“Do you know where I’m from?” Linda asks.

I shake my head.

“The Valley. Encino. I’m a Valley Girl. I miss Southern California. I miss the sun.”

I laugh.

Linda turns on her side. “How did two California college girls end up with this strange herd of British wetbacks? They only want to marry us for the citizenship and the tax advantage. Take my advice. Finish school. Don’t run off with the first Brit who wants to marry you for a green card.”

Linda falls asleep. I sit beside her, watching the sun move across the sky, dip in the horizon, and then the expanding swirl of sunset. The hours are punctuated only by the sound of Jeanette’s clicking heels and Len’s snoring. Clearly, the Rowans are not leaving until Alan returns. It’s evening. Good one, Alan, you could have returned when you promised to!

A sound makes me jump, and the movement of my body jolts Linda awake. There is noise in the foyer. Is Alan back? I start to rise, but Linda latches onto me like a barnacle. “No, stay. This is going to get ugly. Stay with me.”

Len goes from asleep to turbo-charged in a blink of an eye. He’s through the terrace doors. And then there is shouting, lots of shouting, but it is mostly Len, and shouting and breaking glass.

After what seems like a monumental amount of time, I shake Linda off and run toward the great room. Inside I find Alan and Len tangled on the floor, and the room is a mess. I start to move to break it up, but Linda stops me.

“I am not going to fight you, Len,” Alan snaps, trying to break free.

“I’m the one who fucking found you!” It rings through the room with acid potency. “So, is that what you’re pissed about? You’re pissed I didn’t let you screw things up permanently? I happen to love you. And you let my wife cry. You don’t take her calls. You don’t answer her letters. You just disappear, and then come back to New York, smug as you please all secretive and shit. And then you slap us in the face with Arnie Arnowitz.”

“I fucking deserve a little time after eight years,” Alan says, shoving Len back and then sitting up.

“Fine. You can have time. What you can’t do is leave us all hanging around with our cocks in our hand, not knowing what we’re doing, not knowing if you’re all right, and not knowing if there’s a band. Some of us need the fucking work. We don’t have the royalties. Some of us ain’t rich as the Federal Reserve.”

“So is that where we are? It’s about the money?”

“No. It’s about you not telling us you’re in trouble. I thought you kicked that shit. Next thing I know, I’m finding you dead on smack, and they’re bringing you back to life. Fuck you! You were dead, you witless bastard.”

Len pushes back against a sofa, sitting on the floor sprawled and weak, and he is crying.

I’m frozen at the terrace doors, but Linda is suddenly across the room, with Len in her arms, and he’s crying against her.

After several minutes, Linda looks at Alan. “How could you think that it was ever about the money, Manny? Not us. Never us. That’s unfair. Len’s just letting all the garbage out. It’s been rough. But don’t ever accuse us of having it be about the money.”

Alan rakes a hand through his hair. “I never thought it was, Linda.”

Linda brushes at the tears on her face. “You scared the hell out of us, Manny. You’ve really got to stop this shit.”

“I’m working on it.” Alan’s eyes find me and his expression changes into something that looks like apprehension. “Why are you staring at me like that, Chrissie?”

I break free of my thoughts. Alan is still breathing heavy, still trying to calm himself. Before the Rowans, somehow everything managed to remain in my lockboxes. But they are all open again and the mess is here in the room with me, his truth, my truth. I don’t know how I was looking at him and I don’t know what he can see.

I drop to my knees beside him and Alan pulls me fiercely against him. The room is so heavy with grimness, and my thoughts and emotions are in free fall again.

Say something quickly, Chrissie. Something funny. It doesn’t matter if Alan hates the playacting. Right now it is all there is to get me through this. I kiss his cheek. I make an exaggerated face. “It’s the bowl, Alan. The Columbian pottery. I wish Len had broken that horrid little piece over there on your head, but the one he broke was exquisite.”

It’s Linda who laughs, and her laughter, when it flows, is infectious. “I like her. I really do.”

In a minute, they are all laughing, but what I hear in the room is despair.

* * *

I slip quietly from the great room into Alan’s bedroom. The Rowans are hovering in the apartment and somehow I hold it together until I’m alone.

I shut the door and the tears instantly begin to flow. I lie down on the bed, my emotion-drained limbs almost without sensation, and I curl into a tight ball around Alan’s pillow. What do I do? Do I run? Do I stay? I’m so afraid of what being with Alan is doing to me.

I hear Alan open the door. I don’t move. He crosses to the bed, pulling me into his arms, all warm and compassionate.

“I’m sorry,” he breathes.

I want to pull away from Alan. I want to melt into him. I want not to be afraid. I want to know for sure that we are both not totally fucked up. I want him to be all right. I want me to be all right.

“Don’t hate me, Chrissie. Please. I can stand anything else, but not you hating me.”

What does he feel inside of me that he would ask me not to hate him? And what is he apologizing for? I don’t understand him.

Gently, he pulls me full length against him, his face in my hair, and he is kissing my neck. He is sad. Achingly sad. My heart clenches and I cry harder. He kisses me softly across my face, my arms, my chest, and it doesn’t stop until the tears quiet. And he doesn’t pull away.

We lie quietly together, and I feel myself slowly calming, slowly coming back into comfortable order, slowly melting back into him, into this consuming connection I have felt from the start.

I turn in his arms to put space between us. His eyes are midnight black and guarded, and he is afraid too.

“Did you really try to kill yourself?” I whisper.

He closes his eyes and exhales.

“Alan, is it true?”

I need to know this. Know this for sure. So I can figure out later how it fits into me. It is a selfish thing, but I need to know. This is part of who I am, too, in a weird French movie subplot kind of way.

He opens his eyes.

“Yes, it is true.”

“Are you OK now?” I ask cautiously.

I know the answer. I can see it so clearly now. All the things that he hides behind his male beauty and his charm and his brilliant extremes. Or did I just miss it, being too absorbed in my own shit? He hasn’t come back together yet. Not completely. Jack is right. He shouldn’t be in New York. Not yet.

“I’m working on it, Chrissie.” His voice is anguished. He exhales a shuddering breath.

“What can I do for you? I don’t know what you need me to do.”

His eyes widen and he blinks. He reaches up and wipes away the tears from my cheek with his finger, those callused fingers that can touch with such velvet care.

“Just stay and be good to me.”

I bury my lips in his hair. I wrap my arms around him. I let him sink into my breasts. Alan is crying, real tears, real sounds, and it feels like it is something he has really needed to do for a really long time.

Chapter Eleven

I wake alone in the bed. It is still dark and it feels like the middle of the night. I don’t know if I should stir and let Alan see that I’m awake. He is playing very quietly and it is the first time he’s even picked up an instrument. The music is beautiful, quiet, and unlike anything I’ve ever heard out of him. It is haunting and it is sad and full of pain.

What hurt him so much that his life would disintegrate into the train wreck of last year? Something hurt him. Jack is right, the everything else of last year is only a symptom, and the real issue, whatever I am hearing now fighting its way out of him, is something dark and very real.