Stages (27 page)

“Why don’t you go out and get a new dress to wear?” Aaron was saying. “You have the charge cards, and it doesn’t matter how long you don’t use them, you know. The plastic isn’t going to rust so you can mount them on the wall.”

He was looking, with a wiseacre grin on his face, at the old trowel Kathy had found in the garden and hung on the brick wall.

“Are we trying to impress these people or what?” Kathy asked. She was not amused.

“I told you,” her husband replied. “Politically, this is going to be an important evening for me.”

“I wonder what the etymology of the word
political
is,” Kathy said. “I suppose it’s rooted like just about everything else—in expediency and hypocrisy.”

“Or practicality,” Aaron said.

“Touché,” said Kathy. “Okay, I’ll get myself a new dress. You’ll have to tell me how nice it looks, so I’ll feel all radiant even if I look like a phony. All right?”

“You got a deal,” Aaron said.

Reluctantly keeping her part of the bargain, Kathy went shopping the following day. Bonwit’s and Saks were out of the question. Kathy couldn’t stand the women she saw in those stores, the way they wafted in and out of the elevators, as if the act of spending money were uplifting and ennobling. Bloomingdale’s was for the missionaries who’d abandoned themselves to the jungle altogether. And Bergdorfs was the Planet of the Apes.

So Kathy decided to go to Lord & Taylor. Melanie had always shopped there, for the few things she wore besides sweatshirts and jeans. She’d said, “Some people have the map of Ireland on their faces, I have the map of Connecticut on my back—but at least it’s long wearing.”

After an hour in Lord & Taylor, Kathy found a perfect dress. It was a little frilly, and it had a print on it that reminded her of the tea roses she was growing in the garden. Also it was a polyester blend, which would guarantee long wear.

She was somewhat startled, on her way out, to see another woman trying on the exact same dress. The woman looked like someone she had seen at the women’s group.

45

After two and a half years and 59,137 miles on the road (Melanie sometimes drove the bus, so she always knew exactly how much territory they’d covered) the rock group Hard Liquor was still basically a backup band, opening for acts like Chicago and Three Dog Night and headlining in fraternity houses and at senior proms. They’d had one hit single, which rose to number six on the
Billboard
charts, but that had been it. One other song had been played for about three weeks, and then it had flown out the window like a Frisbee. Nothing else had even made it to the airwaves.

Melanie had said that the group was suffering from the curse of Little Eva (she’d recorded the “Locomotion” and then as far as anyone knew gone back to being a housemaid). Jinxed or not, though, Hard Liquor was making money—Brett was pulling down seven hundred and fifty dollars a night. So whenever Melanie was troubled by the thought that running lights for a rock group wasn’t exactly advancing her acting career, she reminded herself that Dustin Hoffman had been paid seven hundred and fifty dollars
a week
while he was making
The Graduate.

It wasn’t as if Melanie had any choice in the matter. She was in love, and to be with Brett she would have gone on the road with Up with People. There were other reasons too. The band was like a family. The roadies, the groupies, even the Dougs (every college in the country had a Special Events Committee with a chairman named Doug) were people for whom Melanie had come to feel a real affection.

The work was challenging too, and sometimes downright dangerous, especially the climbing Melanie had to do, with electrical wires coiled around her shoulder. But then all roads led to an uncertain destiny, so you might as well be on a magic bus having fun.

There were times during the band’s performances when the light booth too was a magical place to be. Melanie could create a halo around Pete, the lead singer, and with a strobe she could follow the drummer’s thunder with lightning, or she could lower a glass moon from the sky and send it spinning round, its tiny mirror images swilling like confetti. She would linger on Brett during one of his guitar solos, using an ice-blue gel, or a rose-colored one. He looked good in any light, and often, watching him onstage, Melanie felt on the verge of pulling at her hair and crying scrumptious tears, like a high school girl seeing the Beatles for the first time.

After each night’s concert the group would return to one of the cheap motels that Melanie always thought were intriguing in their anonymous way, and then the cans of Miller High Life would be pulled by the case off the bus, and in and out of the rooms you’d hear muffled conversations as everyone settled in to get drunk or stoned, and the groupies began to arrive.

Melanie loved the free postcards the motels provided, with their photographs of orange Montgomery Ward bedspreads and parking lots. While the music camp was being set up she would write a postcard to Kathy or to Mike. Often as not, if the news wasn’t about herself and Brett or the group, it would be something she’d read about Veronica Simmons in a Sunday supplement. Any day now, Melanie felt, Veronica was going to make the transition from the
Arts and Leisure
section of the Sunday
Times
to the newspapers next to the razor blades at the supermarket checkout. That was when you really knew you’d achieved celebrity status—when the housewives had to decide whether they were going to read about your personal heartbreak or take the stubble off their legs.

Veronica never got a postcard from Melanie because Melanie had lost touch with her after she’d moved to L.A. Melanie had never even seen her in that Off-Broadway show all the critics had gone nuts over. During the show’s eight-month run Hard Liquor had gone from Reno to Seattle with only a few scattered days off. There’d been some talk of flying back to New York around Christmas, but that had ended abruptly on December 20 when a Winnebago being driven by a middle-aged woman on speed backed into the magic bus. She’d turned out to be a wacko oil heiress, and had invited the band to play at her Christmas party, which she was throwing at her four-thousand-acre ranch in Sonoma County. She’d been hauling champagne and hashish in the Winnebago, just for the occasion. That had been that as far as the New York travel plans were concerned. And then Veronica had gotten her movie offer and had moved to Hollywood.

“I
knew her when,”
Melanie said to Brett one evening when she came across Veronica’s name in a newspaper column. They were smoking dope in bed, in a motel room outside Chicago. As Brett passed the joint to Melanie she noticed that his fingernails were dirty. She was revolted for a moment, not so much by the sight of his dirty fingernails as by the realization that on him they were sexy.

“I guess that’s supposed to give you some kind of satisfaction,” Melanie croaked, holding her breath after inhaling. “Being able to say that you knew them when. But what does
when
mean? When they were two years old and picked up some dog shit that’d turned white? When they were a college sophomore and went around for three whole days with this great big pimple that they didn’t even notice and finally there was a pool going with people trying to predict when it’d get popped? And that was on her
original
nose, if you please. Boy, I sure did know her
when,
all right. I wonder if she’d say hello to me if we ran into each other in the street….”

“Why wouldn’t she?” Brett asked. He relit the joint. An Elton John song was playing on the radio component of the room’s TV set.

“Because fame does funny things to people,” Melanie replied. “Change the station, will you? I think they must have made up Elton John with parts left over from Ringo Starr.”

Brett climbed out of bed to reach the knob, and Melanie drew her knees up cozily. Even now, she thoroughly enjoyed looking at her lover’s body.

“Did I ever tell you the story about Lee Remick and Howard Johnson?” Melanie asked him as she climbed back into bed.

“No, you didn’t,” Brett said. He opened a can of Miller’s.

“Well,” said Melanie. “It’s a parable about fame, but I don’t know whether it’s true or not. Anyhow, Lee Remick’s father owned a department store on the south shore of Massachusetts, and the south shore was where Howard Johnson opened his first ice cream stand. So Lee Remick and Howard Johnson’s son knew each other while they were growing up. And one day, years later, after she’d gotten into the movies and all, Howard Johnson, Jr., ran into her in the street. And she ignored him. Imagine, twenty-eight flavors and he still wasn’t good enough for her.”

Brett was rolling another joint.

“When I saw Paula at Kathy’s wedding,” Melanie continued, “she told me that the only thing she was bringing with her from her former life was a taste for coffee ice cream. That must be significant. Maybe she’d talk to Howard Johnson but not to me?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Brett said, lighting the jay.

“That’s the trouble with this group,” Melanie said. “Nobody worries about anything. Maybe that’s why our lyrics aren’t any good. Look at Paul Simon’s lyrics. Or Carly Simon’s, for that matter. Now there are two people who
fret
over their music.”

“John Lennon thinks of lyrics when he’s on the toilet,” Brett said.

“But I bet Paul and Carly Simon
sweat
more, trying to pass
all that Jewish anxiety,” Melanie replied. “Really, you and Pete should stop doing all this pseudo-Eagles stuff.”

“Why don’t you write us some music?” Brett suggested.

“Maybe I will,” Melanie said. “I’d be the next Carol Bayer Sager. Or maybe I’ll be Carole King. Who do you think is better?”

“Joni Mitchell,” said Brett. “Here’s some paper.” He handed Melanie the sheet of motel stationery he’d been rolling joints on.

“The Holiday Motor Lodge,” Melanie said, reading the logo. “The best for less…I wonder if anyone has ever actually taken a holiday around this part of Chicago.”

“Afternoons, probably,” said Brett.

“Like Lauren,” Melanie said. “She was someone I knew in school. Kathy says she sees her name in the society pages. She married rich. After having an affair with one of our professors—Dr. Riddiford. College professors take a vow of poverty and then try to make up for it with their students’ chastity. I’m glad Lauren made out, anyway. And I hope Paula—Veronica—does too. I wish all my old friends well. I’ve never been the jealous type. Maybe that’s partly because I’ve had you….”

A loud crack came from the room next door.

“What was
that
?” Melanie asked.

“Teddy and Janet,” Brett replied. “He said tonight she was gonna tie him to the bed and beat him with his belt. They’re doing coke.”

“
Janet
? That poor nervous little…collection of fingernail parings.
She’s
doing an S&M scene with
Teddy
?”

“She says that’s what he does to her from the stage.”

There was another
whack,
and another. Followed by whimpering.

“That’s Janet,” Melanie said. “But she’s not the one getting beaten.”

“That’s love,” said Brett.

What the group would do for love—and money and drugs—led them, on this swing through the Midwest, to the Lakeshore Drive apartment of a real estate developer who thought he might want to get into the record business.

“At least there’ll be plenty of good dope,” Brett had told Melanie on the way to the party.

When Melanie saw the apartment, with its floor-to-ceiling windows that took in a great arc of Lake Michigan, she didn’t doubt for a minute that there would be plenty of good dope. The view didn’t impress her much, though. The only skyline that Melanie had ever found truly impressive was the one in New York. Perhaps that was the Broadway baby in her, still fussy after all this time away. But the fact was, when you looked out on the lights of New York, you got this feeling of something really happening out there, whereas in a place like Chicago, you knew damn well that all you were seeing were ten thousand living rooms with the TV set on.

Among a stack of art books on a marble coffee table Melanie found a collection of aerial photographs of L.A., where at this hour—one in the morning, eleven L.A. time—she knew that they’d already be thinking about going to bed, so they’d be able to get up for the next day’s shooting. Poor Paula. No nightlife, and probably sleeping with one of those black light shields over her eyes. Los Angeles from the air did not gain much, in Melanie’s eyes, from the change of perspective. As she looked at the pictures in the coffee table book she got a sense of the seams in the landscape, but realized that you could get the same effect by wearing a T-shirt inside out. On the whole, she would have preferred to be looking at Brett with no shirt on, but he, unfortunately, seemed to be having a good time.

About three quarters of an hour into the party, he and Pete asked Melanie if she wanted to go to the library with them, where people were doing lines of cocaine.

“I don’t want to do any coke,” Melanie said. “I might get a spanking.”

Brett explained to Pete about Teddy and Janet.