Thalo Blue (8 page)

As he walked to the edge of the property, he thought he could hear other music, not Dave Matthews but something different. He could have sworn someone was playing Neil Young’s
Helpless
. It wasn’t in direct competition with the wail and pounce of the rap music in the main house, but from somewhere out there, in the middle of the night, came that distinct and haunting harmonica melody. A party at another cottage? Some middle-agers re-living their teenage years? Hearing it then and there, above the bass throbs from the Leland living room, made no sense...yet it felt unmistakable. Even so, its woeful harmonica left him in an instant. It was gone, and he became sure then that he had just made it up.

He stood there at the lot’s generous rim, having lost Jackson somewhere in the calamity of the night, and he took his breath. The moon was nearly full, and its light reflected on the water of the lake. The sound the ripples made was a loosening cadence, a waltz of unknown instruments that he would never be able to reproduce for any one else. It reminded him of another lake, a few years earlier, where he would stare at the water and up at a saucer full of milk that was the moon. Charlemagne Lake that had been, his mother and dad’s summer cottage, and it had sounded like this on every mild night.

The memory of that let him stop worrying that there weren’t others around—no one was there at Charlemagne Lake then and no one need be here with him now. Briefly, he wished for his father’s camera to record what he saw, a picture to accompany the tune in his head, and one that maybe his mother would have liked. But that desire too, he decided, should be ignored.
I can enjoy it myself
, he thought.
Let them have their throbbing bass, their cans of pop mixed with who knew what, the stuff from the Leland’s stash, and whatever they’re rolling in those white papers. They wouldn’t understand this anyway.

Vivian Leland appeared on the cement pad beside him less than twenty minutes after he had made his hurried exit from the living room. Fortunately he had regained his wits by then, and was able to say something, anything, to her.

She asked him if he hated the music. He told her no, that it was complicated. Someday he would explain it. His voice wavered and he found himself behaving awkwardly. The sun had dipped below the horizon hours before, cooling off the night, but he didn’t think it was yet chilly enough to warrant his lips to become this badly aligned.

She asked him if he wanted a drink. He told her no, beer did nothing for him but make his tongue fuzzy. He nearly added that he might as well have one though, since his tongue was malfunctioning anyway. But that would have outdone the ‘un-coolness’ of even the peach colored flyers so he stopped himself in mid-sentence. And that, he decided, sounded even more ‘un-cool’ than had he finished the sentence, no matter how bad it would have come out. His mind faltered clumsily and he feared that this conversation could only go badly so he clammed up completely.

She said something about enjoying the party, then turned to go. He finally closed his eyes and the song in his head strengthened. Everything else seemed to dilute and become less important as he took another deep and patient breath. She was ten feet away, give or take, when he finally spoke again, his eyes still gently closed towards the lapping water.

He asked her if she ever went out on her dad’s boat, looked at the moon on the water, and heard it sing to her. She turned back and said no, cocking her head.

He asked her if she ever heard music from ordinary things, but things that were ordinarily beautiful just the same. She said no, and then took another step towards him.

He asked her, finally, if she would like him to describe the song he heard when he looked at the light of the moon over the lake. She said yes.

<> <> <>

In the wood garden house where Zeb and Vivian found themselves, there was a moth trapped in the wire light fixture overhead. It flapped and swooned but could not find its way free. Vivian still seemed intoxicated by his description of the moonlit waters. He had hummed for her the long drawn out notes he could hear coming from the dark blue sheets rippling with crisp white eggshells and she had smiled peaceably at that. The corners of her eyes, he noted, tilted upward and crinkled a little. She had paused, looked out at what he had been staring at as if to search for those notes herself, and then said that she was getting chilly. As they had walked in the direction of the garden house, he had asked her why she had invited him and she had responded that it was his eyes:
You finally looked at me and I could see those brilliant blues of yours. They’re beautiful. You should look people in the eye more.

They arrived at the shed not long after that, had crept inside and snapped on the light, making the moth above go mad. There was a long wooden bench covered in scattered tools, ceramic pots and torn bags of soil. A dark corner of junk stood opposite, shadows looming from it.

I don’t like crowds much either
, she told him as she leaned her long exposed arms on the bench behind her.
But they come with the territory. Mum and Dad both always have guests and it’s just a part of my life.

She jumped up on the dirty bench then, the spot where her mother spent time repotting white hyacinths and purple mignonettes, her two favorites, which, along with others, populated the short stone barriers, windowsills and pots that swung from light posts on the property. Vivian disregarded the dirty mess the bench made of her white skirt and Zeb liked how the brown color smeared there. Even liked how she ignored that it would never ever come clean again. The white was gone from a skirt that had probably cost someone a few dollars at least, and she didn’t care.

She caught his eyes as he looked at the skirt, but it didn’t matter. His comfort with this girl was alive now. And it didn’t seem to be waning. Not on her end either.

Do you have many people in your life, coming and going?
she asked.
Lots of stupid dinner parties and stuff at your place, Zeb? That’s what they call you right, your friends? Zeb.

Yeah. Zeb.
He was standing before her with his stomach touching her knees. Behind him was the darkness and above them was that halo of light, flecked by the squirming moth whose wings batted his cage. Their faces were only a little ways apart. He reached past her, brushing her warm arm, and picked up a snipped, nearly starved looking hyacinth bloom from the shallow shelf behind her. Its petals were white and cool to the touch. Looking at them made his fingers feel the contoured texture of his guitar case—the part just above the plastic handle where the tan stitching was starting to fray.
Did you know that the hyacinth, particularly the white hyacinth, represented ‘unobtrusive loveliness’ to the ancient Greeks?

Her eyes met his and she responded with:
I didn’t know that...

He handed her the flower and her response glowed brighter than the living room of people listening to throbbing hip hop inside the main house. She was looking at his eyes and he matched her full-on stare, thinking about how he might seem to her.
She loves my blue eyes. They pulled her in because of what they see reflected in a dark pool of lake water. Because of what I hear there.

She leaned forward and kissed him. Then she picked up another wilting flower from the shelf on her other side and handed it to him.
And what did the ancient Greeks believe the meaning of peach blossoms to be?

Zeb looked down and took a whiff of the sweet flower, then back at Vivian.

“I am your captive.”

<> <> <>

The night of Sebastion’s first real kiss also became the first night he ever made love. He got up on the dirty wooden slats of the potting bench to join Vivian and they laid their clothes beneath them. The moth continued to flit and fuss in the fixture above, but nothing would have dissuaded them. No outside sounds or sights, save for the ones they traded across each other’s bodies, intruded. It was all distant: the stereo and the partiers in the house and in the yard, even the moon’s eggshell coat across the water’s brilliant façade. To Zeb, the act evoked bright swirling circles of purple, tinged with baby blues and shards of silver. They were deep shades defined by solid and spattered paint strokes. There were lavender-skinned orbs that made everything real disappear. They exploded into each other, reformed, and dribbled out of sight. Behind that he heard a symphony of aural sensations. Vivian’s voice, her breathing and all the rest, was gone and in its place was a troop of conductors each commanding a full orchestra of strings, brass and timpani.

The startling conclusion, just as they each came, was when the wine colored orbs finally dissolved from his sight. His body’s million nerve endings had been reeling and exalted from firing all at once and they fell to an exotic calm. Ocean waves settling on a beach, he might have said. In the midst of both their relaxing pants, he looked down in horror to find the face and porcelain skin of his aunt Sicily—

(or was it mom?)

beneath him. The moth had fluttered with agitation during the whole encounter and finally it flew too close to the little sixty watt sun which had been holding it rapt in so much thrall. It died with an audible snap that also promptly burned out the bulb. Darkness fell across the face of his aunt. The face that should have been Vivian Leland.

<> <> <>

During Zeb’s last year of high school, time seemed to be speeding up. It was out of control and he felt like he was falling down a mountain, felt like he was swooping into the gorge on a Bat track, corkscrew ahead—the blinded, backwards loop still to come.

But he took a page from the book of Jackson Cavanaugh: the page about fame, fortune and importance. Those things, Jack made it clear, were as fleeting as a sheet of paper caught in the wind. Though he never said as much outright, the implications lay like a rug under every tone in his voice, under every sentence he mouthed.

Zeb was with Vivian all the time, and out of coincidence by association, that meant he became a liked and respected member of the senior class. And why not? Vivian Leland was of the attractive and connected set, and what was good enough for her, despite Zeb’s apparent differences from the rest, was good enough for them.

Time was spent on that perpetual motion machine, like the sine waves of coaster tracks coursing towards an infinitely unstretching horizon. Activities weren’t limited to such but, most often, sneaking into clubs on Saturday nights or finding a house party to crash and trash were the favored goings-on. And whether they all ended up at Jackson’s, Vivian’s or another’s later on each night, Zeb was always in attendance. It was another high point on the irresolute circle, the peak moment before the coaster cars do their patented plummet. His popularity was a steeple, and everyone wanted to hear what Zeb Redfield, Vivian Leland’s man-boy of choice, had on his mind.

His painting slowed briefly—he was caught in the whirlwind of new activities and new social circles—but it reached an all time high just after Christmas break when Vivian introduced him to the wonders of methamphetamines. Reluctant to even try a drag from a joint at first, he finally gave in to her powers of persuasion. “
’I am your captive’
,” she reminded him, as she licked a rolling paper, and plopped nude on the bedsheets beside him one night. Adams, she called them, came next; they were little dirty white pills she shook out of a vial into his palm. Soon after downing his first two, he became swept away in a fury of color and sound sent to his brain like a bullet. The little white magic pills she had miraculous—and mysterious—access to created effects so simultaneously intricate and glorious that he could scarcely come to a sense of what they all meant initially.

The world was music, it was crimson and clover, it was a marvelous night for a moon dance, it was London burning, it was a whiter shade of pale, it was twisting the night away. The assault on his senses was electrifying in the beginning and his cravings for renewal came like clouds running across the sky at a train speed’s rhythm. When he took an Adam there was a sheen across the world, a shine that glittered and sparkled and added a reverb to every voice and every sound. It was so breathtaking that he took to chasing the pills with alcohol just to dampen their effects a little. And he understood, finally, the fascination other friends had with the substances. Though he doubted they ever experienced them quite as he did.

But hell, was there power in that stuff; that raw, unleashing kind, that kind that made Zeb flex every part of himself. Crimson and clover, over and over—it was as though Adam brought Zeb to the doorway, the lynchpin, holding clear every admonished concept his exhausted brain had ever fumbled with. Skipping the light fandango, as the miller told his tale, he came to understand the reality behind things; just as there is a scribe to every written word, Zeb now discerned, there too must be a painter’s stroke to blame for every mask on every face he had ever seen. Over and over and over and over and over.

He set up his easel in Vivian’s spare bedroom and spent time there throwing paint on canvas after canvas. They became some of the most intense works he had ever produced. Jackson thought so. Vivian thought so. Everyone thought so.

So he continued. And he stayed away from the house in Vaughan, his parents’ house, as much as possible. He painted on weekdays, skipping class at times, he painted while music pounded beyond the door, he painted while couples had awkward high school sex in other rooms, he painted as the liquor cabinet at the Leland residence was emptied then refilled then emptied again. People peeked into the room or sat on the bed or crowded around him to watch as he whipped off another masterpiece. And he was talented, that much everyone could see. He became a modern day Pollock, but with an audience of rowdy, jeering high school kids to rev him up. And always at his side, was a handy joint, ready to be puffed, or a handy little pill, ready to become fuel for this new, this
renewed
, obsession.