I wasn’t angry with Connor. For a man known for his endless stream of girlfriends, it was amazing he’d stayed single this long—he must have finally bounced back from whatever Ruth had done to him. Or, worse, maybe he’d been ready weeks or months ago, and he had been interested in me, but I’d delayed so long that he thought nothing would ever happen. It was all my fault. If I could just rewind time and not go to the restroom….
My heart was breaking. I’d never understood that expression, never felt anything even remotely like the pain brought on by seeing the two of them laughing and smiling together. Everything good we’d had together was being ripped asunder inside me, never to be made whole again. I didn’t want to cry. I just didn’t want to feel that way anymore.
The barman came over to me. “What’ll it be?”
I looked him straight in the eye. “I’ll have The Godfather.”
There was a little intake of breath from behind me. “No one has The Godfather!” said Jasmine.
The barman and I stared at each other. I nodded firmly.
He reached right down to the bottom shelf, rooted around at the very back and pulled out several large bottles with dusty tops. With a pallbearer’s face he poured exact measures of them into a steel bowl, as if a cocktail shaker would be inappropriate. He mixed. He sprinkled in a mystery powder. He mixed again. And then he brought over three glasses, setting them all before me.
The first one was a standard shot glass. “The Godfather,” he said, pouring a shot of what looked like black oil into it.
The second was a heavy-bottomed whiskey tumbler. “The Godfather Part II,” he intoned reverently, filling it to the brim with the same black ooze.
The third was a standard tall glass. He poured in the dregs and then added soda water to dilute it. The drink was a muddy brown. “The Godfather Part III,” he said sadly. And then he stepped back, as if from a firework.
I looked across at Connor and Taylor. He finally saw me, and gave me a happy wave. In his mind, he’d done nothing wrong.
I drank.
Chapter 19
I woke up, and it wasn’t like throwing off the peaceful veil of sleep. It was more like sleep didn’t like the taste of me and spat me out.
Something was wrong with me. My brain was too big for my skull, and expanding rapidly, the pressure and pain building by the second. When I turned my head to look at the clock, violet lances of agony spiked through my skull.
I was in my own bed, in my clothes—although my shoes were missing. The clock said 10:20am. I felt like I could sleep for another week, so what had woken me up? The pain in my head?
My stomach gave a warning lurch. No. Something worse.
I tried to get up, but all my movements were slowed down, my mind unable to cope with doing anything at normal speed. I had to focus on slowly swinging my legs out of bed and then carefully sitting up, and every millimeter triggered a fresh explosion in my head and gurgles in my stomach. When I tried to stand, my legs felt like rubber so I crawled to the bathroom on hands and knees.
The last thing I remembered was ordering The Godfather. What happened?
I decided I’d think about that later. I had to get to the bathroom before—
I crawled faster, hard wood under my knees and then white tiles and then—
I grabbed the toilet with both hands and vomited longer and harder than I ever had in my life. Long, long after my stomach was empty it continued to convulse—seemingly out of sheer spite. I will never drink again, I pleaded. Never ever ever. Not even when Jasmine gets her big break. I promise. Never! Just please make it stop!
I chose what I thought was a safe moment, closed the lid and flushed. Then I knelt there begging for it to finish its cycle because I needed to throw up again. Come on! Come on!
This went on for a half hour.
Eventually, my body figured out that there was nothing more inside me, but I didn’t dare move in case I was wrong. I dozed off like that, still clutching at the bowl, and then woke with a start. I wanted to brush my teeth but, not up to the taste of mint yet, settled for washing my mouth out.
I crawled back to my bed, my throat raw. This time, I noticed the glass of water next to my clock and the Post-It stuck to it in Connor’s handwriting: “DRINK THIS. TAKE THESE.” There was an arrow and I followed it down to two white pills.
I didn’t argue and gulped them down with the water. My stomach grumbled but indicated that, if I lay extremely still, it would play ball.
I begged for sleep to take me back and, eventually, it did.
When I woke up again the pain in my head was still there, but it had shrunk to a level that allowed me to actually think. I started to ask questions like, “What happened last night?” and “What did I say to Connor?” Clearly, he’d been the one who put me to bed. Did that mean we’d spent the evening together, before I’d become incapable of standing?
I closed my eyes as I thought about him and Taylor. Had I had a cat-fight with her? Had I declared my love for Connor and he’d laughed? I wracked my brain, but there was just a black void between drinking The Godfather and waking up. The only thing I could be sure of was that everything hadn’t come out well. I clearly hadn’t pushed my way between Connor and Taylor, told him how I felt and squealed in delight as he swept me up into his arms, because if that had happened he’d be here with me in my bed. Instead, he was probably across town somewhere in her bed. Probably waking up and having sleepy, languorous morning sex with her—
I felt like I was going to throw up again.
I opened my eyes to try to distract me and saw another note on my door. It was at eye height, so I hadn’t noticed it when I’d crawled to the bathroom. It said “GO TO KITCHEN.”
I pulled the covers over my head instead and lay there, half asleep and drowning in misery, until my stomach started to do a different sort of rumbling. Around noon, I finally pulled the covers around me like a protective cocoon and trudged to the kitchen.
There was a frying pan on the stove with oil already in it and a note on the handle saying “FRIDGE.” There was a box of eggs I didn’t remember buying and a pack of some sort of strange, flat bread. When I opened the refrigerator there was a pack of bacon. Connor must have bought all this stuff the night before….
That’s when I spotted the final note, on a plate. It said, “EAT = FEEL BETTER” and, crucially, there was a smiley face underneath.
That smiley face gave me hope. If I’d done anything too awful, he wouldn’t have done all this for me…right?
The bread-like things turned out to be potato bread, and delicious when fried up with the bacon and eggs. I started to feel like I might one day be human again.
My phone beeped with a Facebook update. You have been tagged in a photo. There was another one above it, and another and another. Thirty-seven in all.
I went to the first photo and my fork clattered to the floor.
The photo had been taken in a nightclub, with garish purple lights bathing the scene. A woman with my face but in a tight silver dress was dancing on a table, her arms above her head.
The next photo seemed to have been taken in a Chinese restaurant. The same woman was attempting to hug a worried-looking man in chef’s whites.
The next one I recognized as Battery Park, because the Statue of Liberty was in the background. The woman was imitating her in the foreground, wrapped in what looked like a tablecloth and holding aloft a hot dog.
Thirty-seven photos, each with ten or twenty “likes.”
I called Jasmine. “This is awful! Someone’s Photoshopped my head onto some woman’s body!”
“Oh, no,” said Jasmine. “That’s you.”
The world stopped turning, and I spun off into space.
“How do you feel, this fine morning?” Jasmine asked.
“But that’s not me! I don’t even own a silver dress!”
“You do now. You insisted on going shopping at an all-night market at midnight. You said you needed a whole new look. You changed back later,
when you got cold. Just before the strip club.”
“Strip Club?!”
“Oh…you haven’t gotten to that yet?”
I flicked forward. There I was, back in jeans and sweater, standing between two disgruntled doormen. Signs advertised an all-male strip show.
“They wouldn’t let you in,” Jasmine told me. “Despite your insistence that you could walk in a straight line. You couldn’t, as it turned out.”
I almost didn’t dare to ask. “Did I say anything to Connor?”
“Not that I know of. He seemed happy enough. Worried about you, actually. He’s just a big fluffy bunny rabbit, isn’t he, under that hard man exterior?”
“And Taylor?”
“He sent her home about the time you got completely out of control. Then he took you home in a cab.”
For the first time that day, I felt a tiny ray of hope.
***
By mid-afternoon, I was feeling slightly better, even if my stomach lurched every time I thought of facing the rest of Fenbrook. I lay on the couch, dozing and drinking peppermint tea, glad that at least it was Saturday and I didn’t have to do anything.
When the sun went down, I couldn’t rouse myself to turn the lights on so the room dimmed to a pleasant gloom. My phone’s ringtone shattered the silence. The screen said Connor.
I put it to my ear, closing my eyes in the hope that would help me concentrate. “Hi.”
“How are you feeling?” He sounded concerned and slightly amused. That was better than angry.
“Not good. Better for breakfast. Thank you. Where did you even manage to buy potato bread at three in the morning?”
He laughed. “I stayed all night, to make sure you were okay. I went to the store this morning, while you were still sleeping it off.”
I bit my lip. “I’m sorry if I messed things up with Taylor.”
“Taylor? Not much to mess up. We were just larkin’ about.”
I put my palm to my face and took a few deep breaths to stop myself screaming in frustration.
“Karen?”
Not now. I wasn’t going to tell him now, when I was hungover and humiliated and a mess.
“I’m fine,” I told him. “Just exhausted. I think I’ll sleep some more. You didn’t want to rehearse tonight or anything, did you?”
“Nah. A friend from back home’s crashing.”
When I’d hung up, I lay there and planned it out. Tomorrow morning, first thing, I’d get a cab over to his apartment and tell him. Simple and direct and to his face, and he’d react how he’d react.
I was done playing games; tomorrow, everything would change.
***
The next morning brought snow, the last gasp of winter before it handed over to spring. It wasn’t heavy, but it took everyone by surprise and between that and it being early on Sunday morning, cabs were thin on the ground.
That didn’t stop me, though. A glacier that split the city in two wouldn’t have stopped me.
I pressed the buzzer for Connor’s apartment, only to find it didn’t work and probably hadn’t since he’d moved in. Now I knew why he’d come down to meet me, when we rehearsed there.
Luckily, the main door’s lock was as broken as the buzzer. I trudged up the five flights of stairs, glad that at least I wasn’t carrying my cello this time, and stood outside his door for a second to get my breath back. There was a chance he wouldn’t be there, since I hadn’t called first. But who went out before nine on a Sunday morning?
I knocked, and my heart started pounding. I went through it again and again in my head, just as I had backstage at the bar when I’d asked for his help. I have to tell you something. I have to tell you that—
A thin-faced woman with ruler-straight hair opened the door. For a second, I tried to tell myself that I’d got the wrong apartment, but I recognized her from her photo.
A friend from back home’s crashing.
“Yeah?” said Ruth.
Her accent was just as strong as his and immediately I was imagining them together. She was wearing a vest top and I saw that she had a tattoo, too: A guitar, with a name running down the side. I knew what name it would be.
“Well?” she asked as I stood there frozen. Each word was snapped out with a viciousness that made me flinch, the hiss of a lioness warning me off her mate.
I turned and ran.
***
It was too early for the low-lifes and the dealers to be out on the streets so no one hassled me as I blundered down the street, wiping at my eyes. I didn’t want to cry in public.
I held it together even in the back of the cab. I held it until I got home and then I collapsed on my bed and sobbed and sobbed.
Chapter 20
I got the full story from Connor the next day as we prepared to rehearse in a practice room.
“Saturday morning, I get a collect call. She was standing at a payphone at JFK with a handbag—that’s all she brought, a handbag—and no money. She had nowhere else to go.”
I was staring down at my cello, ostensibly tuning it. “So the two of you are…?”
He sighed. “I don’t know yet. It’s complicated.”
I thought of the lyrics I’d heard. I was bad for you, you were bad for me. But I knew he loved her, or had loved her. They’d permanently etched each other’s names on their bodies, for God’s sake. If I came between them now, even if I stopped them before they’d properly got back together, what did that make me?
“You’ll have to write a new verse now,” I said as brightly as I could.
He nodded. “Or maybe a whole new song.”
We ran through the first two sections, and it was like moving through the stages of our relationship. In the first pair, the ones we’d written when he barely knew each other, the cello and the guitar were almost fighting. My piece was all me; his piece was all him. For the second pair, we’d written each other, my section angry and confident, his timid but passionate. That left the final pair—one piece each—the final stage in our relationship. And both of us were hitting a brick wall writing it.
We’d been playing around with the acoustic guitars, trying to find ways to make the cello sound like an electric guitar and vice versa. We had some ideas, but I could tell he was as stuck as I was.
“It’ll be fine,” he told me. “It’ll all work out.”
I gave him a plastic smile. Nothing was fine, not at all.
***
It was myself I was angry with. Firstly, for not just blurting out how I felt back in Flicker, or later, when I was drunk. Now it was too late—forever. I’d seen the look in Ruth’s eyes when she opened the door to me. Whatever she’d told Connor about needing a place to crash, she was in New York to get him back.
There was a part of me that said I should tell him, even with Ruth in the picture. Some romantic notion of fighting for my man, no matter what. But unlike Ruth, I didn’t know how he felt about me—what if I poured out my heart and he said “No”? Would Ruth allow him to keep working with a woman who was madly in love with him? More likely she’d pressure him to pull out of the recital and drop out of Fenbrook—after all, that was the path he’d been on when they’d last been together.
There was another reason, though. I didn’t know how to fight. I’d never felt that way about anyone before, let alone had to compete for them. Maybe Jasmine would have had the strength to go up against Ruth, but I knew I didn’t.
***
The following night, I was in Flicker with the girls. I’d managed to get Natasha alone for a few minutes while Jasmine and Clarissa fetched more drinks.
“So? How’s Darrell doing?” I asked.
Natasha shook her head. “He still doesn’t sleep. He lies there awake until four or five in the morning and then finally collapses for a few hours.”
“And before all this started—back when you were first together?”
“He’d go down to the workshop and work. That’s how he dealt with it.”
“And now he doesn’t.�
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“Now he doesn’t. Since he quit his job, he hasn’t worked at all.”
I shook my head. “I don’t get it. He’s this amazing designer and engineer, right? So why doesn’t he just make something new, if work is what he needs to be happy?”
She looked at me, and her eyes were suddenly moist.
“What? Nat, I can’t help if I don’t know.”
She took a deep breath. “It’s not that his work made him happy. He was”—she sighed—“Karen, he was making weapons.”
I blinked. “Weapons?!” I knew he’d worked for the defense industry, but I’d had vague images of aircraft, or radar or something.
She nodded.
“Like…guns?”
“You remember when I started dancing for him, as inspiration? He was working on some big project and I didn’t know what it was?”
I nodded.
“It was a missile. A missile that would wipe out half a country. He came up with a way for it to dodge by shifting its weight around as it flew.”
I felt sick inside. “Based on….”
“Based on watching me dance, yes. Based on me.”
I’d gone numb. I’d always liked Darrell, but now, hearing that…. “What happened when you found out?”
“He told me why he was doing it. He—” Her voice broke and she had to swallow and start again. “He watched his parents die. Killed by extremists in the Middle East. He came home and designed his first weapon out of anger—for revenge—and it should have ended there, he should have grieved and moved on. But the weapons company used him…exploited him. They encouraged him to build more and more, bigger and better, and he did—for years. Until I came along. It was killing his soul, Karen, but it was a focus for all that anger.”
I sat there digesting it. It was a horrible story, but in a way I was relieved because it helped me understand why Darrell had done what he did. And I saw how his life had been changed by meeting Natasha. “You found out,” I said, “and he quit his job because he loved you.”
In Harmony Page 18