Tonight, Tonight

Based on the song "Tonight, Tonight" 

Lyrics by Billy Corgan, performed by Smashing Pumpkins
Music video on Youtube: click here

            Karen clutched her seatbelt and pressed hard against the back of the passenger seat. She tried her best to play it cool, but if Billy decided to look over he’d see the terror painted all over her face. Luckily, he kept his eyes on the road.

            “Are you sure I should be doing this?” she asked as calm as she could manage.

            For a while he didn’t respond, focusing more on the clutch than his passenger. When he’d gotten in front of an odiously languid truck, he turned his attention back to the confused young brunette.

            “Tonight’s the night Care’,” he blurted out eventually, his usual flatly unwavering confidence in full form. “You’re going to go in there and do whatever it takes.”

            The thrumming lights of posh North Side high-rises whizzed by on their left, the sun approaching the velvety blue horizon of Lake Michigan on their right. It was a gorgeous clear evening despite the subfreezing temperatures. This was one of those moments where it seemed crazy that people chose to live anywhere else.

It had been one of those crisp, windy afternoons at her mom’s place near Wrigleyville. The new boyfriend Rick had essentially kicked her out of the apartment just as the gusts coming off the lake were really getting going. The double-paned bay windows in the semi-circular living room rattled and groaned in defiance; but they held, keeping the brownstone cozy and warm. Despite this stalwart effort, mom apparently couldn’t go another hour without her favorite tea, which they only sold at the Chinese market. And of course if he drove he’d lose his primo parking spot.

            “Can I tell you what Rick did today?” It was a rhetorical question, of course, so she continued immediately. “He sends me out to get this special fucking tea for my mom from this Chinese market on Belmont that’s like a twenty minute walk each way.”

            “That sucks.”

            “Wait wait, no it gets way worse!” Karen interjects excitedly, as if her odious suffering were a source of tremendous joy. “So I storm out of the apartment, of course forgetting my scarf. And it’s like INSANE cold, especially with the wind. Anyways, I walk all the way there, buy the stupid tea, and walk all the way back freezing my butt off. And guess what?”

            “Wrong kind of tea?”

            “No. Think worse. Waaay worse.”

            “I give up.”

            “They’re sitting in the living room drinking hot cocoa! And my mom goes ‘oh thanks honey, just put that in the cupboard’ and then she like laughs. What the hell? Who does that?”

            “Sounds like you got sexiled,” Billy mused snarkily, earning him a quasi-friendly slug on the shoulder.

            “Eew that’s gross.”

            “Serious. I bet they did it while you were out there freezing your butt off.” A pause creeps over the conversation as they traverse the rhythmic ups and downs of Lake Shore Drive. “Gregg says that people do that to each other all the time down in Champaigne.”

            “Do what, screw?”

            He laughed a little, but not so much that it was condescending. “No, no. Well I mean yeah, but I meant the sexiling part. Make up some stupid reason for your roommate to leave the dorms for a while.”

            “I don’t care what your creepy frat-boy brother does in the dorms, this is my mom Billy. Euuugh.” The last syllable was accompanied by an amusing caricature of a shoulder shudder. Karen’s melodramatic body language had always fascinated him, and was one of the reasons Billy was originally drawn to her. That and her buxom figure.

            “C’mon, Gregg isn’t creepy.” Billy was pretty defensive about his big brother, she knew. She had just said it to rile him up.

            “Yeah whatever,” she responded in a callous tone. “I just want to crucify those insincere bastards,” she added, smashing a fist into her hand. Billy raised his eyebrows at the oddly satisfying smack. It was far more brimstone than he was accustomed to out of her.

            There was a long stretch of silence as the aging Nissan sedan sped north. They passed the curvy black column of Lake Pointe Tower glistening in the sunset and the brand new Navy Pier Ferris wheel shouting out loud neon across the lake. For some reason, the traffic hadn’t kicked in yet and the motion of the drive refreshed both of them. The silence suddenly turned awkward for him, so Billy tried to come up with small talk. Nothing really sounded right, so he cut to the chase instead.

            “So, what’s so great about your dad anyways?”

            “Huh?”

            “I mean, your mom’s boyfriend is an ass. I get that. But why do you think it’d be better with your dad?” Billy hadn’t met the man, and didn’t trust anyone who lived north of Evanston. Not that he could blame her for wanting to live up there, he probably had a huge mansion or something. But after his folks split, Billy was more than happy to see his old man gone. His older brother had it right: “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, asshole,” Gregg had yelled while their father was halfway across the living room with his over-packed suitcase. Luckily the awaiting cabbie interrupted the scene with an impatient horn blow or it probably would have gotten ugly in a hurry.

            “He’s like this totally amazing guy, my dad.” She paused a moment as if to feel out whether this was a sufficient response. It clearly wasn’t. “I mean, he’s a dentist and he is like super nice to all his patients. They all say that he’s much nicer than all their old dentists. They don’t even mind going.” Still feeling shy of the mark, she went on. “And when I was in the second grade he like totally used a sick day to pick me up from school when I had the flu. He brought in Giordano’s and we ate the pizza and watched Little Mermaid together.” In summary, she needlessly added: “he’s just a really great guy.”

            “That’s cool.” It always surprised him when people defended their shitty parents because they acted like a real caregiver one time out of a million. Not like Billy’s mom; she was a saint as far as he and his brother were concerned. Especially since they split, it seemed like she was constantly trying to make up for the tough years by being super-mom. Sometimes she was so attentive it was actually annoying, but unlike most teens he understood where it was coming from and never gave her a hard time about it. It’s not that he would wish an abusive father on anyone, but he knew that he was more mature because of it. Growing up too fast is sad when it’s a boy soldier in Africa, but Billy was 17. Why shouldn’t he act like a man? Gregg certainly did, and he’s kicking ass and scoring chicks down at U of I.

            “What, you don’t believe me?” Billy’s ponderous conversational pace perplexed her sometimes. Was he just not listening? Did he not care? She had learned pretty quickly why Gregg called him “Spaceboy,” but it was hard not to take it personal.

            “Oh sorry, yeah. No, he sounds awesome,” he replied flatly. After half a minute, he went on.  “So is this place of his pretty huge, or what? Dentists totally make bank right?”

            “It’s ok I guess. Just a house.” The last of the sunset was fading, a few dark purples left in the distant clouds over the horizon. The lake looked like smooth black ice in the darker light. “They just redid the basement though, big TV and stuff. It’s pretty cool.”

            “Nice.” For a minute, he was almost going to let it slide. But curiosity got the best of him. “What… uhmm. What did you mean by ‘they’ just now?” It was a loaded question, and he probably could guess the answer. Still it’s always nice to know what the hell you’re getting in to, even if you are just the wheelman.

            “Oh he’s got, like, this other family now,” she said trying gamely to put a strong face on it. “Jenny, his second wife, has like two kids from a different marriage.” She kept her gaze fixed out the passenger window, watching the lake sink deeper into inky darkness. “They’re little, like three and seven, so I figure I can even help out. You know, watching them and stuff.” The degree of rationalization going on next to him was starting to cross into the ridiculous. He’d always thought of Karen as a silly melodramatic girl, especially with her mom. She was constantly making a big stink out of what seemed to him like a lousy but perfectly manageable situation. But now for the first time he really felt sorry for her. He didn’t want to burst her bubble, but at the same time, how could he let a friend walk into a buzz saw like this? Cleary Dr. Dad had moved on.

            That last thought lingered for a bit until he realized that he hadn’t really even thought of her as a friend before. How messed up is that? An intelligent, supposedly enlightened guy like me, thinking of this girl as a series of sexual landmarks to visit. Suddenly he was really glad they were going on this excursion, even if it was doomed to end in tears for her and a cold shower for him. She turned to look at him, nearly in tears, and he knew he couldn’t tell her what he knew was going to happen. It’s not my job to unmask her father as a two-timing prick, he’s going to have to do it himself. He could sense himself changing, growing up a little bit more tonight. He felt it all; not just the hormone-driven desires and insecurities he always felt, but Karen as well. He was picking up on her emotions in a way that rushed at him.

            “Have you thought about what you’ll say?”

            “Only like a million times.” The question seemed to calm her down; she was happy to tread such familiar territory. She probably had a thousand word script penned in her head. “First I’m gonna just be like all ‘I’m just visiting’ and all that.” She turned to Billy for some kind of encouragement, but found only stern concentration on the road ahead.

            Without saying a word, he’d gotten the message across.

Billy switched the headlamps on, the last of the sun’s light gone for another day. The freeway turned away from the lake end ended at a stoplight. The car slowed to a halt at the red light beside a canary yellow SUV with the license plate “LNDSAY T” and a teenage driver chatting away on her phone. Billy laughed to himself has he made the right turn on red.

“What? What’s so funny?”

“Oh, that chick in the yellow truck back there. What a tool.”

“Oh.”

They drove up Sheridan road along a sleepy Northwestern - most of the students still gone on winter break - in silence. Karen showed symptoms of deep thought. Mainly it was what she wasn’t doing that clued Billy in: not fidgeting, not chewing gum, not talking a mile a minute, not twirling her long brown hair. Just staring out that window, past all the gothic lecture halls and grey stone dorms straight through to something beyond. Again he wanted to say something - to comfort her - but he didn’t know what. They had come to an unspoken understanding earlier; there could be no doubt about that moment. But it remained unspoken for a few more blocks.

            “Can we go to the beach first?”

            “It’s a little cold for a swim Karen,” he replied more snarkily than he meant.

            “I know jackass,” she said playing along. She added a surprisingly strong sock on the shoulder. “I just want to sit and think for a while.”

            “Ok. Yeah sure. No problem,” he staggered out awkwardly. The immense and elegant Baha’i temple rose up on their left, a fifty-foot jewel of carved ivory-colored marble glowing above them like a spaceship arrived from the planet India. Somehow he always for got it was here, a pleasant surprise in the monotony of suburbia.

Nearby Gillson Park was certainly closed at this time of year, but no reason they couldn’t park on the street and sneak in. Billy parked across the street from the barred-off entrance. The frigid air was a shock after the stuffy but cozy cabin in the car. Billy swore immediately as he opened the door and fished around in the back seat for his knit Chicago Bears hat. Karen, better prepared, emerged from the car replete with earmuffs and matching pink mittens. Truth be told, their respective outfitting did little to cut the biting wind, but they trudged ahead nonetheless.

            Billy hung back while Karen emerged from the sparsely wooded park onto the twenty-foot wide stretch of imported sand that served as the beach. He didn’t like getting sand in his shoes. Particularly subzero sand. He was surprised to notice that Karen’s spiked black boots barely upset the tough packed ground and she could walk right over the top of it. Nonetheless, he let her have her moment.

            There’s never much surf to Lake Michigan, but the tides created regular undulating bumps, gently rolling onto the beach every twenty seconds or so. The sound of it was enough to put a hungry baby to bed. Yet Karen drew from the energy of the night pushing back against the soporific waves: the slick jazzy outlines of the skyscrapers off in the distance, the first stars emerging above the orange haze of the streetlamps, the wind a living entity of pain and desolation. All these weirdly comforted her at this particular moment, this particular night, like never-fading embers ready for reawakening. In a flicker she realized… It was hard to put into words. That everything was nothing… or something…

            “C’mon, let’s go back,” she ordered walking briskly past her escort.

            “To the car?”

            “No, back home.” He had to break into a trot just to keep up.

            “What happened just now?”

            She stopped in her tracks in the middle of a deserted park road.  “I think I figured out what was wrong with my entire situation.” Then she uncorked a memorable and completely genuine smile. “I can feel it all… and I can change everything. Tonight. I’m not stuck, it’s all going to be ok.” She hugged him around the neck and planted a wet kiss on his cheek, leaving him first warm then freezing. But happy.

            “What’s gotten into you?! Don’t get me wrong, I like it, but…” he trailed off and they had a proper kiss.

            “My crap attitude,” was her fragmented reply. When he shook his head to indicate his complete non-understanding, she added: “Oh nevermind, let’s get a pizza.”

            That he could understand. The nearest Giordano’s wasn’t too far.




IMAGE CREDIT: http://www.richard-seaman.com/