No. Crones did not do shy. So I dropped the towel. I was wearing a swimsuit at a summer camp. That was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. If they wanted to secretly judge me, or secretly ogle me, that was their business. Teddy was still looking spacey, so I didn’t give him a chance to respond to the invitation I regretted issuing. “See you.”
Teddy started to speak and got as far as “Actually we could bring our—” when he realized Jack was talking, too, and stopped.
Jack said, “No thanks. I think I’m going to stick close to home. Gonna try to get some writing done after a drink.”
“Yeah,” Teddy said. “Me, too.”
“Suit yourself.”
The others had not emerged from their cabins yet, so I did a cabriole-sauté series to propel myself over to Maiv’s cabin to wait for her.
4
LITTLE WOMEN, BUT WITH DANCING
Teddy
Jack Branksome was going to be an acquired taste. But honestly, if I was going to acquire a taste for anyone here, it was probably going to be for him. He was smart, and he didn’t feel the need to fill every silence with words. We did talk a bit as we sipped our sake, but it wasn’t oppressive. I hadn’t read his book, but I wasn’t much of a reader these days—I’d read a lot as a kid, but somehow I’d lost the habit. He, however, seemed familiar with Concrete Temple.
“You guys broke up, huh?”
“It would appear so.”
“It would appear so?”
Yeah, that had been an idiotic thing to say. It was just thatbreakupsounded mutual. A civilized parting of ways after both parties realized the relationship had run its course. That was what Karlie and I had done.
That wasnotwhat Scott and I had done. Nope, he’d just satme down in the fucking Hilton Garden Inn in Chicago after the last show of the tour and told me he was done. Our record contract had been fulfilled, and he had no interest in re-upping with our label or any other. In fact, he had studio time and session musicians already booked for a solo album, which meant he’d been sitting on this news for a long time.
Well, he’d been sitting on it for a long time, and then he’d gone and told Jet and Luis before me.
Nothing against Jet and Luis. They were great musicians. But Concrete Temple was Scott and me. The other guys hadn’t been with us from the beginning. They didn’t write. Sure, Jet was a star, but he was still, to be blunt, replaceable. Luis was replaceable.
Scott was not replaceable. There was no Concrete Temple without Scott.
There was no Concrete Temple without me, either, thank you very much.
I guess the problem was, I wasn’t sure if there was a me without Concrete Temple.
I maybe could have dealt with all that junk from Scott—the news he was leaving, being the last to know, the studio already booked for a solo album—if he hadn’t gone on to spew all this shit about how Concrete Temple hadn’t been fulfilling him artistically for fuckingyears.
You sure managed to cash those unfulfilling checks, I’d snarked back. And then when he called me a hack, I’d smashed the TV.
It was still so mortifying. No, it was more than that. It wasterrifying. Because I was not that guy.
And yet, apparently, I was.
I cleared my throat, forced myself back to the here and now,where I was sitting on a porch next to a novelist, looking out at a lake in the middle of a forest where I was meant to get my shit together. “Yeah. We broke up.”
“Too bad.”
“Mm.”
“What do you think of the others here?”
“They seem fine.” What did he want me to say? I didn’t care about paintings or pots, but I could understand that other people did.
“Everyone seems very… perky.”
