Nino took my hand and led me onto the crowded dance floor, pulling me in close, his warm hands on my waist. I caught my reflection in the tilted mirror behind the stage—watching that London hipster with the shock of platinum hair groove—and thought for a moment I’d spotted someone else entirely.
It felt so liberating, leaving behind my family and the failing business, as if I’d shed a too-tight suit and could at last move freely. Walking down a London street, I sometimes imagined myself in the final jailbreak scene of Midnight Express, feeling as if at any moment I might bolt into a run, my sense of buoyancy too much to contain.
As if to test my resolve, my father had begun appearing in public with a young woman named Elisa Keys. He called me in London to tell me that his new girlfriend and I had attended Grosse Pointe South High School together. He seemed proud of this.
Not recognizing her name, I couldn’t recall her face.
I responded as I did with all bad family news. First I felt an intense wave of panic, then shut it out. It was a distant storm. My family’s ship might be sinking; my own, though, was just setting sail.
One day my cousin John, who would soon be the new CEO of the family company, called me, fraught. “Franny, you have to do something about your father and that woman.”
Before my father married her, I knew he meant.
“John, what can I do?”
While John worried about our family’s public image, I ruminated about my father’s health. I heard my father was drinking again, after eight years of sobriety. He and Elisa had met at Sparky’s, a preppy bar in Grosse Pointe where he sat one evening having dinner. Someone told her he was “Eric Stroh, of Stroh’s Beer.” She sat down next to him at the bar and asked the bartender, “Stroh’s! Do you serve that crap?”
“I happen to make that beer,” my father told her.
And they were off to the races.
All the years growing up at the mercy of his alcohol-driven mood swings came back to me in flashes of pain, and I partitioned myself off even further from the barrage of bad news.
As the weeks passed, I found I had no tolerance for the Elisa reports from other family members. The frequent calls were becoming a distraction. London was my golden chance to finally get away, to become independent, and I was determined to circumvent this landslide of family drama.
“What should we do?” Whitney asked too often, the transatlantic static engulfing his voice. “I heard she quit her job at McDonald’s when she met Dad.”
“Just ignore it,” I advised. “I’m sure it won’t last.” My father had told me he would never marry again. And I simply could not picture him with anyone except my mother, certainly not with a high school peer of mine, whoever she was.
Even my mother did not take this relationship seriously. “I saw them having lunch at the country club,” she called me to announce. She paused ceremoniously. “I don’t think you have to worry, Frances; I saw the girl. Dad is just enjoying himself.”
By this point my mother had married Lloyd Marentette, whom she’d known for forty years. The previous spring, they’d been part of a tour group cruising the Seychelles. When Lloyd had grown seriously ill with a respiratory infection, my mother nursed him back to health, sitting in his stateroom through the night and monitoring his breathing. They fell in love. Now my father could no longer drop his laundry off at my mother’s house or take her out to dinner. He must have felt abandoned, all their ancient rituals finally settling into history.
Soon my MA program began, and the noise from the States receded into the background. My flat was located just around the corner from my graduate studio at Chelsea College of Arts. I worked every day, except Sundays, when the studios were closed, and bonded with the other graduate students who haunted the studios on Saturdays.
In October I audited a theory class in the undergraduate program, located just off the King’s Road. I didn’t recognize the instructor’s name but my well-read, cynically witty studio mate, Mike, didn’t miss a trick. “He’s a rock star, Frances,” Mike said, tossing his head up in approval. “Most important critic in London.”
Students spilled into the hallway when I arrived to class on the first day. I slipped through the crowd and found that all the chairs in the seminar room were taken. Some students sat on top of a broad table pushed against the wall, and I seized the last spot, sitting Indian style with my notebook on my lap.
Standing before us was a fit man in his early forties: the famed art critic Trevor Atkins. He had cropped salt-and-pepper hair, glasses, and an ordinary face made exceptional only by the rather pained expression he wore, as if his very popularity were a source of embarrassment to him. His hands rested tentatively on the back of a chair as the masses settled themselves.