Theo

I crept along the winding country road, my ears still buzzing from the tour, watching the blue dot on my phone move closer to the destination marker, and for the hundredth time in an hour, considered turning around.

Caleb had fucked off while I was asleep the morning before I left for the tour. Chances were great that he had no interest in seeing me again. Chances were also great that he was going to think I was a creepy stalker if I knocked on his door.

When I’d woken that morning, it had taken me a moment to realize anything was strange. After all, I rarely woke up with anyone, and I hadn’t woken up in my own bed in long enough that it was discombobulating in and of itself. But when the night had come drifting back to me and I’d turned over, hoping to burrow back into the warmth of Caleb’s body and finding nothing…I’d deflated, the promise of something taken away.

On tour, I hadn’t been able to get him out of my head, even in sleep. I’d wake from dreams of him, turned on and aching, and stay that way all day. Finally, when it was clear I wasn’t just going to stop thinking about him, I googled him, looking up “Caleb” and every keyword about music I could, until I found him.

Caleb Blake Whitman, age thirty-five, originally from Norwood, in upstate New York, nearly at the Canadian border. He’d been a session musician, and toured with other acts starting from when he was eighteen or nineteen, then recorded an album at twenty-one, and toured behind it. After that, he’d toured half the year and lived the other half in a lot of different places. It looked like he’d made New York City his home base for a while, then spent time in New Orleans, then bounced back and forth between the two.

His third album had been successful, in terms of independent labels, and had been well received across the board. He hadn’t been rock star famous, but he’d certainly made a living as a musician, and probably a good one. He’d been featured in music magazines and even one documentary about the post-Katrina music culture in New Orleans.

After the release of his fourth album, I’d begun to see more and more mentions of missed shows, gigs cut short, murmurs about drugs and alcohol and strife. Still, reviews of shows praised the music, and descriptions of him highlighted his chops, his energy as a performer, and his unique musical influences.

Then, a little over a year ago, his website stopped updating, and he seemed to disappear.

One night, after our show in Helsinki, everyone else went out dancing, and I went back to the hotel and watched videos of Caleb performing live. I lay in bed with the lights out, my iPad propped up on my stomach and my earbuds in, so I could get his voice as close to my ear as it had been the night we’d spent together.

I downloaded all his albums. His music was as amazing as I’d imagined it would be from the song that brought me in from the street in Brooklyn. Gritty blues, with influences from country, jazz, rock, bluegrass, and folk. He was a storyteller—not just with his lyrics, but with his voice. Fuck, his voice. It was strong and broken, mournful and teasing, sensual and mocking. And when he performed—usually seated on a stool or a rickety wooden chair, guitar propped on a knee, a glass of whiskey on the stage at his side—he tore the music out of himself and gave it to the audience.

There was a video of a show I found, at a Memphis blues club, where he sang so hard he lost his voice halfway through. He sang with his eyes closed and his throat bared, the tendons of his neck standing out, the veins in his hands thick. Midway through a chorus that had him howling, “Strip away my desire / dismantle the star / I’ll drag this bare body wherever you are,” his voice broke like dry wood. He sang a soft ballad after that, but it came through like pebbles and ash.

He apologized, walked offstage, and after the band did two songs without him, he came back onstage, looking sheepish. Holding up a mug, he said, “They made me this concoction with honey and…”

He glanced at the bartender, who started to laugh, and called out, “Tea, dude!”

“Yeah, that’s right, tea.” Caleb’s sudden smile was for the bartender, but it ripped through me. He got through two more songs interspersed with sips of the honeyed tea (to which he liberally applied the whiskey he had onstage) before his voice was just a scratch.

“Thanks, y’all,” he croaked to the crowd. “Gotta take a couple days with a little more, uh, tea”—he toasted them with the mug—“and a little less whiskey, I guess.” Then he winked, and the camera caught it at an angle like he was winking at me.

It was outrageous how much I wanted him.

The thing was, I was pretty sure he’d wanted me, too. I might not have been great at small talk or pleasantries, but I’d always been good at sensing a vibe, and every signal Caleb had sent me felt like he did.

With that in mind, one night when I’d stumbled offstage shaky and dripping sweat, but high from the crowd, I grabbed my phone and tapped off a quick email to my agent, Lewis, before we rushed back out for the encore. An email that I forgot about until I was in the lobby of the Stockholm airport two nights later, spacing out at the wall of fluorescent light pulsing in ¾ time, and got a response from Lewis with a note and an address. I had to scroll down to the sent email beneath it to see that I had asked him if he could find me an address or phone number for Caleb Blake Whitman, formerly of Neutral Ground Records.

My vision swam and my heart pounded with a mixture that was seventy-five percent embarrassment and twenty-five percent possibility, but I didn’t delete the email. Later, as we waited for takeoff on the mostly empty flight, I fished my phone out and looked at it again, tapped the hyperlink, and watched as the map zoomed in on a place called Stormville.

Stormville. For the last week of the tour and the DeadBeat Festival, the name had bounced around in my head. It sounded like the place a supervillain would live, or the terse detective in one of the Swedish mystery shows that had played on a twenty-four-hour loop in our hotel rooms on tour.

But, as remote as Stormville sounded, I couldn’t stop thinking about Caleb. About the way he’d touched me, hands roaming my body as he played me like an instrument he knew as well as his guitar. Voice sweet and rough in all the right places. His laugh, rare and unexpected, rolling through the conversation like thunder. And his eyes. The way he’d watched me, taking in every detail, like he couldn’t bear to miss anything. I was used to being looked at, but being seen was something quite different.

And I felt like Caleb saw me.

Which is how I now came to be in Stormville (apparently—though there’d been no sign announcing it, the way I’d imagined, like in a comic book: NOW ENTERING STORMVILLE—POPULATION 3,999 + YOU), about seventy-five miles north of the city, watching for the blue dot that was me to meet up with the pin my GPS told me was Caleb’s house. When the two converged, I thought it was a mistake. All I saw was a scratch of land and a few trees. Then I saw a mailbox a ways down the road, so I parked there. There wasn’t a driveway, just a large plot of patchy garden, with a few monstrously tall and woody sunflowers waving overhead in the breeze like creatures from an outsize planet.

Set back a few hundred yards was a small farmhouse, with weather-beaten gray clapboard siding and peeling white paint on the door. A sagging screened-in porch hugged the side of the house, and a shed slumped beside it. I would have assumed it was deserted if not for the freshly turned ground and sound of music coming through an open window.

I’d spent weeks thinking about this man, listening to his music, but now it seemed ridiculous that I was here. That I’d tracked down the address of someone who’d left me in bed after fucking me, without so much as a phone number or a note.

Was this a terrible idea? Probably. But it had been so long since I’d felt any kind of connection with someone. I couldn’t just let it go without trying.

There was no answer when I knocked on the door at first, and no doorbell. I knocked harder and the music stopped. When Caleb opened the door, holding his guitar, a chill ripped through me despite the heat. I couldn’t explain the way my body responded to him. Yes, he was gorgeous, but this was a deep, chemical reaction, like he atomized something in me and set the particles vibrating.

“Hi,” I said. And then I just stood there, looking at him.

When he opened the door, he looked shocked to see me. Then something flickered over his face that I couldn’t quite read. Curiosity, maybe? Did I dare hope, hunger? Now he just looked wary. Which was reasonable, given that I’d shown up unannounced, at a home it seemed likely didn’t get many visitors.

I couldn’t think of a single explanation for my presence that didn’t scream desperation or creepiness. How did you tell someone who was practically a stranger that you’d been thinking about him for weeks? That you realized spending time with him had been the best you’d felt in longer than you could remember? That you kind of wondered if maybe you could just stand near him in the hopes of soaking up some of that good feeling again?

“I wanted to stand near you,” was the garbled jewel that fell out of my mouth, and Caleb’s eyebrows rose.

“Oh Jesus, fuck me. That was so stalker creepy. Not what I meant.” Exactly what I meant.

“How did you find me here?”

I bit my thumbnail. “Uh. I asked my agent to find your address. You didn’t…you left without…so I…oh, fuck, never mind. I’m sorry.”

Miserable, I started to shuffle off the stoop, but a hand snagged my arm.

My face was burning and the awkwardness closed around me like a fog. It was a familiar feeling, though not one I’d had the displeasure of experiencing lately. That kind of went with the territory when people wanted to meet you but you weren’t invested in them. When you didn’t have time to connect with anyone. When you didn’t even try.

“Come inside,” Caleb said. It was gruff but I detected a hint of pity, and the mortification struck deeper, reminding me of too many times in the past. Like when I’d asked Jenny Robinson, who I thought was the coolest person I’d ever met, if I could sit with her at lunch in seventh grade, and she waited politely while I stammered through the answer to every question, then smiled tightly and left. The time I’d drunkenly kissed Miles VanCamp at a party freshman year, and he pulled away, hands on my shoulders, and told me he just didn’t think of me that way. The time I’d come offstage after my first piano recital, smiling because I’d nailed the tricky part in the piece I’d been working on for weeks, and was met with twin pillars of icy dispassion. The night I’d suggested Ven, Ethan, Coco, and I get together for dinner after a writing session, and they exchanged startled looks, like they hadn’t expected having a new member of the band meant actually having to hang out with him.

I stumbled over the threshold, now wishing I were anywhere but here.

The door opened onto a living room, revealing a worn Shaker dining table with only two chairs, and a utilitarian kitchen beyond that. The kitchen had probably been painted white, once upon a time, and was now slightly yellowed, like aged ivory.

The walls of the living room were an unfortunate color that was likely meant to be gray but was more like lavender. It housed a brown corduroy reclining chair, stuck in what looked like a state of permanent semirecline, a card table to the left of it that held a coffee mug and a plate with smears of hot sauce or ketchup on it, a rickety floor lamp, and a dark blue velveteen couch. The couch was turned with its back to the room, facing the wall, as if it had been given a time-out. To sit on it you’d have to vault over the sides or clamber over the back.

“What’s with your—oh, thanks.” Caleb handed me a glass of water and stood, arms crossed over his chest, regarding me. “Your couch,” I finished weakly.

Caleb pulled it out from the wall and spun it around, powerful arms and shoulders flexing beneath his worn white T-shirt, tattoo peeking out from the neck. At his gesture, I sat down next to him.

He was looking at me warily, like he couldn’t quite believe I was here. And fair point to him, since I’d shown up out of the blue. There was something else there besides suspicion, though. I wanted it to be desire, but I thought it might be fear.

“Theo.” My name tore through me, a tender invasion. “Talk.”

The water glass was the kind of old-fashioned beaded yellow glass they’d used at my friend Eric’s house when I was a kid. The color made the water look brackish, medieval. Eric had been one of the only real friends I’d had who actually liked doing the things I liked doing, who I could talk to in more than insults and jokes. He’d moved away when I was fourteen and I’d never seen him again.

The cup disappeared and Caleb slid a hand into mine to replace it, squeezing for just a moment before letting go.

“Talk,” he said again. But everything was swimmy and it all sounded ridiculous.

“You know that thing,” I said, voice scratchy and tight with nerves, “where there’s a melody and you know you can construct a harmony because, duh, you always can, so you try a bunch of different things and some bits are right and others suck, and some of it is better with no harmony, and you work at it a lot before maybe you get something okay?”

I was talking to my knees, but when I glanced up at Caleb, he nodded.

“And then there are other melodies where even before you’ve heard the whole song, you can just sing the harmony because it’s already there, in the air, and it sounds great, and it makes the song better, and it’s as easy as breathing?”

Another nod, and Caleb’s eyes were looking into me so deeply it was like I could feel them on my skin.

“I’m not great with people. And when I try, usually it’s like the hard harmony. Making it up and it fails, or it’s okay but not worth the effort it took. But then, the other night, you and I…it was easy. The harmony was right there. And I just—I’m majorly fucking embarrassing myself right now, but I just wanted it. More of it. But you left with no note or anything and I probably should’ve taken that as a fucking hint, huh? God, sorry, I’m such a tool. I can’t even believe I came out here. Okay, I’m gonna go.”

I stood up so fast I knocked over the water glass Caleb had set on the floor. Then a hand yanked me back down onto the couch. Those green eyes regarded me steadily and Caleb stroked his beard.

Finally, he nodded once and said, simply, “Okay.”

“O-okay?”

“Yeah, but if you’re staying for a bit you can help me in the garden. My squash and peppers are up. And the onions.”

Could it be that easy?

“I—uh, sure.”