I Think I Love You

by Allison Pearson

  Petra took the envelope and looked at it. The flap was not stuck down, just tucked in. She opened it, and slid the letter out. She read it for the first time in her life. Then she read it again to make sure.

  Dear Petra,

  How can I be sure, in a world that’s constantly changing, where I stand with you?

  I’m beginning to think that man has never found the words that could make you want me.

  Nevertheless, cherish is the word I use to describe all the feeling that I have hiding here for you inside.

  As somebody once sang, I forget his name: life is much too beautiful to live it all alone.

  Believe me, you really don’t have to worry. I only want to make you happy and if you say, hey, go away, I will. But I think, better still, I’d better stay around and love you. Do you think I have a case? Let me ask you to your face: do you think you … et cetera.

  I believe you know the rest.

  Yours,

  sincerely,

  Bill x

  Petra put the letter in her pocket and went downstairs. Passing the hall table, she noticed a jug of sweet peas. The scent was so strong, intoxicating. On a Post-it note stuck to the wall, she spied Molly’s girly, looped handwriting: “I picked them. Told you!!!”

  Petra smiled. The daughter, unlike her mother, was going to lead a three-exclamation-marks kind of life. She thought of Molly, obeying the request to pick the sweet peas while Petra was in Vegas, to keep the flowers coming, an instruction Molly’s mamgu had issued more than thirty years ago to Petra herself, and, who knows, maybe Greta heard it from her own mother in Germany. Things being passed on; habits, scents, beloved melodies, a heart-shaped chin: motherhood and memory forging a slender handrail to cling on to down the generations.

  She wondered what Greta and Molly would think of Bill. It took a second to remember that one of those meetings would never take place now. Too soon, she thought. It’s too soon. And yet, we cannot choose those moments when two people are suddenly wide open and the merest glance has the power to console or heal.

  In the years to come, the only thing they would find it hard to agree on was whether they had actually met at White City. Petra always said they must have because she loved the perfect symmetry of it. Bill was the first man to take her in his arms and, if life was kind to them, then he would also be the last.

  Bill, who had made up the story that brought Petra to him, was perfectly happy for his darling wife to write whatever ending she liked best. Cariad was the Welsh word for darling. This Petra taught him, along with so much he had never known before.

  She was so tired that morning she got back from the Cassidy trip, but old habit and new desire sent her into the living room. She bent down and flipped the catches on the case. Bill’s letter was in her pocket. Pulling the cello to her, she answered it. Urging the music on. Each note like a pearl. Each phrase like a string of pearls. One little phrase, and so many ways to say it.

  Afterword

  In 2004, I was asked by the Daily Telegraph Saturday magazine to interview David Cassidy. As I prepared to travel to Florida to meet my teen idol, several unexpected emotions crowded in. Panic about what to wear was high on the list. Should I go dressed as the fan who had worshipped him so ardently from afar or as the wife and mother of two I now was? I felt like a time traveler. If David was still twenty-four in my heart, how old did that make me?

  While I was packing and unpacking my suitcase, my husband sat on the bed and sang an aggressively tuneless version of “Could It Be Forever.”

  “Why on earth would you want to meet him?” he asked. “David Cassidy sang flat and, let’s face it, he was basically a girl.”

  I defended David, exactly as I had defended him thirty years earlier from the taunts of the boys at school. Just as I would always defend him.

  David lived in Fort Lauderdale with his wife, Sue, and his son, Beau. In the cab on the way to his house, everything I had been feeling coalesced into a single thought: Please don’t let me pity him.

  I realized I could bear just about any kind of awkwardness, embarrassment or disappointment, but I never, ever wanted to feel sorry for the man who once bestrode my world like a colossus in a white catsuit trimmed with silver studs.

  David Cassidy was about to turn fifty-four. He looked at least ten years younger, but that still made him twenty years older than the beautiful boy millions of girls like me believed we were in love with. That comparison was clearly a source of pain to him. He who had once turned on half the world was now doomed to disappoint. He was not Peter Pan, nor was he meant to be. David was about to embark on another farewell tour of the United Kingdom. The fans, women now in their forties and fifties with young girls of their own, would still turn out for him in enthusiastic numbers, but I sensed in him a great weariness that he needed to exploit for money a period of his life that in different ways had cost him so dear. His bitterness at the record companies and merchandising people who had managed to spirit away the hundreds of millions of dollars that his records and his image generated was clear and well justified.

  As David posed for the photographer, I said he should be careful the camera didn’t take his soul.

  “I had my soul stolen a long time ago,” he replied. As an actor and the son of two actors, he can be prone to self-dramatizing statements; still, if anyone on the planet can claim to have had his soul stolen, it is David Bruce Cassidy.

  The interview turned out to be more fascinating and moving than I could have hoped. David was thoughtful, intelligent and extremely honest in his responses. At times he became angry, at others he was close to tears. We laughed a good deal as we recalled the strange, compelling experience we had shared, though separated by age, gender and thousands of miles. He was generous enough to scream at me, as I had screamed at him all those years ago, which proved he was a true gentleman. Being able to prompt David on the lyrics of one of his own songs, which I knew better than he did (naturally), was a moment from fan heaven.

  The David Cassidy that millions of us loved did not exist, not really; he was a brilliant marketing invention, though the man who has both the pleasure and the burden of bearing his name was not a disappointment. On the contrary.

  I want to thank David for giving me such a fantastic interview, and for helping me to recapture the way we were. No girl could ask for a finer teen idol. This is the transcript.

  ALLISON PEARSON: David, your agent told me that some of the more aggressive fans still move toward you like you’re a meal. How do you feel about the fans now?

  DAVID CASSIDY: It’s a great compliment that they still care. I’ve never once thought otherwise.

  AP: Really, so it’s not been a burden to you?

  DC: Oh yes, it’s been a burden, but I’ve never thought it wasn’t a blessing, flattering. Yes, lots of aspects have been terribly difficult to cope with. Has it altered my life? Dramatically. Has it changed me? Yes, dramatically. But, it is pretty extraordinary if you can view it somewhat objectively.

  AP: Your last farewell tour was in 1974.

  DC: Yeah, and I said, that’s it. They went, “Oh right, he’ll be back next year.” Before I started it I announced it to the world, this is IT. My final tour. Stadiums all over the world. Started in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Europe, U.K. [he snores in mock boredom]—nine months in all.

  AP: Someone got killed at that last concert in London, didn’t they?

  DC: Next-to-last concert. A girl died, wasn’t killed. She died. Clarify it. There was no violence going on, there was incredible pushing and crushing. She was way up in the back. She had a heart condition. She died. It was very sad, but of course the press made it out to be like, you know—it sells newspapers, right? I called the parents and spoke with them and said, because of the media circus that I attracted wherever I went, out of respect for their daughter I will not come to the funeral. I sent flowers. You know I had no responsibility. There were forty-five thousand people there, I didn’t know where she was. She was half a mile
away. I had no idea that she had died.

  AP: It must have been shocking.

  DC: It was really sad for me because it was a celebration for me and it was the next-to-last day, which was up in Manchester City Main Road, I remember.

  AP: Were you ever frightened?

  DC: For them?

  AP: For you.

  DC: I can’t say I wasn’t ever frightened. It happened so many times in five years. In the car, girls crawling all over it. Black. Darkness, pfffwwwrr, smothered. You just had to make sure you had a really smart driver because it’s a mob. It’s a mob. It has its own consciousness, its own mind. Instead of one or two or three, it’s fifty, a hundred, then they start piling on top of each other, then it becomes crazy.

  AP: Do you remember the first time it happened?

  DC: It was 1970, shortly after The Partridge Family had aired in America. I went to Cleveland—the show has been on the air ten times. I was Grand Marshall of the Cleveland Parade. I’m on like a 1950s fire engine. Reporters said they’d never seen anything like it before or since. There were forty thousand kids following me down the streets of Cleveland and it was cold. It’s like Glasgow. To get off it and get into a safe place I had a minder with me. I’d never had a minder before. It was just starting. I went from the top of the fire engine and into this car. The police were not on top of the situation. The car was instantly smothered. It was chaotic. They were grabbing at my hair and my clothes. It was not comfortable.

  AP: If they got hold of you, what did you think they would do?

  DC: Well, I think they wanted to take a piece of me home so they could have it next to their bed or something. Like a scalp for their wall.

  AP: Did it feel primitive?

  DC: It is very primitive. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. I’ve observed young girls at events since then, like cheerleading events, and when they get excited, the pitches in their voices go way up, and their emotions. It becomes like, well, imagine the level of intensity standing at the focal point of the most emotional thing for them, the most exciting thing for them, and being at the focal point of forty or fifty thousand people. What that feels like vocally to have that come at you—it’s a powerful weapon, it’s a powerful, powerful experience. I remember saying I wish everyone could stand in my shoes for just five seconds and feel what that feels like, because it’s the ultimate expression of love. But it’s spoken in a way—it’s screamed at you. I LOVE YOU! Intensify that ten thousand times and imagine how that feels. It’s overwhelming.

  AP: But it was something the fans were projecting onto this figure called David Cassidy because they didn’t know you. I was one of the ones screaming at you, by the way.

  DC: [Smiles.] If you were screaming, Allison, you know what that emotional pitch was like for you. For me it was like, wow, it was so fantastic to feel people letting go, letting you know that you touched their lives, that you meant something to them. It’s the greatest compliment that someone who does what I do can get.

  AP: Okay, as I once screamed at you, David Cassidy, it’s only fair that you should scream at me.

  DC: [Laughs and screams.] I LOVE you—sorry, can’t quite get that pitch.

  AP: No, that’s very good, thank you. I can see how you could get used to that. It’s as though the fans were on the cusp of a presexual feeling. Sex is implicit in it, but maybe it’s not yet sexual?

  DC: It’s all sexual, but because it’s very naive, extraordinarily romantic and it deals with fantasy, it’s sex before it becomes overtly sexual. You can define it better than I can because I haven’t ever been in a female body. Intellectually now I see it, but I couldn’t see it then.

  AP: What did you think then?

  DC: I thought it was just hysteria. Like they were seeing me as this demigod. I was just a guy who played the guitar.

  AP: Did you feel like a demigod?

  DC: No, never.

  AP: Come on, when you had all those young girls screaming at you?

  DC: Do you want to believe me or do you think I’m making this up?

  AP: I just think you wouldn’t be human unless you felt pretty pleased with yourself with that many girls throwing themselves at you.

  DC: I can’t tell you I wasn’t happy with myself. I can’t tell you I wasn’t aware that people found me attractive. But I never felt like a sexual person. I mean, I was a sexual guy, but I never thought of myself as being sexy, you know what I mean?

  AP: Yeah, but I think that was partly because you were lovely, but you weren’t …

  DC: Threatening?

  AP: There was nothing threatening or aggressively masculine about you.

  DC: See, but I don’t think you knew that at that age. I didn’t know that then, either.

  AP: I certainly didn’t think, Hey, here is David Cassidy, my Transitional Love Object.

  DC: Correct, it’s a phenomenon. I was very male, but there was an androgynous part. When I see pictures of myself, I was skinny, my hair was long, I looked kind of feminine. I wasn’t a big bully kind of guy. Girls between the ages of seven and seventeen would show up at my concerts. In America, the audience was 80:20 girls to boys. I guess in Britain it was not cool for boys to admit to liking me.

  AP: No, you were a fairy, I’m afraid.

  DC: A fairy? [He laughs a little uncertainly.] I knew there was jealousy. I knew what the guys were saying, I knew they were, like, drawing mustaches on my picture and blacking out my teeth. I understood it. I would have felt the same way.

  AP: If I had met you thirty years ago …

  DC: You would not have been able to speak. I had that happen many times. It was very sweet. These girls, they’d just stand there, they’d start crying, it was overwhelming. I have to tell you I was doing a benefit in a TV studio two weeks ago. Backstage, one of the heads of department, she was about thirty-seven years old, walked into the dressing room, held my hand and began to weep. She said, “You don’t understand this,” and I said, “Of course I do. Believe me, I get it and I thank you. I’m glad it still means something to you.”

  AP: But there was this gap, wasn’t there? The David Cassidy I was in love with wasn’t you, was he?

  DC: If you read the magazines, bought the merchandise, of course that wasn’t me. That was a scripted character. On The Partridge Family, they didn’t let me play [Jimi Hendrix’s] “Voodoo Chile.” Trust me, that’s what I was playing at home. I was playing B.B. King.

  AP: Did you ever feel uncomfortable with that velvet suit you had to put on?

  DC: Terrible discomfort. Terrible. I was much older, hipper than Keith Partridge. I was going with women who were in their late twenties.

  AP: [Laughing.] Oh, really old!

  DC: [Laughing also.] Yeah, realllllyyy old …

  AP: I remember when I knew you were in your early twenties—to me that seemed impossibly grown-up.

  DC: When I toured in ’74, I was twenty-four years old. Imagine someone who has lived three lifetimes by the time they’re twenty-four. What kind of a guy was I compared to whatever your preconception was? The line is very smeared. For me, I didn’t go out and act onstage. I performed as a musician. I really cared about that even if nobody listened. That was me. It was the only part of the day I enjoyed.

  AP: I think for the fan there was this aspect of knowing some of your background; there was a sense of you being wounded by your childhood that distinguished you from the other teen stars.

  DC: Well, I was wounded. I hadn’t thought about that. That’s a new one. You are dissecting why I exist, Allison. I think you’re right. I think I need to get seriously wounded again. If you want the girls to like you, go out and hurt, motherfucker!

  AP: Isn’t that the Michael Jackson story?

  DC: You could only imagine what a talent has been destroyed and wasted there. I’m thinking about Off the Wall, the best album ever made. I’ve met Michael a few times. It’s all gone so terribly wrong.

  AP: Does it make you shiver slightly?

  DC: Yes,
it does, but it doesn’t, and I’ll tell you why. He didn’t have a perspective internally to make the choice to go “So long, kerpow!” I pressed the ejector button. He bought the Elvis dream with the belt over the bed. I said ten years ago about Michael Jackson, you have no idea how tragic this is going to get. I had a choice of saying, No more, and I don’t want to buy this dream because it’s a miserable dream. It’s a sad, empty, lonely, shallow, self-absorbed, narcissistic existence. If Michael Jackson isn’t the height of narcissism—look at that face. It’s like anorexics—they want to stay a child. Doing your face like Diana Ross? It’s so terribly tragic and it’s a difficult choice to make. Let’s see: fame, money, adulation, being God or being happy. Hmmm. That other thing, being God, is so alluring. I thought: I’ve got to try and take this road for happiness.

  AP: But you didn’t know it would make you happy.

  DC: Oh, I did. I knew the only way for me to survive and be a human being again was not to live like that. I lived in a vacuum like Elvis, like John, Paul, George and Ringo did, for five years.

  AP: I love the story of you meeting John Lennon and singing his songs to him because he was drunk and he couldn’t remember them.

  DC: I was reteaching John the Beatles lyrics. It would be like you playing my songs to me.

  AP: I probably know your lyrics better than you do.

  DC: You probably do, because I forget them all the time. Actually, there are a few I get confused.

  AP: Could you please sing “I Am a Clown” as a special favor to me?

  DC: [Puzzled frown.] “I Am a Clown”? I can never remember … they’re so similar.

  AP: You say that you bailed out, but isn’t the life span of the teen idol over in a blink?

  DC: Well, mine lasted much longer than most, and it could have gone on for an indefinite period of time. Not forever. I saw I could leave this at the top. There was nothing more to experience. I had the biggest fan club in history. What else can I do with this? I’m not happy. I’m alone and—