There was one person on the bench seat across from me. He was a totally nondescript man. I glanced at him with a perfunctory smile. I was shocked to see him welling up. He stared past me, out the opposite window, at the landscape surging by, the weather vanes combing my hair; I doubt he was aware of me as anything more than a neighboring warmth, a shape against which his private thoughts abutted. They must have been awful, whatever these thoughts were, or at least deeply tiring, or perhaps beautiful, for tears formed in his eyes and rolled in silence down his cheeks. A low-flying plane razed his scalp, and the city kept on rolling past: smokestacks, steeples, lookout posts. I didn’t know what I could say to him. I thought of a time, in the good days, when Oola and I sat in a park; where or when scarcely matters, just that it was a park, probably sunny, with babies and dogs. Those seedlings that spin to the ground like toy tops were falling from the trees, landing in the grass around us. “Whirligigs,” I’d said. That was what we called them in grade school, chasing and catching them on the playground. But Oola shook her head. “Kamikazes.” That was the name she’d been taught as a child, by whom she didn’t know; at school they never chased them but bore somber witness to their flight. Miles from home, we watched the seedlings fall to earth, either a jig or suicide.
I was so distracted by this memory, and by the crying man, that I didn’t notice the other man get on the train. He sat down heavily beside me. He reeked of BO. He wore a dirty brown tracksuit and a worn Giants cap. Lank once-blond hair leaked out from it. He beamed at me: tuna salad and tobacco joined the spice of his sweat.
As neutrally as possible, I scooched an inch away. Chuckling softly, he shadowed me.
“Smile, darlin’,” he cooed.
The only thing I could think to say was, “Why?”
He was startled for one pure moment; his face went blank. Then, rapidly, his expression soured. “Faggot,” he muttered, and scooched away. He nodded solemnly at a nearby nurse, who didn’t look up from her Newsweek. I looked around the train car, which was suddenly packed. There was barely enough room to stand, for the nurse to flip her pages. When did all these people get on? I wondered. Then something strange happened, without fanfare or forewarning: As if choreographed, every passenger turned to look at me. They moved in perfect unison. Their expressions were neutral, their eyes weirdly bright. The nurse in her scrubs; an underdressed tween with impeccable brows, iPhone raised; a crust-punk couple dressed alike in MEAT IS MURDER T-shirts; the dotting of businessmen all through the car; a huddled woman and her seeing-eye dog, who looked too. The crying man, with cheeks still wet. A handful of babies, peering out from their strollers, hushed and tolerant. What gives? I wanted to say. I stared back and things got stranger.
There was a Hare Krishna in the corner, nodding as if he’d planned the whole thing. A skinny boy in a wifebeater picked a scab, held it out. A Mick Jagger lookalike gave me the eye. The greasy man next to me giggled, petted the dog, which had not ceased to hold my gaze. When the nurse blinked, everyone blinked. When she scratched her elbow, fifty others followed suit. The babies didn’t make a sound; sleepy moms picked their collective teeth. The hot tween filmed the whole damn thing, dislodging a wedgie with her other hand. She was Insta-famous, I could tell. I put my hands over my face. I’m fine! I tried to shout. Fuck off! Instead, I rose, using the identically firm bodies of businessmen to hold myself steady. They said nothing but kept staring, as if watching the news. One looked for all the world like Tay, cleaned up and stuffed into a suit, and I resisted the urge to touch his face, to ask for explanations. I said excuse me to the punks, who flicked split tongues at me. We were approaching a station whose name I couldn’t quite read. All fifty heads turned on a single axis to watch me move across the car. One baby raised its fist, as if in salute.
The doors shuddered open and I leapt onto the concrete before the train had stopped moving. I ran to the opposite side of the platform before looking back. My persimmon, forgotten in the heat of the moment, rolled off the bench and onto the floor. It made the tiniest of thuds. As the train revved to life and the doors whooshed shut, I could still feel them watching. One half of the car mouthed the words to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen”; the other half cocked its singular brow. Excuse YOU, I managed to whisper, as the back window of the train car receded into fog and a toddler pressed his dirty face against the glass, still leering. I scrounged for a cigarette, hoping to calm myself. My hands shook too badly to light it.
What the fuck was that? I wanted to ask, but there was no one around to answer me.
My plan for the day was effectively ruined.
I had to wait an hour and a half before the next train came. It was packed with terse commuters, clinging to the handholds and exposing sweat stains on their suits. At least they kept their eyes averted, didn’t make a sound. At Millbrae I couldn’t remember which level I’d parked on and got lost in the massive garage. By the time I got to Gilroy, all the restaurants were closed. The smell of garlic taunted me. I drove to McDonald’s, but at the drive-thru I panicked.
“How can I help you?” the genderless voice on the intercom, always already annoyed, intoned.
The only thing I could think to order was a medium-sized milkshake.
“What flavor?” the voice, near to dying of boredom, pried.
“Vanilla,” I croaked. I immediately regretted it. Neither Oola nor I liked vanilla things. I parked on the side of the road and chugged it, punishing myself. The stomach cramps were swift and cruel. It took all my strength not to toss the cup out the window and into the blued garlic fields.
When at last I got home, it was half past eleven. I felt filthy. The only thing I wanted was a long, hot bath. I decided to have that glass of wine and soak in Oola’s outdoor tub until I nodded off. The combination of sharp night air and piney water might restore my sense of self, I hoped, and wash the feeling of the gaze, steady and implacable, away.
I was stark naked but for a towel on my head, a glass of wine in one hand, rooting through the upstairs closet in search of bath salts when I found it, or, so it seemed, it found me. The foul thing clocked me, like a big fuzzy bat. With a yelp of surprise, I picked up the object—I knew, almost immediately, that it was a diary. I didn’t think, however, that it would be Oola’s; I didn’t think that I could overlook something so major. I figured, at first, that it belonged to one of the cabin’s former residents, a friend of my aunt’s, some mixed-media artist with a fondness for kitsch, one of those New York semi-socialites who wear turquoise and zigzags and overuse the word scrumptious. But it was the kind of diary one buys in a dollar store; it even had a tiny, and imminently snappable, lock.
Cackling to myself, I carried the wine and the diary back out to the tub. There are few things more thrilling than reading somebody else’s diary. I grabbed a flashlight from the kitchen and left all the lights burning; their glow just barely reached the tub, illuminating a sliver of bathwater. Hopping inside, I felt like an astronaut, with the tub as my spaceship; beyond the circle of house lights loomed deep space, and as long as I leaned toward the warmth, keeping my knees in the yellowy section of water and balancing the diary on the tops of my knees, I was safe. For this reason, I barely moved as I read it. I didn’t turn or look around, as that would break the spell. I even stifled my gasps, and the night seemed to as well, turning down its usual sawing of crickets, tiny twigs breaking, the rush and event of far-off waves.
I read, in self-contained astonishment, what turned out to be Oola’s diary from her freshman year at Curtis. This was, of course, shortly after she’d met Le Roy in the bakery. She was eighteen: brimming, skinny, and lewd. Judging by the tone of her entries, she’d mellowed out considerably by the time, four years later, we met. Or perhaps this was how she chose to narrate her love, to tell the crazy story of crazy deeds to herself—a harried, hyper, heady tone was only appropriate for this time in her life, when her sense of composure was thrown out the window, when she felt and said and wanted things that even later, at the time of
writing, with all the benefits of retrospection in her incense-scented dorm room, she couldn’t quite explain to herself. Even the look of her writing—scraggly cursive with whole lines blacked out, plowing into the margins and frequently caps-locked—betrayed a young heart full to bursting.
It was, of course, more than I’d ever received of Le Roy, save for the tidbit she’d told me that day on the beach. It was also the most that I’d heard her talk about music. I met her almost immediately after she’d taken a break from piano; since few of our memories together revolved around her type of music (she said she was sick of it), it was easy to forget that the piano had been, at one point, her whole life. From what I gathered, she did well at Curtis, but she wasn’t the best student, and this weighed on her. She was renowned in her peer group for her ability to play softly; that was her specialty, the most pianissimo hand. Her claim to fame was Ligeti’s pppppp. I also remembered this butterfly touch, put to different use in the cool of so many bedrooms. Our kinkiest encounters—including our stint in Arizona, when I Vaseline’d her scars—seemed more chilling than steamy, better accompanied by crickets and miscellaneous night sounds than by music, though no less erotic for this restraint. Her touch was so exact when at last it made contact that it seemed almost eerie, as if she had access to knowledge about me and my body that even I didn’t, and could never, know; perhaps this was due to her rigorous training in softness. She knew how to keep people on the edge of their seats. What this means, she wrote, is that I can only play sad things. What she lacked in technique, she made up for in feeling. She was constantly berated for showing up late and had been locked out of a master class on more than one occasion. Teachers told her to buckle down and get serious. She wrote: I USED to think I was.
She used marvelous words to describe her competitors’ sound: flabby, limpid, bare-all, glib. She had recorded competition results and additions to her repertoire—nocturnes galore. Fauré and Schumann were her go-to’s. She bitched about professors, fretted about recitals, made musical jokes that were over my head (if Raoul gropes me again, I’ll make him a castrato). She alternately gushed over and tore down her classmates. Someone’s carriage was lazy; someone was slick but lacked passion; someone was bound for the big leagues, if they didn’t kill themselves first; someone was a bona fide prodigy but sloppy; someone else should try jazz (her most scathing insult); someone practiced too much and got carpal tunnel, just like she told them they would. She most harshly condemned other pianists and had nothing but kind words for singers. For some reason, this surprised me, the pages she dedicated to a teen tenor’s ping. I envy the singers, she wrote. To find that sound inside themselves, while we—meaning pianists—plow away in their shadow. She was a frequent accompanist to her singer friends: Easy money, she wrote. By now I can do Sondheim in my sleep. It seemed that she was saving up: It took me dozens of pages to find out what for.
When she started at Curtis, she and Le Roy were together. They were on and off for the next six months. Judith Butplug was going on tour in the spring, tapping into a Portuguese fan base they’d only just learned about. She needed money to buy a ticket to Lisbon. From there, the gang (Le Roy, Otis, Peewee, Curt, and Oola) would make their way through Europe, playing in sex clubs, bars with awful lighting, or friends of friends of friends’ apartments, eventually petering out in Helsinki, where they had a rather odd gig at a sauna lined up. I guess this makes me a groupie, she wrote in early March. I hope that LR doesn’t take back the offer. I need a change of scenery. I need to remember why I love music. It doesn’t have to be like this—she drew an arrow to an earlier entry about a concerto competition for under-twenty-year-olds, in which a judge docked her points for having her hair in her face (Artistry: 9; Comportment: 2.5). Most of all, I need to be with him. Even if I’m only there to warm his bed, that’s fine with me. He can kiss other people. That’s not the issue. She’d scratched something out, and written over it was: I’m afraid that if he goes without me, I’ll never hear from him again. He is a Libra, after all.
But he didn’t take back the offer, and they departed in March. She took a leave of absence for the rest of the quarter, citing reasons of mental health.
There was one entry in particular that disturbed me. This was the entry I read over and over, flashlight poised like a dagger. It was written during her time abroad, when her diary entries became more erratic. Her tone changed too; she was happy, at least for a while, detailing tour-bus antics and megafans, including cursory but optimistic asides about her and Le Roy’s relationship.
We did a Chinese fire drill (is that offensive???) in rush-hour traffic and I lost a shoe …
A 14 y/o kid begged LR to spit in his mouth …
During long drives we listen to Harry Potter books on tape. Sometimes I think the only thing keeping us sane is Jim Dale …
In Madrid a fat goth girl stood in front of the van and refused to move until she’d exchanged email addresses with every person in the band. NO WORK EMAIL! she kept screaming. MUST BE PERSONAL!
LR likes to sleep in the backseat with his feet out the window & his head in my lap. Peewee (the drummer) said it’s sweet …
Of all the places they went, she liked Germany best. It was during their layover in Hamburg that she told her dear diary what went down in Berlin. I felt ashamed that we’d never been to Hamburg together, and so all I could picture was a stock German city, steely and gray. She wrote, in an especially hasty scrawl:
What a crazy night! It’s 2:00 p.m. now and we’re reloading the van. We stopped for gas in Hamburg. Things are still a little weird but we’ll get over it. Peewee is ignoring me. I’m sitting on the curb, drinking an excellent hot chocolate. LR didn’t want my help loading. “Take it easy,” he said. A bit sexist, but still nice, I guess. His loss, I didn’t want to anyway.
How to summarize last night?? I’m still trying to process it. It started on a whim. Some punks from the show invited us to a party, don’t remember their names, so we went, and we were all hanging out in the garden of this really nice co-op in outer Berlin. It was an abandoned dog-food factory that a group of friends remodeled. There were tire swings tied to the rafters and a waterbed with fish in it (is that humane??). The place was called the Doghouse. The kids from the show were squatting there and introduced us to their flatmates—super interesting people, tons of musicians, someone getting their master’s in porn at the Freie Universität, someone else who was a social worker during the day and a professional dominatrix at night. They were so international, people from Sweden, Turkey, Ghana, Greece. I felt guilty that they ALL spoke English and I only knew a bit of German from my Wagner days, but they said they liked the practice. Their accents were DIVINE. There was an especially beautiful boy from South Africa (what was his name?!?) who I could’ve listened to ALL night.
Anyway, a group of them sat down with us, they passed around a bottle of wine, someone asked if we were together. We didn’t understand at first. “Who?” LR said. “Me and her?” That made them laugh. They pointed to all of us. We Americans were sitting in a row on this soggy old couch. “Who sleeps with who?” They were being so open and upfront about it that no one felt uncomfortable. Their questions didn’t even seem that sexual, just factual, like, what are your hobbies? LR said, “She sleeps with me.” It excited me to hear him say that. And they nodded and pointed to Otis and said, “What about him?” I didn’t get it, so they clarified. “Do you have sex with him as well?” When I said no, they pointed to LR. “Does he?” When LR said no, they laughed. They must have thought we were such puritanical Americans!
They said to me, “Well, why not? You don’t think he is attractive?” They meant Otis. Everyone was giggling, like we were girls at a sleepover. I had to be honest and say, “I never thought about it before.” And they said, “Well, think about it now!” That put me in an awkward spot, but everyone was being so relaxed that I didn’t feel weird and neither did Otis. He was smiling and staring at his hands. I mean, I’ve always thought Otis was CUTE. No
t sexy, but cute. He’s short but he has a pretty smile and has always been so nice to me. So I sized him up and said, “He’s sweet.”
They thought this word was hilarious. “What does that mean?” they said. Those wily Berliners! But we were all caught up in it now. LR looked amused and no one seemed especially offended, so I said, “That means I’d probably kiss him on the mouth but not with tongue.”
“OK then!” they said. “And what about you?” They were asking Otis now. He gave me this embarrassed smile, so cute, and thought for a second and said, “She’s hot. I’d kiss her too.” Even though I’ve never had the slightest crush on Otis, I must admit that hearing him say that made me blush. I was even getting a little bit horny.
“OK then!” they said. They stared at us like the next step was obvious, and honestly it was. One of them rubbed my leg and winked and whispered, “Live out your radical utopia,” or something dumb like that. So Otis leaned over LR’s lap and kissed me! A short kiss on the lips—he slipped in tongue, but just for a sec. It was so easy, and everyone watched, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
We were all on the same page, so I wasn’t surprised when the Greek girl asked LR what HE would do to HER. We went around in a circle and things sort of escalated. LR said he’d give her a hickey, so he did. The Greek girl said she’d lick Curt’s neck, so she did. Curt said he would suck her tits. She got them out and he did! At that point I think everyone was feeling pretty horny, probably drunk too. A lot of people were already pawing their neighbors, but in a friendly way, with lots of eye contact—they seem to love eye contact here, it’s a bit much for me. Then one of the punks said he wanted to give Otis a rimjob, and I was like OK, WHOA, buckling my seatbelt, here we GO. No one could have left then. It was fascinating and sexy and a bit hard to watch. Who knew Otis had it in him!!
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