Caleb

“No, Lewis, I’m not doing that! Absolutely not!” Theo was yelling into his phone, pacing on the porch where the signal was better. “Well, if that happens, I guess I’ll just accept that I’m crap at my job, won’t I? Because I’m not fuckin’ lip-synching and I can’t even believe you’re asking me.”

A flurry of swearing followed, and then he banged back inside.

“They want you to lip-synch?”

“On the fucking Night Life Show! And you know what Lewis’s justification is? Everybody does it. Did you know that? That apparently every single person in this industry lip-synchs?” he said sarcastically.

Theo rolled his eyes and flung himself on the couch. After a moment, he pulled the keyboard onto his knees and launched into a lugubrious dirge. With his nostrils flared, his brow furrowed, and his black hair wild around his shoulders, he looked like a petulant teenaged Edgar Allan Poe, and I had to stop myself from laughing, since that would not go over well.

He’d been around long enough by now, and seen enough, that any scrap of naïveté about this business should’ve been stripped from him. But I was realizing that he spent so much of his time feeling like an interloper in Riven, he often missed the part where, compared to the world, he was a star. It jarred him when he received special treatment, made him uncomfortable when people deferred to him, and pissed him off when people thought he’d know better than someone else about anything but music.

But it ran deeper than an intentional disregard for his own celebrity. While onstage, Theo oozed sex, confidence, and charisma, Theo offstage was the man who had grown up in a cold, sterile home, with people who looked at him and saw their daughter’s mistakes. I could see it sometimes, when we were intimate. Theo would reach for me, ask for something he wanted, with words or with his body, and then retract, suddenly sure he’d stepped over a line; asked for something he had no right to. Something that he would surely be denied.

The other night, he’d come out of the shower to find me on the couch, and draped himself over me. After a few seconds, his whole body stiffened, and he started to pull away, as if he’d collect himself and take himself away before I could point out that he’d transgressed.

There was a deep need in him, and it sang to me. Plucked at strings pulled taut inside me that had never been strummed. I wanted to be able to grant him every right over me. I wasn’t there yet. Not quite. But I wanted it. For the first time, I wanted it.

“Well, so you told him no,” I said. “That’s good. That’s your right,” I told Theo, easing down next to him on the couch slowly so I didn’t dislodge the keyboard. I knew I should tell him he could take it home with him so he could use it whenever he wanted, but I couldn’t help thinking that keeping it here meant one more reason he had to come over.

He shrugged.

“No, Theo. It is. You get to decide when you sing and when you don’t. Period. You did the right thing.”

“Yeah.” He sighed. He pushed the keyboard onto the table and put up a knee to face me. “What if they want me to, though?” They invariably meant Ven, Coco, and Ethan.

“Well,” I said, running a hand through his hair, “you’re the singer, so you decide when you sing. If they told Coco she should fake play guitar, it’d be up to her whether she wanted to or not, right?”

Theo laughed.

“Oh my god, I’d pay to see someone try and get Coco to fake playing guitar. She’d behead them with a guitar string like cutting soft cheese.” He made a grotesque popping sound.

“There you go, then.”

“ ’Kay.”

He relaxed, a finger trailing up my cheekbone and then tucking my hair behind my ear as he looked at me. Then, after a minute, “Thanks.”

“You hungry?” I asked. “I can make dinner and then we can do the pumpkins.”

It was the night before Halloween, and Theo had gotten all excited because the pumpkins I’d planted were ready and he wanted to carve jack-o’-lanterns.

“Yah, but, uh…” His eyes darted to his bag. “Don’t kill me, but I brought—” He rummaged around in the bag and brought out a stack of boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese. “I love your I-grew-this-and-we’re-gonna-eat-it thing, but I’m just…so effing sick of hash,” he said apologetically.

I laughed. “No worries. I can just throw an egg on top of this and we’ll be good to go.”

Theo’s eyes got wide and he looked a little queasy. I chucked him under the chin.

“Kidding,” I said.

---

The pumpkins were smaller than your commercial variety, but we’d managed to carve them anyway. Mine looked like the typical triangles-for-eyes-and-a-grin jack-o’-lantern that you saw on every stoop on Halloween. I hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to what I was doing because I was absorbed in watching Theo carve what was possibly the single ugliest jack-o’-lantern I’d ever seen.

He’d spent long minutes deciding among the pumpkins, finally choosing the biggest one he could find. I’d teased him about size not being everything and he’d groped me and said fortunately for him, that wasn’t an issue.

He’d gone into the carving with a plan, I was pretty sure, since he’d drawn something on the pumpkin, but as he cut, the thing just got weirder and weirder. Somehow the facial features mushed together and the cuts combined so that his pumpkin looked like the grimacing corpse of a very old man or a very ugly baby. It was actually kind of horrifying.

Theo kept cocking his head and looking at it like he couldn’t quite figure out why it was betraying him. Finally he gave it up for done, and pushed it away. We both looked at it for a minute, and when I opened my mouth, he said, “Don’t say anything. I already know.”

I chuckled and helped him rinse off the pumpkin seeds we’d scooped out because we were going to roast them.

“Do yours usually turn out…better?” I asked tentatively, mostly just to needle him.

He sniffed. “I’ve never carved one before.”

“What? How’s that possible?”

“I dunno, my parents never celebrated Halloween when I was a kid. Too much trouble, too much mess, candy’s bad for you, et cetera. Then, in college, it was like, parties and people getting wasted.”

He shrugged, and started picking clumps of the leftover mac and cheese out of the pot with his fingers and eating them.

I kissed the side of his neck and rested my chin on his shoulder. He offered me a clump of mac and cheese, popped it in my mouth, and then went back to washing off the pumpkin seeds.

“Well, we’ve got to light them,” I said. If Theo had never done this before, I wanted to make sure he got the full experience.

“What? No, it’s fine. Mine will probably collapse and set the whole house on fire anyway. Or traumatize passing animals.”

“So we’ll put them on the bottom step. At worst, if yours collapses and sets things on fire, we’ll get out alive. And those deer need to stop eating my carrot tops anyway.”

He elbowed me, but nodded okay.

So we lit candles in the pumpkins and turned them so we could see their flickering faces as we sat out on the porch for a cigarette. Mine looked normal and Theo’s sinister. He got up and turned his a bit to the right so that we could only see half of it. From that angle, it just looked abstract. A vast improvement.

Theo strummed a vaguely familiar tune on the guitar and I relaxed, enjoying his company, the music, the cigarette, my garden stretching out before us.

Then suddenly, as I tuned out, I realized what he was playing.

“Hey, that’s the song for Rhys. I’ve been trying to figure out the transition there, but that works.”

“Shit, sorry,” he said, fingers skidding on the strings. “I didn’t even realize I was playing it.”

I held my hand out for the guitar and played the part of the melody I’d already written, swapping in the part Theo was just playing for the bridge. It would work. It would definitely work.

“It’s great,” I said, and handed the guitar back to Theo.

He relaxed when he saw I wasn’t offended, and went back to playing, something else this time. Something I didn’t recognize. Something dark and creeping.

“What’d Rhys say about the other songs?”

“He loved them. He’s writing one now to fit with them.”

Rhys had been ecstatic at the songs I’d brought him, and he was excited to get into the studio and start recording in a few weeks. He’d talked enthusiastically about finding a fiddle player, and getting Coney Sparks, who we’d known forever and played with back in the day, on drums. It seemed like everything was coming together.

“What about the other songs?” Theo asked.

“Huh?”

“The songs you’ve written that weren’t for Rhys.”

My pulse sped. “What do you mean, what songs?”

Theo raised an eyebrow and blew smoke in my direction. “I mean the songs that I’ve heard you humming for the last week, or playing on guitar when I was in the shower, that are clearly written by you and also clearly not written for Rhys.”

I grumbled something unintelligible and lit another cigarette, but Theo didn’t say anything more, just sighed and looked up at the moon, strumming softly.

“How’d you know they weren’t for Rhys?”

He paused before answering, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at him.

“They’re just different. The other songs feel like Rhys, but these don’t. They’re…grittier, deeper. They feel like you.”

I didn’t say anything, but my heart was pounding. They did feel like me. They felt more like me than anything I’d ever written.

“They sound wonderful,” Theo said softly. “I kind of hoped you’d play them for me? For real?”

I shrugged, my shoulders jerking awkwardly. My palms were sweaty and my breath uneven.

“Don’t know there’s much point,” I said. “No one’ll hear them.”

“Why do you think that?”

Theo’s voice was gentle, sincere, but it pissed me off because the answer was so obvious.

“How could they, unless they come eavesdrop while I’m in the shower.”

It came out harsh and I felt immediately guilty when Theo winced.

“People could hear the songs if you let them, Caleb. Don’t you think all your fans would want to—”

I snorted, and shook my head. “Doubt I’ve got many of those left.”

“I’m sure that’s not true. People love your music; I’ve seen online—”

“Loved, past tense, man. Very past. They loved Caleb Blake Whitman, and that fucker’s dead.”

I ground my cigarette out on the porch and pushed inside.

Theo’s hand caught me as I walked to the kitchen.

“That’s not true,” he said, eyes flashing, aggressive. “I’m looking right at him.”

“Nope. Not the same guy.”

“Not the same, sure, but still here. Still a brilliant fucking musician. What’s wrong with you? It’s like you don’t even want to try to get it back.”

“Get what back? What exactly is it that you think I can have anymore?” The bitterness boiled up from my gut and coated my tongue like medicine. “You weren’t there, Theo, you don’t understand what…what I was.”

“I’ve watched videos. You were spectacular.”

I choked out a laugh.

“No. What I was—I was wild, impulsive, on fire because I was out of my fucking mind drunk and on drugs. That’s—that was me. That’s who my fans knew. I once passed out onstage. Not blacked out. Passed out, because I hadn’t drunk any water in two days, only whiskey. Rhys slapped me to bring me around and the crowd cheered and toasted me and offered me more whiskey. I missed my own tour bus because I was conked out in some lady’s bathroom, and when I showed up at the show that night and told the story, everyone applauded.”

I shook my head because that didn’t even scratch the surface.

“That’s not—that doesn’t mean those people actually liked those things about you, Caleb. That’s what people do—what fans do when someone they admire does…anything. They like it because they like you. You coulda told them fuckin’ anything and they’d have cheered because it was a thing that Caleb Blake Whitman did.”

I spun away from him.

“No? You don’t think so? I once got super pissed off at a show in Indiana. I don’t even remember why. And I was looking out at the crowd and instead of the usual appreciation I just felt…scorn. Like they were pathetic for liking us, for liking me. And instead of saying my usual bit about, like, ‘Hey, Indianapolis, I like your fill-in-a-thing-about-the-city,’ I said that I was gonna tell them some super funny jokes. Then I told these totally boneheaded dad-jokes, and people laughed their asses off and cheered for me. The review of the show the next day was like ‘Theo Decker isn’t just a singer he’s also a comedian’ and ‘Theo Decker charms crowd with joke-book offerings.’ Then for the next fuckin’ month, every interview, people would be all, ‘Have any jokes for us?’ wink, wink.”

He rolled his eyes.

“Or once I wore my shirt backward by mistake, running out to get a coffee, and someone took a picture and it was in People magazine with a caption like ‘Too cool to care,’ or some shit, and then a group of pictures the next week did a ‘Regular People Jumping on the Trend Bandwagon’ feature of these dipshits who purposely wore their shirts backward.”

Theo crossed his arms and squared off with me.

“It’s not about the thing, it’s about the person. Your fans were your fans because of the music. They accepted things about you because they were about you, not the other way around. And they’ll still love the music without the shenanigans.”

It was like the world cracked open at Theo using a word like shenanigans to describe the utter landfill of disaster that was my life, and I made a mental note to tell Huey about it. He loved the euphemisms people in meetings used to describe their behavior, and he loved telling them to “call a shit a shit” when they used them.

“Okay, sure, laugh at me, that’s fine,” Theo muttered, and walked toward the bedroom.

“I’m not laughing at you,” I said. “It’s just…”

Theo came right up to me and looked me in the face.

“It’s just what? Because what I see is a whole lot of fucking talent and a whole lot of fucking fear. And I’m kind of hoping the talent is stronger than the fear.”

I sucked in a breath. Put like that, so did I.

Theo’s expression softened and he slid a hand up my arm.

“You can do this on your own terms, Caleb. Isn’t that what you’re always telling me? We can choose not to play the game?”

I nodded slowly. I had told him that. I’d even believed it.

“You wouldn’t have to tour if you didn’t want to. You wouldn’t have to be anywhere that made you feel out of control. But you could still record the songs. You could still get the music out there. Start small, you know? Take it slow?”

The hope on his face nearly tore me apart. Because it was all for me. This man, standing in front of me, was dreaming a dream for me, and it was humbling as fuck.

I cupped his face in my palms and dropped my forehead down to press against his. I could feel his breath, warm against my face, and his arms curled around my shoulders, like we were two football players, huddled up before our next play.

And somewhere, I felt like a window was cracked. Just the smallest amount, like you’d slide it open in winter, welcoming the fresh air but keeping out the chill. But it was an opening. That’s what came through. The ultimate fresh air of maybe I could. And at the moment, that maybe felt like everything.