Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

(…continued from Part 1…)

You really haven’t heard from her?

Alice’s disbelief was understandable.

Our quartet was Elin, me, and our longtime friends Simon and Zander. The last time Alice saw us we were likely all heads down, noses in books, or playing pinochle across a picnic table in the quad. She would never have seen one of us without the others. We were the Gang of Four, a diminutive Academy of Arts and Sciences, each of us wildly independent, each with complementary strengths and weaknesses. Alice, like everyone else, saw the four of us as a unit, but from the inside, we knew that we were all as different from each other as the homes in which we lived.

My family was as white-bread as they came. We lived in a large boxy house my father had designed: a 1970s mélange of Better Homes and Gardens tradition mixed with Sunset Magazine experimentation. From its raked roof to its slanted outer wall, it was unusual without being outlandish. But it had a secret; though it looked fine from the outside, a series of mishaps and misunderstandings between my father and the contractors had left the inside a little off, a little awkward. The landing of the main stairs was four feet from where it should have been. The foundation was dug five feet too deep, so our view of the bay could only be seen through a snarl of telephone wires. The front half of the house was eighteen inches lower than the back half, necessitating the introduction of small, unexpected, three-step staircases between rooms.

Likewise, our family—though constructed of Dad, Mom, four kids, dog; all the standard parts of the 1970s model—appeared different from within than from without. On the placid surface we were happy, normal, and well-adjusted, but underneath we roiled and boiled with what we all would later learn to call “dysfunction.” We didn’t talk about my mother, who had died when I was young, for fear of insulting my stepmother. We did not discuss my father’s difficult youth or indeed much of anything about our ethnic Italian heritage. As the kid in the middle, I was caught between a dead past and a living present, trying to honor one while pleasing the other, but the only thing that really worked was to avoid notice altogether, which distressed me. I did not want to be unnoticed. I wanted to be distinctive. I wanted to be fascinating.

I wanted to be memorable.

My parents discouraged this with small, subtle directions. Don’t be arrogant. Don’t be obvious or proud. Remember that there’s always someone better, smarter, richer than you. It’s all right to shine, as long as you do so quietly, and none too brightly. And preferably in a small corner, where you won’t attract attention.

I learned to please. I turned my musical ability away from excellence and instead picked up whatever instrument my teachers needed. I started with violin, then taught myself bass guitar to help the jazz ensemble, learned tuba to fill the empty spot in band, and eventually settled on viola because as every high school music teacher knows, you can never have enough violas. I turned my hunger for self-expression into writing, read pithy, social fiction, and wrote dense, verb-filled essays. I won prizes for my poetry and awards for my writing, but never top prize, never the highest award. I learned to achieve without standing out.

I learned to be invisible.

Simon was not invisible, though he wanted to be. A violinist, Simon was my stand partner for many years, but he was also Jewish and therefore (by our community’s waspish standards) exotic. With curly hair and sleepy eyes, he came from a quirky family—mother, father, siblings, two dogs, and an indeterminate number of cats—that lived in a dusty, bleary-paned house hanging on a hillside amid a eucalyptus grove. The trees were nature imitating Simon’s family, always shedding outer layers of bark in search for their essential, inner truth.

There was nothing about Simon’s home life that I did not find fascinating. His parents limited the kids’ television viewing to a few hours a week, enforcing it by installing European-style outlets and hiding the adaptors. His family bickered and laughed and shouted at each other from one end of the house to the other, and I wanted nothing so much as to be one of them.

My family’s early traditions were agnostic followed by a pogrom of Roman Catholicism that never really “took” with us kids. I believed in God, but the stuffy, wool-suited Sunday gatherings seemed more a garbled, poorly choreographed line dance with bad music than any real celebration of life. By comparison, Simon’s religious life was vivacious. I attended services at his synagogue and loved the cantor’s voice, the bright colors of the congregants’ clothes, and the exuberance of the songs. Over the years of our friendship, Simon and I would speak the same words at the same time, finish other people’s sentences with the same thought. I knew his heart like I knew my own, and I was sure that, if only I could be bar mitzvahed, my life would become the predictable, joyous, desirable thing I believed it should be.

Where Simon was heart, Zander was brain. The product of what the ‘70s still called a “broken” home, my friendship with Zander was marked by empty weekends as he shuttled between mother and father. Zander’s father was the first gay man I ever met, but I met him only once, as Zander built a wall of silence around his father that kept the rest of us out. He did not build it out of shame, though. Rather, he adored his father, was profoundly possessive of their time together, and refused to share him with anyone.

Zander’s intellect resembled his home: a large, rambling, dark-shingled, fin de siècle craftsman surrounded by towering horse-chestnut trees. Conversations with him never kept on course. They rambled beatifically from room to room, wandering the halls, pulling books off shelves in search of a substantiating fact, taking a turn into the kitchen for a snack or running outside for a game of Kick the Can. In every room there was a knickknack, some remembrance of a different time, a different place. A camel saddle. Leather from an elephant’s ear. A sabre of Toledo steel. A brocade tapestry woven with thread-of-gold. Zander could read a book in an afternoon and tell you everything about it over dinner. He could explain the smallest particles of matter yet known to the mind of Man and discuss with ease the nature of the cosmos.

But he was entirely incapable of telling you how he felt. About anything. Such was his curse.

If Elin had a curse, it was her name. As long as I had known her, teachers mispronounced it, calling her “Eland.” It was an easy trip of the tongue, especially in those days when unusual names were still…unusual. But, even though “Elin” and “eland” are relatively homonymous, it betokened a certain disrespect to turn and essentially label her “a large African antelope.” If she really had short, twisted horns, I know of at least one English don who would have been gored.

As for her home, she lived in a small, clapboard-sided, post-war house with her mother and brother. There were no pictures in the home. There was no banter between the relations. There was also never a mention of a Mr. Abington (though that fact didn’t strike me as odd until many years later.) Had Mr. Abington left? Had he died? We never knew nor did we three boys ever think to ask. It was just the way things were: Mrs. Abington, Elin, and the oft-absent Nils, all snug in their small, plushly upholstered home on a quiet, sunny back street, all without history, seemingly without ancestry, as if they had simply appeared, dropped from the sky the day before we all met.

That was us. Four different kids, drawn together by our distinctive natures, our feelings of isolation, and the overlapping leaves of our intersecting passions.

Simon, Zander, and I were a trio of back-road travelers who had forged our bonds on hundred-mile bike tours up and down the long, winding highways of the California coast. A different trio was formed by Elin’s French horn, Simon’s violin, and my viola, tempered by the pressure of rehearsals, performances, and shared stage-fright. Simon and Zander were the gods of science. Zander and I played in dramatics. Elin was the political beast of our group, keeping our social conscience aware and well-informed. She was also our goddess, adored and desired but pristine and inviolate. We joked about it over partnered pinochle, over smoked joints, during rehearsals, and in class, but we three boys—shame us or laud us—never acted on our carnal urges. Personally, I felt I would probably catch flame if ever I tried.

Together, we passed through our high school years, breezing through our specialties and slogging through the rest. It was in many ways a blissful time for me, happy in the company of three dear friends who I was sure would be with me for the rest of time. And why wouldn’t they be? My formative years were peopled with televised examples of friends who stayed friends forever. Dick and Laura had Jerry and Millie. Ralph and Alice had Ed and Trixie. We might fight and argue, but in the end we four would remain close, bound by shared history, held together by love.

Then, one February, with graduation on the horizon, the foursome fractured.

One day she was there…

(…continued in Part 3…)

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It was May, 1995, a rainy spring in Seattle, when Sir John Gielgud told me—all right, he wasn’t speaking to me personally, but I heard his words as if they were meant for me alone—that there is nothing so remarkable as friendship. For friends, we often do things with no expectation of return.

He imparted this wisdom with a sidelong glance and his sly smile, as if telling me something we both already knew, a common truth upon which everyone agreed.

Except it wasn’t a common truth. Not for me, and I told him so, frankly.

“That’s bullshit.”

He was not pleased.

Sir John stayed on for the next few days, following me from room to room, recounting tales of friendship through the ages. We argued back and forth. He gave me Achilles and Patroclus. I gave him Becket and Henry. To his Adams and Jefferson, I put forth Caesar and Brutus. When he said Hope and Crosby, I said Tupac and Biggie.

But I couldn’t dismiss Sir John’s assertion out of hand—living legends can have that effect—so I continued to ponder his words. Why did he see as basic something that to me seemed so foreign? Naturally, I wanted friendship to be as he described—I expected it, in fact—but life had taught me otherwise. Based on evidence, friendship was transitory, inconstant, and ultimately a source of pain.

We had reached an impasse and sat silently in the living room, he with his paper, me with my book, both of us waiting for inspiration to freshen our debate.

Then the phone rang.

I did not answer it.

I never do.

The little answering machine—all putty-colored plastic and red LEDs—played its spiel to the caller, after which I expected to hear the click and double-tone hum of yet another telemarketer’s denouement. This time, though, from the tinny speaker came a voice from my youth, a woman I hadn’t seen or spoken to in nearly twenty years.

Alice, an old friend from high school, was a fellow survivor of the symphonic and marching bands. A couple years ahead of me, our friendship had never really bridged the upper-classman divide, but we had always been cordial, so I let her ramble on a bit.

She was in Seattle—surprise!—and had heard that I relocated here. She just called to chat and catch up. She nattered on a bit, filling the void as she waited to see if I was merely screening calls or was truly not going to answer. About fifteen seconds in, Sir John cleared his throat. From over his evening edition of the Herald-Tribune he stabbed me with an arched-eyebrow glare, cocked his head toward the phone, and then returned to his perusal of the international news section.

I took his point and picked up the phone just as Alice was preparing to “ring off” (as JG would say, though I hated it when he ended sentences with prepositions; call me old school.)

Alice, I said, and How long has it been? Our first words in two decades were banal clichés that might have come straight from an episode of Room 222 or Marcus Welby, M.D., but we quickly moved past them and on to the “catching up” phase.

As Alice recounted the major events of her post-school-life, I was surprised to find myself smiling, laughing even. Her familiar voice, gravelly and hard-edged, pried open a long-closed, rust-hinged door and together we began inspecting the cobwebbed boxes stored in my memory. Old names flashed across neurons left brittle from disuse, evoking images of black-and-white yearbook smiles. Ancient histories rebuilt themselves, one remembered personality, one nostalgic event at a time. Teachers, friends, rehearsals, concerts, parades; we were awash in recollection and the dreamy-eyed innocence of our once eternal youth.

And then she said the name I’d tried for years to forget, the name that leapt across the chasm of years, stormed the bastions of my brain, and began taking hostages.

“So, have you heard from Elin?”

It is not a common name, Elin, with its long E and short I, and that is fitting. Elin was not a common gal.

Thin, boyish, excruciatingly smart, with long-fingered hands and lanky hair the color of wheat at harvest-time, Elin Abington stood alone in the landscape of my youth, the keystone in an arch of mysteries and betrayals. For the most part, everyone whose life passed close to mine was knowable, sussable, comprehensible. The motivations behind their actions were sometimes obscure, even misguided at times, but eventually I was able to discern the logic that drove their behavior.

Elin, however, was a great unknown, a single riddle orbited by a batch of lesser mysteries.

The fact that we had been close, seemingly inseparable parts of a tight-knit quartet of friends, only deepened the pain.

“You still there?”

“Hm? Yeah. Still here.”

“So, have you heard from her?”

“No. She dropped from sight the February before graduation. Intentionally, it seems.” That was the truth. “I haven’t spoken to her since.” That wasn’t.

Sir John rustled his paper.

“Well,” Alice said, “I saw her brother at my twentieth-year reunion. Nils said she was a lawyer and that she was here living in Seattle. You really haven’t heard from her?”

Even Alice thought it was odd that Elin and I hadn’t kept in contact.

(…continued in Part 2…)

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