Because if that’s what this is, then I should just go home and watch some porn or something. Or go find that bike messenger.
But somehow that second option didn’t seem any more attractive than the first. For some reason, today, whether alone or not, it all seemed like just so much jerking off.
I tossed the cold Starbucks dregs in a trash can and headed for the D train.
Chapter 8
And God Bless Julia Child
Roger
Seeing Fletch had brought up a lot of memories from the time we were together. And although it ended miserably, which spoiled everything, if I could look beyond that—and let’s face it, I hardly ever could—but when I could look beyond that, I could see that it had been a fantastic period of my life. I knew it at the time. I’d never been happier, and I had thought it would go on like that forever.
Oops.
Our law-firm quartet rehearsed regularly and we tended to rotate the location. The first time that it was at my place after Fletch had moved in, I was a little embarrassed about it. About him. Not that he was embarrassing, because he was the opposite, but just the fact of him. I hadn’t mentioned Fletch at work, and I didn’t know how to explain this guy suddenly being in my apartment. The whole how-long-have-you-guys-known-each-other thing. Tommy had only recently found out, and that was by accident. But now it was time to out myself as—what? Somebody who had a boyfriend? That wasn’t so bad. It was outing myself as this incredibly careful, orderly, circumspect person who had chucked all good sense out the window and done this really crazy, impetuous thing. That was embarrassing. Not that I regretted it, because I didn’t. But still.
The four of us were marching up the two flights to my apartment—we’re all fairly mobile except Katrina, who, instead of using a collapsible music stand like the rest of us, always brought her own heavy, not-so-collapsible music stand wherever she went. She was a big woman, and it didn’t seem to slow her down much. Third story, not bad, but then I wasn’t carrying a cello. Bob, the one with the cello strapped to his back, brought up the rear behind Katrina, keeping a safe distance from the music stand, because Katrina could be a little careless.
“My new flatmate is probably home,” I sort of mentioned as we clomped up the stairs. How’s that for casual?
“You have a new flatmate?” asked Katrina. Nothing gets past her. She was behind Janine, who was behind me, but I swear I could hear her ears perking up.
I opened the door.
Our chairs were already set up in a little semicircle, and my music stand was in front of the second chair.
Fletch. I hadn’t asked him to do that. He just had.
“Hello?” That was me.
“Hey!” Fletch was in the kitchen—just separated from the living room by a countertop. He was wearing an apron with giant roses and flounces on it—an ironic gift from Tommy I obviously never used—and he had a little bit of flour or something on one cheek. “Hi,” he said wiping his hands on the apron. All very Martha Stewart, but on him it was totally cute.
“Fletch?” said Katrina. She looked from one of us to the other, as Fletch gave me a squeeze and a kiss on the cheek.
Well, I guess that little kitten was out of the bag.
“Katrina,” said Fletch, “it’s great to see you again.”
“Bob, you remember Fletch from Katrina’s party,” I said.
“Of course. Hey.” He too seemed a little surprised and looked from me to Fletch to me. I guess I might have warned them.
“Janine,” Janine said, shaking hands.
“Viola,” said Fletch.
“I thought your name was Fletch. Kidding!” Music nerds. We never really learn how to make a joke.
“Don’t tease me,” said Fletch. “I’m nervous enough already. I don’t really know what a viola is even.”
“A viola?” asked Janine. “It’s sort of like a violin—only better. Not so runty.”
“Like a swollen violin,” said Katrina.
“A violin with a head cold,” I said.
“It’s more like a violin,” said Janine, “whose balls have dropped.”
From meek, little Janine, that struck us music nerds as pretty damned funny, although it’s probably not funny to anybody else.
“So,” Katrina said, eyeing me and Fletch. Keep in mind that Katrina was not just first violin in the quartet—I’m second—she was actually my boss as well. Janine was a corporate attorney, and Bob did something in the Accounting Department. I wasn’t really sure how much of my personal life I wanted to share with the entire law firm, but here was my personal life in a floral-print apron and grinning. With my thumb I brushed the flour from his cheek.
“So,” Katrina said again. “You guys are old friends from summer camp?”
“Camp Onnaconna,” said Fletch, nodding. “It was a very progressive camp.” He gave me a squeeze as he said it. I blushed to my hairline.
“And an old friend of Bob’s?”
“Me?” asked Bob, pulling out his cello.
Fletch waved to him.
“Don’t bother,” Katrina said. “Marco told me you guys crashed.”
“The rat!” said Fletch.
“So you two boys met at my party. And now you’re…”
“Of course!” said Janine. “You’re the guy Roger was making out with at Katrina’s party!”
“We weren’t making—” I started. “Hey, you weren’t even there!”
“I know, but it was all over the office the next day.”
“Tolja.” Fletch said, beaming.
“And you guys are—living together? Already?”
See? It was embarrassing.
“Well—yeah!” Fletch explained, not in the least embarrassed. “It was pretty fast, but you know, it’s worked out really, really well so far, hasn’t it, Dweeb?”
I heard some Brit on TV use this word once—gobsmacked.
It was all too much, and I was good and gobsmacked.
Fletch—the wild and beautiful boy who crashed parties and flirted with Katrina, who dated sword swallowers—was saying he was happily domesticated in my apartment? I was too gobsmacked to answer.
“Dweeb?” asked Janine.
“When we met, Roger was talking about music, and then said he felt like a dweeb for talking about classical music all night, and then, well…”
“We should start calling you that around the office,” Katrina teased.
“Fletch,” I said, fluffing a flounce of his apron, “what’s with the…”
“Almost forgot! I’ve been cooking!” He turned around and pulled a towel from two platters.
“That’s the fabulous smell,” said Bob.
“I figured you’d be hungry.”
He’d made hors d’oeuvres? They looked like little cream puffs.
“I didn’t want to ask, but my mouth’s been watering since we walked in the door.” That was Janine.
“These are cheese-filled”—he pointed—“and these are crabmeat.”
And they dug in.
“Where did you get the platters? I don’t have platters.”
“Kristy.” Meant nothing to me. “The woman downstairs?” he explained. “With the French bulldogs.”
Fletch knew the neighbors? I’d lived there how long? I didn’t know the neighbors. He held up one of the hors d’oeuvres for me, and I bit it. Wow.
“Oh, Fletch! This is delicious,” said Janine.
“Julia Child. That woman was a genius! And Marco gave me the crabmeat. He says hi, by the way.”
“Still warm!” Bob said.
“Fletch, you should take up catering!” said Katrina.
“I can’t cook!”
“Oh, contrary,” said the accountant, being stupid.
“Maybe we should try to get started?” I was hoping to steer
things back toward rehearsal, but it was completely futile. They had fallen on the little puffs like zombies at the brain buffet. There were mmmms all around. Janine mmmm’d in on a G-sharp with a rising attack and a short glissando down from there. Bob did the same, but being the cellist, an octave lower. Leave it to Katrina to mmmm a step higher than the others. Mozart couldn’t have done it better.
Fletch put his arm around my waist, beaming.
“Try the crabmeat, Roger. They’re really good,” he said, feeding me another one.
And they were. They were really delicious. It was the end of the workday, we were all hungry, and these cheesy pastries with this warm creamy filling—they were out of this world.
I was stunned. By all of it. The hors d’oeuvres. The others. Julia Child and Fletch. Me. Me and Fletch. My reaction to me and Fletch. Office gossip about me and Fletch, for God’s sake. It was all just nonstop smacking of gobs.
I had had no idea where things really stood with Fletch and me. I always felt Fletch was holding back a little. I knew how I felt. I was getting definitely way more wrapped up in Fletch than I’d ever been with anybody. Not because of the body and the looks but mostly because he was so nice to me. That sounds totally stupid, I know. But usually the really pretty ones were arrogant dicks, and Fletch? Fletch made me feel like I was the special one. He made me feel attractive, sexy even. Imagine.
And if I hadn’t been goofy about him, those crabmeat things would have cinched it.
I didn’t dare tell him I was falling for him because—you know—he was so out of my league. And I had no idea how he’d respond. Or if he’d respond. Or if he’d just laugh. Maybe he was really nice to everybody? I was never quite certain how much of his moving in with me was because he actually liked me and how much of it was because he just wanted to get in out of the rain.
But here he was making this deliberate show for my friends.
Make no mistake, he was announcing. This is my boyfriend. We are a couple. This is our home. This is our kitchen.
I hadn’t even realized how much I wanted such a thing—a boyfriend, this boyfriend particularly. I had been perfectly content, or at least I had thought I’d been, just me, my little Mittenwald violin, and Haggis. The quartet. I was never like Tommy, who was always looking. I had never really felt the need for a boyfriend, and now I had one, a staggeringly wonderful boyfriend, who was grinning at me as if somehow he was proud of me.
I smiled at him, and mouthed a silent thank-you. He shrugged a little, modestly, but he was obviously completely pleased with himself. All of a sudden, this crazy and impetuous decision, letting Fletch move in, seemed like the smartest thing I’d ever done.
“You two look so good together,” Janine said, licking melted Gruyère from her thumb. “I’m really happy for you.”
“And you met at my party. I think that’s so sweet.”
Katrina, sentimental? In the office she always seemed so tough. Even with the quartet. With Katrina on first violin, it was sort of like Diana Ross and the Supremes. Katrina and her backup girls. She brooked no difference of opinion about anything—her tempos, her phrasing, everything.
“So what all are you all working on?” asked Fletch as we crowded around the kitchen sink before we moved back to the living room to get our instruments.
“Franz Schubert,” I said.
“It’s always Schubert,” said Bob.
“Not always,” said Katrina.
“We like Schubert,” explained Janine.
“I like raspberry Schubert.” Bob. He was both an accountant and a musician. Double-nerd—his was a hopeless case.
“What’s it called?” Fletch asked.
“This one actually has a name,” said Janine.
“It’s called ‘Death and the Maiden.’” Bob read the title out like a lurid headline out of the New York Post. By now, bows were tightened, instruments were out.
“Cool,” said Fletch. “Should be a horror movie.”
“The title is from a poem,” Katrina explained.
“But it doesn’t really have a lot to do with the poem, I don’t think.” Janine again.
“I don’t know,” said Bob. “There’s a lot of death music in there.”
“You think?”
“Death-ish.”
“Not so much maiden,” said Katrina.
“I think it was kind of a jumping-off point for Schubert,” I said. “A metaphor.”
By this time we were all in our seats, tuning, tuning. Fletch took his cue.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be quiet now. You guys, be—tremendous.”
We all smiled. There was another round of thanks for the pastries. Fletch called the dog, and they withdrew to the bedroom.
Okay, here’s a secret for you, in case you were wondering (and I’m sure you weren’t). There’s no conductor in a quartet, so how do we all come in together? The answer is everybody sort of tunes in to the body language and breathing of everybody else and, especially, to the first violin. After a while, the connection feels almost psychic. A quartet becomes like a living creature all its own, and if one part is sick or out of sorts, we all feel it. Later on, when things went south with Fletch, I was maybe less than stellar for a while, and they hated me for it.
I mean, there we were, working on Beethoven’s opus 133, the “Great Fugue,” one of the last things he wrote and considered by lots of people to be possibly the greatest sixteen minutes of music ever composed. And it’s a total bitch to play. So they were all scraping away, striving to give expression to this titanic vision that Beethoven had managed to put down on paper, despite his complete deafness and at the very end of his life, in his desperate need to articulate his view of his place in the vast, incomprehensible chaos of the universe—and right smack in the middle of this herculean work sat the second violin, aka, the Great Wall of Bummer.
I couldn’t care about Beethoven; I didn’t care about his place in the frigging universe. I only knew I wasn’t supposed to be alone—and I was utterly alone. Not really the right mind-set for an intimate collaboration.
After a couple weeks, I bowed out and they went back to playing trios, which is what they were doing before I came along. Eventually Katrina had had enough of my sulking, and she dragged me back by the forelock. Okay, she actually just scheduled a rehearsal at my place, and they were suddenly all just there. She threw a spanking new set of parts to Schubert’s “Rosamunde” quartet on the stands, which she had obviously just bought for the purpose because she knew I had really wanted to play it, and without another word about it—we were a quartet again.
Thinking back, I suppose it was my salvation.
So. Body language and breathing and coming in together for the first attack. Katrina always brought us in with a sharp inhale before the first note.
No doubt that’s more than you wanted to know.
On this particular day, I was obviously pretty keen. All I wanted in the world was for Fletch to like me, and he had done all this because he wanted me to like him!
“Shall we?” said Katrina.
We nodded. She was still for a second, then she took a deep breath—and four bows hit the strings at precisely the same instant.
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah—
Dadada dum.
I had a really gifted string quartet made up of really good friends; I had the greatest boyfriend imaginable sitting in the next room with my dog, listening to us play my favorite composer; I had a tummy full of crab puffs.
I was feeling pretty damned good about myself and my own particular place in the vast, incomprehensible, and truly marvelous chaos of the universe. The fingers of my left hand seemed to work on their own. They were always magically in exactly the right place at exactly the right instant. I can tell you, I’m a pretty good violinist, but that afternoon?
That afternoon I was—tremendous!
Chapter 9
Some People Might Call It Stalking
Fletch
It was a few days after the opera, and there I was, minding my own business—and if I just happened to be hanging around the streets that just happened to be in Roger’s neighborhood, it was a total coincidence. I swear. Yeah, I know, it was getting beyond creepy, and I had vowed to stop. Soon.
Chelsea Park is just a couple blocks from Roger’s apartment, and I’d decided to take a break from staring at Roger’s windows—yep, it had come to that—and I was enjoying the sun in the park on a very warm day in late September.
The first thing I saw was the dog—Haggis. I haven’t talked about Haggis much, but he’s important. He’s a Scottish terrier, this little black thing with ridiculously short legs and a tough coat—it’s not soft at all—with two black eyes that you can see glinting under looming eyebrows. Roger keeps him really well groomed, so he’s this totally sharp little dog. Gets a lot of attention on the street.
So there I was, minding my own business, hanging around in Roger’s neighborhood, and there was a well-groomed Scottish terrier. They’re not very common, so to see one in Roger’s neighborhood—well, it had to be Haggis, right?
But it wasn’t Roger on the leash. Dog walker? Nice-looking guy, tall, blond, sunglasses. Then I realized that I knew this guy from somewhere. Then I realized from where. I knew him from ushering, and no, I don’t remember every single person I hand a program to. Just some.
“Haggis?” I said when I was about fifteen feet away.
It was definitely Haggis. He flung himself at the end of the leash, ears back, and it was like his whole body was wagging. I squatted down and let him jump all over me and lick my face and spin in circles.
Two years later and he still remembered me. And he didn’t hate me, which made for a nice change.
“I’m sorry,” said the blond, a little perplexed. Not me, the other blond, the one on the other end of the leash. “He’s never like this with strangers.”
“That’s because I’m not a stranger. Am I, Pupper-nickel? Nooooo. We’re old buds.”
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