Page 25 of I Dreamt That You Loved Me
Joni Mitchell was singing “A Case of You,” her voice crackling from the scratchy vinyl record that had been part of the soundtrack of my youth. Joni. Dylan. Hendrix. Led Zep. Nicky.
I cut a slice of birthday cake, yellow with chocolate frosting, and carefully transferred it to a pretty china plate decorated with violets, and poured my coffee into a matching cup.
When I sat across from my mom with my breakfast, my eyes darted to a photo propped against a lit candle like a little shrine.
The flickering flame backlit the smiling faces of my parents leaning against the railing on the fire escape of our East Village apartment.
He was looking at her like she was a work of art; she was looking at him like he held the key to her happiness.
I didnotwant to know what this was about, so I took a bite of my cake and tried to ignore the photos scattered across the table, but my eye snagged on a black and white photo of my parents in their early teens. My mom in a little, plaid skirt and an argyle sweater. My dad in a black sailor’s cap, his hair longish and messy, with holes in the knees of his jeans. He had his arm slung around my mom and they were looking at each other, not the camera.
After a few more angry bites, I just couldn’t seem to help myself. “What are you doing?”
My mom looked up from the yellow legal pad she was scribbling on and tapped the pen against it a few times like she was debating whether to answer. “I’m going to write our story.”
My fork clattered to the table, and I stared at her, horrified. “Why?”
“Because he asked me to,” she said. “And now I’m ready.”
Maybeshewas ready, but I wasn’t.
I stared at her mutinously. My jaw clenched. “Please don’t do this.”
My mom studied my face for a moment. Her eyes softened, but it looked more like pity than acquiescence.
I knew my mother. When she made up her mind to do something, there was no swaying her.
Today she was dressed in bell-bottoms and an embroidered blouse, black with white stitching, with chunky silver and turquoise rings on her fingers. Her long, dark hair was parted in the middle and hung halfway down her back, and at forty, she didn’t look much different to her twenty-something self, smiling in the photos.
She was still the same Alice from Nicky’s song, “Meet me in Wonderland, that evanescent dreamscape where time warped and twisted and the knave stole your heart…”
“I have to,” she said, holding up a hardback copy ofFalse Prophet, an unauthorized biography that had been published two years ago much to her disdain. “Thisis not the man I knew. Your father deserved better.”
She hurled the book across the room. It hit the braided rug with a thunk and landed face up. “Even the critics agreed with me on that.”
“Who cares what he deserved?” I cried. “Youdeserved better.”And so did I.
My mom slid a photo across the table and went back to reading through her journals and scribbling notes while I drank my coffee and tried not to look at the photo. An intimate portrait of a fractured family.
I don’t remember this photo being taken or which city we were in, but I knew it was the summer we went on tour with Nicky, all over Europe.
The room was decorated with mid-century Danish teak, pop-floral wallpaper and 70s-style orange table lamps. It was the summer of ‘79.
In the photo, infused with a soft orange haze, my dad was sitting on the sofa playing an acoustic guitar and smiling at my mom who had been caught mid-laugh. She was sitting on the arm of the sofa, dressed in a simple T-shirt and jeans with a studded leather belt. She made it look chic, very rock and roll.
He wore a paisley button-down with a wide collar, faded denim, and the silver and turquoise rings on his fingers that my mom wore now.
And I, at the tender age of eight going on nine, had donned a baby blue dress trimmed in lace with dozens of strings of pearls and beads around my neck and my dad’s fur coat wrapped around my shoulders. My hair was lighter back then, a towhead with messy waves, and my skin was suntanned a deep shade of bronze.
I was nothing if not dramatic, lounging on the other end of the sofa in cat-eye sunglasses with an unlit cigarette dangling from my fingertips.
“I must have thought I was Edie Sedgwick.”
My mom smiled. “You’ve always had a unique sense of style. Your dad was working on the song he wrote for you. It usually took him ages but that one came to him right away. In ten minutes, he’d created something beautiful. That’s the Nicky I knew.”
This was onlyonesnapshot. One moment in time didn’t define his entire life or even begin to scratch the surface of my complex relationship with him.
I don’t feel like I ever really knew him.
