Page 26 of Lies and Lullabies
Still, I could have gotten her Boston number from her father. I didn’t try to track her down, though. I just… didn’t. At the time, I’d known it was a mistake, but we were three-thousand miles apart, and I didn’t know what I could possibly offer Kira from that distance. At the time, I’d felt letting Kira go was probably the right decision for both of us. That girl did not need to hitch her wagon to a fuckup like me.
And anyway, my great big life had been distracting enough that I didn’t have time to sit around and wonder what might have been. The album I’d written went big, which felt good.
It hadn’t felt as good as winning Kira’s love, although it would take me years to realize it. I’d carried her letter in my pocket until the corners of the envelope began to wear off. Then I’d tucked it into a safe place at home.
I’d met other women, of course. But not one of them had made the same impression on me. I’d gone on the dates my publicist set up for me, always with actresses or models—people with their own publicists, and their own need to be Seen (with a capital S). The occasions were often awards ceremonies, or A-list parties. The girls had always been very beautiful, but compared to Kira, they’d been plastic—styled and painted and perfected within an inch of their lives.
And even if they’d been awesome people underneath, I would have never known. It had been impossible for any real spark to penetrate the charade of an A-list date. The women who’d walked the red carpets with me were on the job, the same as I was. They’d needed their photographs taken with the right celebrities, and they’d needed those pictures to appear in just the right gossip rags.
The encounters had left nothing to chance. They’d been almost entirely empty and rarely led to sex.
For sex, I could always count on the fan girls trying to shove their way past the security staff backstage at my concerts. During the earliest years of my career, unfettered access to a quick fuck had been just as exciting as most red-blooded American men imagined it would be. All I had to do was scan the backstage crowd for the most appealing face. A nod to the bouncers would bring the girl—and often one or two of her friends—ducking under the ropes to party with me. For the next several hours, I would be fawned over, admired and fucked to my liking. There was no need to seduce these women, or even to be too interested in them.
And that got boring fast. I’d discovered that sex lost something when you didn’t have to do anything other than show up. Most nights I’d found my pillow more appealing than a hookup, and I began to put less and less effort into my increasingly infrequent sweaty encounters.
The low point had been when I discovered that even the most casual conversation was unnecessary to get a woman to undress me. One night, in San Francisco, I’d been drinking with a woman after the show, sucking back my rum and Coke, staring into space, and thinking of other things. When our drinks were empty, she’d stood up and taken my hand, silently offering to move the night along to the next stage.
Amid the glitter and booze, the problem had become clear: once you’d looked into the passionate eyes of someone who loved you just for you, nothing else would do.
But by then it had been too late. On a lonely night, I’d finally called the store. “They moved to Boston,” the old man had said when I asked for Kira.
They.
Kira had gone back to her army man. Of course she had. She’d moved on, and I would never get that perfect summer back.
Even so, seeing Kira yesterday had caused my heart to spasm. I was dying to talk to her, and I’d been counting the hours ever since.
Nothing will come of it, I reminded myself every few minutes. She’d probably tell me just how far she’d moved on. Married. With kids. And that was going to hurt. Big time.
The best I could probably hope for was to get another song out of it. A nice ballad of heartbreak and loss. And then what?
More sex with strangers, probably.
One nightlast year I’d ground through the motions with another hookup after a show. Afterward, the band had climbed onto the bus for a six-hour drive. I had taken a couple of hits off of Nixon’s bong—which was something I never did, because drugs just weren’t my thing. High for the first time in years, I’d tried to have a conversation with Ethan about my sex life. I remembered it clearly, even though the voices in my memory sounded like a conversation from the bottom of a barrel.
“Ethan,” I’d complained, “these women are always there, and they’re always ready. It’s like, it’s starting to seem normal.”
“You’re living the dream, Jojo. What’s the problem?”
Ethan had put his giant hands on top of his own shaved head, looking for all the world like Buddha. The stoned-up me had to stare at him a second before continuing. “But, dude,” I whined. “It’s like… they’re notnormal. Who throws themselves at a complete stranger?”
“You do, Jojo. Once or twice a week.”
“Yeah, but I do it because they make it seem, like, normal. And that shit is not normal!”
Ethan had laughed, shaking his big head. “See, Jonas, these women who throw their panties at you? They’ve been listening to you croon words of love directly into their brains, via their phones. They think they know you already, lover boy. It’s just like my grandma talking back toGood Morning America.”
“Fuck me.” Ethan’s explanation had made it even worse. If what he said was true, the girls were at least half deluded into thinking they knew me. So that made me the biggest skank of all.
“Jojo, don’t take this the wrong way,” Ethan had said, patting me on the knee. “But weed is not your friend.”
After our conversation, I had eaten an entire sleeve of Pringles. The inside of my nose smelled like pot and dehydrated potato for a week. But at least the marijuana-induced wisdom stuck with me. The random hookups slowed to a trickle when I finally noticed that my “fuck the emptiness away” strategy wasn’t working all that well.
Now, lying in the grass in Maine, smelling the lilacs and the lake water, I felt unsettled. No—it was worse than that. The idea of loading up on the bus and leaving Maine for another five years made me feel positively unhinged.
“Breakfast in forty-five,” Ethan said. “And I’m still making you a picnic lunch for noon, right?”
“Right. Thanks,” I said, peeling myself up off the grass. How was I even going to survive until noon?
