Dedication (11 page)

December 22, 2005

I let the storm door slap shut behind me as I jog down the snow-packed bricks into the bracing air. Flipping up the collar of my eleventh-grade peacoat, I note with chagrin how indistinguishable it is from a recent J. Crew purchase. Well, minus the holes in the pockets. My fingers slide through the ripped satin, my hands settling into their well-worn niches. My old motorcycle boots provide traction as I set a brisk pace. Willing myself to feel the distance gained from my parents’ kitchen with every step, I look down at my breath puffing into the night air like locomotive steam.

With the full moon to illuminate my path, I tromp past sparkling lawns dotted with glowing snowmen and twigged reindeer frames. Shuffling down the hill, I turn behind the school and cut across the playing fields. As the rubber treads crunch snow beneath my feet I recall his bicycle making lazy circles in my periphery, its wheels streaked green from the morning’s mowing. My mind careens through memories. Then memories of when those memories became anecdotes.

I follow the bank of the frozen creek to the tonier side of town, where the houses are spread out on multiple wooded acres delineated by the low stone walls the colonists used to carve up Croton. The moon disappears behind the clouds, but I find my way on instinct, history both local and personal guiding me. I try to quell my adrenaline, slow my heart, breathing in through my nose out through my mouth, as if this were only mile three in the predawn. I find a pace, clear my mind, trust that when I see him the words will just…be there. They will be there for me.

I round the bend onto Bluebell Lane, immediately sensing a density in the black. “Someone’s coming!” and suddenly I’m blinded by a barrage of klieg lights flooding my vision.

“Who are you?” “Are you here to see Jake?” “Are you a friend?” “How do you know him?” “Are you a friend of the family?” “Did you go to high school together?” “Hey!”
A finger is snapped in my face.
“What’s he really like?” “What was he like in high school?”
The hysteria building, questions fly at me in an indistinguishable cacophony.
“Was he always so talented?” “Was he the most popular guy in school?” “Was he always so hot?”

“Um….” My utterance silences them. Every national newsoutlet hangs on my next words, microphones jockeying for position under my chin.
Saysomething. Say. Something.
“He…I…I’d just say…” But then their faces are harshly illuminated in turn and I follow their shifting gaze to the halogen headlights announcing a cavalcade of limos arriving behind me.

“EDEN!” And I’m forgotten. Absorbed like amoebas, the vehicles roll into their mass; they slap the metal frames loudly with their palms, exhorting her to “ROLL DOWN THE WINDOW!” Tempting, I’m sure. Taking advantage of the distraction, I turn and book it back into the darkness, taking a quick left onto the Ackermans’ land and jogging into the woods—in this era of electric fencing—my face flushes at my recklessness and I slow my gait. Yes, my message is bound to lose impact if delivered with black smoke rising from my hair.

I hit the gully and start snaking back toward the Sharpes’, to the north of their acreage, where the stone wall breaks and about a hundred yards of barbed wire delineate their kingdom. I feel my way, my fingers carefully running over the barbed metal, praying the additions to their mushrooming estate haven’t included closing the hole. And then I feel it, the place where the top row was pressed up, the bottom scooped down, and the middle cut with a pair of pliers. I duck through and run, stumbling down the incline in awkward side steps, my adrenaline pushing me on, the only sound my huffing breath.

As I clear the copse I get my first sight, and I stop, stunned. Still standing in a good acre-size clearing, the addition of a third story makes it look even more like a layer cake on an oversize porcelain platter. Susan always did hate having trees anywhere near the house—they made her “nervous.” Wonder how her “nerves” are standing up to a ground floor that looks like it’s been chosen as the site of the Ascension. A force of white light gusts from each window, creating a spectral ring of artificial sunshine around the domicile. I hold my hand in front of my eyes. Momentarily riveted on the back lawn, I watch the heat from the lights melt the snow in the flower beds. Of course the Sharpes need not be confined by such petty considerations as actual time of day.

I tuck my head down and make the final dash to the house, the old basement dormer window catching my eye. I drop to my knees, my fingertips finding the groove I made in the wood, and tug. Amazingly it flips open, and I swing my legs through until my feet feel something firm beneath them. I shimmy my upper body down.

“Hello, Katie.” I freeze. Crouching atop the washing machine I push my hair out of my eyes as nonchalantly as possible and look over to where Susan Sharpe is perusing a wine label while she fingers the velvet ribbon trim of her cashmere cardigan.

“Hello, Susan,” I reply evenly, enjoying her flinch at the use of her Christian name. “How are you?” I ask politely, even though the faint web of broken capillaries across her cheeks and the bottle in her hand have already answered the question.

She levels her gaze at me, the frosty expression of contempt familiar. “The noise is a bit much upstairs. I can’t for the life of me figure out why Jake would want to double the amount of hysteria around him.” She replaces the bottle and extracts another while I jump down to the concrete floor and straighten my clothes. “Ah, this is the one, the Reserve.” She pulls her glasses down from her gray blonde hair to scrutinize the label, the tortoiseshell frames concealing her watery eyes. “Well, I better get back upstairs.” And she smiles that country club smile that somehow got enticed to the wilds of Vermont. “Do shut the window behind you when you go.” She closes the crosshatched glass door and glides back upstairs in her Ferragamo pumps, flicking the lights off when she gets to the top.

“Thanks,” I mutter, hearing the door shut. I look around in the stark light cascading through the dormer as I unbutton my jacket. Minus the transformation of half the room into a temperature-controlled wine cellar, it’s fairly unchanged. There’s that old green couch and the ghostlike band equipment silhouetted beneath sheets. I look back at the machine I just hopped off of—still the old Maytag. Warmth pounds my cheeks.

Okay, enough.

I put my hand on the railing, my foot pausing on the bottom step. It isn’t the summer. I’m not tan. And I don’t have a husband to buffer me. And I could go away. Scramble back through the window and wait another ten years. I take a breath—all adrenaline suddenly suctioning me back toward the tilted glass. But I can’t. I can’t have come all this way only to stand beneath him.

I climb the stairs and let myself into the long back hallway, which, Susan once proudly told me, in the eighteen hundreds, was designed for servants to scurry back and forth while causing minimal disturbance. I follow the sound of tumult laid over a thumping bass beat to the living room and cautiously peek my head around the door. While it’s immediately obvious that she’s combined the old dining room and living room and knocked out the ceiling to create a “great room” I’ve no idea what else she may have done, because the space is overrun with camera equipment, video equipment, back-drops, prop sets, racks and racks of clothes, two hair and makeup stations, and yards and yards of thick cables snaking over it all.

“Here, Larry.” The teamster-size man next to me tosses a boom to his colleague, gouging the wood paneling. Merry Christmas, Susan.

Taking cover behind a rolling garment rack, I inch forward, following the sound of shouting, which has the tenor and urgency of an emergency room. “ANDY, MORE BLUSH!” “CAN WE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE BLUSH?” “SWAP THE BLUSH!”

“Could someone toss me my Fiji?” a voice asks. “Thanks.” It is at once both deep and somehow breathy. My eyes water and I look up at the ostentatious egg-and-dart molding that marks where the ceiling used to be. I blink until everything’s in focus again. Deep breath. And I peer around the flat. John Norris, Eden Millay, and Jake Sharpe sit in a rugged, bear-claw-laden, L.L. Bean, MTV reimagining of what Jake Sharpe’s childhood living room would look like. Jake Sharpe is maybe twenty feet from me. And he looks familiar. Not just the ghost of his seventeen-year-old features in a thirty-one-year-old face, but the recent-familiar—the lighting, the set, the mikes, the camera—this is the Jake Sharpe I recognize—from the videos playing overhead at the gym, the interviews I click on by accident at home, the magazine covers I catch sight of at the supermarket—this, this…packaged person—
this
is who I recognize.

Behind him, atop a ladder out of frame, someone is shaking detergent flakes over the fake window in the fake wall, creating a bucolic Christmas scene where, I’m sure, at any moment, some MTV intern trussed up as a moose will peer in.

“Rolling sound. Whenever you’re ready, John.” At the director’s go, Jake lifts his arm and Eden nestles against him.

John nods, pulling his eyes up from his index cards to look into the camera. “We’re sitting here with two of the most in-demand stars in the music business, Jake Sharpe and Eden Millay. Hi, guys.”

“What up, John?” Jake nods.

“Happy holidays,” Eden says, her voice surprisingly earthy for someone with such a narrow ribcage, her toffee-hued hair catching the fake moonlight.

“Now, Eden, first off, you just celebrated a significant birthday, the big four-o, and MTV was on location for the festivities at Red Rock.” Jake takes her hand, the spotlight caroming off her multi-carat diamond.

“It was a blast,” she squeezes his affectionately. “There’s something really special about that place. The land has an energy that you just don’t feel anywhere else.”

“Great. Here’s where we’ll cut in with b-roll of that show.” John takes a sip from a paper coffee cup. “Okay, so, Eden, you’ve just finished your world tour promoting your latest album, which features your take on twelve classic country-western songs. This is quite a departure for you,” John politely broaches the subject of her commercially disastrous experiment.

Eden smiles with calm self-assurance as she pushes the waves framing her heart-shaped face from her sightline. “Yeah, I know, it was a risk, but that’s the music I was raised on.” Her fingers flit against the gold feather dangling from her lariat, the taut definition of her biceps appearing in the split of her blouse sleeve. Whatever. “Listen, I’m extremely grateful for all the opportunities the success my first two albums brought me, but I felt it was time to share something more honest.”

John clears his throat. “And you did have record-breaking ticket sales all through Asia.”

“I’m big in Japan.” She laughs with undeniably winning self-deprecation.

“Cut,” the director calls, and people scramble back into frame to check the lights.

A coil of cable is thrust into my shaking hand. “Hold this,” the teamster barks.

John’s voice drops to its non-TV timbre. “So, Jake, this is where we’ll cut away to the montage of your Grammy speeches, your Earth Day performances, the Oscar for best song, all that stuff, and there’ll be a voice-over giving all your stats, the forty million albums, yada yada.”

“Great.” Jake waves him on. Eden whispers something in his ear and he nods, smiling. You have a big dick, maybe?

“And roll sound!”

“Rolling.”

“So, Jake.” John shifts in his chair. “We’re here in your hometown of Croton Falls, a very scenic region of Northern Vermont, whose influence you credit with the rustic imagery in so many of your songs. Much like Sting writes repeatedly about the life of the bygone English port town, you sing a lot about the lost New England industries.”

“Well, I think in the age of global commerce, it’s important to remind the younger generation that there were jobs here once, that America had thriving industries in textiles and manufacturing—jobs that have gotten sent overseas out of greed.”

John asks the appropriate follow-up questions about how their viewers can help and get involved. Eden nods thoughtfully while Jake pontificates, trying his best to look earnest, and I have to move my gaze. I stare at a table of congealing sushi as John continues, “Now, you have a box set coming out in the new year. A decade of all your number-one songs, starting, of course, with your hit single ‘Losing’ off of your breakout album
Lake Stories. Rolling Stone
famously credited you with ‘taking America’s virginity.’”

Jake smiles, casting his green eyes down to his knees as he demurs.

Barf.

“‘Losing,’ it bears repeating, was the number-one hit single of the nineties and you’ve reflected that by including not one, but
three
versions. There’s the original, of course, a live acoustic performance, as well as the version you performed with Bono and Michael Stipe at Live 8.”

“Yeah, we wanted to include the Muzak and pan flute remix, but there just wasn’t room.”

John laughs. “Now, I’d like to discuss the theme of infidelity, which you first introduced on the title track of
Lake Stories,
and is one you’ve revisited over and over.” And over, and over.

“Yeah.”

“Why the fascination?” Uh, yeah, Jake, why the fascination?

There is a barely perceptible pause. Eden laughs lightly. Jake speaks, “I just think in this age of globalization, we have so many options. It gets so much harder to commit to one place, one person, one profession. We’re emotional chameleons, man.”

“Hmmm.” John nods. Eden nods. “Interesting.” Interesting
bullshit.
“So,” John continues. “There’s one new song on this collection and it’s titled…” John flips his index cards. “Let’s see…um, okay, yes, here it is. ‘Katie.’” Wait,
what?!