“Well, before, I could remember everyone.”
“No, but the part about being loved. The parachute.” She shakes her head, taking the high road, setting aside her default response of sarcastic derision. “Anyway, it’s nice to know, nice to hear.” She hugs me, and the scent in her hair reminds me of that memory: the one in my dream that was really a dream about nothing. Honeysuckle. She smells like honeysuckle. But it’s a splinter, a fleeting spark of imagination I conjured up from somewhere deep inside. No matter what Liv says. No one can verify it, and if no one can verify your memory, who knows if it ever really happened?
We’re interrupted by Jamie, who tugs me away by the arm into a corner near a skinny cylindrical sculpture that reminds me of a penis but that Rory assures me sells for nearly twenty grand. Behind it, Anderson is talking two inches too close to three women, all stark lines and black eyeliner and towering heels, whom I know somehow from the art world.
“American Profiles,” Jamie says, his skin flush clear down his neck. “They said yes!” He is glowing, beaming. If he were any more excited, he’d be levitating. “I just got the news. And their connection—he came through. At least partially.”
“My dad? You found him?” I have to lean up against the wall to steady myself.
“No, not quite. It’s not that easy.” He glances toward the crowd. “But the producer—she made a call. To your dad’s best friend. He’s here tonight. Or will be.”
“He’s coming here tonight?” My nerves flare.
“I thought this is what you wanted. She scrambled to make it happen.”
“No, no”—I wave a hand—“it is. I just…didn’t expect it. There are so many questions to be asked.”
“I know,” he starts, but then sees someone in the crowd beckoning. “I’ll circle back, don’t worry. I just want to grab this writer while I have her. Keep an eye out for him.” He’s sucked back into well-wishers, armed with their chardonnay and cheese cubes and cold purple grapes.
I stand there, frozen, keeping that eye out, until I see him. Well, until he sees me, really, since I wouldn’t spot him in the first place, and moves through the crowd toward me. He is older, likely my father’s age, but still handsome, with wavy, boyishly blond hair and wrinkles around his eyes that he’s grown into. He clutches me in too close a grasp for a man I’d never met, and after two claustrophobic seconds, I push my hands against his shoulders and politely wedge some air between us.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t remember you.” It comes out rudely, and I’m unsure if I’m embarrassed at my brusqueness or not. Would this sort of thing embarrass me? Being so trite, so forthcoming. The old me, probably not. No, that brusqueness was actually my defining characteristic.
He’s not offended, and instead, smiles widely.
“You’re still your father’s girl, I see. Blunt to the end. He’d admire that.”
“I’m glad,” I respond because it seems like the right thing to say.
“I’m Jasper Aarons,” he says. “Your dad’s oldest friend in the world.” He laughs. “And if you look at me, I really might be the oldest friend in the world.”
“Ah. I was told you might be here,” I say. “American Profiles.” I spot my mom over Jasper’s left shoulder eyeing us carefully, looking like she’s trying not to stare but staring all the same. He turns and catches her glimpses and offers a sort of sophisticated half-wave, but she startles at him and scampers away.
“American Profiles or not, it’s an honor. A privilege,” he says, glancing back at me.
I nod because now, this seems like the right thing for him to say.
“I have a lot of questions,” I stutter.
“And I’m happy to do my best to answer them.”
“How did I know you…before? From when I was a child?”
“You wouldn’t remember. I haven’t seen you in many, many years.” He stops and tries to pin it down. “Maybe since that summer that he left. Jesus.” He pales. “Could it have been that long?” He catches himself for a moment, lost in a place he doesn’t share. “Well, however long it’s been, when Nancy called—she’s a dear, very old friend who is now at American Profiles—well, I wanted to come down here tonight and tell you how much you meant to him. He’d be devastated to know that you couldn’t remember him, remember your childhood spent with him, so…even though I promised him I’d watch out for you, and I guess I failed at that, I wanted to come down and make sure that you knew.”
He adjusts his glasses, and I notice his green eyes, and I imagine how stunning he must have been thirty years ago. He’s an artist, I can sense that from his worn hands and his earthy demeanor, and I can already see my father and him lighting up the world. A twinge of envy pinches my insides, at their brazenness, at their glory.
“Thank you, I mean, obviously I really don’t know much,” I say, then consider the specifics of what he’s said. “So you knew that he was leaving? Leaving…us? You’re the first one who’s been willing to speak frankly about it.”
He clears his throat. “I wouldn’t say that I knew…explicitly. But on a more fleeting level, I suppose I did. He…struggled. That’s probably the best way of putting it. He struggled for a long time to conform himself to the straight and narrow.…”
“The straight and narrow?” I interrupt. “Like, living within the law or living with my mother, being married?”
“The latter.” He smiles, and I try to force one, too, but don’t find much funny in this. “It just broke him. Conventional society, he used to say. Some men aren’t cut out for it, and then the fame”—he flops a hand—“so I knew that it was perhaps too much for him, and when he hinted that he might be, well, leaving, I didn’t press him for more because I wasn’t sure if he meant this earth or just his current life.”
“So you think he could have killed himself?” My throat feels like it’s closing in on itself, the visceral emotional reaction that comes from stored memories, even if I can’t tap into them.
His shoulders bob, and he starts to reply, but my mom bumps into me at this exact moment and spills red wine clear down the side of my pale gray dress.
“Oh, Jesus!” she and I say together. Jasper grasps her arm but she jolts it away, purposefully ignoring him.
“Hello, Indira,” he says. “It’s so nice to see you.”
She looks up as if she hadn’t noticed him before and makes an enormous show of her false surprise.
“Oh, Jasper! Jasper Aarons, I didn’t recognize you! It’s been so long!”
No one involved in the charade believes it, so Jasper winks to break the tension, then grabs some cocktail napkins from a waiter. I dab at the spreading stain, but am forced to excuse myself before I look like a gunshot victim at my own welcome-back party.
“Listen, he’d want you to move on with your life, to be happy,” Jasper says to me before I retreat to the back office to salvage my outfit, “to know that he loved you more than anything. I know you can’t remember, but try not to forget that.”
I replay his words a few minutes later, after I’ve found a bottle of club soda behind the bar and am blotting my dress with paper towels. I’m huddled in my old office, back behind the hive of activity out front. The chair squeaks when I sit down—welcome back!—and then I survey the furnishings from my former life. The desk is cast iron—spare but both antique and modern at once. There are stacks of papers neatly piled on the left corner, contracts, I’m sure, and a tumbling pile of mail scattered next to the printer. I can tell this is the slush pile—solicitations from aspiring artists who for some reason think that Rory and I can change their destinies, offer them open space on our walls, and alter their futures in doing so.
I flip through the desk calendar parked in front of the computer.
Six weeks ago, there it is: San Francisco. Hope Kingsley.
The following week, I’ve scribbled, 9-week ultrasound.
My chest seizes in grief, grief I wasn’t even aware I was carrying around until I see it
. Here. Confirmed. This lost child is like an apparition, something that I never had, never held, can’t even fucking remember, but still, when I allow it to, it haunts me. Just because I can’t remember it, like everything really, doesn’t mean that it can’t cause me pain. Because here, faced with proof, I’m eviscerated. I want to reach into those dark corners of my brain and pull out answers: What was I going to do? What we were going to do? Become that cliché and hope that a baby can repair our relationship? Become a single mom? Not have it at all?
Peter, in vague terms, has implied that we were working it out, that I was aiming toward forgiveness. But a niggling part of me wonders how much of this is true. Now, with my mind washed clean and without the memory at the outrage of his betrayal, maybe I can—can forgive him. But back then? Really? Was I capable of such a thing? Of forgiveness in the grandest of scales? I sigh, wondering how much it matters what I was going to do before. I flip the calendar a few weeks back and forth to see what else there is, what other bread crumbs I’ve left myself to follow.
Mostly, it’s empty, but there. There it is: something. Something small, and who knows if it’s anything. Probably a dead end. But I commit it to memory anyway. Tina Marquis. 11 a.m. Fifteen letters that mean nothing to me.
Peter pops his head through the door, breaking me free.
“Hey, you okay?”
I pat my dress. It’s still damp and looks like a ruby reddish gray mosaic, but it’s presentable enough. The stain almost looks intentional.
“I’m okay,” I say. I stand and reach for his outstretched arm, and then I shuffle back toward the beckoning crowd.
Three hours later, the guests have scattered themselves out the front door and into the warm New York City night, and I am too tired to move. Really. So tired that I don’t know how I’m going to make it home. Peter will take me, but I am oh-my-god-I-can’t-even-walk-to-the-town-car tired.
“This was too much for her,” my mom hisses at Rory, like I’m not perfectly present and can’t hear her perfectly well.
“You’re the one who told me to do it in the first place!” Rory replies, and I wish they would both shut the hell up and let me go to sleep right there on the bench underneath Still Life with Purple Chair by Antonio Molinero, an artist Rory discovered last year in Barcelona. The lights of the stark gallery are burning my pupils: too much white, too much brightness, all contrast and glare in here. It is hip, it is fabulous, and I can’t take one second more of it. If I had an ounce of energy left, I’d use it for the new me to chastise the old me at being so quick to abandon her promises. As it is, I lie back, resting my head on a faux-glass bench, and accidentally knock over a wayward plastic wineglass.
“I’m here, you know. Right in front of you. So you can stop talking about me like I’m not,” I bleat.
“Yes, of course you are, dear. We’re only trying to sort out what’s best for you,” my mom says, kneeling to mop up the spill.
“Who died and made you my keeper?” I answer, until I realize that 152 people died. And then we all just shut up. Finally, I say, “Can someone please just take me home?”
“Yes, we should go,” Peter says, until Rory gives him a stare that could wither a flower. I’ve seen how she eyes him now—distrustful, distasteful, but when I ask her about it, she usually just hiccups and says, “He has a lot to prove,” which is true, so I let it rest.
“You can stay and help clean,” Rory says. “Anderson can take her home.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m taking her,” Peter says.
“Don’t be ridiculous my ass,” Rory says back. “Half of the drunks here were your friends, and I’m not cleaning up their mess by myself.”
“I’m helping,” my mom says, still on her knees. “And Tate’s here, too. And Hugh.” Rory rolls her eyes, and Hugh, as if on cue for his boyfriend-of-the-year award, strolls from the back office with a box of garbage bags, ready to man up. If he didn’t love my sister so much, he’d make me sick.
“Great, then the five of us should get it done in no time,” Rory tuts, retreating to the office, extinguishing the argument.
Peter starts to disagree but I see him reassess and opt not to push it—it being what? His luck, Rory’s nerves? Instead, he plucks his keys from his jeans pocket and stuffs them in Anderson’s hand.
“Thank you, Ror, it was fun,” I say, righting myself from the bench, kissing her cheek.
“Did it…help? Jog anything?”
I shake my head no. “But it was fun all the same.”
“I’ll be home right after you,” Peter says, pecking my forehead.
“No hurry.” I’m already dreaming of my bed, of swaddling myself in the down comforter and tumbling to sleep. Besides, Peter is still banished to the couch, so it’s not like I’ll notice that he’s gone.
“I drank too much,” Anderson confesses once the town car has pulled away and we’re coasting up the West Side Highway. “I shouldn’t be drinking with my meds.”
“I’ve told you as much,” I say, trying not to sound judgmental, though judgmental might be the old me’s natural setting, my autotune. But I get it. I do. If I were brave enough to wash this all with a pill or a few drinks on top of a pill, I might, too.
“Thanks again for coming. I know you have fancy places to be.”
“Nowhere fancy to be at all. New York in August?” He laughs. “All the cool kids have left anyway.”
“But you’re a cool kid.”
“Less cool than you’d think. Or trying to be anyway.”
“How’s that going?” I’ve read Page Six. I know that he was out at some underground club two nights ago, know that he went home with a Victoria’s Secret model, that the lead gossip story the next day read “Crash and Yearn!”
The town car cruises over a bump and Anderson winces, giving him an out. “You’re still in pain?” I ask.
“Not that much,” he says. “Well, psychological. The nightmares. They don’t stop, not with therapy, not with a girl, not with anything. I’m trying to wean myself, you know, off the meds, but then my brain goes into overdrive. Night sweats, heart palpitations…My therapist says it might take a year to stop thinking about it, and even then, it might come back in fits and starts.”
“That will be weird, too, though, right? I can’t even imagine what we thought about before we thought about this.”
“I can,” he says. “I thought about landing my next job, pushing my career to the next level, breaking up or hooking up with whomever I was with…I don’t know, ridiculous stuff. But still, I’d give my balls to be able to just think about all of that.”
I reach over and squeeze his hand.
“You’re still doing well with the breaking up–hooking up stuff.”
He accepts the jab. “Medicinal balm.”
“In addition to the meds.”
“In addition to the meds,” he says, then smiles. “Can’t hurt.”
“Old habits die hard.”
“Something like that.”
“Did I tell you,” I say, letting go of his fingers, “that I remembered something?” His eyes pop but he burps into his hand as his way of saying no. “It was almost like a dream, but it wasn’t. Even though I don’t really remember it, and even though my mom and sister tell me otherwise, it happened, I know it. Or so my therapist says.”
“That’s my new favorite line,” he says. “‘So my therapist says.’ Mine’s the only one I trust anymore.”
“Well, there’s me.” I rest my head on his shoulder.
“Well, there’s you. That’s true. The girl who saved my life. But you’re as fucked up as I am.”
We both laugh, and I straighten myself up.
“But anyway,” I say, “I did, I did see something. I just don’t know what it means yet.”
“Our brains are strange beasts.”
“That’s helpful.”
“Sorry,” he says. “Too actorly. Ugh, what a stereotype I’ve turned into. I’m trying not to be, though—not to be
such a stereotype.”
“Stumbling around drunk isn’t exactly breaking the cliché.”
“I know.” He hangs his head. “My shrink says the same thing.” He catches himself. “There it is again.” We both go quiet. “Oh, so here’s some good news,” he says finally. “All of this excitement has significantly upped my Hollywood stock.”
“Ha ha.”
“I’ve been offered a Spielberg film. We start shooting in North Carolina just after Thanksgiving, if I accept.”
“If you accept? You can’t say no to that.”
He shrugs. “Like I said, I’m reprioritizing.”
“Don’t abandon your life because of this one terrible thing that happened to us, Anderson. I thought the whole point of the two of us surviving was that we got our second chance, our chance to live the lives we were meant to be living.”
I consider the promise I made to the new me. Isn’t that it? Isn’t that the entire purpose?
“That’s it exactly!” he says, clapping his hands together. “What if this isn’t the life I’m meant to be living? I mean, this acting thing is so flimsy—it’s me dressing up in costumes and saying someone else’s words!”
“But don’t you love it?”
“Sometimes,” he says. “Sometimes it just seems like life.”
The car stops abruptly at a light, and we both—too tensely—grab the other’s wrist. When we finally let go, I’m certain he can feel the imprint of my grasp, as I can his. Holding him, just like I had outside the gallery, feels solid, like I’m finally sinking into something that won’t ebb out beneath me. He says that I’m the girl who saved his life, but what if he’s the one person to understand me, the one person to save mine? I shake my head and shrug this off. No, there’s also Peter.
“Aftershocks,” he says once we’ve started moving again. “Even with the therapy and medication, there are always the aftershocks.”
10
“Every Breath You Take”
—The Police
J amie, Peter, and I decamp to my mother’s house in Bedford for the weekend. Jamie, because we’re forging ahead with American Profiles and this is our initial background research. They’d announced the exclusive just yesterday; Page Six had covered it this morning with the headline “Whoa, Nelly!” I actually laughed when Anderson called to tell me. Peter, because, well, we can use a weekend away, even if that means enduring my mother and Tate.
The Song Remains the Same Page 9