finn
CHAPTER TWELVE
Jesse came around one minute early, but I was already on the porch, sitting and waiting for him. I saw him cutting across the park, walking like a man on a quest with a precise goal waiting for him at the end of the journey.
As if he felt me looking, he lifted his gaze from several yards away and looked right into my eyes. He was too far to make out whether he wore a little smile or not.
For the first time in years, my stomach filled with butterflies. The guys had told me I needed to talk to Jesse about it all, but seeing him move across the park with that confidence, with just me on his mind, I didn’t want to.
I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want to peel back the layers and discover that there was less of it underneath. For now, I just needed to feel special, to feel good. To feel something.
“You look nice,” he said as he stepped onto our lawn.
“You look fire,” I said.
He paused a couple of paces away from where I was standing, and he extended his hand. It took me a moment to realize he wanted me to take it. “Since when are you romantic?” I asked, taking his hand anyway.
“Since now,” he said.
Even then, I didn’t want to push it. I took his hand and came close to him, but I didn’t lean in for a kiss. That was all Jesse. He tugged my hand until our bodies were near each other, and he pressed his lips against mine in a single, breathtaking move.
“Whoa,” I murmured.
“Mm,” he said. “Strawberries.”
It was my lip balm. I guess I’d been hoping to kiss him tonight. “Where are you taking me?”
“On a date,” he said simply, and then pulled my hand gently as we walked into the night.
At the end of our walk was a secret place in a basement under an abandoned building.
You’d never know it was there unless a sexy date took you, but when the first creaky door opened, we were in a hallway lit seemingly by gas lamps, walls covered in red fabric, thick red curtains marking the ends.
After the second curtain, we found ourselves in a bar like no other.
Small, round tables were made of real wood, with bare wooden chairs surrounding them, worn-out hardwood floors covered in red carpets with burn holes beneath us, and a grand piano was placed on a stage in the back.
There were guys playing cards in the corner, and a group of girls drinking cocktails at another table, and more people were filing in with each minute.
“A show?” I asked.
“A New York one, apparently,” Jesse said. “It’s touring the underground across the country.”
Then I noticed a framed poster hanging from one of the dark ochre walls. It looked like a 1930s Berlin street scene at night, with darkness looming from above, but light coming from several very small figures holding hands in the distance, near the vanishing point. Mama Viv’s Dark Delights.
“Jesse, this is…” I looked around. It was difficult to remember that this wasn’t the 1930s Berlin cabaret. The clue was in the audience only, because even the microphone on the stage looked like one of those large, vintage ones from black-and-white films. “Incredible.”
The lights inside were dim, and the stage wasn’t even lit yet, but people were taking seats, placing orders, and I realized that most tables only had two chairs. And the couples were almost all queer. My heart filled with inexplicable warmth.
Jesse sat us down near the stage, where a flyer was placed near a candle. A waiter in a cream shirt, dark green pants, boots, and suspenders came around to take our orders.
I looked at the flyer and almost yelped. “What the hell?”
“Huh?” Jesse leaned in to see what I was looking at.
With a special guest appearance by Caleb Elison, the flyer said. “Caleb Elison? Isn’t he a movie star? He was everywhere a few years ago.”
Jesse smiled. “I read he started acting in a small theater in Santa Barbara,” he said. “I guess the theater bug never leaves you once you catch it.”
Even so, this seemed like a very small venue for someone who regularly walked red carpets across the world.
“I have to ask,” I said. “How much did this cost? It couldn’t have been anything less than a fortune.”
Jesse touched the bridge of his nose and grinned.
“Now you have to tell me,” I said.
Jesse bent one leg over the other and looked at the stage.
Our drinks arrived, but I just waited while he seemed to recall some fond memories.
“The summer before college, I had this idea that I needed to move to New York. It looked like the capital of the world to me. If you wanted to do something, you had to be there. If you wanted to force a change, that’s where you had to start.
So I packed my things, kissed my parents goodbye, and moved with holes in my pockets and a protein bar in my backpack.
Have you ever seen those period movies when people arrive in America on a ship and have to line up to get their passports stamped?
That’s what I felt like. It didn’t take long to realize that the city was going to swallow me whole. ”
“I had no idea,” I said when he paused. “But…”
“But what does it have to do with the tickets?” Jesse guessed, laughing.
“I was really down on my luck, and I figured I needed to find someplace to work and sleep because my parents couldn’t keep paying for a crappy room that cost a fortune for a bed.
And I went to the place where I wanted to be all along.
I went to Hudson Burrow. That’s where the real changes were happening, you know?
It’s where that guy tried to force his way into the neighborhood with a bulldozer, squeezing a local bar owner out until his own son exposed him as a fraud and sent him to prison.
It’s the sort of revolutionary spirit I liked.
So I went to the bar they saved, and I asked for a job.
And got it. It’s sort of famous for outcasts and misfits.
The last refuge for the wicked, except nobody was wicked there. Least of all the owner.”
“Who was the owner?” I asked, leaning in. I hadn’t even noticed a pianist taking a seat at the piano and the lights slowly dimming until Jesse lifted the corners of his lips into a soft smile and pointed.
I looked, and as the curtains behind the stage parted, a glorious drag queen with a blond wig and a roaring twenties dress was standing in the spotlight.
“Mama Viv,” Jesse said. He laughed and rubbed his hands, leaning back in his chair. “She gives her old friends free tickets all the time.”
My heart was in my throat, racing, as I looked at Jesse in shock, but he only searched for my hand on the table and held it.
The show was unlike anything I’d ever seen.
An aging drag queen looked for a place in the changing world, while the city she loved fell into darkness, and soldiers tore her bar apart and terrorized her guests.
Yet I’d found myself laughing at the little stories of people who dwelled in the rotting walls of the derelict cabaret throughout.
It was funny, dramatic, emotional, and entirely intoxicating.
It made me long for a time that never was, and I never once let go of Jesse’s hand.
Set to the tune of piano and only a few occasional instruments supporting the songs, the whole thing was performed through lyrics and minimal movements, yet I felt like I lived every moment of it.
A villainous Caleb Elison looked like a million dollars in his uniform, appearing at the end for a devastating song about the glorious death of cabaret.
And when the lights went out, tears welled in my eyes.
“You’re so beautiful when you’re crying,” Jesse said.
I laughed, shaking my head, but there was a sob choking me. “I’ll cry more often.”
He squeezed my hand, chuckling.
After the show, Jesse waved for the waiter to bring another round of drinks. He looked at me for a long time. “So?” he asked.
“Christ, Jesse,” I said, blinking the sting out of my eyes. “I thought we were going out to stretch our legs. I didn’t expect this.”
He laughed, turning to face me completely. He took my hand into both of his again, running his thumb carefully along the back of it.
I swiped my hand around and took his instead, holding it tightly as I looked into his eyes. “Why did you think I would like this?”
“I didn’t.”
“But you took me here anyway,” I said.
“It was a long shot,” he said simply.
But that wasn’t good enough. He never spoke his mind, not truly. Not completely. So I shook my head and leaned in, looking into his warm brown eyes. “Tell me.”
Jesse licked his lips and drew a breath of air. “I hoped you would like it, but I equally thought you might end up hating it. Either way, I didn’t want to do something that you did a hundred times in the last few weeks. I didn’t want to take you someplace to eat and drink and chat.”
I gazed at him, waiting, giving him space to think, to speak, but he looked back at me and waited, too. And that was good. “It was the right choice,” I said.
“Good.” And that was the end of that. The waiter came around with our drinks, and Jesse picked up his glass, then gestured toward the stage. “Want to meet them?”
My heart stumbled. “Seriously?”
Jesse grinned. “Of course. Come on.” He stood first, and I scrambled to follow him, my palms sweating.
I followed him around the stage and to a thick, red curtain, which he pulled aside for me to pass. We went down the short hallway to an open door. Warm light spilled out of the room, and inside was Mama Viv herself, taking off the many rings from her fingers.
She paused at the sight of movement outside her door and looked at me with a polite smile that cracked and beamed when she noticed Jesse.
“How I knew it would be you, darling Jesse.” She took several elegant steps across the snug dressing room with her arms extended toward Jesse. “Give Mama Viv a hug, Sunshine.”
Jesse did, disappearing into the arms and the billowing silks, then reappearing with a broad smile on his face. “Mama Viv, this is Finn. Finn, this is Vivien Woodcock.”
I almost laughed, but contained it long enough to remember to offer a hand. Mama Viv didn’t bother taking it. She stepped closer and drew me into a hug. The fake breasts were much thicker than I’d imagined. “How lovely to meet friends of one’s friends,” Mama Viv said.
“I…totally agree,” I said, still a little surprised that Jesse had friends from New York. Friends who did national tours. Maybe he wasn’t such a lone wolf after all.
“How long are you in town for?” Jesse asked.
“Only for the night, darling,” Mama Viv said. “No rest for the wicked. And the touring.” She turned to me with a knowing look, or something that looked like it. She was reading me, protective of Jesse perhaps, or simply weighing my worth against Jesse’s. “What did you think of my show?”
“I thought it was incredible,” I said heartily. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“He cried,” Jesse boasted. “And I teared up a little myself with everything that happened around Neon Nights.”
“Did it inspire the show?” I asked. “Jesse told me about the developer.”
Mama Viv laughed. “Life, art, imitation. Who’s to say?”
“Any chance Caleb Elison is still around?” Jesse asked.
Mama Viv shot him an I-knew-what-you-were-after look before laughing. “Cale, I’ve discovered some fans of yours,” she shouted.
The movement behind me nearly froze my feet to the floor. Caleb strolled in, wearing a plain white T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, a towel over his shoulder, and makeup mostly wiped from his face. “I knew I never should’ve introduced you to my aunts, Viv,” he said.
“But you have,” Mama Viv said simply. “Cale.”
The two of them shared a laugh, then Caleb took in Jesse and me, grinning that film star smile that seemed a lot more human here than on the red carpet. “How’s it going, boys?”
“Couldn’t be better,” I said, losing my breath.
He was, after all, a blockbuster miracle summer after summer, while still maintaining the title of a darling prince of indie films. Yet here he was, speaking like a regular person, standing in a shabby dressing room like he couldn’t book the second guard in Hamlet.
He asked how we knew Viv, and Jesse told the bar story again, shorter this time, and Caleb nodded along like a man who had heard plenty of Neon Nights stories. I stood there nodding too, three feet from the towel on a movie star’s shoulder.
I lost the thread of it, because Jesse was laughing. The real laugh, head all the way back, the one I hadn’t heard since before his voice changed.
Ten years, I’d wondered where he went when he stopped answering. He went here. He went to people who called him Sunshine.
We said our goodnights. Mama Viv hugged me again and told me to take care of her boy, and I said I would before I could think better of it. Nobody corrected me. Not even him.
Outside, the night had cooled. Jesse took my hand at the top of the stairs like it was a thing we did.
He was quiet on the walk back, and I didn’t fill it.
I watched him pass under one streetlight, then the next, and caught myself wanting things I had no business wanting yet.
Not the show. Not the movie star. Not just endless nights of sex.
I wanted to know what he ate for breakfast. What his keys would sound like dropped in a bowl by a door we both used.
The flyer crinkled in my jacket pocket. I’d stolen it off the table while he was hugging Mama Viv goodbye.
“What?” he asked, catching me staring.
“Nothing,” I said. Under the next streetlight, his ears had gone pink.