chapter four
— any and all thoughts appreciated! 🦢
FOUR
To be honest, I still wasn’t sure if I was interested in Ricky. In any substantial sense, at least. He was perfectly good at his job and perfectly good at looking good. But I did know that I was interested in the world he was a part of.
I wasn’t quixotic, didn’t think that making music was all sunshine and rainbows and that people only did it out of pure love for the game. And I never wanted to be. I worried that letting things like that get to me would only hurt me in the long run. It wasn’t reality. But Ricky spoke in a way that made it feel like maybe it could be, made all the sacrifices seem paltry in the sea of everything else. I wanted to be part of that, to echo him with some validity.
“His name’s Eddie,” he told me while pointing to what he’d called a ‘test vinyl’: really just a vinyl sleeve with a picture they were still playing around with. He had the actual vinyl playing as we ate. Cigarette smoke still lingered in circles along the record player—like it’d been embedded in the music itself and was slowly creeping back out to greet us. The singer’s, Eddie Ginsberg, voice certainly sounded like it. Deep, but not too deep. Still a little young, still holding onto mulch from the playground and the shoes he wore to ask his first girl out. When my eyes caught his grown-out buzzcut, his brown, slightly warm skin, and a small mustache I could tell was recently trimmed, I hummed.
I thumbed some cream cheese off my sandwich and licked it. “Is he new?”
“New enough,” Ricky answered. “Sent in a demo a few months ago. You know Bert almost told me to backburn him?”
As if to catch my own reaction to whatever insanity he’d perceived it to be, he turned in his chair to see me. Feet propped up on a free space between track machines. My lips curled up—minute, but still.
“Did you tell him hell no?” I decided to probe, amused.
Ricky chuckled. “No, but I did ruin his schedule by coming in before a meeting to play him a bit. Thought I’d lose my damn head.”
“Oh, what ever would we do without it...”
“Guess we’ll never know, baby. I’m persistent. Next day, lil Eddie got a call to schedule a recording with us. This—”
He paused to point at the vinyl sleeve.
“—was what he’d made himself. Good, right?”
I shrugged with a nod and set my sandwich on the brown wrapping paper that it’d come in, wiping my hands. Eddie was busy singing about a girl he’d met in a diner on a late night. Baby blue glasses and straightened brown bangs. A simple enough crooner, just proud enough of himself to bode well for black audiences but just put-together enough to slide by a white household. Young women, I could tell, were the clear goal. The past ten years were practically stuffed with that type like a snug suitcase. Back at Barnard, I’d gotten survey after survey on this artist and this commercial and what young people thought of smokers. It was like bald old men had stumbled upon a goldmine tucked away in thick headbands and Gogo boots.
“He’s got something,” I admitted.
Ricky grinned like he’d won a bet. “Damn right, he does.” He stretched his arms behind his head, the collar of his shirt gaping just enough to show the chain at his throat. “Told you, baby. I got an ear.”
Ricky leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms behind his head. His sleeves had been pushed up to his elbows, and his watch, gold with a worn leather strap, caught the dim studio light as he moved. I noticed, then, how his wrists were dusted with faint scars—small, pale lines, the kind you don’t think to ask about. I didn’t. I was close, yes, the words dangling off the tip of my tongue, but they never made it out.
Instead, I just hummed. I let the music fill the space between us. Eddie’s voice was warm, the kind of warm that makes you think of late summer nights when the air is thick, and you can’t tell if you’re sweating or glowing. The kind that makes girls lean in closer without realizing it. Ricky had an ear for that. He knew how to find something just raw enough to be believable but polished enough to sell. There was an authenticity to what he did. I knew that because he wouldn’t have put a single thing at risk to piss his boss off if he didn’t think it’d be worth something. Even so soon, I could tell. He was a charmer and definitely more than aware of how many women must want him, but there was some truth in it, and I’d be silly to call it repellent.
Eventually, I asked aloud, more to the air than to him directly, “You really think he’s got a shot?”
I should’ve known the answer. Given how Ricky laughed, I could tell he was thinking the same thing. To him, if it was enough to keep in mind, it was a winning lottery ticket. Partially ego, partially just being damn good at assessing things like that. I could always appreciate when a man held true passion instead of whatever felt coolest at that moment.
“You should see him in person. Kid’s got a presence. And the kind of face that’ll have mothers calling their daughters downstairs to see him on TV.” He turned the volume down just a notch, letting the hum of the studio settle in. “You’d like him. He’s got that whole wide-eyed, hopeful thing you like.”
“I’m curious how you’re so certain,” I replied with a tiny, half-minded smile. I reached for my coffee, took a slow sip despite it having long gone lukewarm. “It’s a forward assumption.”
Ricky smiled and passively waved a hand.
“Call it intuition.”
I let his words settle and idly twirled the ring decorating my pinky finger with my thumb. It was a thin gold band, matching Carmela’s. Hers had flowers engraved into it; mine had leaves. She was showing some designs to her boss right about now. I’d told her the rings might be the lucky charms. We’d gotten them at an antique store, after all, with the marriage years and initials still showing on the inside. A week after wearing hers, Carmela had gotten an internship.
Eddie’s voice curled through the speakers, low and honeyed, weaving itself into the air like cigarette smoke, like something meant to linger. It was a sound designed for memory—for girls who would hear it once and hum it absentmindedly in front of their vanities, brushing their hair, wondering if he was singing about them.
The sandwich sat half-eaten in front of me, but my appetite had faded. Maybe it was the music, maybe it was the way Ricky leaned back, completely at ease, like he’d built this world with his own hands and had nothing to prove. He was watching me. Not expectantly, not in a way that demanded anything, but in a way that suggested he’d already mapped out the shape of my thoughts before I even said them.
“You ever regret it?” I asked, voice steady, neutral.
That, however, he hadn’t mapped out. Ricky blinked, his smirk easing into something quieter. “Regret what?”
“Not being the one in front of the mic.”
It wasn’t a question meant to cut, but it seemed to reach somewhere beneath his skin anyway. A flicker of something crossed his expression, just for a second, like the glint of his watch catching light.
“Used to,” he admitted. He glanced away. His fingers drummed once against the armrest. “When I was younger. Thought I could be the one standing under the lights, making girls scream.” A low chuckle. “Then I got older. Realized I like this part better.”
I tilted my head, watching him.
“You like control.”
A smile—real this time, small but genuine. “Damn right.”
He reached for his cigarette, rolling it between his fingers before lighting it. Smoke curled around him, drifting towards the ceiling, as he spoke again.
“I like knowing how it all fits together. The whole puzzle. A voice on its own isn’t enough—it needs the right arrangement, the right production, the right push. The right people. Some guys just wanna sing. They don’t care about the business, the way it all works. But I do.”
I let the silence stretch, considering that. I understood the appeal. The precision of it, the architecture. There was something intimate about being the one who shaped things from the shadows, who made the decisions without being the one people obsessed over. Like you could watch the result and know that, while people cheered and lost a few pairs of their finest bras, you got to go home without hundreds of thousands knowing your address by heart.
My coffee was cold now, but I lifted it anyway, cradling the cup between my palms. “Then you don’t really care about the art, do you?”
That made him laugh. “Shit, Nadine, you wound me.”
I only arched a brow.
He exhaled smoke, tilting his head back. “You think those two things are separate? Art and business?”
I thought about it. Really thought about it. He was wrong, of course. But only partially.
“I think most people who say they love music don’t love what comes with it,” I answered. “Not really.”
He grinned, eyes sharp. “And you?”
My fingers traced the rim of my cup. I thought about all the reasons I was here, in this moment, in this dim-lit studio with a man I wasn’t sure I liked but was certain I wanted to understand.
I thought about the way Eddie’s voice filled the space, warm and young and a little eager, the way it made me feel something I wasn’t sure I had a name for but had certainly felt as a little girl finding the best peaches with my mother and imagining that each one would get me closer to my dream. I thought about how that was the point. How old men in boardrooms spent decades refining formulas for desire, deciding which voices were worth remembering and which would be swallowed whole by the years. That was just how the industry started to work; anybody could tell. Chew all the flavor and then spit you out. You’d wipe your shoe soles and find something else soon enough.
That, among other things, was why music just wasn’t for me. I felt better standing back and enjoying whatever the studio ended up with.
I met Ricky’s gaze. “I think I just want to see it for myself.”
His smirk softened, just slightly. “Then you’re in the right place.”
Another flick of ash. Another song spinning softly in the background.
I didn’t know if I believed him. But I knew I wanted to find out.
❧
New York air is always crisper than a vinyl.
“The number of times my sister made me watch that damn movie. That Rosemary’s Baby shit.” Ricky scoffed and kicked a little stone out of his field of vision. He’d offered—well, highly pushed—to walk me home, which I’d accepted because I was low on fare money, and accepting money from a man felt like a mortal sin I'd never come back from. I’d been close to telling him that it was a crazy walk, that the areas could be vastly different, but I’d learned long ago in a faraway place that telling a man they can’t physically do something sends their testosterone levels flying through the roof.
So, instead, I busied myself by glancing at the apartments on the right of me, Ricky on my left. The air was bitter, clamping down on my arms even with the Harrington jacket I’d thrown on. Shrubs and colorfully painted pots lined the stairs and porches. I always liked seeing the lives other people lived. The little things they carried with them like car keys or their grandmother’s old compact. I liked seeing how they breathed into everything they did. Maybe that was why Ricky pulled me in so much: the entertainment business was everything to him, and you could see it. The classic Jim Morrison-esque haircut, the lean, pretty boy look, the suits that looked like they were straight off The Electric Company. Every part of it felt designed to woo over as many people as possible, which I guess works when you’re trying to convince the public who is and isn’t the next big thing. The people need a face, and Ricky had it.
“Mother of the Antichrist, my ass.”
I shrugged. “I always felt bad for her.”
“No, no,” Ricky assured, “me too. But isn’t it impossible to think about when you’re just sittin’ there thinkin’ about covens? Especially knowin’ what happened to Polanski’s wife? Good God.”
Just then, I shivered like winter was making its second round. Manson, those nurses in Chicago, the Zodiac—they all blended into the same, gross, slobbery monster that I tried to avoid in the papers as much as possible. The 60s had died like a wilting flower pressed to a page you wanted to forget. It’d been a monumentally terrible time to be a college student. I grimaced for a moment. Still, I kept my mind on Ricky and me nearing a corner.
As if absent-mindedly, like I’d intended only to recount the memory to myself, I said, “My mother called like crazy. Told me to never go to California.”
“Can hardly blame her, but what is it with New Yorkers and warnin’ us about California?”
“You’re a New Yorker,” I reminded him with a little smile. “And she’s from Pennsylvania.”
“I’m the good kind,” Ricky insisted. “And Pennsylvania? Huh.”
I rose a brow and turned my head to look over at him, echoing, “Huh?”
“Not sayin’ it’s a bad thing—”
“—Implying it’s a bad thing.”
Chuckling, he waved his hand like it was the surrendering white flag.
“Whatever you wanna say. You just feel New York, is all. Minus how you talk.”
“How do I talk?”
There was no point in asking the question, and maybe he could tell. I’d never quite been able to shake off how I always either sounded like an old man chewing tobacco to quit smoking or someone who didn’t take anything they said very seriously. It was clear enough in New York. The minute I got on the phone with my parents, though? It practically clawed its way out of my lungs and ran free as a vaguely southern wild horse. I was as dutchy as can be, but my ego wouldn’t admit that so easily.
Unfortunately, Ricky wouldn’t humor me. He just gave me that look that said, ‘Really?’ But before he could give his response in, a man donning some old, tan jacket with a slightly darker, thinner one underneath came up to us. And when he pulled out a (somewhat pitifully sized and handled) pistol, I wasn’t stupid.
To note, I’d never been mugged before. I’d worried about it, yes—my father had sat me down and told me the weakest parts of the male body when I told him I’d gotten into college—but until now, the coast had been clear. When you grow up on a small farm where your neighbors are just as poor as you are, threatening talks involve less theft and more hushed whispers on how little the crops are selling for between the passing of seasons. However, while I acknowledged my lack of experience, I still thought that some kind of superhuman adrenaline would kick in and save me like in all the stories. Like I’d just wing it and then end up on a daytime talk show.
I was very wrong. And very dumb.
Rather than anything grand, I just froze and shrunk up like a mouse not wanting to get too close to a trap placed nearby. It was humiliating. People always talk about the fear aspect, not wanting to die, to lose what they value most, but above all else, I was just humiliated. Maybe that was the point of it: to put you back in your place, remind you what can always happen. I thanked God from the bottom of my heart that Ricky was with me and that he was as native to this still-so-strange-world as he was.
The guy was clearly in a rush or something. He used no pretenses, only pulled the offending object from his pocket like we all knew the rules.
“Oh, dear God,” I said under my breath. My heart felt like every wall was closing around it. Blocked all entry. I thought I had to look away from it or else my breathing would stop, so I did. Second date, and I’m being mugged. Isn’t that fantastic luck with romance? With the last guy, his mother had just been too open about sex. What a jump.
“You know what to do,” the guy declared. He sounded a little strung out, which I’d picked up before from spotting the twitching of his free hand.
I turned away and almost lifted a hand to cover the side of my face, but out of worry that it’d aggravate him, I kept it snug in my pocket. My eyes found Ricky’s profile. “Ricky…”
He shushed me before I had to go any further. Well, his look shushed me. He tilted his head down just a bit and reached his hand to pull me behind him.
“Don’t worry, we do. Look down.” I listened without a second thought. Odd an observation as it was, the curtness, the simplicity of his words got to me. Like a fan had clouded everything and started running on an automated system.
From the corner of my eye, I saw him slide off his big, funky rings and the gold watch I’d never been able to disconnect from him. They came together, and seeing him just hand the thing away had me frowning but still quiet. None of my father’s advice on where to kick a man proved very useful. I caught a glimpse of the guy; we locked eyes for a split second. He pointed the pistol to me, gesturing. “And you.”
Shit.
I handed him my purse, as that was easy enough. Not a gift or something I’d worked my ass off to buy. It was simple and held little. I would miss the mirror I carried in a little side pocket, but that felt too vain a thing to linger on for very long, especially when there’s a likely very high man in front of you demanding your things. You don’t have much time for sentimentality. That is, until I couldn’t slide my matching ring out of view in time for him not to catch it. My stomach twisted as if there were two huge metal pipes being melted in the middle to keep the whole thing bone straight. My waterline prickled. Sure, I didn’t think Carmela would shun me for being mugged, but what if everything had failed at work? What if she came home hoping that at least I had a good time, and I had to sit her down and say, ‘Oh, and on top of your boss calling all of your designs terrible scraps of garbage, I got mugged, and some random man now has one of the most important things I own. What’s for dinner?’
I forced my mind off the thought—took a ragged breath. My thumb nail pushed the ring down a bit, and then my other hand pulled it off the rest of the way. I handed it to the guy too fast for me to process it, and then Ricky was telling him we hadn’t seen anything, and he was off in the dark.
As soon as he was out of my sight, I leaned over and hurled the contents of my stomach into a thicket. Half of it was dry heaving, the other half my sandwich from earlier. Burnt coffee still rang through like a slap in the face.