potentially even better, Jeremy thought, than This Invisible Spot had ever been. Less gimmick and more groove. Which was a good thing, especially now that so much was riding on the success of their album. If only they could finish the damn thing.
It wasn’t like the band was stagnating. They’d played a few shows at prestigiously grungy east-side venues and local music festivals, signed with a good manager, received strong write-ups on music blogs. All spring, the songs were materializing out of them like some kind of collective mystical ritual—their practices so intense that Jeremy would come home depleted and sleep for ten hours—but at some critical point this summer they had lost steam. First, it was a business trip that took Emerson to Malaysia for two months, and then Ben the drummer’s epic hangovers took their toll, and now it was Daniel who had canceled their last three practices for suspicious-sounding “personal reasons.” At this rate, it would take another six months to complete the album. Jeremy didn’t have that kind of time; his problems were much more urgent than that.
Isn’t that a respectable job? He thought of Aoki’s e-mail for the hundredth time this week, and could practically see the snide curl of Aoki’s lip as she typed that line. His first instinct had been to avoid mentioning Claudia entirely in his correspondence with Aoki, as if that might somehow protect her from his ex-girlfriend’s cutting opinions—but then he thought it might appear to Aoki that he was disavowing his wife. So he’d dropped in a careful mention of her, and sure enough, Aoki had managed with one word to dismiss her. What Would Aoki Think? Not much, clearly. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that when he read Aoki’s dismissive response—Isn’t that respectable?—his lurching first reaction had been an involuntary nod of agreement.
He didn’t even recognize his wife anymore, this grimly focused woman who put on pumps in the morning and left for work before he’d even woken up and then spent her evenings grading papers instead of drinking margaritas at El Compadre or going to see bands with him or working on the screenplay she’d promised to write. They hadn’t even had sex in weeks—she fell asleep early now, thanks to her 5:30 A.M. wake-up time. Even though he understood that the House Problem had forced this situation; even though he could relate to how defeated she felt by her stalled career; and even though he respected teachers, on principle, for taking on such an important task (educating the leaders of tomorrow and all that)—despite all this, he still couldn’t quite reconcile the fact that the inspiring director he’d married had been replaced seemingly overnight by a home-obsessed, depressingly bourgeois, constantly stressed-out schoolteacher. He watched this strange new Claudia, fussing over curricula and grading systems and mortgage balances and Excel spreadsheets, and couldn’t help thinking that she had overreacted and let go of something critical. Maybe Claudia was saving their house, but her transformation into this new person felt like a different kind of betrayal.
But Audiophone’s success could save Claudia. Could save both of them. A finished record might set an inspirational example for Claudia, yes, but it might also net them enough cash to let her quit that job and boot out Lucy. Like turning in the pawn ticket to get their lives out of hock. Getting rich off his music had never been the goal, exactly—you were stupid if you thought you’d do that as a musician these days—but it wasn’t unrealistic to think it might make some money. If Audiophone knocked out the album in the next month or two, by the end of the year they’d have something to sell. And who knows? They could get a record deal, go on tour, have a radio hit, lay claim to a miracle. Life could return to the way it used to be, only better.
Judging by the enthusiastic response of the audience tonight, maybe it wasn’t such a wild fantasy after all. As the crowd’s cheers crescendoed into a frenzied climax, Jeremy lifted the last crowing notes of “No Assembly Required” out over the heads of the audience and then dropped the song, crashing, to a finish. The house lights came up and the DJ put on a Prince song and the audience began to drift away, back toward the bar. The band broke down their instruments in the dark, invisible except to a clutch of friends and acquaintances who