In fact, Audrey looked great—she’d looked exactly like herself—and all over again he was grateful for her, for the organism there, the whole mystery there, the built-in good luck there, even during this recent period, when patience was called for. The new tool belt from True Value was red, redder than any valentine, its tough nylon webbing lustrous with that almost-lanolin stuff that synthetic hardwarestore fabrics have when they’re brand-new and still faintly cense the factory warehouse perfumes of polymerized thermo-plastic. The way it was slung, the whole belt had a way of locating her hips in the baggy jeans, discovering there a woman-shape. So far, the only tool she’d acquired to hang on it was the wooden-handled hammer from the Tupperware box in the carport. It hung in its metal holster clip, dragging the belt at a rakish slant. She declared this morning (standing over them at the breakfast table, tall at that moment, having recovered a little of her old loft from the new heavy-soled work boots), “I have to be in Oakland in half an hour.” Meaning this breakfast would be their good-bye. It would be a four-day separation. At the moment when their plane was lifting off the ground, she would be standing out in the Oakland sun on a fresh-poured concrete foundation, holding the old wooden-handled hammer from the carport. It was her first day, but she and the other trainees were being asked to “hit the ground running” (now, in the building trades, apparently everyone was going to talk like infantry). This particular project in Oakland was supposed to be a kind of publicity showpiece: in the short time of a three-day weekend, a gang of beginners would build six semidetached low-income homes, start to finish, under the direction of Women Build.
“They’ll all be dykes,” grumbled Lotta at the breakfast table, not lifting her eyes from the Times “Arts” page, her mouth full of cottage cheese and cantaloupe. These days she was testing out a new cynical sophistication in all directions at once.
Audrey only answered, “So, sweetie, I won’t see you till you get back Monday night.” She applied the kiss on the cheek. “Take care of your dad. Don’t let him get up onstage. And hey,” with a little punch in Lotta’s direction, “knock ’em dead.” (That benediction caused, visible to a father’s watchful eye, an inward wringing.)
Lotta, though, at this moment onstage, was in heaven. The band, predictably, at this point did the key-change thing and lifted the whole tune a notch higher. She was coming into the home stretch. “He’s got you and me, brother—in his hands.” Several video cameras around the (honestly rather small) auditorium were recording this for posterity, and the onstage camera had slid in, very close, a little rudely, though Lotta seemed not to notice. It crept on its big-wheeled dolly at a level beneath her, so she would appear in perspective to tower above it.
The man at the sound console below the stage was conferring with Blythe in her cute baseball cap: he seemed to adjust a knob—probably adding pitch correction—so Mark had been right in thinking that, maybe, in the last verse Lotta had hit a flat note. But Lotta didn’t seem to have noticed. And this audience wasn’t going to be supercritical; they were a crowd of random draftees who had shown up only because they’d accepted a handbill this afternoon on the L.A. sidewalks, inviting them to a free concert so they could form the necessary witnessing throng, a motley assemblage of shills, tourists, high school kids out for an idle thrill, bored cheap cityfolk happy to be anywhere—and of course other Celebrity parents, relatives, friends on the so-called guest list.
She threw out her arms, cruciform, and the song was over, mistake-free, it was a triumph, the drummer collapsed upon his last big rolling catastrophe at the foot of the avalanche they’d made. The teenager in her red dress, who had been so cynical and despairing about the fakery of a Fantasy Vacation, was standing onstage uplifted on a surging froth. The glitter in her eye! It might almost be, but surely wasn’t, a tear. Such a moment of victory rewrote the whole weekend, all its contrivances. Those now might have been actual publicity parties, with actual media cameras. It certainly was an actual limousine that met them at the L.A. airport, with a placard in the windshield reading MISS CARLOTTA PERDUE, a certain green-eyed Blythe Cress introducing herself as publicist and media escort, its backseat bar stocked with Mountain Dew and candy. At least for this moment, temporarily, everything pasteboard was redeemed, as good as genuine. Lotta hadn’t believed in joy since she was a tiny scampering girl on the carpet and she’d screamed with delight at her monstrous hulking dad. Now again belief was lighting her up. How long would that last—five minutes?—an hour?—before she sank inward again. And began mistrusting everything again. The Fantasy Vacation brochure philosophy was that a sense of personal fulfillment and the habit of success and pride can be “rehearsed.” Rehearsed presumably for later use, over the years. Presumably, “pride” and “personal fulfillment” are to become normal, habituated conditions in life. Mark of course had secret doubts, down there wadded in the darkness of seat GG in row 7. It was his personal wisdom—his kingly, endpoint knowledge (always to be kept strictly under wraps)—that “pride” and “personal fulfillment” are the mistakes that sooner or later will be punished; pride and fulfillment being poisons intoxicating only to the innocent. All of which is not to be mentioned to a sixteen-year-old Celebrity in her glory.
Blythe, by the sound booth, was removing the headset of stage manager, because the limelight would now be turned over to another Celebrity for his allotted eight minutes onstage—the paraplegic boy from Shaker Heights who could do such a great drum solo. So at this point, his escort would take over as stage manager. And put on the headset. The cheers of the crowd were loud and apparently sincere, if padded somewhat in the PA system by a supplementary recording of a stadium crowd; it was an effect they added so lightly he wouldn’t have noticed it if Blythe hadn’t told him.
Blythe—her chipmunk face (yes, chipmunk! She was his chipmunk, his love and lifemate for just one weekend, and chipmunk captured her, her succinctly pursed cheeks, her provident, darting thrust, the complexion that looked freckly without having actual distinct freckles)—hopped the velvet rope and plopped down in the seat next to him. Never to brush forearms. Never to exchange a knowing glance. They were always extremely careful. But at this moment they were in the dark in row 7. She said, “Well, now Lotta’s headed for the greenroom. They’ll all be in there, living it up. She was great. I’ve seen this before. They do forget themselves, for about a minute.”
She was only, loyally, endorsing the Celebrity Vacations philosophy. Mark was looking up into the rectangle of light, watching the crew who were breaking down Lotta’s stage and setting up for the young drummer. He nodded toward the drum set as it took shape, and he told Blythe, “Those two last night didn’t come home until about two in the morning.”
Lotta and the paraplegic drummer had stayed downstairs in the hotel bar, drinking decaffeinated confections, communing, talking with bowed heads together. Mark had actually crept down, via elevator, about one in the morning to check on them, and they were consulting in such serious attitudes together they might have been praying, the boy’s sporty no-armrest wheelchair docked at the table corner nearest Lotta. They had to be talking about Noddy. Just from how they sat, he knew. He could tell the Ohio boy was dispensing some kind of solace, or some kind of advice, and Lotta was being filled up by it. For some reason the relationship of supplicant to authority looked, to his fatherly eye, unwholesome, or fraudulent. They sat at a dim booth—the table’s lightbulb was quenched—because the boy had environmentalist objections to the burning of electricity and made a point of turning out lights around himself, creating fresh darkness wherever he went.
Then later, after he’d gone back up to his bed, Lotta came up and let herself into Mark’s room. Believing he was asleep, she sat for a few minutes on the arm of a chair, looking out the window into the warm haze of the L.A. night, then went off for her own room, closing Mark’s door after herself with the saddest tact. It was as if she’d wanted to talk but lost courage. That boy had planted something.
Speaking of the drum set taking shape onstage, he grumbled to Blythe, “I suppose he’ll sing ‘I Am the Sun and the Moon and the Stars.’” It was the one he’d been rehearsing all weekend, an original composition.
Blythe only made one of her little eyebrow shrugs.