A Short Affair

by Simon Oldfield

  Sloozie Twitch was getting too old to care about being a Good Person. (Even the handle contrived in her twenties exuded a youthful zing no longer fitting, but she was used to it, and still savoured the way the first name’s amalgamation of floozy and sleazy conveyed an indefinite dirtiness. Besides, there was no fucking way she was reverting to Susan Twitchel, who in her mind’s eye, being mousy and no-account, was a completely different woman.) Sixty this coming April, she’d risen and fallen in the public eye well before the advent of Instagram and Facebook, and decency was a social consideration. Although she didn’t conceive of herself as a recluse, the income from her recordings in the Eighties and Nineties (along with chunky annual cheques of forty-nine cents from Spotify thereafter) had been prudently socked away, thereby affording her the usual curse of what she thought she wanted: a cosy, solidly built cedar-shingled house on the Finger Lakes, with land attached and outbuildings. She had a powerful router and solitude up the ass.

  Having naturally feared the inroads of decay, she was pleased to ascertain that having largely lived your life was restful. And it was interesting. She seemed to have arrived at precisely the age at which it was possible to assess matters – to make summary pronouncements, to step far enough back to see a life as a conclusive whole, as an object. Let’s face it: by sixty, the votes were in. You’d done what you were going to, and at best you would do a bit more of it. The centre-cut of her career had been too frenetic to provide for looking backwards – at the two ex-husbands and all the impractical foreign boyfriends, at the long graph of triumphs and setbacks like a jag of mountains against the sky: a Grammy nomination one year, a solo gig at the Sydney Opera House crushingly fallen through the next. But now the accumulation of all that messy history, a cranial form of hoarding, made her feel accomplished in an avocational sense. At last she possessed a big, fat past to examine, and its accrual had been work.

  Which was not to say that Sloozie Twitch was retired – though she’d have accepted the label of has-been without rancour. She still gave occasional one-off concerts to die-hard fans, most of whom were at least as old as she was, though gigs in Asia or Down Under were no longer worth the plane journey. She granted an interview to Elle only last year. She continued to compose songs here – hopped up at first, eventually conceding that the new one sounded awfully like the last ten – if only to justify her purchase of the sleek black electric piano in the den.

  Indeed, what had kicked off this digital hugger-mugger into the fate of a bygone acquaintance (friend being too strong a word) was keeping a hand in, however limply. This morning, she received an email approach from the producers of a heavily syndicated NPR programme called Injudicious Journals, in which celebrities of her second-rate ilk would read aloud confidential outpourings from their sapling years. Slooz possessed the requisite documents (several tear-spattered spiral notebooks, dense with tight scrawl in red cartridge pen). Yet it was one thing to court humiliation to a professional purpose on the radio – to advertise your self-confidence in your very willingness to expose your frailty. It was a much grimmer matter to grow privately chagrined, and perhaps permanently to destroy your cherished illusions about having been remotely bearable as a college student. So to decide on how to respond to the invitation that afternoon, she’d seated herself cross-legged in the attic under a dangling bare bulb and flipped open the damp cardboard covers with no little trepidation.

  There were discoveries.

  Her thoughts were often lame and clichéd, and not nearly as well expressed as she expected, given that Sloozie Twitch was renowned for her lyrics. This record was historically sloppy, too: few entries were dated, and one long, paranoid section was written in a code she could no longer crack. Worst of all, her younger self had faithfully chronicled her every feeling, but almost never the event that gave rise to it. So the notebooks were margin-to-margin anguish, fury, and pining, but the source of the anguish, the object of the fury, and whatever or whomever she’d been pining for were nowhere to be found.

  The entry that inspired this evening’s Mickey Mouse espionage online was as weak on detail as any other. But something about the opening line – I have never before in my life been accused of any such thing, and I am stricken, mystified, groping for whether there is possibly any truth to it – dislodged a lost memory, which plopped into her lap as if a volume whose author’s name began with C, misfiled under F, had toppled from a high shelf. How odd, too, that the memory had ever gone missing in the first place.

  After three years of ineffably disappointing higher education, admission to an Ivy League school already seemed a little chicken-shit, and by middle age Slooz would dismiss the imprimatur as meaningless. But that indifference was only possible by dint of having got in. If, annoyingly, an all-girls school, Barnard College was at least located in New York City (an ideal jumping-off place for the pre-famous), and the school further leveraged its muted prestige by institutional association with Columbia across the street. Still, in the latter 1970s, most of Barnard’s student housing was bleak and stingy, so it was a relief to have at last been awarded a room in a top-floor suite on West 116th Street for senior year. The more spacious residential arrangement had only one drawback: other people.

  In any hothouse of five young women sharing dormitory accommodation, the casting was strict. There was firstly the Prima Donna – the luminary, the centre of all the action, the superstar. Secondly, a requirement for any proper leading lady, the Sidekick – the egger-on, the whisperer, the golem. Then the Mediator – the neutral party, who listened sympathetically and without judgement as indignant petitioners put their cases, and who as the custodian of much tantalising tittle-tattle would have held the most enviable position, barring the obligatory humility that manifestly disqualified the other four for the job. The Defector – the opt-out, above the fray, who spent most nights with an older boyfriend. Lastly, the Also-Ran. The Also-Ran played wannabe to the starlet’s authenticity. Her purpose was to play second fiddle to the genuine article. Her purpose was to be shown up.

  Susan Twitchel was the Also-Ran. She was at least slim, but not tall. Her clear, accurate singing voice wasn’t thin, but it was small. It required amplification – which in due course it would obtain, albeit not when overheard seeping meekly out from under her bedroom door. Back then she dressed to be ignored, in oversize men’s button-downs and slumped jeans, and college classmates needed little excuse to overlook you. It would take her a few more years to accept that her face would never turn heads without make-up. The hair, too: more merely pale than blonde, it hung fine, lank, and lifeless, in lieu of Slooz’s subsequent discovery of products. At that time, her energy ran inward in a destructive churn. She was unsure of herself in a way that made her wary, which isn’t an attractive aspect, and she had a tendency to check and recheck what she was about to say until by the time she made the remark the others had moved on and had no idea what she was referring to. It was a timing problem that, with deft, syncopated pauses on stage, she would later turn to her advantage; the double-taking hesitations would be funny. Besides, most artists began as socially maladroit. Inadequacy in one medium drove you to another.

  Secretly, beneath the dreary shirts, flat hair, and anxious mental editing, Susan Twitchel was ambitious, to a degree that astonished her now; the Slooz she’d grow into would marvel at the fire and ferocity of her younger self with a bitter envy she never aimed at other people. It would have been precisely the detection of this light burning under a bushel that made her suitemates leery – the two who were players, that is. The other two didn’t count.

  The Also-Ran was lucky enough to bunk with Elsa the Defector, she who was never there, and therefore enjoyed a de facto single – which made both roommates lucky, because filtering off to her mysterious boyfriend, Elsa didn’t have to put up with Susan’s oboe practice. (For a young woman with an eye on pop music to have pursued a chiefly classical proficiency struck most people as incoherent. Foreseeing the wailing interludes that brought Sloozie Tw
itch’s debut album to the attention of the critics would have required more imagination than even Susan could marshal in those days, and the choice of instrument struck her as incoherent, too.)

  Grier Finlayson – not Finleyson, an initial misspelling that would confound online searches for evidence of her later life until Slooz swapped the E for an A – was the Prima Donna. She was full-chested, and built on a grand scale in every respect. Grier was beautiful in that slightly odd manner that makes a woman stand out. Her eyes were too wide – not widely set, but too high, almost circular. Her hands flew widely also; dark and gesticulating, a tumbling, rapid talker, she should have been Italian. Freshman year, she’d suffered a bout of anorexia, a term only just entering the popular lexicon in the late 1970s that still seemed exotic. Evidence that the condition had been not only legitimate but had been allowed to become dangerously advanced, she’d lost much of her black hair, which had only partially grown back. It fuzzed from her scalp in an ethereal afro, touching in its sparseness, fuzzing delicately around her head as if drawn in charcoal softened by the smudge of a forefinger. The premature alopecia lent her a hint of tragedy. Somehow when Grier Finlayson devotedly followed Weight Watchers, sawing off slices of skinless, too-plump chicken breasts until they weighed in to the quarter ounce and wolfing gallons of programmatically permissible string beans straight from the can, the ritual didn’t seem quotidian, daytime-TV, but hallowed, ecclesiastical.

  The suite they shared senior year was more commodious than the housing for lower classmen. But this was well before the client-based crowd-pleasing of modern universities, with their convection ovens, massage chairs, and dining-hall sushi bars. So while the bedrooms were larger than linen cupboards, the only common living space was the kitchen – where swabbing the spatter-patterned linoleum was fruitless because the flooring was manufactured to look dirty already, and where the windows wouldn’t completely close, so that mildew speckled their rattling wooden frames, and in winter the room was overheated and draughty at the same time. Yet five female seniors sharing vastly more capacious digs would still have allowed room for only one talent.

  Grier secured that designation without a fight. With a round, enormous voice, she swooned over a keyboard in the same rolling, frenetic crescendos in which she talked. No amplification necessary. The songs she wrote were tumbling, too: confessional, anguished, accelerating. Her lyrics used the kind of imagery that on paper would have looked silly but that sounded inexplicably poetic when set to music – you know, the broken etching of my whole-winged soul or something. It went without saying if you knew the type that she was also an actress, scoring the leads in school productions of Gilbert and Sullivan – and Ibsen, too. From the September in which the five young women first convened, consensus reigned that it was Grier who had the goods, that Grier was the original, that Grier was the one who would go places.

  Slooz couldn’t remember ever discussing with Grier why a piano powerhouse with a voice the size of the great outdoors hadn’t gone straight to Manhattan School of Music, but maybe the explanation was similar to her own. The Twitchels had been adamant that their daughter get a solid liberal-arts education, in their day believed to pave any life path. If she then continued to chase a kooky pop-music pipedream, at least she’d have a reputable degree to fall back on. (As a teenager, Susan took their demand for a Plan B as an insult. Only once she achieved them did Slooz regard her youthful aspirations as preposterous. Her parents’ real mistake was not forcing her to get a BA in engineering.) This parental insistence on educational breadth explained why Susan wasn’t even a student in the music department, but was enrolled in the recently contrived Interdisciplinary Arts. The programme was ramshackle – poorly conceived, poorly run, poorly taught, and thus anything but reputable, but it was too late to warn her parents that they were squandering their money on a travesty.

  Perhaps because it was so transparently tinker-toy, IA was a small department. Amongst the five students concentrating in music, only Susan and Grier were focusing on composition, both with an eye to becoming singer-songwriters. Anyone assuming that this would make the two suitemates natural allies would have to be an idiot.

  Instead, enter the Sidekick. Myra Haas must have been an English major, because these people always were. Her intelligence thrived within circumscribed boundaries, where the rules were clear and there was such a thing as a right answer. In other words, she was a good student, in the sense that made so many good students flail in dismay once outside the comforting confines of a curriculum. Accordingly, her vague career ambitions were academic; when you flourish in a university setting, you want to stay there. She wielded a generous Latinate vocabulary. She had mastered proper footnote form. She invested in flashy plastic binders for her assignments, and always waited for the Liquid Paper to fully dry before correcting a typo. She was skilful at regurgitating a professor’s lecture in that gently rearranged fashion that flattered the teacher while fostering the infeasible illusion that the paper also included innovative content. Higher education’s ideal, Myra was a supremely competent synthesiser, but she could not come up with anything indisputably new if her life depended on it. To be fair, most people couldn’t – which was why the reinvention ‘Sloozie Twitch’ would eventually own an estate on the Finger Lakes, a slate-grey Audi A5, and a bolt-hole on the coast of Belgium.

  Myra’s appearance mirrored her mind. Everything was functional and in the right place. She was what you would draw when depicting a pretty girl if you had never been in love. It was perplexing why so many pleasantly symmetrical young women still left something to be desired, unless that very expression nailed it. What was missing was something – something intriguing, unknowable, elusive, out of reach – to be desired. Myra’s looks were too available.

  Yet she did have a sidling slyness about her. Often mocking and unashamedly superior, she was the mistress of the unsubstantiated anecdote. Cracking a grin, she’d perch on that high stool in the kitchen and peer up through her lashes with, Well, I know I shouldn’t tell you this, but . . . That facial expression always reminded Susan of the daggered posters for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Myra seduced through collusion. She was conspicuously vain about her IQ, so that those she befriended were complimented by the implication that they must be intelligent, too. She enticed confederates with the prospect of protection from the pointy end of her derision.

  Myra surely attached herself to Grier, not the other way around. By instinct or calculation, the Sidekick sensed that Grier’s passion and panache provided cachet by association. So they were inseparable – Myra made sure of that. And what better to cement the tie than a common adversary.

  A pool of three candidates could be quickly narrowed to one.

  Elsa was a poor prospect for the fulltime position of antagonist if she was chronically AWOL; you could only get so much mileage from despairing behind the absentee’s back that to squander senior year on a boyfriend was politically retrograde, vocationally self-destructive, and criminally wasteful of what, in those days, was hilariously considered high tuition ($6,000 per year! Upper-end refrigerators cost more than that). Pam the Mediator (her surname was now irretrievable, for Pam not only had the kind of name one forgot; she was the kind of person whose name one forgot) made an even more farcical target. Quiet, sexless, and made of straight lines, Pam wore glasses with big, brightly coloured frames that would become all the rage in the following century, but were not fashionable in 1977. She did all the reading for her courses and avoided conflict. She was probably studying social work, and if she wasn’t then she should have been. Pam was not in the game.

  That left guess-who. As if there were ever any question.

  Regarding the vast majority of both semesters – right up until relations grew overtly unpleasant – it would have been self-pitying in the extreme for Slooz to remember that duo as having been cruel to her. Even at the time, whatever injury Susan did experience was mild enough to make her worry about being oversensitive. She’d
mistrusted her sense of exclusion from the central life of the suite as perhaps the inevitable consequence of herself having been standoffish. Still, those two did seem to take turns dropping by the Friday-night Columbia Student Union jam sessions whenever Susan was taking part – as if trading off during a stakeout so that one of them could go for coffee. For they appeared to be keeping tabs on her, a mission quite distinct from providing sisterly support, a popular if optimistic fiction during the flowering of ‘women’s lib’.

  Myra was a master of damning with faint praise. She’d describe Susan’s new song as ‘really tuneful’, and what did that mean? That it had a tune? Or she’d commend Susan’s intonation for ‘getting a lot better’. As for Grier, the Prima Donna was seldom critical. With others, her specialty was effusion, and (if with a touch of melodrama) she primarily disparaged herself. But she would fall into anguished throes of sympathy with Susan over whatever was she going to do with this oboe business, when she spent more time shaving reeds than actually playing the thing, so that maybe she should think about taking up a different instrument but gosh which one would that be, and she’d grow so hyperventilated about this matter that Susan would forget for minutes at a go that it was her problem.

  In retrospect, Susan’s college compositions truly were uneven. Much of her experimentation flopped, and her voice, both instrument and style, hadn’t settled. For female vocalists back then, the cultural atmosphere was still dank with the drippy despondency of Janis Ian, and Sloozie Twitch would later find her stride among the fiercer, more ragged ranks of Kate Bush and Tori Amos, while sometimes falling into sassy step with Rickie Lee Jones. Susan’s early songs were too depressing.