Fly Me Read online

  The light gives the hallway from the front door the feeling of a sci-fi portal—a bridge from an outside world of sea smell and ceaseless mellow and broken-muffler Bugs to something a little higher oxygen. From where they’re standing in the corner near the stage, Suzy and Grace watch the StrandDogs unload and plug in, three cousins and some friends from Sela, experimental, but conceived by the stencil of the Beach Boys. Harmonies and surf guitar, but more brass. They work through each mike—tongue twisters and “oooh-ahhhs” and an impression of Chick Hearn (“Chamberlain, baseline, fourteen-foot jumper…Good!”)—before the guy in the middle snaps his fingers and they hit a five-part harmony on: “Don’t talk, take my hand and listen to my hea-art beat.…Lis-ten…lis-ten…lis-ten…”

  Pet Sounds was a thing in the Whitman house. Something, for reasons never really articulated, that made both girls and parents feel feelings. It came out the spring of Suzy’s sophomore year of high school, that first year Grace was away—the first stretch that Suzy had really missed her. While hitching home for the summer, Grace had stopped at the record store in Schuyler Glen and picked it up. Day after day they sat in their room, Grace on the bed and Suzy on the floor, with the windows wide and new blooms wending their way in. That touch of the outdoors on the skin and those pantry-locked sentiments were soldered in Suzy’s mind, recalled involuntarily whenever she smelled honeysuckle or heard those “Lis-ten…lis-ten…lis-tens.”

  At Howlers, Grace is maybe already on her way to that place, too—she has that kind of purposeful look to her. Sticky sentimental. But she seems also to be moving down a road that leads from those sounds to boogying on a tabletop. She’s loose. Whereas Suzy is fastened still in that bedroom in Schuyler, growing damp in a mist of memory, watching this present rather than acting in it. Mike hands Grace her drink and gives Suzy a beer, too. Both of Suzy’s hands are full, and so she sort of offers up her hip pocket with its wet bar cash, but Mike shakes his head—Let me at least have this one dignity.

  The set is mostly quick little originals, radio bait with big-wall brass, and then a couple pieces of wordless jazz that opens space for solos and intros. On the second-to-last song Jackson comes out and sings the lead of “Spill the Wine” in a spot-on mock. And then sticks around to play the piano outro on a “Layla” cover.

  “Don’t know about you guys,” the StrandDogs’ singer says, “but we sometimes play the Death Song game—name the one you wanna go out to. This is mine.”

  Jackson reaches for the bassist’s mike and says: “Mine’s Rhapsody in Blue.”

  “Rock ’n’ roll,” the singer says.

  Grace orders another vodka piña and then another, and in between sets she argues with Mike about Dylan songs and threatens to separate their record collection to emphasize an aesthetic principle. Or at least that’s what Suzy imagines, judging by the haughty leg posture and head nods. As Suzy begins to lose the line on the conversation, she moves back to the bar herself to stand on the rung of a stool and get a better look at the crowd. With the lights up she can see back to the green glow of the front door, and toward the hallway with the bathrooms, where they keep all the photos of past performers like they do up in Hollywood, groups who come through to try new stuff and work out timing. Linda Ronstadt was here last week. Gram Parsons comes down on Mondays. Suzy takes a loop, acts as though she’s looking for someone, a sister or a boyfriend. And as she’s about to head up the stairs to the roof, she hears laughter and the name “Zar.” She turns expectantly but sees it’s only someone hawking a loogie in the corner.

  Mike gives Grace a piggyback home, her sandals in her hand and her big toes hooked into the belt loops of Mike’s dungarees. Every couple blocks along the Strand, Suzy wrestles Grace’s dress down below her underwear, even though it’s dark except for the lamps.

  “Well, that was fun,” Mike says once he’s dumped Grace into bed.

  “I always get super bummed out listening to Jackson,” Suzy says. “He’s, like, the most depressing musician in California masquerading as its most fun with his radio hits.”

  “‘Song for Adam,’” Mike says.

  “Ugh.”

  “I liked him singing covers better than anything else he did.”

  “I didn’t know the story about ‘Take It Easy,’” Suzy says. “Whoops.”

  “I only caught part of it, I was coming out of the bathroom.”

  “He wrote the whole thing, music and lyrics, except—”

  “Except the only lines most people know. Oh, I did hear that part.”

  “He said Glenn game up with the ‘It’s a girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowin’ down to take a look at me…’ bit.”

  “I love how he talks about that lyric writing like it’s some revelation,” Mike says. “A solution that unsticks the universe.”

  “They’re good lines.”

  “But music writing, man, it’s not like—”

  “Real writing…”

  “Didn’t you do your thesis on this? Rock lyrics as poetry?”

  “Exactly, so I may not quite be in your corner on this one,” Suzy says.

  Mike moves to the kitchen sink to wash his hands.

  “Hey,” Suzy says, “everything cool with you two?”

  “Eh, we’ve been going at each other since the Fourth. Weird day. Fought in the morning about some bullshit—that’s why we were late meeting you at the beach. Argued on the way home from that party, too. She was pissed I was bleeding. And she thought I was hitting on people.”

  “What’s the issue, though?”

  “I dunno, hard to say. Mostly things are good. We’re both a little stressed about money. I really do need to get this magazine off the ground. Or get a job in the meantime.”

  “Flip burgers. Pound some nails. Fix engines.”

  “I’m not the multitalented Suzy Whitman.”

  “You can find something.”

  “The bigger issue, the thing that’s killing me, is she’s more tweaked than ever that the airline’s gonna find out about us and ax her. And then there’ll be no money whatsoever. She just thinks we see too many stews in Sela. She worries too many of them know about the wedding and that someone’s bound to blab.”

  “You don’t even wear rings.”

  “She invokes it outta nowhere and a little too often,” Mike says, popping the top of a Coors. “Sorry, don’t mean to dump this all at once.”

  “I mean, I asked,” Suzy says. “I’m a little drunk, so, you know, don’t take it the wrong way, but I’ve wondered awhile: what was the rush? She said she wanted to wait—isn’t that a guy’s dream?”

  “Well, I hope you’ll remember, she wasn’t that resistant. She was all about it after I asked.”

  “But you could’ve just hung out, right?”

  “I wanted to punch my ticket. Coolest, best-looking chick I ever met.”

  “That’s reasonable enough.”

  “I mean, if not me, it was gonna be someone fast. You know how she puts it out there. She acts all prim, all upstate Episc-y, when certain people are around. But it’s a validation switch stuck in the on position. ‘Oh my God, that vodka pineapple is so interesting. It’s the best drink I’ve ever had, and you make it so well.’”

  “She had a grip like that at thirteen. ‘You made a volcano. How did you do it? Wanna be partners? You play cello, too, that’s amay-zing.’”

  “With the musicians it’s a whole other level,” Mike says.

  “I’ve never understood that.”

  “With Grace?”

  “With anyone, really.”

  “You don’t get the appeal of musicians?”

  “I mean, we seem to forget that it’s only been cool for, what, ten years?” Suzy says. “All these nerds were forced into classical lessons by their parents, with the widow at the end of the block or whatever, and spent their entire childhood in their basement practicing. And so you emerge as an adult male who never went to a school dance or got to second base, and yet the Age has confirmed you a
s the man. All ’cause Dad would’ve beat you with a belt if you’d skipped out on piano.”

  “Jeez, what’d they do to you?”

  “I just don’t buy it. Once a nerd, always a nerd. Ignored by girls like Grace until the end of high school, maybe even in college, and it’s all still there, that resentment. They just lick their chops looking down from the stage on a sea of pussy, ready for revenge.”

  “Dave was a guitarist, wasn’t he?”

  “Weird, hadn’t considered the connection,” Suzy says, caught.

  “Duane Allman never learned to read music,” Mike says, steering wide of Suzy’s acid.

  “Oh yeah, and that,” Suzy says, reminded. “That’s an even better reason for me to be pissed. ‘Jeez, what’d they do to’ me? All these guys, these guys my sister followed around on tour—they took her away from me right when I was finally starting to like her.”

  “But here we are now,” Mike says.

  “Yup,” Suzy says. “The band’s back together.”

  Suzy has nine round-trips in ten days. They’re mostly out-and-backs to places like Denver and Houston and Seattle. The routine of those shorties—airplanes and airports—smothers the novelty of flying. She’s numb to it that fast. It doesn’t help her feeling of sameness that no matter when she lands, the Dodgers are playing: Vin Scully’s voice narrating the fraught cab rides home from LAX, a stream of play-by-play and biographical “wouldn’tchaknowits” that’s possible to follow without interruption from the taxi radio to the stereos in neighbors’ open windows to the on-screen television commentary when she steps through the front door.

  On a Tuesday in mid-July, after working the shuttle from San Francisco, Suzy meets Grace on the beach. It’s afternoon and the beach is deserted. There is a single surfer, a lifeguard in his station at Nineteenth, and a pair of towels—belonging to two people—that overlap with each other at their edges. It takes her longer than she can quite believe to cover the sprawl between the Strand and their spot in the sun. The sand is boiling, and she’s forced to keep her flip-flops on the whole way.

  Grace is wearing a new yellow bikini and, confirming her hunch, Suzy sees that the man with Grace is not Mike. He is tan and he is long, but he is familiar. The Howlers show. The Cover Band guitarist. His mustache is thicker up close, and though it turns down his mouth at the corners, he seems to smile at all times.

  “Suz, you got my note!” Grace says.

  “I did,” Suzy says, dropping her towel and Mike’s new issue of New York on the available side of Grace.

  “Did you meet J.P. when we saw them?”

  “I don’t think so,” Suzy says. “Hi.”

  J.P. lunges over to shake her hand. “Heya,” he says, collapsing onto his stomach. “How was the flight? Where to?”

  “Fine. Just San Francisco. I can’t recall a single thing.”

  “You’re too green for that,” Grace says. And, turning to J.P., smiling: “This is, what, start of the seventh week?”

  “It wasn’t a bad flight. I mean, you know. You’re up, you pour some soda and juice, and then you’re down. I think Warren Beatty was supposed to be on the flight but then didn’t show. That cast a shadow. All the girls were glum.”

  “He made a pass at me once,” Grace says, sitting up, messing with her hair—clumped and fried, salt drying from an earlier dip.

  “Beatty?” J.P. says.

  “It was pretty lazy. He asked me if I’d ever seen the northern lights. I said I preferred warm weather. He asked if I wanted to screw in the bathroom.”

  “So…did you?” J.P. says.

  “I told him to try again later if he was still interested. He had another couple drinks and passed out, and by the time we landed, he had his eye on someone else.”

  “That’s a sad story,” J.P. says.

  “I disagree. When you think about it, it’s one where everybody wins.”

  “Speaking of stories,” Suzy says, “where’s Mike? I wanted to talk to him about the last book he gave me.”

  Grace acknowledges Suzy’s crude transition by pressuring her lips together. “He’s driving around. Went to talk to some publishers about money. Playboy’s ad guys.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It’s something. I guess they’re gonna move the magazine from Chicago to Los Angeles, or at least part of it, maybe.”

  “Everybody’s coming, one by one,” J.P. says. “Hey, he should write for Playboy.”

  “You a subscriber?” Grace says.

  “As a matter of fact…”

  “For the record reviews,” Grace says.

  “And the interviews.”

  “The interviews are pretty great,” Suzy says.

  “Thank you, Suzy,” J.P. says.

  The silence that follows demands that J.P. search the pocket of his trunks for a joint.

  “Ladies?” he says, surfacing one. Suzy waves him off and expects Grace to as well, just as she did on the Fourth. But she allows J.P. to place the joint in her mouth and shelter the flame from the breeze.

  “Out of curiosity,” Suzy says to J.P., “what’s the name of your guy?”

  “What guy?”

  “Who do you buy your grass from?”

  “You know Billy Zar?”

  “Yeah,” she says, “met him a couple weeks ago. That’s what I was guessing.”

  “Look at you,” Grace says, light in the head.

  “He was the one I was talking to at the party on the Fourth.”

  “I know, I remember. Does it make me a bad big sister that I’m proud of you for knowing the town weed dealer on your own?”

  “Not just weed,” Suzy says.

  “Oh great, even better,” Grace says.

  “He’s good for pretty much anything,” J.P. says. “People say it goes up pretty high. Like, not that he’s flying to Colombia or anything, but that he knows the guy who does.”

  “Shut up,” Grace says. “That kid collects on ten- and twenty-dollar tabs. No way he’s tied up in more than you or me.”

  “He’s a smart guy,” J.P. says.

  “What does that matter?”

  “He was second or third in his class at SDM,” J.P. says. “He and my brother were in school together. He gave a speech at graduation and everything.”

  “Billy Zar?” Grace says.

  “Why didn’t he go to college?” Suzy says.

  “You’d have to ask him. I always just figured it was ’cause he was dealing already. Had a gig, was ready to go.”

  “Weird dude,” Suzy says.

  “I like him,” J.P. says. “Everybody likes him. He’s reliable and he’s fun. Supports a lot of people. Knows everyone and is a one hundred percent genuine hombre. He’s like, I dunno, a town mascot or something.”

  Grace and J.P. lie flat on their backs and watch the clouds drift by, describing the animals and countries their shapes resemble. Suzy reads the cover story in New York: FIRE ISLAND BEHAVIOR—WILL IT SPREAD TO THE MAINLAND?

  “‘As California is to the rest of the nation,’” Suzy reads to Grace, “‘Fire Island is to New York: the place where everyone’s rosiest dream of a future Utopia bears fruit in a somewhat unreal present.…’”

  Suzy smiles and hands the issue to Grace, who gets caught instead on a story about New York’s abortion clinics.

  “So where do you guys go next?” J.P. says.

  “Uh, I know I have Denver twice in a row,” Grace says, “and then New York, I think.”

  “When are you going to New York?” he says. Suzy hasn’t been to New York since the Fourth. She wonders if J.P. is wrapped up in it, too, and braces herself for the ask. “’Cause the Stones are closing out their North American tour there with a few dates middle of next week.”

  “Oh yeah, what days?” Grace says. “I was flying when they came through here in June.”

  “Twenty-something. Midtwenties. Four shows, I think.”

  “J.P. is a walking concert calendar,” Grace says. “Any band, any venue.”
<
br />   “I think I’m scheduled for New York next week, too,” Suzy says.

  “Any chance we’re on the same flight?”

  “Don’t know, I can call when we get home.”

  “Well, listen, if we’re not, we should be,” Grace says. “We can ask to move it around.” Suzy recognizes that Grace must be feeling body-warm by now, velvety all over, but Suzy appreciates the suggestion anyway. “We can finally see Mom and Dad.”

  “They do seem desperate,” Suzy says. “Fly in, drive up, come back into the city for the concert?”

  “Do you think we could still get tickets?” Grace says to J.P.

  “If you have any trouble, give me a ring and I’ll hook you up with my man out there.”

  “The Billy Zar of New York.”

  “Lucky for us and unlucky for New York, there’s only the Billy Zar of Sela del Mar.”

  While she keeps one ear in the conversation, Suzy reads and rereads the same sentence from a Nicholas Pileggi story about the mob. She reads it until it’s devoid of information.

  “Sisters, man,” J.P. says. “People on flights must flip.”

  “Oh, and Hawaii in a few days, too,” Suzy says.

  “Man, jackpot.”

  “First time,” Suzy says.

  “How long will you be there?”

  “Half a day and a night.”

  “Still, half a day and a night on Oahu?” he says, wistful on the beach.

  “Hawaii plus sister flight to New York…,” Grace says. “Both a little more memorable than San Francisco?”

  “Sure,” Suzy says. “But don’t you ever get a little bored?”

  “Listen to you,” Grace says. “Always and will ever be: Special Suzy.”

  “You do know what I mean.…”

  “Suzy: racing high. Grace: high high.”

  Suzy’s mouth twists up at the corner.

  “Racing couldn’t have been that great,” Grace says. “Don’t forget that I had to take care of you after some crashes.”

  “I know,” Suzy says, “and somehow that made it seem all the cooler. So beat up and center-spotlight that you had to fetch me OJ. While Mom hovered in the hallway, begging me to take up ceramics instead.”