A quick search: Raven + Honeybear’s referenced on a number of archived sites and listed on the Pittsburgh Business Registry as a fashion line, but the company’s cached home page is corrupted and every direct link’s been fouled. Filtering the Facecrawler to image plus text finds other Raven + Honeybear handbills posted on boutique tackboards, almost all featuring Peyton, waves of white-gold hair and eyes so blue they’re like a doll’s glass eyes. The line specializes in an aesthetic of polo matches, collegiate tenures, private girls’ schools and gentlemen farming; young women sipping tea at the Frick or playing croquet, Peyton in tweed slacks and plaids, tailored blouses and neckties, men’s clothes if such care wasn’t taken to flaunt the model’s figure.
I’ve found Peyton’s picture in other archived ad campaigns and fashion editorials, spreads for Maniac magazine and Whirl, even a few spots for American Eagle but she’s too ethereal to fully meld with the AE girl-next-door vibe. This Raven + Honeybear campaign feels different somehow, Peyton’s other modeling work capitalizing on her surface look, depicting her almost as an ice goddess or as unapproachably beautiful, but the Raven + Honeybear feel much more homemade, like I’m looking at a set of personal photographs rather than a slickly produced ad campaign. The images remind me of the style of the first image of Albion I’d seen. Thinking of Peyton and Zhou together in the elevator, every gesture of Zhou a forgery of a gesture of Albion, thinking of Peyton and Albion in the apartment dying fabric, imagining Albion taking these pictures of Peyton, dressing her up in plaid skirts and asking her to pose.
The Archive lists Peyton Hannover as arriving in Pittsburgh from a place called Darwin, Minnesota—population 308. Peyton’s parents are still alive in retirement in Florida. They’ve set up a VR memorial at remembrance.pit—Peyton their youngest daughter of five, but I’ve only spent a few minutes with her childhood pictures displayed at the memorial, videos of her first Halloween, pictures of a knockout at prom too perfect for the meathead kid in a tux who grapples with her corsage. I consider contacting her parents, to ask if Peyton ever mentioned a woman named Albion, but I’m too closely acquainted with loss to bother whatever memories they’ve let heal over. Leave well enough alone.
Peyton’s first appearance in the Archive is as a freshman at Chatham University. Cutoff jean shorts and steel-toed boots, a Chatham hoodie. She’s at the 61C Café, outside on the patio surrounded by blooming sunflowers, reading a Penguin Classics edition of Jane Eyre, oblivious to the attention her legs attract when middle-aged men sit with their coffee at nearby tables. When she speaks, you hear Minnesota in her voice. An eighteen-year-old shaking off small-town dust in what must have seemed like a big city. I track her: parties most weekends, girls on ratty couches sipping from red Solo cups, basements smoky and crowded with scruffy men holding cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Peyton’s like an orchid in a vegetable patch, smoking cigarettes in holders, occasionally sporting a monocle, aggressively flirting up other girls who don’t seem to quite know what to do with her. She led a wild life at first, destructive—sloppy drunk and sick at parties, passed out by the early morning, striking out with straight girls so letting random guys take her to bed. She laughs everything off—but spends most of her time alone, friendless until she gathers with people to party.
Tracking her life, I find Peyton in Schenley Plaza, at a WYEP summer music festival. She’s with a group of her acquaintances, sharing a blanket spread on the lawn. Peyton’s begun to grow her hair out by now, no longer the T. S. Eliot slick but a wavy blonde—it makes her look younger, somehow. She’s also started the tattoo that will eventually sleeve her arm, just a few flowers, lilies and roses, near her shoulder. We’ve gathered together at the concert, too, other survivors. I see their faces in the crowd—somehow lighter than the others. We notice one another and sometimes smile, but more often than not we simply ignore each other, knowing that the more we acknowledge one another, the more we ruin the illusion that these summer nights might never have ended. I take off my shoes and feel the grass on my feet. Donora’s headlining and Peyton’s enjoying herself, laughing, but by the time moths swarm the park lights, she’s moved away from her friends. I follow her and find Albion sitting alone on one of the benches edging the park. Her hair’s tucked beneath a knit beret. She wears a linen skirt and a suede jacket. She’s older than Peyton by a few years, but they’re comfortable together. Peyton slips her arm beneath Albion’s suede coat, and the intimacy—like Peyton’s fingers touching Zhou’s in the elevator—flusters me, races in my blood. They’re ignoring the concert, ignoring Peyton’s friends. By the time the concert ends I’ve seen the two women kiss, a short kiss but unmistakable that they’re lovers, discreet, but nevertheless drawing attention from the men around them, men with their families, playing with their children in the lawn but unable to keep their eyes away from two women kissing. Peyton and Albion leave together and I try to follow, but the footage runs out and I’m looped back into the crowd.
1, 19—
I’ve only seen two traces of Albion, once dying fabric in Peyton’s apartment, once kissing Peyton in the park. Hours might pass without thinking of Albion, but then the thought of her overwhelms me, at first just a recollection of what I’d seen but growing into a compulsive urge to see again, and again, the pull stronger than any drug I’ve used—I load and reload those traces of Albion and watch her, memorizing everything about her, every detail, perfect, so perfect. I watch until my mind’s like a worn rag and my eyes so strained they feel like they’re still open even when they’re closed. The rest of Albion’s life is a hole I’m filling in by the edges, like I’m figuring out the shape of an object by studying the shadow it casts. Obsessive about the research—my life’s become Albion. I reload the stream of Albion kissing Peyton in the park—
Never stray far from Peyton, because Peyton leads me to Albion—as Peyton reads Camille Paglia at an outdoor table at Panera, yoga classes at the Athletic and Fitness Center, cutting across Chatham’s campus to a class on Blake and British Symbolism. Occasionally, I find Peyton with Zhou and know that Albion’s been replaced in these moments—Zhou’s a forgery, so when I come across her in the Archive, I study her, trying to understand the originaclass="underline" Peyton’s quicker with a laugh than Zhou, Zhou much more serious, sober. At the Carnegie Museum of Art, Zhou stands back to study paintings, she’ll point something out to Peyton, give a quick rundown of the artist’s life or talk about materials. Zhou is Albion, I remind myself. They stand in front of a John Currin painting of two nude women, their bodies in illusory angles, awkwardly posed. Zhou’s mentioning that Currin spent time in Pittsburgh and Peyton listens but she mugs a bit, she poses like the women in the painting. She causes a scene until Zhou laughs along with her. Peyton’s in complete control of her effect on men—Zhou’s much more reticent, almost like she wishes for invisibility. Peyton draws her out, forces Zhou to pose along with her, gets one of the security guards to snap their picture in front of the painting.