Элисон Скотч - The Song Remains the Same

Outside, with Labor Day having come and gone, summer is fighting a dying battle against the fall air. The leaves are hanging perilously on the trees, knowing full well they’re going to make the plunge, clinging on as if they stand a chance not to. The garbage smell that has wafted around us for the better part of August is dissipating, ushered out with the humidity, and in its place a briskness is filtering in, like something you’d smell from a bottle of Tide. All around me, New Yorkers hustle to their daily lives, oblivious to those faltering leaves, to the scent of autumn in the air, to the winds that are blowing in from the north that are threatening to change everything, even if for today they will not.

More than a few people do a double take when they pass me on the sidewalk: a cute twenty-something hipster nodding and smiling, a harried mom overly apologetic— Oh my god, I am so, so sooooo sorry! —when her toddler knocks into my right leg. I tug my hoodie tighter around my neck, protecting my last vestiges of anonymity, and sidle inside the Starbucks, the aroma of burned coffee beans overtaking me.

He is there before me, reading the Arts section of the New York Times, which seems entirely stereotypical and yet entirely logical at the same time. I hesitate before moving closer, wondering whether or not I’m ready. To trust him. To believe him. And even with these things, whether or not I want to hear what he says in the first place.

Yesterday, in our session, Liv and I continued with our free-association exercise. We’d been discussing Peter, and the progress he and I had made, and then she asked me to explore the word trust, to spit out my first instinct.

“Ask again later,” I said in reply.

“‘Ask again later’ is your first instinct?” she said. “Or ‘ask again later’ because you’re being cynical and thus your first instinct about trust is actually cynicism.”

“Both,” I said.

“There’s a reason they call it blind trust,” she said.

I gazed at her and thought not of Peter but instead of my mom, and how even though she knew I needed her to support my memory of that house in Virginia, she didn’t: she instead hedged her bets and protected her own self-interest until it became clear that the ruse was up.

“I think I’m impaired enough,” I said. “Do I need to add blindness to my list, too? People are who they are. Nothing changes.”

She half-smiled, her eyes crinkling into fans. “People can surprise you.”

“Well, you got that right.”

“No, you’re intentionally misinterpreting me.” She spun her hair into a bun. “You’re right: mostly, people are who they are. But if you accept this about them, you can move forward and build from there— then, they can surprise you. People do evolve, people do grow. Some of us may not. But some of us may. Maybe you and Peter can change together, can learn to trust again together.”

Today, I watch Jasper Aarons studying the Arts section with a certain air of what?: Royalty? Snobbery? Je ne sais quoi? And I am more certain than ever that people are who they are—that I can sum him up in this snapshot of a moment.

Jasper spies me over the edge of his headline, crumples the paper onto the ground in a haphazard, almost violent way—surprising me, proving that, in fact, maybe I can’t read everything about him in this one moment—and flags me over. He moves back the free chair at our table, and then, once I’ve eased in and gotten comfortable, inches a latte and a scone toward me.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he says. “I took the liberty of getting you something.”

“Not at all.” I flake the crust off the top of the scone and slide it into my mouth, the butter, the currants, the sugar colliding atop my tongue.

“I’m sure you’re curious why I called, why the urgency,” he says.

“I guess,” I say. I’m trying to study him, employ what Liv would call heightening my senses, homing in on clues other than the obvious.

“Well, at the behest of my producer friend, I watched your American Profiles interview, and when they showed the retrospective of some of Francis’s work, I remembered something.” He shakes his head. “Your dad, he left me something for you, and Jesus, I have been a lousy friend—a gigantic screwup who royally let him down by not watching out for you in the way that I promised—but honestly, I sincerely forgot about this.” He reaches into his bag, strung across the back of his chair, and pulls out a notebook, which he nudges toward me. “Your dad wanted you to have this. He told me before he, well, before he left, that when you were old enough, you were to have it.” His hand flits. “Like I said, time got the best of me.”

“What did you spend all those years doing?” I ask, like that has anything to do with anything. But I’m looking closer, picking things apart the way a medical examiner might, poring over the corpses left behind in my old life.

“Painting. Marriage. Rehab. Divorce. Repeat. Occasionally repeat again,” he says, smiling but not smiling all the same.

“I’m sorry to hear that. Demons can be a hard thing.”

“Your dad knew that better than anyone.”

“I’m sorry?”

“No, it’s nothing,” he says. “Only that we artists are tortured souls, so to speak. Painting tells our story, attempts to exorcise those demons. Your dad did it better than any of us.”

“Exorcised his demons?”

“No,” he laughs softly. “I meant paint, but I guess you could take it any way you wanted to.”

“My mom’s already told me that they had their share of problems,” I say. “But we all have our baggage.” A husband who cheated, a brain that’s gone haywire. Yes, I have a few boatloads of my own. I open the front cover of the notebook. “What’s in here? Sketches?”

“The best I can tell. To be honest, I knew he wanted me to get that to you, so I set it aside and didn’t really examine it too, too much, and then, well, I fell down the rabbit hole, and I never took the time to sort through it. Knew it was private.”

“It’s his diary?”

“Not really a diary, no. It’s sketches, but maybe also a diary, if that makes sense. I remember—back when you were younger—you were quite a little painter yourself, so maybe it will make sense. Your dad thought you were quite good.”

“Not as good as he was. Besides, if left to my own devices, I’d probably have chosen music.”

“Easy to say that now, with hindsight,” he says.

I don’t correct him to say that, in fact, I have no hindsight at all.

He stops for a beat, watching the barista make change behind the counter. “You know, your dad wasn’t always the best communicator. Get a little vodka in him, and then, yes, he could pour his fucking heart out, but mostly, he spoke via his work. That’s what made him so damn magnificent.”

“So this is him speaking to me?” I gesture toward the notebook, with its faded gray cover, its fraying corners, its yellowed sheets. I chew on the scone and mull it over.

“Look, Nell, you asked on the phone if I had a map. Well, this is him giving you one—of where he’s been, what he wanted for you,” he says, his green eyes meeting mine. I’m once again reminded—thrown back to that time when he and my dad must have inhaled this whole goddamn town. Jesus, they must have been glorious, lighting it on fire.

“And in all these years, you never heard from him? You were his best friend.”

“And you were his daughter.” He sips from his cup, which I’m sure is black, no sugar, no milk. “And yet, you didn’t hear anything from him, either.” He swallows and sighs, and now he looks so very tired, rumpled, like a messy-haired shar-pei. “Look, I wish that things had been done differently. God knows that I have my own list of regrets, and yes, I wish I’d stopped him or at least forced him to reconsider, but your dad was who he was. Once you’re in that deep to your own skin, really, is there any turning back?”