Chapter VI
VI
As the band plays, the screen behind the stage loops video footage of Sin-é in the nineties.
Jeff Buckley in his white T-shirt and combat boots, sending the audience into bouts of barely contained ecstasy.
A table of young women, commiserating over coffee and cigarettes.
A flash of Sinéad O’Connor, elegant and ferocious, performing underneath the Sin-é banner.
The footage is grainy and sepia-toned, captured with shaky camcorders. It all looks old-fashioned to me.
I laugh at myself. What does that make me, then?
The frontwoman, a twentysomething with waist-length braids and a voice like suede, swaps her acoustic guitar for an electric one and strums the first crunchy, sexy chords of “Yard of Blonde Girls.” The guitar is a white Telecaster. The sight of it alone floods me with longing.
It’s the same guitar Jeff Buckley played at the Sin-é show in 1993. The show that I still think of as our show.
Emme taps my elbow. “You OK, Mom?”
I look up at my daughter—she inherited her father’s height, to his unending satisfaction—and I notice the crease in her smooth, perpetually dewy brow.
She’s been wearing her blond hair in a pair of pink-dipped space buns these days.
For the concert tonight, she braided it before swirling it into the buns, then lined her eyebrows in stick-on rhinestones.
She’s wearing an Edwardian lace nightgown and a pair of cherry-red cowboy boots, both thrifted.
“It’s giving Gwen Stefani circa Return of Saturn,” I told Emme, when she emerged from her vanilla-scented bedroom earlier tonight.
She shot me a lovingly stern look. “Mom,” she said, with long-suffering patience. “Please never say it’s giving.”
At fifteen, she’s somehow approaching the age I was then.
The passage of time was never so punishingly obvious until I became a parent.
I want so badly to encase this moment in amber, to keep my daughter exactly where she is now—at home, with me.
Especially since the divorce, I’ve organized my life into two boxes: Emme and my work.
I can’t even begin to think about how it will feel when Emme goes to college and that box becomes significantly emptier.
“I’m OK, sweetie,” I tell Emme now.
Then I realize I haven’t picked up my camera during the past ten minutes of this band’s set. They’re covering the first three tracks of Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, my favorite—but an often overlooked—Jeff Buckley album.
“You fine here for a bit?” I ask.
“I’ve been coming to Webster Hall since I was six.” Emme rolls her eyes, and the rhinestones above them sparkle. “I’m gonna go to the bathroom anyway.”
I make my way up to the lip of the stage, flashing my press badge to the few people who stoically refuse to budge. Overall, this crowd is generous, flexible, joyful. Not the case at every show. But this is hardly every show.
A week ago, Nisha sent me an Instagram post announcing the event: a one-night-only tribute show to Jeff Buckley, honoring the twenty-sixth anniversary of his death in 1997.
The owner and two previous employees of the now-defunct Sin-é had hoped to commemorate the twenty-fifth, but COVID prevented that from happening.
And the past three years have felt like a single, sprawling, unidentifiable mass anyway.
What’s the difference between twenty-five and twenty-six?
The hosts had originally planned to put on the event at the club’s original venue on St. Mark’s Place, but they weren’t expecting the thousands of messages from supporters, mourners, and celebrants asking if there was still space for more.
Or the number of musicians who reached out asking if there was room for them to contribute a cover.
Can you believe it’s been over twenty-five years since he’s been gone? Nisha had texted.
Of course, the answer is no. That is always the answer when faced with the relentless march of time.
I remember distinctly where I was when I learned that Jeff Buckley had died: James and I were on our third date at Aquagrill when I got an urgent message on my beeper.
It was Nisha: Call me. For all my complaints about James, he was nothing but compassionate in that moment, displaying the appropriate amount of concern and understanding when I excused myself from the table, hustled up to the hostess booth, and asked to use their phone.
“He’s dead,” Nisha said, her voice thick with fresh tears. My mind went blank, then kaleidoscopic with a riotous montage of every important man in our lives to whom she might be referring. Bill Clinton? Her father? My father?
“Jeff Buckley is dead.”
My knees buckled in relief, and then in potent despair. If someone as alive and electric as him could leave this earth so violently, what hope was there for the rest of us?
I couldn’t help bringing up Nisha’s call when I texted her back: It feels like just yesterday that you ruined my date with James.
Nisha responded instantly, despite the fact that it was 4 a.m. in Seattle, where she’s been living for the past few months to help care for her father.
Nisha: Didn’t stop you from marrying the guy.
Me: Clearly I should’ve taken Jeff’s death as an omen.
Nisha: No comment.
Me: None needed.
Nisha: You have to go to this show for us.
Nisha: And take Emme. Show her how cool we used to be.
But I didn’t want to just go. I wanted to be part of it, to somehow mark what it meant to me.
And though I’ve been lucky to make a living as an artist through commercial work, I’ve always harbored a soft spot for concert photography, though the format rarely suits my schedule or income needs as a single parent.
So few public experiences are as transcendent as live music.
No matter how intimate I am with a portrait subject, I can never get them to release themselves as fully as their favorite musician can.
So I reached out to one of the co-organizers and offered my services for free.
I only told my agent, Hayes, when the gig was confirmed so I didn’t have to hear about his moral allergy to pro bono work.
Now I snap a quick succession of shots of the band—the frontwoman knows exactly how to present for maximum visual impact in her billowing white dress—then swing my camera around to the crowd.
It’s generationally diverse, a testament to the enduring power of Jeff Buckley’s music.
My lens finds more scenes than it can capture, and I wonder if there isn’t something more to this show than a remembrance.
If maybe this night could shake me out of my artistic stasis.
Inspire my next long-term project. Keep me from feeling perpetually unmoored.
When the set ends, I make my way to Emme, who dutifully returned to our original spot after she came back from the bathroom.
Something is wrong. I can see it in her rigid posture, her crossed arms, the defiant set of her mouth. In a matter of milliseconds, using the part of my brain that defies language or logic, I calculate that she isn’t physically harmed, and she’s not particularly sad. She’s angry.
“OK.” I finally reach Emme through the thick crowd. “Tell me what happened.”
She shrugs, dropping her arms to her sides with a dramatic huff. “It’s nothing. Just a girl while I was in line for the bathroom.”
I feel every fight-or-flight muscle in my body tense, ready to tear apart whoever upset her like this.
I flash back to the bout of bullying she faced in middle school before her eclectic interests—manga!
calligraphy! collecting vintage subway tokens!
—made her categorically cool at her artsy high school.
I take a breath. “What happened?”
With the side of her hand, Emme brushes nonexistent hair from her forehead—her signature pissed-off move.
“So I was waiting in line for the bathroom for, like, five million years, and I have never needed to pee so badly in my life—like, the pee was practically leaking out of me—and when I was finally next in line, this girl on a FaceTime call—on speaker, by the way!—brushes right past me and gets into the next open stall before I can. And then she, like, hogs the sink forever, just yapping on her phone. I just get so mad when people are so presumptuous. I mean, who does she think she is? Just because she was fucking—sorry—insanely gorgeous with, like, the shiniest hair I have ever seen, and she was wearing that miniskirt I’ve been trying to find, you know the micro one with all the buckles on it?
And she also smelled amazing, so I guess she thinks she deserves to pee before the rest of us?
I can’t stand it.” Then, “I don’t even think she’s from here.
” The hardest-hitting diss in Emme’s arsenal.
“Did you say anything to her?”
“No. And I’m mad about that too. I wish I’d stood up for myself. I just felt really shy all of a sudden.”
Empathy spears through me. I know exactly how she feels.
“Try not to be so hard on yourself,” I say. “We all have moments when we wish we’d handled things differently.”
A little smirk breaks across Emme’s face that reminds me of the purple devil emoji. Emme wears it when she’s about to say something she knows I won’t like.
“You’re referring to Dad stuff, aren’t you?”
“No, Emme Jade. I’m not referring to Dad stuff.”
I’m not only referring to Dad stuff.
Since my split with James, I’ve tried to protect Emme from the extent to which he neglected me, tossed my feelings aside.
Didn’t consider what I did, said, or thought, let alone care about those things.
Or just how long I let his behavior slide, until I became hardened to his hardness, indifferent to his indifference.
Until I lost myself so completely that I reached a breaking point.
James loves Emme, but as Emme gets older, his perpetual absence speaks for itself. She doesn’t need me to be her translator.
Now I loop my arm through hers, grateful that she’s not the kind of teen who’s mortified by public shows of affection from her mother, and direct our attention back to the show.
The musical acts are now over, and a former waiter at Sin-é, who was also a close friend of Jeff Buckley’s, has taken to the stage to reflect on the musician’s legacy and his outsized influence.
And to remind the crowd to tip their bartenders generously.
Afterward, we slowly filter out to the street. All I want to do right now is get a big bowl of ramen, pop a melatonin, and crawl into bed. My soul may still feel like it’s twenty-two, but my back does not.
The June air is balmy and supple. I’ve lived my entire life in New York City, but I’ll never get over the miracle of stepping outside and being met with warm air. Summer is when the city shows its soft center.
We turn toward home, but Emme suddenly grabs my arm.
She freezes in place, her eyes baby-doll-wide, like she’s seen a ghost.
“That’s her,” she says. “That’s the bitch—sorry—the shockingly entitled young woman who cut me in line for the bathroom.”
I follow where she points down the block, toward the fluorescent lights of the movie theater on Third Avenue.
There, I see a girl with, indeed, remarkably long, shiny chestnut hair, wearing one of the shortest skirts I’ve seen in my life.
Yes, I recognize this miniskirt Emme has attempted to hunt down.
The girl is scrolling through her phone, pinching and pulling her fingers apart on the screen.
I’m about to tell Emme to shake it off, that we can talk more about it over dinner, when I notice something else.
Standing next to the girl is a tall dark-haired man.
The girl leans in to show him something on her phone. When the man tugs a pair of reading glasses out of his shirt pocket, I can’t stop looking at the way his shoulders shift beneath his khaki-green chore coat.
Recognition lances through me.
Emme isn’t the one who’s seeing a ghost.
I am.