by Kristen Mae
“Didn’t you see? He and Mike sat together.”
“I didn’t see,” she giggled. “That’s cute, though, how they’re like, BFFs or something, playing racquetball at the gym all the time.”
It was true. The guys spent a lot of time together. I had a flash of paranoia that Oren might tell Mike about my lust for Claire. Oren had always been so careful not to hurt me, but then again, Mike had told Oren about the agreement between him and Claire, and that Claire was “open-minded,” whatever that meant. I blushed again, unable to stop myself from envisioning a few “open-minded” things I could do to Claire.
Oren eased the car down the cramped street, following a police officer’s direction toward additional parking. We were already several blocks from the after-concert party and rows of parked cars now lined both sides of the darkened tree-lined street. “Wow,” I said to him as he steered toward a spot. “This is way bigger of an event that I was expecting.”
“Yeah,” mumbled Oren, concentrating on straightening the car. Once he’d parked, he turned toward me and held my eyes for a second. “Hey—are you okay?”
“I’m fine. A little nervous, maybe.” I knew what he was getting at, though. We hadn’t talked about it, but he’d been extra cautious around me the past few days since my orgasmic experience had ended in tears. It was as though he thought one poorly worded sentence might send me to the loony bin. I wasn’t sure he was wrong.
“About the party?” he said.
I shrugged.
“Because…she’ll be there?”
“No, I’m not…thinking about her. Not that way.” I cringed at the lie. “I mean, I…I just can’t. It’s not good.”
He turned off the car and reached over to tuck a lock of my hair behind my ear. His brow was knit with worry. “I wish I could fix you,” he said.
“I thought I wasn’t broken,” I said, smiling sadly.
He pursed his lips. “I mean, I think you’re perfect. You know that. I’ve always thought you were perfect even though you’ve always insisted there was something wrong with you. But you’re hurting, I can see it. And I can’t help you. I’ve tried for years, I’ve been trying for so long, but I can’t—”
“Oren, I don’t think—”
“And I see you reaching for Claire, and it seems like you’re miserable because you feel guilty or ashamed about it, and not because it’s actually…a bad feeling.” In front of us, Mike and Claire were parking her old Mercedes. “I mean, it’s just a fantasy, right? What if you could convince yourself it wasn’t a bad thing? What if it would help you to let yourself kind of…use those thoughts? Would it really be so terrible?”
“It is terrible, Oren. You don’t know what’s in my head. If you knew…you wouldn’t like it.” I shivered, hating my body for the way it ached for Claire.
He grabbed my hand in a rush. “Hazel, no. Don’t you see it? Don’t you see that you’re looking for some way to feel again? Who gives a shit why or how or who you fantasize about? When I think of all you’ve been through—”
“Aw, for fuck’s sake, Oren, don’t.” I yanked my hand away. The muscle in his jaw twitched, and his eyes looked glassy. I turned and jerked my car door open. I wasn’t even sure why I was so angry. Just…why would he do this here? What gave him the right to even think of my past? It was mine. Claire and Mike were walking our way and I barely restrained myself from slamming my door in front of them.
I held hands with Oren as we walked into the party, but my stomach was roiling with fury.
FOURTEEN
Inside Bill’s historic riverside home, wealthy orchestra patrons clumped together in groups of three or four, sipping martinis and conversing against a backdrop of light, airy jazz music. Claire and I slipped past them like a pair of ghosts. Neither of us wanted to engage in conversation with the rich music connoisseurs who would talk a musician’s ear off trying to demonstrate their knowledge of classical music. No matter how poorly informed they were, we always felt compelled to nod and swallow every word they said since their donations paid our salaries.
Bill and his partner Kevin had restored the home, once a neglected, boarded-up relic slated for demolition. They’d decorated the place with a tasteful, eclectic mix of old and new. The intricately carved fireplace mantle looked original, but above it hung a brightly colored contemporary painting of a pug, the type of dog Bill and Kevin owned. Elegant moldings edged the floors and ceilings, but most of the furniture was minimalist and modern, with textured fabrics in understated colors.
“Wow,” Claire said, “it’s like they Googled ‘how to live as stereotypically gay as possible’ and followed every single recommendation.”
I giggled. “I love it.”
Just ahead of us, Katrina and her husband Frank stood beneath the perfectly restored wooden archway that divided the main living area from the more formal sitting room. Katrina waved us over. Elizabeth stood next to her, posturing in that too erect way young women sometimes do when they feel they need to remind everyone that they’re grown-up. Frank was smiling and ruddy-faced. He reached out and shook my and Claire’s hands. “It wasn’t a brass quintet,” he said, “but it didn’t totally put me to sleep, either.” Katrina elbowed him in the ribs.
A waiter came by carrying a tray of martinis and offered them to us. We each took a glass except for Elizabeth, who stood there looking like she wanted one but was too shy to ask, and Frank, who wandered off to find a beer. I took a sip from mine and surveyed the room. Oren was standing with Mike and another guy I didn’t recognize on the other side of the sitting room. He caught my eye for a moment and gestured to me with his own glass, his eyes tight with worry. I resolved to limit myself to one drink. Oren could handle beer, but liquor turned him into a giggling schoolgirl and he wouldn’t be able to drive.
Claire said, “So, Elizabeth, are you coming to Italy with us?”
She shook her head shyly. “I wish. I have to work.”
“She’s working in our orchestral library,” said Katrina, “organizing and repairing music. It’ll be good practice for her assistantship this coming year.”
I took a teeny sip of my martini. “I used to work in the orchestral library too, Elizabeth. What school do you attend?”
“UC Boulder.” Her face pinkened.
“Katrina,” Claire said, “are you sure you’re comfortable leaving Elizabeth here in the States for three weeks with a whole house to herself? What if she throws a wild party?”
Elizabeth blushed all the way to her hairline, but Katrina just laughed. “Well, I would know immediately if Elizabeth had thrown a party. The house would be cleaner than when I left.”
A heavy hand landed on my shoulder. I startled, maybe too much for the circumstances since it was only Raymond, and nearly knocked the drink out of his hands.
“Geez, Hazel, are you trynna make me spill?”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Raymond,” Katrina groaned. “Stay out of the martinis. You’re not that kind of guy.”
Raymond snickered, somehow managing to slur as he did it.
Claire was already on her second martini. “It’s okay, Raymond. We worked hard for this. You go ahead and celebrate. By the way, where is Deborah?”
He gestured noncommittally, and a little of his drink sloshed over the rim. “Eh, she’s around here somewhere. If she found another attorney, they’ll be complaining about legal briefings and paper cuts all night while simultaneously trying to sound smarter than one another.”
Claire laughed and took a big gulp of her martini. The drinks were getting to her too; she seemed a little wobblier than usual, and her cheeks were flushed.
Katrina and Elizabeth left us to go search for Frank. The jazz on the surround sound rose in volume, and the tempo quickened its pace, with discernable rhythms, thicker bass, and more prominent sax. This music was both sultry and chic, the kind of music people who donated money to orchestras danced to, or liked to pretend they did, anyway.
“Let’s dance,” said Raymo
nd, rolling his shoulders to the melody of the sax. I laughed at him. He was teetering on the edge of being drunk.
“I’m with you,” said Claire, and she moved into the center of the room where a few people had paired up and were swaying to syncopated diminished seventh chords that barely registered as music to me.
I intended to stand on the sidelines and watch, but Claire came back and snatched my drink from my hands, set it on the fireplace mantle, and pulled me to the middle of the room, where I stood stiff and awkward.
“I don’t do jazz. I can’t find the beat,” I said.
She groaned. “Oh, shut up and dance with us, Hazel.”
I surrendered and bobbed along with Raymond and Claire for one song, glad I was able to feel a ghost of a beat I could sort of move along with. The more I moved, the more the music settled in me; even the complex chords seemed more reasonable than moments before. Claire swayed with her eyes closed as if the intricate harmonies and complicated rhythms made perfect sense to her and always had.
As the song ended, Raymond downed the last of his martini and said, “I gotta find a bathroom.”
We waved him off, and I started to turn back toward the fireplace, but Claire grabbed my hand and pulled me back. “Oh, no, you don’t. You’re not leaving me alone out here.”
My heart took off inside my chest, but I let her draw me close to her, trying to ignore how the little hairs on my arm shot up as if I’d been zapped with a jolt of static electricity. Inches apart, we swayed together the way I’d sometimes seen girlfriends do, but not me, because I’d never been girlfriends, in a friend-only sense, with anyone. How sad, I thought, that I still felt such a longing for her when it would be so nice and comfortable to have an ordinary friendship. She closed her eyes and tipped her head back in time to the music, an innocent gesture, but it bared the creamy skin of her neck, made her vulnerable for a moment, and the impulse to put my mouth on that pale skin was so powerful that I had to bite my cheeks to stop myself.
She raised her head again. “Come on, Hazel,” she said, taking my hand and spinning me playfully. “You’re not even moving. Dance.”
She pulled me even closer, our bodies pressed together from breasts to hips. I tried to move along with her, but my whole body was vibrating, quivering at a frequency that no one could perceive with the eye, but she could surely feel. She must have felt it, but if she did, she ignored it and kept the two of us swaying. For a moment, I was sure she knew, that she was playing along. But would she toy with me like this if she knew the depth of my feelings? The thought sucked all the air out of me.
On the far side of the adjacent room, I caught Oren watching us. He held my eyes for only a second, long enough for me to see his eyebrows furrow, and then he looked away.
Later that night, Oren and I lay together in bed staring at the ceiling, an odd tension between us that had never been there before.
I was leaving in a few days. I knew Oren was worried, maybe wondering if I still loved him, perhaps thinking I’d leave him for Claire. Or maybe he was scared only that his wife might be losing her mind. I wanted to tell him not to worry about me, not to worry about us, that this wild haze of lust that had overcome me was about more than just Claire. I wanted to tell him how ever since the day I saw the dog tied to the chair I couldn’t seem to get control of my body—that I trembled almost constantly and my heart thrummed in my ears every time I was in a quiet room. I wanted him to understand. But how could I explain when I didn’t even understand myself?
Lust. I’d always thought that for me, lust simply did not, could not exist—that it had been destroyed along with my virginity. But I had been wrong. I’d only been gathering that lust and shoving it someplace secret for safekeeping. Oren couldn’t find it. No man could. Claire was my safe place, but I couldn’t have her, couldn’t even imagine having her, without being overcome by guilt and self-loathing. I was trapped in my own mind. Trapped. At the thought of that word, my chest spasmed and shrank painfully.
Oren broke the silence. “Hazel, it’s okay.”
I choked on a sob. “It’s not okay! I’m not okay! I’m crazy!”
“You are not crazy.”
He wrapped his arms around me, but I made a savage growling noise and covered my face with my hands. “But I am. God, if you knew…oh my god, if you only knew the thoughts that go through my head!” Even as Oren had his arms around me, I imagined myself putting my hand between Claire’s legs, sliding my fingers into her wetness, stroking and teasing and watching her tilt her head back and bite her lip while she shifted her body with the beautiful discomfort of lust. A tremor wracked my body. I suddenly had the feeling that if I could be with Claire, just once, if I could have her the way I’d had her in my dream, all the repressed emotions that tied up my nerves might finally be released.
“Oh my god, I want her, Oren,” I whispered.
He squeezed me tighter. “I know.”
“I fucking hate it.”
“I know.”
He held me until at last I stopped trembling and fell asleep.
FIFTEEN
In the two days between the night of the party and the night of our departure to Italy, I did not see Claire. I blew off her last offers to study Italian together, telling her I had a cold. Then I studied on my own anyway because it made me feel closer to her. Sick. Even sicker was that sometimes, in the middle of my studying, my heartbeat would run away from me and I would have to slam my textbook shut and jump up and move. My mind would flood with crazy images of me sloughing off my skin like a reptile and lumbering away on bloody forearms, relieved to be done with that old covering that had itched so mercilessly for Claire’s touch.
A few times I considered cancelling the trip altogether. But we’d already put in so many hours together as a quartet; the other three couldn’t go as a trio without any rehearsal. Or they could, but they would hate me for making them do it. My career as a quartet musician, maybe even as an orchestral musician, would be dead. Besides, cancelling the trip would mean putting an ocean between me and Claire. The very sickest part of me snarled and raged against that thought.
Telling Oren had changed things somehow, made my world lean off its axis a little further. I didn’t have geographical vertigo anymore—I knew where I was, but now I sometimes didn’t know who I was, which was infinitely worse. My nerves had come unsheathed and danced, rebellious, like leaves of seaweed on the ocean floor, vulnerable to every current in the water, and all I could do was watch. I wondered how crazy I could go.
I tried, though, really tried to hold myself together. I ran every day and stopped playing with the damn shower head. I made love to Oren the two nights we had together before my flight took off on Friday, plowing my body into his with a new breathlessness, angry and frustrated that I could be so slippery and feel so little. Each time my mind rebelled against me, I gasped and grabbed Oren tight, clawed his back and shoulders while I thrust away the invasive images with violent, blunt force. Oren didn’t recognize this hissing, frustrated animal. My feralness excited him and he came too quickly, leaving me with a stinging, choked tightness in my throat and sopping wet inner thighs that felt like they belonged to someone else.
In the airport Friday afternoon, Claire suctioned herself to me like a starfish on aquarium glass. “I’m so glad you’re feeling better!” she said. Oren, pulling my suitcase behind us, had to have seen her maul me. I turned back to glance at him and found him looking at me with an odd sort of expression—a smirk, almost, though his eyes belied his equanimity. I exhaled a nervous sound that I hoped came off as a laugh. I wanted to pretend along with him that this was all very funny, nothing serious, nothing to worry over.
While Claire and I moved through the security checkpoint, I kept turning back to look at Oren. The last time I saw him, I was being shuffled through the metal detector, and he had his bottom lip pinched between his thumb and index finger, considering me like I was one of his failed experiments. I had the feeling that if he could stick me
under a giant microscope, he would.
During the red-eye to London Heathrow, Claire used my shoulder as a pillow. It took me hours to fall asleep with her on me that way, her cloud of curls puffing against my neck and spilling over my chest. Again and again, I startled awake with my heart banging against my ribcage and strange false memories of touching her inappropriately while she slept. I tucked my hands under my hips and tried to think asexual thoughts.
During the second leg of our trip, Claire paused during breakfast and gave my hands a pointed look. Of course she’d noticed. She raised her eyebrows as if to say, “Still?” but waited until our trays had been carried away before she took my hand and pressed it to her chest, sending a wave of heat rushing up my arm. “Do you want to talk about it?” she whispered. She was keeping her voice low because Katrina and Frank were sitting in the row in front of us. I shook my head and fake smiled. I thought I should move away from her, but the idea of sitting somewhere else on the plane while she was so close made me want to scream. I compromised by leaning away from her and pretending to fall asleep with my head on the window while she devoured book after book.
After landing in Pisa, we met Paolo, the diminutive but energetic director of the Chamber Music Festival of Lucca. He had a habit of lifting up on his toes, probably trying to appear taller—or maybe he really was that enthusiastic. He’d hired a couple of vans to drive us to Lucca. The vans looked like American minivans shrunk to half their normal size, with barely enough room for three passengers plus instruments and luggage. Raymond, Claire and I rode in one, and Katrina, Frank and Paolo in the other.
Our driver sped down the narrow Italian highway with a recklessness that had me gripping the arm rest until my knuckles turned white. I glanced at Raymond and Claire and found them doing the same. We laughed at ourselves when we saw our fear reflected in each other’s wide eyes. It felt good having something to fear besides myself.
