High risk. Sudden cardiac death.
In the coming hours, Eliot’s past would catch up to the present. His strange behavior in the months prior to his death would all make a horrible new kind of sense. The furtiveness. The whiplash between overly doting and prickly distance. The doctor’s appointments. The affair.
Eliot had been careening through life with a ticking time bomb for a heart. And he knew it.
73
The audience at Zinc Bar was shoulder to shoulder as Darlene began the trusty set closer. “ ‘They tried to make me go to rehab, I said, No, no, no.’ ” And while the students and the tourists and the locals sang along, swaying with their glasses of inexpensive wine, something was missing.
Electricity.
Chemistry.
Zach.
Zach was missing. No one was dancing on tables or making out or doing shots. The Dionysian energy he brought to this, to everything, was gone.
Darlene finished the song. The capable if not particularly charismatic session musicians took a quick bow. The audience clapped. They didn’t cheer. Or holler. Or stamp their feet. Darlene couldn’t blame them. It was painful to admit, but it was true: Zach made her a better musician. He made her a better person, period. But he’d disappeared. Removed himself, entirely, from her life. He’d embedded himself with her for so long, she didn’t think absence was possible. Except, it was. He didn’t reply to her texts, didn’t return her calls.
As she was packing up the equipment, the bartender waved her over, offering her a shot. She shook her head: it wasn’t fun getting drunk without Zach. The bartender shrugged and did it himself.
“Hey, I heard about Zach,” he said. “Pity.”
Adrenaline kicked her ribs. “What do you mean?”
“Didn’t he quit music or some crap?”
Quit music? Quit music?
When Darlene visited Zach’s apartment, the smiling concierge recognized her and called up. Then the smile faded.
She tried to lose herself in her EP, which all this was supposed to be in service of. In lieu of Zach’s twenty-five grand, the check for which she definitely wasn’t cashing, she paid for the producer’s deposit with all her savings, telling herself that when she got a record deal, she could pay it all back.
But that was another avalanche of disappointment.
She submitted ten songs to the producer. They listened to them all in his Harlem studio. Her initial excitement morphed into panic as song after song received only reserved acknowledgment, no real enthusiasm. “Dark Secret” was last. It took every ounce of her strength to keep it together as the lyrics played.
He’s my dark secret; I think he’s a keeper.
I like to run, but he makes me stand still.
When it comes to keeping secrets
I’m nothing but the best
I’m a locked box, baby, I’m a treasure chest
But boy you’re breaking down my defenses
Making me mix up all my tenses
You were the only one who made me feel like coming home.
“That,” the producer said. “That has potential.”
“Oh,” Darlene said in pained surprise. “I sort of cowrote that. With a… former friend.”
The producer asked if her “former friend” had signed a cowriting agreement, for the song they legally owned half of.
Of course the former friend had not. He, apparently, had “quit music.”
Without it, the producer was not willing to work on “Dark Secret,” and without that, Darlene was of no interest to him.
Darlene left the studio in a daze, stepping onto a street messy with car horns blaring, a woman arguing into a cell phone, music playing from a distant window, dogs barking. A rhythmless jumble of random noise.
74
Alone in his apartment, Zach stared at his ceiling in silence. His bed was covered in political books—his newfound medicine. He read, and listened to podcasts, and watched the distressing, dystopian news. He did not listen to, or play, or even think about, music. Because music was Darlene. And once you had the ear for it, every song was about love or women or getting your heart put through a bloody Vitamix and honestly, he couldn’t handle it.
Memories of things she said or did attacked him at all hours. Strangely, there was one moment that he kept coming back to, from a wedding upstate in May, the one where Zia met Clay. Something Darlene said that he couldn’t stop thinking about.
I don’t want my success handed to me. I want to earn it.
He joined a local activist group aimed at registering people to vote, and this felt good; this felt productive. When a very cute fellow activist asked him out for drinks, he declined politely. He dragged his useless, broken heart around with him like a pile of trash, hoping that time would do what the expression claimed, and heal his septic wound.
It didn’t. He missed her. Christ, he missed her. He made it seem like he didn’t love her anymore, but that wasn’t true. He couldn’t turn off his feelings, even if he wanted to. He missed his bandmate. He missed his best friend. He missed his girlfriend. He just missed her. But every time she texted—Please. Please, just call me—he heard those words. I’d sooner marry a donkey than date Zach Livingstone. And his throat would get tight, and his stomach would boil, and he’d throw his stupid phone across the room. Darlene didn’t care for him: she’d only said that because she felt bad she’d been caught. Kissing was easy but love was not and there was still so much he didn’t understand about her, about her world and her struggles. And he’d never be able to. Because he was a stupid white guy with the brains of a witless beast.
* * *
“Can I get everyone’s attention, please?” Mark Livingstone tapped his wineglass with a dessert fork. The clean, high sound rang out across the crowded room. Zach’s twenty-seventh birthday party had originally been planned as a Sunday picnic, but the freezing rain lashing the East Coast moved it into the formal front room of the Livingstone estate. Relatives and family friends nibbled crustless sandwiches and petit fours, to the subdued strains of Bach’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor. Zach’s music buddies, scruffy-looking folk from all walks of life, looked either bewildered or snide at the chichi surroundings. Zach had been too morose to push back on his mother’s planning, and so now he found himself the guest of honor at a ridiculous tea party. He didn’t even feel like getting sauced.
But only a donkey would feel ungrateful surrounded by so much privilege and people who genuinely cared about him. Zach tried to feel thankful for his many blessings—and he did. But the one thing he wanted, the one girl he wanted, thought he was an idiot. So he probably was. His chest hurt. It hadn’t stopped hurting since his sister’s wedding. He slumped into a settee at the back of the room, only to have his shoulders tapped by his mother—Posture, darling—as she took a seat beside him.
“Quiet down,” Mark boomed, and everyone shut up. There’d been three pretty average speeches so far: his great-aunt, one of his father’s business associates, and a family friend he didn’t even like. His dad, thankfully, was last. “It’s been a banner year for the Livingstone family,” began Mark. “Catherine has been doing wonderful work on the board of Save the Children”—his mother inclined her head at the light applause—“and many of you were present last month for the wedding of our daughter, Imogene, to her lovely wife, Mina.” The applause increased. Imogene pinched Mina’s bottom. Mina elbowed her, hiding a smile. “But we’re here today to honor my son, Zachary Bartholomew Livingstone, on his twenty-seventh birthday.” Zach managed a watery smile. Imogene caught his eye and made a sympathetic face. She and Mina were the only ones privy to the true despair felt by the man of the hour. “As many of you know,” Mark continued, “Zachary enjoyed something of a… Bacchanalian youth.”