The Nobodies Album (5 page)

She’s moved on; she doesn’t even recognize that young girl anymore.

Or maybe it’s like this: maybe she’s spent every moment of her life listening for the rising arc of those opening notes, waiting for the words to remind her of who she’s supposed to be.

Of course, the romance of letting an old friend fade out of your life is a luxury of the past, and I’m far too curious a person to have let this one rest. I looked her up a few years ago, and we’ve been in touch sporadically. We’re closer as online “friends” than we ever were as friends in the flesh, and her Facebook updates have turned her from a mythical icon to an ordinary woman living her life. She lives in San Francisco, and if this were a trip for business or pleasure, I’d certainly take the time to get in touch with her, to see if she wanted to get together.

But now, as I sit in the café where Joe has agreed to meet me, I’m thinking about Lisette the wandering girl and not Lisette the fifty-two-year-old divorced real estate agent. The people around me don’t look much different from people buying coffee in any other American city, but I’ve absorbed enough of the California mythology to imagine that each of them is in the grip of some sharp-flavored ambition, aching to be known and remembered. I’ll bet any one of them would be thrilled to have a song written about them. I know I would.

As I wait for Joe to arrive, I tune in to a conversation at a table on my right. Two guys with laptops, one typing away, the other sitting back reading something. From time to time one of them will talk on the phone to someone else. It’s a different model of companionship than I’m used to, but they seem content.

The one who’s been reading looks up. “Hey, here’s a good one. What’s the name of Pareidolia’s follow-up to
December Graffiti
?”

His friend looks up from his screen, smiling already. “What?”

“
Dismember Your Sweetie
.”

His friend shrugs, makes a noncommittal gesture with his hand. “Eh,” he says. “I’ve heard better.”

Much is being made already about the dark nature of the lyrics Milo has written. Everyone’s scrutinizing his songs, looking for violence, misogyny, anything that can be sharpened and used to poke with. The results are iffy at best, but when people see a puzzle, they will find pieces that fit. In one song, “Saskatchewan,” Milo sings, “Be a whore for me / You know how, you’ve done it before.” Not my favorite lyric, but not terribly out of the ordinary when placed in the context of modern pop music. And the irony of it is, “Saskatchewan” is a love song. The narrator (who may or may not be Milo, let’s not forget) is telling his girlfriend that he doesn’t care how many men she’s been with before, as long as she stays true to him. It’s as close to gallantry as this type of music gets. Another song, “Plutonium Kiss,” contains the following couplet: “She had poison between her lips and poison between her thighs / We played Russian roulette to find out who should die.” This one makes me laugh. I’ll bet even Milo can’t keep a straight face when he sings those lines. It’s ludicrous; it’s posturing for effect; it’s a ninth grader showing off for his friends.

But the song people are really excited about is “Diesel Lights,” which describes a lovers’ quarrel at a highway rest stop. As the song builds and the tension rises between the couple in the story, the speaker tells his girlfriend:

I grabbed you hard
There was no one else around
I’ll tell you now
I could have beat you to the ground
.

In light of what’s happened … well. But I don’t think it’s particularly revelatory. I know from personal experience that this kind of treasure hunt is not useful. When Pareidolia’s second album came out, I spent hours with the lyric sheet, looking for anything that might mean something to me. Some hidden wish for immortalization à la Lisette Freyn. And sometimes—a verse about long-standing anger, a line about betrayal—I thought I might have found it. But I was never sure.

Anyway. Young men don’t write songs about their mothers; you’d worry about them if they did. Milo is not some folksinger, composing sentimental ballads about his childhood home, and he’s not a country singer belting out odes to his mama. He’s going for rock star; he’s going for hard, pointed, edged like a sword. And how much can you tell about a person from what he writes anyway? He has a lot to juggle, I imagine—he’s working with rhyme and meter, making the story fit the music—and he’s trying to manufacture a particular image. You can’t assume he’s telling the truth about anything.

•  •  •

The door opens, and there he is, Joe Khan, all grown up. He’s wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses—the half-disguise of the semicelebrity—and he’s affected a careful scruffiness that seems miles away from the true slovenly disregard of his adolescence. It’s a strange sensation to see him here. We haven’t been in a room together for five years or more, but I can’t say that I haven’t seen him in that time. I’d seen enough recent pictures to know what to expect—I knew his hair would be shorter than the last time we met, and that his face would look slightly more angular—but I had forgotten about texture and curve and depth, all of the corporeal minutiae that can’t be conveyed on film. Looking at him in the flesh—in 3-D, as it were—makes me realize that I’ve come to picture Milo in that same flat way.

Joe takes off his sunglasses, and I see his eyes, wide and brown as a seal’s, just exactly like they always were. I feel lifted, somehow, just standing in his presence. To see him after all this time, this man whose boyhood was so entwined with Milo’s, who ate noisily at our table and broke the sugar bowl from my mother’s wedding china, who once couldn’t look at me for a month after reading a novel of mine that included a few racy scenes—it’s like letting out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. There’s a surrogate pleasure in it, a chance to extend some maternal warmth by proxy.

“Joe,” I say. I give him a hug. “You look good.”

“Thanks,” he says. “You too. You really do.”

“Thank you,” I say. I look okay, I suppose, for a middle-aged woman lost in catastrophe. My hair is shorter now, too, but it’s softer and wavier; I used to blow-dry it straight in a way that looks severe to me now in pictures. And though I’m a little travel-rumpled, I took care to dress up today, in the apparently foolish hope that I might be seeing Milo. Perhaps Joe had imagined I’d look worse than this. I’ve been using the same author photo for ten years, so he may not have known what to expect.

He gestures toward the counter. “Let me just grab a coffee.”

I watch as he goes up, orders, pays. No one seems to take any notice of him, though his picture’s been in the paper nearly as much as Milo’s.

“So I should tell you,” he says as he sits down at the table. He pulls the plastic lid off his cup, blows ripples across the surface of the coffee. I can see he has a small tattoo on his forearm, just above his wrist; it looks abstract, some kind of runic design, but it’s partly covered by his sleeve. “My lawyer has advised me not to talk about the case.”

I nod. “Sure,” I say. “That’s fine.” I expected as much, though it does leave us with some awkward holes in the conversation. “So,” I try. “How are your parents doing? I talked to your mom briefly, but we didn’t really have time to catch up.”

“They’re good,” he says. “My dad’s retiring next year.”

“Good for him,” I say.

“Are you still in the same place?” he asks. I nod.

“I always liked that house,” he says, and I have a sudden flash of an image, Milo and Joe sitting on the carpet in front of the TV, video game controllers clutched so tightly their knuckles were pale. In the very room where I sat last night and watched my son move across the screen in handcuffs.

I sigh, and Joe sips his coffee. The conversation is stagnating, but I’m not sure what I can ask him.
How’s the band going?
is clearly not the right question. We sit in silence for a few moments, drinking our coffee studiously.

“Without asking about the case,” I say, “can I ask about Milo?”

“I guess so,” says Joe. “What do you want to know?”

I think about it. How does this happen? That’s one thing I want to know. How is it possible that we find ourselves in this situation? And, did he kill Bettina? And, will I ever lay eyes on him again without a screen of television glass between us?

“Well, whatever you want to tell me, I guess. How was he before all this happened? Just anything. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him.”

“Before this,” Joe says. He sounds almost wistful, as if he’s forgotten such a time existed. “He was okay, I guess. He was … I don’t know. He’s, you know … Milo.”

I look down at the paper cup in my hands, the cardboard sleeve around its middle. I feel suddenly that I might cry. Of course. He’s just Milo.

“What was Bettina like?” I ask. What I really mean is, what was Milo like when he was with her, but that seems to veer too closely to danger territory.

He doesn’t say anything for a minute. “Honestly, I was never crazy about her,” he says. “God, that sounds awful after all this.”

I shrug. “You don’t have to start liking someone just because they’re dead. What didn’t you like about her?”

“She was just annoying. She was kind of childish, always throwing tantrums when she didn’t get her way. And she was very possessive of Milo. Not that he minded—he was way too into her, and I could never really figure out why.”

He stops talking. I think he thinks he’s gone too far. I don’t want him to be uncomfortable, but I’d give any amount of money to know his definition of “way too into her.”

“So how’s the writing going?” he asks. He wants to talk about something else.

“Okay,” I say. I feel like I’m sitting in a cloud of anxiety as it is, and I don’t want to think about
The Nobodies Album
waiting in my editor’s inbox. I wonder instead if the publishing company will be sending me a sympathy fruit basket or something. I wonder if I’ll be staying here long enough for it to molder on the porch before I get home. “Fine.”

“I read one of your books a couple of summers ago,” he says, livening a little. “The one … the ghost story, if you can call it that. The one about the guy who had been on the
Titanic
when he was a kid.”

“Carpathia,”
I say.

“Right. It was really good.”

“Thanks,” I say. “I’m glad you liked it.”

“It was crazy, though—just having it in my house was all cloak-and-dagger. I had to hide it every time Milo came over, to make sure he didn’t see it.” He laughs, as if it’s cute that my son can’t even stand to lay eyes on something I’ve written.

I drink the last of my coffee and set the cup on the table. Casting about for a new topic, I ask if he has a girlfriend. He does, which I already knew—a woman named Chloe, who has a young daughter from a previous relationship. She designs jewelry and sells it online. And we’re back to silence.

I’m about to ask if his parents’ cockatoo is still alive, but at the same moment Joe says, “I have something for you.”

He picks up his messenger bag from where he’s dropped it under the table. When he opens it, I can see the edge of a laptop, a coiled cord, some papers, two CDs. And a square white gift box, which he pulls out and hands to me.

“You’re kidding,” I say. “Really?”

“Yup,” he says. He smiles for the first time since he sat down. “Just a little something.”

I open the box and find a porcelain sugar bowl painted with yellow roses. My mother’s pattern.

“Oh, Joe,” I say. A thread of warmth snakes through me. I’m truly touched. “This is lovely. I can’t believe you did this.”

“Yeah, well,” he says, looking embarrassed. “I always felt bad about breaking it. I actually thought right away that I wanted to get you a new one. I saved a little piece of the one that broke—I put it in my pocket while we were cleaning it up, so I’d have something with the pattern on it. But I never did anything about it. And then, after the band started making money, I was buying presents like crazy—it was a little insane, actually, like I bought my mom a car, and I got my dad this signed baseball that cost twenty-five hundred dollars.”

I smile and try to look charmed. Milo never sent me anything.

“So anyway, I remembered that I always wanted to replace the sugar bowl, and it became like my life’s mission to track one down. Milo was no help—he didn’t know the name of the pattern or who made it or anything, but I still had that little broken piece, and eventually I figured out the details. You know they don’t make this stuff anymore?”

I nod. “I almost never use my pieces anymore because they’re so hard to replace.”

“Yeah. I’d pretty much given up. With everything that happened between you and Milo, it would’ve seemed weird to just send you a sugar bowl out of the blue.”

Weird. I guess I would have thought it was. It’s very sweet, but it’s well beyond what you might expect from a man his age. I think he might have had a bit of a crush on me when he was a teenager.

“So how’d you end up finding it?”

“Chloe finally tracked one down online. She likes those kind of challenges, so she’d do searches from time to time. It actually just arrived this morning.”

“Wow,” I say, rather inelegantly. I nestle the bowl in its tissue paper. “Well, thank you. I really love it. It’s a great gift.”

“Well, good. I’m glad.” He pulls his phone out of his pocket, checks the time. “I’ve got to go,” he says. “I’ve got a meeting with our manager at four. We’ve got to figure out what the rest of the band is going to do until all this is resolved. We’ve got tour dates to cancel … it’s a mess.” We stand up. “How long are you out here for?”

“Not long. Not much I can do if he won’t even talk to me.”

“It’s still good you came, I think,” says Joe. “Even though he won’t see you.”

I look at him. “Really?” I say.

“Yeah. For what it’s worth, I think he’s being a prick. He could use having you around right now.”

I reach up to hug him again, run a hand through his bristly hair like a mother might do. He’s always had beautiful hair, dark and thick.
Wasted on a boy
, my grandmother would have said. “It was great to see you,” I say. “Take care of yourself.”