Write My Name Across the Sky

by O'Neal, Barbara

  Most of us, however, are like me. Modestly successful in our fields, but always scrambling for the next gig, the next influx of cash. My mother’s royalties used to cover a lot of my life, but they’ve dwindled dramatically the past few years. There’s really only enough to cover the fees and upkeep on the apartment.

  But I don’t mind the life of a musician. Not everyone loves the insecurity of it, and I have to admit it gets old, but what can you do if that’s what your very blood insists you’re meant to pursue? Nothing feels like music does, and I can’t imagine what my life would be like without it.

  Empty. Not really a life at all.

  In another room, either the dining room or the parlor with its long windows overlooking the street below, Gloria and Sam are arguing about something. I try not to pay attention, standing up to carry my dishes to the sink, and wonder what to do with the rest of the day.

  Gloria appears at the kitchen door. “Will you join us, sweetheart?”

  I follow her down the dark-paneled hallway to the parlor. It’s smaller than the living room, with a pleasant fireplace and carved wood everywhere. The rain outside obscures the view, making it all gray and misty, blurring out the buildings in the distance. Sam is perched on the edge of a wingback chair that must be older than either of us, one leg flung over the other as it swings back and forth, a sure sign of irritation. Behind her on the wall are gatherings of paintings. One of my favorites, an evocative and colorful rendition of a Middle Eastern market, hangs right over her left shoulder.

  “What’s up?” I ask, curling up on the sofa. I pull a pillow over my middle.

  Gloria gestures with one hand. “Why don’t you share with Willow what you suggested to me?” Her voice is much too calm.

  Sam sighs. “I want us to talk about selling the apartment.”

  “What?” I leap to my feet. “No!”

  Gloria looks smug. She would never leave this place. “That’s what I said.”

  As if she is the most long-suffering martyr in all of time, Sam sighs. “It’s a dinosaur, you guys! Look around you. It needs so much work!”

  “What the hell, Sam?” I’m eyeing the purple shadows beneath her eyes and suddenly remember when she first broke up with Eric. I left the Ren Faire band to come home and check on her, which ended up being one of the best things that ever happened to me, because it was on that trip home that I played a gig where I caught the eye of a music executive with some actual power to do something for me.

  Which led to my album. And a relationship, and a nice stint in a great house in Malibu.

  And getting locked out of that house.

  Best and worst things that ever happened to me.

  It was also one of the better times I’ve shared with my sister. In her loneliness, she let me in, let me cheer her up. I thought maybe we were overcoming the tensions of our childhood. No such luck. A year later, she was as mean as ever, shutting me out when I came to visit after her friend Tina got married.

  She doesn’t really deserve my attention, but old habits die hard. “Is something going on with you, Sam?”

  She frowns irritably. “No. It’s just time.” She looks around the room. “It’s a mausoleum.”

  “It’s not your taste,” Gloria says. “Which is fine, since you don’t live here and haven’t for more than twenty years. I’m with your sister: What’s going on with you? You don’t look good.”

  Sam ducks the hand Gloria reaches out and defensively smooths her hair, even though Gloria never even got close. The movement exposes her collarbone, which is perfectly defined, the skin dipping away from it on both sides. I frown. She’s a bitch, but I’m also the only sister she has, and therefore it’s my job to pay attention.

  I say, “Why all of a sudden, right now?”

  “It’s not all of a sudden. I’ve been thinking about it for months.”

  “Why?”

  “None of your business!” she bursts out. “I have my reasons, but I don’t know why I have to share them with you.”

  Mildly, Gloria says, “Well, maybe because both of us actually live here and you don’t.”

  “Willow lives in LA.”

  “Not anymore,” I say.

  They both look at me. “I thought you were house-sitting,” Sam says.

  “I am.” I hold the pillow close to my chest, not wanting to get into the whole mess, throw blood in the water for my sister the shark. “I’m tired of LA, and I’m also moving back here. I miss New York. I miss my friends.” I gesture, taking in the paintings, the carved fireplace, the big mirror that’s gone smoky, the view of the rooftops out of the windows. “And I love this place.”

  Gloria’s phone vibrates on the coffee table, which I’d love to say is an authentic antique, but it’s just an ordinary glass-topped table with a dusty coffee-table book about my mother on it. She sneers from the front cover, her dyed-black hair chopped into a long shag, her guitar in front of her braless chest. I’ve seen the photo a million times, but for the first time, I realize that she was younger than I am now.

  Gloria picks up her phone and turns off the alarm with her manicured fingernail, painted glossy coral. “I have to go. I have lunch plans and can’t be late.” She stands. “Willow and I are not interested in selling the apartment, Sam.”

  “It’s not yours,” Sam says furiously, glaring up at Gloria.

  A vivid hush falls. There are things families never say, and in ours, this is one of them.

  Gloria doesn’t even flinch. For a long moment she stands where she is, imperious at almost five feet ten, her blue eyes sparking. Once upon a time, several New York agencies tried to get her to model, but she loved flying and thought models had boring jobs. The swoop of cheekbone and the clean jawline have stood her in good stead, because at seventy-four, she is still beautiful.

  And as able to stand up for herself as ever. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, Samantha, but maybe if you’re honest, we can find another way to help you.” She waves. “See you later, Willow.”

  She’s gone. I sit where I am, waiting for Sam to speak up. Instead, she grabs her paper cup off the table and takes a swig. “Wouldn’t you like to live somewhere more modern?”

  “No! I don’t even know what you’re talking about right now.” A pulse of distress thuds against my throat. “I’ve lived lots of modern places. This is better.”

  Her mask slips for the slightest moment, showing weariness. “I saw my dad this morning.”

  “Yeah? I didn’t think you were seeing him much these days.” I try to resist, but she isn’t the only one who can be mean, and I add, “Since he has that lovely new family and all.”

  She rolls her eyes in acknowledgment. “I hadn’t seen him in a while.”

  I nod, waiting. Whenever her dad is involved, trouble follows. He has a gift for dangling things in front of her, then snatching them away, and I’m sure she sort of knows that, but we all have an Achilles’ heel.

  A kaleidoscope of emotions moves over her face, and she digs her hands into her hair at the temple. When she still says no more, I prompt, “And?”

  “I don’t know.” She sighs, allows a tiny glimpse into her real feelings. “I just keep expecting him to be someone else.”

  “How’s that going?”

  To deflect, she asks, “What are you really doing here?”

  “I’ll tell you if you tell me what the hell is really going on with you.”

  She stands. “Nothing.”

  I shrug and stuff my story deeper into my chest, even though I would really like to tell her the truth, that my life in LA was absolute crap at the end. I ran out there with such high hopes, riding on David’s promises, choosing to not see or to ignore the fact that he really only had one value: money.

  Talk about people who offer one thing and deliver another.

  But Sam gathers herself. “If you’re living here, I’m sure I’ll see you more often.”

  “Will we?”

  Again she rolls her eyes. “Don’t
be dramatic. I’ve gotta go get a shower.”

  I want to ask how she could be so mean to Gloria, but it’s not that strange for her to be a bitch. I don’t move as she lets herself out. Eloise leaps up into my lap and butts her head against my hand as I slump in my chair and look toward the rooftops. Her purr gives weight to my sense of homecoming.

  The sky is a pale gray, the windows smeared with rain, and a shimmer of light flashes yellow, then white, against the glass from some invisible source. Inside, paintings my mother and Gloria collected, along with family photos—some professional ones, most of them snapshots and amateur favorites—line the walls. A carved mantelpiece frames the fireplace, and a mottled mirror hangs above it, reflecting the windows and the paintings and the ceiling. If I close my eyes, I can feel myself at five playing with the zoo of stuffed animals I adored, and at nine, my head pressed against the window as I wondered where souls went, if my mother could see me standing there. I am twelve, listening to Gloria’s varied and sometimes-shocking guests laughing and trying to outdo each other with outrageousness. Everyone sat at her table—the opera singer from downstairs, and her flight attendant friends, and drag queens, and bankers, and art-gallery owners. More than one of them died of the scourge of HIV. Others survived. I played my violin for all of them and learned to tell a good story to earn my place at the table.

  Home. It’s so good to be home.

  My mother bought the apartment with cash in 1978. The money was from her first album, a pop/rock/punk mix-up that sold modestly well. One song, “Write My Name Across the Sky,” still plays regularly on radio stations around the country, though most of the rest of her work has slid out of the public eye.

  Anyway, at the time, the nine-room, sixth-floor-with-a-garden apartment cost $85,000. I recently priced it on Zillow, and the equivalents were in the four-mill range or better. It has never been upgraded, so it’s all original, the parquet floors and wainscoting and charming windows in bathrooms and skylights and of course the greenhouse, which is either the greatest selling point of all time or a big headache to be filled with somebody’s leftover junk.

  My mother’s public persona was that of a bad, bad girl—Joan Jett meets Janis Joplin. She sang hard, loved hard, partied hard.

  But she loved this place. At home, she was kinder, easier, quieter, especially during the periods when she was clean, which was more often than the press would have you believe. It was going back on the road, back to the hungry, hungry crowds, that sucked her under. She needed them, craved their attention, but she also couldn’t really manage them or the demands of fame.

  The apartment was her refuge and getaway. The building has always been filled with creative people: The ancient opera singer who still lives in Apartment 4-A; a professor in 2-B who wrote a sweet allegory that rocketed to the bestseller lists, freeing him forever from any kind of material concern; an artist who turned the master bedroom into a studio and played mournful classical music late at night right below us. Next door to us, sharing a wall to the rooftop garden, was a married couple in their eighties who’d escaped Europe after the war and spent the rest of their decades living like it could all end at any moment.

  For me, the apartment is simply home. It’s always here, reliable and peaceful. I don’t know what’s on Sam’s mind, but there’s no way I’d even think of selling. It’s the only place I truly feel I belong.

  Chapter Eight

  Gloria

  Every week for the past forty-five years, except for the sad four years it was closed in the early aughts, I have met with my friends at the Russian Tea Room. Depending on who was in town or who was flying or who had married, there was a fluctuating number of TWA flight attendants, all of us trained in the midsixties, when girls still had to quit when they turned thirty-two or married or gained too much weight. That last one took a while, but we managed to get the other rules changed in time for all of us to fly as long as we wished.

  Today, there are only five left out of the thirteen we started with. Some of us have died, of course, and one is too frail to make the journey into the city anymore.

  Once upon a time, it was a point of pride for me to walk the thirty blocks, enjoying the constitutional, which gave me the chance to work off my treats. Today, Jorge hails my cab, and I take a photo of him through the rain-dotted window, his figure smeared and regal, standing under the awning. A good shot for later, perhaps.

  At the iconic tea room, I find three of my friends assembled around our table, a booth three-quarters of the way back, beneath one of the firebirds flying from the ceiling. It gives me relief simply to walk into the place—the reds and golds, the sense of a time long past, of my own history, lived here at these tables for so long. A thousand conversations I’ve had hang invisibly in the air around us.

  “Good morning,” says Miriam, the one of us who worked the longest, until just four years ago. She is wearing her usual crisp navy pantsuit. Her silver hair is short and tidy, her cheekbones giving her face as much beauty as it held in her twenties, when she’d reminded all of us of Sophia Loren. “You don’t look as if you’ve slept much.”

  I slide into the booth, brush snow from my shoulders. “No.”

  Fran is next to me, a shrinking version of herself, growing tinier and tinier every year, her bones starved of nutrients for too many years. She looks ten years older than she is, too, her skin similarly starved, and she’s had dentures for decades, all the price of what we now know is bulimia. “How was the trip to Antigua?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “Fine. I just wish we’d stop traveling.”

  I pat her hand. “I know. We’ve done our miles, haven’t we?”

  On the other side of her is Dani, a vigorous woman who has slightly darkened the shade of red she dyes her hair but otherwise has kept up the fight against time with excellent results. Everything has been tucked and plumped and exercised to exquisite tone. If you passed her on the street, you’d think her midforties, and her ice-blue eyes still capture every man within a hundred miles. She’s been married for decades to a very wealthy man who worships her. “I loved the slipper/slipper shot on Instagram.”

  “Thanks.”

  The knowledge of what we are all avoiding lies around us, thick on our shoulders as fog. “Is Angie coming?” I ask, turning off my phone.

  “She hasn’t said she wasn’t,” Dani says, sipping her coffee carefully. “She’s the one who is going to freak out the most. She’s waited a long time for a grandchild. The baby is due next month.”

  “Nothing is going to happen to any of you,” I say firmly. “You’ve done nothing wrong. It’s all on me, and I will take responsibility for it.” I know they’re going to worry, but they truly have no reason. None of them carried stolen art or forgeries, and although they don’t know it, they didn’t buy lost masterworks either.

  Which is not going to sit well with my old, old friends. I squirm a little, thinking of how to tell them the truth.

  “Well, it’s not like we didn’t know what we were doing,” Miriam interjects. “There’s Angie.”

  We watch her cross the room, unhurried, graceful. In another tale, she would have been the duchess. In this one, she is ice blonde and patrician, wearing a St. John coat with three brass buttons and a cute flare at the hips. As she sits down, she signals the waiter and asks for a glass of rosé, which is her water of choice. “French, not Californian.”

  Then to us, she says, “This is a pretty pickle.” Her voice is husky from years of smoking, which she gave up ten years ago when it became intolerably politically incorrect. “What are we going to do?”

  Everyone looks at me. “Nothing,” I say. “There is nothing that needs to be done right now. Once I figure things out, I’ll let you know.”

  “What if our husbands divorce us over this?” Fran says.

  “What if we go to jail?” Angie says sharply. “That would be slightly worse than divorce.”

  “I can’t do jail,” Dani says.

  Miriam all but rolls her eye
s. “None of us can ‘do jail.’ We’ll figure things out. Just because Isaak was arrested doesn’t mean we’ll be implicated.”

  “Except Gloria,” Fran says.

  “Thanks for the reminder.” I actually carried stolen and forged paintings, which at the time seemed like a thrilling caper, rather than an international crime. My stomach flips, but I still don’t tell them they’re off the hook, because that would mean confessing that the paintings they paid tens of thousands of dollars for were all nothing but sincere imitations. They’re going to hate me.

  I hate myself for it now, but back then it seemed like a big lark. Their husbands could afford it, and they thought they were getting away with something.

  I pick up the menu. “Can we order before we start planning our doom?”

  The waiter arrives as if he’s been eavesdropping, which makes me remember that we need to be more careful.

  The orders never really change—Angie chooses the caviar and blinis; Miriam loves the chicken salad in summer, beef stroganoff in winter; Fran has never learned to eat so has the appetizer salad; and Dani loves borscht and lamb dumplings, for which she saves calories all week. I’m usually very careful, but today, I’m in need of substance to ground me and get me through the challenges. “I’ll have the kulebyaka.”

  He smiles at me happily.

  “Separate checks,” Fran says.

  “Yes, dear, I remember.”

  As he hurries away, I take out my phone and illustrate. “Turn it all the way off. Not just airplane mode.”

  Dani narrows her eyes. “That’s not paranoid or anything.”

  “It might be,” I say, “but I had ads for Allbirds following me around all week after our discussion about them, so better safe than sorry.”

  “She’s right,” Miriam says. “I’ve been reading a lot about privacy issues. Phones are a big gray area.”

  With varying levels of reluctance, they all turn their phones off.