Lucy gets under her childhood covers. She’s been staying at her parents’ house for most of the summer. Before she goes to sleep, she checks Warren’s ex-girlfriends’ Instagram profiles. She does this every night. She knows their faces so well she would recognize them on the street. 

She closes Instagram and opens Pornhub. Her suggested video section is dominated by various BDSM scenes. Lucy chooses one where a very pretty girl is being forced to stand up, holding a tray full of heavy weights, while different people torment her with vibrators and clamps and plugs. Eleven minutes into the video, she imagines Warren forcing her to ask permission before she can come. 

If any of Warren’s ex-girlfriends ever checked Lucy’s Instagram - which they would never do, since they have no way of knowing she exists - they would be able to find a 20 second video of her as a child. Lucy’s dad filmed it from behind a corner, knowing from hours and hours of footage that a camera will intrude on even the most chaotic of scenes. One of the children might reach over and over, hoping to see their reflection through the lens. Everyone will start to perform. In the video, Lucy is nine.

She is jumping up and down, twisting. The light is irresistibly warm. Her mother is roasting sweet potatoes. The Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat soundtrack is playing from their stereo. A big band orchestra blasting through old speakers. Biblical family drama. The camera zooms in on Lucy. Her blonde hair is cut right below her chin. Left side part. She pushes it out of her face. It keeps getting in the way as she belts out the chorus in sync with the soundtrack. Her baby brother watches from a high chair in complete awe. Jaw down, hints of incoming teeth. Glistening eyes. 

Lucy thrusts her arms into the air in time with the shifting verses. She sings about favoritism and chosenness. Leaping from left foot to right foot. Her brother’s oversized cheeks pushed so high up in a grin that it’s almost painful. He jolts around in time to her movements, unable to control his limbs with the kind of dexterity she’s developed with eight extra years of practice. She twirls. 

The camera shifts between their faces. Lucy is in the central role. Entertainer. 

***

Outside baggage claim, in El Paso,  Lucy sees Warren for the first time in weeks. He jumps out of his beat up beige 2004 Corolla. For a second, he looks older than she remembered. As disembodied voices over the phone, they are both ageless. She reminds herself that when they spend days and days together, the 31 years separating them will fade away. His wrinkles and age spots and loose flesh disappear along with her inexperience and doubt and insecurity. 

He kisses Lucy, and they meet in the middle. They are both thirty six and a half years old. He opens the car door for her. This is something he does for any passenger, regardless of their gender. He’s assured Lucy of this many times. 

He’s wearing tight shorts and a bright button down shirt. He always wears very vivid colors. Lime green, deep pink, sunburst orange. Warren is skinny, kind of short, and has a large nose. Dyed blue hair that’s long on the top but short on the sides. When Lucy showed her younger brother a picture of him, he said that he looked like a Dr. Suess character.

“Lucy.” Warren’s eyes are blue, blue, electric blue. 

“Warren.” Lucy always starts out shy.  

He pulls away from the curb. Lucy plays with the hair at the base of his neck, leaning as far as she can to be close to him while he drives. He puts his hand on her thigh, his pinky grazing the end of her white linen shorts. 

Warren hands her the AUX cord. He wants to listen to whatever she wants to listen to. 

“How did your show go last night?”

“It was totally great. People asked very good questions.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m so happy you’re going to be there for the rest of the shows. Except I’m also very nervous.”

“Don’t be nervous. I love watching you play.”

“I can’t help it! You’re the only person whose opinion I care about. I really just want you to think I do a good job. You would feel the same.”

“Last semester my painting professor asked me to write about who my intended audience is and the only thing I could think to put down was ‘my crush.’”

“Exactly. Remember when I used to send you videos of myself rehearsing in my kitchen?”

“Back when we were supposed to just be friends.”

Warren and Lucy drive into orange-purple mountains and leave the last of the airport signage behind. Infinite yellow, white, brown, gray houses are nestled up against the foot of each summit. The road is elevated, it feels like they are looking down at everyone in El Paso from thousands of feet.  

“Do you want a mint?” Warren asks and pulls out the same box of mints he had before he went on tour. Lucy takes one and puts it in her mouth. When Warren looks over his shoulder to make a left turn, she spits it out into her hand and slips it into her pocket. 

Warren tells Lucy he picked out a restaurant on Yelp. He’s already made reservations. He did lots of research. He always does. He’s very thorough. Always makes the right decisions.  

On the second day, they’ve already fucked three times. 

Their hotel room in Tucson overlooks a parking lot, and beyond it - pale yellow fields. A highway bridge. Cacti and brush. Monotone sky. Lucy can hear Warren finish his shower. The room is full of 4pm overcast light. She’s wrapped in a plush white towel. 

This room is bigger than the hotel room in El Paso. It’s beige. Two queen sized beds instead of one. Dark mahogany furniture and an inexplicably mirrored ceiling. It has some sort of treatment that makes it opaque and rusted. Engraved in gold cursive lettering are the words, “I don’t drink coffee to wake up. I wake up to drink coffee”.

Over the phone, weeks or maybe months earlier, Warren described his hotel selection process. He emphasized that he always requests a room facing away from the highway with a window that can open. So far every room they have stayed in faced a highway and had a window that couldn’t be opened. She doesn’t bring up this discrepancy. 

They are going to fuck again when he gets out of the shower. It used to be hard for Lucy to stay present during sex. This was a leftover from past relationships. Warren and Lucy have been working on getting over that stuff. He looks silly and cute stepping out of the bathroom. His hair is pushed back flat on his head. He’s already kind of hard. He sits down next to Lucy, places his hand over her forehead, and they start to kiss. Lucy is thrilled it is so light out. She can see him so clearly. Warren who is safe and knows what to do. Her mind begins to shift pleasantly. Away from a verbal space, zooming her in, microscopic. Folds of skin. Nuzzling. Pulling. He tells her what to do. She asks for permission. He decides what’s best. Rocking. Lucy is on top, looking down at him. 

“Spit on me.” Warren says, squirming around under her. She does. 

“Do you want me to slap you?”

She does. He has control. She’ll comply with anything. 

Their faces are so close together. Gasping and gulping. She tugs harder at his hair. Their eyes are linked, dazed, foggy. He’s working her up. 

“Can I come?” she asks. 

“No,” he says. “Absolutely not.”

She closes her eyes tight. Grips his shoulder and then his neck. 

“Lucy - can I say the R-word?”

The haze lifts and she stops moving. As quickly as she fell into it, she’s out of it.

“... Retarded?” she asks.

Instead of a tangle of limbs, governed by texture and force and smell and pressure, she is a 21 year old girl, with medium sized breasts and hastily trimmed pubic hair, three years of college education, and an impulse towards people pleasing. Sitting on top of a 52 year old man, with wispy chest hair and knobby knees, two cats, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. She looks in his eyes for the same kind of practically-laughing energy in her chest.

“Uh.” 

And then instead of hilarity it’s something very heavy. “Oh.”

“Lucy, I’m sorry. Fuck, I’m glad I asked.” 

He sits up, pulling her off of him, and turns her around into a small spoon. 

“You wanted to say rape?” she asks, very quietly, it’s not really a question. She glances up at the two of them in the mirror. She shifts her leg slightly to look skinnier. Warren puts pressure on her neck, then under her shoulder blades. 

“We can always stop,” he says.

“I know,” she says. 

“Tell me right now.”

“Stop.” 

He pulls his hands away. 

“We can practice that whenever you want,” he says. He rolls over, puts his hands behind his head, “I’m never going to do that to you. You’re with me.” 

Lucy distracts herself with another mental inventory of everything in the hotel room. She tells herself he didn’t fail her. She gets cold and pulls up the beige blanket at the foot of the bed. Warren joins her, tucking it under his chin. 

“Talk to me, Lucy.”

She would rather pretend to be retarded than pretend to be without agency. She also loves being told what to do. The contradiction feels difficult to explain. She’s not sure that she knows it herself. What is the difference between being raped and saying yes to anything?

***

They leave Tucson for Phoenix at 11AM. In the back seat, Warren has a cooler full of indie-brand versions of every snack Lucy has ever heard of in her whole life. Dried fruit from a natural food co-op. Cheese twists. Sweet potato chips. Popcorn with nutritional yeast. Rice cakes. Homemade granola. Pretzels. 

As usual, her hand is playing with the hair at the base of his neck. His hand rests on her thigh, this time, inches below a mini-dress patterned with purple flowers. 

“How did you meet Delia, again?”

“Okay, well. I’ll tell you the whole story,” says Warren, “Remember that week I told you about?”

“When you hooked up with three different girls, three nights in a row?”

“Right. While I was on tour. It was right after Claudette and I divorced. And we were together for eight years. I didn’t really even have a career before we got married. So I never really knew what it was like to be single and on tour.”

“It’s always so interesting for me to think about that week because it seems so unlike you.”

“I mean, I never did it again. But really Lucy, it was a revelation to me. I was not the way I am with you sexually. Seriously, Claudette used to get mad at me for always keeping my eyes closed during sex. I was in my early 40s and still was scared of looking someone in the eyes while fucking them.”

“What changed?”

“Who knows. I’ve never been as free with anyone sexually as I am with you, Lucy.”

“I can say the same.” 

Warren laughs at this. “Anyway, it was after the only promiscuous week I’ve ever had on tour. I was almost at the end of it, those grueling final weeks. I would be emotionally fucked right now if you weren’t here with me. The last stretch is always the hardest. I was all the way in Philadelphia. I had a day off. It was very gray out, sort of rainy. I really wanted to visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I always go to museums on my days off. But this time it was closed. It was a Monday. So, I went to a coffee shop instead. She was the barista there. We were the only two people in the shop for at least an hour.” 

Lucy imagines her. From the pictures she’s seen, Delia has an extraordinarily big nose. It must have complemented Warren’s. Delia’s usually wearing black, with very brightly colored, expensive looking shoes. Lucy has heard vague details about Delia and Warren’s relationship, but being told the story so clearly gives Lucy the opportunity to find new details to long for, to try and emulate, to look for inside of herself. 

“I really can’t tell you what it was, we barely said anything. But I knew that I liked her. I kept looking at her while I was drinking my coffee. And then, I swear, Lucy. I did something I’ve never done before or since.”

Lucy is wide eyed and immersed.

“I wrote my email on a piece of paper. Very simple note. It just had my email.”

“How did she react?”

“Honestly, she seemed angry, and I kind of just ran out the door before she could really say anything. She didn’t email me, I left Philadelphia, I drove back to California. I thought, oh well. So, she didn’t want to email me. That’s okay. Then, a week after the tour ended, I get an email from her. She’s very defensive, on guard. Telling me she doesn’t know why she emails me when she emails me. We start writing back and forth. She always takes over a week to respond. I send her my records.”

Lucy holds his hand tightly when he tells her this. The first thing he ever sent her in the mail was a test pressing of his new record, a copy of Malone Dies, and two grams of cocaine he bought off the dark web. She loves thinking about the comparisons. “Remember that?”

He nods. 

“Then, I had to go back to the east coast. She agrees to meet me for dinner. She brought a sketchbook with her. There was a long wait for the restaurant, and we just sat on a bench outside the whole time. She brought out some pencils and wanted me to draw diagrams for her. How to set up mics when I’m performing. How I set up the speakers at my recording studio. What the best layout is, etc. She’s very visual.”

Lucy likes to think of herself as very visual too, but she could never be interested in a mic set up. It’s possible Delia was pretending. 

“We went back to my hotel but just fooled around a little bit. She didn’t want to sleep with me then. I was only the third person she’d ever slept with, you know.”

Maybe he is telling Lucy this as a dig, since Warren is the 27th person she’s slept with, and he wasn’t very happy when he found that out. 

“And then?”

“We were long distance for two years.”

“Did you ever meet her parents?”

“Yeah. I remember driving up their long, gravely driveway. We sat outside around a fire pit.”

“They didn’t care that you were older?”

“Look, no one really cared. But I guess 20 years is more acceptable than 30.”

“And then?”

“Well, when she got offered the position at Columbia, it was clear the long distance was never going to stop. She’s always had one goal. She’s always just wanted to be a painter. So, being a painting professor at Columbia… I respected the decision. How could I not? Los Angeles doesn’t have the same kind of art scene to offer. If you’re really serious, you have to be in New York.”

“And you couldn’t move there?”

“There’s a certain way people live in New York that’s life-negating. I can’t do it. I’m from the tropics, man. I’ve suffered too much in my life. You’re the same, Lucy. We both need it to be easy.”

“And now?”

“She’s engaged, and her fiance doesn’t like it when we talk. At least that’s what she tells me. So, we don’t talk very much,” Warren continues, “Is this entertaining? Am I entertaining? I think it’s very important to be entertaining.”

“Yes! Of course you are.” 

“Good.”

“So then you met Maude…”

“When Delia and I were still breaking up. Well, we were already broken up. But we were still negotiating the terms, you know.”

“What was it like when you met Maude?”

“Remember, after the first night we met? You asked me when was the last time I had that much fun?”

“Yeah.”

“The first thing that came to mind was the first time I met Maude. It was the same thing, you know. We couldn’t stop talking. You know talking is the most important thing to me. Just like it is for you.”

“Sex is the most important thing for me,” she says.

“I wish!”

“And then Maude moved down to Los Angeles right away.”

“Immediately. It was great. Maude’s great. She’s so funny. In this cynical way. Like, so nihilistic. Truly nihilistic. Which is funny. But she also didn’t really have a why.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s like this. One day, she’d tell me she was going to do ceramics. That she was going to order a wheel and start sculpting. I’m like, yes. Great. I buy her everything. She never touches it. Then, the next day, it’s painting. Then, the next day, it’s music.”

“I mean, it seems like she’s been pretty successful at that.”

“She’s gotten successful enough to make a very entertaining 15 second Instagram video.”

“There’s the Givenchy ad, though.” 

“Again - it’s 15 seconds! 15 seconds isn’t long enough for a why. She doesn’t know what she wants. And that’s very tiring to be around for an extended period of time. Look, as long as there’s a why, I can do it.”

“I’m not thinking about my own why too far down the line, just personally.”

“I get it. I’ve been there. I think it’s a coping mechanism, honestly. But pretty soon you’re going to have novels, books, paintings. That’s going to be part of your identity and part of your arc as a character in my own narration, you know what I mean. You’ve had a setback, I get it. You know that I know how much of a setback it’s been. No one should have to live through something like that. I’m not discrediting how hard the assault was for you, please don’t think I am. But you’re really doing it, Lucy. Trauma is part of it, and that’s beautiful. I think.”

Maude didn’t have a why but Warren is confident that someday Lucy will. Lucy keeps going down the list. Emily, who came after Maude, is a photographer for the New York Times. A friend introduced them. Claudette was a fashion designer, but is now a real estate agent, something Warren sees as selling out and part of why they split. The others, nameless and faceless, too old for active social media profiles, come to his shows whenever his tours hit their town. 

Warren tells Lucy how much he loved each girlfriend and it fills her up, like somehow each time it’s grown and now it’s landed on Lucy. She loves his creased hands and the blonde hair on his forearms. 

“And you don’t want to hear about my exes.”

He laughs, “Of course not.”

“Why?”

“You know why. No one wants to hear about people treating you badly, Lucy. I love you too much.”

She looks at dried grass. Stacks of rocks. Far away apricot mountains. She thinks about her bedroom. The New York Times, Columbia, and Givenchy are in her future.

***

They swim in the hotel pool. Everyone they see in the lobby is an older businessman in an expensive suit. Everyone they see in the elevator is an older businessman in an expensive suit. Everyone they see having a drink outside, by the pool, is an older businessman in an expensive suit.  

Lucy is the only girl. She smiles with all of her teeth. She drapes herself around Warren, who is an older man with faded dyed blue hair. She hopes they see how long her legs are. She hopes they think he’s a freak. She hopes they see how much fun she is having. She splashes Warren in the pool to make this clear. She hopes they want to fuck her, and she hopes they are jealous that she wants to fuck a freak instead of them.

***

In Phoenix, Warren performs his set in a puppet theater. They arrive 15 minutes early. They get out of the car and Warren pops open the trunk. He hands her several trashbags full of T-Shirts and hoists up a cardboard box full of vinyl. 

Lucy arranges Warren’s T-Shirts and vinyl on a wooden platform near the entrance. Ten records made over the past twenty years. She likes the way the colors of each record coordinate with each other. Warm yellows. Teal blues. Windows, gates, and doorways.

Warren asks Lucy to sit in the front row, on the upper left corner. For a few minutes, she is the only one there, a one woman audience for a one man show where Warren plugs in pedals and tunes his guitar, turning knobs on his drum machine. 

Over the next twenty minutes, people trickle in. Everyone is white. Most people are over thirty. A gay couple sits next to her and offers her a beer. There is a camaraderie among them. They love Warren. They found him somehow amidst an oversaturation of corporate music labels and mainstream media. Loving him aligns them with DIY culture, modernist literature, and the Democratic party. Warren passes around a small wicker basket full of torn up pieces of paper and crayons. He wants everyone to write him questions that he will answer in between songs. This is always the structure of his performance. 

Lucy writes a question in burnt sienna, trying to flatten the piece of paper against her thigh. Her handwriting is distorted without a hard surface to write on. It looks like the scrawl of a child just barely able to write. She folds up the question and drops it in the basket, hoping Warren finds it intelligent and thought-provoking. 

Warren plays an opening chord and all side conversations stop. People lean forward. Laser beam focus. Lucy lets Warren be something else for her. She watches his hands move around his guitar, his eyes closing off and on. She’s focused on a single point in the present. Consumed by sonic waves and echoes and intonations and rhythm. She looks at the rest of the audience intermittently. Another man in the front row is softly singing along to Warren’s every word. He finishes the first song. 

Warren unfolds a piece of paper from the wicker basket. 

“We are about to have a baby,” he reads. “What should the name be?” 

A short pause.

“Lucy,” he answers. 

“It’s going to be a boy!” The couple shouts from the audience.

“Name him Lucy anyway!”

Lucy tries to notice everything these people might notice about Warren. They see his faded hair (not knowing, like Lucy knows, that it was at exactly the stage he likes it, sun-bleached away from the intensity of the first few days post-dye) and tanned skin (100+ degree weather is where he thrives) and stubby but dexterous fingers. A performance can only communicate so much. 

At the end of the show, Lucy stands next to Warren while he shakes everyone’s hand, and signs their vinyl, and consults with them about which T-Shirt they should buy. One man, dressed in black skinny jeans with straight hair down to his shoulders, lingers. He says, nodding at Lucy, “If just one person could watch me play the way she watches you… Man, I would leave it all. That would be it for me.”

Lucy and Warren laugh. Lucy feels proud that she’s playing her part so well. 

***

That night, Lucy dreams that she is inside a bathroom with green tiles. Stumbled through the door by losing her balance. The bathroom is filled with white light, filtering in through frosted windows. Warren is crouched in a corner, masturbating while clutching a phone. She runs into him with the same sort of imbalance she had when confronted with the bathroom door. She grabs the phone, even though it’s slippery, practically squeezing through her fingers. A picture of her brother is on the phone. “He’s only nine!” she yells. 

When she wakes up, she’s so angry. Her heart is pounding. She made the wrong decision. She rolls over. She made the wrong decision again. Warren is sound asleep. He’s huddled in a fetal position, both hands under his chin. Lashes against his cheek. 

Lucy stands up. Turns on the bathroom faucet to drink some water. She writes down the dream in her notes app. She can use it as evidence if she has to. Warren’s black leather toiletry bag is open on the counter. He has the same brand of floss Lucy uses. He didn’t use that before he met her. He stole that. A tiny nail brush is next to it. He didn’t care whether his nails were clean or dirty before he met her. He stole that too. She looks at him lying in bed, curled around, knees drawn up. Lucy is sure he never slept that way before he saw her sleeping like that first. She wonders what else she’s losing through osmosis, just by sheer proximity to Warren. 

When Lucy’s breathing slows down, she gets back into bed. Warren pulls her against him. He nuzzles into her back. She feels small against him, and wonders where his grasp will lead her tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. 

***

They drive out of Phoenix and back into desert wasteland. There’s hardly anyone else on the road. They pass an amusement park that looks permanently shut down. Warren nods his head along to the music she’s playing. They drive past an adult video store, the only building on a small road twisting off from the freeway. She plays an episode of her favorite podcast, about a famous musician, who plays arenas instead of house shows. Warren starts crying three quarters of the way through.

“I can see you so clearly in what you love,” he says, when Lucy asks him why.

The last hotel is pale pink. Lucy leaves the door open while she gets ready to go to dinner. Warren can see her from where he’s resting on the bed. She spends extra time moisturizing her face, filling in her eyebrows, lining her eyes. Brushes her hair three times more than she needs to. She dusts her cheekbones with highlighter. She doesn’t put on her black dress till the very end. She steps out of the bathroom to ask Warren to zip her up, even though she can reach the zipper herself. 

“You’re so beautiful,” Warren says. 

They’re meeting the hosts of tonight’s show at a restaurant. Josh and Josh’s wife. Lucy and Warren are the last members of the dinner party to arrive. There are three couples. One of them brought along a four year old child. She has very curly hair. Smiles widely. 

All of them have met Warren many times. They are so happy he could be there for dinner. They’ve been waiting for him to perform again in Palm Springs for three years. One of them drove eight hours to be there. They settle into dining chairs covered in luxurious emerald green upholstery. Lucy is next to Josh. A young waiter wearing all black comes to take their orders. He looks at Lucy right in the eyes. 

Warren says that he will be splitting a fennel sausage pizza and an arugula prosciutto pizza with Lucy. Lucy had wanted the anchovy jalapeno pizza but she doesn’t say anything. She reminds herself that the comfort of Warren making decisions is worth the occasional error in judgment.

“How do you and Warren know each other?” Josh asks. 

“Well, I used to date one of the engineers at his studio. We met about two years ago and have been really close since.” 

Josh and the others sitting around the table nod knowingly. Like these kinds of friendships are perfectly ordinary. Of course Warren’s companion at a dinner full of people who have been following his career for decades is a girl who was born the same year as his first release. 

The whole night, in between trying to discreetly dip her fingers in candle wax and cataloging the different ranges of green throughout the restaurant, Lucy tries to recreate moments of eye contact with the waiter. She wonders what his cum tastes like and how often he jerks off. She wonders what he thinks she’s doing at this table, with these adults, sharing two plates with a blue haired man. She imagines him showing up at the house show. She imagines him recognizing Warren but trying to play it cool. She imagines him being bitter that she’s chosen a man with accomplishments he could never compete with. How silly a journal full of unsung song lyrics must look in comparison to a New Yorker profile. 

When they get to the house, there are already lines of cars parked on the street. Lucy hoists up the trash bag of shirts. Warren balances the box of vinyl on his hip. They walk together through a dimly lit gravel pathway, bordered by short and squat palm trees, into a pristine art deco masterpiece.

The porcelain tiled entryway opens up into a large living room where the entire back wall is glass. It’s dark outside, except for the glowing electric blue of a kidney shaped swimming pool. Luxurious. Lucy wishes she was wearing high heels. 

Warren turns to her. “Hey, if you need anything, you can always just tap me. I’m so glad you’re here.”

And then, facing the others, “This is my friend, Lucy.”

Over thirty people are packed into the living room, sitting on couches, standing by tables, and all looking at Warren with an air of anticipation. A bigger turnout than Phoenix. Similar ‘60s and ‘70s vintage clothes, spiral patterns, beat-up oxfords, long beards, eccentric glasses, although the Palm Springs selections seem more expensive. Lucy looks among them for any pretty young girls, who maybe have the potential to be New York Times photographers, or Columbia painting professors, or Givenchy-background-music-composers. There are none in sight. Like the last show, the audience is made up of more men than women. 

Warren and Lucy pass a table set up with an old looking fruit plate and several stacked boxes of local craft IPAs. Warren floats the wicker basket and crayons, urging people to write him questions. Lucy writes the same question she did before. 

Soft purple light filters through the whole room from a tinted ceiling lamp, above Warren’s music stand, stool, drum machine, and guitar. A metal shelf on one of the walls is covered in pedals and amps and microphones. Each one displayed like a sculpture. Lucy doesn't know anything about these things but she knows Warren does. As everyone gets settled, arranging themselves in the chairs or on floor pillows right up close, Warren walks over to Lucy and puts his hand gently on the top of her head. 

“Do you need anything?”

“No,” she smiles at him. She feels at least ten, maybe fifteen people watching them. 

“Do you want any water? I’m glad you have a beer. Are you hungry? Do you need a snack?”

Lucy shifts her weight from side to side. “I’m alright, thank you though.”

Without looking at his audience, Warren says, “I really can get you anything you need.”

“Thank you, Warren. Where do you want me to sit?”

“Wherever you want to sit.”

“I want to sit wherever you want me to sit.” 

“I want you to sit right here on this piano bench.” 

“Then that’s where I’m going to sit.” 

The piano bench is practically parallel to Warren’s music stand. If playing piano was part of Warren’s repertoire, the audience would only have to shift their gaze by a few feet to follow him. She is in the same field of vision as the mic. She can see Warren perfectly and everyone can see her. She sits down and draws her knees up to her chest, holding them tightly. She’s careful to make sure no one can see her underwear.

Warren plays an opening chord and the surrounding ambient chatter immediately stops. People lean forward. Laser beam focus. Lucy looks at the audience. Lots of lips mouth his lyrics. When he leans forward, everyone leans back. When the rhythm increases, they bounce their knees up and down. When it slows, they look wistful and bright eyed. He finishes the first song.

“Hey guys. Thank you so much for coming. You don’t know how much I love it here. I love Palm Springs. I love Southern California. I love Josh - who’s supplying this wonderful space. Josh, can I personally say that I really like you and that it’s really nice to talk to you.” 

The crowd claps and smiles and Josh gets a pat on the back. 

“You know, I never planned to make this record. I really thought I’d made the last one. I’ve always had a pet peeve about musicians drawing out their careers too long. I think it’s important to know when to stop, what you’ve grown out of, when it’s time for the focus to be on other people. But then I suffered a great loss, experienced a real trauma... to put it lightly, and was offered the opportunity to make a record. It was a way to get through each day. I just said yes, going along with what someone else wanted, too depressed to have the desire to make art at all. But here I am. I just said yes. And honestly, I think it’s my favorite record yet. It’s a record about survival. Being here makes it all feel worth it.”

He plays another chord that reverberates around the room. Warren looks at the floor. He plays another song. When Lucy looks at the audience, they are looking at Warren. When Lucy looks at Warren, the audience is looking at her. 

He reaches into the wicker basket, pulls out a carefully folded piece of paper. 

“When did I first start to feel like I was performing? Well…the very first time?”

He’s answering her question. Her breath catches in her throat. 

“Growing up in Gainesville, Florida with a single mom who was working all the time, I never really had anyone that could expose me to any kind of art stuff.”

Lucy hears someone cough. She feels slightly too hot, places her beer can against her cheek. 

“I don’t think my mom ever consciously put a record on in her life. But I remember this one babysitter, who I was totally and completely in love with, used to come over. She’d bring records. Let me tell you - it wasn’t incredibly sophisticated stuff. Like, Broadway cast recordings of musicals. Big background orchestra.”

When she takes the can away, her make-up smudges. Instead of listening to Warren, everyone is noticing the uneven redness of her face, shininess from precipitation or maybe sweat. She is so visibly vulnerable. 

“Something about the storytelling struck a chord with me. There was one record in particular. I loved embodying the characters. Once the music started playing, I was completely overtaken. The light would automatically become warmer. I would imagine the whole world watching me. Like I was the absolute best. Like I had been chosen. And then, you know, I’d just be leaping around my kitchen singing along to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Belting out every word. The youngest performer of all time. At the center of everything.”

Lucy works very hard to keep her face open and blank. She avoids any kind of eye contact. She holds her position perfectly still. She looks at the audience, who is looking at Warren because she is looking at them. They are all dreaming about their childhoods. She can see it. 

Warren winks at her. The audience looks for her reaction. 

“What an act,” Lucy says, and hopes it doesn’t sound as cruel as it did in her head. 

Ruby Zuckerman is a writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has been published by Burn All Books and The Quarterless Review and is forthcoming in the Beloit Fiction Journal. She was the winner of the 2020 Nick Adams ACM short story contest. As a day job, she works at a wedding DJ company and writes for Hannah Hoffman Gallery. She speaks Yiddish.