Where Do I Start?

by Chase Taylor Hackett

  “Is it creepy? That’s sort of why I baked, to make it not so creepy. Still creepy?”

  “Duh!”

  “I’ll just finish loading the dishwasher and go. Oh—just so you know—you’re out of eggs.”

  I had always admired Fletch for being so ballsy. I envied him even. If only I had one quarter of his moxie. But this—this was amazing. This was too much. This was jaw-dropping.

  “These were just getting in the way out there,” Jeff said, suddenly behind me.

  He was carrying the vase of Fletch’s gerberas. He pulled the flowers out, opened the cabinet under the sink, and stuffed them into the garbage—on top of the eggshells. Fletch shook his head and laughed a little. Even I had to roll my eyes.

  “Everything okay, baby?” Jeff asked.

  Brilliant. Jeff had decided now was the time to play the possessive boyfriend. He started to slip an arm around me, but I shook it off.

  “Everything’s fine, Jeff. I was about to explain things to Fletch. Just go back and—”

  “Salmon puff?” Fletch held the little pastry out to Jeff between two fingers.

  “I hate—”

  “Totally forgot,” said Fletch. “Sorry!” He bit the little pastry in half and then stood there smiling at Jeff, chewing, smiling. “Mmmm.” Does everyone mmm on G-sharp?

  “Please, Jeff, just…” I turned Jeff around and pushed him back toward the living room, and he went reluctantly.

  “So you really like this music?” Bob asked from the living room.

  “Not really,” said Jeff.

  “Actually, I meant Fletch. Actually.”

  Fletch stepped around me and leaned his elbows on the counter to bend under the upper cabinets to answer—and his shirt pulled up in back, uncovering a good couple inches of skin. There was this little bit of blond fuzz there that sort of glistened, right there above his boxers, almost golden in the light from the—

  Oh-jeez, what was I staring at??!!

  I looked away quickly and could feel myself blush.

  “You should see my phone,” Fletch was saying. “It’s still full of stuff I stole from Roger—there’s a ton of quartets in there.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Katrina.

  “Would Fletch lie?” Jeff chimed in.

  What were they talking about? I’d missed some of this conversation.

  “It was hard for me at first,” Fletch was saying. “The instruments mostly all sound alike—no offense—it’s not like an orchestra, all those different sounds. And for lots of it you’re all playing at the same time.”

  “That’s true—in orchestral music there’s more sharing, trading off,” said Janine.

  “And more rests,” said Bob.

  “Don’t encourage him,” said Jeff, laughing a little, but no one joined in.

  “But once you sort of work your way inside the voices, then you hear all the intricacies and the interplay, the different lines, and the way the notes lie against each other—I don’t know how to say it.”

  “Harmonies,” I said quietly. It actually touched me how much he’d picked up about music.

  “That’s it. Harmonies.”

  I mean, he was totally stupid, of course—but he wasn’t.

  “That’s very well put, Fletch,” said Katrina.

  He was actually listening.

  “Did you ever play anything, Fletch?” That was Bob.

  “Once,” he said and looked at me, smiling. “Roger let me play his violin one time.”

  “Really?” Janine said. “I always thought Roger was like me, he never let anybody touch his instrument.”

  “It was just the once. You remember, Dweeb?” Fletched looked at me, all wide-eyed innocence.

  Let me point something out for you, in case you missed it: Nothing Fletch does is ever, ever innocent.

  “I remember,” I said.

  Of course I remembered, and I could feel the heat in my cheeks. Fletch grinned. That bastard, he knew exactly what he was doing.

  We’d been living together for a few weeks, when one day after practicing, it occurred to me—I don’t know why—

  “Hey,” I asked, “do you want to try?” I’d never offered that to anyone. My little German violin was precious to me. I had never even offered to let my father hold it—my father, whom I had dragged around through months of violin shopping—or my grandfather, who controlled the trust that paid for the thing.

  But Fletch was far from just anyone. If I was ever going to trust somebody, I thought, it was going to be Fletch. (Oh, the irony.) I held out the violin and bow to him.

  “That’s a terrible idea, Dweeb. I’m sure it’s really valuable, and I’m such an ox. What if I drop it or something?”

  “Well, promise not to drop it.”

  “You know I don’t do promises.”

  I didn’t want him to be afraid, and somehow it was important to share this with him, even if only in a tiny way.

  “Come over here.” He stood and came to me warily. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt you, but let’s try this. Here, you take the bow, in your right hand.” He did. I moved around behind him. “You’re so damned tall.” I reached over and pulled out Tort Law & Alternatives—finally a use for that damned book—put it on the floor behind him, and stood on it. “There. I’ll hold the violin in my left—lift your chin.” He did, and I laid the violin’s shoulder rest on his shoulder. “See? Now bring your jaw down onto the chin thing.” He did. “There. See how it fits?” To do this, I was right up behind him. “Now bring the bow up, there, and set the bow down on the third string with your hand right up close to the strings so you can draw the bow down. Closer to the bridge.” He moved the bow, but in the wrong direction. “Sorry. Move it away from my hand.” I waved a couple fingers on the violin neck. “Little more. Perfect. You’re really tense. Try to relax a bit, take a deep breath.”

  He did.

  “There. Now—slowly pull the bow across the string.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He pulled the bow down—and bow and violin did what bow and violin do. They sang.

  All pretty matter-of-fact, no big deal, nothing magical about it, just bow on string. It’s what I do about a million times every day, and he’d heard me do it about a trazillion times. But if you’ve never done it, if you’ve never heard the sound come out of the instrument when you play it, and if you’re not a totally jaded fart and you can really hear things with fresh ears—it’s a very big deal. It’s a frigging miracle.

  I looked sideways at Fletch’s face, and I could tell that he had heard what I had heard.

  He had heard the miracle.

  It wasn’t the prettiest note ever produced by man, but it didn’t sound bad either. It sounded like a violin. It sounded like an A.

  “Do it again, and keep going. That’s it, pull your hand all the way down until you’ve run out of bow—and reverse.” And he pushed the bow back up, still on the open A-string. My right hand, I realized, was around his waist on his tummy. “Keep going. With the left hand we can change the pitch.” I moved my left hand through the positions to play an A scale up through an octave, all legato because he was doing the bowing.

  “That’s incredible,” said Fletch. He had stopped bowing.

  “Do it again.” He laid the bow back in place, and pulled again. “This is a glissando, going up.” I slid my hand toward his face, and the pitch slid up. “And down.” I slid the hand back. He looked at me like I could walk on water and I’d brought him along for a stroll.

  “Here, you want to try something? We’ll do that again. Bring your hand up for the down stroke.” He laid the bow back on the A-string in the same place. “I think this’ll work. Go.” He drew the bow slowly down, and with my left hand—don’t ask me why I picked this off the top of my head
, I just wanted something that I thought he’d recognize—I played the bridge to “Over the Rainbow,” this pretty eighth-note line, while he kept bowing. And then on through to the end of the song.

  There’s a little coda at the end.

  “Move to the next string,” I said. He laid the bow across the E-string and bowed, and I took the coda up an octave. At the very end—where the bluebirds are flying and she asks, “Why oh why can’t I?”—I took a big fat ritard, and I wanted him to hold that last high note.

  “That’s it…don’t stop….keep going…just like that.” Together we let that last, sweet note sing out. “Stop,” I whispered, holding him a little tighter.

  We stood there, still pressed against each other, our faces very close. Somewhere in here, his left hand had reached around and gripped the back of my thigh, as if he needed something to hold on to. We looked at each other now, as best we could, with his face so close to mine.

  “Do you have any idea how sexy you are?” he asked quietly. I didn’t, but I was perfectly content to let him explain it to me. “That was the hottest, most erotic thing I’ve ever done in my entire life,” he said, and he turned around to me. Arms around each other, him with a bow in one hand, me with the fiddle still dangling in my left behind him, we were pressed against each other, and it was pretty obvious just how erotic he had found violin playing to be. Me too, apparently.

  “Sexy? Seriously?”

  “Absolutely. Sharing that with you—the sound, you know, how it sort of hits your chest and your face, and it’s right there under your ear and the violin vibrating against your body, and with you behind me, and watching your fingers on the neck of the thing. Hot. Damn.”

  “It was fun, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m telling you—I once spent a weekend with identical twins, and this was hotter than that.”

  “Now I know you’re making fun of me.”

  “I would never joke about something as serious as identical twins.”

  May I tell you how earth-shaking it is to discover that somebody likes you, genuinely likes you, thinks you’re sexy, wants to spend time with you because you are exactly who you are? It wasn’t for some pose I’d copied from somebody, not for the shirt I bought in the hope that it might fool somebody into thinking I was attractive. Not because I had successfully hidden the fact that my entire adolescence was spent locked in practice rooms and it had left me with zero social skills.

  Here was somebody who wanted me because I was so inept. He didn’t like me in spite of my unbelievable awkwardness. He liked me because of it, because I had no social skills and because I had never learned how to flirt or pick up guys or make a joke.

  I’ve mentioned enough how Fletch was this Adonis—and he was—but after that night, that was so irrelevant. I was hopelessly, blissfully, bark-at-the-moon crazy in love with him because he was the most beautiful guy I had ever met—and that had absolutely nothing to do with gorgeous eyes or a handsome smile.

  “Hey, are you all right?” Fletch asked very softly.

  Lost in the memory, I slowly realized it was a quartet rehearsel. The others were talking, but I had no idea about what. I was still in the kitchen and Fletch seemed to be standing really close, between me and the gap under the cabinets.

  “Dweeb? All of a sudden you looked so—”

  “I’m—okay,” I said. It was somewhere on the underside of triple pianissimo. As in “not quite audible.”

  “Hey! I’m sorry,” he said, still whispering. He reached up, and—with the cuff of his sweatshirt—he brushed something off my cheek. “Don’t, Dweeb. Really, I didn’t mean to—”

  I was suddenly livid, and I guessed I was livid with Fletch. Anyway, he was right there.

  “Leave me alone,” I said in a broken whisper and pulled myself away from him roughly, wiping my eyes.

  What was he doing here anyway? What was he thinking? What was I thinking??? Hiding in the kitchen with Fletch, whispering, and now he was wiping my face with his sleeve?! With everybody in the next room! Even Jeff, for God’s sake! And—and—and he used all my eggs!!! Not that I needed the eggs, but it was the principle of the thing, damn it.

  “Didn’t you, Roger?” That was Janine, asking me something. But what?

  I moved to lean around Fletch.

  “Actually—” I tried to say to the others, hoping to get the rehearsal started, but there was still this thing in my throat, and my voice sounded like a bassoon with a cracked reed.

  “I learned a lot about playing from Roger,” said Fletch, turning back to the living room conversation. Jeez Louise, was he—covering for me? “I mean, I know it won’t impress you guys, but I know all about arco and pizzicato, and the difference between a glissando and portmanteau, tremolo and martele.”

  “Nice vocabulary, Fletch,” Jeff sniped from the couch.

  Mercifully, everyone seemed to have decided to ignore him.

  I went past Fletch to join the others, who all had their instruments out by now. Concentrate, Prescott, I thought. Stop trying to figure things out. Just get the violin out and play.

  “Actually it is impressive, Fletch,” Katrina said.

  I tightened my bow. Deep breaths.

  “Where’d you go to college, Fletch?”

  Wait—what was Jeff asking? Such a dick.

  “New York Public Library,” Fletch said before I could find my voice.

  “Good answer,” said Janine quietly.

  “What about you, Jeff?” Now it was Fletch who was challenging.

  “Dartmouth. Summa cum laude.”

  Katrina gave me a look that said, “Seriously?” And really, seriously?

  “Summa what?” said Fletch.

  “Summa cum laude.” Of course Jeff’s Latin pronunciation was perfect. Fletch’s—anything but, especially “cum” which he pronounced more like…yeah, that.

  The musicians were all suddenly busy with their instruments, waiting for this to be over.

  “Cool. Know what I’ve learned about college boys, Jeff?”

  “What? Do tell.”

  “Summa cum laude—than others.”

  Wait, what did Fletch just say? He didn’t! I glanced around. And my well-trained and experienced chamber music colleagues exploded with laughter—in perfect unison. So yeah, I guess he had said what I thought he’d said. Katrina especially seemed to think this was about the funniest thing she’d ever heard. Of course I had to laugh too. Fletch went back to loading the dishwasher.

  And Jeff?

  Jeff just turned red. Then redder. I didn’t even know he could do that.

  “Funny, Fletch, really funny,” he said. “But I should go.” He stood up. “You too, Fletch.”

  Wait a second, was Jeff throwing Fletch out of my apartment? First the flowers, and now? I seriously needed to start paying more attention.

  “You’re so right, Jeff, I have to get to the theatre. I’ll walk you out. It was great seeing you all.”

  Jeff went to the door and held it open for Fletch as if he wanted to make sure Fletch was leaving. Fletch wiped down the countertop; hung a dishtowel on the refrigerator handle the way he always used to do; said his farewells, kissing Katrina and then Janine on their respective cheeks—and all while Jeff stood by the open door. Jeff finally grabbed Fletch’s jacket from the hook and threw it at him.

  “Something on your mind, Jeff?” Fletch said, smiling, catching the jacket.

  “We can talk about it outside.” He indicated the door with one of those jerks of the head I thought only straight boys knew how to do. Everyone was watching them. My suitors.

  Seriously? Were they going to go outside now and beat the tar out of each other? Over me?

  They went out, and Jeff banged the door closed behind them. No one in the room spoke. We listened to feet going down the stairs, until we heard the front door pulled open.


  “Roger, Roger,” Katrina said finally, shaking her head. “It’s always the quiet ones.”

  The other two positively erupted—again—into sputtering and snorting laughter.

  “I’m so glad you’re enjoying this,” I said. “Can we get started now? We do have a recital on Sunday.”

  “Absolutely,” Katrina said, although the viola and cello clearly would need a minute. “Okay, let’s start with Roger’s medley, shall we?”

  I opened the music to the first page and stared at the notes I’d written for myself. Jeez Louise, how was I supposed to do this? Like I was going to be able to concentrate after all that. As if. I was still half expecting to hear something outside. What?—shouts?—a brawl?—pistol shots?

  But the show must blah-blah-blah.

  Everyone settled; scores were opened; bows were raised.

  I think I mentioned earlier how when one member of a quartet is sort of off, it tends to throw everyone off. Today was going to be my day.

  Katrina took a deep breath and

  Well—

  Hell—

  O-o-o-o-o——Dolly!

  Chapter 13

  An Epiphany—on Forty-Third Street

  Fletch

  In my junky high-tops, I rabbited down the two flights, while Jeffie thudded along right behind me in his Italian whatevers. Okay, I thought. Jeff wants to chat. No problem. Keep it short, and it will improve your chances of getting through this without hitting him.

  I wasn’t normally a violent person, but you know, for Jeff, exceptions could be made.

  “Hey, Fletch,” he said. “I feel like I should say something here, just to make sure we’re on the same page.”

  “Make it quick, okay, handsome?” He was still on the last step while I was on the sidewalk—kinda pathetic, I thought. “Why don’t you come down here and we can get to know each other better.” I backed away from the stoop, arms stretched out to the side, inviting him to follow me. An asshole gesture, I admit. I’m blaming Jeff.

  “Well played up there, by the way: ‘Laude than others.’”

  “Thanks.”

  “I don’t imagine you know—it means ‘with highest honor.’ If you knew how much work went into getting that, you wouldn’t think it was so funny.”