17. Gerard
Gerard
A few days later, the mail boat swanned in carrying people, freight, and a first feel of autumnal weather.
A chilly breeze blew off the bay, and the temperature hovered south of seventy degrees for the first time since Gerard had arrived on the island.
Even in the unclouded Saturday sunshine, Gerard longed for a cozy cable-knit sweater to curl up in, but he couldn’t go back to the apartment to get one while Emory slept.
They’d agreed on a schedule, and Gerard wouldn’t break it so soon.
Gerard stopped into the tiny Bay Brew café.
The barista was a tall Asian woman with bangs and a black bob whose greeting was overpowered by a loud Halloween-sounds CD playing from a nearby ancient-looking boom box.
Between creaks, thunderclaps, and maniacal laughter, Gerard attempted to order a small vanilla latte with oat milk, only to be interrupted by the sound of a real live scream.
It came from the barista herself, who rushed to the door when she saw the postman coming up the steps.
“Pumpkin spice syrup!” she shouted, hoisting a package into the air when she returned. “Do you know how long ago I ordered this? Spooky season can finally start! Shall we make that a small pumpkin spice latte instead?”
Gerard began to decline until he noticed the sparkle dim in her eyes. He acquiesced. Even though his coffee tasted like melted decorative-candle wax, he was happy to have shared in someone else’s excitement.
Later in his amble, he found himself lured back to the church. Notes played on a grand organ curled out the open doors and down the front steps, beckoning him like God’s all-powerful finger as painted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Vibrations filled Gerard’s hands as he recalled organ lessons at his childhood church.
During his first lesson with the choir director, Mr. Bud—an older, single man whose flashy outfits and interesting jewelry were often talked about behind his back—Gerard was shocked by the robustness of the sound the instrument could make up close.
As his fingers pressed down on the black-and-white keys, he’d felt powerful beyond his boyish strength.
Having never shined on a field or on a court, in church, sitting at that instrument, he could command an entire room with his stylings.
Nearly on tiptoe, he crept inside the church, imagining himself as a furry, solitary mouse poking out from a hidey-hole.
If he kept himself small and quiet, maybe nobody would notice him lurking, and he could bask in the music and the memories of a simpler time when playing instruments was only for fun and sexuality was a term they hadn’t yet gotten to in health class.
The organ placement and a creaking floorboard shot his fantasy in the foot.
At the threshold to the nave, Regina caught his eye over the small, unshowy light brown organ.
The instrument paled sharply in comparison to the grandiose pipe organ Gerard had learned to play on.
Mr. Bud treated the organ as if it were a deity all its own.
Gerard was required to thoroughly wash his hands before even touching the instrument, and he had to change into special, narrow leather shoes, which were never to be worn outside, to operate the foot pedals. The routine of it made his brain happy.
Regina’s voice wrenched him back into the present. “Come in, James.”
Once again, he fumbled by turning over his shoulder, assuming someone named James stood behind him. Being called by his middle name was an adjustment he still hadn’t quite mastered. “Sorry to interrupt.”
“It’s okay. I was warming up before choir practice,” she said. She stopped playing and began reorganizing her chaotically strewn sheet music. “Would you care to join us?”
Her offer called to mind warm, candlelit Christmas masses as a tween, being one small voice rising up during “Silent Night” under Mr. Bud’s waving hands. Despite the fondness he felt for those days and this talented woman, he said, “No, thank you.”
Joining them would require stepping fully inside, and while he didn’t expect to burst into flames, he did not want old emotions to swarm him without due cause.
If he joined them for practice, that meant he’d have to sing at masses, and attending a mass was a rope bridge over violent rapids. He couldn’t risk getting swept up.
“That’s a shame. I’ve heard you singing down on the beach at low tide with that gorgeous guitar of yours. You have a sweet voice,” she said, standing and then moving toward him so she wasn’t shouting over ten rows of pews. “We could use a boost in our tenor section.”
“I couldn’t possibly,” he said quickly. “I’m too busy.
I was just on my way to—Yeah, I’m busy.” Lifelike Jesus up on the crucifix presiding over the altar stopped Gerard from lying further.
If his fame and sexuality weren’t enough, lying in a house of worship would certainly open a trapdoor underfoot that slid him right to hell.
Gerard made like he was off someplace else in a hurry, but he ended up circling the church and nesting in the graveyard next door with his journal open in his lap.
Through a partially open window, he listened alongside the dead to the beautiful communal vocal music being made inside. “You’re really lucky,” he said quietly to the row of headstones in front of him, “to have personal concerts like these every single day.”
Gerard was no scientist or philosopher. He did not know what happened to a person after they died, nor did he particularly wish to, but he’d always had this theory that music transcended realms. Mr. Bud would always say, “Play like you’re playing for the angels, because you are.
” Certainly not every person buried in that graveyard had gone on to become some halo-wearing cherub in Grecian dress, but he liked to think they were still somewhere warm and welcoming, humming along to the hymns that he was surprised he still knew the words to.
“Since Love is lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?” he repeated after the choir into the leaf-dusted graveyard. He sang it a few more times, relishing the melody, unaware that the music inside had stopped.
Moments later, a voice called out from behind him. “How can you keep from singing with us?”
Gerard almost startled off his bench. His journal landed face down in the dirt. He squinted against the sun that poked over the steeple and saw Regina grinning in the window frame.
“Sorry!” he said, utterly embarrassed. “Sorry.”
“Next rehearsal is on Wednesday, same time! I’ll have a book of hymns waiting with your name on it,” Regina shouted after him as he ran off.
Over dinner that night, with song still on the brain, Gerard asked Emory, “What kind of music do you like?”
Emory had made another stir-fry—the third that week alone—but Gerard couldn’t complain. Vegetables, protein, and rice hit the spot and left him full.
Emory sat across from him in his sleep clothes—a pair of sweatpants and his university hoodie. His glasses floated several inches above the collar. Gerard wondered if Emory’s hair was mussed from sleep or if he had any hair at all. His roommate was a tangible question mark floating about the room.
A charge waggled between them when they sat on opposite sides of the table over a meal. Emory’s hunger took on an almost physical manifestation, sauntering across the length of the table, twirling about like a personified candlestick in a Disney cartoon.
Gerard had told him dozens of times at that point that he would simply turn away so they could both sup in peace, but Emory insisted that he preferred to eat after, that he liked watching Gerard enjoy what he’d made.
Who was he to take away the invisible man’s pleasures, even if they felt weirdly intimate?
“I don’t,” Emory said after some time.
“You don’t know what kind of music you like?
” By Gerard’s estimations, Emory had to be somewhere in the vicinity of twenty-seven, so that didn’t make much sense.
Surely Emory had encountered at least one genre of music that made him want to get up and dance or blow through an entire box of tissues while crying or bash in a car with a baseball bat while shouting the lyrics at the top of his lungs.
Emory audibly cleared his throat. “I don’t like any kind of music.”
Gerard almost did a spit take. “What? Who doesn’t like music?”
“I don’t. At least, I think I don’t. I’ve never really given it much attention,” he said. “When in the lab, if given the choice between music and silence, I’d pick silence every time.”
Gerard’s jaw almost unattached as it gaped. “You really should’ve said that before I graciously offered to let you be my roommate.”
“Don’t take it personally. In college, I stopped making time for entertainment.
I dedicate what little time I have on this earth to studying and to experimentation.
” His sleeve swung to the table in the middle of the room behind the love seat, where his in-progress experiment sat waiting for him to resume.
“Maybe that’s why you’re spinning your wheels,” Gerard said.
When Gerard had arrived back to the apartment, there was stale defeat thick in the air.
As Gerard always did, he’d asked how last night’s work had gone, and Emory’d said there’d been no breakthroughs.
Gerard understood that without more human test subjects, Emory didn’t have new data to work with, which meant until he turned back, he was mostly poring over the same calculations and running his own blood tests to see if his miracle oxygen-carrying proteins could outlive red blood cells.
It was clear Emory found the recording part of his work tedious.
“Unless someone wrote a song about when my tissue will turn opaque again, I don’t see how music is going to help me,” he said in a noxious way.