Opening Act Page 21

  He sighed theatrically. “Do you mind if I don’t? I freakin’ lived that business for nearly three months. Now I just want a little space that’s clear of it.” He shrugged. “Besides, I gave you all the high points in my e-mails.”

  “Thanks for those, by the way. They made me feel special.”

  “Well, if that’s all it takes for you to feel special, then there’s something extra fucked-up about the world.”

  She blushed again.

  “I tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me what’s goin’ on in your life?”

  She took a deep breath. “Honestly, pretty much work, is all. This new job, though it’s not so new, anymore. Anyway, it really keeps me jumping. I’m on from nine to five, pretty much nonstop. Fortunately, there’s not a lot of overtime required—I’m just clerical staff—but by the time I get home, I’m basically too burned out for anything. I haven’t been to a club in weeks.”

  He clicked his tongue. “Shame.”

  “I’m not complaining, though. Glad to have it. Sure as hell glad of the paycheck.”

  Lockwood shoved another entire fajita into his mouth and worked it down. “And how’s things at home?” he said, once he’d managed to swallow it. “You get a new roommate?”

  “No,” she said, making a tentative start on her second fajita. The way he was going, she had some catching up to do. “I don’t really need one anymore, with the job. Though the company might be nice. And for a while…” She paused, with the fajita before her lips, and looked up at him.

  He took a swig of beer, then set down the can with a barely audible burp. “For a while, what?”

  “For a while,” she said in a low voice, “I thought Loni might move back. So I kept the room open for her.”

  “Wow,” he said. “You’re a real sweetheart.” He took another swig of beer.

  She nibbled a corner off her fajita, then said, “But now, I think…she’s happier. Loni, I mean.”

  He nodded. “Good. Good for her.”

  She waited for him to go on, and when he started making tactical moves toward his third fajita, she said, “That…that’s all?”

  He looked up. “What’s all?”

  “You’re not going to pump me for info about Loni?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  She felt suddenly embarrassed, as if she’d farted or something. “I just thought, maybe that’s why you invited me here.”

  He gave her an astonished look. “I invited you here because I like you.”

  “And…and Shay Dayton didn’t ask you to get the lowdown on Loni from me?”

  “Oh, hell yeah, he did.”

  She felt dizzy. “He did?”

  “Yeah. And I told him to go fuck himself. He used me for that once, and nothing came of it. So I said, this is your goddamn deal, you play it out.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Did you really?”

  He shrugged. “Well. I was nicer about it, obviously.”

  “So…he’s not expecting to hear anything from you? About Loni?”

  “Knowing him, probably, yeah.” He grinned. “But he’ll be disappointed.”

  “He will?”

  “Well, yeah.” He raised his palms in the air. “I mean, I don’t know anything.”

  “And if you did know anything?”

  He smirked. “I still wouldn’t tell him.”

  She smiled so hard, her face hurt. “Lockwood, you are so totally a gentleman.”

  He slammed down his can and said, “You take that back!”

  She laughed so hard she actually belched. Which made him laugh.

  When they’d both settled down, Zee had another few bites of her fajita, then said, “As it happens, Loni really is happy. Though not because of the teaching gig so much. It’s ’cause she’s decided to publish her own poems. Which is just incredibly major good news, because she’s been scribbling them in private for, like, fifteen years, squirreled away in her room like a crazy person. Seriously, since grade school this has been going on. But anytime someone would ask to see them, she’d react like they were asking her to take off her underpants or something.”

  “Well, good for her,” he said, eyeing his now empty plate. Then he looked up and said, “ ’Scuse me while I head in for seconds.” He got up. “You want anything?”

  “No, no, I’m good.”

  When he came back and sat down again—his plate now wobbling under the weight of four more fajitas—she said, “So, is Shay not still with that Pernita woman, then?”

  He groaned, then said, “Slooowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch…”

  She laughed and said, “Excuse me, what?”

  “Didn’t you ever hear that? It’s an old, old vaudeville routine. This guy’s just out of prison for killing his wife and her lover at Niagara Falls. He’s telling this other guy how he hid in their cabin and when they came in, he crept out of the shadows and strangled them. ‘Slooowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch—and then I grabbed them, and I throttled them…’ and so on. Only now that he’s out of prison, he snaps back to that moment whenever he hears the name ‘Niagara Falls.’ And the joke is, of course the other poor schmuck in the sketch keeps saying ‘Niagara Falls,’ which triggers the ex-con to say, ‘Niagara Falls! Slooowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch…and then I grabbed them, and I strangled them,’ and so on. Of course while he’s saying it he’s strangling the other guy, who’s screaming, Stop it, stop it, you freak. He regains control of himself, and he’s like, I’m sorry, friend, I didn’t mean to hurt you, and the other guy says, Dude, listen, you can’t go around getting all medieval on people just ’cause they say Niagara Falls, and then it’s ‘Niagara Falls! Slooowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch…’ ”

  Zee was laughing so hard she could barely breathe.

  “So anyway,” Lockwood said, nodding his head. “Yeah. That woman’s name has the same effect on me.”

  “Pernita’s?” said Zee, wiping a tear from her eye.

  “Pernita Hasque!” he cried, and he jumped up from the table so quickly he toppled his fajitas onto the floor. “Slooowly I turned,” he said, creeping toward Zee, who was too helpless with laughter to move, “step by step, inch by inch—and then…I caught her! And I shook her! And I shook her some more!” And here he actually grabbed Zee by the shoulders and gave her a good shaking. “And…and I shook her some more after that! And…and then…”

  By this time, Zee had stopped laughing and was looking into Lockwood’s face in confusion—not a bad confusion, by any means—a kind of dizzy, happy confusion. She wondered what Lockwood would do next and was surprised to find herself open to several interesting possibilities…

  …When all of a sudden Trina Kutsch burst back into the apartment, her arms raised in triumph, followed by the other members of Overlords and a few hangers-on.

  “Braithwaite and Maple have been planked!” she crowed. “This is why they call me Kid Daredevil!”

  “Jesus, Trina,” said Jimmy, plopping down before the TV and turning it on. “No one calls you Kid Daredevil.”

  Lockwood released Zee, who took a moment to compose herself. “Where’s your amp?” Lockwood asked.

  Baby ran his hand through his hair and frowned. “Wrecked, man,” he said. “Plowed over by an eighteen-wheeler.”

  “Kid Daredevil having escaped in the nick of time,” called Trina from the kitchen, where she had her head in the fridge.

  “No one calls you Kid Daredevil,” said Baby and Jimmy in perfect synch.

  “Well,” Lockwood said, “at least it was an old one.”

  “Yeah,” Baby said, falling into the beanbag chair, “but I still used it…”

  Zee gathered up her purse. “I should get going. Lunch hour’s nearly up.”

  Lockwood walked her to the door. “You can come back later, after you get off work. We’ll still be here, just hanging.”

  She smiled, slipping her purse strap over her shoulder. “Thanks, but like I said, I’m usua
lly pretty wiped out at the end of the day. I only have enough energy to go home and collapse.”

  He scowled. “Seriously? What do you do about dinner?”

  “Skip it, usually. Too tired to cook.”

  He looked momentarily uncertain, then said, “How about…how about if when you collapse tonight, it’s into a chair at some swanky Italian restaurant? My treat.”

  When Trina exited the kitchen, bearing an armload of cold beers, she found Lockwood standing by the front door, a dopey grin on his face.

  “Man, you should’a’ been there,” she said, handing him one of the beers. “It was fucking crazy. That truck just exploded into the orange crate and the amp, man. And I was, like, already on the meridian pumping my fists. You really, really messed up by sittin’ it out, dude.”

  Lockwood popped open the beer, raised it to salute her, and said, “Actually, I really, really did just the opposite.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Shay was learning that there were different ways to be a prisoner.

  Take New York. When he’d been held captive there in Halbert Hasque’s east side apartment with its magnificent view of Central Park, he’d been utterly miserable. The only time he could be on his own recognizance, going where he wanted and doing whatever he liked, was when Pernita was busy elsewhere. Whenever she’d leave the apartment for a hair appointment, or a shopping spree, or a lunch date, or whatever, Shay would watch out the window till she exited the building, got into a cab, and zipped away; then he’d let out a whoop of exhilaration and head out himself. And for a few glorious hours he’d be alone—alone—on the streets of Manhattan and be his own goddamn master.

  Then Pernita would return, and once again he’d find himself utterly under her thumb, told where to go and how to dress and whom to talk to and when to sit down and when to take a piss.

  But damn. Looking back? He hadn’t realized how good he’d had it.

  Here, in Halbert Hasque’s mansion in Holmby Hills, he was much more a prisoner than he ever was in New York. And this was despite Pernita almost never being around during the day. She got up every morning, complaining of all the plans she had, and of the seven thousand best, most intimate friends she had to see while they were in town or God only knew the consequences, and then she was basically gone. So in theory, Shay was freer than ever. Except…to do what?

  In New York, all he had to do was step out onto the pavement, and the world of Halbert and Pernita Hasque would already be behind him. He could take four steps, buy a hot pretzel from a street vendor, chat up a girl or two. In a few more steps, he’d be at the subway, and any place on the island was just minutes away.

  When he stepped out the door of the Hasque mansion here in LA, there was nothing but blue sky, green lawn, and black asphalt driveway for as far as his eyes could see. Once, feeling adventurous, he’d trekked all the way down to the boulevard beyond the driveway’s gate (he’d had to shimmy over the wall because he didn’t have the code to punch into the gate’s keypad), but there had been no cab there waiting to whisk him to some new adventure. Certainly no subway.

  In fact, there’d been nothing in any direction. Just houses the size of battleships and acres and acres of the crispest landscaping imaginable. He tried going it on foot to see where it took him, but where it took him was someplace so utterly like everything he’d seen everywhere else he’d been that he’d had to admit he was hopelessly lost and called Pernita to come and fetch him.

  It didn’t take long for her to reach him, either, because she was already out in her car. She’d come home, found him gone, and the housekeeper and gardener had both told her he’d done a runner. Shay then realized, too, that unlike New York, here the prison had extra guards. They posed as household staff, but as far as he was concerned, their real function was to watch him and report on his movements.

  “I don’t understand why you feel so compelled to leave,” Pernita had complained as she drove him home. She reminded him of her father’s swimming pool, his billiards room, his bowling alley, and his two separate home theaters with high-res monitors and DVD libraries of every film and TV show produced since the dawn of man.

  “If it’s such a goddamn paradise,” Shay had said, “how come you never spend more than ninety minutes at a time there? Short of sleeping, I mean.”

  She always had a million excuses. Then he’d ask why he couldn’t just have a car of his own; he’d even pay to rent one. And she’d say, Don’t be silly, you can have this one when I’m not using it. And he’d say, When the hell aren’t you using it? And sometimes when she seemed to sense his desperation reaching a certain pitch she’d say, Oh, you can have it tomorrow, and he’d say, Really, and she’d say, Of course. He’d make plans for everything he was going to do the next day, but then that day would dawn and just as he was getting ready to leave, Pernita would remember some hugely important errand she had to run and would he mind terribly if she came with him? And that would be that. He’d escape the house, but only for the smaller prison of the car.

  Occasionally he broke down and accused her of trying to control him. Which led her to call him ungrateful and selfish and to cry, which was the big gun in her arsenal, the one she pulled out every time she felt backed into a corner. In fact, Shay was completely unmoved by her tears, but he let her believe the opposite. Better to save his implacability for a time when revealing it would score him an actual point.

  But he didn’t know if he had the strength of will to wait that long. As the busyness of the first few days of his stay receded—days filled with image consultants and hair stylists and wardrobe fittings—the flurry of activity was replaced by…nothing at all. Oh, the nights were always filled with some event or other, where Pernita trotted him out like a trained seal to smile and bark and clap his fins for the amusement of the crowd. But the days? The days passed in a manner he could only call glacial.

  He’d already exhausted every entertainment the house had to offer. Always an excellent bowler, he’d managed a perfect game on his third day in Halbert’s private alley, and after that there didn’t seem much point. He’d watched the entire run of M*A*S*H on DVD and was still too emotionally involved in that experience to want to move on to something else. He’d had to abandon the pool when his skin burned and then started to peel. (Pernita had been furious at that and called in an emergency dermatologist to buff away all the dead skin and to refresh and tone what was underneath, as there was a big party that night with cameras, she’d said, he couldn’t go there looking like his head was emerging from a cocoon.) Finally, he’d had to give up honing his billiard skills after he accidentally ripped a hole in the green felt of Hasque’s pool table. In fact, he’d hung up his cue, turned out the light, and skulked guiltily away, hoping it would be several weeks before anyone noticed, by which time it would be harder to connect the crime with him.

  The only thing left for him, then, was to eat. And Halbert Hasque’s kitchen was better stocked than any he’d ever known—which was crazy, considering that Halbert himself was almost never there. What happened to all that fresh produce brought in three times a week when there was no one here to eat it? The mind boggled.

  But then one night, when he was changing into an incredibly expensive Dolce & Gabbana suit for an appearance at some music awards pre-show party (“where there will be cameras,” Pernita had again told him urgently, as if she ever brought him any place where there weren’t any), he found he couldn’t zip the fly. He dropped a few f-bombs trying to manage it, and Pernita flew over to see what the trouble was because for God’s sake they were already running late. She exploded into affronted horror when she realized Shay had put on just enough weight to turn the Dolce & Gabbana suit into a hugely expensive hanger decoration.

  After that, she ordered all the food out of the house except what she prescribed for him, which was all locally grown and organic, and on any given day filled about a third of one shelf of the house’s commercial-grade refrigerator. Seriously, Shay was convinced he could hear his ec
ho when he spoke into that vast, chilly emptiness. Pernita also rustled up a personal trainer to come in every morning and aggressively banish the unwelcome fat with extended sessions in the Hasque mansion weight room. Under ordinary circumstances that would have been the purest torment for Shay, but now, what the hell, it was something to do for two hours out of twenty-four. And at the end of his sixteen-day junket in la-la land, he had to admit he was looking pretty ripped.

  He’d tried to fight the boredom by working on musical ideas. He’d asked Pernita if she could rent a piano for him during his stay, which was a huge concession for him. Up until then it had been a point of pride that he never asked her for anything, ever, and it was telling that on this one occasion when he did, the answer was no. “You don’t need to be a musical genius,” she said with a dismissive smirk. “You’re a front man. You need to sing like an angel and look like a devil. And make everyone in the whole goddamn world know it.”

  He tried using a keyboard app on his laptop, but it wasn’t the same as running his fingers over actual keys, so he eventually gave up the effort.

  And then there was nothing left but Facebook. (Facebook and web porn, but he suspected Pernita of keeping tabs on his Internet history, so he was almost monastically sparing with the latter.) He would spend marathon sessions checking all his friends’ personal pages to see what they were doing with their actual human lives in the actual real world where he used to live before it spat him out onto Mount Olympus. One day at the end of his stay, he sat down to begin one of these sessions, and a sudden urge struck him. He did something he almost never bothered doing: he checked the Overlords of Loneliness fan page.

  And damn if he wasn’t impressed. The last time he’d looked, just after the tour began, they’d had 275 fans, which he’d thought was phenomenal. Now they were at 8,011. He had to hand it to Pernita: she was really honest-to-God doing her job. She might kill him in the process, but she was getting the results she’d promised. He clicked on the list of people who had liked the page, wondering whether they were predominately male or female, black or white, young or old—any demographic trend at all. It wasn’t that he wildly cared; he was just mildly curious and epically bored.