Chapter 18
During rehearsals, Keith kept messing up where he was supposed to stand, which made Shawn mad and made Terrence laugh, because he was used to being the one who fucked things up.
Corey never missed a turn or a note. They’d had it down on the last tour, but it had been five years, and they’d only had a couple of rehearsals before the cruise.
One of the things that Keith hated most was listening to Shawn give him shit and then praise Corey in the same breath.
It had been that way since Corey clawed his way through puberty, emerging taller and more handsome than anyone had expected.
Shawn had seen something in Corey that he’d never seen in Keith—an equal.
The hardest part of the show was “Always,” the title track from Boy Talk’s third and best record, a song where Keith had to hit a B in the first line of the song, just—bam!
—right there at the beginning. It was a song they couldn’t cut from the show—no matter what, Keith was singing the song.
In rehearsals, they’d tried a few different arrangements, some lower and slower, but the Talkers liked it the way they liked it, which was the way it sounded on the record, and so Keith had to pray that he would get there, or close enough.
There was only one other person in Boy Talk who had a prayer of hitting the note, and Keith was not about to let Corey take his best song.
There were enough backing tracks to make the songs sound full and good, but the lead vocals, those were coming live, and sometimes they landed better than others.
Tonight’s set list was tight. Fifteen songs, most of them off the second and third albums. The costumes were minimal—shiny black pants and white shirts with their names ironed on across their backs, as if anyone in the nautical mile needed help identifying them.
The Boys were known for their pelvic thrusts, and so they did that too.
Keith tried not to think about it, or rather, not to think about it differently than any other dance move he had to remember.
Shawn and Scotty took off their shirts, and sometimes, depending on how much he’d been working out, Keith unbuttoned his pretty far.
It had stayed buttoned lately. Next to Shawn and Scotty, who had long ago dispatched most of their body hair, Keith felt like a baboon.
In rehearsals, Corey had laughed in between songs, more to himself than to anyone else, but when the songs were playing, he locked in.
That was the best thing about Corey; it always had been.
When he was focused, there was nothing like him.
Keith was always in two places at once—doing the dances but also watching the audience.
Singing the songs but also looking at the women singing the lyrics back to him.
In his nightmares, there were subtitles running across his forehead, where everyone could see what he was thinking.
He and Scotty started out stage left, the other guys on stage right. The stage was dark, but the Talkers were already rowdy. Scotty was farting like crazy, and Keith took a step farther away.
“Feels good out there,” Scotty said, gesturing with his chin toward the audience.
It didn’t always, and Scotty was right. The fans were giddier than usual.
Keith could hear them laughing and talking in their seats.
Across the stage, he could see Corey and Terrence and Shawn.
They were practicing—rather, Shawn was reminding Terrence about the choreo at the start of “Grown,” which involved a microphone stand.
He’d whacked Shawn in the leg with it twice in rehearsals.
Shawn wasn’t the best singer, he never had been, but he was the best at everything else and had very low tolerance for other people’s failures.
He and Corey always started on the same side of the stage.
When Corey turned sixteen, he and Shawn started sharing hotel rooms, kicking Keith off to bunk with either Scotty or Terrence or both, leaving Corey and Shawn to spend their time scheming about world domination or drinking contraband booze or talking to girls or maybe all of that at the same time. Bobby always had his own room.
Keith was sweating. The pants were made of some sort of shiny pleather, a material that allowed not an ounce of air in nor out.
“Hey.” Sarah appeared behind them. “Two minutes.”
Not counting his wedding day, Keith hadn’t cried in front of another person since grade school—not his parents, not Shawn.
He looked at Sarah and wanted to apologize, even more so because he knew an apology wasn’t necessary.
Keith wasn’t a neanderthal—he was in therapy!
Men could cry, yadda yadda. That didn’t mean it was comfortable.
Keith felt like his skin was transparent and Sarah had seen—could still see—his beating heart.
She shone her flashlight across the way once, twice, and someone on the other side flashed back.
There was a table that held all their props—hats for the choreo during “Yes or No” and color-coded microphones, like dots on a kindergarten class rug.
Keith was always yellow for a reason lost to time.
“You ready? Got everything you need? Waters are right here, and, Scotty, there will be a vodka soda waiting there as soon as the runner gets back. Keith, just let me know if you want anything.” Sarah was good at her job.
Scotty bowed. “Much obliged.” He high-fived her.
The music began to play, and five spotlights appeared on the stage. Scotty bounced on his toes like a prize fighter. He whiffed a slo-mo punch at Sarah, who pretended to fall back.
“Have fun! Break a leg!” Sarah said. She smiled widely, her freckled cheeks round.
Dr. Robert was always encouraging Keith to make friends, as if that were easy to do.
Maybe it had nothing to do with being famous and was just a by-product of heterosexuality and middle age—there was no way to tell.
He had some guy friends here and there, but nothing too deep.
The girls who’d been his friends before he met Steffani were off-limits, live wires that had been extinguished when they got married.
He wouldn’t even know how to get in touch with them now, it had been so long.
Sarah was different—she was just easy to hang out with.
It was clearly okay that she’d seen him cry, and that all by itself kind of made him want to cry again.
Keith wanted to explain all of it to her, where he was in space, how he felt about the guys and the group and his wife and his life, but it wasn’t the time.
He wanted to explain about the woman who’d asked him how he was—it wasn’t a real question most of the time!
Did Sarah agree?—and how that had set him off.
“Are you gonna watch? Don’t watch,” Keith said.
What he didn’t want her to see was how happy it still did make him, the way a vampire looked with his mouth full of blood.
When they weren’t in front of the fans, it was easy enough to pretend that they had normal jobs, or that this abnormal job was in some way equivalent to other things, but when they were in the middle of it, with all the Talkers singing every single word and getting every joke, there was no mistaking it.
This was dinner, these were the nutrients his body craved.
This was what made it hard to move on, no matter how much he wanted to.
“Of course I’m going to watch!” Sarah did a little pelvic thrust, and the keys dangling from her belt jangled.
She took a step back just as the spotlights shone straight down, creating five little identical white pools in a line across the back of the stage.
Scotty hit Keith on the butt, and they stepped out onto the stage.
The light was hot, and Keith squinted. His body felt jangly with anticipation.
The theater was small and already smelled like sweat.
He could walk into a room in his house a million times, and Steffani would never look at him the way the Talkers did.
Not even a fraction of it. This was what was so hard to say no to—the pure acceptance and love from setting foot onstage in front of these people.
He looked up at the crowd, and they screamed.