Say Goodbye

Now I'd Best Be On My Way

The Drake Hotel
Saturday, September 14, 2003
(6:00 pm)
********************

"It's not that bad when I'm away from you all. It's Fleetwood Mac that upsets her."

Lindsey was sitting across the sofa from Stevie in the living room area of her suite, their knees grazing occasionally as they sat with legs tucked beneath them, and Stevie was still holding the crumpled tissue he'd handed her when they got into her suite, pulling a few from the box on the coffee table and feeling his heart break as she accepted them with barely a whimpered thank you through her tears. Her crying had given way to a flurry of apologies, explaining that she didn't know why she'd let Kristen's comments about her relationship to motherhood affect her so deeply, which had prompted a second flurry of apologies - from Lindsey this time - and a long explanation of the way things had been going in his household for the last few years. The trouble, Stevie had ascertained, had begun the moment he had told her that his solo album was turning into a Fleetwood Mac album, and that Kristen had been less than understanding when Stevie's songs for the album that had become Say You Will had sounded a bit too confessional.

"Lindsey, look at me." Stevie clutched the clump of tissues in one hand, and let the other one drop affectionately to his knee. Lindsey looked up as she sniffled, a hangover from her earlier sobs, and she said, "You can be honest with me. Is it Fleetwood Mac she opposes or just one member in particular?"

"I know where you're taking this, Stevie, and that's only part of the problem," Lindsey assured her. "I'm not going to lie - she has her issues with you singing about us - but it's my involvement with you all that really gets her." He sighed and added, "I guess she feels like an outsider. I mean, hell, she's only thirty-two years old, you know? She doesn't share the same history as us...she's Generation X, not a Boomer...she doesn't understand or appreciate the same things we do."

"Can I ask you a serious question, Linds?" Stevie had not moved her hand from his knee, and he noticed.

"Shoot," he said.

"What brought you two together if you were so different?" Stevie remembered hearing about Kristen for the first time on The Dance tour six years earlier, not much more information other than she was twenty-seven, a photographer hired by Warner Brothers to shoot Lindsey for an album cover, and an aspiring interior decorator. She had not laid eyes on her until January of 1998, at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction, and by that time the damage had been done.

"Stevie, you don't want to know that." Lindsey's face grew a mixture of alarmed and assuring. He covered her hand on his knee with his own. "Why put yourself through that? My God, hasn't my relationship with Kristen made you suffer enough? I mean, I still can't get over that night at The Garden...you know...when I told you."

Stevie nodded in understanding. She knew he was referring to Thanksgiving 1997, the night they'd performed to a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden and he had shared with her the news he'd only learned hours before - that Kristen was pregnant with his child. The memory did little to deter her. She said, "It's something I've been wondering for six years. Please. Tell me."

Lindsey drew back a long breath and began. "She was fun at first," he said. "I'm not going to lie and say that when a twenty-seven-year-old woman seemed interested in me, I wasn't flattered. I mean, there I was, single again at forty-seven...you know what happened there...and she knew a lot about art, liked to go out and have a good time, laughed at my jokes...I mean, it's the age-old story, Stevie...it was a good time. But then we all got together in April and started playing music again...the gang all together and just like old times, of course, saner and soberer but still..." He heard Stevie's small giggle at his last comment, and he squeezed her hand as he continued. "I wasn't sure what to expect when I saw you again after 'Twisted' and that weekend, but there you were, healthy and happy and beautiful and...I mean...you were the girl I used to live with, angel. The girl I used to be in love with and would die for, the one I sat with in the coffee plant till three in the morning trying not to attack with kisses while we were recording the demos...and suddenly a fun night out with a twenty-seven-year-old girl who flattered me was nothing compared to the amazing, beautiful woman who was the love of my life...so I told her it was over." Lindsey looked at Stevie then, his explanation done, and he could see deep into her sad brown eyes that there was more she wanted, needed, to know.