Twenty-seven
Adina
A BROKEN INSTRUMENT FOR A broken girl. My viola and I have this in common, and I like the poetry of it so much that I haven’t brought it in to be repaired yet. We are both imperfect, but we still make beautiful music.
Arjun may feel differently about it, though it’s been three days since I returned from my trip and he hasn’t seen me or my viola. Two days ago I performed with the youth symphony and waited around to see him afterward, but he wasn’t there, despite promising me earlier this month he would be. Yesterday I called him four times. Each time it went to voice mail and I hung up. Maybe he got bored of me. Maybe he went back to his old girlfriend, the one with the wild rose moisturizer who wasn’t his student. I imagine him and this faceless girl in his bed. I imagine him touching her the way he touches me.
I have to make sure there is still an us. Adi and Arjun. Even our names sound right together. Like music.
Friday after sundown, Shabbat, Tovah is locked in her room weeping over Johns Hopkins. I am still waiting on my acceptances; they ought to arrive any day. I am not nervous, though, only eager to know which places want me.
My parents are on a walk, unlikely to notice the car and I are gone until much later. I have no patience for the unreliability of the bus, not today. Besides, if my parents are upset when I get home, I have a feeling I will get away with it.
When I get to his building, before I can get out of my car or even find a parking spot, I spy him getting into his silver Honda Civic. He’s wearing a deep brown jacket I’ve never seen before, probably because we’ve never really been outside together. I’m not sure if I’ve ever noticed the way he walks, but he does it with purpose. Head high, back straight. Perfect posture.
I could wait around until he returns to his apartment, I suppose. Or I could head back home. He fiddles with something in his car, probably trying to find the right music. Liszt? Schubert? Mozart?
I tap my fingernails on the steering wheel. And then I follow him out of the parking lot.
First he goes to Bartell Drugs. I park far enough away that he won’t notice I’m there. He doesn’t know this car, anyway, considering I always take the bus. He carries a canvas tote with the words I ♥ NPR on it, the kind everyone in Seattle uses since the city outlawed plastic bags. He must be either eco-conscious or stingy. I wonder if he keeps the bags in the backseat of his car, the way my family does.
After fifteen minutes, he emerges with his canvas bag half full, judging by how he’s holding it. I wonder what’s inside. Toothpaste and hand soap. Shaving cream. Shampoo. Condoms.
Then he heads to a music shop, my store’s primary competitor, which makes me silently seethe. Is he avoiding my store, or does he simply prefer this one? Mine is better—I made sure of that when I applied. Arjun wanders around the store for a while, chats with a couple salespeople.
I send another text, trying to sound casual.
You around tonight?
Through the window, I watch him peek at his phone and then slip it back in his pocket.
Clearly he is so busy running errands that he cannot reply.
Next he goes to a café in Capitol Hill. I can’t find a parking spot that lets me see inside, so I have to pay for street parking five blocks away. I pull my hood up as I approach the café’s window. Arjun is sitting at a table toward the back. Across from a woman.
My guts twist into pretzels, tighter and tighter until I think I might collapse in the middle of the sidewalk. The woman has delicate features and a blond bob that skims her shirt collar. She’s thin, entirely curveless, and I wonder if the way Arjun pinches the curves of my body and buries his lips in my hip bones is because I am the type of woman he prefers. But she is older than I am, probably in her midtwenties. Closer to his age.
She crosses her carrot-stick legs beneath the table and leans over it. Arjun is tilted slightly away from her. They each have their own cup of coffee, and while she’s nibbling on a muffin, he’s not eating anything. When she reaches out to stroke Arjun’s forearm, he pulls back.
What the hell is going on?
I stand outside the coffee shop watching their conversation I cannot hear for ten, twenty, thirty minutes. By the time Arjun heads for the door, I have to race out of sight, but I lose my balance and slip on a square of wet pavement. I go down hard. When I get back to my car, there’s a pressure behind my eyes and my knees are burning, probably beginning to bruise and bleed beneath my torn-up tights.
I tune the radio to Seattle’s classical station, which is playing Dvorak, and I circle the blocks again and again until I find his car and follow him all the way back to his apartment.
I key in the access code: one-nine-four-five. No patience for the elevator, I take the stairs two, three at a time. The stairwell smells like wet dog. I don’t know how Tovah runs for fun because this is torture, four flights of stairs. When I reach the third flight, I’m huffing and puffing and have to hold my hand against the wall to ground myself.
On the fourth floor, before I can make it across the hall, the door to 403 swings opens. There he is, holding a basket of laundry, which he nearly drops when he sees me.
“Adina! Shit, you scared me.” He sets the basket down as I draw nearer. Inside I see his collared shirts, his burgundy sweater, his underwear, black and gray and one pair that’s plaid. “What are you—how did you get in?”
He didn’t ask me that the last time I got in. He didn’t ask how.
“I need to talk to you.”
Picking up the basket, he heads to the elevator and presses the down button. “I’m busy. Can this wait?”
I wedge myself inside the elevator with him. “No. It can’t. Who is she?”
“Who is who?”
“The blond woman!” I sputter, breath ragged. Who the fuck else would I be talking about? “The blond woman I saw you with in Capitol Hill today.”
“You were there?”
“You weren’t answering any of my messages or calls. I’ve been back for three days and I haven’t seen you.” My voice trembles and cracks. My stupid, young, eighteen-year-old voice. “What were you so busy with today that you couldn’t take two seconds to reply to me? Going to Bartell’s and the music shop and meeting her?”
A couple measures of silence pass between us.
“Were you following me?”
I open my mouth to either defend myself or confess, I’m not sure which.
Then, with a screech, the elevator stops.
“Fuck,” he mutters, shoving his palm into the wall. “It’s always doing this. It should start back up again soon.”
Pushing my back against the wall, I say, “How long does it usually take?” I wonder if we will suck up all the oxygen before it begins descending again.
“A few minutes. This building’s ancient. They really need to fix it up.” There’s something unfamiliar in Arjun’s eyes, and they won’t meet mine.
That look makes something inside me snap. I want this to be a relationship. And in relationships, I think, you are supposed to talk about things that upset you.
“Who is she?” I demand again, inching closer to him. Heat radiates off his body. I soften my voice. “Please. I deserve to know.”
He sighs, dropping his basket to the elevator floor in front of us, putting up a barrier. “Becca and I dated for a little while last year, but it didn’t work out, and she wanted to get coffee to catch up.”
“You’re not getting back together or anything, are you?”
“No. We’re not. We were just talking.” There’s a sharp edge to his words.
Our voices echo in this small space where we are stuck between floors, stuck between together and apart.
“I hate that you and I can’t ‘just talk’ in public like that.”
“You know why we can’t. You said you understood. I’ve worked hard to build my reputation here, and even a rumor about us could ruin it.” He gives the side of the elevator a light kick. “Why isn’t it working yet?” he grumbles. He takes out his cell and curses under his breath. “No service.”
“Why didn’t you answer my messages earlier?”
Another deep sigh, and he props an arm against the elevator wall. “You’re starting to worry me. You text me constantly, and I work, and I can’t always respond right away like you apparently need me to. And then you follow me? I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but I don’t like it.”
“I had to see you. I—I’m really scared.” I bite the inside of my cheek. “I think I’m starting to show symptoms.”
“Adi,” he says, an eyebrow quirking like he thinks I am making this up to mess with him. Half true, perhaps.
“I’m serious. When it first happened to my mother, she was clumsy all the time, and that’s how I’ve been feeling. You know how she hit her head on New Year’s Eve? I dropped my viola, and now it has this crack, and I’ve never been careless with it—you know that about me. And my moods are all over the place. Also—I’ve been hearing things, seeing things out of the corner of my eye that I’m pretty sure aren’t real. Hallucinations, delusions. My mother has them.” I’m bending the truth now, seeing how far it will stretch before it snaps. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Have you talked to your parents?” His words become gentler, though his face is still anger and hard angles.
I shake my head. “You’re the first person I’ve said it out loud to. It’s—” I force my voice up an octave so it’ll crack with just the right amount of emotion to get to him. “It’s really hard to say, and I’m terrified I won’t be able to play viola, and that’s the most important thing to me—you know that. . . . What happens when I don’t have that anymore? Who am I without it?” Tears trickle down my cheeks.
Finally, his features soften, all his earlier rage turning into sympathy. I used to want him to want me because of me, but if pity is the only way to tether him to me right now, I will settle for it. At least it means he cares for me.
“Come here,” he says, shoeing the laundry basket out of our way. He holds his arms out, and I collapse into them, able to breathe more deeply with his warmth around me. I grip the fabric of his shirt, hanging on tight. He feels bigger than I remember, his arms able to hold more of me. He strokes my hair, uses a finger to catch my tears. “I’m sorry, Adina.”
When I lift my face from his chest, I put my lips to his neck and inhale him, rosin and soap and laundry detergent. I kiss the hollow of his throat until it rumbles with a groan. Then I move higher, bringing my mouth to his, biting down on his lower lip the way he likes.
By the time we reach the first floor, I realize I hadn’t even noticed the elevator had started moving again.
A jazz singer croons through Arjun’s speakers. Two wineglasses sit on the coffee table in front of us. Earlier we cooked dinner together, as much as boiling water for pasta and tossing arugula in oil and vinegar can be considered cooking. His refrigerator barely had anything in it—the arugula was wilted but I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t have pasta sauce, so we just sprinkled shredded cheddar on top of it. One day we will go grocery shopping together, and I will make sure he is well stocked. He probably didn’t have time to go earlier and didn’t know I’d be here. Though I guess he had time to have coffee with Becca.
This cozy Friday night feels like a regular couple activity, but Arjun has been relatively quiet. It’s turned me into a chatterbox. I have peppered him with as many questions as I can think of, more questions about his life in India and classical music and minute details about his family members.
“Why did you stop performing?” I ask him now. I’m wearing one of his collared shirts with the top few buttons undone. It stops at my thighs. We had sex earlier, and while it was good, if rushed—he always makes sure it is good for me—that cannot be the only language we speak anymore.
“It’s nothing dramatic.” He sips his wine and focuses on the ruby liquid as he answers my question. When he speaks again, his voice is weary, as though he is exhausted by my interrogations. But I don’t understand it. I want to savor this adult conversation with my adult boyfriend. I want him to be so fascinated by me that he asks me questions too, but he has barely sent any my way.
“I still want to know,” I urge as gently as I can. It must bring up bad memories. Maybe it’s similar to how my mother doesn’t talk about Israel and her life there.
He sighs. “I’d been playing since I was very young, and it started to feel monotonous. This might sound arrogant, but a lot of the challenge was gone for me. I began to dread performances because it felt like I was spitting out music I’d committed to memory long ago. There was no excitement left for me.”
“Why haven’t you ever told me that?”
“How can it possibly inspire my students? I gave up, but you should go for it?” He shakes his head. “My parents couldn’t understand why I’d give it up, but I wanted out of everything. Out of that life, out of the symphony. I had a cousin in the States, so I moved here. I couldn’t be entirely away from the music, so I started teaching.”
“Do you ever want to go back? To performing?”
“Sometimes. I can enjoy playing simply for pleasure now. There’s no pressure. And I love teaching.”
I draw a quarter note on his knee with a fingertip. “You’re very good at it.”
He shifts his leg away from me, and my hand plummets to the couch. “Thank you.” Then he rises and picks up our wineglasses. “So . . . you’re okay now?”
“What do you mean?” My heart flutters into overdrive.
“You’re okay to go home? It seems as though you’ve calmed down. You’ll talk to your doctor about what’s going on with the clumsiness and the—hallucinations.” He trips over the word. It is always a difficult one to say.
“Yes, but . . . I was kind of hoping I could stay over tonight.” Like we’re a real couple, I don’t say. He cannot be ready to banish me. I have never spent the night here, and I want to wake up next to him so badly. His face the first thing I see, his body the first thing I touch.
Another tremendous sigh, as though I am asking him to let me paint his walls neon yellow as opposed to sharing a bed for eight hours. “I really don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“Why not? Tomorrow’s Saturday. You don’t have students on Saturday. And I can tell my parents I’m spending the night at a friend’s house. Easy.”
I want to spend the night, but I also need him to say that he thinks about one day going public with our relationship. I want him to say that he’s falling for me. I want him to say he will visit me in college. All the time.
I used to think I’d be satisfied with only the physical pieces of him, but I crave something deeper now. Love is gradual. A few more nights like this, and I know he will feel it too.
Perhaps he senses how deep that need is for me, or he realizes I have shattered all his potential excuses, because he says, “All right. You can stay. Just tonight, though, okay?”
I grin at him.
After we clean up and decide it’s time for bed, I use the bathroom connected to his room. It is very small—in fact, the whole apartment is, but it has never bothered me. I don’t need a lot of space. I open the drawers and cabinets and examine everything. My honeysuckle body lotion could fit right there, next to his aftershave, and I could line up my tubes of lipstick to the left of his Tylenol and cough syrup. I use his toothbrush, squeeze a pinky-nail-size amount of minty green onto it.
If I had allowed myself to continue to mope about my result, I might not be here. I might not have decided that I needed Arjun in my life not simply as a hookup or a fling, like I’ve had before, but as the real thing.
I’ve been in his bed more than a dozen times, but tonight when I slip between the sheets, it feels different. Foreign, but in a very good way. I’ve only ever shared a bed with Tovah. She used to accuse me of touching her with my cold feet and hogging the bedcovers, which I insisted I never did. Arjun’s sheets are too thin; at home I sleep with several extra blankets because I am always cold. But I imagine his body heat will make up for that.
He switches off the lamp, sinking the room into darkness, but he stays on the other side of the bed. I assumed he would arrange himself next to me, drape an arm across my stomach, plant a kiss between my shoulder blades.
But none of that happens. I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek in frustration. Perhaps I have one more way to keep myself in control long enough for him to realize he is falling for me. One last secret to reveal.
“I’ve decided something,” I say, and he must be nearing sleep because he gives a slightly muffled “Mm?”
“I’ve been doing a lot of research about what’s going to happen to me when I—when I develop Huntington’s.” The when, the tangibility of it, trips on my tongue. “I have a plan.”
“That’s good,” he says sleepily. “I’m so glad to hear that.”
I smile. It is good. Then I choose my words carefully. “I won’t let this thing hold me back. I’ll go to conservatory, and I’ll do whatever I can to become a soloist as soon as possible.” Even though my hands quake when I play. “I’m going to travel, too. With you, hopefully. Until the symptoms start. And then, well, that will be it. I will be done. With . . . living.”
It is the first time I’ve uttered my plan aloud. There is a poetry to it, a quiet sadness that lives inside all my favorite concertos and preludes.
For a while he doesn’t speak, and I wonder if he’s fallen asleep. But then he says, “Adina—” and I shift to face him, putting a finger to his lips. He draws in a deep breath.
“I don’t want to say anything else about it. Not tonight, okay? I just want to enjoy this with you.”
He nods in the darkness and finally pulls me tight against him, his chest against my back. My bones and muscles melt victoriously into his touch.
The next time I see him, I will insist our relationship cannot stay a secret any longer. I will tell him I’ve fallen so hard that spending these past three days without him was like living without oxygen. Without music. On vacations from school we’ll go to Israel and India and anywhere else we want. We’ll eat falafel and dunk bread in neon curries and paint ourselves with mud from the Dead Sea. We’ll listen to symphonies in all the world capitals. And someday, even just for a short time, I’ll be up on that stage, knowing that when my performance is over, he will be waiting for me.