses even held the door open for them, then gave them a few angry snorts as they passed through it, like a cartoon bull chasing intruders out of his field.

Shay felt like his entire brainpan had been jostled. He could barely see straight. Jonah had to lead him back to the car like he was drunk. When they passed a pair of Santa Barbara matrons who looked down their noses at him, presumably thinking he
was
drunk, Jonah accosted them with, “Get a good look, Stepford Wives, then hurry on home and hump your Mexican gardeners! Yeah, because
your
shit don't stink,” which, perhaps predictably, set them running.

Shay was too disoriented to drive. He couldn't seem to focus his eyes—was he concussed?—so Jonah took the wheel, but not before another snort of party mix.

As they sped back on the Ventura Freeway, Shay worked his jaw back and forth, then held it cupped in his hand as though afraid it might fall off if he let go.

Jonah laughed at him. “You should'a just let me take what was comin' at me. What the hell? That goddamn bookworm didn't look like he could punch his way out of a taco wrapper. Plus,” he said, grinning, “my jaw's built up plenty of scar tissue, having been clocked so many times by Marcia. Most recently, yesterday. See any bruising?” He turned his face toward Shay.

“None. You mean, she actually hit you? Watch it, you're drifting to the right.”

He corrected his steering and said, “Oh, she fucking
whaled
on me. I pretty much knew I had it coming, the way I left her stranded at…whaddayacall. Razmatazz.”

“Hazzard. You mean, you
knew
she'd hit you?” He couldn't imagine the corpselike Wail exhibiting that much animation.

“Oh, we've been goin' at it hammer and tongs for years. You'd think we'd learn. Walk away from each other. But. Y'know.
That
never goes well.”

“Jesus! I'd think you'd
want
to walk away from each other,
run
from each other, if it's as bad as that. You're drifting right again.”

He swung back to the left. “Who says it's bad? I mean…yeah, it ain't pleasant. But…y'know. It's
feeling
, man. It's knowing you're
alive
. And while we're takin' swings at each other, we're thrashing it all out, getting everything off our chests we've been holding in all week, month, however long it's been. That kind of honesty, it
hurts
, you know? But it's necessary. So it kinda makes sense to throw it in when you're hurting each other physically, too.” He gave Shay a sidelong look. “I'm sure you know what I mean. Gotta be the same for you and your…whatever her name is. Hasque's little whelp. Juanita.”

“Pernita. And…actually. Huh.” He fell silent, suddenly and astonishingly ashamed to admit that his relationship with her wasn't as spectacularly dysfunctional as Jonah's with the Wail. He tried to imagine Pernita hitting him. If she ever did that, he'd turn on his heel and walk away from her forever, star-making father or not. And if he ever hit her? Hell, he knew beyond a doubt he'd be locked up in a jail before the hour was up.

“You know,” he said, realizing something else, “I don't think, in the entire time I've known her, that I've ever said
anything
honest to Pernita. Never anything that even hinted at what I was really thinking or feeling. And I'd bet cash money it's the same for her.”

“Man,” said Jonah, laughing in disbelief. “You guys, you're really fucked up.”

So it had come to this: Jonah Piercon, one half of a living Punch and Judy sketch, had told him
his
relationship was the warped one.

But he was right, wasn't he? Shay knew it; he'd always known it.

What he
hadn't
always known was the thought that struck him now. From the moment he'd met Loni, they had been scaldingly honest with each other. Yeah, sure, maybe she hadn't mentioned her steady guy and he'd never mentioned Pernita, but the way they'd talked about everything else? There hadn't been anything in the way. No barriers, no evasions, nothing.

No wonder he'd immediately thought she was so remarkable. And this was the woman he'd just had to run out on, because he'd gotten into a freaking brawl at her literary event. What the hell kind of black cloud was he born under, anyway?

“You're drifting right again,” he said.

The excitement of the day took its toll on him, and in the monotony of traffic he fell asleep. He didn't wake up till LA was once again sprawled out before them. Traffic had thickened, so that Jonah was no longer able to barrel along at quite the speed of sound, but he was still maintaining a pretty hell-bent clip. He was also jumping around in his seat as if to the beat of some wild thrash-rock tune.

But…the radio wasn't on.

Shay began to suspect there'd been a little more party mix while he was asleep.

He looked out the window and saw, coming up fast, the ramp for Mulholland Drive.

“Uh, Jonah—isn't this our exit?”

“What? Oh,
shit
—” He swung hard to the right.

“Jesus,
wait
,” Shay cried. “There's someone
there
—”

Jonah swung left to avoid a collision. The Mustang's wheels locked and they went skidding, at a harrowing speed, right into the highway's meridian.