“Tell me about it.” Corey twinkled at her. “Don’t go. I’ll be ready in a second. Just sit and talk to me.”
Sarah nodded and moved toward one of the plush chairs. Corey was neat. So many people on the ship turned into messy college kids, having someone else around to pick up after them. Not Sarah—she put everything where it should go. Corey was clearly the same. It was a surprising quality in someone so famously messy in other areas, but good for him for defying expectations.
“So, what do you do when you’re not here?” he asked. Corey uncapped a stick of deodorant and swiped at both armpits.
“Plan the next one.” Sarah crossed her legs. Her walkie-talkie beeped, and she silenced it.
“And you like it?” Corey was looking at her in the mirror. There was a bottle of vodka in an ice bucket, and Sarah watched as Corey unscrewed the top and poured a hefty amount into his color-coded water bottle.
“Sure,” Sarah said. She liked some things about it. She liked being in charge. She liked the wind at night on the lido deck. She liked how many moving parts there were and her own efficiency. She liked solving other people’s problems. If it were up to her, Corey would not be drinking an entire bottle of vodka onstage. In a way, it was a good reminder that control was an illusion and that she was just spinning plates. No one came to the circus to see the spinning plates; they came to see people flying through the air. No one would care if she wasn’t there. They would care if no one could find whatever cord DJ Pancake needed and it was all quiet on the lido front, but they wouldn’t actually be missingher. Sarah was a capable body, nothing more. She took a breath and fluttered her lips. This happened every cruise—by the last night, Sarah was ready to pack it in, but she always came back around. She almost wanted to thank Corey for reminding her that she’d been in this psychological washing machine before. “Do you like it, the cruise?”
“No.” He wasn’t trying to make a joke.
“That’s a serious drink,” she said, pointing to his water bottle.
“Yeah, well, my wife is making me go to rehab after the cruise anyway, so might as well, right?” He took a sip and then breathed out a thin stream of air that could have burst into flames.
The walkie-talkie crackled again. “We should get going,” Sarah said.
“They can wait.” Corey turned around, so he was looking at her directly, and all Sarah could see in the mirror were his back muscles.She really should go to the gym. Lexie loved doing sporty things—playing soccer, rock climbing—and all Sarah wanted to do was go to concerts. Maybe that would have made the difference, doing things that Lexie liked. Plum seemed to be in some sort of adult kickball league, a thought that made Sarah feel ill with both scorn and self-hatred. “You like girls, right?” Corey said.
“I do,” Sarah said.
“No boys? Never?” He smiled. “Just asking for an interested party. We have a little time, don’t we?” He opened his arms and made what was supposed to be an irresistible face. “You don’t even want to try?” This was the problem with people who had always been adored. Their own desires superseded everything else. It was why so many famous people belonged to bogus religions. No one ever said no.
“Put your shirt on, Corey.” Sarah stood up and walked to the door. “We’re coming right now,” she said into the walkie-talkie. “And if he’s not, I’m not coming back to get him.”
38
Sunday, 6:15 p.m.
Deck 3
Shawn didn’t like the way the chairs were set up. The production crew had put the guys with their backs to the audience, but obviously that was dumb, so Shawn shouted at some dopey kid with neck tattoos to move everything around. The theater staff were standing by the doors, making sure the Talkers didn’t come in until Shawn gave the okay. Keith sat on top of a staircase that had been shoved into the wings and watched, glad not to be the one in the line of fire. They did all kinds of shows on these ships—Vegas-style dancers, the works—and for a second, Keith closed his eyes and pretended that he was on a different cruise, doing some other job, maybe just pushing around pieces of set, but his brother’s voice was so loud that he couldn’t get lost for long. Jonathan was meditating in the second row, dead center, the spot that fans paid the most money for, no doubt imagining doing the same thing in Dubai, in Kyoto, in São Paulo. Keith wanted to throw something at him.
Terrence and Kelsey were sitting in the balcony, sucking face. Keith could see them from where he was sitting, which meant that everyone else could see them too. Terrence’s hands were out of sight, whichmeant they were probably somewhere inside Kelsey’s body. It was gross, but that didn’t mean Keith wasn’t jealous. Not of the actual public sex acts but thedesirefor the public sex acts, the unwillingness to wait until a more appropriate time and place. He remembered that feeling. Maria Scarpetti. Seventh grade. She had braces, and neither of them knew what they were doing, and it didn’t matter because it felt like getting electrocuted when she kissed his neck. They both had so many hickeys that their parents grounded them, but it was worth it. Paula Brown, his first real girlfriend. She was twenty playing a sixteen-year-old on television, and he was seventeen, singing songs about forever. What did he know? Keith wasn’t sure he knew more now than he did then, but he understood forever more, that was for sure. He would have kissed Paula anywhere. He would have jumped in front of a bus if she told him to. She was his entire sex ed class, his blueprint. They had sex in the bathrooms of clubs in LA, at the Hard Rock Café, in his hotel rooms, and the last time, at his parents’ house in New Jersey, the day after his eighteenth birthday. It had been a mistake to bring her there, a place where she could see his parents and his baseball-themed bedroom and Shawn’s makeshift weightlifting gym in the basement. He saw her twenty years later backstage at a talk show, and she’d kissed him on the cheek, and he hadn’t been able to think about anything else for weeks. By then, Paula had found Jesus, and Keith felt bad, all the things he was remembering about her hands and her mouth and her body, but he couldn’t help it. It was just like the Talkers, really—these songs brought all the memories back. It was just that for him, not all the memories were good.
“Hey,” Scotty said, appearing on the bottom step of the staircase to nowhere.
“Oh, hey,” Keith said.
“Shawn talked to you?”
Keith shrugged. “He talks to me all the time.”
Scotty walked up the next two steps and sat next to Keith. “About the tour, I mean.” His voice was low. They both faced the stage instead of each other.
“He mentioned the idea, yeah. He talked to you too?”
Shawn had stalked off toward the back of the house and was hovering near the soundboard. Bobby was standing there with his arms crossed, shaking his head. Bobby would calm him down eventually. This was how it worked.
“Listen, it’s okay if you don’t want to do it. I told them you wouldn’t want to, but obviously nobody listens to me.” Scotty patted Keith on the knee. “It would be a lot of fucking face cream. Like, more face cream than I could sell in a lifetime. But we don’t have to.”
One of the doors to the theater opened, and Sarah came in, walking fast. Keith could hear her boots clomping all the way from where he was sitting. The door started to shut behind her, but Corey caught it and slipped in behind her. Shawn looked over and said, “Yeah, baby!” and gave him a high five. Jonathan’s eyes stayed closed. Keith looked up at the balcony and saw Kelsey leaning on Terrence’s shoulder. People only looked solid from the outside. On the inside, they were spinning molecules, little clouds of dust held together by habit. What was skin, even, really? Keith was sure if Scotty had touched him in just the right spot at that exact moment, he would have exploded into a million pieces, like confetti. The Talkers loved confetti.
39
Sunday, 7:42 p.m.
