SIX
I’ll be your mess, you be mine
That was the deal that we had signed
I bought a hazmat suit to clean up your waste
Gas masks, gloves, to keep us safe
But now I’m alone in an empty room
Staring down immaculate doom
“MESSY”
COLLATERAL DAMAGE, TRACK 2
When I get onto the street, my hands are quaking and my insides feel like they’re staging a coup. I reach for my pills, but the bottle is empty. Fuck! Aldous must’ve fed me the last one in the cab. Do I have more at the hotel? I’ve got to get some before tomorrow’s flight. I grab for my phone and remember that I left it back at the hotel in some boneheaded attempt to disconnect.
People are swarming around and their gazes are lingering a little too long on me. I can’t deal with being recognized right now. I can’t deal with anything. I don’t want this. I don’t want any of this.
I just want out. Out of my existence. I find myself wishing that a lot lately. Not be dead. Or kill myself. Or any of that kind of stupid shit. It’s more that I can’t help thinking that if I’d never been born in the first place, I wouldn’t be facing those sixty-seven nights, I wouldn’t be right here, right now, having just endured that conversation with her. It’s your own fault for coming tonight, I tell myself. You should’ve left well enough alone.
I light a cigarette and hope that will steady me enough to walk back to the hotel where I’ll call Aldous and get everything straightened out and maybe even sleep a few hours and get this disastrous day behind me once and for all.
“You should quit.”
Her voice jars me. But it also somehow calms me. I look up. There’s Mia, face flushed, but also, oddly, smiling. She’s breathing hard, like she’s been running. Maybe she gets chased by fans, too. I imagine that old couple in the tux and pearls tottering after her.
I don’t even have time to feel embarrassed because Mia is here again, standing in front of me like when we still shared the same space and time and bumping into each other, though always a happy coincidence, was nothing unusual, not the slightest bit extraordinary. For a second I think of that line in Casablanca when Bogart says: Of all the gin joints in the world, she has to walk into mine. But then I remind myself that I walked into her gin joint.
Mia covers the final few feet between us slowly, like I’m a cagey cat that needs to be brought in. She eyes the cigarette in my hand. “Since when do you smoke?” she asks. And it’s like the years between us are gone, and Mia has forgotten that she no longer has the right to get on my case.
Even if in this instance it’s deserved. Once upon a time, I’d been adamantly straightedge where nicotine was concerned. “I know. It’s a cliché,” I admit.
She eyes me, the cigarette. “Can I have one?”
“You?” When Mia was like six or something, she’d read some kid’s book about a girl who got her dad to quit smoking and then she’d decided to lobby her mom, an on-again-off-again-smoker, to quit. It had taken Mia months to prevail upon Kat, but prevail she did. By the time I met them, Kat didn’t smoke at all. Mia’s dad, Denny, puffed on a pipe, but that seemed mostly for show. “You smoke now?” I ask her.
“No,” Mia replies. “But I just had a really intense experience and I’m told cigarettes calm your nerves.”
The intensity of a concert—it sometimes left me pent up and edgy. “I feel that way after shows sometimes,” I say, nodding.
I shake out a cigarette for her; her hand is still trembling, so I keep missing the tip of the cigarette with my lighter. For a second I imagine grabbing her wrist to hold her steady. But I don’t. I just chase the cigarette until the flame flashes across her eyes and lights the tip. She inhales and exhales, coughs a little. “I’m not talking about the concert, Adam,” she says before taking another labored drag. “I’m talking about you.”
Little pinpricks fire-cracker up and down my body. Just calm down, I tell myself. You just make her nervous, showing up all out of the blue like that. Still, I’m flattered that I matter—even if it’s just enough to scare her.
We smoke in silence for a while. And then I hear something gurgle. Mia shakes her head in dismay and looks down at her stomach. “Remember how I used to get before concerts?”
Back in the day, Mia would get too nervous to eat before shows, so afterward she was usually ravenous. Back then, we’d go eat Mexican food at our favorite joint or hit a diner out on the highway for French fries with gravy and pie—Mia’s dream meal. “How long since your last meal ?” I ask.
Mia peers at me again and stubs out her half-smoked cigarette. She shakes her head. “Zankel Hall? I haven’t eaten for days. My stomach was rumbling all through the performance. I was sure even people in the balcony seats could hear it.”
“Nope. Just the cello.”
“That’s a relief. I think.”
We stand there in silence for a second. Her stomach gurgles again. “Fries and pie still the optimal meal?” I ask. I picture her in a booth back in our place in Oregon, waving her fork around, as she critiqued her own performance.
“Not pie. Not in New York. The diner pies are such disappointments. The fruit’s almost always canned. And marionberry does not exist here. How is it possible that a fruit simply ceases to exist from one coast to another?”
How is it possible that a boyfriend ceases to exist from one day to another? “Couldn’t tell you.”
“But the French fries are good.” She gives me a hopeful half smile.
“I like French fries,” I say. I like French fries? I sound like a slow child in a made-for-TV movie.
Her eyes flutter up to meet mine. “Are you hungry?” she asks.
Am I ever.
I follow her across Fifty-seventh Street and then down Ninth Avenue. She walks quickly—without even a faint hint of the limp she had when she left—and purposefully, like New Yorkers do, pointing out landmarks here and there like a professional tour guide. It occurs to me I don’t even know if she still lives here or if tonight was just a tour date.
You could just ask her, I tell myself. It’s a normal enough question.
Yeah, but it’s so normal that it’s weird that I have to ask.
Well you’ve got to say something to her.
But just as I’m getting up the nerve, Beethoven’s Ninth starts chiming from her bag. Mia stops her NYC monologue, reaches in for her cell phone, looks at the screen, and winces.
“Bad news?”
She shakes her head and gives a look so pained it has to be practiced. “No. But I have to take this.”
She flips open the phone. “Hello. I know. Please calm down. I know. Look, can you just hold on one second?” She turns to me, her voice all smooth and professional now. “I know this is unbearably rude, but can you just give me five minutes?”
I get it. She just played a big show. She’s got people calling. But even so, and in spite of the mask of apology she’s wearing, I feel like a groupie being asked to wait in the back of the bus until the rock star’s ready. But like the groupies always do, I acquiesce. The rock star is Mia. What else am I gonna do?
“Thank you,” she says.
I let Mia walk a few paces ahead of me, to give her some privacy, but I still catch snippets of her end of the conversation. I know it was important to you. To us. I promise I’ll make it up to everyone. She doesn’t mention me once. In fact she seems to have forgotten about me back here entirely.
Which would be okay except that she’s also oblivious to the commotion that my presence is creating along Ninth Avenue, which is full of bars and people loitering and smoking in front of them. People who double take as they recognize me, and yank out their cell phones and digital cameras to snap pictures.
I vaguely wonder if any of the shots will make it onto Gabber or one of the tabloids. It would be a dream for Vanessa LeGrande. And a nightmare with Bryn. Bryn is jealous enough of Mia as it is, even though she’s never met her; she only knows about her. Even though she knows I haven’t seen Mia in years, Bryn still complains: “It’s hard competing with a ghost.” As if Bryn Shraeder has to compete with anyone.
“Adam? Adam Wilde?” It’s a real paparazzo with a telephoto lens about a half block away. “Yo, Adam. Can we get a shot? Just one shot,” he calls.
Sometimes that works. Give them one minute of your face and they leave. But more often than not, it’s like killing one bee and inviting the swarm’s wrath.
“Yo, Adam. Where’s Bryn?”
I put on my glasses, speed up, though it’s too late for that. I stop walking and step out on to Ninth Avenue, which is clogged with taxis. Mia just keeps walking down the block, yapping away into her cell phone. The old Mia hated cell phones, hated people who talked on them in public, who dismissed one person’s company to take a phone call from someone else. The old Mia would never have uttered the phrase unbearably rude.
I wonder if I should let her keep going. The thought of just jumping into a cab and being back at my hotel by the time she figures out I’m not behind her anymore gives me a certain gritty satisfaction. Let her do the wondering for a change.
But the cabs are all occupied, and, as if the scent of my distress has suddenly reached her, Mia swivels back around to see me, to see the photographer approaching me, brandishing his cameras like machetes. She looks back on to Ninth Avenue at the sea of cars. Just go on, go on ahead, I silently tell her. Get your picture taken with me and your life becomes fodder for the mill. Just keep moving.
But Mia’s striding toward me, grabbing me by the wrist and, even though she’s a foot shorter and sixty pounds lighter than me, I suddenly feel safe, safer in her custody than I do in any bouncer’s. She walks right into the crowded avenue, stopping traffic just by holding up her other hand. A path opens for us, like we’re the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. As soon as we’re on the opposite curb, that opening disappears as the cabs all roar toward a green light, leaving my paparazzo stalker on the other side of the street. “It’s near impossible to get a cab now,” Mia tells me. “All the Broadway shows just let out.”
“I’ve got about two minutes on that guy. Even if I get into a cab, he’s gonna follow on foot in this traffic.”
“Don’t worry. He can’t follow where we’re going.”
She jogs through the crowds, down the avenue, simultaneously pushing me ahead of her and shielding me like a defensive linebacker. She turns off on to a dark street full of tenement buildings. About halfway down the block, the cityscape of brick apartments abruptly gives way to a low area full of trees that’s surrounded by a tall iron fence with a heavy-duty lock for which Mia magically produces the key. With a clank, the lock pops open. “In you go,” she tells me, pointing to a hedge and a gazebo behind it. “Duck in the gazebo. I’ll lock up.”
I do as she says and a minute later she’s back at my side. It’s dark in here, the only light the soft glow of a nearby street lamp. Mia puts a finger to her lips and motions for me to crouch down.
“Where the hell did he go?” I hear someone call from the street.
“He went this way,” says a woman, her voice thick with a New York accent. “I swear to ya.”
“Well then, where is he?”
“What about that park?” the woman asks.
The clatter of the gate echoes through the garden. “It’s locked,” he says. In the darkness, I see Mia grin.
“Maybe he jumped over.”
“It’s like ten feet high,” the guy replies. “You don’t just leap over something like that.”
“D’ya think he has superhuman strength?” the woman replies. “Ya could go inside and check for him.”
“And rip my new Armani pants on the fence? A man has his limits. And it looks empty in there. He probably caught a cab. Which we should do. I got sources texting that Timberlake’s at the Breslin.”
I hear the sound of footsteps retreating and stay quiet for a while longer just to be safe. Mia breaks the silence.
“D’ya think he has superhuman strength?” she asks in a pitch-perfect imitation. Then she starts to laugh.
“I’m not gonna rip my new Armani pants,” I reply. “A man has his limits.”
Mia laughs even harder. The tension in my gut eases. I almost smile.
After her laughter dies down, she stands up, wipes the dirt from her backside, and sits down on the bench in the gazebo. I do the same. “That must happen to you all the time.”
I shrug. “It’s worse in New York and L.A. And London. But it’s everywhere now. Even fans sell their pics to the tabloids.”
“Everyone’s in on the game, huh?” she says. Now this sounds more like the Mia I once knew, not like a Classical Cellist with a lofty vocabulary and one of those pan-Euro accents like Madonna’s.
“Everyone wants their cut,” I say. “You get used to it.”
“You get used to a lot of things,” Mia acknowledges.
I nod in the darkness. My eyes have adjusted so I can see that the garden is pretty big, an expanse of grass bisected by brick paths and ringed by flower beds. Every now and then, a tiny light flashes in the air. “Are those fireflies?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“In the middle of the city?”
“Right. It used to amaze me, too. But if there’s a patch of green, those little guys will find it and light it up. They only come for a few weeks a year. I always wonder where they go the rest of the time.”
I ponder that. “Maybe they’re still here, but just don’t have anything to light up about.”
“Could be. The insect version of seasonal affective disorder, though the buggers should try living in Oregon if they really want to know what a depressing winter is like.”
“How’d you get the key to this place?” I ask. “Do you have to live around here?”
Mia shakes her head, then nods. “Yes, you do have to live in the area to get a key, but I don’t. The key belongs to Ernesto Castorel. Or did belong to. When he was a guest conductor at the Philharmonic, he lived nearby and the garden key came with his sublet. I was having roommate issues at the time, which is a repeating theme in my life, so I wound up crashing at his place a lot, and after he left, I ‘accidentally’ took the key.”
I don’t know why I should feel so sucker-punched. You’ve been with so many girls since Mia you’ve lost count, I reason with myself. It’s not like you’ve been languishing in celibacy. You think she has?
“Have you ever seen him conduct?” she asks me. “He always reminded me of you.”
Except for tonight, I haven’t so much as listened to classical music since you left. “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
“Castorel? Oh, he’s incredible. He came from the slums of Venezuela, and through this program that helps street kids by teaching them to play musical instruments, he wound up becoming a conductor at sixteen. He was the conductor of the Prague Philharmonic at twenty-four, and now he’s the artistic director for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and runs that very same program in Venezuela that gave him his start. He sort of breathes music. Same as you.”
Who says I breathe music? Who says I even breathe? “Wow,” I say, trying to push back against the jealousy I have no right to.
Mia looks up, suddenly embarrassed. “Sorry. I forget sometimes that the entire world isn’t up on the minutiae of classical music. He’s pretty famous in our world.”
Yeah, well my girlfriend is really famous in the rest of the world, I think. But does she even know about Bryn and me? You’d have to have your head buried beneath a mountain not to have heard about us. Or you’d have to intentionally be avoiding any news of me. Or maybe you’d just have to be a classical cellist who doesn’t read tabloids. “He sounds swell,” I say.
Even Mia doesn’t miss the sarcasm. “Not famous, like you, I mean,” she says, her gushiness petering into awkwardness.
I don’t answer. For a few seconds there’s no sound, save for the river of traffic on the street. And then Mia’s stomach gurgles again, reminding us that we’ve been waylaid in this garden. That we’re actually on our way someplace else.