by Mary McCoy
I feel like I’m supposed to be angry with her. Is it weird that all I feel is sad?
Max knocks on my door, and I tell him to come in.
“What’s going on?” he asks. “You took one look at Greg and disappeared in here.”
I play back the call with my mom that I’d recorded.
“I’m not quite ready to face everyone yet,” I say.
Max lies down on the floor next to me, propped up on his elbow. I can feel his eyes studying every contour of my face. I suppose he could be feeling some satisfaction at having his conspiracy theories proven right, but what he says to me is, “I don’t see it.”
“Don’t see what?”
“Greg,” he says. “I see your mom’s eyebrows. Your dad’s eyes. Your mom’s nose. Your chin somewhere between the two. Your mouth is just… yours. But I don’t see Greg in your face.”
I swallow hard and take a deep breath, trying to stop my heart from racing. When someone looks right into the center of you, it’s hard not to run out of the room. It’s hard to sit there and take it, to let someone see you, especially when you’re pretty sure that the center of you is a disaster.
I think about making a joke that he’s not exactly a reliable paternity-testing apparatus, but I stop myself.
“What else do you see?”
“Someone whose life is about to change,” he says.
“I suppose that’s true.”
“What do you see when you look at me?”
I try to see Max the way he’s seeing me, right into the center, like I’ve locked onto his soul with a tractor beam. But when I open my mouth to speak, he looks away, and before I can say anything, he gets up from the floor and says, “Never mind. Are you ready to go out there?”
“Is something the matter?” I ask. I don’t know what just happened, why Max changed his mind all of a sudden.
“I’m okay,” he says. “It’s just that lately, when people see who I really am, they end up being disappointed.”
“Those people don’t know what they’re talking about,” I say, but Max is already walking out the door.
LEE SWAN: (studio)
When we go back into the kitchen, there’s a weird dynamic. Like Sage, Harold, and my dad are this unit, and Greg’s not quite part of it. But also, they know what Max and I are doing. They know what we’re going to ask Greg, and they want to protect him from us.
(the sound of footsteps ascending the attic steps)
Soon we have Greg in the attic, sitting in front of the mic with an agreeable and jolly look on his face. He seems to think what we’re doing is very cute and charming.
I dislike him a little in that moment because he doesn’t seem like a person who’s ever suffered or struggled the way I know my parents and the rest of their friends have. He seems like one of those blithe assholes who floats along getting everything they want.
I don’t like thinking that I might be related to him.
LEE:
So, Greg, you knew my parents in college. You knew them well. Were you surprised when you found out they’d gotten together?
GREG THURBER:
We all were. It happened so fast. One morning, they gathered us all around the dining room table, and out of nowhere, they announced they were getting married. We barely had enough time to throw together a wedding party for them.
LEE:
And nobody thought to ask, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
GREG:
They seemed happy! Everybody else had their big plans and big news. Harold’s band, Sage and Maggie going to Berlin. Me going to LA. This was Arthur and Maya’s big news. We celebrated it like we’d celebrated everything else.
LEE:
Did anyone know that Mom was pregnant?
GREG:
By the time we found out about that, everyone had left town.
LEE: (studio)
There is a stack of Blackwing pencil boxes on the table next to my computer. Ten boxes, to be exact, one for all of my birthdays from the time I was nine until this year. Some of them are still full of pencils because how many could I conceivably go through in a year? But they smell nice, like cedar, and the boxes are very fancy, sturdy, slick cardboard lined with patterned paper. I use them to store my audio adapters, my splitters and couplers, and my guitar picks. The older ones are filled with my little-kid treasures—rocks I liked, feathers I’d plucked out of the grass in the backyard.
LEE:
Do you recognize these?
GREG:
Did I get you those?
LEE:
I have the cards, too. My dad joked that I could sell them to fund college. Is that true, by the way?
GREG:
I hoped you’d like them, but I doubt my little doodles would even cover your books.
MAX: (studio)
Last year, a pair of sketches by Los Angeles artist Greg Thurber fetched ten thousand dollars at auction.
LEE:
I’ve been wondering about them lately. Do you remember when you started sending them to me?
GREG:
I don’t think so.
LEE:
Sage and Maggie had just adopted Max, and the three of them came to our house.
MAX:
Technically, the adoption didn’t happen for another two years. But they’d just gotten custody of me.
LEE:
The party at our house was a really big deal.
MAX:
It was really important to my parents that everyone was here. It was a “Hey Everybody, This Is Max and He’s Part of Our Crew Now” party.
GREG:
I remember now.
MAX:
You spent the whole weekend up in the attic with us, drawing pictures. I barely saw you with any of the grown-ups, aka your friends, that weekend.
LEE:
I heard them talk about you all the time, but that was the first time I remember you coming to our house.
GREG:
I guess it was. I missed out on a lot of stuff in everyone’s lives. Such as the two of you.
MAX:
But the Blackwing pencils and birthday cards. You only send them to Lee.
GREG: (nervous laugh)
I don’t know when your birthday is.
MAX:
It’s May twenty-third. But that’s not the point.
LEE:
What we’re getting at is, well, we wanted to know whether there was some reason…
GREG:
Have you talked to your parents about this, Lee?
LEE:
I’m asking because I think you do remember why you sent me those pencils and cards. And I wanted to ask what was going through your head that weekend, when you came to our house and met Max and me.
GREG:
I’m… I’m at a loss. I think I’m on your dad’s side, Lee. Maybe I’d rather not talk about the past.
LEE:
But that’s all any of you talk about! All your adventures, how wild you were, crazy shit you did.
GREG:
That doesn’t mean that I want to talk about it with you.
CHAPTER 17 Another One Waiting to Take Its Place
After Greg retreats down the attic steps, Max and I plan our next moves, which are few. When you’re interviewing people, you can’t force things. You can’t go back over and over again until you wear them down. You can’t bully someone into talking to you. I mean, you can. One can. But I choose not to.
“I don’t know what to do next,” I tell Max. “Maybe there’s nothing to do. Maybe this isn’t a story I can figure out.”
Max sits down next to me on the air mattress and gives my hand a comforting squeeze.
“It makes me sad, though,” he says. “Objects of Destruction. It sounds like it should exist.”
“Maybe it was only ever an Object to Be Destroyed. Make it, get it out of your system, and then smash it to bits. You get over yourself.”
Max chuckles. “Who’s this ‘you’
you’re speaking of?”
“The royal ‘you,’ ” I say indignantly. “Anyhow, how do you deal with heartbreak?”
“I keep busy,” Max says. “Look for something else to be interested in, whatever keeps me out of my own head.”
I think about Vincent, specifically about his Shure SM7B studio-quality microphone. I wonder if he’ll think about me when he packs it to take to Washington, DC, the way we went to Yarbrough’s Music together every week to visit it while he was saving up the money to buy it. We called it our puppy, and then when he bought it, we named it Puppy. Sometimes he’d leave Puppy at my house over the weekend, then text late at night, Give Puppy a good-night kiss from me. Save one for yourself, too.
I want to shake myself out of memories like that before they get any realer, any more raw, but what’s the point? There’s always another one waiting to take its place.
I put my head on Max’s shoulder and sigh.
“Nothing keeps me out of my own head.”
* * *
“You two sure know how to kill a party,” Sage says when Max and I come down from the attic a few minutes later.
“We won’t bother you anymore tonight,” I tell Sage. “Will you tell them that when you go back outside? Tell them I’m putting the recorder away.”
Sage looks surprised. “Wanting to know things isn’t wrong, Lee.”
“I know.”
“And you’re allowed to ask questions.”
Beside me, Max has the same politely antsy look on his face that he did this afternoon before I took him out for fried pickles. He has little patience for Sage right now, especially when they’re being wise and understanding with someone who’s not him.
“Do you feel like doing something?” Max asks me suddenly.
I feel guilty about it, but I don’t think I can set foot in Java Cabana tonight without it feeling like failure on two fronts.
“I’m going to go to bed,” I say. “I’m sorry. You should go out. Do something fun.”
He looks at the clock on the microwave and says, “I told Claire I might stop by the poetry open mic.”
“Don’t stay out too late,” Sage says.
Max glares at them, and I realize that working on Objects of Destruction with me hasn’t just distracted him from his breakups—it’s allowed him to keep his distance from Sage.
“I don’t need your permission,” he says.
“And I don’t need your attitude.”
“Cool.”
“It isn’t cool.”
Max bites the back of his hand and stifles a frustrated sigh, then shakes his head and marches out the front door in his postapocalyptic-rogue-from-the-club wear.
Sage stares after him, at the door he’s slammed shut.
“And that’s what I get for being nice,” they say to no one in particular. I mean, I suppose it’s for my benefit since I’m the only one standing in the kitchen.
“What’s going on with you two?” I ask. I feel like a traitor asking, for not automatically accepting Max’s version of events. But Sage has always talked to me like I was a person with potentially interesting things to say, more than almost any of my parents’ friends. They treat me like a fully formed human, and a person like that is worth giving the benefit of the doubt.
“Having a kid is crazy hard and deeply weird,” Sage says.
“You’re lucky to have Max,” I say because I can’t not defend him, and also because it has the virtue of being true.
“I know I am. I wouldn’t choose another kid on the planet if I could, no offense.”
“None taken.”
“When he was little, I thought, well, I’ll just love him and that’ll be enough. But it’s not. That’s what I know now, that you can love someone more than your own life and still fail them as a parent.”
I wonder if this is how my mom feels right now, if she’s sitting in her New Orleans hotel wondering if what’s happened this week cancels out eighteen years of being a good parent. It wasn’t her fault. When she made her plans, she thought I’d be up in the attic with Vincent, in love and too busy to notice she was gone. I could have told her that I needed her; I could have asked her to stay.
But I think, really, I wanted her to know that I needed her and stay without being asked.
“What do you think Max wants you to do?” I ask.
“Right now? I think he wants me to leave him alone,” Sage says.
Maybe humans aren’t made to experience love, I think. We never evolved the kind of telepathy it seems to require.
CHAPTER 18 The Rush of What Comes Next
Staring at my bedroom ceiling, I continue this trend of cheerful and life-affirming thoughts.
I begin to second-guess everything I’ve been doing for the past three days. What if I’m telling the wrong story, from the wrong angle? What if the only thing I have to show for it is a pile of interviews with people who do not want to talk to me? And why should they? Just because I’m a melodramatic attention whore who breaks up with her boyfriend on a podcast doesn’t mean everybody wants to dredge up their lives in public. I remember what my mom said, how the last episode of Artists in Love seemed like a lot of my heart to spill out on the pavement.
When a confessional poet tells you that you overshared, it’s time to reevaluate your life choices.
I never doubted myself like this when I was working with Vincent. Realizing this makes me miss him all over again, fresh and visceral as if I’d just lost him this minute. I miss all of our old rhythms, the way we planned stories, the things we argued about. I could talk to him about art and life and love, and he never treated me like I was being too serious or pretentious. He loved those things about me. I loved being loved for those things.
What if I never had that again with anyone?
I get out of bed and walk out to the living room, to the spot where I was standing when Vincent told me that life would be intolerable without me.
I could still have everything I wanted. I could write him back. I could take my one wild and precious life to Washington, DC, with someone I loved. What was so bad about that?
In the backyard, I hear my dad and his friends talking, listening to music on the outdoor speaker system that Harold installed for us. I know I could go out there and join them. Sage would give me a hug, and Harold would let me pick the music, and my dad would find little ways to include me in the conversation.
Instead I go out the front door and get in the car. And because I’m me, because I’m not happy unless I’m having it both ways, I bring my recorder with me.
LEE: (in the car)
Don’t judge me.
It’s eight p.m. on a Sunday night, and I’m parked across the street from my ex-boyfriend’s house.
Don’t judge me, because you never know when the universe will conspire to make you the sad girl parked across the street from your ex-boyfriend’s house, trying to decide what you’re going to do about it.
If I texted him right now, I’d say, I’m parked outside. Come on, let’s go someplace.
Maybe he’d come out. Maybe he wouldn’t. But either way, I’d have that nervy, electric buzz running through me while I waited to find out what was going to happen.
Maybe that’s what Max meant when he called me a love junkie.
What if I don’t want love? What if I just want the rush of what comes next?
Suddenly, the front door opens and people stream out of Vincent’s house. I’d forgotten that Vincent’s parents always had people from church over at their house on Sunday nights after evening service. When they were younger, they were missionaries. That’s how they met, actually. Vincent’s mom, a white lady from Germantown, Memphis’s most affluent suburb, went to Kenya to teach at a Christian school. Vincent’s dad, who’s Kenyan, was teaching there too, and I don’t know, their eyes met across the lunchroom; they brushed fingers while they were reaching for the same piece of chalk. They never talked about how they fell in love, only that it was God’s will that they
did. They didn’t act lovey-dovey around each other. They didn’t kiss hello or hold hands in public. However, they interacted like they were two gears in a clockwork that kept perfect time, a perfectly aligned team.
Vincent says they talked about staying in Nairobi, but his mom got homesick, and his dad was curious to see what Memphis was like. He’d been to Boston and New York, but Memphis wasn’t rich or glitzy or cosmopolitan. There was work to be done in Memphis; they prayed about it and decided together. And now they’re church leaders. His dad directs the choir. His mom is a deacon. It’s a nondenominational Pentecostal church that’s fairly integrated by Memphis standards. Like, it’s not a white church attended by five Black families who are in every single picture on the website, or a Black church with a couple of white members who never shut up about how they go to Black church because it’s so authentic and real. Vincent’s church actually looks more or less like Memphis does, all in one place. However, it’s also the kind of church that says marriage exists between one man and one woman right on the home page so nobody misses it.
I’ve never really understood how Vincent wraps his head around it. He doesn’t agree with it, but he never speaks up or stays home or finds another church to attend. He just keeps going, like he doesn’t have any choice in the matter.
Vincent was homeschooled until he was in tenth grade, when he begged his parents to let him go to public school. He told me that it took six months to convince them. As far as I could tell, he’d never confronted them about anything since. It was almost like he’d used up all his stamina for teenage rebellion on that one argument, and spent the rest of high school trying to prove to them that they hadn’t made a mistake.
I realize that I don’t even know why he fought them so hard to go to public school. I think I assumed he felt like I did, that it would be stifling and boring to have your parents be your teachers. Maybe he had other reasons, though.
