Perfect Fifths (30 page)

"Yes, I saw Marcus. I ran over him at the airport, then we spent the whole afternoon talking to each other over coffee. He looks the same but even better than the same. He did ask about you."

Jessica stops here, squats down, and looks for the dropped slip of paper.

"Aunt J.?! You haven't answered the most important question of all!!!"

"I haven't," Jessica says, crawling on her hands and knees. "Have I?"

"I'll answer it for you," Marin announces in the same all-business tone that declared she couldn't wear the fugly tracksuits.

"Oh, really?" Jessica spots the paper underneath the desk, reaches for it.

"And the answer is ..." Marin takes a dramatic breath and delivers a speech that draws upon everything she has ever learned about love from watching too much reality television with her nanny. "YES! You and Marcus still LOVE LOVE LOVE each other because you and Marcus are TRUE SOUL MATES even though you haven't

seen each other in, like, FOREVER, but it's just like MOM and E-CAR JERRY, who didn't see each other after, like, FOREVER, and it was, like, WHAMMO! BLAMMO!

Cupid's ARROW with, like, MANY INTIMATE MOMENTS, and they knew it was FATE and DESTINY that had brought them back together ..." Marin pauses just long enough to suck in a lungful of air.

"YES! You and Marcus are still in LOVE and you're totally going to get MARRIED and have ME as a FLOWER GIRL in the ceremony and MAYBE you'll even get

married at twenty-seven like my mom did the first time which is ONLY A YEAR AWAY only YOU

AND MARCUS won't ever ever ever split up because you are SOUL

MATES with MANY INTIMATE MOMENTS you are DESTINED to live HAPPLILY HAPPILY

HAPPILY ever AFTER ..."

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Marin is hyperventilating. Jessica, too, is having trouble breathing. She shakily stands up, then backs herself onto Marcus's untouched bed.

"So?" Marin asks.

Jessica squints, trying to focus on the shaking paper.

Gone for a while

Hoping, always, to return

If you will let me

"Aunt J.! Helllloooooooo? Are you there?"

Am I here? Jessica asks herself. Am I really here? Is any of this really happening? Or is this really a long, vivid-coma dream?

Jessica clears her throat. "I gotta go, Marin," she says, trying to steady her voice. "I'll talk to you soon."

"But you didn't answer the most important question of all!!!"

"I didn't need to," Jessica replies matter-of-factly. "You answered it for me."

She shuts off the phone. Sloppily folds the note and stores it in her back pocket. She calls out to him.

"Marcus Flutie."

fifteen

arcus doesn't know how long he's been leaning against this wall with his eyes closed, recuperating from the strange encounter with the salesclerk. It's been long

enough to get noticed.

"Aren't you a tall drink of water."

Marcus opens his eyes and looks down to see a woman whose complicated yellow feathered hat is half as tall as she is. From her vantage point, even Natty would qualify as a tall drink of water.

"My name is Lola."

"Er, hi, Lola."

"I am a showgirl."

"A showgirl?"

She flounces her wrists. "With painted feathers in my hair." Then risks another hip replacement surgery with a shimmy. "And a dress cut down to there ..."

"Oh," Marcus says, slow on the uptake. "I get it. 'Copacabana.'"

"I knew you were good people!" She tries to punch him in the arm but doesn't come close enough to connect. "What are you up to?"

"Loitering," Marcus replies, smiling slightly, wishing Jessica were here to hear him say it.

"That's nice," says Lola, clearly not listening. "Listen, I've got sort of a wager going."

"A wager?"

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"Yeah, a wager. And it involves you."

"Me?"

Lola has already taken him by the elbow and is leading him toward the sign at the entrance of a room that encourages guests to play HERE. "Can ya sing?"

And before Marcus can answer, he is muted by the sight and sound of a blue-haired granny appropriately attired in a blue-sequined true blue spectacle T-shirt.

"Somewhere down the road ... Our roads are gonna cross again ..."

"We took over the place!" shouts Lola. "We turned Karaoke Tuesday into Barry-oke Tuesday!"

The stranded members of the Tristate Chapter of the Barry Manilow International Fan Club have indeed taken over the bar and the interactive gameplay arena. They have pooled their resources and have paid off the DJ, who for the under-the-table price of $250 was bribed into letting the BMIFC use their own backing tracks.

"What does this have to do with me?" Marcus asks.

"I bet Adele that I could turn anyone into a Can't Smile girl—or boy, in your case!"

"A what?"

"It's a Barry tradition dating back to the early eighties, when he would bring a girl up onstage to—"

"Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" hisses the crowd, eager to hear True Blue Spectacle bring her song to its dramatic close.

"Look," Lola says, sticking a knotty finger into Marcus's chest. "All ya gotta do is get up on that stage and sing a few bars of 'Can't Smile Without You,1 and I win the bet."

This strikes Marcus as a fair request. At Princeton, always at Natty's prodding, usually as a diversion during stressful midterm or final exam weeks, Marcus has

participated in wagers that were far more complicated and possibly injurious to one's health. The Fall of

'08 Bet You Can't Drink a Blenderized Taco Bell Cheesy Double Beef Burrito, Caramel Apple Empanada, and Mango Strawberry Frutista Freeze While Arguing Why George W. Bush Is the Greatest American President in History

comes to mind. (Marcus won ... barely. And it wasn't the value-menu smoothie that posed the biggest challenge to his regurgitative reflexes.) Though he's anxious to return to Jessica, he knows this will be one hell of a story, one that would totally justify waking her up.

"Look, Lola ..."

"SHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Marcus shuts up to give the song the reverence it deserves.

"You be-e-e-loooooong." True Blue stretches out the word, looking heavenward, before completing the line in a lilting, surprisingly plaintive alto. To-o

meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee."

The crowd goes wild. Those who can leap to their feet, do. True Blue modestly averts her eyes,
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curtsies. When she looks up, she catches Lola's eye, claps excitedly, and motions for her and Marcus to join the rest of the Tristate Chapter of the Barry Manilow International Fan Club at the front-and-center table before the stage. This table is trashed. There are glasses decorated with half-sucked orange halves and spiky crescents of pineapple. Glasses foamy with machine-mixed

coladas, daiquiris, and margaritas. Glasses swishing with pink and white but never red wine. Glasses thick with the Barrytini (vodka, maraschino cherry liqueur, chocolate liqueur), the official cocktail of the Barry Manilow International Fan Club.

The Tristate Chapter of the Barry Manilow International Fan Club is getting shitfaced tonight.

"Drink up," Lola says, handing Marcus a glass full of what looks like a chocolate milk shake. He takes a long pull. It tastes like a milk shake, too, but with a

battery-acid afterburn.

"And now," the DJ is saying, "we've got Barbara singing 'Looks Like We Made It.1"

Barbara pushes herself up from the table, leaving a trail of fan i low sweatshirt glitter in her slow-moving wake.

"This is a very sparkly crowd," Marcus observes out loud, already feeling the loosey-goosey effects of the Barrytini.

Hands are extended, names are offered, but Marcus forgets them all as soon as he hears them. They are all pleasant middle-aged women with beauty parlor hair who look like they've recently retired from various careers in elementary education—teacher, librarian, nurse, lunch lady It is far easier to distinguish them through their homemade Barry Manilow-themed fashions than by their names he can't remember.

"That's today," Marcus says, pointing at a T-shirt with 1/19/2010 across the chest.

"Yes," says 1/19/2010. "That's the ... It's his ... I can't even say it!" She drops her head on the table.

"Get over it!" snaps Worldwide Symphony Tour '84. "The last show is tonight, and we're gonna miss it!

Hmph!"

Barbara has finally lumbered up onstage.

"Maybe it is time for Barry to end it once and for all," says Lola.

The table gasps at this act of sedition. "Nononononono!"

The BMIFC respectfully settles down for the opening horns and the first line of Barbara's ballad. "There you are, looking just the same as you did last time I touched you…”

But a few members will not stand for this kind of talk.

"He's got another decade in him!" shouts True Blue with a raised fist.

"Maybe two!" chimes in Let It Shine, Let It Shine, Let It Shine.

"Sinatra kept it going into his eighties!" adds True Blue.

"I think we should just trust Barry to know what's right," Lola says. "Maybe he wants to go out while he's still on top."

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"Hmph! If that were the case, he would've never sung another note after 1977. Hmph!"

More gasps.

"How can you say that?"

"I say trust Barry," says Lola. "He'd never intentionally let us down. Maybe he's got something even better up his sleeve. And even if he doesn't, shouldn't we be grateful for all the magic he's made for us already?"

They all concede agreement on this point.

"All I could taste was love the way we made it..."

"You're up next," Lola says, pointing at Marcus. "If you can get up there and sing the chorus, I win the bet!"

"I don't really sing," Marcus says, slurping up the last of his Barrytini.

"Neither does Barbara, but that doesn't stop her!"

The table earthquakes in laughter as Barbara painfully modulates between one chorus and the next.

"LOOKS LIKE WE MADE IT!"

"I haven't sung in public in a very long time." It's a halfhearted protest. Whether it's the Barrytini, or the strangeness of the situation, or rather, the strangeness of how this entire day has unfolded since he first heard Jessica Darling's name over the Clear Sky Airlines public address system, Marcus is ready to take the stage and win

this bet not just for Lola but for Barry Manilow fans the world over.

"We MAY-ee-YAY-ee-YAY-ee-DIT..."

Another standing ovation! Marcus has just learned a key lesson of Barry-oke: A spectacularly delivered last line can make up for the previous three minutes and thirty seconds of caterwauling, especially if it is spectacularly awful, as Barbara's last line was, as opposed to just boring awful.

"And now, singing 'Can't Smile Without You,1" the DJ booms, "we've got... Who do we got?"

"What's your name?" asks Lola.

"Namesmarcus." Marcus is slurring. He is teetering on the borderline between tipsy and shitfaced.

"Nieman Marcus? Like the department store?"

Without a formal introduction to the crowd, Marcus shakily pushes himself into an upright position and wobbles toward the stage. Marcus has not been onstage like this since prom night 2002, when he sang his song for Jessica. He had hoped it would be like the depictions of such heartwarming novice-takes-the-stage scenes in movies, when the bright spotlight blinds the nervous singer and he can't see the audience so it's easier to pretend that he isn't onstage in front of a roomful of strangers, oh no, but that he's really alone in his own bedroom, singing into a hairbrush microphone as he has so many times before, and this little delusion tricks him into being the show-stealing rock star he has always been but until now has been too shy to show the world. However, in Marcus's case, (a) there is no difference between the

lighting on the karaoke stage and the bar, so he can see the BMIFC's every wrinkle, mole, and flesh roll, and (b) he has never, ever sung into a hairbrush microphone,
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even in the privacy of his own bedroom.

The song begins with piano and a lackadaisical whistle. Marcus puckers his lips, but something (vodka) about this gesture (maraschino cherry liqueur) strikes him as funny (chocolate liqueur). He spit-laughs into the microphone.

"Sing it, don't spray it," grouses Worldwide Symphony Tour '84.

Marcus has just enough time to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand before singing. "You ... know

... I..."

It's just like watching the wannabes on American Idol or any other talent competition. You can tell within the first few notes whether the performer has It or not. And while the standards that determine what It is and whether or not one has It vary greatly from show to show and judge to judge, the collective opinion of the stranded members of the Tristate Chapter of the Barry Manilow International Fan Club is unanimous: Neiman Marcus has It.

"Victory is mine!" boasts Lola.

The rest of the BMIFC shares her joy, always pleased for any opportunity to turn a neophyte Fanilow into an acolyte. They sway and snap their fingers along to the easy soft-shoe beat of the first chorus-verse-chorus. They whisper a digressive commentary about the performance.

"He's got a nice voice, this Neiman Marcus ..."

"It's a bit deeper, more resonant, than the recording ..."

"More of a baritone than a tenor..."

"Barry himself is more of a baritone than a tenor these days ..."

"Hmph. He can't sing it in the original key anymore. Hmph."

"Hey! I like the way Neiman Marcus shakes his little butt!"

"He's got a nice butt!"

"Barry has a nice butt!"

"Hmph. Barry never had a butt like that!"

"You didn't see him back in seventy-seven!"