by Laurel Brett
“And the pearls?”
“A gift for my sixteenth birthday from my parents. I wanted a guitar. I think they’re hideous, but my mother says I’ll be grateful for them someday. I feel like I’m an impostor.”
“And who are you impersonating?” I asked.
“The good girl you thought I was.”
“So you’re not a good girl?”
“God, I hope not.”
“And you haven’t become president of the Young Republican Club or anything like that since I last saw you?”
“No, I don’t think so, though my mom has been talking about Vassar.”
“You’re not interested?”
“No guys. I don’t think so.”
The cloud lifted. She was my Ur-Daphne. I was very anxious, waiting for Galen and his Daphne to arrive. Every time the door opened I checked out the mirror to see who was entering. So far they were no-shows. I wanted some answers, but I didn’t know how much to reveal to my Schrödinger girl.
“You seemed pretty upset when you ran out of the gallery two months ago, the last time I saw you. I was really worried about you.”
“I guess I am a bit of a good girl. I got so embarrassed remembering the way I propositioned you, and I couldn’t bear seeing myself naked with you next to me. I guess all that bravado was a bit of an act, though I hated to admit it. I was just so mortified I had to run away. Have you found out anything else about the painting or the model?”
“No,” I lied. I’m not really sure why, but after Caroline’s reaction, I was keeping the particulars of the Schrödinger mystery to myself. Besides, I rationalized, the truth might be too upsetting to a teenager. “I have been studying the myth though,” I added. “I find it fascinating that Daphne gets turned into a tree.”
“A laurel. I know. I’ve been reading about the myth. A psychoanalyst said that the laurel tree represents Daphne’s paralysis, but I think Ovid is after something else. By becoming a laurel, Daphne gets to stay herself, even if she has to change form. Changing form is trivial. Losing oneself is much more serious. I think the laurel is a symbol of self-actualization. That’s Maslow’s term.” She blushed. “I must sound pompous.”
“Not at all. Don’t forget, you’re talking to an academic.” I had studied a bit of Maslow, though the human potential movement was as far from behaviorism as you could get.
“Well, one thing has changed, anyway.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I am not going around offering myself to men like you and that guy with the question mark outside the Museum of Modern of Art. Thank you so much for not taking me up on it.”
“Don’t mention it,” I said sheepishly.
As the hour passed it became clear that Galen’s Daphne, the beautiful artist’s muse, was not going to show up. I felt bitterly disappointed. Although I had been nervous about what might have happened, I needed some answers. I wondered if a magnetic force was keeping the Daphnes apart.
I was caught up in these thoughts when I heard my young friend say, “So the most interesting part of our physics book was the idea that our universe is only one possibility in an array of many. It is just as likely that vastly different events could have happened or that we’d be very different people. In fact, those people might actually exist in alternate realities.”
“That is interesting, but no one can prove anything.”
“I know,” she sighed. “Promise you won’t laugh if I tell you something?”
“I can’t 100 percent promise because laughing is a pretty involuntary reflex, but I promise I’ll try not to laugh.”
“Sometimes I think I see another version of myself. She looks just like me, but she wears camouflage and combat boots, and just seems, I don’t know, maybe more militant. I thought I saw her once at a shopping center and another time at an antiwar rally we held at the school. She was with the SDS organizers, but when I went to find her, she’d vanished. It makes me feel really creepy. And then of course there’s the girl in the painting.”
I got chills listening to her. This girl had seen SDS Daphne! She had seen her more than once. I knew I should probably tell her everything then, but something primal made me keep my experiences secret. Instead I sang, “Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes, and she’s gone.”
“Ooh, exactly! ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’ Sometimes I’m afraid I’m going to see myself everywhere.”
I knew exactly what she meant. There were days at school when any auburn-haired girl could take me by surprise and I’d find myself searching for Daphne in her.
I decided to do some reality testing. “Let me ask you this,” I said. “Do you still live at home? Are you staying at the same school?”
“Yes and yes. By that I mean to say, yes, everything is the same, sad as that is. I’m not going to get away anytime soon.”
“Do you know a guy named Terry Collins?”
“How do you know about him? I’ve heard of him. I’ve never met him. He started an SDS chapter in the next town. I’m against the war and all, but lots of older hippies hang around with him, and there’s a lot of pot smoking, and I’m really just not ready for all that. I learned my lesson from going around offering myself to two men and then coming face to face with a nude picture of myself.” She laughed, seemingly no longer upset about the painting, or overly burdened by the ambiguities surrounding it.
This was still the Daphne who’d come with me to the gallery. I’d been right, of course. The Daphne whom I’d met up with at the New York Public Library was a new girl. “Are you sure you’re not a good girl?” I teased.
“Maybe I am, but I hate the war.”
“What convinced you of that?”
“Last year I saw a photograph taken by a French photographer. Henry Huet, I think his name was. It was of a helicopter lifting up a dead paratrooper. And then I thought of all the American guys being drafted and of all the Vietnamese people being killed, kids included, and I just knew it was wrong.”
I remembered talking about the same thing with SDS Daphne. When I asked her the same question about how she’d become an antiwar activist she had given me a different answer. She had told me of her letter from a young soldier named Rick Lopez and of her meeting with Terry.
“Can I ask you another question?”
“Fire away,” she said.
“Did you ever have a pen pal?”
“Is this This Is Your Life? You seem to know everything about me. How do you find these things out? I was supposed to have one, a guy named Rick, but he never answered me back after I wrote to him.”
“What did you write about?”
“Nietzsche.”
That was exactly what the other Daphne said her first letter was about. But she had received an answer, though only one.
“Do you want anything else?”
“I’ll take a TaB.”
TaB was this awful diet soda that Coca-Cola had introduced a few years back. But who was I to judge what Daphne drank?
After her TaB came we chatted a bit longer. She told me about the books she was reading. I told her I’d read the R.D. Laing book and thanked her for it again. We talked about how much we both loved Sgt. Pepper and she ordered me to get Blonde on Blonde.
“Whenever I feel like too much of a good girl, I just listen to Bob Dylan, and I know that in my soul I’m a rebel. I can’t wait to get home to take off these pearls.”
Chapter Eleven
* * *
I stayed at the discount hotel that night. I caught a movie in Times Square and bought new bathing trunks. I thought about a gift for Caroline. I wasn’t sure why she was giving me another chance.
I showed up at her place the next day at ten a.m. on the dot carrying a bottle of chilled champagne that I had just bought from a liquor store in the Village, my new swim trunks, and an unopened copy of Blonde on Blonde I purchased on the way over from a street vendor. I handed them all to Caroline. Her bed was already put away, and she had some picnic items s
et up on a little hinged fold-down shelf next to the baker’s rack. She put everything in her huge straw bag, including my trunks. She had laid out bittersweet-orange towels for us both, and was now packing them.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“It’s a secret, but I can tell you I have a light lunch already packed, and the champagne will be perfect.” She walked over to one of her shelves and added two plastic cups to the bag.
“You’re beautiful,” I said. Even her sundress was black, though there was a profusion of white flowers scattered across the fabric. “What do you call those kind of flowers?”
“It’s a Jacobean print,” she said.
One of the things I appreciated so much about Caroline was the well-thought-out and artful way she did everything. I didn’t know if that was Smith, her art background, or just the sensibility she was born with.
“Where are we going?” I asked again.
“I think you can guess where we’re going. You’ve lived around New York your entire life.”
“Then I guess we’re going to Coney Island. It will be crowded on a weekend in August, and it’s not in the best neighborhood these days. But you know that, right?”
“I’m sure it’s unbearably crowded, and I don’t care about the neighborhood.” She was grinning. “Come on, Garrett. Live with the common folk.”
“Spoken by my Modigliani odalisque who can’t wear ordinary florals.”
“You know an odalisque is a concubine, right?”
“Isn’t it just an elongated, beautiful woman?”
“Nope. You’re thinking of the Ingres painting. But he means concubine. From a harem.”
“Okay. You’re not an odalisque. But the sound of the word describes you perfectly.”
“You chose our Russian Tea Room date. Today is mine. And I say Coney Island.”
“Yes ma’am.” I offered to get the car, but Caroline said the subway was fine. She even insisted on carrying the straw bag herself.
“You are the consort today,” she said.
“No problem.”
* * *
When we got to Coney Island the first words out of Caroline’s mouth were, “It is soooooooo crowded here.”
“Well, yeah. Have you ever been here before?”
She just shook her head. The expression on her face would have been comical if she weren’t so upset. “I wanted to have a real New York summer experience.”
“Well, you are,” I said. “It’s always this crowded. Tomorrow, Sunday, will probably be even worse.”
People were everywhere in various states of undress. Some women wore bikinis so scanty they were almost naked. Some glistened with oiled tans. Others were so white that it seemed to be their first summer day out in the world. Girls wore sunglasses. Guys blinked at the sun, their muscled chests walking before them. Children of a hundred ethnicities speaking a hundred languages, like little voices piping above the crowd, slipped between the legs of their parents and ran after each other. Dogs barked and chased their tails. Bathing suits, towels, sundresses, and shorts made a rainbow of colors. Hippies wore tie-dyed T-shirts with metal peace signs dangling from chains or strings. More militant kids wore surplus combat fatigues, even on this boiling day. I wondered what SDS Daphne did on the Fourth of July. Then I came back to Caroline.
“Well, the first rule in New York is that if you’re out at an iconic place, and it’s crowded, it’s okay. We can have fun. Beach or rides?” I asked.
I had been to Coney Island many times as a kid with my dad. Sometimes we came in the winter when it wasn’t crowded at all. He had run away from his family and run away from Harvard, and until the war, he had never really found his place in life. He did a lot of different jobs, but nothing stuck. He was often out of work. He was one of those guys always dreaming big, and the quotidian details of life were just pit stops between dreams. A day at Coney Island with him was magical, but my mother was never with us because she was always toiling to get our lives to work, whether it was behind a bar or in the apartment. She admired his education and his manners, and she’d fallen hard for the rosy world he saw and always believed he could bring about. By the time he’d left for war she must have been completely on to him, but she had an Irish girl’s pride, and she never complained. Danny Malone was nothing like him, and for my mother, that was mostly a good thing.
Caroline wanted to go on the teacup ride, but I nixed that. “That’s kid’s stuff,” I said. “When we have a daughter, I’ll take you both on that.” I can’t imagine how those words came out of my mouth, but we both ignored the comment. “Let’s just do it. Ride the Cyclone,” I quickly added.
“Really? Isn’t it scary?”
“That’s the point.”
We put the heavy basket in a locker. It must have taken an hour on line to get our turn, but we finally climbed onto the old wooden roller coaster. As we rode, she clung to me, screaming with terror and delight.
My father had taken me on this ride the last time we came to Coney Island, before he went into the army. I was one of those tiny boys who grows in his teens and finally reaches a respectable height, so for years I had been too little to ride the Cyclone. I didn’t think about the fact that it was a weekday and that he’d kept me out of school. I concentrated on not acting scared because I knew my father needed to see that I was brave. That control was easy to summon up now. I had fun watching Caroline lose control while I played the straight man.
“Worth it?” I asked. She nodded, eyes wide.
After the Cyclone the other rides would be anticlimactic, so we retrieved the basket and walked to the beach. She had brought a light sheet to sit on. I found rocks for the corners, and we went into a cabana to change. True to form, Caroline’s suit was a one-piece black bandeau that really flattered her. In contrast, I was unattractively pale—white and pasty.
The beach was even more crowded than the amusement park. I could hear snippets of so many different songs on the transistor radios almost everyone carried. I heard the Monkees sing “Last Train to Clarksville,” and the Beach Boys sing “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” I heard Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music.” These were songs from earlier summers that some deejays had thrown into the mix. From every direction I heard Procol Harum singing “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the big hit that summer. I ruefully concluded that their lyric aptly described my legs.
We ran into the water together. The blue-green waves of the Atlantic knocked us down and buoyed us up, and Caroline held tight to my neck, and deeply exhilarated, we kissed and licked salt from each other’s mouths. Since we didn’t swim far out, the water was clogged with other couples as well, like a huge school of lovers gathered in the shallows.
She asked me to watch her as she floated, and when she stood up again, we decided to push past the others and swim out a bit. We were both strong swimmers. After a while, we turned around and headed back toward shore.
“Wow, I’m hungry,” she announced. We sat on our sheet with Caroline’s towels wrapped around us. We drank the champagne out of the plastic cups and ate hard-boiled eggs, crackers, and grapes. Since we were both still hungry we walked along the beach and found the Nathan’s hot dog stand. Apparently 1967 marked the 100-year-anniversary of the hot dog, and we each had one with mustard and sauerkraut, and then I had to get some french fries too. We shared a Coke and went back to our spot to doze in the sun.
We held hands as we lay on the sand. Nearby a radio played “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
“That was so nice of you to bring me Blonde on Blonde,” Caroline said. “Of course, I’ve heard some of the songs, but I’ve never listened to the album all the way through. I can’t wait. We can listen to it together, the way we listened to Sgt. Pepper.”
“Sounds great,” I said. “Daphne told me to buy the album.” I don’t know why I said that, but I could feel her body suddenly stiffen.
“Daphne?” She was angry. “Did she tell you to buy it for me? Does she know about me?”
“N
o. She just wanted me to hear it.”
“So you thought of giving it to me all by yourself?” Her voice was cold and sarcastic. What had happened to our ecstasy in the water?
“But I thought you wanted me to keep working on the Daphne mystery. I saw her yesterday, and because of you I really want to solve this. Remember when you said the way to do that was to get the two Daphnes in a room together? So I tried.”
“Maybe I would be more interesting to you if there were three of me, Garrett.”
I hated the way my name sounded at that moment. The t’s resonated with such harshness. Maybe I needed a nickname. Gar or even Gary. No one had ever called me anything but Garrett, just like my dad.
“Don’t you want me to solve this mystery?”
“Either that, or give it up.”
“You know I’m not crazy, right? I mean you saw her. You saw Daphne. You saw the portrait. You saw her upset. You know I’m not crazy.”
“That’s not what makes you crazy. It’s what it all means to you that is crazy. You think she’s a harbinger of new dimensions of reality or something like that. And anyway, one would think that you’d have enough common sense not to bring her up in relation to a present for me.”
I was scared now. I was afraid she’d vanish. I thought of Helena, my young ex-wife, and how wispy she’d felt to me. When I was with Caroline I knew I wasn’t alone.
“Why did you decide to keep seeing me?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I feel like there’s something between us. There are some things about you I really like.”
“Like what?”
“I can’t give you a list right now.”
“I know how you feel about me disappointing you. I really do.”
“You do? How do you know?”
“My father had some strange ideas, and I know he made my mother suffer. But I can tell you that when he died he took a special quality with him, took it right out of my life, something I’ve never been able to get back. Not until this year when I met you . . . and Daphne. It’s the feeling of unexpectedness and possibility. I wouldn’t want you to lose that from your life, Caroline. Can’t we just enjoy the rest of the day?”