not, though, or she wouldn’t have let herself get pregnant. But it’s true she was in flight mode. Desperate to escape her dickhead fiancé. Greenwich. Don and Viv. Her father’s horrible death. So, yeah, she might have imagined the disease was one more thing she could run away from.”
“You didn’t talk about it?”
He shook his head. “That was the worst part. Every time I showed concern, she’d fly into a rage. And I mean a real rage. We all saw her get angry at Minerva, but this was different. She’d scream at me that if she wanted a fucking mother she’d have stayed in fucking Greenwich. That I should mind my own fucking business. Which would piss me off, but then the symptoms would disappear for weeks at a stretch and I’d think maybe she was right and I was acting paranoid.
“Also, there was the band. Man, you wouldn’t believe how good we were. Like, ten times better than what you heard tonight. Tight? Jesus, we could read each other’s minds.” Despite himself, he was smiling. Joy, Teddy thought. The one thing his own even keel did not permit. For him such bliss led to euphoria, which inevitably pivoted, plunging headlong into depression and despair. Was this, like Jacy’s ataxia, also genetic? Had his parents ever experienced real joy? Or had they, too, had to guard themselves against emotional extremes? They seemed to want nothing more than they had. Each other. The Sunday New York Times. Each autumn, a fresh batch of high-school students to mold. Their own version of that even keel of his.
“We were a hot ticket all over Montreal,” Mickey was saying. “Throughout Quebec, really. We also made some serious dough, which was good because I never could reconcile myself to living off the money Jacy took from her old man’s safe. We blew a good chunk of it on amps and mics and a sound system. Plus an old hearse we repurposed to schlep all the equipment around in. I told myself I’d pay back every cent once we were famous, which it actually looked like we might be for a while. When Jacy sang, man, people just lost it. Her evolution was amazing. When we started out, she was doing maybe one song per set, but before long she was singing lead on, like, every other song and backup harmonies on most of the others. In the beginning we had to coax her up onstage. By the end, you couldn’t get her off it. And with every performance she got more bold, more free. It was the part of our lives she loved the most. Like I said, she was in escape mode, and performing, for her, was the best escape of all.”
His expression darkened now. “At gigs she liked to wear these miniskirts and she had this deal where she’d leap, microphone in hand, from the stage onto a table in the front row. As you can imagine, that gave anybody sitting there a pretty good view. She always wore black panties, so when the assholes looked up her skirt, for that split second, they wouldn’t be sure what they were seeing.”
Lincoln shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “She admitted this?”
Mickey sighed. “Okay, look, I wasn’t going to go into this, but if I don’t, you’re never going to understand. Jacy’s relationship to sex was complicated. She loved it, but it had to be on her terms, and it always, always had to be her idea.”
Which was certainly how it had been at Gay Head, Teddy remembered. Jacy, merrily shucking her clothes as he looked on, paralyzed, in wonder and fear and gratitude. Shouting “Come on, Teddy!” when he didn’t follow her into the icy waves quickly enough. Then pulling him into her embrace, her surprising strength overruling his moral qualms. Had her power over him been what excited her most?
“You always got the impression that sex itself was somehow secondary, as if she was driven by something even more powerful than desire, or maybe apart from desire. Like that night at the Theta house. I’m not saying she didn’t enjoy kissing us, but those kisses weren’t really about us.”
Of course they weren’t, Teddy thought. Given what had been going on in her home for so long, how could she be anything but confused by sex? Why wouldn’t she be tempted to weaponize it?
“Anyway,” Mickey continued, “it was like that with music, too. She loved to sing, don’t get me wrong. But it