Playing the Pauses

by Michelle Hazen

  After I furiously wash the dishes, Danny starts shepherding me toward the exit. We say our goodbyes and on the way out, we pass Brian sitting in a corner of the kitchen. He’s still looking down at the floor, but now he’s smiling.

  We get in the car, my door closing a little more solidly than is probably polite. Danny cranks the key and then props his arms on the steering wheel. He turns his head toward me, smirking. “I had no idea you were so proud of the band. Or so...encyclopedic.”

  He’s joking, but I’m not in the mood.

  “I’m proud of you. Because you’re already one of the best bass players this decade has seen, and because you’re beyond incredible as a tattoo artist, and the band kicked every kind of ass on this tour.” I rip my seatbelt on. “And I’m sorry, but I hate your fucking parents.”

  Danny chokes on his laughter, turning his head toward the driver’s window in a poor cover as his shoulders shake with amusement.

  I cross my arms. “Can we go? Please?”

  Danny sits back, grinning as he puts the car in gear. “Yes, ma’am.” He pulls out, dropping it into second gear before he reaches over for my hand, still chuckling as he brings it up to press a kiss to my knuckles. “Jera’s going to be livid when she finds out she missed that.”

  “They just...didn’t even ask about the tour!” I sputter. “Who would rather talk about their leaky kitchen faucet than the fact that their son is an actual freaking rock star?”

  Danny shrugs, keeping my fingers laced with his as he shifts into third. “They were pretty upset when I didn’t go to college, and they kind of wrote me off when I got the job at the tattoo parlor. The band thing...it’s so far out of the realm of their reality, I don’t think they even know how to talk to me about it.”

  “So what?” I explode. “You don’t have to know anything about music to be proud of what your son has accomplished. And fuck college! I didn’t go to college, and I live exactly the life I’ve always wanted, with more freedom than I’d have with three stupid bachelors’ degrees. Do I even need to tell your parents how much more you make than all the office monkeys and unemployed philosophy majors who went to college?”

  He snickers. “I think they’ve got a pretty clear idea, after tonight.”

  “Sorry.” I cringe, losing a little of my steam. “That was all your private business, and I probably shouldn’t have gone blabbing it to your whole family, especially the money part. I just wanted them to...” I gesture, knocking my knuckles against the door by accident. “I don’t know, to notice you. To see how far you’ve come.”

  Danny brings our hands up and lays another kiss on my fingers. He’s smiling as he drives.

  I huff out a breath, leaning back into the seat. “My dad’s like that,” I say after a moment. “When I was little, he was so busy taking care of Mom’s depressive episodes that he didn’t even know what I would and wouldn’t eat when it was time to make dinner. Then after he took off, he sent a gift card on my birthday and Christmas, but by the time I was in high school, it was just cash. I mean, we live in the age of super stores where you can buy anything from a computer to a zucchini, and yet he couldn’t find a single store where he knew his daughter would want to shop.” I turn my head, glaring out at the lights of Portland. “I don’t understand how people can have kids and then not even...have the slightest interest in the person they’ve given life to, you know?”

  “Divorce?” Danny asks softly.

  I sigh, my thumb rubbing over the tattoo on his forefinger. “Yup. When I was ten. He took my little sister, and left me with my mom.” It hurts. Fifteen years later and it still hurts every time I say it. “He told me later it was because he was afraid my sister was too fragile to survive in that environment, and he knew I would take care of Mom, so she’d be okay without him. Can you believe that shit? I was ten.”

  “Yeah.” Danny glances in the rearview mirror. “He was right.”

  I turn to gape at him. “Well, fuck you very much...” I’m half-laughing, but a little taken aback.

  “Didn’t say you should have had to.” His eyes are dark as he flips on the blinker to switch lanes. “But I can believe that at ten, you were strong enough to parent your mother when your dad wasn't.”

  I blink, and then clear my throat and glance away. “Anyway, the point is neither of my parents give a crap what I do, either. Parents suck.”

  “Parents are just people. They have limited attention. I mean, half the time I don’t pay my power bill even when I have the money, because I forget it exists. I clean my microwave twice a week but I hardly ever remember to scrub the toilet. I have no idea who is at war with who, and I’ve voted exactly once since I turned eighteen.” He slows to a stop at a red light and looks over. “I have all the attention span in the world for what’s important to me, but that means there are a lot of other things that just go by the wayside.”

  My chest throbs, and I say nothing for a moment. I can’t stand the thought that he simply accepts his parents’ disinterest.

  “I just hope you know it’s their failing, not yours,” I say softly, “when your success makes them feel small.”

  His agile fingers are quiet and warm in my grip, and his eyes don’t break away from mine until the light turns green, and the car behind us begins to honk.

  Chapter 19: Draw Me A Picture

  The rest of the way home, we keep to our own thoughts. My anger starts to subside, but I can tell Danny’s still a little off-balance, and I’m not sure how to help.

  Danny unlocks the door and swipes off his hat as he comes inside, tossing it onto the bench that looks like it’s growing out of a sea of discarded sneakers. I close the door behind us and watch as he leaves behind his shoes and socks, bare feet silent when he crosses the dark wood planks of the floor.

  Moonlight glints off the Willamette River through his wall of windows, but darkness still shrouds the foyer. I shift uneasily, feeling for the first time this week like the houseguest I actually am.

  “You want tea?” He turns on the light in the kitchen.

  The zippers on my boots are loud as I draw them down, and my socks rustle when I cross the apartment floor. Danny pulls out an old, scratched pot and adds some tap water, every movement precise but without his usual easy comfort in his own skin.

  “Are you all right?” My throat aches as I hug my arms around myself to keep from reaching for him. He’s not my man to comfort, and it’s not my place, but I can’t ignore the agitation roiling under the quiet surface of him.

  “I don’t really enjoy seeing them.” He sets the pot on the stove and flips on the burner. “Do you mind if I draw for a while?”

  I shake my head, still standing in the middle of his kitchen. He ducks around me to take a sketchpad out of a drawer and a charcoal pencil out of a little square basket. It’s on the tip of my tongue to offer to go to a hotel and give him privacy, but I desperately don’t want to leave him alone right now.

  He pauses in front of me, propping the pencil behind his ear, and then slips one long-fingered hand around the back of my neck, beneath my hair. I exhale when he draws me close, tipping my head against his shoulder as he folds down around me, with the smoothness of his chin brushing my temple. It makes me furious all over again that he shaved for dinner tonight, and then they served meat.

  I wrap my arms around him, squeezing hard in the hug his mother should have given him tonight.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I shouldn’t have taken you over there.”

  “I’m glad you did.” My stomach churns at the thought of him having to face their crushing indifference on his own. “I like your brother.”

  “Me, too.” He presses a hard kiss into my temple and I hold onto him, closing my eyes. I wish I could kiss his lips. Just once, tonight, so he knows someone sees him. That they’re proud and they care, just for him.

  The pot starts to boil over with a hiss of water hitting the burner. He swivels, tossing the sketchpad onto the counter and turns off the burne
r. I step out of the way as he opens a cupboard for cups. He fills a chipped diner ceramic and a hand-thrown pottery mug, dropping a tea bag into each. I smile when he nudges the nicer cup toward me. “You know, I think tea is the only green thing I’ve seen you consume.”

  Danny crosses the room and turns on a lamp. “It’s a weird taste,” he admits. “But once you start liking it, you can’t ever seem to get enough.” He sets down his mug before he drops into a seat on the couch, flipping through pages to find a blank one. I move closer, my gaze drawn by his sketchpad.

  Sinuous lines tease my eyes as pages fly past, but I don’t want to stop him to peek at the drawings right now. I think he might need the therapy of a moving pencil even more than I need to see the beauty of the things that have poured out of his mind on previous days.

  I curl onto the other end of the couch and cradle his mug against my chest, letting the warmth seep into my palms as the calm shadows of his loft begin to soothe away the tension of his parents’ house. I search for some kind of positive spin to put on the night.

  “It was fun seeing all those old pictures of you.” I smile as I think of the horrible bowl-cut. “What were you like, back when you were a kid?”

  “Loud.”

  A laugh jumps to my lips. “Come on, really?”

  His pencil skims quick, weightless lines across the rough grain of the paper. “There were three of us, and I was dying for my share of everyone’s attention. I was always bounding off the furniture or ramming my trucks into somebody’s legs, setting up racetracks through the house and screaming my way to glory across imaginary finish lines.” He tosses an amused glance my way. “Think Jax after twenty hours on a bus and shrink him down to six years old. That was me.”

  “I just can’t picture it.” I shake my head, my eyes dancing. “Is this the part where you admit that it takes six Xanax a day to maintain your image as untouchably Zen?”

  His hair falls forward, the uneven ends shielding his eyes as his pencil moves faster. “I told you attention issues kind of run in my family, and you met my brother. He does okay, works as a software programmer now, but he lives in his own world and he doesn’t come out. My mom spent years trying to get him to socialize and engage, but then my little sister, Lori, started school. Her ADHD made class pretty hard for her, and she gave the teachers a rough time. The first time she lit something on fire, Mom forgot all about Brian.”

  “Lit something on fire? Um, like a building?”

  “Her homework, the first time. It just got bigger from there.” Danny frowns down at his paper, turning it to get a different angle. “When I was nine, Lori got suspended, and then the school sent home a letter suggesting Brian be put in therapy because he wouldn’t speak in class. The next week was spring break, and it was raining.”

  My hands tighten on my mug as I consider what might be coming next.

  “I was cooped up and bored, so I tore apart the whole kitchen. I built a fort out of pots and pans and ‘defended’ it by filling them with liquids—dish soap and pudding and Drain-O and hot sauce—all different colors to show if they were acid or slime or poison or whatever. Anyway, my mom came in and tripped into the middle of the whole mess, and she just lost it. Started screaming and crying that she couldn’t do it anymore. Dad came and took her away, and she didn’t come back for a week. So...I shut up.”

  My lips are parted in shock, my mind racing. Did she go to a mental hospital? A relative’s house? And more importantly, how could his mom’s single meltdown change Danny from that boisterous kid to the quiet, deliberate man he still is today?

  “After that,” he says, a face starting to take shape on the page of his sketchpad, “I mostly just tried to stay out of the way for a while.”

  My fingers clench on my mug. Didn’t his mom tell him it wasn’t his fault, that she just got overwhelmed for a minute? Wouldn’t she notice her son’s entire personality had changed?

  “Sometime after that, I don’t really remember when, my aunt gave me a ukulele. She bought it for my cousin, but he wasn’t interested. I ended up with it, and I remember messing around a lot, having fun. That Christmas, Dad got me an acoustic guitar and a certificate for some lessons.” He shakes his hair back with a quick flick of his head. “I don’t think I did anything else for about a year. For the first time, I could make noise and it didn’t bug anybody. People actually seemed to like it, but by then I didn’t care anymore what they thought. I just wanted to play.”

  I let out a quiet huff of laughter, and his eyes are warm when they find mine. Most nights I have to bring the backup instrument to his dressing room before he’ll give up his bass so it can be plugged in and waiting on stage.

  “The summer when I was, I don’t know, ten maybe? Anyway, my parents were doing this intensive family therapy thing with Lori. They gave us this big speech about how Brian and I needed to be responsible and pull our weight. Blah blah—basically do laundry and cook for ourselves since they didn’t get home until late at night.”

  I pull my legs up to my chest, resting my chin on my knees as I hold the cup on top of my sock-clad toes. I was about that same age when my dad and sister left, but I’d started doing a lot of the housework even before that. I was never alone, because my mom needed me all the time. But it’s amazing how invisible you feel when all somebody notices about you is what you can do for them.

  I manage a smile. “I bet I know how that went. Lots of Febreze and microwaved burritos?”

  “Pretty much.” He snickers. “I ate anything I didn’t have to cook: chips, peanut butter, whatever. After a while, my parents caught on and stopped buying that stuff so I’d have a healthier diet. Of course, I just wanted to be left alone to play my guitar, so I kept eating everything raw. Pasta, spaghetti sauce out of the jar, gallons of pickles and olives...”

  “Ew.” I laugh, crinkling my nose. “Dried pasta?”

  “Pasta wasn’t the worst thing. We had a dog, this crazy Beagle who would eat anything, and I’d read somewhere that dogs had amazing digestive powers that came from eating trash.”

  “For the record, I do not like where this story is going.”

  “Yeah.” He smiles without looking up from his drawing. “I figured I could train myself to eat raw meat, because it was hard to get full on dried pasta. The first couple times, I only had a little and it went okay, but the third time, I got sick. Overnight in the hospital sick.”

  I clap a hand over my mouth, not sure if I want to laugh or be horrified. “Wait, is this why you’re a vegetarian?”

  “Not really a vegetarian. I just can’t think about having meat in my mouth without wanting to throw up. It’s not because I think cows are all fuzzy or cute or anything. Mostly, I’m too lazy to cook things before I eat them.”

  I shake my head with a fond smile. “Can’t be bothered to microwave Ramen noodles, and yet you can draw for six hours without blinking. Though I have no room to talk, since I live off catering most of the year, and a raft of takeout menus at home.”

  “Mmm.” Danny’s response is a wordless rumble, the tone that usually means acknowledgment with a hint of amusement.

  I scoot up a little bit to get a better look at his sketchpad, and my heart jumps when I recognize it. The face is a few spare lines, but it’s me. My hair scraped up into a severe ponytail, the ends curling with a flounce of flirtation. My body bare, though it’s not explicit. Just a sensual suggestion of curves with strong shoulders and confident legs. I steal a peek up at Danny through my lashes.

  Is this how he sees me?

  I set my cooling tea on the floor and tip my head against the back of the couch, so many questions about his life swirling through my head. Being here in his home makes him look so different to me. Somehow more touchable and even more distant all at once.

  He’s not just an enigmatically sexy bassist now. He’s a man with bare feet and a bathroom organized into baskets, whose wallet is open to any roadie in a tight spot; who never makes small talk but always seems to start a po
ker game just when the tempers on the bus are starting to spark.

  He’ll make somebody an incredibly devoted husband someday, give her terrible in-laws and drive her crazy by never remembering to pick up milk on his way home. But I know all it will take is one slight smile, a crinkling at the edges of those vivid eyes, and she’ll forgive him anything.

  This place makes all our borrowed time together seem so fragile, so imaginary.

  It’s a dangerous thought, so I clear my tightening throat and try to distract myself by asking, “How did you end up meeting your bandmates?” I know Jera’s version, but Danny’s mind seems to take things in a little sideways, and that makes it endlessly fascinating to me.

  “I met Jera way back in junior high. I had some friends, guys I rode bikes with and stuff, but she was the first person who actually liked it when I talked.” Danny’s pencil moves swiftly, making hands for me. Capable, beautiful hands. “By then, I had moved onto the bass, but my sister’s therapy didn’t leave any spare money for lessons, so I taught myself. Jera liked it when I played, too, and she didn’t seem to mind when I wanted to be quiet and draw. One time, I didn’t have any paper, and she let me sketch on her arm instead.”

  His lips twitch and his pencil hesitates.

  “That day is why I became a tattoo artist. As soon as I saw how the body moved below the lines of my drawings, the entire thing changed in my head. Art became something I needed to share, not just something I did to keep my hands busy.”

  “She spoke all your languages,” I say softly, threading my fingers into my hair so I can lean my head on my palm. Art and music and that multilingual silence that is purely Danny.

  “I loved her.” He looks up at me, his eyes narrowed a little like he doesn’t believe I’ll understand what he’s saying. “I loved her, you know? I saw all my friends getting interested in different girls. They’d start fooling around and the whole thing would fall apart, and everybody would end up hating each other. I knew I would never risk that with Jera.”