The Big Rewind (20 page)

He watched me get on the bus.

I watched him walk away.

I played Warren Zevon's “Accidentally Like a Martyr” six times in a row and cried silently the whole way back to Brooklyn.

I
had finally managed to stop sobbing by the time Sid got home, but the lack of Trader Joe's bags and my red, swollen eyes were probably a dead giveaway that our evening's plans had changed.

“He's getting married, Sid,” I blubbered. “Catch. The one who broke my heart. He's still going to marry that
bimbo
and I never told him, Sid, I never told him how I felt and now it's
too late
!” I wasn't crying because he wasn't marrying me. I was crying out of pride, as though I could have saved him from that suit and his office and whatever cracker-box apartment he and Amanda had filled with IKEA furniture. And because Catch had given me the same speech that George had parceled out into sixty minutes of music. It was like watching his soul come out. KitKat never had to know this grief, but I felt hers along with mine.

I sank into a chair and buried my head in the nest of my arms. I watched under the table as Sid's worn brown oxfords carried him to the kitchen. I lifted my head and watched with blurry eyes as he uncorked the bottle of wine he'd come home with. But he didn't pour me any, didn't offer a few more ruby-colored hours away from my heartache. He sloshed a heavy measure into a dirty
juice glass and killed half of it, then turned and carried it into the living room, his back to me.

I wiped away tears and mascara and rose to my feet, treading as delicately as a gazelle among sleeping lions. “Sid?” I ventured to ask. “Sid, are you all right?”

He dropped the empty glass on the carpet and took my face in his hands, kissing me deeper than any man had ever tried to before. It was a kiss to shut me up, to stop my sobbing, to save my soul. “I don't want to hear one more word,” he whispered, his lips barely brushing against my cheek. “Not one goddamn word, not one more name. Not unless it's mine.”

Those were terms I could agree with.

I
AWOKE AROUND
midnight to faint music and empty sheets. It took me a minute to place what it was: the Psychedelic Furs, “The Ghost in You.” I put on my panties and Sid's yellow oxford shirt and found him stretched out on the couch in his gray undershirt and bike-printed boxers, the record player spinning and most of the bottle of wine gone.

The moment couldn't have been any more perfect if it had been set up on film. Everything I had at one time felt for Catch was magnified a hundred times as I watched Sid slumber. Nothing hurt. Nothing ached. I was just happy, an utter bliss like I had never felt.

I wasn't even afraid of what dawn would bring. If he wanted to walk out, chalk it up to a lonely mistake, I would be content treasuring these few hours.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Didn't mean to wake you,” he said. “I couldn't sleep.”

I curled up on the other end of the couch, facing him. “It's a good album,” I said. “I haven't played it in a while.” I would play this song every day, I promised myself, if it would remind me of this perfect moment. It wasn't just the sex, as good as that was. I wanted to write his name just to see it spelled out. I wanted to
get a locker just so I could hang his photo inside the door. And I never wanted to close my eyes, never wanted to fall asleep, just so that I could savor forever these first blossoms of love in my chest.

He leaned in and kissed me. “We never ate,” he said. “You want to order some Chinese?”

I nodded and he pulled up the number for Hunan Fun, a twenty-four-hour dumpling joint that Barter Street had grown up around. Rumor had it that the secret to their longevity was that they'd dealt opium in the twenties, weed in the thirties, dope in the forties and fifties, acid in the sixties, and coke up through the eighties. If it didn't require getting dressed, I would have suggested we walk down there, sit in the red and gold vinyl booth next to the big ceramic dragon, drink tea under fringed dome lanterns, split blue and white willow dishes overflowing with sesame chicken and beef chow mein, slurp wonton soup from wide bowls with flat porcelain spoons.

While he placed our order, I went into the other room and made myself presentable. If there was a product that could make hair look as post-sex perfect every day as mine did in the big mirror on my grandmother's antique dresser right then, I would buy it by the shipping crate. There was a text from Natalie on my phone, asking if I wanted to get bubble tea six hours ago. I was almost compelled to text her and tell her that I finally slept with Sid and that it was amazing. I wanted her to be proud, but more than that, I just wanted to brag to anyone who would listen.

He switched the record to Duran Duran's
Rio
and held out his hand. “Let's dance,” he said, eyes starry. “We've got twenty minutes before the food shows up.”

I mimicked a shy
Me?
gesture and let him pull me in close. He slid his hand down to the small of my back, fusing our bodies as one. “This should be our next house party,” he said as we grooved to “Lonely in Your Nightmare.” “Late-night pajama dance party. No one can show up before midnight, music is entirely by request. And we'll just dance. No theme, no costume required, just bring food, bring booze, bring records, and dance until dawn.”

“
Our
next party?” I teased. “Are you moving in?”

“I already have,” he said, waltzing me in a circle. “While you were asleep. You can check the bathroom; my toothbrush is there on the sink. You can't get rid of me now.”

“Not until after the food arrives, anyway,” I said. “How did you get out of your rent at Terry's place?”

“Left him all my Vicodin,” he said. “Figure that's worth at least a month, and if he gets caught, well, I'll just say he stole it.”

“You've thought of everything.”

“All I thought of was you.”

We danced until the doorbell rang. I dove onto the couch, giggling, to hide my half-nakedness under a blanket while Sid exchanged money for food through a crack in the door. He returned with two I-heart-NY bags, and I poured us what was left of the wine.

“Cheers,” I said. “To your toothbrush.”

He grinned wider than I'd ever seen. “Cheers,” he said. “To your sink.”

P
laying house with Sid was the only thing that kept my mind off KitKat's case. Every evening he arrived with a few more pieces of his apartment: a different shirt, a pair of jeans, the half-flat pillow from his bed, a yellow mug with a chicken on it. We didn't speak in official terms—
moving in,
cohabitation, boyfriend, girlfriend
. We drank coffee in the morning and had sex at night. The sex had a strange spontaneity to it, as though every night was the first time we'd found ourselves naked, kissing as though we were discovering it for all of humanity. Even when he brought home a fresh pack of Trojans along with a bottle of wine, he didn't grin or slap my ass or do anything resembling seduction. Night after night, we found ourselves in bed, legs tangled, flesh pressed tight against eager flesh. And every morning, I woke up happy that he was there beside me.

Work picked up at MetroReaders. We'd walk to the subway together and kiss good-bye, meet back on the doorstep in the evening. I had money in my bank account and treated him to dinner. For a few days, I could convince myself that this was how normal people lived. Normal people who weren't trying to solve their friend's murder.

Bronco was going to trial in less than a month. One of Philip's
friends had agreed to take his case, but Bronco still wasn't feeling like he was in the clear just yet. I called around to pawnshops, asking about the bracelet. No one had seen a chain plate with a Joe Jackson quote. I went back through her mix tape binder and stalked a few more of her ex-boyfriends on Facebook but found nothing that raised any suspicions. Calvin was living in France. David was now Diana. Neither Bronco or Hillary had any ideas either. I was failing him. I was failing Hillary. And worst of all, I was failing KitKat.

G
ARBAGE DAY ON
Barter Street was like a neighborhood garage sale. There were two kinds of trash: the food scraps and coffee grounds and wads of paper you threw in white bags in the basement for the building super to take, and the boxes of perfectly good items you left on the front steps for people to browse through. I'd gotten an Express pencil skirt from the porch of the building on the corner and two Boz Scaggs records from a box two doors down from Egg School. The unspoken rule was if you found something, it was good karma to leave something on your own porch the following week.

MetroReaders hadn't called me in that day, so after Sid left for work, I gathered up the trash from the bathroom and the kitchen, dumped Baldrick's litter box, and briefly considered going for a browse. I was starting to like being up early, having coffee with Sid in the morning dream-haze. Baldrick liked it too; it meant he got fed earlier and didn't have to sit on my chest and howl until I appeased him.

On the way out the door, I grabbed
The Bridge
. For whatever reason, I couldn't stand the thought of having it in my house one minute longer. Billy Joel could still pack Madison Square Garden; someone on Barter Street had to like him, even ironically.

A 212 number I didn't recognize popped up on my phone.
This better not be Sid at the hospital again,
I thought. For a moment
the fear of Tommy's retaliation was a real, concrete thing, until I answered and heard a woman's voice.

“Jett, hi, it's Cassie, from the Bitter End?”

The same Cassie who'd cursed me out for mentioning “Secret Girlfriend”? Before I could snap back with a snarky retort, she jumped in.

“I was a real bitch to you the other night,” she admitted. “I don't blame you for not sticking around, and as soon as I noticed you'd left, I realized how hateful I sounded. I was kind of just hoping you'd gone to the bathroom, because I was trying to remember the lyrics to ‘Secret Girlfriend' so I could sing it to you by way of apology. But you left, which is exactly what I would have done. And then this guy called me up to have a bracelet engraved for you—at least, I assume it was you, I don't think there are too many girls named Jett—and I took it as this cosmic sign that I should apologize.”

I couldn't decide whether the feeling in the pit of my stomach was excitement or dread. I hadn't been expecting that kind of apology. I'd forgotten I'd even given her my number. “Yeah, the bracelet was for me,” I said. “It looks great. Thanks for calling.”

She let out a sigh that sounded like relief. “So now this is going to sound really weird,” she continued. “But I'm going record shopping, and I got this idea that you might want to come along. You're so young, do you even know what records are?”

“I've got a turntable here in my apartment,” I said. I hated when people asked me that, like I was born in a void with an iPhone in my hand, but I let it slide for her.

“I knew you were cool,” she said. “You want to meet me at the cube on Astor? There's a couple good places near there, Salvation Armys and the like. You find the best stuff in the dollar bin.”

Records
and
an apology? It wasn't going to get much better than that. I looked at the record in my hand. It was no longer destined for the junk pile or to become an ironic plant holder. It would have a home, as all records should.

Besides, it was a long shot, but I wanted to ask her about the bracelet. She said she did engraving, and George wouldn't have bought KitKat jewelry from some Chinatown stall. Maybe she could put word out to the other jewelers in case they had something useful for me.

I
t was easy to spot Cassie in the crowd, even with all the NYU posers taking selfies in front of the cube. She looked like she'd accidentally warped there from the nineties: 505s cuff-rolled over the same blood-red Docs, a tangle of long necklaces spilling down the front of a black tank top, her chunky chain bracelet dangling from her skinny wrist, a black-and-gray checked flannel dangling off her slim shoulders like it was in danger of falling to its death on the sidewalk. It took her half a second to recognize me and then she gave me a hug.

“I'm really sorry,” she said again. “I've been staring at your number on my fridge for two weeks trying to get the courage to call you up and apologize.”

“It's okay.” I dug the record out of my bag and held it out to her. “You played ‘State of Grace' at your show; I thought you might like this. Hope you don't have it already.”

She took it with an enormous grin. “This is so cool!” she gushed. “God, when I was in high school, I used to play this album all the time. I thought ‘Running on Ice' was, like, so deep. How did you know?”

I just smiled, not wanting to tell her its original destiny.

“I'm on this ongoing hunt for the Fontanelles' seven-inch EP,” she said as we strolled through the crowd like we owned the
crosswalk. “I saw them play out in L.A. when I was visiting my sister. I bought their EP that night—the guy manning their booth had a tattoo of Captain Crunch—but I've long since lost it. I keep hoping it'll turn up in one of these bins. I know I'll never find it but what's there to life if we don't have hope?”

“I've never heard of them,” I admitted. “It's weird to think that in the age of iTunes and Spotify, there's a band that can't be found—then again, it took me weeks to track you down.”

I jogged a little to keep up with her enormous pace as we started toward St. Marks. I don't get over to St. Marks very often; I don't have any need for Elmo hash pipes or T-shirts with the double bird where the Twin Towers used to be.

“I miss the old St. Marks,” said Cassie. “Kim's Video, Love Saves the Day, Religious Sex . . . it all folded up overnight and now it's nothing but tourist T-shirt joints and places for drunk Westchester skanks to get belly-button piercings and hepatitis.” She blew a stray curl out of her face. “I had this dream about New York when I moved out here from Minnesota; I saw this gritty, raw place and believed—like everybody does—that I could cut to the heart of it like a surgeon. Too many Lou Reed albums, I guess, but I got here, and I got dirty, and it wasn't at all like I planned.”

We crossed Second Avenue and she continued. “But even now, a decade clean, I still miss the New York I bought drugs in, like old punks miss CBGB. So much of it is gone now; Times Square is just a huge Disneyland mall, and all the bright lights and manufactured shit is just fucking smack. You come here, you buy the sparkly M&M's World T-shirt, get your picture taken with some meth-addled homeless dude in a Shrek costume, sit through
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
. Fuck, I'm so old I remember when Green Day was a punk band and not a Broadway show.” She smirked and stopped in front of a rickety set of stairs and two card tables of milk crates filled with vinyl no one else wanted.

“Maybe I'm just nostalgic,” she said, not looking at me as she began to paw through a crate of Toto records. “I get it, things
change, but it seems like everything changes for the cheap and tawdry. People don't like to feel anything anymore; they don't like to take risks. They want what they know and they want it without questions, and that isn't any different than the reasons people take drugs. To hide. To escape. But why have some girl standing alone on a stage with a guitar, reminding you of all the sadness and ache of the world, when you can have Katy Perry shooting whipped cream out of her big plastic tits and telling you that you're just so fucking special?”

I picked through a crate of seventies singer-songwriter LPs and thought about Catch's girlfriend. His
fiancée
. At a time when all the other roads seemed unpaved and littered with potholes, she was smooth, straight highway. I couldn't fault him for choosing Amanda—Cassie and I may have had our pride, sure, but we were standing here flipping through records everyone else had forgotten, griping about a world we didn't understand. Were we really that much better off?

We didn't find anything in the dollar bin and descended into the darkness downstairs. This place looked nothing like Ol' Vinylsides; records were crammed in crates and piled in corners with no real order to them. The manager had tired eyes and a beard that would have put a pirate captain to shame; he barely looked up from an old issue of
Crawdaddy
to acknowledge us. There wasn't an ironic Bee Gees T-shirt or eight-track player to be found.

I picked a two-dollar bin at random while Cassie perused the stacks of seven-inch EPs. I could see what George had first loved in her, how she'd formed the foundations of his heart, which would later be turned toward KitKat. I wondered if he knew she was still here, if he ever looked her up, paused with one finger on the last digit of her phone number. It was a cause unknown to people my age, a fear of rejection, of loss, that we never had to experience. We never had to lose touch with anybody; our Facebooks were filled with people we hadn't spoken to in years, just in case we ever needed to find out how many kids our best friend
from nursery school had or whether the guy who sat in front of us in Earth Science had ever come out as gay. We hoarded friends, memories, moments on camera we were too busy recording to actually enjoy. Nothing had the chance to become old, forgotten, or rediscovered by someone else.

I ran my fingers along the worn tops of the album covers, the cardboard fuzzy with years of use. Someone had let go of all of these. Someone had moved on, packed them up, said good-bye, and left them for someone else. There are no used-MP3 stores; you never have to delete an e-mail from someone you've all but forgotten. Everything we own is ours to keep locked up in our own private towers. Only rent receipts show that not everything is ours to possess.

I had almost psyched myself out of record shopping when a bit of blue caught my eye. I pushed a few Thompson Twins records aside and there it was: the Vapors,
New Clear Days
. The sleeve was pretty battered, but it was all there—“News at Ten,” “Bunkers,” and, of course, “Turning Japanese.”

I plucked it from the crate like I was picking up the Holy Grail. “Nice.” Cassie nodded her head. “I haven't thought about that album in decades. My girlfriends and I used to dance to ‘Turning Japanese' all the time.”

“It's my friend Sid's favorite,” I said. “He's been looking for it for months. He's got it digitally, of course, but—”

“But vinyl is so much better,” she agreed. “He'll love it.”

We resumed flipping through bins until she pulled out Joe Jackson's
Body and Soul
. “This was my college boyfriend's favorite album,” she said, clutching the record to her chest. “I bought it for him and we used to drink cheap red wine and play the whole thing by candlelight.” She sighed, her eyes getting distant. “He was the only man I ever wrote a love song for,” she said. “I almost didn't put ‘Secret Girlfriend' on the album, but I wanted everyone in the world to know how I felt about him.”

I knew she was talking about George, but I wasn't about to open that wound back up. “It's a beautiful song,” I said. “It really
captures what it feels like to be in love, those first early, uncertain pangs.” I hadn't let myself think about that song after the incident at the Bitter End, but now, knowing that Sid would be coming home to me tonight, her lyrics took on a new gravitas.

“Thanks,” she said. “There's nothing like being in love in your early twenties. Everything is so intense, so pure—it's just the two of you against the whole world. You must know what that's like.” She dropped the record back into the crate. “But I guess he didn't feel that way—he got the house, the wife, the soul-sucking job. I doubt he's even picked up his drumsticks in years, just goes to work, teaches music theory without any of the heart, without having to
really
feel the music, the way he used to.”

George hadn't even mentioned that he'd played drums. I thought about Catch's trumpet, stashed somewhere in the basement with the Christmas decorations, the case cracking with moisture and neglect.

“I would give
anything
just to see that ex one more time. Like maybe I could save him, we could run off and start over.” She sighed. “It's a dream I've been having since I got out of rehab. But I guess he thinks he's happy, so I guess I wish him well. Makes me sad, though.”

I imagined Catch going to work in his three-hundred-dollar suit, coming home and kissing Amanda on the cheek, listening to Top 40 radio in the car on his way to the mall during the weekend's excursion to Bed Bath & Beyond for holiday-themed dish towels. I wondered if he was happy, if he felt at peace, if he had some switch that I lacked that allowed him to just turn off all the frustration that he had poured into his music as a balm for the ugliness of the world. I felt sorry for him. And I envied him for a moment—until I remembered what I had waiting for me at home.

I half-listened as she told me her side of George's same story. She'd been married briefly to a guy who'd knocked her around and ended it when he got picked up for selling heroin. She'd gone to rehab for her own habit, then recorded her first album, opened
for Joan Osborne, toured with Lilith Fair. Now she freelanced ad jingles and played small clubs.

“Look,” she continued. “I may not be the most successful musician in the world, but at least I'm doing what I love. I still feel things, here, in my heart.” She tapped her chest, then reached out and tapped mine, her fingers warm through my shirt. “You feel things too, I can tell. You won't ever sell out.”

I wanted to clutch her hand to my breastbone. Was this what a kindred spirit felt like? Someone who read your thoughts before you had words to put to them? Was Cassie my Iona, like
Pretty in Pink
—the cool older sister I never had? We
were
in a record store together, even if neither of us worked there.

The light caught her bracelet and sent silver sparks scattering through the store. I made out just a few quick words on the plate,
a dream or two
. . .

“What's your bracelet engraved with?” I asked.

Her face went strange and she pulled her sleeve down over it. “Some bullshit love quote,” she said. “I liked the chain; my boss let me have it cheap when the customer returned it. Guess his girlfriend thought it was lame. We get that a lot. That store keeps me decked out in more bling than any boyfriend ever did.”

When I was a kid, I used to get this weird feeling in the pit of my stomach when my body knew I needed to escape before my brain did. It would start at the back of my gut and climb up my spine into my shoulders, and I would go to my room and get in my bed and play a tape until it went away. I had that same feeling now—the claustrophobic sense that there were too many people around me, hearing my thoughts and my heartbeat, even though it was just me and Cassie and a record store clerk who was ignoring us.

I couldn't let go of that feeling, even as we paid for our records. It got stronger, harder, like food poisoning.

“I'm going into the studio next month,” she said once we were outside again. “And when my new album comes out, I want you to be the first person to listen to it. If you hate it, I won't hold it
against you, but I really want you to do my press kit. I looked up some of your reviews and you do good work.”

I hadn't heard that in months, but even her compliment couldn't ward off my discomfort. The walk back to Astor seemed to be a thousand miles. She hugged me good-bye, thanked me for the record, told me she'd call. But that brick at the bottom of my stomach didn't budge, and it wasn't until I was halfway back to Brooklyn that my idiot brain put all the pieces together.

I'd just given a Billy Joel record to KitKat's killer.