“I can’t believe this is my life.” He leans his full weight into me and I groan. “Holls. This day was madness. Like a dream.”
I struggle with my keys, propping him against the wall to get the lock open before my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Mossman, comes out and demands we shut the hell up. As tipsy as I am from my own share of martinis, I am even more intoxicated by what I witnessed today. Calvin alone was stunning. Calvin and Ramón together were prodigious. Ramón is already an impressive baritone, and with the unfurled richness of Calvin’s guitar, his voice opened up and rolled across the theater: bottomless and infinite. They brought the house down—and this was a house full of people who have seen and heard these songs hundreds of times. Even Luis Genova came by to watch the last half hour or so, and was nearly weeping with relief that the beloved show wouldn’t die in a whimper when he left.
“And I owe it all to you.” Calvin presses his thumb below my lip. “My sweet Holland and her magical ear.” It seems to require a good deal of effort for him to focus, but when he does, he murmurs, “Your freckles really are lovely.”
Just as my heated blood seems to press up against my skin, I manage to get the door open and he trips inside, sprawling past me and onto the couch.
I stare down at him already half-asleep. Even in his rumpled clothes and his untied sneakers, I can’t help thinking, Look at you. Just look at you here in my apartment, being.
“ ’S Lulu here?” he asks.
“She went home with Gene.”
He laughs, rolling to giggle into a pillow. “Gene.”
I’m unreasonably pleased that Calvin is as tickled by Gene’s old-man name as I am.
I’m less pleased, however, with Lulu’s behavior tonight. Once again, she was on obnoxious overload, teasing me in biting, passive-aggressive ways, buying shots for Calvin and Ramón, sitting on their laps, flirting shamelessly.
Lulu’s always been my wild friend, but never this sharp before. Seeing her through Calvin’s eyes is embarrassing; I want her to relax and back off, just the tiniest bit.
“She’s so jealous of you,” Calvin says, tugging his shirt up and over his head. He tosses it past the couch; a puddle of blue lands somewhere near the bay window.
I shuffle to the kitchen, getting us each a glass of water so I can pretend I don’t need to respond to this—his comment about Lulu or his apparent preference for bare skin. Calvin hiccups from the couch and then groans; thank God he doesn’t need to be at the theater until Tuesday afternoon.
“Why’s she like that?” he mumbles, and I press the glass of water into his hand.
I wonder if he’s thinking of the same moment I am, from early in the evening: Lulu climbing on Calvin, straddling his lap, pretending to dance on him, and the barely masked revulsion that spread over his face before he urged her to stand back up. I hate that Lulu flirted so brazenly with him, but even more, I hate that she made such a mockery of our marriage tonight.
“I don’t know, really.”
He opens one eye, squints at me. “I don’t think that’s true.”
“Maybe it’s what you said, she likes being the crazy one.” I mean . . . tonight definitely counted as crazy. I return to the living room and hand him the water. “Did you have fun?”
His full lips push out in a thoughtful pout. “I liked being with Ramón. I like being with you.”
The alcohol dims my natural reflexes and instead of sprinting away, my heart gives a single heavy punch to my ribs. “I like being with you, too.”
He scrunches up his nose. “But I don’t like her.”
This makes me laugh. In less than a week, I’ve discovered that Calvin is incredibly chill about nearly everything, but when he doesn’t like someone, he has zero poker face. “I can tell.”
“I’ve had friends like that,” he says, “the ones you outgrow but keep anyway.”
When he says this, a wind blows through me. I can’t tell if it feels happy or sad to realize he’s right. Lulu and I met nearly three years ago at Columbia, and have clung to each other in these months post-graduation when we’re told we’re supposed to have some idea how to adult. She’s my only girlfriend here, and I’ve wanted it to be great even if it didn’t always feel like we fit so well anymore.
“I think you’re pretty drunk to be making such sweeping statements.”
He giggles. “I’m your husband, don’t I get a say?”
He stops laughing, and for the duration of an inhale looks completely sober—in this exact moment we’re both struck by the absurdity, the incomprehensibility of our situation. And then he closes his eyes and the hysteria bubbles out of him, round and unstoppable. I have to take the water glass from his hand so he doesn’t spill it or drop it on the carpet. Calvin gets control of himself again while I watch in amusement, and then without warning he reaches up, tugging me down over him, tucking me so that I’m trapped sweetly between his body and the back of the couch. An ache spreads up my thighs, and settles heavily between my legs.
His breath is humid on my neck. “I think you might be the best girl there ever was.”
The heat of his bare chest against me sends a paradoxical shiver from my throat to my toes. I open my mouth to respond, trying to find words through the haze of the reality of him—the virtuoso musician, this silly boy rolling around on my couch, his shirtless form pressed so easily to mine—but when my simple “Thank you” makes its way to the surface, he’s already asleep.
“I think you’re the best boy there ever was, too.”
fifteen
“For the love of God, who do I have to blow to get a fucking electrician over here?”
It’s nearing the end of rehearsal and there’s barely a hiccup when Brian screeches this into the backstage abyss. Coming from anyone else, this rhetorical would be met with an array of saucily raised hands, but none of us can even get it up to joke about getting sexual where Brian is concerned.
I click a surreptitious photo of his rage face and then show it to Calvin, who’s standing beside me, waiting for Robert to finish up auditioning a new percussionist.
“Wow,” Calvin whispers. “That one’s sour as vinegar.”
“Don’t even get me—”
“Holland.” Brian materializes like a dementor in front of me, and I lower my camera as inconspicuously as I can. “You think this is the time for photos? You have seventeen boxes of merch up front to unpack, and two hours until tonight’s show.”
Mortified, I glance quickly to Calvin.
“Don’t look at him,” Brian growls, and snaps crisply in front of my face. “He’s not going to touch a box with those hands. Get up front, and get unpacking.”
I feel so belittled; I can’t even meet Calvin’s eyes right now. With a tight “Sounds good,” I turn and head toward the front of the house.
I hate Brian.
I hate Brian.
This is why no one corrects you when you say expresso, or ex cetera, I think, all the way down the aisle. This is why even Robert didn’t tell you when you had toilet paper on your shoe.
Is it time for me to start looking for another job? The thought makes me laugh, because that time came and went about two years ago. If I haven’t started my novel by summer—a lofty goal, considering I don’t even have an idea—maybe I can find something as an intern at a magazine? I think of the connections I have and wonder if it’s time to send out more feeler résumés.
Turns out Brian was exaggerating slightly about the loads of boxes to unpack: there are four, and they’re tiny. I’m guessing they’re full of key chains and embroidered knit caps. Even with only one arm it will take me, at most, ten minutes to put this stuff away.
A low whistle comes from the other side of the counter and I look up to see Calvin surveying the span of merch beneath the glass case. “I forgot how much of this stuff there was.”
I look up, humiliated all over again for him to see me standing out here unpacking overpriced crap with my comparably untalented hands. “Hey.”
He picks up a key chain and spins it on an index finger. “Do you ever think of taking some of this stuff and selling it on eBay?”
I look around wildly, making sure no one heard him. To even joke about something like that is a huge no-no. “God, no.”
“I was kidding. I mean, I’d only encourage that sort of thing if you set it up under Brian’s name.” He leans his folded arms on the glass case, bending so he’s level with me. He never rushes to speak, this one. Green eyes search mine before he quietly asks, “You okay?”
I busy myself with unpacking the box. “Sure, why?”
“You seem a little tense.”
Ripping at a stubborn piece of packing tape, I growl, “Why would I be tense?”
Calvin reaches out, bracing a hand on each side of the cardboard to steady it. “Because your boss is a twat?”
Embarrassment and gratitude flush through me and I look up at him. “He’s pretty abhorrent.”
“D’you like your job, though?” he asks, and looks away, back down at the contents of the display case.
The reprieve from eye contact allows me to answer honestly: “I like hearing the music. I like taking the photographs, but out here . . . I feel like I’m wasting my brain.”
“You know, that night, what Jeff said . . .”
Jeff’s words come running back to me, and they ache: She sees herself as a supporting character, even in her own life story.
Calvin continues, “I mean, in all the time we’ve talked about who we are, we’ve never talked about what you studied, what you want to do with your life.”
This makes me pause in surprise. “Yes, we have.”
But when he looks back at me, eyes narrowed, I realize he’s right.
“I have an MFA in creative writing.” I bite my lip and pull a strand of hair away from my face while he gazes at me intently. “I want to be a novelist.”