Элисон Скотч - The Song Remains the Same

“And, you are not supposed to be drinking, mixing your meds!”

“Tell me about it, Mom,” he says. “I’ll be there in two.” The line goes dead.

“I take it that wasn’t my boyfriend calling to beg for my forgiveness?” Rory says.

Before I can answer, Peter pokes his head out of the bedroom door.

“Hey,” he says sleepily, “what’s with the commotion?”

“What’s not with the commotion?” Rory says. “Hugh dumped me, Anderson is drunk, and you are very lucky to have gotten laid.”

His eyes bulge, and I shrug, and we both realize there’s no getting around it, so what the hell anyway. He moseys in and sits in the armchair opposite the sofa. He and Rory size each other up warily. The phone clangs again with my doorman’s announcement of Anderson’s arrival.

Anderson smells of bourbon when I kiss him hello, his cheeks pocked with sweat from the Labor Day heat wave.

“The paps followed me here,” he says. “No one leave for a while. They’re waiting outside.” For a second, I remember how different we are, how far apart our worlds were before they literally collided.

“As if anyone here is in any condition to go anywhere,” Rory mutters. “Besides, shouldn’t you be in Saint Barts or the Hamptons, somewhere fancy, other than here?”

“I can’t take the travel right now,” he says from the kitchen. He leans into the sink and douses his face with water, staining the color of his faded green hipster tee.

“What distillery did you fall into?” I ask.

“Don’t judge,” he answers, then straightens himself and pours a glass of water.

“It’s hard not to,” I answer.

“Judging is her specialty,” Rory says, still prostrate on the sofa, “at least when she wants it to be.” Peter raises his eyebrows and washes his hands over his face.

“Shut up, Rory,” I say. And just like that, we’ve unraveled.

She glances unobtrusively at Peter, then to me.

“You’re right,” she says, genuinely contrite. “That wasn’t fair. Ignore me. I’m just a mess right now.”

“That’s beautiful,” Anderson interjects.

“Oh, you shut up, too, and cut the sarcasm,” I snap, startled at how quickly I can turn, how quickly my flip can switch. I’m supposed to be living in the moment! What is wrong with all of you that you’re all goddamn ruining it?

“I wasn’t being sarcastic—I was talking about the painting.” He gestures to the sunburst—or whatever it’s intended to be—over the mantel.

“It’s my dad’s,” Rory and I say in unison.

“Jinx,” she says, but no one has the energy to laugh.

I turn toward Anderson. “Oh, well, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He shrugs.

I sink next to him on the couch and assess the sad lot of our situations. Eventually, Anderson starts breathing deeply next to me, and Peter retreats uninvited to the bedroom, and Rory, too, stretches out in the armchair, her feet propped up on the ottoman. I pull a blanket over Anderson, then her, and then lean back against the pass-through, staring at my father’s brilliance, how I’d kept this magnificent, unavoidable reminder of him in my house, my home, the one place I could have exorcised him entirely. I stare at the reds and the golds and the biting black shards and absorb this contradiction, this realization that despite the many ways that my father scarred me, I never fully let myself heal.

What had Liv said? That everything within our control is a choice. I close my eyes and wonder which feels farther away: the time when I once had control or the time when I had a choice in the matter anyway.

R ory and I converge at the gallery on Monday morning, with a plan to go couch shopping afterward—my attempt to regain control, to have a choice in the matter over my old life, over my new life. Anderson, because he is bored and can’t stand to be alone with everyone gone for the holiday weekend, joins us. “Besides,” he said over the phone, “I’ll sweet-talk the staff at Crate and Barrel and get you a discount. They do that for actors, you know.” I sighed and wondered how someone could be both amiable and insufferable at the same time.

I’ve tried to go without sleeping pills for the weekend, anxious of becoming dependent, so rest has come in fits and starts, and last night was no exception: me, staring at my alarm clock at 2:32 a.m., and now my eyes feel like marshmallows. Too puffy to open properly. Anderson hands me an extra venti latte he thought to pick up for me.

“Ah, you read my mind,” I say, feeling momentarily guilty for faulting his earlier display of narcissism.

He guzzles his own cup. “Insomnia. It’s robbing us of our last shred of dignity. You look like a train wreck, I feel like a train wreck.” But he smiles as he says this. We both know we could have lost much more by now.

“I could use your help over here,” Rory says, her arms stacked with binders and free-floating papers.

Rory is doing no better than either of us, having spent the duration of the weekend fused to my couch or on the cusp of my bed or curled up against the radiator, hashing and rehashing her implosion with Hugh. I listened, I listened some more, and though I wanted to seize her by the shoulders and yell, “Don’t you get it, this isn’t the end of the world!” I instead brewed coffee and warmed up cold leftovers and tried to appease her when I could. Making that choice that Liv had imparted: choosing to be there for her, asserting control when I could. This, I could do.

Peter grew either bored or annoyed by Saturday evening, so offered a quick good-bye and headed out to…I don’t even know where. Thinking about it now in the gallery, I’m not sure I even asked, and I’m not sure that he told me when I woke up on Sunday morning and found him asleep, still clothed and smelling like stale cigarettes, next to me. I trusted him. I had to trust him even if I didn’t trust him. This was the bridge that we had to cross to get past beige.

Rory thuds the binders down on the desk, atop the desk calendar with its reminders of my obstetrician appointments, while Anderson slides up the spare office chair, the wheels squeaking on the tile floor. He nudges me into it.

“So this is what you did,” she says, gesturing to the binders. “These are your files, how you kept everything in order.”

“I was the paper pusher.” Oh god, was I really a paper pusher? Where is the sex? The glamour? The tiny smidge of excitement that I actually enjoyed any aspect of this job?

“But a good paper pusher at that.” Rory opens the top spiral. “Clients, all alphabetized—their last purchases, their likes and dislikes, their children’s names, their jobs. It’s all in here.”

I flip through a few pages, amazed at how much about a person can be compartmentalized onto a single page. Just like my file, the one that tells Liv everything she needs to know about me. Not everything, I remind myself. Not even close to everything. I turn to the last page, then snap the cover closed, already uninterested. I sink back into the chair, scanning the room, my eyes surfing to the bookshelves against the wall. More binders. Only these are marked FRANCIS SLATTERY.

“Are those Dad’s?” I flick my chin toward them.

Rory spins quickly, her fingers finding their way to her neck.

“What?” She laughs in a pitch too high to sound natural. “Oh, yes, those. Um, yes, those are Dad’s.”

“Of his work?”

She blinks an acknowledgment.

“Didn’t Jamie ask you for these weeks ago? Back when he was researching?” I say. Operation Free Nell Slattery. Yes, let’s get back to that while we’re thinking of it.