A Short Affair

Whatever Became of Whatsherface had doubtless become a national preoccupation (if not also an exercise in self-abasement; as a rule, the subject of your web sleuthing would never in a million years do a search on you). But she’d long been one of the looked-for, so tracking down an old classmate was a brand-new game for Sloozie Twitch.

So far, poking around another person’s digital residue felt defiling, as if she were rifling someone else’s underwear drawer. Getting the scuttlebutt on the long lost in the analogue era would have entailed, say, chatting with the mother on the phone, and only after proving bona fides. The target would hear about the call. By contrast, prying by search engine seemed cowardly. You weren’t required to declare yourself. You didn’t have to confess to a curiosity that granted this person an unacceptably large place in your history – worse, that allowed them a place on a rainy winter evening in your very present. These searches felt sneaky, underhanded, and strangely invasive, however ignorant of the impertinence the victim would remain. The violation recalled assault cases in which dentists felt up patients who were under general anaesthesia.

Except maybe the real revelation of these enquiries (with reading glasses, magnification two-point-five, and wine) was less the lowdown itself than what you hoped to find.

Thus before inputting Grier Finleyson into Firefox, when the surprising or simply boring results had yet to contaminate her virgin mindset, Slooz missed a valuable and currently rather rare opportunity for soul searching. Did she want to discover that her old suitemate from senior year in college had done spectacularly well for herself, or was she looking to crow over a shockingly poor showing? Surely the spirit in which she began this idle research might have testified to whether or not she was a Good Person.

Sloozie Twitch was getting too old to care about being a Good Person. (Even the handle contrived in her twenties exuded a youthful zing no longer fitting, but she was used to it, and still savoured the way the first name’s amalgamation of floozy and sleazy conveyed an indefinite dirtiness. Besides, there was no fucking way she was reverting to Susan Twitchel, who in her mind’s eye, being mousy and no-account, was a completely different woman.) Sixty this coming April, she’d risen and fallen in the public eye well before the advent of Instagram and Facebook, and decency was a social consideration. Although she didn’t conceive of herself as a recluse, the income from her recordings in the Eighties and Nineties (along with chunky annual cheques of forty-nine cents from Spotify thereafter) had been prudently socked away, thereby affording her the usual curse of what she thought she wanted: a cosy, solidly built cedar-shingled house on the Finger Lakes, with land attached and outbuildings. She had a powerful router and solitude up the ass.

Having naturally feared the inroads of decay, she was pleased to ascertain that having largely lived your life was restful. And it was interesting. She seemed to have arrived at precisely the age at which it was possible to assess matters – to make summary pronouncements, to step far enough back to see a life as a conclusive whole, as an object. Let’s face it: by sixty, the votes were in. You’d done what you were going to, and at best you would do a bit more of it. The centre-cut of her career had been too frenetic to provide for looking backwards – at the two ex-husbands and all the impractical foreign boyfriends, at the long graph of triumphs and setbacks like a jag of mountains against the sky: a Grammy nomination one year, a solo gig at the Sydney Opera House crushingly fallen through the next. But now the accumulation of all that messy history, a cranial form of hoarding, made her feel accomplished in an avocational sense. At last she possessed a big, fat past to examine, and its accrual had been work.

Which was not to say that Sloozie Twitch was retired – though she’d have accepted the label of has-been without rancour. She still gave occasional one-off concerts to die-hard fans, most of whom were at least as old as she was, though gigs in Asia or Down Under were no longer worth the plane journey. She granted an interview to Elle only last year. She continued to compose songs here – hopped up at first, eventually conceding that the new one sounded awfully like the last ten – if only to justify her purchase of the sleek black electric piano in the den.

Indeed, what had kicked off this digital hugger-mugger into the fate of a bygone acquaintance (friend being too strong a word) was keeping a hand in, however limply. This morning, she received an email approach from the producers of a heavily syndicated NPR programme called Injudicious Journals, in which celebrities of her second-rate ilk would read aloud confidential outpourings from their sapling years. Slooz possessed the requisite documents (several tear-spattered spiral notebooks, dense with tight scrawl in red cartridge pen). Yet it was one thing to court humiliation to a professional purpose on the radio – to advertise your self-confidence in your very willingness to expose your frailty. It was a much grimmer matter to grow privately chagrined, and perhaps permanently to destroy your cherished illusions about having been remotely bearable as a college student. So to decide on how to respond to the invitation that afternoon, she’d seated herself cross-legged in the attic under a dangling bare bulb and flipped open the damp cardboard covers with no little trepidation.

Her thoughts were often lame and clichéd, and not nearly as well expressed as she expected, given that Sloozie Twitch was renowned for her lyrics. This record was historically sloppy, too: few entries were dated, and one long, paranoid section was written in a code she could no longer crack. Worst of all, her younger self had faithfully chronicled her every feeling, but almost never the event that gave rise to it. So the notebooks were margin-to-margin anguish, fury, and pining, but the source of the anguish, the object of the fury, and whatever or whomever she’d been pining for were nowhere to be found.

The entry that inspired this evening’s Mickey Mouse espionage online was as weak on detail as any other. But something about the opening line – I have never before in my life been accused of any such thing, and I am stricken, mystified, groping for whether there is possibly any truth to it – dislodged a lost memory, which plopped into her lap as if a volume whose author’s name began with C, misfiled under F, had toppled from a high shelf. How odd, too, that the memory had ever gone missing in the first place.

After three years of ineffably disappointing higher education, admission to an Ivy League school already seemed a little chicken-shit, and by middle age Slooz would dismiss the imprimatur as meaningless. But that indifference was only possible by dint of having got in. If, annoyingly, an all-girls school, Barnard College was at least located in New York City (an ideal jumping-off place for the pre-famous), and the school further leveraged its muted prestige by institutional association with Columbia across the street. Still, in the latter 1970s, most of Barnard’s student housing was bleak and stingy, so it was a relief to have at last been awarded a room in a top-floor suite on West 116th Street for senior year. The more spacious residential arrangement had only one drawback: other people.

In any hothouse of five young women sharing dormitory accommodation, the casting was strict. There was firstly the Prima Donna – the luminary, the centre of all the action, the superstar. Secondly, a requirement for any proper leading lady, the Sidekick – the egger-on, the whisperer, the golem. Then the Mediator – the neutral party, who listened sympathetically and without judgement as indignant petitioners put their cases, and who as the custodian of much tantalising tittle-tattle would have held the most enviable position, barring the obligatory humility that manifestly disqualified the other four for the job. The Defector – the opt-out, above the fray, who spent most nights with an older boyfriend. Lastly, the Also-Ran. The Also-Ran played wannabe to the starlet’s authenticity. Her purpose was to play second fiddle to the genuine article. Her purpose was to be shown up.

Susan Twitchel was the Also-Ran. She was at least slim, but not tall. Her clear, accurate singing voice wasn’t thin, but it was small. It required amplification – which in due course it would obtain, albeit not when overheard seeping meekly out from under her bedroom door. Back then she dressed to be ignored, in oversize men’s button-downs and slumped jeans, and college classmates needed little excuse to overlook you. It would take her a few more years to accept that her face would never turn heads without make-up. The hair, too: more merely pale than blonde, it hung fine, lank, and lifeless, in lieu of Slooz’s subsequent discovery of products. At that time, her energy ran inward in a destructive churn. She was unsure of herself in a way that made her wary, which isn’t an attractive aspect, and she had a tendency to check and recheck what she was about to say until by the time she made the remark the others had moved on and had no idea what she was referring to. It was a timing problem that, with deft, syncopated pauses on stage, she would later turn to her advantage; the double-taking hesitations would be funny. Besides, most artists began as socially maladroit. Inadequacy in one medium drove you to another.

Secretly, beneath the dreary shirts, flat hair, and anxious mental editing, Susan Twitchel was ambitious, to a degree that astonished her now; the Slooz she’d grow into would marvel at the fire and ferocity of her younger self with a bitter envy she never aimed at other people. It would have been precisely the detection of this light burning under a bushel that made her suitemates leery – the two who were players, that is. The other two didn’t count.

The Also-Ran was lucky enough to bunk with Elsa the Defector, she who was never there, and therefore enjoyed a de facto single – which made both roommates lucky, because filtering off to her mysterious boyfriend, Elsa didn’t have to put up with Susan’s oboe practice. (For a young woman with an eye on pop music to have pursued a chiefly classical proficiency struck most people as incoherent. Foreseeing the wailing interludes that brought Sloozie Twitch’s debut album to the attention of the critics would have required more imagination than even Susan could marshal in those days, and the choice of instrument struck her as incoherent, too.)

Grier Finlayson – not Finleyson, an initial misspelling that would confound online searches for evidence of her later life until Slooz swapped the E for an A – was the Prima Donna. She was full-chested, and built on a grand scale in every respect. Grier was beautiful in that slightly odd manner that makes a woman stand out. Her eyes were too wide – not widely set, but too high, almost circular. Her hands flew widely also; dark and gesticulating, a tumbling, rapid talker, she should have been Italian. Freshman year, she’d suffered a bout of anorexia, a term only just entering the popular lexicon in the late 1970s that still seemed exotic. Evidence that the condition had been not only legitimate but had been allowed to become dangerously advanced, she’d lost much of her black hair, which had only partially grown back. It fuzzed from her scalp in an ethereal afro, touching in its sparseness, fuzzing delicately around her head as if drawn in charcoal softened by the smudge of a forefinger. The premature alopecia lent her a hint of tragedy. Somehow when Grier Finlayson devotedly followed Weight Watchers, sawing off slices of skinless, too-plump chicken breasts until they weighed in to the quarter ounce and wolfing gallons of programmatically permissible string beans straight from the can, the ritual didn’t seem quotidian, daytime-TV, but hallowed, ecclesiastical.

The suite they shared senior year was more commodious than the housing for lower classmen. But this was well before the client-based crowd-pleasing of modern universities, with their convection ovens, massage chairs, and dining-hall sushi bars. So while the bedrooms were larger than linen cupboards, the only common living space was the kitchen – where swabbing the spatter-patterned linoleum was fruitless because the flooring was manufactured to look dirty already, and where the windows wouldn’t completely close, so that mildew speckled their rattling wooden frames, and in winter the room was overheated and draughty at the same time. Yet five female seniors sharing vastly more capacious digs would still have allowed room for only one talent.

Grier secured that designation without a fight. With a round, enormous voice, she swooned over a keyboard in the same rolling, frenetic crescendos in which she talked. No amplification necessary. The songs she wrote were tumbling, too: confessional, anguished, accelerating. Her lyrics used the kind of imagery that on paper would have looked silly but that sounded inexplicably poetic when set to music – you know, the broken etching of my whole-winged soul or something. It went without saying if you knew the type that she was also an actress, scoring the leads in school productions of Gilbert and Sullivan – and Ibsen, too. From the September in which the five young women first convened, consensus reigned that it was Grier who had the goods, that Grier was the original, that Grier was the one who would go places.

Slooz couldn’t remember ever discussing with Grier why a piano powerhouse with a voice the size of the great outdoors hadn’t gone straight to Manhattan School of Music, but maybe the explanation was similar to her own. The Twitchels had been adamant that their daughter get a solid liberal-arts education, in their day believed to pave any life path. If she then continued to chase a kooky pop-music pipedream, at least she’d have a reputable degree to fall back on. (As a teenager, Susan took their demand for a Plan B as an insult. Only once she achieved them did Slooz regard her youthful aspirations as preposterous. Her parents’ real mistake was not forcing her to get a BA in engineering.) This parental insistence on educational breadth explained why Susan wasn’t even a student in the music department, but was enrolled in the recently contrived Interdisciplinary Arts. The programme was ramshackle – poorly conceived, poorly run, poorly taught, and thus anything but reputable, but it was too late to warn her parents that they were squandering their money on a travesty.

Perhaps because it was so transparently tinker-toy, IA was a small department. Amongst the five students concentrating in music, only Susan and Grier were focusing on composition, both with an eye to becoming singer-songwriters. Anyone assuming that this would make the two suitemates natural allies would have to be an idiot.

Instead, enter the Sidekick. Myra Haas must have been an English major, because these people always were. Her intelligence thrived within circumscribed boundaries, where the rules were clear and there was such a thing as a right answer. In other words, she was a good student, in the sense that made so many good students flail in dismay once outside the comforting confines of a curriculum. Accordingly, her vague career ambitions were academic; when you flourish in a university setting, you want to stay there. She wielded a generous Latinate vocabulary. She had mastered proper footnote form. She invested in flashy plastic binders for her assignments, and always waited for the Liquid Paper to fully dry before correcting a typo. She was skilful at regurgitating a professor’s lecture in that gently rearranged fashion that flattered the teacher while fostering the infeasible illusion that the paper also included innovative content. Higher education’s ideal, Myra was a supremely competent synthesiser, but she could not come up with anything indisputably new if her life depended on it. To be fair, most people couldn’t – which was why the reinvention ‘Sloozie Twitch’ would eventually own an estate on the Finger Lakes, a slate-grey Audi A5, and a bolt-hole on the coast of Belgium.

Myra’s appearance mirrored her mind. Everything was functional and in the right place. She was what you would draw when depicting a pretty girl if you had never been in love. It was perplexing why so many pleasantly symmetrical young women still left something to be desired, unless that very expression nailed it. What was missing was something – something intriguing, unknowable, elusive, out of reach – to be desired. Myra’s looks were too available.

Yet she did have a sidling slyness about her. Often mocking and unashamedly superior, she was the mistress of the unsubstantiated anecdote. Cracking a grin, she’d perch on that high stool in the kitchen and peer up through her lashes with, Well, I know I shouldn’t tell you this, but . . . That facial expression always reminded Susan of the daggered posters for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Myra seduced through collusion. She was conspicuously vain about her IQ, so that those she befriended were complimented by the implication that they must be intelligent, too. She enticed confederates with the prospect of protection from the pointy end of her derision.

Myra surely attached herself to Grier, not the other way around. By instinct or calculation, the Sidekick sensed that Grier’s passion and panache provided cachet by association. So they were inseparable – Myra made sure of that. And what better to cement the tie than a common adversary.

Elsa was a poor prospect for the fulltime position of antagonist if she was chronically AWOL; you could only get so much mileage from despairing behind the absentee’s back that to squander senior year on a boyfriend was politically retrograde, vocationally self-destructive, and criminally wasteful of what, in those days, was hilariously considered high tuition ($6,000 per year! Upper-end refrigerators cost more than that). Pam the Mediator (her surname was now irretrievable, for Pam not only had the kind of name one forgot; she was the kind of person whose name one forgot) made an even more farcical target. Quiet, sexless, and made of straight lines, Pam wore glasses with big, brightly coloured frames that would become all the rage in the following century, but were not fashionable in 1977. She did all the reading for her courses and avoided conflict. She was probably studying social work, and if she wasn’t then she should have been. Pam was not in the game.

Regarding the vast majority of both semesters – right up until relations grew overtly unpleasant – it would have been self-pitying in the extreme for Slooz to remember that duo as having been cruel to her. Even at the time, whatever injury Susan did experience was mild enough to make her worry about being oversensitive. She’d mistrusted her sense of exclusion from the central life of the suite as perhaps the inevitable consequence of herself having been standoffish. Still, those two did seem to take turns dropping by the Friday-night Columbia Student Union jam sessions whenever Susan was taking part – as if trading off during a stakeout so that one of them could go for coffee. For they appeared to be keeping tabs on her, a mission quite distinct from providing sisterly support, a popular if optimistic fiction during the flowering of ‘women’s lib’.

Myra was a master of damning with faint praise. She’d describe Susan’s new song as ‘really tuneful’, and what did that mean? That it had a tune? Or she’d commend Susan’s intonation for ‘getting a lot better’. As for Grier, the Prima Donna was seldom critical. With others, her specialty was effusion, and (if with a touch of melodrama) she primarily disparaged herself. But she would fall into anguished throes of sympathy with Susan over whatever was she going to do with this oboe business, when she spent more time shaving reeds than actually playing the thing, so that maybe she should think about taking up a different instrument but gosh which one would that be, and she’d grow so hyperventilated about this matter that Susan would forget for minutes at a go that it was her problem.

In retrospect, Susan’s college compositions truly were uneven. Much of her experimentation flopped, and her voice, both instrument and style, hadn’t settled. For female vocalists back then, the cultural atmosphere was still dank with the drippy despondency of Janis Ian, and Sloozie Twitch would later find her stride among the fiercer, more ragged ranks of Kate Bush and Tori Amos, while sometimes falling into sassy step with Rickie Lee Jones. Susan’s early songs were too depressing.

Yet few young women would have come into their own by the age of twenty-one, and the predictable hit-and-miss of this period still didn’t explain why her suitemates greeted even her most confident performances with a penultimate enthusiasm. By contrast, when bundling back to the dorm in a posse after attending opening night of My Fair Lady, at which the promising Miss Finlayson as Eliza had drawn a standing ovation, the superlatives flew, and Susan’s confederates could have danced all night in the glow of their idol’s reflected glory. Susan Twitchel made a soldierly effort, but Grier Finlayson – now, Grier Finlayson was the real deal.

Indeed, so irrefutably had this hierarchy been established that both the Susan of that era and the Slooz of Christmas Future would grow equally confounded why at the end of that year it would still seem necessary to put the Also-Ran in her place one last time.

The pressure-cooker competition on a college campus was wont to suggest that students who distinguished themselves within its grounds – impressed the professors, led the clubs, copped the grades and Phi Beta Kappa keys – were streaking across a finish line at the head of the pack. Only senior year did it dawn dimly on some students – if only on the smart ones, and not the book-smart, but the biologically smart ones: the real race hadn’t even started.

It was this very creeping awareness that how well or badly they performed on their senior projects was of no earthly importance whatsoever that inevitably drove even the animal-smart kids like Susan to focus exclusively on that project with redoubled ferocity. The intolerable alternative was to face the fact that on the other side of graduation they had accomplished nothing, they were nothing, and they were lost.

To substitute for a senior thesis, IA students with music concentrations were required to deliver full-length recitals to live audiences. Susan planned a contemporary programme of original songs, and put together a cabaret to be performed in a dark, sticky campus bar at Columbia called the Culvert. Subtly worn down by her suitemates’ too-moderate approval all year, she was private about her line-up, and rehearsed only in a music-department practice room with the door closed. She mixed up the running order so that the few heavier tunes would never drag the mood of a set to morose. For this second semester, something had started to flow. She’d finally discovered rhythm, so this tranche of new work had drive. Yet the untried tunes felt vulnerable. She was still polishing the lyrics, more personally exposing than her earlier songs, which had hidden under a cloak of nonspecific glumness. She even dared a number called ‘Under the Radar’ that hinted at the experience of feeling underestimated, of cultivating a rising, unobserved excellence by stealth. In an attic nearly four decades later, she’d discover the first verse and refrain in red cartridge pen:

I broadcast on frequencies between your stations.

I lurk on tiny islands unclaimed by other nations.

I wail in registers only dogs and deer detect.

You’re colour blind and I glow candy-apple red.

Watch your back! I’m coming up under the radar.

Watch your back! I’m coming up under the radar . . .

Susan drafted a pianist a year behind her in the programme as an accompanist, who could duet with the oboe cadenzas that she incorporated into her tunes for the first time. Considering how the whole evening ended up making her feel, it was a testimony to the force pulsing through ‘Under the Radar’ that thereafter she continued to play around with oboe interludes, refining what would at length become her signature sound.

Make no mistake: the cabaret went swimmingly. Pulling out all the stops, she’d bullied friends, family, and fellow IA students into showing up. Once the first set was underway, the full house left off looking at watches, too. Anyone who appears in public will tell you that it’s wildly obvious from the stage how a performance is going down, and Susan led this crowd by the leash.

She was tapping into something, a presence. Finally at ease before an audience, she didn’t apologise in the intros, or resort to self-deprecation. She seemed to have expanded to fill out a wider perimeter, as if the mic amplified not merely her voice but her very being. This iteration of Susan Twitchel was just as true as the regular-sized one. She was acting all right, but the role she was performing was herself – not a fraud or simulacrum, but her real self. The more searing her vocals, the more vaulting her reedy intervals, the wittier her patter between songs, the bigger and more bona fide she grew. She finally grasped why some people crave live performance like a drug, and it wasn’t from a need for love, but from a lust for scale. There was an interior magnitude you could never achieve on your lonesome.

The quantity of new material being limited, it was fortunate that she’d reserved a couple of songs for encores. The other thing you can always tell from the stage is the difference between wholehearted and merely compulsory applause, and this clapping bounced off the low ceiling of the bar with a spanking resonance and rapid tempo that you never got from duty.

Down from Connecticut for the occasion, her parents took her out for a congratulatory dinner, so she didn’t get back to the suite until nearly midnight. When she entered the kitchen, Pam mumbled an anodyne ‘nice job tonight’ and fled to bed. Grier was pacing in her quilted magenta bathrobe. The Sidekick was perched upright on the high stool, eyes shiny and darting, like a bird of prey on an outstretched arm.

‘A cut above okay,’ Susan said. ‘You know, the Indian place. They put the same sauce on everything, but it’s a good sauce.’ She didn’t want to talk about dinner. None of her suitemates had come up to her after the show, which she excused in the magnanimity of her success as their allowing fans who’d a distance to travel home to monopolise the star. Obviously they’d have plenty of opportunity to wax eloquent about Susan’s tour de force back at the dorm.

‘Not really,’ Susan said quizzically. ‘This is pretty comfortable.’ Wearing all black was hackneyed, but she’d varied the textures with a silk shirt and leather vest. The jeans fit for once, and she’d bought the boots especially for the cabaret. With a slim red scarf at her neck as a snazzy accent, in Susan’s terms this was dressing up. She was reluctant to swap the hip duds for a bathrobe, thereby resigning herself that the highlight of her undergraduate education was officially over.

‘Because I’m afraid we’re going to have to talk,’ Myra said, clasping her hands on her knee.

‘Myra, will you stop being coy?’ Grier exploded at last, raking her fingers through the ethereal fluff of hair. ‘You copied me! You copied me, okay?’

‘. . . Ho-ow?’ Susan asked carefully, having trouble adjusting to a very different encounter than the Aw, shucks bow-taking she’d anticipated.

‘Well, let us count the ways.’ Myra curved her elbow atop her knee, rested her chin on her knuckles, and slid a forefinger alongside her cheek. The motion was feline, the pose inquisitional. ‘Style, delivery, content. If someone had led me into the Culvert blindfolded, I’d have bet the farm that I was at Grier Finlayson’s senior recital.’

‘You don’t have a farm.’ It was the sort of stalling crack one concocted in a state of stupefaction. ‘And maybe the reason you don’t have a farm,’ Susan added, ‘is you’ve made lousy bets like that with it.’

‘No?’ Myra said. ‘Then why was she so secretive about all this new material? Scuttling off to a rehearsal room, when usually she fishes for compliments by practising here?’ They must have conducted this conversation in Susan’s absence, and were repeating it for her benefit.

‘I can see how just being around someone else’s work all the time, it could get into your head,’ Grier said.

‘But at a certain point, you have to step back and realise you’ve been influenced,’ Grier said. ‘Or worse. That you’ve been channelling someone else’s voice. You step back and realise that – that what you’re writing doesn’t belong to you!’

‘It’s also called the sincerest form of flattery,’ Grier said. ‘But Susan, I just can’t . . . I really don’t need that kind of compliment right now. I’m under a lot of pressure. My stepmom’s gone back to drinking, I just gained another two pounds on a diet of canned green beans, that essay on Joyce is due at the end of this week and I haven’t even started it, and my senior recital is twelve days from now and I just don’t need this!’

‘Don’t need what?’ Susan cried. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Yet she was about to discover that the more she denied the charge, the more valid it would appear. Later she’d puzzle over how one ever proclaimed one’s innocence without sounding guilty. I did not! perfectly translated Oh, shit, you caught me.

‘Seriously,’ Myra said. ‘That stuff you sang tonight didn’t sound, even to your own ears, strangely familiar?’

‘It sounded familiar because I’ve been working my ass off on these tunes since mid-term break, and when you sing your own work over and over, yes, it starts to sound fucking familiar!’

‘That little dying fall at the end of the line?’ Myra needled. ‘The deliberate breaking on the high notes? You could have taken a course in Grier’s vocals. Congratulations, you aced the final.’

‘Our voices don’t sound the same in the least,’ Susan protested. ‘Grier’s projection is way better, and she’s got, I don’t know, more – mass.’

She’d meant to disarm by sucking up, but the choice of noun, amongst women, was unfortunate. ‘Thanks,’ Grier said.

‘Your voices sound similar enough when you shove the mic down your throat,’ Myra said sweetly.

‘It wasn’t only the colouration,’ Grier said. ‘It was the lyrics, too. Bringing in whales in the second number, and then you mention an egg timer in the refrain, which is exactly the same as “Kerosene”, which I wrote in December—’

‘So we’re both suggestible!’ Susan cried, waving her hand at the egg timer on the counter between them. ‘The rest of the lyrics don’t overlap at all!’

‘If it were only the once,’ Grier went on, ‘maybe it would be a coincidence, but once you throw in several dozen coincidences it’s not called coincidence any more, it’s called a pattern! A consistent, relentless, and yes, for all I know purposeful pattern, and I just feel robbed! The way you used all those slant rhymes—’

‘And the juxtapositions – the “rancorous cherry blossom” and the “tedious joy” and the “woolly wine”—’

‘Oh, who cares, it’s the same technique! The same jarring, dissociative, apples-with-oranges, slightly surreal fish-on-an-operating-table technique, and where do you think you got it? The “glittering sorrow” and “gushy belligerence” and “angry relaxation” . . . The “careful daring” and “brave cowardice” and “idiotic intelligence” – all that good badness and evil virtue . . . I mean, I was too embarrassed to take notes in the Culvert, but it was like – it was like you weren’t, you weren’t too embarrassed, almost like you had been taking notes!’

Susan didn’t recognise any of these citations. But when Grier was on a roll, Susan had learned early in the academic year not to interrupt.

‘Taking notes in more than one sense,’ Myra chimed in. ‘Taking Grier’s notes. The melodies. Like, that fourth song, what you called “Gangrene” or something—’

‘Hmm-hmm-hmm,’ Myra hummed in an ascending arpeggio. ‘That’s straight out of Grier’s “Rock Covers Paper”.’

‘Three notes? You can’t accuse someone of musical plagiarism on the basis of three notes!’

‘It was a lot more than three notes, Susan,’ Myra chided, looking away as if out of decorum.

There were two of them, and they corroborated each other, while Susan’s lonely refutation was subjective and self-interested. She was beginning to feel crazy. Was there something to the allegation after all? Had she subconsciously absorbed lines and riffs and whole phrases to which she’d only half-listened in the dorm, and then unwittingly parroted back that background noise in the guise of new compositions? But how could that be? That hadn’t been what it felt like to write them!

‘I—’ Susan floundered. ‘I don’t know, I – I really just don’t see it, I – I was so excited because the tunes finally started to tick over, and I could hear them unspool in the back of my head almost like they were playing themselves, and I was at long last able to really say something, express what I feel and stop hiding behind the, you know, mopey vagueness of the earlier stuff . . . To be more heartfelt, like the songs I made up as a kid and sang to my little brother . . . I thought the new material was pretty good, I . . . thought it sounded like me, the real me for once, and now you . . . I don’t see it, I . . . I wasn’t trying, I wasn’t trying to . . .’ To her horror, Susan had started to cry.

‘Typical,’ Myra remarked under her breath. ‘Turning around who’s really the injured party.’

Grier put a hand on Susan’s shoulder as the ‘thief’ crumpled into an aluminium frame chair at the dining table. ‘Okay, I believe you, I believe you can’t hear it, or at least that you don’t want to hear it, and why would you? I believe you didn’t do it on purpose exactly but you also have to understand how it makes me feel. I mean, I’m glad you like my stuff and I’m even kind of touched you like my stuff but I can’t help it, I’m also upset, all right? I feel a little – a little abused, taken advantage of, like you think you can just help yourself to me. Like I’m some smorgasbord, and there will always be enough to go around. But I don’t have anything extra to give away right now, you understand? This stuff with my stepmom, it’s left me wrung out, and school’s almost over and I have no idea where I’m even living this summer and that kind of anxiety always makes me eat – and then you come along and . . . take the one thing I have to protect me, my only solace, the one thing that’s mine, the very centre, the core, the essence of what’s mine.’

‘I don’t see it.’ Susan had dropped her head and was shaking it back and forth so that her hair got stuck in her snot.

‘I’ve heard apologies before,’ Myra said. ‘And honey lamb, that didn’t sound like one.’

Grier broke away. ‘Look, this is pointless,’ she told Myra. ‘I told you, what’s done is done. She may not “see it”, but the committee will, which means I’ve got twelve days to come up with a whole new programme. I’m damned if I’m graduating from this dump with the faculty claiming that I copied her.’

Little remained of the semester, and Susan made herself scarce at the suite. But she still had to return to sleep, which meant that she couldn’t altogether miss out on what had become the dominant drama of their quintet: the composition of completely new songs for Grier’s recital. The Prima Donna pulled multiple all-nighters, which required a handful of illicit uppers, a steady stream of caffeine, and countless cans of string beans.

Shortly after the already-celebrated showdown over alleged copycatting, on an afternoon Grier had crashed catatonically to bed and Myra was out, Susan corralled Pam against a countertop with a mug of malted milk. ‘Okay, you were there,’ Susan said. ‘Was I doing some kleptomaniacal imitation of Grier – channelling her – or are those two out to lunch?’

Pam’s plain face constricted. ‘Well, I can see, from some perspectives, how they might have interpreted it that way . . . But I can also see how you might not recognise the similarities, or maybe even how, for you, there wasn’t much to recognise . . .’

Pam’s eyes flashed with a flintiness that Susan didn’t know was in her. ‘What I do think is that this is a terrible way to end senior year, and you and Myra and Grier should try to reconcile and put this behind you. If you don’t, I think you’ll all regret it.’

‘You can’t “reconcile” if you’re living in alternative universes. I’m not apologising for something I didn’t do, and they’re the ones, in my view, who owe me an apology. Which won’t be forthcoming either. So I repeat: off the record, if that makes it easier. Was there anything to that accusation? You’re the only one without a dog in this race.’ At the time, it still seemed a stylish expression.

‘Only you know.’ With that, Pam slipped between the counter and Susan’s malted milk and pronounced no more on the matter.

Call it ungenerous, but grace is rare at barely twenty-two, and Susan declined to attend Grier’s recital. Presumably after all the theatrics, the young woman the suite had nominated as their one true wunderkind did fill out her concert with entirely fresh material, though if the snatches escaping Grier’s bedroom were any indication the new songs sounded pretty much like the old ones.

Barring an exchange of phone numbers on graduation day that Susan interpreted as an empty exercise of social form, that would have been it, save for a postscript near the end of the ensuing summer. Out of the blue, Myra called Susan at her sublet and asked her to come by for a drink. (Unsurprisingly, she and Grier had found an apartment together, and they, too, had stayed on the Upper West Side.) Intrigued, and coming to realise that all along she’d been hoping that the doyens of 12C would eventually come to like her, Susan accepted the olive branch.

Yet rather than providing for a halting truce, the occasion was jittery and superficial, discussion mostly centring on home décor, until those two got to the point – pulling out a case of potions and an order form. Grier started chattering about how much more fully her hair was growing in now, and she wasn’t being confiding. Obviously desperate for income to cover their rent, these newly matriculated liberal-arts graduates had signed up to sell supplements for a nutritional company that conformed to the personalised-harassment-cum-blackmail model of Amway and Tupperware. Susan Twitchel wouldn’t have got her invitation to submit to this sales pitch until late August, because clearly the doyens had already run through their genuine friends, first cousins, and neighbours in the building, and were now down to the long-shot B-list. Mortified for all concerned, Susan didn’t buy anything, and left most of her Chablis.

These days Slooz preferred Malbec, of which she took a few contemplative sips in her messy Finger Lakes study. The chill from hunkering over that clammy carton of woe in the unheated attic all afternoon still hadn’t ebbed, even after a hot dinner and an hour at this computer. The shiver seemed emotional. Perhaps she had too vividly summoned the experience of being out in the cold in a larger sense – of being so disgracefully young, so hideously hopeful, so inanely certain that baselessly high expectations were fated to be met.

From this vantage point, the confrontation over her purported musical imposture was absurd. At that age, none of them would have developed a voice distinctive enough to emulate. Those two had merely been miffed that Susan Twitchel was better received in the Culvert than she had licence to be and was getting ideas above her station. Besides which, mimicry was a gift at which Slooz had never excelled. Sit her down and order up an Elvis Costello song, it would come out sounding like one more cut from Short Walk on a Long Pier, and nine out of ten of her fans would identify the artist on the first guess. Critics hadn’t been universally admiring, but she was fairly sure that the word derivative had made no appearance in reviews. In the big picture anyway, everyone derived from everyone else, since they all emerged from the same cultural primordial soup, in which Grier, Slooz and Elvis were fungible chunks of carrot.

Yet if she’d forgotten about the altercation altogether until flipping to that journal entry, the trauma couldn’t have left her irreparably scarred. Sure, she’d felt wounded at the time, but the incident no more fazed her in the present than did boo-boos from tumbling to the sidewalk at the age of four.

So why on earth had she initiated this half-hearted investigation into Whatever Became of Grier Finlayson? The you-copied-me thing was nugatory. What did cling was the memory of having been cast as second string – of living in the shadow of the Chosen One, and fearing that her own role of Also-Ran was well deserved. Of worrying that her suitemates saw something not up to scratch in her that was real and incorrigible. For most of her adulthood, Slooz had washed between buoyant self-assurance and this doomed, hobbled sensation, a suspicion that she didn’t have the goods and never would. Doubt of her endowments persisted into the heyday of her career (longer ago than she cared to admit), and had served as a useful spur to productivity: she was forever proving that she and the likes of Grier Finlayson were cut of the same fine cloth.

Arguably, if she were meant to know how Grier turned out, then they would still be in touch, and Grier would tell her what happened over coffee. Instead, Slooz had stooped to an anonymous fishing expedition – first clearing up the spelling issue, then establishing that Grier’s married name was Danilowicz.

Her husband was a banker. They had twin boys, but not until 2000 – when Grier had to have been at least forty-three. A multiple birth at that age hinted at IVF, and so perhaps also at years of frustration and heartache before an implantation took. According to the public property registry, the couple owned an apartment on East 98th Street.

Grier wasn’t on Facebook, but she was on LinkedIn, where the Prima Donna advertised the following:

‘I plan parties, sometimes with themes. I write original lyrics for parties, and perform both commissioned work and standards in your living room. Let me write a birthday song for your child, specially tailored to their interests!

‘I can also dress you for any special occasion, including making over your whole wardrobe. Let someone who has the eye transform you into all that you were meant to be!’

Grier Finlayson also showed up on an historical list of music internships at an arts institute in Colorado, under the interns for 1982. In the absence of any Wikipedia page, Slooz found evidence of two performances: in a small Chicago club in 1996 and a dinner theatre in Kansas City in 1998. Even allowing for the fact that the Web didn’t really take off until around 1995, these were slim pickings. As of the twenty-first century, the sparse trail of digital breadcrumbs dried up completely. Under neither her maiden nor her married name had Grier left any professional footprint in almost twenty years.

So her husband supported her. The children could soon be off to college, hence the party-planning and makeover promotion: she’d need something to do.

There was a photo. One photo, as far as Slooz could discern, on the entire internet. It was a very bad photo. It was such a bad photo to choose to accompany your LinkedIn profile that it could only have been posted because the subject’s horror of the camera made the selection at hand negligible. The phobia would have to have been so drastic that the ordeal of having another photo taken for social networking presented itself as even more forbidding than ensuring that nobody would ever hire you to design their themed party, sing at their house, write a birthday song for their child, or refurbish their wardrobe.

The shot had no date, and could have been old. She is shying from the lens, cutting her eyes askance. Though the eyes are recognisable, their gleam has retracted to pinpricks, and they look slittier. Her coat collar is raised. The grin is nervous, a little shit-eating. Her hair is full, dark with henna highlights, closing around her chin and trailing in an uneven zig into her eyebrows – so either the hair did grow back or she’s wearing a wig. She’s sitting in the passenger seat of a car, leaving the impression that the photographer, snatching a rare opportunity, has caught – his wife? – unawares. She is only a measure thinner than she was in college, so literal contraction doesn’t explain the impression that this woman has shrunk.

She looks neurotic. She looks in retreat. She looks like someone you would have to cosset, of whom sons would be protective, lying to strangers that Mother is ill. She looks like a woman who can be difficult, who is fragile, for whom exceptions are frequently made.

To make herself feel better – though why Slooz felt bad could have stood examination – she impulsively input ‘Myra Haas’ into the search field. As her forefinger hovered above the return key, this time she took a moment to place her bets. What would have happened to Myra Haas? Myra was practical. She wasn’t creative, but she was wily. So whatever arty or intellectual notions she nursed in college would have quickly fallen by the wayside. Applying that dry intelligence of hers, she’d have earned an advanced degree in business or law. It was the 1980s, after all. She’d have married a go-getter in financial services, for it was Myra who belonged with a banker. So she’d be well-to-do, and a live-in Eastern European nanny would have raised her kids. She’d solicit corporate donations to cancer charities, if only to attend the swank fund-raisers. She’d still be competitive, so she’d be rail thin.

Myra Haas married Alan Metcalf, a representative of the same nutritional-supplement company whose wares she sold right out of college. They had no children. She was fond of animals, especially cats. She never left New York. She was a disciple of a ‘spiritual healer’ whose name Slooz didn’t recognise, and worked part-time for years as a counsellor in the shyster’s clinic.

This information was tidily all in one place on legacy.com, because Myra Haas was dead. In lieu of flowers, the bereaved were asked to donate to a variety of nonprofits with phrases like ‘furry friends’ in their names. The listing only asserted that Myra had died ‘suddenly’ in 2012 from causes unexplained. She would have been fifty-six. So much for the efficacy of nutritional supplements.

There was a lone picture too, and once again Slooz was flummoxed. If you were going to pick a single photograph of someone you presumably cared about for a memorial page on legacy.com, why would you choose this one? It was a bit out of focus, though even in black and white the eyes displayed a telltale sidling slyness: this was Myra Haas, all right. Age-wise, the photo was wildly out of date; she couldn’t have been more than thirty-five in this shot. Still, the face had expanded.

Myra led a weird, fringy life, and she got fat. Beyond legacy.com, further searches on myra haas, myra haas barnard college, myra metcalf, myra haas metcalf, and even myra metcalf with the spiritualist thrown in turned up no relevant hits whatsoever. In internet terms, she was invisible. Yet on a sole point Slooz had been right: once you were rounding on sixty, the vote on what you’d amounted to was definitely in, since for Myra that tally was finalised by fifty-six. Closing the laptop, Slooz was embarrassed to find herself considering whether there was a song in all this.

Those two turned out rather badly. Most people turn out badly, at least by the grubby measure of a Google search. In parts per billion, the concentration of folks who distinguished themselves amidst the slosh of humanity resembled the proportion of active ingredients in quack-homeopathy cures. Which is why Slooz wasn’t upset by being called a has-been. At least a has-been had been.

Of course, you could only convincingly piss on celebrity if you were already famous, and Slooz had been just successful enough to grow a bit Groucho about the club of worldly glory. That is, while she’d hardly clawed her way to the top of the heap – when her CD sales were at their highest, she might have been compared to Tori Amos, but nobody was comparing Tori Amos to her – she had clambered high enough to get a look at the view. No one would be listening to any of this middlebrow pop music a hundred years from now, and even if they were, a point-blank asteroid would hurtle along to melt their ear buds and everything else, too. All that will have mattered about Sloozie Twitch is that she two-timed a tender second husband who might otherwise have gone the distance, and she would die alone. In kind, whatever truly mattered about her old suitemates was probably not available online – though, alas, by all appearances, neither had forged a career sufficiently illustrious for either woman to discount it.

Full circle, then: never mind the answers she actually found. What had she wanted to find?

She’d wanted to find what she found. She wanted to confirm that Susan Twitchel had made good, while these snide, condescending classmates from her senior year of college had come to nothing. A stray journal entry from those distant days had brought back an acrid memory and stirred old resentments. In running those mouldy names through a search engine, she’d wanted to gloat.

But the bad feeling that had nagged her ever since finding Grier’s pitiable listing on LinkedIn was clearly guilt. Grier Finlayson commanded a more impressive instrument than Susan Twitchel from the get go, and had been much more disciplined about practising scales and doing vocal exercises. As Sloozie Twitch, our Susan may have cleverly palmed off the weaknesses of her voice as style, but by any standard measure Grier was the superior vocalist, which ought rightly to have reaped greater rewards than children’s birthday parties. Even Myra: call her intelligence ‘dry’ or ‘uncreative’, she was still smart, medically smarter by a yard than her suitemate Susan, a B-plus-to-A-minus student with marginal SAT scores who could only have been admitted to Barnard by the skin of her teeth. Myra was a hard worker who followed directions and submitted papers on time, exhibiting just the reliability for which the working world was starved. She possessed excellent writing skills, and she was good at public speaking – why, Slooz could have written a boffo LinkedIn profile for Myra Haas. So how in God’s name did this attractive, capable, well-educated young woman end up hawking sham nutritional supplements and purveying the nostrums of a spiritual huckster?

Plenty sucked, but there were thousands of photos of Sloozie Twitch online – some amateur snaps snatched from an audience, others from professional shoots. Yet for Slooz to hope that Grier and Myra would have tripped across any of these, in Interview, in Rolling Stone – for Slooz to hope that those two would have recognised their old classmate’s voice on the radio, that they would have stared – or glared – at the posters in the windows of Tower Records in the days there was such a store . . . Well, the notion was repellent. It wouldn’t have taken a genius to sort out that Sloozie Twitch was none other than Susan Twitchel, but honestly she prayed that neither of the suitemates who had seemed to ‘count’ in 1977 had ever made the connection.

For gloating was out of the question. All she felt was a killing sorrow. Myra Haas and Grier Finlayson were strangers, and they had been strangers for a long, long time. As such, they were stand-ins for all the young people who’d ever felt anointed, and for whom the sensation of having a date with destiny would prove brief. Slooz knew better than anyone how readily her own laughable aspirations could have come to ash, had an influential producer not heard her warm-up set at CB’s in 1981 and gone to the Vanguard instead.

In Googling rudely into private and professional lives that were none of her business, she’d also brushed against a universe in reverse: in which on a similarly chill, random, under-occupied evening, they were the ones who idly input Susan Titchel into a search engine, and they were the ones who misspelled the surname at first, only getting digital satisfaction after remembering to insert the W. They were the ones to note smugly that their old suitemate didn’t even merit a Wikipedia page, which would have linked ‘born as . . .’ to a stage name, in the improbable instance that Also-Ran ever required one. They were the ones who, just to make sure, ran the same search on Spotify, Amazon, and the iTunes Store, in order to confirm precisely what they’d have predicted: Susan Twitchel never recorded an ever-loving thing. They were the ones who tracked down photographs of their former classmate in the secret hopes that she would have got fat, and they were the ones who found only a cringing, poorly composed snapshot in which she looked neurotic – or for that matter, they were the ones who pulled up short against the fact that Susan had escaped their doggy snapping at her heels by being underhandedly dead. They were the ones who only remembered the aloof, acerbic girl in the first place because of her brazen counterfeiting of the dorm’s sole budding virtuoso. They were the ones to suppose archly that this run-of-the-mill singer with her incongruous oboe was just the sort of no-hoper who’d have ended up working in lower-level municipal government her whole life – overseeing recycling, or pothole repair – and they were the ones perplexed to not find themselves quite as gratified by Susan Twitchel’s obvious disappointment as they might have anticipated. She brushed up against the universe in which they were the ones left mystified by what they were looking for in the first place.

It all made for a particularly rich interview on Injudicious Journals and Slooz pinned the transcript, when they published it, to the top of her new Twitter feed.

HOW THEY TURNED OUT