Not that I’d slept well, having fallen, postcoitally, into a pinch-me state of best-case insomnia. Jeremy, though, was dozing between my conversational pinball. I had to ask, didn’t I, about the hiatus he’d initiated—the why of it, and whether the breakup helped us get to where we were now?
He murmured, facing the viny wallpaper, “Izznit obvious we broke up ’cuz I was falling in love with you?”
That made me hitch myself up on my elbows to ask, “How does that make sense? Continue, please.”
“Tomorrow . . .”
“Now, please.”
He turned back in my direction. “Okay. I was twenty-five. I thought: Twenty. Fucking. Five. She’s been married and divorced. I never even came close. Maybe I need to get out there.”
“Out there? You work on a TV show surrounded by beautiful actresses”—but that’s where I stopped, reminding myself that he was testifying as to why he was lying next to me, not why he was plotting his escape. Of course, I couldn’t leave it there. “Can I play devil’s advocate, against my own self-interest?”
“Sure—” he said, followed by a fake snore.
“It was a pretty short break. You didn’t go off for a year like a Mormon missionary to a foreign land.”
“Very true but not what I’d call an apt analogy.”
“I just meant you had a little PG fling, then you came back. After only—what was it, two months?”
“It looked like two months. I was back before that. In spirit. Mentally.”
I did know that. Who wouldn’t have noticed his non-disappearance, his checking in? I thought it only right to say, “The falling in love part? I had that, too.”
No answer, just some murmured syllables. Was he back asleep? I asked if we were going public.
“I think we have.”
“I don’t mean at the wedding. I mean if the play got produced, can we put an extra little spin on ‘collaborators’ so people get that we’re together?”
“Sure.”
I moved my pillow closer so we’d be falling asleep ear to ear. I said, “Have I told you yet that I find you delightful?”
“Thank you. I try.”
“And one more thing: When I said I’d also fallen in love—did that sound like I was speaking in the past tense?”
“I can’t say I noticed the tense—”
“I may not have said it aloud lately. Like tonight. By which I mean the love part. Because it’s extremely present tense.”
“Thank you. Now go to sleep.” He reached over and found a thigh to pat.
A few minutes later, I heard a faint “You looked beautiful tonight.” Was he in REM sleep already, delivering a line of dialogue meant for Veronica or Betty or even the hateful Cheryl Blossom, Riverdale’s villain? I didn’t nudge him to ask, Were you speaking to me? I accepted the compliment, silently for once, smiling in the dark.
On the ride to Pickering, borrowing from a Riverdale voice-over, Jeremy intoned, “This story is about a town, once fulsome and innocent, now forever changed by the disappearance and eventual murder of a cherished yearbook.” Earlier, I’d woken up thinking that our one-woman show was doable, or at least no longer the worst idea I’d ever heard. I could imagine myself reciting lines on stage in front of pixelated images of the town. Life had sorted itself out, and I was turning into an excellent tour guide.
First stop on this unseasonably warm March day was a no-brainer: the high school, built in 1920, with its flag pole, its bronze memorial plaque to fallen graduates, its double-wide doors painted so many times that their high-gloss black finish was crackled. Now that PHS was a regional high school, the word PICKERING had disappeared from above the door. I reminded Jeremy that he could blow up the yearbook’s black-and-white photo, which would look appropriately antiquey and—whoops. Maybe not.
“As if I didn’t ask the mayor’s mother and that guy who told us a dozen times that he’d driven all the way from Buffalo to attend the wedding—which he wouldn’t have missed for the world because he’d played water polo with Pete—if I could borrow their yearbook for a project I was working on.”
“And when they heard you were an actor, they said, ‘Oh, boy. You bet.’”
“Just about.”
“Clever.”
“And if they don’t come through, I’ll put an ad in the Pickering Sentinel offering to buy a 1968 yearbook.”
Once again, I expressed regret over my impulsive shredding.
“Don’t worry. That bag of shreds could open the show, as a prop, I mean. Where to now?”
I drove to the first house I lived in, 198 Front Street, and the second house, from age six to eighteen, at 55 Olde Coach Road. I said, “We should ask permission first. A neighbor is probably taking down our license plate and calling the police as we speak.”
“So we do what?”
I got out of the car and, at both locations, rang the doorbell, introduced myself, and said, “I used to live here. Do you mind if I take a few pictures—just the outside?”
Both owners said, “Fine, take what you need,” without even the slightest curiosity about why. Jeremy noted, “It’s like ‘Maritch’ is the golden ticket. Is there anyone here who didn’t go to the high school?”
The owner at Olde Coach Road had bought the house from my dad only a year before. She felt compelled to question whether the master bathroom’s tub had drained as slowly during our tenure as it was draining now. I told her to use a plunger, like she would for a toilet. Worked like a charm for us. Photo okay? I asked again. “I’m documenting my life.”
“Oh, sure. Good luck with that.”
Next, the public library and the Knights of Columbus Hall where the eventful reunion took place, then moody shots of goalposts and empty bleachers, then the bandstand on the town green and the former Nagle’s department store, now a branch of New Hampshire Technical Institute.
“Any other place that still speaks to you? A high school hangout?”
That led us to the Rialto, no longer a movie theater but an indoor flea market on weekends, marquee intact and proclaiming OVER 50 BOOTHS! Then, a few miles out of town, to the Ice Cream Barn, closed for the season, but not an inch of it changed, its perennial flavors posted on wooden slats. I said, “I used to get either rum raisin or burnt sugar. The scoops were huge,” which led Jeremy to make a note.
At the town’s only red light, he asked, “How far a drive to the motel where your mother hooked up with Armstrong?”
“Forget that! My father’s coming to this show, and I’d prefer if he didn’t leave in the middle. Promise me you’re not writing a slutty-mom part.”
“I’m not. Besides, you’re the boss. You’re the one delivering the lines, which should take your slutty mother and the question of your paternity off the table.”
“My paternity is no longer a question, remember? I fixed that. Done. Over.”
“Got it. Your dad is your dad.”
“Exactly.”
“Except . . . he knows he’s not.”
“Immaterial! My birth certificate says ‘Thomas Maritch” next to ‘father,’ and you can take that to the bank.”
“Along with the fantasy DNA test.”
“No comment,” I said.
Our last stop was the extant Pretty Good Diner, where we had weak coffee in thick mugs and shared a grilled cheese-and-tomato sandwich. Jeremy was charmed by the multipage laminated menu with “International Specialties” (lasagna, moussaka, French onion soup, chili con carne) and “All desserts homemade except the chocolate pudding.” We ordered frappes, one vanilla, one chocolate, aka “milkshakes,” an homage to everyone’s favorite beverage at Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe on Riverdale.
I took at least a half-dozen selfies with the two of us practically cheek to cheek, achievable because we were occupying the same side of the booth. As soon as we’d placed our order, Jeremy walked to the juke box and spent a long time there. When he returned, it was with a sly grin, attributable, he said, to the bargain rate of four songs for a dollar. But then he sat opposite me, looking unusually solemn, taking my hands across the table, clinically, in the manner of a bearer of bad news.
“Are you—?”
“Shhh, listen,” he said.
What then filled the Pretty Good were love songs of the seriously earnest kind—classics—by the Righteous Brothers, then Paul McCartney, then Roberta Flack.
And finally—oh, God—the late, great Whitney Houston belting out what I now call our anthem. Was Jeremy even born when she recorded “I Will Always Love You”?