Vivian In Red (36 page)

I trace a pattern in the granite countertop with a ragged, bitten nail and wonder if Naomi’s guy would have dug up the same information anyway. It wasn’t anything remarkable, what I did. I interviewed the son of his late collaborator, is what started all this. Anyone would’ve have done the same. Maybe Jerry Allen wouldn’t have mentioned his theory about Vivian, though. He seemed to be telling that story specifically to Milo’s granddaughter. Surely he would have had chances to tell that story over the years, and he never did.

If only. If only I’d never freaked out at that Bed-Stuy interview, if only Daniel hadn’t broken it off. I’d have been working away in my career like always and if anyone approached me with a book I’d have waved them away: too busy. Going back further: if only Daniel had never flirted with pretty little Moira, I could have relaxed around him, trusted him, given him whatever he thought he needed, so that he didn’t leave me. So he won’t decide to move away to California if I can’t come through with enough eye contact to make him stay.

I haven’t called Daniel. He hasn’t called me. He also hasn’t popped up anyplace unexpectedly. It’s as if he has declared: your move. Though I miss him, I haven’t made that move. I realize now I probably won’t. My heart clenches against my will. After all, this is my doing. I could rally for him. I could form myself to his expectations and do away with the loneliness, the absence of him, this person who knows me. I’m choosing not to. I’m choosing not to change myself just because he thinks I should.

Alex clears his throat from across the room. I raise my hand to acknowledge him, but my eyes are blurring at the countertop, the tiny specks in the granite beginning to swirl with my concentrated staring.

Objects never care whether you stare back, which is what I like most about them.

I glance past Alex at the bedroom. Through the open door, I can see that he has opened his big suitcase and removed the contents of Vivian’s box, arraying them on the duvet.

“You hungry?” I ask. “We can go out for a bite. Or get some delivery.”

A shrug, and somehow he manages to toss his wavy hair away from his face in a way that looks nonchalant and masculine. “I had a bag of pretzels. I can hold off.”

“I feel bad for dragging you here and then the first thing we do is shut ourselves into an apartment…”

“Well, like I said, this isn’t supposed to be a fun vacation. I’ll save my pennies and pay my own way another time. That will be more fun, anyway.”

“We’re not going to talk about money, I thought.”

“Right. Never mind.”

When I lived here with Daniel, and for the brief time afterward alone, the bed was never made, except for maybe the duvet tossed up over the hills and valleys of rumpled sheets. When I moved out, I washed the sheets and smoothed it out so potential renters wouldn’t think the place looked gross.

So even though I know this used to be my apartment and my bed, it looks so foreign all straightened up like this that I easily toss away all thoughts of Daniel and focus on what’s really here, alive and tangible.

Alex hovers near the bed as I sit down slowly trying not to jostle the objects, like they’re sleeping and might be disturbed. There are playbills, the aforementioned steno book, its edges curled with age and careless storage. Yellowed news clippings and black-and-white photographs stare up at me from the bed. In the center of the array as if in a position of honor is an open book, a pressed flower crumbling on its pages. I start to touch the flower but my hand freezes midair, because I have just pictured the whole thing disintegrating. Instead I crane my neck to see the book’s title at the top of an open page. It’s
Gone with the Wind.

“Was the flower always in there?”

“Yes. I leafed through the book in case there were mementoes in it, or notes. That was all I found. I think it’s a pink rose.”

An image unbidden leaps to mind, of my grandfather in his fedora, handing a bouquet of roses to Vivian, or maybe pinning a corsage onto her dress. It could have come from anywhere, though. She could have plucked it out of a garden and taken it home.

As I extend my hand for the notebook, I see that I’m trembling. I snatch my hand back. “Maybe we’d better eat. I’ll go order.”

It’s an odd time of day to eat, so the delivery won’t take long, I know. Still, there’s time now to be filled, and no clear goal, as I’ve decided I can’t open that notebook yet. We return to the brown couch, half-covered by a throw blanket to obscure its wear and tear, and in my peripheral vision I sense the box growing larger, like something out of Lewis Carroll, until it fills the apartment and crushes us against the window.

I’ve left the TV, but there’s no cable service, so there’s nothing to watch, as I explain to Alex.

He shrugs that off. I offer to get him a beer, because I may not have planned very well to feed him lunch, but I did stock the place with basics like bread, butter, and beer.

Obtaining the beers only eats up two minutes, and so we both stare out the windows, from the opposite ends of the couch.

“It looks like rain,” I finally say, glad that the sky has provided me with conversation.

“Hmmm. It rained at home yesterday. Maybe those are the same rain clouds.”

“So how is it you could leave so easily? I thought it would take some time to … untangle, from work.”

“Ah. That. Well, see, there’s this assistant director everyone likes better. His name is Kevin and he is a musical theater kid from way back.”

“Would this be the work nemesis you mentioned in email?”

“Oh yes, it would. See, he was almost famous, in a small-town way. He played all the little kid roles in local productions all over West Michigan. You needed a kid, you found Kevin.
The King and I, The Music Man, Fiddler.
And of course,
Sound of Music
. Everyone was happy as hell to let him take over.”

“Can I ask you a stupid question, then?”

“Those are my favorite kind.”

“How did you end up in the job if you don’t sound like you even like it, it doesn’t suit you, and you say people don’t want you to succeed?”

“I fell into it, I guess. My band had just broken up, and the record store I was managing closed, and the previous guy had been basically casting all his girlfriends in all the good parts until it pissed off the wrong people. Which actually wasn’t so bad for the theater, because he seemed to really like screwing talented people. Anyhow, he left abruptly. Kevin hadn’t materialized yet, I think he was still in college. So they were up a creek kinda, and I offered to do it. Then I was swamped with work and trying to figure out all the stupid logistics of running a community theater, which I didn’t know a damn thing about, and then they hired this Kevin guy. To ‘help’ me.”

“Where’d they get the funding?” I know this much from the family business, to always wonder where the money comes from.

Alex snickers and takes a pull from the beer as rain begins to spatter the window. “I don’t know exactly but they can’t afford to keep us both. They’re waiting for me to fail.”

“What do they have against you?”

“I don’t look the part, I’m not good at sucking up to rich donors. I don’t have the right kind of drama background. I was in a couple plays in school but I didn’t stick with it. You know, I guess I’m waiting for me to fail, too.”

“Why?”

“You said it. I don’t like the job. It doesn’t suit me. But in order to pay rent, and eat, and not have to live with my mother, I need a paycheck of some kind, and for now it’s easier to keep working than it is to try and find something, because what, I’d work at Walmart as a greeter?”

“Do you have a degree?”

“Sociology,” he answered, a wry smirk unfurling. “Very useful. So, tell me your life story now. It’s only fair.”

“First, there’s one burning question I must have answered.”

“Yeah?”

“Your band’s name.”

He turns to face me, one lock of hair over his face until he rakes it all back with his fingers. “Tweeney Sodd.”

“Ha! The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, but with a twist!”

“Mock if you will, but I thought it was awfully clever.”

“Oh it is. Just please don’t tell me you carried a straight razor on stage.”

“No, because that would be literal, and literal is totally uncool.”

“And you were the growling front man, channeling Eddie Vedder as you draped yourself over your mic stand, hanging onto it like it was keeping you from drowning in your own tortured ennui.”

“I hate Eddie Vedder.”

“Jim Morrison.”

“We did do a killer cover of ‘Light My Fire.’ And you are changing the subject.”

In fifteen minutes, I catch him up on my own hapless career, arranged mostly by the interference of my bossy cousins. And how I almost managed to become a solid interviewer. My quiet presence was just enough to get people talking about anything, it seemed.

“And yet, I’m totally a fraud in this,” I explain to Alex. “I’m non-threatening, and not confrontational, and I let people forget they’re being interviewed. It’s not even by design, it’s just how I’m wired, and for a while I could get by like that. But it also means I don’t ask the tough questions when they should be asked, so someone who’s savvy, or angry… not a stoned poet or an earnest community reformer, but the source for a real, gutsy story… then it all goes to hell, as it did in dramatic flame-out fashion not too long ago. I was never a real journalist, and I knew it all along.”

I look down at the floor and clunk my beer on the table. “I envy people who know what they want, like my cousins. And why should that be so hard to know?”

Alex’s answer is interrupted by the pizza, and by now the gentle rain is full-on monsoon so I tip extravagantly.

I stick the pizza on the kitchen pass-through counter. “Listen to me going on about ‘oh woe is me I don’t know what to do with my life’ and that guy has to bike around delivering food in a frigging rainstorm for a few dollars an hour.”

“Other people’s problems don’t mean yours don’t exist. Anyway, maybe he loves his job.”

Naomi has said as much to me more times than I can count, after pointing out all the ways the Short family is charitable, which is all true as far as it goes, but the guilt is comforting to me. It’s like my ticket of admission to the life I have; it’s all good as long as I feel properly conflicted. Of course, I feel guilty about this, too.

We make small talk about the flight over the pizza, and finally I’ve eaten all I can manage, and Vivian’s box of keepsakes is still there, still large in my imagination.

Alex shoves the pizza box into the fridge with the leftovers, and helps me gather up napkins, rinse the plates. We line up our four empty beer bottles neatly along the tile backsplash.

He dusts off his hands and turns to me. “Are you ready now?”

“No. But here goes.”

I stop in the bedroom doorway, and Alex bumps into me lightly. He steps back and just waits there. I brace my hands in the doorframe as if he’s about to shove me through, though he has not moved or said a word.

I swallow, and my tired eyes unfocus a little and I let them. The rain tinks against the glass, the sky now the color of concrete, and looking about as solid, too.

“What if this turns my grandfather into a stranger?”

“Whatever all this means, it was sixty years ago. People don’t carry around their same selves for six decades. He’s still the same grandpa, to you.”

I pull in a long, steadying breath and let it gust out, before I step fully into the room.

M
ilo leaned against a lamppost, stretching his collar to let in some air. He tried to pick out which window was Vivian’s in the brick building. He’d circled the block now three or four times, having tried to form the resolution to walk up and ring the bell each time he rounded the corner.

He should make himself go home, just go to his own apartment and work on the song and forget Allen for now, just work, hard work could cure anything, just like hard work got his parents out of the ghetto and into the Bronx while Milo still had baby teeth. Hard work got them to write all those songs on that impossible deadline for
Hilarity
… Allen. He couldn’t shake off Allen. He was everywhere he looked, even in his nose, Allen’s shaving lather blended with the tang of summer sweat.