“Of course, but I’m not going to win,” I say, giving him a wink, because why the hell should I not flirt back? The man is hot, and as I turn away, I hope those blue eyes of his are still on me.
Then I am whisked into the theater by an usher who offers me an elbow, Ethan, Natalie, and Owen still by my side.
“Don’t jinx you? Don’t jinx yourself, doofus,” Natalie whispers in my ear.
As we walk down the aisle, I can start to feel the buzz of the room. There’s an energy and heat that’s swimming amidst this sea of the bizarrely, beautifully, and barely clad people. A white noise vibrates in the auditorium, like a slow hum, coming up through the floor, passing into the carpets and then clinging to the air. It’s anticipation. The sense that great things, cool things, wildly implausible, I-can’t-believe-it things could happen. The feeling that childhood and adult dreams might just be filled. Dreams that were almost shelved.
I wasn’t even supposed to be here, I tell myself as the usher guides us down, down, down, closer and closer to the stage. I wasn’t supposed to have this, this mere whiff of success. I was supposed to have hung it up, stopped singing and found a real job or something after my first three pedestrian efforts.
Except, somehow, I am here. The buzz in the room grows louder, but the thrumming in my body drowns it out as the usher gestures to the first four seats in the third row.
“You’re going on at seven thirty-five, so I’ll come back at seven fifteen sharp to get you,” he instructs. I nod automatically and thank him, then gingerly reach for a patch of fabric right above my knee so I can sit gracefully. Natalie squeezes my hand and Ethan leans in to give me a kiss on the cheek.
“Don’t worry, Mom, you’ll be fine.”
She plunges you into the longing, the lament, the where did it all go wrong, taking you on a tour of the hurt; first through the clinging memories in “Shape of You,” then the practically primal pain of the inevitable protest in “But You Said,” and next to the healing, coming as it does in fits and starts, in “It’s Not Every Day.”
In fact, it’s really not every day that it hurts like it did that first day or the second or the third. Pain has a funny way of subsiding, eventually, so you can survive. It has this way of not suffocating you every single day. Sure, some days you’re still blindsided by a memory, a feeling, a song. But other days, you realize you can get through and get by and not feel the claustrophobia, the fear that you’ll never be normal again.
Tonight the past feels behind me, and the present is all I want. Because I’m not thinking about Aidan, or what happened. I refuse to. Because tonight, I am sitting down in the third row at the Staples Center for the Grammy Awards and my album has been nominated for Album of the Year.
She finally pulls you out at the very end with “Something Like Normal,” leaving you at last with the sense that maybe, just maybe, you could try again without getting burned that next time around.
Chapter Two
The lights dim onstage, a weird sort of mist rises, the band plays the familiar opening notes to “But You Said,” and now, I am in my element. This is my zone; this is where I belong. Singing my heart out, because I love music like it’s my life force. A microphone in hand, I sing the song I know so well, the song I lived, the chorus so harshly me…
But you said you’d love me
You said you’d stay with me
And now I’m that girl
Saying those words
But you said, but you said, but you said…
There’s more to it, but you sort of get the gist from those lines. Because that’s sort of the essence of that phase of a breakup. The denial, the begging, the pathetic “but you said you loved me” pleas, whether public or private. Like there was a contract. So you try to negotiate your way back by saying, “What we have here, Your Honor, is a man who pledged to love this woman forever. I urge you to force him to honor his contractual obligation.”
And yet, there is no argument more pointless—none in the entire universe—than the one that begins with the words, “But you said you loved me.” You will never win; you will never emerge victorious like a successful high school debate student. Nope, when it comes to love, a thoughtful position paper will not win him back.
The last note fades, the crowd claps, and I wave to the audience. I feel that familiar rush from performing—a pure sort of joy that never grows old. And the song, it does this thing to me—every time I sing it, I feel like it stitches me up a little more, like the music heals my heart bit by bit. Maybe the music is why I’ve started to move on. Music mends.
The usher escorts me offstage and back to my seat in the third row. As Katy Perry takes the stage to present the final award, my palms start sweating and butterflies take flight in my belly, while she rattles off the other names: Coldplay, Florence + the Machine, Adele, and Bianca Sweetwater, the American Idol winner from last year.
Will she ever say mine, I wonder?
Maybe I wasn’t really nominated. Maybe it was all just a dream. You’ve been punk’d, Jane Black.
Natalie squeezes my hand. Ethan starts tapping my arm in excitement.
Time has slowed to a glacial crawl. Finally Katy Perry says, “and Jane Black for Crushed.” Okay, I was actually nominated.
Then, she pauses, another endless, interminable hiatus as she opens the envelope, before she says, “And the winner for best album of the year is…”
She won’t say my name again, she won’t say my name again, she won’t say my name again. It’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen. There’s no way. There’s no way. There’s no way.