My parents must have had a first kiss somewhere, before the band, the records, the tours. Before Luna and me. I wonder if they felt sure in that moment, like I do now, in that slow heat that enveloped them, that everything was going to turn out just fine.
Or even if they knew there was a chance it wouldn’t, they’d still have chosen to do it anyway.
thirty-six
MEG
OCTOBER 1993
OUTSIDE THE DINER, DRY LEAVES skittered across the pavement. The heels of my boots clicked on the sidewalk and I could hear the swish of traffic from Broadway, but otherwise, the street was quiet and we were alone.
I took a deep breath and tipped my head back. The sky was a washed-out shade of blue, crisscrossed with bare branches. The trees were my favorite thing about that block, besides the Flamingo Diner. We used to come here in the middle of the night after our shows, with our friends or alone, exhausted and wired and sometimes a little drunk. Now we’d been on tour for two months, and the Flamingo felt like a place from some other life.
“We’ve been gone so long,” I said to Kieran. I turned to face him.
He was smiling. “And now we’re back.”
“Yeah,” I said. “For two weeks. And then we have to leave again.”
“Come on, Meg,” Kieran said. He reached out to hold my hand. “You want this too. We have to work for it.”
“I know. I just miss home,” I said. “I miss you.”
He pulled me close and kissed me then, and I could feel all the molecules in my body come loose and float toward his. I remembered the first time he kissed me, outside a bar on Allen Street back home. It was January in Buffalo, freezing and gorgeous, the stars bright pinpricks in a velvet sky. I wanted to keep kissing him forever.
“I miss you too, babe,” Kieran said now. “But I’m always here. We’re always together.”
“I know.”
He looked up at the pink neon of the Flamingo’s sign. “Let’s eat, and then we’ll go home. Just the two of us.”
He opened the glass door and the bell jingled above us. Our favorite waitress, Gina, waved to us from behind the counter. Her bright red hair was exactly the same, and so was her blue uniform, her Doc Martens.
“You guys are back!” she shouted.
“Finally!” I said, smiling, but she was too far away to hear.
“And the Flamingo is our first stop,” Kieran said, his voice louder than mine. He squeezed my hand.
“We’re honored,” Gina said. “Give me a second. I’ll clean your table.”
I leaned back on the wall, covered in a palm tree mural, and closed my eyes. I could hear the pleasant racket of the diner’s kitchen, plates and silverware clanking and the hum of the dishwasher.
“It sounds the same,” I said, opening my eyes.
“And I’m sure it tastes the same,” Kieran said. He leaned toward me. “Do you taste the same? Let me see.” He kissed me, wrapping his arm around the small of my back. My blood started to thump a new rhythm through my veins.
When we pulled apart, there was a girl standing in front of us.
She was maybe nineteen, blond and brown-eyed, wearing jeans and white T-shirt. She looked friendly.
“You’re Kieran and Meg, right?” she said.
Kieran looked at me, smiling. “That’s us,” he said.
“I’m Annabel.” She turned toward a table on the opposite side of the restaurant and nodded. Her friends—lots of them—stood up and came over. There were at least six, and they formed a semicircle around us.
“We saw you guys at the Knitting Factory last year,” Annabel said. “It was incredible.”
“Thanks,” Kieran said. “I remember that show. We just got back from a tour.”
They started to ask questions, but I wasn’t really listening. I put a smile on my face, but it felt like a mask. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. The Flamingo was our place, and we weren’t supposed to have to talk to anyone but each other. And maybe Gina, while we ordered our pancakes. But now everyone in the restaurant was looking our way, either recognizing us too, or figuring we were people worthy of staring at. I could hear Cat Stevens’s “Here Comes My Baby” on the speakers overhead, tambourine jangling happily, and I wondered what would happen if I just danced right out the door. There goes my baby.
From there I could see the booth I liked best, empty against the window. Blue vinyl seats, Formica tabletop lined with a sugar bowl, a pitcher of cream, a ketchup bottle. We’d sat there at least a hundred times since we’d moved to the city, eating pancakes and eggs and grilled cheese, milky coffee so sweet it hurt my teeth. The table was right there, twenty steps away, but I didn’t know how to get there at that moment.
thirty-seven
WE LEAVE THE BENCH AROUND MIDNIGHT. An hour ago the moon slid beneath the buildings across the street and now I have this sleepy, dreamy feeling that makes the world around us seem high contrast and vivid, even in the dark.
“One more thing,” Archer says, as we reach the edge of the park. “I want to show you something.” He steps out on the sidewalk and looks around to orient himself, then starts walking west.
We walk without talking, holding hands. I wonder what the people we pass see when they look at us, if they notice us at all. It feels different now, being with him, after the last few hours. Some of the questions we wanted to ask have been answered. A connection like an electric current runs in the air between us, and through our fingertips when we touch.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“SoHo.” Archer checks a street sign and leads me over the curb. “It’s just a few more blocks.”
He stops a while later in front of a redbrick building and pulls me up on the stoop.
“Look,” he says, pointing to the list of names next to the buzzers for each apartment. He watches me as I read them. I consider them like puzzles or riddles, but none of them mean anything until I get to the fifth: D. Byrne. I look at Archer.
“Really?” I say. “As in David Byrne of Talking Heads? He lives here?”
A wide smile stretches across his face. “It’s his studio,” he says. “I just like looking at his name. When I feel crappy, sometimes I walk down here.” He looks a little embarrassed, then shrugs. “I do a lot of walking. It gives me somewhere to go.”
I think about what Luna told me earlier, about the Archer of a few months ago, screwing up and missing shows. I want to ask him about it but it doesn’t seem like the right time. Maybe it’s that I want him to tell me without my asking.
“Sounds like meditation,” I say, and I sound to myself like my mother. I step closer to the buzzer and look at the letters of the musician’s name. “You’ve never wanted to press it?”
“Of course I have,” Archer says. He doesn’t step any closer. “But it wouldn’t be right.”
I kiss him then, again, on David Byrne’s doorstep, and then we step back to the sidewalk and walk toward the train.
“Josh walks by Walt Whitman’s old house in Fort Greene sometimes,” Archer says. He slips his hand into mine and I’m surprised at how natural it feels. “Same reason.”
It surprises me that Josh, with his sarcasm and his music facts, would choose a long-dead American poet to calm him. “Really?”
Archer nods. “Josh is a complex man.”
We pass a coffee shop, still open and glowing through its big front windows. There are two old men sitting in a booth in the front, leaning forward over their ceramic mugs.
“Want a latte?” Archer asks, smiling. “Or any other coffee-shop food prop?”
“Ha-ha,” I say. “You know, I actually do like that job. My coworkers tease me for being so straitlaced, but I feel like part of a family there.” I say it and I realize that it’s true. “They all have nicknames. It’s like a club.”
Archer glances at me and waits for me to keep going.
“I’m the youngest,” I say. “They called me Lolita until I explained to them that the character was a victim of a pedophile. So n
ow they just call me Phoebs.”
“That’s okay,” he says.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I would like to have a really great nickname.”
Archer points to the subway sign a half block away, and we turn toward it.
“I could try to give you one,” he says. I glance down into the open hole of a basement in front of a market. The narrow stairs and all that darkness makes me feel a little dizzy.
“Go for it.”
He steps around a box of lettuce on the sidewalk. “All right. A phoebe is a kind of bird, right?”
“Yeah, but I’m named for the moon goddess.”
“You already have a sister named Luna.” He waves his hand. “Too many moons. Let’s go with the bird phoebe. How about Bird? Or Birdie.”
We walk under the awning of a flower shop and I smile in the direction of the roses in the window. I can see his reflection, watching me. “I like that,” I say. “Birdie.”
“Truthfully, there are probably a bunch of toddlers running around Brooklyn with that name actually on their birth certificate,” he says.
“There are worse things,” I say. “How did you know that, anyway?”
He looks at me. “How’d I know what?”
“About the phoebe bird.”
He flips his palm up toward the sky in a Who knows? gesture. “I’m a man of much hidden knowledge.”
“I see that.” I take my first step down the stairs. “Fake constellations, rock-star doorsteps, that kind of thing.”
Archer smiles. “I have it all,” he says.
Archer insists on riding the train with me back to Brooklyn Heights.
“I don’t have anything better to do,” he says, swiping his MetroCard through the reader.
“It’s one o’clock in the morning,” I say.
“I’m not tired.”
He stands with me on the platform, our shoulders touching, while the train pulls in after a rush of air that comes first.
A half hour later, when we come out on the street in front of Borough Hall, the air smells like rain but the pavement is dry.
“We better hurry up,” he says.
On Luna’s street, it’s almost perfectly quiet except for the sound of someone in one of the brownstones listening to Otis Redding. I hold Archer’s hand and close my eyes for a second, knowing that next time I hear “Try a Little Tenderness” I’ll think of this moment, right here.
In front of Fourteen, a car slides past on the street. I look up to the window of Luna’s bedroom. It’s dark.
Archer leans in to kiss me there on the sidewalk, but I turn my head away.
“Not here,” I say, and grab his hand. “Come on.” I pull him down the stairs to the front door. His lips are on mine before we get all the way down; my back presses into the wall and his hands find their way into my hair. I feel like I’m made of embers, like I’m burning. I have no idea now long it is before he pulls back just a little, and our lips separate. He looks at me.
“I should go upstairs,” I say. I’m breathless. “It’s so late.”
“Okay,” he says, but he kisses me again, his fingers gently pressing against my spine. And then he lets me go.
When the door clicks shut behind me, I want to open it again immediately and go wherever Archer is going. I stand for a moment in the foyer waiting for my heart to slow down. The ceiling light shines brightly on the pile of mail, which has fallen in a small avalanche over the table. There are half a dozen magazines amid the white envelopes holding bills or whatever and I’m happy to notice that no one in my family is on their covers.
thirty-eight
“WHAT THE HELL, PHOEBE?”
It’s so dark in the apartment I can’t really see Luna at first. When my eyes begin to adjust I can just make her out, standing in front of the window. She’s a shadow with nothing to stick to, the glow from the street surrounding her like an aura.
“What?” I say. Luna turns on a lamp and the room fills with light.
“Where have you been all night?” she asks. She’s wearing a black tank top and pink gym shorts, her hair loose around her shoulders. Her hands are moving, as they always are, fingers splayed and palms facing one another. If you took a picture of her right now, she’d look like she was clapping, cheerleader-style. But angry.
As for me, I just don’t want to get any closer to Luna. She’s like a dangerous wild animal, a panther maybe, or some graceful and terrifying wild dog.
“I was with Archer,” I say. I’m trying to keep my voice calm. “I told you that.”
She shakes her head. “It’s nearly two in the morning. You couldn’t call?”
I look at my purse, which I’m still holding. “My phone ran out of battery.” It seems safe to say this, since my phone is switched off in the bottom of my bag and I’m reasonably certain she won’t ask for proof.
She takes a step toward me, barefoot on the worn wood floor. “So Archer couldn’t have sent a text?”
“I didn’t ask him to. You’re not Mom. And you knew where I was.”
“I didn’t, actually.” She switches her weight to other hip. “That’s the point.”
James comes out of their bedroom then, hair rumpled, in a white T-shirt and pajama pants. He leans in the doorway, looking sleepy and a little worried. I smile at him, partly so he’ll stop worrying and partly so he’ll be on my side, at least a little.
I walk over to the table to put down my purse and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My hair has curled into loose ringlets from the humidity and my lips look bee-stung, kissed. It’s likely Luna can guess what I’ve been doing. I wonder if James can too.
“Luna,” he says, his accent just cool enough to make him sound like an alien in our superheated Ferris-girl galaxy. “She’s back. She’s fine. It’s okay.”
“I know, J. I just—I need to talk to her.” She lowers her voice to a purr. “I’ll be nice. Go back to bed.” I can see how tense her shoulders are. Her stance is so tight it seems as if she’s ready to pounce.
James stands in the doorway for another moment, looking at me. I give him a half smile to let him know it’s okay if he leaves. I almost mean it. He nods almost imperceptibly, then steps back and closes the door with a soft click.
Luna walks over to the turntable and puts the needle on the record she left on there earlier. It’s white vinyl, so I’m not surprised when the sounds of Vampire Weekend fill the room.
“We’re not going to do this,” Luna says, her voice a low whisper. The music, I can see, is a cover. She doesn’t want James to hear.
“Do what?” I try to make my voice sound bored, but my heart is racing. I flop down on the couch.
“This . . . role switching. You are not going to be the bad one.” She’s walking toward me, taking measured steps in her bare feet. She perches on the edge of the gray armchair, her posture rigid.
“Why?” I ask, angling my shoulders toward her. “Because you’re so good at it?”
“Because it’s bullshit.” She practically spits out this last word. “Because you’re a kid.”
“I’m only two years younger than you.” I uncurl my fingers, my hands at my sides. I can’t remember the last time I argued with Luna, but that’s because I usually just let her have her way.
“Exactly,” Luna says. “Two years is a long time. You’re still in high school.” Behind her, framing her head, is one of her narrow bookcases, and I figure some of the thick books must be her college textbooks. She was studying psychology with a music minor. Then she quit, and now she wants to pretend she has all the answers.
“Right,” I say. “You’re so old and so wise.” I shake my head. “How’d you get that way? Because you dropped out of college?”
“I didn’t drop out,” she says, “I’m going back.” But her voice is unsteady. She doesn’t sound sure. She shakes her head and looks at the bedroom door, then takes a deep, slow breath.
“Right,” I say. “You’re on leave. That’s why I should listen to yo
u?”
“You should listen to me because I’m on my own.” Her voice is softer now, steady again, but a surge of anger runs like electricity through me.
“Are you?” I say. “Because I’m pretty sure Mom pays your phone bill, at least. And you’re living with your boyfriend, Luna. You’re in a band. Like Mom was. With your boyfriend. Like Mom. You moved to New York. Like Mom!” I take a step closer to her. “You named your band the Moons! I don’t know why you don’t get it. You want to pretend that you’re nothing like her, you act like you hate her, but you’re practically trying to live her life.”
She shakes her head and looks away from me.
“Mom’s not perfect, you know.” Luna’s looking at the robot flower, which is shining cheerily in the lamplight, fake blooming forever.
“I have never, ever considered her perfect,” I say, but Luna just keeps talking.
“First of all, she’s not as independent as you think she is.”
I roll my eyes and she delivers the rest of it quickly, like a punch line she doesn’t expect to be funny.
“She’s sleeping with Jake,” Luna says.
“What?” I feel my face get hot. “No, she’s not.”
It’s true that Jake is around a lot. They’ve been friends for years. But he’s not her boyfriend.
“Of course she is,” Luna says. “Mom wants to pretend she doesn’t need a man or whatever, but that’s only because Jake basically is her man. Has been for years.” Luna leans against the back of the chair as if she’s exhausted. “But she won’t talk about it. I suppose she thinks it’s better to be known as the patron saint of fortitude.”
I can’t make myself say anything, so instead I look down, inhale the night air, cool and fresh, coming in the window. I suddenly have the urge to go back outside, where the sky is open and there’s more air than anyone can possibly use. The apartment seems so small right now. I look at Luna.
“Everything is so easy for you,” I say. I mean: her life, her talent. I mean the way she always knows what’s going on or just convinces herself that what she believes is right. She’ll rewrite the story if necessary, and she can make herself believe it.
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