“I’m saving up for a better guitar,” he said. “I’ve got my eye on a starburst Telecaster I saw at Sweet Daddy’s.”
Of course: Money was an issue for Hence. Why hadn’t I thought of that? I could offer to pay for us both, but would that be rubbing his lack of money in his face? “It doesn’t cost anything to window-shop,” I ventured.
But still he looked doubtful, so I tried another tack. “Is there something you’ve always wanted to do in the city but haven’t had a chance?”
To my relief, Hence snapped to attention. He told me that ever since he’d started reading about the seventies punk scene he’d imagined himself living someday in the Hotel Chelsea. “You know—where all those musicians and writers lived. Patti Smith. Leonard Cohen. Iggy Pop…”
“Where Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend?” I asked. “We could pay it a visit. I’ve never been inside, but I’ve passed it. It’s not that far from here.”
“Seriously?”
So that Thursday we made a trek uptown. Like me, Hence was a fast walker, and I loved keeping pace with him, the brisk wind blowing our hair back as we walked. When we reached the Chelsea, we stood across the street and stared at the hulking redbrick exterior, the ornate black balconies, and the familiar hotel sign. Nobody went in or came out for a long time.
“Look.” I pointed at Chelsea Guitars, a narrow storefront tucked into the hotel’s ground floor. “We’ll have to check it out.” I turned my attention to El Quijote, the funky-looking restaurant beside it. “And maybe that place, too.”
Hence nodded. “People still stay at the Chelsea?”
Just then, a couple stepped out through the hotel’s glass doors, he in a black trench coat and with slicked-back hair, she in red heels and a black miniskirt. We watched them disappear into the sidewalk crowd.
“Let’s get closer.” I grabbed his arm. Across the street, we could read the bronze plaques dedicated in memory of Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe, and Arthur Miller.
“I wish I had a camera,” Hence said, still sounding awed.
I released him. “We’re going in, right?”
“They’ll let us in?”
“It’s a hotel. People come and go all the time. Just act like you know where you’re going, and they’ll think we’re staying here.”
Hence looked doubtful.
“The worst they can do is kick us out.”
The hotel lobby was dark and grungy, not at all glamorous, but its walls were hung with colorful paintings. We hurried past the front desk, where the burly clerk was absorbed in a phone conversation and seemed not to notice us at all.
“Over here.” I slipped around a corner, out of sight of the few hotel guests in the lobby, and Hence followed. “Shhh. Close your eyes.”
“What are we doing?”
“Take a deep breath.”
He complied.
“We’re breathing in the air all those poets and musicians exhaled,” I told him. “We’re taking them into us… and adding our breath to theirs.”
There in the dim corridor, I could swear an electrical current charged the air between us. I was almost sure he felt that charge, too. But almost wasn’t enough. We stood there a moment, just breathing, until someone behind us cleared his throat. We opened our eyes and an older man in a worn tweed suit slipped around us to get down the hall, breaking the spell.
Chelsea
In the privacy of my mother’s room, I toasted some Pop-Tarts and settled down in front of my computer. As it turned out, a search for Jackie Gray turned up a mere thirty-two thousand hits. I scrolled through the list, looking for clues to which one was my mom’s Jackie—a New York address, maybe? That narrowed it down to about five hundred. It was all so frustrating. Hence could have told me which one was my mom’s friend, but I wasn’t ready to face him again just yet. Coward that I was, I munched my Pop-Tarts and scrutinized the faces of Jackie Gray the biology professor, Jackie Gray the screenplay writer, and Jackie Gray the financial strategist, willing them to come to life and give up their secrets.
The music started around eight. I’d given up on the Internet and had taken down a stack of my mother’s books to browse through when the bass started thumping from downstairs. So far I hadn’t found much of anything new—just some doodles of men with curlicue mustaches and women with elaborate beehives.
Close to giving up hope, I paged listlessly through another book, then another, and finally found something on the first page of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s collected sonnets: my mom’s name doodled many different ways—curly script, balloon letters, zigzag letters. Catherine Eversole for a quarter page, and then, over and over, Catherine Hence, filling the rest of the flyleaf. So my mother had daydreamed about marrying him. It wasn’t terribly useful information, but it was one more tiny piece of evidence that Catherine Eversole had once existed, had been about my age, and had lived in this bright little apartment with her lace curtains and books. Had she been kept awake by the endless pounding bass guitar, and by drums I hadn’t noticed before but that seemed to have gotten louder? Had she been tempted to dress in her best clothes, make herself up to look older, and slip downstairs to blend in with the crowd, just to see what all the fuss was about?
Because, come to think of it, I was tempted.
Not that I had brought much in the way of clothes. I did have my best pair of jeans with me, a pair of boots, a purple T-shirt, and some dangly earrings. I had lip balm, and some smoky eyeshadow that might make me look a bit older. I dressed slowly, unsure if I was really going to go through with the plan blossoming in my mind. I bent over at the waist and brushed my hair upside down so it would look fuller. I took a deep breath and stepped out into the hall, locking the apartment door behind me.
The elevator’s creaking was, luckily enough, drowned out by music that grew louder as I drew closer. When the door slid open into the gray hall at the rear of the building, I looked both ways, then hurried down the hallway and into the main room, which was almost full and buzzing with conversation. The blue neon cast its otherworldly spell on the room, and bartenders in black vests waited on the gathering crowd.
An audience pressed in close to the stage. On the room’s fringes, people were gathered around high tables. I found a spot in a dark corner off toward the side and watched the band, a trio of skinny dudes in matching snakeskin boots. The music was jittery, full of jagged edges—not my usual taste, but catchy. From the edge of the room I could watch the bassist joke around with the rhythm guitarist, and take in every emotion on the lead singer’s face; I could even catch his eye from time to time. Did my mother get to do this when she was my age? And how had she not missed living over The Underground after she married my dad and moved to suburbia?
Once the song ended, I thought to check the room for Hence. When I didn’t see him, I slipped closer to the stage. Just then, Cooper passed by carrying a bin of empty bottles and glasses. He looked shocked to see me there and shouted something in my direction. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, so he shouted it louder: “You’re not twenty-one.”
“Neither are you,” I yelled, fairly certain it was true.
He shook his head and started to go. I tapped his shoulder before he got away.
“Don’t tell,” I begged, mouthing the words exaggeratedly so he wouldn’t miss them. “Please?”
He frowned and stalked off. Still, I didn’t think he would rat me out to Hence, so I stayed where I was, wishing I was daring enough to slip up to the bar and order a soda. Instead, I retreated to my shadowy place on the sidelines. After a while, the spotlight flashed on to bathe the stage in red light. The crowd started milling around, jockeying for a position near the band. As tempted as I was to squeeze through the crowd for a better view, I stayed put.
Eventually, a new band took the stage. “Hey, everybody. We’re the Charmed Particles,” a man’s voice shouted. Around me, the crowd went berserk. Yellow and white lights flooded the stage, and there, front and center, stood a guy with longish hair and
a triangle-shaped soul patch that made his grin seem devilish. Soul Patch grabbed the mike and started to sing, stalking the stage in his tight black jeans and motorcycle boots. A thrill ran through my body, from my feet right to the roots of my hair.
It wasn’t just that he was gorgeous, though he was. The rest of the band was gorgeous, too, in a super-skinny, cooler-than-thou kind of way. The guitarist, a tall man whose white-blond Afro contrasted with his dark skin, pogoed up and down as he played; the shirtless drummer’s long, straight hair flew in and out of his high-cheekboned face. A sleek woman with flame-red hair stalked the stage in a crushed-velvet catsuit, playing her bass guitar almost as an afterthought. I couldn’t help envying her—so confident and in charge, holding a whole room full of people at attention just by doing something she obviously loved.
“What are you doing down here?” Hence growled in my ear, picking that moment to find and humiliate me. He grabbed me by the arm and yanked me out of the room, the crowd parting to let us through, and pulled me down the long hall toward the elevator.
“Stop it!” I struggled to free my arm. “I can walk on my own.”
“What do you think you’re doing? This isn’t some teen hangout.”
“I know that.”
“Do you know what kind of trouble a girl like you could get into in a nightclub?” He was screaming at me now. “For one thing, you can attract the wrong kind of attention. You could get…” His voice trailed off.
“I could get what?”
No answer. He glowered down at me.
“You don’t need to worry. I can take care of myself.”
Hence’s voice got quieter, but if anything, he sounded even angrier. “It’s not you I’m worried about. I could get busted for having an underage child in my club. Fined. Or even shut down.”
“I wasn’t planning to drink. I was just watching the show.” I started to explain that the noise had kept me awake and that I’d been curious, but he cut me off with a wave of his hand.
“No excuses. I’m letting you stay in my house, and if you give me any reason—the tiniest reason—to regret it, I’ll kick you out faster than you can say ‘boo.’ ” His eyes narrowed and his glare froze my tongue.
What choice did I have? I got into the elevator. Up in my mother’s apartment, I changed into my pajamas and lay in bed seething. If only I could at least make out the words and music—but, like a cruel taunt, all I could hear was that thumping bassline.
Catherine
Just when it felt like I was on the verge of really getting to know Hence, fate touched down like a tornado to spin me off track. Early the next week, I was making chicken salad, hacking the last of the white meat from the previous night’s bird, when Dad came into the kitchen and kissed me on the cheek. “Have I told you lately how proud I am of you?”
“Once or twice.”
“Your creative writing teacher couldn’t stop raving about you.” He’d gone to parent-teacher conferences the night before. “She says you’re one of the most promising writers she’s ever taught. She wants to submit one of your poems to a real literary magazine. And here I’ve got you slaving over the stove when you should be off at a writer’s colony, working on your magnum opus.”
“Somebody’s got to make dinner.” Dad’s cooking repertoire consisted of instant mac and cheese and frozen peas. As for Q, he lived on Big Macs, potato chips, and Gatorade. The two of them would have been perfectly happy eating takeout every night, but I couldn’t go without home-cooked food very long without starting to feel sad and motherless. Which of course I was, but that didn’t mean I had to eat pork fried rice every single night of the week.
“You won’t forget your old man when you go off to Harvard, will you?”
“I can’t go off to Harvard. Who would feed you?”
“Peking Road misses me. I’ll go back to being their best customer.” Dad picked a chunk of chicken out of the bowl with his fingers. I pretended to wave my chef’s knife at him, and he pretended to cower in fear. “You win! I’ll wait till dinner.”
“You’d better.”
Dad got a glass out of the cupboard and poured himself some cabernet, his dinnertime ritual. “Of course you’ll go to Harvard. You’ll make all sorts of snooty friends, and be ashamed of your lowbrow old man.”
“You went to Harvard,” I reminded him, as if he needed reminding.
“And got gentleman’s Cs. I wasted my college years screwing around.” That’s my dad: Even when I was a little kid, he talked to me like I was a grown-up, swearing, making embarrassing revelations about his past, and generally saying whatever popped into his head.
“Mom went to Harvard,” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Though eleven years had passed since we lost her, the mention of her could still send Dad into his sad and wistful mode, and that night was no exception.
“Your mother kicked Harvard’s ass,” he said after a pause. “She had this amazing swagger. And determination: That woman knew her own mind. She wanted to write for Rolling Stone, and she never let anything get in her way. God knows what she saw in a dilettante like me. I had no idea what I wanted out of life.” I’d heard this story before, but it never got old for Dad. “I wasted all my time at college partying with musicians, painters, writers, wishing I had some kind of talent. Did I ever tell you I played drums in a punk band for a while?”
“The Bloody Crusades,” I offered, filling in the blanks.
Dad smiled absently. “I even had my retro-beatnik phase—smoked clove cigarettes and wore a beret, if you can picture that.”
I smiled, washing the mess off my hands.
“All I ever wanted was to be some kind of great artist, but all I turned out good at was business, like my old fart of a father, and… well, you know the rest. Look at me now.”
“Yeah, you’re a real failure, Dad.” I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know how you live with yourself.”
He kissed me on the cheek. “I’m relieved you got your mother’s brains.” Then he grabbed the rolled-up newspaper from the kitchen table and bonked me on the head with it. “I know what we should do: Let’s take a family vacation. You deserve a break, and come to think of it, so do I.”
So, less than a week later, we were headed for Mykonos, Greece. Sebastian Clegg, one of Dad’s rock-star friends, had a villa there, and Dad pulled some strings. “But I’ll miss school,” I said when he showed me the plane tickets.
“You’ll make it up.”
“But what about Q? Can he afford to skip a whole week of classes?”
“Your brother can fend for himself. He’ll charm his professors into giving him extensions.” Dad grinned. “You and Q will learn more about the world from going places than from sitting in some stuffy classroom, daughter of mine. So no more worrying. Just sit back and enjoy.”
For about a minute and a half, I was thrilled. I’d always loved our family trips. And Dad had taken us lots of places, but never to Greece. But then I thought about Hence. Did I really want to leave him behind, even for just ten days? Our time together wandering through Chelsea had been so much fun. After the Hotel Chelsea I’d even lured him into a few record stores, and while we browsed through used albums, he told me about the first time he’d picked up a guitar at a friend’s house, how right it had felt in his hands, and how he’d hated to give it back.
“As soon as I could, I got one of my own,” he told me. “A super-cheap acoustic, but I loved that thing. I taught myself by ear.” He talked about going to the public library to read and reread the one book they’d had on the punk-rock scene, and how he’d hatched his plan to come to New York. “New York or London, but London seemed out of reach, so here I am.” He had finally started talking about his past, and I listened eagerly, hoping he would reveal more about himself, but all I could piece together from his stories was that he hadn’t had a lot of money, and that music had meant more to him than school, or his friends, or even his family.
Now, as Dad showed off our tickets to Greece,
a crazy thought popped into my head. Why not ask Dad if we could bring Hence along with us? It would only be one more plane ticket, and Sebastian Clegg’s villa must have at least one extra bedroom. Hence had probably never been to Europe. Was it fair that I was getting to go there again, and he’d be stuck holding down the fort at The Underground?
As I looked into Dad’s glowing face, I realized how irrational I was being. The tickets were already bought. And, anyway, as nice as Dad was to his employees, he’d never bring one along on a family vacation.
“What’s wrong, Cupcake? Aren’t you excited?” Dad took a closer look at me. “I thought you loved our family adventures.”
I shut the dishwasher and punched its buttons, not knowing what to say.
“Are you thinking of Mom?” he asked, in a quieter voice. “She’d want you to be happy. You know that, don’t you?”
After that I felt bad, because I hadn’t been thinking of Mom at all. I threw my arms around Dad’s shoulders and hid my face in his shirt. A wave of sadness swept through me, as though I were absorbing it from him. My father needed this vacation. I would go to keep him company and try to have the best time possible, for his sake.
Dad kissed my forehead. Before I could stop him, he started rummaging in his wallet. “You’ll need clothes, right? A bathing suit? Or maybe a sundress? Don’t say no—what’s money for if I can’t treat my only daughter to something nice once in a while?”
As hard as I protested, he kept insisting, until, feeling even guiltier, I pocketed his money.
Mykonos was every bit as gorgeous as I’d imagined, its houses and hotels blindingly white against the cloudless sky; by day I stretched out and read beside the deep blue Aegean or wandered through the winding streets, popping into boutique after boutique to shop for souvenirs. Dad, Q, and I went out every night to hear live music in little seaside clubs, and for two glorious days, we chartered a sailboat and took an overnight trip to Vernon Hale’s villa on Naxos. Vernon was one of Dad’s oldest friends and one of my musical heroes; I had every album he’d ever recorded. He and his band jammed until three AM under a delicate crescent moon. His wife, Riki, made me virgin piña coladas, and all her party guests danced barefoot on the patio under Japanese paper lanterns. I was blissfully happy until I thought of Hence, a whole ocean away, mopping the floor and hauling crates while I was having the time of my life.