Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
“Cleo!” Annika greeted me with a big, goofy smile and tried to stand, but went right back down again. She had a giggling fit while Gabriel shook his head with an amused smile.
A pizza box sat on the coffee table and a weed fog hung in the air.
On Annika’s insistence to join them, I dropped into the olive green leather chair across from the sofa, too tired to fight it and too broke to turn down the slice of pepperoni pizza Gabriel offered me.
I folded the slice in half and took a big bite.
“Remember how I used to get all paranoid whenever I smoked weed?” Annika held up one finger and squinted at me. “Well, not anymore. I’m soooo relaxed.” She let out a sigh, curled up on the sofa, and promptly fell asleep.
Gabriel and I laughed.
“She barely even smoked,” he said. “Two tokes and she was high.”
“Yeah, she’s a lightweight.” I smiled at my friend. Even asleep, she was so pretty with her lilac hair splayed across the purple velvet sofa and her cheeks flushed a pretty pink.
“She had a rough day,” he said.
“Oh no.” I leaned over the pizza box to eat. “What happened?”
“Things didn’t go well with the rehearsals today and that asshole Trent was giving her shit again.”
“God. He’s such a prima donna. I’d love to give him a piece of my mind.”
Gabriel gave me an amused smile. “What would you do, Cleo? March right up to him and tell him to go fuck himself.”
I rolled my eyes. “Annika tells you too much. But I’m pretty sure I said, you can kindly go fuck yourself, thank you very much.”
A laugh burst out of Gabriel. “So polite. So demure.”
“What can I say?” I finished the slice and wiped my mouth with a paper napkin. “My mother raised me to have good manners.”
He laughed again. “You wanna smoke?”
“Weed?”
He nodded. What the hell. It couldn’t hurt. “Okay. Sure.”
He relit the joint and took a hit then leaned over the coffee table, passing it to me.
I slunk down in my chair and propped my feet on the table, holding the smoke in my lungs before releasing it. Getting high and forgetting everything seemed like a good call so that’s exactly what I did.
Soon, all the edges started to blur, and the brass lamp cast a hazy amber glow around Gabriel’s head. Like a halo. An archangel in a halo.
I choked on a laugh.
He jerked his chin at me, smiling like he anticipated a good joke. “What’s so funny?”
I took another hit off the joint and laughed again, shaking my head. Nothing. Everything.
A ribbon of smoke from the incense curled up to the ceiling and our gazes locked and held through the gray haze.
His eyes told a story of loss and regret, mine asked a million and one questions.
Did you, by any chance, lose a notebook in the spring of 1990? Please, please, please say it wasn’t you.
The music changed and the threadbare kilim rug captured my undivided attention.
“I fucking love this album,” Gabriel said, holding up his hand as if to say, wait, you need to listen to this .
Van Morrison was singing about wandering through gardens wet with rain and vowing to never grow so old again.
The lyrics that always hit me hardest though were the ones about driving a chariot down your streets and crying…and then you’ll take me in your arms again…and I won’t remember that I ever felt any pain.
God. Why does that hurt so much?
I looked over my shoulder at the CD tower, mostly to avoid eye contact. “My mom left most of her CDs for me.”
“She’s a writer and she knows good music.”
“Well, yeah, she used to be a music journalist,” I said with a laugh, passing the joint back to him.
“Do you think she’d like me?” His gaze lowered, suddenly bashful, openly vulnerable. The kind of guy you wanted to protect from the big, bad world.
I wasn’t sure if he was asking if she’d like him as a person or if she’d like his music, but either way I said yes, she would. My mother would love Gabriel.
“So how’s the songwriting coming?”
“It’s not.” He rubbed the back of his neck, took a final hit off the joint and tossed it into the metal incense holder. “How was your day?”
“I don’t know.” I sighed. “I feel conflicted.”
“About what?”
I’d been hoping to discuss this with Annika but clearly that wasn’t going to happen tonight. Blame it on the weed and lack of inhibitions, but I ended up telling Gabriel about the job offer and my qualms about accepting it.
Gabriel was one of those people who really listened when you talked. Even in a noisy bar or a crowded restaurant, he gave you his undivided attention and made you feel like you were the only person in the room, and he found you so fascinating that he would happily listen for hours.
Maybe that’s what made him such a good performer. He had that extra special something that made everyone in the audience feel like he was singing just for them. Charisma, I guess.
“So I don’t know. I guess I feel like I’m selling out,” I said in conclusion.
Gabriel nodded like he understood. “I feel the same about music. Everyone’s always saying that I need to get a record deal. Blah, blah, blah. But do I really want some corporate suits telling me what I can and cannot play?”
He leaned his head against the back of the sofa and folded his hands under it.
While he stared at the ceiling, I stared at his throat, so open and exposed, and played with the chunky sandalwood beads tied around my neck like a choker.
I wanted to bury my face in his neck and breathe him in.
Bad Cleo, you don’t want that.
I looked away and stared out the window at the rooftops under a violet sky.
“I don’t even know what my own sound is yet,” Gabriel said a few minutes later.
“That’s how I feel about my art. In high school, all my paintings looked like Picasso or Salvador Dali rip-offs. I was just imitating other artists and producing sloppy copies.”
“Yeah, but that’s how you learn,” he said. “By emulating the greats who have gone before you. Once you’ve mastered the basics, then you can run with it and find your own style, change the composition.”
I nodded. “You have to know the rules so you can break them.”
“Yeah. Your art can still be inspired by Picasso but be something entirely different.”
“Like your covers,” I said. “I recognize the original version and it’s still in there to some extent, but you make the song completely your own. I don’t know how you do it.”
He shrugged one shoulder. “I can’t paint or draw or sculpt so I guess we’re even. But I feel like my music is all over the place. No one can even figure out what genre it is. Which is good because I don’t want to be put in a box, but at the same time, I just have too many options.”
“What a terrible problem to have,” I joked. “The audacity of being that good that your options are endless.”
He rolled his head from side to side on the sofa cushion. “I’m not as good as I want to be. Some nights are great, and everything flows. Most nights I’m just up there jamming, trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing.”
He pushed his hands through his dark, wavy hair and released a frustrated breath. “No one knows what to expect on any given night. What the fuck is my sound? I don’t even know.”
I don’t think artists ever thought they were good enough.
The creative process was so slippery and elusive, like you knew what your vision was going in, but the final product always fell short. Or, at least, ended up being something completely different than what you’d initially imagined.
But after a month of going to Gabriel’s gigs, I knew who he was. A risk-taker who pushed his voice to the limits and had a gift for interpreting music in a way it had never been done before.
He could be the next Bob Dylan. The voice of a generation.
“You’re just you,” I said. “You’re experimental. Unique. You can sing opera or gospel or rock or the blues…”
“I sing them all,” he laughed, throwing his arms up.
“Sometimes all at the same time.”
We laughed.
Gabriel drummed his fingers on his thigh, his head moving to the beat of the music. I wondered if we heard the same thing or if musicians listened to music with a keener sense of appreciation. A more critical ear.
“What does it feel like when you’re up there performing?”
“It’s like…” He thought about it for a minute, one eye closed. “You’re reciprocating the energy of the people in the room. But at the same time, I almost leave my body and just let the music flow right through me.”
“So you’re just up there levitating. Defying the laws of gravity.”
“My feet never touch the ground,” he said with a laugh. “But after a show, it always feels weird. Like I’ve given everything I have inside me and then I’m so emotionally drained that I feel hollowed out and empty. It’s fucking embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing how?”
He sighed. “For two hours or however long I’m up there, it feels like my sacred space, you know? I share all the secrets of my soul and when the music stops, I’m staring at a roomful of strangers and I feel so fucking exposed.”
That sounded like my worst fear. “I couldn’t do it.”
“Yes, you could,” he said emphatically. “If music was your passion, you’d do it because you can’t imagine doing anything else. It’s like…I always knew I had to do this. I need to do this. And if I don’t, I would just, you know…perish and die.”
With anyone else, I would call them out for being overly dramatic but that was just the way Gabriel talked. He was either madly in love with something or so completely dismissive it bordered on rudeness.
Gabriel gestured to the collage hanging above the sofa. Gentrification is Class War. “Tell me about the collages.”
“I did that one after the Tompkins Square riots in ‘88,” I said.
“A group of higher income residents were trying to gentrify the East Village and complained about the noise and the unsafe atmosphere in the park. Homeless people were camping out in a tent community, so the city enforced a curfew on the park and activists protested. Cops came in on horseback, destroyed the encampment and beat the protestors with batons.”
“Those bastards.”
I nodded. “There was so much police brutality. I wanted to capture that moment in history, the unrest and the violence, but also the way it brought people together.”
“What about the collage in the hallway?” he asked.
“You tell me,” I challenged.
He thought about it for a minute. “I think it’s fucking incredible.
The way you wove the lacy textiles and your paintings into it.
The eyes, hands, lips, the pomegranate split down the middle with the jewel-toned ruby fruit…
the poetry… It’s provocative. It tells a story.
The violent beauty of nature and sex and love and death.
You captured the entire human experience. ”
Wow. He’d really studied my collage and took from it what I’d hoped to convey. “I can’t take credit for the poetry though. I didn’t write it.”
“I know. Song of Songs , right?”
“I can’t believe you knew that!”
“Who knew the Bible could be so sensual? I used it for inspiration for some music I wrote—” He cut himself off and ran his hand through his hair then looked away and cleared his throat.
I was hoping he’d say more about the music, but he didn’t.
“Anyway, your collages are cool.” He raised his arms in the air. “Big fan.”
I laughed. “Thanks. I dated a guy who called my collages a ‘nice little hobby.’ He said they’re social commentary, not art and that I’m not creating anything original if I use found objects.”
“Bullshit,” Gabriel said. “He sounds like an asshole who doesn’t know the first thing about art.”
“He worked for an ad agency.”
“You dated a guy who works in advertising ?” Gabriel made it sound like a dirty word. He looked so scandalized that I was laughing again.
“When we met, he told me he was a writer,” I said. “He was one of those guys who pretends to believe in the same things you do but it turns out to be a big fat lie. He was a pretty slick salesman though. I’ll give him that.”
“No wonder he didn’t appreciate your art.
He was a phony who probably never had an original thought in his head,” Gabriel scoffed.
“Newsflash, Slick, art is social commentary. Art by its very nature is political.” He swept his arm across the collage.
“This is fucking art. Everything you create is art. You’re wearing art right now. ”
I wasn’t so sure that my baggy Girbaud jeans and crocheted black top could be called art. I pointed to my feet. “I bought these jelly sandals on Canal Street for five bucks.”
“Doesn’t matter. You always look like art,” he said incisively. “Sometimes it’s graffiti like that tank top you wore the first time we met. Or a Jackson Pollock painting like the short skirt you wore to Yaffa. Or your Frida Kahlo-esque Doc Martens…”
He stopped and bit the corner of his mouth like he’d said too much, had noticed too much, had revealed too many secrets.
“Wow. I didn’t realize you were such a fashionista,” I joked, trying to lighten the mood.
He laughed under his breath. “My jeans and T-shirts didn’t give me away?’
“Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me.” I smiled. “And what am I tonight?”
He thought about it, eyes narrowed as if this was a test and he wanted to get it right. The longer the silence stretched out, the more I started to squirm.
I wanted to punch myself in the face. I shouldn’t have asked him that. “Just forget?—"
“A ballad in E minor.”
A ballad in E minor?
“Oh.” I nodded like I understood but I had no idea what he meant by that.
Wasn’t E minor a mournful note? Was I giving off pathetic, sad girl vibes?
I didn’t ask though. I couldn’t.
Annika stirred, and his gaze lowered. With a soft smile, he brushed the hair off her cheek, his touch so tender, so gentle that it felt like a punch in the gut.
A visceral reminder that Gabriel belonged to my best friend. The girl who ran out in a snowstorm to get me chicken soup when I had a bad cold last winter. The girl who was like the sister I’d never had.
I stood to go.
“I don’t think you’d be selling out,” he said. “You’d be feeding your creative soul, not selling it. Stick to your convictions and create something that’s meaningful to you.”
And burn, burn, burn…
I spun on my heel and headed to my room, throwing a belated good night over my shoulder.
As the door snapped shut behind me, I heard Annika ask, “Who’s selling their soul?”
My soul wasn’t for sale, but my heart couldn’t be trusted.
I needed to stay away from Gabriel Francis.