Winnie
After our successful Thanksgiving with my Mom and Miranda, I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t come down to LA to spend a day or two at Christmas with Lincoln and his mother, her husband George, and Seraphina.
“Trust me,” he said, “I’m saving you.”
“Come on. You saw my family in all its glory at Thanksgiving. Besides, parents love me.”
“I’m sure they would love you, and that’s exactly the problem. I don’t want them to get their hooks into you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“First Mom will flatter your clothes and writing and have you spilling all your hopes and dreams so that she can meddle with them, and George will be suggesting ten people he can call to get your work published, again with the end goal of controlling your life.”
“I can think for myself, you know.”
“Of course you can. So can I! But they’re just…no, Winnie. I need you to be separate. Special. Please?”
He looked at me pleadingly. How could I refuse? Even though the conversation didn’t sit quite right with me, I wanted to be the most special thing in his life.
And our New Year’s together was perfect: a big party with all of our friends, then sleeping in and spending the whole first day of 1968 in bed. Togetherness like that would just erase the other stuff.
The start of ’68 felt rhythmic and right.
Lincoln and I fell into a groove of work and art and concerts and readings.
It was an explosively creative time for both of us—he writing songs and getting booked at venues around the Bay, and me writing poetry, about a half dozen of which even got published.
I started thinking about a chapbook, and I kept up with my journalism, and even snagged an interview with Jerry Garcia for the Sunday Chronicle.
“Seriously?” Lincoln said when I told him who I’d be talking to on a bench in Golden Gate Park the next day. “That’s amazing, Win, congratulations.”
“I’ve only got 800 words.”
“You’ll make them shine.” He kissed my temple, then said as he picked up his guitar, “Jerry Garcia is going places, man.”
He bought ten copies of the paper my interview ran in, and sent one to my mother because, as he put it, “It’s better if I’m the one bragging about you.” He was right, because Mom actually called.
“Winnie, I had no idea you were writing for the Sunday paper! I don’t know who this Mr. Garcia is, but he sounds important. Congratulations.”
“Thanks, Mom.” My heart practically supernovaed in my chest. Leave it to Lincoln to know how to get to my mother. Surely he’d introduce me to his mother soon.
He even framed a clip of the interview and hung it on our bedroom wall by the door. “So whenever we leave this room, we remember what’s possible,” he said. I loved this, because it encapsulated both our work. Words and music.
Anything and everything seemed possible in those days.
The biggest compliment of all, though, was the spring morning he finally said, “So Mom and George are going to be in town next weekend and they are dying to meet you.”
“They are?” My cheeks burned. I hadn’t even been sure they knew about me.
He took me by the shoulders and looked sternly into my eyes. “Just promise me that no matter what they say or do, you won’t take their side?”
“You have nothing to worry about,” I vowed.
We met for brunch in the bright Fairmont dining room with the gleaming silver flatware and gold-rimmed plates and champagne glasses.
His mother, Sylvia, was resplendent in a Pucci dress I was pretty sure I’d seen in that month’s Vogue.
George was shorter than her, and he wore a yellow silk shirt unbuttoned too low on his hairy chest, which was layered with gold chains.
He wore a diamond pinkie ring, and he reminded me of a lot of the successful wine men in Napa—brash bulls in china shops.
Seraphina—Sera, not Sarah, I was instructed to call her—had Shirley Temple pigtails and wore a white eyelet dress.
“No, you may not have juice,” Sylvia said, and proceeded to only allow her four-year-old daughter the smallest bites of foods unlikely to stain: scrambled eggs, honeydew cubes, unbuttered toast. Sylvia herself ate maybe two bites of her own eggs Benedict.
Sera looked hungry, but didn’t complain.
“Lincoln here tells us you’re a writer,” George boomed at me, having spent the first half of the conversation grilling Lincoln on his music.
Are you sure you want to stick with electric?
Isn’t the market saturated?…Where are you playing?
I’ll call my friend Angelo and get you booked at…
Why not? Linc, no one gets anywhere without a helping hand.
Look at your own father. That was a low blow.
Lincoln’s mercurial father was a failed Broadway actor who scraped together a living as the janitor of a school in Arizona.
Lincoln had seen him maybe twice in the last decade.
“Yes, I’m a writer,” I replied uncertainly as Lincoln signaled the waiter for a third mimosa.
“Where have you been published so far?”
Sensing an opportunity, I replied, “Oh, a few smaller journals but also the Chronicle and Playboy.”
“Playboy!” George turned to Lincoln and said with a lascivious elbow poke, “You’ve got a live one on your hands, eh?”
“It’s poetry, George, not pornography.”
“I know all about the writing in Hugh’s rag, boy. I’m impressed is all.”
He turned back to me. “I can open doors for you, little lady. Just say the word.”
I winked back at him and raised my glass. “I’ll do that, George, thank you.”
He guffawed and Lincoln stared. I thought I’d scored a point, but when I smirked in victory at him, he looked away from me, and my stomach clenched.
“You know, I got Sylvia here the part that landed her the Oscar,” George went on. “And next she’s going to be starring opposite Marlon Brando.”
Sylvia smiled but her subsequent frown and the circles under her eyes told a different story as she wiped crumbs from Sera’s mouth.
George spent the rest of brunch bragging about everyone else he’d “made” in Hollywood, and I felt terrible for Lincoln. He’d said before that he’d “lost” both of his parents, and I hadn’t quite believed him, since his mother was still alive and ostensibly part of his life. Now I saw the truth.
When we got home, Lincoln rounded on me. “I can’t believe you cozied up to him like that.”
“What? I was only trying to get him on my side, like you did with my mom and the cornbread.” My compassion of a moment ago evaporated as I put my defenses up.
“Except I asked you to stay on my side.”
“I assumed impressing them was staying on your side.”
“Just you wait,” he said. “Now they’re going to be after us both.”
I didn’t see what he was so worried about. “I can handle it,” I said.
As soon as his mother realized I was home most evenings at six, though, she started calling regularly to probe about our lives and ask me to tell Lincoln to call her. She sounded breathy and desperate every time, and often, I heard Sera shrieking in the background.
The first time I told Lincoln about these calls, he just shook his head and said, “See?”
I did, and I didn’t mention them again. I just absorbed his family for him.
After that brunch that I’d once wanted so badly—or maybe partly because of it?
—other problems started to pile up, too.
He’d forget to call if he picked up overtime at work.
I got mad that he left the laundry in the wash and it got moldy, then we’d fight about it, and I’d call him lazy and say I wasn’t going to be June to his Ward Cleaver.
He said that was fine with him because he never asked me to be.
We both started falling asleep while reading or watching a television show, because we were either too tired or too stoned to have sex.
Then, he’d wake up wanting sex in the middle of the night and I’d want sleep more and put him off.
For a long time, it felt like we were equally participating in a dance that only distanced us.
Then came a night in the fall of 1968. It was unusually warm, and I had all the windows in our place open, all the fans turned on high.
I made a salad assembled from various leftovers in the fridge, a trick I’d learned from Mom, who was apoplectic about never wasting a morsel from her precious garden.
I did it to save money, and I’d gotten pretty good at making sure nothing went bad in the crisper.
Sometimes these bowls of random bits tossed together with vinaigrette were downright delicious, and I was pretty proud of the one I’d made that night.
Lincoln didn’t make it home for dinner at seven like he said he would.
Or eight.
I picked at my salad and tried to watch Bewitched to distract myself. Oh, how I loved that show! With a cute little twitch of her nose, Samantha could make anything right again.
By nine thirty, I’d called everyone who might know where he was, and everyone was clueless.
The worst possible images invaded my mind; the blond in the bikini at Magic Mountain was a persistent one.
I never imagined him dead; my worst fears all had to do with him cheating.
When I finally called Bernard, choking back tears, we agreed together that if Lincoln wasn’t home by eleven, I’d go over to his place to smoke a bowl and chill out and not be home myself when my irresponsible boyfriend returned.
At 10 p.m., he strolled in.
“Where were you? I’ve been worried sick!” I hated myself for being such a cliché.
He laughed and kissed me on the cheek. He smelled like pot and tobacco, but not sex or even soap, which I found somewhat reassuring.
“Relax,” he said. “I’ve just been rehearsing. It went great, and I lost track of time.”
“I called Nathan,” his drummer, “and he was home, and didn’t know where you were.”
“This was the other band.”
“What other band?”
“Win, I know I told you about them,” he said. “The Wicked Six. Sarah and Glen, remember?”
I shook my head. “You did not tell me about them.”
He laughed again. “I did. The night you made that amazing chicken for dinner.”