by Kristen Mae
“Sorry, Katrina.” Claire set her case on the floor next to a large stack of rehearsal chairs. “I locked my cello in the car, and Hazel here had to rescue me.” She cocked her head in my direction, then paused and scanned the room as if she’d just noticed something was missing. “Where’s James?”
“James had to bounce,” said the black man in one of the deepest baritones I’d ever heard. I must’ve still been shaken by audition nerves and paranoia—and possibly a bit of glee—because when I heard the man speak, I imagined a giant bullfrog sitting there holding a viola and croaking at us. Before I could stop it, a giggle burst out of me. I choked it down, horrified that I’d laughed, but the man’s eyes twinkled like it wasn’t the first time someone had gotten a kick out of his rumbly voice.
Katrina scrunched her nose in that way people do before relaying unpleasant news. “He left for Atlanta to go be with his mom. Could be weeks, could be months. He and Brady went together.”
The room grew heavy and solemn. I felt like an intruder then, like I’d crashed someone’s funeral, and all the more mortified that I’d giggled at Raymond’s voice.
He scratched his bald head and faced Claire. “We were trying to figure out what to do about next week’s performance, if we should cancel it, or—”
“Well, we hardly have a choice.” Katrina’s hands couldn’t seem to decide whether or not to close her violin case. “The rest of the orchestra will be at the Bach Festival in Orlando next weekend, and everyone else we know is doing weddings.”
“And it’s the bookstore gig,” said Raymond, drumming his fingers on the wood of his viola. “We always bank so much in tips over there.”
“I know, I know.” Claire rubbed her index finger over her lip and glanced my way. She was thinking of asking me to play with them, it was plain to see, but was deliberating whether or not it was a good idea. These sorts of situations could get awkward in a hurry. Finally, she raised an eyebrow at me. “You any good?”
I laughed, but it came out like a sneeze. “I’m decent, I think.” No, I was damn good, but I could never predict what my nerves were going to do to me. “What are you guys playing?”
Katrina said, “Brahms A Minor.”
“I’ve played both first and second on that, but…it’s been a while.” I knew both violin parts quite well, actually, but already my chest and neck were crawling with heat. “What else?”
“Ravel.” Raymond’s chin went up as if in challenge. The chances I’d played Ravel were slimmer, as it was a lesser-known quartet and very difficult. But Claire had already made up her mind and was unlatching her case, pulling her cello free.
“I’ve only learned the first part on that one.” I followed Claire’s lead and slid my arms from the straps of my case. “I’ll play with you guys and see if I can swing the second violin, if you don’t mind a little bumbling. And no worries if it doesn’t work out.” I tried to be as reassuring as possible with my smile, even adding a shrug of indifference for good measure, but the backs of my arms had taken on that tingly feeling they always did right before an audition. My stomach flipped in anticipation.
Claire sat with her cello and pursed her lips at the other two. I waited, looking from face to face and chewing the inside of my cheek.
Katrina lifted her violin from its case. “Let’s give her a try.”
I had my violin out in a flash, ignoring my jittery fingers as I took the newly vacant second violin chair where James’s music still lay waiting on the stand. Claire did a more formal round of introductions, and the four of us dove into the Brahms without ceremony. I started out bristling with performance anxiety, but as we got into the music, my focus sharpened and my nerves calmed.
Brahms has always made me think of waves; it’s all sinks and swells, pushes and pulls, louds and softs, underpinned by deep harmonies that feel like they’re drawing you down into them, like you could sink beneath them and feel their weight churning and rolling over top of you. I nestled my playing into the void created by the missing violinist, made my own voice heard while blending my sound with the others, mimicking Katrina’s playing style and noting when I shared passages with Raymond so I could match his rhythm. Claire plucked through much of the first movement, so I wasn’t able to see her dig into the music with her bow until we came to a crescendo—a climax which she drove, as musicians say, from the bottom up. She moved her bow across the strings with so much power that her cello rocked side to side between her knees. There was a clunky moment when the music should have gone soft but didn’t, and Claire waved her bow in the air. We clattered to a halt.
She tapped her music. “We should take time here, pull way back, don’t you think? We plowed through it.”
I noted with relief that up to that point, I’d drawn no attention from the other three. It was a good thing, a sign of acceptance.
“Ahhhh, you’re right,” said Katrina. “Three measures back?”
And into the waves we dove again. I peeked at Claire and caught her in a closed-lipped half smile as she pushed and pulled and plucked with her pale little fairy arms, and soon a smile crept across my face too.
It is really something to get not one, but two jobs in a day, to go from not knowing what the future might hold to having it lie solidly before you. I imagined myself as a planet that had wobbled dangerously for months on the little orange elliptical path I was meant to trace around the sun, and now I was tipping back into orbit with a reassuring boom.
I left the concert hall early that afternoon bursting with anticipation for what lay ahead, called Oren to tell him yes, the orchestra job, but also a quartet gig, and isn’t all this just too perfect? We’d done the right thing, I was sure now, sure of our move, sure of Oren’s new job, sure that it was okay leaving my mom on her own in Ohio after a lifetime of never living more than twenty minutes apart. I remembered watching her grow smaller and smaller in the rear-view mirror of the moving van, her face red with the effort of not crying. But she had her own life, friends, a boyfriend, a comfy office job she enjoyed, a cute condo she never stopped decorating. Now it would be my turn to decorate. Oren and I had bought a house, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it in another week. The whole drive back to our rental I gripped the steering wheel like it was the new and different life I’d sought for so long, the very incarnation of promise. I gripped it so hard that my knuckles glowed white under the glare of the sun.
I parked my car in the gravel driveway, leaving the garage for Oren, and dashed inside to get started packing. Oren had wanted to buy a house right away, but I’d felt it would be smarter to rent for a while and get to know the area first. By the time I’d filled my third box of kitchen supplies, my muscles twitched with restlessness and I wished Oren had not been so easy to convince.
We’d been right to wait, though. We’d stumbled upon the perfect house, a little brick ranch tucked into a neighborhood of one-acre lots. The property felt like a park, with towering Florida pines scattered amid squat lemon, grapefruit, and orange trees, and a nature preserve bordering the back edge of the yard. The house had three bedrooms—I’d stiffened during the tour when Oren said, “Perfect for when we have kids!”—and a large wooden deck off the kitchen.
I scratched “non-perishable food” across the sixth moving box, the fat permanent marker squeaking as it released the scent of organization and new opportunities into the air. For a moment I was back in my teenage bedroom, watching my mom’s slender, knobby hands marking boxes en route to the conservatory where I’d won a full scholarship, her voice, tremulous for herself but certain for me, reminding me again and again that I could do this. I smiled at the memory and gathered the fabric of my tank-top to wipe the sweat from under my breasts before it ran down my stomach. I couldn’t wait to have dependable air conditioning in our new house.
When I could do nothing more with the kitchen, I moved to the master bedroom and pulled boxes from the walk-in closet—the winter clothes I regretted not having given to charity while we still lived
up north. At the back of the closet I’d stashed my beloved art supplies: charcoal pencils and paints along with thick, gorgeous blank paper and hundreds of drawings neatly stacked and filed. I took the lid off one of the boxes for just a moment so I could rifle through some of my favorite drawings. It had been months since I’d sketched anything of note—since we’d moved, actually, so, six months. I replaced the lid on the bin with a sigh and continued working. I was organizing the boxes in the front entry when I heard the garage door screech open.
A minute later, Oren’s keys jangled against the counter. I cringed at the sound and the flash of memory that came with it—dark soil, rancid breath, the taste of blood in my mouth. The memory vanished almost before I had a chance to register its existence.
I shoved the last box into place and found Oren in the kitchen, slouching against the dated Formica peninsula and eating lunchmeat straight from the container. He had never been the type to shout obvious things like “Honey! I’m home!” as if I were both deaf and stupid—which did a lot in my mind to make up for his sloppiness. I glanced at the stacks of research papers scattered beside the phone on the counter and smiled. Mad scientist.
He was dressed in his usual uniform of khakis and a white dress shirt with pens sticking out of the pocket. A coffee stain, or maybe brown mustard, marked the side without the pocket. He smiled at me around a mouthful of lunchmeat.
I stopped short. “Shit! I completely forgot to cook dinner.”
“But…weren’t you packing?” He shoved another piece of turkey into his mouth and gestured at the empty cabinets—I’d left all the doors hanging open because it felt good to see the evidence of my labor, but now it only looked like I’d left the kitchen in disarray. “You can’t do two things at once, babe.”
I shrugged, tapping my fingers on the countertop, irritated with myself, shocked that I’d let myself get so carried away packing boxes and mooning over old sketches that I’d neglected my routine.
“And I might have packed up all the food. I don’t know what I was thinking.” I pulled open the top of the nearest box, not bothering to check the label I’d written on the outside. Toaster, oven mitts, spatulas, hand towels. I shoved it aside and grabbed for another.
Oren took my hand and gently pulled it away. “Babe.”
“Oren, it’s really no trouble. Let me do it.” I shook my hand free of his, suddenly frantic to whip up a delicious dinner for two, as if the fate of our marriage could hinge on a single meal.
I started to tear open the next box but stopped when Oren hung his head and shook it, a little smile of exasperation playing on his lips.
My hands fell to the counter. “What?”
“You.”
“What?”
“It’s funny…how you can’t see yourself. You just have no idea.”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“This is so you, Hazel. So…so unapologetically industrious. Not because there are things to be done, but because you have a need to feel useful and get everything perfect.”
I balked at his words. “All this because I want to cook dinner?”
“All this because you played a major audition and packed half the house already and on top of that you’re still itching to cook dinner. It’s okay to take a moment to breathe, you know.”
“Well, maybe I don’t like breathing!”
He stared at me.
“Dammit, Oren, you know what I mean.” He was doing that thing where he made me all flustered with his creepy intuitive comments. I crossed my arms over my chest.
He grinned and shoved another piece of turkey in his mouth.
“You’re chewing with your mouth open,” I told him, but I was fighting a smile.
“Why don’t we do dinner at that Italian place, the one with the tomato soup you like? We should celebrate your new job.”
I put my hands on my hips and allowed myself a full, proud smile. “Jobsss—plural.”
He laughed. “Ah, yes. My mistake. So, you up for going out then, Betty Crocker?”
“Sure, let’s go out. But no soup. I’ve taken two showers already today and still can’t stop sweating.”
He wiped his hands and slid his fingers beneath my sweat-slicked hair, lifting it off my neck and blowing lightly on the exposed skin. “How’s this?”
His cool breath dissipated some of the heat, and I twisted to wrap my arms around him, surrendering my head to his chest with a sigh. The pens in his shirt pocket pressed into my cheek the way they had since we began dating after I took the biology class he taught during graduate school. I was the one who’d given him his first pocket protector because it seemed marginally less nerdy than ink stains from leaky pens.
Not that I minded him being a nerdy molecular biologist; if he hadn’t had the dork thing going to balance out his muscular body, chiseled face and sweet blond curls, I might not have found him attractive at all. Or maybe his nerdiness had nothing at all to do with what drew me to him. I’d hardly noticed him, really, until the class after midterms when I overheard him deny a very attractive female student a grade change. She’d flashed him her cleavage and purred at him, asked him if he was sure there wasn’t “anything she could do,” and I’d stopped to listen because she was so plainly coming on to him that I just had to see what would happen next. He was so…brusque with her, curt bordering on mean, to the point I half expected him to shove her—and an unexpected surge of irrational, searing jealousy had ripped through me. I wanted him to be brusque like that with me.
I waited him out the rest of the semester, knowing he couldn’t date students, and, since he clearly wasn’t a man to be won over by looks alone, I drew attention to myself by asking thoughtful questions, acing every test, and producing meticulous lab results. Then, on the last day of class, with my heart lodged in my throat, I wrote my phone number in the margin of my final exam along with a note for him to call me.
A few days later, I was sitting in his naked lap with my legs wrapped around his hips, and I told him, “I’ve done this before. Many times.” It was such a twist on the truth that it was very nearly a lie, and though I expected him to recoil in horror, he only became more desperate, pulling me closer and sweeping his hands over my body as if he was trying to find the broken cog or cracked part that made a nice girl say such peculiar things. And I responded as I knew a woman should—by gasping, moaning, and arching my back. In retrospect, maybe it was unfair to put up such an act. It set a precedent for me to pretend to be more than I was.
Now, standing in the muggy kitchen of our rental, I pressed my cheek a little harder into the cool metal of his dorky pens, as if that could connect me more firmly to him. He was still lifting my hair and blowing on my neck, his chest inflating against mine with thick, needful breaths.
I peeled myself away from him, traced a finger down his forearm. “Guess I’ll get changed, then.”
I left him standing in the kitchen and went to the bedroom, where I took my time stripping out of my sweat-dampened clothes. I tossed them in the hamper and then slid the dresser drawers out as slowly as I could, drawing out the selection of new undergarments to a ridiculous, plodding pace.
Oren clumped down the hall as I expected he would, his lean figure darkening the doorway, arms dangling at his sides like he wasn’t sure what to do with them. This was the game we always played: I pretended to be unaware of his pursuit, and he pretended he didn’t know I was pretending. There was no frantic stumbling-grabbing-panting-yanking in our marriage. The fiery brusqueness that had first drawn me to Oren had bent and withered under the weight of my detachment. I’d misjudged him. I wondered if he ever thought he’d misjudged me, too.
I laid my clothes on the dresser and sat stiffly at the foot of our unmade bed. Oren still stood in the doorway, unmoving except for his chest, which seemed to strain to contain his labored breath. Poor Oren, I thought. He wants to pant and grab. I swept my hair off my shoulders and let it fall in a smooth brown sheet down my back. Oren’s face remained calm. He
always waited for me. I scooted further up the bed and spread my legs for him.
Beams of late-afternoon light spilled from the front window of the house and down the hallway, breaking and bending around his legs as if he were a prism. The wooden floor creaked with each step he took. Dust motes spun in his wake as he moved forward, faster now, and slid his feet from his shoes, his belt from its buckle. The room glowed gold.
I should have leveled smoldering eyes at him while he took off his clothes, should have done something to heighten the mood or at least make him feel desired, but instead, my focus flicked from his solemn face to the bedsheets, the floor, the doorway behind him. And, as always, he played along, polite with his eyes, soft with his movements, demanding nothing. Oren had a talent for holding back, diminishing himself as if he were one of my sketches and possessed only two dimensions—I never felt him coming at me. To me, yes, but not at me. I wondered what it would take to make him pop off the page, to lay claim to that third dimension.
I reached out a hand in invitation and he crawled to me, laying a palm between my legs, brushing his fingers against me in a way I knew ought to elicit some kind of reaction but, for me, was merely another step in the game we played.
“You are so beautiful, Hazel.”
“Don’t.”
His hand quickly retreated, and he kissed my neck, reaching for the lubricant from the bedside table. The tube made a farting sound when he squirted it into his palm, and I swallowed down a gag. He made both of us slippery with a few quick, methodical movements, like a doctor washing up before surgery, and I lay in wait beneath him, his reluctant but willing patient. He was so good to me. The least I could do was try.
The sun disappeared behind the trees and the golden light vanished, leaving us in a grey room. I focused on Oren’s eyelids and watched his brow wrinkle as he pushed slowly in and out of me, the muscles in his cheeks twitching as he tried to rub me in the right spots—though he couldn’t be sure where those were since I never let him touch me there, not in the way he wanted to. I wondered at his passion for me, how he could enjoy making love to what amounted to a block of ice. Or maybe he didn’t enjoy it—maybe he thought of me as a two-dimensional animation, too. I put my arms around his neck, tried to involve myself. He opened his eyes once, blinked at me, and closed them again. What was he thinking? Did I want to know?
