Thank You, Goodnight (20 page)

CHAPTER 11

A
laina Farber strode into the reception area looking every bit as slim, tight, and animated by innate elegance as ever. When she marched up to me in her sin-scarlet suit, I could do nothing but drop a dispirited little frown. “You know, I used to be younger than you,” I said with a sigh.

“My Theodore has come for me at last,” she proclaimed, planting the business end of a peck on my lips and throwing her arms over my shoulders. Her taste in high-end perfume smelled intoxicatingly familiar, like my brilliant, unreachable past. Her hand dropped down my back and cupped my right butt cheek. “You’ve kept yourself in shape,” she observed. Then, with a raised eyebrow, “Is that a roll of Smarties in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

“I see somebody still needs her sexual harassment training.”

“Nonsense. I’m an expert.”

She led me through a glass door and down a corridor of offices, each one populated by a chattering, pacing agent. It felt like millennia since I’d set foot in the agency, and the faces I used to know had been replaced by successive generations of burnouts in the making.

“New digs?” I asked, pausing in the door frame of her office. “Or did you just have the walls pushed back?”

She sank into her chair and started reading something on her phone. “I moved ages ago,” she said absently.

I scoped out the room, the walls crammed with photos of Alaina with her famous clients, a roster of A-list actors and musicians. There were those I recognized and those that bore the wild, world-owning shine of people I should’ve recognized. This documentation of Alaina Farber’s rise to the top only magnified my drumming sense of irrelevance.

“You’re up there.” Though intended for me, the remark was addressed to her phone. As she thumbed out a text, I scanned the jumble of frames, surprised that any photo of me hadn’t long ago been stuffed into a box and hidden away in a closet, maybe somewhere down the hall where they kept the mop bucket.

Then I discovered it, an eight-by-ten of a frozen moment in the prime of the band. My ruddy mug was centered between my agent, whose arm was slung insouciantly around my neck, and Colin Stone, the perennially upbeat label executive who’d shrewdly shepherded us along the road to stardom. Jumbo lounged behind us in an outfit of black and white stripes that made him look like the Hamburglar or the least convincing salesman at Foot Locker. I couldn’t specifically recall when the photo had been taken—all those days now had all the focus of a smear—but it was snapped at the East Village Italian restaurant that doubled as our hangout, the place we congregated for dinners and cocktails. As one of Alaina’s premier clients, Tremble enjoyed all her oily affections and zealous indulgences. She’d cozy up to me in the booth and take slurps of Warren’s whiskey. Jumbo would pound beers or, when feeling superior, a classy glass of Southern Comfort. Mackenzie would lose herself in the specials insert.

“What was the name of that place?” I asked.

Alaina finally looked up from her device. “You’ve forgotten the fucking Mirabelle Plum?”

It had distant recognition for me. I never needed to know the name. I always got a ride.

“It’s still there and the gnocchi still kicks ass. And I think your ban has been lifted.”

“Right. The ban.”

We’d just turned in the tracks for our sophomore release, and the label was grumbling—presciently, as it turned out—because too many of the songs were in need of “reworking” for radio-friendliness. The gist of their complaint was, Where was “It Feels like a Lie, Part Two”? As if corporate intrusion into the sacred realm of the artist wasn’t galling enough, they compounded the treachery by dispatching some cocksure newbie to convey the message. We didn’t take well to the criticism, rendered as it was for so mean and castrating a purpose as airplay. Nor did we appreciate its being delivered by this arrogant little twerp. We were nine fucking months removed from a number-one hit and an Academy Award. A testy exchange between the label kid and me spiraled into a bona fide donnybrook when Jumbo lunged at the guy. After the predictable upending of a table and the pitching of a glass against a wall, we all ended up locked in a rugby scrum that stumbled out the front door. Only Mackenzie escaped the fracas, standing to the side guarding her wine. A paparazzo was on hand to record the badly behaving musicians, and Jumbo’s side of the story was printed in all its eloquence in the
New York Post
the following morning: “This is just [bad]! You get some [jerk] who doesn’t know [anything] about this business coming in here talking [nonsense] to us. I mean, [rats]! Don’t come into our [darn] hang in SoHo [sic] and give us [grief]. That’s just [unfortunate]! Really [very] [unfortunate]! We won a Golden Globe [sic], for Christ’s sake!” The restaurant owner didn’t see the humor in a trashed dining room: ban imposed. A short while later, Alaina sauntered into the Plum with a tight skirt and heels and apologized as only she could: ban lifted. But by that point, it hardly mattered: band defunct.

I had spoken to my former agent only once in advance of this visit, and even then, very briefly. I’d simply called to ask if we could meet. She wanted to know if this was just a social call from a long-
lost friend. I admitted that there was a little more to it but saved the full embarrassing truth for when I saw her in person. She asked if I’d finally come to my senses and if the “little more to it” involved the two of us “mauling” each other in a Jacuzzi at the Paramount. I told her it probably didn’t but that I was impressed with her ability to make the word
mauling
sound seductive.

“So.” Alaina dropped her phone onto her desk. “It took you ten years to pay me a visit, Theodore.”

“I never saw the point in bothering you.”

“Humility. Cute. I guess better late than never. But if you start kissing my ass, I’m going to think you want to kiss my ass.”

I gave her my best unassuming shrug. “I left the business. I honestly didn’t think you had room in your life for a client whose only value to you was sentimental.”

“Ten years,” she said, shaking her head and clicking like a scold. “Without so much as lunch.”

“The phone lines run both ways.”

“I’m me, okay? You know I’m not going to call. It was your job.”

“I became a lawyer, Alaina. I started hanging out with fucking lawyers. Meanwhile, there’s a picture of you and Adele. There’s you and Robert Downey, Jr. You and—holy shit, is that Demi Lovato?”

“Okay, so, the mere fact that you know who she is makes you a perv. And listen to yourself. You’re the pathetic little supplicant and I’m the castle bitch who’s finally deigned to allow you past the guards? That hurts my feelings.”

“I apologize. I didn’t really know you had feelings.”

“That’s more like it!” She pounded the desk. “There’s my salty little misanthrope.” Then she picked up a pen and twittered it between her fingers. “I do have emotions, you know. Would you like to hear about some of them?”

“Guile is not an emotion,” I told her. “Neither is unscrupulousness.”

“I was actually going to tell you about my grandfather.”

“Oh. What about him?”

“Well, he kicked it recently.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I accept your apology. He was, however, one million years old. I never told you about him?”

I shook my head. “Alaina’s pop-pop isn’t ringing any bells.”

“Well, I’m going to tell you about him now.” She swiveled philosophically in her chair. “When I was a little girl in Shanghai, he and I used to listen to music together on a beat-up piece-of-shit record player.”

“Wait—you lived in China?”

She fluttered her fingers over her face like a magician bewitching a deck of cards. “Um, hello?”

“I always assumed you were adopted by some Manhattan Hebrews or something.”

“Mutha, Chinee. Fatha, Upper Rest Side.”

“Huh. How could I not have known that?”

“Don’t feel bad. Demi Lovato doesn’t know a thing about me either.”

I crossed my legs and settled in for story hour.

“So, believe it or not, my folks hooked up when my dad was studying to be a chef in Shanghai. This was the late sixties, mind you, when you could neither waltz into nor out of the People’s Republic whenever you fucking felt like it. Chairman Mao was not an easygoing cat. But my dad, resourceful Manhattanite that he was, somehow managed to smuggle his pasty Jew ass in, learn how to cook a noodle or two, and stay there long enough to meet, marry, and knock up my mom.

“I was but a young whippersnapper, but I do have some wonderful memories of Shanghai and all of us living together in my grandparents’ puny apartment. Every evening, my grandfather and I would sit and listen to music, just the two of us. He’d put on records of old Chinese folk songs and we’d park ourselves on the floor, side by side. I remember the dusty vinyl smell of the speakers, the claw scratch of the needle dipping on the grooves. I can still picture the way the old man would soak up that ancient music, his eyes closed, a contented
smile on his face. Looking back on it now, I know he was trying to pass these songs on to me because he feared that his round-eyed son-in-law would one day drag his beloved daughter and granddaughter back to the States—shanghai us away, if you will—and I would live my whole life estranged from my native culture. Which is exactly what happened. And thank the good Lord for that.

“Then one day my dad came home with a Beatles album.
Rubber Soul
. Imagine, Teddy darling, what a coup that was. This was China in the early seventies. You couldn’t exactly flip on Casey Kasem’s
American Top 40
. I have no clue how he got his hands on it or how it even got into the country, but it wouldn’t be totally outlandish to suggest that my family was the only one on the entire mainland to be rocking out to the Fab Four.

“Now, I’m sure my dad expected his old-world Chinese father-in-law to recoil in horror at this brash, obnoxious Western music. You know, like, Dude, where’s my lute? But he fucking ate it up! Couldn’t understand a single lyric, mind you, but the guy went bananas for ‘Norwegian Wood,’ ‘Michelle,’ and ‘In My Life’ like an American schoolgirl in heat. So now my grandfather would come home in the evenings and instead of putting on creaky recordings of a bamboo flute from the Ming Dynasty, we’d sit together and spin
Revolver
,
Magical Mystery Tour
, and
Sgt. Pepper
, because my wily old man somehow got hold of the whole freakin’ catalog.”

I found myself transfixed, amazed by how much I hadn’t known about Alaina. I guess I’d assumed she’d just materialized on the planet one day in her current feline form, accessorized and pissy.

She snapped her fingers at the air. “Pay attention. I am going somewhere with this. So, when I was seven, my dad finally came to his senses and said enough of this shit. He got a job at a restaurant here in the city and moved my mom and me to New York. My grandparents, of course, stayed behind in the old country like the good little Commies that they were. Now, I know it’s been decades upon decades, but God, Theodore, I have a clear memory of that last night
together, the night before we left China. My grandfather and I sat down on the floor like we always did, but on our final night under his roof he didn’t put any records on. He was too sad. He just sat there with this dark look on his face. He looked like he was losing everything. I still see it, Teddy, I really do. I didn’t know what to say to him. I was just a stupid, albeit uncommonly beautiful, kid. I didn’t understand distances, separation, missing somebody while you grow older, any of that.

“Finally, after sitting there quietly for a long time, I got up and put on a record. It was ‘Let It Be.’ I told him not to be sad. One day I would move back to China and we’d be together again, but until then, he could play his Beatles records over here in Shanghai and I’d play them in New York, and we could each imagine that we were sitting in the same room, listening side by side like we always did.”

I stared at her, hoping she wasn’t going to come apart. I wasn’t good with that.

“See? I was kind of a nice kid,” she said.

“We’re talking about forty years ago,” I reminded her.

“Anyhoo, I obviously never moved back to Shanghai and I only saw my grandfather a handful of times after that. But when he died a few months ago, my mother and I flew over there to go through his things. We were cleaning out the apartment—that same little place I knew as a kid—sorting through all the random shit you accumulate over the course of a lifetime. And do you know what I found?”

I shook my head.

“The albums of one stupid, insignificant, boring little band. A collection of nobodies that named itself after its marginally talented, bland-faced front man. The same marginal talent that’s sitting in front of me now. None of the other acts I’ve worked with over the years were to be found, and need I remind you, there have been some big ones. Real big. A lot bigger and a lot better than you.”

“I think you’ve made your point.”

“The only records in his collection that had anything to do with
his precious granddaughter’s career were yours. You were my first client to make it big, and I imagine that made him a whole mess of proud.”

I blinked at her, unsure how to respond.

Alaina suddenly turned dark and serious. “It’s a terrible thing, Teddy, to die while missing someone. Don’t you think? It seems like something too brutal for the universe to tolerate.”

Then she rose and walked around her desk, positioning herself directly in front of my chair. It was a simultaneous act of intimacy and control.

“So, my little rhubarb,” she said, folding her arms. “Are you catching my drift?”

“Did you really just say ‘a whole mess of proud’? We’re Eudora Welty now, are we?”

She kicked me on the shin. “Are you getting my point?”

I looked up at her. “I think you’re trying to tell me that you have an overdeveloped sense of loyalty. Either that or your grandfather lost interest in your career very early on.”

“I have an overdeveloped everything.” She smiled warmly. “It’s good to see you again, Teddy Tremble. And in the name of my grandfather, I forgive you for ignoring my existence for the past ten years.”