“You have to communicate with me.”
“I do. I will. I’m sorry I didn’t mention the gig in the Bronx or the one in A.C.”
They got ready for bed, both uncharacteristically silent and lost in their own heads. He didn’t make love to her, but he held her all night as if afraid she might suddenly slip out of reach and disappear. In a way, she needed to be held like that, anchored and secure.
For the next few days, they spent every second together. Giovanni ran through his act with her, but he was nervous due to his last performance.
She didn’t like his jokes about sleeping with other women. “Why don’t you tell some stories about your family?”
“That stuff’s not funny. It’s just ordinary family crap.”
“But people love that. They’ll relate to it.”
He mumbled a line, repeating the sentence from his script in various ways, trying to figure out which word needed emphasis to make the joke land. The more she heard him talk about all his past female conquests the more disinterested she became.
“I’m taking a shower.” She needed some time to herself, but when she returned from the shower, he was still scribbling notes and running through lines.
She didn’t know if it was her own jealousy or the jokes, but the material about women simply wasn’t funny to her.
The night before he left for Atlantic City, she was moody and tense. She wanted him to do well, but if he had a good show he’d likely get booked for a repeat performance and that meant more time apart.
She considered asking if she could go with him, but she had the appointment with the attorney and she didn’t want to add more pressure when Giovanni already seemed tense.
It was strange seeing him stressed out because she was typically the high strung one in their relationship. The night before he left, she did her best to ease his tension, but even in bed, he seemed distracted.
When he left the following day, a gaping sense of emptiness took hold, and no matter how she tried to fill it, nothing replaced the hollowness that occupied her in his absence.
CHAPTER 20
Giovanni had never been happier to get off a stage. The second he passed the curtain, he tucked his head down and rushed to the little closet with his name taped on the door, closing himself inside.
He couldn’t breathe. Sweating under his clothes, he wrestled his jacket off and threw it at the vanity against the wall. “Fuck!”
He died out there tonight. None of his jokes landed and the few that got sympathy laughs only made him look bad. He’d never wanted to bail on an act before the halfway point, but it was clear when he started that the audience wasn’t jiving with his material.
He’d told these jokes a hundred times, but they no longer delivered the same laughs. Maybe it was him. He felt guilty talking about other women when his heart belonged to only one.
God, he missed Erin. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours and he was going crazy.
He didn’t want to stay at the hotel he’d booked. He just wanted to get back to her, back to her bed, back to holding her in his arms and breathing in her familiar scent, back to her voice and the comfort of her stare when she looked in his eyes, and far away from this feeling that his life was falling apart.
Erin centered him in an unexpected way. She gave him a sense of purpose as if his presence in her life was doing some good for her on a level far removed from their sexual relationship.
They were friends. But more than that, she had become his closest friend, his best friend. How had that happened? Not to mention that he was falling in love with her.
She appreciated him and he desperately needed to feel needed. Being away from her tempted change. He feared returning and finding walls surrounding her. He didn’t want to lose their connection or risk her taking it away, because it was one of the strongest connections he’d ever shared with someone. But what if she didn’t feel everything he was feeling?
A paper slid under the door and he knew right away what it was. A comedian’s pink slip—a check for his act with no invitation to return.
He canceled his hotel and drove home that night, but he didn’t go to Erin’s. He needed to talk to his father.
His stomach burned like acid the longer he thought of what his dad would have to say to him. He could hear the I told you so already.
Giovanni didn’t sleep all night. His father found him sitting at the kitchen table, just after the sun came up.
“What are you doing here?” He dug out a heaping scoop of coffee from the canister and dropped it into the percolator trap.