My head sinks toward her. We kiss.
I hear so many new songs clamoring at the edges of my mind; their rhythms drive the beat of my heart as hard and quick as “Sin with Me.”
She pulls us back onto the street. I keep listening to the soundtrack in my head as we start down Belmont. Under the streetlights there, different songs muscle their way into my attention, drowning out the sounds of passion with the sounds of endings, when gravity takes back control and we hurl against the ground, splitting us apart. These rhythms mimic “Just Walk Away” and “Suffer in Silence,” and quicken fear in me as they slash from anger to regret.
I refuse to hear to these sounds—these stories of the end. Michele’s here. Now. I push everything from my thoughts but her.
You remind me of Amy. But Tanya hated Amy. How did you ever get invited to her parties in the first place? Let alone be a regular?
“You know,” Michele says, breaking our silence, “when I first saw you, I thought you were just another one of Tanya and Randal’s flaky friends.”
I give a quick chuckle. “You have a creepy way of saying what I was thinking about.”
“Sign of destiny.”
The way she says “destiny” is thrilling. It makes me want to believe in destiny, if only for a moment, this one time.
“I’ve often wondered,” I say. “How did you ever get hooked up with her? You’re not like her regular people.”
“I was on dates with them.”
“On dates? With them?”
“Randal gave me as a birthday present to Tanya—for them both, really. I was at those parties to warm things up.”
“A birthday present. Hmm.”
“Sure. Tanya enjoyed girls from time to time; Randal liked the idea of a three-way. Like all men. Even you.”
My shoulders rise slightly, and my palms turn up in vague agreement; she’s not exactly wrong. Still, I won’t completely admit to it either—too treacherous.
“So,” I say, “when she got pregnant—”
“That was the problem indeed. But not the way you’re thinking. When she got pregnant, he still liked his fun. He kept after me. Tried to get into my skivvies without her around. Tanya didn’t like it, of course. That’s what got them in trouble. Not the miscarriage.”
“Slow down here.”
“Oh, it’s really not that interesting. Randal couldn’t keep his pants on when Tanya had to. Now it’s done. I’m not friends with either of them anymore. Tanya was jealous. She left. He’s not that interesting—never was, frankly.”
“But at the parties, you were flirting with me—”
“That’s what parties are for: titillation, brushes with jealousy, jockeying for position, creating a mystery. Who will finally hook up with whom? And how? And when?”
“With Scott and me both.”
“Scott? He was a prop. And soooooo queer for you.”
“So I found out.”
“You didn’t see that?”
“Back then? No. Not at all.”
“How could you have missed it?” Michele asks. “The way he treated the woman around you. He was so jealous. And possessive.”
“If I’d seen it sooner, everything would’ve been different. Kenny wouldn’t be dead. And Mercurial Visions—we’d still be playing. And, well …” I shake my head.
She stops walking and regards me carefully, her head tilting to the side.
“You don’t like boys at all, do you?” she asks, her finger making a couple of tight circles before landing on her lips.
“No.” I shrug. “So?”
“At all—as in nada,” she says. Her finger flicks back and forth and then rests on her cheek. “Oh, now. That’s something I never suspected—a truly straight boy. That’s like an albino.”
“An albino?”
“Everyone’s at least part queer. A lot of people are freaked out by it, so they do straight with all their might. Ten percent let it shine. Except you. You simply don’t like boys at all.”
“Um. Yeah,” I say. “That’s strange?”
She guffaws. “An honest-to-god straight boy—who’s funny too. Wow, that is hot,” Michele says. “But now, sorry to say, I do have to get some sleep. It’s a school night for me.” She kisses my cheek good-bye. “I’ll call you. Believe me.”
For weeks, we circle each other. We talk, have dinner together, and watch movies. We allow ourselves only brief kisses, fingertip caresses, and holding hands, while I constantly fight off the urge to ask her to the loft. I refuse to because of an ugly thought that intrudes when I’m alone: if I only push us a little further, let us dissolve into each other, save us from our solitude, she’ll be my band’s salvation; I’ll stand on stage for her, spilling out songs with her name and her face woven into them.
I feel vile when this thought trots into my awareness.
She too seems wary of our hurling together, smashing pell-mell into each other’s lives and bodies, and never asks me to hers. At least I don’t have to decide if her place is safe.
As I keep my ugly thought at bay, I struggle to find the new sound for our unnamed band, and all I have to show for this is “Daydream and Try.” One song doesn’t start a band—certainly not with the expectations everyone has for us.
As more time passes with me empty of ideas, I find it harder to resist the lure of songs with Michele’s name and her face woven into them. Oh, they would be so very good, these new songs I can imagine hearing at the edges of my mind. These could-be songs with Michele would be joyful, not regretful—what I need to feel now.
Then, one night in Subterranean, as Michele and I sit on a couch, I talk to her about my band, about creating music and my frustrations. I weave in hints at what we might do together, to probe the depth of her reluctance. I nudge the talk to us and what could be. As I do, the reluctance in her eyes softens, and then her smile widens, and as they do, I can make out the sound of our furious first album: a soundtrack for seduction, temptation, and the disintegration of one into the other. I can feel myself on stage again, singing of her. Of us. Ultimately of what we once were.
Everything sounds so familiar. Like my darkest fantasy.
My right arm has already found a perch, stretched along the carved wood backrest of our couch, grazing her shoulders; the music surrounding us here is rich and sexy. From the rim of her glass, a smudge of her lipstick whispers that I need to have her lips smear its color on me as well.
Be my lover. Live it with me. We’ll feel like we’re flying.
Picking up my scotch, I lean closer to her than I need to, and linger there, watching her shift her legs so her skirt spreads open as if she is testing me—making me choose, right here, what’s most important to me.
Choruses from unwritten songs urge me to touch her. They crescendo as I put my glass down and lift my hand over the space she’s opened for me at the bottom of her skirt. I look at the smooth skin of the inside of her thighs. It would be so warm.
I need this tonight. Need you as much as I ever needed Amy. I’ll transform us.
Then I hear Amy’s voice, giving me my only choices I have for a woman.
A sudden anger freezes my hand there above Michele’s legs.
Next I remember Scott giving me my only choices for music.
I pull my hand back from over Michele’s legs and set it on my lap.
A wave of disgust courses though me. At everyone. Everything. Including myself. For letting myself believe these stories I was being told, letting myself get trapped by them, like I’d allowed the white cubicles to trap me years and lifetimes before.
All I want is to get up and walk away.
I can’t explain why. I only know it’s safer this way.
I put my hands on the seat cushion to push myself up. I can’t meet her eyes, so I look at the floor as I stand.
As I turn
to leave, I remember a time I was just as disgusted at myself—when Arcade Land foundered, when Scott pretended to be our manager, when I tumbled into a world I never understood yet let its sterile white walls and 5:00 p.m. release define the limits of who I was. I’d believed those walls were as far as I could be.
Until I met Amy.
She shocked me back to life. Told me to turn her into songs. Then was I able to freeze moments, thoughts, and feelings into lyrics and string them together like crystals on a necklace of melody and rhythm, song after song.
Only to lose her. Then Jennifer. Then everything.
The desperate feeling sinking into me as I try to leave Michele in Subterranean is the same as the moments I’d thought of jumping off a chair, my neck in a belt, because I had no way back to who I was. This time no sterile white walls trapped me: I have. And the only way I can see of escaping is through Michele.
I finally force myself to look at her, and I see questions hanging from her expression, which quickly shifts to suspicion.
If I do not love you as intensely as I can right now, then what? There’s no one to lose. Nothing to drive lyrics and melody. Nothing left to fill me out. I’ll be nothing. Desperate, without a voice. Silently crying out.
This is the moment I understood what I’d failed to grasp all those years ago: the unspoken desperation in the eyes of everyone around me were songs they tried to sing, but they needed me to give them voice.
Holding my finger to my lips, I shush her.
“No,” I say, laying it on her cheek. “Not what you’re thinking.”
We all need something to live for—a mirror in which to look and see ourselves reflected in a way that matters, to somehow matter, to someone. But the desperate ones gaze into mirrors that are warped by contrived oughts and shoulds, by impossible exemplars of perfection and exotica, by supernatural offers of life’s higher purpose obtained after life has ended. These fun house mirrors merely feed an addiction to higher meaning—whet the need for ever more—like those that killed Charlene, ruled Jennifer’s imagination, and deaden the eyes of anyone who looks in them too long.
The need to sing this for all those without a voice blazes inside.
Then the songs come. Songs years in the fermentation: a thousand new melodies bursting forth, crying out their lyrics, all screaming for my attention. I hear a lifetime of music unfolding: meaning woven from moments of living the best one can, through the tumult of hopes and dreams and fears and losses that fill every life with desperate acts, perdition, compassion, and a hope for redemption.
That night, perched on the edge of leaving, I look at her, and she at me. I nod.
The way she bites her lip lets me know she understands that our story won’t be the same as all those we kept reliving when we were apart.
My fingers tap out a new rhythm on her shoulder; she shimmies in perfect time to it.
• • • • •
Over the next month, I wrote enough songs to fill three full-length CDs. A month later, our band, now named Merciful Release, gelled. In two months, our demo was ready. In three, TVT records inked a multidisk deal with us.
No one had to leave.
I still think back to our time together every now and then.
When I sift through all the things that happened to my friends and lovers, I always get angry—with myself mostly. Then regret takes over: I wish I could tell Kenny how sorry I am that I didn’t understand in time to save him. Scott—my best friend—well, I failed him the most. Perhaps one day we’ll meet. When we do, I hope I can find the words to let him understand.
I imagine I should tell Amy and Jennifer I’m sorry. Or not; they’re alive and doing well from what I’ve heard. I doubt they’d have much use of our past anymore.
Oh, yes, Michele did eventually see the loft, not long after the TVT deal. I invited her over. We had coffee and talked of us and what might be. As we did, I ignored the angel that still hung on the wall, refusing to look.
Our first night together, Michele remarked that “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was a great song but a lousy way to live.
Since then I’ve only been able to love her, this woman named Michele, who listens to my music—and who now carries our child.
In quiet times like now, I sing a little song I keep only to serenade her:
There once
Was a man named Jonathan,
And a woman named Michele.
They were
Simply
In love.
About the Author
W. Lance Hunt earned two bachelor’s degrees from Ohio State University, cofounded the Rudely Elegant Theatre in Chicago, and helped produce an Emmy Award–winning film. After living in Mexico City, he moved to New York City, where he earned a Master of Arts in English from CCNY. Hunt works as a freelance writer and editor and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
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