Chapter 13
Finn
Of all the insults that Juliet had aimed at me in our acquaintance—that I was a rich snob, that I was an asshole who tried to pay her to go to her sister’s wedding, that I was a douchebag—I found that one had gotten under my skin. It had stuck with me in a way I didn’t like, a way that made me uncomfortable in the odd moments when it bubbled up in my mind.
I’m sure it’s easy for you to take a weekend in a posh Seattle hotel. It isn’t like you have anything else going on.
Sitting in my posh room at this posh hotel, I put my feet up and dialed a familiar number. I needed advice.
Travis White picked up on the third ring. “Yeah,” he mumbled, as if he was half asleep.
“It’s me,” I said. Frowning, I checked the time. Since he was in L.A., we were in the same time zone, and it was six p.m. “Why are you asleep?”
Travis made a mumbling sound, and I heard shuffling. I prayed, briefly and hard, that he didn’t have a woman there in the background. “Hey, Finn. I’m up,” he protested. “I’m up.”
“Did you sleep all day?” I asked. I was more worried than judgmental. Travis had had a rough year with Seven Dog Down breaking up, and he wasn’t handling it well.
“Just a nap,” he said. “I had a flu thing. I’m fine, I swear.”
“I don’t believe you. I’m making this call a FaceTime.”
He groaned. “What are you, my mother?”
“Shut up and hit Accept.”
He did, and I waited while he propped his phone up on a table and sat on a sofa. He’d lost a few pounds since I last saw him, and he’d had his dirty blond hair cut above his ears, though the long strands on top fell over his eyes in sleepy disarray. He was clean shaven, wearing a threadbare navy T-shirt. A silver stud glinted on one earlobe.
He was a handsome guy, rock star handsome, with blue eyes and a sharp jaw, but he hadn’t looked much like the world-famous lead singer of Seven Dog Down recently. He’d crashed hard—mentally, financially, and emotionally—since the band broke up. The split was messy, and the lawsuits involving their management and record label were viciously expensive. Travis had handled the pressure by getting dumped by his famous girlfriend, drunkenly trashing a hotel room, and telling a radio shock jock to go fuck himself during an interview. The media labeled him a problem, but he’d stayed at my house for a month, and I knew the truth of what Travis was—a depressed guy teetering on the edge of chaos while he laughed at danger.
I stared closely at him now, trying to assess him through my phone screen. Travis looked tired and slightly homeless, but at least he didn’t look high.
“Check me out,” he said, lifting his arms from his sides and leaning back so I could see him better. “I’m the picture of health.”
“That isn’t your house,” I said, looking at the sofa and the room behind it. “Where the hell are you?”
“I had to sell the house in Malibu. Lawyer bills. I’m crashing with Andy for a while.”
I didn’t know who Andy was, and I didn’t ask. Andy’s house looked rather nice. I hoped to hell he wasn’t a drug dealer.
“If you need somewhere to stay, you know my security code,” I told him. “Gary loves you.”
Travis grinned and lowered his arms. “I love that dog.”
“I mean it.”
“Thanks, brother. I’m good. Aside from crawling up my ass, what are you calling me for?”
I sighed and rubbed my forehead, willing to admit that Travis was okay, at least for the moment. “I’m calling because I’m having a small crisis.”
“I live in crisis,” Travis said, the truest thing ever spoken. “Shoot.”
“Do you think I should start recording again?”
Travis laughed. It took a minute, because the laugh trailed into coughing, but he recovered. “Is that a serious question?” he finally asked.
“Yes, it’s serious.”
He pushed his hair back from his forehead. “Finn, I went through the database in the recording room in your basement. You have, like, a hundred songs in there.”
“Sixty-seven,” I corrected him.
“Okay, fine. Do you know how many songs I’ve written in the past year?” He waggled his eyebrows at me. “None, and half the songs Seven Dog Down played were by hired writers. You’ve written sixty-seven songs, a lot of them are really fucking good, and you refuse to consider recording and releasing them. Do you not like money? Because I like money.”
“I like money,” I protested. I realized that I was rubbing the back of my head, and I dropped my hand. “I just don’t think it’s the center of everything. And I don’t assume that anyone would care if I released music. Also, you may have noticed that the music business is trash.”
“Oh, I know it’s trash.” Travis leaned over and picked up something I couldn’t see out of the frame. “I have the lawyer bills to prove it. The music business is a blank, amoral void that sucks your soul dry and leaves you a husk, helpless and thirsty for something you’ll never have.”
Travis had a way with words. It was dramatic, it was entertaining, and it was one of the many reasons I still liked him. “Believe me, I know,” I said.
Travis popped the top of the can he was holding—root beer. “You know and I know, brother. You barely got out with your life. I’ve been left for dead, which I probably deserve.” He took a swig. “I am paying for my sins, no doubt. But you don’t have to sell your soul to release music. Not anymore.”
“I’m not doing that shit again,” I said. “The nonstop touring, the grind, the shitty contracts, the publicity. I did my time. Not for any money. Never again.”
“And yet you’re calling me right now,” Travis said. “Why is that?”
“Because someone pointed out that I’m not doing much with my life these days.”
“Yeah?” Travis tilted his head. “I wonder what that feels like.”
We shared a knowing look. “It’s someone I respect. Someone whose opinion matters.”
“Oh.” He nodded. “Got it. Is she hot?”
Damn him. “No comment.”
“She’s that hot, huh? Who is she?”
I shrugged. “A musician. No one you know.”
“She a singer?”
“Sometimes. Her main gig is bass.”
Travis whistled. He took another sip of root beer. “Yeah, you’re done for. Chicks who play bass are hot as hell. They don’t even have to try. Okay, here’s my advice. Go through those sixty-seven songs and pick the best ones, then release an album. Do it while getting fucked over by as few people as possible.”
“Travis,” I said.
He held up a finger. “But first—and most important—hook up with your bass girl. Do it proper, because her standards are probably high. Musician chicks have seen every trick in the book, and they are not impressed. You need to get laid more than anyone I’ve ever met. Put your back into it, man. Do it right.”
I sighed. “Okay, well, this advice was underwhelming.”
Travis put down his drink. “I always aim to disappoint. It’s the one thing I’m good at.”
We talked a while longer, about music, about everything. I suggested, as I always did, that he see a therapist and take better care of himself. Travis was talented, and he had a distinctive singing voice, smoky and seductive. His voice had never been right for pop music, and he had been wasted in Seven Dog Down. Travis didn’t agree to get help—he never did—but I felt, this time, that he was listening a little. He was thirty-two. I had a feeling he’d come back from near-death in ways no one would suspect.
And suddenly I wanted to do that, too.
Juliet knocked on my door at seven thirty. She looked frazzled. She threw down her purse and kicked off her boots, barely looking around my lavish room. “Don’t get any ideas, Finn,” she said. “This doesn’t mean you’re getting laid.”
I watched her with a grin. Travis was right. Women who played bass were hot.
“Is that for me?” Juliet asked, pointing at the bottle of wine I’d had delivered by room service, which was now sitting in a bucket of ice. “Because after the day I’ve had, I need it.”
“Help yourself,” I told her. “Pour me one, too.”
She lifted the bottle from the ice and read the label. “This is nice. I’m warning you, I’ll probably drink most of it.”
“Then I’ll order another one.”
She popped the cork. “I guess there are perks to hanging out with a rich asshole.”
I dropped into a chair and watched her. She was wearing a plain gray T-shirt tucked into jeans that fit her like a glove. Her hair was down, the ends falling at her shoulders. She’d put some makeup on—mascara, shadow, probably other kinds I couldn’t see. Onstage with the Road Kings, she’d worn black eyeliner in dark cat’s-eye strokes at the corners. She’d also worn a stretchy black knee-length dress, black tights, and the same black boots she’d just kicked off in my hotel room. Juliet didn’t have to show skin to look like a rock n’ roll wet dream.
“Done staring?” she asked without turning around.
“Fair is fair,” I said. “You have a nice ass.” She’d said it to me, so I figured I could say it back.
Juliet put down the wine bottle, cocked a hip, and pointed at her perfect ass. “I do. And this is all you’re going to see of it, so look your fill.”
I scratched my chin. “For a woman who knocked on my door, you seem awfully fixated on not sleeping with me.”
“You’re convenient,” she said, handing me a glass of wine. “And I’m tired of hanging out with normal women all day. There’s only so much of that I can take.”
She was tense, which was why she was throwing her defenses in my face. I waited a moment for her to sit down and take a sip of wine. Getting Juliet into a relaxed state of mind took patience and skill, and I planned on achieving it. “Admit it,” I said. “The mean girls aren’t as mean as you thought they’d be.”
She sank down on the sofa, her shoulders sagging, and took another sip. “They’re annoying, but they’re all right,” she admitted. “It isn’t them, it’s me. Like always.”
We were getting to the heart of it already. I drank my wine and gave her a raised-eyebrow look. “Go on.”
“They’re decent people,” she said, “including Vicki and Mom. I just don’t know what to say to them, and I never have. And I don’t mean that in an I’m so special, I’m not like other girls way. I mean that I’m a literal fucking alien. In The Muffins, we used to talk about deep shit—history, politics, music, art. We’d stay up all night in the tour van, arguing about something for hours on end until our voices went hoarse. Then we’d go onstage and scream our frustrations out.” She looked down at her glass. “I don’t do that anymore, obviously. We were teenagers. But how do you grow up from that? I haven’t figured it out. And other women my age have everything figured out.”
I was holding my breath as she spoke. I didn’t want her to stop talking, because I had been longing to know what thoughts swirled through her mind, and now she was finally telling me. I waited a moment, then said, “Maybe you should call up your old bandmates.”
Juliet shook her head, still staring down into her glass. “Two of them are addicts now. Stacey is in rehab after overdosing, and Nicole lives with her parents as part of her recovery program. The last thing they need is to talk about the music business. Lena is the only one still playing—she makes weird-ass solo albums, where she shouts poetry over a single out-of-tune guitar. I think she lives in a commune.” She lifted her gaze to mine. “That’s what happens to women in this business. We either burn out or we get really fucked up. There doesn’t seem to be an in-between.”
I thought of Travis, lying sick on a stranger’s sofa after being in one of the biggest bands in the world, and of me, hiding away in my house for years, putting songs on my hard drive because I couldn’t face the business again. “It happens to all of us,” I said. “It’s the hardest business there is. Failure is hard, but success is hard, too. Maybe even harder.”
Our gazes locked, and I knew she was remembering that nineteen-year-old kid with the world on his shoulders, eating lean chicken in the middle of the night in a house he owned but never lived in, stealing a few minutes before getting back on a plane.
“I can’t quit,” Juliet said. “I can’t think of anything else to do.”
I laughed softly, without much humor. “Yeah, I know how that feels.”
“What did you do?” she asked. Her voice had softened, and she wasn’t as keyed up as when she’d walked through my door. “After I met you that night, after you shut everything down. You stopped making music. What did you do?”
“You really want to know?”
She nodded.
I took a swig of wine. This was getting deep. The price of learning what was in Juliet’s head was to tell her what was in mine. “After it was all over, I went to Paris. I picked it because in the times I’d played Paris, I’d never had even an hour free to see it, so it was still on my bucket list. I rented a tiny apartment and lived there for over a year.”
“Do you know any French?” Juliet asked.
I smiled. “No. I tried, and I picked up enough to get by, but my accent was always atrocious, and I did a lot of miming. I got used to being the stupid American.”
She blinked, her glass forgotten. “What did you do?”
“I slept late. I walked around the city. Everyone had forgotten about me, and the French are hard to impress anyway, so no one cared who I was. I spent days in the Louvre. I lay on the grass in the Luxembourg Gardens and looked at the sky. I ate bread and Brie. I forgot about who I was, what I’d thought I wanted. It was a sad and lonely time, but it was also good for me, in a way. It was a time to be myself, whoever that was. Then Travis came to stay with me.”
It took her a second. “Travis White?”
I nodded. “He had a few months off between tours. I think he was avoiding an ex-girlfriend. He seems to like being homeless. Anyway, he moved into my apartment. Travis doesn’t lie in parks and eat cheese, in case you don’t know. He took over my life and gave me a whole new experience.”
Juliet’s eyes sparkled. “Let me guess. The teen pop star got a taste of rock n’ roll?”
“Did he ever. I think I tried six or seven different drugs in those three months. I don’t think I slept even once at night. Getting up at two in the afternoon was standard. I puked in a gutter and passed out on a sidewalk. It was awful and it was very, very unhealthy, but somehow it was necessary. I’d never gotten to do any of that at sixteen, when everyone else gets it out of their system.”
“Aw.” Juliet put a hand on her heart. “The boy I met was so innocent.”
I shook my head. “Not as innocent as you think, but innocent enough. I’d never been able to screw up without people hounding me and taking pictures. Not being Finn Wiley anymore made me a human again.”
“Uh huh,” she said. “And there were women, I assume?”
I winced at the memory. “Only a few.”
She sat forward, putting down her glass, her eyes lighting up. “Come on, Finn, fess up. You slayed all those French women.”
“Juliet, no one slays French women, except for French men. And sometimes, not even them.”
She laughed, her face lighting with real humor. “Okay, I get that. But you tried.”
I shrugged, putting my empty glass down. “The point was to try everything at least once, so yeah, I tried. But hooking up with strangers wasn’t what it was about. It was about everything else.” I looked at her, remembering. “I did get dumped by a French woman, though. At a nightclub.”
“A nightclub?” She was into this, her smile genuine. I wanted to take a picture so I could see her like this whenever I wanted, but I had to settle for taking a mental picture instead. “What song was playing?”
“I’ll play it.” I took out my phone and swiped it on. Juliet cackled harder when I played “What Is Love” by Haddaway, a song so dumb it was immortalized by Saturday Night Live. “I’m not kidding,” I said to her as the song played. “I was dumped to this song. I think I win.”
“You haven’t heard my worst story yet.” Juliet stood and grabbed the wine bottle to refill us. “So you lived in Paris, ate cheese, got high, got laid, and got dumped to bad music,” she said. “Then what?”
I held out my glass to her. “Travis left to go back on the road. Eventually, I went home and drifted for a while, which is when I met Denver Gilchrist at a party. Then Dad got sick.”
She nodded. “The party was over.”
She said the words without pity, without awkwardness. She said them like someone who knows what bad things feel like, that once you’ve faced them and gone through them then they’re something that happened, something that made you who you are.
I thought of my father’s long, hard illness, of how I’d held his hand when he finally let go. I thought of what had happened in the year afterward. I wanted to tell Juliet about that, too. I wanted her to know everything, but I couldn’t find the words.
What happened that year was a bad dream that had seemed like it was almost worse than Dad dying. I could never quite decide.
Still, it had happened. All of it had changed me.
“Right,” I said to Juliet. “The party was over.” I looked up at her, where she stood to put away the empty bottle. “Until Alistair asked me to be his best man. Until I went to a Road Kings show, then took the gorgeous bass player out dancing all night.”
To my surprise, red bloomed on her cheekbones, vibrant against her pale skin. I had never seen Juliet blush before, had never thought she was capable of it. It was so beautiful it robbed me of speech.
She took only a beat to recover, and then she called up a sarcastic retort. “Lucky bitch,” she said.
I found my voice, though it was raspy. “Yeah. Lucky.”