The Nobodies Album

by Carolyn Parkhurst

  I’m afraid people are going to applaud, and they do. I want to get out of here, and I want to do it without being noticed. I don’t see any choice but to wait until she’s finished talking.

  “If you’d like to contribute to this worthy cause, there’s a box by the door. You can also pick up a flyer with information about the Web site I’ve started, and please, everyone, take a button. We owe this to Bettina.”

  More clapping, and finally Kathy says, “And now, please stay and have something to eat. After a short break, we’re going to reconvene, and I hope some of you will get up and share your memories of Bettina.”

  She steps away from the podium, and we’re released.

  I lean over to whisper to Lisette, “I’m going to make my exit before anyone spots me.”

  We hug briefly, and I keep an eye on Kathy over Lisette’s shoulder. She seems to have started a one-person receiving line, so I should have a few minutes to get out without being seen.

  I leave the rotunda and make my way around the outer circle toward the door. There’s a sudden roar of sound from the crowd outside, and I step into an alcove and pretend to study a memorial niche that contains a china teacup and a photo of a Labrador retriever. If there’s something going on, I don’t want to be in the middle of it.

  I hear the man with the checklist addressing someone outside the door. “I’m sorry, sir,” he says, “but I can’t let you in. I’ve received very clear instructions.”

  A male voice answers, though I can’t make out the words.

  “Well, like I said, my instructions were clear, and if I need to call security, I will.”

  Another reply I can’t hear.

  “Thank you for understanding,” Checklist says, his voice a little lower. “If it were up to me, I’d let you in. I’m a huge fan.”

  I wait another moment and then leave my nook and head for the door, as casual as any invited guest. I smile at Checklist as I go.

  When I step outside, I see that there’s still a bit of a commotion, with people taking pictures and yelling questions. Everyone’s attention is directed at an expensive black car stopped just outside the gate. I see a dark suit, the back of a man’s head as he opens the rear door. And then, just before he disappears inside, he looks up and glances over the assembled crowd. His profile is unmistakable. It’s Roland Nysmith.

  “Roland!” I shout, but there are thirty people shouting the same thing, and he doesn’t hear me. The door closes, the car begins to move, and I take off after it like it’s 1964 and I’m a teenage girl hoping to touch the hallowed flesh of a Beatle.

  The car speeds up, and of course I’m no match for it. The driver turns the corner, and they’re gone. I’m breathing hard, and I nearly twist my ankle while I’m lurching to a stop. As I walk away from the Columbarium, I look back just once to confirm what I imagine I’ll see behind me: a crowd of people staring at the spectacle I’ve become, a middle-aged woman running after a rock star’s car.

  “What I did on my summer vacation is I killed my sister and my dad.”

  Excerpt from an essay by Milo Frost, September 1992

  Chapter Nine

  Mitch and I met when we were in college and married shortly after graduation. At the time he died, we’d been together fourteen years. Our marriage was … well, it was many things. Is there truly anyone who can say My marriage was _________ or My husband was _________ and think they’ve said anything at all? Complexity, that’s what it’s all about. The simplest thing that can be said about any person, any relationship, is that it’s not simple at all. (You should see me when I get called for jury duty and the judge asks me if there’s any reason I might not be able to approach a case impartially. It sounds like a riddle to me; I genuinely don’t know what to say. Have I ever been impartial, about anything? Is impartiality even possible within the confines of human nature? Usually after a few moments of this I’m free to go.)

  So Mitch and I were … happy, yes, but happiness isn’t what people think it is. There is no synonym for “happiness” that could possibly describe the entirety of a life shared by two people. Bliss? Joy? Ecstasy? Not outside of romance novels and the expectations of twelve-year-old girls. Contentment comes closest, but it errs on the other side. Say your marriage was content, and it sounds like you’re damning it with faint praise.

  So this is how I’ll describe it: our marriage was affectionate and tiresome, passionate and dull. After so many years together, the quality of love changes. It’s not that it fades or weakens, but it doesn’t follow the same clear path it did at the beginning. There’s a certain clogging of the arteries; each resentment, each disappointment leaves its trace, and those narrow passages become built up with detritus, making it harder for blood to pass through. The heart, whose job is not to love or to warm or to break but simply to move that vital fluid from place to place, becomes strained with new effort. It grows bigger, not because its capacity has changed, but because that’s what happens to a muscle when you make it work too hard.

  And so you focus on the minutiae of each day and lose sight of the larger picture, and slowly the miraculous becomes commonplace. You board an airplane without thinking that it should be impossible for such a machine to take flight; you live with another person, forging good days more often than bad, and never stop to think how unlikely it is that the two of you should be so lucky. A change of perspective is all it takes to shake loose your assumptions: a cloud seen from above instead of below; a husband gone, when you thought you had time to spare.

  To say I’ve been lonely since Mitch has been gone isn’t quite right. I live inside my head, and I’ve always been my own best company. But to be fully known? To be wholly and tenderly understood? That’s something I haven’t had in eighteen years.

  • • •

  I limp away from the Columbarium—my heels aren’t terribly high, but they weren’t intended for running—and make as dignified an exit as possible after my apparent descent into adolescent frenzy. You could say I’m feeling battered, or you could say I’m feeling sorry for myself; either way, the seemingly endless series of hits thrown in my direction this week is catching up with me, and for a moment I think I might actually cry. But I summon … not strength, exactly, but emptiness, neutrality, and I concentrate on moving one foot in front of the other until I’ve put some distance between myself and the roomful of well-dressed people who are so easily convinced that my son is a brutal man.

  I’m at a loss as to what to do next. I’ve felt this way on book tours, when I’m in an unfamiliar city for a day or sometimes less: it’s an opportunity of uncertain nature. There’s free time to fill, but not enough to see very much, and anyway, I’m not here for pleasure. My only home base is a hotel, and to retire indoors, to lie down and write a pay-per-view movie in the middle of the afternoon, much as I may want to, feels like the kind of pathos I might write into a book if I wanted to paint a character as particularly unadventurous. But what am I supposed to do, go to Fisherman’s Wharf?

  I take my phone out of my bag and check my messages; there are none. And then I do something that requires a surprising degree of determination: I turn it off.

  Immediately I feel better, the kind of relief a bleeding animal might feel upon finding someplace hidden to lie down. I walk aimlessly until my feet begin to hurt, and as I go, I think about nothing except the question Where do I want to be? The answer, as it turns out, is that I want to be nowhere at all.

  I stop on a corner and find a cab—more difficult here than in any large city I’ve been to—and I ask the driver to take me to a movie theater. A big one, I say. One with a lot of screens. Mitch and I did this a few times in the years before we had kids: go to a theater and see the next show that’s starting, no matter what it is. Mostly we saw films that were forgettable (and one or two that we both truly hated), and at the time it was just a way to occupy an afternoon, to combat the kind of lazy, affable boredom that we took for granted until our first child was born and then never had again
for the rest of our marriage.

  But in the years that I’ve been alone, especially since Milo’s been out of the house, it’s become something different for me. It’s a way to let chance into my life, relinquish control and see what the universe has to show me. New Agey of me, I know, and a bit grand, especially when so often the universe has nothing more to offer than a romantic comedy about a bland couple who meet when his mutt impregnates her purebred. But I believe coincidence can reveal connections that might not have emerged otherwise, and I think this is as good a means of divination as any. Study the flight of birds in the sky on any given day; stand a book on its spine and let it fall open to whatever page it may. Or enter a dark room with no expectations and see what images come to life.

  The driver drops me in front of an ornate building on Van Ness Avenue. I walk through an enormous arched portal of bronze and glass set in the middle of four terra-cotta columns, into a cavernous lobby. Fourteen screens—that’s what I like to see. I walk up to the ticket counter—it’s a little after four in the afternoon, and there’s no line—careful to keep my eyes away from the electronic schedule above my head.

  I’m about to ask the young man behind the glass for a ticket to the next movie starting, and I’m ready for the look he’s sure to give me, skeptical and world-weary in the way only a twenty-year-old can be. But then I stop. As it turns out, I don’t want to leave it up to the universe.

  “Hi,” I say. “Can you tell me if The Dying Brain is playing?”

  I’m absurdly tempted to elaborate further: The Dying Brain, based on the novel by Sara Ferdinand, my old writer friend from college. Sara Ferdinand, winner of the prestigious Jeanne Kern Prize for Fiction. My partner in a thirty-year-old rivalry that perhaps only I am aware of.

  The boy behind the counter looks pointedly at the timetable on the wall, which indicates that the movie is occupying not one but two of the theater’s screens. Well, good for Sara Ferdinand.

  “Next show?” he asks, and I nod. He pushes a button on the panel in front of him, and a ticket pops up cheerily through the slot.

  I pass my money under the glass and take the ticket. “How long until it begins?” I ask.

  More exaggerated looks, this time at the written information on the ticket and the clock behind him. “Fifteen minutes,” he says. “Theater nine.”

  “Thank you,” I say, smiling sweetly. “You’ve been a big help.”

  I walk across the lobby, and now that I’m no longer keeping secrets from myself, I stop to look at the posters. The one for The Dying Brain has the same picture as the cover of the paperback I bought at the airport the other day: two women in profile (both well-known Hollywood actresses in their thirties, in the midst of that dizzy flip where beauty and substance switch positions of importance), facing away from each other, against a background of undulating lines that I suspect are supposed to be brain waves, though they could just as easily be points on a graph charting, say, the rise and fall of paper sales in the mid-Atlantic region.

  I fight the impulse to turn on my phone and check my messages quickly before the show starts, try one more time to reach Joe or Chloe. No one in the world knows how to reach me—a vertiginous place to stand in this day and age. But isn’t that why I’m here?

  I buy myself a box of Junior Mints and ride up a series of escalators, find a seat in the nearly empty theater. I sit back to wait and think for a few moments about Sara Ferdinand.

  Sara and I met in a creative writing class our sophomore year of college. We both already considered ourselves Writers-with-a-capital-W in a way that makes me cringe now, but it was also clear early on that we were the two most talented students in the class. We weren’t as good as we thought we were, of course, nor as good as we’d later get, but it would be disingenuous for me to pretend there wasn’t something there, some spark, some flow of blood that separated our work from our classmates’ graceless sex scenes and moony dissections of unrequited love in a philosophy seminar.

  And so we were drawn together. But always, at the back of my mind—and hers, I can only assume—the question remained: which of us had a stronger hold on this gleaming, ineffable thing? Which of us could stretch it further? More than thirty years later, I still don’t know the answer.

  As I’ve mentioned, I haven’t read The Dying Brain—I stopped buying Sarah’s books five or six novels ago, though I’m quite thorough about reading her reviews—so I don’t know much about the plot, but I do know that it has something to do with academia; a woman who’s a professor, I think. Sara has taught, off and on, for most of her career, and her novels often take place on a college campus.

  One of the best parts of having friends who are fiction writers is that you get to mine their work for psychological bombshells: unspoken yearnings, unflattering preoccupations, neuroses blooming from a bit of history you’ve seen firsthand. Yes, I know: butter in cookie dough, I said it myself. But that’s not to say that there isn’t a fair bit of tangling between life and fiction. We are the people we are. We each have one mind to tap, one life to learn from. We’re fairy-tale emperors, all of us: we’re naked, but we have you convinced we’re dressed in the richest silks.

  Not too long ago I met a woman at a party who, I gathered, was familiar with my work. I was careful not to ask her opinion—I’ve learned the hard way that that’s not always something you want to hear—but as our conversation progressed, she began to speak more frankly. “Your books are beautiful,” she said. “But so many children die.”

  Well … yes. I may spend more time on trees than forest, but I’m not so obtuse that I hadn’t noticed that pattern. But in spite of the simplicity and obviousness of the observation, I found myself completely at a loss. I’m afraid I wasn’t very polite, though it wasn’t that her comment had angered me. I felt ashamed, somehow, that I’d inserted so transparent an obsession into the books I’d written, and there was no way to get it back out. She was watching me, waiting; she genuinely thought she’d asked something I could easily answer. I smiled unconvincingly and made some kind of nonreply. And then I walked away, naked in a roomful of people.

  The lights go down, and the previews begin. I’ve often imagined what it would be like to sit in a movie theater and watch a trailer for a film based on one of my books; for some reason, that’s almost more exciting to me than seeing the actual film. Coming this fall, based on the novel by Octavia Frost … which one would it be? Carpathia has been optioned and is supposedly “making the rounds” in Hollywood, though that doesn’t appear to mean anything. I suspect the general feeling is that there have been too many movies about the Titanic already. For a while it looked like The Human Slice might go forward, but it seems to have stalled somewhere along the line, and maybe it’s for the best. Do I really want to see my delicate and complex novel, a story I lived inside for almost three years, reduced to A wife who wishes she could remember; a husband who’s glad to forget …?

  A reminder to turn off our cell phones (which I ignore, with a rather irrational feeling of smugness), several film company logos, and then the credits start to roll. On the screen … yes, it’s a woman walking across a college campus. Way to be fresh, Sara; way to try something new.

  I’m suddenly jumpy, and I realize it’s because I’m waiting for Sara’s name to go past. The screenwriter gets billed first, I notice. And then, on the screen for a full three seconds, there it is: SARA FERDINAND, big, big, big. I suck the chocolate skin from a Junior Mint.

  The film takes a while to get going, but the basic story is this: Our heroine, a woman named Frances, is a neuroscientist. She teaches graduate seminars and does research that involves studying the pain receptors of mice. She’s recently divorced and about to take a sabbatical, during which she intends to write a book about phantom pain—the sensations that, for example, an amputee feels in the limb that has been removed. So nothing heavy-handed there.

  While Frances is away, the university will be hosting a visiting professor. (Also a female neuroscientist�
�what are the odds?) This other woman, Cleo, is British; she’s a single mother with a young son named Felix. Her research, however, is a bit more controversial than Frances’s, and also less obviously useful: she’s studying what happens to the brain during a near-death experience. For better or for worse, Cleo is portrayed from the very beginning as being more of a free spirit than Frances; in one early sequence, we see Frances preparing a meal of brown rice and vegetables, intercut with shots of Cleo allowing her son to eat waffles and ice cream for dinner because they’ve both “had a rough day.” The two women correspond, and they decide that it makes sense for them to swap houses for the duration of the semester.

  Incidentally, Cleo’s research is where the film gets its title. Certain phenomena that occur during near-death experiences are inexplicably universal: people across many different time periods, regardless of culture or religious belief, have reported seeing tunnels, bright lights, a feeling of floating and looking down on one’s body from above, and so on. Those who believe in such things take this commonality as evidence of a life hereafter; scientists and skeptics, on the other hand, have suggested that these effects are merely hallucinations caused by neurons misfiring as the brain shuts itself down at the moment of death. Logical Frances subscribes to the dying brain theory; flighty Cleo would like to prove it wrong.

  So, all right. Sara’s got her metaphors all set up and neatly packaged: science and faith, the tangibility of pain and the uncertainty of heaven. The symbolism’s a bit precious for my taste, but I suppose I’m with her so far. Writing the story forward in my own mind, I’m expecting that moving into each other’s houses will change the women more than they expect. Settling into the neat lines of Frances’s life, Cleo will learn to be a more responsible mother; Frances, living in Cleo’s crowded, whimsical cottage, will loosen her restraints and have an impetuous and slightly self-destructive affair with Cleo’s brooding ex-boyfriend. In the process, Frances’s research will benefit from a more creative approach, and Cleo will discover that the dying brain theory and life after death are not mutually exclusive after all. If that’s the way it goes, then as a viewer, I’ll leave the theater fairly satisfied; as a longtime friend-slash-rival of Sara’s, I’ll be positively giddy at the predictability of it all.