Contrary Motion

by Andy Mozina

  “Hello,” I say. “My name’s Matt.”

  “Happy to meet you,” he says softly, and he points his broomstick arm at something across the room. “Michael.” It takes me a moment to realize he wants me to shake his hand. I smile, we shake. His hand is so cool my arm involuntarily shivers when I release it, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Did she tell you I’ve got AIDS?” he asks.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Not supposed to do that. Thinks I’m deaf.”

  “That’s not good,” I say, and laugh nervously. Sweat prickles on my forehead.

  “I don’t really mind,” he says in a slow but steady voice. “Except dying from HIV is so nineties.” He sighs. “Late to the party again.”

  He gives me a crooked grin.

  I smile, but not too much.

  “Would you play me something?” he asks.

  “Sure,” I say. “Whatever you want.”

  “Surprise me,” he says.

  I bring the harp in and take a look around the room for clues as to what he might like. His windowsills are filled with plants, and there’s an antique lamp on his nightstand. Next to the lamp, there’s an autographed black-and-white head shot of, if I’m not mistaken, Paul Lynde, the snarky, barely closeted center square on the old Hollywood Squares show. There are other homey touches—an afghan thrown over the recliner, a chalky portrait on the wall of someone who very well might be Michael, an old movie poster for The Poseidon Adventure that has a prominent image of Shelley Winters swimming in her bra and panties.

  I take him at his word and play the unexpected “Don’t Fence Me In,” which makes him smile with half his mouth.

  “I am surprised,” he says, and he nods.

  The picture of Paul Lynde sends me deep into my collection of cheesy pop. I play him some Partridge Family—“I Think I Love You,” which gets Michael moving his shoulders slightly, as if dancing in bed.

  I try a classical piece, Handel’s Harp Concerto in B Flat, and he seems to like it.

  “How about some opera?” I ask.

  “Don’t I have to love opera?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I do. I love everything. That’s my problem.”

  After I finish the Overture to Verdi’s La forza del destino, which is on the St. Louis list, he brings his fingertips across his lap and pats them together.

  “I saw Tosca at the Met in New York five years ago,” he says. “That’s the night I saw Gabe Kaplan.”

  “Gabe Kaplan?” I ask. His enunciation is somewhat impaired by his tight mouth.

  “Kotter, from Welcome Back, Kotter. Leaving a restaurant in the East Village. He had a beard, but I recognized him.” Michael smiles weakly, but there’s pleasure in his eyes. He recounts other sightings of celebrities from his childhood: Julia Child at Savenor’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Angie Dickinson buying contact lens solution at a Walgreens on Michigan Avenue; Wilt Chamberlain at a party on South Beach.

  “Those were the coke years,” he adds with a sigh.

  “Sounds like you were living the life,” I say inanely. “What did you do, if I can ask?”

  “Sold business software.”

  “Ah.”

  “Traveled. Had fun.” He grunts. His eyes turn toward the windows. “Is it cold outside? It looks cold.”

  “It is,” I say.

  He stares out the window. Once his head assumes a new position, it seems to lock into it like a mannequin’s. It’s hard to tell his exact age, but he’s a lot closer to me than to Richard or Mrs. F. It’s far too easy to visualize his bare skull, to see his cranium and his mandible as distinct parts, like a chattering skeleton.

  I should get out of this building soon. “Well,” I say. I stand up and bow to him, to ease my abrupt departure: “I should probably take my song-and-dance down the road.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  “See you, Michael. You take care!” I add, overcompensating with fake enthusiasm.

  “Okay, thanks,” he says quietly.

  I’m schlepping my harp to the entrance when I run into Erin and Malcolm talking intently by the doors of the Great Room. Erin reaches out to shake my hand again.

  “Thank you so much,” she says.

  “Glad to do it,” I say.

  “Listen,” she adds. “We’ve been talking, and I don’t know your schedule, but we’d like you to come by one or two times a week if possible.” Something in my expression seems to prompt her to add, “I know that’s asking a lot, but it would mean so much to him and to us, and, well, all we can do is ask.”

  Malcolm steps up and says, “We can pay you fifty dollars every time you come out.” And to illustrate this, he holds out a check, apparently for today.

  I stare at the check. Maybe playing for Richard can somehow honor my father, though I can’t say whether Richard enjoyed my playing. My sense is he didn’t. I am not feeling super about being here, but now that I’m out of Michael’s presence I don’t like the image of me bailing on him so quickly.

  “That’s okay,” Erin says, because I haven’t actually moved a muscle, am just staring at the check. “You must be busy.”

  “They already pay me,” I stammer. I finally look up and see the disappointed look on her face. Guilt squeezes my head and chest. “Let me get back to you,” I manage to say. She looks at me intently, a bit frozen.

  “Thank you,” Malcolm suddenly jumps in, the check vanishing. I shake his hand again, and, finally, we part.

  —

  Outside, the wind buffets me, and I stop at the harp factory to check on Carl’s progress. Stanley is in the front workroom, talking to a guy who’s stringing up a new harp. He smiles when he sees me: “Come on back. You’re going to be pleased.”

  We go to the showroom, where Carl gives a detailed explanation of what he’s done to my harp, starting with a lecture on how the pedal action gets transmitted to the disks on the neck plate via metal rods that pass through the column, and moving on to how he placed felt at certain places in the column and sheathed some of the rods in plastic, dampening vibrations while preserving the fluidity of the action. The man’s aviators are practically fogging up with excitement.

  “That’s amazing, Carl,” I say, though I’ve barely followed him, anxious to hear for myself. Finally, I sit down and play licks designed to aggravate the buzz, and yet there is no buzz, unless I totally whale on it—and then only the ghost of a buzz.

  “Hey,” Stanley says. “Don’t break the thing!”

  “I can’t believe this,” I say, standing up from the instrument. “How much do I owe you?”

  “It’s on the house,” Stanley says.

  “Are you sure?” I ask halfheartedly.

  “I’m always sure,” Stanley says, mindful, no doubt, that I’ll be in the market for a new harp soon enough.

  “Thanks, Stanley,” I say. “Thanks a ton, Carl.” And I give them both firm handshakes, which is all the payment any man has ever wanted from any other man.

  Carl and I roll the harp into the back hallway. Through a window in the door, I see snow falling. So what if it’s April.

  “Damn,” I say. “It’s snowing.”

  “Fucking Chicago,” Carl says.

  That’s when I realize I’ve already got the 85P in the Volvo, so I’ll have to run that one home first. And by the time I do that, return for my Aphrodite, and get back to my neighborhood, the snow has whitened the grass like chalk dust. The snow throws me back to December, when I first met Cynthia, when my father was still alive, and I had lived for years with a reasonable sense of sexual potency. Let it snow!

  As I drive down the alley toward the garage, I see T.R. and Charles unloading grocery bags from T.R.’s old BMW. I pull in and bound out of the car with a barely restrained desire to give them both a hug. “Hello, men!” I say. “How are you?”

  “I’m sane,” Charles says, pausing in the alley with a laden plastic bag in each hand. “And yourself?”

  “Good, really good,�
� I say.

  “That’s nice to hear,” Charles says. “Oh, guess who I ran into up on Belmont last week.” Before I can answer, he says, “Cynthia. Interesting girl. We went for coffee and had a nice chat about you.”

  “Oh, really,” I say.

  He makes a pouting face. “She’s so worried about you!”

  Not sure how to respond to Charles, I ask T.R., “Hey, what about your garden?” and I lift a hand at the snow.

  “Worse things have happened,” T.R. drawls, taking the last bag out of his trunk and slamming the hatch shut.

  “Oh, don’t believe the stoic,” Charles says. “He’s crying inside.”

  “Every few years it snows this late and most things make it,” T.R. says. “Charles has his hands full with the present, so his memory is not good.”

  “Come along, Father,” Charles says to T.R. “Time for your meds.”

  T.R. laughs briefly, like a cough—or maybe he coughs like a laugh. They go inside, and I begin to unload the repaired harp at the scene of its near-fatal injury. The Volvo is looking especially hearse-like. The alley, with its askew dumpsters and light poles and strung wires and dry weeds and trash and enormous rats in hiding, grows beautiful with snow.

  When I was about eleven there was a midday blizzard, and nearly a foot of heavy snow had accumulated by the time I made it home from school. I started shoveling the driveway while it was still coming down. The snow was so wet and heavy I was wary of overexerting my heart, so I was basically lifting and heaving one shovelful at a time, especially near the street, where a plow had thrown up a wall of chunks as unwieldy as broken concrete. By five-thirty the sky was darkening, though all the snow still glowed, and my dad’s white Pontiac station wagon rolled slowly up the street. I paused in my shoveling, head sweating beneath my snow-encrusted hat, and stepped up near the side of the garage, to give him maximum berth. I leaned on the shovel handle, breathing heavily but complacently, waiting for a “Good job” that would offset dozens of moments of his disgust with all my typical boyish incompetencies. The wagon turned in, fishtailing slightly, accelerated up to my line of progress, and stopped a body length from the garage door. He got out, hoisted his thick briefcase, put a cardboard tube of blueprints under his arm, and finally noticed me, snow gusting between us. Then, with a mere glance, no nod or any other gesture, he continued on into the house.

  What I wouldn’t give to be back at the top of that driveway, beside the pine tree, in that same heavy snow. “Helluva storm, Dad!” I’d say. “Damn straight!” he’d respond, though he never used that phrase in his life. What I actually did was pound my wet glove against my chest, trying to further fuck with the congenital backbeat of my heart’s rhythm and bring on a paroxysm that would leave me dead in the snow and my father rethinking his ways.

  But knowing what I now know about his state of mind, the moment appears different. Maybe he was looking out at me from the bottom of a well. Maybe to him, I was a mere silhouette against a distant circle of sky, someone who couldn’t really help him, someone whom he couldn’t hope to reach.

  In this alley, it occurs to me to cry. But the intensity feels good, and as the feeling blooms, it actually seems that I’m happy. I’m not as bad off as my old man. I can see Malcolm and Erin for who they are and what they need, and I can see her dying father, and I can do something for them, and maybe for Michael, too. And though playing at the hospice will make me sad, it might also be a way to escape my anxieties and corrosive self-loathing. I don’t believe it will absolve me for what I did with Milena, but at least it will be a step in the right moral direction. With Cynthia out of town, I can make up the practice time. I’ll call Erin and Malcolm and play an extra day at the hospice until the audition. At that point, if I fail again, this may be a way to avoid my own well on an ongoing basis. For now, with my harp miraculously fixed and an April snow falling and Cynthia landing in Denver and Milena in her office downtown and Audrey learning at school, I’m just about as happy as I can be.

  14

  I CALL MILENA AT work. Since the early days of the divorce, after we reestablished regular contact centered on Audrey, I often call her on Mondays at the end of the day. I have Audrey at my place on Tuesday after school, which likely means we have things to discuss. Now, it’s also an easy way to call her without goosing Steve’s suspicions.

  I’m not sure what I want to say to her, but I’m resigned to the fact that whatever path I take will cover the shady valleys and fetid swamps of human motivation rather than the moral high ground. I’m going to betray Cynthia by exploring how Milena thinks about the future, and I’m going to betray Milena by having feelings for Cynthia at the same time. In short, I’m going to be a two-timing bastard until things get figured out.

  “Hi,” I say when Milena picks up. “It’s your ex, Jimmy Malone.” Why the persona? Not sure.

  “Jimmy the deadbeat? Please hold.” She puts the receiver down, has a brief muffled exchange with a co-worker.

  When she gets back on the line, she says, “What’s on your mind, Jimmy?” in a voice that is guarded enough that my heart starts taking on water.

  “Look, if I made things bad, I apologize, but it wasn’t just that moment. I’ve been thinking about you.”

  This is more than I wanted to say right off the bat. There’s silence on the line.

  “I’ve been thinking about you, too,” she says finally. Her quiet voice reminds me of Audrey apologizing in the car.

  And with that, all of my equivocation is gone. It’s all I can do to keep from proposing to her again, right on the phone.

  “I think it would be good to talk,” I say.

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “How about we get together for lunch, downtown?”

  She considers this for a beat that could contain the consideration of a million unresolvable pros and cons, or her gathering the resolve to put on the brakes, or just a look at her planner. “Not tomorrow—I’ve got a meeting,” she says, steady. “How about Wednesday?”

  “I’m driving to New York on Wednesday, like I think I said?”

  “Oh, yeah. Why are you going out there again?”

  When I brought the trip up a week ago, I actually didn’t say why, just that I would have to leave town by 10:00 a.m., and would she let me switch my Friday night with Audrey for Saturday night.

  “It’s to make a good chunk of money,” I say. And then, because I’ve entered this conversation having already exceeded my deception quota, I add, “Adam Brackett called. He wants me to play harp in some videos he’s making.”

  “I thought you were getting ready for an audition.” There’s an edge of challenge and hurt in her voice.

  And with this it appears we’re passing from getting remarried to getting redivorced.

  Milena knows too well the family things I blew off, the chores I didn’t do, the times I rolled out of bed after lovemaking way too soon just to put on my headphones and work on a score. I did take her for granted to some degree. Many uncleared mines are buried in these marital fields.

  “I do have an audition,” I say. “I’ve got a lot I’m dealing with.”

  “You worship that guy,” she says flatly.

  Adam Brackett may not be Milena’s favorite person. There was an off-campus party in college at which Milena ventured a joke that involved seafood, exercise, and “pulling a mussel.” Adam took that moment to assert his superior comedic genius by projecting through cupped hands, “Boo! No! Please develop a sense of humor before attempting further jokes!” The drinking had been going on for a while, and though Adam’s comment fit within the bounds of the raillery permissible among friends, it was also typical of the dismissiveness Adam often directed toward Milena. She startled at Adam’s words, as if her hair had been pulled from behind, then turned red and gave him the finger.

  On top of this, by the end of our marriage, nothing made Milena madder than me protesting about not having time for things around the house and then jumping to go out with a friend—
sometimes Adam, who occasionally dropped into town to play as a guest in the third set of Second City shows. Now it must look to her that Adam is even more important to me than one of the auditions that she always took a backseat to.

  “He’s paying me a thousand bucks,” I say. “I just can’t say no to that much money. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

  Near the end of our marriage she admitted that my lack of earning power was “disappointing.”

  I can almost see her at her desk, the phone clamped to her ear with both hands, as she does during traumatic calls. “I do want to see you,” she finally says. “But it has to be different, Matt. You know?”

  “I am different, Mil. If you could know how much I miss you, how much I need you, you wouldn’t be thinking like you might be thinking. I’ve been through stuff. I know myself better now.”

  She sighs heavily enough to blow a sail taut.

  “Okay, meet me in my lobby at noon next Monday.”

  “You got it.”

  Then I add, by way of good-bye:

  “Take care, sweetie.”

  “Take care, Matt,” she says diplomatically, though perhaps sincerely, too.

  15

  THERE’S ONLY PARKING on one side of Adam’s underlit West Village street, and the vehicles are jammed tight. After fruitlessly circling the neighboring blocks, I pull up over the low curb onto the sidewalk in front of his townhouse to honor my agreed-upon arrival time and to avoid blocking the single-lane street. I put on my flashers and get out, road-buzzed, limbs numb and creaky, smelling like something that’s been deep-fried and left out in a waxed paper bag. From dirt squares surrounded by tiny fences, spindly trees rise and intertwine in the darkness above the quaint streetlamps. The narrowness of the street, the lighting through the trees, and the walls of townhouses make the space feel almost more indoors than out.