She’s startled. Just when she starts to see Michael as a kind of caricature, a relic, he’ll show his old power this way.
She glances down at her heels, looks at the skirt she wore today—interview clothes. “They offered me the job. Curator of a film museum.”
“And are you taking it?”
“I haven’t decided.”
He nods. “Look, I really need your help this weekend. Next week, if you still want to leave, I’ll understand. I’ll even help. But this weekend I need you to keep an eye on the Italian and his translator. Get me through this pitch Monday morning and help me find the actress and her kid. Can you do that for me, Claire?”
She nods. “Of course, Michael.” Then, quietly: “So . . . is it? Your kid?”
Michael Deane laughs, looks to the ground and then back up again. “Do you know the old saying, about success having a thousand fathers and failure only one?”
She nods again.
He wraps the coat around himself again. “In that sense, this little fucker . . . might be the only child I ever had.”
10
The UK Tour
August 2008
Edinburgh, Scotland
Some skinny Irish kid knocking into Pat Bender’s shoulder in a Portland bar—that’s what started it.
Pat turned and saw pale, saw gapped front teeth and Superman hair, saw black glasses, Dandy Warhols T-shirt. “Three weeks in America, know what I hate most?” the kid asked. “Your bloody sparts.” He nodded toward the muted Mariners game on the bar TV. “Fact, maybe you can explain something about bess-bowl that I don’t quite get.”
Before Pat could speak, the kid yelled, “Averthing!” and slid into Pat’s booth. “I’m Joe,” he said. “Admit it, Americans suck at every spart you didn’t invent.”
“Actually,” Pat said, “I suck at American sports, too.”
This seemed to amuse and satisfy Joe, and he pointed to Pat’s guitar case, perched next to him in the booth like a bored date. “And do you play that Larrivée?”
“Across the street,” Pat said, “in an hour.”
“Seriously? I’m a bit of a club promoter,” Joe said. “What kind of stuff you play?”
“Failed mostly,” Pat said. “I used to front this band, the Reticents?” No response, and Pat felt pathetic for trying. And how to describe what he did now, which had begun as a talky acoustic set—like that old show Storytellers—but after a year had evolved into a comic-music monologue, Spalding Gray with guitar. “Well,” he told Joe, “I sit on a stool and I sing a little. I tell some funny stories, confess to a lot of bullshit; and, once every few months, after the show, I do some amateur gynecology.”
And that was how it all started—the whole notion of a UK tour. Like every highlight of Pasquale “Pat” Bender’s grubby little career, it wasn’t even his idea. It was this Joe, who sat midway back in a half-full club, laughing at “Showerpalooza,” Pat’s song about the way jam bands stink; howling at Pat’s riff about his band’s stoned liner notes reading like a Chinese food menu; singing along with the crowd at the chorus on “Why Are Drummers So Ducking Fumb?”
There was something magnetic about this Joe. Any other night, Pat would’ve focused on this little stab at a front table, white panties strobe-flashing beneath her skirt, but he kept hearing Joe’s horselaugh, which was bigger than the kid himself, and by the time Pat pivoted into the dark, confessional part of the show—the drugs and breakups—Joe was deeply affected, removing his glasses and dabbing his eyes to the chorus of Pat’s most heartfelt song, “Lydia.”
It’s an old line: you’re too good for me
Yeah, it’s not you it’s me
But Lydia, baby . . . what if that’s the one true thing
You ever got from me—
Afterward, the kid was crazy with praise. He said it was unlike anything he’d ever seen: funny and honest and smart, the music and comic observations complementing each other perfectly. “And that song ‘Lydia’—Jaysus, Pat!”
Just as Pat figured, “Lydia” had made Joe wistful about some girl he’d never gotten over—and he was compelled to tell the whole story, most of which Pat ignored. No matter how much they laughed during the rest of the show, young men were always moved by that song, and its description of the end of a relationship, Pat endlessly surprised at the way they mistook its cold, bitter refutation of romantic negation （Did I ever even exist/Before your brown eyes） for a love song.