Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,84
over and made it sound somehow worse every time, it certainly seemed that way.
As she fumbled through her song one last time, she became aware that the band that had studio time booked next had arrived a few minutes early; she could hear them milling around in the cold cement hallway outside. This distraction was the last straw; she quit aimlessly strumming and started packing up her little pile of gear, turning off switches, generally aiming to leave the place nicer than she’d found it, unlike whoever had left an open bag of Cape Cod salt-and-vinegar chips on the console before her. Their stale, almost bodily odor mixed with the warm electrical smells of the room in an almost pleasant way, but she had still been mommishly offended. When she was satisfied that everything was tidy, she opened the door and let the band in.
They were kids, four boys, probably ten years younger than Laura. They mumbled hey and walked past her with their heads down, studiously rushing to maximize their time. The tallest one looked her in the eye as he passed. “Thanks for the extra ten minutes,” he said.
“No problem; I wasn’t getting anything done anyway,” she admitted. She realized she sounded pathetic, but he laughed. “We’ve all been there. We’re probably about to be there, but you gotta give it a shot.”
There was a sharp line where his haircut ended and the skin of his neck began. On a man her own age, this kind of attention to grooming would read as suspicious, narcissistic, or overcompensatory. He was still looking at her, squinting in what seemed almost like recognition.
“Hey, this is so random, but did you play a show in Philly with the Clips like ten or eleven years ago?”
She was so shocked that she almost dropped the cord she was too deliberately bundling up. “Yeah, that was me. You’ve got a great memory.”
“Oh, it made a huge impression. I mean, I was sixteen; it was one of the best shows I’d ever seen. You were incredible. Do you still play with them?”
“No, I …” She couldn’t figure out how to explain the lost decade of her life quickly to a stranger. “It was just that one time.”
“Well, if you ever want to sit in with us, it would be a total honor. I’m Leo, by the way.”
She put down the cord so they could awkwardly shake hands. He was still making eye contact. Laura decided to pretend to Leo and to herself that this was the kind of encounter she had all the time, instead of only the second time she’d been recognized and admired in more than a decade.
“Hey, what are you doing right now? We didn’t have anything we were really itching to play. We could just, like, jam?” He rolled his eyes as he said it to make sure she knew that he wasn’t the kind of person who said “jam” in earnest (but was also still sincere about wanting to jam).
“I’ve got to go. I have a … thing,” she said, for some reason not wanting to mention that the thing was work, or that the work was teaching middle schoolers.
“Okay, well, let me give you my number. We can do it some other time. Or not, but just so you know, it’s, like, an option.” Leo seemed weirdly flustered. It was bizarre to Laura to be the person in this situation who was making someone else nervous. She studied him more closely as he took her proffered phone and typed his number into it, then sent a text from it saying, “Hi Leo, it’s Laura .” He looked up at her shyly as he did this.
The likeliest explanation for his behavior was that he just moved through the world like this—seducing everyone a little bit as his default mode. He probably got a lot of free coffee. She remembered going through phases, pre-Marie, of doing the same kind of thing—deciding to approach ordinary situations in an extra-charming way, just for fun, for variety. When she’d done this, she’d thought of it as “being Callie.”
When he handed her the phone back, she tried to turn on that Callie mode, smiling with a “we have a mutual joke or secret” look in her eyes. She let her hand brush his during the phone handoff, and he actually blushed—it was working! She still had whatever measure of “it” she’d ever had access to. It was nice to know this, but also bittersweet to realize