by CD Reiss
The damaged artery in my neck beat so hard, I thought my sutures would break.
My father hadn’t been weak, but nothing I could do would prove otherwise. He was dead and Declan Drazen was alive, looking at me from the winner’s perch.
“Get out.”
“Don’t take it personally,” he said. “It is what it is. No insult was intended.”
“Get out.” My voice dropped an octave but squeaked at the end as if it couldn’t sustain a show of strength.
“I haven’t told you what I came to tell you.”
“Say it and leave.”
He nodded, satisfied with the terms. “My daughter wanted to make sure you were all right. Once she knew you were alive and well, I told her what you…” He waved toward my face. “I described your injuries. At first she was strong about it. She made a compelling case to see you, but then… let’s just say she’s no lion. She’s a lamb.”
I wasn’t going to fall apart in front of him, but setting my jaw hurt like fuck.
The woman on the other side of the curtain moaned loudly, shocking me out of self-pity.
“I can see it in what’s left of your face,” Declan continued. “You think you can power through me and get to her. But she’s my lamb to protect. Don’t make me defend her.”
“I can fix my face. There’s no cure for you.”
“You can fix your face? With what money? And after how many years? By the time you look like a man again, she’ll be married with children. But…” He stood, holding the envelope in both hands as if it was now the most important thing in the room. “Once the best plastic surgeons in the world are finished with you, you can find someone else. A nice, pretty lamb. Maybe even a lion who won’t leave you when you need her.”
He dropped the envelope on the tray next to my bed. It was fat with heartbreak and loneliness. I’d been rejected like a warped bow. Unusable. Substandard. A mistake to be forgotten.
“Let me know,” he said before turning to leave.
“Wait,” I said as I picked up the envelope.
“Yes?” He turned back to me and took a single step in my direction.
I untwisted the string fastening and pulled out a contract.
“I still hate you,” I said, scanning it. There was a place to check my option. A normal face or a career. Neither with the woman I loved.
“Understandable.” He handed me a pen.
I took it and checked my choice.
If she didn’t want me, what could I do? Chase her down? Force her to want a grotesque mask of a man?
“And I’m going to fucking bleed you.” I found the amount offered to start my career and added a zero to the end.
“Oh, really?” Declan said, sounding bemused.
“No,” I said before changing the first digit to a nine. “Want to patronize me again?”
“I don’t think I can afford it.”
“Initial it.” I gave him the pen, and he initialed the change.
I’d checked the box to choose my music instead of my face, leaving myself unlovable for another woman, then I signed her away, restricting her to my past as she’d banished me from her future.
He signed in his space and folded the contract back into the envelope. “I wish you well. Truly.”
I turned to the window, where the black night and the light in the room met, reflecting my face on the glass. “Turn the light out when you leave.”
In the reflection, he flipped the light switch down before he closed the door behind him. My face dissolved and the gray sky appeared in the window.
My roommate moaned.
The machines beeped.
I was alone.
Chapter 36
NEW YORK - 1995
Music works because the tones fall into patterns we’re hardwired to find pleasing. Then culture steps in, refining the expectations until we become consumers with expectations of what music is, how it should sound, what marks need to be hit, and what conventions should be present. That’s why when people hear a musical genre they aren’t familiar with, they’re apt to say, “It doesn’t sound like music to me.”
Music tells us what we already believe.
A con man does the same thing when what you already believe is false. He learns who you are by observing you and, with a sharp sense of human nature, feeds you your own lies, giving you a way out of the trap of faulty assumptions.
It didn’t occur to me that Declan was lying, because he told me what I knew was true.
Carrie couldn’t love an ugly man. She’d never settle for someone damaged.
Wholeness cannot love brokenness.
Beauty can only love beauty.
A weak lamb loves weakly.
That was my truth until she appeared in the car window, unwinding her scarf to expose objective perfection.
And it was her. Bounded by the dark frame of the car door, it was her. Even with cold pink at the tip of her nose and flecks of snow on her red lashes, it was the same Carrie I’d only known in California sun, her breath now condensing into winter smoke and her ginger mane circling her head like a fire.
The first time she opened her mouth, I was too stunned to accept her face and my name together. Then she shouted it again with such fierce intention that the sound pierced the glass, driving into my heart, silencing a reply with the bang and crack of my shattering reality.
How had I not seen it?
She was a lioness.
I told Herv to turn the car around and out of the lot. The snow slowed us enough to make following her to the library discreet. When she went in, I stopped myself. My face was a wild card. She might recoil.
No. She would freak out. Who wouldn’t? The patch over my left eye couldn’t hide the destruction of my cheek or the scar that closed the corner of my mouth.
Like a regal, unpredictable animal, she could not be approached from the front.
The guard was distracted enough to let me slip into the research section, and I spotted her right away, red hair flowing over my coat as her fingers brushed the book spines the way they’d brushed the bones of my back on our quiet nights together. I ducked away when she turned.
What was I going to do about this?
Nothing?
Not an option. She was mine. She’d always be mine. Even if she didn’t know it. I played her song every night, and every time I did, I molded the air into the shape of her.
Pinching a piece of scrap paper from the librarians’ desk, I scrawled a note she’d only understand if she remembered me, and I stuck it inside a book on music.
I sensed her on the other side of the shelves. Through the space in the stacks, I saw her chin tilting down to read as she caressed pages like a devotee. That piece of her, so close, was all I needed.
I pushed the volume through the space above the books before I slipped away.
A hundred things had to go right. She’d have to pick up the book. Read the note. Understand it.
None of it worked unless I was on her mind. The old me. The normal boy with brown eyes and a future with her. The one who hadn’t sold his love.
I didn’t like looking at my reflection, but I’d cut myself shaving too many times trying to avoid it.
In the hotel, leaning into the bathroom mirror, I said all the usual, horrible things to myself because they were true. There was objective beauty, which meant there was objective ugliness, and I was looking at one of the two. And to some extent, it had been a choice.
No reconstructive surgery. No glass eye. No skin grafts. Nothing. This was me. This was my face. Not one dime of Declan Drazen’s money went into people seeing me. Every penny left after I paid for living expenses and whatever I could get away with giving my mother went into making sure I was heard. I built a persona, an apparatus to hide it behind, and a career.
After a while, the idea of plastic surgery seemed like an insult to what I’d built and a dishonor to what I’d lost.
I realized I’d decided to break my contract the moment I played
“I Will Always Love You” in LA. My resolution had grown from an irritating grain of sand to a pearl that got so big I cracked open. I had no room for the ring on her finger or the promises I’d made. I only had to consider how I would do it, and full front, in public, wouldn’t work.
I took off the patch. Would I be okay with her seeing the deep recess where my eye had been? The sewn-shut eyelid with the lashes preserved so that one day a glass replacement could be inserted? I touched it. Would she want to? Would she run her fingers along my face and stop where no hair grew? The wound on my neck had damaged the nerves so badly, even I couldn’t touch it without a buzzing pain. Would she feel cheated?
Would she ever leave a handsome husband for this minefield of knotted tissue?
“Can you walk away?” I asked my half-normal reflection.
I had to embrace the possibility that nothing would change, but I had to know.
Maybe it wasn’t a reporter looking for me, but an investigator.
That rich girl wound up on a New York street corner, peeking into the tinted window of my limo. And maybe an investigator had shown up looking for me.
It hadn’t been an accident or coincidence.
It was all so clear, I could barely pay attention to the conversation.
She didn’t just happen to be on that corner in a blizzard, knocking on my window and saying my name. She’d found me.
She was always inquisitive.
Maybe playing that song for her had ignited no more than curiosity about her old college love. Maybe she wanted to catch up over coffee. What then?
If she’d banged on the car window in a snowstorm so she could make small talk, I’d eat my cello.
“I’ll walk away,” my reflection said back. “I’ll respect her, and I’ll leave her alone.”
It would leave me solo forever, but I wouldn’t try to capture a lioness who didn’t want to be caged.
But if she didn’t open the book and meet me at Carnegie Hall? What then? Had I been too cryptic?
When I left the bathroom, Cherie called. “I spoke to Danny Mankewicz.”
“Him? Or his assistant?”
“Him.”
“Did he admit he was a reporter?”
“No. He said he was a record exec.”
His story was consistent. Maybe it was him? I’d cut off everyone but my mother after Venice, but with the possibility that my friend was real and not the result of diligent, if sneaky, reporting, I smiled at the thought of a cup of coffee.
“When are we meeting?”
“I said you were really tightly booked with students. He said fine, he’s home in New York anyway, but he’ll be in Chicago March fourth.”
“I’m in Seattle that week.”
“Right. I didn’t say you’d be gone, but I asked for a backup date. He suggested the following week. Saturday the twelfth.”
“San Francisco.”
Weird that he’d only suggest days Adam Brate was scheduled to play. I wanted to see him, but the real him. I’d almost been tricked into a meeting before.
A reporter would know Adam Brate’s schedule. If Gabriel Marlowe agreed to meet him when Adam was supposed to be across the country, Danny would show up. A reporter would reschedule.
“Call him back,” I said. “Tell him the fourth is okay.”
“You’ll be in—”
“I know. Just tell him that. Tell him I look forward to hearing all about how he leveled up in Chrono Trigger.”
She said “Chrono-trigger” as she wrote it down as if she’d never heard it before.
“Tell him if he can’t make it, he should call me in my hotel room here. 2220.”
“Got it.”
“I’m going to make it up to you for helping me.”
“Okay?”
“When I get back, I’ll work with you on Dvorak. In person. I’ll tell you everything I know.”
“Really?” she squeaked. “In person?”
“Yes, but Cherie?”
“Yes?”
“I’m a hard teacher.”
“Oh my God, please be the worst, hardest ever! Thank you, thank you!”
I hung up, smiling even though I’d broken two of my rules. She knew my name and she was about to see my face. But I didn’t feel as if I had a choice. To an extent, exposing myself was unavoidable. All I had to do was keep it to a minimum. If she was going above and beyond the call of duty, I could too. Cherie couldn’t have made those calls without knowing my name, and those calls were the first notes in what sounded like a much larger piece.
First though, I needed to know if I could expect a call with a bullshit Danny.
Thank God he wasn’t named Smith.
New York 411 had no Daniel or Daniel Mankewicz listed. He could easily have an unlisted number, but that was out of my control.
Los Angeles 411 had two listings for Danny Manckewicz and one for Daniel Manckewicz.
On the second try, a voice I recognized came through.
“Hello?”
“Hello, is this Danny?”
“Sure is.”
“This is Gabriel—”
“Hey! You dumb fuck, where have you been?”
“Around. I heard you were a big shot record executive.”
“Me? Hell, no. If you meet one, give him my number.”
It wasn’t him hunting my mother down in a coffee shop.
“Man,” Danny said. “I was worried about you when I didn’t hear from you. You still with that rich girl?”
“No,” I said, stopping before I gave an explanation I’d want to change later.
“Whatever.” He blew her off like a summer fling that wouldn’t tolerate shorter days. “You in LA? If you’re still here, we have to get together.”
Rule Six was already shot. My problems had gone from wide, high-stakes methods of hiding my identity to the mundane avoidance of a day with an old friend. I didn’t have time for it. Not the small talk or the explanations about my face. “There’s a lot going on…”
“No excuses. I have a place in Silver Lake. Big yard. Two Great Danes you can saddle up and ride.”
I could either give him a definite no or bite the bullet and see him. Go to his place in Silver Lake. Take a dog for a spin around the block. Act like a normal guy for an afternoon.
“Things happened since USC,” I said. “I look different.”
“I wasn’t into you for your looks.”
We laughed because of course, why would it matter? Besides the sad story that came with my scars, my face was irrelevant. A friend is a friend, and I’d been friendless too long.
“Then let’s meet.” I said.
“I need a date. Don’t do that LA thing where you make promises you aren’t going to keep.”
“The twenty-ninth. Brunch?”
“You’re on. Whoa, whoa,” he said at the sound of dog nails scratching on the floor. “Down, Killer. Bring your violin. I want to hear what you’ve been working on. We can do a classical jam.”
“I don’t—” I stopped.
There was no explaining why I’d moved to cello without telling him about the alley in Venice. And that would have to wait until the dogs were calm and I had a beer in me. But I would tell him. Besides the people who didn’t need to be told because they had been there in the aftermath, like my mother, I hadn’t told anyone from my life before, and I knew Danny would be the first.
“I’ll bring my instrument.”
After hanging up with Danny, I had Cherie cancel my flight home. I told my manager I was staying in New York until she heard otherwise. I gave Herv a cash bonus to watch Margie’s apartment building. If Carrie left with suitcases, I wanted to know, and if she hadn’t hired Fake Danny to find me, I needed to know who had.
She wanted to see me. She’d hunted me down. Whether it was out of curiosity or love didn’t even matter. Whether she’d changed her mind about being with an ugly man or not was beside the point. I wanted to see her one last time. I wanted to hear her tell me she love
d her husband with tones that clicked together in truth.
I needed to hear it from her lips.
Standing at the high windows, looking over the gray-sludge-frosted Manhattan rooftops, I imagined breaking my contract. Doing what I’d dedicated myself to avoiding. Gauging her reaction. Hearing no more than relief that her curiosity had been satisfied. Making small talk about future plans that didn’t include each other.
Then what?
Maybe Declan Drazen would sue me. We’d settle. Maybe he’d destroy me out of spite. But I’d have no more reason to be a nameless cellist. Only shame would keep my face hidden.
Shame was as exhausting as anonymity, and I was tired. Very tired. The burden was as heavy as the wet snow on the rooftops, and as temporary. Everything changed. Seasons plodded forth, one after the other, whether I was ready or not. Walls crumbled and secrets were revealed. Truth had a way of following a man, hiding under the thick pads of snow until spring. Carrie was the warm sun, and I’d extended winter as long as I could.
I had to find a way to walk away from that night in Venice. Acknowledge it and move on, like she had. Let the snow melt and reveal the ground I walked on.
I spent the rest of the afternoon making a deal to get me into Carnegie Hall the next morning.
How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
In the fugue between coma and consciousness, darkness and half-sight, you compose a violin sonata that turns into a concerto. Every note is a hymn to a moment with a woman you love.
You try to play it, only to find you can’t hold a violin under your neck.
You pick up the pieces of your broken heart, put them back together with spit and chewing gum, and rewrite the entire thing for cello, because the concerto has a life of its own, even if the love it was written to describe is dead.