Royalty

by Franz Neumann

My parents naming me Royalty wasn’t enough. My praised voice and songwriting, and all the gigs—not enough. I needed to gild myself with an origin story to break through. I needed Touch Ferguson, music executive, to discover me.

I did my homework and had myself hired by Like Heaven, the service that cleaned Touch Ferguson’s house on the beach. I always brought my A game: hair, make-up, and as much allure as my Marian-blue maid outfit would allow.

“You got a date with a mop, Your Majesty? You trying to impress the bathroom mirrors, Princess?”

To clear the audition stage, I told my teasing co-workers that I’d clean the house solo. They didn’t need convincing to nap in the Like Heaven van. I sang as I cleaned, making certain to come off as genuine and not thirsty as I lingered near the security cameras. Touch who?

I was Royalty, the red-hot ball of talent Touch Ferguson would discover “in my own house!”—if he was ever home. If he checked his security footage, he’d marvel at my voice, witness my songwriting chops, be blown away by my work ethic. His neurons would light up as they imagined G-clefs tightening into dick-hard dollar signs. I had the rags part down and was ready for riches.

The morning I finally encountered Touch Ferguson, he was lowering a suitcase a step at a time from the second floor. He carried it the rest of the way down the stairs when he saw me. He didn’t seem to be in a good mood, but I began singing anyway over the drone of the vacuum cleaner. He paced to the window and checked the street, not even acknowledging me. Then he came toward me, grabbed the vacuum from my grasp, and tore out the bag. He ripped it open and scattered the contents all over the sofa: dust, hair, bits of string, glitter, crumbs, dead skin. I stopped singing, too confused to make a sound. He dropped the bag and then kissed me roughly, all harsh lips and cheese breath. He gripped my ass so fiercely that I felt his knuckles crack. Then he stepped back, took in the room and the mess he’d made, grimaced, then rolled his suitcase outside, where a car had pulled up.

Bewildered, I went and sat in the pantry, out of reach of the security cameras. I swiped through my alerts for Touch Ferguson. His wife, Lynn Ann, was seeing an R&B artist Touch had signed last year. There was a paparazzi photo of all of them on a yacht. It wasn’t Touch’s hand in the small of Lynn Ann’s bikini-bared back, two fingers tucked under the top elastic like scissors at a tag. Touch was looking over the side of the boat at something in the water. Touch and Lynn’s children were also in the photo; they wore life preservers so engulfing that the tabloid site hadn’t bothered to obscure their faces. I confirmed the rumor with a quick trip upstairs: the kids’ rooms held only furniture; Touch and Lynn’s walk-in closet was half-empty. It hadn’t been like that the week before.

I returned to the house that night, alone, deciding Touch could continue what he’d started with that kiss; providing succor would simply be a line item in our business contract. I warmed my voice and tested the acoustics in the master bedroom, then lay down and fanned my hair over the pillows, wondering if he’d be back in the morning. I didn’t know that he was way over in Chicago, intoxicated, plowing a car into a crossing filled with pedestrians. But I knew by morning; it was all over my alerts and on TV.

Downstairs, I found a man rifling through the desk in Touch’s home office. He said he was Touch’s lawyer, and gave me a long hard look. “Aren’t you that singing maid?”

I shrugged. I was gratified to know that Touch had watched me sing and had shared the security camera footage. But was that all I was to Touch? The Singing Maid, another casualty of his inattention? I asked how long jail time would be if Touch were put away.

“Six months, if I do my job right. Medications can make you do the damnedest things,” he said, and left.

Six months was nothing, but would Touch still have industry connections when he got out? He had plowed into all those people after all, including the owner of a popular Thai restaurant who was in critical condition. I had doubts that Touch Ferguson was my catalyst for success, but I remained at his house since he wasn’t using it. I went through the rooms and unplugged all the security cameras, then worked on my songs. I let Like Heaven clean the mess Touch had made. I met groups on the beach and invited them back for impromptu parties where I tried out material. My songs made people happy. I started jogging and collecting sea glass. I slept with a lifeguard who was pure candy and watched him swim laps in my pool the next morning. I breathed the fresh ocean air that the rich get first dibs on and experienced a preview of the life I was striving for, as though the deep gulf that was my lack of success did not divide my potential from its realization.

Touch’s trial began. The weather grew colder. Storms stole all the sand from the beach and left behind oval stones that clattered as they tried to get comfortable in the jumpier surf. No one visited the beach. The house’s electricity was cut, then the water; I found warning notices in the mail. I had to flush the toilets with buckets of pool water.

Around the time Touch Ferguson was sentenced, I received a reply to an email I’d sent asking about our encounter and what he thought of my voice. The terse reply, in the form of an attached PDF from a lawyer, stated that Touch had no memory of the incident in question, but if he had exhibited unwanted attention, they were the actions of a man devastated by his marriage’s collapse. There was no mention of my voice.

A Sotheby’s sign went up outside, followed by a notice of an estate sale. The divorce and the trial had punched two holes in Touch’s fast-sinking boat. I bailed the morning of the estate sale, passing possessions I had carefully dusted while with Heaven’s Touch and which now sat in the driveway and on tables in the garage. Surf art, African sculptures, high-end kitchen appliances. My preview of success was over. Riches, rags.

Songs don’t pay the bills, and winter is no busker’s paradise. I went back to college and paid for my last two years on the credit card I’d found in Touch Ferguson’s desk. I felt owed. I found work at a multinational after graduation, took a room in an apartment I shared with dullards, and spent weekends on bad dates or alone. For the next few years, my life took on the imposed shape I had tried to escape through music.

After Touch was released, I learned he was working in Orlando as a booking agent, supplying cruise ships and conventions with take-anything talent. Even though he was a nobody now, I felt compelled to go down there and see for myself. I found his office, but he wasn’t in. I sat at his desk and looked at his computer and his keyboard and the empty trashcan on the floor. Though he had fallen far and fallen hard, Touch still had a better stapler than the one I had at work.

I thought I wanted him to apologize, to regret his whole life since the last moment he saw me. But when Touch Ferguson entered his office from his lunch break, my body told me that wasn’t why I had come. I went up to him and slapped his face, not once but twice, on my way out. I didn’t stop walking until I’d taken a seat at a bar across from Touch’s office. I felt good and ordered a bottle of champagne. I pictured him searching for his stapler, which now sat in my bag along with his keyboard’s F and U keys and his computer’s mouse. The nerves in my hand and wrist still prickled from my slaps. I refilled my flute of champagne, drained it, then went over to the karaoke stage and sang without backup tracks, without scrolling lyrics, without lights or amplification. The bar’s door was open; I was within earshot of the once mighty Touch Ferguson but told myself I didn’t care if he heard me, not when the most he could do for me would be a spot on a cruise ship’s stage. I told myself I’d rather hold the dream that wasn’t going to come true than set sail on S.S. Disillusionment.

A group of guys were having lunch in a nearby booth. After one song, one of the men came over and asked my name. When I told him it was Royalty, he went down on his knees at the edge of the little stage. The guys in the booth chuckled, one even filming me. He was making fun of me, but the champagne had me in a beneficent mood. I touched the base of the champagne bottle on one shoulder, then the other, as though to knight him. “I hereby—”

“Royalty,” he said. “I’m Bernard. Marry me.” (Not: Can I have your number? Not: Can I buy you a drink? No. A down-on-his-knees ambush proposal, his face earnest and pure.)

Bernard took me to the machine shop where he worked with the other guys. Among other jobs, they supplied precision nozzles used in booster rockets. They had a clean room where they worked on the space stuff, which I could see if I wanted, Bernard said, but I’d need to put on special booties. He introduced me to the rest of the crew inside. I had a bit of a buzz going and scolded them for not wearing their booties. Bernard told everyone that I was his fiancée for the day—my answer to his proposal back at the bar. We divvied the remains of the champagne bottle into paper cups for those who wanted some. Bernard hadn’t touched a drink in ten years, he said, and he didn’t have one then, either.

He drove me to his place, where his father lived with him. His father played a beat-up three-quarter-sized acoustic and I sang a few songs with him at Bernard’s insistence. Bernard told his father that we were getting married, and his father smiled as he rubbed the grooves the strings had made in his fingertips. He hadn’t played or smiled in a year, Bernard told me afterwards when the two of us were down at the beach, walking in the dark. He said it like I was a miracle worker.

My champagne lark was going too far, being here with this stranger on the tail end of my trip to confront Touch Ferguson for how much he’d failed me, failed himself, failed those people crossing a Chicago street. But I was also just catching up to the fact that Bernard had heard me sing just once and never wanted to see me go. I’d never had anyone feel that way about me or had ever felt that way about anyone else.

We walked along the beach and talked about our fears and frustrations, our views on religion and politics, sports, kids, which way the toilet paper should hang—everything but our hopes, as though to mention them might reveal an irreconcilable incompatibility. A new future lapped at my ankles if I wanted it. We paid for a motel room and fucked ourselves silly to see if we were as compatible in bed as we seemed to be on other matters. We married within a month, Bernard settling into the institution confidently while, to me, the marriage still felt like one you might hear about in a song.

The next time I saw Touch Ferguson, I was singing the national anthem out on the viewing flats, a few miles from the launch site. My eyes wandered from Bernard to the guys from the shop, as well as to the other contractors and their families and the usual space enthusiasts off to the side with their telephoto lenses trained on the pad. I spotted Touch in the very back and almost forgot the anthem’s words. He was standing with his hat on heart. I sang for Touch, to make clear to him what he could have had back when he had been someone, and could have made me someone too.

During the applause that followed, everyone’s faces tilted back in spooky unison. I rejoined Bernard and watched the sun-bright flare of the rocket rise high above the clouds on the ground. And then, long after liftoff, there came a crackling roar as the past caught up with the present. The plume rose into the atmosphere like an enormous, perfectly balanced drip castle, rising so high that the growl began to reach us only in quick packets of sound, which were replaced entirely by the call of birds and the tick of insects and people talking louder than they needed to.

We stayed on, Bernard on his guitar and me singing “Fly Me to the Moon” but not “Rocket Man,” “Man on the Moon,” but not “Major Tom.” I didn’t like singing about things going wrong in space, where you can’t be heard.

Touch Ferguson came forward and sat cross-legged, playing with the sand in front of him. He didn’t look angry about our encounter in his office a couple of years back. Maybe he hadn’t gotten a good look at me. Or maybe he was here to get back that tuition money from years earlier.

“You’ve got a fine voice,” Touch said, when we were packing up. He handed me a plain white business card. “Give me a call if you’re interested.”

“Interested in what?” Bernard said, pulling at the card in my fingers so he could read it. T. Ferguson – Talent Agent. A phone number and email address. Blank on the back.

“She’s got the voice, doesn’t she?” Bernard said. “She can sing with the best of them.”

On the drive home, Bernard was still talking about T. Ferguson and how I could become a star. I still had Touch’s business card in my hand, my arm out the window. The sun had gone down on us, but still shone on the rocket’s wind-smudged plume. Bernard remembered what he’d wanted to surprise me with: he’d engraved our initials into a part of the rocket nozzle that had gone up. He hadn’t wanted to tell me about it until he saw that the launch was successful.

The truck turned onto asphalt. Bernard rolled up the window on his side. I thanked him but told him I didn’t like the idea of our names being up there in all that cold space.

“Well, no,” he said. “It’s only on the booster rocket. But it was way up there for a while.”

“You’re too sweet,” I said.

I felt my palm cupping the wind as we accelerated, the resistance from Touch’s business card tugging at my fingers. And then no resistance at all when I let it go, like releasing a frantic moth by its wings. I pulled my arm into the warmer cab and rolled up the window. We listened to people singing on the radio. Songs of impossible love and endless heartbreak. And then the weather report came on, telling us what to expect tomorrow and in the days to come.

 

Franz Jørgen Neumann’s stories have received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and have appeared in The Southern Review, Colorado Review, and Water~Stone Review. His past published work can be read at www.storiesandnovels.com.