Maya.
All night.
Maya.
I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
And him.
That was him, wasn’t it?
It’s all so surreal.
I hope she’s okay. I wonder if Stu’s with her? Does he know? Does he care?
It’s hard to make sense of what happened. I keep replaying the night from beginning to end. The strange smell of the club when I walked in, which was a kind of cologne and beer stew. There must have been 50 people there that I didn’t recognize. You think you’re entrenched in someone’s life until you go to a surprise party for their husband’s 50th birthday and discover there are dozens of people there who you’ve never met or heard about who also feel entrenched in their lives. I don’t remember looking over at the band, but I do recall they were playing Joe Jackson covers. Everyone in the room was cheerfully bopping as they milled about. I scanned the room for familiar faces—where in the world were Bobby and Erick? I spotted Fiona and Michael in a circle of parents that I sort of knew and walked over to them.
“How are you guys?” I asked. The fathers replied by saying, “Good, good,” as if one good wouldn’t be good enough. These fathers were two-goods good. The mothers responded by updating me on their kids. I’ve noticed this is a thing that mothers sometimes do. You ask a mother how she is, and she gives you an update on her kid.
When Maya and Stu arrived, the band started playing “He’s So Fine” and got a huge laugh. That’s when I first really looked at them. The lead singer looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him.
Maya was wearing a black dress that hugged her still slender-at-50 body and black boots that had a 104-inch heels. Stu, perennially boyish at 50, wore a blue pinstriped shirt and khakis. Maya and Stu are not a perfect couple, but something happens when they enter a room together. It’s like we’re all a little better for them being together.
I know that Maya wanted Stu to be confused, to walk in and have his eyes graze over his old friends, one by one, and start putting the pieces together, but that’s not what happened. Someone shouted out: Happy birthday Stubert! And then we were all shouting, “Stuuuubert! Stuuubert! Stuuubert!”
I turned my head back to the stage when the lead singer—I was wracking my brain, where did I know him from?—launched into a kind of Violent Femmes-meets-the Talking Heads version of “Happy Birthday.” I moved closer to the stage. Our eyes caught. His gaze grabbed mine. That’s the best way to describe it. I still wasn’t absolutely certain it was him though.
I turned around to find Maya.
There was an amp screech and I turned back to look at the stage again. Oh my God! This time when our eyes met, I winked at him. I don’t think I’ve ever winked at anyone before. Not like that at least. He winked back and I considered rushing the stage.
He started talking about Stu—their drummer and college buddy.
Stu was a Jekyll and Hyde, he said. “Cum laude by day, drum loudly by night. Stubert, buddy, come up here and hit the drums.”
We all turned to watch Stu walk to the stage. To see him embrace his old bandmates, to be moved by the emotion it all. We searched the room with our eyes. Our necks twisted to the left, to the right, and to the left again. We stood on our toes. We furrowed our brows. We waited for Stu.
Stu didn’t jump onto the stage. He didn’t lift his arm and wave from the back of the club. He didn’t shout out, “Thank you all for being here!” There was no Stu.
The sound of silence in a crowd echoes. Not in the pin drop kind of way, but in the clickity clack of high heels walking alone.
Maya stepped up onto the stage. A clump of hair fell onto her face and she didn’t seem to notice or care. Her body was shaking, not quite convulsing, but almost. She was teetering. The lead singer—yes, it was him. What was he doing there?—put his hand on Maya’s shoulder, which seemed to steady her. He whispered something into her ear and she gently shook her head and took the mic from him. At first it was just sad—listening to her explain, listening to her apologize.
“Thank you all for coming. Stu was definitely surprised. Not in the way I had hoped. I’m really sorry. I know some of you traveled to get here and I appreciate all the effort you went through. I thought he’d be happy. I thought he’d be so happy. I just wanted him to be happy. Stu left. I don’t know why he would leave with so many people here that he loves.”
She stopped talking, and I guessed she was figuring out what to say next. I couldn’t read her expression. It wasn’t a look I had seen on her face before. She was still holding the microphone, but it was no longer directed at her lips, and her words, amplified but not entirely, started coming out indecipherably gibberishy—a bundle of disconnected syllables incoherently strung together. Then she collapsed.
He helped her up. She could walk. She was okay. He was keeping her steady, but she was walking. I think. Am I remembering this correctly?
I tried to rush the stage, to push my way through, but I was stopped by some ass-wipe who commanded, “Don’t!”
“Move!” I yelled. “She needs me.”
By the time I had maneuvered around him, the band and Maya were gone.
And the rest of us? What did we do then? I suppose we claimed our coats and bags and piled out onto the street and dispersed without knowing what to say and saying what we didn’t know.
And now, after a night of twists and turns and drinks of water and trips to the bathroom to pee and turning lights on and wandering the house and turning lights off and lying in bed, looking at the blank screen of my phone and checking my email, it’s 5:55 in the morning and all I can think to do is write these Morning Pages.