Caleb

“What the fuck’s wrong with you, bro?”

“What? Nothing. What.”

Rhys dropped heavily into the sprung chair on the porch, wiping his forehead with his bandanna and squinting at me like I was a puzzle he couldn’t quite suss.

“You’re all…” He made a series of illegible gestures, like he was casting a spell in the air between us. “Weird.”

“Very enlightening.”

“No, but…you’re not…you’re still…”

“No, I’m not using; yes, I’m still fine.” I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice, since it was a perfectly reasonable question. How long would I need to stay clean before that wasn’t the first thing that would cross Rhys’s mind?

“Sorry, man. You’re just all…spacey or something. Distracted. And since I’m totally fascinating, you know, gotta wonder.”

I toasted him with my lemonade and scowled at the garden we’d just come from. A basket of sun-hot tomatoes rested between us.

“I’ve been…there’s this guy. And I’m stupid into him, but I think it’s a disaster. And another disaster is about the last thing I need right now. But I can’t stop…thinking about him. Wanting to be near him.”

“Fucking him,” Rhys added in a winking voice.

“Yeah, well.”

“You don’t know it’ll be a disaster, C. Maybe it’ll be great.”

“Your optimism is noted, appreciated, and dismissed.”

“What does Huey say?”

“I haven’t told him. That’s where I met him, though. He came in while I was playing. Just messin’ around. But he liked my song.”

“Well, la-di-da, fastest way to Caleb Whitman’s heart,” Rhys teased. “Who is this guy?”

“He’s a musician. He…uh, that’s kind of why I think it’s a disaster. He’s…remember when you were here last time and you looked at the computer—”

“That pretty kid in Riven? Holy shit, for real?”

He was sizing me up like he’d underestimated me.

“His name’s Theo. And that’s the thing, right, is that he’s—”

“A fucking rock star.”

“Yeah. So, that comes with a hell of a lot of nonsense I don’t need. Not just the lifestyle, but the scrutiny. Getting away from that is why I moved out here in the first place, you know? The idea of being thrust back into all that…”

Terrified me. I had been feeling good lately. Strong. But I was painfully aware that feeling came and went. And it was in the moments that I felt…susceptible that I needed the isolation, the safety of miles and miles between me and anything that rubbed against the itch and teased it into an inferno. Which was exactly what dating a rock star was almost guaranteed to do. Yeah, it was definitely a disaster.

“Besides,” I added, “he’ll probably get bored soon. I’m just this guy who does nothing and lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Who the fuck would want any part of that?”

The wood of the porch was cracked and brittle from years of expanding and contracting throughout the heat and cold with no wax or stain. I should probably do something about it before the whole thing fell to pieces.

“If I thought you actually wanted to hear it, I’d tell you all the reasons someone would want to be with you. I am intimately familiar with them, after all.”

I grumbled but kept my gaze on the floor.

“But since I know you don’t, I’ll say this. You’re in an in-between place right now, man. You’re figuring shit out in a lot of different categories, and I know that feels like you’re doing nothing. But you won’t be here forever. Whatever you decide to do about my album”—he elbowed me—“you’ve still got the music. Don’t know what you’ll do with it yet, but there is no goddamn way that Caleb Blake Whitman gives up making music. You practically radiate it. What was that you were singing in the garden, hmm?”

“Huh? I wasn’t.”

“Yeah, okay. But you were. Which you do when you’re cooking a new song in that noggin.” He rapped lightly at the top of my head. “It’ll make its way out eventually. Maybe it’ll be for me, maybe not. But it’s all still in there, bro. It hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just whattayacallit, when you let the ribs sit in the barbecue sauce.”

“Marinating.”

“Marinating, right. So it’ll be that much tastier when you throw that fucker on the fire. Hmmm.”

“You’re hungry, aren’t you?”

“Fuck, now that you mention it, I could definitely eat.”

---

What I didn’t tell Rhys was that with every late-night phone conversation with Theo, it became harder and harder to imagine letting him go. I loved his stories, and I was intrigued by his weird brain and the way he would get furiously mad about some small thing and then get over it immediately, moving on to the next. I liked how he had something to say about everything, and had strong opinions about the mildest of things.

“I love cucumbers,” he’d mused a few days ago, at about three in the morning.

“Dude, that is a hell of a lot of feeling for a vegetable that tastes like nothing.”

“They don’t taste like nothing! They taste green. They taste like green water. I love them. If your cucumbers taste like nothing, you’ve just been growing them too long. Did you read that article I sent?”

Theo had become invested in my garden, and would text me factoids and suggestions that he came across. Once, when he came over, he brought me a zine on installing your own irrigation system using empty soda bottles and hose. When I asked where he’d gotten it, he shrugged self-consciously and said, “I read.” The idea of him seeking out materials on projects I could do charmed me.

He also, I learned that night, loved oatmeal and moss, loathed khaki and pens with blue ink, and believed that there was a special corner of hell for people who used public bathrooms and didn’t put the new toilet paper roll on the holder.

“It’s right there. All you have to do is stick it on the damn thing. Like, really, are you in that much of a hurry after you take a shit that you have to just grab your toilet paper and rush out of the stall, leaving the roll sitting on top where it could fall onto the ground? Or you just don’t care? Seriously, go die.”

I related to the way he found inspiration for songs in everything, and was constantly pausing things or interrupting himself to scribble lyrics or chord progressions or bits of a tune in the notebook he carried around, or sending himself memos on his phone. I respected it.

I’d had to admit that, yeah, I’d brought a lot of assumptions to the table about what kind of musician Theo was simply because he was the front man of a popular rock band. Even once I’d seen how good he and his bandmates were, I still had a bit of the attitude that all the other musicians I knew who weren’t famous had: if you hit it that big, either you cared more about being famous than the music, so you compromised your music to appeal to the masses, or it was shit to begin with, because most people have terrible taste.

After his perceived slight at the Lion’s Share show—well, and after we’d woken up from fucking each other cockeyed—Theo had confessed that he was self-conscious about that. About people thinking he didn’t have chops.

“I actually can play a lot,” he said. “Of instruments, I mean.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said, distracted because I was running a hand over his round ass and between his taut thighs.

And he told me how he’d begun taking piano lessons as a kid, at his parents’ urging.

“I played for years, all through high school. Did the whole recital and competition thing. And I did pretty well.”

I pressed at that, and got him to admit that he’d won or placed in the National Piano Association Competition five years in a row, which I was pretty sure made him hella good by anyone’s measure.

“When I was in middle school, I taught myself other stuff. Guitar, bass, fucking banjo, because there was one lying around in the music room. Violin. I played that in orchestra in high school since they already had enough people on keys.”

His expression turned wistful as he spoke.

“So, what happened?”

“I didn’t love the music. Classical stuff…I learned a lot from it, but it never really felt quite like my thing. So learning guitar was cool because I could write songs on it. Couldn’t have a piano with me all the time.” He sighed and I let my fingers creep into his hair, untangling the unruly strands as I waited for him to go on. “Piano, though,” he said finally. “I loved piano. The…the fucking piano-ness of it. The feel of the keys, the resonance of the body, the—god, the sound of it. That combination of rhythm and tune, and how your hands can be in concert or contrast…”

“Do you still play?”

He got a dreamy smile.

“They have a Bösendorfer at the studio that I mess with sometimes. I thought about getting one for the apartment, but it just seems—” He shook his head.

“What? It seems what?”

“So extravagant or whatever. You know, just buying a piano.”

And that was another thing I liked about Theo. Aside from the fact that he lived in a very nice apartment (which, I’d learned, his manager had essentially bought with his money and shoved him into after learning he was living in a shithole walk-up in Queens that also housed an unofficial butcher who sold sides of meat off his balcony), he didn’t do anything…rock star-y. It was a natural outgrowth of the fact that he also didn’t really think of himself in that way except in the moments when he was forced to hide from the press or from being recognized.

The other thing I didn’t tell Rhys was that the more time I spent around Theo, the more bits of music were starting to fall back into my head. Slowly, at first—little two- and three-note clusters that hit like raindrops. Then in more familiar forms. A chorus that drifted up from the subway’s roar, the first line of a verse from misreading the billboard outside the country grocery store a few miles from my house.

Sometimes, we messed around on guitar while we were on the phone. One night, Theo switched to FaceTiming me, and we riffed off each other, each of us starting a song on the chord the other’s ended on. And it felt so fucking good to be making music again that I felt this surge of hope. Theo grinned at me like he could feel the change in my mood. He was wearing navy sweatpants and a gray T-shirt worn to holes, and his hair was a tangled mess around his face, and even on the tiny screen, propped askew on my coffee table, he was luminous.

I hadn’t been aware I was singing something when Rhys and I were in the garden, but once he’d mentioned it, I realized that at some point those bits and pieces had coalesced into something like the bones of a song. It was stark and clumsy—tottering on the weak springtime muscles of something just waking after a harsh winter—but it was there. Proof that I wasn’t useless. Proof that I wasn’t nothing. And, most important, proof that it hadn’t just been the drugs that had made me the musician I was.

I knew it wasn’t factually true. I’d been playing music and writing songs a long time before the drugs became a problem. But knowing it factually counted for very little against the fear that somewhere in there, I’d wiped out the part of me that could create without them.

It had crept in so slowly I’d hardly noticed it. Drugs, alcohol, partying—it was all part of being on tour, all part of playing in smoky bars, and finishing your day at one in the morning when the only thing to do was go to another bar, or hang out on someone’s tour bus, or in their dressing room, or hotel room. And everyone did it, so I thought nothing of it. It was as natural as picking up a guitar and starting a song, knowing everyone else would join in.

That was the part that was always hardest to take. That something others did casually and without thinking could have such a hold on me. It felt ridiculous at first, and I dismissed it. How could this thing suddenly be a problem? How had it happened? It felt unfair, silly, stupid. And I’d refused to accept that such a problem was suddenly my life.

I’d always been in control. Always made decisions, took responsibility. I was the one who calmed down musicians freaking out about going onstage, or soothed ruffled feathers when egos butted. I was the one who always remembered to budget food money and oil checks for our touring vehicles. I called my mother on her birthday and always mailed my rent on time.

It was absurd to imagine that I had woken up one day so far down that everyone had seen the crash but me.

---

Theo came bursting through the front door as I was pulling on clothes after a shower.

“Hey!” He was flushed and buzzy as he grabbed me. “Guess what?” He bounced in front of me. “So, I met with the band today to map out our studio time.”

Riven was ramping up to record material for their new album starting the next week.

“And we were talking and I was telling them about you, and I played them your stuff and they totally loved it, and we were going to get an acoustic on a bunch of tracks along with Coco’s electric anyway, and so everyone was totally jazzed for you to do it. And backing vocals, if you wanted? I would love it, I think they’d be so great. I fucking love your voice, as you know.”

He nuzzled my throat for emphasis, but I held him off, hands on his shoulders. A chill slid down my spine like the screams of the barn owls late at night.

“What the hell, Theo?”

“I—what?”

The anger and the fear waged war with each other so quickly I almost shoved him away from me so it wouldn’t touch him. So he couldn’t see. Instead, I slipped around him and stalked into the kitchen for a lemonade, hoping that putting something into my mouth would help keep other things from coming out.

“Caleb, I don’t—what did I do?”

“Look, don’t do me any favors, all right?” I snapped. “That’s exactly what I don’t want—all your bandmates taking pity on the washed-up asshole you’re fucking who ruined his career. No thanks.”

And there it was, on the heels of the anger and fear: shame, turning my stomach to acid. I just wanted him out of there so that I could curl up and lick my wounds.

“That’s not what they thought at all! They thought you were great. And I didn’t tell them that we’re—that we—about the fucking.” He trailed off self-consciously, voice trembling.

“Did I say that I wanted back in the studio? Did I ask you to do this? No. There are reasons why I’m here and not in New York. And when I’m ready to record again, I don’t need you lighting the way, okay?”

Theo threw his hands up. “Okay! Jesus. Sorry I fucking wanted to help.”

“I don’t need your help, Theo! I had a career in this business when you were playing the violin in your high school orchestra. I don’t need your damned charity.”

“Fine!” Theo snarled at me, glorious in his righteous anger. “Excuse the fuck out of me for thinking it would be good for you to do something other than sitting around in this house and digging in the dirt. Sometimes you actually have to take a chance, you know?”

He stood before me, so clean and shiny, the world at his feet. And in that moment, I hated him.