“Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes.” – E.M Forster
One may as well begin with Mercedes’ phone call to her sister, Phil.
“Hello?”
“Phil?”
“Mercedes? It’s 1:15 in the morning.”
“I need your help. Come get me.”
“Where are you?”
“The Nightingale.”
“Wait for me.”
Philomela—“Phil” since Mercedes decided at the age of four that their mother’s drug-addled allusive choice of a name for the newly-arrived baby had far too many syllables (not to mention the mythic implications of the christening which would evade her understanding until a university course on Eliot’s The Waste Land)—hangs up the phone. She had fallen asleep on her not quite comfortable couch while grading essays. Dressed in tapered and tight black pants and an emerald lace top that reveals an inch of skin above her waist, she stands, brushes away cracker crumbs, locates her glasses and examines herself in the mirror. Her earlier-evening hopes for dazzling are dashed against the reality the glass provides. A glance at the digital blinking red hour. She has time.
Minutes before the shrill beeping of Phil’s cell phone invaded her slumber, she had been dreaming of a stag in a boardroom. In the dream, the beast stood on a long cherry wood table surrounded by men in blue business suits. Hooves lightly stamping, the bristling yet silent beast grazes its antlers along the ceiling of the room, making a dragging noise, sonically resembling the rush of a current. The men in blue business suits stare seem unconcerned. The stag’s liquid muscles tense, preparing to gallop off the table—when Phil is sliced out of the dream by her sister’s S.O.S
The dream is recurring, one of the most nagging of her mind’s nighttime machinations. As she searches for her shoes among heaps of blue books and misshapen mountains of highlighted articles, she considers the dream as an archaeologist considers a heap of dusty bones; the vision is not simply the after-effect of bad Thai food, but an opportunity for discovery, meaning, and above all, connection. If it were up to her, she would push aside the stacks of papers, lie on the couch in her warmly lit, cluttered apartment and drift away into analysis, pondering. Instead, she fastens the straps of her four-inch heels and sets out the door, leaving it unlocked.
Walking down the steps of her Westwood apartment, Phil immediately regrets not bringing a coat. She checks her purse to make sure she has everything she might need for the night and grabs a hair tie from the bottom of her bag. While she pulls her two-sugars-and-one-cream coffee hair back and up, she tries to count how many times she has gotten the “I’m too drunk, come pick me up” call from her sister. Getting into her affordable green coupe, sticking the key in the ignition, she thinks that Western mathematics cannot compute such a sum and settles on “too many.” And what the hell was she doing at The Nightingale? Her sister’s drinking life was encroaching uncomfortably close to Phil’s area of the city. This must be addressed. She turns off the radio and acknowledges the hour as she gets on to the freeway: 1:25a.m; she still has time.
Earlier, she had received a phone call from her father inquiring about her and her sister’s general well-being, whether she was enjoying her recently-acquired assistant lecturer position at UCLA, and of course to complain about her mother. Timothy and Teresa had been separated for five years and six months; the split occurred after both the daughters set off for college from their modest Northern California suburban home. Mercedes made her way first to New York, then followed Philomela to Los Angeles. Their mother and father were professors of literature at Santa Clara University and, in each other’s eyes, failed writers. Her mother took the typical route of alcoholism to reconcile her Marxist, Bohemian ways with life as mother-in-suburbia, and her father immersed himself in his work and students (sometimes too deeply). During this particular conversation, her father ranted about Teresa’s recent inebriated phone call to him in which she called him a “two-bit cuckold.” He bit back by referring to her as “Isadora Wing without the wit, just the mess.” Phil offered a polite chuckle and listened to her father hoot uproariously at himself. She is her father’s daughter, through and through: austere, sharp, sensitive and serious with a deep love of literature, especially poetry. Mercedes, obviously, falls under the maternal wing.
Phil pulls up to The Nightingale, her usual loading zone parking available. The establishment fits the definition of dive like a tattered mitten, situated in the nether-regions of downtown. Above it floors and floors of tenement apartments, a few windows lit, many busted or boarded up. The building looks like a battered spouse. She strides into the bar and doesn’t need to look far before spotting the shiny, golden-brown locks of her sister though she actually hears her barking dog laughter first. The bar is surprisingly busy for this late on a Tuesday evening. A few men sit at the bar nursing beers, others are playing doctor with tall booze and tonic concoctions, and nearly all are scratching at the wooden surface, leaving their mark. The bartender notices the young, over-dressed, sharp-nosed woman who has entered the bar and hollers across the room to Mercedes.
“Hey Benz! Your better half is here.”
Phil throws a dagger-sharp glare at the bartender. He offers a gap-toothed grin.
“Beautiful, don’t look so sullen. Glass of Pinot on the house?”
She is about to decline when she notices the craning neck of a handsome man in a gray blazer and black t-shirt at the end of the bar. All the hairs on her body salute simultaneously and she mutters an obscenity. This is not the time. She clips along to her sister’s table.
“Let’s go.”
Mercedes sits at a table with a barely post-pubescent fellow who wears a torn denim jacket, wrinkled t-shirt, and red sweatpants. Empty beer bottles and cherry stems clutter the table to the point that both occupants sit with their arms crossed, making eyes at each other as they orally attempt to tie knots in fruit stems.
“P-Nasty! You made it! Thank god, ‘cause Joey here was about to give me a ride if you didn’t make your expected cameo. Joey, this is the person who came out of my mother’s vagina a few years after me.”
“Sup, lady? I’m Joey.”
He extends a scrawny, hairy, inked arm. Phil does not take it. She points to the door and says, “Let’s go now.”
“You look tres nice. Why are you all gussied up?”
“I had a date. Let’s go.”
“All right, okay, we’re going. Shiza. Just let me finish recounting this tale to Joey. I was telling him about that restaurant we went to that one time, remember, where you got that sweet-ass chocolate vodka cocktail martini drink thing…what was it called?”
Phil looks over her shoulder and sees the man in the gray blazer sitting with his back to the bar, watching her with —she must admit— a hell of sexy smile. He points at his watch and raises an eyebrow. She turns back to her sister.
“We need to leave. Now.”
“Wait, what was that drink you got, you know, the one at Mom’s 50th, what did they call it?”
“What? I don’t remember. Why? It had an Italian name, I think…”
“A White Russian?” Joey offers, cherry stem and pink drool dripping from the corner of his lips.
Mercedes snorts with laughter and, in her convulsions, knocks numerous bottles off the table. Phil groans and grabs her sister’s coat, then arm.
“We’re leaving.”
As they make their way out of the bar, Phil keeps her grip tight on Mercedes’ arm, guiding her, attempting to avoid eye contact with everyone.
“Ow, let go, you’re hurting me.”
“Sorry. How drunk are you?”
“Not enough.”
Mercedes bumps her head while trying to get into the coupe.
“Fuck, get a bigger car.”
“Take a taxi next time.”
“This is your job. You’re my little sister. You’re supposed to look out for me.”
“You’re an immature alcoholic. The world is shocked you haven’t started snorting something by this point.”
“I don’t really care for cocaine. Only the way it smells.”
Phil does not join her sister in laughter. Instead she turns up the music and pilots the car through downtown, searching for a freeway.
“Phil, aren’t you sore from having that big stick-bug living in your ass?”
“You’re thirty-two. Just acknowledge that. Thirty-two, a too well-paid journalist, and pissing away your life and liver in shitty dive bars. Alone.”
“I’m not alone.”
“That’s right, you have Joey.”
“Fuck you.”
They remain silent as they pass masses of black garbage bags, box-houses, and grocery carts lining the streets of the city. Mercedes takes a breath, as if she’s about to say something. She does it a second time. At the third priming, Phil loses her patience,
“What, Mercedes? Just say it.”
“Don’t you miss the simple past?”
"You’re wasted."
“I’m serious! Don’t you miss how we used to be? When we were young and everything was easy and taken care of for us? When we would go to Golden Gate Park with Daddy and just read and write all day in the sun.”
“Sure. But that’s childhood. It ended. For some of us.”
“Look at me.”
Philomela keeps her eyes on the road.
“No wonder you’re alone and unfucked. Who was the last guy you dated? That novelist from Oregon, like two years ago?”
“Sure.”
“You’re heartless. All you have under those tiny breasts is a hollow punctured pericardium.”
She ignores this stab, a favorite of Mercedes’. Phil’s supposed lack of a heart was likely the greatest hit among her sister’s treasured topics of criticism. The preening poet without a pulse. Mercedes had come up with that one when she stumbled into their bedroom reeking of marijuana, lashing out at Phil’s exaggerated sniffs and glares of junior-high judgment.
“Have you talked to Mom lately?” Phil asks, steering the conversation towards an at-times common enemy.
“Yeah, last night actually.”
They pull on to the freeway and head towards Mercedes’ studio in the borderlands between the Valley and L.A. Mercedes fiddles with the radio station, putting on a pop station that is in the middle of “Unchained Melody.” Phil hates this song but remains silent.
“She told me the Murphys are divorcing.”
Phil grips the steering wheel as the car slightly swerves. She steels herself and does her best to not show any reaction, keeping her voice modulated and calm.
“Really? That’s sad to hear.”
“Guess you never really get over something like that…”
Mercedes would never have been so blind and tactless to make such a statement in front of Phil, but the six beers and three vodka tonics allow her lips to be less careful than usual.
“Yes. I suppose that would make a marriage difficult. Losing your only child.”
“It’s been what…eight years?”
Ten. Ten years, three months…No. She stopped counting days, hours and minutes when she was eighteen. She will not start again. She will not. She does.
Ten years, three months, fifteen days, nine hours, twenty-three minutes.
“Something like that,” is all she offers to Mercedes.
Mercedes sighs loudly and leans her forehead against the glass. Phil glances at her sister, the orange lights of the freeway shading her milky skin and golden brown hair. Her resemblance to their mother is uncanny; in appearance (those wide-set, heavy blue eyes) and behavior--as evidenced by tonight.
Phil remembers these same types of late-night drives as a child, except she was in the backseat with Mercedes, and her father sat glowering in the driver’s seat, hissing harsh chiding remarks to Teresa who sat slouched over, head lolling back and forth. She remembers the phone ringing and her father demanding, “Where are you?!” And that time her mother fell in the bushes outside the house, as they walked up the driveway. Phil must have been only five and Mercedes nine. They watched their mother stumble into the rhododendrons and curse, “Fucking flowers! Get off me, vines of the devil!” Her mother’s dramatic and literary flair always surfaced when she was drunk (Phil shared this attribute, having one time given a twenty-minute lecture to a bar full of gay men on the significance of the word “Yes” in Ulysses; when she mentioned Molly Bloom, a voice shouted “Isn’t that the bitch in ‘Beaches’?”).
“You loved him, didn’t you?”
Phil is pulled out of her memory trance.
“Who?”
“Will Murphy.”
A pause. Phil takes a breath and gets into the next lane.
“Yes. Yes, I did love him.”
“Was he your first?”
“What? Stop. I’m not going to do this.”
“It’s only a question. Phil, it’s been-- ”
“I know how long it’s been. Please. Don’t.”
“But-- ”
“Stop.”
“I-I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were still so--”
“So what, Mercedes?”
Mercedes does not respond. She continues staring at the window. They leave downtown, the towers reaching for the sky like fingers of a palm turned upward.
“The poem you read at the funeral was beautiful. I remember it still.”
Phil continues staring at the road, unsure of how to respond to her sister’s statement. She remembers the poem as well. Word for word.
At the service, she delivered “Broken Lily” with a controlled and powerful voice, emphasizing just the right phrases and rhythms to bring the gathered mourners to tears. Her own face remained still. As she drives, Phil allows the final lines of the poem to take her:
The shadowed foliage and swaying branches
act as silent witnesses to the passing.
A broken lily pauses, adrift upon the creek
Nothing stirs.
She remembers the phone ringing. A skirt populated with green and white stars floated around her legs. Her mother was passed out somewhere, her father at work and Mercedes was away at college. Phil answered the phone, twirling her skirt around her hips, a universe orbiting her legs. She remembers the shaken voice of Will’s mother, the tremulous sobs and hesitation, and the fragments of words spilling out in a heap. She chooses not to remember the exact words. Instead she remembers in scenes that seem to be projected against the concrete slabs she speeds along, the two years she spent loving Will Murphy.
The memory that should be shared here is the one in which Philomela and William sit in his movie-postered bedroom (Chinatown, Annie Hall, Say Anything). Will stares at a computer screen, typing a poem. Phil reads on Will’s bed, her bare legs drifting in the air. She gazes at him as he works. It’s April of their sophomore year. As Phil stares at Will, he reaches for his glasses on the desk and puts them on. Phil thinks, when he wears his glasses I see him thirty years from now, still sitting here next to me, writing in silence. She looks and looks at that face. It’s carved in her like long-dried soap, firm and cold. Suddenly she has the urge to ask him, “You’ll always love me, right?” but she doesn’t want to succumb to such pointless (and impossible) questions. How does love end, she wonders. What are the ends of love? Orgasm or death, she supposes and laughs to herself. Will shifts his gaze looks away from the computer to Phil, the light from the screen illuminating his golden stubble. He reaches one arm out and strokes her bare leg.
“So Shakespeare, what are you pondering today?”
This was how she remembered him. Reaching out to her, witty and warm.
Mercedes wrote an elegant piece for the local newspaper about Will’s death that caught the attention of a certain gentlemen who had happened to know a respectable woman who was good friends with…on and on; another one of those unexpected turns of the road and off she went, the piece eventually being published in People. Phil never read the article, just as Mercedes never ventured to read any of Phil’s poetry (it was a disconnect that bothered Phil as she would toss in bed at night, her mind thrashing and turning). From that launching pad, Mercedes moved on to bigger and better journalistic endeavors, now writing for the Times as well as being published in various magazines and journals that she would be delighted to list at length.
After Will’s death, Phil became aware of the literary legacy into which she had abruptly stumbled and began embracing it. She read “The Dead” over and over, picking apart those final scenes. There were many attempts in the years following to properly elegize Will, in the tradition of Tennyson and Shelley. Phil saturated pages upon pages with mourning epics and ballads about young, slain gods and the frigid cessation of life. She edited and revised, draft after draft, attempting to make something out of this nothing. Then, one May afternoon, a senior in high school, she stopped. No more ink would be spent on poems about him, she decided. She could do it no more. With the rapidly approaching crossing of a graduation stage and the beautiful, liberatory possibilities of the city that awaited her, Phil put the poems into a folder and away in a drawer. She brought them with her down south and they followed her throughout college and grad school, from drawer to drawer.
She wants to read them now, as she pulls into her sister’s driveway. More than she’s willing to admit to herself, she feels the urge to return to her apartment, unlock the drawer, pull out the folder and immerse herself.
“You going to be okay?” Phil asks Mercedes, who is clambering out of the door.
“You bet. Thanks. For this. And I’m sorry about-”
“Yeah, don’t worry about it. I have to get going”
“I love you, Philomela.”
“Goodnight, Mercedes.”
Mercedes shuts the door and Phil watches as she stumbles up the steps to her front door, fumbling with keys and cursing to herself, looking back at Phil to smile embarrassingly. She’s coy yet somehow aggressive when she’s drunk, Phil muses to herself. An odd combination. She pulls away once Mercedes gets inside the door.
The traffic is light as she follows the freeways out of the Valley and back into the city. It’s nearly three a.m. and she drives with purpose under the dirty purple sky. The concrete walls slide by her; the flashing reds and tagged-up tunnels all blend together. She gets so easily lost in this city, where there are no clear beginning or end to roads, everything twisting and twirled together, a horizontal cat’s cradle of concrete.
She’s back at The Nightingale. It’s three-twenty a.m. She has time. She returns to her parking spot and gets out of the car. She walks around the outside of the bar to iron gates that lead to the tenement apartments above. She pulls her keys out of her purse and opens the door, walking up the dank white-walled staircase. Her heels make a heavy, knocking sound as she climbs up six flights of stairs. She has to use another key to get into the hallway and soon she is at Apartment 611. She sticks the key in and opens the door.
The room is bare but for a mattress in the middle, a light blue sheet pulled over it. She closes the door and pulls off her shoes. The walls are the color of milk and egg yolk, with holes and scraps of peeled wallpaper. There’s a lone window, barred, that looks out onto the street below. Phil sits on the mattress and waits.
A knock at the door. She stands and opens it. A man with a gray blazer and black t-shirt stands leaning on the doorframe. He has dark hair and rings under his eyes and as he rubs his chin, the growth of black stubble makes a scratching noise.
“You’re late,” Phil murmurs as she pulls him inside and begins to unbutton his pants, tossing off his blazer and tugging at his shirt.
“You were early.”
She kisses his neck and pushes him down on the mattress. Here is her end.
“Was that your sister?”
She is licking at his navel and pulling off her shirt.
“Is she younger or older?”
She straddles him and removes her bra, proceeding to push her waist and hips into his jean-clad groin. He puts his hands onto her arms and stops her with a smile.
“Hey, I’m asking you questions.”
“Do you hear me giving answers?”
She kisses him, but he pushes her away.
“You don’t have to be so cold.”
“Look,” Phil says, her voice tense and nipples erect, “when we made this arrangement, you knew the deal. No questions. No names. If you can’t handle that, then this is not going to work.”
The man stares at this woman, her dark, somber eyes and hair that flows like a mountain river and a gravelly voice that commands attention. She stretches out, naked, on the mattress.
“It’s not a problem.”
He lies down with her. She wraps him in her arms. They fold into each other.
A few hours later as the sun is beginning to creep through the barred window, the man leaves. Phil is still asleep on the mattress. He glances at her one last time, before he shuts the door and leaves her alone. The creak of the door closing awakens Phil from her dreams. She doesn’t remember much, only the faint whisper of “Reach for me” and the sound of rocks skipping on water. She dresses and leaves.
Walking out into the downtown Los Angeles morning, she walks toward her car but decides instead to turn down the corner and walk to the nearest coffee shop to buy something to drink. The early morning wind wraps around her body as she walks into it, down the sidewalk.
What has brought her here? she wonders as her heels click on the concrete. How has she managed to bump and slide her way to this moment? She tries to remember if there was ever one turning point and decides that, really, it’s all been turns. All of it. She knows that our future is held in our present and that everything passes.
She decides to get coffee, go home and write a poem about a place where there is no water, only rock. Then she’ll call her sister. Perhaps tonight she’ll dream about boys with skin like snow on open plains. Perhaps tonight she’ll sleep a dreamless, whisper-less sleep. She has no idea what will happen tonight.
She stands, shoulders squared, waiting for the light to change.
Go.