The women on the treadmill looked like they could keep it up all day.
Peter’s phone beeped. Judith had sent him an email with the subject line: “Rock Star.”
Do you remember the letters I wrote while you were at science camp? The camp director had told all the parents that writing would help ward off homesickness, but when I picked you up you said the letters made things worse. You told me, “Most moms sent care packages, but you only sent words.” It seems we really are doomed to repeat history.
You asked me what I thought about you going on tour with him. In part, it feels like you’ve discovered a time machine. I imagine you turning a corner and running into the person I was at twenty — I suppose that the fear of running into one’s mother must be among the chief deterrents to time travel. The bottom line: you have as good a chance of running into the person I used to be as you do of running into the person Cross was back then. He wasn’t a musician when I knew him — he’d been a musician, but it was as if he and music had had a falling-out.
I was as shocked as anyone when he released that album. Suddenly he was nowhere and everywhere.
He gave us the money to open Natural Wonders. It was sort of like a settlement. I planned to repay him, but when I wrote him to set up a payment schedule one of his attorneys told me the money should go into an account for your education. I probably should have told you that before, but he’s always had too much money to care about it and I never cared to have any.
I may have given you the impression that I don’t like Cross’s music. That’s not the case. The first time I heard “Pleiades for Breakfast,” it spoke to me on a molecular level — I wanted to pretend he’d written it for me (he didn’t!). He always seemed more interested in you.
All of Peter’s friends had the same complaint: their mothers had no idea how to write a proper hundred-word email. A bunch of inveterate letter writers, their mothers composed essays. Reading her message on his phone was like viewing a mural through a loupe.
Judith’s mention of a time machine seemed prophetic: her email had taken him back. When had he last thought about science camp? He remembered shaving a plantar wart off a kid’s heel with a plastic-handled scalpel; he’d performed the surgery for the same reason the patient agreed to it — to attract the attention of a home-schooled Amazonian named Lauren Platz, the only girl at the camp.
This email had shocked him. Why would she have let Cross loan her money? Loans produced debt. Peter’s sense of Judith’s untarnished self-sufficiency took a hit. Plus, he felt retroactively wounded — he’d always imagined that he and Judith were equal partners in the store.
When Cross first called, Peter had wondered if he wasn’t trying to collect a debt. Was it possible that his instinct had been correct?
37
I refuse to let myself be dragged down by a few anonymous voices on the Internet, and certainly not while driving to a great American city to see a great American performer, Live and In Person.
Is Pittsburgh28 a great American city? I suppose some people still think of it as Steel Town, USA, but it’s remade itself into a great technological city, a great medical research city, as well as a cultural hub. Is anything more American than our right to reinvent ourselves? A collection of colonies became an independent country. We ended slavery and gave women the vote. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Norma Jeane Mortenson, and Caryn Elaine Johnson became Mark Twain, Marilyn Monroe, and Whoopi Goldberg. The folk-song/protest singer became the rock rebel, became the born-again prophet, became the rockabilly/two-step/western/world musician. A by-the-books small-business owner, husband, and father walked away from everything in order to chronicle something larger than his lawn. Look what happens to those people and places that don’t reinvent themselves: Detroit. Buffalo Springfield. People like my ex-wife.
IT SHOULD HAVE occurred to me that Gabby lived near Bowling Green. It’s strange that I didn’t notice while I was planning my itinerary. For the most part, I’m very thorough, but our minds will play tricks on us. At this point, nothing I can say will convince Gabby that my oversight wasn’t intentional.
Once, when Gabby was sixteen, she surprised me by showing up at the MCI Center (now the Verizon Center) in Washington, D.C. I was watching the show when she clapped her hands over my eyes and said, “Guess who?” Finally, I thought, we could see a concert together.
It wasn’t until after the show that she told me Patricia didn’t know where she was; she’d run away from home!
We went back to my hotel, and while I got the sofa bed set up she called her mother. Then Gabby handed the phone to me so Patricia could explain how our daughter had put herself at risk because of me, and that if I hadn’t made a habit of running away from my problems, then Gabby. . But I didn’t feel that bad because I had my daughter with me and, on top of that, Cross had given a really solid show.
Gabby fell asleep almost instantly — I can’t imagine how hectic her day had been — but I found it harder to quiet my head. I listened to Gabby snore and wondered if she and I might have had a breakthrough, if we might be emerging on the other side of something.
In the morning, I should have bought her pancakes and listened while she talked. Instead, as a surprise, I drove us to the National Zoo. I guess I assumed every teenaged girl was crazy about animals. As it turned out, Gabby only had eyes for the cages — she wasn’t satisfied until she’d pointed out the camouflaged electric fences that ringed each enclosure. I thought she’d run away in order to see me, but after a while it became clear that she needed some space from her mother.
NOW THAT WE’re both adults we get along better. But why does she insist on calling me Daddy? And why, when her friends know her as Gabrielle, do I call her Gabby?
38
Peter passed the morning in his room, waiting for someone to call on him. No one called on him. Instead, he’d watched a show called Yukon Tech about sixteen IT engineers who get airlifted into a remote Alaskan wilderness. A little before noon, he ventured into the hotel’s restaurant, hoping to avoid eating alone. Around the room, solitary businessmen camped out at tables — with their bright neckties the men reminded Peter of betta fish.
Bluto sat at the bar, jabbing a toast point into an egg cup. Two black cell phones, identical but for a red rubber band that encircled one, sat atop a stack of paper. A glass of tomato juice sweated onto a paper doily.
“Great show last night.”
Bluto looked up. Blinked. “You need something?”
“Just lunch.”
The tour manager pointed across the room. “Sutliff’s over there. Why don’t you sit with him?”
The musician sat bent over in a booth, his hands doing some delicate task not related to eating.
“Sutliff’s the guitarist, right?”
“A tampon is the only stringed instrument he can’t play.”
Peter would use that line on Martin sometime.
“You need a formal introduction?” Bluto asked, holding the red-banded phone to his ear.
IN THE MIDDLE of the table, the guitarist had a small plastic tool caddy stocked with a spool of fine gauge copper wire, hemostats, and needle-nose pliers. In contrast to the bright particularity of those objects, a clump of silver lozenges appeared to have melted together.
Peter said, “Bluto sent me over.”
“Then take a seat.” Sutliff’s attention stayed on a small object right in front of his nose, with the effect that he resembled a praying mantis.
“Are you making jewelry?”
“Is that what it looks like?”
Peter explained that his mother designed jewelry.