Chapter 25 Levi
I wake up, and I know he’s gone before my eyes open.
You can hear an empty apartment. It’s got a different sound than one with a man in it, even a man asleep. I lie there with my face to the open door and listen to the nothing, and then I look anyway, because looking is how you make a thing official.
His sleeping bag is right where it was, eighteen inches off mine.
Empty. The apartment’s dim, blinds down, and the light coming through the door says the morning’s half spent.
And there’s no coffee in the air. Every morning I’ve been under this roof, that little pot of his has been going on the stove before anything else.
The strong sweet Cuban stuff he offered me my first morning here, and I walked past it like a fool.
I’ve been smelling it ever since, wishing I hadn’t turned it down.
This morning there’s nothing. The stove’s cold and he’s gone, and he didn’t say one word to me on his way out.
I lie there a minute and think about it.
The showing. At ten o’clock. He had to go. Big day, be at the house by six. He got up in the dark, dressed without a light, and didn’t even make his coffee. Then slipped out of his own home like a man leaving a motel he’s ashamed of.
Because he saw what I am.
And when the sun came up he looked at what was lying in his doorway and he got out of the building.
I get up. I gather both sleeping bags, and carry them down the hall and lay them back out in the second bedroom, in my gap along the wall.
I realize what I’m doing. If I thought this was over, I’d roll them up and set them by the door.
Instead, I’m laying out a room I’ve got no claim on and hoping like hell I get a chance to sleep in it again.
Then there’s nothing left to do with my hands, and the morning gets long. I put the TV on and sit in front of it a while. There’s a fishing show, men holding up what they caught, and I couldn’t tell you one thing that happened. I turn it off.
I pace. I’m not proud of it. Up the little hall and back, past the bathroom, past his door standing open the way he leaves it, and all the while I’m running last night like a game tape, hunting for the frame where I lost him.
The balcony rail. The ice. His hand on my bare back and me letting it stay.
I’m watching over you.
A man doesn’t say that to somebody that disgusts him. Then again, a man says whatever gets the wreck off his balcony at three in the morning. I catch myself spiraling and I stop. I stand in his kitchen and I make myself say it out loud, or near enough.
He had early work with no sleep. He let me stay. He left me sleeping in his home, alone, with everything he owns, which is not a thing you do with a man you can’t stand the sight of. I need to wait for him to come back.
And I decide something, that I’ve got no business deciding and do it anyway. When he comes through that door, I’m going to do the one thing I’ve never done in my life, not once, not to anybody.
I’m going to ask him to spend time with me.
Not a date because I wouldn’t even know how to do that. Nobody’s ever asked me out either. Girl or boy. Nobody.
Just something simple. Maybe to watch a ballgame on TV again. Get a pizza. A casual evening he could say no to. Tonight there’s another game on, and I’ve got a television the size of a barn door sitting in that cold house. It can’t hurt to ask him. As long as I don’t lose my nerve.
It’s past noon when I hear him, and I know the morning went good before the door opens. His feet hit the metal stairs two at a time, taking them at a run, and that’s not how Dante climbs when it goes bad. That’s Dante coming home with a win on him. I get myself set to meet him.
The door opens, and the first thing out of him is, “Hey. You okay, Levi?”
And it knocks me flat-footed. He’s stopped just inside the door, jacket over one shoulder, tie gone, collar open, and his eyes are going over me.
Those same eyes were on me a few hours ago while I came apart on his balcony. The hand holding his keys is the one that stayed flat on my back until the shaking let go.
The biggest morning of his year. The deal of his life on the table. He should be out celebrating. And the first words through his own front door aren’t about the house. They’re about me and not in a good way.
The shame from last night gets there before anything else can. It puts me right back on that rail, soaked through and gasping, and everything in me wants out from under his eyes.
“Yeah, I’m good.” Too quick, too smooth. I wave it off and get the energy back up.
He sets the keys down, still watching me, working up to something that isn’t the house. Last night is in the room with us, taking up all the air.
“Levi. About last night—”
“Did you sell it? How did it go?”
He holds on me one more second, like he’s deciding whether to take the answer. Then he takes it.
“It’s not sold yet.” But the corner of his mouth gives him up. “It’s going to sell.”
“Alright! Knew you had it in you.”
He looks at me a second too long, like he’s deciding whether he should tell me the story, and then decides not to.
He can’t work out how to say a normal thing to me across his own kitchen.
Whatever happened on that balcony knocked him off his script too.
You’d think that would make me feel less alone in it. It doesn’t.
“The buyer was serious,” he says. “Air was clean. I’ll spare you the dull broker talk.” He grabs his keys off the counter where he set them five seconds ago. “Come on. House is yours again. I’ll run you back.”
House is yours again.
Said in a kind voice. He’s taking me back like a tool that got borrowed for a job that’s done. He’s already halfway out the door, key ready, and God, the speed of it. Dante can’t get me out of his apartment fast enough.
This is the part where I should follow him down, and let him drive me back. Instead, I do the bravest stupid thing I’ve done.
“Hey.” It’s out of my mouth before I can lose my nerve. He stops, half-turned in the doorway with the light behind him, and I have to look at the floor to get the rest out. “You doing anything tonight?”
“Tonight,” he says, puzzled. “Why?”
“Second night of the series is on.” I lift my head and make myself look at him.
“There’s a TV in that house the size of a barn door.
Figured, if you got no place to be, you could come watch it.
I’ll order in. Whatever you want, all the pizza a man can hold.
It’s covered. You’ve fed me all week — ribs, the circus at the bar. Let me get a turn for once.”
That’s the part I can say. Pizza and a ballgame, take it or leave it. The part riding under it, the part he’d have to be deaf not to hear, is I want you there.
First time I’ve held that out to anybody, and my hands are steadier on a live microphone in front of thousands of people than they are right now. I stand there with the offer out in front of me, waiting.
And Dante freezes.
Oh, damn, I know what that means and it’s not good.
He stops with his keys in his hand and his mouth half open, like I caught him by surprise.
“That’s a good offer,” he says, giving me a polite smile. “I can’t tonight.”
“Yeah. No. Of course.” I’m already reeling it back in fast.
“I’ve got a stack of calls to run down before tomorrow,” he says, every word of it probably true. “Half my clients fly in for the weekends, and a Saturday like today, you ride the momentum or you lose it. It’s just part of the work.” A small shrug. “You know how it is.”
“Sure.” I find a grin somewhere and put it on. “Strike while the iron’s hot. Forget I mentioned it.”
And that’s the end of it. We go down the metal stairs into the heat, and I do what I do. Take the hit, go still, wait for it to be over.
I wasn’t one bit wrong on the balcony about what he was feeling.
I was early.
The ice was first aid. The floor was Dante doing right by an emergency in his own home. And just now I held the door open a crack. One night, one ballgame, the smallest thing there is, and he found a reason not to walk through it before I finished asking.
And the worst of it isn’t even being turned down. I can’t trust my own judgment now. And if I can’t trust my judgment, then I’ve got nothing between myself and the world at all.
We get in the SUV and he pulls out. I put my arm on the windowsill and my eyes on the scenery going by and I don’t let one piece of it onto my face. I’m good at this. You can take my insides apart, and as long as my face holds, nobody collects on it.
“You went quiet,” he says, when we hit 30A.
“Just worn out.” I keep it light, keep it out the window. “Didn’t sleep much.” And then I hear what I said, closer to the night than I meant to get, and I watch it land on him sideways. His hands tighten on the wheel and neither of us picks it up.
The big white houses go by, all of them empty. He pulls into the cul-de-sac and puts it in park. There’s a moment where the engine’s running, neither of us has moved and the week is sitting in the car with us.
I don’t let it sit long. Sitting in it is how you end up saying a true thing, and a true thing right now would cost more than I’ve got.
I get the door open and put a boot on the driveway. I make myself turn back and smile at him. “Congratulations again on the house, Dante.” I mean it, too, which is its own small misery. “It’s been a helluva week. Talk to you later.”
I shut the door and walk up the path with my head where I keep it when a night’s gone wrong and the crowd can’t ever know. Behind me I hear him sit a minute longer than he needs to before the SUV backs out, and the engine fades off down the street, and the gate closes on the sound of it.
Then it’s me alone in the fucking house again.
White and cold. Every door sealed shut because Dante closed them for the showing, the place holding its fancy staged breath, smelling like eucalyptus. I cross straight to the glass door and haul it back along its track, and the Gulf comes over the threshold the way I like it.
My body knows where the air is. That much of me’s still working.
But I can feel the rest of it going.
There’s no tequila in the house, and that’s the only reason it isn’t already in my hand. I’m honest enough to say it. A week ago, gutted like this, I’d have had the bottle off the counter before the gate finished closing, turned the night down to a hum, and ridden it numb into tomorrow.
That’s the familiar move.
And I can feel the old me settling back into the space behind my ribs.
The one who runs on numb and keeps his bag packed by the door.
Telling me he never left. Telling me last night proved it.
That the bad thing under the floor is still under the floor, sober or not, and it knows my new address and where to find me.
And then my feet take me up the stairs. I go into the master and down onto my knees on the far side of the bed and drag the case out into the light. The Martin. I carry it back down the stairs, into the big room where the door stands open.
I drag a chair to the threshold and sit down half in the house and half in the night air. I set the guitar on my knee and don’t tune it. It doesn’t need it. I put my hand on the neck and start.
Not any song with a name.
I play whatever’s coming up out of me. What’s coming up is the balcony, and his hand flat on my back, and a cold coffee pot in an empty kitchen, and me in his doorway offering a game and a pizza, and the smooth kind sound of him saying it’s just the deal.
I’m not playing so much as bleeding out through six strings. The voice that comes out is the one from before all of it. It’s a mess, and it’s cracked. And I let it crack, because there’s nobody here to hear it break or even care.
It’s the most naked I’ve been in my life, except once, and the once was last night, and both times I couldn’t breathe.
I play it into the fog coming down over the Gulf, the worthless ache of it, a man singing the truest thing he’s got to nobody at all. And the part of me that started healing all week. The part that learned to want the food and laugh at Tex’s stories and write the line on the napkin. It’s not dead.
I can feel it isn’t dead.
It’s right here in my hands, working the strings instead of reaching for a bottle. But it’s cracked down the middle same as my voice, and I don’t know yet if a thing that cracks like this grows back or just learns to play around the gap.
I keep playing.
It’s the only thing left in this house that’s mine.