Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Summer 2022
J ames woke up on thousand-count sheets. There was a funny ache in his lower back, and he rolled over and stretched his legs to the far end of the bed, arching his spine. This is forty-three, he thought darkly. A part of him wished he was in his own bed. But Kinsey didn’t like it when he left after their date nights. He didn’t like to deal with the repercussions of leaving.
On the left wall hung a massive black-and-white photograph taken by a famous photographer from the eighties, and a monstera plant sat in the corner that seemed eager to swallow him up. The sounds of morning rituals came from the kitchen: brewing coffee, making toast, scrambling eggs. He hadn’t been seeing Kinsey long, but he knew already that she liked her toast with peanut butter, her eggs with sriracha, and her coffee with games on her phone. Wordle was a particular favorite as of earlier this year.
But James couldn’t calm his mind down enough to play word games so early in the morning. Kinsey said that was precisely the reason he should try.
James got out of bed, touched his tender lower back, and donned a big sweatshirt he kept at Kinsey’s for chilly mornings like this. Kinsey’s apartment was on the first floor of a thirty-story ornate apartment building near Central Park, and it got very little sunlight. James joked it was the same season in the apartment all year long—somewhere between winter and spring.
Kinsey sat in the breakfast nook with her traditional breakfast, a big mug of coffee, and a pile of manuscripts ready for her attention to her left. She smiled at him, and he dropped down to kiss her cheek.
“Morning,” she said.
“Good morning!” James turned to pour himself some coffee, then sat across from her, eyeing the manuscripts. Kinsey was an editor at one of the Big Five publishing houses and was instrumental in bringing some of the most iconic and oft-discussed novels of the past ten years to the public eye. She was thirty-seven years old and incredibly driven, so much so that she’d never gotten around to getting married or having children. She’d told James she hadn’t been averse to the idea; it just hadn’t happened yet. Sometimes James worried she wanted to have children with him. He’d already done that.
Be in the moment, Atkinson, he told himself.
But Kinsey didn’t want to talk so early in the morning. She was finishing her word games, leaving James in peace. And James was pleased with that. He had a big day ahead.
James carried his coffee into the foyer to hunt for his notebook in his black leather bag. Later today, he had an interview with Colton Parsons, one of James’s favorite musicians of all time. James already had several interview questions lined up, but he wanted to nail down a few more before he set out for the studio.
Kinsey eyed the opened notepad curiously as James clicked his pen. She set down her phone and picked up a manuscript, clicking another pen to imitate him. She winked.
“There he is,” she teased, “the famous music journalist.”
“There she is. The famous editor,” James shot back.
“Editors aren’t famous,” she said. “We hide behind the authors.”
“Couldn’t you say the same about journalists?” James asked.
“Not you,” Kinsey reminded him, raising both eyebrows.
And it was true that Kinsey had heard of James when they’d first met. “I read your profile on Paul McCartney,” she’d said when they’d been introduced at a dinner party late last year.
The profile on Paul McCartney had come out more than ten years ago. It meant that she’d followed his career since then. James was touched.
Kinsey took a shower and got ready for work, and James walked her down the block to grab the subway. They kissed like lovers do at the top of the stairs, and then James watched her walk into the darkness and turn out of sight. As he always did when he said goodbye to the women he was dating, James felt an opening up in his chest, freedom now that they were gone, and he was left to do whatever he wanted. He’d once explained that feeling to a male friend who’d looked at him as though he were crazy. “Doesn’t that mean you’re dating someone you don’t really like?” he’d asked. But James had said no. That wasn’t it. “I just like to feel like my time is my own. That it belongs to me,” he’d explained. The friend still hadn’t understood.
James returned to his flat in Greenwich Village at ten that morning, grabbing a bagel at the corner shop before heading inside. Kinsey didn’t like bagels—one of her rare negative traits. He liked to tease her about it.
James sat at his own table, surrounded by his records, books, plants, Persian rugs, and artwork made by friends on the walls. He ate his bagel, slathered in cream cheese with dill.
The past two years felt like the raucous final cycle in a washing machine. He’d been living in the Florida Keys with Taylor, and then Taylor had come back to Manhattan, and then he’d lived alone in the Keys until he couldn’t take it anymore. He’d found himself lonely; he’d watched the world begin to move on from the pandemic—inch by inch, step by step. So he’d left the Keys and returned to London, where his job had abruptly ended and cast him back into the world of freelance journalism again. He’d returned to Manhattan, back to the flat he’d rented out after he’d left Manhattan in the first place. And toward the end of 2021, he’d met Kinsey.
Taylor texted him now.
TAYLOR: Still up for hanging today?
JAMES: Sounds good. 5?
TAYLOR: Perfect.
Taylor said she had someone she wanted him to meet. It was pretty clear it was a male somebody, a romantic somebody. But Taylor and James had never gone through this step before. James felt strangely nervous about meeting his daughter’s boyfriend.
It was bizarre for James to feel nervous. He’d met some of the biggest celebrities in the world. He’d shared numerous pints with Paul McCartney. Bruce Springsteen had once called James “an essential voice of a music generation.”
But parenthood brought so many surprises.
James left his apartment at two that afternoon to walk to Colton Parsons’ studio, which was about a mile from his place in the Village. When he arrived, the studio secretary buzzed him in and shook his hand.
“Colton’s waiting for you in the studio,” she said. “Do you want something to drink?”
“Just a water,” James said. “Thanks.”
James entered the studio to find Colton bent over the soundboard. One of Colton’s latest tracks—one he’d only performed live and was in the midst of recording—came through the speakers. The music tugged at James’s heart. It was truly beautiful and ragged, offering the aching of a man who’d been through so much and wasn’t afraid to dig into it.
Colton cut the music and offered James one of his signature gap-toothed smiles. “James!” he said, getting up to shake his hand. “How long has it been?”
James was surprised Colton remembered they’d met before. It was back in London in the early 2000s. A million years ago.
“How long have you been back in New York?” Colton asked.
“Seven months, thereabouts,” James said. “But you’ve been here straight through, right?”
“Since 2007,” Colton said. “This city is the only place for me.” He laughed. “Don’t write that in the article. It sounds cheesy.”
James laughed.
“Make me look cool, James!” Colton said with a big laugh.
James might have assured Colton that Colton Parsons always looked cool. He’d built his reputation over a number of musically iconic years. James would never screw that up. He would never dream of it.
They had light chitchat for a few more minutes before James dug into the new album.
“Tell me where it came from,” James said, making sure his recording equipment was on.
Colton’s eyes were illuminated. “You really want to know?”
James laughed. Of course, he did. But he kept quiet.
“It’s about love,” Colton said, rolling his eyes. “Specifically, it’s about my first love. This was all the way back in the early nineties. We were both totally wild and unhinged, unleashed upon London like fireworks. We couldn’t get enough of each other. We also fought ourselves silly. We met when I was playing with The Stone Age, and she came to all of our gigs and stood in the front row. Sometimes she got up on stage and danced around. Everyone loved her. We thought we were sort of famous in the scene, you know. People waited for us to show up to parties.”
James could imagine that. Colton had a magnetism. Obviously, any woman he was with would have that kind of magnetism, too.
“But anything that intense has a dark side,” Colton said. “We couldn’t survive the storm of that love.”
James felt his heart darken.
“One night, we got into a huge blowout fight,” Colton said, laughing, his shoulders drooped. “I still remember her stomping her way down this London back alley to get away from me. I told her to go! I said you’ll regret this for the rest of your life! I assumed it was all theatrics, you know? I thought we’d see each other the next day and make up. That was what we’d always done before. But this time was different.
“I milled around London, looking for her over the next week or two. I was about to go on tour and wanted to see her before then. I wanted to apologize. But I didn’t see her for several more years. I had already gone solo by then. I was buying a sandwich from a little shop in London between tours, and there she was with a baby in a stroller. Her hair wasn’t blue anymore, obviously. And she wore a big rock on her finger. But when we looked at each other, I could see it in her eyes. She remembered everything. And she still loved me. And at that moment, it was as though an alternate universe was created, one in which we had never broken up. One in which that baby was never born. Maybe we’d had a baby instead.”
James was captivated. “Did you say something to her that day?”
Colton chuckled. “I didn’t. She was on the other side of the street. A big double-decker bus went between us, and she must have used those seconds to hide herself and her baby away.”
“Did you think she was a coward?”
“No. I understood why she did it,” Colton said. He looked contemplative. “Some things are better off left in the past.” He tugged his collar. “What about you? Tell me about your first love so I don’t feel so square.”
James felt his soul fly out of his body. It was incredibly rare for the musician to turn the questions back on him. But Colton was a rare sort of musician.
“I suppose it’s similar, in a sense,” James offered. “We had a fiery and passionate love affair. It didn’t last long enough. Something happened. Something that I can’t fully grapple with. And all at once, we were apart, and we never saw one another again.”
James thought, Don’t burst into tears in front of Colton Parsons.
It was bizarre. He hadn’t cried about it in years. Decades.
But it was as though his sorrow expanded in his chest, growing dark, pulling him back into that time.
“Where did you meet her?” Colton asked. He wanted more of the story.
“Athens,” James said with a laugh.
Colton looked taken aback. “Athens! Was she Greek?”
“American,” James said.
Colton’s smile was crooked. “I can see how you feel about her.”
“It was all a long time ago,” James assured him. He wanted to get back to the questions he’d scheduled for the interview. He wanted to get out of Athens in 2001 and back to Greenwich Village in 2021.
“Can I ask you something?” Colton asked.
Ugh, James thought.
“Do you know where she is now?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t a part of you want to find out? Doesn’t a part of you want to tell her how important she was to your story?” Colton asked. “I mean, I wrote this entire album about Cynthia. I think when she hears it, she’ll know how much she meant to me. She’ll know it’s all about her. And who knows? Will she tell her husband? Will they have a laugh about it? Or will she appear on my doorstep one day and say let’s try again ?” Colton barked with laughter, but his eyes were dark and shadowy.
“I don’t know if I need to know where she is,” James offered.
Colton snapped his fingers. “You should look her up! What with the internet, you can learn anything. You can hire private detectives. You can find anyone.”
James wasn’t sure he liked how easy it was to find someone. He liked his privacy. He assumed she did, too.
James left the meeting and walked immediately to the coffee shop where he planned to meet Taylor and her “special somebody.” Colton’s stories buzzed around his head, making it feel heavy, weighted. He couldn’t believe he’d told him about his first love. How juvenile he felt.
Taylor was already at the coffee shop when James arrived. He was twenty-five minutes early, hoping to make notes about the interview, and they gave one another startled smiles.
“Surprise!” Taylor said with a laugh, getting up to hug him.
James hugged her back and sat down. He looked at the empty chair beside her, upon which hung a black sweater that didn’t belong to Taylor.
The boyfriend emerged from the bathroom a minute later.
He was every father’s nightmare.
Long, greasy hair cascaded down his broad shoulders; his eyes were enormous but slightly buzzed out, as though he’d smoked weed recently and planned to do so again soon. He was tall and gangly, and when he shook James’s hand, his grip was loose.
Taylor was so effusive. “Dad, this is Aiden. He’s like you. He loves music. But he’s more into playing it, obviously.”
James told himself to play it cool. He’d been around people like Aiden all his life. It was just that all those gangly, greasy musicians had seemed cool to James, whereas this one was dating his daughter. He wanted him to have a 401K. He wanted him to pay rent on time.
“What kind of music do you play, Aiden?” James asked.
“It’s rock, man,” Aiden said. “Heavily influenced by the metal of the late nineties.”
A shiver ran down James’s spine. He imagined his daughter at a metal show, waving her beautiful hair around as that sound assaulted her eardrums. He imagined himself storming through the door and dragging her out of there.
“That’s cool,” James said.
“Aiden has read a lot of your articles,” Taylor explained. “He loved the one you did on Metallica.”
“Right. Yeah.” James was feeling extraordinarily hot. He touched the back of his neck, which was lined with sweat.
Taylor got up to order them juices from the juice bar. James was suddenly forced to reckon with Aiden by himself. Aiden looked like he didn’t know where he was.
“So, Aiden. Any tours coming up?” James asked. He assumed the answer was no. There was no way a guy like Aiden could organize a tour.
“Um, yeah. We got one starting next week,” Aiden said. “The booking agent just sent me a list.” He tugged his phone with a cracked screen from his back pocket and showed James the schedule. Manhattan, Brooklyn, Boston, Providence, going down the East Coast and then embarking west. James knew almost all of the venues, and they weren’t small. He whistled. He couldn’t help it. He was impressed.
“Did he show you the tour?” Taylor asked, setting down the juices.
“He did,” James said. “It looks amazing.”
Taylor looked thrilled. She sat down and took Aiden’s hand over the table. “I decided to drop out of university next semester and travel with the band.”
James felt it like a javelin through his stomach. He wanted to erupt. He wanted to scream You will do no such thing! What about your future?
But he bit his tongue, remembering something. Hadn’t he been the same kind of young person? Hadn’t he been similarly reckless? Hadn’t things worked out just fine?
“That’s a big step,” he said.
Taylor couldn’t quit smiling. “I know. It sounds like a lot. But really, it’s just one semester. Pratt University will be here when I get back. And I don’t want to miss the epic times they’ll have on tour. I mean, I was thinking I could even blog about it. Do a little music journalism?”
This was the first time Taylor had indicated she wanted to follow in James’s footsteps. He wasn’t sure he believed her. But it was nice, anyway.
“Have you told your mother yet?” James asked.
Taylor grimaced. “Not yet.”
“You need to tell her,” James said. “She isn’t like me.”
“Exactly,” Taylor said. “I don’t know how to reason with her.”
This isn’t a reasonable thing to do. There’s no reasoning it through.
James took a deep breath. He knew what a tour was like. He wanted her to be safe.
“Can I give you a few phone numbers?” he asked. “I know people from most of these cities. People who can help you if something happens.”
“That would be great, Dad,” Taylor said. “Thank you.”
But James decided not to hesitate. He called Nancy immediately after Aiden and Taylor left the coffee shop.
“I think we should talk,” he said.
Nancy sounded surprised yet grateful. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d seen one another in the flesh. Maybe seven months ago, right after he’d gotten back to Manhattan? That had been right before her wedding to the handsome, rich banker she’d taken up with, and she’d been emotionally all over the place but extremely arrogant with him. James hadn’t managed more than forty minutes with her.
But this was different. They needed to talk about Taylor.
James and Nancy agreed to meet at an Italian restaurant around the corner from Nancy’s place. Nancy’s husband was out of town on business, and he sensed she was bored and curious. He didn’t bother to go home first and instead went immediately to the restaurant, where he had a glass of red wine and waited for her to arrive.
Nancy walked into the restaurant like a movie star.
She wore a black dress with a scarf and a large pair of sunglasses that blocked most of her face. Her newly blond hair cascaded in luscious waves down her shoulders. After she whipped off the sunglasses, she gave him a once-over, then offered a soft smile. That smile had led James to take up with Nancy back in the day. He’d been captivated with it.
“There he is. My ragtag ex-husband,” Nancy said as she approached.
James got up and gave her a hug. “You look wonderful.”
Nancy blushed a little bit and sat across from him. James’s stomach fluttered strangely. Was he nervous? No. That would be ridiculous.
James had ordered a bottle of wine for the table, one he knew Nancy liked. He filled her a glass. She watched him with catlike eyes.
“You aren’t here to wine and dine me, are you?” Nancy teased.
James laughed. “If only.”
Nancy sighed and spread her hands across the tablecloth. “I know she’s hiding something.”
“Have you met the guy?”
Nancy shook her head. “I know there is one, though.”
“Did she show you a picture?” James asked.
“Is it really that bad?”
“It’s worse,” James said.
Nancy hung her head. “I wanted her to go to an Ivy League school!”
“Pratt is a great school,” he reminded her. “And it’s not like Taylor ever took her education seriously enough to go to an Ivy League. Can’t blame her for that.”
“Because she’s so much like you,” Nancy shot back. “She’s living life by the seat of her pants!”
“That’s not all,” James said.
Nancy winced.
“She asked me not to tell you, but you’ll find out eventually,” James said. “She’s taking next semester off and going on tour with him.”
Nancy’s face went pale. “Over my dead body!”
James couldn’t help but laugh. He’d never seen Nancy like that. He thought she might faint.
“Stop laughing,” Nancy snapped. “You’re loving this, aren’t you? It’s exactly what you always did when you were her age! You ran around. You did whatever you wanted!”
“And it worked out for me!” James reminded her.
“She’s twenty!”
“We were once twenty,” James said.
“When I was twenty, I was in school,” Nancy pointed out. “I stayed in school till I graduated. It’s just what you do.”
“There is no roadmap for life,” James said.
Nancy was quiet. She pressed her lips into a thin line. “We can’t let her go.”
And this, James realized now, was why he’d wanted to talk to Nancy ahead of time. He’d wanted to mitigate disaster.
“All we can do is make sure she’s safe,” James said. “I’m going to give her phone numbers and addresses. I know plenty of people in this business. If something happens…”
“Nothing is going to happen because she’s not going,” Nancy repeated.
James sighed. “I wish it was that simple.”
The server came to take their order. Nancy ordered a salad, and James ordered carbonara. Once upon a time, Nancy would have ordered carbonara, too. But she’d stopped eating carbs twenty years ago and never looked back.
“I’m going to be sick with worry the entire time,” Nancy whispered when the server left.
“I’ll make sure she’s all right,” James promised.
A few minutes passed. Nancy got her coloring back. James took her mind off Taylor and asked about her wedding, her banker husband, and her redecoration plans for the apartment. They weren’t topics that interested James, but he wanted to calm her down.
Eventually, Nancy said, “Taylor tells me you’re seeing someone.”
James laughed with surprise. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Not serious?”
“Not especially.” James shook his head.
Nancy raised her eyebrows. A moment of silence passed between them.
“What?” James asked. He didn’t like the way she was looking at him.
“It’s just that nothing is ever serious with you,” she said. “We had a child together, and I still don’t know if it was ever serious between us.”
“We got married,” he reminded her.
“Still. I don’t know. It was like you were always somewhere else,” Nancy offered.
James’s false smile fell. He sipped his wine and wondered, Has every woman I’ve ever dated felt that way?
But he knew the answer was no.
He knew one woman in the world might have said he was completely present and that they were in love.
I was lucky enough to have it. But it’s over.