The Lost Boys Symphony (17 page)

“I’m thirsty,” she said. “You need some water?”

Gabe looked at her and nodded once. She got up again and went to the kitchen, her hands inside her sleeves and drawn up to her face. Was it cold?  He couldn’t feel anything resembling a sensitivity to temperature. The adrenaline had obliterated all other sensations. She came back and he moved over so she could sit down next to him. He noted where her lips touched the glass as she drank. When she handed it over he put his lips there too.

They looked at the television. Gabe stared without seeing and heard without listening until finally he caught himself falling asleep.

“You wanna sleep out here?” he asked. “Or Cal’s not here. You can have his bed.”

She nodded, drowsy. “You sure that’s okay?”

He stood up, inviting her to follow him. They went up the stairs and he knocked on Cal’s door, just to be sure. When he heard no answer he opened it and turned on the light. Val looked at the bed. A single twisted top sheet covered the bare mattress, and a stained gray comforter sat huddled at the foot of the bed like a dead body.

“Never mind,” said Gabe.

Val laughed.

“You could just sleep with me,” he said, though he couldn’t believe it.

“Okay,” she said. The couch was forgotten. “Whatever.”

Gabe knew at that moment that they would not be resisting forever. They wouldn’t be resisting at all. He told himself it was for the best. The longer they went without touching each other, the better it would feel when they finally did, and when Gabe really thought about it that meant that the ethical concerns underpinning their mutual resistance were more or less moot. Better to do it sooner rather than later. They’d enjoy it less. Which would in turn make it more acceptable.

Gabe chuckled to himself.

“What?” said Val.

“No. Nothing. Cal’s bed. Go ahead down,” he said.

Gabe brushed his teeth, and when he got downstairs Val was on the couch.

“Do you think this is the best idea?” he asked. “Given, you know. Our conversation? Earlier.”

She screwed up her mouth to one side and cast her eyes down as if she was thinking really hard. They were both playacting now. Partly to save face. Partly as a form of foreplay.

“We’re grown-ups, right?” she said.

Gabe wondered if that meant
We’re grown-ups, so we can handle ourselves, right?
or
We’re grown-ups, so doing what we’re about to do is completely reasonable, right?

“I can control myself,” he said.

She laughed. “Good.”

“Let me just get changed.”

Gabe went in his room and closed the door. He had one pair of pajama pants, which he never wore. They were a Christmas gift from his parents, blue flannel with white snowflakes. He had to search the plastic storage bins beneath his bed to find them, but it was worth the effort. It seemed critical that he wear pants to bed. He slid open the door again.

Val’s head lolled over. She looked up at him.

“I’m so tired,” she said.

Gabe nodded again. He went to get more water, and when he got back his comforter had conformed itself to the shape of Val’s body. She was facing the wall, her hair pushed up off her neck and splayed out on the pillow. He turned off the lights and climbed in.

It wasn’t courage so much as total lack of self-control that made him find her lower back with his fingers. He dug his thumb in, massaging the column of muscle that sat next to her spine. She whimpered a little, not in a sexual way, but encouragingly. They had given each other massages before. There was a precedent. They were still on the safe side of the line.

“Could you do my shoulders?” she said. Simple and direct, not much for Gabe to base any assumptions on, but she flattened onto her stomach and he did as she asked.

Gabe listened closely to her breathing and hoped for hints about how her body was responding. All he heard was the steady, faint passing of air through her lips. His own hand moved under the covers, kneading the softness behind her shoulder blades. The rustling made its own little rhythm. It took a minute, but Gabe began to sense that her breathing and the rustling were in synch.

Val cleared her throat, punctuating the soft music of her breathing. “Can you do my lower back again, but the other side?”

He tried to move his hand to the side of her back closest to him, but he was all jammed up. “Turn on your side,” he said.

Gabe lifted the covers with his arm and Val rolled to face him. She lifted her head and tried to free her hair, but it was caught underneath her shoulder. Gabe helped without thinking, his fingertips finding the base of her neck and combing outward until she was satisfied enough to rest her face on the pillow. Gabe placed his hand on what he thought was her waist, but he felt ribs and quickly moved lower. He rolled the pads of his fingers into the muscle at the small of her back, and she moaned. It sounded different from before. Something uncontrollable about it. Not a
Thanks, that’s nice
sound, but something unconscious, as if her body were speaking directly through her throat with no cerebral middle-woman. It wasn’t his intention, but as he pressed harder into her back, he was effectively pulling her closer to him. She was almost near enough to feel how hard he was, so he moved his hips back.

The muscles in his hand burned but he didn’t dare stop. His fingers moved as if he were playing a chromatic scale up and down her back, and he began to hear it overlaid on the sound of her breathing, which was suddenly much louder than before. His eyes, now adjusted, caught the shine on her lower lip. Her breath smelled like beer and toothpaste, but strangely the combination was perfect. He wanted to taste her. The higher up on her back he went, the closer her face came to his own, and though she must have been conscious of it she didn’t retreat.

Were they still on the right side of the line? Even if Val’s lips were so close to Gabe’s that he could have grabbed them with his teeth; even if their breath was mingling so much that he felt lightheaded; even if the only thing separating her breasts from his chest were her wrists crossed in front of her—were they safe?

Val lifted her arm and snaked it between Gabe’s body and the inside of his elbow. Her hand came to rest on his back—the sound of it moving underneath the blanket swept up around his ears and was amplified and transformed. It locked in place with the rhythm of their breathing and echoed before finally resolving into a variation on the music that had been torturing Gabe for days. This time, though, it felt different. There was no dissonance. A dark memory materialized in his mind then, of Henry in a sleeping bag, the strange song that was a part of their game. Whenever that image appeared, Gabe tried his best to push it away—the shame and humiliation hadn’t lessened in the years since Jan had pulled them out. But now, with Val close to him, he didn’t feel the need to escape it. He simply let it float in and out, like a breath. One of millions. No more meaningful or powerful than any other. It wasn’t shame he felt just then, but a beautiful sort of sadness. Henry was gone and all of Gabe’s memories of him mattered, no matter their quality. He was glad for that.

With Val’s arm around him Gabe thought of how little space and cloth lay between his skin and hers, and he willed it to disappear. She had remained calm, never opening her eyes or reacting outright to the way their bodies had found each other, but she was not asleep and she was not resisting. Gabe moved his hand to her neck and prodded deeply into the muscle that he’d so wanted to touch that morning a week before—had it only been a week? He drew her face closer until the only difference between a kiss and what they were doing was the width of a hair, a minuscule protraction of the lips. Gabe increased the pressure on her neck and pulled her mouth perfectly against his own. The kiss was soft, and then it stopped. They both exhaled as though they’d been holding their breath for hours. Gabe pulled the warm, moist air from her mouth deep into his lungs. The sound of his heart—so loud, how could he never hear it?—pulsed its way into the song. He wasn’t frightened or confused. He didn’t need to ignore the music, but neither did he need to give it his attention. It washed through him, inseparable from the sensation in his body. The pause after that first kiss was long enough for either of them to reconsider.
Speak now,
said the moment, but they both held their peace. Val pulled him closer, her hand pressing into Gabe’s back until the tops of their bodies met and he could finally feel the shape of her against him. He kept his hips swung out and away, not sure how she would react. They had removed the old boundary, but he didn’t know what that meant.

Val pulled him closer.

The anthem pushed him forward.

When it was over, the music didn’t stop. It became a lullaby, set to the beat of Val’s even inhale and exhale. She was already asleep, her pajamas back on and her now heavy arm thrown over his chest. He wanted her naked again. He didn’t know that he could wait. Val hadn’t been awake long enough to express regret, but the way she draped herself over him said that she didn’t have any. Still, Gabe felt a panic in his chest like a puddle of molten desperation.

Eventually the music decrescendoed and diminuendoed and, in silence, he fell asleep.

H
enry worried about
her. He knew she shouldn’t be alone, not during the first trimester when she might be sick and exhausted, but Val insisted she was fine. It was so early, she said. Not yet a month since the test had come back positive. She was busy with work, enjoying herself while he was on tour. It gave her the opportunity to read the birthing books, see friends, concentrate on her work. She told him she was stocking up on solitude before the baby came.

But still Henry worried, and after a week on the tour bus his anxiety began to shift into something more dangerous. He couldn’t sleep. He had a bed—the top bunk of a little cubby enclosed by a thick curtain—but it made him claustrophobic. So each night he retired to one of the captain’s chairs up front, reclined as best he could, pulled a blanket up over his chest, and closed his eyes. There were minutes when he slept, but mostly he occupied the queer place in between. Imagined sounds awoke him while real sounds formed the auditory landscape of his dreams. The dreams themselves weren’t all bad, but they were powerful and would linger for hours after he was up and about. Then the nightmares began. At first, the threat was vague, nothing more than an invisible undercurrent of violence. It pulled at him, beckoning him deeper, until soon the violence surfaced in fantastic detail. He didn’t tell anyone, especially not Val. She didn’t need to hear about the gruesome scenes of murder and evisceration that accompanied his fears about her and the baby. He could not bring himself to say how he awoke convinced that he was covered in blood and bits of flesh. Neither did he mention the feeling he had been getting that she was in real danger in the waking world, that he had to save her.

It seemed unfair to burden her with all of that when he was so far away.

The tour started in Louisville. It was a southern circuit of colleges and clubs calculated to give Molly some of the American roots music provenance she so desired. Nashville and Memphis, then west through Arkansas and Oklahoma before dipping down into Texas and heading back east by way of Houston and New Orleans.

There had been insurance forms to fill out. The tour manager, Marco, wasn’t really entitled to know anything about Henry’s mental health history, but Henry felt strange not telling him. It made him feel like a liar.

“Do I need to know this?” Marco had asked. “Is there some reason for you to be concerned about it?”

Henry had said no.

“All right, then.” And that was the end of it.

Henry was embarrassed to have brought it up.

Now, after he’d had a week of little sleep and increasing insecurity, Marco’s having been so cool about the whole thing made Henry less inclined to talk to him. He didn’t want to disappoint the man, so he kept his mouth shut. By the time they reached Austin, he was basically mute. Jack and Phil and Marco all assumed he was shy and left him alone. Not Molly, though. She was a self-professed bitch and extremely proud of it. Her thing—and Henry couldn’t really argue that she was wrong—was that male rock stars had always gotten a free pass when it came to their attitude. It wasn’t just accepted that they were assholes—it was encouraged. She wanted to single-handedly dismantle the double standard. Club promoters who did a shitty job of filling the room were a common target of her wrath. If they tried to turn it back around on Molly (and they usually did), she displayed her knack for the kind of pithy vitriol that few people have the balls to pull off.

“I thought it was
my
fucking job to bring the music and it was
your
fucking job to bring the audience. Maybe if you’d told me that this was a fucking redneck sheep-fuck rodeo bar and that there was ‘technically’ no fucking stage for actual fucking musicians, we could have avoided this uncomfortable fucking situation, would you agree? And furthermore”—she was college educated, after all—“don’t give me this ‘technically’ bullshit, asshole. Me saying
Technically, I don’t have a nine-inch dick
is the same shit as me saying
I
don’t have a fucking nine-inch fucking dick.
”

She gave it to Marco, too—about the bus, her stipend, how often she had to perform, it was something different every time—but he was a professional. He responded sensibly to her message and ignored her delivery. Jack and Phil stayed out of her way, and at first Henry wasn’t even on her radar. As the tour wore on, though, Molly sensed something in him that set her off.

It was the day after their last show in Austin. The plan had called for a stop in San Antonio, but the club had canceled—something about underage drinking and a temporary issue with their liquor license—so instead they headed to Houston early. Everyone was excited for a day off and a surprise stay at an actual hotel. As they drove, Jack and Phil took turns telling war stories about a coke-fiend keyboard player they’d toured with a few years before. Marco was laughing politely, Molly was nearly hysterical. Henry watched her closely. The tank top she wore bared a dense sleeve of tattoos—dark green and brilliant magenta. Henry felt there was something intimate about them. That was her
skin
she was wearing. It belonged to her, covered her whole body, and he was seeing it. And when she laughed she was as far from Minerva as Henry had ever seen her. She was, for a moment, a shining symbol of everything right. Her teeth so white and straight. Her hair, falling across her forehead in locks bound together with the oil of her skin. She was so naturally beautiful and it was beautiful, too, that she could activate that other persona. Molly could be Minerva when she wanted to be. There was something very
old
about that, something very yin and yang and Vishnu and Jesus—

“Henry, what the fuck?” Molly was staring back.

He wasn’t prepared for that. The thought that she would notice him watching her hadn’t occurred to him. He didn’t move, unable to recall if it was more normal to turn away or to keep on looking.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“Hmm?” said Henry.

“So what the fuck? What do you want?”

Marco got up to stand between them. “Come on, Mol, he’s not staring—”

“Shut the fuck up,
Mar
. Henry. Hello?”

Finally he turned away. He had been admiring the yin and now he had to contend with the yang it inferred: brute force, aggression, war. Jack and Phil, per usual, shared a reaction. They sat, confused, waiting to see what happened next. They respected Henry, he knew that, but they were not exactly his allies.

“I’m fine,” said Henry.

“No, you’re not fucking fine, man. You’re freaking me out.” Molly leaned forward in her seat, as if preparing to lunge. “Looking at me like I’m a goddamn turkey leg or something.”

Henry didn’t know what that meant but it sounded funny, so he laughed but it came out as a half whimper.

“Marco, I swear to God,” said Molly. She stood from her seat. “Get this motherfucker sober or get him out of the fucking backup band.” She stomped to the rear of the bus and disappeared into her private sleeper compartment.

“Backup band?” said Jack.

Phil laughed.

“Don’t worry about her,” said Marco. His eyes said that
he
was a little worried, but there was compassion in them. “You want to lie down awhile?”

Henry stood up. He walked back to his bunk, climbed in, and closed the curtain. He could feel the heat coming from Minerva, and he knew she was making preparations. She would destroy him and he’d probably let her. He didn’t have the energy to fight the kind of war she seemed capable of waging. He lay with his eyes open, listening to the road.

Alone in his Houston hotel room, Henry slept deeply that first night. His dreams were sinister and circular scenes of being trapped, cornered, and broken, and the panic they inspired didn’t ebb when he woke up. He walked the few blocks that surrounded his hotel for hours until finally, mercifully, it was time to get back on the bus and head to the venue.

When he saw Minerva again she was darker and more beautiful than before. That night, her voice puffed sensual flames of pain through Henry’s body, and though he couldn’t bear to look at her he also couldn’t turn away. At the end of the show he was spent and he slept well once more, though he awoke from dreams that made him wish he hadn’t. It was so much easier to control his thoughts when he was awake.

The second Houston show was worse. He stared out at Minerva, her painfully proportioned little body framed by his cymbal stands. She seduced the whole crowd, men and women alike, and Henry marveled at her power. Minerva was showing off, threatening Henry with a demonstration of all she could do. He hated her, but it wasn’t as simple as that. He worshipped her too. The only way Henry knew to fight back was through the music, so he pushed himself hard. His rim shots were brutal
thwack
s, sonic punches aimed at her throat. He drove the music faster, tried to wrest control from her through force and blistering speed. By the end of the set he was soaked in sweat and on the verge of bawling. It hadn’t been enough, he knew that. She’d bested him. Rather than withering in the face of his attack, she’d drawn power from his intensity, as had Jack and Phil. The set was fevered and raucous, and Minerva fed on the frenzy.

Henry packed his gear alone, avoiding eye contact with members of the audience, spurning proffered fist bumps and high fives, ignoring even Jack and Phil. He didn’t feel he could trust them anymore.

As soon as the drums were loaded Henry took a cab back to the hotel. He was supposed to stay in the bus that night, but that would have been impossible. He would pay for the room himself if it meant that he got to be alone. Once in his room he locked the door, closed the security clasp, and sat on the bed with the lights off. Through the open curtains, constellations revealed themselves in the streets below. Lighted windows of office buildings, car headlights and streetlamps—they formed a shifting milieu for a metaphysical soap opera peopled by voices and songs and poignant images of Henry’s own devising. He watched for what might have been fifteen minutes or fifteen hours. His phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and was struck by the picture that appeared. It was of Val. She sat in a chair at an airport gate. They’d been on their way somewhere—he couldn’t remember now—and the sun coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows facing out onto the tarmac was incredibly bright. She wore a white T-shirt, the soft skin of her neck revealed by a deep V. Henry almost forgot that the picture on his phone signified that Val herself was trying to get through to him. He whisked his finger over the screen to accept the call.

“Hello?”

“Hey, love.”

The constellations disappeared the instant her voice struck his eardrum. Minerva was Molly again. Whatever strange man had been plotting defenses and strategizing attacks was a pathetic shadow of the person Henry knew he was. It was like waking from a nightmare.

They talked for almost two hours. He told her he was having trouble sleeping, but that he was having fun.

Val told him to be careful. She said she wished he would just come home.

He told her he was staying. That he was fine. Each word burned his throat.

They talked about the tour, about Minerva and Jack and Phil and Marco. Val told him about her days, about how she missed him but found it funny how quickly her whole routine changed. She was saying yes to every invitation, reading books that had sat on their shelf for years. They talked about the baby. It hadn’t really hit Henry that they would be parents soon, and he told Val so. She said she felt sort of the same way but that it was different for her. She had accepted that she was pregnant but not that she was going to have a baby. In Henry’s mind those two were the same thing, but to her they were completely separate. One was something that was happening to her body. The other was something that would happen to her life.

By the time they hung up Henry had almost forgotten about the strangeness that had brought him to the hotel in the first place. The constellations outside his window and his fantasies about Minerva were like dreams he was happy to forget. He turned off the lights and took off his clothes, then climbed under the covers and spread each of his limbs as far as he could, his body forming a big X draped in cool satin.

He didn’t want to sleep. It felt good to simply exist in a quiet hotel room seventeen stories above the ground. He opened his eyes and glanced at the window. The view was beautiful, for a moment.

Seventeen stories.

Some quick mental math.

That was somewhere around a hundred and fifty feet in the air.

Without warning, Henry imagined what his insides would look like as they burst out of his body upon impact with the ground. He felt the asphalt give beneath him and “Pop Goes the Weasel” began to chime in his head, the muted, thunking sound of it as if from his childhood jack-in-the-box. His fingertips vibrated with the chiming as he held the red wooden ball on the end of the lever and turned and turned and turned. He thought of Jack and Phil in the box of their bus, sleeping on top of one another in their little stacked compartments. He saw Minerva slinking out from the back, sliding across the floor, feeding on them, her naked body slick with blood. “Pop Goes the Weasel” accelerated now in time with Henry’s heartbeat until it went so fast that he felt like his chest might explode and paint the walls with bits of bone and lung.

He turned on the television hoping for a distraction but forgot to look at it. Hours passed before the bright white smiles of weekday morning news anchors told him it was Wednesday. They told him the sky would be blue. They told him about thigh-trimming exercise tips and how the famous chef with the jaw of a pit bull would be coming on later to make simple summer salads. Henry turned off the television and got in the shower. The rushing water quieted his mind for a time. It told him what he already knew. He was falling into something, and though he’d beaten it before that was no guarantee he would beat it again. It warned him to take care. He didn’t notice the tears falling from his eyes until after he’d dried off. He put his clothes back on, the same ones he’d been wearing for days, and left.