Chapter Text
“You want to ask if Marcus Kane is in love with me.”
This is the first thing Abigail Griffin says to me when she returns from the hospital and we finally sit down in the living room to have the conversation that I am anticipating and she is dreading. She says it calmly, unemotionally, as though she's forcing it out into the open unprompted to save me having to ask. As though she is ripping off the bandage to save me poking at the wound underneath.
She is wearing yoga pants and a white t-shirt today, her hair pulled up in a messy knot at the top of her head. She spent an exhausting morning at the hospital and came home to shower, have lunch with her daughter, and meet with me. There is no Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress today, no perfectly-arranged tray of iced tea and glasses. She is wearing no makeup, her hair is wet, and we have left the formal downstairs living room behind for a smaller, more intimate upstairs room with a couch and a TV where she and Clarke appear to do all their real living. I observe a great deal about both of them from this room. Abigail's book club is reading Cheryl Strayed's Wild, while Clarke is just now getting around to The Fault In Our Stars. They are in the middle of a Veronica Mars DVD box set marathon; there are popcorn bowls and throw blankets scattered around that make me wonder if that's what they were doing after I left last night. This is a room that belongs to real people. The gap between the mythological woman in Marcus Kane's songs and the small-town mom who reads Oprah book club recommendations on the treadmill is starting to confound me. But I suppose in some way, isn't that the whole point? Isn't that what love is? I can't look at her and see what Kane sees because I don't see her with his eyes.
And yet, even in this settled domestic normalcy, surrounded by tossed-aside sweaters and IKEA lamps, even with wet hair and yoga pants and no real enthusiasm for this conversation, there is something about Abigail Griffin that I am mesmerized by. She seems in some way more alive than other people. She is sharp and animated and a little spiky, and I remember what it felt like to re-listen to Kane's music last night and to feel the way her voice and presence runs through it like an invisible ribbon.
If I met her right now, I would never know she was "The Woman." Now that I know, I see it everywhere.
"No," I tell her. She is startled - and irritated, maybe? But I'm telling the truth. That isn't the thing I want to ask. I explain to her that everyone who has ever turned on a radio since 2001 knows that Marcus Kane is in love with her and that with all due respect, that is not the story I rented a car at LaGuardia and drove through farmland to spend three days in a town with no Starbucks to find. Marcus Kane is the easy part. Marcus Kane's side of the story we all already know. I am here for the hard part. I want to know what he means to her. She looks down, away. She doesn’t want to talk about it. I tell her that this is the question everyone will be asking, and they will go away once she answers it definitively for someone who isn’t them. “It could be worse,” I offer as a joke, “I could be a British tabloid,” and she rolls her eyes as if to ask how different that would be, really, and it’s hard to argue with her. I am here to ask her about a profoundly intimate, decades-long relationship about which she has never spoken publicly and we both know I am not leaving without a story.
And so she tells me the story.
Abigail watching Kane perform at an East Village dive bar, circa 1999 or 2000. (photo courtesy of Abigail Griffin)
The question Marcus Kane aficionados - from Rolling Stone editors to Reddit conspiracy theorists - were all asking themselves when Clarke's blog post exploded out of nowhere was this: after all the decades of digging into every woman even remotely connected to Kane's life, mining for clues, taking to Google every time he was spotted in public having lunch with a mysterious blonde or kissing the cheek of a pop starlet on the Grammy red carpet, how was it possible that we all overlooked Abigail Griffin? How did nobody find her? How did her name never come up when every single woman Marcus Kane had even the most tenuous connection with was put through the ringer and vetted as a possible solution to the mystery?
The answer is both simple and profound, explaining everything.
We obsessively studied all the women in Kane's life for clues. We paid no attention to the men.
And so if, for example, Marcus Kane had a childhood best friend named Jake, whose family moved away when the boys were in middle school; and if Jake and Marcus happened to reconnect entirely by accident in New York in the mid-90's, running into each other in the beer queue at a Knicks game; and if later that night Jake had come home to his studio apartment on the Lower East Side and while brushing his teeth that night had called over his shoulder, "Hey, I ran into my old friend Marcus Kane at the game tonight, he's a musician now, I'm going to go hear him play tomorrow"; and if Abby, his girlfriend of four years and a passionate lover of music, who was undressing in the other room (she remembers this with a bizarre specificity, as though it were some kind of a sign - the first time she ever heard Marcus Kane's name she was naked), had been in desperate search of an excuse to get out of her coworker's sister's bachelorette party and said, "I'll come with you"; and if there was only one table left when they arrived at the bar, and it was right up front, and Jake had gallantly given Abby the good seat, so when Marcus Kane walked out with his guitar she was less than ten feet away from him and Jake Griffin was in the shadows behind her; and if the first song he played that night was the sweet, lilting eulogy to his mother, "The Eden Tree"; and if Abby Arker's own mother had just passed away six months ago, and the pressures of her Sloan Kettering medical residency had kept her in such a constant cycle between adrenaline and exhaustion that she had cried a little at the funeral but been unable to cry since, and not just about her mother but about anything, and was secretly perhaps a little bit afraid that a piece of her heart had been shattered forever; and if she sat there in that dim little bar, watching a man with sad dark eyes sing a haunting ballad about death and rebirth, and felt the sound of his voice soak in through her skin, seep inside of her, fill her up, rush through her blood, make her entire body come alive; and if Marcus Kane had looked up at the end of the song to see a beautiful woman with sad dark eyes silently crying in the front row, and looked at her, really looked at her, and she looked back at him, and they were the only people in the entire room; and if Jake Griffin had leaned over just then and tapped Abby on the shoulder to make sure she was okay, and she snapped back to reality and realized that she had become so enmeshed in the song that she had literally forgotten who and what and where she was; and if the rest of the evening was a blur, she remembers none of it, except that she went home that night, back to her own apartment, and climbed into bed and cried for her mother for the very first time, cried so hard that she finally wore herself out with sobbing around four a.m. and then fell asleep, dreaming of Marcus Kane's voice; and if the very next day, Jake Griffin had asked her to marry him and she had said yes . . .
Well, it's easy to see how we all missed that. Jake was the connection. But we weren't, of course, looking for him.
* * *
Marcus Kane and Jake Griffin reconnected and remained friends. Jake and Abby were engaged by the time she was first properly introduced to Marcus, and so even though - as we all know, from "I'm Right Here" and "Buried Under" and half a dozen other songs - he fell immediately and irrevocably in love with her from the moment he looked out through the stage lights and saw her crying, he knew he could never say anything to her. Perhaps, if we wanted to look closely, we might see in his enthusiastic and loyal friendship to Jake over the years an element of penance - trying to prove to himself that he liked spending time with his friend for his own sake, and not entirely out of the hopes of a few minutes' conversation with his brilliant, opinionated, captivating, stubborn, fiery and beautiful wife. Marcus knew Abby for five years before Jake Griffin died, and Abby is absolutely insistent upon this point: that even though she knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Marcus was in love with her the entire time, and even though her own feelings were not, perhaps, as simple as she would have liked them to be, there was no question of anything happening between them. There would be no torrid, tragic affairs here. Abby Griffin woke up one day, about three years into her marriage, and realized that she was in love with Marcus Kane. She did not love Jake or her daughter any less. She had no interest in breaking up her family. This was simply one more difficult thing in a lifetime of difficult things that she would have to summon the strength to bear. That was all.
That was supposed to be all.
And then it went wrong.
Marcus Kane called her at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, waking her up only three hours after she had tumbled into bed at the end of an all-nighter. "I had known him at this point for five years," she said, "and he had never called me before. He only ever called the apartment looking for Jake." But this time it was her he was looking for. After apologizing for waking her up, he broke the news: he had just come from a meeting with City of Light Records and Thelonious J was interested in his work. "You're smarter about music than anyone I've ever met in my life," he had said to her, "and I really wanted to talk this through with someone before I say yes." Abigail was delighted for him, but was also barely half-awake, so they made plans to meet later that afternoon for coffee. Then she hung up the phone, lay her head back down on the pillow, and the last thought she had before sinking into a blissful sleep was a little thrill of delight that she had a date with Marcus Kane.
She slept for a few hours, then woke and spent far too long - embarrassingly too long, she says now - getting ready. Which was silly. It was just coffee. He just wanted to talk about music. Clarke was at day care, Jake was at work, and there was no one to tell Abby Griffin that putting her hair up and then taking it down five separate times, trying to make a decision, was not the behavior of a person who was just doing a favor for her husband's friend. She remembers, as though it were yesterday instead of 15 years ago, exactly what she wore - hair down her back in a sleek, simple braid, a knee-length black pencil skirt, black boots, and a plum-colored sweater that made her feel more curvy than she really was. Marcus Kane made her feel like a cool New Yorker, not the smart but plain Midwestern girl she had felt like her entire life. She liked the person she was when she was around him. She felt alive, she felt sexy, she felt whole. She walked down the street to the coffee shop wondering what it would feel like if Marcus Kane kissed her. She knew he would never do it - she knew she would never let him - she knew it was far too dangerous.
And yet.
She wondered.
They sat in the coffee shop for four hours, talking about music and life and New York and each other. They stayed for so long that Abby realized she was late to pick up Clarke from day care; unwilling to bring their conversation to an end so soon, she asked Marcus if she would like to walk with her. It was only about ten blocks away. It was spring, she remembers, and they were strolling down a street of prewar brownstones flanked by cherry trees, arguing about the relative merits of Abbey Road vs. Revolver in the Beatles canon when she saw the police cars parked outside the day care.
All afternoon the cops had been trying to reach her to let her know that her husband had been shot. They had called her office. They had knocked on her door. They had left voicemails everywhere. They had been unable to track her down. They had finally managed to get through to a coworker of Jake's who mentioned that Abby would have to go pick up Clarke from day care that afternoon and they would be able to find her there at 5:30. Except that it was 6:15, and she was late for the first time ever, and Clarke was the last child there, and she had strolled up to the door mid-laughing conversation with a handsome man who was not her husband. Because her husband, the police officer who had been hunting her down for the past two hours explained, was dead.
Jake was dead.
She had been drinking coffee and talking about the Beatles and very nearly holding hands with Marcus Kane in a coffee shop while her husband was trapped in an armed bank robbery and the police tried desperately to find her. She did not know how to even begin to live with that.
And so Abigail Griffin buried her husband, packed up her life, sold her apartment, moved out of New York City, and disappeared into rural Massachusetts, intending never to see or speak to Marcus Kane again.
* * *
We know, of course, from our secure position fifteen years into the future, that that wasn't the end of the story.
Because we know that a year and a half after Abigail and Clarke Griffin left the city, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center on a sunny Tuesday September morning, and if you knew and loved somebody in New York City that day it didn't matter how long you had been estranged or how over you thought your relationship was or what else had passed between them. You only wanted to know that the people who mattered to you were alive and safe.
Abigail Griffin's friends and neighbors and coworkers were all alive and safe. But she could not find Marcus Kane. She called his home, his cell phone, his recording studio. She left messages with everyone in Thelonious J's office who would take her calls. She called everyone she knew. She was pacing back and forth in the two-story living room of that Massachusetts house, clenching and unclenching her fists over and over to ward off a panic attack when Marcus Kane knocked on her door.
When she opened it and saw him standing there, she burst into tears. And then she kissed him.
She admits frankly that it was as much about sheer relief that he wasn't dead as it was affection and desire - though both of those were present, and real. She had convinced herself that this story would end the same way Jake's had - with Clarke lost in hysterical sobs while a stone-faced Abigail had to identify a dead body. But there was also regret. There was also the fear that something might happen to Marcus before she ever had the chance to say how she felt. And so, as he stood there on her doorstep, holding a hastily-packed overnight bag, with the ash of Manhattan in his hair, on the day we all thought the world was ending, this is what she said to him.
"I'm in love with you, Marcus. I've always been in love with you. It didn't mean I loved Jake any less, so I'm done feeling guilty about it, because neither of us did anything wrong. But I'm still a single mom with a dead husband and a lot of shit to deal with and I can't be anyone's girlfriend, and I can't move back to the city where my husband got shot. This is where I live now, and this is who I am, and I can't make you any guarantees about anything except that I love you and I need you in my life. If you need anything more than that from me, I can't give it to you; but if you're okay with this as a place to start, you should bring that bag inside and stay here for awhile."
He came inside.
He stayed for two months.
When he finally left, to go back to New York and work on the album that became The Woman That Fell From the Sky, I ask Abigail about how they left things with each other. She shrugs a little.
"We never called it by a name," she said. "I never said, 'Marcus Kane is my boyfriend.' We didn't need to discuss it endlessly. It just was what it was. He came out here whenever he could, and we spent time together, and it was wonderful, and then he would leave and we would all go back to our lives. It worked fine."
"Did you never talk about marriage?" I ask. She arches an eyebrow at me.
"He's 46," she says. "I'm 44. Of course we've talked about marriage."
"But . . ."
She sighs. "Look," she says. "I was only a wife for a few years, when I was very young. It was great. I was happy. But then I spent fifteen years after that as a single mom, and my daughter was my priority. And I had the life I wanted. I had work, and Clarke, and this town, which I love, and this house I love, and my own space and freedom and identity, but I also had love and affection and companionship and -" She stops. I finish the sentence for her.
"Really great sex?"
She blushes like a teenager and looks away, and I find myself irrationally delighted by this burst of unguarded humanity.
"I had everything I needed," she says. "I had a wonderful life."
I ask her why she keeps referring to it in the past tense. I ask her why she seems so certain that all of that is over now. She looks at me, walls back up, withering scorn on her face.
"There's a stranger in my living room asking me invasive questions about my love life," she says. "What's the average shelf life of a Hollywood marriage? Once the spotlight is shining on you, on your relationship, it begins to wear you down."
I ask her - and I could not have told you then, and still cannot tell you now, why I felt a knot of panic in my stomach at the thought of her answer - if what she is really telling me is that she is afraid, now that she and Clarke are out in the open, no longer Marcus Kane's safe refuge, that it will be the end of their relationship. She does not answer, but I can see that she is worried.
Now I am too.