I find myself at the Louisiana Hayride in the days after my birthday, seated in the audience beside his little girlfriend, whom, for some reason, I’ve been appointed to chaperone. Oddly, I don’t mind. I look out for her: buying sodas, finding our seats. She feels so young to me, untested, unarmoured, especially beside the boy and me, who have already learned the price of illusion. So I wear my cloak of maturity, partly to comfort her, partly to remind myself that I still have one.
She’s prickly from the start, curt and self-conscious, but I pretend not to notice.
“Are you excited?” I ask, light-hearted.
She nods, sipping her cola through a straw. The air smells of fried dough and sawdust, carnival air.
The boy steps out from behind the stage and spots us in the crowd. His face lights up.
“Hey, girls,” he grins, swaggering over.
“Hello, Crazy,” I say, laughing as I hug him.
He shoots the girlfriend a quick look.
“I’m real glad you’re both here,” he says, scanning the room. “I’ll get us fresh drinks.”
“We already have some,” I reply.
He shrugs. “Alright then. Gotta get ready backstage.”
Before he goes on, the compere introduces him as the Memphis Flash, which makes me laugh, the first time I’ve heard him called that, though it fits.
He struts onstage and greets Mr Logan, the announcer.
“How you doin’, son?” Logan calls.
“Well, Mr Logan, I’m sick, sober and sorry,” the boy shoots back with a grin.
It makes me laugh aloud. The girlfriend doesn’t; she stares down, watching the other girls in the crowd instead of him, measuring the threat.
He’s electric onstage, almost manic, leaping, joking. When he starts Baby, Let’s Play House, he sings the whole thing while staring directly at me in the front row.
The girlfriend leans towards me. “I feel sick. I wanna go outside.”
“Go ahead,” I say. “I’ll stay.”
The crowd is wild, I’ve never seen anything like it, hysteria in real time. When the song ends, I go to find her. She’s sulking by the side of the building.
“I know he’s got girls on the side,” she says, “but does he have to rub my face in it?”
She looks me up and down, as though I’m just another side-girl, not the original, and it’s irritating. But I stay calm. “Sure,” I say gently. “I get it.”
We return as the band launches into Maybellene. She wants to leave.
“Let’s stay till the end,” I tell her, keeping my tone reasonable.
Onstage, he’s talking to Mr Logan again, rapid-fire, then suddenly turns on someone in the audience.
“What’s the matter with you?” he yells.
Scotty, Bill, and DJ roll their eyes. Then he launches into That’s All Right, Mama, furious, wild, unmoored. He’s nothing like the boy I used to know.
After the show he comes out to talk, instantly snapping at his girlfriend when he feels her mood.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Stop it,” I say. “Be kind to her.”
Through tears she tells him he didn’t have to sing Let’s Play House right at me.
“It’s just a song, you ninnies,” he mutters. “I didn’t even write it, just fixed the lyrics.”
He calls us idiots and storms backstage.
I follow, trying to steady him. “It was a good show,” I say, ignoring the drama. Truthfully, it feels beneath me, juvenile, performative. I’m beyond it.
He asks me to come later, once she’s gone home. Red West offers to drive her, six hours through the night. That’s the kind of friend he is. I walk her to the car, then head back.
“I thought we were going to celebrate my birthday,” I say when I find him backstage. I’m smiling, detached now.
“Is she gone?” he asks. “Are we alone?”
“Yes,” I tell him.
His irritability grates on me. I hate when he refuses to take responsibility for the mess he makes of other people’s feelings.
“Shush,” I say finally. “I don’t want to deal with it.”
He sighs, then suggests we go back to his motel.
“I’ll give you your birthday present,” he says. “I’ll make it extra special, for comin’ all this way.”
When we arrive, a line of girls waits outside his door. “What on earth?” I ask. He grins. “Get used to it, baby. This is what it’s like now.” He gestures to them, half amused, half triumphant. “Y’all can go home,” he calls. “I’m with my number one girl tonight.”
He already told me about some of this, but I didn’t know just how wild it really was, the sheer number of girls, the waiting, his nonchalance about it all. I’m not sure I can get used to it, even if he isn’t really mine anymore.
Inside, he asks if I want to open my birthday present.
“Sure,” I say.
He smiles, starts unbuttoning his shirt.
I laugh. “That’s your idea of a gift?”
“Best kind there is,” he says, stepping closer.
For a moment he’s just himself again, the boy I first knew. And as we fall against each other, the illusion collapses; what’s left is only the truth of two people, unperformed, unconstructed, momentarily free.
***
Back in Memphis a few days later, we’re upstairs in my room.
“I have to go out West,” I tell him.
“What for?” he asks, sullen. “I thought we were just gettin’ back to havin’ fun again.”
“We are,” I say. “But let’s quit while we’re ahead.”
“I won’t stand for it,” he snaps, then checks himself, now more accommodating. “What’re you goin’ for, anyhow?”
“I’ve been invited to Los Angeles for a few parties,” I tell him, leaving out the part about Tilly and me staying with Cary Grant and his wife. They’re hosting my birthday, which, apart from our late-night mischief at the motel, passed unnoticed in Memphis.
“Uh-uh,” he says, shaking his head. “You think any more about my proposition?”
“What proposition?” I frown.
“The one in the song!” he grins.
I laugh. “You silly goose.” He starts singing Baby, Let’s Play House. But then, as so often of late, the mood shifts for no discernible reason.
“What’s going on with you?” I ask, trying, and failing, to keep the edge out of my voice. “You’re either flying or collapsing. I can’t keep up.”
He looks away. The colour drains from his face. His pride is preventing him from just coming out with it, that it pisses him off when I don’t do what he wants me to do.
“I ain’t in the mood for your shit,” he mutters, cold now. “I’m leavin’.”
He storms downstairs and slams the door, not even saying goodbye to Miss Mary.
A moment later, she appears in the doorway. “Is he on something?” she asks quietly. “He sure seems like it.”
I shrug. “I don’t know,” I say, though the frustration catches in my throat.
I can’t deal with the nonsense anymore, so I leave for California. He seems to have forgotten one key thing about me: I take shit from no one. And he can go straight to hell.
***
I’m at the Beverly Hills Hotel with Tilly and the rest of the gang for a birthday soirée hosted by Mr Grant. It’s not a big party; it’s intimate and leaves room for conversation and anecdotes. Topper has flown in for it, but has to go back East in the morning to start preparing for the next term at college. He is more serious about Harvard than any of us are about our higher education, even Tilly, who has a need to always be number one. He is a serious man, you can rely on him being the responsible adult in the room.
The boy calls me.
“Can you fly out for a few days?” he asks. “I need a little break to recharge.”
I tell him I can’t. That I’m going to my house in Palm Springs, but he’s welcome to visit, if he has time off.
“I’ll be there,” he says.
My World of Interiors 