I’m telling you, it really happened. I’d taken Monday off for a dentist appointment—a few weeks ago the nurse had written down all the numbers and given me the prognosis that there wasn’t anything to be done apart from extracting the tooth entirely. ‘Honestly,’ she’d said, ‘I’m surprised you’ve made it to twenty-eight with all your wisdom teeth.’ I’m telling you this because it means I’ve got the receipts down pat. I know when it happened, for instance: 9:30AM in the waiting room while Dr. Alfred was finishing off a root canal on an old man who’d tottered in with a cane, and I was thinking about why all dentist’s receptionists were dumpy, middle-aged women while the nurses were extraordinarily beautiful. It’s a good question; my hypothesis is that it’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, where because every woman you’ve seen as an assistant has been kind of dumpy the applicants inevitably filter themselves out—but as I said, I’m only telling you this to show you that I know what I’m talking about. I’m not kooky. It was 9:30AM and they had Cheers on the television. One of the NBC spinoff channels. A later season—Frasier Crane was on the show. I’d seen the first couple seasons of Cheers. Tracy’d wanted to see what the fuss was all about; they were fine, but pretty dated, I reckoned—Sam couldn’t get away with all that sort of stuff these days.
Later I would find out that this was Episode 10 of Season 6, “A Kiss is Still a Kiss.” The plot of the episode had something to do with Rebecca’s boss mistaking her for a lesbian, but that doesn’t matter. I’ve never watched the full thing, anyway—you don’t even have to make it to the theme song, because it’s right there in the cold open. There’s a bit in which con artist Harry Gittes pulls a fast one on the characters while playing for his drink, and as he leaves the bar they refocus on a lovely blonde sitting on a barseat who’s looking straight into the camera, chewing some gum, and winks. Freeze frame, cut to theme song.
It wasn’t until I was pumped full of anesthetic on the dentist’s chair that the wink itself began registering—in the waiting room all I could gather was the audacity of it. This was from, what, the ‘80s? That was Happy Days territory. Families gathered around the fireplace, not Krysten Ritter OD’ing on heroin. You just didn’t do things like that. My first instinct was to ask anyone in the immediate vicinity whether they’d caught that, but the problem was that there was no one in my immediate vicinity: the waiting room was empty apart from me in it and I’d have to open up a door to get to the reception. There was a window so that the receptionist could see me and wave, but it was fixed on the same wall as the TV. The whole incident gave me the heebie-jeebies like that talk about hearing demonic messages when playing records backwards. And when I went through with the wisdom tooth removal and Tracy came to pick me up in the car I briefly asked her if she’d ever finished Cheers and whether she’d ever seen something resembling what I saw, and she wracked her brains for a while and said that I sounded as if I’d seen a ghost. If it was a ghost it was an eerily opaque one, none of that hearing your name out on the street stuff. I know what I saw. It was a beautiful blond woman chewing gum and looking seductively at the camera, then giving a wink.
But on Tracy’s insistence I forgot about the whole thing for a couple days. Back to work meant organizing spreadsheets and running audits, and the numbers the next couple days tired me enough to push the wink to the back of my mind—I’d pulled the short straw and had to do the yearly bookkeeping for PepsiCo, which meant that I’d have to be on call with Irvin Levinson. He was a grayish guy with the face of a fed and had personally paid the psych ward bills for the last accountant who’d done the PepsiCo annual, and on Tuesday he’d sent me as a gift some kind of lioness statuette that was more imposing than decorative. All that’s to say that I was swamped. And when I woke up after my nap on Friday afternoon it was to my surprise as much as yours that I found myself still thinking about that sultry blonde and, of course, her wink. It annoyed me enough that I searched for the gag involving Harry playing with some dollar bills and discovered on a fansite something about this being Harry’s return to the show in season 6, but the site didn’t have any links to the episode itself.
So I did what I could. Reached home at 6PM, leaned back on the recliner, turned Netflix to Cheers season 6 episode 10—only to find that after Harry runs out the door there’s no zoom, no nothing, and instead Sam pops out and there’s another gag before we hit the title sequence. No blonde, no wink.
At this point I was thinking I’d had one too many glasses of wine in my life, but it’s not as if it was completely unprecedented—shows have a lot of different versions and everyone knows about all these cutscenes that later make their way to public viewing. Who knows what mixups happened when they shipped the reruns for syndication? But perusing some forums online yielded nothing at all; even after trying every possible permutation of the words ‘cheers,’ ‘blonde,’ ‘wink,’ ‘Harry’ and ‘season 6’ there wasn’t a single mention of anything even remotely related to the whole incident. It was such a stupid little thing, but what a brainworm. Even with Irvin Levinson breathing down my neck and Tracy’s plans for the two of us that Friday my head was a looping image of that girl winking at me. As if she fired all the dopamine receptors in my brain at once. That’s how Tracy found me when she returned round about 8, anyway—staring at the ceiling, stupefied; she’d have to literally snap her fingers to get me out of it. And though I put on my coat and drove her down to Barbara Lasky’s wedding anniversary dinner I was only incidentally listening to her story about the new resident at the hospital.
So she gets drunk, we have a little dance, we head back. Tracy’s the type who needs to fuck alcohol out of her system, and as we’re snuggling down under the covers and I’m trying to unhook her bra she gives me a mighty pleased look and I ask her, point blank—‘give me a little wink.’
She winked with her right eye.
‘Other eye, baby.’
She giggled and obliged, causing her full face to scrunch up on the left.
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Just a simple one. Just the eyelid.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Like this,’ I said, and demonstrated the difference between the two motions. One was a simple blink of a single eyelid, while the other had several additional muscles involved—cheek, forehead, mouth, you name it.
‘Oh,’ she said, and tried again. Same scrunching face. ‘Was that better?’
I shook my head.
‘Hmm.’ Yet again. ‘What about that?’
‘Never mind,’ I said, leaning in to kiss her. ‘Forget it.’
And she did. But after that, while making love, my mind began to make an observation I’d never made before—Tracy was a brunette. It hadn’t seemed of much consequence when we’d gotten together and even less so when I’d proposed, but in that moment it was a bullseye. I reached out and passed her fine hair through my fingers. Yup. Definitely brown. That’s not to say she wasn’t pretty, but nobody could accurately describe her as a bombshell, you know—eyes brown, too, though right now they were closed, and her wriggling was making me feel awkward more than anything. I reasoned that it wasn’t my fault if my fiancée didn’t fit my preference if I’d realized that I had a preference after she was already my fiancée. Besides, she cared about me—that had to count for something, didn’t it? That thought was enough for me to go through and fall asleep.
The next morning I woke up while it was still dark to Tracy wrapped all around me. It was always nice to wake up next to a girl, even a brunette, and honestly I was feeling quite guilty for thinking all those shocking things while I should’ve just been in the moment with her so I gave her a few quick kisses, causing her to stir and smile. I guess Tracy hadn’t been all that drunk after all. She probably wouldn’t have a headache in the morning when she’d have to head back out for her Saturday shift. And her hair didn’t seem so bad in the dark. But the inability to wink was a serious imperfection and I had some idea that if I explained this to a judge they’d respond by saying that was a pretty despicable thing to think about the person you’re supposedly willing to marry, so I got out of bed and into the car, hoping that some morning breeze would soothe my troubles.
While backing out of the driveway I almost ran over Ernie, the young guitarist who lived next door.
‘Hold up, Jack,’ he yelled. ‘I’m walking here!’
‘What the hell are you doing at 5:30AM on the street, man?’ I yelled back.
He walked over and I rolled the passenger-side window down. Ernie crossed his arms into it like a little kid, and even the first few traces of sunlight were enough to illuminate just how mischievous his grin was. ‘Just getting home,’ he replied.
‘On foot?’
‘Hey, you know how these things are,’ he said.
‘What things?’
‘You know. I know you’re getting old, Jack, but you must’ve had a rebellious streak when you were twenty, too.’
I scratched my chin. ‘You really think I’m getting old?’
‘Sure you are. How’s the wife?’
‘Sleeping,’ I said, not bothering to correct him.
‘And you’re out here in the car. Mind if I take a sec to check your, uh, CO levels up there in the the garage—’
‘Very funny. You didn’t tell me what you were doing out here.’
‘It’s kind of a long story. Why don’t you go first?’
I sighed, unlocking the door for him. ‘Alright, get in. I’m going out for a drive to clear my head.’
‘Missus say something?’
‘Like hell she did. I’m just a bit disoriented, that’s all.’
‘Uh-huh.’ He put the seatbelt on and slammed the door shut, and I backed out onto the street. ‘What kind of troubles have you out here conspiring with young Ernie Miller in the wee hours of the morning?’
‘None of—’ I started, but suddenly I caught a whiff of women’s perfume off the boy instead of the usual conglomerate of pot and cigarettes. Maybe Ernie could be actually useful here. ‘Actually, hear me out,’ I said.
‘Hey, I’m all ears.’
‘How do you—how do you determine if a woman’s right for you?’ I said, keeping my eyes on the street.
‘Whoa,’ said Ernie. ‘Shouldn’t you have thought about that before putting a ring on her, Jack? You can’t put me in this position. What if I say the wrong thing and you call it splits?’
‘I assure you that your contribution to this deliberation is minimal.’
‘But you’ve got cold feet.’
I sighed. ‘No—if anything it’s the opposite. It’s a big decision. Ever since I was a kid I was always surprised at how inconsequential these things feel in the moment, but then you look back and you’re like damn, what the hell? Like when I moved out of my parents’ house. At eighteen, what’s the big deal? But then I’m twenty, like you, looking back and it seems like it changed my trajectory forever, you know what I mean?’
‘I guess.’
‘Anyway, what do you think?’
‘Well. I suppose I’d want to know if I love her.’
‘Uh-huh. Let me ask you something.’
‘Sure.’
‘What do you think of, I dunno, girls taller than you.’
He chuckled. ‘Hey, I don’t judge.’
‘Suppose you did. You probably judge based on something, don’t you?’
He looked out the window. ‘Look, I don’t know how much I trust you, Jack. Are we friends?’
‘I’d say so.’
‘Aight. Then I’ll tell you that I’m not a big fan of those size twelves and fourteens, you get me.’
‘You don’t like them big?’
‘I prefer to avoid it.’
‘But let’s say you meet a fat girl. And she loves you. Like, really loves you, kisses you, all that. And you think she’s great, and she’s got a great job, and she’s basically perfect except she’s a bit on the heavier side. Would you fall in love?’
‘Probably. Who’s to say?’
‘No, really think.’
‘I’m not saying it’s out of the question, but it’d be hard. I mean, sometimes it’s all irrational and then you can’t do anything about that. But there’s always the possibility I’d, like, start considering the alternatives.’
‘Which are?’
‘Well, it’s not as if there aren’t thin girls around me, you know what I mean. And there are a lot of them I like. They’re great. If our hypothetical fatty had some serious chops in every other department, I’m sure that could compensate, but she’d have to work a bit harder, I guess.’
‘That’s your honest truth?’
‘I don’t want to be rude, but it is what it is.’
‘It is what it is, right. I like that.’
‘Glad I could be of use.’
‘I’m not done with you yet,’ I said. ‘Look at me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Can you wink?’
‘Like—with my eye?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Sure. What the fuck?’
‘Show it to me.’
He laughed nervously, then winked with his left eye. A perfect wink—just the eyelid.
‘Yeah, that’s all. Just making sure.’
‘What was that all about?’
‘Never you mind,’ I said. ‘Now it’s your turn. Why were you out at 5:30?’
Pretty much exactly the kind of thing I’d imagined—he’d biked over to your average Friday night house party, had one too many drinks and his bike had gotten nicked overnight. My advice to drink a moderate amount was greeted with the usual sneering. He was a good kid, on the whole—going through the motions like everyone else, and he was having girl trouble, too; some art major called Donna who’d put him through the wringer after a breakup and made him out to be some kind of sexual degenerate, decreasing his appeal in certain circles and increasing it in others. When I dropped him off at his front door it was about 7:30 and he asked me if I could let him take my car out for a spin every now and then, to which I responded that maybe if he took a breathalyzer both before taking and after returning my keys.
I didn’t want to give Ernie full credit for the kind of thing I was scared to even begin considering, so I rationalized it by making a long spreadsheet of relevant spousal characteristics that ranged from ‘familiarity’ to ‘likelihood of conflict with in-laws’ and ranked Tracy on each of them from a scale of 1-10. To my dismay she passed with flying colors, which meant that her brunette-ness and inability to wink were largely incidental obstacles. In fact, looking at the results before me, one would have to rank very highly indeed on the blonde and winkability scales in order to compensate for the variety of assets that Tracy brought to the table—the fact that she loved me, for one. There was was the matter that before I’d met Tracy my relationship prospects had remained limited to a small number of intense flings that hadn’t led to anything that could be described as serious, and since I had only a single data point as to making these things work I could not really deign this to be reproducible. For example, we’d met in college—which was no longer a viable option—and none of the blondes at work ranked even moderately close to Tracy on my questionnaire. She popped in for a second to help me untangle the necklace I’d gotten her from my trip to Bosnia from her scrubs and asked me what I was doing on my computer so early in the morning. Dismissing that was simple enough, of course—her current mood was one in which each of my gestures of secrecy were interpreted as ‘secret plans for the wedding,’ and so she didn’t question me any further. But there was still the matter of the winking blonde, whose ghost haunted me each time I closed my eyelids. And ultimately it did not seem fair to Tracy, either, that she deserve a husband who would consider leaving her over a 5-second piece of television. There was now only one thing to be done: I looked up my old friend Barry from college, who last I’d heard had been a screenwriter on Supernatural, and sent him a polite email about some questions related to television archival.
The rest of the day was spent perusing the internet with an even finer comb, but that line of inquiry still led to dead ends—zero hits on anything related to a winking blonde on Cheers. At around five I drove downtown and bought myself some Wingstop when I got a call from Robin about about a tax account I managed for a small LLC in Bloomington. By this time such things had begun to seem quite frivolous, and I considered the state of affairs I was in while coating the wings with ranch. By all means I could be described as mild-mannered; one time Tracy had asked me to take this online quiz to determine my spirit animal, and it’d returned ‘otter.’ My only piece of jewelry had a roman insignia on it, I didn’t even know what it said, and the last time I’d gotten high had been in 2016. I’d never really thought about it that way before—that in three months I was going to be a suburban accountant married to a radiologist, living in Fort Wayne, Indiana—and ‘that way’ suddenly started giving me the shivers. That’s not the kind of guy I’d ever wanted to be, but then I’d always been kind of passive, letting things happen to me—like the wink, which had taken precisely five seconds to hijack my brain. The one big thing that I’d ever done was go to UIC and have a love story that had ended with an existential crisis during a rerun of Cheers. In the grand scheme of things I really was just ‘some guy’—growing up in Indianapolis my parents had tried to get me to go to church but I’d been the kind of kid to say that I’m sitting and praying but this God guy goes and does whatever the hell he wants, anyway. It’s not the greatest feeling to realize that somehow or the other you’ve always held the thought that you’re kind of irrelevant as far as God’s plan goes—a pawn can turn into a queen, but I wasn’t even on the chessboard. Well, stuff happens that’s not on the chessboard: there’s sunrise and sunset and kids tackling each other on the street, and I’d somehow found myself into one of those situations. Here was God’s answer, only God was a blonde on a Cheers rerun. And as they say, if you make it to the end of the rainbow, you get a pot of gold.
At that precise moment my phone chimed. It was an email from Barry.
It held a phone number. I wiped the ranch off my keys and barreled out the store. I needed motion. Back in the car I honked twice for luck and gave myself a little pep talk in the rear-view mirror about how life’s a bitch and how I’m a guy with a job and a wife and how that’s gotta count for something. I couldn’t just call Barry up immediately; that would be desperate, so I spent about an hour circling around downtown before stopping next to Memorial Park and punching the digits in while a sinking feeling collected in my stomach—like throwing a birthday party and slowly realizing that no one was going to turn up. A couple teenage blondes passed by me while chewing gum. What would be it be like if I left Tracy for one of them? The angel was telling me that I’d never had any kind of desire to inspire scandal or intrigue and there’s no reason why I should be doing the same thing now, while the devil was showing me snippets of passing away on a hospital bed surrounded by dark-haired grandchildren. I tried again to fixate on, say, that time Tracy had thrown a fit because I hadn’t called her for a week up in Omaha even though it was because I had been getting exactly zero signal, but I couldn’t really count that as irrationality so much as her caring about me. Other things I couldn’t verify—it’s not as if I had any data points to measure her sexual prowess, but it was still grating to discover that if I closed my eyes and imagined her naked I was able to get it up, no sweat. And ultimately I don’t think I was under any risk of her leaving me. As for love… surely the fact that I had proposed to her proved that I was in love with her? Which meant that I had to turn my attention to the only possible alternative I possessed—that primordial blonde, the apex of blondness, the originator of the winking dreamboat herself, and with that thought the line connected.
‘Jack Newell. Well, well. I haven’t heard that name in quite a while.’
‘Hello, Barry,’ I replied.
I’ll spare you the college reminiscing and the chatter about ball games, I’ll spare you the pleasantries—I’ll spare you the ‘when’s the wedding’ discussion which, yes, I see the irony in—because what I thought had been a polite email when I’d sent it today morning now, reread, could be far better described as schizoid ramblings, and though Barry was growing calmer by the second—I’d probably just been half-asleep and somewhat drunk—he did have a little bit to say about the matter.
‘So, back to the stuff you were asking me about, Jack,’ he said.
‘Yeah—sorry for the email, I can see how it reads—’
He laughed. ‘I’m not going to say it didn’t worry me for a second, but hey! Fucking Hollywood, man, you get that shit on the daily. Anyway, I looked up the SAG registry—not a difficult task, or anything—because they keep a record of all the parts with speaking lines. Now in general, it’d have been kind of impossible to find your little extra, they just pick them off the street, usually, or at least that’s how they do it in Vancouver these days, but it looks like there’s some funny stuff in the NBC archives that my friend Alicia looked up—God bless digitization, it’s so easy to do that shit now. That Cheers episode you’re talking about has more than the usual number of credits—you’ve got the regulars and the guest stars, but also a special guest star that’s not in the actual cut!’
‘So you’re saying this woman is real?’
‘Looks like it. If I’m being real I’m pretty sure you’re fucking with me—there’s no way Pluto TV or some shit actually aired this cut or whatever, nobody I know even knows of its existence—how the hell did you find it, anyway? I want the real story.’
‘I gave you the real story.’
‘Bullshit,’ he chuckled. ‘No, seriously.’
‘I can’t tell you that,’ I said. ‘It’s for work reasons.’
‘Uh-huh, totally.’
‘So who’s the guest star?’
‘Someone called Lux Lynn. Now if ever there was a name made for television…’
‘Is she still around?’
‘Well, I mean, she’s got an iMDB and a LinkedIn, if that helps. You do realize she’s like sixty-five or something, right? Apart from Cheers it looks like she was running around doing guest roles on, I don’t know, Star Trek, Law And Order—couple of B-movies—’
‘Lux Lynn, you said?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Alright, thanks for the help, Barry. You don’t mind if I call you tomorrow? I’m passing through a tunnel—’
‘Hey—’
I made some radio static sounds with my mouth and gave a few chopped syllables before cutting the call and putting my phone on airplane mode. After about five minutes I turned it back on and looked up this Lux Lynn who’d been on Cheers and lo and behold, she had a credit for the exact episode and the few other pieces of media Barry had mentioned, but no picture. Scraping through about twenty pages of results I finally landed on the obituary of one Keith Lynn: orthopedic surgeon, 1954-2018, buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Boston, MA and remembered by children Spencer and Samantha and wife Lux. And included, there, on the obituary, was a digicam image from what looked more or less like 2004 of four people smiling and posing in front of the Statue of Liberty—all good-looking, all blonde, and the mother—though she’d gained weight since then and was far more wrinkled—as complete a knockout as she’d been in 1987. There was no number or Email ID, but there was an address: an old brick-row house on Mission Hill, Boston, and the registry stated that it belonged to one Lucia Lynn.
The decision was made in a split second. First I called Tracy.
‘Yeah, babe? You OK?’ she said. She sounded so sweet that I almost cut the call altogether.
‘Hey, babe. You got a minute?’
‘I’ve almost out, yeah.’
‘Just got a call from Sam Morton down in Toledo. You remember Sam? From the bar?’
‘Vaguely. He’s the one who tried to sell us a chicken coop?’
‘Yup, that’s the one. His dad died a couple hours ago and he’s having a hard time, I’m heading over to his place.’
‘Oh my god, that’s horrible. How did it happen?’
‘Cardiac arrest. I think it was kind of sudden, too—from what I gather he wasn’t even sixty.’
‘Well, can you wait for a couple hours or so?’
‘I don’t think so. And honestly honey I don’t think you should be there—he lives in a shitty sort of condo, and I don’t think his wife likes you.’
‘Oh, yeah, I remember that. She was always kind of cold, I wonder why—remember the business with the salad dressing? Well. You’d better get over there quick, then—I’m kind of surprised that he called you, though, doesn’t he have other friends?’
‘It looks like they’re all in Miami—he couldn’t make the trip because his mom’s broken her hip.’
‘Oh, how horrible. You’d better get down there quick, honey. Do you think you’ll make it back by today, or are you planning on staying overnight? I don’t know how this funeral stuff works, everyone in my family is still—oh, let me knock on wood—’
‘No clue, honestly, but I’ll give you a call and let you know. I’ll try to be back in the morning. Oh, by the way—I’m taking the Corolla.’
She chuckled. ‘You don’t think the Subaru is more appropriate?’
‘I took the Subaru out today morning, I think it’s got an oil leak or something. I’ll take a look once I get back.’
‘Okay. I wish you luck, I suppose. Love you.’
‘Love you too. Bye.’
After a split second, I dialed Ernie.
‘Jesus, Jack, what the fuck’s going on?’
‘It’s 5PM. Don’t tell me you’re asleep.’
‘Fuck you. I do whatever I please.’
‘Alright, here’s the deal—I’ll let you use my car if you do me a favor.’
‘Ooh, what’s that?’
‘I’m heading out to Boston in 20 minutes, and I want you to join me.’
‘Boston? Like, Boston, Massachusetts?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Jesus, what the fuck’s gotten into you? Why?’
‘I’ll tell you on the way.’
‘That’s, like, half a day, isn’t it?’
‘Which is why I need a second driver. You’re a nocturnal animal, I know you can drive through the night.’
‘You need to be in Boston tomorrow? Why don’t you take a plane?’
It was a good question, but I had no desire to take the plane. Wasn’t for any practical reason, I just didn’t want to.
‘No, we’re going by car. You in or you out?’
‘Fuck… twenty minutes?’
‘Yup.’
‘And when are we back?’
‘Hopefully tomorrow evening.’
‘Jesus, that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. Okay, I’m in. Give me 10, I’ll take a shower and grab some spare cash.’
‘I’ll be at your front door.’
Before setting out, I looked into the rear-view mirror and verified, for last time, that it was actually possible. A simple blink of my left eye, no screwed-up face. The perfect wink.
I parked the Subaru in the garage and backed out the Corolla, waving back at Ernie on the sidewalk. His hair was combed back and he was in a plain shirt and jeans, and he had a small backpack on him. I believe he was enrolled in university, and I really only saw him on weekends—Tracy had a habit of giving him handouts in the form of leftovers, and in return he would fetch groceries if we were too tired to make them.
‘So, what’s the scoop?’ he said, getting into the passengers’ seat.
‘Work trip,’ I said.
‘Yeah, right. And, what, they’re reimbursing you for gas?’
I gave him a strained expression. ‘Nobody ever told you you ask too many questions?’
‘Listen, Jack, for all I know, you’re kidnapping me. Hey—my parents live down in Dayton, they haven’t got all that much cash, if you know what I mean. You’d do much better with this one Donna Summers—her dad works on Madison Avenue—’
‘Alright, listen. We’re looking for an old TV actress called Lucia Lynn.’
‘Whoa. Don’t tell me you’ve got the hots for her.’
‘No, idiot, she’s like seventy or something.’
‘Hey, I don’t know how you function, Jack. Do I get your wife if you leave her?’
‘Keep your eyes off my wife, Ernie. Next time you say that I’m really gonna slam into you with this car, I swear.’
He laughed. ‘Whatever. So?’
‘She’s a credited extra in this episode of Cheers Tracy really likes.’
‘What’s Cheers?’
‘Okay, look—you know what Cheers is. You’ve heard of Ted Danson. Woody Harrelson.’
‘Those guys were on TV?’
‘Yeah. Back in the 80s.’
‘Okay. But why do you want to meet her?’
‘She’s got a nice wedding gift for Tracy.’
He broke out into a grin. ‘Oh. It’s one of those things, huh.’
‘Yup.’
‘You know, you’re a nice guy, Jack. I won’t make those jokes about Tracy any more. Assuming I’m going to be invited to the wedding, of course—’
‘Yeah, well, consider this drive a test.’ I gave him a brief rundown of the itinerary: Cleveland and upstate New York, then down from Albany into Massachusetts. He’d take over around Buffalo. Ernie wasn’t the most experienced driver, but these highways were a piece of cake even at night—and he proved to be pleasant company with a good taste in road music. We stopped in Cleveland for about half an hour to grab dinner—which I paid for, much to his delight—and I called Tracy and gave her a big sob story about buying coffins and the like which she bought without question.
‘I’ve been thinking, Jack,’ she said. ‘This whole trip’s got me all nervous. We should visit your parents in a few weeks—memorial day weekend’s coming up. I’m sure they’d be thrilled.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We could also head out to St. Louis. Bit of a longer drive, but I think it’s about time you and I take a trip. We’ve got a lot of talking to do before August.’
‘That’s not half-bad. Let’s discuss this once you get back? What’s it looking like?’
‘I think I’ll be back tomorrow night,’ I said. ‘Guess what—I got a call from Ernie, he says he’s stranded in Cleveland as part of some mishap with his band. He needs a ride home, I’m going to pick him up then head back.’
Across the table Ernie mouthed ‘What the fuck?’ I waved him away.
‘That idiot,’ said Tracy. ‘We should invite him to the wedding, by the way—he deserves it.’
‘Let’s talk about that later,’ I said. ‘I gotta go now—bye.’
‘Love you. Bye.’
We didn’t stick around in Ohio for much longer; there was nothing to do in Cleveland, really, and I’d realized that my 5 o’clock shadow was lengthening into an 11 o’clock shadow, and the more I delayed the less put-together I’d look once I inevitably encountered Mrs Lynn. What would I actually do once I met her? I was torn between asking her to wink and asking her to marry me, but neither of those made all that much sense. The appeal was growing by the minute. I had no idea what it was driving me to do. We made the switch around an hour before Buffalo and I fell asleep to a dream which involved the Michelin Man running after me with a whip while I tried not to trip on a large floor made out of bubble gum. I tried to think of Tracy but the nasty face of Lux Lynn kept passing over her, an eclipse, obscuring any attempt at normalcy. I was both a pilgrim and a dog chasing cars, but I had no clue what my Mecca held for me. A flash of light from a doorframe, some kind of reckoning. All I knew was that answers awaited me in Boston.
I woke up to see a beautiful sunrise over the grassy horizon and Ernie whistling one of the looney tunes themes. He laughed when he saw me stir.
‘Where are we?’ I asked.
‘About half-hour out of Springfield. Hey—Jack, your phone fell asleep at night, I didn’t want to wake you up. I don’t know where exactly we’re going, I’m just following the signs that say Boston on them.’
I groaned, but we weren’t off-course, at least according to the map. I pulled a cable out the glovebox and plugged the phone in, then set up the address onto Mission Hill. ‘You want to grab some breakfast?’ I asked.
‘Whatever,’ replied Ernie. ‘Shake Shack?’
‘Might as well.’
We pulled over to a couple soggy burgers about 15 minutes’ drive outside the city while the sun rose fully outside. It was around 10AM. You couldn’t really make intense decisions in the morning; somehow the sun laid bare both the landscape and your mind, and I had the fleeting impulse to turn back altogether. But we were far too close now. The allure was overwhelming.
‘So, where are we meeting this Mrs. Lynn?’ asked Ernie.
‘At her house. I’ve pulled up the address on the GPS.’
‘Well I hope she’s got a shower.’
I went to the bathroom to wash my hands and face and take a good look at myself in the mirror. The expression was not dissimilar to that of a mechanic who opens up a newly-chromed hood to find a blackened, slobbering mold of an engine inside. I’d like to think that I’m not that bad of a guy, you know—just a little misguided, but good when it came to the essentials. When I was twelve I’d baked a cake for my English teacher cause I’d called her geriatric in front of the class. You have to understand the totality of my obsession. It wasn’t as if I didn’t love Tracy—I did, and that’s what made the whole thing so frightening. She was beautiful and kind and all those good things that you can say about anyone. But that didn’t get rid of the whole idea that somehow we were doing a disservice to each other, kind of playing at a domesticity that neither of us had never done anything to deserve. It was almost too good, you know, too easy. I’d drive a thousand miles for Tracy in an instant but Tracy would never make me drive those thousand miles. She’d make me drive, like, thirty. Meanwhile there was a whole universe of winking blondes out there just waiting for guys like me to be ensnared in their webs. It was just nature—destiny, some might call it. You’ve gotta understand. There was a possibility of salvation. Sure I was twisted but I was also thinking straighter than ever. There were no logistics to be followed, no protocols, no hugs, no kisses—just a straight line of driving that ended in a triple-decker house. I didn’t even want the prize. I just wanted the drive. Can you really blame a man for that?
So I packed up the rest of my fries and got back into the Corolla and drove the last half-hour to Mission Hill, finding myself sweaty and unshaven outside a red-brick building that stood out in precisely no ways from the others and rang the doorbell.
About half a minute later a doddering old woman opened the door just an inch.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘Are you Mrs. Lucia Lynn?’ I asked. I’d told Ernie to wait in the car, which was parked around the block.
‘Yes,’ she said. I’d never heard the voice before; it was deeper than expected, bordering on raspy.
‘I’m Jack Newell from the Screen Actor’s Guild. I’m here to talk to you about your SAG membership dues. Have you received our emails?’
‘Screen Actor’s Guild? I haven’t acted since the ‘90s.’
‘That’s actually what I’m here to talk about.’
‘Okay. Well, come on in. It’s Sunday morning, I’m a little surprised by the visit, that’s all.’
She unlatched the door chain and motioned me to come in. On the whole she was a rather short woman, only about five foot two—Tracy was a couple inches taller. She was also portly and had her hair tied back into a braid instead of leaving it open straight down. I wouldn’t have taken her to be the same blonde on the Cheers episode if it weren’t for the sultry green eyes. It was very quiet apart from a fly in the background.
‘Do you live alone, Mrs. Lynn?’
‘Since my husband died, yes.’ I was led to an overdecorated living room which held quite a number of sculptures all over the furniture—nudes, mostly, and somewhat grotesque-looking ones, too. One of them was a naked woman with the face of a cheetah.
‘Well, we were doing an internal audit and realized that you had failed to pay your SAG dues in ’94, ’95 and ’96,’ I said. ‘It’s old news so we’ll let it slide, but for logistical reasons we’ll have to obtain written confirmation from you certifying that you’ve officially withdrawn your membership.’
‘I’m pretty certain I did that a long time ago,’ she said, narrowing her eyes. Almost! I still don’t know if she ever fully bought the whole thing, but she was happy enough to play along with it. I sat down on a sofa that was a sickly green color, and she herself got down on an orange armchair, hands folded. One thing was clear—I had no intention of asking her to marry me. The buzzing of the fly was getting louder, and I had a troublesome tomato seed caught between my teeth. I clamped down on it and felt a harsh pain in my upper molar.
‘Well, our records say that there’s some kind of problem. You are Mrs. Lucia Lynn, yes?’ I pulled out my phone and scrolled idly through it. ‘It says here that you were on Cheers, Star Trek: The Next Generation—’
‘Yes, yes. So what have I got to do?’
‘Not much,’ I said. ‘Do you have an email ID?’
‘Yes.’ She produced a pair of glasses and put them on. ‘Do I email someone?’
‘Let me get a pen and paper—’
‘There’s something on the mantelpiece.’ I walked over and found a Costco bill and an old pencil, and scribbled down a convincing-sounding Email ID. ‘You don’t really have to mention anything apart from the fact that you want to confirm the cancellation of your SAG membership that you initiated a while ago. You don’t even need to write down dates; I’ll do the rest.’
‘That sounds about right.’ She turned towards me attentively. ‘Anything else?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which is?’
‘I’ll need a picture. To prove I actually met you, of course—I’m sure you know that you needed to give a headshot when you took the membership, so you also have to—’
‘I understand.’ Of course she did; she was an actress. She’d done a million of these—though from the stationary on the Costco bill, I’d have guessed her to be some kind of schoolteacher now. ‘Do you want me to sit still?’
‘Ideally, yes.’
She assumed the exact posture she’d taken on the barseat. I felt faint. ‘Give me a second.’ I pulled out my phone and took a picture. She really was quite beautiful in her own right, but nothing compared to my fiancée back home.
‘What are you chuckling about?’ she said, smiling widely.
‘Nothing,’ I replied. ‘It’s just that before I came here I saw a couple clips of you on TV, and there was one on Cheers in which you gave a mighty fine wink. Thought it was quite endearing.’
‘I don’t remember that,’ she said, shrugging. ‘But you know how it is.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Can you do that? With your left eye, I mean? I don’t usually see people wink with their left eye, I just thought it funny.’
She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t do it even if you paid me for it. My doctor messed up a facelift almost four years ago—haven’t winked once since. If you ever find a way to do it, let me know.’