checking my e-mail, a mug of coffee cooling at my side, two dead cigarettes already in the ashtray. A tiny thump of a hangover persisted through the caffeine, less from the Merlot than from the lingering feeling that I’d not only fucked Woody the night before, I’d screwed him.
“I had an idea,” he said.
“As long as it’s not about therapy,” I said, “I’m game.”
“Have you done an Internet search for Danny Ficchino?”
That I hadn’t wasn’t surprising. I’d been a slow starter in the wired world, the last of all my friends to get an e-mail account. I was trekking to the library to do research when everyone else was swearing by search engines. This wasn’t the smartest attitude for a radio producer to take. True, I often found sources on library databases that didn’t quickly appear when using the ’net. But when I finally got screamed at by an executive producer for taking too long to put together a list of possible interviewees for a deadline-driven project, I learned that I needed to pick up the pace.
At home, I was still using a modem to connect. Woody had a T1 line at work, which was about a zillion times faster. “I’ll do it for you,” he was saying. “I’ll try PeopleSearch.”
“Search, people! Search!” I commanded, listening to his keyboard clacking.
In an instant, he had results: nothing under Dan or Daniel or Danny Ficchino, but almost thirty variations of Dean Foster. He forwarded the page to me, and when we got off the phone I looked it over.
Some of the names were clearly wrong—Roderick Dean Foster, Dean Smith-Foster—and I eliminated those immediately. Any listing with a middle name or initial—Dean Thomas Foster, Dean M. Foster—I cut as well; I figured since Dean Foster was an alias, it was unlikely that Danny would have made up a middle name. That left about eighteen to consider. Of those, five were in California, including three in Los Angeles and a couple in towns not far from San Francisco. I stared at the screen, at all the possible Deans. I debated whether or not to make phone calls first or send each one an e-mail. Both choices seemed presumptuous, invasive—somewhere between junk mail and stalking. I could mention my professional credentials, the possibility of a public-radio story, but how would I back that up? I couldn’t even convince Brady that this was anything but personal.
All but two of the entries had street addresses. That seemed best: I’d send a letter, a good old-fashioned winds-up-in-your-mailbox letter. Time wasn’t pressing; in the interest of not scaring him off, I could wait.
I jammed some of Anton’s pot into my pipe and spent the afternoon composing letters:
Dear Mr. Foster:
Forgive me for intruding, but I tracked your address down through the Internet and was hoping you might be the same Dean Foster who grew up on the West Side of Manhattan under the name “Danny Ficchino,” departed for California in 1960, and was once a friend of my father, Edward “Rusty” Garner. If you are not, please disregard this request. If you are the person I think you might be, I would like to speak with you.
Sadly, my father recently passed away after a long illness, and I uncovered your name and photo in his belongings. I understand that, owing to circumstances which I know next to nothing about, you have become estranged from the family, including your sister-in-law, who is my aunt, Katie Ficchino. I am writing to you not only to share the news of my father’s passing but to see about reestablishing contact. I have only the best intentions at heart. If you are interested, please contact me.
Very truly yours,
Jamie Garner
…which decomposed as the morning progressed and I got more and more stoned…
Dear Dean:
I have a hunch that you might be someone I’m trying to track down—Danny Ficchino. You were once my father’s friend, and your brother was married to my aunt, but for some reason, which no one will tell me, you dropped out of everyone’s life. This past month, my father, Teddy Garner, died, and I’ve taken it upon myself to piece together some of the missing links of his past. That seems to include you, Dean. Are you interested? I sure hope so, because even though all of this stuff took place forty years ago, it’s never too late to mend a fence. Don’t you agree?
Your sort-of nephew,
Jamie Garner
…until at last I was typing out the true, fucked-up heart of the matter:
Hey Danny Ficchino:
Yeah, you read that right. I know who you are, and I know you’ve been hiding from your relatives for a long, long time. I don’t know why, but I plan on finding out, so why not go right to the horse’s mouth? Who am I? I’m Teddy Garner’s son, all grown up and homosexual, which is a detail that’s only important because what I really want to know is if you and my father had some kind of teenage jack-off buddy thing going on way back when. And the reason I want to know is because he turned out to be a homophobic prick, and drove me away from him, which I find kind of interesting given the bisexual porn hidden in his bedroom. Maybe I’m a pervert, but that’s just the way my mind works.
By the way, Teddy is dead. So I’m the closest you can get to him now. They say I kind of look like him, though that’s debatable.
One more thing: you were white-hot when you were young. I’d have sucked your dick, for sure.
Cheers,
Jamie
I didn’t print any of these out. I didn’t send anything. I couldn’t. Not yet.
Anton was sliding the knife set across the glass counter, the blades gleaming, the handles buffed and creamy, the velvet brushed clean. “A thing of beauty,” he marveled, as if he had no idea how these shining objects had wound up in his shop.
I liked witnessing this side of Anton, the proud tradesman emerging from beneath the pot-addled painter and the paranoid drug dealer. I plopped down sixty bucks, more than I’d ever given him at once—for knives, that is—and said, “Better than new.”
As I turned to leave, Anton said, “Hold on.” He disappeared into the back room, returning with a newspaper clipping in hand. “The lady painter. Ray Gladwell. I knew the name was familiar.” He handed me the clipping, a review from a gallery show, dated about a year previous. There she was: a short, curvy woman with cropped, salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a dark turtleneck sweater and an ornate, metal necklace. Her smile told you she’d be the easiest person in the world to talk to.
“We were both in a show at the Berkeley Gallery, in ’68 or ’69,” Anton said.
The article reviewed a show of abstract landscapes at a gallery near Union Square. A transformer of reality into dream, Ray Gladwell is a tireless career artist, one of the last of the California-landscape generation receiving much deserved recognition. Sixty-five and finally getting her due—no wonder she was smiling (though she could just as easily have bitterness scarred across her face). The text said she lived on the Peninsula, south of the city. Assuming she hadn’t died in the past year, she was still alive, this woman who’d been my father’s—what? Lover? Girlfriend? Old lady? What would they have called it in 1960?
“Do you remember her at all?” I asked Anton.
“I remember thinking she painted like a man.”
I pulled from my father’s San Francisco box the break-up letter Ray had written to him, the one I’d first skimmed in New Jersey. I hadn’t noticed before how fragile the paper felt. The creases where it had been folded were splitting and frayed.
Dear Teddy,
This smothering fog is terrible for one’s state of mind. Outside it presses down, and inside I sit wishing I wasn’t so poor with words so that I might explain myself, your “magic girl” with too many tricks up her sleeve.
I believe in the freedom of the individual, whether that means I paint the way I wish, or I take a spin out of Mountain View without telling my