The Last Dreamer (17 page)

“And then what happened?” Jeff asked.

“Things changed,” she said. “I got to high school, joined the school newspaper, made some new friends. Got a boyfriend. I guess I didn’t need you anymore.” The words surprised her. But it was true—she had needed him, and then she hadn’t. Without even realizing it, she had changed her life in a way that freed her from him. And now, decades later, she had needed him again. Why? Why couldn’t she do this winter what she had done in high school without even thinking—change her life and be happier? Why was it harder as an adult?

Because things were different back then, she told herself. Once she left middle school and escaped from the tyranny of the rich girls, it was like she’d been given a book with blank pages to fill. Every decision sprang from a wealth of choices—what classes to take, what clubs to join, what to do with the money she made from babysitting, where to hang out on Friday nights once she and her friends had their driver’s licenses. And then there were all the college and post-college choices—what subject to major in, what boy to date, what career to choose, whether to marry, where to buy a house, when to start a family. Life could be a very creative project when you were young.

And now she was a grown woman who had had a career, who had fallen in love and gotten married, who was raising two children. Did she really have no choices left to make? Couldn’t life still be a creative project? If so, then why had she chosen for so long to spend each and every day of her life shopping for groceries, chauffeuring kids, and putting the stuff she really wanted to do on hold? Yes, it was hard to run a household, take care of two kids, and still find the time to do something else. Yes, there were only twenty-four hours in a day. But giving up wasn’t the answer. She loved her children, she loved her life, she even still loved Marc, although she had a lot of hurt. But abandoning herself shouldn’t be the price she had to pay for that love. She realized now that this trip to California was a game changer. She could never go back to living the same old way again.

Jeff was deep in his own thoughts as well, turning his credit card over in his hands. “You didn’t need me anymore,” he finally said, sounding resentful. “None of you did. You all just left me. Do you know how that felt? If I could have walked away when
I
was ready, oh man, Iliana, my life would have been so much better. But suddenly all of you were gone, and I was a has-been. The girls who came next, they were all into the guys who came next. New Kids on the Block. Menudo. Kirk Cameron. Ricky Schroder. You all just dumped me.”

“We
 . . .
didn’t mean it,” Iliana said tentatively, recognizing the absurdity of apologizing for the millions of girls in America who had decided to change the channel. “We had to get on with our lives.”

“Yeah,” said Jeff. “You teenyboppers, what a cruel lot.”

He signed the bill and they left the restaurant, walking back to the parking lot in silence. In the car, Iliana watched Jeff drive. Although she had certainly suffered in middle school, she suddenly believed that when all was said and done, he had probably had a rougher time of it. After all, she had had
him
—or felt she had him—when she listened to his albums or watched
Guitar Dreams
, or examined her collection of magazines with his photo in them. They had used him, she and the millions of other teenage girls like her. They had used him when they needed him. Maybe she was using him again now.

They were quiet on the way back to the hotel. Jeff looked straight ahead as he drove, somber and seemingly deep in thought. She had revealed something to him that he may have suspected but had probably never heard articulated. That he was dispensable. He had most likely been hoping that she would give another reason that she and her peers had abandoned him in high school. He probably wanted her to say that it became too hard to keep loving him, that it was too discouraging to love him yet know there was no chance of ever meeting him. But that’s not what she had said. She had told the truth. That they had outgrown him. But he had stayed locked in the past. He was locked there still.

She glanced over at him. He looked positively shell-shocked, and she felt sorry for him. She hadn’t meant to hurt him.

“You know, when I watched you singing on
Guitar Dreams
, you used to do this cute little thing with your chin,” she said, wanting to lift his spirits.

He was still pouting. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, you used to sort of dip your chin and then thrust it slightly forward in time with the music. It was really sweet. All the girls loved it.”

“I don’t do that,” he said, brushing her off with his hand, but smiling.

“You do,” she said. “I’ll prove it. Go ahead, sing!” He sang a few bars of “The Best of Times,” and she watched as his chin dipped in time with the song, like a canoe oar skimming through water. “See?” she said. “You’re doing it!”

“No, I’m not!”

“Yes, you are!”

“You’re crazy.”

“No, you did it, you just did!”

Soon they were at the hotel. A valet took their car, and they went through the glass doors and to the elevator. The lobby had an atrium with an enormous fountain lit from within by colored lightbulbs. It had been turned on while they were out, and the rush of water made a terrific racket. She could barely hear Jeff suggest that they meet back in the lobby at seven.

“And that’s when you’ll get your surprise,” he added.

The doors opened on his floor. As they began to close again, she watched him swagger down the hall. Her mention of his head-dipping mannerism had clearly shaken him out of his melancholy, and he was on top of the world again. It scared her to think how much he loved being the center of attention, and how much he seemed to relish thinking he was once again the center of
her
attention. What kind of a surprise did he have for her—and what was he expecting to happen that night?

Chapter 17

In her room, Iliana washed her face and put on a T-shirt and sweatpants, then checked the time. It was six thirty in New York, and she knew Marc would be on the train. She decided to call home. Since he was so furious with her, she thought it best to talk to just the kids.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Matthew honey, it’s Mom. How are you?”

She listened as he told her about his day at school, the math test that he thought he aced and all the points he scored in the basketball scrimmage against Somers. Then she talked to Dara, who complained of too much homework and went on to say that it was her friend Karen’s birthday tomorrow, and she and some of the other girls were going to decorate Karen’s locker with candy and signs. Iliana loved hearing how different Dara’s middle school experience was from her own. Even though she and Marc had their problems, the kids were fine: happy and self-sufficient, as they should be. They had great kids, and they were good parents. She loved her children so much.

“Say hi to Daddy for me,” she added. “I’ll be home late tomorrow night, so I’ll see you first thing Friday!”

She hung up and crawled between the sheets of the king-size bed. It had been good to talk to Matt and Dara, but now she felt strange, hollow, like an empty tin can. She missed them. At the same time, guilty feelings about leaving them worked their way through her system, like a fire burning through the edges of a sheet of newspaper in the fireplace. Picking up the remote from the night table, she clicked through the TV stations to see if there was something on to distract her. Life never stopped being complicated. She found an old Cary Grant movie and watched a bit, dozing on and off.

At six, she got out of bed and took a shower. The stall had a flimsy plastic wall, and the towels were thinner and smaller than she would have liked. In the dressing area, she opened the closet, where she had hung her good clothes. It was hard to get dressed, though, because it felt as though she were getting ready for a date. It didn’t matter that she had often stayed in hotels and dressed for business dinners with attractive men, even after she was engaged to Marc. Back then she was having dinner with men who seemed old to her, men she wanted to be with because they could tell her about new products or management changes. But Jeff was different. They had opened up a lot to each other today. She had seen so many sides of him. She had seen him preen like a peacock when the women at the restaurant asked for his autograph, and she had seen him crumble when he talked about how it felt to be forgotten. He was real to her now—charming, but also vulnerable and flawed. She didn’t know what he was expecting from dinner tonight. She was scared that by allowing them both to open up so much, she had given him the impression that she wanted to let their relationship get more personal.

She pulled out the outfit she had brought for dinner, a sleeveless white tank top and a swingy black skirt with tan espadrilles. She had thought it was sophisticated and stylish when she packed it, but now it seemed suggestive, almost provocative. It wasn’t businesslike, and it didn’t feel like the kind of outfit Jeff should see her in. But there was no choice; it was all she had. At the last minute she decided to take along the black blazer she had traveled in from New York. She knew she didn’t really need it, but at the least, she could use it to cover up in case she felt too exposed. She left her room, hearing the lock on her door click behind her.

Jeff was leaning on the marble concierge counter when she stepped off the elevator. He looked up and grinned when he saw her. The deep green of his button-down shirt made his face look golden tan, reminding her of that first love of his, the neighbor Wendy, and her long, tanned legs. His eyes showed flecks of green that she hadn’t noticed before.

He kissed her cheek, and she felt his warm lips on her face. “You look beautiful,” he said. His fingers on her skin felt electric. Why hadn’t she put the blazer on before she got downstairs? The fountain in the lobby shot streams of color toward the skylights above. The scene was just so overwhelmingly romantic. She felt the urge to touch his face, to feel his jaw, to close her eyes and melt into a long kiss on the mouth. Maybe she had been deluding herself earlier tonight when she worried that Jeff would want to be intimate. Maybe she had been deluding herself back in New York, when she tried to convince herself she was coming out here for a story. Maybe this was really what she had been hoping for all along. But no, it didn’t feel right, not at all. She was married with a family, and so was he. It was wrong. It had to stop.

She felt him pick up her hand and stroke her fingers with his thumb. She pulled it away and clumsily opened her shoulder bag.

“Anyway, I have questions,” she blurted out. “More questions. For you.”

He looked at her as though he were amused. “We’re still working?” he asked agreeably. “Okay, shoot.”

She took a couple of steps back as she pulled out her notepad and pen. Then she put on her blazer, stalling until she could come up with something. “Okay, let’s see
 . . .
merchandise! That’s what I need to know about. More about, I mean. Because we talked about it at lunch, I know. But how, or what
 . . .
or what kind of money did you make, from all that?”

“Like I told you at the house, none, believe it or not,” he answered, turning more serious. They began to walk farther into the lobby, Iliana trying to steady her hand to write. “You know, it all has to do with how smart you are when you negotiate these things. And everything was less sophisticated then. Merchandise tie-ins were nowhere near the kind of business
 . . .”

It took her a moment to realize that Jeff had stopped talking. When she looked up, she saw him staring past her. “What is it?” she said.

“Oh man,” he answered. “It’s Terry.”

“What?”

“I invited him to have dinner with us.”

“He’s here? Terry’s here?”

“Will you look at him,” Jeff said, shaking his head. “Son of a gun.”

She turned to see Terry walking toward them, with the fountain bursting in the background. Iliana recognized him immediately but was struck by how different he looked. The years hadn’t been nearly so kind to him as they had to Jeff. It was as though parts of him—his full lips, his blue eyes—had been superimposed on an old, misshapen body. He had gained a lot of weight, all above the waist, so he had an enormous torso on top of short legs. His face had expanded while his features stayed the same size, so his cheeks and forehead were huge, and his eyes, nose, and mouth looked tiny and squished together. His hair had darkened to a mustardy brown and lost all its curl. It looked thin and greasy, combed back from his forehead. He wore a dark-blue button-down shirt tucked into too-tight pants and had a thick, tacky gold ring on his left pinky.

Iliana watched as Jeff walked past her and grasped Terry warmly by the shoulders. Terry lifted his hands to hold Jeff’s shoulders, blinking away tears. His mouth twisted to the side as he sniffed a few times. Then they pulled each other closer, coming in for a real hug, patting each other on the back. Iliana lowered her arms, letting the notebook and pen hang from her hands. She was stunned by Terry’s changed appearance, and also by the emotion the two men were showing. Even other guests were looking over. Some walked closer, forming a ring around the two men.

“Hey, Jeff,” she heard Terry whisper between little gasps. “Hey, Basketball.”

Jeff was the first to break away. He motioned toward Iliana. “Terry, man,” he said. “This is her, the writer I told you about. Iliana Fisher. She’s really here, like I said she would be.”

Iliana put out her hand. “Hi, Terry,” she said.

“Iliana Fisher,” Terry said. “You know what you are? You’re a dream come true.”

Twenty minutes later they were sitting at a round table in a warm, dark Italian restaurant, drinking red wine while Terry talked about his life. He had spent the first ten years after the show severely addicted to cocaine, and the next ten trying to get clean. He was twice divorced, and he had a fifteen-year-old daughter who lived with his first wife in Atlanta and hated his guts. He’d been diagnosed last year with a chronic form of leukemia, and although he was in remission, he required transfusions every three months that left his arms spotted with angry purple bruises.

Gripping the edge of the table as though it were a lifeboat, Terry talked for a long time. His speech was punctuated by present-tense half sentences—quick three- or four-word phrases that were missing subjects or verbs but sounded like they ended in exclamation points.

“The
Bye Bye Birdie
gig? Fired in two weeks. Stranded in St. Paul! Not even a plane ticket home. Good drugs, though, plenty good. A week later—back in LA.”

He told them he had tried to use his old connections to make a living in the music business, primarily by discovering and promoting young, talented bands he saw in small clubs, but none took off. Nobody in the music industry had much respect for his opinion. He worked for a while as a DJ at a small club, and when he was really desperate for money, he worked as a telemarketer, too. He also tried to start up an Internet business, buying and auctioning off old cassettes and records. That did well for a short time, but eventually failed. “Kept the website, though. Good thing. ’Cause old Basketball here tracks me down!”

“So what have you been doing lately, buddy?” Jeff asked.

“Teaching,” Terry answered. “Yes, sir. Old Terry a teacher! Alternative high school
 . . .
you know. Vocational. Kids do all right. They come out engineers, technicians. For radio stations, recording studios.”

“That’s so interesting,” Iliana said, glad that he had finally succeeded at something. She felt a little responsible for him, since she was clearly a key reason why he had come down to LA, and she found herself rooting for him, the way she’d silently root for Matthew at his baseball games.
Shoot! Pass!
It was strange, feeling this way. She’d always imagined herself as the girlfriend of a Dreamer, not the mother. But hearing Terry talk made her see him in a new light. He had been the daredevil member of the group. She’d never realized what a naive little boy he probably was then—and seemed to be now. Just like Jeff.

“It’s okay,” Terry said. “Pays some bills, you know what it’s like. But then”—his tiny eyebrows lifted onto that huge forehead, his tiny blue eyes lit up, and his speech became more normal—“then I got your call, Basketball. And I can’t think of anything else. I see it all happening. A whole new start.”

“Exactly,” Jeff said, leaning forward.

“Yeah, baby!” Terry exclaimed, banging his leg into the table so the glasses and plates made a sudden, loud clank. Iliana instinctively reached out her hands to catch any glass that might tip over. Neither Terry nor Jeff even acknowledged the noise. “You know, man—a comeback,” he continued. “Iliana’s book comes out, and boom! We’re a hit! Pull Peter off the farm, find Bruce wherever the hell he landed, launch a reunion album, a tour. We’re back on top, man. Back on top!”

“That’s just what I’m thinking,” Jeff said. Iliana could imagine the same relationship between the two men years ago:
“We’ll take all the newspapers from all the machines!” “That’s just what I’m thinking!”
But this time it wasn’t just all in fun. Terry was really counting on her to publish a book about them. And now it seemed even more unlikely to happen than ever. Terry’s life was a mess, and he looked terrible, too. How did he expect to actually make a comeback, let alone have a book written about it? How did Jeff not see that this was all so unrealistic?

“Yeah,” Terry said, pounding on the table with one fist to emphasize his words: “Because. It. All. Starts. With. The. Book! The book, man! I mean, look, Iliana works for the
Times
. The fuckin’
New York Times
!” He turned to Iliana. “A bestseller, right? Could you get us on Jimmy Fallon?”

Iliana felt her breath speeding up. Her cheeks were hot, and not from the wine. She felt as frantic as a trapped animal, which she sort of was, her chair pressed against the wall in this crowded restaurant, the two men blocking her path to the door. Now she was supposed to book them on late-night TV? “Hang on, Terry,” she said, trying to let out a casual-sounding laugh. “As I’m sure Jeff told you, it’s just a book
idea
at this point—”

“I even wrote a reunion song for us!” Terry said, tossing an unlit votive candle in the air.

“A
song
?” she said, trying to sound like this was a happy surprise. And what did he expect her to do about that—get someone to sing it on
The Voice
?
Terry was on another planet. This was getting out of hand.

Jeff laughed, a big, sudden “Ha!” then turned to Iliana. “If there’s a way to get attention, leave it to Terry to find it.” He shook his head and chuckled, but Iliana thought he actually sounded a little annoyed.

“It’s not just attention, man! Jeff! It’s a real song!” Iliana noticed that he used Jeff’s real name, for the first time that evening. “I worked on it ’round the clock. Collaborated, you know? With one of my students. So it’s more
now
.”