Pretty Scars

by CD Reiss

“You… you left this… in the…” I held out the money. “The wrong bill.”

  I was making the worst first impression ever. Out of breath. Barely making a complete sentence. I stood straight, trying to get my shit together.

  “No,” she said. “It’s the right one.”

  The insanity of her action played against the sound of her voice. She was gorgeous. I’d established that. But her voice? It was in direct contrast. It was rough and rattled. In five words, she’d ranged an octave and a quarter in the strangest places, phrasing like Bjork with the vocal fry of Axl Rose.

  She’d gone from magnetically pretty to irresistibly interesting.

  “It’s too much,” I said.

  Her eyes were a blue I’d never seen before. Bright, but with a hint of gray. For everything I thought I saw, closer inspection revealed another layer.

  “I’ve never heard anyone play like that,” she said with a shrug.

  “Like what?”

  Was it possible she found me interesting too?

  “Like they were about to levitate.”

  I laughed because she’d said something so unexpected, and because I was a goner. Total fucking goner.

  “Really,” I said, holding out the bill again. At this point, it was more about giving her my number than returning the money. “It’s my pleasure. A dollar would have been enough.”

  “Keep it, I have to get to class.”

  She was turning away. I was going to lose her. I didn’t know her name, and USC was huge. She could be any of forty-four thousand students.

  “I’m going to throw it away if you don’t take it.”

  If I sounded desperate, I was. I gave her friend a desperate look which, in retrospect, could have backfired.

  “Like hell,” Miss Quirky said, taking it. “I’ll stick it in her bag when she’s not looking.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “If you busk again, I’m putting another hundred and I’m going to run away so fast you won’t catch me.”

  Two solid octaves in flats and sharps with fry in the most counterintuitive places. Her looks were one thing, but I could listen to her all day.

  “I’ll catch you,” I said. “Don’t you worry about that.”

  “What if I don’t want to be chased?”

  I started to promise her she couldn’t run fast enough, but that was the kind of thing Babette had gotten fed up with, so I shut the fuck up.

  “Great,” Quirky said, pulling her elbow. “Thanks. Come on.”

  “Bye,” the beautiful girl said.

  What if she didn’t see the number?

  “What’s your name?” I called.

  “Bye,” she said back.

  She didn’t want me to find her. I could accept that. But I could leave the door unlocked if she changed her mind.

  “I’m Gabriel!”

  The only Gabriel at Thornton. She could figure it out.

  “Bye, Gabriel!”

  I could walk her to class. Spend a moment. Listen to the warble and wave of her voice.

  But I left her alone, and that made all the difference.

  “Okay, wait.” Danny was stretched the length of the couch, game controller in both hands. He didn’t stop playing for a single second. “A hundred? US dollars?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you gave it back?”

  “Dude. She’s a student.”

  “And that’s where you wrote your number. Fuck!” He threw his arms up in mourning for a dead video game character. “You get a name?”

  “No.”

  “Who are you?”

  Danny swung his legs off the couch, standing to his full six-foot-six. His straight hair was cut evenly all around, landing at his jaw. When he tucked it behind his ear, the gesture was almost feminine. “I’m making a sandwich. You want?”

  It would be peanut butter and jelly. House favorite.

  “Nah.”

  He walked to the attached kitchen in three steps, the distance made shorter by the size of the apartment and the length of his legs.

  “You still need your night?” he asked, getting the bread from the top of the fridge.

  We kept a schedule of nights for when we had plans with women and needed the other to make himself scarce. I was set that night to be with Nancy, a women’s studies major who, every time I told her to spread her legs, made it a point to tell me it could be the last time I could tell her what to do.

  That worked for both of us.

  But now?

  “Take it,” I said. “I’m going to cancel.”

  “Cool.” Danny’s hair flopped over his face as he made his sandwich.

  “Let me know if she calls tonight.”

  “Who?”

  She’d never told me her name. As if waking from a fog of love-struck stupidity, I remembered our last words. She didn’t just say, “Bye, Gabriel.” She’d waved a big red flag with the words “I’m not calling you” written on it.

  “Jefferson. The girl from Jefferson. Whatever she says. You’ll know.”

  He tucked his hair behind his ear as he looked at me. “What’s with you?”

  “With me what?”

  He cocked his head before wrapping up the bread. “You look like a guy who never got laid before.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Whatever. Gerry and I are gonna start looking at apartments in Silver Lake. Last chance to room with us as free men.”

  “Whatever. Gerry and I are gonna start looking at apartments in Silver Lake. Last chance to room with us as free men.”

  Danny was eager to start a life as a starving Los Angeles musician, but my career was elsewhere.

  “Pass.”

  “Your loss.”

  “I’ll crash when I’m in town.”

  He came back to the couch, lunch in hand, and picked up the controller. He started the game again and played with the sandwich wedged in his mouth.

  Chapter 30

  CHICAGO - 1995

  I had six rules.

  One: My face was my own. If I never showed it in public, I wouldn’t have to explain it. That meant scarves, sunglasses, hats. It meant being outside only when necessary, and usually at night. It meant I was a pain in the ass to work with.

  Two: The name Gabriel Marlowe was forbidden. Anyone who worked for me worked for the Adumbrate Corporation of the Cayman Islands and anyone who spoke to me called me Adam.

  Three: Separation of roles. My manager didn’t know my agent. My assistant lived in Chicago but worked from home. She didn’t ask questions, but when she was in trouble, I helped her with her tuition. She never met my driver, Herv, who agreed to never look at my face, even when I was right in front of him.

  Four: My mind was a pressure-sealed container with a single valve. I was never, ever to think of Carrie Drazen unless I was playing Ballad of Blades, when thinking of her was unavoidable. It was composed with the rise and fall of her voice to tell our story. Once the bow left the strings, the valve was shut again.

  Five: Control the mental narrative. Even in my mind, my dreams, the subconscious river of my thoughts, I was not allowed to complain about losing her.

  Six: Los Angeles belonged to the Drazens. Stay away.

  It all started when I broke rule six and played Dorothy Chandler Pavilion right smack in the center of the Drazen’s LA.

  She was there.

  Right there.

  Third row center, casting her own light. Finally summoned by the concerto I’d written for her.

  I thought I’d never see her again, but when I did, she was like a magnet. She drew me, but more than that, she changed the shape of everything inside me.

  Grief became hope.

  Despair became courage.

  Without thinking, I played something for her, only her.

  How else would it all go to shit?

  Playing that song was foolish. Reckless. Unavoidable. I should have made a rule against it, but how could I have known she’d slip through my defenses?

>   “I got the Lincoln Center contracts,” my manager, Lori, said from the other side of the phone. She was a forty-two-year-old shark who wore misleadingly feminine pastel suits and didn’t care if I called her in the middle of the night about an unruly cameraman in Latvia. “They added a rider. You’re liable for licensing and legal fees as a result of you going off-script with random pop songs.”

  “It wasn’t random.”

  “Sure,” she said. “I guess it could be worse. Everyone’s talking.”

  A year ago, I would have been happy with that. Last week, even. But now? I had the sense that my entire life after Venice was going to fall between the night I’d spotted her in the third row and everything after.

  “I’ll sign off on the Lincoln Center rider.”

  “Good. Lighting and sound design are on the twenty-third.”

  Impatient, I got to the one thing I wanted to ask. “Did you get anything on what I asked about?”

  “Carrie Drazen?”

  Hearing her name spoken aloud vibrated inside me. “Yes.”

  “Married to Peter Thorne.”

  “That guy,” I grumbled.

  “He works for her father, but before that, he ran Anchor Savings and Loan right into the ground. He’s being investigated by the SEC. It doesn’t look good for him.”

  My fist clenched and unclenched as if looking for a bow to hold. The scar on my neck ached the way it always did when I was irritated.

  “Who is she?” Lori asked. “To you, I mean.”

  I’d made promises, and I kept my promises. Always.

  But now?

  This one would be hard to keep.

  “No one,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

  “Fine,” she said without suspicion or concern. My secrets were mine and she knew it. “Let me get you a copy of the Lincoln Center rider before you go.”

  New York. Far away from her.

  Exactly what I needed.

  Chapter 31

  VENICE, ITALY - 1993

  The blackness took a shape I understood not as a sticky, heavy mass around me, but a deep dreamless sleep I sometimes woke from. I heard voices far away, then closer. But even fully conscious, my eyes wouldn’t open and my mouth wouldn’t move.

  In those wakeful hours, I made music. From the way her hair twisted in the breeze, I wove melodies. From her voice in the throes of ecstasy, I chose the scale. From her heartbeat against my ear, the throbbing percussion. From the stages of our time together, starting at the moment we met to these hours of separation, I constructed movements. When I fell into unconsciousness, I woke to darkness, remembering everything, and what I forgot, I rebuilt, adding more until I came to the music I couldn’t avoid. The accordion on the gondola. The dark street. The cobblestones hard on my back, and the flash of a knife in the moonlight.

  My ambition to get well came from my desire to play the Ballad of Blades for her.

  My Italian was rudimentary, but I could catch the doctors and nurses saying scarring and blood loss. When the English language reached my ears, my brain fired and the haze was shot through with sunlight.

  “Don’t be alarmed at the bandages. He’s stable.”

  “Is he in pain?” My mother’s voice quickened my heart, and a stinging erupted behind sightless eyes.

  “No, signora.”

  “Gabriel, my angel,” she said. “I’m here now. It’s going to be okay.”

  My voice box rumbled her name with the hum of a mental orchestra behind me.

  Carrie Carrie Carrie

  But my lips were sealed and my jaw was immobilized.

  My voice and the music were silent.

  They prepared me for what I’d see when the bandages came off. The sharpest points of pain were the sites of the worst damage.

  My eye.

  My cheek.

  My jaw.

  My throat.

  They all felt as if the knife was still in them, and as the doctors spoke, my mind searched for Carrie’s voice, but it never came.

  Chapter 32

  CHICAGO - 1995

  How easy is it to lie to your mother?

  If you tell her you’re giving music lessons to kids in your home, why wouldn’t she believe you? Especially if your face is so shameful you can’t leave the house without covering it? Especially if she’s as ashamed as you are?

  Lying was easy enough.

  I could, but that didn’t answer the question of why I didn’t tell her I was Adam Brate.

  Adam was everything she dreamed I’d be, but without my father’s name.

  His success was in spite of the Drazens, but it was also caused by them.

  The anonymity was necessary, and it would hurt her the most.

  I couldn’t bear telling her what her dreams for me had cost us both. I kept promising myself I’d tell her, but she wouldn’t react the way I needed her to. She wouldn’t jump for joy and tell me how proud she was. There would be questions with answers she didn’t like.

  So, payment for my cowardice, I gave her money and bought her things, but not enough to tip my hand.

  “I had the most interesting conversation with a man in the coffee shop,” she said, sitting across from me. The coffee shop was the one she managed in Wicker Park. As a lonely extrovert, she found comfort in being the chatterbox at work.

  “Really?” I cut into the steak, finding it pink and perfect inside.

  “He said he went to Thornton when you were there. Turns out he knew you!”

  Looking at my plate, I chewed, trying to hide my expression. I didn’t like old contacts. They tended to ask questions I didn’t have lies for. “What was his name?”

  “Danny.”

  My old roommate.

  “Tall guy?” I asked.

  “He was sitting, so I don’t know. But he asked what you were doing. How you were.”

  You couldn’t miss Danny’s height whether he was sitting, lying down, or curled up in a fetal position. He wore it like a skin. That was my first clue something was wrong.

  Still, I asked, “How’s he doing?”

  “He was in town on business. I told him you were teaching and he said he’s working for some record company and travels a lot. I gave him your number. I hope that’s all right?”

  “Mom.”

  “What? He’s with a record company—”

  “I haven’t seen him since USC.” I pointed at my face as if it was the subtext she wasn’t getting.

  “I didn’t tell him about the accident.”

  The “accident” was a mugging in a Venetian alley. Mom had flipped it to a strange misfortune the same way she called Dad’s suicide a “death.” I never corrected her. She needed her illusions as much as I needed my lies.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “We talked about how talented you were.”

  “Before I was a grotesque freak?”

  She put down her fork. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “You’re the one who didn’t tell him.”

  “So? Neither did you.” She balled up her napkin and put it next to her plate. “I’m sorry if I wanted to talk about your talent. I’m sorry if fate dropped a record executive in my lap and I tried to use it to your advantage.”

  I felt like a defensive teenager again, trying to find fault with my elders without dealing with my own shortcomings. And like a teenager, I was helpless to get myself out of it.

  “That part of me is gone.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not. You’ll always be a musician. I didn’t get used to the idea so you could turn around and deny it.”

  I could deny having the ambition to pursue music further, but Adam Brate’s ambition made it a double-stacked lie. I was tired of lying. I was going to tell her the truth. Soon. Maybe today.

  “That Drazen girl.” Mom put her napkin back in her lap. “She messed with your head.”

  Today was not the day for truth. She was really running for the third rail. Why now? Was it this visit from Danny? This miraculo
usly-not-noticeably-tall Danny who was probably on an unmasking assignment for a sleazy paper?

  “Do you need help getting the Christmas lights down?” I asked.

  “Sometimes I think it’s her you’re upset over. The way she ditched you when you needed her. She was shallow. All she cared about was beauty she could see. Like that whole family. They’d kill to keep up appearances.”

  “Mom. Stop.” What I couldn’t say was that she was just as concerned about appearances, but not powerful enough to destroy lives over them. Nothing about that would help.

  “I know this therapist.” She stabbed a piece of meat. “She comes into the shop on Tuesdays.”

  “I don’t need therapy. And before you even start, I don’t need a dating service or a matchmaker or anything.”

  She left her fork on the plate with the meat still on it, staring at the napkin in her lap.

  “What, Ma?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Just say it.” It was wrong of me to demand honesty from her when I had so little truth to offer her. But the facts wouldn’t help her feel any better.

  “All I want is for you to be happy.”

  “I am happy.”

  “You should have a family. A wife who loves you.”

  I sighed. There would be no wife. No children. Not without Carrie, who existed behind a wall of vows, contracts, and money. My mother needed to accept my solitude the way I had. Isolation was the defining characteristic of my life, and it hadn’t killed me yet.

  “I have you,” I said.

  “You do. Always.”

  “I have friends,” I lied. “I have my students.”

  “You can play again. Get out there. Do some composition?”

  I had to give her something to hold on to. She’d never been ambitious for herself, but for her children, she strove for great heights.

  “I’ve been thinking of it,” I said cheerfully.

  We continued on a lighter note, and I fed her hope.

  But inside, my mind turned over the possibility that Danny wasn’t really Danny at all.

  I had a message when I got home. Female. Identified herself as Danny Mankewicz’s office and left a New York number with a request to call back. Click. Beep.