“You know Morgan from school? She’s a year behind me. Her older brother is in the chorus of this in New York,” Ofir suddenly spoke, just as Jamie and I began to frantically look for points on which to believably focus our eyes. From what I could tell, with the help of my peripheral vision, Jamie chose to study his shoes.
“Oh, that’s nice,” I gushed, nodding entirely too manically to read convincing.
“Yeah. He was in Spider-Man, too, but now that moved to Vegas and this is his new gig,” Ofir continued, unfazed.
“Did he go to Talents?” I asked, hearing Jamie shuffle in his seat next to me, crossing and re-crossing his legs.
“I think so, but that was before either you or I ever set foot in there.”
I did all I could do, which was to continue to nod. It was true enough of a statement and there was nothing else to add. The school has been around for decades before me and it would continue to exist for many decades more, its doors revolving with fresh talent every four years. My presence (or absence) failed to change much of anything, but the least I could do was participate. I suspected Ofir was of similar mindset. So I nodded.
~ ~ ~
A small crowd of tourists was gathered by the stage door outside the theatre. Despite the drizzle overhead, as well as their occasional facade of jadedness, our kids wanted to join.
“Oh, Christ, there are no celebrities in this, so what’s the bloody point? Can’t we just go back to the hotel? It’s raining,” Abbott whined. Reluctantly, he took the kids’ phones and cameras from their hands. Jamie and I took the surplus to immediately proceed to take pictures of our students with various obscure actors still sporting their theatre makeup. Each got their own ticket autographed in metallic marker, smiling eagerly at their future, surely hoping to trade places soon enough.
“What is it about wanting to take pictures with actors, et cetera, anyway? And getting autographs? I don’t get it,” Stephanie asked. She was the only one not armed with anyone’s gadgets. Instead, she stood fidgeting with her umbrella.
I shrugged in response as I snapped a photo of Jordan and “Mother,” unsure if the picture was any good, given the less than generous lighting of the theatre awning.
“I guess you get to be a part of someone’s greatness, so to speak, even if it is for only a moment,” Abbott spoke from across the way, his eyes on a screen in front of him, taking a photo of Riley and one of the “dads.” “I mean, I get it with real celebrities…no offense, darling,” he chuckled at a chorus girl with long, spiky lashes. The woman politely smiled and continued on her way through the crowd with her back hunched under the weight of her backpack, no one stopping her for a photo. “I mean, we should probably know that these are just regular folks, right, Jamie?” Having said this, Abbott looked up at Jamie, seeking confirmation, but getting not much by way of any facial expression in response. Undeterred, he continued. “But still, to us, just about anyone on any stage is automatically someone superior. It’s madness! Even the no-names…no offense, mate,” he paused to insincerely apologize to another chorus member—this time, a young man making his way to the Tube with his eyes on the pavement. “For the split second they are next to us, we get to kind of feel one with them. Hey, maybe we even hope that their talent and success is more like some communicable disease—that it’ll rub off on us.”
Stephanie listened, looking eager to learn. She nodded, taking everything in. How in the world these two wound up together, I could not understand.
“But then they leave and we are still who we are. Nothing actually changes. You’re still you, and always will be. This isn’t even a master-class or anything, not even a stepping-stone. Meaning, you don’t actually learn anything from the experience,” she reasoned, elementarily. “I mean, all you have in the end is a photograph and an autograph, like a taunt of something better than your own life, allegedly!” she exclaimed. “Hey, ‘photograph and autograph!’ That rhymes!”
“Well, I hear Jamie leaves a little more behind. Or at least he means to. Right, mate?” Abbott sniggered, eyeing Jamie from behind someone’s phone.
Slowly, I rotated my head toward Jamie, careful not to disturb the bun I’d been able to quickly construct before leaving my room, earlier. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to see (perhaps any sign of rebuke), but he remained stoic, his eyes squinting in the dark, trying to locate the appropriate buttons on yet another camera.
“Thanks, Ms. Levit,” Sage squealed, skipping up to me in her heels. Gingerly, she removed her phone from my frigid fingers. “Paz is going to be on the other side of that barricade one day soon, Ms. Levit. You just wait and see! And when you go see her, you tell the security guy your name, and I’m sure she’ll come get you, give you a tour and everything.”
Carefully unloading all the electronics on my person into the hands of their respective owners, I smiled at her.
“I don’t doubt it for a minute,” I answered with a smile that chilled my own insides. “And so will you.”
She seemed confused. “But I just want to be a set designer. I’m not like ‘the talent’ or anything.”
“Are you kidding? There is more than one way to be great! Or important! Or talented! So long as you do what it is that you want to do, and you do it well, you do your best—that’s it, you’re great,” I tried, doubting my own conviction. Never mind the manners they’d exhibited at the Stonehenge, we were failing as teachers.
“Well, Ms. Levit, no offense, but I don’t know if that’s apples and oranges or whatever, to be fair. A set designer is definitely not the talent on set. But, you can be part of my greatness, if you want,” Wisdom chimed in, pocketing her iPhone. “You’ll be able to hear my lungs all the way from Lincoln Center—I’ll be Carmen,” she announced, proudly. “No hard feelings, Sagey-girl!” she added when we both saw Sage’s shoulders round.
I looked for Veronika for some assurance that not all was lost. Surely she couldn’t be of the same mind. Craning my neck around fellow vacationers, I finally made out her form. She was engaged in a hushed discussion with Jamie, their figures huddled in the dark. Try as I might, I couldn’t read their lips, but Veronika’s getup took the wind out of me: with her hair slicked back and her skinny legs looking fantastically long in those pleather leggings and high-heeled stilettos, this was the first time I ever saw this girl look the part she was born to play.
The proximities of their bodies made my neck hot, but I knew I couldn’t come to its rescue and scratch it in public.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: From the Horse’s Mouth
Jamie was back atop my ottoman. He seemed to like perching himself there. I watched as he breathed and pressed the palms of his hands into the seat, curling his long back into a stretch. His hair fell on his face.
I sat on the bed across from him, with my legs crossed, my knees modestly covered by my dress. My feet moaning after the lengthy walk in my heels on the wet cobblestones, my shoes sat neatly at the foot of the bed.
The room was quiet, only the low buzz of electricity overhead. Given our silence, it seemed more like a growl.
We came here together, arranging our bodies in our respective positions without any syllables, let alone words, exchanged between us. The kids, for all their privilege and talent, had a tough time hiding their elation after the show, busting out four-part harmonies of “Our Last Summer” while practically skipping through the empty Covent Garden. They were kids. No matter their age, no matter their curriculum vitaes. We finally managed to talk them into their rooms by quarter to midnight.
“The baby— it’s not my baby,” I heard Jamie say from behind the black curtain of hair. There was something animal about him there—feline. I wasn’t sure if it was the light or the angle, given his rounded spine. “That’s what Abbott was referring to so transparently over there. I’m surprised he still hasn’t told you all this.”
Feeling the words slither inside my ear canals and make their way in from there, I felt my stomach drop as if it were my own paternity on the
line.
“You just found out?” I fought the phlegm in the back of my throat to ask. I’d skipped a whole day’s worth of cold medicine, apparently paying the price now.
Jamie chuckled then, his thin shoulders shuddering, while I searched his face as it went in and out of the shadows of his hair. He had a large, sexy mouth that always made something in my lower stomach melt, threatening to seep out.
“No, I was in the delivery room. And there was a Korean drummer in the band I was touring with when we met, so…,” he informed the dingy carpet under his shoes.
I couldn’t be sure that my face wasn’t betraying my brain’s trouble processing this information, it being too hopeful to pay much attention to the details. Slowly, his words painted images.
“Oh…. Oh!”
I couldn’t prevent laughter from violently erupting from my chest, tears following; they washed the makeup from my lids and into my eyes, making them burn, in turn producing more tears. I wiped the mess with my hands, still unwashed after returning to the hotel—practically putting out the welcome mat for all the germs surely picked up en route, contrary to the very core of my upbringing.
“What were you talking to Veronika about before?”
“This.”
“She knows?”
“The girl knows more than she lets on.”
Switching to wiping my face with my wrists, operating on the assumption that perhaps they were cleaner, I tried to stop laughing.
“I’m sorry, do you know what time it is?”
Reflexively flicking his wrist up but finding no watch, he shook his head.
“No.”
“Can you get my phone, then?” I asked, motioning behind him.
Slow to uncurl his spine and pull his hair back, Jamie turned toward the mirror and took my phone off its charger. He handed it to me, careful to make sure that only our fingertips touched.
Quickly, I turned it on, only to be immediately greeted by its burping of text messages.
“Your ex?”
I nodded hard enough for my bun to begin to unravel. Taking pins out of it one by one, I once again shut my phone off (but only after reading that I was a stupid bitch who would be sorry for all she’s done when he’s dead).
“So what time is it?”
“Oh,” I coughed to answer. “I think it said it was just past midnight.” I pushed off the edge of the bed where I’d been sitting and shuffled backward until I felt the cool of the wall behind my back. “I’m sorry,” I said, giving my eyes one last wipe with my dirty hands.
Jamie must’ve sighed (given that I saw his chest rise and fall, the top four buttons of his shirt undone), but I couldn’t hear him, my mind abuzz and unfocused. My hair slowly reclaiming my shoulders, I continued watching him as he stood up and crawled across the bed. Soundlessly, his spine made contact with the same wall that was supporting me.
“Well, anyway, it’s all good. He was a handsome fellow. And Zoe, his daughter, is a very pretty girl,” Jamie said, looking toward his reflection in the mirror. I followed his gaze.
“But you two are still together?” I asked the glass.
“Who?”
“You and your neither Argentinian nor underage groupie wife.”
“Of course not!” he exclaimed, as if this were some absurd idea I’d come up with all on my own.
“But…,” I stammered, my insides impossibly hot.
“Oh, this?” he asked, pointing to his wedding band. “Yeah, no, the marriage was annulled some time ago and finalized this week, actually. Thus my numerous phone conversations and distractedness…. Well, that and my needing to arrange a whole new life again—a place to live, a job that’s not this, of course…. You know what I mean…. But anyway, I wear the ring to school on Abbott’s advice, believe it or not. He says that since I am a ‘young teacher’ and kids these days ‘struggle with boundaries,’ a wedding band would help keep things ‘proper,’” he explained whilst aggressively demonstrating air quotes with his fingers. “He also told me not to wear jeans, but he does, so fuck it.”
Abbott. Somehow everything sooner or later led to Abbott.
“Well, I’m not a student with boundary issues,” I protested in spite of myself. “And the tip about jeans is a good one. It’s fine for Abbott because he’s quite a few decades older than us,” I added in some sort of an inexplicable defense.
I heard Jamie shrug, his vest and his shirt rustling against the wallpaper behind him. Our eyes met only in the mirror.
“What do you want from me, Levit? You were engaged.”
Truth.
“Ah, but, allegedly Abbott had informed everybody who’s anybody that I wasn’t by the time we boarded the plane back in New York.”
I saw him nod, his eyes unblinking.
“That was Abbott.”
“Oh, I see—you needed to hear it from the horse’s mouth?” I laughed, unexpectedly.
In the mirror, I watched Jamie’s thick, full lips stretch into a long, wide smile. Then I saw his shoulders push off from the wall and turn toward me. He leaned in enough for his mouth to softly graze mine, testing the waters.
“Well, here it is, then: I’m not engaged,” I whispered when his face drew back a millimeter and stayed there a second too long without action.
“And I’m not married,” he whispered back, his sweet, warm breath tickling my face. Only in that proximity could I truly see just how pigmented his lips were—how pink.
My hand instinctively reached out to his face, my palms meeting his hollow, stubbly cheeks, eager for his lips to finally touch mine again. In turn, his fingertips traced the contours of my mouth. His eyes searched mine for what seemed like a slow-burning eternity before he brushed my limp hair behind my ears and swayed toward me, the cool of his ring startling me as it touched my earlobe.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, drawing back.
“Take it off,” I whispered without batting an eye.
“The ring?”
“Yes.”
I watched him struggle to remove the thick band before tossing it on the dresser; we both listened as it took its time settling on the lacquered surface.
His lips’ buttery softness took me by surprise. I’d spent a considerable amount of time studying their plushness from a distance, but feeling their velvet against me was akin to a high—a high so intense, my arms flexed of their own volition and clutched his whole body to me. If this was all we ever did, I’d be grateful.
Jamie’s fingers squeezed the flesh of my arms. In seconds, he was leaning his weight slowly onto me, until I eventually landed on a set of thin hotel pillows. He followed, his frame elegantly arranging itself on top of mine. To feel his weight on me was the opposite of a burden—rather, it felt like sweet relief of completeness. Ready, I shifted my thighs to allow his leg to come between mine as our mouths moved in an easy, improvised rhythm. I hadn’t forgotten how to kiss, after all; this, too, was a relief.
My heart grew increasingly numb as our tongues swirled and lips puckered, our bodies emitting no more than whispers as they slid against each other, the heat between us overwhelming. When I felt his fingers grasp my thigh, my hands recklessly rushed to his belt to hurriedly untuck whatever of his shirt that still managed to remain inside his pants. His skin was warm against my touch, his stomach fluttering as my nails grazed it, likely tickling it; this drove him only deeper into my mouth.
I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s what Paz felt that night in Paris—in that abandoned hallway outside that godforsaken club, when she reached inside Jamie’s jeans. Did he quiver in that split second before he pulled away?
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Secret
“Mr. Sola, it’s a whole store dedicated to The Beatles!”
I’d never heard Veronika actually squeal before, not without being coaxed by Paz. I’d also never seen this girl skip, but skip she did as the rest of us shuffled along the few feet from the Sherlock Holmes museum to this hole-in-
the-wall of a store stuffed solid with various Beatles memorabilia.
She beamed up at Jamie, her patchy complexion somehow smoother in the English humidity. Though her eyebrows were still unevenly tortured, and she was back in her civilian clothing that morning (her stretched-out turtleneck hung loosely on her bones, as if careful not to cling too closely for fear of actually making contact with her skin), Veronika looked endearing that day—our last full day away together.
The sun was warm overhead and the air pungent with that intangible, unidentifiable something that we all call “spring.” As usual, it filled my stomach full of unease, leaving it chilled, but my chest remained warm to the point of discomfort from the night before. The two fought for space within.
I stuffed my fists inside my tweed coat and looked on. Veronika’s green eyes, I saw, still had the same excited spark to them as they did earlier that morning, when she had bumped into Jamie on his two steps from my room back to his own. She’d paused to say hello while his sleepy eyes struggled to coordinate with his equally sleepy fingers, failing to open his damn door with his keycard in time to avoid the awkward run-in. She must’ve seen me push my own door shut as she passed by on her way to breakfast, but I wasn’t sure.
“I know, Veronika! I’m the one who brought you here, remember?” Jamie smiled down at her, holding the door open for us all. Veronika, Riley, Ofir, Liam, and Jordan were the only ones who came along. The rest of the gang chose Madame Tussauds. Apparently, no one was going to be spending the day at the British Museum or any of the infamous Galleries.
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