Indestructible Object

by Mary McCoy

  “You’re a really good guitar player,” I say. “And I liked your songs.”

  Behind the counter, I see Claire roll her eyes. Max gives her a look of commiseration, and in that moment, wins her over in a way that I never did.

  “I’ve been writing nonstop since that night, so I’ll have more to play for you next week,” Risa says.

  I stammer for a moment, trying to figure out a way to convey excitement about her songwriting without sharing that I’ve been fired and won’t be there to hear it. Much to my surprise, Claire comes to my rescue.

  “Lee’s taking a couple weeks off from the open mic so she can focus on this new podcast she’s producing.”

  “That’s so cool,” Risa says, looking at me with a respect that I in no way deserve. “What’s it about?”

  “It’s about love,” I say. “Making bad decisions about love.”

  Claire does not even try to conceal her snort of laughter.

  Max extends his hand to her. “Max Lozada,” he says. “Co-producer. Could we interview you?”

  Now it’s Risa’s turn to look alarmed. It does sound awfully presumptuous and probably insulting to tell someone you want to interview them for a podcast about bad romantic decisions.

  “We aren’t going to ask you to talk about anything personal,” I explain. “Basically, I’m going to tell you and Claire a very strange story about something that happened yesterday involving my mother’s ex-boyfriend, and a book of poetry, and a missed flight, and a strange voice in the background on a video call, and I’m going to ask you what you think about it.”

  Both Risa and Claire look like they want to hear more, so while I wash the smoothie blenders and wipe tables, I fill in all the backstory, all the context, Greg’s previous flake-outs, my mother’s retreat to New Orleans, the man pounding on the door of her hotel room.

  LEE SWAN:

  So, my question to all of you is, what the hell is really going on?

  RISA:

  If I had to guess, I’d say that Greg is in New Orleans with your mom right now.

  LEE:

  Maybe she’d been planning to meet him there all along.

  CLAIRE:

  But we don’t even know it was Greg outside her hotel room. It could have been some poetry professor from Tulane, just like your mom said it was.

  MAX:

  Then why didn’t Greg show up at the Memphis airport last night?

  CLAIRE:

  He missed his connection.

  LEE:

  Then why did he ghost my dad?

  CLAIRE:

  He missed his connection, took it as a cosmic sign that he wasn’t meant to come to Memphis.

  RISA:

  Or he intended to come, but your mom asked him to stay in New Orleans with her. Maybe it was very dramatic. She could have bought a cheap ticket to get through security, and met his plane at the gate and said, “Don’t go, I need you.”

  MAX:

  Are you okay, Lee? This is your family we’re speculating about.

  LEE:

  Because I asked you to speculate. These are all really good theories.

  MAX:

  Okay, then let’s go a step further. Let’s say Greg gets off his plane in New Orleans. He’s just flown from Los Angeles. He’s tired, he only has a few minutes to catch his connection, but your mom is waiting at the gate, and he says, “What are you doing here?” and she says, “Lee is your kid.”

  CLAIRE:

  Whoa.

  RISA:

  Whoa.

  LEE:

  That’s ridiculous.

  MAX:

  Is it? They were all living together in the same house.

  LEE:

  They’d broken up.

  CLAIRE:

  And nobody in the world has ever hooked up with their ex.

  MAX:

  Certainly not Lee. Lee wouldn’t know anything about that.

  LEE:

  Okay, fine. Maybe it’s not ridiculous. Greg and my dad sort of look alike. Harold, too, like they’re all on this white hipster continuum of willfully ungroomed to artfully disheveled.

  This is why I wanted to talk to all of you for my podcast.

  MAX:

  Is that what this is? Your podcast? I thought you said you were just messing around.

  LEE:

  Our podcast, and no, I’m not messing around. Do we know anyone who has a VCR?

  After we finish recording, Risa shakes her head in disbelief, then her arms, all the way down to her fingertips, like the story is stuck to her and she’s trying to get it off.

  “That was wild, y’all. If you ever need anyone to speculate further, you know where to find me.”

  “Maybe we’ll come by Burke’s sometime and interview you,” I say, wishing I wasn’t holding a mop and a bottle of toilet cleaner while I made plans with her.

  “What’s the name of your podcast?” she asks.

  I haven’t thought about that yet. I’ve barely allowed myself to think about it as something real, something I’m making, something that might someday find its way into the world. Something with a title.

  “It’s called Objects of Destruction,” Max says.

  I start to glare at him, because really, in a creative partnership, you need to run those things by each other. You don’t just go making big, disruptive decisions without a conversation. But I don’t glare at him, because also, it’s a good title.

  “For now,” Max adds with a smile.

  “Objects of Destruction,” Risa says. “I like it.”

  CHAPTER 13 Dilettante Life

  There are so many things I should have been honest about right from the beginning. Instead I hid them, and then I had to keep hiding everything.

  I delete my reply to Vincent and try again.

  I was worried you wouldn’t love me if you knew who I really was. I thought I’d lose you if I told you the truth. But then I lost you anyway.

  I delete that one too. It sounds like I’m making excuses for what I did.

  It’s so strange. We loved each other, and it felt very big, but the rooms where it happened were all very small, and there weren’t very many of them.

  It takes me half an hour to compose all these texts, and I don’t send any of them.

  Max and I are back from Java Cabana, sitting side by side on my bed with our backs against the headboard, legs outstretched, catching up on our correspondence. I don’t know whether he’s writing to Niko, or to Xochitl, or whether he’s doing the same thing I am, writing drafts of texts and deleting them.

  We hear the front door open and come out of the bedroom to find Harold and Sage in the kitchen, stocking the fridge with ice, beer, and sodas.

  “Where’s Dad?” I ask.

  “Grocery store,” Harold says. “He has declared it a Cookout Night.”

  I feel a little teary-eyed at this news. My mom was the one who could infuse a trip to the dentist or an afternoon pulling weeds with something sparkling and magical. But it was my dad who invented all of our family rituals, routines, and feast days. At different points in my childhood, we’d had weekly Game Nights, Movie Nights, Museum Days, Outside Afternoons, Swimming Sundays. And from April through October, we had Cookout Night every chance we got. And this was probably one of the last ones we’d ever have together in this house.

  That said, I am not one to let sentimentality interfere with an opportunity to get an interview. I look at Max, who understands what I’m thinking and runs to the bedroom for the digital recorder.

  We corner Harold and Sage on the patio as they’re installing a new propane tank on the grill. I want to tell them it’s a waste of time, that Mom will never use it, that Dad is moving to a cursed fourplex with no room for a gas grill.

  Harold shuffles his feet as he scrapes the grill clean, humming a tune to himself. It has no lyrics, but periodically, he chimes in with a doo-wop backup chorus part. Sage is hosing down the deck chairs, wiping off the filth of disuse. Ordinarily, we would have got
ten the deck up to Cookout Night standards by this point in the summer, but I guess nobody had felt very festive these past few months.

  “Sage, Uncle Harold, I was wondering if we could talk to you on the record.”

  Sage and Harold exchange a glance, as if they’re working out the most prudent course of action, as friends, as family.

  “You dad said he didn’t want to talk about the past,” Sage says.

  “He let me record him the whole time we were apartment hunting,” I say. “I just don’t ask him to talk about the things he doesn’t want to.”

  “What did you want to talk to us about?”

  “A passport.”

  “Go ahead,” Harold says, looking relieved. “That doesn’t seem like so much.”

  LEE SWAN: (studio)

  I show them my dad’s unused passport. First they giggle at how young he looks, but then…

  SAGE STEELE:

  Did you know about this?

  HAROLD WASSERMAN:

  Not a clue what he was up to.

  LEE:

  So he didn’t have any plans?

  HAROLD:

  He would have told me. Besides, your dad is the biggest homebody I know. Except maybe your mom.

  LEE:

  They had something in common?

  SAGE:

  Oh come on… they have a lot in common. They’re both writers…

  LEE:

  Dad’s an introvert, Mom’s an extrovert. Dad likes theater, Mom likes movies. Mom yells, Dad gives the silent treatment.

  SAGE:

  I was going to say they both had dads who weren’t around, moms who died when they were pretty young.

  HAROLD:

  And they have you in common, Lee. They have this house, and the people they filled it with, and the past twenty years. That’s a lot to have in common with someone. I’ve never had that much in common with anyone in my life.

  LEE: (studio)

  If you ever want to feel like an asshole, launch a critical investigation of your parents’ marriage. Learn that for every one of their bad habits, there’s a tragic backstory. You start to feel sorry for the jerks.

  Even if my parents’ love story was about their shitty childhoods and thwarted dreams and me, somehow they managed to get almost twenty years out of it. It makes me wonder what Vincent’s and my love story was really about after all.

  When it happened, it felt like magic—someone who wanted to talk about art and ideas as much as I did. And when he said, “I’ve always wanted to have a podcast,” I thought, I have an attic and access to recording equipment, and I can figure out how to use it. I can make this happen for you. For us.

  I’m already beginning to see the shape of the first episode of Objects of Destruction. Even though I don’t have the music in my head, I have the idea of it—something instrumental, sad and haunting. I introduce the poetry book, the passport. I’ll record myself saying, “These are the clues to unlocking a mystery about how this all happened. These are artifacts of a love story I don’t know how to tell. They are… Objects of Destruction.” And then the music, which has been building all this time, explodes into a theme song I haven’t heard yet.

  I’ll read the poems and introduce each of the people who have descended upon my house and splice in the interview with my mom. Then, the first episode ends with the scene at Java Cabana, the cliffhanger that Greg might be my biological father.

  I wish Vincent was here with me in the attic so I could ask him, Does that sound right? What would you do next?

  * * *

  While Man Ray was getting over his broken heart, he painted a giant canvas of Lee Miller’s lips floating in the sky above the Paris Observatory. It took two years to finish, and each night he hung the unfinished canvas over his bed. This should be considered obsessive by nearly any metric. It is also one of the most iconic artworks of the twentieth century, so it was probably worth the suffering.

  * * *

  Max and I stay up late working on Objects of Destruction, and the next morning, we roll out of bed and go straight back upstairs. By noon, we’ve fallen into a comfortable rhythm, working side by side. While I edit and mix the segments we’ve already recorded, he searches for music clips we can use. He seems to have limitless patience for all of this, offering up his opinion on one cut versus another, making suggestions that I nearly always end up taking.

  “What if we make that scene in Java Cabana a recurring segment?” he suggests. “Each episode, you bring all the evidence you’ve gathered to me and Claire and Risa, lay it all out, and we call it, ‘What the Hell Is Really Going On?’ ”

  “The next installment can be the fact that neither of my dad’s two closest friends had any idea he was thinking about leaving the country right before I was born.”

  “I have some possible intro songs for you,” he says, holding up his phone. I showed him some of the royalty-free music sites I sometimes used for Artists in Love. They’re free, but you have to sift through thousands of songs by people you’ve never heard of, looking for something that captures exactly the feeling you’re looking for. It can take hours of tedious searching just to fill a few seconds.

  The first one he plays sounds like the instrumental music that would be playing in a hippie store that sells crystals and nutritional supplements. The second is catchy, but when we layer it onto my track, it’s too flashy and distracting, so we throw it out.

  “This is so annoying,” Max says. “If I could play any instruments, I’d just write it myself.”

  The third song he’s found isn’t perfect, but we don’t hate it, and for the moment, that’s good enough for me. I mix it in, even though I can hear Vincent’s voice in my head:

  Lee, “good enough” isn’t.

  When I’m done, I notice that Max is lying patiently on the air mattress, combing through the free music databases, listening to one instrumental clip after another. Poor Max, I think. First his parents drag him to Memphis, and then I hold him captive in my attic.

  “You know, Max,” I say, “this is my weird deal. If there’s some other way you’d rather spend your days, I would completely understand.”

  “I’m good,” he says.

  “Do you have something like this? Something that does for you whatever it is that this does for me?”

  “This is it. I’m doing it.”

  “You didn’t know how to use a digital recorder until yesterday.”

  “But now I do. I enjoy being a dilettante like that.”

  “Uh, Max, I don’t think that word means what you think it means. Like, it is not a compliment. It means you’re not a serious person.”

  “I know exactly what the word means, and I think it has a terrible and unearned reputation. Like you, Lee.”

  “Ha ha,” I say, swatting him with the back of my hand.

  “I like knowing a little bit about a lot of things. I like that I keep adding to my arsenal. It’s an excellent way to be a person in the world, wandering around being fascinated by shit.”

  “And then moving on to the next thing.”

  I think about Max’s litany of unrelated college majors, how easily he puts things down and picks up other things, and I wonder if he’ll ever find one thing that holds his interest. Then again, I made all my college plans a year in advance and look where it got me.

  “What of it?” he asks, sensing the criticism in my remark.

  “If you just move on to the next thing, then what was the point?”

  “So they can write on my tombstone, HERE LIES MAX, HE FOUND ALL OF THIS ENDLESSLY CAPTIVATING.”

  “What would mine say?”

  “HERE LIES LEE. WE FINALLY GOT HER OUT OF THE ATTIC.”

  Even if Max said that he wanted to help me, I knew myself. I knew that if it was just me, I’d stay up here working for entire days. I’d steal the air mattress and sleep up here if I could. Just because that’s how Vincent and I used to work didn’t mean it was fair to hold a self-proclaimed dilettante to our unhealthy
standards.

  “Hey,” I say, taking off the headphones, “I want to take you somewhere. Somewhere fun.”

  He perks up right away, and I immediately feel glad I suggested it. We brave the outdoors and walk to the Young Avenue Deli, where we order fried cheese and fried pickles and play pool. Then we walk to Goner Records and go through the bins of vinyl. I take him to the comic book shop and flip through issues of Black Panther and Runaways, and I remember that my friends and I used to come to these places all the time. But Vincent wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music at his house, or have comics, and Artists in Love took up so much of our time. By the end of senior year, everyone I used to know had graduated, moved, switched schools, or stopped speaking to me, and Vincent was the only person left. By then, I was so focused on my future with him that I lost sight of everything else.

  I buy a couple trades, to catch up on what I’ve missed, and then Max says, “Didn’t Risa say she worked at Burke’s?”

  “She did.”

  “Let’s go see if she’s there.”

  I’m caught up in the buoyant spirit of the day, floating around Midtown with a belly full of fried pickles and a bag of comics and records slapping against my thigh. The strap of my sundress slips off my shoulder, and I leave it where it falls.

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

  Would it be wrong if I answered, “Eat fried pickles and visit cute girls who work in bookshops?”

  Risa is behind the register when we walk in, and she jumps up and down when she sees us.

  “How’s the investigation?” she asks.

  “We’re taking the afternoon off,” Max explains. A customer approaches, and we step aside to let her help them. Risa’s patient, even though the person can’t remember the title of the book, or the author, or what it was about, only that a car runs off the road in a blizzard in the first scene and the cover is navy blue. I’m amazed as she leads them to exactly the right spot on the shelf and puts the book in their hands.