Page 85 of Caught in a Storm
“You are?” says Billy. “Just like that?”
“Probably for the best. Also, only slightly related, I was informed this morning that if I’m not back in L.A. by tomorrow I’ll be sued for thirty-four million U.S. dollars.”
“That…that’s a lot of money.”
“It is. I should probably start reading my contracts. But I want you to know two things. First, I’m not just rolling over. If Mar comes to her senses, I’ll gladly welcome her home. To whichever home she likes. New York, L.A., London, my little place in the Alps.”
“The Alps?”
“French side,” says Lawson. “It’s lovely there. You should check it out. And second. Mar fancies you. Cheers, you cunt. But I think you need to ask yourself an important question. Is Mar fancying you what’s best for Mar?”
The mirror again. In it, Billy sees his smile fall.
Lawson waves his hand in a circle over his head. “Baltimore. Charming place. However, doesn’t Mar perhaps belong somewhere a little…I don’t know, bigger? Again, no offense, but perhaps…better?”
Billy has wondered this, too, of course. At night, usually, with Margot sleeping beside him. Not just Baltimore. A little apartment above a garage. Trips to a dusty record shop, evenings watching an historically shitty baseball team. A piano teacher with a drawer stuffed full of cardigans. Margot deserves more than all of it, and Billy knows it.
He has two untouched beers to choose from, so he picks the American one. He takes a sip, touches the cold bottle to his face.
“She’s a star, mate.”
“I know.”
“And I’m not psychic, but I have a pretty good idea why Nikki and Axl are here.”
“Me too.”
The two men drink. People watch, whispering about them.
“The world wants her back,” says Lawson.
“I know.”
The bartender and two of the waitresses ask Lawson for a photo, which Billy takes for them. He tells everyone to say cheese. A middle-aged couple asks Lawson to sign their menu. When they’re alone again, Lawson asks if he can have Billy’s Boddingtons, because it’s just going to waste there. Then he says, “In a year or two—five years’ time, whenever it is—do you want to look at yourself in a mirror like this one here one day and know that you were the bloke who stood in our Margie’s way?”
Chapter 47
For a few weeks when they were both briefly freshmen in college, Margot wondered if she was in love with Nikki. They’d been staying up late, huddled closely over notebooks and sketch pads as they mapped out their future, chose a band name, doodled potential logos and tattoos, and brainstormed the types of guitarist and bass player they wanted to find.
“Chicks who are cool and badass,” said Nikki, “but not as cool and badass as us. Duh.”
Nikki was sexy and smart and magnetic. She smelled like vanilla and cigarettes. She made Margot feel cooler than she was. Like a rock star. Margot’s sexuality had always felt fluid, too—a tempo that fluctuated with a piece of music. As she looks at Nikki sitting now at Billy’s Steinway, she’s angry, but she remembers that feeling of maybe-love: a knotted-up stomach, heat at the crooks of her elbows. Nikki is wearing dark, legging-tight jeans and a T-shirt with a strategically shlumpy sweater over it. Her beauty is still vivid, like everyone else in the room has been shot slightly out of focus.
The instant they stepped into the apartment, Nikki went right for the piano. “Hello, gorgeous,” she said, tapping out some notes from one of her solo songs. She stops now, like she suddenly remembers why she’s here. She looks at the unpacked boxes, the espresso machine, the clutter of two adults living in a space that’s too small. “And you look great, too,” she says.
“What?” asks Margot.
“Sorry. That didn’t make sense.” Nikki sounds nervous. “I said your hair looks great earlier, in the driveway. It does, but so does the rest of you. You look great, Margot.”
Her feelings for her old friend have softened, she now realizes, and she knows that this is because of stupid Lawson. He showed up last night and was funny and contrite and not the monster she’d kept casting him as. The bastard went and sucked the oxygen out of her rage, and Margot finds that she wishes Nikki would play one of their old songs.
“That girl you sang with in those videos,” Nikki says. “She wasn’t bad.”
“She was all right,” says Margot.
“I was jealous of her,” says Nikki. “Does that make me a psycho? I was like, shut up, you bitch. That’s supposed to be me.”
Margot nearly says, You should’ve thought of that years ago, but she doesn’t, because it would sound childish—chronologically unreasonable, too.
