Pickup Notes

by Jane Lebak

  The next time I noticed, we’d played a full hour. I hadn’t been able to do it alone, but with Josh, I’d managed to get my mind off the world. I almost wished we hadn’t succeeded, though. Although we were both relaxed and ready to really start, the rest of the world would have thought (strangely enough) it was time to head to our respective jobs.

  At the front door, I squirted water from my bottle into a bowl behind the trash cans. There was a stray cat I kind-of cared for. I also left a handful of food on the ground.

  I said, “Thank you. I’m glad you came over.”

  Josh averted his eyes.

  I looked up from the bowl. “Do you ever wish something really frustrating in your life would just go away?”

  After a long pause, he replied, “Yeah. I do.”

  EIGHT

  Let me tell you two ways to screw up a relationship.

  The first way is to email your friend—your buddy since first grade, the guy you ate every lunch with in grammar school and whom you’ve exchanged letters with every week since—and mention the upcoming high school dance.

  Sure, you know he stutters. He was the one who gave you your nickname, since he always tripped over the “s” in “Josie.”

  And sure, for years after his parents divorced and his dad moved him to another neighborhood, every so often you’d see him at your recitals or at his, and you’d remember, yeah, he does that thing with his voice, where his mouth zips ahead of his brain, and you get a couple of pickup notes before the word starts.

  But you don’t think about that when you say, “Hey, want to come?”

  Because your friends want to meet this mysterious guy who sends actual in-the-mail letters and whom they sometimes scrawl notes to in the letters you write back, this Josh Galen who calls you Mrs. Galen. They don’t know you both hid from the same bullies who called him Gay-gay-galen and used an even worse name for you. They just think you were friends. They’ve seen his stick-figure cartoons hanging in your locker, remnants of the days you used to draw in each others’ notebooks at the rear of the classroom, and they don’t know—you wish you could tell them but you don’t—how on the last day of sixth grade before he left for a performing arts middle school, how he struggled to speak and couldn’t get out anything at all while you sat on the swings. Finally he gave up and handed you a note that said, “Will you be my first kiss?”

  And when you said yes, he leaned forward and gave you a peck on the lips, a touch that burned a line all the way to your stomach. You saved the note in your grammar school yearbook.

  Now you’re both sixteen, and he says sure, he’ll come to the dance at your school. That’s how to screw up a relationship.

  Because when he gets there, he stutters. And when he blinks or twitches, your friends stare, and you’re embarrassed. No, you’re more than embarrassed. You’re totally ashamed because they don’t hear the intelligence and they can’t see the mischief. Instead someone laughs, and one of your classmates whispers, “What’s wrong with that freak?”

  He tries to put his arm around you, and now your friends are laughing at you.

  That’s when you say you’re sick and you want to go home, and you won’t talk to him on the way back to your house because you don’t want him to talk either. You just want the night to end. And when you get home, he tries to hug you, but you won’t. You tell him not to bring you inside. You slam the front door and run all the way to your bedroom.

  Then you don’t email him for a few weeks. When he finally emails you, it’s sterile, just a forwarded joke. Replying, you never mention what happened, and neither does he.

  Congratulations: you may now live the rest of your life knowing you were ashamed of your best friend. And based on how things cool off on his end, he lives the rest of his life knowing it too.

  Here’s the second way to screw up a relationship:

  On our first date, Harrison and I were cuddling on his couch, bored with our rental movie, and he breathed into my ear: would I prefer something more exciting? And yes, I had something much more exciting in mind. We downloaded sheet music and played violin-viola duets until midnight.

  As he walked me to the subway, he said, “That’s not how I envisioned spending a night together.”

  I shrugged. “In my limited experience, playing music is better than sex.”

  “Ouch!” His eyes fluttered with the wounded puppy look that’s saved his life many a time since. “Maybe the problem was your duet partner?”

  I laughed. “I never found it to shut off my brain the way music does.”

  At the subway, Harrison kissed me good night. “Maybe if I put on some background music...?” and I replied, “We’ll have to find out.”

  Harrison and I had met three weeks earlier in an orchestra run by a steel-haired conductor in possession of a whip-like sarcasm: “Oboes! What the hell is going on there?” “Flutes, you remind me of the Beatles—they also haven’t played together since 1970!”

  One afternoon, preparing for a Tchaikovsky symphony, I asked a question about the viola part. She snapped that the second-chair violist shouldn’t dare bother the conductor with the kind of minutiae the first chair should be taking care of. The first chair was a really nice eighty-year-old man who should have retired around the time I’d graduated grammar school, and he gave me the wrong answer—as we learned after the next take. Glaring with those armor-piercing eyes, the conductor unleashed enough vitriol to poison the whole section. The first chair violist let me take the hit while I quivered, small and useless and worthless, as she cataloged every last one of my musical faults for the entire orchestra.

  Afterward Harrison secured us a booth in the corner of a nearby restaurant. He tried to tell me I should have been first chair but no one could bear to let the old guy go, but I could see right through that. So then, with me cuddled against him fighting tears, he nuzzled my neck and whispered the plan he’d devised after our first date: a string quartet. No yelling, no venom. A cozy group. On the back of the sheet music for Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony he jotted notes on everything our string quartet could become.

  I went home that night with an unfamiliar feeling: hope. We’d make this work. We’d recruit two more players, then someday have brochures and a playlist, and maybe even clients. I daydreamed my way into tolerating that horrible orchestra, propping open a little escape hatch in my mind.

  Meanwhile, authorized by my “I guess so,” Harrison lured Peter and Josh onboard within two weeks, and our first client signed a contract five days after that. We were in it together now.

  In the mornings, I’d awaken without that crushing dread of yet another day with no money, no joy. Harrison took charge, and I felt nothing but relief. I couldn’t believe he’d even have taken a glance in my direction, but the fact that he liked me—that he was building a future with me? Really? Viv told me about guys who nail-and-bail, but Harrison was building a foundation. Had I wandered into a Jane Austen novel? I mean—his family had money from way back, but their current family portrait featured a lawyer mother and a doctor father, plus their three heirs—the oldest daughter a doctor, the middle son a lawyer.

  And bringing up the rear, Harrison Roosevelt Archer, the caboose child in a family where both parents ended each day knowing their heritage had been handed down. They indulged his every whim. I’d always loved the stories about how as a child Felix Mendelssohn was given his own orchestra to conduct, and Harrison would have gotten one too if he’d had half a mind to conduct.

  Instead, starting at age three, he took violin lessons, and he never stopped. Whatever he wanted, the checkbook opened. Summer at the music camp? A Juilliard education? A Stradivarius? (Okay, not a Strad, but his two-hundred-year-old violin appraised at well into five figures.) Whatever you want to do. Just do it with excellence.

  So Harrison excelled. For him, starting a string quartet based on little more than a one-night-music-stand wasn’t scary at all: he never considered it might fail.

  Besides, if he crashed
and burned, you can extinguish a lot of flames with a trust fund—or whatever you have if your moneyed family is distantly related to an ex-president. (I never probed his finances, but he didn’t afford that apartment on a music teacher’s income. And later on, I knew how much he got paid by the quartet because I was the one who paid him.)

  One night he took me for sushi, and afterward to his apartment to (theoretically) listen to quartets. Ten minutes later we lay entangled on the couch, hardly listening analytically…if at all. Harrison in those days showed a romantic energy I found startling in its gusts, as if he spent all his time thinking about me until we were together, and then he wanted to do all the things he’d thought about. After the CD ended, he turned on a performance DVD until I needed to go home. We didn’t watch much of that either.

  Brushing the hair back from my cheek, he murmured, “You could stay. You’ll only be coming back in the morning anyhow.”

  We had planned tomorrow to “conduct” musical business.

  I feigned confusion. “You’re trying to save me the train fare?”

  Serious, he nodded. “That’s a lot of money.”

  I kept my tone academic. “I think you want to hook up.”

  He took that for permission, saying “Maybe a little,” and kissed his way up my throat.

  I shifted away. “What if I get pregnant?”

  He nuzzled my ear. “I’d take care of you.”

  I ran a hand through his hair. “Really? You’d rearrange your life to include child support, Sunday visits, the whole fatherhood thing?”

  His lips brushed my neck. “Anything you wanted.”

  I whispered back, “You are such a liar.”

  He burst out laughing. “I love you!” He pulled me close for more teasing, but no matter how good he smelled or how much I loved his arms around me, I insisted no.

  Later I kept asking myself why, but I only came back to this: fear. Not afraid of sex, but afraid of him seeing me, afraid of him having all of me in front of him. He had everything. It made no sense he’d be interested in me. I didn’t trust him, not yet, not with my heart, not with so little time as collateral.

  Pouting, he got out the instruments and we played together, me asserting this was better than sex anyway and him insisting he had insufficient data for a proper comparison.

  At one o’clock he said, “Really, Joey, stay. I promise not to hassle you.” He paused, then added, “Although if you change your mind and tear off my clothes, I swear to put up token resistance for a tenth of a second,” and he was so genuine that I laughed. Yes, I’d stay.

  We joked around, the way we did so often back then (“I only own one pair of pajamas, so we’ll have to share”) and in his bed we cuddled. With his breath against my neck, I could imagine this was how eternity felt, wrapped in the rhythm of someone else’s existence.

  Just like in a chick flick, I woke up alone. I found him in the kitchen, already showered and dressed, brewing a pot of coffee. He tensed as I wrapped my arms around him, and instead of kissing me, he gentled me back.

  I said, “Is something wrong?”

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Are you okay with eggs for breakfast?”

  I felt cold all over. “No. Talk to me.”

  He said nothing for the longest pause in history. Then, not raising his eyes, he tried to hug me, and I shoved him away because I realized we were breaking up.

  He appeared shocked as I glared into the face of a guy who’d only yesterday said he loved me, and here on the cusp of hearing that he didn’t really, I struggled not to lose it. What the hell happened? What about our quartet?

  He said, “Joey…I’m sorry.”

  I folded my arms. “Is this because I turned you down?”

  He looked aside. “No. I mean, I was disappointed, but then I was lying awake, and I started thinking—thinking about Josh and Peter coming over later today—” The hollow in his eyes pitted me at the core. “We need to be professional.”

  “What do Josh and Peter have to do with anything? Unless—”

  Unless he didn’t want to admit—admit to them—

  Harrison wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You have to begin as you mean to go on.”

  —because he could do better—

  Voice raised, I struggled to react to what he’d said rather than what he hadn’t. “You and I began this group because we were dating!”

  Harrison flushed. “But dating—it never ends well. What if we wind up hating each other? We’d be stuck working together anyhow, like Fleetwood Mac.”

  “Who then produced the top-selling rock album in history because of it—and recorded seven more albums!”

  Harrison laughed. “And where are they now?”

  “They performed at a presidential inauguration! I’ll take that!”

  Why the hell were we shouting about Fleetwood Mac? But it hurt less than having the real fight. My mother showed me long ago that if you scream about dish towels, you never have to admit out loud that you’re unloved.

  He sounded desperate. “A sub-group within the group creates factions, and factions affect dynamics. People take sides. To go the distance, we all need to be equal partners. That means we have to be professional. About everything.”

  I said, “Will you listen to yourself? It’s not about power dynamics!”

  He folded his arms. “Do you want to be second-rate? Because for me, that’s not good enough!”

  That was when my heart stopped. If I pushed, he was going to go all the way and say it: I wasn’t good enough. I was the disposable one. The viola joke. And now that I’d said no to Harrison, Harrison was going to get rid of me.

  Fighting tears, I couldn’t talk. I’d maybe get out a squeak and I’d never hang on; I’d fall to pieces, and I didn’t want him to see that. I didn’t want him to see me naked, and if I cried in front of him, that was the worst nakedness.

  I fled his kitchen and slammed his bedroom door.

  Not good enough. Not good enough.

  I yanked on my clothes, but it took three tries to button my blouse.

  Once dressed, I ran out of energy. I dropped to his floor, back to the bed, knees up, face cradled in my hands. He didn’t want me. I wasn’t good enough. Not as a musician. Not as a girlfriend. He was embarrassed to be seen with me both personally and professionally. By breaking up, he could make me leave. He’d get a new violist and a new girlfriend, and they’d all move on. But what about me?

  No. Stop. Think. I had things I could do. I could manage the finances, and I could design the website. I knew how to pay taxes and get licenses. I could be useful. No one ever noticed the viola part. I could stay if I didn’t cause any trouble. Keep my head down. Just keep doing my job and at some point things would be okay. That would be good enough.

  I forced myself to a stand and folded his pajamas, tucked them under his pillow, made his bed, put everything where it belonged, and then returned to the living room.

  Harrison slumped on his couch, staring into the fishtank. “There’s your viola. Are you leaving?”

  Damn him.

  “No.” He’d have to work harder than that to get rid of me. “We’re going to be professionals.”

  That’s how we decided. We wouldn’t mention our brief relationship to Josh or Peter. We’d pretend it never happened at all.

  An hour later, I commandeered our meeting and forced a host of decisions. A name, a repertoire, a group website, a list of contacts. I didn’t think of the nevers: that we’d never kiss again, never spend hours on the phone, never make love.

  Josh finally asked if I’d washed down a handful of amphetamines with five espressos.

  In my peripheral vision, I saw Harrison glance up, but I didn’t turn my head. “We need to get everything in the right places if the group is going to succeed, and I’m going to make sure it happens.”

  So you see, there are two ways to screw up a relationship. You can be ashamed of him. Or he can be ashamed of you.

  NINE

  D
uring practice, my cell phone buzzed. I glanced at the number, then gasped. “It’s the Village Voice!”

  While the other three stared, I fielded a request to interview us.

  “Your press release got us interested in a series of articles about survival as a musician in a city full of musicians,” the reporter explained in a cigarette-worn voice. “I want to interview the four of you prior to your gig for the Manhattan International Group, then send a photographer to capture you playing.”

  Violin upright in his lap, Harrison mimed that I should tell him what was going on while Shreya did the same, and Josh, standing by the kitchen with a can of Coke, just looked shocked. It was too many people demanding my attention, and I blanked. “I— I think that would be fine.”

  Harrison hissed, “What is it?” while the reporter asked in my other ear when and where we could meet. I told him to hold on while I checked.

  “I caught you all together?” He laughed. “I should go meet you now.”

  No, Harrison would have ripped off my head. Actually, he might have invited the guy over. Both options sucked.

  On the other hand, I didn’t want Harrison to blow an aneurysm, so I told him, “It’s an interview request.”

  I didn’t get to finish. Our fearless leader snatched the phone, introducing himself as he disappeared down the hall.

  Shreya’s eyes were huge.

  Josh was pale. “I can’t.”

  I blinked.

  “Interview.” He tried to speak, then blinked quickly enough that I recognized a block. “I- I- I- I—” His face reddened, and he gulped air, then tried again to talk.

  He looked scared. And then I realized why. Of course a reporter who wanted to talk to us would be talking to Josh. And Josh stuttered: right now he was thinking he’d stutter in front of the whole world.

  “You don’t have to,” I blurted.

  “Hey!” Shreya stepped close and cocked her head. “It’s a reporter. Not a subpoena. Besides, I’ll talk to him first. Terrify him with the blue hair.”