by CD Reiss
“Yup. Fucking right. Oh. My. God.”
We paused. I set my feet apart so I wouldn’t fall over.
“He likes to what?” Andrea asked.
My mouth tasted like a burned match. I took another swig of beer to get rid of it.
“He likes to hurt me.” I rushed to finish before she had a thing to say. “And I wanted to tell you… to say it first so it’s out there. Whenever a man looks at me, he punishes me. And I let him. I let him.”
“Oh, Carrie.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.”
“When it was nice, I liked it, but now it’s not nice and what I’m telling you…” A bubble of beer came up, making me stop for a second. “What I’m telling you is I don’t think it’s nice anymore, but he’s not stopping and also? He’s a criminal. I thought it was just moving too much money around so whatever, but he had blood on his cuff this one time.”
“Jesus.”
“Praise Jesus!”
“Where are you?”
“Big Apple with my big sister,” I slurred. “Looking for Gabriel, but he’s dead. Like I told you. But I’m calling Peter and telling him it’s over so I don’t have to look at his face or be close enough to…” I gulped. “He can’t hurt me if I’m here. Right? It’s okay to do it over the phone?”
“Yes, Carrie. It’s okay to be safe.”
“Are you happy, Andrea? With Lenny? And the baby coming? Is it good?”
“It’s fine.”
She sounded as if she was sparing my feelings. I didn’t want them spared. I wanted them teased out from the corners I’d stuffed them into.
“No. Tell me. I want to know if there’s hope or if it’s just all shit. Say ‘it’s great,’ or ‘it’s terrible,’ or tell me it’s somewhere in the middle, but I want the honest answer.”
She sighed before taking a long breath as if she needed the time to couch her reply. “Lenny’s everything to me. I’m everything to him. It’s everything.”
“You’re happy?”
“Work sucks.”
“With him, you dork.”
“I’m very happy.”
The front door deadbolt clicked open.
“Good,” I said. “That’s what I needed to hear.”
Margie came in and closed the door. “Hey,” she said, taking off her coat.
“I have to go,” I said into the phone. “My sister’s here.”
“Can you call me after you talk to him?”
“Yep.”
“Please be safe.”
“I will.”
“I love you, Carrie. You’re the sister I never had.”
“I love you too, Andrea. You’re the sister I never knew I needed.”
After hitting the button to hang up, I tossed the phone to Margie, who snatched it out of the air.
“You smell like a brewery,” she said, coming close. “Sam Adams.”
“Winner, winner chicken dinner,” I said, touching the tip of my nose. “You know why?”
“I couldn’t hazard a guess,” she replied dryly.
“I made a decision.” I took the phone from her.
“Let’s hear it.”
“I’m not chasing a dead man anymore.” I pressed the green button. It beeped and gave a dial tone.
Margie picked up my bottle. It was nearly empty. “I’ll get you another.”
She went to the kitchen. I took a deep breath, and with an alarmingly sudden flash of sobriety, I called Peter’s office.
He wouldn’t like hearing this at work. He’d be angry and punish me. He’d make it harder for me to travel without him.
But it was now or the next time I had the nerve. When the line was picked up, my body stopped functioning for a split second.
“Peter Thorne’s office,” his receptionist chanted.
“Hi, Greta, it’s Carrie. Is he in?”
“Left about an hour ago. I can connect you to the car.”
“No,” I said. “Thanks. I got it.”
After I hung up, Margie came back with two open beers and handed me one. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was bad with him.”
Holding up my beer, I said, “Here’s to me not hiding anything from you.”
“Hear, hear.”
We clicked our bottles, and I drank my nerves away before sitting to dial the car. Margie sat next to me.
Having dialed the office first, the car was less nerve-racking.
But there was no answer.
“Okay,” I said, hanging up. “He’s probably already home.”
I tried there and got the machine.
“Does he have a pager?” Margie asked.
“Yeah. But I’ve left enough messages. I don’t want him to panic. He’s probably in a meeting.”
Or meeting a white Honda by the train tracks.
“I’ll sit up with you and wait.”
I put the phone on the coffee table, next to my beer. The room was swoony and soft, edgeless and curved. My mouth was thick and dry and my limbs flopped bonelessly. “Where’s Drew?”
“Work, then rehearsal.”
My body leaned, then dropped in her direction with my head in her lap. “Does he make you happy?”
She put her bottle on the side table and brushed my hair away from my face. “No.”
“No?”
“No. Happy is situational. He’s my companion of choice.”
“I don’t get it,” I mumbled.
“It’s not about happiness.” She stroked my hair pensively. “Not for us. We have history together. Lots of ugly shit we don’t have to explain. That makes us indispensable to one another.”
Even in my drunken haze, I knew she wouldn’t tell me her ugly shit. Not that night. Maybe never.
“So,” I said. “You love him or no?”
“More than I can ever say.”
Her fingers soothed the last of my uneasiness, drawing out drowsy, unfiltered thoughts.
“I thought love was about happiness. It made everything perfect. Blue skies and birds singing. It was music and light. That was Gabriel. He made everything all right and we would have been so happy. So happy if we could just have a chance. And then it happened.” I swallowed hard, remembering the feel of the cobblestones against my head and the blood… all the blood. For months, I saw it whenever I closed my eyes.
“And I loved Peter,” I said. “I know I did. But it didn’t make me happy. He saw that. He knew. It made him crazy because he couldn’t give me what Gabriel could have. And now, no one can give it to me.”
“No one ever could, Carrie.”
“Whenever I hear a violin, I miss him. So I used to hear them in everything, then I just gave up and listened to classical music all the time. It’s like I can’t let it go. Then that piece came out. Ballad of Blades. It made me crazy. It was so… him.” I sat up and pushed my hair out of my face. It was seven forty-five. Too early to go to sleep. “I keep thinking if I hadn’t gone to Venice, he wouldn’t have died. I’d have so much music in my life.”
“You can still have music.” Margie picked up the bottles and stood. “Just not with him.”
While she was in the kitchen, my gaze landed on her stereo. I got up and flipped through her CDs. Rock. Rock. Rock. Margie’s life. I found a Debussy next to Dinosaur Jr. and pulled it out, slapping the case against the heel of my hand. The desire to play classical music so I could think of him was like the hunger for a drug.
Transported to a thoughtless past where possibilities opened like a flower. Where we could have been anything with enough wisdom and work. His work. My life was always going to be artless and gray without the sound of him. No amount of practice would have made me a musician, and hours of listening didn’t fill my life with music.
But that life of troubles and joys had been so close. I’d chosen it, and it had been taken with the fierceness of a knife in the dark. The days and nights of reading while he played the same thing over and over until he got it right.
The
stereo lights blinked to life when I turned it on. I flipped open the CD case.
“What are you playing?” Margie asked as she flopped back on the couch.
“Debussy.”
“Rock out,” she said. “But keep it down. The neighbors have a kid they put down early.”
I wanted to do what I always did. Bring Gabriel back to earth, pretend he was in the next room, practicing as if his life depended on it. Over and over. Better and better. Fortifying his muscle memory until you could hear his proficiency with every stroke, and he practically levitated while I read about the workings of the human mind.
Jung on the synchronicity of meaningless events.
Maybe even Freud on the psychology of music.
Blissfully reading while he practiced and practiced.
I laid the CD in place and let the player pull it in like a tongue.
“Margie,” I said, pressing Play, “how do you get to Carnegie Hall?”
Chapter 24
VENICE, ITALY - 1993
Gabriel wet a washcloth with warm water from the room’s sink and cleaned my body with such sweet tenderness, I fell asleep.
It was night when I woke with a blanket over me. The French doors were open to the sounds of the street, and Gabriel was playing a melody I’d never heard before.
“What is that?” I asked, still sticky with sleep.
“That’s you.” He put down his bow.
“Play it again.”
He placed the violin in the case. “It’s not ready yet.”
I stretched as he snapped the case closed and sat on the edge of the bed.
“I’m hungry,” I said.
“Me too.” He slipped the blanket off me, revealing my naked, satisfied body. “Let’s go eat, then we’ll have another round.”
After eating, we took a walk. The streets of Venice were so narrow and the canals so still in the moonlight, they folded us into safety. We didn’t have parents, families, or expectations. We met where our laughter mingled in the space between us, the places where our skin touched, the rhythm of our footsteps. We found our way around corners and through cobblestone alleys, wandering arm-in-arm into the untrammeled part of the city.
Seemingly enchanted by something going on in his head, he stopped at a little store that was no more than a hole in the wall. The store was half the size of my shoe closet in Malibu, shelves of beauty supplies and makeup stacked behind a window.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Mm-hm.” He took a few crumpled lire from his pocket and spoke in Italian to the woman behind the window.
The woman took a little jar from a rack.
“What are you getting?”
He smirked. One eyebrow twitched with mischief. “Tomorrow night, you’ll find out.”
He handed the woman the money. She gave him the little jar and offered a brush, which he declined.
“Let me see.” I reached for the jar, but he hid it inside his jacket.
“No peeking.”
I pouted. “I hate not knowing.”
“Now you know how I feel,” Gabriel said. “I’m two days into the music program here, and I’ve learned more than I learned in four years at USC.”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“I’m pointing out that we learn when the knowledge is given. Not sooner.”
“You mean you didn’t know everything?”
“Not about music,” he said. “Playing your body though…”
“You might not know everything about that.”
“We’ll see.”
The alley ended in water. Without deciding, we sat on the edge of the short dock, feet dangling, the voices of residents drifting down from windows above.
“What do you want to do?” I asked. “About us?”
He tilted into me, hand braced on the wooden surface behind me. “We didn’t invent this. Romeo and Juliet did.”
“That didn’t work out well.”
“We’ll be patient. You go to school. I’ll finish up here and meet you there.”
“What’s a classical violinist going to do in North Carolina?”
“There are musicians everywhere. We’ll just be who we are. Your parents will see how appropriate I am.”
I had to twist to see his face, blue in the moonlight, darker than dark in the shadows. “Your mother though. If she blames my father for what happened to your father? It’s hard to get over that.”
“You trying to talk me out of loving you?”
“Could I, if I wanted to?”
“No. Never.” He sat up. Down the canal, a lone gondola made its way toward us, the gondolier singing a song that softly bounced off the walls of the narrow street. “There are notes that go together. Play them alone and they’re fine, but play them together and it makes music. No matter the instrument or what part of the world you’re in, they’re linked by a chord. That’s us. We were waiting for the moment the world put us together. I can’t unhear us now.”
We kissed as if we were making that music, notes weaving together in a pattern predicted by science and art. Yet we were doomed by history.
“Buona sera, piccioncini,” the lanky gondolier cried as he approached.
We jumped up as he leveraged his oar so the boat came within a foot of the dock. Gabriel spoke in a broken conversational Italian. The gondolier answered, and Gabriel turned to me.
“He has time for one more tonight.”
“It’s late.”
But he’d already jumped onto the boat and was holding his hand out to me. I stepped on, and he helped me sit on one of the padded benches. We were off in the swish of rippling water. Gabriel chatted with the gondolier, and he agreed to something.
“Grazie,” Gabriel said, reaching for a case at the gondolier’s feet. He unzipped it and took out an accordion.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“He’s agreed to let me do the serenading as long as I knew how to play it.”
“Do you?”
“Not really.” He pulled out the accordion, making it whine. “You’re not going to leave me if I can’t figure this out, are you?”
“I’ll give you a minute,” I joked as he fingered the buttons. “But our gondolier might not.”
“I think I have it.”
The boat turned deeper into the city, away from the crowds, where it was quiet and dark. Gabriel got used to squeezing the bellows and found the right way to press the buttons. Even a goofy grandpa instrument was sexy in his hands.
“What are you going to play?”
“Ah,” he said with a series of confident notes. “I think this.” He hummed to get the note right, then half spoke, half sang the first line. “If I should stay…”
“‘I Will Always Love You’!” I clapped. “I love this one!”
The gondolier laughed.
At the next line, Gabriel’s voice went from timid to assured, as if the words carried a truth that elevated his voice. He would always love me. He got more confident as the song went on and the canals got tighter.
At the last note, a voice came from a window above. “Basta!”
The gondolier called upward, “Scusa!” then turned back to us and put his finger on his lips.
We kissed through laughter like teenagers caught behind the gym. Gabriel put the accordion back, thanked our gondolier, and held me close all the way back to the dock. The swish swish of the boat in the still water was the breath between us, and I felt right, calm, and with him at my side, powerful enough to overcome anything.
The boat pulled up to the dock where we’d started. Gabriel paid the gondolier, helped me off the boat, and we walked hand in hand down the shadowed alley.
“Do you know where we are?” I asked. “I feel lost.”
“I’m not. Come.”
Trusting him, I let him lead me into the darkness of the old city.
Chapter 25
NEW YORK - 1995
The next morning, I made my way to Carnegie Hal
l’s 56th Street entrance.
Because practice was at eight o’clock.
Possibility one: I was seeing meaning where none existed. That was the most likely scenario. Jung’s synchronicity only worked when no other cause for the connection could be found. But there was a connection, and it was my desire to see one. A random note in a library book that looked more like a reminder to some unknown person didn’t bring the dead back to life. “Practice” did not equal “Carnegie Hall” any more than “the road” equaled “chicken crossing.”
Possibility two: The man in the library had left the book not for me, but for himself. It was his note and he had practice at eight on 56th Street. Maybe at Carnegie Hall. Maybe not. The idea that the library man, whose face had been hidden, was Adam Brate occurred to me, but I dismissed it even as I hoped it was true. Adam had seen me through the limo window. Maybe he wanted to see me again and was only telling me where he’d be. I’d enjoyed playing out that idea on the cab ride, but let it go as I got out into the freezing rain.
Possibility three: The ghost of my first love was sending me messages through a living person. I didn’t even have time for that, but in the context of the mind’s push toward hope, I understood it.
Carnegie Hall was closed for the morning. The 56th Street entrance was a small, deeply-set brown door. Just inside it, a man in a black parka sat behind a desk, doing a crossword. His mahogany cheeks were pocked with old acne scars and his fingers were thick around the pen.
“Hi,” I said.
“Good morning, miss.” He laid down the newspaper and picked up a clipboard. “Name, please.”
“Carrie Thorne.”
He glanced at me. “You sure about that?”
My heart sank. I’d let the cab go. Now I would have to hail another one in the freezing rain and go back to Margie’s after a wild goose chase. “Drazen? Carrie Drazen?”
“You got ID?”
Bending my face toward my bag so he wouldn’t see me smile, I took out my wallet. “It all has my married name, which is Thorne.”
“Mm-hm.”
I showed him my driver’s license.
“Looks like you.” He folded the list over the top of the clipboard and handed me the sign-in sheet. “Sign here.”