CHAPTER NINE
Flying into Los Angeles is a thrill no matter the time of year, the time of day, or the flight pattern. It’s not like St. Martin, where you glide in straight over the water, or Gilbraltar, where the runway is literally built on the sea. But it has the absolute feel of being on the edge of a continent. From Salt Lake, you fly over Capitol Reef and the Escalante Wilderness. It’s desolate out there. There’s nothing but rock and an occasional road, a range of mountains, a few tiny towns. Then you come over the Angeles Crest and there’s the enormous sprawl—the amazing reality of all those homes, all those cars, all those lights, and all those people packed into the tidal plain. As the plane edges toward the ocean, you can pick out the contours of the Santa Monica Bay, the harbor at Marina del Rey, the steam plant at El Porto, the piers of Manhattan, Hermosa, and Redondo Beach. As soon as the piers come into focus, you can spot our house. I always had the thought that if the plane just slowed down for a moment, I could gather up my books and magazines, my empty bottle of sparkling water, and just step off the wing and float down to my porch like Mary Pop-pins gliding into London.
Instead, of course, I waited for the plane to descend, to land, to taxi to the gate, and then I waited for all the people in front of me to gather their belongings and make their way off the plane, and then I waited at the airport curb amid the noise and the exhaust for Harrison to pick me up.
I spotted his car first—a deep sea-blue metallic BMW 550i, as solid, practical, and efficient as he was, a car that would never let you down—and as he moved out of the flow of traffic and pulled up to where I stood, I saw him. He was still wearing his clothes from the office—button-down shirt with a button-down collar, brown pants in a tropical-weight wool, Allen-Edmonds shoes built by hand with the same kind of precision as the car. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had to take a Town Car or taxi home from the airport. Harrison always picked me up. He was as reliable as clockwork, and while there was something deeply comforting about having someone be there for you so consistently, there was something disturbing about it, as well, because although Harrison would always love me, and would do anything to help me, he would never be able to get inside my skin. He would always be outside, other, and we would always be ultimately unknowable to each other.
I opened the car door and slipped into the front seat. Harrison leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “How’d it go?” he asked, and with just those three words, the ambivalence I had been feeling toward him crystallized into something hard and ugly. Oh, I had a great time, I wanted to say. Got a lot done, made friends with Alex Kepler, made up for Bailey’s absence, made peace with my dad.
“Fine,” I said. “Did you get through your paperwork?”
He navigated the car through the traffic at LAX. “Most of it,” he said.
I nodded. “That’s good,” I said. I had offered him nothing about what it had been like to start sifting through my father’s estate, and he had offered me nothing in return about what it had been like to finalize the documents that would end an era of maple sugaring in his family. We had known each other so long that we could speak in shorthand now. There was no need to say anything real or revealing.
I remembered going to dinner one night in Burlington when Bailey was still an infant. We left her with Harrison’s sister, and were giddy with excitement to have a long, leisurely night ahead of us. We ordered artichoke and lamb and chatted feverishly about our plans for our future, our thoughts about our new family. There was an older couple seated in the booth across from us—a professor and his wife, we guessed—and we noticed that they ordered exactly the same food that we did. During the course of the dinner, we kept watching them as if they had been placed there for our enjoyment like actors on a stage, but we noticed how they hardly spoke to each other. They sat in a pool of silence almost the entire evening, sipping their wine, taking bits of meat on their forks. “Poor old married couple have nothing to say to each other,” Harrison whispered during dessert. “We’ll never be like them,” I whispered back, and seized his hand and kissed it.
Yet here we were, just like that old couple—saying nothing, doing nothing other than being present in each other’s life. Was that enough? That day was one of the days I wasn’t sure.
When we pulled into the garage, Harrison turned off the engine of the car, turned toward me, and, as if to prove that I had been wrong about being disconnected, said, “I heard Bailey yelling at you last night.”
“I called to apologize,” I said, grateful to be saying something of substance. “It didn’t go very well. She doesn’t want me to go to the show.”
He nodded. “I was afraid of that.”
“And I’ve been thinking about something she said to me that day in the studio. She said, ‘Who are you to judge what makes art any good?’ I’ve been thinking that maybe she’s right. Maybe my dad has been right all this time, you know? That Bailey got the DNA and I didn’t. Maybe that was the moment of truth right there in front of that seagull.”
Harrison looked out the driver’s side window, took a breath, and looked back. “People don’t inherit the ability to make art, Claire. Maybe people can pick up on a passion, or learn a way of life, but this whole thing about DNA is just a pile of crap.”
I cocked my head. “I just told you that I might have figured out that I’m not an artist, and you’re going to sit there and tell me that what I’m feeling is a pile of crap?”
“I met you when you had a camera in your hands,” Harrison said, “and I’ve lived with you for twenty-three years, most of which time you’ve had a camera in your hands. It’s ridiculous to suddenly say that you don’t have the right DNA to be an artist. A photographer is someone who takes photographs, and that makes you a photographer.”
“But I may not be a very good one. That’s what this is about.”
“No,” Harrison said. “You know what I think this is about?” He didn’t wait for me to reply. “I think it’s about the fact that you’ve spent your whole life wishing your father loved you better than he did.”
“I do wish that,” I said quietly. “I do.”
“He loved you the best way he knew how, Claire. That’s what we all do. He was a complicated and difficult guy who didn’t have a lot of interest in sticking around and didn’t have a lot of patience. But neither did my dad, and neither do a lot of other dads. You’re fifty-four years old. I think it’s time to get over it.”
I opened the car door. “I’m not sure that’s something you can just get over, Harrison.”
“Well, I am,” he said. “Because otherwise it’s going to eat you alive.”
There was a large manila envelope from Bridget in the stack of mail that had piled up for me while I was gone. Inside was the Rolling Stone issue she had mentioned—Children of Rock: They Grew Up in the Shadow of Legends and Lived to Tell the Tale—with a note written in her loopy cursive: Thought you might like to see this. The cover featured a photograph of Art Garfunkel’s son, James Taylor’s son, Marvin Gaye’s daughter, and John Lennon’s son Sean, a dark-haired young man in round glasses who looked like he had a shadow across his face. Could I imagine him opening his mouth to sing? I could, in fact, imagine it exactly. I could imagine him strumming a guitar alone in his bedroom, singing softly to the night, wondering if some of the stardust that had blessed his dad had fallen on him, too. I could also imagine John the father listening at the door, yearning for it to be true, and hoping against hope that it wasn’t—because as magical as it is to have your child share your gifts and talents, what you really want as a parent is for your child to discover his own best way of being in the world and his own best way of connecting to other people.
I read the article about the strange and wonderful things the children of rock heard and saw as they grew up and when I was done, I went out to the flat files in my studio and pulled out some portfolios of my work. I had an entire drawer full of wedding photos, with cake after cake, and a large envelope that featured a Thanksgiving dinner prepared by my friend Sonya, who at one time wanted to be a chef, but ended up being an executive assistant at Boeing. There were photos from the Bon Appétit years—mint sprigs and Christmas cookies, heirloom tomatoes and jambalaya—and one whole cabinet devoted to photos of Harrison and Bailey. I sifted through the photos, smiling at the memory of the time Harrison barbecued his first salmon, and the time Bailey went to the prom with the freckled boy who was a foot shorter than she was. Inside one large, thick envelope was an eleven-by-fourteen print of a picture of Bailey building a sand castle in the annual Manhattan Beach competition. People worked all day, sometimes in teams, creating elaborate sand sculptures of castles and villages, mermaids and dolphins. That year Bailey was twelve, and she insisted on working alone. She made a sleeping dragon with its head tucked under a wing and its tail curled up alongside its enormous, scaly body. The dragon was four feet wide and almost as tall as she was. In my photograph, she is lying on top of the beast, her long arms around its neck, pretending to sleep, as well. At the foot of the dragon lay the tools of her efforts—a plastic yellow bucket, a little red shovel, a tin funnel. The light of the late afternoon had washed the scene in gold—gold light, gold sand, golden child with golden hair. The photograph is so good that it almost seems as if I could reach out and brush the dusting of sand off Bailey’s cheek.
I couldn’t stand another day of walking on eggshells around my own daughter; I was desperate for some kind of resolution. I found Bailey in her room the next morning. There were clothes piled on the floor and outfits laid out on her bed, complete with underwear and jewelry.
“Hey,” I said, from the doorway, “did you get your artist’s statement done?”
“Yeah,” she said, without looking at me.
“I told Alex what you said about Grandpa’s work, and he was grateful for the direction.”
“Good,” she said.
“Are you planning out what to wear?”
“Yeah,” she said.
She wasn’t going to give me any ground. I took a step forward. “Bailey,” I said, “I don’t expect you to forgive me for what I did to your painting, and I suppose you don’t have to talk to me if you can’t stand it, but I’d really like to come to your show. I’d just really like to be there, especially since Grandpa’s gone.”
She shook her head. “He’s dead, Mom. It’s not like you can do anything about it.”
“No,” I said, “but at least you can have the rest of your family there.”
“I don’t think that’s the best idea,” she said. “I can’t—” She started to say something, then stopped and sat down on the bed. “I can’t look at you without seeing that painting. Every time I look at you, I see you standing with a brush in front of that painting. It just . . . it totally freaks me out.”
She picked up a purple suede platform sling-back Mary Jane and slipped it onto her foot. “See, I hated that seagull,” she said, “but I’d made peace with it. I mean, I’d decided that everything doesn’t have to be perfect. I decided that it was good enough. Do you have any idea what a big deal that is for an artist? I mean, there are a million artists who paint stuff and keep it in their garage or their studio because they don’t think it’s good enough. Anyone can do that. But to be the kind of artist who says, ‘I want my work to see the light of day and I think it’s good enough to show’? That’s huge.”
I looked out the window at the beach, which was drenched in sunlight. I watched a man throw a blue Frisbee into the air like a boomerang; it came straight back to the exact place where he stood. Sometimes things worked exactly the way you wanted—kites flew, Frisbees came back—but often, they didn’t. “I get it now,” I said. “I get it, and I’m just . . . I’m so sorry. I completely understand why you wouldn’t want me to come to your show. I can’t undo what I did, but I guess I can stay away.” I turned to leave just as Bailey picked up the second purple shoe.
“I guess you can come to the show,” she said, “if you want.”
It wasn’t exactly a heartfelt invitation, but it was all I wanted. I turned back toward her, humble and elated. “Thank you,” I said.
I walked into town to find something to wear. I passed the stationery store where a beautiful piece of marbled Italian paper was set out on a yellow painted table; a yarn shop where a basket was overflowing with cashmere the color of the Caribbean sea; a toy store with an elaborate wooden fairy tree house complete with a pulley and tiny wooden bucket; a shoe store with a pair of sandals whose tread was stamped with daisies; the bakery, where rosemary olive-oil bread had recently been taken out of the oven; and a T-shirt retailer who switched the palette of available colors every three months, reflecting the same kind of subtle sense of the progression of time that the natural world provides in places like Maine and Wyoming.
I stood on the corner of Manhattan Beach Boulevard for a few minutes watching people walk toward the roundhouse at the end of the pier. The glass of the windows of the hexagonal structure glinted in the sunlight and seemed to draw people toward it like a beacon. There was a bench I liked midway down the pier on the south side. You could sit there and look down the coast toward the cliffs of Palos Verdes. With the red tile roofs climbing into the sage-green hills and the blue water flashing below, the view from that bench looked exactly like the French Riviera.
I walked onto Highland Boulevard and stopped in front of a clothing store whose window featured a display in shades of brown and blue. There was a pair of wide-legged deep chocolate-brown linen pants paired with a white camisole and a flirty blue knit cardigan that was nipped in at the waist, flared at the wrists. I walked in and saw the ensemble on a rack against the wall. I touched the blue sweater. It felt cool and slippery, and when I checked the label, I saw that it was a silk, linen, and rayon blend.
“Would you like to try it on?” the saleslady asked. “I sold two of those sweaters this morning already.” She had long black hair that looked as if it had been oiled. “One man bought it for his wife for her birthday and another woman bought it to wear to a party.”
“My daughter’s having a party,” I said.
“Well, there you go.” She stepped out from behind the counter and reached for the sweater. “These look great together,” she said, grabbing a pair of pants. “What are you, a size eight?”
I nodded, took the clothes into the dressing room, and slipped them on. I felt instantly transformed. The stretchy camisole felt cool against my skin and the pants felt light as air. I normally wear blue jeans and black or white T-shirts or turtlenecks. They were a uniform, something I didn’t have to think about every day. I turned to view myself in the mirror, and noted the way the sweater flared at the wrists. It had a row of fabric-covered buttons down the front, which stopped at the waist, and from that line the sweater flared out, as well.
I stepped out of the dressing room so the saleslady could appraise me. “See?” she said. “It’s a magic sweater. It looks fabulous.”
I bought the entire ensemble, with a hammered-silver necklace to match. The tab came to $427, and something about the expense seemed entirely justified. Perhaps in order to be forgiven, I had to be wearing a fabulous pair of pants. Perhaps in order to stop feeling doubt, I had to be wearing a silk knit sweater. Maybe what had been holding me back from seeing was how I saw myself and maybe that could change in an instant, if only I had the right clothes.
When I got home, I put the outfit on again to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake. Seconds later, Bailey tapped on my bedroom door.
“Do you know where Dad is?” she asked.
“I haven’t seen him,” I said.
She hesitated a moment. “Those colors clash with your gray hair,” she said. “You should stick with black.”
I returned the clothes the next day, and the necklace, too. The same saleslady was there, and I was so mindful of her previous enthusiasm that I crafted a lie. “I learned that the reception’s going to be outside, so I need something warmer, in case it’s cold.”
She smiled. She said it was no problem. She did not try to point out that no one ever wears more than a sweater in Southern California in the spring.
I called Bridget that night. “I have nothing to wear to Bailey’s opening,” I said.
“Do you even own anything that’s not black?”
“I have things that are gray.”
“So what’s the problem? You wear black pants, a gray sweater. A nice pair of shoes.”
I looked at my hands. “The problem,” I said, “is that I’ve already pissed her off. I don’t want to embarrass her, too.”
“How would that happen?”
“If I look too young or too much like I’m someone’s mom or like I’m a person who is trying too hard or like I’m a person who expects her paintings to do well or who doesn’t expect her paintings to do well. There’s a very narrow range of options available to me. Invisible would be best.”
“Oh,” Bridget said, as if the entire workings of the universe were suddenly clear. “You know what happened to me the other day? I went to a hockey party, and I stood in the doorway of this room filled with eighteen-year-old boys and their parents, and not one person looked at me. Not one person said, ‘Hi, Mrs. Tate,’ or ‘Aren’t you Cole’s mom?’ or ‘Don’t you work at the Bean?’ I swear I had a moment where I thought, ‘Whoa! I’m invisible.’ ”
“Maybe you’re further along the spectrum than I am,” I said. “I just feel faded and dull. Maybe invisible is what comes next.”
“We’ll be like the furniture,” Bridget said. “Like a bunch of old chairs just sitting there in the middle of every room.”
I laughed. “Speaking of furniture, do you remember that guy I went on that blind date with sophomore year? Peter Couch?”
“You wanted to marry him after that night, but then he never called.”
“He disappeared off the face of the earth is more like it, and totally broke my heart.”
“What about him?”
“I’ve never stopped thinking about him.”
“No shit? You pine for Peter Couch?”
“No, I don’t pine for him. I just wonder what happened to him, you know? Whether he became a Hollywood producer like he said he was going to be, or if he ended up being a tax attorney or a tennis pro. And I’d really like to know why he never called when we had such a good time that night.”
“You do see what point this makes, don’t you?” Bridget said. “If you’re still thinking about Peter Couch thirty-four years after one measly date, then imagine the beach-head you have in my brain. Invisible isn’t happening.”