The Paradise Gig Read online

“Sure you want to know?”

  He hesitated, worked his toes through the top layer of soft sand. With knowledge came responsibility. Responsibility was what he always told himself he didn’t want. He said yes anyway.

  “I made someone a promise,” she went on. “It happened that night at your place. That crazy phone call at three a.m. with a glass of bourbon in my hand. I made someone a promise and I’ve kept it. That was my last drink, Pete.”

  “Since then it’s yoga and kombucha?”

  “And regular hours and good nights’ sleep.”

  “Congratulations. Can’t have been easy.”

  “Nothing’s easy. I’ve accepted that. And it’s kind of funny. Once I accepted that nothing’s easy, things got a little easier.”

  “Well, I’m happy for you. But I was such a jerk, I never even thought to ask who you were talking to that night. Guess I was too tired and ticked off to care.”

  “And I was too drunk and overwhelmed to tell you. Probably didn’t think you’d want to know or that it was any of your business anyway. Shall I tell you now?”

  “If you like.”

  “Come on, Pete, don’t put it all on me. Would you like me to tell you?”

  He licked his lips and nodded.

  “I was talking to my son.”

  It was a very simple statement but it took Pete a long moment to process it. There they were, on the beach, the most shared and public place there is, free of walls, free of doors, surrounded by strangers. On blankets laid out nearly as close as tiles, separate lives were being lived. Some people did crosswords or read books or lay there doing nothing at all, while others, barely an elbow away, were making revelations, clearing up mysteries, creating new ones, changing their lives. All in the same instant on the same narrow swath of sand at the water’s edge.

  Finally he said, “You have a son? You never told me that.”

  “You never told me you’re a detective. Like Bert said, everybody has their secrets. But yes, I have a son. A wonderful young man who let me into his life a couple years ago, which is way more than I deserve.”

  Pete hugged his knees, leaned a little closer, felt himself getting pulled in deeper and stopped fighting it. “So tell me.”

  She drew her spine up very straight, took a measured breath, and said, “Well, it’s not really that unusual a story. I got pregnant at sixteen. Happens every day, right? Nothing ugly. Just two teenagers who don’t know what they’re doing. The boy’s parents lived on the better side of town and took it pretty calmly, offered to buy me an abortion. Guess they were afraid their son would marry me and wreck his life. But I didn’t want that and neither did he. I mean, we’d goofed but we weren’t stupid. But I didn’t want an abortion either, and I couldn’t even tell you why. It wasn’t any kind of high and mighty moral thing, just a feeling. So I did the totally old-fashioned thing, junior year of high school in a place for unwed mothers at a decent distance from my dinky little town. Signed some papers and had the baby. They wouldn’t let me hold him. Afraid I’d change my mind after all that expense and paperwork, I guess. The agency took him away and that was that.”

  She paused. Sunshine poured down. Sounds filled in from other blankets, other lives. “Must’ve been tough,” Pete managed.

  Callie pressed her lips together. “Let’s just say it’s when the nightmares started. And the drinking. Which is kind of the funny part. I wasn’t a wild girl when I got pregnant. I was a good girl who slipped up. I got wild later. Like screw it, why not? Like nothing mattered anyway. Gave up the baby, may as well give up on myself.”

  “You seemed happy most of the time.”

  “Happy? Yes and no. I had some fun. Lots of fun. But you can have a lot of fun and still be miserable deep down. Trust me on that. Anyway, years went by. I don’t think a day passed when I didn’t wonder where my kid was and how things were turning out for him. Then one day, right after he turned twenty-one, he tracked me down through the agency and called me up.”

  “That night at my place?”

  “No, a few months earlier. The very first time we spoke.”

  “He just called up? Out of the blue?”

  “Out of the blue. Called up one night and said, ‘Um, hi, you don’t know me. I’m your son.’”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “Must’ve been amazing.”

  “Amazing and excruciating. He was angry with me. Not yelling angry. Smoldering angry. I tried asking him all kinds of things about himself. He wouldn’t answer. Wouldn’t even tell me his name at the beginning. Said he was calling just to ask me a simple question. He wanted to know what kind of addict I was.”

  “What kind?”

  “Yeah, what kind. He didn’t ask if. He assumed I was an addict. Who else gives up their kid? Well, pretty shocking question, right? Pretty flustering. So I told him I wasn’t an addict, just a regular person who got pregnant way too young. He seemed to consider that a few seconds, then he said, ‘You sound kind of drunk.’

  “That was another kick in the stomach,” Callie went on. “What could I say? This is the first time I’m ever speaking with my kid. Am I going to start off with a lie? So I tell him I drink a fair bit, that maybe I have a problem with it. It was the first time I ever admitted it to anyone, especially myself.

  “And he says to me, ‘So do I. I binge. I binge and it scares me and I like it. And I’ve been wondering why I like it so much. I was wondering if maybe it comes from you.’

  “So I hear this and I just feel sick. Did I mess up my kid without even raising him? I tell him I was clean and healthy when I had him, and that I’d do anything to help if he’s having trouble, and that I just want to get to know him.”

  “So what did he say?” asked Pete.

  “He hung up on me. His phone number was blocked. I had no idea where he lived. I didn’t know if I’d ever hear from again.”

  “But you did.”

  “Yeah, he started calling now and then. Maybe once a month or so. Usually at weird hours. Sometimes I’d be drunk and feel really ashamed of it. Sometimes he sounded like he was on a binge, sometimes not. But he gradually got less hostile. Told me a few things about himself. Lived in Atlanta. Had just dropped out of college to work full-time on his music. That was what he lived for, music. He’d light up when he talked about it. Sometimes I’d work up the nerve to ask how it was going with the drinking, if he was getting a handle on it. Never knew how he’d react. Sometimes he’d say he was trying to stop. Other times he’d get defensive and mad and say some pretty painful things about who the hell was I to tell him what to do. Couldn’t really argue with that, could I?”

  “Guess not,” said Pete, silently thanking the universe or the condom industry or plain dumb luck for leaving him childless.

  “So that brings us up to my last night at your place. When he called at three in the morning. Not that he knew what time it was. He’d been binging and he blacked out and gave himself a clunk on the head and finally he was flat-out scared. And that’s when I made my promise. If he’d get sober, I’d get sober. Starting then. We’d help each other.”

  “So you got together?”

  “Not in person, no. He didn’t think it was a good idea. Not sure why. Maybe he was afraid he’d be dissing his parents. Maybe he was just scared to meet me, in case I turned out to be a total wreck or monster. Anyway, it was all by phone at first. No judging, no pressure. We turned things around.”

  “And now you’re…pals?”

  “Mostly. Being given away, I guess it’s tough to forgive on the first try or the second or the third. But we’re getting there. Maybe he’s even letting himself love me a little. I felt that when we met.”

  “So he finally agreed to get together?”

  “He finally did. Just the other day. Guess I wore him down. Plus I sweetened the deal.”

  “The deal? How? What was the sweetener?”

  “An audition. I got him an audition with a big music producer up o
n No Name Key. I figured if I could help him with his music, it would be a good way to make amends. A start at least. So he agreed to meet.”

  “Wow, the first time seeing your grownup kid. I can’t even imagine.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “So where’d it happen? How?”

  Callie seemed a little surprised that he needed to ask. “You haven’t put it together by now?”

  “Put what together?”

  “Wow, Pete, you really are a terrible detective.”

  “Believe me, I know that. Why do you think I don’t tell anyone? So how’d you finally meet?”

  “Well, it was why those guys picked me up at the beach.”

  “Those thugs?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The thugs. The tough guys who knocked you over from your headstand. Bert said they looked like thugs.”

  She considered that. Waves hissed at the shoreline. Smells of sunblock filled the air. Other lives went on on other blankets. “I guess maybe they did,” she said at last. “I didn’t give much thought to how they looked. I was too excited. They were bringing me up to No Name. Bringing me to meet Sarge.”

  “Sarge? Cool name,” said Pete. He was still trying to fit the pieces together and it was all he could think of to say.

  A moment passed. Callie shifted on her towel, stretched her legs straight out in front of her. “Bert really thought those guys were thugs?”

  “That was his impression, yeah.”

  She looked down at the sand. “Well, they were definitely a little bit bizarre with the matching outfits and all. And, okay, maybe even a little scary.” She attempted a smile that didn’t quite hide the unease. “But, hey, they were singing Beatles songs the whole drive up the Keys. I mean, if they were singing Beatles songs, how bad could they be?”

  12

  S arge LeRoi was playing guitar in his crummy room at the Sea Dream Motel on Big Pine Key, just a few miles and a world away from the grand estate on No Name.

  Late afternoon sunlight was leaking in through torn screens and yellowed shades with wavy brown stains marking the places where decades of rain had blown or dripped. Beyond the window, the faded lines of the parking lot were like the stark diagonals of a fish’s skeleton. A few pickup trucks and rented sedans sat in front of splintered doors as if poised to make a getaway. The room itself smelled of mildew and ancient cigarette smoke that had leached into the wallpaper and the lingering memory of a rat that had once died underneath the floor. The bed was grooved from years of overweight sleepers and frantic episodes of illicit sex. The towels had no loops left in them and were see-though in places as they hung on their rack.

  For all of that, Sarge felt that he was just at the beginning of a run of great good luck.

  He’d met his mom, and she was not an addict or pathetic or a dragon lady; in fact, he thought she was pretty terrific, and meeting her had quieted fears he’d carried around forever—fears that he’d been born unloved and with screwed-up genes, hard-wired for floundering and failure, doomed from the start. But now it turned out that his mom was fit and sharp and sober. She loved him and believed in him and had proved she meant it by giving him the kind of boost he’d never thought he get in life: an audition with Marco Mondesi.

  Sarge had heard of Mondesi, of course. Who hadn’t, in that small but passionate world of people who didn’t just listen to music but thought a great deal about how songs were actually made, why they sounded like they did rather than like the million other ways they might have sounded, and how they touched and moved people like nothing else could? To the wider audience, a song was…what? Two-and-a-half minutes of background pleasantness with a beat, a few rhymes, maybe a message. But to those who built a song from the inside out, who constructed it note by note and layer by layer from a near-infinity of choices, every song was a vast canvas, a fresh invention, a chance to do something never done before.

  And now Sarge LeRoi, a total unknown, was being entrusted with a song by an established tunesmith, to be produced by a proven hitmaker, given a chance to make it his own, to be the first to record it, maybe to make it a smash. It was an extraordinary opportunity, as Mondesi was not bashful about reminding the young man, who’d left the studio with a set of simple and emphatic instructions: Start with the chords. Feel how the tune flows out of them. Think hard about the words. Say them aloud. Just speak them a few times. Let them find their own way into the melody. Don’t force the phrasing, just let it happen. Then commit to it. Polish it. Most important, don’t show the song to anyone. Don’t discuss it with anyone. Keep the sheet music in your possession at all times. Come back in three days prepared to record it with a session group coming down from Miami.

  So Sarge had been spending most of his waking hours working on the song; or maybe it would be more accurate to say letting the song seep into him. And what a song it was! “Gone Tomorrow.” It had one of those miraculous melodies that seemed both bracingly fresh yet somehow eternal, as if it had existed forever yet been made up on the spot. The beat fell effortlessly into sync with the cadence of the breath. The lyrics, after many repetitions, stopped seeming like mere stacks of words and took on the force of a whispered story. Syllables became emotions. Lines echoed like brief prayers. Unexpected meanings dwelled in the silence between chords; the song explained nothing yet made certain things suddenly seem clear. “Gone Tomorrow.” It started off seeming like a standard love song leading to a standard breakup. But after singing it fifty or a hundred times, Sarge knew in his bones that it wasn’t about a failed romance at all; it was about friendships and enthusiasms that had run their course and dwindled, joys that were outgrown, loyalties that paled into mere habit. It was an anthem of youth and its inevitable losses and the grudging, chastened wisdom that came after, all slyly camouflaged in a typical tale of boy-loses-girl.

  Sarge played the song over and over. He played it faster and slower, louder and softer, his voice rasping or cooing, teasing out the alchemy of song and singer. Sometimes his eyes fell closed while he was singing and he enjoyed a perfect privacy. Other times he imagined himself performing for a crowd of millions. A star, an idol, a fixture on everybody’s playlist. Sometimes he wondered if he would ever get to meet the anonymous genius who’d actually written the song. At the very least, Sarge would like to thank him. In the meantime, the young man practiced and refined and reconsidered in his crummy, empty room, the sound of his voice mostly swallowed up by the smoke-laden walls and the drooping curtains and the water-stained shades.

  13

  I t had been a long time since Pete and Callie had a swim together, and an even longer time since there were bathing suits involved. But now they were wading ribs-deep among other swimmers and snorkelers at Smathers Beach, he in baggy, faded green trunks, she in her snug blue one-piece. They stood a step apart, their feet feeling for havens of sand without shards of coral, tiny fish and tatters of seaweed occasionally tickling their ankles, and it just didn’t seem quite right to Pete, it seemed a shame, a harsh renunciation, that they weren’t touching. What he was feeling in that moment wasn’t lust exactly; more a kind of sensual nostalgia. He blinked through salty eyes and ocean glare at Callie. Her hair was wet. There were sparkling droplets on her neck and shoulders, hints of goosebumps on her upper arms. He remembered how it had felt when the two of them were close enough together to sense the coolness of water yielding to the warmth of skin. He remembered the texture of her fingertips when they were wrinkled from a long soak. He remembered how the water streamed down her legs when she stepped out of the pool.

  And he realized that he’d better think of something else instead, or it would be an extremely self-conscious walk to shore. So he jumped back to their conversation on the beach. Rather abruptly, he said, “You know, Bert really thought you’d been abducted.”

  “Vivid imagination,” said Callie.

  “And very wide experience,” Pete added. For a few moments he slowly waved his arms like he was treading water, even though hi
s feet were planted on the bottom. “But you have to admit,” he went on, “if all those guys were doing was picking you up to go meet your son, it seems like, oh, I don’t know, a pretty theatrical and oddball way of doing it. I mean, they just appeared, right? It certainly didn’t sound like you were expecting them just then.”

  “Well, that’s Marco.”

  “Marco?”

  “The big producer. Marco Mondesi. Look, he’s a very strange guy. Has a flair for drama. His estate, I guess you could say it’s sort of a Neverland kind of place. Things don’t just happen there like they might in the real world. They happen how Marco makes them happen. People who work for him, their clothes are more like costumes. He likes theme parties. Ramones Night. Construction Workers Ball. Whatever he thinks might be amusing. Like I say, just a very strange guy.”

  “Sounds like you know him pretty well,” said Pete.

  “No, actually I don’t. I don’t think anybody does. Not really. Not deep down.”

  She paused, scooped up some water, splashed it onto her shoulders. Shallow pools formed in the hollows of her collarbone and glistened in the sun for just a moment before they dried. Nearby, terns wheeled, hovered, folded their wings, dove, dipped their beaks and sometimes came away with the prize of a tiny translucent fish.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “I just happened to meet him one day at Luigi’s a while back. I was working brunch. He came in with a few other men. They had Bloody Marys, except Marco had a Virgin. You notice things like that when you first get sober. Anyway, he was talking to them about his studio and his estate, and my first thought was that he was just one more blowhard bullshitter. But it turned out he was nice enough. Whatever nice enough means these days. He didn’t grab me. Spoke to me like a person, not just the server. Anyway, the other guys left, we chatted a little more and he gave me his card and invited me to a party up at No Name. I didn’t think I’d go. But the night of the party came along and I had nothing better to do and I was curious and I went.”