The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (27 page)

There was a long silence. Jane said, “I missed you. I don’t like going this long without seeing you.”

“It’s only been three days.”

“I know.” I could hear her tracing her fingers over his chest. “Still.”

For some reason this made me even more upset. I tried to remember all the other times Jane had said she was meeting with a promoter or something so she wasn’t coming back to the hotel. Sometimes I bet it was real, and the rest it was Bill.

“You want to go to the bedroom?” she asked.

“Mmm.” He stretched and stood up. “I gotta go.”

“Can’t you just stay a little?”

“You know I have to check in with Elsa before she goes to sleep, and I won’t do it from here.”

“You can come back after.”

“I never sleep well with you, and we’re loading up early tomorrow.”

“Okay,” she said, even more quietly, like she’d really been slapped this time.

He put his clothes on there, and when he was dressed he gave her a quick kiss on the mouth and said, “We’ll do something nice for your
birthday, okay?” and she said, “Uh-huh,” and he walked out quickly and let the door shut on its own behind him.

Jane didn’t move, but I knew she was awake, probably with her eyes open. I could almost hear her thinking in the dead quiet of the room. I didn’t know what was going through her head, but I was sure it wasn’t about my digital apps or the Asian market or anything like that. Finally she went to the bathroom, and I thought about making a run for it, but it was risky. A pill bottle opened with a popping sound. It was smarter to wait it out.

From now on, when I looked at Bill, I’d know he was cheating on his wife. I kind of hoped I’d run into him in the hall, even if it meant getting in trouble. I’d ask him if Elsa was a fan, because I could make a courtesy call to her to say hi. Just to make him sweat.

And when Jane told me she had to go to an unexpected dinner with a regional promoter, I’d know she was lying. It’s also probably why she defended Bill for the heart-shaped swing. Plus it made me pissed that of all the guys on the tour, she chose him. He was muscular and good-looking and the best at his job, but he was an asshole. If she had to pick someone, it should’ve been Zack. He’s not much younger than some of the other guys she’s been with.

She started snoring like a quivering bird from the bedroom, and I climbed out carefully from behind the couch and left. When I got to my room, I called the label. It was late, but someone would be there. A girl picked up, and I identified myself as Client 463, password
Breathtaking,
and asked if I could get Zack Ford’s cell phone number. She said he was no longer a client of the label but they still had it on file.

I called his number. It rang a few times, and I thought it was going to go to voice mail, but then Zack said hello.

“It’s Jonny,” I said, so he didn’t think I was a girl again.

“Jonny,” he said in a flat voice. That was it.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“In my kitchen. Making couscous. It’s a glamorous life.”

I’d meant what city, in case Jane was lying about that, too, but she’d told the truth. “So you’re not with the label anymore?”

“Nope,” he said. “Their lawyers found a variety of clever ways to cleave us. Cleave in the sense of
separate,
not
join
. That’s called a
contronym,
by the way, when a word means its own opposite.”

If he’d stayed on the tour I could’ve learned all this stuff, plus new bands I’d never heard of and ideas about movies and smart jokes. Now I couldn’t.

“I’m sorry I made it so you had to leave,” I said. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have even come to the nightclub with you.”

“It’s okay. We’ll find another label.”

“And I wouldn’t have had any of the alcohol.”

Right when I said it, I could hear him tense up in his kitchen in L.A. “Anyway, it was nice talking to you, Jonny,” he said. “And watch out for yourself out there. It’s a cutthroat industry.” He hung up before I could even say good-bye.

Maybe he thought I was taping him for a tabloid or something, except that would make me look worse than him. That was probably the last chance I’d get to talk to him. I didn’t blame him. I’d left Michael Carns behind in St. Louis and I’d left Zack behind in Memphis, even if officially we made him leave. I was like the criminal who told the police my friend was guilty.

T
he next morning I watched out the bus window as Bill directed the final loading of the eighteen-wheelers near us. He just did it like normal, like nothing had happened the night before. A silver wedding ring was on his finger. Elsa.

I told Walter I was getting air for a second and stepped outside and went up to Bill. “Hey, is Els—” It wasn’t worth him asking Jane how I knew his wife’s name. “Is there anything else to know about the Nashville setup? Is it standard or special prep?”

He said, “Standard.” He never said more to me than he needed to.

Jane looked hungover but not too bad on the bus. I waited until we were a few hours on the road and she’d had a chance to hydrate before I reminded her that she promised I could go with Walter tonight to visit his daughters and I was giving them a game system and a copy of The Secret Land of Zenon that was supposed to be waiting at the hotel for me.

“Sure,” she said. Her eyes were closed and she was reclining in her seat. I was going to ask her to call the hotel to confirm the game system was there, but I didn’t want to push it. She asked Rog to sit next to her, which was my cue to leave her alone and let them talk.

At the hotel, before I left with Walter in the car service, Jane called to say she was staying in that night. I wasn’t sure if it was because she was seeing Bill or she was actually staying in. “Do you want to come with us?” I asked.

“No, thanks,” she said, and she was so tired-sounding, I was pretty sure she was hanging at the hotel. “You sure you don’t want to stay in tonight, too? You don’t have many days off coming up.”

“I promised Walter.”

“Just because you promised doesn’t mean you
have
to do it. We could order room service, watch pay-per-view.”

“I love hanging out with Walter,” I said. “He’s the best.”

“All right. Do what you want,” she said, and hung up.

“Yeah, and do what you want with Bill every other night,” I said to the dial tone. “Maybe I’ll die tonight like your other baby you never told me about.”

We brought the game system and Zenon along in the car, and Walter was jittery in the backseat. He hadn’t seen his daughters since last summer, or his ex-wife, Callie. He’s all calm when he has to push away a hundred fans who might stampede me and him, but seeing his own family got him nervous.

Callie’s house was in an okay part of town, with streets that had some trees and grass, but her house was kind of depressing. It looked thinner than my bedroom and connected to the houses on both sides of it, with flimsy wood that was painted yellow and peeling. Walter was
really
jittery when we walked up to the house and he rang the bell. Callie opened the door in her winter coat. She wasn’t fat, which I was expecting, but she also wasn’t cute. Walter wasn’t that handsome, either, so I guess they were a good match. “Hi, Walter,” she said.

“Hey, Callie,” he said.

He waited a second before leaning forward to hug her. I’d never seen him hug anyone before. Standing there for five seconds with them was so awkward, it felt as painful as sitting on the tour bus for eight hours. He returned to his spot, and like he’d just remembered I was there, too, he said, “This is Jonny.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s great to finally meet you, Jonny.”

I said hi and handed her the game system in a box and told her it was for her daughters. She thanked me and set it down inside and said she’d head out and would be back at eight. She called out, “Girls, your father’s here!” and walked out before they could get there.

They were six and seven and ten years old, and the youngest two, Danny and Pris, squealed a lot when they saw Walter and jumped on him and called him Daddy, which was weird for me to see. They didn’t know who I was. But the oldest, Sally, was quieter, and she only let Walter hug her the way Callie did, with her arms mostly by her sides. She knew who I was, so maybe that was part of why she was shy. It’s okay to be shy if you’re a girl, but it’s really bad if you’re a boy, like Michael is, except a lot of it was from being on camera. I’m less shy on camera than I am off it. Someone’s going to watch it later, so you have to step it up.

“What do you girls want to eat for dinner?” Walter asked.

“Pancakes,” Pris said.

“The pancake place,” Danny said.

“They’re into pancakes now,” Sally said.

“Okay,” Walter said. “How about we make them here?”

“The pancake place,” Danny said again.

“You sure?” Walter asked.

I could tell Walter didn’t want to go out to dinner. It wasn’t because he was cheap, though, since he was always sneaking me little presents in L.A. And I liked the idea of him making pancakes for dinner for his kids. Plus I didn’t want to deal with crowd interference, especially after Memphis. I pointed to the box and said, “I’ve got a video game system for you guys if we can eat here.”

Danny ran over and ripped open the box’s packaging and it was like she’d forgotten all about the pancake place. Little kids are easy to distract. That’s why it’s annoying to have girls younger than eight or so at concerts, because they lose interest in the whole concert if they don’t like one song. Older kids, it takes a few songs in a row they don’t like before they’re gone. That’s why you have to keep producing and pump out an album every eighteen months max, or your fan base will forget about you and move on to the next artist.

I helped them set up the system in the living room and explained how to play Zenon as Walter poked around the kitchen right next to us. I’d never seen Walter cook before, since Peter always made him food at home or he ordered in, and here he was getting out pancake batter and butter and pans and everything. But he actually knew what he was doing, and once I got the girls set up with Zenon, I watched him cook. His face was super-serious, like making these pancakes was the most important job in the world not to fuck up.

Me and the girls played Zenon and ate the pancakes Walter made fresh batches of every few minutes. One time, when he thought no one was looking, he stuck a couple twenty-dollar bills in one of the girls’ pink backpacks on the floor. I ate and tried not to think about how much cardio I’d owe and let the girls switch off playing and stepped in to show them how to do certain actions, though later I stopped touching the controller, because sometimes with games it’s best just to let kids figure out for themselves what to do and what not to do, even if their characters keep getting damaged. Also they didn’t get the idea of experience points, even Sally, who asked, “How do you know what to do if you don’t know how many points it gets you?” and I was like, “That’s why it’s different from other games, you have to play it a long time to get a sense of what helps you, but sometimes it still surprises you.”

Pris laughed at the voice of this archer Shamino who sounded like a baritone demon, so I turned off the character sounds and did the voices for all the characters in his voice. She laughed every time I did it, and Danny did, too, even though it wasn’t really funny. Then I whipped out my impression of Walter, whose voice wasn’t far from Shamino’s, and made up dialogue in his voice, like, “Pris, you must bestow upon me the last pancake in your inventory or I will eat you, brother.”

Walter never laughs, but he smiled and said, “You got me, brother.” It hurt a little to do the impression, since I had to make my voice all gravelly and scratchy like Lennon on “Twist and Shout,” but it was worth it, and after a few minutes even Sally started laughing, so I said everything in his voice the rest of the night, like, “Where’s the bathroom, brother?” It was a fun night, like hanging out with the Latchkeys,
even if it was cooler to say you were with a rock group at a club instead of eating pancakes with three little girls and your bodyguard at their mother’s house.

When I went to the bathroom, I saw an old desktop computer in a small room next to it. I thought they might not have the Internet, because they were so poor, but they did. Everyone has the Internet except me. So I closed the door behind me, even though Walter wouldn’t actually care and I could just tell him I was doing an assignment for Nadine. A spreadsheet was open called “budget.xls.” Callie only budgeted $150 a week for groceries for her and her daughters, and I could tell from the ingredients Walter used that she shopped at supermarkets way below Schnucks. I sometimes saw Peter’s receipts for food at the organic stores, which was for me, Jane, Walter, Sharon, and him, and they were over a thousand dollars each time, but some of that was wine and liquor.

I went into my email. I wondered if my father had heard about Memphis and everything or if he was the kind of person who didn’t hear about things like that. There was one more email from him, written a few hours ago. It was strange to picture him going on a computer somewhere in New York today and writing to me. It was strange to think of him at all in a way that wasn’t just like, I wonder who the hell my father is.

I thought I would have heard back from you if you really were Jonathan or knew him. Now I guess it was a joke. Please don’t screw around with people like that in the future. It’s not nice. I just wanted to connect with my son and tell him a little about my life.

I wanted to write that it was me, I wasn’t making it up, I wanted to hear more about his life, but I didn’t have a chance to do it because I could never get on the Internet, and he was the one who didn’t make it clear if he was coming to my concert in Cincinnati or not. I almost even said to the computer, Fuck you. But I wrote

I don’t get to go on email alot but it is really me. Did you see my TV morning show appearance where I mentioned Pittsburgh and Australia and peanut butter? Where did you live in Australia? Why did you move there? Do you have any pictures you can send? Or from when you were in the Wrecking Balls? And are you coming to my concert in Cincinnati?