by Peter Ferry
Lydia Greene worked at an ad agency with my old high school friend Tom MacMillan, and after college I hung out some with them and a bunch of other agency people. One beery Friday night the three of us discovered that we were all looking for apartments, and by the end of a very long evening at some after-hours bar on the Near North Side feeling confidential, even intimate, in that way that you only can when you're drunk—I was able to see the other two only by closing one eye—someone was saying, "Listen, guys, each of us needs a bedroom, right?"
"Right."
"Right."
"But each of us doesn't need a living room, right?"
"Right."
"And we don't each need a kitchen or a bathroom, right?"
"Right."
"Or dining rooms?"
"Right."
"So why rent twelve rooms when what we really need is six? Let's go in together and get one of those great big three-bedroom places with hardwood floors and high ceilings and bay windows."
"I don't care."
"Whatever." There was a senior account executive at the ad agency where Lydia worked who called her and the other young art directors and copywriters "the whatever kids." He did a very amusing, shoulder-shrugging impersonation of their studied nonchalance and claimed that they had managed to transform a relative pronoun into a "bon mot that distilled four thousand years of Western cynicism and Eastern mysticism into a single word of which virtually every user is oblivious to origin, meaning, and implication."
So the three of us rented an apartment in Rogers Park, a neighborhood that couldn't decide if it was going up or going down, but was still close enough to the middle for our purposes. Our hardwood floors had paint speckles, but the place was big and airy with a little balcony and, if you stuck your head out far enough, a lake view. The night we moved in was another beery one, and this time Lydia and I discovered we were both liberals, baseball fans, and movie buffs, and ended up in the same bed. First thing she said in the morning was, "That was a mistake." When I mumbled a protest, she said, "Look, I need an apartment more than I need a boyfriend." We didn't mention that night again for a long time.
Then after two years, Tom fell in love and moved in with his girlfriend, and Lydia and I could neither afford the place without him nor find a suitable replacement. Still, we worked well together because we were both neat, quiet, and independent.
"Want to find an inexpensive two-bedroom, then?" I asked.
"Why not?"
Instead we found an expensive one-bedroom, but it was very cool. It was on Lake Michigan, all windows and light and French doors. There were only four rooms, but they were huge.
"One of us could sleep on the pullout in the living room," she said.
"Not me."
"Not me."
"Well, we could get twin beds," I said.
"Rob and Laura. Ugh."
"Well," I said. We looked at each other. "I guess we could sleep together."
We looked at each other some more. She shrugged. "Whatever. We did once. It wasn't so bad."
So that was that. Why not? At first we pretended to be roommates. Just roommates. But people would glance in our bedroom and raise their eyebrows. So then we decided to be lovers, but people would say, "Why isn't Lydia going with you to the wedding? To your parents for Thanksgiving? To Ecuador?" So finally we decided we were inventing an entirely new, completely unique kind of relationship. Lydia liked that idea a lot at the time. She had a kind of attitude, one that she had gotten at Bennington or perhaps earlier, about the whole falling-in-love-getting-married-and-growing-old-together thing. She called it an "unfortunate sentimental narrative," and while I didn't think this attitude was quite as original as she did, I accepted it and even adopted it sometimes. I did so as a matter of personal convenience. In truth, I thought then that there was something missing in her or me or between the two of us, something that could be defined only by its absence. At the same time, I suspected that that something was missing in everyone and that tales of love and devotion were either delusion or romance.
And, to be fair, there was a lot between Lydia and me. We liked some of the same things: mystery novels, foreign movies, hot food, cooking, Scrabble, Django Reinhardt, jigsaw puzzles, and dogs (we eventually got a big black-and-white pound dog named Art) in addition to baseball and later Mexico. And I liked her. I liked living with her. So we gave each other companionship, sex-when-it-suited-both-ourneeds-but-never-otherwise-mister, respect, care, concern, even affection up to a point, and freedom. Lots of freedom.
At first we could see other people, and we were free to travel separately. In fact, we were free to go anywhere at any time with anyone for any reason, no questions asked. Lydia once disappeared for nearly a month, and only the fact that she seemed to have taken some clothing kept me from calling her parents or the police. When she finally showed up, she looked three years older, and I never did find out where she had been. We were definitely "don't ask, don't tell," and never, never require, request, insist, or report. Even a question as neutral and innocuous as "What time are you getting home from work tonight?" was forbidden. At first.
Seeing other people worked just fine until I brought one home.
"Where'd you pick her up?" Lydia asked the next day.
"Who?"
"That slut you were boffing in the living room last night."
"What? Why would you ever say something like that?" But we both knew, although neither of us could even quite think the word: jealousy. How horribly ordinary. In time our relationship became exclusive without either of us ever saying so, and in the end it became conventional. That was unfortunate because I would later realize that the main thing it had had going for it was that it wasn't conventional.
"Do you know," Lydia said one day, "that in the eyes of the state of Illinois, we are married?"
"Really?" I said.
"That's what someone told me. Common-law marriage. If you cohabit for five years, you have a common-law marriage."
"No kidding."
That was about the time we decided to go to Mexico to live for a while, and it may even have been the reason, or one of them. It's true that I was sick of corporate publishing and wanted to try to write that novel I mentioned, and Lydia was sick of the advertising business and wanted to try to paint, and it's true that Mexico was a very inexpensive place to live, but it's also true that Lydia and I were very much afraid of being like everyone else.
"What happened to that story?" asks the dog-faced boy.
"What story?"
"You know, the one about the dead girl. The girl in the car. Is it over?"
"Oh, that story. No, it's not over."
"But you keep going off on tangents," says the girl whose hair is green this day. "Can't you just tell us what happened?"
"I am."
"No, just to her. We don't want to hear about everything you ever wrote in your whole life or some dumb town in Mexico and all that crap."
"But that's all part of the story. The woman in the car is just another part."
"Can't you just tell us that part?" asks Nick.
"Okay. Here comes some more."
Evanston Weekly Thursday, December 14
SHERIDAN ROAD CRASH FATAL
A Chicago woman was killed Friday evening in a one-car crash on Sheridan Road in Wilmette. Lisa Kim, age 28, was driving south near Gillson Park when her car left the pavement and hit a lamppost. Kim was pronounced dead on arrival at Evanston Hospital at 7:12 p.m. She was the only passenger in the vehicle.
Kim of 1854 N. Wolcott was a native of Kenilworth and a graduate of New Trier High School. She attended Northwestern School of Drama and was an original cast member of the musical review Gangbusters. She appeared in several local productions and the films After the Opera and Oops! She also made radio and television commercials and was employed at Trattoria Lemongello in Chicago.
Kim is survived by her parents, Dr. Roh Dae Kim and Dr. Pae Pok Kim, and three sisters: Maud Nho of Glenview, Sophie M
cCracken of Newport Beach, California, and Tanya Kim of Evanston. Funeral arrangements are being made with the Stanton Funeral Home in Kenilworth.
Attended Northwestern; didn't graduate. Original-cast member, but didn't go with the show to New York. 1854 N. Wolcott. Wicker Park or maybe Buck Town, certainly not Lincoln Park. The trattoria; still waiting tables? Four girls. I'll bet she was the second and the one in Glenview was the first. First-generation parents, second-generation kids. The one in California got away. Married a non-Korean. Doctor and doctor. I wanted to guess they were both pediatricians.
Another person I encountered along the way besides Walter Tevis who had something to say was one of my dermatologists, although I had no idea what he meant when he said it and have forgotten much of it since. Still, somehow I knew it was important, and as if to prove to myself that the fourth dimension is indeed time, I stuck some of it away somewhere until I was ready for it.
I had more than one dermatologist because I had very bad pimples. I don't remember where I found this doctor. I don't even remember his name for sure; I think it was Lorenz, but it may be been Lazaar. He seemed about seventy, had a potato face, smiling eyes, a tuft or two of hair, an Eastern European accent, and was Jewish, I think; his little office was at Devon and California, then the heart of the Jewish community in Chicago. I sat on the examining table and he on the little stool. I talked earnestly about my pimples and everything I'd tried with them, how they were interfering with my social life, and how now my hair was beginning to fall out; I probably went on and on. He responded by telling me this story that I don't remember very well, that at the time seemed a non sequitur. I don't think it was original. It had the sound of a parable, and I might even be able to find it somewhere if I looked, but I prefer my imperfect memory of it. It had to do with a young man, a Candide-like figure, who faced a series of travails in his life: illnesses, accidents, wars, catastrophes. And with each my little dermatologist would pause, raise his hands, and repeat the same refrain, which was something like, "So, it either kills you or it doesn't kill you; and if it kills you, you have nothing more to worry about, and if it doesn't, you go on."
I remember afterward going into the pharmacy in the building where a nervous, gaunt woman was trying to fill a prescription, and the pharmacist was abrupt with her, sent her away, looked over his glasses at me, and said, "Percodan addict." I realized that for the second time in an hour and perhaps for the first two times in my life, adults had taken me into their confidence, if in very different ways. I remember walking out into the hot sun full of feelings. Should I have been insulted by the doctor's story? Yes, my little problems had been dismissed, if gently, but somehow I felt flattered. Why did I think that he didn't tell this story to everyone? I was a little ashamed when I began to put two and two together: Devon Avenue, his accent, his age. If he hadn't been in a concentration camp himself, certainly he knew people who had. And here was this whiny American kid seeking medical attention because he wasn't getting laid enough. Or maybe those thoughts came only later, came after the story had settled deep into me somewhere, nested and fermented. Maybe that day I was just insulted and a little pissed off that he didn't understand just how tough it was to be pimple-faced and balding at the age of twenty. Yes, that's how it was. At any rate, I went on, but, of course, Lisa Kim did not, and here are ten possible reasons why:
(1) She was genetically predisposed to risk taking.
(2) She was still practicing adolescent rebellion.
(3) She was always practicing second-generation rebellion.
(4) A guy with whom she was in love had broken her heart recently.
(5) She'd had a late lunch with him that very day, and it hadn't gone well. She'd had two glasses of white wine.
(6) Because she was hurt and angry and because of the two glasses of afternoon wine, she'd gone to a Christmas party she had no intention of attending with people she knew better than to be around.
(7) One of them, a guy named Randy who was trying to get into her pants, gave her a joint, hoping she would smoke it with him. She didn't. She smoked it in the car on the way back to see the man who had broken her heart one more time.
(8) Two of the people at the party bought rounds of shooters at the same time just as Lisa was leaving, and she drank both shots straight down.
(9) None of the people at the party said, "Hey, Lisa, you shouldn't be driving."
(10) I didn't open her door, reach across her, and take her keys.
Now, obviously I was at the end of a rather long list, my involvement being both very late and relatively incidental. Still, had I stopped her, she would have gone on a while longer: an hour, a day, a year, a lifetime. And just maybe someday she'd be telling someone about that night, laughing in embarrassment. "Jeez, I was so trashed, some absolute stranger pulled me over and took my keys. Can you imagine? Man, was I lucky." Instead, her life was over and my life was somehow different.
Now I'm going to try again telling you about the funeral. I've tried before, but without success. It came out sounding like bad situation comedy what with the mistaken identity, incorrect assumptions, and people finishing each other's sentences. Cheap laughs, but it really wasn't like that at all.
I had to go, of course, although I didn't mention it to Lydia; it had turned out that she had little patience with my interest in Lisa Kim.
Outside the door were two knots of friends: the old suburban, high-school friends in their casually expensive, saggy, baggy just-so clothes and the urban theater friends in their tighter, blacker, angrier clothes. All friends, I noticed, were smoking. Inside I signed the book and looked at the picture boards. My gosh, she'd been pretty. Even as a little kid, she had one of those magical smiles that makes you want to trust or love or confide or buy. By the time she was fourteen or fifteen, she knew about the smile; you could tell. She had high cheekbones, black, black hair and eyes, skin you wanted to touch with the tip of your finger. And she was the star of every single photograph from the earliest on. Her images were alive, energetic, almost bursting into three dimensions. No doubt in my mind that if she had been a troubled soul, it had been of the Dylan Thomas rather than the Sylvia Plath variety.
"Peter?" Someone had taken my elbow, and I realized when I turned it must be one of her sisters.
"Yes?"
"Oh, I thought you might be. I'm Maud, Lisa's sister."
"Yes, I know. How in the world . . . ?"
"You do? Sophie, this is Peter." And Sophie took my one hand in both of hers.
"Oh, Peter."
"Wait a minute," I said.
"Tanya, this is Peter Carey," she said
"No, no," I said, but Tanya, who was nineteen or twenty, had already given me a quick, shy hug. "Peter Ferry," I said.
"Ferry? I thought it was Carey."
"I thought it was Cleary," Tanya said. "I thought Lisa said 'Cleary.' " She shrugged.
"Oh, well," said Sophie.
Now you may wonder why I didn't stop them right there and clarify things. Two reasons. First, I didn't know who Peter Carey or Cleary was, or if he was at all. Second, had I told them who I wasn't, I would have had to tell them who I was, with all the last-person-to-see-her-alive stuff, scenes of the accident, mea culpas. I didn't want that. It was clear that they were just barely hanging together to begin with. Still, I tried.
"I need to explain something."
"You need to explain nothing." Maud took me by the hand and walked with me. "No one could ever blame you for breaking up with her, believe me; we all know how difficult she could be. But we could also all see how good you were for her."
"No, no."
"We could see that. And we're very happy you came. Mother, it's Peter."
"Oh." I was lost. It was too late. I smiled and nodded and begged off when they asked me to sit with the family, sat in the back row and sneaked off as soon as the service began. If the real Peter Carey or Cleary showed up, they'd figure out their mistake. If he didn't, no harm done. I badly wanted to be fin
ished with Lisa Kim; I really did. I wanted to say goodbye, close the box, put it in the ground, and walk away, but it wasn't going to be that easy. I was beginning to realize that I shared with this utter stranger an intimacy more intense than sex or confession or even betrayal. I was beginning to feel that it was more intense than any I'd known before.
John Thompson, the chair of my department, was looking through the window of my classroom door. He beckoned to me. "Just a minute," I said to the kids and stepped out into the hall.
"Sorry," he said. "I'm sorry, but there's a detective in my office to see you."
"A detective? Oh, the accident."
"Go take care of it. I'll sit in for you."
Lieutenant Carl Grassi was sitting at John's desk talking on his phone as if the place belonged to him, and he motioned me to sit down. He asked me to tell him about the accident. "I'm sure it's in the officer's report," I said.
"Just one more time," he said. I watched him as I talked. He was a bored, slightly hostile man who made no attempt whatsoever at civility. He affected a smirk as if it might have made him seem intelligent or worldly. "Couple more things," he said when I finished. "Where were you that day from noon until the time of the crash?"
"Me? Where was I? Well, I was here."
"Anyone see you?"
"Well, I taught until 3:15. My students saw me. Why are you asking me this?"
"Just answer the questions, okay? How about after that?"
He wanted to know if anyone had seen me after school and if I'd made any stops on the way home. When I said I'd bought a bottle of wine at Sunset Foods, he wanted to know if I had a receipt. I dug around in my wallet until I found it. The time on it was 6:17 p.m. Grassi took it with him.
On my lunch hour, I called Officer Lotts. "Sounds like they've got an open investigation of some kind," he said.
"Do you mean they suspect me of something?"
"Probably not. Probably just talking to everyone who saw her last. Process of elimination. Or maybe because you went to the funeral. If there's foul play, they watch the funerals."