A Short Affair

by Simon Oldfield

  These days Slooz preferred Malbec, of which she took a few contemplative sips in her messy Finger Lakes study. The chill from hunkering over that clammy carton of woe in the unheated attic all afternoon still hadn’t ebbed, even after a hot dinner and an hour at this computer. The shiver seemed emotional. Perhaps she had too vividly summoned the experience of being out in the cold in a larger sense – of being so disgracefully young, so hideously hopeful, so inanely certain that baselessly high expectations were fated to be met.

  From this vantage point, the confrontation over her purported musical imposture was absurd. At that age, none of them would have developed a voice distinctive enough to emulate. Those two had merely been miffed that Susan Twitchel was better received in the Culvert than she had licence to be and was getting ideas above her station. Besides which, mimicry was a gift at which Slooz had never excelled. Sit her down and order up an Elvis Costello song, it would come out sounding like one more cut from Short Walk on a Long Pier, and nine out of ten of her fans would identify the artist on the first guess. Critics hadn’t been universally admiring, but she was fairly sure that the word derivative had made no appearance in reviews. In the big picture anyway, everyone derived from everyone else, since they all emerged from the same cultural primordial soup, in which Grier, Slooz and Elvis were fungible chunks of carrot.

  Yet if she’d forgotten about the altercation altogether until flipping to that journal entry, the trauma couldn’t have left her irreparably scarred. Sure, she’d felt wounded at the time, but the incident no more fazed her in the present than did boo-boos from tumbling to the sidewalk at the age of four.

  So why on earth had she initiated this half-hearted investigation into Whatever Became of Grier Finlayson? The you-copied-me thing was nugatory. What did cling was the memory of having been cast as second string – of living in the shadow of the Chosen One, and fearing that her own role of Also-Ran was well deserved. Of worrying that her suitemates saw something not up to scratch in her that was real and incorrigible. For most of her adulthood, Slooz had washed between buoyant self-assurance and this doomed, hobbled sensation, a suspicion that she didn’t have the goods and never would. Doubt of her endowments persisted into the heyday of her career (longer ago than she cared to admit), and had served as a useful spur to productivity: she was forever proving that she and the likes of Grier Finlayson were cut of the same fine cloth.

  Arguably, if she were meant to know how Grier turned out, then they would still be in touch, and Grier would tell her what happened over coffee. Instead, Slooz had stooped to an anonymous fishing expedition – first clearing up the spelling issue, then establishing that Grier’s married name was Danilowicz.

  The results were in.

  Her husband was a banker. They had twin boys, but not until 2000 – when Grier had to have been at least forty-three. A multiple birth at that age hinted at IVF, and so perhaps also at years of frustration and heartache before an implantation took. According to the public property registry, the couple owned an apartment on East 98th Street.

  Grier wasn’t on Facebook, but she was on LinkedIn, where the Prima Donna advertised the following:

  ‘I plan parties, sometimes with themes. I write original lyrics for parties, and perform both commissioned work and standards in your living room. Let me write a birthday song for your child, specially tailored to their interests!

  ‘I can also dress you for any special occasion, including making over your whole wardrobe. Let someone who has the eye transform you into all that you were meant to be!’

  Grier Finlayson also showed up on an historical list of music internships at an arts institute in Colorado, under the interns for 1982. In the absence of any Wikipedia page, Slooz found evidence of two performances: in a small Chicago club in 1996 and a dinner theatre in Kansas City in 1998. Even allowing for the fact that the Web didn’t really take off until around 1995, these were slim pickings. As of the twenty-first century, the sparse trail of digital breadcrumbs dried up completely. Under neither her maiden nor her married name had Grier left any professional footprint in almost twenty years.

  So her husband supported her. The children could soon be off to college, hence the party-planning and makeover promotion: she’d need something to do.

  There was a photo. One photo, as far as Slooz could discern, on the entire internet. It was a very bad photo. It was such a bad photo to choose to accompany your LinkedIn profile that it could only have been posted because the subject’s horror of the camera made the selection at hand negligible. The phobia would have to have been so drastic that the ordeal of having another photo taken for social networking presented itself as even more forbidding than ensuring that nobody would ever hire you to design their themed party, sing at their house, write a birthday song for their child, or refurbish their wardrobe.

  The shot had no date, and could have been old. She is shying from the lens, cutting her eyes askance. Though the eyes are recognisable, their gleam has retracted to pinpricks, and they look slittier. Her coat collar is raised. The grin is nervous, a little shit-eating. Her hair is full, dark with henna highlights, closing around her chin and trailing in an uneven zig into her eyebrows – so either the hair did grow back or she’s wearing a wig. She’s sitting in the passenger seat of a car, leaving the impression that the photographer, snatching a rare opportunity, has caught – his wife? – unawares. She is only a measure thinner than she was in college, so literal contraction doesn’t explain the impression that this woman has shrunk.

  She looks neurotic. She looks in retreat. She looks like someone you would have to cosset, of whom sons would be protective, lying to strangers that Mother is ill. She looks like a woman who can be difficult, who is fragile, for whom exceptions are frequently made.

  To make herself feel better – though why Slooz felt bad could have stood examination – she impulsively input ‘Myra Haas’ into the search field. As her forefinger hovered above the return key, this time she took a moment to place her bets. What would have happened to Myra Haas? Myra was practical. She wasn’t creative, but she was wily. So whatever arty or intellectual notions she nursed in college would have quickly fallen by the wayside. Applying that dry intelligence of hers, she’d have earned an advanced degree in business or law. It was the 1980s, after all. She’d have married a go-getter in financial services, for it was Myra who belonged with a banker. So she’d be well-to-do, and a live-in Eastern European nanny would have raised her kids. She’d solicit corporate donations to cancer charities, if only to attend the swank fund-raisers. She’d still be competitive, so she’d be rail thin.

  Enter.

  Myra Haas married Alan Metcalf, a representative of the same nutritional-supplement company whose wares she sold right out of college. They had no children. She was fond of animals, especially cats. She never left New York. She was a disciple of a ‘spiritual healer’ whose name Slooz didn’t recognise, and worked part-time for years as a counsellor in the shyster’s clinic.

  This information was tidily all in one place on legacy.com, because Myra Haas was dead. In lieu of flowers, the bereaved were asked to donate to a variety of nonprofits with phrases like ‘furry friends’ in their names. The listing only asserted that Myra had died ‘suddenly’ in 2012 from causes unexplained. She would have been fifty-six. So much for the efficacy of nutritional supplements.

  There was a lone picture too, and once again Slooz was flummoxed. If you were going to pick a single photograph of someone you presumably cared about for a memorial page on legacy.com, why would you choose this one? It was a bit out of focus, though even in black and white the eyes displayed a telltale sidling slyness: this was Myra Haas, all right. Age-wise, the photo was wildly out of date; she couldn’t have been more than thirty-five in this shot. Still, the face had expanded.

  Myra led a weird, fringy life, and she got fat. Beyond legacy.com, further searches on myra haas, myra haas barnard college, myra metcalf, myra haas metcalf, and even myra metcalf with the spiritu
alist thrown in turned up no relevant hits whatsoever. In internet terms, she was invisible. Yet on a sole point Slooz had been right: once you were rounding on sixty, the vote on what you’d amounted to was definitely in, since for Myra that tally was finalised by fifty-six. Closing the laptop, Slooz was embarrassed to find herself considering whether there was a song in all this.

  Those two turned out rather badly. Most people turn out badly, at least by the grubby measure of a Google search. In parts per billion, the concentration of folks who distinguished themselves amidst the slosh of humanity resembled the proportion of active ingredients in quack-homeopathy cures. Which is why Slooz wasn’t upset by being called a has-been. At least a has-been had been.

  Of course, you could only convincingly piss on celebrity if you were already famous, and Slooz had been just successful enough to grow a bit Groucho about the club of worldly glory. That is, while she’d hardly clawed her way to the top of the heap – when her CD sales were at their highest, she might have been compared to Tori Amos, but nobody was comparing Tori Amos to her – she had clambered high enough to get a look at the view. No one would be listening to any of this middlebrow pop music a hundred years from now, and even if they were, a point-blank asteroid would hurtle along to melt their ear buds and everything else, too. All that will have mattered about Sloozie Twitch is that she two-timed a tender second husband who might otherwise have gone the distance, and she would die alone. In kind, whatever truly mattered about her old suitemates was probably not available online – though, alas, by all appearances, neither had forged a career sufficiently illustrious for either woman to discount it.

  Full circle, then: never mind the answers she actually found. What had she wanted to find?

  She’d wanted to find what she found. She wanted to confirm that Susan Twitchel had made good, while these snide, condescending classmates from her senior year of college had come to nothing. A stray journal entry from those distant days had brought back an acrid memory and stirred old resentments. In running those mouldy names through a search engine, she’d wanted to gloat.

  But the bad feeling that had nagged her ever since finding Grier’s pitiable listing on LinkedIn was clearly guilt. Grier Finlayson commanded a more impressive instrument than Susan Twitchel from the get go, and had been much more disciplined about practising scales and doing vocal exercises. As Sloozie Twitch, our Susan may have cleverly palmed off the weaknesses of her voice as style, but by any standard measure Grier was the superior vocalist, which ought rightly to have reaped greater rewards than children’s birthday parties. Even Myra: call her intelligence ‘dry’ or ‘uncreative’, she was still smart, medically smarter by a yard than her suitemate Susan, a B-plus-to-A-minus student with marginal SAT scores who could only have been admitted to Barnard by the skin of her teeth. Myra was a hard worker who followed directions and submitted papers on time, exhibiting just the reliability for which the working world was starved. She possessed excellent writing skills, and she was good at public speaking – why, Slooz could have written a boffo LinkedIn profile for Myra Haas. So how in God’s name did this attractive, capable, well-educated young woman end up hawking sham nutritional supplements and purveying the nostrums of a spiritual huckster?

  Plenty sucked, but there were thousands of photos of Sloozie Twitch online – some amateur snaps snatched from an audience, others from professional shoots. Yet for Slooz to hope that Grier and Myra would have tripped across any of these, in Interview, in Rolling Stone – for Slooz to hope that those two would have recognised their old classmate’s voice on the radio, that they would have stared – or glared – at the posters in the windows of Tower Records in the days there was such a store . . . Well, the notion was repellent. It wouldn’t have taken a genius to sort out that Sloozie Twitch was none other than Susan Twitchel, but honestly she prayed that neither of the suitemates who had seemed to ‘count’ in 1977 had ever made the connection.

  For gloating was out of the question. All she felt was a killing sorrow. Myra Haas and Grier Finlayson were strangers, and they had been strangers for a long, long time. As such, they were stand-ins for all the young people who’d ever felt anointed, and for whom the sensation of having a date with destiny would prove brief. Slooz knew better than anyone how readily her own laughable aspirations could have come to ash, had an influential producer not heard her warm-up set at CB’s in 1981 and gone to the Vanguard instead.

  In Googling rudely into private and professional lives that were none of her business, she’d also brushed against a universe in reverse: in which on a similarly chill, random, under-occupied evening, they were the ones who idly input Susan Titchel into a search engine, and they were the ones who misspelled the surname at first, only getting digital satisfaction after remembering to insert the W. They were the ones to note smugly that their old suitemate didn’t even merit a Wikipedia page, which would have linked ‘born as . . .’ to a stage name, in the improbable instance that Also-Ran ever required one. They were the ones who, just to make sure, ran the same search on Spotify, Amazon, and the iTunes Store, in order to confirm precisely what they’d have predicted: Susan Twitchel never recorded an ever-loving thing. They were the ones who tracked down photographs of their former classmate in the secret hopes that she would have got fat, and they were the ones who found only a cringing, poorly composed snapshot in which she looked neurotic – or for that matter, they were the ones who pulled up short against the fact that Susan had escaped their doggy snapping at her heels by being underhandedly dead. They were the ones who only remembered the aloof, acerbic girl in the first place because of her brazen counterfeiting of the dorm’s sole budding virtuoso. They were the ones to suppose archly that this run-of-the-mill singer with her incongruous oboe was just the sort of no-hoper who’d have ended up working in lower-level municipal government her whole life – overseeing recycling, or pothole repair – and they were the ones perplexed to not find themselves quite as gratified by Susan Twitchel’s obvious disappointment as they might have anticipated. She brushed up against the universe in which they were the ones left mystified by what they were looking for in the first place.

  It all made for a particularly rich interview on Injudicious Journals and Slooz pinned the transcript, when they published it, to the top of her new Twitter feed.

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

  Elizabeth Day is an award-winning author, journalist and co-founder of Pin Drop.

  Day is the author of four novels and numerous short stories. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Scissors Paper Stone, won a Betty Trask Award for a first novel written by an author under the age of thirty-five. Her second novel, Home Fires, was published in 2013, followed by Paradise City in 2015 and The Party in 2017, all to critical acclaim.

  Day is also a feature writer for UK and US publications including New York Magazine and Vogue, and is a contributing editor for Harper’s Bazaar. She won a British Press Award in 2004 for Young Journalist of the Year and in 2013 was Highly Commended in the category of Feature Writer of the Year.

  Day has appeared for Pin Drop on a number of occasions, including at the Simon Oldfield Gallery, Soho House, London, and at Pin Drop in Paris.

  Bethan Roberts won the inaugural Pin Drop Short Story Award in 2015 with ‘Ms Featherstone and the Beast’.

  Roberts is the author of four novels and numerous short stories. Her first novel, The Pools, was published in 2007 and won a Jerwood/Arvon Young Writers’ Award. Her second novel, The Good Plain Cook, published in 2008, was serialised on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime and featured in Time Out’s Books of the Year. My Policeman followed in 2012, and was chosen as that year’s City Read for Brighton. Her latest novel, Mother Island, is the recipient of a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. Roberts’ short fiction has been widely published and her dramas have been featured on BBC Radio 4.

  Nikesh Shukla is the author of three widely acclaimed novels and was the editor of the hugely successful collection of essays, The Good Immigrant.

/>   Shukla’s debut novel, Coconut Unlimited, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2010 and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2011. This was followed in 2014 by Meatspace, which was hailed by the Guardian as capturing ‘a cultural moment’ and in 2018 by The One Who Wrote Destiny. His short stories have been featured in Best British Short Stories 2013, the Sunday Times and BBC Radio 4. A key voice in the conversation around diversity in publishing, Shukla is a champion of emerging BAME writers.

  Shukla appeared for Pin Drop at the Simon Oldfield Gallery in 2013.

  Claire Fuller won the Pin Drop Short Story Award in 2016 for ‘A Quiet Tidy Man’.

  Fuller’s short stories and flash fiction have received numerous awards, including the BBC Opening Lines competition in 2014.

  Her novels Our Endless Numbered Days and Swimming Lessons have been released internationally to widespread critical acclaim, including the 2016 American Bookseller Association Awards (finalist) and 2015 Desmond Elliott Prize (winner).

  Ben Okri is the Man Booker Prize-winning author of eight novels, including The Famished Road and Starbook, as well as collections of poetry, short stories and essays.

  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been awarded an OBE as well as numerous international prizes, including the Man Booker Prize for The Famished Road, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa, the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the Chianti Ruffino-Antico Fattore. He is a vice president of the English Centre of International PEN and was presented with a Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum.