Sighing, Brazil got up from his chair. Panesa watched Brazil pick up an ugly red rose in a Snapple bottle, and the publisher smiled. Panesa and his wife had desperately wanted a son, and after five daughters it was either move to a larger home, become Catholic or Mormon, or practice safe sex. Instead, they had gotten divorced. He could not imagine what it must be like to have a son like Andy Brazil. Brazil was striking to look at, and sensitive, and, though all the results weren’t in, the biggest talent ever to walk through Panesa’s door.
tw Tommy Axel was typing a big review of a new k. d. lang album that he was listening to on earphones. He was a goofball, sort of a Matt Dillon who wasn’t famous and never would be, Brazil thought. He walked up to Axel’s desk and clunked the rose next to the keyboard as Axel boogied in his Star Trek T-shirt. Surprised, Axel pushed the earphones down around his neck, faint, thin music leaking out. Axel’s face was smitten. This was the One for him. He had known it since he was six, somehow had a premonition that a divine creature like this would overlap orbits with his when the planets were aligned.
“Axel,” Brazil’s heavenly voice sounded like a thunderclap, ‘no more flowers. ”
Axel stared at his lovely rose as Brazil stalked off. Brazil didn’t mean it, Axel was certain, as he watched Brazil. Axel was grateful for his desk. He scooted his chair in closer and crossed his legs, aching for the blond “od walking with purpose out of the newsroom. Axel wondered where he was going.
Brazil carried his briefcase as if he wasn’t coming back. Axel had Brazil’s home phone number because he had looked it up in the book.
Brazil didn’t live in the city, sort of out in the sticks, and Axel didn’t quite understand it.
Of course, Brazil probably didn’t make twenty thousand dollars a year, but he had a bad car. Axel drove a Ford Escort that wasn’t new. The paint job was beginning to remind him of Keith Richards’s face. There was no CD player and the Observer wouldn’t buy him one, and he planned to remind everyone there of that someday when he landed a job with Rolling Stone. Axel was thirty-two. He had been married once, for exactly a year, when he and his wife looked at each other during a candlelight dinner, their relationship the mystery of all time, she from one planet, he from another.
They, the aliens, agreeably left for new frontiers where no person had gone before. It had nothing to do with his habit of picking up groupies at concerts after Meatloaf, Gloria Estefan, Michael Bolton, had worked them into a lather. Axel would get a few quotes. He’d put the boys and their winking lighted shoes, shaved heads, dreadlocks, and body piercing, in the newspaper. They called Axel excited, wanting extra copies, eight-by-ten photographs, followup interviews, concert tickets, backstage passes. One thing usually led to another.
While Axel was thinking about Brazil, Brazil was not thinking about him. Brazil was in his BMW and trying to calculate when he might need gas next since neither that gauge nor the speedometer had worked in more than forty thousand miles. BMW parts on a scale this grand were, in his mind, aviation instrumentation and simply beyond his means. This was not good for one who drove too fast and did not enjoy being stranded on a roadside waiting for the next non-serial killer to offer a ride to the nearest gas station.
His mother was still snoring in front of the TV. Brazil had learned to walk through his decaying home and the family life it represented without seeing any of it. He headed straight to his small bedroom, unlocked the door and shut it behind him. He turned on a boom box, but not too loud, and let Joan Osborne envelop him as he went into his closet. Putting on his uniform was a ritual, and he did not see how he could ever get tired of it.
First, he always laid it out on the bed and indulged himself, just looking for a moment, not quite believing someone had given him permission to wear such a glorious thing. His Charlotte uniform was midnight blue, creased and new with a bright white hornet’s nest that seemed in motion, like a white twister, on each shoulder patch. He always put socks on first, black cotton, and these had not come from the city. Next he carefully pulled on summer trousers that were hot no matter how light the material, a subtle stripe down each leg.