I don’t know quite how it’s happened, but I’m falling in love with Topper.
He’s so different from the boy, steady where the boy is volatile, conscious where the boy is instinctive. Topper is deep, calm seas; the boy is like a bottle rocket. With my parents gone, the boy still childlike like me, and Miss Mary my only real grown-up, Topper’s way of treating me feels unfamiliar in the best way. It’s loving, in the clearest way I’ve ever experienced. He is never messy.
Where the boy and I share a love forged by some deep, inexplicable bond, Topper’s love is chosen. He has chosen me. He wants me, not from obsession or need, but out of clarity and care. He wants to make my life easier, better, to show me things, take me places, open my world. Not to own it, but to share in it.
The boy is Puer Aeternus, the eternal youth. Vibrant, instinctual, emotionally raw. Forever chasing something, freedom, transcendence, whatever he thinks might save him. He burns so brightly and resists all limits. But he’s also fragile, capable of becoming lost, unmoored, undone by the same forces that make him magical. Topper is wise enough not to need to live it. His compass points to another field. It’s as though my heart has grown another room inside it, one belongs to the boy, the other to Topper.
I don’t tell the boy about this, and he doesn’t tell me about his life on the road anymore. We’ve given each other quiet space, unspoken, agreeing not to ask, not to name it. We’ve come to terms with the idea that we can remain the same, but different. That we don’t have to ruin what’s between us with jealousy. Because none of this touches what exists underneath.
***
When I return home for Christmas, the boy shows up twenty minutes after I arrive in Memphis.
“Swear I love you more now than I ever did,” he says, pinning me against the wall in my room.
There’s a new danger beneath his soft, gentle surface. He’s still that somewhat clumsy country boy, but something else has emerged, a new edge, a flicker of experience he’s trying out on me. A part of him I haven’t met before.
He’s grown a little more self-absorbed and vain these past few months, but I say nothing. I tell myself it’ll pass. He’s becoming famous; he needs time to adjust. So I play along and let him explore it. Slowly, we find our way back home.
Miss Mary makes us lunch, and we watch the comedy Casanova’s Big Night and then the adventure drama Green Fire in the screening room. I think about man’s desire to strike it rich, and I wonder what’s wrong with people, why are we so drawn to conquest?
In the boy, I see a different kind of longing: the desire to be somebody, to prove everyone wrong, to claim his place. But I don’t see greed in him. Not really. He wants to make life more fun, to take care of his family. There’s still so much of the boy I grew up with in him. And I pray it stays that way.
***
Mrs P starts warming to me again over Christmas. She comes to the house when he’s off in his new world. We drink coffee in the kitchen with Miss Mary. At one point, she takes my hand and lets her fears spill out. She pleads with me to settle down with him, though I think she knows, deep down, that ship has sailed.
“I can’t give you what you’re asking for,” I tell her gently. “But I’m not going anywhere. I’ll always care about him.”
She squeezes my hand, and I see tears in her eyes.
We all have to adjust to a new reality, one that’s uncertain, where only the strong survive around him.
She’s worried, and she prays. Slowly, she begins to fade. And I can see it happening, the bigger she grows physically, the more the feisty and fun Mrs P disappears.
When the subject of his independence comes up, and the mother he’s drifting from, he gets angry. He won’t hear it. He won’t admit she’s hurting. He won’t stay, and he won’t change. And maybe he shouldn’t, maybe Mrs P needs to accept that her boy’s changing, that he’s moving into the world on his own. All she can do now is be there if he falls or when he needs her.
***
Before I go back to school, I tell the boy he can drive the pink Cadillac as much as he wants.
It’s a car I could never bring back to Pennsylvania. They’d call it crass. But to us, it’s the prettiest little thing we’ve ever seen.
We sit in the driveway, admiring it, its curves, its colour, its sheer modernity. It’s our baby, and it brings endless joy to look at and drive. He can’t understand how anyone, no matter how refined, can’t see its beauty.
I tell him he can have it, that it’s his if he wants it.
“Happy birthday,” I say.
He grins. “Nah, I’ll just take her out every now and then. Maybe drop by, say hi to Miss Mary… maybe just sit with her a while.”
A month later, I get a call from Miss Mary. She tells me she’s just sent the boy home with the car. She found him in the garage, asleep in the front seat, hands on the wheel. When she woke him and asked what he was doing, he told her he’d come to quiet his mind. Just to sit there. To be near it. They went inside. She made him a meal, and afterward she handed him the keys.
***
In April, I receive a letter from home with one of the now-familiar Sun Records tucked inside. He’s been playing bigger venues now, I’ve heard from Mabel. The band is on the radio constantly. Things are accelerating.
There’s a rushed note, scrawled in a hurried hand:
Baby Bird – this is for you.
It’s both a promise of my undying love and a threat!
Hope you like.
EAP
On the other side, he’s drawn a stick figure with a guitar and scribbled something I can’t quite make out, the ink is smudged.
I put the record on the turntable in our apartment and hear his voice stutter over Bill’s bass, joined by Scotty on guitar and DJ Fontana on drums.
“Baby, baby, baby,” he croons, and then sings the lines he’s changed from Arthur Gunter’s original:
Well, you may go to college,
You may go to school,
You may have a pink Cadillac,
But don’t you be nobody’s fool.
I burst out laughing.
But then his voice goes cold:
Now listen to me, baby,
Try to understand,
I’d rather see you dead, little girl,
Than to be with another man.
Tilly, who’s been at her desk, walks over, lifts the record, and chucks it straight out the open window.
“Well, that’s the end of that petulant boy’s whinging,” she says, patting my shoulder before returning to her coursework.
I run outside and fish the record from the bushes. For a moment, the vinyl feels ice-cold in my palm.
When I come back inside, Tilly warns me not to play side two while she’s around.
“I might be the one to kill you myself,” she mutters. “I cannot, for the life of me, see what you like about him. He’s gruff, unsophisticated, and backwards. I’ve never heard him say a single thing of value. All he does is grunt and snarl.”
“Maybe that’s because you’re so dang unwelcoming and snooty toward him,” I shoot back, heading to my room.
I close the door, and let her voice fade out.
My World of Interiors 