Peter Beckman was magnetic, like my mother said. I had met my fair share of rock stars, and usually they were smaller and shyer in person, their onstage persona not adapting well to the real world, making them awkward offstage, never comfortable being out of the spotlight. But not Peter Beckman, maybe because he hadn’t been onstage in two decades. All the energy he once used for performing he now harnessed for everyday life. He was the front man of his front hall. Dynamic, graceful, and so crazy handsome. I felt a charge when he took my hands, welcoming me to his home, a connection of some sort. That annoyed me.
He didn’t attempt to hug me, but he did study me. “Joan of California. Wow, it’s like looking at, at . . . 1979.”
Fuck him and his memory lane. “Mr. Beckman, I’m not my mother. I don’t know you, and given what you have apparently put me through in the past days, I don’t care about you. But if you do have my father’s notebooks, I want them now.”
“Whoa.” Beckman took a few steps back. “Got it, Joanie. You’re . . . conflicted. There’s a lot going on here.”
“I’m not conflicted. I’m fucking mad. You hijacked my life and my work for . . . theatrical effect?”
Now Nate chimed in. “And you did try to run Joan over . . . which is unacceptable.” Not exactly a strong sentiment against attempted manslaughter, but I saw a kind of awe pass over Nate’s face when he realized exactly whom he was addressing. His rock hero.
“Nate, you’re the man.” Beckman grabbed Nate’s hand and pumped it up and down, congratulating him like he’d just saved a litter of puppies from a burning building. Neither of us bothered to ask why Beckman even knew Nate’s name. He’d been watching us, with us, for days. “I’m so sorry that happened in front of the hotel. That was some kind of coincidence, huh? Out-of-the-blue bad driver. I had nothing to do with it, truly. Wait until I tell you the whole story and I will, I promise. And you can ask me all the questions you want. But for now, let me say thank you for coming. I’m sorry for the subterfuge, Joan, but I hope I can make it up to you. Marianne showed you to your rooms? Everything to your liking?”
“Fine. Lovely. Thank you.” Anger couldn’t override breeding. Marianne had shown Nate and I to adjoining rooms in what appeared to be a new wing of the house designed to look original. Our rooms were like suites at a luxury property with four-poster beds and fresh flowers, a lit fireplace and sparkling candles on the mantel, and a huge modern bathroom stocked with lavender-scented amenities. We’d only spent five minutes freshening up, but I’d touched all the sheets and towels because I couldn’t help it.
“What can I get you? Water, wine, champagne?” Beckman said as he dramatically opened the heavy wood doors into the library.
“The notebooks, please.”
I didn’t need to see a single page to know that the black-and-white notebooks stacked neatly on the library table were my father’s. I recognized the handwriting on the outside immediately: #14, #26, #39. The numbers written in black Sharpie in the same spot on every book, lower left-hand corner, not the white box in the middle. I had to touch them all to make sure they were real.
There was no small talk. “How? How are these here? I mean, just how?”
Beckman went for a straight answer. “Read this.” Beckman reached into a cheap plastic sleeve, one that could have been bought at any office supply store, and carefully removed a piece of paper, one that had once been folded into quarters. It was a handwritten note on what looked to be hotel stationery, dull white and worn, like it had been opened and refolded many times before being preserved in OfficeMax’s finest. I looked closer at the engraving. It featured a stone building with arches, like the drawing in one of the clues. The lettering underneath said “St. Michael’s Seminary, Newton, MA.” It was my father’s writing for sure:
10 September 2001
Becks . . .
I need you to take these notebooks with you back to Paris. Do whatever you want with them—hide them in a closet, read them at bedtime, just don’t lose them. In ten years, I’m going to ask you for them. Give them to me then, but not beforehand.
I’m not done yet. I’m still doing my thing and I don’t want to start wrapping up my creative life because some museum or some school wants these in their library. Don’t let me give up, Becks.
Keep them safe. And keep yourself safe. Ten years, Becks. Ten years.
Henry
I read the letter three times to make sure I understood the significance. I passed the folder to Nate. I’m not done yet. There were tears in my eyes.
Beckman stood silent until Nate finished. “Your father gave them to me, Joan. The whole trunk. We’d been at the retreat, you know, the one he had every year, the sobriety renewal one? At the old seminary outside of Boston. It was the usual suspects. Those of us your father had collected over the years—artists, writers, musicians, a couple of fallen actors for good measure, a few Jesuits and university profs to keep us digging deeper. Every year he had a theme, and that year it was ‘Why Are We Still Fucking Here?’”
Nate laughed despite himself; I couldn’t bring myself to laugh, though I could hear my father’s voice saying that sentence out loud clear as day.
Beckman continued, “It was a good one, deep. We talked a lot about gratitude. For most of us, it was a miracle we hadn’t killed ourselves during the course of our addictions. And then we talked about staying relevant, not just present, but relevant. Our creative purpose. One of the speakers, this professor from somewhere, really pushed us to take stock in where we were and where we were going with our work. ‘Don’t stop yet. Don’t let your work slip into insignificance. Your time isn’t passed,’ he said. ‘Continue to enhance the human experience.’ I think that got to Henry. He’d been talking about turning over his papers to a museum, and it must have started to feel like his career was ending, that he was signing off and slipping away. All I know is that I when I left the seminary on the night of the tenth to fly back to Paris, I opened my door, and there was this note and a trunk full of notebooks. Frankly, it was kind of a pain in the ass to check them in and cost me a small fortune in overweight fees. But Henry asked, so I had no choice but to take them. I was in the car on the way back with the damn trunk that had taken a few hours to pass through customs when I heard the news.”
I snapped out a question. “Why? Why would he do that? Why would he give you his life’s work? He wouldn’t even let my mother bring them home from Boston.” I remember her asking him repeatedly when we were in Maine about shipping the books back with everything else that was coming home to California from that installation. She had tortured herself over that for years, why hadn’t she insisted? Why had Henry resisted? “I’ve been struggling to remember if my father mentioned you once in my lifetime. Why are you the guy he asked to hold on to the notebooks?”
“I asked myself that a million times. Reread his letter. It’s in there. I think, I think . . . he knew something was up. I felt it then, and I still believe that. ‘Keep them safe.’ That’s what Henry wrote. That seemed weird to me at the time. I mean, they’re notebooks in a trunk. My plan was to put them in a spare room and forget about them. And then, after what happened, it seemed prophetic.”
That sounded like my father. He wasn’t psychic, but he did listen to the universe in a way that was otherworldly. I was silent, but Nate wasn’t. “You know, you could have made sure they knew the notebooks still existed. Joan and her mother. They deserved to know. It’s been ten years.”
“I tried, man. I sent letter after letter to Suzannah. But I got nothing back.”
“A few letters over the course of a couple of years isn’t trying very hard for a guy who has clearly orchestrated much more complicated deceptions, like the one you put Joan through,” Nate said quietly. “How about trying an email once a month? Or call a lawyer? That’s what lawyers are for. You should have had your lawyer contact their lawyer. Or pick up your phone. Or get on a plane. Like a normal human being. It’s been ten years.”