Installing ourselves at the long lacquered bar, trying hard to be heard over the Portishead blaring in surreal, hypnotic waves, we ordered scotches on the rocks. The bartender scrutinized us as he poured. Was he trying to make out our relationship? Elisa took a long draw from her drink, emptying half the glass. We talked about people we’d both known in high school and what had become of them, although in truth there wasn’t a lot of overlap, beyond the smoking exit.
“You knew Caitlin Jaspers,” asked Elisa. “Right?”
The bar was filling up, and I knew it had to be around midnight. “Of course.” My mind flashed to the pale, impossibly beautiful girl in Hobey’s backseat, her thick black hair blowing around as we headed to the Uniroyal plant.
“She’s really been through hell,” said Elisa. A while back, she told me, Caitlin had gotten out of the car one night at the side of the freeway after a fight with her boyfriend, then was badly beaten by someone who came out of nowhere. By the time her boyfriend came back to get her she was being loaded into an ambulance. Her face had to be totally reconstructed.
I found the story so upsetting I felt physically ill. “Oh, my God,” was all I could say.
“Yeah, it was really bad,” continued Elisa. “You might not recognize her now. But she got married, you know . . . now she’s teaching photography or something at a high school in Maine.”
I found even this happy ending depressing. I’d imagined so much more for Caitlin—a glitzy career as a Rolling Stone magazine staff photographer, rock-star boyfriends she’d stub out like cigarettes as soon as she grew bored, a wardrobe that would put Kate Moss to shame. “Damn,” I said. “I’m just . . . floored, I guess. Caitlin deserved . . . so much better.”
“I know.” Elisa nodded toward the back of the club. “Hold on. I’ll be right back.”
I had thought about Caitlin often since high school. I’d last seen her ten years before, at a Beastie Boys concert at St. Andrew’s Hall in Detroit. She was photographing the band for a magazine spread. The glamorous life I’d envisaged seemed well under way. And then, apparently, it had all come apart. Or had she just realized she didn’t need all the lights? Didn’t I myself have some of the same doubts?
As flamboyant a partygoer as I could be, the truth was, I liked the quiet life of making art, talking about art, and enjoying close friends at dinner parties—the kind of life I’d been having in London for the most part. Those evenings I spent out among the “art stars” at private views and parties, they weren’t the most memorable, the ones I truly cherished.
Elisa weaved through the dancers on her way back from the restroom, making a goofy show of using her handbag as a front fender to ward off collisions.
“I’m still speechless,” I said as she sat down.
“Yeah.” She studied me, her eyes widening in the dim light. “Not to change the subject or anything, but . . .”
“Go ahead,” I told her.
“I’ve been feeling really sorry for your dad. He’s a good man, but . . . you know, he never got any love.” Her voice cracked on the word love.
“You’re right . . .” I said guardedly. I wasn’t sure where she was going with this, but I had the distinct feeling I was being rather purposefully led. “He got shortchanged, I guess, as a kid.”
“See, so did I,” she said, downing the rest of her drink. “I know what it means to basically be an orphan. I’m going to make up all those lost years to your dad, though, you know? Give him everything he never got. You’ll see.”
My stomach tightened into a thorny little ball. She was going to parent him? As much as I wanted to believe this, the age difference between them had already spelled things out pretty clearly: Elisa would be the pampered child. My father had already told me they slept in separate bedrooms and that he gave her a large monthly allowance.
Besides, I had my doubts that anyone could make up the losses of childhood with another person’s affection. I’d been my own lab rat, and the data was not encouraging. “Do you really think it works that way?”
Elisa nodded slowly, considering her next move. “He’s like a lost little kid. He needs someone.”
“He should have been a photographer,” I said.
“It’s funny,” she said, resting her elbows on the bar. “That’s exactly what he always says about you . . .”
Gorgeous people swayed all around us to the heroin beat of Massive Attack. A couple fell against the bar in a cinematic embrace, one of her long earrings coming unhooked as she swatted flirtatiously at his drunk, groping hands. Elisa lit a cigarette and I saw her, eleven years before, huddled in the corner of the smoking exit, laughing at my jokes but perhaps afraid to speak, the snow blowing around us in subzero gusts.
NON-SPECIFIC LOCATION #1, 1996
(by Frances Stroh)