M
y father is teaching you to play chess. The two of you face one another across the board. When you take his knight, he says: “Very good.”
Too excited to sit still, you jump up and do a little dance.
“Concentrate, Minnow,” he says.
“Dad, she's a child.” I hear myself sound like a nag. I'm watching from the hallway, between the den and kitchen.
My parents have moved, after twenty-five years, to another split-level house, in another Long Island town. It's free of history and ghosts. I like the way it feels clean.
I never learned how to play chess. My father attempted to teach me when I was a kid, but I had no interest in it. It seemed too complicated. I remember he invited a little friend of mine to play instead, which made me jealous, but I pretended not to care.
He ignores me now, and you grow still. Your lovely hair falls in nutty-brown waves over your face and shoulders. You've picked out the plaid jumper you're wearing and also the red shoes, the ones we call your Dorothy slippers. You're completely focused on the board as my father considers his next move.
I pour myself a cup of coffee and join my mother at the kitchen table. The weekend papers are spread out across it,
Newsday
and the
New York Times
. I find the Arts & Leisure section in the pile. If it's a test of compatibility to be able to sit silently with someone and read, my mother and I fail this test, addressing one another when we are most absorbed in what we are reading. We listen to the other's thought or observation, halfheartedly, holding a finger on an interrupted sentence, waiting to return to it.
You come running in, Minnow, and climb onto my lap.
“I won, Mama,” you say, grinning. “Grandpa showed me how.” One of your front teeth is missing. You've wiggled it free in the dark, excited to get a dollar from the tooth fairy.
My father is right behind you. He joins us at the kitchen table. I predict he will last no longer than five minutes. It's Sunday, and the pregame beckons.
“What can I get everybody?” my mother asks. She stands at the refrigerator, the door ajar. She is scanning the packed shelves for our midmorning snack.
“Pancakes!” you say.
“You don't want pancakes,” my father says. “You just had breakfast.”
“With chocolate chips?” my mother asks.
“Yes!” You jump off my lap and hop around the kitchen enthusiastically. “Pancakes! Pancakes!”
“If Grandma wants to make them, you can have pancakes,” I say. I catch my father's disdainful glance, but ignore it and return my attention to an article I'm reading. It's about a recent scientific discovery. Evidently, every time a memory is retrieved, it is altered in the process.
“Pancakes, it is,” my mother says.
A
fter I walk you to school, I go to my office, which is just around the corner on Tenth Street off Perry. The neighborhood feels like a real village in the mornings, the scent of fresh bread wafting out over the street. I make a quick stop at the bakery for a coffee.
The sign above the storefront office reads
CLARK AND WINSTON, REAL ESTATEâSALES AND RENTALS.
Its elegant font is what attracted me to this particular agency. The bell on the door rings as I push it open, and the two owners look up. “Good morning,” they say, almost in unison.
Barry and Arnie sit at opposite ends of the room, with a number of desks in between them. Neither one is named Clark or Winston. The name was chosen for the respectability it suggests.
“Good morning!” I say. I'm still new and trying my best to bring the correct enthusiasm to the job.
I've been fortunate so far. I have what everyone tells me is beginner's luck. It's hard to make a living doing real estate rentals. Nevertheless, I've rented two my first month and have a new client coming in this morning. She needs to find a one-bedroom before leaving town at the end of the day.
Arnie calls me over to ask me what I plan to show her. We go through my list. He makes a couple of calls and finds another apartment that has just come on the market.
When my client arrives, I stand and shake her hand. She's a busy young lawyer relocating from Boston to New York City. I introduce her to Arnie, who is wearing a nice suit but still comes across as sleazy.
I'm polite, professional, and dressed the part, still I feel like an impostor as I lead her back to my desk and hand her our registration form to fill out.
The young lawyer rents the first apartment I show her, a beautiful one-bedroom with casement windows and perfect wood floors on Christopher Street. My fellow agents can't hide their envy. They think my good luck is using up the supply. Arnie gives me a pat on the back, which gives him an excuse to rest his hand on my ass.
To celebrate my luck I pick up some day-old roses at the Korean market, along with the half gallon of milk we need. At home, on the way to the kitchen, I notice my Martin in its stand, unplayed and patient as a good dog. Maybe I'll sit out back on the terrace and try to write something, I think. I put the milk away, cut the stems on the roses, and glance at the clock. I've got ten minutes before I need to be at school to pick you up.
I
n the original 1989, my first record is released.
We drive across country, Alan at the wheel, Marianne Mercurio in back, her cello beside her like a fourth person. We play in what feels like every small club in every town or city that has one.
After sound check, we walk around trying to see into second-floor windows, wondering what it would be like to live in that particular city or town. Maybe we'll put down roots in Austin, we say, or Santa Fe, or Portland.
We stop for meals at fast-food restaurants along the highway, and stay in Motel 6s and weird family motels, where the first thing you do when you get into your room is strip the dirty coverlet off the bed.
We play a game where one person improvises a noise and the next adds a sound and it keeps building, layers of shifting harmonies, lip smacks, whistles, mouth drums, and humming, until something strikes us so funny, it ends in gasping, hysterical giggles.
The shows are the best part. It feels good to play, and momentum is building. Mitch, the head of marketing at Warners, calls. I can hear the excitement in his voice. The single is getting adds. “I wanted to be the one to tell you,” he says, then lists the more than a dozen radio stations that are playing my record.
Every night there are a few more people in the audience than there were the day before. Suddenly we're playing for sold-out crowds. It seems to happen overnight. It energizes us through our exhaustion.
I wonder what Gabriel would think if he were standing in the crowd. When he hears my song on the radioâa song about himâdoes it make him miss me, just a little?
Sometimes I choose a fan-boy, the cutest one, and kiss him under a streetlight, or ride on the back of his motorcycle, or take him back to the motel. Always a part of me is thinking:
See Gabriel? Other men want me
.
T
hough most of what I know of him lives in my imagination, or in the past, or in your resemblance to him, Minnow, when I fantasize in the dark, it's still Gabriel who plays the lover. Other boyfriends come and go, but Gabriel is like a hole in a tooth. My tongue likes to run over and over it. It's been years since we've actually spoken, but my memories of him play like a TV show in syndication.
I'm aware that his real life continues. Watching the Grammys a couple of years ago, I heard his name announced. He'd won in some obscure category, during the pretaping part of the show. And once, while waiting for you at the dentist's office, I read in a magazine that he'd gotten a divorce.
I know that the real Gabriel Luna still exists, but to me he's no longer an actual person. My fantasies have become more real to me than the man I knew.
So I'm stunned one day to see his name on a marquee at a supper club in Midtown. I believe the year is 1992. When I see it, I think, Could it be that easy? Simply buy a ticket and take a seat? The potential power of the experience frightens me. But I talk Alan into going and spend nearly two weeks' worth of grocery money on the expensive tickets. I feel like a dirty drug addict using that money. It's like I'm being controlled by a madness I thought I'd outgrown. I try to justify it. I tell myself that I need to see him to scold him for never taking an interest in you.
On the night of the concert, I leave you uptown with Maria. You sense my agitation and linger at the door as we say good-bye.
“Go have fun,” I tell you. “I'll be back to get you first thing in the morning.”
When I get to the club, Alan is already waiting for me out front. He is his usual happy, laid-back self and doesn't notice how charged up I am. We're seated at a small table right up front. I order a glass of red wine and finish it before Alan's even taken a sip of his beer. I order another and drink half of it down.
“Whoa, Nelly,” Alan says.
I feel the warm confidence of the alcohol spread through my brain and body.
While we wait, I look around. This is a completely different scene from the downtown clubs I used to frequent, before you were born, where we paid five bucks at the door to stand in a packed crowd, watching a skinny boy play guitar on a makeshift stage. This place looks like it could be in Miami or Cleveland or some place other than New York City. Everything is red and black. There are round booths against the wall. People are dressed up, drinking and smoking, throwing their heads back, laughing.
Downtown, there would be an opening band, or two, or three. The headliner wouldn't come on before midnight. Here there is no opener. Gabriel is scheduled to go on at eight, and at eight-fifteen his band begins to play the intro to a song I know from the first note. Instantly, I'm transported back to 1982, to the Vantage and the salsa clubs on upper Broadway.
A trumpet player I don't recognize steps up to his microphone and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together . . .”
Gabriel walks out onto the stage and into the warm spotlight as his name is announced, nodding and smiling at the applauding crowd. He holds a pair of maracas in one hand. He's wearing the black-brimmed hat, a black T-shirt, and suit trousers. He closes his eyes and lifts his face to the spotlight as if in prayer. He moves simply and elegantly, a salsa step. Front and back, and front, back, front.
He is almost the same. Almost. Although I think he's been drinking. He seems less in control of himself. He avoids the high notes. Between songs, he talks too long, more lecture than stage patter. A guy in the back starts to heckle him. “Enough talk, already. Shut up and sing!”
Surely, Gabriel can hear the comments, but if he does, he gives no sign.
“Shut up, yourself!” someone shouts at the heckler, and the guy grumbles but quiets down. I signal the waiter for another glass of wine.
Gabriel brings his talk to a rambling end and introduces a love song. As he begins to sing it, the room erupts in applause, and then gets pin-drop quiet.
I remember the song from when it was brand-new, sung in a seaside town called Githion. I close my eyes and see a rumpled bedspread, doors open to a terrace, our clothes billowing on a line like sails. Gabriel, brown from the sun, playing his small guitar with its stiff nylon strings. Someone had told us Githion was the true location for the story of Helen of Troy. I loved him like lungs love breath.
While he sings the love song, he looks out into the audience and his eyes seem to rest on mine. I'm almost certain he is blinded by the stage lights and can only see me in silhouette. Still, it makes my heart leap. I think, in that moment, if he asked me to, I would run away with him. I would pick up right where we left off.
But the thought leads me back to you. I reach into my bag and take your fourth-grade class picture from my wallet.
After the show is over, Alan and I linger at our table while the room empties. “I want to say hello to him,” I tell Alan.
“Sure, let's go back,” he says casually, unaware of quite how much it means to me.
I scribble a note on the back of a cocktail napkin and hand it to a guy who stands by the stage door.
Within minutes, Gabriel appears. “Hey!” he says. “Thanks so much for coming.” He hugs me and shakes Alan's hand. Close up, he looks pale and tired. I catch my own reflection in the glass behind him and think I don't look much better. I'm flushed and puffy. My eyes are bloodshot from the wine.
“Great show, man,” Alan says.
“It was amazing to hear the songs again,” I say, thinking: Devastating is more like it. It's unreal to be in his presence after all this time, but I try to be cool.
We follow him backstage. “Amanda!” he says excitedly to a tall blonde leaning against a table. “This is Lisa Nelson, the best female songwriter I ever met!”
“Oh, hi!” She's got a southern accent, an American girl from Georgia, or someplace near. “I've heard so much about you,” she drawls.
I shake her hand and introduce her to Alan. Gabriel holds on to my arm as he speaks briefly to all the others who have come backstage to see him. He introduces me to everyone as a great songwriter. They look at me with respect and it feels good, but what I want, more than anything, is for them all to go away so I can have him for a few minutes to myself. In my hand, I clutch your fourth-grade picture. You look so like yourself in it, confident smile and bright eyes.
Your father doesn't give me a chance, though. Time goes by and the alcohol is wearing off. I see him fading before my eyes. He starts to get his things together to go and asks Amanda for a pen. He hands me a scrap of paper with his number. “Call me tomorrow,” he says. Amanda doesn't look worried. I guess she's not the jealous type, or maybe she feels certain that I'm no threat.
Alan and I leave through a back door under the red exit sign. The sidewalk is packed with theatergoers, and it's begun to snow. I think about how excited you would be to see it falling and decide to ride uptown with Alan and surprise you at Maria's.
On the subway, Alan mentions that Charlotte Winter is looking for someone to open for her on a few dates, someone who can travel light. “You could do it solo. Just you and your guitar,” he says.
It seems impossible to me, beyond my wildest dreams. “Charlotte would never go for it. And even if she did, what would I do with Minnow?”
“You could get your mother to stay with her. It's just a couple of weeks. I'm pretty sure they're all East Coast dates.”
“I don't know,” I say, but the idea of it seems to shift from completely impossible to merely unlikely. I think about the songs I might play if, by some miracle, it were to actually happen.