by Laurel Brett
“That might not be easy to do. Up until now I have waited for them to contact me.”
“Your mental health seems more important than a nicety. Anyway, you did stop in Bronxville to see the second Daphne.”
“What if the girls can’t exist in the same room together? What if they can’t inhabit the same reality?”
“But you are in all three realities, Garrett.”
“True. But it’s the same me.”
“You do know that according to quantum theory an object can be in two places at the same time.”
I didn’t know that. “How do you know that?” I asked.
“I did go to Smith, Garrett. I didn’t just study art history. I understand a lot of things.”
I saw her point. I couldn’t obsess about these Daphnes forever. I had a scientist’s training, and I could use it.
We finished our tea and then walked through town window-shopping. Rhinebeck had a toy train store, and we both enjoyed the miniature town in the window. Caroline pointed out the theater, and I pointed out the skating rink. The miniature train station was at one end of town and resembled the station in Poughkeepsie. In the real world the commuter train didn’t travel as far north as Rhinebeck.
* * *
I had planned a surprise for when we returned to New Paltz, but I wasn’t sure she’d be in the mood for it now. As we entered the house I said, “I have the new Beatles album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It’s been out for two months, but I haven’t heard it yet. I decided that I wanted to listen to it with you after I heard you humming ‘Good Day Sunshine’ at your apartment. How did an almost contemporary of mine come to the Beatles?” I asked.
“I am in the art world, Garrett. I encounter all sorts of things. And I make it my business to. You have been in your ivory tower too long.”
“Touché.”
We sat in the living room on the floor. She put her head in my lap as we listened to the album. I had never heard anything like it. We entered a world of marmalade trees and tangerine skies. Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes, and she’s gone. I knew all about that. It seemed as if Daphne was always disappearing. Then I took John’s advice from “Tomorrow Never Knows” and turned off my mind and floated downstream. When the last notes of the really sad “Day in the Life” ended, Caroline exclaimed, “That was amazing!”
We sat quietly together. The afternoon was turning to dusk and the honey light was fading. Out the window we could see streaks of peach and violet. Caroline lifted her head out of my lap and said, “I think I want to go back to the city tonight. Don’t read anything into it. I just need to think. I’m sorry.”
“You are that upset about Daphne?” I had been kidding myself into thinking that I had already explained everything to her and that she understood. But there was nothing to do now except go along with what she wanted.
“Okay,” I said, “whatever you think best. At least let me drive you back to the city so you don’t have another two-hour train trip on the same day.”
“Nah. That’s okay. I like the train. It’s soothing. I’ll be fine.”
She gathered up her things and stuffed them into her straw bag. We checked the schedule and discovered that we didn’t have much time to spare if we were going to make the next train. I dropped her at the station, and before she boarded, she turned to me and waved.
I drove home with the T-bird top down under a clear sky lit by a riot of stars.
Chapter Ten
* * *
The summer of 1967 had brought love and hate. In San Francisco hippies celebrated the Summer of Love with the Monterey International Pop Festival, flowers, dreams of communes, and images of love. Over 100,000 tourists converged on the city armed with flowers and hallucinogens. Throughout the rest of the country the long, hot summer brought 159 race riots, some featuring arson and looting.
In the midst of this chaos, I heard nothing from Daphne for nearly a month, and I could detect Caroline’s ambivalence in our frequent phone calls. Some days she was warm and confiding, and other days noncommittal and distant. I was tired of waiting for her to resolve her feelings and wanted to see her. One hot mid-August night, I decided to call her with an invitation. “Hey, you,” I said when she answered after one ring, “how about dinner Friday? My treat. Any place you want to go.”
She didn’t respond at first. The silence stretched out uncomfortably. Finally she said, “I don’t know, Garrett. I still don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” I asked, trying to keep the exasperation out of my voice. I was walking a tightrope. I didn’t want to let her drift away, but I didn’t want to drive her away either.
“I don’t know if I want to see you or not.” She sighed. “I mean, I do want to see you. I know that. But I also don’t want to see you. As long as you’re wrapped up in all that Daphne business, I don’t think we can move forward, and I get angry with you. That’s not really fair. You’re not technically doing anything wrong.”
“Technically?”
“Okay. You’re not doing anything wrong.”
“Caroline?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
“I love you too, but it doesn’t change anything.”
This had to be the least romantic exchange of first “I love you”s ever.
“So back to the original question. We can talk about all this Friday night.”
She finally agreed. I engaged her in small talk. I asked about the gallery, inquiring after its current show. She talked with animation about a neorealist they were showing. I imagined Jane’s work hanging there someday.
* * *
That Friday, I arrived at the Italian restaurant that Caroline had chosen. The place was intimate without being crowded. The exposed brick walls and soft taupe leather banquettes were rustic and elegant. I slid onto a bench and appreciated its plush comfort. I ordered a glass of wine, red. I was just starting to buzz with a pleasant anticipation when the waiter approached the table again. I tried to wave him away, having everything I needed for the moment, but he stepped forward and bowed slightly.
“I have a phone call for you,” he explained.
It had to be Caroline, and it was.
“I just don’t feel up to going out tonight. I have a splitting headache. I spent all day haggling with a customer. I hoped it would get better, but I’m seeing stars.” She sounded closed and weary.
“Okay. I’ll just pop around with a bottle of aspirin,” I suggested.
“No, that’s all right. I just need to sleep it off. I’m sorry. I know it’s a pain. You drove all the way here, Garrett. Don’t be angry.”
“No. Of course not,” I lied. “You can’t help not feeling well.”
I really wished Caroline could get over her reservations about me. I hadn’t even seen Daphne for a month.
Since I was in the city anyway, I gave Jerry a call. I was pleased that he was still home at eight. “Things were odd the last time we saw each other,” I began. He agreed that they were and proposed that we meet up on the Upper West Side. “I was just on my way out,” he added.
Jerry’s hangout was on Broadway at 112th Street. He loved getting out of his tony neighborhood and venturing fifteen blocks north to Morningside Heights, which he considered more authentic. He liked all the Columbia types he’d meet up with there. The place was an Irish bar where I was in my element too, yet even though I was the Irishman, he was usually the one singing “Danny Boy” at the end of the night.
It took me awhile to get to the bar. I decided not to ride the subway but to move the car so I could get out of the city quickly when I was ready to leave. Uptown I had to circle around for a while before I finally found a parking space on Riverside Drive. By the time I got to the bar it was obvious that Jerry had started without me.
“Garrett, my man!” he said boisterously. He was at a table with a smart blonde—just his type. Someone she knew walked in, and I slid into the chair she vacated. His eyes were glassy. H
e was feeling no pain. He asked me what I’d drink.
“Beer is fine,” I answered, and he headed over to the bartender.
Jerry put the beers on the table roughly so that some of the foam sloshed out over the mugs onto the scarred wood. “Oops. Sorry about that,” he said, working hard to avoid slurring.
“I’m having lady problems, Jer. Caroline is really annoyed with me. She’s really spooked by Daphne—”
“Both of them,” he interrupted, very pleased at his understanding of events and finding humor in my plight.
“Well, actually, there’s a third, a radical activist—”
“Three of them? That’s crazy!”
This last remark was a little too unrestrained, but it was Friday night, and his raucousness was to be expected. I saw that it would be impossible for us to have a serious conversation. Just then I watched the attractive girl he’d been talking with coming back to our table.
“Why don’t you buy a girl a drink?” he said. “We can have a double date.”
“Because of Caroline? Remember?”
“Of course,” he said, reaching for his beer. “The beauteous Caroline. She was my patient, Garrett. Did I ever tell you that?”
Of course I knew that, and if he weren’t plastered, he’d know that I did. He’d also know that he wasn’t supposed to be talking about it, especially in public. I’d come to smooth things over and get his advice, but Jerry was one of those people who liked to work hard and party hard, and after all, it was the weekend. I felt discouraged, and I felt alone with all the mysteries of the universe, so I decided to leave early and head up north. Since he had already begun an animated conversation with the blonde, I had to tap him on the shoulder to tell him that I was leaving.
“Really?” he said, clearly crestfallen. “Before you go, do want you want to hear me sing ‘Danny Boy’?”
I didn’t.
On the way home, I realized I’d have to make sense of things on my own. I decided to take a week to visit my mother, who now lived in Florida. I liked making the drive, and I hadn’t been to visit in a while. She had remarried about five years before, and she and her husband, whom she met tending bar, had moved south to open their own Irish pub. The pub was in West Palm Beach, and they had named it Molly Bloom’s. I had to laugh when I thought of my sixtyish sapphire-eyed mom reciting bits and pieces of Molly’s soliloquy to any customer who asked. They lived in a large house on a man-made lake. My mother always kept a room waiting for me.
* * *
I had forgotten how much I hated Florida in the summer, but we had a good visit; my mother was doing well. She got along with her husband, a big Irish guy named Danny Malone, and business was good. She had trained me to tend bar when I was a just a kid, and I enjoyed spending time behind the bar. Sometimes I wanted to talk to her about my dad, but those conversations never went anywhere. She had made her peace with the past and wanted to leave it behind. She had loved him, but by the time he’d gone off to war, their marriage was strained because he found it difficult to settle down and put his shoulder to the grindstone of life. She tried to be brave, but things hadn’t been going well when he got the urge to enlist. When he died she was almost felled by guilt. It was nice to see her happy now. My longing for my father was all my own.
I had put Caroline and the Daphnes out of my mind as much as I could during my visit, and I saved my worrying for the drive home. I worried that Galen’s Daphne would be furious with me for seeing the other Daphne portraits in Galen’s studio. I worried that she would be angry that I knew Jane. I worried that I would never see any of the Daphnes again, and I worried that Caroline would never want to see me again.
The mechanics of the trip home were always the same. I drove nonstop except for brief breaks at truck stops, and I stayed the night at the same motel in St. Pauls, North Carolina.
After the long drive and a night in my own bed, I arrived at my post office box bright and early the next morning. My next stop was my mail cubby at school. I collected an impressive haul of academic detritus and the few important school memos that had trailed in during the summer.
Hidden in the monster pile were two postcards, one from Caroline and one from Daphne. I felt relieved and terrified. I read Caroline’s first. On the flip side of a picture of Modigliani’s The Black Dress she wrote, I want to cautiously proceed. I tried calling, but no answer. Call me. Daphne had chosen a postcard of a photograph of an Egyptian sculpture of a cat. Her message read, I finished the book. Meet me August 25th at our place at our time. It had only been one month since we’d met, but the universe was now a completely different place. I probably should have wondered which Daphne it would be, but I hoped she would be my original Daphne.
It’s funny how quickly we can move from despair to elation. I had returned from Florida feeling empty in a way I hadn’t known I could be six months earlier, but now it seemed that all might be well because I was going to be seeing both Daphne and Caroline. I wanted to make arrangements to spend a few nights in the city. I tried calling Jerry, but his answering service indicated that, like many New York therapists, he would be away for most of August. He wouldn’t have minded me crashing at his pad in his absence, but he had never given me a key. I didn’t want to impose on Caroline. I called around and made a reservation for three nights at a discount hotel near Times Square even though I wasn’t a tourist. The room would be fine—I wouldn’t need much.
I wanted to see Daphne before I saw Caroline. I imagined myself bringing Caroline an answer like a cat carrying a bird in his mouth and laying it at the feet of his mistress. I called her at the gallery and we made quick plans for Saturday. “This is my outing, and my treat,” Caroline volunteered. “Be at my place by ten a.m.”
“What will I need?”
“Shorts. Swim trunks. Just in case.”
“Sure, see you then.” We didn’t talk much because she had to get back to work.
Although the meet-up at the coffee shop was just a few days away, I decided to take Caroline’s advice and try to get Galen’s Daphne there as well. SDS Daphne, as I had named her in my mind, could wait for another time. I didn’t have Daphne’s phone number at Galen’s house, but Jane did, and Jane had given me her own number. I called her. She was bubbling over with excitement because a painting of hers had been accepted into a juried show. After I offered my sincere and enthusiastic congratulations, I asked for Daphne’s Bronxville number, and I told Jane to let me know how her painting fared.
Daphne answered the phone on the third ring. “Garrett. Hey. How are you?”
“Well. You?”
“Great. We went to England. London is wonderful. And we went to the Lake District. Have you ever been there? Wordsworth lived there. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve been so far.”
“How are things in paradise?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Things still good with you and Galen?”
“Why shouldn’t they be? How did you get this number?”
“From Jane Pinsky. I stopped by when you two were in England, and I met her. She showed me the entire Daphne series.”
“Really? That’s so strange. She never mentioned anything about it. You’d think she would have.” I decided that Jane had been protecting me. Daphne asked, “What did you think of the series?” Far from being upset, she sounded delighted that I’d seen these paintings.
“Honestly, I thought they were just beautiful. Will they be exhibited together?”
“Galen’s working on that. You know, I love studying art. It makes me a better model. Do you know the myth?”
“I actually read the Ovid because of you.”
“Good for you. Now what can I do for you?”
“I’m going to be in the city on Friday, and there’s someone I’d like you to meet—another young woman, if Galen asks. We’ll be at the coffee shop at two thirty, where you and I met. It’s important to me, and I think you’d really like her. She’s just your age.”
; “What fun. Galen’s been talking about going to the city for some supplies. We have a picnic to go to in Bedford the next day, but Friday sounds good. Galen knows all about you. I think he would like to talk to you. He even mentioned that your names are similar. Count me in. Give me your number so I can call you if I can’t come.”
I couldn’t bring myself to mention the other Daphne. I thought things would work out better if they discovered each other by meeting in person. I didn’t want to introduce skepticism, confusion, and suspicion into our uncanny situation.
I feared that the two girls might arrive before I did, so I got to the coffee shop early, but my Daphne, at least I thought that’s who it was, was already in her spot. She must have been really hungry, because she already had the grilled cheese sandwich in front of her.
“Garrett!” she squealed.
I sat down. The waitress took my order. I was too nervous to eat so I just ordered lemonade. It was a seasonally hot day. I observed Daphne with a sinking feeling. I didn’t think that the girl in front of me was a new iteration, but she seemed very different. She was dressed like a member of the Junior League. Her wild mane of hair had been smoothed into a shining helmet without a hair out of place. She was wearing a strand of expensive pearls.
“Garrett, what’s wrong?”
I wasn’t sure what to tell her. Should I tell her that I was afraid that we were in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers and a pod person had replaced her? I didn’t think so.
“Tell me,” she commanded, actually sounding more like her old self.
“It’s just that I’m not used to seeing you like this, all groomed, wearing pearls. I like to think of you as a fashionable ragamuffin.”
She burst out laughing. “Oh, is that all? Well, I don’t like seeing me like this either.”
“What do you mean?”
“We came into the city today for portraits. My uncle, my dad’s brother, is getting married. The family, including my cousins, took pictures together. My mother insisted I get my hair done like this. They set it in the beauty parlor with huge rollers and made me sit under a hair dryer for hours because it takes my hair so long to dry. I hate this get-up, but you should have seen my mother beaming.”
