Opening Act Read online

  “Don’t,” Shay interjected, raising a hand to quiet Halbert before he could speak. “Don’t…do not…dare her.”

  The corners of Halbert’s lips curled into a kind of sneer as he stared “Tina” down. “If you can put half of this crazy-lady passion into your playing,” he said as he turned away from her, “we’ll all be the better for it.”

  “Yeah,” she said, shouting after him as he retreated, “I love you, too. In fact, talking to you now? I came twice.”

  Pernita was tugging Shay’s shirt off him. “You can’t wear this,” she said.

  “It’s all right, I already managed to sweat through it worse than the first time.”

  “Never mind. I have a replacement. Where’s my garment bag?”

  “Around here somewhere,” he said, and he grabbed her wrist before she could go in search of it. “Hey,” he said, “what the hell? How does Trina, of all people, get away with mouthing off to your old man like that?”

  She laughed, as if it were a silly question. “Oh, baby, he’s not an ogre, you know. He makes allowances for personality types. And she’s definitely her own category, there.”

  He released her, and she went looking around the greenroom for her bag.

  And he felt something come over him, a kind of dread. It was becoming clear that everyone else in his position—Jonah, Trina, all the others—were taken at face value and adjustments were made for their quirks and habits. Only he was being hammered into a new shape, molded into something he didn’t even recognize as him. And only because he’d been idiot enough to allow it.

  He tamped down the feeling for the moment. It wouldn’t be at all helpful to let it cripple him now, not when he was just an hour away from taking the stage at the Hollywood Palladium.

  That hour passed incredibly swiftly. Before he knew it, Halbert returned to announce that Jonah and the Wail had completed their set, and it was Overlords’ turn to go on.

  Pernita had found her garment bag stuffed next to the couch with Shay’s replacement shirt crumpled within it. (“When I find out who did that, blood will flow,” she’d seethed.) She’d hung the shirt in the bathroom and turned the shower on to steam out the wrinkles, but it was still a mess—it looked like a chamois. And it was damp, besides.

  “I’ll just have to wear the shirt I wore in,” he said, going to his duffel bag.

  “No, wait,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “That awful old thing…no.”

  He shot her an impatient look. “Well, we’re sort of out of options here, Pernita.”

  “No. No, we’re not.” She had a wild, excited look in her eyes. “Lockwood,” she said.

  He looked up from his chair. “Hm?”

  “Give me your vest.”

  Lockwood plucked at the arm holes of the burgundy vest he was wearing over his black T-shirt. “This vest? That I’m wearing?”

  “Yes, exactly.” She waggled her fingers at him. “Come on, come on.”

  “All right,” he said, seemingly unwilling to argue with her in this state. “Just let me get my phone out of the pocket.” He did so, then slipped off the vest and handed it to her.

  She in turn handed it to Shay. “Put this on.”

  He gave her a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look. “Over my bare chest?”

  “Over your magnificently bare and beautifully tattooed chest, yes.”

  He stepped back from her. “No fucking way. I’ll look like an idiot.”

  “You’ll look like sex on two legs. Just do it.”

  He complied, hoping that as soon as she saw him, she’d realize what a dork he looked like and change her mind. But the look on her face immediately told him different.

  “God, I’ve been wasting my time with you,” she said exultantly. “All those fittings and couturiers. It’s not about how you’re dressed, it’s about how you’re undressed.”

  Jonah and the Wail returned to the greenroom. The Wail took one look at him and smiled lasciviously.

  “See?” Pernita said. “Oh, God, this is genius. I love being me.”

  “Fine,” he said, realizing they were running out of time. “But believe me, Pernita, this is a one-time thing.”

  “Whatever you say,” she said, in a tone that implied exactly the opposite.

  As they headed down to the stage, Shay said, “I cannot believe I’m going out there like this,” and hugged his chest as if embarrassed by his near-nakedness.

  “Never mind,” said Lockwood. “Just pretend you’re Jagger. Or Morrison.”

  “I feel more like Borat.” Shay noticed that Lockwood was staring at the phone he’d just removed from the vest in question. “What is it? Another message from the missus? She not make it?”

  “No, she’s here,” he said. “But her friend isn’t. And she has no idea why. Not responding to any texts or calls.”

  “Never mind,” he said, slapping Lockwood’s shoulder. “Zee’s the important one, right? You got your lady in the crowd, and you’re going out to wow her. Be happy, dude.”

  Lockwood gave him an unconvincing grin. Shay might have wondered what was behind it, but there was no time for that.

  The moment had arrived for Overlords of Loneliness to take the stage.

  CHAPTER 23

  Loni really should have been out the door ten minutes ago. As it was, she’d have to count on traffic being light in order to get to the Palladium on time. Fortunately, she had a reserved parking spot waiting for her, thanks to Lockwood. That would save her a good chunk of time.

  If only she could tear herself away from her mirror. It was just so maddeningly hard to know how to make herself look tonight. Obviously, she wanted to be completely irresistible, but she didn’t want to look like she was trying to be irresistible. She wanted to knock Shay Dayton on his rock-star ass, while at the same time looking like she didn’t give a damn what he thought. It was a real tightrope.

  She applied a little bit more color to her lips, then decided it was too much and wiped it off. It was ridiculous, really. She wasn’t even sure she’d see Shay. Given the choice—say, if Zee tried to bring her backstage after the gig—she’d refuse to go. She wouldn’t pursue him, absolutely not. Let him come to her, if he felt like it. She had her pride, and as far as she knew, Shay was still involved with his manager’s daughter. Loni wasn’t about to go chasing another woman’s man.

  It occurred to her, as it did every time she thought of Pernita, that Shay wasn’t the only one currently committed. She was still with Byron, though the thought of it kind of sank her heart in ways she wasn’t prepared to examine too closely.

  As soon as she thought of him, she heard the key turn in the front-door lock. It was as though he’d been waiting offstage for a telepathic prompt. Loni sighed and figured it was for the best. Now she could at least greet him after his trip, instead of having him arrive home to an empty apartment. It would remove some of the sting of his having to spend his first night home alone.

  She applied a little more lipstick after all, figuring what the hell, then grabbed her purse and her jacket and went down to greet him.

  “Hi,” she said brightly, and by the way he looked glumly at her—he set down his suitcase but stayed stooped over, as though bent double by fate—she knew this was going to be a difficult conversation. “How’d the conference go?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it,” he said, trying to stretch himself out of his cramped posture. “Some pompous hack from the University of Chicago read a paper on menstrual imagery in Poe.”

  Loni waited, but nothing else seemed to be forthcoming. “Ah,” she said. “And this is bad because…?”

  He shot her a look of extreme annoyance. “For God’s sake. I’ve told you that’s one of my ideas. I just haven’t been able to get around to it because of all this goddamn teaching work.” He glared at her again, as though his class load were her fault, she being presumably too lazy to take it over for him.

  She bit her lip to keep from sniping back. It would hardly help matters to be
gin an argument now, to point out that Loni had her own classes to teach, not to mention her own classes to attend, and by the way, the number of ideas Byron had for potential papers would keep a team of academics busy for a lifetime. Choosing the diplomatic approach, she just cocked her head sympathetically and said, “Sorry. That really sucks.”

  “I just want to have dinner and watch some mindless TV and forget the whole thing,” he said, and he glanced toward the kitchen.

  “There’s some pasta salad in the fridge,” she said. “And I bought a bottle of Chianti yesterday. I only had a glass, so it’s almost full.” She hitched her purse up over her shoulder.

  He looked at her as though just seeing her for the first time. “You’re going out?”

  She nodded. “Zee’s in town. Well, in LA. She invited me to a concert.” That sounded insufficiently urgent for her to abandon him in his distress, so she added, “The Palladium. Her favorite band. She’s dating the drummer.”

  He sighed, and it was the kind of sigh a biblical patriarch might issue over his errant children continuing to worship false idols. “For God’s sake, Loni.”

  “For God’s sake, what?” She looked toward the door, her avenue of escape. She should leave right now. She was already running late. Save this argument for later.

  But she stood fast, rooted by something…a sudden flickering of angry rebellion.

  He gestured toward her clothes. “Look at you. This is…I mean, I just don’t understand what the attraction is to this cheap, noisy cesspit of a world you continually find yourself drawn back to.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “What cesspit is that, exactly?”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about,” he said, shifting his weight from foot to foot, like a boxer getting ready to jab. “The one your little vulgarian friend Zee inhabits. All that binge-drinking and crashing music and mindless, casual sex.”

  “Except for the crashing music, you’ve exactly described faculty life here.”

  He extended his jaw and breathed audibly. “And this,” he said, snubbing his nose at her. “This air of superiority you put on whenever you get anywhere near the common herd. Like associating with them ennobles you or something.”

  “The…the ‘common herd,’ ” she repeated, unable to believe he’d actually just said that.

  “Not to mention the rank ingratitude it implies. I mean, for Christ’s sake,” and here he started pacing, growing more agitated with every step, “I rescued you from all of that! I saved you from a life in that stockyard world of human cattle and subhuman swine! I brought you here, to this place where your intellect and your sensibilities are appreciated, hell, honored, and where you can live the life you were meant to live—the life of the mind, pursuing inquiry and delving into the eternal mysteries. And here you are, in this…this world of privilege, and you seem to grasp at every opportunity to hurl yourself back into the gutter. Even embarrassing yourself by insisting on publishing your own tepid work and then reading it in public. Putting yourself on display for the derision of those cretins. What the hell were you thinking? Are you so eager to debase yourself?”

  She bristled at this reference to Venus in Retrograde, the first he’d dared to make since the bookstore. “The online reader reviews have been good,” she protested.

  He barked a laugh. “Who do you think has been writing those reviews?”

  Her jaw dropped. “No.”

  “Yes. Somebody had to salvage some scrap of dignity from that fiasco, even if it’s only the appearance of dignity. Of course I did it. Like I said, I’ve saved you, and I keep on saving you. Every goddamn day. Hell, I even save you from yourself.”

  She stared at him, mouth open, for a very long time. The entire world seemed to have gone very, very still. She could hear her heartbeat in her ears—her angry, stuttering heartbeat—but everything else was calm, like in an orchestra waiting for a cymbal to crash.

  “If I’d known that’s how you felt,” she said, “I never would have come here with you. I never would have allowed you to have such influence and control over me.” She shook her head. “You know my love for the Romantic poets, the ones who wandered the world finding the source of their art in all the things you look down your nose at: the lives of common people, their rituals and their communities, their songs and their sweat. Yet you think removing me from that world is doing me a favor. Taking me to this little insular enclave of fetishism and navel-gazing. I—I’m just completely astonished by your arrogance.”

  “Well, I’m completely astonished by your ignorance.”

  She headed for the door. “We can talk about this later. I have some subhuman swine to commune with.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” he said, grabbing her arm. “You don’t walk out on me like that! Not with everything you owe me.”

  “I owe you respect, and gratitude, and that’s it,” she said, jerking her arm away. “And don’t ever lay a hand on me that way again.”

  “You can’t play that card,” he said with a shockingly callous laugh. “Not after all the times you’ve spread-eagled for me in bed, like a goddamn bitch in heat—”

  He made a move to grab her again. She batted away his hand, and he immediately lunged in with his other one. She backed away to dodge it and in the process lost her balance. She fell and hit her forehead on the metal edge of the coat rack.

  “Oh, my God,” he cried, “oh, God, Loni! Oh, my God, I’m so sorry! Loni! Loni!”

  She sat up and gingerly felt her forehead, her fingers coming away bathed in blood.

  “Oh, my God!” With fumbling hands, he unzipped his suitcase and pulled out a white T-shirt, then bundled it up and applied it to Loni’s wound. “Oh, Jesus! Oh, sweet fucking Christ! I’m so sorry!”

  “How bad is it?” she said, feeling quite amazingly calm.

  “It’s soaking right through,” he said. “Head wounds, they bleed like crazy. Oh, Loni, sweetheart, I’m so fucking insanely sorry…”

  “Help me up,” she commanded him.

  And he did. She gave him her left hand, while continuing to hold the T-shirt to her forehead with her right.

  “Please, please,” he said, “say you’ll forgive me. Oh, my God. I can’t believe this is happening. Sweetheart, baby, I’m so incredibly, overwhelmingly sorry…”

  “Byron,” she said.

  “…You know how I get when I’m angry. I know that’s no excuse, but, honey, you mean everything to me…”

  “Byron!” she said, more pointedly.

  “…You won’t tell anyone about this, will you? We can keep this to ourselves. This would just be a goddamn feeding frenzy, and not just in our department. Honey, I’m sorry, I’m such a shit, I admit it. Please forgive me, everything will change, I promise…”

  “Byron!”

  He gulped down the rest of his rampaging apology. “What? What, sweetheart? Anything you say. I mean it. Anything.”

  She looked into his eyes in a way that made him visibly shudder.

  Then she said, “Take me to a hospital.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Three encores, baby. Three.

  They’d been prepared for two, though they thought that was wildly optimistic. For the third, they’d had to improvise. Shay called the Decemberists’ “The Rake’s Song,” which they’d only ever played before in rehearsal as a warm-up, and which had a ton of lyrics that Shay ended up only imperfectly remembering. But it hadn’t seemed to matter. The crowd had been really, really into them.

  Possibly because everyone had seemed to ramp up their energy level tonight, starting with Trina. Maybe she took Halbert Hasque’s parting shot to her as a challenge, but in fact, she focused less on her usual onstage grandstanding and instead poured all of her showmanship into her playing. Her performance was flat-out blistering.

  So much so that Baby had been taken by surprise and upped his game. Then Jimmy, not wanting to be the only one holding back, had really thrown down some epic keyboard solos. As for Lockwood…well, his
lady was in the audience, so of course he was going to go all-out.

  Meaning that Shay had suddenly found himself surrounded by bandmates who were all in very real contention for the spotlight he himself usually held. He’d had to ratchet up his own performance accordingly, just to hold his own. In fact, he found himself actually grateful Pernita had sent him out wearing only Lockwood’s vest, which had elicited some whoops of approval when the lights had come up. He even doffed it for the final two encores and sang entirely naked from the waist up, feeling like a shameless attention whore, but he was clinging on to his front man status by his fingernails here. Whatever it took, he’d do it, and worry about personal dignity later.

  He retrieved the vest after the last encore and mopped his brow with it as the crowd—a very respectable size, as Halbert had said—stomped and wailed for more. This had been a freaking great night for Overlords.

  Backstage, Shay handed the vest back to Lockwood. “Thanks for the loan, man,” he said.

  Lockwood looked at it with distaste. “Yeah, well, maybe you could have it dry-cleaned first. Or better yet, just throw it on the burn pile.”

  They both laughed—they’d laugh at anything right then. They were on top of the world.

  “You see Zee out there?” Shay asked as they climbed the stairs back to the greenroom.

  Lockwood shook his head. “I’m a professional, Dayton. I was in the zone, not checkin’ out the room for any goddamn tail.”

  Shay laughed again. “You’re full of shit, man.”

  Lockwood shrugged. “Yeah, all right. Sure I saw her. Watched her watching me, the whole goddamn time.”

  In the greenroom, Halbert had champagne flowing (still not his own preferred label, Shay noted), but Shay himself preferred to crack open a bottle of the bourbon Paul Di Santangelo had sent. He took his first few sips as he donned the shirt he’d worn from the hotel and simultaneously felt both the warmth of the liquor and the comfort of once again being dressed like a post–Stone Age human being.

  Fans and press started filing in, and both Halbert and Pernita, visibly uncomfortable at milling about with common people, left the room. Overlords of Loneliness spent a dizzying half hour or so holding court, though during the process their members, one by one, slipped away to go back to the stage and break down their equipment. No one entirely trusted the house crew, especially Lockwood with his precious drums. He was the first to go.