The High Notes: A Novel(43)
They spent two weeks just looking for clothes, it was hard finding a middle ground that they both liked. He wanted her in something sexier, and she wanted the simplest lines and plainest dresses. He made her come out and show him each dress so he could vote on it too. In the end, they had found six dresses that they agreed on and both loved, and shoes to go with them. They were in keeping with the image she liked, with the utmost simplicity, but there was just a little more kick to them than what she usually wore. She tried them on for Boy, and he loved them too.
“Now that’s what men want to see women in,” he informed her. “You always want to look like a nun. You can’t sell love dressed like that. There has to be just a little something naughty about what you wear, otherwise it’s no fun.”
“But I don’t want to be naughty,” she said, complaining. “I want to be nice.”
“Be nice at home. Be naughty onstage. It works better that way.” He grinned at her.
She was smiling when she packed her suitcases for the tour. She tried to think of everything, not just her clothes.
She called Pattie before they left. It felt strange going on tour without her.
“I wish I were going with you,” Pattie said sadly. “I hated Glen, but I miss the tours, all the funny little towns we went to, the people who couldn’t wait to see us, and this is going to be such a big deal. I never went on a tour like that.”
“Neither did I,” Iris said, wondering what it would be like to see Clay every day. It would be harder to hide her feelings for him, with so much time together. She was sure that he would never feel about her the way she did for him. He was unattainable. She knew it and respected it. She didn’t expect anything other than warm camaraderie while they were on the tour and maybe some fatherly advice thrown in. She had silenced her heart’s stirrings right from the beginning, and she intended to keep it that way, no matter how warm, attentive, and handsome he was. There were some men you couldn’t have in life. He was one of them, up on a pinnacle somewhere in the sky, so there was no point wishing otherwise. It was just never going to happen. He would always be out of reach. All she had to do now was accept it. Clay was telling himself the same things about her, and had been since he met her.
Chapter 12
They left for Las Vegas from Teterboro Airport in Clay’s plane. Iris, Clay, Boy, Star, who was going to sing with Iris’s backup band for Boy’s opening act, and Iris’s backup boys were on board too. Eight of them in total, and the plane could comfortably seat twenty. Iris had never seen such luxury, and gasped when she walked in and looked around. There were two flight attendants to serve them, and everything was upholstered in rich cognac-colored leather.
The pilot and co-pilot came out of the cockpit to greet them. There were two bathrooms, with showers, and a very efficient galley, and there was a bedroom for Clay when he took longer flights, or preferred to spend the night on board instead of checking in to a hotel if he went to a city to see a performer or attended a meeting and didn’t stay long. It was supremely luxurious and offered every comfort, and a big screen to watch movies, or individual ones. None of them had ever been on his plane before, or seen anything like it. The seats were large club chairs and there were tables to eat on, or work on.
“Goodbye, Nashville. Hello, Las Vegas!” Boy said in his Tennessee drawl, and the backup boys laughed. Star was too awestruck to say anything, and clung to Boy’s hand, and Iris looked at Clay gratefully.
“Thank you. I spent nine years in a van with sweaty guys, crawling over the equipment, traveling for fifteen hours, and going straight into a performance without a rehearsal and taking off again right after we played.” This was a whole different experience, just as Clay wanted it to be for her.
“I resisted buying a plane for a long time, but this just makes life so much easier when I’m flying all over the country seeing bands and artists in out-of-the-way places, or have to get to a meeting in another city in a hurry. My girls keep hounding me to borrow it, but I’m pretty strict about only using it for business.” He showed her the bedroom then, which was big enough to move around in with a comfortable bed and its own bathroom. It was a four-hour flight from New York, so he didn’t plan to use the bedroom, and the flight would go quickly with a meal and a movie. He went to Las Vegas a lot to see performers in nightclubs or concerts. This time he had set up additional security for Iris, just in case Glen Hendrix was on the loose again. They had checked and he was in a halfway house for the remainder of his sentence, which made Clay uneasy. Hendrix could easily slip away and cause trouble for her, if he was crazy enough to do that, which Clay hoped he wasn’t. Clay hoped that some jail time had calmed him down a little. Even Glen admitted that he was shocked by how far the two thugs had gone. He said that he had hired them just to “scare them a little.” They’d done a lot more than scare them. There was a restraining order still in force to keep Glen well away from Iris. If he violated it, he’d go back to jail.
As they took off smoothly, the others were talking to one another, and Iris sat next to Clay, talking about some details of the performance in Vegas. She wanted to change the order of two songs, which he left up to her. As she looked out the window afterward, she thought about her father, and wondered if he was still in Vegas, hustling odd jobs and willing women, who were foolish enough to let him stay with them and take advantage of them.