17
Friday, 4:09 p.m.
Deck 2
It didn’t feel right to be so tired. Regardless, Annie was exhausted and needed to be horizontal for a little while if she wanted to make it to the lido deck later tonight. The dragon book she was reading weighed about ten pounds, and so it also counted as exercise when she held it in her lap or over her face. The heroine in the book was taking over a kingdom after her sister’s illness, which felt familiar enough. The dragons had just hatched and were spitting fire onto various cloaks and piles of hay. Annie put the book on the nightstand.
The beds were comfortable, if spartan. Everything in the cabins seemed to be made out of the sort of highly durable material that was immune to mold or dust but might give you cancer if you pressed your face against it. Annie pulled her laptop onto her belly and wrote a quick email to Claudia.Hi honey—Cruise is NUTTY but fun so far! It’s what I imagine Comic Con would be like if there were no men. It’s fun, I’m having fun. Miss you lots and lots. Give Figaro a big kiss for me, and have him give you one, too. Love you, hon. Xo Mom.To Katherine, she wrote,Kitty, this place is crazy. So so so wish you were here. Cruises are very wheelchair-friendly. If it had been a few weeks later, it wouldn’t have been a problem. Xoxox Sis.
Ding!An incoming message. Annie clicked it open—it was from Geoff.Whoopsie, read the subject line.Hey, Annie—Sorry to bug you again, but it turns out while Kayla is great (doing GREAT!!), there are some basics she still needs to get briefed on. We promoted her so quickly (again, she’s doing GREAT), but there were a few things that have come up that we’ll need your help training her on. Thought I’d reach out just in case you’ve got access to any training docs on your home computer, anything you could send over that might help. Otherwise we’ll just wait until you’re back. Thanks again, G.
Annie could have told Geoff that Kayla didn’t know how to do anything. She closed her laptop and tucked it in next to her so that it wouldn’t fall on the floor and then clicked on the television, which was still on BTTV. It was showing an interview from some years ago, but the guys were adults. Scotty had a soul patch, and Terrence had bigger sideburns than Annie remembered. The screen dissolved for a second into 1980s static, and then the music video for “Trust Me” began to play. It looked like Super 8 film, already retro in 1990, and the guys were at an amusement park.
Annie had been a senior in high school when it came out, Katherine had been in eighth grade. She’d had a crush on a guy in her math class, Lawrence Rink. He’d had red hair and freckles—Annie knew from Facebook that he still did. Lawrence had been kind—exactly the sort of person who would have been the world’s best first real boyfriend, but instead, Annie had never done anything about it. She’d sat next to him every day for years. They’d had punch together at the school dances. He was shy, and she was shy, and it had been an insurmountable situation. Lawrence! He was probably still married—who would divorce Lawrence Rink? On the television, the video crackled and paused, and then it was Boy Talk sitting on two couches with a young man in between them, holding a microphone.
“So,” the man said, “what do you remember about making this video?”
Shawn spoke first. “It was cold. You remember?” He tapped his brother on the knee, and Keith nodded.
“Freezing,” Keith said. “But it was April, and we needed the new video by June, and so we were out there in our T-shirts, flying through the air, pretending it was summer.”
An unseen crowd laughed.
“I remember the director was German, right?” Scotty said. “And he kept saying ‘Vasters, boys!’ when we were running on the boardwalk. He was hot, though.”
The crowd laughed again, at Scotty’s bad German accent and at his admission of sexual attraction before anyone else knew he was gay, and Annie thought to herself,Well, there it is.He knows that we know. He knows we didn’t know. He knows we’re all still here, supporting him.There had to have been times when Scotty wondered if the Talkers would still love him, and they did, and it was beautiful. In some ways, they really were old friends, the men and the Talkers. That was the goal of this whole thing, to make people feelthat.
Chris had never wanted to tell anyone anything. It had been one of their biggest problems, the way he answered “Fine” whenever Annie asked him how he was, even if she could see smoke coming out of his ears. When they finally started couples therapy, it was too late. There was no way for him to talk about anything that didn’t involve peeling back about twenty layers of skin, and so all he did was grumble and growl and then shout. Annie had said to him—this had made him madder than almost anything else—that if she ever got married again, she was going to marry someone who didn’t have anger issues. Someone more like Lawrence Rink, who had always let her share his calculator. Chris had asked for the divorce, even though Annie had wanted it first, she was sure. What was her problem? Wanting to keep thingsnice, wanting to keep things steady? Whatever that was, Annie wanted to make sure she never did it again.
Of course Chris found someone else before she did. That was how the world worked. That was how algorithms worked. A good-looking fifty-two-year-old man with a decent income could find a woman to date in minutes. Chris had dated a score of women (she knew this from Claudia) within the first month, and by three months, he had a girlfriend. Annie didn’t want to know more, but she did. The woman—Emily—was thirty-five and pretty. She said she didn’t care about having children, but Annie knew what that meant—she wanted a husband, and she wanted a baby. Anyone could have told him, but Chris was not a good listener. If Annie were a betting woman, she would have put a hundred bucks on Chris being back on diaper duty within the next year. He was going to get back on the track, he was going to start over, which would make him feel young again, at least for a little while. Was that the difference between men and women, that Annie had no choice but to face her own mortality, whereas Chris could choose to ignore it until his body began to fall apart? The other parents would think he was a grandpa—that was as weird as it would be. One did hear stories about men doing better the second time around, with all that testosterone and ambition out of their system. How nice for Emily.
Annie had downloaded one app, let Claudia help her set it up, and then she only opened it when she was drunk, a state that was now achievable at exactly one and a half glasses of wine. Chris hadn’t wanted her in so long that Annie didn’t even remember what it felt like to want someone, to be wanted. She’d been left wanting in the wanting department. Annie didn’t like swiping because it all felt pointless. Whose idea of a dream date was a divorced fifty-year-old woman, one who hadn’t been injecting toxins into her forehead or lifting weights or starving herself for decades? She wasn’t trying to be dramatic. It wasthe truth—there were middle-aged women out there who looked sleek as greyhounds, and she wasn’t one of them. It was fine! She was fine with it! Chris had found a newer model. That’s what men did. And then the old models—interesting, smart women—hung out with each other until they died. She wasn’t trying to be morbid. That was just how it felt.
Annie wondered what Keith Fiore’s marriage was like. She would ask Maira. Maira would know. She imagined him in his glasses, singing to his wife in their kitchen, a room that smelled like simmering tomato sauce. It was so funny to think of regular women having married these men. Did they think they’d done something impossible? Or had they just met a man and fallen in love, and that love had come with the baggage of talent and fame? Like Kelsey, Terrence’s new wife. She was too young to have beheld him in the prime of his fame, so who knew what she thought. At least Shawn’s wife understood what he’d been through, because she’d been through it too. Corey’s wife—maybe ex-wife now—was an actress too. They’d been on the same prime-time television show. That made sense, like two teachers falling in love, or two cryptozoologists. Annie couldn’t fathom getting married again. It was too hard, too painful. For now, she was content with freedom. Freedom from whatever Chris had boxed her into, freedom even from what Claudia had made her into, freedom from everything that society told her a woman should have or be or do. Maybe she’d stop coloring her hair and be one of those older women with two long gray braids, like ancient teenagers. She wasn’t there yet, but maybe someday.
The interview clip ended, and another music video started. It was for a song Annie didn’t know, presumably from after they got back together, and seemed to be just Shawn and Keith singing, with the rest of the guys hulking in the background. Shawn was wearing an unbuttoned shirt with a vest over it and a newsboy cap and dark sunglasses, the kind of outfit you’d put on if there was a fire and you were giventhirty seconds to leave the house with as many items as you could wear. Women in the next cabin were laughing, maybe at the video, though probably not. Annie sat up in bed and clicked the volume button. Keith started to sing straight into the camera. He wasn’t really looking at her. He was staring into a camera and asking it for help because it had helped him before.
Annie hadn’t masturbated as a teenager. That was another thing Annie felt ashamed of—ashamed that she hadn’t, like some kind of religious zealot, when in reality, she just hadn’t known how. With boys, it seemed easier, like everything else. If you pull on this, something comes out. It was a math problem. But no boy had ever given her an orgasm, and nothing she’d ever seen or read or heard as a teenager had given her any instructions, so it took until she was in college with a sweet, patient boyfriend to find out what all the fuss was about. It was something the divorce was giving her space to get used to. That was the point, wasn’t it? She didn’t need anyone else. She was an island. Islands didn’t need other islands to exist. Annie reached into her small bedside bag, which contained her eye mask, her earplugs, some nose stickers that were supposed to keep her from snoring, her melatonin, and a very small vibrator.
Usually, Annie pictured herself walking into a hotel lobby: somewhere dark enough that, in reality, she’d need to turn on her phone flashlight to look at the drink menu. She would walk in and see a man. A handsome man. She didn’t usually imagine anyone in particular, but sometimes she did. Lawrence Rink. Louis, who worked in sales at the magazine, whom she had almost kissed once at an office holiday party. A cute math teacher from Claudia’s school. It didn’t really matter—it wasn’t real. Now Annie imagined walking through the hotel lobby and watching a man turn around. She thought about Shawn Fiore’s face, but it was too manicured, too sharp. That’s what he had lost from his youth—his impetuousness, his roughness. He had looked real then,but he didn’t look real now. Annie shook her head and started over, back from the hotel lobby door. This time, it was Keith Fiore’s face that turned toward her, his adult face. She thought about being so close to someone’s body that you weren’t even looking at them anymore. She thought about Keith until she wasn’t thinking about anything, and then the video changed, and the guys were fifteen again, singing “Sunshine.”
18
Friday, 7:20 p.m.
Deck 3
During rehearsals, Keith kept messing up where he was supposed to stand, which made Shawn mad and made Terrence laugh, because he was used to being the one who fucked things up. Corey never missed a turn or a note. They’d had it down on the last tour, but it had been five years, and they’d only had a couple of rehearsals before the cruise. One of the things that Keith hated most was listening to Shawn give him shit and then praise Corey in the same breath. It had been that way since Corey clawed his way through puberty, emerging taller and more handsome than anyone had expected. Shawn had seen something in Corey that he’d never seen in Keith—an equal.
The hardest part of the show was “Always,” the title track from Boy Talk’s third and best record, a song where Keith had to hit a B in the first line of the song, just—bam!—right there at the beginning. It was a song they couldn’t cut from the show—no matter what, Keith was singing the song. In rehearsals, they’d tried a few different arrangements, some lower and slower, but the Talkers liked it the way they liked it, which was the way it sounded on the record, and so Keith had to pray that he would get there, or close enough. There was only oneother person in Boy Talk who had a prayer of hitting the note, and Keith was not about to let Corey take his best song. There were enough backing tracks to make the songs sound full and good, but the lead vocals, those were coming live, and sometimes they landed better than others.
It had all started with performance. He and Shawn on a square of cardboard outside their school. It could have been so sordid—so many stories like theirs were—but Uncle Kenny hadn’t been a pedophile or a cheat, two small miracles. The story was that Kenny had been at a family reunion as a child, and one of his older cousins, one of the Temptations, had driven up in a Cadillac and given out silver dollars to all the kids.Boom.Kenny had seen his whole life in that silver dollar, and he saw it again when he saw these two little white boys spinning around on their butts, their legs in the air like cockroaches. It was 1987, and their mom said okay because she was working, and it was better to have the boys doing something after school. No one had thought it would lead to anything. Certainly not to this. When they’d broken up the first time, Keith was sure they’d never get back together, because who did that? It was both easier and harder to do it without someone else being the boss. Easier because all the decisions were up to them, and harder for the same reason. He wanted to perform and to sing and he couldn’t go sing their songs by himself—they weren’t that kind of band, and he wasn’t that kind of guy.
Tonight’s set list was tight. Fifteen songs, most of them off the second and third albums. The costumes were minimal—shiny black pants and white shirts with their names ironed on across their backs, as if anyone in the nautical mile needed help identifying them. The Boys were known for their pelvic thrusts, and so they did that too. Keith tried not to think about it, or rather, not to think about it differently than any other dance move he had to remember. Shawn and Scotty took off their shirts, and sometimes, depending on how much he’dbeen working out, Keith unbuttoned his pretty far. It had stayed buttoned lately. Next to Shawn and Scotty, who had long ago dispatched most of their body hair, Keith felt like a baboon. In rehearsals, Corey had laughed in between songs, more to himself than to anyone else, but when the songs were playing, he locked in. That was the best thing about Corey; it always had been. When he was focused, there was nothing like him. Keith was always in two places at once—doing the dances but also watching the audience. Singing the songs but also looking at the women singing the lyrics back to him. In his nightmares, there were subtitles running across his forehead, where everyone could see what he was thinking.
He and Scotty started out stage left, the other guys on stage right. The stage was dark, but the Talkers were already rowdy. Scotty was farting like crazy, and Keith took a step farther away.
“Feels good out there,” Scotty said, gesturing with his chin toward the audience. It didn’t always, and Scotty was right. The fans were giddier than usual. Keith could hear them laughing and talking in their seats. Across the stage, he could see Corey and Terrence and Shawn. They were practicing—rather, Shawn was reminding Terrence about the choreo at the start of “Grown,” which involved a microphone stand. He’d whacked Shawn in the leg with it twice in rehearsals. Shawn wasn’t the best singer, he never had been, but he was the best at everything else and had very low tolerance for other people’s failures. He and Corey always started on the same side of the stage. When Corey turned sixteen, he and Shawn started sharing hotel rooms, kicking Keith off to bunk with either Scotty or Terrence or both, leaving Corey and Shawn to spend their time scheming about world domination or drinking contraband booze or talking to girls or maybe all of that at the same time. Bobby always had his own room.
