Part 59: Bobby

Three phone calls, each stranger than the last.

And forming a sort of associative thread, Bobby realized later, if you happened to be into that sort of thing, which he wasn’t.

The first was expected. Even though he had specifically told Cicero to text or email, he knew the journalist would ignore content in favor of form, as usual. So when he heard his phone buzzing on top of the dresser as he shaved and brushed his teeth somewhat-simultaneously for the sake of saving time, he was confident enough to answer it with a sharp yet garbled “No” before he even spit out his toothpaste.

The voice on the other end, definitely that guy’s, started its overture, but Bobby didn’t listen. He just waited for a pause, and then elaborated: “I know what you’re calling me to ask, and let me save us both some time, the answer is no.”

“Oh?” Bobby continued shaving. "Are you too busy to converse?'

"Not busy, just disinterested."

"Ah. And why, pray tell, do you suppose I have telephoned?"

“You’re going to ask me for an interview,” Bobby stated, as if he was summarizing an old, familiar story. “A full interview, a real interview. The story you published this morning - up with the birds, by the way, Jesus Christ, I’d be impressed if I weren’t so annoyed - got a bigger reception than you expected, and people want to hear more about me, the mysterious aloof Russian at the center of it all, and ---”

“How the devil -”

“I’ve been in this business a long time, pal. But I do think it’s awfully inconsiderate of you to call me back to ask me any sort of question, nevermind such a stupid one that I’ve already said no to as many ways as I can think of, without answering mine. Common decency, you know, let people off the train before you try to squeeze on there yourself, type of thing.”

“To what are you referring?”

“See, this is why I wanted you to text me back instead. At least when someone writes like that, you can picture them laboring over it for hours on end, consulting the old Strunk and White to see if you’re allowed to end a question with a preposition or not, taking the whole business way too seriously. But you, you actually talk like that. In real life. Again, impressive if it wasn’t so annoying. But anyway, my point is, I asked you if your whole bit about the pre-orders was just journalistic flourish or if there’s actually some hard evidence for it.”

“Well, Mr. Melrose,” the other end began, “I have to wonder if a direct quote from a record label executive would meet your standards for hard evidence.” He evidently thought this was a trump card, uttering the word executive as if it carried the same weight as, say, general did in the military or priest did in the Church.

“It would not,” Bobby said glibly. He put the phone down for a moment so he could rinse off his razor, indifferent to whether the other man was responding. He imagined him sputtering, stammering, shocked by Bobby’s casual iconoclasm the way they always were at Youth Group. “When I say hard, I mean numbers.”

“Well, how about . . .” He was going to try again, with all the foolish optimism of Charlie Brown. “Six hundred thousand. Does that, pardon the pun, count as a number?”

“Technically it does, and yet. What you said before makes me think someone said this number, which makes it not really a number so much as a word, and anyone can say anything with words. Flipper, nougat, trapezoid, Louis Armstrong went to the moon. See my point here, all just words.” Bobby was having fun, toying with this guy. Maybe it was worth keeping him around, since he couldn’t banter with Xander anymore. Xander had crossed a line, done something irrevocable. "That's like saying a bunch of circled 5's on a feedback survey count as hard data, it's just the aesthetics of math wrapped around a core of wishy-washy nonsense, it's numerology, its . . ." 

“Very well, Mr. Melrose, that will do just fine.”

“What do you mean?” Bobby peered in the mirror at the patches of unshaved stubble and tried to decide if they merited more shaving cream.

“I must confess I am a smidgen surprised that someone so erudite, so clever, such a wit in the style of Wilde, could fall into a trap so elementary, set by such an amateur sportsman as myself. You sought to deny me an interview, but you are well on your way to giving me all the material I need for a fascinating profile.”

“What, no, I haven’t. I haven’t said anything interesting at all.” Bobby tried to recall what he had said, but it was all gone, breath in the wind. “Besides, this was all off the record. Off the record!”

“Oh, Mr. Melrose,” the voice practically whispered, relishing the turn of the tables. Cicero was experiencing the one instance in a lifetime when a conversation goes exactly the way one has planned, even offering the opportunity to use the clever lines one has rehearsed. “On the record, off the record, those are just words.”

Bobby, fuming, decided against more shaving cream but in favor of bringing the razor back to his face. If he happened to cut himself, big deal. A little bit of blood was nothing compared to his current predicament.

He was supposed to be the Kingmaker, not the King, because the Kingmaker wielded all the real power. The man wearing the crown was never the one with the real power; that was too obvious. But now Xander had flipped the script on him, named him as King, which made Xander the Kingmaker, which made him the real king and made Bobby - nothing, really. A villain; a usurper; an Iago unmasked.

He finished shaving and inspected his face in the mirror again, surprised not to see a single nick or extraneous hair.

Could he flip things back on Xander? No, not yet at least. Bobby-as-villain was still too new, too compelling a narrative. They would feel like they were getting a peak behind the curtain at the way things really worked. Maybe in time he could have a redemption arc. But he had to write the damn profile first.

Fine, let him write it. Bobby imagined him typing away furiously (on a typewriter, which would have been an absurd anachronism for anyone else but that fucker probably used one), each second bringing a flurry of new words and taking them a little bit closer to where they could move on.

His phone buzzed again, resting on the sink where he had left it.

Christ, had he not even started writing yet? Did Bobby need to hold his hand and walk him through the entire process? Jaded, cynical businessman, doesn’t believe in truth or beauty or beauty being truth, any of that Keatsian nonsense, just cold, hard cash . . .

“What is it now?” he snapped into the phone.

“Hello, is this Mr. Robert Melrose?” A woman’s voice, one that evoked the past in the same way a mid-Atlantic accent does. 

“It’s Bobby now, but sure, yeah, who is this,” Bobby said in a rush, leaving the bathroom and starting to pace around the hotel room proper, which felt more appropriate for a conversation across gender lines.

“Hello, Mr. Melrose,” the woman said. “My name is Anna-Louise Gunderson, and I’m with NAMM.”

“Nam? As in Viet?”

“Oh, dear me, no. NAMM is an acronym. The National Association of Moms and Mothers. I assume you have heard of us?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t, sorry. Wait, did you say moms and mothers? What’s the difference?”

“There’s all the difference in the world,” Anna-Louise replied enigmatically. “Now, we here at NAMM understand that you’re surely a very busy man, Mr. Melrose . . .”

“Not particularly,” Bobby interrupted, thinking of Cicero. The more time that passed, the better.

“Oh, excellent. Perhaps, then, you’ll permit me to take a few moments of your time to explain about our organization?”

It occurred to Bobby, too late, that this had been another conversational trap, like Cicero's fishing for compliments. He was off his game lately. Having the right thoughts at the wrong moments. “Yeah, alright, sure.” He had to restrain himself from telling her to keep it brief because he was a very busy man, a tag he put on almost every interaction with a stranger.

“NAMM was formed,” Anna-Louise began proudly, “from the merger of two existing organizations, The Alliance of Moms and the National Mothers’ Association, when they realized that their aims were more similar than dissimilar.”

“Not to mention their names,” Bobby commented.

“Hmm.” Anna-Louise clearly did not like to be interrupted during her spiel - or she was bothered by the implication that moms and mothers were at all related. “Anyway, the leaders of the two organizations realized they would be more effective if they fought together rather than fighting each other, and so, in 1998, NAMM was born.”

“Fought what, exactly?”

“NAMM is a Christian organization devoted to fighting the influence of Satan upon our children’s lives, particularly in the form of rock music.”

“I see,” said Bobby, scowling in the mirror (he was back in the bathroom; Anna-Louise was surely in her fifties, at least.) “Doesn’t that seem a bit, uh, anachronistic to you?”

“Anachronistic?”

“Yeah, isn’t that what people were worried about in, like, the fifties? I mean, hell, by the eighties you had bands doing it on purpose, just to fu - mess with your kind, you know.”

“Hm. Well, I don’t know about that,” Anna-Louise humphed, refusing to engage. “But allow me to explain why we are calling you, and why now.”

“Please.”

“For some time now, NAMM has been paying close attention to the so-called musical group known as Our Beautiful Misery, in the belief that it is one of Satan’s more obvious manifestations on Earth. That is why I am surprised you haven’t heard of us. We are the largest organization to date to condemn the group, and we have been at the forefront of nearly all of the protests and boycotts of its alleged 'music;.”

Bobby wasn’t aware there had been any protests or boycotts. “Oh, sorry, I guess we don’t pay that much attention to that kind of stuff. We’re more concentrated on the fans, you see.”

“Well then. As are we. You are aware that most of what you call fans are, in fact, impressionable children?”

“Adolescents, I’d say.”

“Legally, children. Spiritually, children. But we’re not calling you to quibble about names. That is one of the things we pledged to give up in 98,” Anna-Louise explained. “We’re calling you because we read a very interesting article this morning . . .”

“About The Letter?”

“Precisely. And your role in creating it.”

“Listen, I didn’t really --”

“And we think,” Anna-Louise continued over his objections, raising her voice slightly but only in volume; her tone was even as ever. “We think that you are in the perfect position to exert a positive influence over the future of OBM. We’ve looked into your history, Mr. Melrose, and we saw that you were raised Christian?”

“Well, Catholic, actually,” Bobby replied, surprised at their diligence. “And I’m guessing you all are more on the evangelical side of things, so . . .”

“NAMM tolerates Catholics. Since ‘98”

“Well, that’s very big of you, and clearly 1998 was a very big year for you, but really I’m more of a lapsed Catholic, serious emphasis on the lapsed.”

“It’s never too late to come back into God’s favor,” she intoned. A familiar refrain, a familiar refusal to take a hint. 

“Well, see, that’s the problem, really, ‘come back’ sort of implies that you were there in the first place . . .” 

“As does ‘lapsed,’ Mr. Melrose,” said Anna-Louise patiently. He was off his game. “But again, NAMM isn’t in the business of semantics. We have a more important mission, and we believe you are uniquely suited and positioned to further our cause. We would like you to use your position and influence to ensure that all further iterations of The Letter are infused with a Christian moral.”

“The Letter isn’t a Christian story,” Bobby objected, pacing more quickly now. “It’s about hopelessness and despair and misery, it’s bleak as hell, it’s about a guy who’s so miserable that he falls in love with a damn piece of paper, it’s . . .”

“All the better. Perhaps you have observed that it’s often in our darkest times that we turn to the Lord most readily?”

“Yeah, and somehow you all think that’s an argument that your God exists. No atheists in foxholes and all that. More of an argument against foxholes than atheists, in my view.”

“Hm, well.” She dismissed his point. “It’s the end of a story that makes it Christian or non-Christian, as I am sure you are aware. All The Letter needs is a brief coda wherein the narrator goes to Heaven or meets Jesus, and then the rest falls into place. The letter becomes symbolic of the Bible; the letter-writer God; the intended recipient the sinning masses of mankind. The good Christian reader does most of the work for you.”

Bobby had to admit this interpretation would fit. The real calculation he needed to do was whether the financial gains of appealing to a Christian audience was worth sacrificing the better part of Teen Group B, whose Myssenger profiles almost always read Atheist (basic), Agnostic (advanced), or I Am My Own Damn God (chaotic.)

“Well, I’d need to talk to Xander, of course . . .”

“Mr. Melrose. I hope it hasn’t escaped your attention that you also have an opportunity here to fully rebrand OBM as a Christian rock band. His chosen name is Xander Cross. He has expressed interest in the Bible. He has written lyrics with Christian themes. All that is missing are those four most powerful words: ‘I am a Christian.’ Get him to say those words and we will take care of the rest.”

“Wouldn’t you be worried about, like, all the pagan stuff mixed up in there? The first three albums are a mess, theologically speaking.”

“Not a problem. Not if you’re on our team,” Anna-Louise replied, lapsing into that same mystical tone she used when she discussed moms and mothers. “Anything is forgivable if it’s in the service of the Lord.”

Bobby found himself wondering what Christina from Youth Group, still picturing a ponytailed preteen, would say to this. “Are you making a deal with the devil?”

“Not a deal, Mr. Melrose,” she replied. “We are not offering you anything in return. We just wanted to make you aware of your options. And we hope you freely choose the right one. Any-and-all-praise-be-to-God.” These last words said so dispassionately that Bobby figured they were the routine goodbye among members of NAMM.

Sure enough, her presence disappeared. Bobby put his phone down - he had wandered onto the balcony, which he hadn’t consciously realized existed - and began to look for clothes for the day. Luggage unzipped, a few wrinkled shirts fished out, his phone began to buzz again, out on the balcony. It couldn’t be NAMM again; it had better not be you-know-who, he should have half the profile written by now; Xander wouldn’t dare; so who?

“Hello?” he answered. The most basic greeting, one that he had long since graduated from, but he was rattled. Usually he was the one who called, texted, emailed: initiated conversations. It was strange to be on the other end.

“Robert! I’m so glad you answered!”

His mom, his mother - he still believed they were synonyms - a voice he hadn’t heard in months, maybe a year, but instantly recognizable. And just as instantly, the source of a myriad of different emotions, from guilt to anxiety to pre-emptive relief for when it was over. Like settling into the dentist’s chair and reassuring yourself, okay, once I get through this I don’t have to even think about teeth for six months, and this guy has to think about them all day every day.

“Why wouldn’t I answer?” he said.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, drawing her words out as she always did. “I thought you might be, you know, busy.” She whispered the last word: it was short for “busy with something gay.” He wondered how much of his daily activity met his mother’s standard for gay. Surely at least ninety percent of it, including what he had just been doing - picking out an outfit - met his father’s.

“No, no, I’m not busy,” he said for the third time that morning.

“Good, I’m glad. Well, I just wanted to check in and touch base . . .”

“Did you see the article?” Something must have jogged his parents’ memory of him. As hard as it was to imagine his mother on the Internet - when he left home, they didn’t even have a computer - if Christianity could evolve with the times, then maybe so could she.

“What article? There’s an article? About you?”

“No, no, nevermind. I just remembered, there was going to be but it got bumped for space. Things like that happen all the time here.”

“Speaking of here, how is New York?” Bobby saw no reason to correct her. Philadelphia, New York, they were the same to her anyway. “Have you been . . .” A pause; paper shuffling. “Have you been reading a lot of Ger-trude Stein?”

Of all the questions his mother could ask, this was perhaps the one that he was expecting least. He had to stop himself from saying “what the fuck” - those words still carried a lot of weight for someone like her. “What? Gertrude Stein? Mom, I only, like, sixty-percent know who that is. How do you know who that is?”

“What about . . .” She was reading from a paper. Sitting in the living room, surely, on that old, uncomfortable couch, the notepad and the base of the phone on the little, round, glass endtable - how easily it all came back. “What about eating huevos rancheros?” She overdid the Spanish a little bit, but it was mostly good. “Or listening to Maya Angelou? She’s a singer, right? One of those R&B ones?” This meant black.

It also meant she had definitely typed "Maya Angelou" into a search engine and seen a picture.

“Poet, actually, but . . .”

“Oh. A rapper.” She sounded disappointed.

“No, no, no, I’m not doing some ‘rap is actually poetry’ thing, she’s like an actual, regular, gun-to-your-head poet, but wait, hold on a second . . .” All these references in proximity to caused something to emerge from the depths of Bobby’s mind, a common thread. “Mom. Did you see Rent?”

“We did!” she exclaimed, sounding gleeful.

“Wait, Dad saw Rent?”

“Of course he did, honey. They were playing it at the Community Night, and what’s he going to do, not go to Community Night? You know how he likes the muffins there.” Ten years; the same muffins. “And he’ll never admit it, of course, you know how he is, but I think he may have even liked it. Parts of it. I caught him humming.”

“And what about you? What did you think of it?” Bobby felt personally invested, as if it was a referendum on his identity - though he groaned audibly every time he heard “Seasons of Love" start up.

“Oh, honey, it was so cute. It was so nice. Even the part where the man and the other man, the one who dressed like a woman, were dancing around with each other, they looked so happy. You almost forgot they were both men for a second. You almost forgot she had a . . . you know.” This meant penis, a word that she refused to use in any context, along with black, gay, and Mexican. Most identities. “And it really opened my eyes.”

“I’m surprised they showed it at Community Night,” Bobby commented. “An edited version, sanitized for your sanity type of thing, I’m sure, but still, more progressive than I would have thought.”

“Progressive? How so?”

“Well, you know, all the . . . stuff.” He couldn’t know how much she had actually seen or heard, and he couldn’t bring himself to mention it first. She was still his mother.

“Oh, but honey . . .” She sounded hesitant, as if she was about to break some bad news, the same way she had sounded when she told him about Santa (which he had already known for years, and had even spent the previous Advent spoiling for other kids, but had never bothered to tell his parents, since they already knew.) “You do know what it’s really about, don’t you? I understand that if you take some parts out of context, it could look like they’re having such fun, but when you watch the whole thing . . . it’s a morality play, Robert honey.”

“A morality play?” Bobby repeated blankly.

“Yes, honey. Jacob explained it all to us afterwards during the Q-and-A, which was much more A than Q, I have to say, but that was how I wanted it. How all the characters are being punished for their sins. And if we have trouble seeing it like that, we should just imagine an extra scene at the very end where they’re all roasting in Hell. And that helped, I think. It helped your father, certainly. Maybe it would help you, too?”

“Is that why you’re calling. Still. After all this time. Really.”

“It’s never too late, honey. And you probably don’t know this, living in that bubble of yours, but the Church has changed since you left! You know, within a couple of years, if you come back and do everything right for a while, they might even be okay with you getting gay married . . .”

“Same-sex,” Bobby muttered, gritting his teeth. When he had come out to his parents, he had needed a way to mark the change, and replacing “gay marriage” with “same-sex marriage” in his vocabulary had been an easy one. Plus, it served him just fine in New York, as well, where it had made him seem uber-progressive in the early 2000’s and a normal amount of progressive now.

It was so automatic a response that he didn’t immediately register the bigger news: his mom had said the word “gay.” Slow progress, but still something.

“Yes, well. I hope you’ll at least think about it, honey.”

“Sure, sure, sure,” Bobby responded, his mind reeling; connecting; churning. “I’ll think about it.”