Page 30 of Caught in a Storm
“No, after that. After she played at the Horse. We were down by the Harbor, having pretzels.”
“Cinnamon?” asks Caleb.
“Yeah.”
“Nice.”
“I told her how great she played,” says Billy. “It felt like, I don’t know, we had a moment. So I asked if she wanted to get a drink.”
“What’d she say?” Caleb asks.
“She said no. Then she left.”
“Left?”
“In a cab.”
Caleb collapses onto the couch, digs in for more Goldfish.
“Just because you like a girl—a woman,” says Billy, “it doesn’t mean she owes you something. It’s not her job to like you back.”
“But she does like you,” says Caleb.
Billy hangs his cardigan on a hook by the door and sits next to his son. Burnt Flowers plays on the turntable next to the Steinway. Caleb offers Billy some Goldfish crackers. What if Robyn is wrong? Billy wonders. Would it be so bad if Caleb stayed in Baltimore? If after graduating from Hopkins he got a job downtown and lived a few miles from Billy? He thinks of hitting concerts with his son—of taking him out for a beer when he turns twenty-one, of having him…well, here.
“I get that you don’t wanna be, like, that guy,” says Caleb. “You know, pushy. But, before you give up, I don’t think you’re respecting the full enormity of this situation, Dad.”
Billy laughs. “Enormity? Isn’t that a little dramatic? A couple of YouTube videos?”
Caleb shakes his head. “Give me my iPad. You need to see something.”
Chapter 16
A few days later, Margot is thinking about fifteen minutes of fame: the Andy Warhol thing from the sixties. The members of Burnt Flowers used to talk about it all the time. Anna and Jenny were convinced that their clocks were rapidly ticking, and after some symbolic quarter of an hour everything would go poof, and they’d be four nobodies again. Anna joked that she’d open a restaurant called the Gunn Show, and Jenny figured her dad could get her a job selling life insurance in Trenton if she somehow managed to hide her tattoos, particularly the one on her collarbone. Nikki thought that was all bullshit, though.
According to the lead singer, they were on their way to becoming icons, the first all-female rock band to go nuclear and, more importantly, stay nuclear. U2 with uteruses, an edgier R.E.M. in short skirts, Zeppelin with curves and on less coke. She went on about their staying power—about becoming multigenerational entertainment powerhouses. “That’s how goddamn good we are,” she told Spin magazine. “I’m personally here to give fifty years of rock-and-roll misogyny the middle finger. Better get used to it, too. If fucking Jagger can prance around stages in tiny T-shirts at his age, you think I won’t be able to? Just wait.”
Margot didn’t talk to the music media as much as Nikki did, because her attitude was that nobody wanted to hear from the drummer—any drummer. When she did talk, though, she preferred to talk about the music, because that was what she loved. “My dream was never to be famous,” she told Mojo once. “The day my dad set my first drum kit up for me, my dream was to be in a band. To make music. Being famous just makes me anxious.”
When the issue of Mojo came out, Anna read that quote aloud to the band. The four of them were eating sushi together in the deep, dark depths of Madison Square Garden before a rehearsal. “Interesting point of view from the only one of us currently married to a movie star,” Anna said. Jenny laughed and said, “Busted,” while Nikki looked down at her little block of raw tuna—suddenly, it seemed, unable to meet Margot’s eyes.
As Margot walks now through her neighborhood, she wonders what Andy Warhol would say about social media. He’d probably talk about reality stars and influencers and artificial fame and about how made-up it all is. Well, artificial or not, Margot is aware of the extremely real fact that people are looking at her more than usual.
Poppy texted earlier that Jimmy Fallon talked about her last night in his monologue, and that Good Morning America played “Power Pink” as they went to commercial. Poppy called it the “next stage of viraldom.”
And these are just the things Poppy told her about. Margot doesn’t know that the episode of the Netflix documentary that features Burnt Flowers is the streamer’s third most watched unscripted program. She doesn’t know about the vlogger who’s figured out who Billy Perkins is and is currently telling the world. She hasn’t found out about how Urban Outfitters is selling “Team Margot” T-shirts for $34.99.
Did you watch the video I sent you or what?
Poppy asked her that over text an hour ago.
No, Margot hadn’t. Watching videos of yourself is a slippery slope. Because there are always more of them, like bugs camped out under stones.
“You rock, Margot!” a woman shouts from across the street. She gives Margot devil horns with her fingers. Two guys recognize Margot while she stands waiting for a light to change. They’re holding hands. One of them openly stares, the other apologizes. “Sorry, he loses his shit around famous people. Love that jacket, by the way.”
“Thanks, guys,” she tells them.
Lawson was better at being famous. Mostly because he loved it so much. He made friends with the handful of photographers who lurked outside their apartment. He brought them donuts. Margot would squeeze his hand in a vise of anxious energy as their flashbulbs flashed. “This is part of it, love,” he told her.
