A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [41]
“Scotty? You still there?”
“So,” I said. “You’re a big shot now, and everyone wants something from you.”
Bennie went back around to his desk chair and sat there facing me with arms folded in a pose that looked less relaxed than the first one, but was actually more so. “Come on, Scotty,” he said. “You write me a letter out of nowhere, now you show up at my office—I’m guessing you didn’t come here just to bring me a fish.”
“No, that was a gift,” I said. “I came for this reason: I want to know what happened between A and B.”
Bennie seemed to be waiting for more.
“A is when we were both in the band, chasing the same girl. B is now.”
I knew instantly that it had been the right move to bring up Alice. I’d said something literally, yes, but underneath that I’d said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I’m an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe. And deepest of all: You were the one chasing. But she picked me.
“I’ve busted my balls,” Bennie said. “That’s what happened.”
“Ditto.”
We looked at each other across the black desk, the seat of Bennie’s power. There was a long, strange pause, and in that pause I felt myself pulling Bennie back—or maybe it was him pulling me—back to San Francisco, where we were two out of four Flaming Dildos, Bennie one of the lousier bass players you were likely to hear, a kid with brownish skin and hair on his hands, and my best friend. I felt a kick of anger so violent it made me dizzy. I closed my eyes and imagined coming at Bennie across that desk and ripping off his head, yanking it from the neck of that beautiful white shirt like a knobby weed with long tangled roots. I pictured carrying it into his swank waiting room by his bushy hair and dropping it on Sasha’s desk.
I rose from my chair, but at that same moment, Bennie got up, too—sprang up, I should say, because when I looked at him, he was already standing.
“Mind if I look out your window?” I asked.
“Not at all.” He didn’t sound afraid, but I smelled that he was. Vinegar: that’s what fear smells like.
I went to the window. I pretended to look at the view, but my eyes were closed.
After a while, I sensed that Bennie had moved closer to me. “You still doing any music, Scotty?” he asked gently.
“I try,” I said. “Mostly by myself, just to keep loose.” I was able to open my eyes, but not to look at him.
“You were amazing on that guitar,” he said. Then he asked, “Are you married?”
“Divorced. From Alice.”
“I know,” he said. “I meant remarried.”
“It lasted four years.”
“I’m sorry, buddy.”
“All for the best,” I said. Then I turned to look at Bennie. He was standing with his back to the window, and I wondered if he ever bothered to look out, if having so much beauty at close range meant anything at all to him. “What about you?” I asked.
“Married. Three-month-old son.” He smiled, then—a waffly, embarrassed smile at the thought of his baby boy, like he knew he didn’t deserve that much. And behind Bennie’s smile the fear was still there: that I’d tracked him down to snatch away these gifts life had shoveled upon him, wipe them out in a few emphatic seconds. This made me want to scream with laughter: Hey “buddy,” don’t you get it? There’s nothing you have that I don’t have! It’s all just X’s and O’s, and you can come by those a million different ways. But two thoughts distracted me as I stood there, smelling Bennie’s fear: (1) I didn’t have what Bennie had. (2) He was right.
Instead, I thought of Alice. This was something I almost never let myself do—just think of her, as opposed to think about not thinking about her, which I did almost constantly. The thought of Alice broke open in me, and I let it fan out until I saw her hair in the sun—gold, her hair was gold—and I smelled those oils she used to dab on her