was parked only a hundred yards away. A middle-aged woman with smartly cut auburn hair who’d been loitering by the information booth had followed us outside—confirming my suspicion that Edison and I were being stared at.
“Sorry to bother you,” said the stranger. “But are you by any chance Pandora Halfdanarson?”
For many a younger sibling with an older brother looking on, being solicited for an autograph, or whatever this woman wanted, would be a fantasy come true. But not today, and I came close to denying I was any such person just to get away. On the other hand, explaining to Edison why I’d lied would make a bigger mess, so I said yes.
“I thought so!” said the woman. “I recognized your face from the profile in Vanity Fair. Well, I just had to tell you: my husband gave me a Baby Monotonous doll for our anniversary. I don’t know if you remember it—well, of course not, you must make so many—but it’s wearing a stiff suit and snooty hat, and the TV remote is stitched in one hand. It says things like, George! You know you’re supposed to cut down on salt! And George! You know I can’t bear that shirt! And George! You know you don’t understand Middle Eastern politics! Or sometimes it preens, I went to Bryn Maaaaaaaawr! I was offended at first, but then I just had to laugh. I’d no idea I was so critical and controlling! That doll helped save my marriage. So I wanted to thank you.”
Don’t get me wrong: I’m usually very nice to satisfied customers. I might not enjoy being recognized in public as much as some people would—as much as Edison would—but I don’t take any la-di-da status for granted. The main thing that rattles me about such encounters is the embarrassment: this woman recognized me and I didn’t recognize her, which didn’t seem right. So usually I’d have been warm and chatty and grateful, but not today. I shook off the fan mumbling, “Well, I’m very happy for you, then,” and pivoted to the crosswalk.
“Is it true?” the woman cried at my back. “You’re Travis Appaloosa’s daughter?”
Annoyed, since I’d not told that to Vanity Fair and the journalist dug it up anyway, I declined to answer. Edison boomed behind me, “Got that ass-backwards, lady. Travis Appaloosa is Pandora Halfdanarson’s father. Which is eating the fucker hollow.”
Fortunately, when I drove up to the curb she’d cleared off. Hefting his bag into the back, I said, “Sorry about that woman. Honestly, that hardly ever happens.”
“Price of fame, babe!” His tone was opaque.
It took some doing to get the front passenger seat of our Camry to go back to its last notch. Climbing inside, Edison braced one hand on the door; I worried whether the hinges could take the stress. I’d have helped him myself, but I didn’t think he could lean on me without us both collapsing. He lowered himself into the bucket seat with the delicacy of a giant crane maneuvering haulage from a container ship. When he dropped the last few inches, the chassis tilted to the right. His knees jammed the glove compartment, and I had to give his door an extra oomph to get it shut. Those heavy hips were good for something.
I had trouble releasing the parking brake, with Edison’s thigh pressed against it, and getting the gearshift out of park was hampered by the spill of his forearm. I was desperate to call Fletcher and warn him, though advance notice that the brother-in-law who had shown up at the airport looked thrice the size of the brother-in-law he’d once hosted would have been useless. As I pulled from the lot, my phone rang, and I recognized the caller. After our curbside encounter with that Baby Monotonous fan, this was the last thing we needed, and I didn’t answer.
Edison rustled into the pockets of his black leather jacket—the hip kind with lapels, though this one would have required the benevolence of half a cow. I recognized it as a replacement of the calf-length leather trench coat that he’d worn for years, with a tie-belt, soft as the skin of an eggplant, always worn with the collar raised. He’d looked so cool in it, so Mafioso mysterious and—sleek. I wondered what happened to the original, out of nostalgia, but also because whether Edison had kept his smaller clothes might be a key to how he saw his future. This wider, unfitted jacket had more the texture of plastic, and none of the fine styling of his old trademark. I’d no idea where one got such clothes; I’d never seen apparel that size in Kohl’s, or even at Target.
He withdrew what looked like a mashed Cinnabon, the white frosting drooling over its waxed paper. I did not say, You know, that strikes me as the last thing you need. I did not say, You know, I read once that those buns clock in at 900 calories apiece. I did not say, You know, we’re going to be eating dinner in less than an hour. In all, everything I did not say would have nicely filled out the entire recording of one of my pull-string dolls.
Yet even the innocuous question I put instead sounded loaded: “So what have you been up to?” As if it weren’t obvious.
“Few CDs,” he said through frosting. “Mostly New York gigs, and a lot of the scene has moved to Brooklyn. Hooked up with this guitarist Charlie Hunter who’s really starting to headline. Some killing up-and-comers: John Hebert, John O’Gallagher, Ben Monder, Bill McHenry. Really hit it off with Michael Brecker at a hang at the 55 Bar last year, and it’s a damned shame he just died of leukemia. Man, between the two of us, we could have done Birdland standing room only. Regular thing in Nyack—restaurant, which is a drag, though with so many venues closing we all gotta take what we can get. Maine Jazz Camp for bread, but also ’cause your brother got a few promising protégés, believe it or not. Working on my own tunes, of course. Long tour of Spain and Portugal coming up in December. Maybe London Jazz Festival next fall. Some interest from Brazil, though that’s not nailed. Money’s not good enough. Cat in Rio’s working on it.”
I was accustomed to Edison’s catalogue of names that meant nothing to me. Eyes on the road, I could almost hear my brother as he’d always sounded: brash, slick, sure of himself; whatever the disappointments of the present, something lucrative and high profile lay just around the corner. I thought: He’d never sounded fat over the phone.
“Talk to Travis lately?” asked Edison.
Travis Appaloosa sounds made up—since it was. “Dad,” né Hugh Halfdanarson, had assumed his barmy stage name when I was six and Edison nine, too late to sound anything but artificial. So we always called him Travis, with an implicit elbow in the ribs, a get-a-load-of-this. Yet during my childhood and adolescence Travis Appaloosa had lilted with the tuneful familiarity of Bill Bixby, Danny Bonaduce, and Barbara Billingsley. Maybe any sequence of syllables that rings out across the nation every Wednesday at nine simply cannot sound ridiculous. From 1974 to 1982, Travis Appaloosa was part of the landscape, just as Hugh Halfdanarson had always hoped.
“About a month ago,” I said. “He’s obsessed with his website. Have you seen it? There’s a quiz on Joint Custody trivia. A ‘Where Are They Now?’ tab that updates you on whatever drugs Tiffany Kite is currently shooting up—”
“Or which ten-year-old boys Sinclair Vanpelt is shtupping—”
“Though you’d be surprised, Floy Newport is mayor of San Diego.”
“The underestimated one. They’re the ones who sneak up from behind. The devious little fuckers who plot behind your back. Who use the fact that nobody pays any attention to them to bide their time, and then make their move when you least expect it.”
Edison’s tone was playful but needling. Of the three kids in our father’s supposedly cutting-edge one-hour drama, Floy Newport was the closest I had to a doppelgänger, although—oddly, since Edison of all people should know the difference—he was confusing Floy the actress with Maple Fields, the character she played. On Joint Custody, Maple was the middle
