I read that sources had confirmed that the long-observed friendship between Grammy-nominated recording artist Tyler Wilkie and Grace Barnum, the low-profile daughter of Pop Art painter Dan Barnum, had blossomed into impending coparenthood. That Tyler had cut his tour short and had been back in the city for several weeks now, according to his watchers.
His watchers. I shuddered.
When I got home I sat on the couch next to Ty with the laptop and showed him the blog. He read it and looked at the picture tight-lipped.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess it could be worse. Like Princess Diana or something.”
“It’s not your fault. I just thought you’d want to know.”
“So show me that message board.”
Was he kidding? “You’ve never seen it?”
He shrugged. “You know I don’t spend a lot of time on the computer.” It was true. He didn’t spend any, that I knew of.
I showed him the fan forum, which had grown. The gallery had page after page of pictures people had posted of themselves with Ty.
“You’ve met a lot of people,” I said, as he scrolled through them.
“Yeah. I remember some of them.”
“Like who?”
“This chick asked me to sign her boob with a Sharpie.”
“A Sharpie! Indelible ink, seeping into her breast tissue?”
“Yeah,” he said dryly. “That’s what I was thinking.”
“Did you do it?”
“Of course.”
I scowled. He smiled.
I clicked on the message board. The top threads read
He’s Having a BABY
Grace Barnum
Ty missing various clothing
New Album?
“Hold it right there.” I tried to take the laptop from him. He held on. “Give me the computer! I want to see what they’re saying about me.”
“So do I.” He clicked on the Grace Barnum thread.
TysGal85: i know her from when he played a lot downtown. she always came with this hippie looking woman and sat off to the side or in the back. she always looked stuck up and a little board. the one time i saw her laugh was when he said something to her from the stage. some kind of joke. if she was there he usually went to her table between sets.
“Stuck-up!” I said. “Do I look stuck-up?”
Ty smiled in a way that made me want to pinch him, hard.
“And I wasn’t bored! I was very interested!”
Ty scrolled down and we read the next post.
ShowMeSomeLove: I read about her dad on wikipedia . . . man, having your dad bail on you that young, that’s got to fuck you up!
I could feel Ty not looking at me.
MrsWilkie: Yeah my dad did that, and I’m a real case. [not]
ShowMeSomeLove: She’d better be pretty, at least! I can’t tell in that pregnant picture. She’s covering her face. I google-imaged her and nothing else came up.
TysGal85: not suprised you didn’t find anything I think she’s kind of a hermet. is she pretty. yeah kind of. i think she could try harder.
“Okay, let’s shut it down,” Ty said.
“I am calm.” I was impressed with myself; I only wanted to destroy TysGal85 a little. Perhaps because her embarrassing inability to spell bored, surprised, and hermit, or to correctly capitalize and punctuate a sentence were going to hobble her in life almost as effectively as if I found where she lived and kneecapped her with a croquet mallet.
I had just finished reading The Shining. I don’t recommend it in your third trimester.
Ty clicked on the Ty missing various clothing link. There were pictures of him onstage at gigs barefoot. With no shirt. There was one backstage shot of him semi-mooning the camera.
“That’s dignified,” I said.
“You get hot, under the lights. And I guess I might have had a coupla beers.”
“You think?”
I went to fix us supper and peeked in occasionally to watch him reading the message board. He turned pink a time or two. Laughed. Scowled. “That’s fucking bullshit,” he muttered.
I called him to come eat.
He got up and put the laptop away. “Life just gets weirder and weirder, Gracie.”
It was after supper, and we were watching Andy Griffith. One of the best. The one about Aunt Bee wanting to enter her terrible homemade pickles in the county fair. Andy and Barney call them “kerosene cucumbers.”
I love Aunt Bee. One time after particularly great sex with Ty I rapturously quoted her: “I haven’t had an experience like that since I was baptized!”
He liked that.
Anyway. We were watching.
“Can you take the afternoon off a week from Thursday?” Ty asked, at the commercial.
“Maybe. Why?”
“I’m making us an appointment at City Hall. Maybe you’d better take the whole day, in case there’s blood work first. I’ll call and find out.”
Blood work. It shocked and hurt me, that he could even think it. “Ty! You’re the father!”
He switched off the TV with the remote. “I swear, for a woman with a gigantic brain you can be as dumb as a bucket of hair. I am not talking about a paternity test. I’m talking about getting married.”
I recoiled. Like he’d not only thrust a big silver cross at me, but also a braid of garlic and a pointy wooden stake. “Have you lost your mind ?”
“Obviously,” he said dryly.
I got up and went around to the back of the couch. “I-I just don’t think that getting married is necessary.”
“I do.”
“It would be a terrible mistake. We would grow to hate and resent each other.”
“See,” he said in that same dry tone, “I thought it might make things better.”
“Better for whom?”
He sighed. “Grace. You can put down the Boppy.”
I looked down at myself. I was clutching the baby pillow to my chest as if it was an inflatable flotation device and my plane was about to go down over Lake Michigan.
He shook his head. “We can talk about it later, I guess.” He picked up the remote and turned the TV back on.
When he came to bed I pretended to be asleep, afraid he’d bring up the subject again. I tried to understand why I was so freaked out. I loved him. Not only could I imagine spending the rest of my life with him, I wanted to. But the way the offer had come about made me feel sad. Was he just making it out of obligation, or responsibility? For whom was he doing it? The baby? Did he really want to make such a drastic change to his life? Had he really thought about it?
I went to see my dad. He was leaving for Tokyo the next day.
He made grilled cheese sandwiches and we sat on his rooftop patio and ate them while we watched rain clouds roll in from uptown.
“Dan, why did you and Julia get married?”
“You, of course.”
“Damn,” I moaned. “I knew it.”
“What’s the problem?”
“You got married because she was pregnant. And look what happened.” “Listen, I don’t regret marrying your mother. And I certainly don’t regret you.”
“I know, but your marriage was disastrous, wasn’t it? No offense.”
“Are you getting married, Grace?”
“The idea has been mentioned.”
He was thoughtful. “You and Ty are probably different. I think you really love each other.”
“Didn’t you and Julia love each other?”
“In some ways, yes. What has your mom told you about us?”
“Um, almost nothing?”
“Seriously?”
“Here are the talking points: You met in the city. She was an actress. She got married too young and should have gone to college and had a career first, though of course she’s glad she had me. It just didn’t work out. You cared about me, but needed to be alone so you could focus on your art.”
“Do you remember me at all from when you were little?”
&nb
sp; “You carried me to bed when I was sleepy. You drew pictures of anything I asked you to.”
“And then I was gone.”
I nodded.
“So,” he sighed. “Time to fill in the blanks.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t look happy about whatever it was he was going to tell me.
“Even five words would be helpful, Dan.”
“I wasn’t faithful.” He looked at me. “I guess maybe you’ve heard about that.”
“Yeah, I think I read something about it somewhere.”
“Grace, I’m sorry. I went to Paris for three months to study. You and your mother were there with me for a while, but she was home-sick and we were not getting along. I was in a lot of turmoil. My mother had died the year before, right after I turned thirty. My paintings weren’t selling. I was grieving and afraid. Angry. Drinking too much, and sometimes raging. So Julia went home early and took you with her. After that, I made it all so much worse. I did hurtful, stupid things.”
He sighed. “Someone told Julia about it all and she left me. I came back to New York to an empty apartment. I didn’t mean to end it.
Not permanently. I wanted to pull myself together and try again, but she was done.” He looked at me. “You know she does not suffer fools.”
“Not even a little bit,” I said.
“And then she won custody of you. There were wild stories about me, and the judge was this conservative old bastard who severely limited how often I was allowed to see you. Any extra time with you was at Julia’s discretion. If I had to travel for work and miss one of our days, I was not allowed to reschedule. I lost my chance and couldn’t see you until the next month. It was infuriating.” He looked at me. “What did you think was going on?”
“Once, when I hadn’t seen you in a long time, I asked Julia if you were dead. She said ‘To me he is.’ I learned to not talk about you so she wouldn’t get upset.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t think it was just about our marriage. Did she tell you about her dad?”
“She told me he died in a train accident and she never knew him.”
“He died when she was two. He worked at the Hoboken station. He was a big risk-taker, very grandiose. They figured out later that he was probably bipolar, and in a manic phase. Apparently he took a dare from a coworker to lie down on the tracks when a train was coming and see who would stay there the longest. They were both killed.”
“God.”
“Then, when she was a teenager, her mother died suddenly. A heart attack.”
I nodded.
“So she was already on her own, by the time we met.”
My poor mom. She had kept so much hurt so close. So private. “So . . . why did Mom let me see you so much when I got older?”
“I never stopped asking for more time with you. I called, sent letters. I offered more money than just the child support. She ignored me for years. Then one day, she got in touch. She said she was worried about you. You seemed quiet and sad, and she thought she might have made a mistake. She asked if you could come for a long visit with me. That summer you were almost thirteen. Remember?”
“Of course. I wasn’t very nice to you.”
Dan shrugged. “I figured at that age you would have hated me even if I’d been with you all along.”
“I didn’t hate you. Julia tried so hard to deemphasize you all those years and then when I spent more time with you I adored you. It was very confusing. I was scared you would leave again.”
He handed me a napkin and rubbed my shoulder.
“Dan, what’s weird is, she still believes in marriage like it’s the Holy Grail. For me, at least.”
“Maybe she dreams of a perfect love for you.”
I laughed and blew my nose. “If so, I guess love with a few dents in it may have to do.”
“I’m the last person who should advise you about marriage, Grace. Obviously I wasn’t so good at it. All I can say for certain is, whether you get married or not—let your son be with his father as much as possible. It matters, for both of them.”
I invited Julia to come on a Saturday, when Ty was at the recording studio and Peg would be gone to the matinee. I prepared all of Julia’s lunch-at-home favorites, tuna salad made with apples and pickles and walnuts. Salt and vinegar chips. A big, icy glass of diet root beer.
“You’re spoiling me!” she said, sitting down at the table. “Why?”
Typical Julia. Right to the point.
“Because I love you, Mom.”
She smiled.
“And also . . . I want to have a talk with you. About marriage.”
“Grace, are you thinking about getting married?”
“Well, yes . . . it is being discussed.”
She clapped her hands, grinning. All but said “yippee.”
“Mom, why does that make you so happy?”
“Well, a committed life with someone can be wonderful. And now you have the absolute right guy, no question.”
“How do you know he’s the right guy?”
“Well, look at how much he cares for you!”
The only time she had seen Ty in person had been while moving the crib upstairs and he had been pretty cool and impersonal. “Mom, what are you talking about?”
She started to say something and then clammed up. Sat back in her seat and stared at her sandwich. Picked it up and took a bite. It was like I was watching a film and suddenly there were a few crucial frames missing.
“Mmm, this is great tuna salad!”
“Julia!”
“Hm?” She crunched into her dill spear.
“What did you mean, he cares for me? How do you know?”
“Oh, well, you can just see it.” She held her glass of diet root beer up to the light and peered through it as if she was trying to guess the vintage. “What brand is this? Barq’s?”
“A&W.”
“Yum!”
I could see why that acting career hadn’t worked out for her.
Obviously, no one could actually give me something firm to go on. I was going to have to make this decision all by myself.
Susannah Grace, 2.0
I made a list.
Marrying Ty Pros and Cons
Pro (selfish, in random order)
Whenever I want, I will get to: Look at him. Smell him. Touch him. Be touched by him. Talk to him. Hear him. Have him. Hold him. Sleep beside him.
the eyes
the smile
we laugh at the same things
the music
help with the baby
I love his mom
Icing:
jar opening/heavy lifting/flower arranging
Pro (unselfish)
my boy will have his dad
we will be a family
Con (to varying degrees)
the penchant for partying
his scary sister
scary fans/the “watchers”
the twinge of anxiety I sometimes get when I’m especially loving him (what is that?)
I took a cab that afternoon to find him at the studio, which was in a renovated toy factory in Brooklyn. A knot of girls were sitting outside on the steps. I asked the driver to let me out halfway up the block and wait.
As I approached, the girls got up and came toward me. I wondered if I should turn around and go back to the cab—fast—but they were almost upon me.
“Grace?” one of them said as the four of them surrounded me. They looked like they ought to be home studying for finals.
They were blocking my way and staring like they’d never seen anything like me. “You’re kind of small. And prettier than we thought,” the same girl said.
Another girl stepped closer and reverently touched my belly.
“We hate you, kind of,” the first girl said cheerfully. “But we like you, too! Don’t take it personally.”
“Okay, I won’t!” I gave them a broad smile and squeezed past.
Inside the building everything was clean a
nd bright and minimalist in that Scandinavian way, with shining blond wood floors and black leather-and-chrome furniture. The receptionist smiled when I introduced myself. She called someone and asked them to tell Ty I was there, and then directed me to the elevator.
He was waiting for me in the third-floor hallway. “What’s the matter?” he asked, before I stepped off the elevator.
“Nothing. I just want to talk to you for a minute.”
He looked at my belly. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes!” I laughed. “Would you relax?”
He smiled, a little. His shoulders settled.
I looked around. There were framed records and album covers lining the hallway walls, each with its own small ceiling spotlight.
He took my arm and led me down the hall to the room where he was recording. He introduced me to the engineers and musicians. Two of them, the drummer and bass player, had been on tour with him. I felt like he must have said good things because they greeted me kindly, as if they already knew me. One of them suggested that Ty and I come out to their house on Long Island to meet his wife and kids and have a cookout. I eagerly agreed, so relieved to feel approval from Ty’s friends.
Ty took me into an office with a big desk and a leather couch, where we sat.
“Hey, don’t you have one of those?” I asked, pointing at the shiny, framed CDs on the wall above the couch.
“Yeah.”
“Is it really made of platinum?”
“Nah, plastic, I think.”
“Where is it?”
“Hanging next to the deer head.”
I winced. He smiled.
How to begin? “I—I’ve been thinking about what you said the other night. And, well, okay. I think it’s a great idea. Let’s do it!”
Grace Grows Page 26
