The street is mobbed. Men, women, children, and dogs all crammed onto eight blocks of urban road for an arts fair.
Paige is with Joan in line for kettle corn. Looks like they’ll be there a while. In the meantime, I’m browsing the offerings, or pretending to. Amid the funnel cake and brick-oven pizza is every kind of craft and tchotchke you could imagine. It’s all a bit dizzying.
I wasn’t going to come. I was planning on finally chipping away at the avalanche of e-mails smothering my in-box. My agent has been trying to get me to give an interview about the fire. My mother keeps asking when I’m going to visit her. Sydney’s cousin wants my help in starting the Sydney Brennett Fund to benefit families who’ve lost loved ones to sudden cardiac death.
But Joan convinced me to join her and her mother. She said if I had any hope of writing good lyrics, I had to keep having new experiences. Smart kid. Once again, she’s coaxed me into doing something I didn’t expect to be doing. First I’m facing Sydney head-on, welcoming his memory when I had sworn to outrun it. Now I’m writing song lyrics, something I haven’t done in almost twenty years, and, what’s more, writing about the very things I’ve been trying not to dwell on.
I pass by vendors of all types, surveying their wares from a distance, careful not to make eye contact with the artists. I feel too guilty not buying their stuff.
One artist’s tent finally intrigues me. I’m particularly drawn to a painting of a woman surfing a wave. The ocean is achieved with haphazard strokes. In contrast, the woman and her surfboard are ultra-precise, even down to the thin strands of hair. I can’t tell if it’s the artist’s style that’s familiar or the feeling it evokes. Either way, I think it would make a nice gift for my sister.
On a table below the surfer painting is a box of prints containing smaller versions of the larger works hanging around the tent. Now I’m wondering if a bulky painting is too ambitious. I decide to look for an eight-by-ten instead. I leaf through the cards until I find a copy of the surfer painting.
“Those are twenty-five each,” says a voice. “The postcards are five.”
It’s a girl. A young woman, rather. Probably my sister’s age, in her twenties. But there’s something old-soul about her eyes, like she knows more than her years might suggest.
“Gavin?”
I’ve been recognized. Ever since my video aired on the news and gossip shows, I swear people have been looking at me funny.
“Sorry,” she says. “You don’t know me. I knew Sydney.”
I remove my shades, turn again to the surfer painting. The loose ends start to connect. “We had one of your paintings in our house,” I say. “The one with the forest.”
The trees were a smattering of messy green jutting up against a starry night. The moon, meanwhile, was rendered with photorealism. It was a dramatic piece. The key word: was. I set it on fire.
“Mara,” she says, reaching out her hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“You too.”
There were artists of all types at Syd’s funeral, many of whom I’d never met before. Syd had championed their work, nurtured their creativity, and they all came to show their gratitude.
I hold up the eight-by-ten print of the surfer. “I’d like to buy this one for my sister.”
“Awesome,” Mara says. “Does she surf?”
“I don’t think so. But she loves the beach.”
She smiles. “It’s a nice gesture.”
I look again at the box of prints. “And do you have any postcards of the forest painting?”
Syd loved that painting, hung it in a prominent spot in our home. It took him several years to find something worthy of placing on that central wall.
Mara leafs through the box, keeps shuffling, seemingly without luck. Then, toward the back, she spots something. She reaches in and removes a card sheathed in plastic.
“On the house,” she says, hesitating before adding, “I’m sorry about what happened. I didn’t know him that well, but he meant a lot to me. In a weird way, he sort of made me realize how much I’m capable of.”
I know the feeling. How unlikely to share it with a stranger on this day, in this random place. And I almost didn’t come. Syd would say it was meant to be.
I tell Paige and Joan I’ll meet them back at the house. I walk east until I’m up against the Hudson River, one hand gripping the railing. Below, the dark water sloshes against a concrete foundation.
In my other hand, I hold the two prints: the one for my sister and the copy of the painting Syd and I once owned. I torched the painting and somehow it returned to me. At first it seemed like a stroke of cosmic luck. But soon after, about the time Paige and Joan returned with their enormous bag of kettle corn, I was hit with an overwhelming despair. The forest painting that hung in our house hadn’t been restored. I just had a smaller, cheaper duplicate of the real thing. The same can be said of Joan’s memories of Syd. They might bring me closer to him, but they never truly bring him back.
And it only frustrates me more not to have full command over my experience of the past, the way Joan does. She asked me to share my favorite memory of Syd and I couldn’t do it. Of course, I’ve got memories that stand out. The time he put way too much chili sauce in his pho and started dripping sweat and I couldn’t stop laughing. Or the time we took a road trip out to the Salton Sea and checked into a dank motel where we discovered a suspicious hole in our window the size of a bullet; we held each other extra-tight that night. Or both of us shedding tears at the exact same moment while watching Sigur Rós perform at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Or the time I had the flu and Syd took the day off from work and sat with me in bed with his laptop while I watched a ten-hour marathon of House Hunters.
I know there are a hundred better memories that I’m forgetting. I wasn’t paying close enough attention when they were happening. I was too busy living, just enjoying our time together, completely unaware that it could all suddenly end. Now it feels like a distant dream.
And on top of that, to suddenly have doubts about Sydney when I never had them before. He lied to me, fine, but why? What was he doing out here? What was he hiding? Or is it still possible that this is all a misunderstanding? I might never know the answers.
I lean over the railing and stare down into the dark water. So tranquil. Sometimes I wonder if total blackness would be easier. When we were newly in love and totally inseparable, we hypothesized about what we’d do if one of us suddenly died.
The other will kill himself, I said.
Deal, he said. Unless, of course, we have a child.
I turn away from the water and start walking. Just moving my body helps to unblock my mind. It’s been so long since I’ve done any kind of exercise.
I pick up my pace, the rhythm of my steps against the pavement creating its own kind of music. A skeleton of some larger composition. I flesh it out with the chords and melody that are foremost in my mind: Joan’s. All that’s missing now are some verse lyrics to go on top.
I think you’ve already sealed my fate.
I sing the brand-new line to myself as I walk along. It feels true, worth keeping. I repeat it over and over like a mantra.
Pretty soon another one comes:
I can’t let you go, can never escape.
I’ve got two lines now. It’s a start.
Joan hops off the studio couch.
“I guess you were right about me coming to the fair today,” I say, holding a scrap of paper in my hand. “I have some lyrics for the verse.”
She starts playing. I read-sing my handwriting:
Life began when you arrived
What came before was a waste of time
Now I’m wondering where to go
Some answers I’ll never know
I could get up and flee this place
But no one leaves without a trace
I think you’ve already sealed my fate
Can’t let you go, can never escape
I had forgotten how satisfying writing can be. Matching language to cadence. Flipping through the mental thesaurus. Seizing the perfect word, the one that packs meaning and feeling. I forgot how each vowel sings differently, alters tonality and emotion. I forgot how much music can help.
“That’s all I have,” I say.
“I love it,” Joan says.
“That one line is weak. I could get up and flee this place. It’s clunky.”
“Are you saying you don’t want to be here anymore?”
“I’m trying to say that wherever you go, you’re never really gone. It’s kind of like how you see people in your memories. They’re still here somehow. Anyway, I’ll keep working on it.”
“Okay,” Joan says. “For the chorus, you know how you say Keep dwelling on what went wrong, keep reaching for what is gone? What if one time you changed the second line to Keep singing the saddest song? Dad loves it when one chorus is different.”
“Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about a bridge. Wouldn’t it be great to have a song that makes people dance and cry at the same time? One of Dad’s all-time favorite songs is ‘A Day in the Life.’ It starts off really sad and slow and then the bridge gets fast and John sings about waking up and getting ready for the bus and then you totally want to dance.”
“That’s not John. That’s Paul.”
“What do you mean?” Joan says. “It’s John’s song. He read a story in the newspaper and he wrote the song.”
“True, but that’s Paul in the bridge. He wrote the middle part and he’s the one singing. You know, your style is more like Paul’s than John’s. Paul was a master of melody and he was the one coming up with the grand schemes, like Sgt. Pepper’s and all that. That’s you.”
Her eyes narrow, ready to pounce. “Do you know how to talk with a British accent?”
“You takin’ the piss?” I say.
“What?”
“That’s my accent.”
“Oh. Okay. Say ‘John Lennon’ with the same voice.”
“John Lennon.”
“Did you hear it?” Joan says. “When you say it with a British accent, it sounds like you’re saying Joan Lennon.”
“So?”
“I’m just like John! Dad named me Joan Lennon, not Joan McCartney. I’m the walrus!”
I wait for her to sit down. “You know my last name is Winters, right? But my real name is Deifendorf.”
“I saw that on your license. What’s Winters, then?”
“I made it up.”
Plenty of actors invent new monikers. For me, it wasn’t just the fact that my birth name is clumsy and difficult to spell. I discovered I was only able to truly disappear into acting roles once I’d made my past disappear. Of course, it was just an illusion.
“Listen, you can call yourself whatever you want,” I say, “but at the end of the day you’re still you. There’s no way around that.”
She pulls out a loose thread from her pants and ties it around her finger. “What if that’s not true?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, my friend Wyatt told me I might lose my memory if I fell on my head again in Home Depot. And if I lost my memory, then I wouldn’t be like me anymore. I’d be like everyone else.”
I want to laugh, but it’s clear she’s not joking. “Look, kids tell each other a lot of crazy stuff. I once told my little sister there was a half-bird, half-man creature who lived on our roof, and she was too scared to open her window for weeks.”
She peeks up, cracks a smile. “I wish I had a sister or brother.”
“Do your parents ever talk about having another child?”
“Yeah, all the time,” Joan says. “But it’s never going to happen.”
I feel the need to offer an answer, though I’m not sure she’s asking for one. “Having a kid is a really big decision. It’s not something you just step into lightly. Maybe one person is ready and the other needs more time. And then, for whatever reason, it just doesn’t work out like you planned.”
I look up. Joan is doing her best to follow, but the thing is, she’s not really the one I’m trying to explain something to.