“That makes no sense.”
I drew the bow over the strings and adjusted the tension, waiting for one to break in a snapping curlicue, but it didn’t happen. I got the tension close and played something he’d know, dragging that first note across the bow as if summoning it from our collective past.
“You weren’t capable of being needed.” I played the next note.
“Don’t.” His whisper came out husky, as if the command had caught in his throat.
I didn’t listen to him, but played the song my mind would never have recalled but my body knew.
Kevin didn’t sleep well. Unlike workaholics and TV addicts, he wanted desperately to sleep a full night, and unlike most insomniacs, he fell soundly to sleep at a decent hour. But about four times a week, he awoke in the early hours of the morning with a pounding, anxious pain in his chest. I woke up when he shifted. I held him, stroked his hair, hummed, but nothing put him back to sleep except me playing the viola. We had a tune we shared, a lullaby I wrote for him with my fingers and arm. I never wrote it down because it became as real as the bond between us, and it ceased to exist when that bond broke.
So I played it for him in that first0draft installation that looked more like a storage room than a homage to a breakup. And he watched me with his butt leaning on the table, and his ankles and arms crossed. I let the last note drift off. The song had no end; I’d always just played it until his breathing became level and regular.
“Sounds like shit,” I said.
“I don’t know what you were doing, playing that.”
“Maybe you can tell me what you were doing putting my shit in a museum without telling me.”
“I was scared.”
I laid the instrument in its case. “Of?”
“The piece was happening, and I wasn’t fighting about it.”
“I want my jeans back.” This was ridiculous. I didn’t give a rat’s ass about my fucking jeans. I just wanted to provide him with the exact thing he didn’t want. I wanted to fight him.
“The whole thing is sold. Even the books and catalogs are sold out. You’d be after me and some collector on a Spanish island. Our lawyers would have lawyers.”
“This is not fair,” I whispered, stroking the brittle strings of my lost viola.
“I know. None of it was.”
I knew he didn’t just mean his piece. He meant everything from the minute we met to the moment I finished playing our lullaby. I felt emotionally dehydrated and raw at the edges.
“I should go.” I snapped my case shut. “Thanks for not putting this in the piece.”
I turned to walk out, and like a cat, he jumped in front of me, putting his hands on my cheeks. “You’re happy? With this new guy?”
“Jonathan. You know his name.”
“Are you happy?”
“It’s casual.”
“You? Tweety Bird? I don’t believe it.”
I’d forgotten that. He called me his canary when he was feeling warm and affectionate. How convenient for me to overlook that when he felt confronted in the slightest, or distant, or overwhelmed, he called me Tweety Bird. I never knew if he even realized the name he used for me said more about him than it did about me.
“Take your hands off my face,” I said. His fingers fell off my cheeks as if they melted away. “I don’t mean to be callous, Kevin. I don’t want to fall into life unintentionally any more. Jonathan has a purpose.” His eyebrows went up half a tick. That had to be answered. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”
Out of the gutter
meant one thing to the rest of the world and the opposite to us. It meant,
Stop thinking it’s about money
.
“You know, I didn’t ask you to come here to talk about us. If you could give me another ten minutes, we can sit in the kitchen, and I’ll make you some tea. Properly. I want to pitch something to you.”
I looked at my watch. I had the night shift. “You have half an hour.”
He leaned down a little to look me in the face with his big chocolate-coin eyes. “Thank you.”
He walked quickly back to the kitchen. He made tea with efficiency and grace, speaking with a catch of thrill in his voice I hadn’t heard in a long time. I couldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise if I’d wanted.
“We all make art about these big concepts. We feel like we need to put it all under a cultural umbrella if we want to get into the lexicon, but I haven’t cried in front of a piece of art since I was in college. It’s because the whole scene is up in its head. Banksy’s scribbling culture, Barbara Kruger’s still yelling about consumer culture, John Currin’s talking about sex and culture, and Frank Hermaine is... I don’t even know what that guy is talking about. No one’s doing anything about the stuff that matters, stuff that gets us up in the morning and rocks us to sleep at night. When I realized this, I started being thankful you walked out. I mean… not really, but it made me realize that nothing I was doing made a damn bit of difference or touched anyone, and I thought if I could take that pain I felt and put it in a room, so when someone walked into that room who was going through the same thing, they’d recognize it. They’d say, yes, I’m connected to this. I’m feeling it. Can you imagine it? The bond? The potential? The power?”
In the middle of his pitch, he’d sat down, and like a coiled spring, perched on the edge of the seat, his legs splayed, heels rocking his seat back onto the corners of the legs. His elbows were angled to the tabletop, hands gesturing.
How young I’d been to fall so deeply in love with his enthusiasm. “So this is what you were trying to do with the Eclipse piece?”
“I was trying to exorcise you with that, trying to figure it out so I could get rid of you. But it made me think about what something truly personal could mean as a visual narrative, and then I thought, maybe it’s not a visual narrative. Maybe it’s a multi-media narrative, with one party speaking to the visual and another to the aural.” As if reacting to my expression, he leaned forward even farther. “Before you think anything, both narratives need to fight each other. There needs to be an aesthetic tension until it all goes black and silent. It’s an experience of fullness before death. Pow.”
I sipped my tea. He needed to wait for me to think. I wasn’t fucking him anymore. I didn’t have to jump like a brainless fangirl on every idea he pitched me. Except it was a good idea. Everything about it could be beautiful, a truly moving experience, a three-dimensional cinema of tone.
“You’re not talking about a linear narrative,” I said.
“Of course not.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, what?”
“You should do it. But without my toiletries.”
“Fuck your toiletries. I want
you
.”
I took a long breath through my nose and closed my eyes. I needed to avoid lashing out. He couldn’t have meant it sexually. Couldn’t.
“Let me rephrase that,” he said.
“Please.”
“It’s a collaboration. You do the aural, obviously.”
I pursed my lips and stared into my tea. “Kevin, I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“For one, it would be awkward.”
“Only if we let it be.”
He leaned on the wall, his posture relaxed now that the pitch phase of the process was ended and the artistic seduction phase was about to begin.
“And two,” I said, “I haven’t been able to write a word or make two notes together make sense. I’m stuck.”
“Getting stuck is part of the process”
“It’s a no.”
“So you’ll think about it?”
“Your thirty minutes are up, Kevin.” I stood. “It was nice to see you.”
“Let me walk you out.” He smiled like a man who hadn’t been rejected but had just gotten exactly what he wanted.
CHAPTER 2
Fifteen minutes after Jessica Carnes implied Jonathan’s roughness in bed had broken her wrist, Jonathan had texted me.
—
What did she tell you?
—
I didn’t answer, and I didn’t hear from him again. Debbie, my bar manager and a friend of Jonathan’s, had seen but not heard the exchange and had alerted him while he was in San Francisco. She’d admitted it with no guilt.
“If you saw your face,” she said, “you would have called him too.”
“Sometimes I think you’re more invested in this relationship than either of us,” I’d replied, arranging drinks on a tray.
“I like you both. Jessica, not as much. Now go serve those before the ice melts.”
But I was glad I didn’t hear from Jonathan again. I didn’t want to have some drawn-out phone conversation about what Jessica had told me and why it upset me whether or not he fucked her. I didn’t want excuses. I didn’t want conflicting stories. I just wanted to do what I was supposed to be doing: making music, being at peace with it, watching Gabby, doing my paying job without a sad look on my face or clumsy spills.
So when I got another call from Jonathan, I sent it to voicemail. I was driving. And I didn’t want to talk to him. I knew he was back, because for all my posturing, I was counting the days until his return. He texted, and I ignored it. But when I got to a red light, I had to read it. I was only human.
—
If you’re ending it with me just tell me, ok?
—
Fuck. He had to go there. He had to undercut my delicious spite. I pulled the car over and drafted and redrafted a text. If I saw him before our studio time for WDE tomorrow, I could cut it short. No twelve-hour fuck sessions. Perfect. I needed to avoid hurting myself on his body.
—
Tomorrow afternoon to talk?—
My screen told me he was typing, and I imagined his thumb sliding over the glass, the way it had slid over my body, and I shuddered a little as the car idled in a red zone.
—Public space?—
I started typing, then stopped myself. A public space meant I couldn’t show that I was upset, and if I were honest with myself for a change, I
was
upset. The problem with a private space was that being alone in a room with him meant the conversation could only end one way.
—
Private—
—Would the Loft Club be ok? Not exactly neutral—
—It’s fine. 1pm. Gotta go—
I tossed the phone onto the passenger seat and put the car in drive. I’d scheduled Jonathan three hours before a recording session in Burbank. The session had been set up by Eugene Testarossa at WDE because Gabby and I didn’t have a track between us.
The lunch meeting with Testarossa had gone smoothly and lasted exactly one hour. We were stroked, complimented, and offered gigs and contracts that could never be delivered. I’d become convinced some time during college that the most valuable skill one needed in Los Angeles was the ability to tell the bullshit from the real shit. Only one piece of reality entered the conversation.
“Carnival has a new label,” Eugene said as he finished his salad. He’d taken us to Mantini’s and spent the whole meal looking at the door. “Singer, songwriters. Not folk, but a kind of trip-hop poetry. Lyrically heavy lounge.”
“I don’t have a lot of songs ready,” I’d jumped in. I didn’t want to say I didn’t have
any
have songs, but I couldn’t lie completely without getting busted.
Eugene waved his hand. “We have a songwriter. We need your pipes.” As an afterthought, he turned to Gabby. “And your compositional skills.”
So we’d agreed to cut two songs written by a WDE client at DownDawg Studios in Burbank. Gabby and I were hip-pocketed, meaning they could take a portion of any money we made without committing to represent us over the long term. Gabby giggled the whole way home, but I felt as though I’d just had a fist removed from my ass.
The songs had been messengered the next day. For all Eugene’s pretentions about lyrically driven vocals, they were lame garbage. I was going to have to work twice as hard to make them sound like anything. The last thing I should have done was make a date with Jonathan just before the recording session, but I’d been compelled. It was good timing. I’d have an excuse to leave.
When my phone blooped, I didn’t look at it. If Jonathan and I were on, then we were on. If he had a change, he was going to have to wait for me to accept it. I wasn’t playing games with him. I really needed to get to Darren’s if I was going to talk to him and still get to Frontage on time.
I parked in my driveway and walked down the hill and right on Echo Park Ave. Darren lived in a two-story apartment building with a courtyard in the middle of a giant U. It was exactly like thousands of other buildings in Los Angeles: poorly thought-out, carelessly built, and hopelessly ugly. But the tall hedges and trees in the front gave it the appearance of a quiet hideaway, and its proximity to his damaged sister, who he had to watch if he was going to sleep at night, made it the perfect place for him.
The front gate was chocked open as always by the kids running in and out. I was thinking about how to ask him what I wanted to ask him and what answer I wanted as I trudged up the steps. I passed his window. The TV was on, so he was home. The front door was open, the screen was shut, and inside, Darren leaned on the kitchen doorframe and laughed. It was a relaxed laugh, done with his arms crossed, as an answer to something, and I felt as though I was eavesdropping. I raised my hand to knock, but a man with short sandy hair got up from the couch, and Darren laughed harder as he was engulfed in arms and kisses—wet and passionate—and four robust male arms tangled around each other.
I couldn’t keep silent. “A
ha
!”
They pulled off each other and looked at me.
“Musical theater!” I shouted. “You’re the mystery woman taking him out to shows!”
“Which one is this?” Sandy Hair asked.
They looked at each other, and Darren said, “You coming in or what?”
I went through the door and held out my hand. “I’m Monica. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Adam. Same here.”
We shook. His grip was tight and dry. He was hot, with a little blondish stubble and grey eyes I knew would change color depending on what he wore. I tried to stay calm, but inside, I was giggling with delight. I was happy not only to uncover Darren’s secret, but that he was only hiding happiness.
Adam picked up his jacket. “I gotta go.” He approached Darren and went in for a kiss. Darren kept his arms crossed and turned his face to catch it on the cheek. Adam took him by the cheeks and turned his face, kissing him wetly on the lips. Darren was non-responsive.