B
y 1988, we've relocated from West Seventy-first Street to a floor-through in an old row house on Sixth Avenue in the Village. The location puts us in the right school district for you to attend one of the better public schools in the city. The new apartment has a slanted floor and a funky kitchen; the rent is an astronomical thirteen hundred a month. But my parents are contributing a small sum toward it, and I've got a new job, too.
Today we're back on the Upper West Side on our way to have lunch with Maria. We walk faster as we get close to our old building. You're excited to show Maria the dress you're wearing especially for her. It's pink and has a skirt like a tutu.
“Mama, is Maria going to be surprised to see me?” Your brown curls lift and fall as you skip along.
“No, baby. 'Cause she knows we're coming. She's going to be excited, though.”
We approach the familiar front door, and you reach up to ring her buzzer.
I'm still climbing the last stairs as you run ahead to throw your arms around Maria's waist. She pats your back. “Hello, Minnow. Come in, you two.”
Taking your hand, she leads you into the kitchen, where something smells good. Your voice is high and clear as you answer her questions about your new teacher, your school, and your pink dress. From her living room window I can see our former garden below. The old fencing has come down in one corner, and there are leaves from last fall covering the grass and flower beds. I wonder if the current tenants will bother to keep it up.
“How is the new job going, Lisa?” Maria asks, carrying a bowl of her special meatballs from the kitchen. She hands me a spoon. “Minnow, sit down at the table,” she says to you. You carry your own bowl, carefully.
“I'm starting to get the hang of it,” I say, about the job. I've recently gotten my real estate license at the suggestion of my cousin Rachel. I'm hoping to make some real money doing it. I'm still at Silver one day a week, too, but since you started school, it's been increasingly difficult to work those hours.
“And what about the music?” Maria asks. “Have you been playing your guitar?”
“I have,” I tell her. The new apartment has a back terrace that faces the beautiful old brick of another low building. Whenever I can, I sit out on there with my guitar and write. I watch the clouds roll past and sing my songs to the blue sky.
“That's good,” Maria says. “Never stop.”
“I won't,” I say. But the truth is, it's hard to find the time. Days get eaten up by other things, or I'm too tired and crash out in front of the TV instead. I still love it, maybe more than ever, but it's not my priority. Not this time.
On Maria's table, the ceramic salt and pepper shakers are shaped like Hawaiian girls. You like to play with them, and she moves them closer to you. “Minnow,” she says, “how is your Spanish coming along? Have you been practicing?”
“I'm a little busy right now,” you explain, “but I'm still very good at it.”
We smile at one another over your head.
“How do you say âI love you very much'?”
“
Te amo mucho,
Maria,” you say sweetly.
“Very, very good.” She laughs appreciatively.
Maria's table feels like one of the safest places on earth. I think of the night that things got out of control with Corbin, when I grabbed you and escaped up the stairs. Her door was our salvation. She never said a bad word about Corbin. She never told me I was making a mess of my life.
When we go, we promise to come back soon.
“Can I sleep at Maria's house one day?” you ask me as we walk to Broadway to catch the train.
“Sure you can, baby. I think Maria would love that.”
E
very morning, I walk you to your kindergarten class, down Sixth Avenue and right on Eleventh Street. You hold my hand. Mixed into your walk is a little skip. You love to talk, nonstop, for the pleasure of it, like a chirping bird. You ask questions about the trees, the weather, people who pass by, clouds, the future, tall buildings, and more. When I don't know the answer to something, we go to the Jefferson Library after school and look it up.
“Mama, is that the horizon?” you ask one day, pointing west toward the river. How do you know these things?
Another day you ask about a boy who is a bully at school. “Maybe people haven't been nice to Sebastian, so he doesn't know how to be nice to other people,” I say to you about that boy.
“You mean Sebastian's mommy and daddy?” you ask.
“Maybe,” I say. “Or other kids might have been mean to him when he was little.”
You're quiet for a few seconds as you think it over.
We've had many conversations about
your
daddy, the first when you were only three. You bring him up frequently, in ordinary ways. I've told you he's very busy and lives far away. I've said that someday when you're much older, you'll be able to see him. I don't know if this is the right thing to say, or if it's true.
You used to ask Corbin if he could be your daddy, but Corbin is gone now, back to Austin. You still talk to him on the phone sometimes, and you have your uncle Alan, and your grandpa. You seem to be at least as happy and well adjusted as the rest of the kids.
Alan continues to come by on Sundays when he's in town. You watch for him, pressed up against a window that looks out onto Sixth Avenue from the second floor.
Alan greets you with hugs and kisses. Sometimes he brings his girlfriend. She's a different one each time. It's hard to keep a relationship going when he's on the road so much. They're blond or brown-haired, or his favorites, the redheads. They're all young and skinny and a little self-conscious. They follow him up the stairs and hang back. Say hello with lowered eyes and stand in the corner or by the bookshelves, pretending to look at the titles. You're the icebreaker, Minnow. You're always so nice to them. You hold their hands and point out your drawings, framed in clear plastic on the long wall behind the dining table. You introduce them to the cats. You take them to your room and show them the papier-mâché sculpture that sits on your dresser. “See, it's a unicorn with wings,” you explain.
They tell you you have pretty hair, or that they like your shoes, or your nail polish. When they ask you what you want to be when you grow up, you say a veterinarian, a scientist, or a mathematician. “I love prime numbers,” you volunteer.
That usually throws them. They look dumbfounded. The first time I heard you say it, I was right there with them. I thought it must be something your grandfather had taught you to say; you've inherited his gift for logic and numbers. When I asked you what you loved about prime numbers, you said: “They're fun.”
I don't know what it means to love prime numbers. But who am I to tell you what to love?
Alan still likes to take charge in the kitchen. He tastes the sauce and looks through my spices to add bay leaves or nutmeg or cinnamon. I'm happy to let him, though after all these years of his suggestions, I can cook almost as well as he can.
“Hey, do you ever hear from Jules?” he asks one Sunday.
Dave is there, too, that night. He's the bass player from Charlotte's band and Alan's good friend. It's just after midnight and Talk Talk's “Spirit of Eden” is turned down low. We're sitting around the long table, finishing up the last bottle of wine. “Yeah,” I say, feeling a little drunk. “I'm in touch with her pretty regularly.”
Renee, the current girlfriend, is resting her head on Alan's shoulder. I keep noticing the way her hennaed hair curls at the edges, the last of a grown-out perm. Beyond her through the open pocket doors, I can see you sleeping in my bed on a pile of coats.
“What's she up to these days?” Alan asks.
“She's still doing that television series, the medical drama. She plays the wife of the lead doctor.”
“Oh, that's right,” Alan says. “
L.A. Emergency.
I knew that.”
“Which one is she?” Dave asks.
“The beautiful blonde,” I say proudly.
Dave is impressed. “The one who accidentally kills her kid and has a mental breakdown?”
“Yeah.”
“Say hi next time you speak to her,” Alan says. “Tell her she's great on that show.”
“I will.” I yawn.
Alan stands and stretches. “Okay, time to go.”
We watch Renee walk slowly across the long room to get their coats. She removes hers from under your head, carefully.
After they've gone, I lock up, turn off the stereo and the lights.
I carry you into your room and put you to bed. You pretend to stay asleep because you love to be carried. I used to do the same thing when I was a kid.
Your small bedroom, intended to be a dressing room, has no windows. It's dark except for the green glow of the night-light. I pull the covers up to your chin and kiss your warm head. “Good night, Minnow.”
Your voice is sleepy and sweet.
“I love you, Mama.”
J
ules has always had a way with animals. Now she's got an injured blue jay in her house. She says the patient has a broken wing. She describes the way the other jays squawk outside the windows and beat their wings against the screens. When she steps outside, they do flybys, grab pieces of her hair. She thinks they aim to free the one she's nursing back to health. But then she leaves the door open for all the blue jays, and one brave bird, the leader, she suspects, flies in to check on his friend. He steals a bit of food from the captive's cage. After that, it's as if they understand she means no harm.
Minnow, isn't she just like a heroine in a children's book? A beautiful princess with a squirrel on her shoulder and a bird lighting on her outstretched hand?
As she tells me about the blue jays, I picture the house she rents in Santa Monica. I've only seen it in photographs. It's a Spanish-style hacienda with a red clay roof and a center courtyard with lush green plantings, colorful floor tiles, and a fountain. Light shines through big windows onto English pine dressers, large abstract paintings, a velvet fainting couch, a marble bust, two crystal chandeliers, her bed covered in the finest Irish linen. Even the vegetables on the kitchen counter seem more still life than salad. She shares the splendor with her beloved companion, a sensitive, geriatric Yorkshire terrier named George.
“What does George make of all the bird activity?” I ask. We've already been on the phone for forty minutes by then. I switch ears as she asks George what he thinks.
“George thinks everything should be about George.”
We talk on the phone late at night. It's three hours earlier there, and she likes to stay up late. I can call her at four in the morning, New York time, and she answers after one ring.
Always, our talk turns to men. Jules is dating a powerful man in the movie business. He's married, so the relationship is hush-hush. He collects art and admires her good eye. They visit galleries together where she chooses the paintings, and he buys them for himself. It seems unlikely that he'll leave his wife and kids for her, but she says that's fine. She takes a painting class, cuts fresh flowers from her garden. She runs down to Mexico for a long weekend. And of course she's working. Doing a television series means long days and weeks. She says it's fun but exhausting.
I tell her my news. I've recently started seeing someone, too, a photographer I met at a Chris Whitley show. I describe the way we rip each other's clothes off and do it on the floor.
“Where does this happen?” Jules asks. She's never approved of my boyfriends.
“He has an apartment on Second and Tenth Street. It's a total crash pad. There's usually a roommate asleep on the couch.”
“Charming,” she says. “Has he met Minnow?”
“No, and he never will,” I say. “Don't worry. I'm not serious about him.”
“I hope you're being careful,” Jules says. Careful. Because in the original 1988 when was I ever careful? Condoms, diaphragms, sponges, jellies, but always there were months when I relied only on prayer, as in:
Please, God, let me get away with it this time and I promise next time I'll be more careful.
“Of course I'm being careful,” I say now.
I'm about to turn thirty. So is Jules, but she's still got another two months left of being twenty-nine. It seems a momentous birthday, an age that requires I should have my life together. I've been torturing myself about my nonexistent musical career. “I feel like a big failure,” I tell Jules.
“What are you talking about?” she says. “How are you a failure? You're supporting Minnow, building a real estate career. You're a talented songwriter and a great friend.”
It makes me feel slightly better.
“And you're a goddess and a savior of birds,” I tell her sleepily. It's starting to get light outside when we say good-bye.
I
n the original 1988, I open my eyes in Los Angeles, a city I'm unfamiliar with. It's hard to imagine that ten years later I'll buy a house here and know this city well.
I'm in town to meet the people at my new record company. They've put me up in a hotel just off Sunset and every morning I order the same thing from room service: a croissant with butter and jam, a pot of black coffee, and a pitcher of half-and-half.
Then I get dressed and pull on my brand-new cowboy boots.
The record company sends a car for me because I can't drive. I have my license, but I'm afraid. I'm afraid of getting lost in this strange city, afraid of missing an exit, or driving too slowly and being hit from behind. I'm afraid of so many things.
But my bank account has more money in it than it ever has before, thanks to a publishing advance. A bidding war has taken place between five record companies. Every day another major jumped in, making crazy promises that even in my total innocence I knew were too good to be true.
I signed with Harry Garfield for three reasons. One: he was the first to ask. Two: he'd signed some of my idols. Three: he said that we were going to make a record like Jackson Brown's
Late for the Sky
or Joni Mitchell's
Blue
.
Yesterday Harry Garfield walked me around to the various departments, introduced me to everyone; they smiled and shook my hand. They said they loved my songs and couldn't wait to work with me. Then Harry and I went to lunch and talked about choosing a producer. He made suggestions for how I could spruce up my image.
“Lose the backpack,” he told me. I carry a black leather backpack with me that has my notebooks in it and whatever else I may need. I told him I didn't understand why I had to lose it. He smiled and shook his head at me. “You're such an
artist,
” he said.
Somewhere in this city I know Gabriel is waking up. I haven't spoken to him in three years, but being in the same city makes me think of him.
I have a boyfriend, Tom, waiting for me back in New York, but that relationship seems doomed. When Harry Garfield met Tom he said I could do better, but I don't think that's why I've gone cold on him. I've tried to love him but I can't do it.
The car is late, so I sit down on the bed with my guitar. My Martin travels with me everywhere I go. I feel as if it contains the songs I've yet to write, or at the very least is a conduit. The guitar's warm rosewood body feels alive. It comforts me and keeps me from feeling lonely.