The Man I Love

by Suanne Laqueur

  “I think it’s the shooting,” he whispered. “Life is so tenuous. Lucky’s afraid of it and Will wants to fight it.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I feel terrible,” he said in the dark.

  “I feel helpless.”

  “Nothing we can do. Except just be here. Be ready to do what they need when they need it.”

  A week went by, a week of tense, whispered conversations and the sound of tears through thin walls. Will was spending nights alone at Colby Street. Jay Street felt immobilized for war. Poised and braced, balanced on a single eggshell. Wolves paced on the horizon, primed for the hunt.

  Erik woke up one night, not to tears or wolves, but a warm thickness in his blood, a pleasantly familiar feeling in his lap. Daisy had a hand down his sweatpants, stroking a very cheerful erection.

  “Good evening,” she whispered against his temple.

  “What’s up,” he said, his eyes closed.

  “You.”

  “How ‘bout that.”

  “This is impressive.”

  “Thank you,” he said, his voice still slurred with sleep. “I worked a long time on it.”

  She was pushing his pants down his hips, and pulling him toward her. “You should put that in me.”

  “I should, right?”

  “Yes.”

  They rolled. She was pulling her own clothes away and aside. Half asleep, he took her by the waist and languidly worked himself into her heat. Her breath left her chest with a dry little puff as her butt settled into his lap. Sweetness radiated off the nape of her neck.

  “I love when you wake me up,” he murmured. He slid his hand under her shirt, filled it with one warm breast. She sighed and pushed further back into his lap.

  And then a startling noise from outside their door, a knocking into the wall. A human sound. They flinched a little, then froze in the embrace. Daisy looked back over her shoulder guiltily. Erik put a finger to his lips.

  Footsteps. Another thump. Silence.

  More silence.

  Erik touched his fingertip to Daisy’s lips. She drew it into her mouth and pushed back hard on him. He started to move in her again. Throwing out the hook, looking for her edge. Hot, wet, squeezing pressure all around him. Sugar. Skin.

  Noise again, just beyond their door, and now a cry.

  “Daisy.”

  Daisy pushed up on her elbow, looked over at the door. “Luck?”

  “Daisy.” Louder. Urgent. An edge of panic.

  “Stay here,” Daisy whispered, pulling her shirt down and her pants up and hurrying out. Erik sat up, strained to hear something even as the sound of his own quickening heartbeat filled his ears.

  “Oh my God. Erik, help me…”

  He exploded out of bed, tying his own pants, tripped over something as he burst into the hallway. Daisy came flying out of the bathroom. “She’s having a miscarriage. I need to get Will, stay here with her.”

  “Wait.” But she was down the stairs and seconds later, the back door slammed. Erik stared at the floor. The drops of blood on the scuffed wooden planks. A trail leading to the bathroom. His heartbeat grew louder, heavier, a sledgehammer against the inner wall of his chest. He had to go in there. He had to.

  Do it. Now.

  Blood like a constellation of stars across the white-tiled bathroom floor. Lucky sat on the toilet, wearing nothing but a T-shirt, hunched over, her face in her hands. Erik reeled back, hesitating. This was a bathroom. A private, insanely intimate place of bodily function and his entire instinct screamed at him to get out of here and leave the lady alone. Don’t embarrass her.

  But this was Lucky. The same Lucky who got down in the blood on the stage floor and saved Daisy’s life.

  Erik knelt down on the lilac shag rug and gathered her into his arms. She was weeping. “I changed my mind.”

  “I got you, Lucky. I got you, hold onto me.”

  “No, please, I changed my mind. Don’t let it—don’t let it happen, please, I changed my mind.”

  But then a slow and steady dripping in the water beneath her, and she screamed against Erik’s shoulder, not in pain but in despair. Her whole body contracted desperately, trying to hold it back, hold onto the baby.

  Erik yanked a bath towel from the rack, wrapped it around Lucky, hiding the bowl and her legs, trying to shroud this in some kind of dignity. He held her tight, she hung on his neck. It was too late.

  “You gotta let it go, honey,” he whispered against her hair. “Let it go, Luck, hold onto me. Hold onto me, I got you. Let it go.”

  Her body relaxed in his arms, he felt her surrender. Another cascade of drips, muffled beneath the towel, and Lucky buried her face in his neck, moaning like a wounded animal.

  A commotion of footsteps up the stairs and Will was there then. He slid in on his knees, and Erik carefully handed Lucky off to him, scooting back and out of the way.

  Will rocked her, holding her head safe on his chest. Lucky was sobbing. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Will picked up her face, kissed it all over. He was crying too, whispering, “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault, it’s all right.”

  “I changed my mind, I wanted it.”

  “I know. It’s all right. I just need you to be all right. I just need you. I just need you. It’s all right, Luck. I just need you…”

  Erik helped Will put Lucky in his car to take her to the campus health center. He stood on the porch, watching the red tail lights disappear down the street and turn a corner.

  They always leave in the middle of the night, he thought.

  He went back inside.

  Daisy was in the little front hall, wrapped in a throw blanket and shivering. Erik shut the door, then lurched into her. She opened her arms and caught him. They slid down to the floor, clutching one another.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for helping her. You were so good. You were so good to her.”

  He was shaking so hard his bones hurt. The thought of the blood in the bathroom was making him feel sick. “I can’t go back up there,” he whispered, filled with shame about it, feeling cowardly and weak but he couldn’t, he could not go back in there.

  “What’s the matter? Tell me.”

  “The blood. I can’t, Dais, I can’t do it again.”

  “I’ll take care of it. No, no, it’s all right, I understand.” Her kisses on his face, her hands soothing on his head. “I’ll clean it up. It won’t upset me.”

  The wolves were on him. They had him by all four limbs, one tearing open his chest, another devouring his belly, a third at his throat. They had him. “God, Dais, what’s happening to me?”

  She wrapped him in the blanket, in her arms and legs, and her hair. “It’s all right. It’s all right…”

  They leave in the middle of the night. He couldn’t shake the foreboding thought, couldn’t discern who he meant by “they.” They left. It left. Everything left. Nothing would stay in place. It was a constant clutch and grab and fight like hell to hold onto anything good anymore.

  Beginning Of The End

  The winter was cold, bleak and relentless. The sun never seemed to break through the veil of sickly grey clouds pressed down over Lancaster. All ice and slush and mud, a dirty film on the sidewalks and windows. A dull malaise permeated the student body. The whole campus seemed to be shivering, sunken in on itself, looking for warmth within instead of reaching out to build a fire.

  Since the miscarriage, Erik could not deal with blood. Of any kind. A cut or scratch made him queasy. One of the stage techs suffered a nosebleed in class and Erik almost passed out. He had never been bothered by Daisy having her period, now he couldn’t bear it. It wasn’t revulsion, it was fear.

  Life had become tenuous and bloody.

  He wasn’t doing well.

  In the apartment on Jay Street, nobody was doing well. Lucky was withdrawn, a shadow of herself. Even her curls lost their spring—they gave up, and unwound into sad, mournful tendrils.
/>   Will looked haunted. Nobody had ever seen him so subdued and distracted, even as he wrapped himself in work and preparation for the spring concert.

  Daisy chain-smoked and lost weight, her body diminishing back to ballerina fragility. She was jittery and frenetic, prone to weeping for no reason. She lost her stillness.

  Erik was smoking regularly, too. He buried himself in work, buried the struggle against constant anxiety and the never-ending visions of blood. The nightmares came regularly. He woke up Daisy. She woke him. Sex was infrequent and unremarkable.

  David’s mean streak was back. He regressed into old ways, like a child acting out, looking for love by asking for it in the most unloving ways. But everyone was too consumed with their own wars to pay much attention.

  They gathered together in the evenings, yet each struggled alone. The winter was hard and long. One night, as they sat around watching TV, David brazenly cut cocaine out in the open, razoring the snowy powder into neat snakes on a little mirror on the coffee table.

  Had the color of cocaine been the irresistible temptation? The pristine whiteness? Its seductive purity?

  Erik flinched at the harsh, sucking sound of David doing two lines.

  “Anyone?” David said.

  They stared. Not a glance was exchanged. Everyone was making up their own mind.

  “I’m good,” Will said. A beat of silence. Then he stood up. “On second thought, fuck everything.” He went over.

  “Fuck this fucking world,” Lucky said, and crossed.

  Daisy got off Erik’s lap. “I don’t care anymore.”

  Erik followed. “I could get shot tomorrow. Screw it.”

  They knelt around the altar of the coffee table. Will patted David’s head, and David smiled like a well-praised puppy. He was the high priest now: King David, singer of songs, bearer of gifts and bringer of comfort.

  In later years, Erik viewed that night as the beginning of the end of the world. The descent into hell.

  And he never forgot David had opened the gate.

  Emotional Hamburger

  The night of the spring concert, Daisy and Will’s comeback, Kees asked Erik if he would mind having company in the lighting booth.

  “I need to be somewhere soundproof so I can cry in peace.”

  “You just want to be with me, Keesja.”

  “Yeah. And if anyone tries anything the least bit cute, you and I are gonna take their asses out.”

  Erik who was a bit of a controlled wreck, could think of no one he’d rather have in the booth with him than Kees, who was a blatant wreck.

  Fate was kind, putting the anniversary of the shootings, the nineteenth of April, on a Monday. The ceremonial recognition wouldn’t overlap with the concert, which was scheduled for the following weekend.

  The contemporary division had the first act. Daisy and Will’s pas de deux would be the first number in the second act. During intermission, Erik sought out Joe and Francine Bianco, standing with them at the back of the theater, pressed on all sides by the crowd. The space buzzed with conversation and anticipation.

  They chattered nervously at each other, laughing too hard and too loud. Adrenaline kept flooding Erik’s chest as the minutes ticked by. It seemed it would never be time. And then it was nearly time. His heart was pounding. He caught Kees’s eye and tapped his watch. Joe tugged his earlobe. Francine kissed him.

  Erik went back into the booth and Kees followed. They drew on their headsets. Erik rubbed his cold hands together, chafing his fingers, blowing on them.

  “Wat denk je, mijn vriend?”

  Erik smiled. “I’m dying. How about you?”

  “I am an emotional hamburger.”

  Erik’s headset crackled. “Five minutes,” David said. “Flash the houselights.”

  Erik reached and slid the master switch down, dimming the house, then up again. Once more. The murmur of the milling audience intensified, then people began filing back into seats. Erik and Kees fidgeted relentlessly, tapping pencils and fingers, jiggling knees, spinning in their chairs, inhaling and exhaling loudly, over and over, trying to whittle away these last, agonizing minutes.

  “How we doing back there, Dave?” Erik asked.

  “Nobody’s thrown up yet.”

  “Great, I get to puke alone,” Kees muttered.

  “Where’s Dais?” Erik asked.

  “Warming up.”

  “Tell her I love her.”

  “Tell me first,” David said.

  Erik smiled into the headset. “All my enemies whisper together against me,” he said.

  “They imagine the worst for me, saying, ‘He will never get up from the place where he lies.’”

  “Raise me up, that I may repay them.”

  “For my enemy does not triumph over me.”

  “Amen,” Kees said.

  “Now tell her I love her,” Erik said.

  “And grab both their asses for me,” Kees said.

  “With pleasure.” Another crackle and David was gone. Erik stared at his own reflection in the booth glass, fingertips rubbing his chin.

  “Tums?” Kees offered him a couple from the bottle kept in the booth.

  “Thanks, I’ve already had eleven tonight.”

  “You guys keep booze back here?”

  Erik smiled, but his eyes slid away guiltily. David had cut a couple lines before coming to the theater. Erik had passed. Barely. The idea of being high at Daisy’s return to the stage was unthinkable to him.

  But damn, it was hard to pass up.

  She was a sick mistress, Lady Cocaine. The rush to the brain, the dizzying clarity, the euphoria of everything being all right. But she got bored of you so quickly, and then left without saying goodbye. In her cold, slushy wake, you crawled, a strung-along, anxious mess. Erik was starting to hate her.

  And he was starting to need her.

  “Bring down the house,” David said over the headset.

  Erik’s chest tightened, released fiery hot waves into his stomach and arms.

  Kees held out a formal hand. “Merde.”

  Erik shook it. “Merde.” He brought down the master switch with his left hand while his right hand hovered, fingers poised over a section of levers as if he were about to play a chord on the piano.

  The curtain rose with a velvety hum.

  “Lights up,” David said. Erik pushed the levers forward and the cyclorama began to glow a rich, twilight blue.

  “Cue sound.”

  Out floated the lush, measured tones of the introduction to “The Man I Love.” From the upstage left wing came Daisy and Will. She in her pink dress, bourréeing in fifth, her hand tucked in Will’s elbow, her head tilted toward but not quite on his shoulder. Tall and tender in black, Will walked beside her, his maimed hand covering her fingers.

  And then the auditorium erupted.

  Both Kees and Erik jumped in their seats, reared backwards, open-mouthed in shock as the applause came roaring down from the balcony and met with the ovation coming from the orchestra seats, whirling together in a thunderstorm of clapping, stamping triumph drowning out the music.

  “Jesus,” Kees said, stumbling to stand up, his hands on top of his head.

  Erik stood up as well, leaning over the console to peer out at the audience. “What is happening…?”

  He scanned the crowd: on their feet, applauding and whistling.

  Will and Daisy reached center stage. She turned on her toes, bourréeing backwards, still with the choreography, but the music was lost.

  “Oh boy.” He could hear David exclaiming low in his ear. “Holy shit. Holy shit. I don’t believe this.”

  Daisy kept moving, her feet lightly gathering up the inches of the stage floor, her arms liquid patterns. She turned under Will’s arm, his other twining around her waist and she fell back, languid, melting, her eyes never leaving his. Will caught her, but clumsily, he was breaking down, breaking out of the dance, his face crumpling. Instead of bringing Daisy up into the next phrase, he brought
her up and crushed her to his chest. She came off pointe, stood in her flat, pedestrian feet. Her shoulders were heaving, shaking and she buried her face into Will’s shirt. The intensity of the applause rose up another level. People were yelling now, as if at a rock concert.

  Erik’s hands closed up his mouth and nose as the enormity of it dropped onto his shoulders.

  Kees put an arm around him. “Good Lord, I haven’t seen an ovation like this since I watched Cynthia Gregory in Swan Lake. And that was after the show, not before.” His other arm joined the first, hugging tight as Erik cried into the steeple of his fingers.

  Neil Martinez, stationed stage left, called over his headset. “Dave, what do we do?”

  “Kill the music. Just run it back to the start. Stand by, everyone, stand by, let’s just let this pan out.”

  Erik didn’t think it could possibly last any longer, yet on and on it went. Will was whispering to Daisy, coaxing her head up off his shoulder, and finally he got her to turn around. They stood there then, clasped in each other’s arms, stood and faced it, accepted the moment as rightfully theirs. Will was shaking his head over and over, laughing, wiping his eyes. Daisy’s face had bloomed with her full, bright beautiful smile.

  Erik leaned and put one hand flat on the glass of the booth, palm to the stage. He usually did this at curtain call, but tonight everything was out of order, upside-down and unbelievable. Daisy wormed one of her arms free from Will’s embrace. She touched her fingers to her mouth and turned her palm out back to Erik.

  He thought his heart was going to explode. He needed no other high. This was enough.

  This is my life.

  A whole minute went by before David spoke again. “Erik, can you hear me?”

  Erik ignored the tissue Kees held out and roughly wiped his wet face on his upper arm as he sat down. “Yeah, I can hear you.”

  “Start taking the stage lights down. Leave the cyc lit.”

  “Lights going down.”

  As the stage dimmed, Will and Daisy retreated into silhouette, disappearing through the upstage wing. The applause petered out as the audience sat.