Dangerously Happy (13 page)

When Dario buzzed my intercom that night after rehearsal, while I was waiting for him to climb the five flights of stairs, I was so on edge it felt like at the cells in my body were vibrating out of sync, like a reaction was building and building that was going to shake me to pieces at the atomic level until I disintegrated into nothing. I opened the door and made myself sit down on the couch, the least threatening way I could think of to greet him. I watched him step up onto the landing then pause for a second in the doorway, then step inside and shut the door. He came over to the couch, and for a few seconds he stood there looking down at me. Then he extended his arm. Like he wanted to shake hands or something. But when I put my hand out—not touching his but waiting for him to make the first contact—he gripped my hand and coaxed me to my feet. After a few more seconds of looking at each other, me trying not to vibrate apart into dust and him looking like he was trying not to cry, he took a step forward and hugged me. I was so stunned I think I barely even hugged him back at first. I just stood there, rigid and afraid to move the wrong way or touch him the wrong way while he went on holding me, and finally I put my arms around him and really hugged him back. It felt like the saddest good-bye of my life.

As soon as his embrace softened I let go, even though I ached to keep holding him. Even though I wanted to ask him, beg him to put his arms back around me. He sat down on the sofa, so I sat down too.

Meeting my eyes he said, “I believe you that what happened the other night was . . . an error in judgment.” Suddenly I had the idea that maybe—almost certainly not, but maybe—he was going to give me another chance. That tiny bit of improbable hope changed my pained resignation into excruciating anticipation. Like I was awaiting a verdict. “And I think that unfortunately someone slipped you something without you knowing it. A couple other people have mentioned something similar happening. Including your friend Melissa. Which I acknowledge lessens your culpability for that error in judgment.”

The words sounded so promising. But his tone sounded like a death sentence.

“
But I’m still really freaked out. I’m not trying to punish you. But I don’t feel safe with you.”

God, that hurt. But I said, “I understand,” because I wanted him to know I didn’t blame him for whatever he was feeling.

“
I’m not asking you to leave the band or find another rehearsal space. You’re always welcome to come to the loft with the band, for the weekend events. But I can’t see you romantically anymore. Not for a while, at least.”

“
Okay.”

“
Maybe never,” he added, crushing the faint, already dying spark of hope his “Not for a while” had allowed to survive.

“
Okay.”

He got up. I felt like he’d meant to say more, and changed his mind, but I let him go without saying anything.

I felt destroyed. We’d had a week-long secret affair, and the ending of it was the first time I’d ever really felt like my life was over. I forced myself to get up each morning and go to work. I started going to the gym every day instead of a few times a week, because I couldn’t stand socializing and I couldn’t stand being alone with my thoughts. Late at night, afraid to turn of the lights, turn off the music and face my sadness, I read his book. The cruelest act of self-flagellation I could have contrived. His prose was so sensual, reading it was almost like being touched. And the story, the people in it, made me sure that Dario had a gift I'd never discovered in anyone else, a delicate, perceptive empathy for the joy and pain of other people. Every page I read made me miss him more, to the point where a few times I had to stop reading because I'd started crying.

During our rehearsals, I went through the motions. Actually, suddenly, it felt like that’s all any of us were doing. No one really cared about the music, about virtuosity. Everyone seemed to be doing it just because there was nothing better to do. Maybe I wasn’t genuinely suicidal, but for the first time in my life I felt like I understood why people kill themselves.

The one and only good thing during those weeks was that it was incredibly fruitful for my songwriting. I wrote every night, from the minute I got home from rehearsal or the gym, until I couldn’t stay awake anymore. Half the time I woke up in the middle of the night and, tortured by my miserable thoughts I couldn’t fall back asleep, so I wrote. I wasn’t just prolific. The music I wrote during that period was the best I’d ever produced. The compositions, and the lyrics.

Three weeks and five days after Dario had broken things off, he texted me saying he had a professional proposal to discuss, did I want to come by after work? The other band wouldn’t be rehearsing there that night. For the first time in a month life didn’t feel pointless, like a burden I was dragging around against my will. Feeling that much better and knowing it rode on one innocuous text from Dario scared the hell out of me.

Of course I went. He was nervous, but warmer than he’d been since we’d said good-bye at my apartment. I turned down the offer of a beer, so we both had water.

“
How are you doing?” he asked.

“
I’m alright,” I lied, and I could see in his face that he knew it was bullshit. “How are you doing?”

“
About as good as you, I suppose.” He gave me a sad smile, and in that moment I recalled the dozens of melancholy smiles he’d given me during our brief interlude, and had the uncanny feeling that he’d known from the start that we were both going to end up terribly hurt. “I have something I want you to consider,” he said. “Do a solo show.”

“
What? A whole set, just me?”

His indulgent grin. Such a poignant, bittersweet thing to see. “Yes, that’s what solo means. Or, if it sounds like too much work to get ready for just one show, we could plan on two or three. One night over however many consecutive weekends.”

“
I’m not ready for anything like that.”

“
You mean you don’t have enough material?”

Only then did I get how serendipitous his offer was. “No. I mean, actually, yes. I have enough material. I have enough material for a ten-hour rock opera if you want to convert the loft into a mass torture chamber. Heartache is a phenomenal catalyst for creative output.” I regretted it the moment I’d said it, but he gave me one of his deep, earnest looks and an empathetic smile. So I wouldn’t throw my arms around him and tell him again how sorry I was, I said, “I mean I’m not ready as a performer. I’d feel too . . . vulnerable or something, up there by myself.”

“
Even if you had time to rehearse?”

“
Rehearse?”

“
Painful Friction are breaking up. You know, Kevin’s partner just had a baby, so he can’t be gone three nights a week playing rockstar. The guys from Zip Code and Absinthe Make the Heart Grow Fonder have been telling me for months that they’d kill for a slot here, but they’re nowhere near as good as you are. None of the groups I could get in here are as good as you are.”

“
You’re really serious?”

“
Of course. Or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. And you could have Friction’s rehearsal slot, too.”

My heart was beating faster, faster with every passing second. “Here?”

“
Mondays and Wednesdays. As many hours as you wanted.”

I couldn’t believe what he was saying. “That wouldn’t be . . . weird for you?”

“
No. Would it be weird for you?”

“
I don’t know.”

He caught me and held me still in an earnest, vulnerable gaze. “I’ve missed you, Aidan.”

My chest ached. I didn’t know if my heart was healing, or breaking again. “I’ve missed you, too.”

“
I came up with the idea because of your music. But I confess that I like the idea of getting to see you sometimes without the other guys.” Then he added, “But I also don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”

“
No,” I said, trying to hide my hurt and disappointment, “I won’t get the wrong idea.”

“
Will you think about it?”

“
No. I don’t need to think about it. Before . . . things went wrong between us, I promised myself I was going to start putting my time into things that really matter to me. I can’t imagine a better opportunity to keep that promise.”

That night, instead of writing, I spent a couple hours going through the binder of stuff I’d written over the last few weeks, and chose the ones I wanted to start rehearsing with. Then I got my acoustic guitar and practiced each one a couple times. Rehearsing for the rehearsal. I was too nervous, too excited, in a way almost too happy to sleep much that night.

When I got to the loft the next day, Dario had already told the guys about his offer to me and they called me Gwen for the rest of the night to punish me for embarking on my solo venture (which is maybe a much nicer thing to be called than whatever the No Doubt guys probably said about Stefani when she abandoned them to obscurity in her rise to global stardom). For the first time in weeks I stuck around after rehearsal and we all got stoned. It was a good night. For whatever reason, for the first time in a long time it felt like we were all genuinely close. Even Dario seemed happy. When I got home, I practiced my new material for an hour or so and then slept like a baby.

When I started rehearsing, suddenly the music didn’t seem nearly as complex, innovative, transporting as it had sounded in my mind, as it had sounded in those hushed acoustic prerehearsals in my apartment. When Dario set his computer aside and swiveled his armchair to face the stage, then sat there perfectly still, staring at me as I struggled to drag my voice over the hurdle of my mounting doubts, the worst part was knowing how disappointed he must have been. How let down he must have felt. After he’d been impossibly generous, giving me a chance like that after how I’d already hurt him. After I’d gotten through the fourth song, he stood up and came over. I set my guitar aside and braced myself. He patted the edge of the stage, and I sat down, my shins dangling over the edge so he could deliver the news face-to-face.

Dario put his hands on my thighs. The memory of that first time he’d touched me, when he’d laid one hand on my thigh, midway between my knee and my hard cock filled me with melancholy. “You beautiful fucking genius,” he said, like he was whispering a prayer. “I don’t even want to let the hordes in to profane this with their collective din.” He must have seen in my face how relieved, how surprised I was, because then he said, “What did you think I came over to say?”

“
I was afraid it wasn’t . . . what you expected.”

“
It’s not. I thought you’d come with ten variations on that piece you played me that first night. And I would have been thrilled. But this is on another plane of existence. Where the fuck did this come from?”

I didn’t say,
my pain
.

“
Did you really write all of this just these last few weeks?” he asked, somberly, sadly, as if I had said out loud. His hands still on my thighs.

“
Yes.”

“
Aidan. You need to get a manager. You need to get time in a recording studio. I’m not fucking around.”

“
You’re biased.”

“
You suck at taking a compliment. A heartfelt, true compliment from the man who sucks at telling white lies.”

That night I left after three hours of rehearsing without a break, and on Saturday I played the set with the band, but didn’t hang around after, or come for the other shows. I agreed to play the solo set the following weekend, telling myself it didn’t matter that I hadn’t perfected my repertoire, since basically I’d be playing for the crowd that was already loyal to Babel, so they’d be a sympathetic audience. Low pressure. After my next solo rehearsal Dario and I smoked and hung out for a couple hours, talking more seriously and more playfully than we ever did when the rest of Babel was around, and I felt a deep, melancholy contentment that even if I’d ruined what we’d had before, it looked like we were going to be real friends. The next time I was there on my own, after I’d rehearsed we spent another few hours talking even though we didn’t smoke.

On Friday night I played with Babel, and on Saturday night I did my first solo set. Predictably, all my sang froid about performing for the u
sual suspects went out the window as the day approached, but I got through it, and I was thrilled that only half the crowd seemed dismayed to get stuck with such an intimate, moody performance so unlike the pounding, driving onslaught they were used to getting from Babel and Painful Friction, while the other half seemed genuinely into it. Enraptured, actually. I couldn’t believe how still the room got, how quiet, a few people even shushing people who were talking quietly in the back. After, there was a long procession of people coming up to hug me, congratulate me, flirt with me. I adamantly refused all proffered drinks, though.