with Lydia’s eyes. And now she’s looking close for the first time. She’s realizing that I’m someone else.
No. She’s only confused because we’re not excited.
Lydia stops at the foot of the bed and shifts her weight from one hip to the other. Her tangled hair is draped over her left shoulder. Her lips are even more swollen than usual.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
Oh. Well.
Maybe I’m more like Christopher than I thought.
You are Christopher.
Shut up. I can do this myself now. Whoever I am.
Later I take Christopher’s beat-up white Chevy pickup truck and head for the H.E.B. in Kerrville. Lydia worries over me as I leave the house, but she doesn’t pitch another fit. She gives me a cash card with ten thousand bucks on it, kisses me, and tells me to come home safe, goddamn it. As I let the truck coast down the switchbacked driveway, I glance into the rearview mirror and see that both Lydia and the stained-glass eye are watching me. Then the trees obscure them, but I know they’re still there.
As I reach Texas 27, a guy in a lawn chair under the trees on the far side of the highway points a camcorder at me. He’s probably only a tabloid ’razzi, but I wait until the driveway’s automatic gate closes behind me before I turn toward Kerrville. After all, Lydia Love has more than her share of obsessive fans. That hasn’t changed even though she hasn’t recorded and has hardly performed in the three years since Christopher Jennings came into her life. But I guess her fans know as well as I do that the phoenix will rise again.
And it will rise thanks to me. To Willie.
You are Christopher.
Thanks to both of us, then.
The pickup doesn’t have air-conditioning, which says something about Christopher’s economic situation before he met Lydia. I roll down both windows and let the hot breeze blast me as I follow the twisting highway eastward alongside the Guadalupe River. Kerrville, a small town with a big reputation, is just a few miles away.
Its big reputation is the result of its annual folk-music festival, but I stopped going to the festival two years ago. It seemed as if almost everyone was using amplifiers and distortion, trying to be Lydia Love. She’s my favorite singer too, but some of these kids can’t get it through their heads that if Lydia didn’t make it big by trying to look and sound like someone else, they shouldn’t try to look and sound like someone else either.
Like I’ve got room to talk. It’s only now that I do look and sound like someone else that I have a shot at a future in the music business.
The supermarket’s the first thing on my left as I come into town. After parking the truck, I find a pay phone on the store’s outside wall, run the cash card through it, and punch up Danny Daniels’ number in Dallas. Daniels is an L.A. boy, but he says he’ll be working at CCA-Dallas until he can get a new Lydia Love album in the can. If he wants to stay close to her, he’d do better to relocate to CCA-Austin—but when I pointed that out, he gave a theatrical shudder and said, “Hippies.” I guess Dallas is closer to being his kind of scene.
He comes on the line before it rings. “Yo, Christopher,” he says. “Except for that minor bout of impotence this morning, you’re doing peachy-keen. Keep it up. And I mean that.”
Unlike the original Christopher, I know that I’m being observed while I’m with Lydia. But there ought to be limits.
“You don’t have to watch us screw,” I say. “Sex is just sex. It’s the other stuff that’ll break us up.”
“But sex is part of ‘the other stuff,’ Chris,” Daniels says. “So just pretend you’re alone with her. Besides, if everything continues going peachy-keen, I’m the only one who’ll see it. And it’s not like I’m enjoying it.”
How could anyone not enjoy seeing Lydia Love naked? I wonder.
Or is that Christopher?
You are Christopher.
Not when I’m on the phone with Danny Daniels.
You are Christopher.
Let me think.
You are Christopher.
“The chip’s talking too much,” I tell Daniels. “It’s getting in my face, and Lydia’s going to notice that something’s not right.”
Daniels sighs. “We put everything we know about the Christopher-Lydia relationship into that chip, so of course it’s gonna have a lot to say. I’ve already told you, just think of it as your conscience.”
“My conscience doesn’t speak from my back teeth.”
“It does