CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jersey
A bottle of Jack Daniels is cold fucking comfort when the woman you want won’t heat your bed. I tipped my bottle to my guest’s glass to refill it and then to mine.
“Why are we drinking this?” my guest said wincing as he took a sip of the whiskey. “It’s like fire.”
I rechecked the bottle. I had grabbed the cinnamon version, the fire whiskey. It wasn’t exactly for sipping.
“Sorry.” I pulled a can of coke from the cooler at my chair and chucked it at him. “Mix that in.”
He caught the can with a smooth flick of his wrist but set it on the table next to him.
“The depth of your sophistication astounds me.”
I grunt. He’s as unhappy as I am, but it does no good to whine.
It’s been two weeks since we got out of jail but we might as well have stayed behind bars because the paperwork Jacine had us sign was the better prison. What she didn’t tell us was that in those contracts we agreed to go nowhere but rehearsals, talk shows, and promo events until the actual concert. So if I wasn’t working, I was sitting here at the pool of my house, staring at the damned Hollywood Hills.
My phone rang, and with surprise, I see it was Kane.
“What the hell?”
“I’m sick of this shit.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We should have stayed in jail.”
“What’s your real problem, Kane? It’s not your abiding love of incarceration.”
“She won’t fucking see me.”
“That was the deal.”
“But I didn’t think she meant it.”
“She meant it.”
“I bet she’s seeing lawyer man.”
“She’s not.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s sitting right here drinking with me.”
“Hello, Kane,” called out Marshall. He tipped his glass toward me as if Kane could see it.
“How the hell? I thought that we were supposed to stay apart.”
“You, me and Holmes aren’t to see each other. He doesn’t have that restriction.”
“What the hell?”
“You keep saying that.”
“What are you doing?”
“I told you, drinking.”
“That stupid cinnamon crap you like, no doubt.”
“Yeah.”
“I wish I had some.”
“Go bother someone else, Kane.”
“Dude. I’ve been a royal ass.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“I sent her flowers. She sent them back.” His voice is bitterness and despair, an even worse combination than Fire Jack and coke. But what the hell can I do? I have the same problem.
I raked the top of my head with my hands. I don’t need this. It’s hard enough for me sitting here, knowing she’s in the same city and I can’t do a goddamn thing about it. The day in the hospital on that conference room table uncorked the genie. I tasted her and couldn’t get that sweet taste out of my mouth.
There wasn’t enough whiskey in the world to do that.
“Jeezus, you must be desperate to use me as your priest.”
“I am. I love her. I can’t think of anything but her.”
I’d listen to enough of Kane’s on-the-road confessions of how he loved this one or that, but he’d never fixated on a single woman this long.
This was serious shit.
My phone rang again, and it was Holmes.
“Hang on, its Holmes.”
I put Kane on hold, and let him cool his jets while I talked to Rory. At least he wasn’t going to do the pining away nonsense.
“My chi is in serious trouble.”
I groaned.
“Not you, too.”
“What?”
“I got Kane on hold whining about how he misses Jacine. Marshall is here drinking my whiskey singing the same song.”
“Am not.”
“Dude, I can hear your thoughts.”
Marshall scoffed and tossed down the whiskey from his glass in one shot. He reached for the bottle of Jack, and I passed it to him.
“Misery likes company,” said Rory.
“That’s rather unoriginal for a man who writes lyrics that makes women’s panties melt.”
“Merge the calls. I want to talk to all of you anyway.”
I do and put the call on speaker. I set the phone in the fancy docking port that doubles as a speaker unit.
“So talk,” I said.
“Kane, you there?”
“Yeah.”
“So I’ve been thinking.”
“That’s a danger sign,” quipped Kane. It was a good thing his house was a good three miles from mine because I could do something against the contract if I spied his wisecracking grin.
“Shut up, Kane,” said Holmes. “Look, the one thing we can all agree on is that we want the same woman.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sucks for us.”
“I’ve been reading that in Tibet there is like this shortage of women—”
“So, sucks for them.”
“Shut up and listen, because I don’t like this any better than you do, but it might be the only solution to our problem.”
“Okay, I'm listening. You listening Kane, Marshall?”
Marshall's eyes glittered in the lights that lit my veranda. He nodded.
“Yeah,” said Kane.
“So what they do is that brothers share a wife.”
“Share?”
“Yeah, like polygamy.”
“It’s called polyandry,” said Marshall, “when there are several men and one woman.”
“Yeah,” said Holmes. “Polyandry.”
“Wait,” said Kane. “You want to sister-wife this situation?” His voice was incredulous, and I didn’t blame him. For one thing, I had no clue what he was talking about.
“Sister-wife?” I said.
“It’s a reality show on television. There is one man who has four wives.”
“They can’t all be his legal wives.”
“No,” said Marshall. “Only one is. But they had wedding ceremonies and call the relationships spiritual unions.”
“You seem to know a lot about this, Marshall.”
“I’ve had some time on my hands.”
That was the problem we all had, which led to Jack Daniels and impossible conversations.
“And what?” I said. “He has sex with all of them?”
“He must,” said Kane. “They have eighteen kids between all of them.”
“He,” said Marshall. “Divides his time equally between them. They have four different houses on the same street, and he goes to a different house each night.”
“That’s just fucking educational. But I don’t see how that helps us.”
“Don’t you?” said Holmes. “Think about it. All of us are on the road half the year, and Mr. Attorney hasn’t poked his head out of his office in so long that he barely knows what a woman is.”
“Hey,” protested Marshall.
“You have to admit,” I said, “you’ve let things slide on that front. A rich, good-looking guy like you should have been married and divorced three different times by now.”
“Granted.”
“So back to the conversation," I said. "You think that we should take turns with Jacine?”
“Yeah. It makes sense. We are all busy people, and none of us has had the time to commit to a single relationship. Maybe part-time would work? Think of it as serial monogamy but without messy divorces. We just set our schedules to rotate who is in town when.”
“Except, I’m always in town,” said Marshall.
“Not to be indelicate, old man,” said Kane. “But you do work like a demon. I’ve called you what—three times in the last week at eleven at night and you are in your office. What kind of life is that for Jacine?”
“Maybe it’d change if I had someone to come home to.”
“That sound like a river in Egypt to me,” said Holmes.
“What?”
“Denial,” I said. “Geezus, haven’t you ever been in rehab?”
“No.” He stared at me with disapproval. Clearly, he thought that I, Kane and Holmes and our rock star ways weren’t good enough for Jacine.
But Holmes pressed on. “We all get what we want, and Jacine isn’t left home alone prey for whoever else would make moves on her.”
“I doubt,” said Marshall, “that Jacine thinks of herself as prey.”
“You forget something,” I said. “There is a good reason that Jacine doesn’t allow us to see each other. We don’t get along well. How could we share a woman?”
“Didn’t we work that out in the jail?”
“Yeah, before I realized that Kane wanted to make moves on my woman.”
“Well, if you have that attitude," said Rory, "then we’ll never get anywhere, except the next jail when one of us takes a shot at the other.”
“Holmes has a point,” said Marshall. “You’ll end up killing each other if you try to compete for her. And I tell you, she won’t like it one bit.”
“What makes you the expert?” I said.
“I’ve watched her grow up. She’s always been independent. No one is going to pin her down. Plus, she saw enough shit when her parents broke up it soured her ideas on marriage.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m talking out of school here. If she wants to share that with you, she will. All I’m saying is, she’ll shut us all out if we push her too hard.”
“Like she did the past couple of weeks,” said Kane thoughtfully.
“Yes, exactly,” said Marshall. He settled his glass down with a clink on the glass table by his chair and stood. “But really, Holmes. I don’t see how this idea of yours will work. I don’t intend to share Jacine with anyone. Like I said, I’m always in town.”
With that, Tobias Marshall sauntered out toward the driveway as if he held all the cards.