Tease (Songs of Submission #2)(9)

“Come sit with us at lunch,” she’d said. “I think my brother has a crush on you, so… gross. Okay?”

She’d folded me into the in crowd from that lunch on, like a complementary voice in a symphony, just adding me as if I was naturally in the same rhythm and key, and my entrance simply hadn’t been arranged for the first few measures.

“You calm?” I asked Gabby in the dressing room as she poked at something nonexistent on her face. She had to be. Since my night with Jonathan when he’d promised to call Arnie Sanderson, she’d been blissed out. The call had been totally unnecessary, but any light at the end of her tunnel was a positive.

“No, I am not calm.” She giggled. “Look!” She held her hands out. They were shaking. Generally, one wouldn’t want that in a pianist, but in Gabby’s case, as soon as she sat down, her fingers and body would quiet, and she’d be completely on top of it. “I got everyone from school in. I called in every favor. And the whole gang from Thelonius? All here. Darren, too.”

“He bring his new girl?”

“I have no idea. Do you feel strong on Cheek to Cheek?” We’d worked on a rendition that sounded as though Gershwin had been talking about more than a little facial contact. All the songs were shaking out that way, and it brought them in.

“We’re good on Cheek to Cheek.”

“It’s happening, Mon. Really happening.”

“This is a long process.” I took out my makeup bag and smeared back on what Jonathan had kissed off. “We’re not signing any contracts in the morning. We don’t even have a disc or anything.”

“You said not to worry about that.”

“I didn’t worry about it until Jonathan introduced me to Eddie Walker as if I didn’t know who he was, and if he’d asked me for a disc, I wouldn’t have had one.”

I watched her in the mirror and saw her eyes go blank. She was doing a calculation in her head, and she took a second to come up with the answer.

“Penn,” she said.

“Yes, they went to University of Pennsylvania together, but do you know what sport they played?”

When Gabby didn’t know something, she didn’t pretend she did, so her answer came quickly. “No.”

“Baseball.”

She pushed her mascara stick into the tube slowly, staring at it. I could almost see her filing the information and cross-referencing it with every other piece of Hollywood intelligence in her head.

“Thanks for doing this,” she said. “I know you didn’t want to do a restaurant gig, but I feel really good about it, and I couldn’t do it without you.”

“Well, I was wrong. I should have said yes right off. I mean, the thing about performing is you have to perform, otherwise you’re all talk, right?” I said.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. If we get WDE behind us, we can maybe start doing your songs.”

I shrugged. My songs were rage-filled punk diatribes and wouldn’t translate into the loungey thing I was doing with Gabby. If we landed an agent as a piano-driven lounge act, I had no idea what I would do with him. I couldn’t go from eXene to Sade on a dime. As a keyboardist, Gabby could play anything at any time, but I would be in a world of shit at the first hint of success working at Frontage. I had zero songs ready.

“I didn’t tell you something about meeting Eddie today,” I said, trying to sound flip.

“He cute?”

“Yes. And he’d heard about us.”

“He was trying to get into your pants.”

“No, he didn’t know it was me singing here when he mentioned it. I mean, he did, but he could have just said something polite like, oh, how nice. But he didn’t. He was all, Oh, that’s you?”

“What did he say, exactly?”

“He’d heard someone was bringing down the house at Frontage.”

“Someone?”

I got defensive. She’d gotten me through high school. I’d never abandon her. “He didn’t phrase it like it was just one person. Could have been a swing ensemble from the way he said it.”

Gabby tossed her sticks and tubes back in her little bag. “I’d better get out there,” she said. “I have to warm them up.”

We hugged like sisters, and I went back to making my face presentable.

When I told Jonathan he was lucky to have sisters, I’d meant it. I hated being an only child. I hated when my mother looked at me as if I’d somehow disappointed her by being her first and last, as if it was my fault they found cancer during the C-section. I hated being the only kid in the house. I hated being responsible for every success and failure of my parents’ children. The attention was great, except when I wanted to die from it.

If anything happens to the only child, there’s no backup. If she’s a drug addict, all the kids are drug addicts. If she dies in a car accident, suddenly the family is dissolved.

In one way, I never felt right around people, and in another, I craved their company. I needed them too much. So I had tons of acquaintances, maybe four hundred people in a loose music-scene around Echo Park and Silver Lake. I could fill a club when I needed to, but outside the guys who wanted to screw me, I inspired no closeness in anyone besides Darren and Gabby, who were orphans and needed me as much as I needed them.