She's Not There (9 page)

“How do you get over missing your father?” I asked Grace as we ate our salades niçoises. “What's the secret?”

Grace looked at me with her large green eyes. “There's no secret, Jim,” she said. “It just hurts. After a while, it hurts a little less.”

I could tell from the way she said this that she didn't especially like the fact that bereavement was something we shared. It wasn't the thing she wanted me to find interesting about her. But she shouldn't have had to worry about that.

Grace was half Dutch, half Irish, equal measures elegance and salt. She drank Jameson's Irish whiskey and could whistle with two fingers in her mouth. She liked Little Feat, the Nighthawks, the Seldom Scene, and Bruce Springsteen. When her car broke down she could open the hood and fix the engine by herself. At black-tie theater galas, she wore elegant gowns and pearl earrings; she moved through a room with a poise and style that made people turn their heads and blink. She had shoulder-length blond hair, an infectious laugh, and freckles.

After dinner, we went to see the final performance of
As Is
at the Studio Theatre, where she was the production manager. I sat in the house afterward and watched the crew, including Grace, tear down the set. They were a tight group, the Studio crowd, and I felt a little like an outsider, in spite of the fact that Grace very nicely introduced me to everyone. From the lighting booth, during the show, I had seen the manager of the theater, and the director, and the light board operator, all eyeing me with suspicion. They weren't in the mood to start sharing Grace with anyone.

At the end of the night, a large crowd of people from the production had burgers and beers in a local diner called Trios, which was run by three elderly women who called you
“hon.”
By my count there were at least two other guys there auditioning for the part of Grace's boyfriend. Her
real
boyfriend was now in the Peace Corps, serving out the year in Africa. She thus viewed all her suitors with tender suspicion.

Toward two A. M., Grace remembered that she'd neglected to throw a large bag of trash from the theater into the Dumpster. So we all—the other boyfriends and I—climbed back into a car and drove to the Studio and waited in the parking lot as Grace hauled a large bag of trash out of the theater and toward a giant Dumpster. We all offered to do this for her, but she just looked at us as if we were crazy. “I got it, I got it,” she said.

The Dumpster was so large that she had to climb a small wooden ladder to get the trash bag in it. Up the rungs she went, as we watched from the Honda. Grace reached the top of the ladder, threw back the lid of the Dumpster, and teetered.

The driver of the car, aka Auditioning Boyfriend #1, said, “She isn't going to—”

“No, don't worry,” interrupted Auditioning Boyfriend #2 with authority. “I've seen her do this before, lots of times.”

Grace windmilled her arms around.

“
Lots
of times,” said AB #2 again, to make sure we got the point.

“I don't know,” I said. “It doesn't look good.”

Alone among these gentlemen, I had imagined the future correctly. Grace teetered off to one side, then disappeared completely into the Dumpster. The last we saw of her was a pair of feet sticking straight up. Then these too vanished.

Interestingly, the men stayed in the car. No one leaped to his feet to rescue her. I think we all knew Grace well enough to understand that she would prefer to rescue herself from this predicament, and we were right.

After a few moments, Grace's head appeared out of the top of the Dumpster. There was a banana peel on one of her shoulders. Her face was lit by an enormous, proud smile. She looked as graceful as a flamenco dancer, as if she were sitting there with a rose between her teeth.

Grace climbed down the ladder and got back into the front passenger seat.

“Don't. Say. Anything,” she suggested.

We didn't. We drove up 16th Street, toward our homes. As the out-of-town guest, I was sleeping on Grace's couch that night. Halfway there, AB #1 very gently rolled down all the windows in the car, to provide us with some badly needed fresh air.

“Sorry,” Grace said with unquashed charm.

I sat in the backseat, hopelessly in love.

That summer, my friend Curly got engaged to the heiress to a whiskey fortune, a wild debutante named Mary Catherine. The wedding was going to be in Charlotte, North Carolina, about as high society a wedding as one could imagine. Curly asked me if I'd be his best man. It would involve lots of toasting. I asked Grace if she'd accompany me to Charlotte, and she said she'd think it over. She wasn't sure if she was busy or not.

I called her in the weeks following the Dumpster incident, but I didn't get through. She didn't call me back, either. I left messages, then stopped. I figured that by not returning my calls, she was letting me know how things stood.

I sat in my father's black leather chair in my apartment in Baltimore one night, after I'd left Grace a message asking her to call. The loudest sound I'd ever heard was the sound of that phone not ringing.

On the one-year anniversary of my father's death, I loaded all my things into the Volkswagen and started driving north. I wasn't sure where I was going, but I knew I wanted to get away from the Maryland spring, with its cherry blossoms and its bursting tulips and all that bullshit. I figured I'd keep driving farther and farther north until there weren't any people. I wasn't sure what I was going to do then, but I was certain something would occur to me that would end this business once and for all.

My first stop was New York City, where my mother and my sister and I had dinner at what had been my father's favorite restaurant, the Leopard, on the East Side. It was one of those restaurants where there weren't any menus. This very large Frenchman simply came over and told you what he was going to bring you. The three of us sat there like pilots flying in the missing man formation. I had a steak.

The next morning I drove up to Maine. I'd set my sights on Nova Scotia. The only ferry was the one out of Bar Harbor. As I drove farther north, the spring receded. It felt better that way. In the afternoon I drove onto the
SS Bluenose
and stood on the deck and watched America drift away behind me.

There was someone walking around in a rabbit costume on the ship. He'd pose with you and they'd snap your picture and an hour or so later you could purchase the photo of yourself with the rabbit as a memento of your trip to Nova Scotia. I purchased mine. It showed a sad-looking young man with long hair reading Coffin and Roelof's
The Major Poets
as a moth-eaten rabbit bends over him.

In Nova Scotia I drove the car east and north. When dusk came, I'd eat in a diner, and then I'd sleep either in the car or in a small tent that I had in the back. There were scattered patches of snow up there, even in May. I kept going north until I got to Cape Breton.

In Cape Breton I hiked around the cliffs, looked at the ocean. At night I lay in my sleeping bag by the sea as breezes shook the tent. I wrote in my journal, or read
The Major Poets
, or grazed around in the Modern Library's
Great Tales of Horror and the Supernatural.
I read one up there called “Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad.”

In the car I listened to the Warlocks sing “In the Early Morning Rain” on the tape deck. I thought about my father asking for a blindfold. I thought about Grace Finney falling into the trash. I thought about Onion drying herself off with that towel, one arm raised. I thought about the clear, inescapable fact that I was female in spirit and how, in order to be whole, I would have to give up on every dream I'd had, save one.

I stayed in a motel one night that was officially closed for the season, but which the operator let me stay in for half price. I opened my suitcase and put on my bra and some jeans and a blue knit top. I combed out my hair and looked in the mirror and saw a perfectly normal-looking young woman. This is so wrong? I asked myself in the mirror. This is the cause of all the trouble?

I thought about settling in one of the little villages around here, just starting life over as a woman. I'd tell everyone I was Canadian.

Then I lay on my back and sobbed. Nobody would ever believe I was Canadian.

The next morning I climbed a mountain at the far northern edge of Cape Breton Island. I climbed up to the top, trying to clear my head, but it wouldn't clear. I kept going up and up, past the tree line, past the shrub line, until at last there was just moss.

There I stood, looking out at the cold ocean a thousand miles below me, totally cut off from the world.

A fierce wind blew in from the Atlantic. I leaned into it. I saw the waves crashing against the cliff below. I stood right at the edge. My heart pounded.

I leaned over the edge of the precipice, but the gale blowing into my body kept me from falling. When the wind died down, I'd start to fall, then it would blow me back up again and I didn't. I played a little game with the wind, leaning a little farther over the edge each time.

Then I leaned off the edge of the cliff at a sharp angle, my arms held outward like wings, my body sustained only by the fierce wind, and I thought,
well, all right. Is this what you came here to do?

Let's do it, then.

Then a huge blast of wind blew me backward, and I landed on the moss. It was soft. I stared straight up at the blue sky, and I felt a presence.
Are you all right, Son?

This time it wasn't a cop, though.

I headed down the mountain and got into the car and started driving home. There wasn't a rabbit on the ferry this time.

I had a big party for Curly in New York a month or so later. It was a kind of anti–bachelor party featuring performances by all the musicians and writers and actors we knew. I played “Good Lovin'” on the Autoharp:
I said doctor (doctor) / Mr. M. D. / Now can you tell me
(doctor) / What's ailing me? . . .
I hired a set of twins who played trumpets to perform a duet. I also hired something called the Mini-Circus, which consisted of a clown named Winky who had performing monkeys. Her boss, a domineering woman with a wig, demanded that we turn on all the lights when Winky was performing. “We don't work in the dark!” she shouted. Winky made us all join a parade, and then everybody on the groom's side marched behind Winky and the performing monkeys, one of whom was named Zippy.

All of the people on the bride's side remained in their seats, not joining the parade. They were deeply frightened. At one point a monkey jumped off Winky's shoulder and landed in the maid of honor's hair.

There was a party after the party at the home of a journalist down in TriBeCa. Everyone except me got drunk and danced. I went into an empty bedroom and sat on the radiator and looked out at the dark streets of the city.

“Hey,” said a woman's voice. “Where did you go?”

It was Grace Finney. I hadn't known she was there.

“I just came in here to sort of catch my breath, I guess,” I said.

“I don't mean just now. I mean this last month. You were around, and then you weren't. How come?”

“I went up to Nova Scotia,” I said.

“What was that like?”

“Kind of depressing,” I said. “I thought I was going to get away from everything, just kind of groove on the ocean and the trees and everything, but all I felt was sad.”

“I had a trip like that last summer,” Grace said. “I was climbing Mt. Rainier with my boyfriend, before he went to Africa. I told myself I was doing it for my mother. I kept saying,‘Do it for Sally. You've got to do it for Sally.' Then I stopped halfway up the mountain and realized, Sally doesn't care if I climb the mountain. Sally could care less. Sally would want me to come down and sit at the table and eat lobsters and corn.”

“Are you still seeing him—the boyfriend?”

Grace smiled at me. “That depends,” she said.

I stayed the night at my sister's apartment down on Hanover Square. Grace slept on the foldout couch. The next day we went to the Statue of Liberty on the ferry. We noticed that on the ferry all the tourists stood in the front of the boat, taking pictures of the Statue of Liberty. The New Yorkers stood in the back, looking back at Manhattan.

Later that summer I brought Grace home to Pennsylvania to meet my mother. “Your mother is the nicest person I've ever met,” Grace said. “It's almost scary how kind and cheerful she is. She's like a balloon filled with helium.”

“You got it,” I said.

Grace came as my date to Curly's wedding in Charlotte. The groom's friends were all emaciated Caucasians from the East Coast. One guy, pale as a sheet of typewriter paper, cut himself shaving and bled and bled and bled all over his tuxedo shirt. The bride's friends, meanwhile, were all tanned and southern and poised. The wedding went on for days. There was a bridesmaid's party and a rehearsal and a rehearsal dinner and a barbecue given by the grandmother and a special play that Curly wrote in honor of the occasion and the wedding itself and the reception afterward and then a party the next day, after the reception, at Uncle Rochester's house.

In the receiving line, Mary Catherine's mother took me aside and had me sign the family Bible. Then she started crying. “What's wrong?” I asked.

“Oh,” said Mary Catherine's mother. “I am just so concerned about this marriage. You see, it's your friend Curluhee. He's a—a— well, you know. I suppose the word is
heathen.
”

I nodded. She had that right.

Curly and Mary Catherine started arguing about money on their honeymoon and were divorced within the year.

The day after the wedding, after Uncle Rochester's party, Grace and I got in the Volkswagen and started heading north. We took small back roads through Virginia, and at one point, in some small hamlet, we passed a rickety-looking log cabin that had exactly half of a Ford Mustang embedded in its outer wall. In big neon lights there was a sign that read, HOUSE OF MYSTERY. And in smaller lights: “Now Open.”