The Man I Love

by Suanne Laqueur

  This was weird. He crossed one leg over the other and kept eating, lost in horny thoughtfulness.

  “It’s hot being the first,” David said, squeezing ketchup on his fries. “You belong to a girl’s history forever.”

  “Technical penetration doesn’t mean shit,” Will said, snorting. “Half the time it sucks for her. I’d rather be the guy who makes her come the first time. That’s the better pantheon. He’s the one she’ll remember forever.”

  Erik crunched a few potato chips, nibbling on the image of Daisy under him, her hair spread out on a pillow. Her eyes full of blue-green fire. Opening her knees to him. Raising her hips up and letting him slide into her warm, wet…

  He squirmed and casually hitched closer to the table. Great. He was stuck here now. Served him right.

  “Hey, Lucia,” David said as Lucky arrived at the table and sat next to Will. “When were you deflowered? Wait, let me guess. Fifteen. Sixteen, tops.”

  “You know, Dave, you’re really unattractive when you’re coked up,” Lucky said.

  Erik had been mentally reciting states and capitals—a trick which usually deflected blood away from an unwanted erection back to his brain. He lifted his head at Lucky’s remark. He glanced at Will, who rolled his eyes as he bit into his burger.

  David was unperturbed. “Willy, you had to have been what, twelve?”

  Will chewed and swallowed, took a sip of his drink and replied, “Male or female?”

  Lucky gave a little catcall under her breath.

  “I always knew you batted for both sides,” David said.

  “Sure,” Will said, looking around the table. “I’ll fuck any one of you.”

  “Not in front of the children,” David said, as Daisy returned to the table.

  “Not what in front of the children,” she said, sliding in next to Lucky, across from Erik.

  “Talking about Will’s bisexual tendencies.”

  “He’s double the lay,” Daisy said.

  “Thank you, darling.” Will kissed the air at her.

  David laughed. “Look at Fish’s face, he’s about to shit.”

  Fighting the heat rising up his neck, Erik looked coolly around the table. “Clearly I’m not in Kansas anymore.”

  “So,” David said. “Marge is the only one keeping herself pure for marriage.”

  “Dave, give it a rest,” Will said.

  “I’m not waiting for marriage,” Daisy said, chewing a french fry. Both her body language and her expression were smolderingly serene. She was calm and gorgeous. And a virgin. It was an effort for Erik to look away from her, a struggle not to imagine her beautiful stillness in his arms. To turn it wild. Could he do it?

  “What are you waiting for then? True love?” David’s tone took on an edge of cruelness. This teasing was just short of nasty. It actually seemed irrational. Erik caught Will’s eye, silently asking if this was what he meant yesterday. Will lifted his chin in confirmation.

  Daisy wasn’t taking any of his bait. “I’m just waiting for the one.”

  “The one?”

  “The One,” she said again, and then slowly began to sing, “singular sensation…every little step he—”

  The table erupted in moans and fries being pelted at Daisy.

  “Let me know how that goes, honey,” David said.

  “For that, honey, you’ll be the first,” Daisy said. She looked over at Will, who was offering her his pack of cigarettes. She reached for one, glanced quickly at Erik, then took her hand back. “No, I’m good.”

  “You have a girlfriend, Erik?” Lucky asked casually, shaking the ice cubes in her cup.

  He looked up, shook his head.

  “Fishy, fishy, in the brook,” David said, “at what young age were you took?”

  Silence at the table. Unnerved, Erik looked sideways at David, then across the table. “Ask Will.”

  They all laughed and threw more fries. Will held his palm out to Erik, who smacked his against it.

  Thankfully the subject then turned to the concert and shop talk. After another ten minutes, David departed, leaving his tray of trash on the table and the cue sheets for Erik to transpose. Daisy had gotten herself a cup of tea and taken a book out of her bag.

  His pup-tent safely dismantled, Erik went and got a cup of his own. Back at the table, he worked slowly, harboring the hope Daisy was hanging around because of him, and the greater hope Will and Lucky might take off soon and give him a few minutes alone with her.

  Miracle of miracles, they did. “You’ll see my partner home?” Will said, shrugging on his jacket. Erik glanced at Daisy who smiled. Erik looked back at Will and nodded.

  Lucky was pulling on her gloves. She bent and put her cheek next to Daisy’s. “Don’t wait up, dear,” she said.

  Daisy kissed the air. “I never do, dear.” She watched them walk away, then looked back to Erik, giving him a quick smile before returning to her book.

  Erik looked left and right before speaking. “Was David coked up?”

  Daisy looked up. Her eyes flared bright blue for a split second, then mellowed. “Probably,” she said slowly. “I know he does it. But I’m not good at detecting that kind of thing. Lucky knows better.”

  “She was the one who said.”

  “Then he probably was. Poor David.”

  “Poor?”

  “Sometimes I think he’s homesick,” she said. “For Belgium, I mean.”

  Erik knew the story. David’s parents had died in a car accident when he was eleven, leaving him with only elderly grandparents who could not care for him. His mother’s sister, Helen, had flown from the States to Brussels and collected her nephew, bringing him to her home in New York and becoming his legal guardian.

  “He wears his father’s wedding band,” she said. “On his index finger. Funny. It just occurred to me you’re both fatherless.”

  And we both want you, Erik thought. He flipped his pencil around a few times, and then tried to sound nonchalant as he asked, “Is Will really bisexual?”

  Daisy put her tea down and leaned toward him a little. “I don’t know,” she mouthed, as if confessing.

  “You don’t know?” he mouthed back with exaggeration.

  Her smile was infectious. “I certainly couldn’t go to court with anything on him but it would not surprise me. At all.”

  “Huh,” Erik said thoughtfully, staring at the faint lipstick mark on the rim of Daisy’s cup. She was staring at his cup as well, which was bothersome because he already took a lot of shit for drinking tea. Apparently it wasn’t the manly thing to do. But he had never liked coffee and tea had sentimental roots in his heart. His mother brewed tea every night, making cups for her sons while they did homework. Erik’s first independent act in the kitchen was learning to light the burner under the kettle. And he liked how it tasted, especially when it was brewed strong. He used two bags and barely any sugar.

  Daisy said nothing about his beverage of choice, though, and opened her book again. Erik went back to work, and a pleasant interlude passed where he was busy and she was reading, yet the space they shared was companionable. The silence between them shimmered warm and inviting, like a campfire. He settled into it contentedly. A cat on the hearth.

  “I like your necklace,” she said.

  “This?”

  “Can I see?”

  He put his pencil down, reached behind his neck and unclasped it. He put it in a coiled heap in her waiting palm. She stretched it carefully across her long fingers. It was a gold chain with squared, faceted links. The squares gave it a unique, masculine silhouette, heavy but streamlined. Off the chain hung three small charms. Erik watched as Daisy examined each one: a boat, a fish and a saint’s medal, which was also square.

  “Who is this?”

  “Birgitta. She’s the patron saint of Sweden.”

  Her fingers, with their unpolished oval nails, played with the charms which, like the chain, were old gold, weathered. They had a dull, wise brightness. Many fingers had
rubbed, contemplated and worried over them.

  “This is beautiful,” Daisy said. “Actually it’s handsome. I don’t want to say macho, but it’s strong-looking.”

  “I like the weight of it,” he said. “It’s solid.”

  “Is it old?”

  He reached and turned the medal over, to show her the engraving on the back: B.K.E.F. 1865.

  “Bjorn Kennet Erik Fiskare. My great-great-great-grandfather.”

  “Wow. This is like your history right here.”

  “I’m told the boat and the fish are even older but nobody knows really. See. Here.” Erik turned the boat over and showed her Fiskare engraved into its bottom. “Fiskare means fisherman in Swedish.”

  She looked at him sheepishly. “I thought it meant scissors. You know, the ones with the orange handles.”

  He laughed. “I get that all the time.”

  “Do you know the word for scissors?”

  “No idea.”

  “You’re Swedish but your eyes are brown,” she said, gazing intently at him.

  “You’re French but your eyes are impossible.”

  “I get that all the time.”

  He looked away. “My mother’s Italian. So I get blond hair and brown eyes. Makes for a weird combination.”

  “Not weird at all. I like it.” She studied the necklace again, holding it up. “So this has come down through the generations?”

  He nodded. She wasn’t the first girl to ask him questions about his father’s side of the family. But other girls’ questions always felt like birds pecking at him, wearing him down or tearing him open. Daisy’s curiosity was soft on his skin. She was a beautiful china cup on a table, quietly asking to be filled. And little by little, Erik was tipping over and pouring out.

  “Do you remember your father wearing this?”

  “Sure. All the time. If I was sitting on his lap I’d like, you know, play with it. I had a little story in my head, this is the pretty lady and this is her boat and she goes sailing in the boat and catches this beautiful fish…”

  She held the chain back out to him and he took it, their fingertips touching. “When did he give it to you? You said you were eight when he left.”

  He fastened the chain behind his neck again. “The story I know,” he said, “is my mom saw him one more time after he left. To sign divorce papers.”

  He glanced down. Daisy had put her hand out, palm up on the table between them. “And sometime during the meeting—” he put his hand on hers. “—he gave this to her. To give to me. And she didn’t for a long time, she kept it put away. I was too young.” His other hand joined the first, holding Daisy’s, rolling it between his palms, running his fingertips along the edges of her nails. “Then when I was about sixteen, she gave it to me.”

  “Did you want it?”

  “I hadn’t seen it in years so at first it was like, ‘Oh wow, I remember this, the lady and the boat.’ But then I had to be sixteen about it, you know, prove he was no big deal to me. I told her I didn’t want it, I didn’t want anything of his. Screw him. All that shit.”

  Under the table their ankles had cozied up together. It felt intimate and close there in the booth, holding her hands and feet, telling her secret things.

  “What did she say?”

  “She didn’t push it. Just reminded me it had been my grandfather’s too, and his father’s before, and back on through the generations. It was mine now, to give to my son if I ever had one. She said, and I still remember this, she said, ‘It’s an heirloom, it belongs to your name. Don’t let one asshole ruin it for you.’”

  “Don’t let one weak link break the chain.”

  “Right. I kept in a little box in my dresser for a while, and then my great-uncle died, my grandfather’s brother. And he was the last Fiskare brother, the last of his generation and… I don’t know. I was just moved to start wearing it.”

  She leaned forward again, touched the chain, then put her chin on the heel of her hand. “For the record, you know what my favorite candy is?”

  Which seemed a random question but then it hit him. “Swedish Fish?”

  She nodded, smiling, and looked away, the color rising up in her face a little. He laughed. She looked back. And then they were staring again. And it happened again, just as it had in the theater yesterday. Time slowed, atoms and particles separating and recombining into a secret sphere around them.

  “I like you,” he said.

  Her hand out on the table again, between them, and he put his on it. “I like you,” she said, almost soundless.

  They stared on through another timeless moment, after which she went back to her book, and he bent his head over his work again. They held hands on the table, held feet beneath. Erik had never been so relaxed with a girl, never known such comfort with another human being. He had no desire to leave this space, and yet within it, he was free. He could sit with her and feel what he was feeling, with no need to explain it, dismiss it or joke it away. Every time he looked up at her and thought, I love this, she looked up too, and her eyes seemed to nod at him.

  Love Will Do That

  Final dress rehearsal. The atmosphere backstage was significantly calmer, but still carried a buzzing pulse of energy. Erik threaded his way through dancers and techs, looking for Daisy, not even bothering with the pretense of an errand or task.

  She was being sewn up. David was standing by her, with the sole of one foot against the wall. His arms were crossed and he looked both calm and content. A rare stance for David, who was one moody son of a bitch. He always kept you guessing. His compliments were backhanded, his humor dark and sardonic. He joked everything away, constantly pushing buttons and boundaries. And just when you had him pegged as an asshole, he showed his softer side: he sat still for a serious conversation, or showed sympathy for someone in a bind, offering a fix or a favor without the “you owe me one” implication. Once you relaxed into this kinder, gentler David, he abruptly turned into an asshole again.

  Erik felt a stab of jealousy at the sight of David and Daisy chatting, smiling and laughing with ease. Probably in French. He didn’t feel right barging in on the conversation so he was forced to invent business after all. He fussed with cables that didn’t need fussing with, shielded his eyes and gazed up at the catwalk as if in contact with someone up there. When at last he saw David pat Daisy’s shoulder and walk away, he counted to thirty before casually putting himself in her sight.

  She smiled at him and held out her hands. He went to her and took them in his. His skin seemed to peel away like a dry husk, leaving him a core of pure joy. They stood in silence, fingers clasped, staring in a way that felt like kissing. Her gravity was so strong, his attraction to her so complex and layered, he felt he was drifting in another dimension. Turning over and over like a satellite broken free of its mother planet, re-orienting itself to the center of a new universe. He ached to touch more of her, longed to pull her against him as he had never longed for anything before in his life.

  “Do a triple tonight,” he said.

  She looked a long moment back, then smiled. “Are you daring me?”

  “I’m asking.” He couldn’t bear it. He had to touch her. He reached with shy fingertips and brushed her small diamond earring and then trailed down her jawline. Her eyes followed his hand and closed as he touched her, her chin lifting a little. She opened them again, put her own fingertips on his necklace charms.

  “All right. I’ll do one for you.”

  But she didn’t.

  Erik watched her in the Prelude, feeling the pull of her across the rows of seats and through the glass of the lighting booth. She was dancing well—a heightened energy in her movements, a palpable transcendence of all thought and calculation. She was on her game, in her element. This was everything she was, everything she was born to do.

  The end of her solo passage now, the circle of turns, the dizzying rush down the diagonal of the stage. The controlled preparation onto her right foot, the step onto the pointe
of her left, followed by blind speed turning into spin.

  “Dave, watch this,” Erik whispered.

  One turn. Two turns. Three.

  Four.

  “Holy fuck, Marge,” David said, a hand on his head.

  Marie Del’Amici was sitting just outside the lighting booth. They could hear her bubbling laugh. “O mio dio, Margarita. You naughty thing…”

  Me, Erik thought, as triumphant as if he’d pulled it off. She did it for me. That was mine.

  Daisy and Will’s Siciliano was beyond description. Erik had watched it so many times this week, memorizing whole sections of the dance despite not knowing the names of steps. He thought he knew it. Now he watched Daisy and Will take it to yet another place, and he followed them there, mesmerized and connected. Through the medium of Will he could feel Daisy’s body, its weight and warmth and closeness. Her arms here, her leg there, her waist in his hands, her back arching against his chest. He had it. He understood now. He felt the meld of music and movement and grasped how it became something greater, an expression beyond counts and beats and the vocabulary of steps.

  Watching Daisy, his throat was tight, his heart swollen in his chest. Will took her back in his arms, laid his cheek at the base of her throat. Erik’s own cheek grew warmer. Daisy’s hand languidly came up to Will’s head and Erik felt it caress his hair. He was being touched by her. He felt his entire being condensing down to one truth: I’m falling in love with her.

  He was grateful for the dark of the booth and the simplicity of the lighting cues for the Siciliano, which left him free and alone to savor this moment, hold it in his hands and press it into his memory. I am falling in love. This was the first time he had felt so powerfully and instinctively connected to a girl without yet possessing any intimate physical knowledge of her. This was the profound realization that sex was the fruit of an emotional bond, not the dirt in which it grew. How limited his experience was in this realm of human affinity. He was a baby. As much a virgin as Daisy. At least she was waiting to make love.

  He wanted to make love with her, to partner her and create something together, to find their own dance.