Authors: Suanne Laqueur
A smile began to curve up Will’s mouth. “Well, I’ll be fucked,” he said.
“I’ve been fucked for years. Be nice to have some company.”
Will shook his head, looking at the floor. “You’re killing me.”
“I’m sorry,” Erik said. He took the last few steps to close the gap and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I’m really sorry, Will.”
Will muttered some unintelligible French and then seized Erik. Grabbed him in arms and hugged him hard, his hands pummeling and patting until they both landed with a not-so-loving smack on Erik’s ass.
“Jesus,” Erik said. “I said in the face.”
Will pushed him away. “Wanted to do that for years. I best go for it before you disappear again.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Will started unbuckling his belt. “You’re going on your knees.”
Erik sprang back, laughing, and headed for the door.
“Yeah, that’s right. Run away, Fish.”
“It’s what I do,” Erik said. “No watching my ass as I run.”
“High and tight,” Will yelled after him. “Just like a girl’s.”
“It’s a sweet little house,” Daisy said, turning the key in her front door, “but I really bought it for the porch.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Erik said. The porch ran along the whole front of the small house and hugged one side. It was bare now, but he could imagine wicker furniture and flower boxes in spring. Daisy sitting out here with a book and some iced tea. He added himself into the scene, sitting on the steps, playing guitar.
It was too easy.
He was an idiot.
“Come in,” Daisy said.
It looked nothing like La Tarasque, and yet the moment Erik stepped inside, he knew every piece of furniture, every cushion and lamp and knick-knack had been chosen and placed to evoke the essence of her parents’ house. Right down to the Meyer lemon tree by the window.
She gave him a short tour of the downstairs, ending up in the kitchen.
“It’s a carbon copy of your mother’s,” he said, gazing around at the yellow walls, the red-enameled pots on a shelf. A basket of cloth napkins, a bowl of oranges.
“Not exactly. I don’t have her big table.”
“I know, but…” It was obvious and yet he couldn’t explain. It was all so familiar.
Daisy took two beers from the fridge. “Opener is in the drawer there.” She put her head through the loop of a red butcher apron and tied it around her narrow waist.
“What are we having?” Erik said, opening the bottles.
“You kidding? Grilled cheese and tomato soup. The best conversational food out there.”
As Erik sat down at the island, a grey cat gracefully jumped up and onto the counter. “Hello,” he said, holding his fingers out to be sniffed.
“Bastet. My live-in lover.”
Having passed inspection, his palm moved in long, slow arcs over the top of Bastet’s head and down her silvery back. Her eyes were powder blue marbles. “She’s beautiful.”
“She,” Daisy said, “is a standoffish bitch. As are most Russian Blues.”
As if cued, the cat meowed at her. Daisy leaned in, lips puckered, letting Bastet rub and nudge at her face. “But yes, she is beautiful.”
Erik sat and drank his beer, chin resting on his hand between sips. Daisy sliced bread and cheese. Assembled the sandwiches and set them on the hot grill. Warmed up soup. She lit a few candles, turned on some music. His eyes followed her everywhere. He was reminded of their long-ago Thanksgiving, when he had watched her move around the kitchen with her mother. Blithe and confident and happy. As if she had never suffered a day in her life.
“Tell me what happened to you,” he said. “After I left.”
Daisy flipped the four sandwiches on the griddle over. “We tabled this one, didn’t we?”
“I needed to be looking at you.”
She smiled at him before turning to take some plates and bowls from a cabinet. “After you left, two things were going on. Three. One was mourning you. Two was beating myself up for sleeping with David. The third was dealing with the trauma of the shooting.”
“Did it ever come back to you?” he asked. “Anything from the day?”
She slid her spatula beneath the corner of one sandwich, peeked under to see how done it was. “Yes, it did.”
He sat a little straighter on his stool. “It did? Really?”
“I’ll get to that.” She took a pull of her beer. “So, after graduation I got into the corps of the Pennsylvania Ballet. Living the dream, right? I assume so because I can barely remember a thing from those days. I remember waking up every morning being shocked the sun was up.
I’m alive? Again? I thought surely I’d be dead by now.
I wasn’t taking care of myself at all. Not eating, barely sleeping—”
“Were you still doing coke?”
She shook her head, ladling soup into bowls. “But I was smoking like a fiend. God, the chain-smoking. I was a shell. Just going through the motions.” She flipped the sandwiches onto a cutting board and sliced them on the diagonal. “And I got fired.”
“Shut up.” Erik passed her one bowl at a time to be filled up with soup.
“I know. Me, right? The smartest girl in ballet? I blew it. I mean, the tactful way to put it is they didn’t renew my contract.” She rolled one of her shoulders dismissively. “I got fired. Which broke me out of my pity party a little. Unemployment will do that. But dance is a small world, I had some good contacts. I got into the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and I thought it would be good—New York, fresh start. Out of Pennsylvania, away from the memories and the ghosts. This was my second chance. I wasn’t going to screw it up. I started caring for myself better—just in terms of eating healthy and not smoking so much and managing my body. I was dancing really well, and I was starting to teach, too. Just freelance at studios around Manhattan and Brooklyn. And then I ran into Opie one day. I mean John. Dammit.”
He laughed. “See?”
“The artist formerly known as Opie. We were going to the same master class and it was totally random, but totally wonderful at the same time. I felt really lonely and it was good to see an old friend. After class we went for coffee. You know. The four-hour cup of coffee? And it just went from there…” Her voice trailed off. She bit a corner of her lip as she sat down.
“I always liked him,” Erik said, wanting to put her at ease.
“He was good to me,” Daisy said, stirring her spoon around her bowl. “And he was there when the window broke.”
“The window?”
She was in a diner with John, one evening in the hard winter of 1995. Manhattan was getting pummeled with its umpteenth snowstorm. As they sat eating in a booth, a sanitation truck came down the street, perhaps a little too fast. The load of snow in its plow flew up against the front of the diner and broke one of the windows.
“Right behind where I was sitting,” Daisy said. “So one minute I’m eating an omelette, the next minute I am under the table, curled up in a ball, screaming your name.”
She looked at him and he looked back, not making a connection.
“I was screaming your name,” she said. “Because of the broken glass.”
His spoon clattered into the bowl. “The glass,” he said, a hand to his head.
She nodded.
“You saw James shoot the glass of the lighting booth.”
She kept nodding. “I’ve never experienced something so surreal in my life. As soon as the window shattered, it came back to me. Being on the floor of the stage, hearing shots. Knowing I’d been hit. Knowing Will was shot, too. I didn’t know it was James. Just someone with a gun was in the theater. I couldn’t get up. I pushed on my elbow, twisted my head and looked over my shoulder. I saw him shoot out the windows of the booth. And I screamed your name. Then the memory stops. My brain pauses until I woke up in the hospital the next day and they had cut my leg.”
“Holy shit.”
“You remember the nightmares I had? Just vast, dark silence. No people, no sound. Just terrible space?”
“I remember.”
“After the day in the diner, the dreams had imagery. They went from being a black cavern to a crazy hall of mirrors.” She glanced at him. “Your dreams were filled with blood. Mine were filled with broken glass. And then the real breakdown started.”
She took a bite of sandwich and he ate some more of his own dinner. Her silence was thoughtful but she didn’t speak.
“Go on,” he said. “Please.”
“I was obsessed,” she said. “With glass. This horrible compulsion to smash mirrors or break windows.” She smiled at his raised eyebrows. “I wasn’t doing those things. I was just thinking about it. All the time. And listening to Billy Joel’s
Glass Houses.
You know, just before the track ‘You May Be Right’ starts?”
“It’s a breaking window.”
“Right. I’d listen over and over. I made a mix tape once. The sound clip of the breaking window was in between every song. It was crazy. And then one night I smashed a wine bottle in the sink.” She put her forehead in her hand. “God, I haven’t talked about this in a while. I cringe telling it now, it sounds really sick.”
His heart twisted in his chest. He wanted to gather her to him, hold her safe and make it all go away, even the memory of it. But he only made his hand gentle on her arm, and kept his voice calm as he asked, “What did you do?”
She reached to ladle some more soup into her bowl. “Took a piece of the glass and tried to cut my fasciotomy scars open. It wasn’t a conscious thought at the time, of course, but later in therapy we talked about how the surgical procedure had been necessary to relieve the pressure building up in my leg. And in a real sense, pressure was building up again in me. My entire body, my entire being was suffering from compartment syndrome. And I tried to release it.” She looked at him. “I didn’t do a good job. It’s harder to cut through scar tissue than you would think. Plus in my line of work, my legs tend to be visible. It wouldn’t be something I could keep secret. So I started just making these little cuts. Like on my lower back or along my waist or stomach. And then I’d…” She put her hand to her head again, laughing a little. “Oh boy.”
“It’s all right.”
“I’d put straight alcohol on the cuts. Or I’d get this lotion—it was anti-itch and it had menthol in it.”
He cringed himself, his face screwing up in imagined pain. “Jesus, you’d put that on your cuts?”
“Yeah. Anything to make them sting. The harder the better. I used vodka once. Salt another time—how about that metaphor?”
“You were feeding the hurt,” he said. “Just like you and I used to do.”
“If I made it sting bad enough I could actually get off on it. It was just a really deranged time. I was in trouble.”
“Did John know this was going on?”
“Well, naturally he found out.” She glanced at him and her face colored behind an apprehensive smile. “I’m sorry. I’m acting like a teenager.”
“It’s all right.”
“I’ll eventually stop blushing when I talk about the other men in my life.” She ran her fingertips beneath her eyes. “It’s just… When there’s no official breakup, it’s hard not to feel every other man is cheat—“
“No,” he said. “No. That was David. And we’ve talked about him. Everything else, everyone else—it was your life after I left. All right?”
Eyes closed, she let her breath out, nodding her head. “Thanks,” she whispered. Her shoulders relaxed. “When John and I started sleeping together, naturally he saw the cuts. And right away he was on it. But in such a supportive, awesome way. He knew how fragile I was, he knew just how to approach it. It sounds dramatic but he saved my life. I started going to a therapist and doing the dirty work.”
“Digging.”
“Digging. Learning how to stop scarring and punishing myself. It all circled back to forgiveness. I had to forgive myself. I couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t grow or evolve until I did.”
“And is that when you sent me back my stuff?”
She nodded. “My skin healed. The sun came out and it was spring. Things were going really well. I felt better. Felt like myself again. John and I were turning the corner into our relationship. And I still had this box of your stuff. He kind of gave me a soft ultimatum, asked me, ‘When are you going to let go of him?’ And I said, ‘Right now.’ I packed it all up. I called you, just to let the record show I tried one last time.”
“I hung up on you.”
“And I sent it back. And I was fine. I thought I had moved on. Few months passed, I went to Chicago for the
Phantom
auditions and when I came home, John told me you had called.”
Erik flopped sideways, putting his forehead into the crook of an elbow. “Could that conversation have been any more awkward?”
She laughed. “Frankly, no.”
“I swear. As it dawned on me you were living together, I was just a blithering idiot.”
“When he told me you called I was a blithering idiot,” she said. “To be fair he sprung it on me the second I walked in the door. Hi, honey. Erik called.”
“Erik called. He was looking for a necklace. I think he was stoned.”
“I was immediately in tears. Not quietly sneak into the bathroom and cry in a towel. No, right there in the doorway, bag still on my shoulder, bursting into tears. John just walked out of the apartment. He couldn’t even watch. And I couldn’t blame him.” Resting her elbows on the table, Daisy pressed her fingers against her eyelids. “I wanted to kill you,” she whispered. “You finally called. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.”
“You wrote me the postcard.”
“Yeah, with John looking over my shoulder. God, what a mess. We made up but the whole incident put a crack in the relationship. Then I got into the touring production so being separated didn’t help things. It was over within six months. A civil breakup as far as breakups go, but I know he was hurt. I felt terrible. Yet another guy who gave me his all and saved me from the abyss and I broke his heart. And,” she said, widening her eyes and taking on a chipper tone. “I found myself fondling windows and wine glasses again so back into therapy, y’all. Let’s go digging.”
“I’m sorry that call screwed things up.”
She shook her head. “It’s not about you.” She looked at him. “That sounded harsh.”