The English American (24 page)

T
HE LINEUP
for the cable talent show consists of the Keenan Cowboys, a rap artist, a magician wearing an electric blue suit with silver stars on it, and me. I’m going to sing my “Rock-and-Roll Redneck” song while playing the piano. Only this time I’ll have a live band, who I’ve been rehearsing with all afternoon. The song sounds great, except the drummer hasn’t shown up. This matters, because there’s a drum solo, during which I am to leave the piano stool and do a leaping, redneckish sort of dance.

With no drummer in sight, the director decides to cut my dance in the middle of the song. I’m devastated. I’ve been practicing it for days and have a really great moment where I reach behind the piano and put on sideburns. With the dance I’ve got a chance of winning. Without the dance there’s no way.

I’m feeling horribly disappointed when Jack arrives with the rest of the audience and sits down at my table. I’m about to explain the situation when one of the band members shouts out Jack’s name and starts clambering toward us, through television cameras, over cable wires, through the already drinking crowd.

“Jack Cain!” The man’s almost shouting.

“Billy J?!” Jack says, standing up and laughing. The two men are slapping each other on the back like old friends, which leads me to conclude that they are old friends.

“Hey,” Billy shouts to the guys in the band, “it’s Jack Cain.”

“You still playing, man?” Billy J. says.

“No,” Jack says. “I quit a few years ago. It’s been a long time.” Jack’s eyes are alight.

“Can you help us out? Our drummer hasn’t shown up.”

“Well I dunno…”

“You were a
drummer
?” I say, turning toward Jack.

“Come on, Jack. We’re playing this great new song by this cute new British chick.” Billy’s winking at me now.

Jack throws his head back and laughs and laughs.

“Oh man, Pippa, you got a drum solo in this now?”

I’m beaming. “Yes!”

“How long we got?”

“About fifteen minutes. And we’re going up live.”

“Hey! Brian! Ben! Richie! Jimmy! Look who’s here! It’s Jack Cain.”

Suddenly the table is surrounded by men in their late thirties with long hair who drag Jack up onto the stage and sit him down behind the drums. Jack picks up the drumsticks.

“I know the song,” he says. “It’ll be fine.”

The men go to their positions onstage and start playing the show’s theme tune. When it’s time for me to go on, I’m excited. And alive. And on edge. And I know it’s going to be a good set. And it is.

When its time for the drum solo, I jump off the piano stool and reach behind the piano, where I have hidden my special sideburns. I’ve got special glue stuck to the side of my face, so the sideburns will stick on at a touch. With my hat on, I suddenly transform into a real redneck. Billie, Walt, and the pain that accompanies me everywhere are forgotten. As I jump and whoop and leap in a redneckish way across the stage, Jack plays the drums like a wild man.

The drumsticks have become a part of his body and they move together to the frenzied rhythm he’s creating throughout the room. It’s hot under the lights. Half the buttons on his shirt have come undone and Jack’s hair is plastered against his face.

At the end of the song, the whole crowd jumps to its feet.

Now we’re offstage. A woman I’ve not seen before has put her arms around Jack’s neck.

“Jack! I haven’t seen you since you broke up with Lisa!”

“How is she?” Jack says.

“Good—great! Got kids now, you know.”

“Hey!” I say, shouting across the room. “Hey! I thought you were gay!” The words come out without my thinking about them. And when I realize what I’ve said, it’s too late to take them back.

Jack stops kissing the woman’s cheek and is looking at me.

“You thought
what
?”

I walk quickly over to where Jack is standing.

“So, you’re not?” I say.

I try to take my eyes away from Jack’s, but I can’t. He is looking into mine with an expression I can’t quite read. He’s covered in sweat, and very, very sexy.

“You had a girlfriend?”

The woman is saying something, but neither Jack nor I hear her. “Yes,” he says.

“But I thought you were gay.” Oh God, Pip, shut up.

Jack looks perplexed.

“You thought I was gay.”

“Well, yes.”

“Why?”

“Well, you iron your sheets. And you work at The Gold Room. And then there’s the Harvey Fierstein quote on your fridge.”

“What?”

“‘Never be bullied into silence.’ The Harvey Fierstein quote.”

“I tore that out for you, Pippa.”

“You tore that out for me?”

“Whatever—or whoever—has been stopping you singing about what was really going on, well, that felt like bullying to me.”

“Oh.”

We’re still looking at each other. The rest of the room isn’t there.

“So, you’re not gay?”

“No,” he says. Still now. “No. I’m not. Never have been. Not going to start now.”

The moment is broken by the emcee, who comes over to hand me my check.

“You should have some of this money, Jack,” I say. “I wouldn’t have won without the drum dance.”

“No,” he says, his eyes still on me. “Use it to move into the city.”

I write a letter to Billie and send it to her in Georgia, where she is spending the rest of the summer.

Jack rents a truck, drives it out to Adler, and helps me lift my garage-sale couch and my suitcase onto the back of it. I follow in Earl Grey. And as I do so, the tightness in my chest begins to loosen, and I start to feel like myself again.

E
LFRIDA’S APARTMENT
is on the second floor above a restaurant on Union Square West, right next to the farmer’s market, with a marble bathtub so tall you have to climb into it, like a Roman.

My windowless bedroom has a loft bed, under which Elfrida has put some curtains, to create a dressing room that doubles as a closet. For the first time since I arrived in America, I have my own space, somewhere that has nothing whatsoever to do with Billie. I start having moments in my day when I do not think about Billie or even Walt, who I haven’t heard from at all.

The feelings I have for them have become a brown muddy thing that I keep in a box on a mantelpiece. When I’m feeling strong enough, I take them down and feel a bit more of the pain that I do not understand. Then, when it becomes overwhelming again, I put it back in the box on the mantelpiece, next to the silver cuckoo clock and the yellow ceramic pig Charlotte gave me on my thirteenth birthday.

Like every genuinely gorgeous American woman I’ve ever met, Elfrida thinks she’s ugly and is obsessed by how much she weighs. She wants to fall in love, but her Norwegian boyfriend went back to Norway, her day-job boss is married, and the guy she likes in her theater group hasn’t made a move yet. She thinks he might be gay. I think she might be right. But then again, I’m not exactly batting a hundred in that department.

I solve Elfrida’s imaginary weight issue by eating most of her chocolate, which she keeps in the freezer, under her bed, and in glass jars behind the kitchen sink.

As far as men are concerned, I keep trying to sell her on our mutual friend Jack.

“He’s a really good man,” I say. “He’d treat you beautifully. And he’s funny and kind, not to mention cute. And he cooks and he irons and he cries whenever he remembers his dead dog, so you know he’d be a wonderful father. And he’s calm and he’s someone you know you could trust with the really important things. He’s sexy, too—and absolutely not the kind of guy to cheat on his wife. He’d be perfect for you.”

“He’d be perfect for you,” Elfrida says. “If you weren’t in love with the infamous Nick.”

I can’t pretend I haven’t thought about what it would be like to be with Jack. But I’ve come too far to settle for a man just because he makes me feel safe.

“It’s not just Nick,” I say, pouring dinner into large red plastic cups. We recently discovered Carnation chocolate meal-in-a-drink. It only has a hundred and fifty calories and contains all the nutrients you need for a well-balanced dinner.

“I’ve had tea with the Governor of Hong Kong. Jack’s never been out of the United States. He would never fit into my world.”

“Pippa, you don’t fit into your world.”

“But I can. Therein lies the difference. You should see me at Henley. I can blend in with the best of them.”

“What’s Henley?”

“It’s a town by a famous river in England where people in fancy hats go to watch people race boats, while they sit on the side of the river on a grassy bank drinking Pimm’s.”

“You’re into rowing and Pimm’s?”

“Not at all. But that’s not the point. What I’m trying to say is that Nick and I—we come from the same world. We want the same kind of things. Nick wants to go down the Amazon, and so do I. He’s traveled all around the world, and so have I. He reads Rudyard Kipling, and he knows what I’m talking about when I refer to Blue Peter. Actually he probably doesn’t, scrap that. But he’s—well, we’re adventurers, Nick and I. We’re not the type to settle.”

Now Elfrida and I are ready for the garlic cloves we roasted in the new convection oven that she ordered from the Home Shopping Network.

“I like Mozart. Jack likes rock and roll.”

“But you
write
rock and roll. You
sing
rock and roll.”

“True.”

We spread the garlic clove on two Carr’s water biscuits and bite into them.

“Deeelicious,” we say, in unison.

“You’re out of your mind,” Elfrida says.

“And so’s Nick. And that’s why he’s right for me.”

“No matter,” Elfrida says, when we’re done with dinner. “Jack’s a lost cause anyway.”

“But he said he wasn’t gay.”

“It’s not that. He’s been in love with someone else for a while now.”

It would be supremely unfair to allow any feelings of jealousy. And so I don’t.

“Really? Who is she?”

“He won’t tell anyone. And you can’t probe Jack.”

“True,” I say. And then, “So, you’re not interested in Jack?”

“Not in that way,” Elfrida says. “It would be like dating my brother.”

“Okay,” I say, curiously relieved. And I’m pleased for Jack. Really. He’s met someone. Good. Good, good, good, good, good. Jack and I can stay friends. Because we’re both in love with other people. It’s good to have got this sorted.

So now I know that Jack is helping Elfrida paint her bedroom walls from maroon to cream because he’s her friend, not because he wants to date her. Soon he’s going to start working on her ceiling. So he’ll be around a lot.

J
AMES
S
OUK
encourages me to generate all the preshow publicity I can for the exhibition—“An artist only gets one chance to make a first impression,” he says—and Nick and I are in contact almost every day.

“I’m inviting all the bankers,” I tell him. “And the Brits. According to the embassy there are one hundred and fifty thousand of them in the New York area.”

Nick can’t make it to New York before the exhibition, which is scheduled for October, but we’re thinking of rewarding ourselves with a trip to Rome, perhaps, in November. If the exhibition goes well, we might go to Athens too.

I have days when I am almost happy.

I have moments of lightness. Sometimes I have moments of hilarity. Like the moment Elfrida and I discover that what we thought was a mouse under the stove is actually a dirty sock.

And then the phone rings. And it’s Billie. In an instant the pain is back and the joy has gone.

“I know what this is all about. You’re testing me, honey. Well, I’m not going anywhere without you,” Billie is saying. “Without you I carry around an empty space inside me. Just talking to you helps a little, but seeing you would put cupfuls of joy back into me. I’d feel full again. You said you were going to call!”

By the time I put the phone down my hand is shaking.

“Hey,” Elfrida says, on her way back up from the laundry room to which she has delivered the dirty sock. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I say.

I’m
not
going to burden my friends with this.

It’s bad, but not as bad as it was. I’m not in Billie’s house anymore. I’m no longer alone. I have Elfrida, and Jack, and, of course, my Nick.

I’m getting paid five hundred dollars a gig on Saturday nights now. I have to perform outside Manhattan to get that kind of money, but Earl Grey drives me safely out to Brooklyn and New Jersey, getting me home by one or two in the morning.

Whether I collapse on the couch or in my bed, at eight o’clock on Sunday mornings, the phone rings. And it’s always Billie.

“When are you going to call me?”

“I just need some time.”

“How much more time to you need? You’ve had six weeks!”

If I give in to her, and go and see her, she’ll start pulling me to her again. I won’t be able to resist. I’ll lose the tentative grip I have on becoming Pippa again. A different Pippa from the Pippa I was before, but Pippa nonetheless. I’ll be drowning in the mud again, with no way out.

I tell Billie I have a lot to think about and ask her to please give me some time. She says she understands and promises to wait for me to call her.

But then, as I’m padding across the floor to the bathroom to brush my teeth the following morning, the phone rings. And it’s Billie again. And I’m plunged back into the bog.

“Ralph’s moved over into publicity, and he’s doing wonderfully well. We’re making a profit this year. You can come back anytime. We can pay you anything you want.”

“Billie, it’s not about the money. I just can’t. I’m busy here. I—”

Now her voice turns.

“I’ve been reading about adoptees and their issues. Whatever kind of family you went to, you’ve all got issues!”

I’ve been at the gallery, going over the list of people to invite to the exhibition. We’re getting close now, and there’s a lot to do. I want Nick to take New York by storm.

When I get home, the phone rings and it’s Billie. I find I can distance myself a little if her voice isn’t in my ear, so I put the phone on speaker. Then I put down my bag and sit on the floor next to the phone.

“I love you so much, Pippa.” The pitch of her voice goes from low to high. “And you’re hurting me so badly.”

“What do you want me to do?” I say.

“Well, for a start, I’d like you to do what you say you’re going to do! You said you were going to call me for my sausage stew recipe, but you never did!”

The words, in all their absurdity, hang in the air.

“I’ve been busy, Billie.”

“I feel like a dictionary.”

“A dictionary?”

“You walk into my life, make me fall in love with you, get the information you need, and then you walk out again. You are not the only one with abandonment issues.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I love you, Pippa!” She’s shouting now. “I want you in my life! And I want to see my grandchildren! They are my grandchildren, goddammit! How can you deprive your children of their grandmother in this way?!”

“But I don’t have any children.”

“I know you don’t have children, what are you, nuts? I’m talking about when you
do
! I loved my grandparents so much.”

And then ten minutes of memories of her childhood at her grandparents’ estate. My arms are wrapped tightly around my knees now. My head is buried in them too. The same body that took a tough Saturday night crowd by storm two nights before is now curled up in the fetal position next to the phone. The darkness is back.

And then Billie changes tone.

“I went to the adoption agency. I wanted to find out what happened. I figured you must have been abused or something, to be having this much trouble with your adoption.”

I’m not having trouble with my adoption,
I want to shout.
I’m having trouble with you!

“I figured something must have happened to you in the foster home for you to have all these issues. But they said it was a nice foster home. So you just got problems. So, deal with them, honey! You gotta work them through! Just like I worked mine through in AA. Becoming an alcoholic was the best thing that ever happened to me.” And then she tells me, as she has told me time and again, about how her alcoholism started soon after she gave me away.

I sense someone standing in the door to the kitchen. It’s Jack. I have no idea how long he’s been standing there. He’s looking at me with an expression I don’t recognize. I can’t move.

“You can love your adoptive parents and me, you know,” Billie is saying. “It doesn’t have to be one or the other!” And then, when I don’t reply, she says, “How can you be so cruel?”

“I’m so sorry, Billie. I’m so sorry.”

“Well you should be.”

“And I am.”

I can’t stop the shaking and I still can’t move. Jack walks over to the phone. Solid. Sure.

“Billie?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a friend of Pippa’s. She’s very upset.”

“
She’s
upset?”

“Yes. And she needs to hang up now. Good-bye.”

And with that, Jack puts the phone on the cradle.

“Has this been going on a long time?” Jack’s eyes are dark with fury. “Has it?”

“Jack—you just—you just hung up on her.”

“It wasn’t hard,” he says. “You just close your hand around the phone and put it down.” He isn’t smiling.

From the look on his face, I can tell that he heard it all. My cover is blown. The Pippa Jack knows isn’t what she seems. Underneath, she’s a heaving, porous mass of mess. The darkness is winning. She’s going under.

“How long have you been there?”

“Long enough.”

A siren screams past on the street outside. Jack comes over to me and helps me up off the floor.

“You must think I’m a terrible person, causing her so much pain.”

I can see Jack choosing his words carefully.

“Pippa,” he says, his voice straining in anger, “you’re not the one who’s only thinking about herself here. Do you
really
think it’s fair of her to lay this huge guilt trip on you?”

I look at him. “Maybe not, but…”

“But nothing,” Jack says. “But fucking nothing.”

A few moments later, we’re standing next to the phone, my friend and I, as close as it is possible for two people to stand together with all their clothes on.

And then the phone rings.

“Let the machine pick up,” Jack says.

We wait for the needy southern voice, but it doesn’t come.

Instead the voice is young and male.

“Hi. I hope I’ve got the right number. This is Walt Markham’s son Edwin speaking. I’m—uh—I guess I’m Pippa’s brother.”

“Edwin?” I say, picking up the phone.

“Hi sis,” the voice says.

“Hi,” I say, feeling a huge sense of relief. Then again, “Hi.”

“Can you meet me on the corner of Thirty-fourth and Sixth in an hour? I’ll be the redhead in the Orioles hat.”

“Yes!” I tell him. And then, “Me too.”

I put down the phone, grinning.

“Jesus!” Jack says. “It’s one helluva rollercoaster you’re on here.”

But, seeing the joy in my face, he’s smiling as I go.