“Right,” Lee said. They stopped talking for a minute. She looked at her hands, at her father’s ring, at an elm tree outside the window. Then she asked him how his classes were going so far. He went into great detail about the scheduling conflict he was trying to work out during add/drop. It involved a film theory class he wanted to try and the fact that he’d taken AP calculus in high school so he should be able to enroll in the advanced math course that was more optimally timed. She thought that might have been the first time she ever heard someone use the word “optimally” in conversation. She wished him luck and, speaking of timing, said she had better be off to her late-afternoon survey on architecture and urbanism.
She wrote “Parthenon” and “Vitruvius” and “morphology” and “cobbler” in her notebook and when the lecture was over, she walked to the record store near campus and bought a copy of Motel Television. She had heard all of her father’s music before. At eleven, she had listened to “Yours” over and over as though it contained a message for her from beyond the grave. Still, she’d never experienced the connection that Andy did. How a song, like nothing else, can possess you.
Linda had all of Jesse’s output at home, of course, not just all of the albums and singles on vinyl but also eight-tracks, cassettes, and all the recently reissued CDs. But Lee hadn’t brought any of it with her to college. That evening, while her roommate (a very nice girl she had very little in common with) was out at dinner, she put it on. As she listened to it, she imagined Andy listening to it, and she heard a heartbeat there that she hadn’t picked up on before. She listened to it straight through and when her roommate returned, she apologized for being rude and then put on headphones, lay back on her narrow bed, and listened to it again. If this is what people were going to project onto her, was that so bad? She had read an interview once with a young actress, the daughter of a more famous actress. No disrespect to her mother, who was her greatest champion (and whom she spoke of as one might a lighthouse or the Statue of Liberty—shining and exemplary but sexless and not in competition with her), said the young actress (whose career would later tank), but you want people to like and respect you for you, and she often found that hard to come by. Lee was beginning to understand this. She’d been somewhat sheltered from this growing up in the world that she had. Most of the kids she knew were more or less like her in this regard. Lee wanted people to like her—or not like her—for who she was, only she wasn’t really sure who or what that was.
Days later, she approached Andy in a corner of the quad, and they both pretended they hadn’t been avoiding each other.
“Do you know what you need?” she asked him.
“Uh, no. What?”
“You need to come with me tonight.”
She took him to a party that an older girl she knew from high school had invited her to. A house off-campus throbbing with people. Entering it was like making your way inside a dark, warm muscle as it contracted and released. The pulsating absorbed her so she became part of it. Which is what she wanted, to move with it and not to think. She wasn’t so sure about Andy. She could sense him not wanting to get separated from her. She didn’t really think he was going to dance. She knew he was going to stand there and she would dance and he would watch her. Which he did. And then she would pull him in and he would be hesitant, reluctant, but she would make him stay and dance with her until he lost himself. Which he never quite did. She couldn’t tell if he looked bored because he thought that’s how you were supposed to look in a place like this, or if he actually was bored.
“Do you want to go?” she shouted.
“What?” he shouted back.
She took his hand and pushed their way through until they had expelled themselves back onto the street.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s not really my scene.”
“Oh, you have a scene?”
“Yeah. I’ve got a scene.”
“What’s your scene?”
“I’d say it’s centered around long, uncomfortable pauses. And a very close relationship with my right hand.”
“Did you take something?” Almost laughing, almost proud of him.
“Yes, but I don’t know what the fuck it was. Can you get me back to my bed please?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
He couldn’t find his room key. So she took him back to her bed, where he fell asleep before either of them had made enough noise to wake her roommate. She thought better of getting in there next to him, letting him wake up with her in his arms and misleading him more—misleading herself. She took a pillow and lay down on the floor.
They woke Sunday morning to the first fall-like day of the year. A bright blue sky and a few gentle cumulous clouds. A day made for wrought iron gates and piles of leaves and wool sweaters and apple cider, the kind of New England fantasy Lee had growing up in Los Angeles. A day that demanded, at the very least, a walk. The coolness of the air seemed to do Andy good, though they walked slowly, aimlessly, more in recuperation than invigoration. They stopped for hot chocolate (on the idealized beverage equivalency scale, in the same class as apple cider, which proved to be elusive in reality), taking it with them as they continued across campus and up along streets of old houses with small historic plaques and sizable yards. Then they cut east, downhill, toward the stadium.
“I used to play football,” said Andy.
“You did?”
“Yeah, varsity.”
“Really? So, do you have, like, a varsity jacket?”
“I do.”
Lee laughed.
“Is that funny?”
“No, it’s not funny. I don’t know why I laughed. I just had no idea. You’re like a scholar athlete.”
“Well, I’m not much of an athlete anymore. It was just something I did growing up. It wasn’t a big deal in my town. I broke my arm junior year and I was out all season and that was it.”
“But you were kind of a jock.”
“Yeah. It was very character-building.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I miss being on a team. I wouldn’t exactly say I’m a joiner, and I always kind of want to think of myself as a lone wolf, but I’m not. Can I tell you something?”
“Of course.”
“This is weird. That we’re here, walking around, and a month ago I was just, like, in my room.”
“Is that a Beach Boys reference?” One of maybe five Beach Boys songs, including “Kokomo,” she knew just by osmosis, just from living in the world. But she figured Andy would appreciate it.
“I guess it is. Everything is a reference now. But do you know what I mean?”
She did. It meant she would have to stop with the superficialities and they would have to talk about her parents.
“I know these things about you and about your life,” he said. “So I feel like I know where you’re coming from, but maybe I have no idea.”
“I have no idea either, sometimes. So.”
Andy was staring at his feet as he walked, as if to hide some frustration with her. As if he had risked something and she hadn’t.
“I’m not being glib. What I’m trying to say is you love my father. He clearly means a lot to you. You obviously know who my mother is. But what I’m trying to say is that I really don’t know who they are. I’ve listened to Motel Television I don’t know how many times in my life and, honestly, I never really heard it until about a week ago. So maybe you do know where I’m coming from, even if I don’t.”
“What did you hear when you heard it?”
“Oh, the things people talk about. Haunting. Heartbreaking.” She knew she wasn’t close to arriving at what it was she actually heard. “What do you hear?”
”It depends. It changes. But what I love about that record, in particular, is that there’s such a prettiness to his singing but you can feel this edge to it, like he’s trying to keep it from curdling into something else, something kind of vindictive. And the music, half the time, is already there, over that edg
e, if it’s not loping toward it. I think I just really admire the effort, how pretty he wants it to be, and then I just love the failure, when he gives over to everything underneath. The production on that album was genius. It adds this sheen to everything and that probably made it go down easier. It’s so easy to listen to. Like, the last song, “Waves,” it’s basically a lullaby, right? It might as well be spooning you, the take that’s on the album. But have you ever listened to the demo version? They put it in the box set but before that it was an extra track on the bootleg of his 1972 tour. It’s the same melody but the arrangement—there is no arrangement really. It’s just Jesse and it’s really intimate and, I don’t know, like, wounding. It’s kind of a precursor to the stuff on The Garden of Allah. When things got really troubled.”
Andy being spooned. Like he had any experience with that. He still had never mentioned a girl. But she hadn’t yet mentioned any of the boys she’d known either. None of whom she’d ever spooned.
“I should stop talking,” he said.
“No.”
But he did. So did she. The long, uncomfortable pause that was “his scene.” Only it wasn’t that uncomfortable. Their silence contained a reverberation, as though they were still communicating on a low, infrasonic frequency. They picked up on each other’s vibrations. His: I want to keep walking with you. Hers: Yes.
WHEN LEE AND Andy sat across from each other in a café, books splayed, she would think, I shouldn’t touch my lips like that or let my hair fall into my face and then she would touch her lips and let her hair fall in a way that most likely made him want to touch her lips and brush her hair back. She didn’t know why she did that with Andy. More to the point, why she did that and then found herself encouraging him toward other girls.
“Like what about Sarah or Porter down the hall?” she asked.
“Moose and Chipmunk?” he said. “No.”
She figured it was her role to discourage his negativity, but she just couldn’t. Moose and Chipmunk. His negativity was perfect. She asked herself, Why not Andy? There was a night, out walking with him, when he took her hand. He wasn’t even tentative. He just took it, and she let him. As long as she did, they were suspended, safe, moving along in a hypnotic state. It brought them to wherever they were going and then she must have let go. Neither of them ever mentioned it afterward. Soon she started sleeping with Jeremy from her playwriting workshop, effectively establishing a pattern later borne out in her relationship with slimy-yet-seductive Bruce.
She thought the whole thing with Bruce and Mind Faith might have finally dulled Andy’s feelings for her, but he was still there for her when she came back to school. He practically took her in. Though she didn’t know what she would have done if he hadn’t been there, she was also annoyed at that fact. It made her want to lash out at him and then feel guilty about it; take up with Noah Stone in a sexless relationship. A penitent one. Like a nun.
Noah tried. He said he wanted to but he almost never could. She would lie there while he went down on her and think: This is nice and it’s enough. But then there was a month or so when he had a lot of dental work done and barely touched her and finally she felt the not-very-nunlike frustration of it. That night at his place, the night of that party, when all he wanted to do was hold her and fall asleep, she couldn’t take it any longer.
“Did you not have fluoride in your water? What’s the deal with your teeth?”
“It’s my gums, actually. And it’s not that.”
She didn’t feel entitled to an explanation from him and felt even worse that he trusted her enough to offer one: his antidepressants. She hadn’t thought Noah had enough emotional range to be depressed. Even as he told her this, she still didn’t see him as an entirely real person. He held her after he shared this with her and she ran her fingers along his face until he fell asleep. Then she got out of the fortlike bed he’d constructed from lumberyard scraps. She didn’t know for sure but she thought maybe Andy was secretly still a virgin and maybe she would be doing him a favor. That’s how she’d justified it when she pulled him up off that mattress, taking him away from Viv and over to the sofa in the room they called the study. But he probably wasn’t a virgin because it seemed like he knew what he was doing, the way he touched her as though he was guiding her and not the other way around. When she came, she wasn’t thinking about anyone else and then she looked down and saw he still had on that T-shirt with the seahorse and she thought: Oh. No.
IF SHE HAD once been irritated with Andy for some reason she could never quite understand, taking her free-floating anger out on him, soon it seemed as if all that was left between them was a sadness she had created. She could never bring herself to tell him what it was, that she had been pregnant, could never bring herself to tell any of them. Even when Noah had picked her up after her appointment at the clinic, he apparently believed she just had this “ovary thing” to take care of. Viv had no idea, though she’d seen her go off with Andy the night of that party. Viv’s eye through the crook of her elbow.
Viv probably assumed Lee had had several abortions by now. Viv was someone you thought was unassuming, until you got to know her and you realized she assumed so many things. Had Lee told her at the time, Viv would have offered support and understanding. Still, something, something less than judgment, less than disapproval or disappointment—knowledge—would have been there ever after, would have become part of who Lee was to her friend. Viv would have seen it as one more way in which Lee had more experience, was somehow deep in a way Viv envied. Maybe this is how Lee wanted to think of it herself. For a while she had clung to her abortion as a private identifier, something that belonged to her. That job out of college, when she went to work at the reproductive rights center—she tried to convince herself that that was where she fit. But she didn’t, any more than she had fit in Bruce’s chapter of Mind Faith. Not any more than she would fit in the world of luxury brand ambassadorship.
She would come home sometimes and hear, in the hall by the front door, the sound of Viv and Andy watching a movie, talking or laughing. It surprised her that her instinct wasn’t to insert herself between them, to claim one of them as her own. Instead, she would head back down the stairs and find another place to be. It got easier later that year, when Andy started seeing the awful Lisette. (Who probably wasn’t even that awful, in retrospect.) With Lisette came a certain alleviation, and then Andy graduated, and then it was just Lee and Viv.
Though she kept things from Viv, she never felt she had to hide from her friend. To pretend she wasn’t, on a good day, moody, and on a bad day, sometimes panicky. What Viv was able to do was take Lee out of herself. She provided a focus. Viv’s surprising self-absorption came as a relief to Lee—because the absorption extended beyond Viv’s self. Lee once described their college relationship to Barbara, her therapist, in terms of paper towel commercials. Lee was the blue liquid that tore through weaker sheets and Viv was the strong, fibrous brand that could soak up big spills. Barbara laughed and asked if ads for bladder control garments weren’t perhaps even more on point, cementing Lee’s respect for her.
INSIDE THE LIBRARY, Lee and Viv sat down at a computer station to see what, if anything, they might find on Marion before they visited Patti Driggs during her office hours the next morning. Viv assumed the air of a focused secretary. Her keystrokes were like heels down a corridor. Lee loved how seriously Viv was taking this, using words like “cross-reference” as she called up various public records, searching for any scrap of information on the whereabouts of Marion Washington. A number of Marion Washingtons popped up but, upon further digging, each of them turned out to be wrong.
“Remember microfiche?” said Viv.
“No, not really.”
“You never used it?”
“Nope.”
“Did you ever even write a paper? I don’t think I ever remember you writing a paper.”
“I wrote papers. I even took exams.”
“What did you major in? I can’t remem
ber that either.”
“American Civilization.”
“What is that, really?”
“An oxymoron. Just kidding. God bless the USA.”
“I’m sorry. Of course you wrote papers.”
“Well, I was never the most diligent student. I didn’t have the best models. Linda never went to college. She just took some business classes. Jesse dropped out of undergrad after a semester.”
Viv nodded, half-listening while she focused on the screen in front of them and opened up several digital archives of old newspapers and periodicals.
“You should have finished your Ph.D.”
At this, Viv stopped typing.
“Why do you say that?”
“You’re, like, in your element here.”
“The library is my element?”
“I just mean, you’ve always been kind of scholastic. You’re really into researching stuff.”
“Well, sure, and if that’s all a Ph.D. was, then maybe I would have gotten one. But it also involves a lot of bullshit political maneuvering that I didn’t want to engage in. And I think I’ve been much happier writing for THATH. But thank you for making me feel like Edward Casaubon.”
Lee didn’t know who that was. But she knew saying as much would only further the opposition here: Lee as breezy hedonist, Viv as studious pedant.
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