Chapter 7

At the beginning, it was easy to dismiss the music coming out of Brashton as surfer reggae pop; its bright melodies are why you might hear a tune by Bear Claw or Peeler piped-in at the grocery store. Brashton’s sound was on the face of it as mellow as the homeless hippie who sidles up to you on the beach and tries to sell you a joint. But the shadows show up soon enough in the coastal sunshine. The hippie starts telling you a story about Miami and Bolivia and a jail cell and a vision of Guadalupe. The best Seawall single will take you on a perfect three-minute ride, and it’s only when the wave dumps you off at the end that you realize how far away you still are from shore.

And back there on the shore, the bars are blasting Rock Me Amadeus and Livin on a Prayer and Michael Jackson, bless his heart. There was nothing else in 1986 in music like what was happening in Brashton in 1986, the year the House of Beef and the Manta Ray started having shows. The closest thing to it was halfway around the world with another beach boy gone bad, Nick Cave in Australia, who was breaking out right around that time. Or maybe, with its bright, heart-tugging melodies, elemental lyrics, and glossy finish, it was the aural equivalent of David Lynch, whose Blue Velvet also came out that year: It looks like a beautiful day, and then the camera zooms in on a severed ear, exploring it with as much detachment as if it were a chambered nautilus.

Maybe it was caused by everyone’s ocean-addled hearing or by the hurricane-warped walls of the clubs, but the one thing you always hear in Brashton’s music is echo. And the thing about echo is that it’s an illusion. You think there’s someone listening, and someone singing back, but it’s just you in there, alone. What’s at the heart of Brashton Beach music is the same thing that’s inside the best guitars and drums—a beautiful, resonant, hollowness.

--B.B. Bodeaux, text from “Wander or the Wave: Brashton Beach Music and Musicians”

Malone nodded and smiled and picked at a fast dinner at Karen’s, which had gone exactly as she’d feared. Linney was bouncing around in a little activity chair Karen’s kids had outgrown, batting at toys and turning herself in circles with her little dancing feet. She looked happy. Thank god she hadn’t displayed any of the “stranger danger” vibe she’d just started to show, crying when anyone but Malone picked her up. That would have been her fault somehow.

But it was a problem that she’d be too tired for a bath, Malone fretted. Probably fall asleep in her carseat, then wake up hungry at 1 or 2 a.m. There went the schedule. Even though she usually kept her baby awake until 10 or 11 anyway, for the last feeding of the night, Malone begged off by saying she had to get Linney home into bed. Then she heard about how Karen’s children had slept through the night at four months.

All the way home, through the drive now past rush hour but still on packed roads, through finding a parking space and strapping on the backpack and clicking out the carseat and walking three blocks in the dark with the shell carrier, the handle cutting into first one hand and then the other—why did they call it a carrier and then design it so that no one could actually carry it? she wondered. As usual, she countered that by thanking the gods that she and Nils had, fully by accident, ended up in a safe neighborhood, two blocks from a police station that usually had to deal with nothing more harrowing than getting non-diplomatic cars towed out of diplomat-only parking spaces. All the way through changing the sleeping Linney’s diaper and gently pushing her arms and legs into her sleeper, through taking a two-minute shower and sterilizing the hand pump from the backpack and lying on her bed reading a clutch of zines that were months old and drinking glass after glass of water mixed with cranberry juice—nursing set up a thirst that never seemed to end—Malone was somewhere else, trying to figure out where they’d been and how they’d gotten to where they were now.

They’d met in Brashton, at a restaurant just south of the border of the Magnolia lands, a sawdust-and-peanuts local steakhouse known for having good-looking young waitresses who took no shit. The three filled the bill. They had to be on the sharp side, because the House of Beef was the kind of place both the locals and the Magnolia men came when they wanted to cut loose a little. Between the waitresses and the country gospel music the owner piped in whenever a local band wasn’t playing, they were kept in line.

The three women had all come in as Brashton University freshmen. Bebe was Brandy then, and had to endure being sung to a half-dozen times a shift: “Brandy, you’re a fine girl…” She didn’t become Bebe to the world until she began to be published under her byline, B.B. Bodeaux, chosen to conceal her gender. No one made it too easy for a woman writing about rock and roll.

Bebe and Lee took to the job right away, firing back as good as they got, being Southerners practiced at taking the piss out of someone, but charmingly. Malone, as a “quiet type” from up north, was a little less comfortable with it all, but having waitressed from age 14, she handled it as she had all her life. She specialized in the dark “you must be shittin me” look, and could shut grown men up without saying a word.

Malone had moved into her college dorm only to find an absentee roommate, who had gone to live with her boyfriend, without telling her parents. After two months, Lee, whose roommate was a rabid Christian, had taken her place. Bebe lived at her grandmother’s house, in a little low-ceilinged suite fashioned out of the attic of the poolhouse. Far from being the despair of her grandmother, she was her darling, and it wasn’t because they didn’t know what she was up to. She prized her “high spirits,” cultivating her eccentricities as she would a prize dahlia.

Neither of her new friends could figure out why she was working at Beef at first. But she really did need the cash. Her parents were busy spending the money, and her grandmother wasn’t inclined to share anymore. She was generous about her closets, however. Bebe’s ironic retro style was a result of not being able to afford new clothes—she shopped in her grandmother’s storage rooms.

Lee and Malone had bonded first, on the day they discovered, both poised at the service bar, trays shaking slightly and trying not to cry, that they’d both broken up with their hometown boyfriends. It was trending toward November, and it was pretty remarkable that it had even lasted that long. A university five miles from a beach town known for bands and bud was not a setting designed to encourage fidelity to long-distance love. Soon, Bebe was joining them at the bars after work, and then everything started speeding up, with or without the meth they took on and off.

Malone, a vegetarian at the House of Beef, had the run of the salad bar. None of them had to buy much food or cook for four years at least, and their friends and their men often ate for free as well.

One night when the three of them were at the Manta Ray, some scrub from the newspaper was doing one of those polls that newspapers thought they had to do back then to keep up with USAToday. The leftover Beatles had rigged up another pseudo-reunion, so that was the theme. The reporter made the mistake of asking them: “John or Paul?”

“George,” Malone said.

“Badfinger,” Bebe said.

And the mysterious Jackson, who had been draped over an old wooden chair and watching the stage idly, simply noticed them and smiled, like a light turning on. After that, it was if they had all known each other for years.

Brashton was a vortex that made things like that possible, an inland town of swamp and shine and gators and crackers with an intrusive wedge of Magnolia money jabbing in from the north and a beery wave of students sloshing up from the south. All anyone had in common was that they liked to party, and that was enough to build an empire. Any town-gown conflict was dissolved in beer. Even in the ’80s, when suddenly everyone wasn’t white anymore and the gays came out and started kicking ass about being left to die, it was OK—the Magnolias were in that golden ’80s glow of being too rich and Republican and most of all too Floridian to feel threatened by anyone. The townies were cool with eccentrics, just like Bebe’s grandmother was with her.

So it was that Bebe in a Dior pouf and bouffant could walk down the beach road arm-in-arm with Malone in pegged pants and a Louise Brooks bob and Jackson in pants so ripped his ass hung out and a newsboy cap over his reverse-mullet hair—shaved in the back and long in the front—and no one would throw anything. People did throw things, sometimes, in those times, in other towns. It was a good place to be in college in 1986, in a backwater safe from the Reagan clampdown.

It was a place where, three months after having picked up a bass guitar for the first time, Malone could find herself on stage next to someone who would go on to be reviewed in Rolling Stone magazine. She never imagined anything like that—no, really, she didn’t. Lee had plunked down her cocktail tray one evening at the service bar and said: “I want you to be in my band. Play bass, tambourine, whatever. I want a band and you need to be in it.”

Malone would never have an original musical idea in her life, but she was a good parrot, with good hands and a good ear. What she’d done was apply her obsessiveness, as she did to everything else she wanted. For a solid month, she played for two hours every day, until she’d mastered the bass part from The Song Remains the Same by rote. That gave her enough familiarity with the frets; then she just did what Lee and Tommy told her to do, creating a few fills. Truth be told, Mr. Jones and—really—the Grateful Dead were formative influences on the Brashton sound, much more so than Alex Chilton or the Velvet Underground, as much as people would have preferred that hip cred. The only “secret” to the Brashton sound was front-loading the melodic bass and laying some echo on the vocals. Chilton and Reed just taught them to keep the songs short.

Most everyone had forgotten Malone was even behind a guitar at that first show, and she had no problem with that. And no one had the pictures, either—because she had been busy playing.

But, as Bebe said, if everyone who said they were there, at that first show at the House of Beef, featuring the lineup that would become Seawall, had actually, truly been there? Well, every other bar in Brashton would have had to be empty that night, and maybe every bar on the mainland, too. Malone could remember a crowd of about 30, tops, herself.

She played with them about six months. She never figured out how to use a pick, and real musicians found it highly amusing to see a small-framed woman playing a Vox hollow body with her fingers. She bought it on installment (and eventually sold it to Tommy). Brashton was like a music library or flea market, with constant trading. You could hear the difference later, when everyone from that lineup ended up in bands with real bass players, but in those six months, there was enough talent playing next to her to cover up her ineptitude.

Bebe wouldn’t have done it, and Lee knew that; she hated to be on public display. Malone was easy with it and Lee liked her voice well enough. No one paid any attention to anyone else when Lee was there, anyway—with her music, her beauty.

She still had it all, Malone thought, thinking of how she’d looked at Seth’s, ignoring his crudity, graceful, serene.

Bebe and Malone segued easily from college to the regional newspaper, which ate up the best of the university as quickly and cheaply as it could. The newspaper was flush with Magnolia money; the halls teemed with young people on what were essentially microbeats: high schools, visual arts, restaurant business. They worked two or three to a cubicle, taking turns on computers and phone lines. Department stores and car dealerships bought page after page of ads, giving them more newsprint to fill.

Meanwhile, it was the Jackson-Lee era, and the battles were fierce. Lee’s story was like a Behind the Music with a lot less money. On and off with Jackson, always touring, seven years of chaos during which Malone was never sure what really happened. About the fifth time she and Jackson split up, Lee took up with a Magnolia lawyer. He kept her as a kind of pet, but he did keep her, and he was kind, even eventually, covering her hospital bills. They saw Lee less and less, and they saw Jackson, well, never. Nobody saw him around anymore. The creator of the Brashton sound rarely even recorded there.

It didn’t seem to matter to anyone else. Everyone wanted a piece of Brashton, and as usual, by the time anyone started talking about the scene there, it was dying out. Satellite bands spun off in speed-fueled tours up and down I-95, Lee always a passenger in some van or other, being flown home after a crisis by her rich guy, in a tedious repeating cycle. She was playing with this one, she was touring with that one. Word only got back to Malone and Bebe intermittently. Malone figured that was all part of the rock star thing; she hardly saw anyone else from those times anymore, so why should Lee be any different?

Everyone did speed in Brashton once in a while, from a townie pulling a double shift to a student trying to finish a paper. The Magnolia men did coke in the 80s; it was part of the package for some people with money. Surfers smoked weed and wives took Valium. Lee, generous spirit that she was, took everything. Because that’s what musicians do, right?

Malone had moved in with Nils by then and retreated into a safe haven of long swims, working, long projects of her own choosing, and always answering to the daily assign-shoot-print-edit cycle at the newspaper. Malone and Nils became, prematurely, like old marrieds when they went out occasionally to Manta Ray’s, sipping gin and tonics at a side booth, listening to the music getting grungier, duller. Bebe saw plenty of music people, from Brashton and from everywhere else, because she was sleeping with as many of them as she could. That was the hamster wheel that she had jumped onto.

Bebe had bagged Seth first. A carpetbagger, he’d had a minor college radio hit and came to Brashton to check out the sound in 1994, a little too late to be for real, but not too late for anyone on the outside looking in to notice how dead it was. Seth used Bebe to get to Lee. First he took Lee, then he took Jackson’s longtime manager, an early fan with an MBA, and the only one who had been keeping Jackson on track. Jackson spun off into isolation and increasingly odd recordings.

When the music world declared Seth as Jackson’s successor, Seth left Lee behind. Everyone left her behind. Bebe careened from job to job, to Charlotte, to Richmond, finally landing in Baltimore, still writing about rock and roll.

When Lee had her big smash-up, Malone only heard about it via email. She was in the middle of another trip “home.” There wasn’t much home there anymore. It was a disaster scene. Her brother, always drugged up and otherworldly, went permanently missing, presumed dead, and it literally killed her stoic and silent father, who made quick work of dying of pancreatic cancer. After the funeral, her mother’s clan decided to welcome her back to the fold, bundling her back to the bosom of the West Virginia mountains and the Catholic church. So Malone and Nils moved north again, “to be closer to family,” although there was nothing left of that. At regular intervals, Malone zoomed down I-81, dodging big rigs, to visit her mother, listened to her talk about the Virgin Mary for an hour or so, and then drove back. Her mother didn’t know her anymore—but Malone could hardly blame her; she herself didn’t know who she was.

The three women had started tentatively remaking their relationship about three years ago. Malone felt guilty for never having helped Lee, Lee felt guilty for being a crazy addict, and Bebe was just crazy. All they had done was love rock and roll, and this is what they got for it. But they were alive.

Look at us out there, walking on water

Watching me wander, watching me falter

What are you drinking

Drinking

What are you drinking

The wander or the wave

The man who holds the sticks is cryptic as ever

The man who holds the strings is amused by it all

What are you drinking

Drinking

What are you drinking

He’s just pretending to fall

Look at them out there, so far from the shore

I’m all the way out here, looking for more

What are you thinking

Thinking

What were you thinking

What was it for

--Jackson Hill, Wander and the Wave

Chapter 8

Nils got home around midnight, and they actually got in a quick fuck before she passed out. The weekend, she remembered to mumble a reminder to him, had been claimed by his sister Kathy in exchange for babysitting favors. She had agreed to take the 7-year-old, a girl, and the 10-year-old, a boy, so Kathy and her husband could have a date night. Not to be outdone in conspicuous consumption of family togetherness, his sister Karen had then insisted the whole tribe get together to see the cherry blossoms Sunday after breakfast.

For Malone, the blossoms meant nothing but work, fighting for a decent shot and tripping over gnarled roots, and the only tolerable way to enjoy them had for many years been in the middle of the night, with a bottle of wine, and at Haines Point, not at the Tidal Basin. But that was out for the duration, even though Linney was something of a night owl and might have cooperated. Malone wondered if they would even let you hang out at Haines Point at night anymore, or if the ones fishing all night off that built-up fake island that extended into the Potomac were regarded as potential terrorists and were being run off, catfish swinging from the line as they went.

Saturday night she sent Nils out with his friends, a crew of ex-jock lawyers and tech bubblers. IT was an easy way to get double-plus good wife points. She pulled out her stash of percussion and the present she had recently bought Kaitlin, the little girl: a tinny sounding Barbie “rock star” microphone and stand. The children rattled and banged and fought over the mic while Linney hollered along from her bouncy seat. Malone pulled out the couch and set up the sleeping bags, cooked the frozen brick-oven organic pizza and popped the organic popcorn (by hand, no microwave; microwaves are poisonous) in olive oil, to be sprinkled with freshly grated Parmesan. In the past, Kaitlin and Jonathon (always, always the full version; never think of calling him Jon) had looked to Malone as a potential unindoctrinated ally in getting them to McDonald’s once in a while, but those days were gone—she didn’t need the trouble.

She could always count on a good half-hour or so of the pair skulking around the living room and dining room, giggling and nudging over the “weird” photos on the walls. If it was transgressive, it was entertaining to them and a distraction, so Malone welcomed it, and their parents couldn’t very well ask her to take her own work off the walls, could they?

After the kids were down and Linney was bathed and nursed and down, Malone sank onto her own bed, drinking a decaf green tea and wishing it were a beer. There had been about an hour of fragile, big-eyed “I can’t sleep,” and some “I’m hungry,” because they hadn’t liked the pizza Kathy had insisted she get, so she made them apples and peanut butter. But at least there had been no clear indicator of failure: the brave visit, eyes swimming, throat working, and the words: “I need you to call my parents now. I can’t stay here.” That had happened once before, and it hadn’t been pretty. And no throwing up. And Linney had been her usual dream baby self. When would she turn into a pain? Malone wondered.

She remembered her own aunt, Kate, her father’s sister, in her tiny home that smelled like cigarettes, with the silent but kind husband, and the drum set in the basement and odd people coming and going at odd hours. She remembered Kate saying: “No, I’m not taking you home. It’s late and I’m tired. Besides, if you run out now you’ll feel like crap. Like you’re quitting. I’ll teach you a new word: Suck it up.”

“That’s three words,” 9-year-old Malone had observed, shakily.

“Do you WANT me to smack you?” Kate had laughed. “Come here, I’m gonna beat your ass right now.” And hugging her and giving her a couple little pats on her bony rear. She was about as different from Malone’s own mother as a woman could be, and one of the few people who had ever hugged her much. Aunt Kate would let Malone and her brother, two years older, who could explain things but never in a way that made them duller, stay up and read into the night, even from the stacks of magazines and comic books that had plenty of weird pictures. Rolling Stone, of course, but also Crawdaddy and CREEM and National Lampoon and Ms. By age 13, between her reading and her realization that people were smoking weed in the basement, she learned that sex and drugs would not kill you but could certainly piss some people off, so it was best to play your cards close, much as she did about everything anyway. By 14, Aunt Kate deemed her old enough to go to concerts, and she’d seen AC/DC, the Stones, Black Sabbath, and the Police at the Capital Centre, a cavernous arena that looked like an oversize stack of Pringles potato chips (which coincidentally was considered a main course in her aunt’s household). In turn, she’d brought in Pretenders, the Go-Gos, the Cure, Joy Division, the Crass, and Dead Kennedys (the one group Kate said no to). Kate had a good desk job at Motor Vehicles and her husband had a union gig with the grocery chain, until he dropped dead of a heart attack at 50, after Malone moved to college. Kate had moved to South Florida and acquired a string of old-man boyfriends and was hated by every widow in Hollywood beach. Malone had come down to visit her from time to time out of Brashton and once, to Kate’s endless delight, brought Lee’s then-band along, who filled the bill like a fine set of china found at a flea market—two good-looking guitarists, the tall and lanky Tommy on bass, and a crazy-ass drummer.

She heard the front door open, and a few minutes later Nils came in, a glass of soda water in one hand and a couple Tylenol in the other and a slight waft of bourbon in his wake. “Why are they sleeping in our sleeping bags on top of the blankets?” he asked.

“They like it that way. It feels like camping out.”

“The point of a sofa bed is that it’s a bed,” he said. “Not camping out. And there’s popcorn all over the floor,” he continued, not registering her. Whenever he felt things were getting out of control, he’d come home and see what he could micromanage to make himself feel better. Even his fucked-up-ness was predictable, balanced and usually easy to deal with. Her own was not—it was so diffuse and so sick with guilt and confusion that she couldn’t even make sense of it herself most of the time, much less expect a straight man to.

She settled back on the bed and said: “You know, you’ve got about ten minutes before I pass out. Do you really want to spend it talking about sleeping bags?”

He sat on the bed and pulled her head and shoulders into his lap.

“Right,” she said. “Did you have a good time at least?”

“Fucking Tech. They clutched.”

“Lose any cash?”

“No way. Not with these guys. I don’t even get close to the amounts they’re fucking with.”

“It’s dreadful to be poor!” Malone said the Little Women line in a little-woman voice. Nils didn’t get the reference, but he got the idea. He scooted himself around so he was lying next to her.

“Please don’t pass out now. Please, please get up and brush your teeth and take your clothes off,” she said.

“Two nights in a row, what a lucky man he was,” he said sleepily, starting to crawl over her.

“You’ve got about 8 minutes left to work with.”

In the morning, she pulled out what she had hoped would be her ace, chocolate chip pancakes. Sitting at the kitchen table, Jonathon had said: “My mom makes chocolate CHUNK pancakes. Can you make those?”

At that point, she reached for Nils’ coffee and drank the half-cup left, the one tiny strategic error that would set off a chain reaction that resulted in Linney going into a crying jag in the Jefferson Memorial, her howls reverberating under the dome as if centuries of oppressed souls seeking liberty had been given voice. Caffeine didn’t agree with her. People hovered and blustered and clucked, Kathy going so far as to start undoing the Snuggli, which sent Malone into a hissing fury, because she was standing up for god’s sake on a marble floor. She stepped back, methodically checked every clip on the Snuggli for firmness, and then slowly and deliberately walked down every last slippery marble step, Linney wailing like John Lydon on The Flowers of Romance, to the grass by the tidal basin, where Malone sat down on a tough tree root and took Linney out of the Snuggli and rested her on her thighs while she unclipped the Snuggli from herself, then held Linney up and looked at her and smiled. The baby farted loudly and smiled back. “Well, that was simple enough, wasn’t it, sweet girl,” Malone said, and cuddled her against her shoulder.

She’d have snot on her sweater and a lot to make up for with Kathy later, but for now a spring breeze blew and a few delicate blush petals fell on gently onto them.

The day wound up with dinner at Kathy’s that night, meaning a long drive through Virginia traffic on route I-66, a fucked-up schedule and a tired start to the week. Malone was never allowed to do so much as chop a carrot in this household, because everyone knew she drank Coca-Cola in the mornings and you can’t trust someone like that to understand food. Linney was still crashed out in her carseat shell, which they’d brought into the house and put in the darkened study. Malone lied and said she was expecting something from work, and could she check her email?

“Of course!” Kathy trilled, up to her elbows in Italian flatleaf parsley. “You want to make sure everything’s lined up for the big day!”

She left Nils to explain all about Linney’s incipient daycare commencement, and its complicated schedule involving three half-days of “orientation,” and then two days when she’d be “on-call” and needed to stay within a half-hour of the center. “All that for three days a week!” Nils was saying, while his sisters protested that it was a very good place, with Emilia Reggiana methods, and definitely worth all the trouble.

There was nothing new on her work email address, and little on her home one, so she just sat in the desk chair and stared at her baby for a while. She sent a quick email to Bebe: Coldplay. Ride My Seesaw. Progrock is coming back and man is it pissed. Then she sighed and typed in the AOL address she never used anymore—might as well kill out the spam. She was mechanically hitting the delete key when she saw the return address: HillorHighWater, the one Jackson used for his water-rights projects.

The subject line read: I still miss someone.

Johnny Cash, she thought, then noticed the date and noticed it had multiple attachments, and she pulled her hand back as if a palmetto bug had flown out of the screen. It was old--it had been sent out the same day he had gotten busted for so-called child porn. Was this part of the same batch? Were these the attachments that had gotten him busted? She found and hit the AOL logoff button and waited for the screen to clear, and sat back.

Her heart was pounding, but she didn’t know whether that was because she had nearly unleashed some king of alleged-not-exactly-child-porn virus onto her in-laws’ computer, or because of the subject line. She was floored, confused, and above it all, flattered. Then she grabbed for the mouse at a gentle knock on the door. It was Nils, calling her up to dinner. He came in quietly, and she conquered an impulse to hide the screen.

“Still sleeping?” he said, smiling at Linney.

“Yeah,” she said. “It would appear that I’m going to have to break some rules.” She meant the rule they had about never waking a sleeping baby.

“Yeah, we need you on schedule for tomorrow,” he said, sitting down next to the carseat shell and stroking the baby’s face gently. “Come on, little girl, gonna bring you upstairs for dinner.”

Malone turned back to the computer. “This is slow as hell,” she said. “I’m just going to shut it down.”

“Tom can fix it if you can’t get it going,” he said.

“No, I got what I need. I just wanted to check something else and it got hung up, but I’m fine. I’m going to have to go in to work for a little tomorrow afternoon, though, I think.”

Chapter 9

The question of what to do about the email intruded as she tried to follow the elaborate explanations of policies and requirements at the daycare center. There was one other woman with her for the “orientation,” a sleekly suited, high-heeled, glossily ponytailed lawyer, with a boy just three months old. She didn’t look any happier about the prospect of leaving her baby than Malone felt. Malone had also been handed a 40-page photocopied book and a sheaf of forms to fill out—even though she had already filled most of them out while she was still pregnant, and Nils had brought over the medical forms a scant week after Linney was born. She guessed she would have to do it again.

They toured the rooms for older children, then the three infant nurseries, just as she had before Linney was born, learning nothing more. She moved Linney from her carseat shell to a bouncy seat, strapping her in and talking with her as she tried to figure out where she was supposed to put her little cooler of bottles for the day and what to do next. The director, the woman leading the tour and the two women from the infant room were all cooing over the other woman on the tour and her baby.

Malone knew the score. Class, money, and the question of her race made for a weird mix. The daycare people would give women like the lawyer extra reassurance and a break if she showed up late, where if Malone asked for a bending of rules, it would be assumed she was just careless. On the other hand, she didn’t have to worry about being seen as a Miss Anne who expected the world to revolve around her and her problems.

She had come back to a DC where the racism was both sharper and more difficult to pin down. Growing up, many of her friends—and most of her boyfriends—had been black. Occasionally people had asked her about her race, and she’d passed along what her father had told her—that she didn’t know, but she might be part black, way back. But as Reagan re-segregated America, and the radio stations turned all-white or all-black again—where for a while there they’d played Al Green and the Stones back-to-back—and her black girlfriends gradually got “too busy” to get together. These days, she wondered if she really had any friends at all.

She’d been wrenched loose from her beach and pushed by strange tides ever since—her father’s hand yanked out of hers, her mother pulled away from her more slowly but as surely as by any undertow, her brother drifted off or tugged under; she would never know. She’d surfaced to find her friends too far away to wave to.

Just another one on the list of tell no one, she thought, as she drove with Linney down to the Capital Life office to see if she could get Andy’s help in opening the email. Add it to: My brother’s insanity might be my fault, because how come I could deal with all the drugs we took and he can’t, and why am I never addicted to anything but Lee ended up out of her mind on coke and will my giving her pills feed some new addiction, and is the only thing I love about Nils his dick, and why did I let my life get taken over by a couple of sisters from Prairie Home Companion, and how come the people who are supposed to be my friends are people I only see about three times a year, and why aren’t we friends like chicks are friends on TV, and am I supposed to make new friends? How? And how come my friends never want to talk about my baby, but everyone else never wants to talk about anything else?

And when the hell did women in Washington DC start wearing high heels and fashion? she thought, toting Linney in her carseat shell up in the elevator, and seeing herself next to a couple of the new breed in the polished mirrors that lined the cage. We used to go around in sensible skirts and running shoes. I look like I have childhood obesity, she thought; in her hightops and black jeans and black sweater, with her swollen boobs and saggy little tummy and skinny legs, she realized, she looked like a plump high school Goth boy.

Good enough, she thought, having a vision of opening Jackson’s email and having it pump the magazine’s entire computer system full of pornographic images and pseudoterrorist threats and god knows what kinds of viruses. Get me my 12-sided dice; I’m coming in to take this place DOWN, she thought, smiling broadly as she greeted Jeannette, who seemed a little taken aback at this uncharacteristic enthusiasm out of little, quiet, gloomy Malone.

“Most everyone’s gone home,” Jeannette told her. “Wine-tasting day.”

“Not for us!” she smiled, breezing to the back, where she knew Andy would be in his warren, avoiding the alcohol. Yet another addict, she thought.

The place smelled like a bar, with two overflowing wastebaskets full of plastic cups and more than a dozen empty wine bottles lined up on an intern’s desk, along with crumpled paper bags and scattered tally sheets. She registered a couple of expensive-looking labels; lucky day for interns. She wondered how strenuously the hot “media editor” had worked to cut one out of the pack today; maybe lucky for him, too.

Andy was careening between two screens, with music playing softly from a third computer; Steve Wynn’s Here Come the Miracles. “You’re too late,” he said, without looking up.

“I don’t indulge much at present,” she said, putting Linney and her backpack down, and taking out the activity string and strapping it onto the carseat shell’s handle. Linney squirmed and kicked at it, babbling and singing a little.

“Liking that?” she asked.

“Guitar noir,” he said. “Not bad.”

She wasn’t coming empty handed—or at least she had something to offer beyond a baby carrier. One of the things Capital Life was most read and most reviled for was its monthly listing of real estate transactions among the rich and famous-for-Washington. It named names. And listed purchase prices. Most of it was from public records, but if Andy heard about something early he could catch the details before they got spat out by the bureaucracy a month after the purchase. Both the editor and the publisher loved fresh real estate prices.

“I have a house for you,” she said. “And I need a favor.”

“What’s the house?”

She gave him the address. “The owner is Seth Tower.”

“Well! What brings that boy to our town?”

“Who the fuck knows. Reinventing himself as a gogo drummer? Or auditioning for Fugazi. He’s good at showing up after the party’s over and making it look like he was there all along.”

“And making some money off it,” Andy said, scanning his computer screen again. “But he really made his money the same way all the new people in Great Falls did, didn’t he. Tech bubble.” He gave the enter key a bear-paw smack and turned in her direction again. “And now it’ll be real estate.”

“It’s pretty empty—I mean, it doesn’t look like he’s really living there,” Malone said. “But yeah. He was into having me shoot it. It’s all design clichés, but people would like it. He sure paid enough for it. He said he’s got places in Orange County—that’s where he’s from—and North Carolina. And of course Brashton.”

“What do you hear from Jackson,” he said, looking down, acting casual, but she could tell he was really hungry for news. Maybe he just had a crush on Jackson. And here I’d thought it was me, she smiled to herself.

“That’s sort of why I’m here,” she said. “Do you know if there’s a computer that it’s OK to wreck?”

“You got a baseball bat? You could do this one.”

“I’ve got an email that may have a kind of virus,” she said. “A, um, Jackson Hill kind of virus.”

He looked at her then, his mouth in a silent “ooooh.” And steepled his fingers. “Hmm. Where is it?”

“I saw it in my old AOL account. It’s kind of dead, I never use it.”

“I can’t imagine why not, such a quality internet service provider,” he said, hitting save on something on one screen. “OK. I think I can fix you up.”

“Nobody can know, though,” she said.

“What? Can’t hear you,” he said, pushing back his wheeled chair and pulling his bulk to standing. “Rachel’s office.”

She picked Linney up again and stood back to let him pass. Rachel was the “lifestyle editor,” who had published several roman a clef romances set in Congress, another of the names on the masthead for show. Malone set Linney down in this new doorway and they pushed aside several plastic-wrapped baskets full of free-gift “spa” products that reeked of lavender and fresh-mown grass. Two computer setups balanced on top of another large box. Andy had her crawl back to plug in various cables and cords, and punched at some keys, and they waited, and waited some more.

“OK,” he told her. “You can open it up here. They’re gonna wipe these before they donate them, so just download it to the desktop, not to the internal server. That should be OK.”

“Should be?”

“Stop fussing,” he said, squeezing past the boxes, but stopped in the doorway, reluctant to squeeze past the baby. Malone picked up the carseat and brought her farther into the office to let him by. She sat down and pulled up her AOL account. Linney sneezed. Malone knelt to wipe her nose and give her a kiss. Then she went back and pulled up the email.

Want to come to Bahia? it read. For the water. I need a photographer.

Well, she wouldn’t have been able to do that, but it was nice to be asked, she thought, slightly relieved.

Then she took a breath and downloaded the attachments to the desktop, and opened them, one by one.

Andy loomed in the doorway. She could tell he was embarrassed to stay, but he wanted to know. She solved it: “Could you stick around? I’m afraid this thing’s going to explode or some damn thing, infect every computer here with tuberculosis, you know.”

“Sure,” he muttered, shifting around uneasily, not knowing where to look. “Tuberculosis isn’t a virus, though,” he muttered. “Bacteria.”

She started with a Word document. It started in the middle of a thought, if you could call it that. She skimmed the sea of random capitalized words; the point seemed to be that the West had caused 9/11, nothing more than what you could hear any day on Democracy Now, if significantly less coherently stated. Three more files, all the same.

She closed them and went to the photo files.

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” she shouted, and slammed back in the desk chair. Linney let out a squawk.

“What?” Malone looked over at him and saw he was looking at the door, afraid to see what she was seeing.

“Who would ever think this was porn? Jackson’s life was ruined for this shit? You are shitting me!”

The lineup of five guys posed with tube socks and goofy expressions; three of them were doing the see-no-evil monkeys. The room was badly lit and oddly pink, but anyone could see it was just goofing. It looked like they were in a music studio—she saw part of a drum kit and a bass propped against the wall.

“I never liked the Chilis. That’s a nice bass, though,” she said, almost automatically playing with the enlarger to get a better look. It was one of those little Steinbergers.

She quickly opened and closed three more images, all variations, some with the guys lying down, pretending to be passed out, holding beers. They could have been guys she’d see at any shows, really young, yes, but not pubescent or anything, probably college age. Had to be legal, or very close to any technical definitions. Though that length of hair on the one was unusual, you didn’t see too many guys around with that.

“No wonder it all got dismissed so fast,” she said.

“Damage is done, though,” Andy said, shifting from foot to foot. Linney started to babble and bash at her toys. Malone knew her window was closing.

“Everyone keeps saying that,” she said. “It’s starting to get a little annoying. Look, if I print these out—will anyone be able to see them? Or find out?”

“There’ll be a record in the printer,” Andy said. “But I don’t think much else. Your call.”

“I’ll use the intern printer,” she said. “See what happens.” She didn’t know why, but she had a vague notion that she could confront someone sometime with this absurdity, it could make a difference. Tell Bebe maybe? Get her crusading? That was even more ridiculous.

But maybe—maybe to show Nils. To show him that there was nothing to it. And that maybe, in the future, she and Jackson really could work on something together. Maybe be friends.

Chapter 10

Daycare was alleged to give her time to not only work, but cook and clean, but she had lost a couple hours with her trip downtown. She put Linney in her bouncy chair and worked up some chicken and pasta while she threw newspapers and magazines into random baskets and clothes into closets and hampers and cranked through some laundry. Nils did at least half of everything, maybe more, and the free restaurant credits meant they didn’t have to eat at home much. But Malone still felt guilty because she didn’t make much money and thought she ought to do more than her share at home to make up for it. He’d grown up with women taking care of him, the adored baby brother, and had managed to shake it off pretty well, but feminist enlightenment only went so far.

She had things almost at an acceptable level when he got home. She was nursing Linney and then they’d eat, and then bath and bed. She waited until Linney was down for the night, about 11, and they were lying around reading, watching TV, and working on the computer—Nils doing all at once—to bring it up.

“I’m really worried about the Jackson situation,” she said.

He looked up from the computer. “Have they found out anything new?”

“No,” she said. “I’m just worried about how he’s doing. I mean, everyone has admitted that it was nothing and all a mistake, but this could be the kind of thing that makes it so he never gets back to where he was.”

“Just as well,” Nils said vaguely, reaching for the remote and changing to another sports news station before going back to the computer screen.

“What does that mean?” she said.

“I don’t know, just that it’s better if he keeps to himself for a while. Maybe for a long time. Look, I’m trying to finish up this email here.”

She waited a while, reading a two-month-old fanzine Bebe had sent her way. He finished up on the computer and started scanning channels again. Then she spoke up again: “I was thinking of trying to do something for him.”

“What, like a telethon?” he snorted. Then he looked up. “Wait. No. What are you talking about?”

“I mean line up some kind of interview, maybe with Bebe. Get quotes from people who know him, who know he’d never do anything like that. Maybe shots of his house, the art he collects. People just don’t know Jackson, he’s such a hermit. So they believe all that crazy shit. If they knew what he was really like…”

Nils sat down next to where she was curled up on the couch. He rubbed at his jaw and sighed. He was in what she thought of as the “bench position,” the one he folded his tall, lanky body into when he meant business, a forearm on his knees, neck craned up to look into the distance. Like he was watching the final minutes of a game he wasn’t in, but cared about desperately.

“Why don’t you let him do that himself?” he said.

“He can’t do it himself.”

Nils looked at her.

“He really can’t,” she said. “He’s a total idiot about everything but music. Or art, stuff like that. You know that. If he had any clue about how to look after himself he’d be way richer. Like Seth. You have no idea what an asshole he’s turned into.” She shook her head and almost started telling him what a waste Seth was lately, but thought better of it. He’d be pissed about her not telling him earlier, and he’d start questioning whether she should be involved in this book at all. It was too late to go back on that, and besides, there wasn’t any danger involved in going to the opening party at Seth’s. Unless maybe Seth got fucked up and tripped over her. She almost laughed. Or OD’ed that night. Not so funny. Maybe things might get a little sketchy. But it was only one night of her life, and there would plenty of handlers around to make sure Seth would be on good behavior.

“At least Seth isn’t a pedophile,” Nils said.

“Neither is Jackson, for god’s sake!” Malone said.

“You know what? I don’t care,” Nils said. “The appearance…that’s all it takes. That’s enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s enough for me. It should be enough for you. You know where we are now. Are you really, actually willing to take that kind of chance? With Linda Lee? I’m thinking about it, now, and I can’t believe you’d even be wondering about this!”

She stared at him. “But there’s nothing proven!”

“No,” Nils said. “No. This is something you have to stay away from.”

“But you know Jackson!”

“I don’t, and neither do you anymore. We have to cut him off. Shit, just cut yourself off—it’s not like he cares about you. When has he ever gotten in touch with you? When has he ever done anything for you, or anyone else?”

She thought about the email.

“He’s just a fucking flake who got lucky! There were plenty more talented than he is, who didn’t get the same breaks. And maybe he’s not so lucky now. Look at me! You know this. Stay away from him. Keep him away from you and Linney. You know it’s right. You know it.”

She was sniffling now. “You aren’t making any sense,” she said.

“I’m the only one making sense here. You have to draw a line.”

“In the sand?” she said, furiously. “What am I supposed to do? Bury myself in the house and never come out? I don’t see a danger! He didn’t do anything! What are you so afraid of?”

He was silent. Maybe she would win. Then he straightened out of bench position and looked straight at her. “Cut that shit out, Mal. I’m serious. Don’t even start with me.”

She pulled back, a little afraid.

“You’ve got nothing to stand on with this. This is our child, up against some kind of bullshit college radio fantasy of yours.”

Her crying crossed into the place where she couldn’t control it. “I’m supposed to give up all my friends, all my life. I hate the people here. They talk to me like I’m the maid. I’m shooting bathrooms, and I ask for this one thing? I have to give up everything?”

He wasn’t hearing her. “Your whole world won’t go away if you drop one person, who’s not even your friend anyway.”

She kept crying.

“I’ve seen this happen before. You give everything over to some person or project or group. Everything you do goes to make them happy. You go all out to make them feel great, like they’re some kind of star. And then you come out of a project and they forget all about you. You should be glad you’re shooting bathrooms! At least you get paid for that, instead of treated like shit!”

She stopped crying, shocked. The last bit of her power had been erased. Her looks, her cool, her talent, her intellect, had gone, and now she felt the last prop slide out from under her. Whatever it had been that made her Malone, a person of substance and interest, was gone, and she was now a function, a wife, a mother, a daughter. Her jetties and sandbags couldn’t stand up to it. Her seawall had collapsed, she thought, and almost laughed.

And he kept on talking. “I’m asking for something completely reasonable. No, I’m telling you this is what you’re doing, because she’s my child, and I won’t let you put her in danger. You have to draw a line.”

Malone got up off the couch and walked upstairs to the bedroom. She came within a spare inch of punching a hole in the drywall or smashing the lamp. Her paranoia came to the rescue. Don’t give them any ammo, it said. They’ll take her away if they think you’re nuts. Don’t give them any reasons. This is the world you live in now. It’s not yours. You have to be smart. Hide. She breathed through it.

Nils came upstairs after her. He took her tears of rage for those of regret, and he held her and told her that of course she was a wonderful mother. He knew how careful she was about Linney, about everything she ate and drank and did with her, and even that she didn’t play with those soft plastic toys his crazy ass sisters were always sending him emails about. And that yeah, his sisters were crazy, but he’d prefer it if they didn’t go there right this minute, but if it would make her feel better, yes, they could be very annoying. She was just going to have to learn to ignore them, like he did.

“But what happens is…they’re the only people I see,” she said.

“You’ve been hanging out with your friends all the time,” he said.

That made her start crying again. “Lee will be back home soon. And Bebe might as well be just as far away. Everyone around in DC, the work people and all, they’re just like them. And it’s hard to ignore it if that’s the only thing you see and hear every day. Everyone talks to me like I’m an idiot. All I ever hear from anyone is how I’m doing it wrong. Or that I’m supposed to be afraid of everything. I need to be able to listen to my instincts. My instincts are good, too. But I’m getting so I can’t see things that are right in front of my face. I’m being drowned out.”

“Look,” Nils said. “We can try to find a way to get you more time to do some things you like to do. But you have to promise me it won’t be anything to do with Jackson.”

She sighed. Be smart, the voice said. Keep your secrets. “You said yourself I never see him anyway,” she said, by way of agreement.

He picked her up, which he could still easily do despite the 10 extra pounds she was carrying. “I know you don’t think you have a life anymore.”

As he put her down on the bed, she tried to protest that that wasn’t true, that she loved having Linney, that it was all the other people that—

“It’s OK,” he said. “I love you whether you have a life or not. I mean, look at me, I don’t have one either.”

He meant it as a joke, and they laughed, but she still felt like breaking something. Secret, she thought. Keep it to yourself.

The next day, Karen called asking if she wanted to join her and Kathy for a spa day. It was really helpful to pamper yourself when you had a high stress level, she said. Malone declined carefully, with a breezy smile in her voice—maybe in a few weeks when things calmed down at work, she said.

She went through the first two days of Linney’s daycare without talking to anyone apart from Nils and Linney. She spent every hour aching for her baby, worried, making plans for alternate routes across town if the city shut down, if the buildings exploded, if she were quarantined—byzantine spy thriller scenarios to try to fight off the reality she knew: If there were another attack, she would probably be buried in a building while waiting in an orderly line to exit and struggling to get a cell phone signal. No heroics permitted. She got up from the office computers only to pump; it was a close week for the magazine, the week of getting ready to go to press, and she had files of photos to correct, smooth, and prep for production.

She had started out being praised for her ability to capture reality; now she got paid to take away what was real and make what was left better looking. She had the patience to pick and pick away at an image until the corrections blended flawlessly. Her art-school training served her well, but she thought she might be happier if she didn’t understand the history and the theories. She could have simply made food look tastier and faces less distracting and taken a crafty pride in her work, instead of feeling like she was perpetrating a fraud.

But on Thursday, now officially her last working day of the week, she had gotten a PostIt, attached to an email about credentials.

Will you cover Dome Smokr? Harlin sz NO FREELANCER.

She decoded the note and wrote one of her own, leaving it stuck to the editor’s office chair. The Dome Smoker was an unintentionally—she was quite sure—homerotically named benefit event, one of the most popular and biggest benefits in the city. The foundation that Nils worked for always had a table—they could run about 25 grand—and some involvement. He spent months prepping for it, and he was only a small part of the picture. It was a bizarre throwback, a men’s-only night of steaks and Scotch and barely dressed waitresses and one star athlete per table, and it was that very weirdness for Washington that helped make it popular. They did allow women to cover and photograph it.

She actually wouldn’t mind taking the gig, because it would pay, and the event did raise a shit ton of money for all kinds of children’s programs. She had no idea what she was going to do about her own child, however. It wasn’t like she could bring her along. She thought of herself with Linney in the Snuggli, trying to take photos of some tech millionaire sandwiched between Redskins cheerleaders while Welcome to the Jungle blared over the sound system. At the same time, she couldn’t say no to a PostIt, especially one invoking the name of the publisher. She’d lose her job in no time.

“Call Kathy,” Nils said on the phone. “She owes us one.”

“But I don’t want to leave her with anyone at night. Maybe I could--“

“Call Kathy. You have to leave her at night sometime, with someone besides me.”

She was silent.

“Come on. It’ll be like a date night, sort of. She can come over to our place and leave the kids with Tom.”

“She hates coming into the city.”

“She bitches about it, but she likes it. I know this.”

He was right. Besides, with the extra money, she might actually end up netting about $50 dollars this week. Hitting the big time with the bathrooms, baby, she thought.

Friday after Achtung Baby! she almost caved in and got real coffee. She was going to have to slap herself in the face to stay awake through the Smoker. She settled for peppermint tea.

“This is supposed to help wake you up,” she said to Jessica, through a yawn, as they both sat, sipping at their lukewarm tea, with their babies latched on.

“Don’t count on it,” Jessica said. “You could maybe try getting some sleep sometime, umm?”

“I’m supposed to work tonight,” she said. “This is the first time I’m leaving Linney with someone at night.”

“Ohhhh. Have enough people told you not to worry and you’re making too big a thing out of it? Cause I won’t.”

“It’s my husband’s sister. I’m not really worried,” she lied. “But I really don’t want to get dressed up and go out. I’m taking photos at a dinner, a society kind of thing. Hey—I got the clear shower curtain. It worked, I couldn’t believe it.” Linney had taken to crying when Malone was in the shower, and Jessica had suggested she get a clear shower curtain and bring Linney in in her carrier and set her on the bathroom floor where the baby could see her.

“Society thing?”

“Oh, it’s awful, it’s just a bunch of old dudes smoking cigars,” Malone said. “We should go outside next week, now that it’s getting warmer.”

“There’s a really good park a block from here,” Jessica said. “I’ve been scoping them out. It’s funny how you don’t see things like that until you need them. I see temples, dance studios, and natural food stores, and now playgrounds. I never see liquor stores, or aquarium stores, or tennis courts. I truly do not see them. What makes it like that? Do you see everything? Like a musician, you know, they can tell if something’s out of tune. I mean, I can tell if something’s real dreck, but just a little out of tune, I can’t hear it.”

Malone smiled. “I see things, but I don’t always recognize them,” she said. “I mean, I get their shape, and how they relate to what’s around them, but their function is what I miss. Like, there was this pine forest, back where I went to school? In Florida, north Florida. And I was taking pictures there, and the trees were really thick, but in the center of this one grove there was an old car, some car from the 60s. I got some good photos, and they were really popular, everyone liked them and I sold a couple, but the thing is, people would always ask me: How did that car get out there? And What kind of car is that? And, Oh, I had one like that way back when!

“But it never occurred to me to think of it as a car, really. I sort of thought of it as a rock or something. A shape, I don’t know. And I wondered if I was stupid, or not curious enough, for not wondering about those kinds of things. I just get caught up in how things look and I don’t think about what they might mean to other people.”

Linney was done. Malone lifted her up to burp her. Hanging out talking like this, it was like being in college again. As if there were all the time in the world. “Time is all skewed now, too,” Malone said.

Jessica got it. “Lots of people with babies say that,” she said. “It seems endless while it’s going on. I can sit and watch him wave his hand around for an hour and it’s gone—but when I’m waiting for him to fall asleep, it’s an eternity.”

Malone began tucking Linney back into the carseat shell. “Why can’t we live in one of those damn places where you get a year off,” she said. “I have to get home and wash my hair. Thanks again about the shower curtain.”

She sighed as she drove home. She’d have to clean up a little. Kathy’s place always looked like a show house. She thought about taking half a Vicodin for the night, just to get through it, and saw right away where that kind of thing could lead, and put the thought aside. The whole sequence, desire and denial, went through her head as simply and quickly as a fragment of music, a song she used to know, inconsequential, a little nagging, and gone.

Chapter 11

The Dome Smoker started out duller and more nervewracking than she had feared. After a half-hour of kneeling and shooting grip-and-grins, she had actually started feeling sorry for Michael Jordan. He should be excused from ever paying taxes again for this kind of charity work, she thought; grown men were actually shaking with awe when they went up to him.

Not that she was doing much better. She was shaking from exhaustion. Getting searched and having to dismantle her entire gear bag had been bad enough and it had almost made her late.

Everyone was pissed about the search lines, so there was much commiserating and exchange of horror stories. Malone was pretty sure that if she told her stories, she’d be a runner-up. After the baby was born, she’d twice taken a plane instead of driving to see her mother, because Nils didn’t want her alone in the car that long, in her typical almost-falling-asleep state. In each puddle-jumper plane trip to Chattanooga, she couldn’t believe the number of times she’d had to detach her child from the sling, the Snugli, and, in one memorable instance, her breast, to stand for a search or the benediction of the x-ray wand, to defend the contents of bottles (they’d at least never made her sip them), or explain where she was going and why. And all for an hour-long visit with someone who was not her mother anymore, but beautiful pale shell who smiled at “that beautiful little boy” and told her the story of St. Bernadette.

In the stunned postpartum state, she’d simply accepted it all as part of her new reality, as if searches and questioning and the invasion of the bodies of loved ones by alien forces were inconveniences on a par with the breast pump and night wakings. She would simply have to accommodate, and she did; it was as if she’d always known life would be like this, or she was recovering habits from way back. She knew she was prone to hiding her thoughts, to not revealing anything that could be used against her. But maybe she was just being paranoid. That was a phrase that ought to come at the end of any number of thoughts or actions nowadays, sort of like the “paid for by the committee to elect x” notice that came at the end of campaign messages. Or “your milage may vary.”

The only women there were working—she and a few other photographers and writers, and the cheerleaders, waitresses, singers and models hired to decorate the party. The place was so hazed with cigar smoke it made her dizzy, and Harlan was on a high. He had grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, laughing and cawing like an old crow: “You one of mine? You one of mine? Do a good job tonight, or I’ll fire you! Ha ha ha!” He turned to the tuxedoed stick by his side and gave him an arm punch. “I’m gonna fire em all and sell the whole thing to Bill Regardie! Ha ha ha!”

She anticipated an interesting week at the office ahead, with Harlan taking the express mood elevator to the manic penthouse. Being part-time had its advantages. She’d have to hide out shooting master bathrooms until he either crashed or got sent out of town on a “bass fishing trip.” It was too bad, really, she thought, after the media had been shooed from the Jordan VIP area and she followed him around, shooting as he embraced random buddies. He was a handsome, charismatic guy, really. You’d think he was the next Clinton if you only saw him for five minutes, then he’d scare the shit out of you.

She rubbed at her shoulder—he’d actually left a mark. She was wearing an old sleeveless black beaded top with an empire waist. It showed off her temporarily generous boobs while keeping her stomach hidden. She’d let a pair of black bootcut stretch jeans pretend to be evening pants and gotten away with it in the dimly lit ballroom. She had a vintage tuxedo jacket she used to wear when she had to shoot things like this, but she hadn’t shrunk quite enough for it to fit her yet.

She spotted Harlan manhandling a blonde woman and pushed and scooted her way toward him, to try to avert an incident, or at least photograph it. “Why don’t you come back to work so I can fire you!” Harlan was saying, giving her a few shakes, before Malone recognized the object of his torture. It was Alexis Templeton, who had moved on from Capital Life to the big time—Celeb magazine, a national weekly that pretended it wasn’t a tabloid, mostly by running an article about a disabled child or a recovering addict in each issue. The Magnolia guys had brought her up to DC from a little paper they had in Macon, and in a year she’d written two very good articles on women in the capital, and a few short profiles of cave dwellers. A combination of a luminous fragility and Southern sorority connections seemed to work well for her. Harlan had then authorized her to take a year’s leave so she could write a memoir of her 24-some years on earth. “Summer’s Glow Is Gone,” was a southern gothic about anorexia and finding out her fiancé was gay (Andy always accidentally-on-purpose referred to it as “Suddenly, Last Summer”). It had brought her fame-for-DC and the job with Celeb, in Los Angeles, and an open-invitation gig as a talking head whenever the subjects of eating disorders or gay boyfriends came up.

Harlan got distracted by something shiny and pinballed across the room as Malone walked up. “Hey,” she said to Alexis.

“Oh, how are you,” Alexis said, her eyes darting around and toward Malone’s chest. Malone had no illusions—Alexis did remember her, but not her name, and she was trying to get a look at her credential.

“Malone,” Malone said, flipping her credential around to face Alexis briefly, then flipping it backwards again, so people couldn’t see she was “only” with Capital Life. “Need any photos? Harlan fired me a few minutes ago, so I’m free.”

“I’m sorry I forgot your name,” Alexis said, smiling weakly and giving her a shoulder hug. “I’m so jet-lagged.”

“I was wondering what you were doing here,” Malone said. “You didn’t come in just for this?”

“Oh, no,” Alexis said. “There was a hearing.” It was on insurance coverage for eating disorders, she explained, and a young actress, whose work playing a young girl in a mental hospital apparently qualified her to speak on the subject, had come to testify.

“That sounds interesting,” Malone said. She lifted her camera and randomly shot at a table off to the side, where a white-haired man in a tux and bolo tie was toasting a tequila shot with a very young, very good-looking young man. They were so far back from the VIP area, though, that he might not be anyone important, but the good looks of both of them put them as not being from DC, so it didn’t hurt to get a shot.

“So you’re getting pretty good stuff to do?” Malone asked. “It’s hard to tell, the way they lump you all’s bylines up.”

“Yeah, it’s mostly body after baby. They’re just obsessed with body after baby out there. How soon will she get her body back? What kind of diet is she on?”

Malone smiled. “I had a baby six months ago, and I don’t have mine back yet,” she said.

“Oh, but you look good!” Alexis said. “You’re just naturally skinny.”

“I’m more worried about whether I’ll ever sleep again,” Malone lied, to get off the subject. That was pure evil on the part of Celeb to put that poor girl on such a beat, she thought. Then she eyed the bolo-tie and handsome-boy couple again. They were leaning closer together, talking confidentially.

“Looks like someone might be getting his dome smoked tonight,” she said, only half realizing she’d said it aloud.

“Who? You mean him? You think—“

Malone lifted her camera and shot a few more as bolo-tie let his hand linger and drift over the other man’s butt.

“Duh,” Malone said. “Could see that one a mile away.”

“Oh, well,” Alexis said. “With my record…”

Malone remembered the topic of the memoir and wanted to take back what she’d said immediately. Two insensitive blunders in a row—she shouldn’t be allowed out. But at the same time, it was hard to believe this girl would be so insecure she would think Malone was making fun of her. “Oh, no, no way, I didn’t mean that!” she said. “Look. Your book was fantastic, you know. You’re in LA already. And you’re what, 26?”

Alexis nodded and smiled. “They want me to do online work now.”

“That’s great! You’ve got tons of things ahead,” Malone said, then stopped when she heard herself, and tried again. “There’s so much more than body after baby for someone with your talent. You’ll see.” She felt idiotic taking an avuncular tone with someone who was obviously so much more successful than she was, but Alexis seemed to like it. She reached out and hugged the young woman’s shoulders in a sort of coach-y way. Nils suddenly surfaced in front of them, his eyes lighting up at the sight of the women hugging. She wondered if this was how he felt, trying to encourage athletes, many of whom could buy and sell him five times over, but who were afraid of looking foolish in front of a bunch of policy wonks.

“Do you remember my husband, Nils? He’s with the Uplift Foundation,” Malone made introductions. As they said hello, she took a few more photos of the May-December couple. She nudged Nils: “Hey, do you know who that is?”

“Who?” he said, staring into the crowd.

“Don’t look!” she said, at the same time as Alexis said, “Oh, that’s Owen Sinclair. He’s from LA, too—“

“Oh, fuck me,” Malone said, as she saw him get up and head toward them, looking like he was off to shoot a coyote. “Don’t tell him I’m with Cap Life. He hates Harlan. Those two about like to rip each other’s throats out.”

She faked a girly smile after this, Alexis following suit, so they could look like they’d been having social talk.

Sinclair came up close and peered at Alexis’ credential. “Celeb? Far from home, aren’t you?”

“I could say the same for you, Senator Sinclair,” she said, with as little flirtation or depth as a Boy Scout reciting the pledge.

“Nils Edinger,” Nils said, extending his hand, to take the heat off Malone. “Uplift Foundation.”

“This is your shindig, isn’t it? Where’s Jordan?” Sinclair asked, craning his head toward the front of the room.

“Working the room, trying to get some votes,” he said. Sinclair went with the joke. “How come you’re looking for him? Want him to come to LA and make another movie?”

“I have as little as possible to do with movies,” Sinclair said. “We leave that to the Hollywood liberals. I’m after something bigger than that. Here,” he said, hugging Nils’ shoulder, “take our picture, Miss Celeb.”

She tried not to laugh out loud. This asshole was actually hitting on Nils. He was either drunk or as crazy as Harlan. She ought to put them together and see if they could get a cage match to end the evening. But as she raised her camera, the strap got caught in her credential, and she had to pause to untangle things.

The senator, posing, suddenly lost his smile. He dropped his arm from Nils’ shoulder and reached out for her. “Don’t you dare put my picture in that piece of shit,” he hissed. “Give me the film.”

She pretended to be shocked and flustered. “But—um--it’s not film. It’s, like, digital.” She turned big eyes to Nils and Alexis for help.

“Oh, no, sir, she’s working for me right now,” Alexis said. “These photos are for Celeb, not Cap Life. Really, sir, there’s just a misunderstanding about the credential.”

Sinclair looked directly into her eyes, furious. Then it was as if something had turned off inside him. He was suddenly cold and blank. “OK. I’ll be in touch.”

He walked away from them toward the VIP section.

“That was weird,” Alexis said. “Did anyone else think that was weird?”

“Talk about Hollywood,” said Malone. “What a diva.”

Nils hugged her. “He just realized all the sudden that he was drunk. He almost did something stupid. Good thing, too. I don’t need that. It’s not like he ever gives up a dime to anyone.”

He wasn’t worried, she could see. The power tonight rested with the ones who were going to give money, not the ones looking for it.

“What’s his deal?” Malone said.

Nils shook his head. “There’s a couple of them like that, they think having a poker game and a hot tub means they can be Charlie Wilson or something. But Sinclair doesn’t have the brains. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong party.”

“He looks the part,” Malone said.

“Yeah, but he doesn’t give a damn about anything but himself, his people, his company.” Nils shrugged. “You saw. No charisma, no nothing.”

“Paranoia and self-preservation are two entire different animals,” Malone said. “I’d call that the former. You should keep an eye on him,” she said to Alexis. “You know something weird? Seth—“ she stopped talking. She didn’t want to give away the tidbit she’d brought Andy, about the house.

“Seth Tower? What about him?”

“Oh—he does some business with him, that’s all. A tech thing.”

“Oh, that’s right! You know Seth Tower, I remember who you are, now!” Alexis said, as Malone winced. “Did you go out with him? I mean I remembered you, but I didn’t remember who you really were. Oh my god. You know Jackson Hill from Seawall. Oh my god. What is going on with that?” Alexis was beside herself.

Nils looked professionally bland and shook his head in a way that could be construed as tsking over the whole mess, but taking no allegiances.

“I don’t know,” Malone said, following his lead. “I mean of course, it can’t be true. It has to be some big horrible thing where someone hacked his email. I heard he’s suing someone, but I don’t know anything more than that.”

“Who said he’s suing someone?” Alexis asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s just a horrible thing. God, this music. It’s been making me cringe all night. I feel like my head is retracting like a turtle. Why are they so stuck in the 80s?”

“Look who’s talking,” Nils said, half a dig, half to restore some lightness.

“You bitch,” she said to him, laughing. “Go get that Senator Sinclair and go home with him. He likes em big.” She turned to Alexis. “You should keep an eye on him, really.”

She saw Alexis doing just that, staring across the room, pointedly casual and sharp at once.

Chapter 12

Two nights out in a row, Malone thought, staring into the dregs of a watery vodka tonic. Though last night didn’t count, it being work, she thought, despite Nils trying to pass it off as a date night. And a Saturday night out at that. Vicodin, weed, coke, shots of tequila; the alternatives floated through her mind and on and gone; no action required. It was all under control. A man in a bright blue clown wig and a smoking jacket was singing karaoke to Styx’ “Babe.”

“The big blue ox,” Bebe muttered into her ear.

“Time for Me to Fly?” Malone said, trying to guess what Bebe was going to sing. Bebe had to do a trend piece, so she’d asked her and Lee to come along to a place RahnJahn was running a costume karaoke night. With their recent fights fresh in his mind, Nils had practically shoved her out the door, determined that she would get out and have some fun with her own tribe if it killed her.

The singers had to wear costumes provided by the bar, with the song list heavily weighted to '70s lite and '80s hair-band ballads. Lee had already torn the place up wearing a hard hat and a Mama Cass caftan and singing “Delta Dawn.” Malone had met a somewhat less enthusiastic reaction in a cheerleader outfit, doing a Shonen Knife-style “Strawberry Letter 22.” RahnJahn, providing stripper-bar style MC commentary, had seen her offstage with a kind “domo arigato.”

“Journey,” she said, trying again.

“You know my fucking specialty,” Bebe said. She was up next, and had on a studded plastic-leather jacket and a feather boa, which she twirled idly. “The Village People gave up a lot so we could have this experience. I expect you to honor that, and you go fucking bringing up Journey. You have no appreciation for sacrifice. What’s at stake here.”

“You’re buying the drinks,” Malone said. “You should get combat pay for this shit.”

“I’m up!” Bebe said, and weaved her way up to the stage.

“You certainly are,” Malone said, toasting her with the last ice cubes. She knew full well what Bebe was going to perform. It was the only thing she ever performed in public, but it was always a little different. It had been a standard on the House of Beef canned music, and she’d come up with variations for years, based on whatever was going down at the time.

“She’s getting that acoustically sincere look up there,” Malone said to Lee.

“I taught her how to do that,” Lee said.

Jesus blows up the boom all day

Sits on the porch swing, swattin at flies

She used a white-girl blues slur, and laid on the expressive wincing eyebrow action. It was calibrated to make people think she was serious.

And Jesus, he wants to grow a penis

Leave leave it far behind

Put up the loom

I’m going sailing

While Levon, Levon’s shootin dice

He was born a pompatus of love on a Christmas Day--

Malone looked around and was happy to see that the performance appeared to be making some people uncomfortable. Bebe would be happy.

“Give it up for Brrrrrrandi!” RahnJahn announced, trying to drum up applause as Bebe walked off the stage. “You’re a fiiiine girl, girl.”

Bebe came back to the table after dropping the jacket and boa at the costume table. “Jesus, those things are hot,” she said, dabbing at her neck with a napkin.

“Drinks,” Malone said, and got up and went to the bar.

On her way back, she saw Bebe and Lee, huddled together, heading for the back and the bar. She caught them and followed.

“You up for this?” she asked, handing Bebe a drink.

“Fuck,” Bebe said, her phone in one hand, her purse strap and drink in the other. “I have to work. I mean besides doing this.”

“What happened?” Malone said. She caught herself before saying anything out loud about whether someone else got busted for kiddie porn.

“They found that guy,” Bebe said. “That boy. They found a body, and it’s him.”

“The missing kid, the one in the band,” Lee said. “You remember.”

“Oh,” Malone said.

“Over on the Virginia side. Below Great Falls,” Bebe said. “They don’t know how it happened yet.”

She looked down at her phone, then handed Malone her drink and started going through her purse. “They want me to get some comments from local music people. Because he was in the band and all.”

“Talk to RahnJohn,” Lee said.

“I don’t want to,” Bebe said. “But yeah.”

Malone felt a stab of panic. She put her untouched drink down on the bar. “You can take this,” she said vaguely to Lee. “I have to go now.”

Lee hugged her, hard. “Are you sure you’re OK?” Malone nodded. “Call me later?” Malone nodded again.

She somehow got the bulky Volvo out of the tiny parking space, though she was shaking. Lee and Bebe thought they knew, thought they got it: She would be upset because someday she was likely to get a call like that about her brother, and she didn’t know whether the prospect was welcome or it was better never knowing.

The few people who knew about her brother and knew her well would be kind. The ones who knew about it but didn’t know her tried to be kind, but there was something behind their flaccid “concern” that implied Malone herself wasn’t concerned enough. People didn’t understand that you couldn’t just send out the cops or the dogs or whatever forces they expected her to rally. You couldn’t chase down a grown man who chose to vanish, whatever disorder this doctor or that one had labeled him with. It was his choice. She chose to respect it. And that made her suspect.

The Oscar Wilde line about “to lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness” could still make her smile. What does it look like to lose everyone? It must look like you don’t have a care in the world.

The bit of anger growing in her steadied her. She was jealous, in a way. After all, the people who loved that boy had gone through only a few months of not knowing. They had their answers long before all the “missing” posters had been torn off the walls, leaving only shredded bits behind.

Bebe did not want to talk about the dead boy. She told Malone that first thing, when she called Monday. Malone was at work, trying to line up some “outdoor kitchens” to shoot for a special section in August. It promised to be lucrative for the magazine, and somewhat less so for her, but how she was going to get bright and summery shots at this stage she didn’t know. The outdoors were silver and spare green with late-April rain; daffodils and barbecues didn’t work so well together.

She’d yesterday barely getting off the couch. Even Nils had blown off his workout. They’d read, surfed sports channels, taken turns playing with Linney. The week had worn them both out; they felt old. Malone wasn’t looking forward to going out again Thursday night—especially since the gig was at Seth’s house, for the promotional party for the book. She wanted a few more weeks time, to get her hair done and get a new stomach. Maybe she could wear the same thing she’d worn to the Dome Smoker. Maybe with all the other people around, Seth would have other people to pick at.

And now Bebe wanted to talk about going out again, to some place she had to do a story on. She held the phone away from her mouth as she yawned. Just two more hours until she could go pick up Linney.

“So it’s a bar, but you can bring babies,” Bebe was saying. “They have a special stroller moms happy hour. I guess I mean parents happy hour. You want to go? The place is totally fucking hipster. We can go and laugh at them. You can go undercover pretending to be hipster mom.”

“I am so exhausted,” Malone said. “I don’t think Nils would go for it, me taking the baby to a bar.”

“It’s what people are doing now!” said Bebe. “What is he, a fucking Mormon? I always knew he was a secret Mormon. All those North Dakota people are Mormons, out there being all pioneer and polygamous and shit.”

“Minnesota,” Malone said, cutting and pasting another url onto her source list. Patio Wonderland. That sounded promising. “And they’re Lutheran.”

“Whatever. Tell him to become a Catholic so you can at least have a cocktail once in a while.”

Bebe sounded like she had had one herself, Malone thought. “Are you at work?”

“Busted. No, I went out to lunch. Carlo’s in town.”

Carlo was a reporter from the last paper where Bebe had worked. And he was married.

“Oh,” Malone said.

“Oh, yes. No, but I have to work tonight is why I wasn’t working today. I’m resting up. I’m so pissed off. It’s another fucking feature, on this group that does like—have you ever heard of the Dances of Universal Peace?”

“Is that a band?”

“No, it’s a cult. No, not really. It’s these people, they think by doing these sort of super-slow hippie square-dances they can bring peace and love and Dick Cheney’ll turn into Santa Claus.”

“Beautiful. Does it work?”

“What do you think?”

“I think they’re fucking undercover Mormons,” Malone said. Grilling Universe. That sounded scary. She pasted the information into her file.

“It’s like shape note singing, or kickball. Raising chickens. All those things hipsters are doing because it makes them feel authentic. Wilco. Authentic reconstructed sincere folk music.”

“Don’t you be saying that too loud.”

“I know. I’ll probably have to move to Chicago if I ever want to actually write about music again. Except if there’s even one job left, it’ll go to someone in his 20s.”

Malone sighed. “How about Natalie Merchant doing ‘Seasons in the Sun’?”

“It’s good, but it’s really too obvious. But you know what I mean. It’s a completely transparent reaction to the attacks. Let’s go back to the old days, when things were real. Except we’ll have our real realness with the Internet and plumbing and antibiotics. We’ll have alternative realness. Which came first, the alternative chicken or the alternative egg?”

“The alternative hash browns,” Malone said. She was hungry. As always. Nursing meant being hungry and thirsty every second. But she was still dropping weight without even trying.

“That’s what you get at the Waffle House. A hash brown three-way. But like with Carlo today—“

“You had a three-way?” she asked, only too late seeing an intern passing by gaping at her. “Hash browns!” she said. “Hash browns three way!” Made it worse. Now she just sounded insane. Well, it was what the magazine was known for.

“In his dreams. But he kept talking about how ‘authentic’ and ‘alternative’ Baltimore is, and we’re at the Owl Bar, which with the exception of the stained glass could be a Marriott, for fuck’s sake. But what’s real? What’s honest? He’s the last one who would know.”

“Then why see him.”

“You know why,” she sighed. “I don’t need a real relationship. And it doesn’t concern me what degree of authenticity he might have. All that matters to me is that I’m honest with myself. I know what I’m doing. What I’m talking about—what he cultivates, what the hipsters do, the whole thing—it’s creating the illusion of honesty. An authenticity simulcrum. You know how you do that?”

“How?” Malone said. Barbecue World… and More! She cut and pasted. What more could there possibly be? she wondered.

“You withhold,” Bebe said. “Being inarticulate means you’re not being some kind of intellectual trying to manipulate everyone. Don’t show anyone what you know. Don’t use too many instruments, no production. The more you hold back, the more honest you appear.”

“Appear,” Malone said.

“Yeah. You get it. And this new crop, in music, you know, they were taught by the master, right? Who never lets two intelligible words come out of his mouth anymore?”

“Does it always have to come down to Jackson?”

“No, it always comes down to Elvis. OK, I have to catch a shower before I go do the Dances of Uni-fucking-versal Peace. Lee said she can drive us all to Seth’s Thursday, OK?”

“Our designated driver. All right.”

“I told her we’d dress up like her bodyguards.”

“Seth won’t recognize us anyway. Later.”

Chapter 13

“Sly Stone does not deserve this,” Malone said, with what was probably more precision than necessary, to Bebe, as they sank side-by-side into the couch in Seth’s basement chamber. She felt as if she’d been staring at the ugly chair rail, while pretending to watch the slide show above it, for an hour, but it had only been through the duration of the third gin-and-tonic, which was more like 40 minutes.

She had to pace herself. The first had gone down quickly as they watched Seth’s “acoustic set,” under the big party tent in the yard. He’d shambled his way through a couple of his own songs, muffing a verse of “Incredible Time,” and then attempted a couple covers—a half-assed “Sloop John B” and then a Pete Marshall obscurity. All the frosted sweetness of Pete’s song had dissolved under Seth’s gloomy assault. He’d even managed to slush up the structure. Bebe had been furious, and Malone couldn’t stop sipping at her drink to try to hide what she was thinking. She’d come out of it with an empty glass, even the ice cubes chewed and gone.

But the worst part was all the mutters of “Jackson” Malone kept hearing whenever they pushed by a knot of people. They should have known everyone there, she thought. But no one involved in Brashton or even in the book was there. Instead, it was a sausage festival, nothing but boys, mostly from the Hill or dot-commers. The few people she talked to told her they were from Texas or Orange County (as their wingmen sneered and snickered). “He should have just had this thing in Fairfax,” Bebe had muttered to her. “It’s the pop-collar mafia.”

Seth had surrendered the stage to a DJ doing mashups, whose work was getting piped through the house, too loud everywhere but here. The current sonic adventure combined “Hot Fun in the Summertime” with “Give It Away” by the Chilis.

“Everything Rick Rubin touches sounds like it went through the Starbucks coffee roaster,” Bebe said. The slide show on the giant TV above them stopped, backed up, froze, and showed the same slide again, a blurry stage dive. It had been malfunctioning steadily since they’d sat down, and just moments after one of the Texans had proclaimed how far Seth was ahead of his time in home theaters and security technology. He’s got them all thinking he’s freaking Steve Case, Malone thought. And his shit works just about as well.

“Let it mellow,” she said to Bebe. “So when someone’s got a crush on you, and you keep leading him on even though you both know nothing will come of it, and you like him but you don’t like like him—“

“Jesus, what did you just say, like like? Are you like in second grade?”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” Malone said. “I’m too tired to be complex. So is it wrong?”

“No,” Bebe said. “If he doesn’t love it, he can leave. Why is it your responsibility to manage his emotions? You do it with Nils, too. Don’t make Nils mad, don’t get Nils upset,” she said in a whiny girly voice. “When anyone can see he’s the one who’s terrified you’ll get pissed and walk.”

“I don’t know where you get that,” Malone said, looking at her drink, to avoid looking at the photos or the chair rail. “Plus, I’ve gotten plenty pissed, and I’m not walking anywhere. And if I left, he’d be free to go off with a nice tall blonde lawyer. Skinny. Who knows how to clean house.”

Bebe shook her head. “You’re wrong,” she said. “You’ll see. Plus, she’d pay someone else to clean. Let’s go out under the tent. I need to be in some photos. Why don’t you take some?”

“Fuck that,” Malone said. “Unlike you, I still have a shred of journalistic integrity. I don’t shoot when I’m part of the story.”

“Lazy ass.”

“I’m actually shooting this place next week, I think,” she said, looking around her as they went up the stairs from the basement. “It’s gonna be hard to make anything of it.”

“Just shoot the bathrooms,” Bebe said.

“I love limestone tile. It’s so cool against my face when I pass out on the bathroom floor,” Malone said, using her boy’s voice to sound like a drugged-out Seth. They were squeezing past a clump of artfully scrubby looking guys to get to the tent on the lawn where the main party activity was going on. Two of them overheard her and gave her a strange look. She looked back and tried not to stumble. Stupid heels. There was a not-too-obvious ripple among the crowd as the two women walked through. There it was again—the slap-and-hiss of his name: “Jackson.” “Jackson Hill.” “Sicko.” “What was up with that?” And then, the new mantra, the words she was already tired of hearing and overhearing: "If you didn't do anything wrong, you shouldn't have anything to worry about."

“This is why,” Bebe sighed, planting herself in line for the bar. “This is why I wasn’t so hot on this. Where the hell is Lee, anyway?”

“Why did I mention bathroom?” Malone said. “I’ll be back.”

She turned away, and rather than pushing back through the gantlet between the tent and the French doors at the back of the house, she walked toward the side, intending to take the long way around and come in the front door. The wet grass soaked her shoes as she stumbled a little on the stony, rooty ground, and she shivered despite the tuxedo jacket. It had miraculously begun to fit again—not perfectly, but OK. She must be getting back to her normal size somehow.

Spotlights set off by her movement seemed to blaze at her every step. That Seth and his security fetish. She stepped a little unsteadily, half-worried she’d set off some kind of trip line that would bring out sirens, dogs, bodyguards. In front of her now were cars lining the circular drive and a few figures on the front portico. You couldn’t call it a porch, she thought. Or a stoop. A stoopico. She snickered to herself a little, then, as she walked between blinding spotlights, slowed down as she realized who the people were. Found Lee, she thought. She was out here, talking to Seth.

“It’s too late now. I can’t change any of it,” he was saying, whining, almost crying. “I can’t take any of it back. You don’t understand. You’ve never had it this bad, so much shit happening to you. Even when it was bad, everyone was on your side.”

“But I have felt like that,” Lee said, kind, sympathetic, soft. “It just feels like it’s the worst that could ever be. But feelings aren’t things.”

“Huh. Money’s a thing. Having people ripping off everything you’ve got, that’s a thing!” He flung his arms out like Bono doing his patented Christ-on-the-cross move. Patent, Malone thought drunkenly. You violated Bono's patent. That’s funny.

“First the government tried to take everything, and now these other guys are after me! And then that guy in there talking about poor Jackson, being so misunderstood? What the fuck! What about me, who’s been catching shit for years, and I never did anything wrong. All I did was state my beliefs. I just live my beliefs. But because I don’t do concerts for the whales they all come after me.” He swayed and windmilled some more. “He even managed to fuck this up, you know? It’s like he just reached in, like he didn’t even have to say a word, and just fucked up this whole thing, too. He has to cockblock every last thing I do! It just never fucking stops! You never had this kind of persecution. It is persecution!”

She tried to be extra noisy on the gravel as she walked toward them. Seth almost fell as he started at the sound.

“What the fuck!” he yelled at her. “What the fuck—were you sneaking up on me?”

She caught the fear on Lee’s face and that, along with too much experience with dealing with unreasonable men under the influence, showed her how to play it.

She laughed sweetly and slipped an arm around him, saying: “This place is so huge I got lost. Maybe me and Lee’ll come live here and you won’t even know it,” she said, letting herself sound drunk, feeling him calming and his control restoring itself. “We can all have our own rooms. Two rooms. We’ll just bake a cake for you once in a while and leave it in one of the rooms for you,” she said.

“What’s your favorite cake?” Lee said, slipping her arm around his other side. “I know he won’t eat no carrot cake.”

“Chocolate,” Seth slurred, leaning on them both as they walked him back into the house. “Chocolate cake is freedom cake,” he said. She could feel how strong he still was, underneath the long-sleeve surfer shirt and the drooping jeans. He smelled like bourbon, on top of that that sweet dusty smell opiates give a body. She looked over at Lee and saw that she looked old, suddenly. It wasn’t just the bright lights of the big pretentious chandelier in the foyer. It was worse than she’d thought at first sight. Just like Seth.

“Freedom cake. That’s a song,” Lee said. “You gonna write it for us?”

“You take it,” he said. “I don’t write songs no more.”

Chapter 14

She made it through the morning in that grace period between having the drinks wear off and having the hangover set in. She was even singing a bit as she got Linney ready for the day, packed the bottles and the spare romper and the pump and drove in, getting her settled at day care. It was during the drive downtown to work, with “Dead Finks Don’t Talk” playing on the CD player, that she began to feel a little nauseated, but she put it down to Eno. She stopped at the vendor outside the Cap Life building for an extra-salt pretzel and a Coca-Cola—this once wouldn’t hurt—her never-fail cure. It helped her stomach, but not her head. She dropped off the bag with her gear and her pump in photo and went to see Andy, who always had Tylenol.

“I’ve got something for you,” he said, not looking up, as usual.

“Good, I need something,” she said, and actually walked in and sat down on a grungy plastic chair leftover from a long-lost conference room set. “Tylenol,” she said, sipping at her coke through the straw.

He looked up then, said “hmm,” and opened his drawer and handed her a giant bottle with a generic label. “Leave me some.”

“OK,” she said, pulling at the childproof cap. “Fuck. What’s up?” She was too tired and ill to monitor her language.

“Your guy Seth’s in trouble,” he said.

“Tell me about it. You should have seen him last night. He couldn’t play ‘Stepping Stone’ without fucking it up.”

“The Monkees actually had pretty sophisticated musicianship, if you count the session players,” Andy said. “But this is major. It’s with his pal Sinclair. The real estate’s not right.”

“What do you mean?”

“The place isn’t worth anything near what he paid for it,” Andy said, handing her something in print that she couldn’t quite focus on.

“We knew that. Everyone’s paying too much now. What’s the deal?”

“There’s too much by bubble standards, and then there’s too much by earthling standards. Those prices are from Mars.”

“I’m not—“ Malone shook her head.

“Everybody pays Sinclair more than what his places are worth. He’s had a really lucky year with his real estate investments. More lucky than any mortal, or certainly any Senator, could ever hope to be. Look—” Andy leaned over and pointed to the papers. Her Coke cup dripped a blot of condensation on one of the tables.

Andy sighed and took the papers away from her. “This is major, Malone.”

“Sorry,” she said.

“It’s not a granite countertop.”

“I get it,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m listening.”

“Seth, two guys in digital music, three in some kind of software shell company—they all paid too much. Two homes in LA, condos in San Diego, and a ranch—hah—in the Mojave. Plus one defense tech contractor. A place at Laguna Beach. That’s the one that’s going to kill him,” Andy said, more to himself. “That’s the one. He might have made it if he’d stuck to his knitting, but no one’s going to overlook defense, even now.”

“It’s not a granite countertop,” Malone said softly. “No, it is not. They’re not buying real estate. They’re buying him.” She reached out for the papers again. She felt some excitement through the fog. Andy’s hands were even shaking a little, it looked like. A question—why would Seth do it?—bubbled up, but she wanted to check out the rest, first.

“I thought for sure it would be something about that company,” she said, to stall, to try to figure out what to do next. “Or they’d catch him on C-SPAN punching somebody on the floor. I didn’t see this one at all. I’m just thinking, so what, it’s the bubble, big deal. You really are too fucking good for this place.”

He pretended not to hear the admiration. “Everyone was watching the company. Everybody’s been waiting for that one to go down. It’s like a baby Enron. It’s bound to fold. So they were watching that, and they didn’t see this.” He jiggled his leg nervously. “I’ve been wondering if anyone has this yet.”

“You’d have heard. Right?”

He shrugged. “Depends. I checked around. I’d have heard it probably if it were press, or even a blog. But some other kind of investigation, probably not.”

She sat for a moment. “What happens now?”

Andy shook his head. “Capital Life is a monthly. It’s a gossipy little lifestyle monthly,” he said. “This isn’t a granite countertop. Nor is it best bagels, nor 50 romantic getaways.”

“James—he goes a little deeper sometimes. He’d have our backs. I mean, this is simple, it’s follow the money, it’s obvious.”

“It’s Harlan I don’t know about.”

“He hates Sinclair.”

“Yeah, but he’s a Republican all the same. I don’t know.”

They were silent for a while. She had to ask. “You didn’t give it to … anyone?”

He snorted and shook his head. “You really don’t know me, do you?”

That was cutting a little too close. “So—“ she spread her hands. “We’ve got it. What do we do with it?”

“We take it to the boys,” he said. “Harlan. Ideally, he’d find a way to get the basics out there, fast, and someone else takes it and runs with it. They’ll still have to credit Cap Life anytime anyone follows it. That’s what I’ll try to steer them toward. What will actually happen depends on how wound up Harlan happens to be at this point.”

“So let’s go,” Malone said, pulling herself out of the chair. The pounding lump in her head followed her up like the floor of a lurching elevator. She grabbed at her Coke.

“Don’t bring that. He’s picky about what comes into his office.”

“Thanks. I’ve never known the rules for the inner sanctum,” she muttered as she followed Andy down the hall.

“Friday afternoon release,” Harlan said, bouncing up on his toes, his hands in his pockets. “Why couldn’t you two come up with this on a Monday?”

“Burial ground,” said James. It was conventional wisdom that if you wanted to diminish a story, you released it for Saturday—so much so that the current administration had made a sort of art form out of the destined-for-burial release. But conventional wisdom didn’t cover the new kind of news cycle, she thought.

“Hell,” said Harlan. “Seems like a lot of trouble to go to for what’s gonna be a couple graphs of hey, look how he got lucky and then two big refused to comments.”

“There are a few other places to go for comment,” Andy said. “Just to get the general reaction.”

“You’re not throwing this out there to your watchdog groups,” Harlan said. “Bunch of hippies. We’re not trying this here. The magazine’s not a court, last time I checked. We’re giving this man the full benefit of the doubt. And everything that’s written had better damn well reflect that. For all we know, it could have been the market behind it.”

Andy was silent. He was so good at keeping it together that even Malone couldn’t detect the effort behind his silence.

“There’s the Sunday talk shows,” James said. “Every time someone mentions it, they’ll have to give us a credit.”

“Not bad,” said Harlan. He sighed and sat on the edge of his desk. “OK, James, y’all put it on the website.”

Harlan had a special “y’all” card, Malone figured. It must come when you reach a certain income level.

James actually had to speak instead of using a PostIt: “Currently, the website is not something that we could employ. We have a weblog, but it’s largely for theater reviews.”

Malone and Andy looked at each other. She suspected he had thought the blog issue would come up. James had started the blog, which was buried three levels deep in the architecture, only because several of the name writers liked to go to free plays on preview nights or write blurbs about their friends’ books or fashion or home boutiques. James considered a blog below the quality standards for the magazine. On top of that, he’d stalled on putting any other magazine content online because no one could figure out how to make money off it. Putting new—and news—content up was beyond anything they’d conceived.

“So what, just put it up there, put his name plus Cap Life staff on it,” Harlan said, pointing to Andy. “Or just Cap Life staff. I’ll take it.”

“The way the blog looks now, no one would see it,” James said, affronted.

“Hell, put it on the front page. Fix it so the blog’s on the front page. You know how to do that, don’t you?” he said, looking at Andy. “Isn’t he the one who’s been changing up your website’s front page?”

James reluctantly concurred. It was true that Andy had been refreshing the website home page every few days. Malone and the entertainment editor sometimes punted him a photo and a headline and short writeup for it. James had been required to hire someone’s daughter out of Sweet Briar as the “New Media editor,” but she didn’t know any coding, so the website tasks had fallen to Andy, who knew some basics. The “New Media editor”’s contribution was limited to cutting-and-pasting the occasional writeup, slapping it on top of the blog and praying nothing more would be required of her before she learned how to do it. Their collective ignorance had the side effect of keeping the page pretty clean-looking, actually, better than some sites Malone could name.

James and Harlan went into a discussion of some of the finer points of linking information, other blogs of Washington news, and website details, constructing a rickety scaffolding of misinformation as Andy tried tactfully to set them straight.

She attempted to subtly press on her right temple, where the pain was pounding away energetically. She wished he had her Coke. She didn’t trust herself to open her mouth, though if she could, she didn’t know what to say. It was too bad, she thought—Andy had done such great work, and here he’d just be getting extra work on top of it, and not much credit. He has this great story, she thought, and he has to give it away. Give it away, give it away, give it away now…the bass line for the Chilis song swung like a pendulum somewhere in the back of her brain, a fragment of last night coming back to her. She closed her eyes for just a moment to shut out the light. She saw, oddly and clearly, an image of Seth, as he used to be, young and handsome, his long dark hair shining, as if in one of the slides from the night before, his muscled body against that ugly chair rail. The Chilis and the chair rail and a handsome, muscled, dark-haired boy.

Holy fuck. Her eyes snapped open and her whole body lurched. Andy stared at her. He must have thought she had almost fallen asleep. She almost had.

She had to see the photo again. It was him. The boy from the posters. The boy who died. She’d have to look closer at the face. She remembered it as a three-quarters angle shot. Maybe there wasn’t enough there to be sure. But she knew. Where could she see the photo again, compare it with one of those that had come out when the body had been found? The dead computer in Rachel’s office. No, that was probably gone. She had to get home. She had the printout of the photos of the young guys wearing socks, posing like the Chilis. She had the printout at home. Cause of death was a tacky chair rail, she thought, and for a minute didn’t know whether to laugh or puke.

“Do we need a release about how we’re starting to feature our blog on the home page?” James asked, and he and Harlan debated that for a while, as Andy tried to gently steer them clear.

The boy had been at Seth’s place. Or maybe it was back when it was still Sinclair’s place. How could she know? It might not mean anything. It could have been any night. But that’s where he was found, by the river. Someone just starting out in a band—of course he wouldn’t turn down an invitation to go to Seth Tower’s and party. Of course. On a hot summer night by the river…

She couldn’t stand to make that leap. She had to know more.

“So, you two get it up there, put some headlines on it—not like that asshole over at the Patriot Pages with his New York Post stuff, just keep it normal-looking, clean, like you’ve been doing. You two work it out,” he waved in Andy and Malone’s general direction. “Make sure James and I see it before you push the button or whatever y’all do to send it out there.”

They had been dismissed.

She had to get home, but she couldn’t leave Andy in the middle of this. “Do you want me to get a Seth comment? I’ll send you a photo of the house, and I can email you anything I have about the basics of the place—” she started, after they left Harlan’s office.

She must have looked worse than she thought. She was shaking a little, it was true.

“You’ll send me a photo, and then you’ll leave,” Andy said. “You look awful. You look like a Goth zombie. Your lips are blue.” She was aware that he’d blushed and looked away.

He stared down the hall. “I’ll cover it from here.”

She knew she’d dropped in his estimation, but she had to fall back on the lame hangover excuse. “What about Seth?”

He took a breath. “He’ll be more willing to answer if he sees your number. Can you do it? Make it clear why you’re calling, the minute he picks up.”

She was a little pissed that he felt he had to say so. At the same time, she didn’t know how she was going to do it, really.

“Call me when you’ve got the no comment. I’ve got everything else I need. It’s three graphs that are gonna be vetted to death anyway.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to Seth. It’s possible he didn’t know he was overpaying. It could be a mistake. Why would he try to bribe a congressman?”

“The mythical killer app,” Andy said. “His music wasn’t going anywhere, and he got used to the money. But if the regulations went the wrong way, he’d have had to start over.”

“I guess so.” She had some other ideas. She was feverish to check them out. Andy would have been the best person to help her do that, but she couldn’t tell him anything, not yet at least. It all felt unreal, but if not for the hangover and the lack of sleep, she would have been too afraid to act. Unreality was her friend right now.

“Go,” Andy said. “Bring me that Seawall bootleg next week. We’ll be even.”

“Thanks,” she said, guilt like a bad taste in her throat.

First, home. The photo. Make sure. She gave herself orders. * * *

She wanted to be wrong. She hated being right. It was the boy from the posters. Once she saw it, she couldn’t imagine how she hadn’t seen it. From there, it went as if she had been planning it all along.

She called Jessica, only partially lying, about needing a huge, huge, favor, it was work, she didn’t know what to do. Any shiver in her voice could have been put down to stress. “This guy asked me to reschedule a shoot for this afternoon, and I’m afraid if I say no, I’ll never get another chance. Could I bring Linney to you? It might be kind of late before I get back—it could be after dinnertime. I know, it’s awful, my husband’s working late.”

She was fine with it. It had taken Malone a lot to ask, but she didn’t know where else to go. She’d be toast if she didn’t make it back from Seth’s and to the daycare before 6; there was no way she could call on the sisters, and Lee was on her way back to Brashton. She was afraid to leave Linney with an almost-stranger, but even more afraid to bring her to Seth’s. And she knew she’d have to go to Seth. No phones. As soon as the house price thing broke, he’d vanish. She wouldn’t get another chance at this. She called Andy and told him Seth would be back at 3, and could the item wait until she got him. It could.

In the slog uptown to get Linney and then across town to Jessica’s, she felt a twinge that she was also putting a new friendship at risk. It was no risk compared to the rest of them, but she felt a little resentful all the same.

Jessica seemed actually happy to be helping her out, which made it worse. Malone checked Linney for a change she really didn’t need, and realized she was stalling. Same with leaving the extra bottle and staying and talking and joking about how Jessica could feed her if she needed anything more than that. She was afraid. Just go. Don’t think. Just go.