“Believe me,” she said, “I earned it. This comes from weeding the
garden and mowing the lawn, not from lying under any sun lamp.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything less from you.”
It was a sunny, smogless day, and as he drove, he kept up a steady
stream of conversation, brought her up to date on the local music scene, told
her who was new and who was working and who was washed up. She let him run
down before she attempted conversation. “So,” she said at last, “what’s on the
agenda for tonight?”
“You hungry?”
“Famished.”
“You’re in luck. I’ve been taking this Oriental cooking class,
and I thought tonight I’d make
moo goo gai pan
. It’ll knock your socks
off.”
He was right. The
moo goo gai pan
was out of this world.
After dinner, they retired to the living room with two jelly glasses and a
bottle of Chablis. “MacKenzie,” she said, stretching her legs and leaning back
against the couch, “you certainly do know the way to a woman’s heart.”
“Aha! The truth comes out. It’s my cooking that keeps luring you
back to my den of iniquity.”
“I thought you knew,” she said. “It’s your record collection.
You just happen to have the most extensive collection of Jimmy Buffett
recordings on the planet.”
“Laugh. Someday they’ll be worth a fortune.”
“But you’d never sell them,” she said. “You’re more the type to
will them to the archeology department of some prestigious university. Of course,
they’d reward you handsomely by naming a wing after you. The R.K. MacKenzie
Clinic for the Terminally Free-Thinking, or something of that ilk.”
“Are you calling me unconventional, Fiore?”
“Nobody in their right mind would call you unconventional. Eccentric,
maybe, but certainly not unconventional.”
“That’s a relief. For a minute there, you had me worried.” He
stretched out his lanky legs and crossed them at the ankles. Took a sip of
Chablis and studied the contents of his glass. “So,” he said, “what’s going on
between you and Jesse?”
“Nothing’s going on,” she said in exasperation. “Why does
everybody keep asking me that?”
“Well, for starters,” he said, “you’re dating him.”
“Oh, for the love of God. I am not dating him. We’re friends.
We spend time together because we’re both alone and we enjoy each other’s
company. But I’d hardly call it dating. I’m not in the market for another
husband. I’m never getting married again.”
“Never,” he said thoughtfully. “I don’t know, babe. Never’s a
long time.”
“Danny would always be there between us. Nobody could ever
measure up.”
“I suppose it would be hard,” he said, his voice gone suddenly
flat, “competing with a ghost.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Are you mad at me?” she said.
He squared his jaw. “I don’t know,” he said. “Should I be?”
“I can’t imagine why.”
“Look around you, Casey. Don’t you ever wake up in the middle of
the night and wonder why nobody’s there?”
She thought of the emptiness of her king-size bed, of the black
void she faced nightly. “More times than you’d care to know,” she said. “But
you see, I have you.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot. Damn cozy, those three thousand miles of
telephone line.” He folded his arms across his belly and studied his toes.
Quietly, he said, “I do, you know.”
“You do what?”
“Wake up in the middle of the night and wonder why nobody’s
there.”
Inside her chest, she felt the tug of an emotion she couldn’t
identify. “Flash,” she said, “why don’t you find yourself some nice girl and
get married?”
“You sound like my mother. It’s not like I haven’t been looking.
Is it my fault that Miss Right hasn’t shown up?”
“Ms. And in the immortal words of Johnny Lee, you’re looking for
love in all the wrong places.”
“That’s what my mom says. She wants me to come home to Southie
and marry Mary Frances O’Reilly.”
“Ah, yes,” she said. “The infamous Mary Frances. Still single,
is she?”
“And getting more desperate by the hour. Her biological clock is
ticking like crazy.”
Glenn Frey, in an earlier incarnation, was singing in full, lush
stereo about taking it easy. In the flickering light of a single candle, Rob
held up his Flintstones jelly glass and stared morosely into its depths. “All
I know,” he said, “is that something’s wrong with my life, and I don’t know how
to fix it.”
Casey rested her glass on her knee. Toying with a strand of his
hair, she said, “You could do something really radical.”
He leaned his head back and studied her. “Yeah? Like what?”
She wrapped one golden curl around a slender forefinger. “Maybe
move to the East Coast.”
“And give up all this?”
She looked around the room. “Maybe you could buy the Hotel
California and have it dismantled and moved, piece by piece.”
They shared a wry grin. “I think,” he said, suddenly serious,
“that you’re the only person in my life who’s ever loved me unconditionally.”
He drew a pattern on his glass with a fingernail.
It was a curious thing for him to say. Still toying with his
hair, she said, “How’s that?”
“You accept me for what I am. You don’t have any preconceived
expectations. No matter what damn-fool thing I do, you love me anyway.” He
turned his jelly glass in his hand. “Do you realize how old this thing is?
They had these when I was a kid. It’s probably an antique by now.”
***
They spent the next few days in the studio, re-recording and
remixing portions of his new album, drinking murky coffee and eating stale
doughnuts and cold pizza. She’d been away from all this long enough to have
forgotten the exhilaration she felt surrounded by the lively chaos of a
recording studio. This was a world she understood, a world a million miles
away from the one she’d been living in since Danny died.
A little after nine on Saturday night, exhausted but pleased with
the way the session had gone, they wound things to a close. As Casey was
boxing up the remains of the pizza, Niall, one of the sound engineers, swung
his jacket over his shoulder and said, “A bunch of us are stopping by the Blue
Onion for a while. You two want to come with us?”
“What’s the Blue Onion?” she said.
“It’s a blues club,” Rob said around the pencil clenched between
his teeth. He tucked a cluster of sheet music into a leather portfolio,
dropped in the pencil, and zipped it up. “They opened up about three months
ago.”
“Very hot,” Niall added.
“This isn’t one of those see-and-be-seen places, is it?” Pizza
box in hand, Casey looked down at her jeans and flannel shirt. “I’m not
exactly dressed for going out.”
“It’s very low-key,” Niall said. “Ultra casual.”
“Everybody’s there for the same reason,” Rob said. “To drink, to
dance, and to hear some of the best blues on the West Coast.”
“Sounds like my kind of place,” she said. “Let’s go.”
The Blue Onion was a musician’s hangout, liberally sprinkled with
familiar faces, people Casey had known and worked with over the years. There
were a few well-knowns scattered among the crowd, but the majority were the
backbone of the music industry, the studio musicians, the songwriters, the
backup singers who made the stars of the industry sound good on vinyl, tape, or
CD. As usual, she was the lone woman at the table, and as usual, the guys
talked shop. It was inevitable. Get a bunch of musicians together, and you
could almost guarantee that they’d be either listening to music, making music,
or talking about making music. Frequently, it was a combination of the
three. Over the years, the talk had changed; new words like
MIDI
and
download
showed up with regularity. Computers had taken over the recording industry—to
its detriment, some believed. Certainly the new technology had put a number of
sessions musicians out on the street. Electronic technology was cheaper and
easier in the long run than live musicians, so competition for available jobs
was fierce, and only the strongest and the best survived.
Other things had changed over the years, too. Looking around the
table, Casey realized that their group was aging. Receding hairlines and
graying ponytails weren’t uncommon, and most of the guys here tonight would
have a drink or two and then go home to their wives and kids. Only Niall and
Rob remained single. Casey took a sip of beer, closed her eyes and let the
music take her.
Ah, the music
.
It was rich and earthy, cool and jazzy, hot and steamy, with a disturbing,
primitive sexual rhythm that moved her in a way she’d never been able to
translate into words. Her response to the blues was overwhelmingly physical,
visceral and erotic, bringing to mind something she’d heard Rob say years ago:
Good blues is like good sex; you can feel it from your toenails to the roots
of your hair.
She opened her eyes and caught him watching her, and she
flushed red-hot. He casually rested his elbow on the back of her chair while
he continued his conversation with Mike Andreason. Crowded together as they
were, six of them sitting around a table designed for no more than three, she
was crammed tight against him, hip to hip, thigh to thigh, knee to knee. He
gave off so much heat, she could feel dampness forming under her arms and
beneath the collar of her shirt. She discreetly peeled the damp fabric away
from her chest, wondering why on earth she’d worn flannel, in California, in
July.
Rob shifted position, rested his hand on the back of her neck.
She shot him a quick, speculative glance, but he was still deep in conversation,
slumped on his tailbone with those long legs spread wide before him, seemingly
oblivious to her. Casey took another sip of beer, relaxed into his warmth, and
made a halfhearted attempt to follow the conversation. But it was impossible;
she was too distracted by the thumb that was lazily stroking the tender flesh
just behind her left ear. Had he been any other man on the planet, she would
have thought he was coming on to her. But Rob was an extremely physical
person, eminently comfortable inside his body and free with his affection, and
she doubted he even realized what he was doing.
She, on the other hand, was excruciatingly aware of what he was
doing. And if he didn’t stop doing it, she was going to experience nuclear
meltdown, right here at the table. She reached up and removed his hand, then
patted his shoulder. “Bathroom run,” she said. “Be right back.”
She stood in front of the mirror in the powder room beside a leggy
twenty-year-old blonde who was applying eyeliner. Feeling like the frumpy country
mouse, Casey splashed cool water on her face and the back of her neck. The
window was open, a soft breeze drifting in, and she undid the top button of her
flannel shirt for ventilation. The blonde eyed her distastefully before
pulling out lipstick and pursing pouty lips that would have given Jagger a run
for his money. Ignoring her, Casey took out her brush and tried to tame her
hair into some semblance of order. But it was useless; the humidity inevitably
removed what little body it had and left it limp and straight as a stick. She
gave up, crammed the brush back into her purse and left the blonde to her
toilette.
A friend of Niall’s had shanghaied Casey’s chair, so she stood
behind Rob with her hands resting lightly on his shoulders, her body swaying
restlessly to the rhythm of the music. He reached up, caught her hands in his
and leaned his head back. “Wanna dance, sweet stuff?” he said.
He didn’t have to ask twice. When the music moved her, Casey
wanted to move to the music. They found an empty spot on the dance floor and
she stepped into his arms with an ease born of years of familiarity. He was
warm and damp, slender and solid, and she had forgotten how wonderful it felt
to be held in a man’s arms, engulfed in his searing heat, pressed against a
hard body from knee to shoulder. It was true what they said about people
having their own unique scents; blindfolded, in a room full of people, she
could still have picked Rob out by smell alone.
She wound her arms around his neck and did her best to follow his
lead. Rob MacKenzie danced the way he did everything in life: full speed
ahead, with rhythm and panache. He wasn’t a flashy dancer, but had an innate,
organic understanding of music that went light years beyond any scattered
pieces of theory he’d picked up in a college classroom. He was a natural, born
to make music, born to translate it into a language that other, less fortunate
creatures could comprehend.
She lost all sense of time as they swayed together, bluesy ballad
segueing into bluesy ballad. The humidity ceased to have meaning as they
melted together like a pair of Crayolas left out too long in the sun. Her
dampness was now his dampness, and his hers. She could no longer distinguish
up from down, Casey from Rob, and she wondered how she could possibly be this
drunk when she’d only had one beer. It had to be the music, that damned erotic
music. Nothing else could explain the hollow ache inside her. Nothing else
could explain why his body crushed against hers was sending sparks shooting off
into the stratosphere.