I saw us at a dinner with his family, exchanging frequent smiles, giddy in the knowledge that we had each other.
I saw Billy and me at a school dance shortly after we’d decided not to go to college. We drifted around the hardwood floor, draped on each other.
For some reason, that memory made me realize I was still in the lobby, standing on its hardwood floor, hiding behind a plant. I knew if I hadn’t yet been spotted by Billy or the doorman, it would only be a matter of moments before I was.
When I opened my eyes again, I felt a little dizzy.
Yes, that was Billy McGowan.
He looked up from his phone and around the lobby.
His head swiveled to the right as if to look toward the door, but then it froze. His face swung toward me and he stopped. I saw his eyes then, as if I were right in front of him.
His mouth parted, and I knew he saw me, even if I was mostly hidden by the plant.
I stepped to the right. Then I stepped farther to the right until I was in full view. The doorman wasn’t at the desk for some reason. No one else was in the lobby.
I felt exposed, almost violently so, as though I had stepped naked into a freezing-cold valley. The feeling almost made me flinch, want to fall to the ground.
Somewhere along the line Billy must have decided to remain, in part, an innocent. He had always been that, being the youngest, but a lot of people who had that quality lost it. Yet he smiled now, and I saw a childlike curiosity still present. Our eyes met.
“Jessica,” he said.
He stood. He took a step, then another and another and another.
37
Later, I would think of that hour Billy and I spent in my lobby as idyllic, despite the fact that at the time I thought the worst had happened. My past had shown up on my figurative doorstep.
We talked softly at first, really nothing more than “Hello.” And “How are you?”
A maintenance man replaced the doorman for a break, and I saw him recognize Billy. Saw him recognize me. But he was trained well by the building management. He immediately launched into an apparent plethora of tasks, studiously avoiding us with his eyes or taking himself out of the lobby again.
And so Billy and I kept talking.
“I couldn’t believe it when I saw it,” Billy said eventually, speaking about the Superdog video. “Or I guess I should say I couldn’t believe it when I heard it. When I heard your voice.”
“What do you mean? Why?” I didn’t know how to do much but ask questions.
“I was with my kid that weekend.”
“Your kid? Oh, that’s right.” My eyes went on an autoblink function, but some part of me understood the information. I’d read a few years ago that Billy had gotten his makeup artist/girlfriend pregnant, and they had been together a few years before breaking up.
Billy nodded. “We call him Will.”
“Will,” I said. “I like that. Will McGowan.”
Billy’s eyes were never as clear as they were at that moment, his smile never so wide. “I am in love with the kid.”
“I’m glad.”
He said something about Will and the “minimally sane” relationship with Will’s mom.
“So I was with Will for the weekend,” he said, “and I was in the studio, and I was letting him play with a tablet. He was watching videos. I never really hear them anymore but then...” He paused, looked at me. “Then I heard your voice.”
I sat there and looked at him. “So you saw the video of Baxter before the magazine article about us came out?” I wasn’t sure why I was so keen to know, but this seemed important.
Billy nodded. “Will kept playing it. He kept shrieking and laughing. Then he’d yell, ‘Baxter! Baxter!’ along with you. You. I think I knew it was you before I asked him for the video to see for myself. And then there you were on the screen, running across the street, as beautiful as ever, apologizing to that mom, sweet as ever.”
I sat back on the lobby couch. A woman I knew from the same floor came in the front doors and waved. She glanced at Billy. And stopped. Just stopped dead in her tracks.
The neighbor pointed and mouthed, Billy McGowan?
There was no point in denying it. I nodded. She made a big-eyed, excited expression, gave me the thumbs-up, then moved toward the elevators.
“That’s funny you’ve seen the Superdog video,” I said, not knowing where to go from there.
“About ten million times. But I’m not the only one, Jess. Everyone has seen that video.”
“Yeah, seems like it, doesn’t it?”
“Jess, seriously,” Billy said, “people in other countries have seen Baxter’s video. I did a couple of concerts overseas and I saw it in Asia. I saw it in the Middle East!”
“C’mon.”
“I’m not kidding!”
I nodded. I couldn’t figure out what to say, or even why to say it. I didn’t know what to make of his presence or his words.
He seemed to sense my confusion. He told me about his family, not mentioning Mick, then asked me about my parents. We kept catching each other up on our lives.
“It was good, wasn’t it?” Billy said.
“‘It’ meaning what?”
“Us.”
Us. I felt a crazy zing rip through me, a fourteen-year-old girl’s thrill at that word.
“It was good when it was good.”
“When it was good,” Billy repeated.
I’d started getting suspicious with Billy about five months after we got married, four months after we’d gone on tour. I knew him too well. I knew he was hiding something. It was the way he spoke with certain girls after shows, clearly not just people he knew through meet and greets but rather people who knew each other.
I watched him once while he spoke to a girl at a gig. She was adorable. She looked like someone I would want to be friends with. Has she been at our place? In our bed?
My suspicions led me to arranging our medicine cabinet like a curator. I figured if he was cheating, bringing home the occasional groupie, at least the items in the medicine cabinet would say, Someone lives here, someone permanent. I tried to put in the forefront of the cabinet things that indicated a woman lived in that apartment, a woman who only needed minor products to enhance herself but who was also fashionable and cool. It became a weird obsession—as if it would make any difference. I started shopping for items that other women would see. Two lipsticks were usually mainstays, both in enameled tubes with carved floral designs on the top. They sat near a silver-plated hairbrush that had its own case. I found a tiny marigold-colored compact at a vintage store in Greenwich Village, its cover etched with silver lines.
Later it was more obvious that he was cheating. I found things like the condom wrappers and the errant earring under the bed.
And then I found Mavis there.
“Did you want me to find you and her?” I said now. In Chicago. In my lobby.
He didn’t have to ask who I was speaking of.
“No!” he said. He kept shaking his head. “I didn’t want you to know. I hated myself for it.”
And so, after all those years, we finally talked about his infidelities.
Billy apologized. “I would be nothing without your encouragement,” he said. When I remained silent, still, he said, “I needed you for my creativity.” Still I said nothing. “For my life,” he finished.
I let it sit. I had to. I had gotten so good at being alive, staying in the moment. And now I couldn’t help but process everything, process that I was with my ex-husband, fifteen years after our breakup, long after our dirty laundry (my dirty laundry) had been aired. We had been outed.
“I sometimes wonder if maybe I wanted out of that life,” I said. “But I didn’t have the strength to do it. Maybe I wanted to be
caught—forced to be myself again, to re-create myself.”
I took a breath. I filled my lungs. I checked in on my heart and got a wallop of pain when I thought about Gavin. Then everything veered again into today.
“So what happened with you?” I asked. I let the question be unspecific. I wasn’t sure what I really wanted to ask him.
Billy was looking at me, seeming to search my eyes. Then, as if he couldn’t take what he saw there, he reached out. I held my breath. He put his face in his right hand. How many times had I seen that gesture? I knew it wasn’t studied. I knew it meant Billy was struggling. And why did that make me feel good?
“I’m sorry,” he said. His voice sounded strangled. “I’m sorry it happened. I’m sorry I got defensive about Mick.”
“He’s your brother,” I said. “Your bandmate.”
“He was. They were,” Billy said. “But you were my heart.”
That hurt so bad I almost moaned out loud.
“You heard the band broke up?” he asked.
I nodded. Even after all that had happened, the news of the band’s split when I’d read it had saddened me. Because even if I was no longer a part of them, wasn’t allowed to be, I’d hoped their bonds and their music would fuel them, sustain them.
“Are you still close?”
“Kevin and me,” he said. “Not Mick.”
“I’m sorry.”
A small shrug, one too understated for the fact that Billy no longer spoke to his oldest brother, the one who had gotten him into music, the person Billy had always wanted to be.
“Are you heartbroken?” I asked.
It was a bold question. We both felt it. We both knew that my demise had been orchestrated, in a way, by Mick.
“I was,” Billy said. “I’m moving past it.”
My phone dinged a few times. I looked down. People often talk about how bad news is delivered—the call came out of nowhere; it was such a normal day.
My day was not normal. There was nothing normal about seeing your old lover, your ex-husband, for the first time since a long horrible time ago. And yet I saw some kind of simplicity in that scene—Billy and I speaking in low tones in my lobby.
My phone rang. Then rang again. The screen read, Barbara. Sebastian’s mother.
I answered, mostly in an effort to show Billy what a wildly functioning person I was—I could be in the midst of a shocker of a conversation like this and still take a call.
“Hey, Barb,” I said in a cheery tone
“Jess,” she said. She never called me that. She wasn’t one for nicknames. Sebastian’s brother was always Thomas, never Tom.
I was about to ask how she was, but then she spoke again.
“Sebastian has been arrested. Detained, they say.”
“They?”
“The Libyan government.”
38
My world imploded, corroded, then exploded again.
“Detained?” I said incredulously. “Arrested?”
Sebastian’s mom wailed, the cry piercing me, waking me up.
“I’ll call you right back,” I said.
I stood. Billy did the same, blinking, confused.
“Thanks for coming, Billy,” I said. “But I have to go.”
“Why?” He smiled, and I remembered that smile, the one that said, I can talk you into this. I know how to get through to you.
“My husband has been arrested overseas,” I said.
“I thought you were divorced.”
“I am.” Something hit me then, a realization—I had insisted on breaking up with Sebastian in part because of the fear that something like this would happen. Now that it had. Strangely. Strangely...
I sat down on the lobby chair.
I took a breath and took stock of myself. I had always feared these potentials about Sebastian—that he would be kidnapped, killed, tortured. And yet I was, I realized then, slightly fine right now; I was even grateful Barb had called me. I was glad to be kept abreast of it, if “it” was going to happen.
I focused on Billy’s questioning face.
“I have the dog upstairs.” I waved vaguely at the ceiling. Somehow I’d forgotten about Baxter when I was talking with Billy. He’d always been able to make me see only him.
I left Billy and ran up ten flights of stairs. I’d taken the stairs only once before when there had been a fire in an upstairs apartment and we’d been evacuated. I couldn’t have taken the elevator now if I wanted to because...because...I felt the need. To run to something? From something? I didn’t know.
Baxter was just inside my door, fairly bouncing, as if he, too, sensed an emergency.
He barked, jumped, barked again.
“Baxter, stop!” My voice was loud, shrill. Baxy shrunk away from me, cowering.
“I’m sorry, good dog,” I said, crouching to pick him up.
I kissed his neck. I whispered, “Sebastian...” then let my voice die away.
But he whined, whimpered, as if to say, Tell me.
“Something’s happened.”
Holding him, I went into the kitchen and called Sebastian’s mom. “Hi. It’s me again. What happened?”
“I got a call from the paper,” she said, sounding more reined in now, although how could she be? “He and his cameraman picked up a translator and a driver, and they were going to interview rebels, but they were stopped by a roadblock and taken by the police.”
“Okay,” I said, like, Okay, I can handle this. Could I? Here was what I’d always wondered. “Do we know why they were picked up? What they’re alleging?”
“No.”
We were quiet a second.
“Thanks for calling me.” Technically, I wasn’t Sebastian’s wife anymore. I wasn’t his emergency contact. I wasn’t, legally, anything at all to him.
“Of course.” Barbara made a little whimper. “I have to stop crying.” She took a breath and exhaled loudly. “But we can’t talk about this to anyone else. That’s what they say.”
“Do they know you were going to tell me?” I wasn’t sure why I asked that. Who were “they,” exactly?
“Yes. They said I shouldn’t tell anyone. But I knew you would want to know, and I knew Sebastian would want you to know.”
“Thank you,” I said. We both paused again. “How do you know that?”
I thought of conversations Sebastian and I had had, about his job and its dangers, especially when I couldn’t know anything about his assignments.
“I think you’re one of the best people to handle a crisis,” Sebastian had said. “I watch you handle them all day.”
“But those are styling choices,” I’d said, knowing I was shortchanging myself even as I said it. “Those decisions are only about whether to lose the scarf or keep the scarf and the earrings.”
“Don’t belittle what you do,” he’d said.
The oft-occurring conversational tango, when we discussed his job, and I negatively compared mine to his, was one of the last steps of the dance Sebastian and I would make. Then we would round to his job again, to the demands it posed that I saw as too great.
“I have a great job,” he would say. “Even you think that.”
“It is a great job,” I would say.
“But you don’t want me to do it.”
I didn’t often respond to that. How would you tell someone (who you love so very much) not to do the thing that they love?
“I wish you weren’t such a thrill seeker,” I’d say.
“So what if I am?” Sebastian would say. We had debated the point, discussed the point, philosophized about the point. And yet he always humored me, kept discussing it.
Sebastian was usually the first to make a suggestion. Could I accept and support his position,
that his job was necessary to tell the stories no one else was going to hear, to tell about the people in various regions, caught unawares, their lives hemorrhaging with risk?
“Every day they’re on the edge of dying,” he’d said. His face strained. “Every day. And meanwhile, when I’m there I’m staying in the freaking Kabul Serena Hotel, where I can get a massage every day if I want it.” He had shaken his head, the strain intensifying.
And now...now that Sebastian had been detained by a foreign government...now that he was at the same edge as those people he spoke about, I could look back on that argument and with crystalline recognition see that his expression had been not only strained it had also been one of despair. It hurt him for me to not understand why he needed to be there, to tell these stories, how hard it was to stay at the “freaking Kabul Serena” when people were dying outside. How had I been so shortsighted and unable to see it?
My memories were drawn away by the sound of Barbara, over the phone line, sighing loudly, sounding as if she was trying to keep it together.
“How are you?” I asked.
She ignored the question. “He really loves you, Jess,” she said.
I went still, quiet. Not just in my words but in my whole body and mind. Like an animal. “Thanks for saying that.”
“I’m not just saying it.” Barbara had been jealous-seeming at times, especially when Sebastian and I had been exuberantly happy.
“He always said how hard it was to keep secrets from you,” Barbara said. “He knew you didn’t like it, and he didn’t, either.”
“It’s part of the job,” I said, repeating the sentence Sebastian often had.
“Yes.” She breathed out. “He’s said that since he first started writing for the paper in New York. It’s part of the job.”
I took a breath. “Barbara, has the newspaper notified the government?”
I remembered our first year in Chicago when Sebastian was making an effort to share things with me, and he’d shown me disclaimer paperwork that he had to sign with the paper, assuming his own risks, agreeing that his “heirs and assigns” would not have the right to sue “in the case of death or injury.” It also indicated that in a situation of detainment overseas, the newspaper would make every effort to work in tandem with the U.S. government, whatever agencies were involved.
The Dog Park Page 17