The Lost Boys Symphony (25 page)

V
al nibbled the
cuticle of her right thumb and stared into her television’s bright void. It was only three o’clock. Gabe was just finishing his shift and it would be another few hours before he showed up at her door. She wanted him to be there
right fucking then, 
but she also wished he would never come at all. She didn’t want to tell him. She wondered, for the hundredth time, whether she had to.

But of course she did. Not telling him? It wasn’t even worth fantasizing about. She didn’t want a lifelong secret. It would kill her. It would come out. Something horrible would happen. She wanted to stand up, go to the bathroom, dig through the garbage to take another look, because maybe there was a mistake, maybe she’d read it wrong. But no, she’d already done that. She’d bought a three-pack of the tests and taken each one. She forced herself to stay on the couch. She sucked her cuticle. She’d gone too far, nibbled too much, but it was too hard to stop, so she bit harder, tasted blood, took her hand from her mouth and shook it, shoved it under her thigh to keep herself from starting on another finger.

The television flickered as she changed the channel. Images reached her eyes but seemed to get scrambled on the way to her mind. As had happened so often since that night in the Washington Square Hotel, unwelcome memories of the man flooded through her. Not his face—she could never quite remember what he looked like and was disturbed to always find herself imagining Henry—but the way he made her feel. The thrill and the fear. The way her heart beat when she took off her clothes and saw her own desire reflected in his eyes. Her blood scrambling like a wild animal as it fought its way through her body. Then, afterward, how she was so pleasantly tender from alcohol and sex. The way the king-sized bed took her shape and cradled her.

Val slid her hand from beneath her and found the raw spot just above the nail on her thumb. It stung as she pushed against it with her tongue. She changed the channel, not because she cared what was on but because she thought that maybe if she found the right show Kara would emerge from her room and sit down to watch. They hadn’t spoken much since Val’s outburst at the Sullivan Room. Val had tried to apologize, but it seemed of little use. She had long known of Kara’s deepest fears—that she was merely being tolerated, that she was a joke, that people thought she was prudish and boring—and Val had exploited those insecurities to wound her. Had it been anyone else Val might have been able to blame it on the alcohol, but Kara didn’t drink. Any excuse based on drunkenness would only make her respect Val even less.

And Gabe?
Jesus,
she thought. Gabe. How would he respect her after this? He loved her. She knew that. She wondered if it was possible—in light of what she’d done and what she’d kept from him—that she loved him, too. And what if she did? Even that was fraught and fucked up. There was still Henry to think about, wasn’t there? He deserved some kind of consideration, even if, or maybe especially if, he never came back.

No.

Val wouldn’t think about that. Not just then.

How much longer until Gabe arrived? She looked at the clock and had to keep herself from groaning in protest. Three minutes had passed since last she checked.

Val wondered what it meant about her that she was more embarrassed than ashamed. She just felt so incredibly stupid. So out of control. Who was that girl, she wondered? Who was that reckless stranger who had taken over her body and wreaked impressive havoc in just a few short hours? At least she’d had the sense to walk out in the middle of the night. She thanked herself for that. It would have been so much worse to wake up in that hotel room. Small talk about all that she and that man had in common would have lasted no more than a few minutes. And after that? Breakfast in the lounge. Or, worse, room service. Some server coming in and discovering her there, removing those silver covers with a flourish while secretly imagining what had happened the night before. No, Val was glad she’d left. The only thing she regretted about her escape was the note. She’d known it was a mistake even as she was writing it by the light of her cell phone screen. Halfway through she’d considered tearing the paper off the pad and leaving, but then she thought the man might notice an indentation on the pad itself and scratch it with a pencil to reveal the proof of her cowardice. She could have taken the whole thing, but she didn’t want to be remembered as the girl who’d absconded with the hotel stationery in the dead of the night.

So she wrote. She apologized for leaving, though she knew that was ludicrous. She shouldn’t have been apologizing at all. Better to have written
YOU’RE WELCOME
in big block letters and sign it
Valerie
with a cute little heart dotting the
i
the way she did in middle school.

A commercial came on, obnoxiously loud. As designed, it grabbed Val’s attention. Toilet paper and cartoon bears. She took her thumb from her mouth. A large angular patch was now the glossy pink of new flesh tinged with blood. It didn’t hurt too badly yet, but she knew that the pain would soon get worse. Maybe by the time Gabe showed up. Maybe by the time she’d told him the full truth about that night.

She changed the channel.

H
enry watched the
girl he’d married and raised a child with crawl naked across the rich plush carpet in the dark. Val swept her arms across the floor as if swimming. She was looking for something. Her clothes? Her bag? Henry could have turned on the light. He could have said something or offered to help her. But he didn’t. He would have had to see her and hear her voice, and he didn’t feel ready for that. Not yet.

He thought of how it began. The way she’d reached behind her back to unclasp her bra. The small round bones that protruded from the front of her shoulders, her slender rib cage, her smooth skin made sublime by its imperfections, the freckles and scars—all those delicate parts of her summoned a lifetime’s worth of desire. There was no music, no great white light, but still Henry was transported. He was nineteen again and Val’s body was a miracle to him, a present that he couldn’t believe he had the fortune to unwrap. The future was only an idea, a cosmological certainty that nevertheless held no real power or meaning. The moment, the present, the very fact of Val’s existence—that was all that mattered to Henry, and to want her so badly was to experience a pain better than pleasure.

But Val’s youthful delicacy did more than turn him on. All those parts of her that had yet to be swollen and stretched and softened by time reminded him of another young girl. An eleven-year-old that he’d lost. Henry had pushed the thought from his mind as soon as Val kissed his lips, and he ignored it again now. That deep, dark Freudian hole was best left unexplored for the moment.

Val found her underwear and slipped them on without standing up.

What Henry could not ignore was the question of what to do next. He’d been trying for months to push Gabe and Val together. At first he enjoyed the self-righteous assuredness that his goal provided, how it justified his every action. But that certainty faded as he realized that his plan wasn’t working. No matter how much time he gave them, no matter how much encouragement, Gabe and Val’s tryst would end soon after 19 reappeared. It didn’t make any sense, and Henry was running out of ideas.

And then Gabe revealed his secret.

Except it wasn’t a secret at all. Or it needn’t have been, anyway. It was an obvious fact of Henry’s life and it was his own fault that he’d neglected to notice it before. NYU, the Minerva Blanc tour, the
Bridgesong
travesty—he’d understood that Val’s absence was related to his decline, but he’d always seen it as a symptom, not a cause. But once he understood the truth, it seemed obvious that it was he and not Gabe who was fated to be with Val. The music came to him first and Val could silence it completely. She was the normalizing force of the universe, the antidote to his poison. They were both a part of some larger scheme then, and without Val nearby Henry had no hope of discovering what grand purpose they were meant to serve.

So he went to her. He prepared for weeks. The initial approach would decide everything, he figured, so he had to get it right. He headed back to New York. On the basement level of the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal was a convenience store kiosk that sold scratch-offs. It was open-air, no walls or doors, so Henry could easily watch over it from a bench nearby. He begged for change from passing commuters, ate junk food, washed himself in the public bathroom. It took three days, but finally someone hit a five-hundred-dollar jackpot. Henry got close enough to see what game the lucky customer had been playing, then walked up to the street, climbed the circular ramp to the bridge, and shifted back a few minutes before heading back to the basement to cash in.

He got a haircut. Some new clothes. A shared room in a hostel in the East Village. And then he set to watching her.

Days passed. He sat outside her building. Waited for her outside of class. He almost spoke to her on a few occasions, but each time he lost his courage at the last moment and told himself that there would be better opportunities to come.

One evening, she left her apartment building with the roommate. He followed her to a restaurant, then to a bar, where he had to fight the urge to pounce on some kid whose hands kept finding their way to the small of her back. Then to a club, where he bought a ticket and went inside. From a distance he watched her dance, her body growing more and more slack from the alcohol. An hour later her friends carried her outside and encouraged her in cooing tones to throw up on the sidewalk. Two, three, and then four cabs refused her entry, but at last a black car opened its doors and spirited her away. On the walk back to the East Village, Henry’s plan came into focus. Early the next morning he walked to the Williamsburg Bridge and shifted back a day, then set a course for the Washington Square Hotel.

And now it was over.

From the floor of the hotel room came the sound of short, labored breathing. Val’s head appeared just beyond the edge of the bed, then her torso, and Henry could tell by her vague silhouette that she was holding her jeans out in front of her. She bent over to slip her feet into the legs, then shimmied the waistband back and forth and up as she rocked her hips. Henry smirked. How many times had he watched her put on pants? He knew her body so well. He’d seen it through countless illnesses and held it every night for almost twenty years. He’d seen it give birth.

Now, mostly dressed, Val stepped into the bathroom and closed the door. It seemed clear that she was getting ready to leave, and Henry had no idea what that meant. He tried to remember some change in his past, something that would help him understand where this night was leading her, but nothing came to mind. The bathroom door opened. Val stepped toward the desk and pulled out the chair before lowering herself into it. Her profile was illuminated by a soft electric glow, and a small, methodical tremor moved through her. She was writing something. Soon the light dimmed and went out. Val grabbed her bag from the desk and pushed the chair out behind her.

The door opened, flooding the room with light, then closed. Suddenly Henry saw the fantasy he’d been entertaining for what it was: the self-indulgent wish of a teenager, a figment of a manic imagination. He had allowed himself to hope that Val would know who he was, that all doubt would leave her, and that she’d allow herself to be taken away into a life so strange and beautiful that she would need nothing but him forever.

With so many emotions vying for his attention, Henry was surprised to be overwhelmed by something as ordinary as embarrassment.

He groaned and sat up, pulled the comforter from his body, and stood. He stretched, yawned, put on his underwear and the thick terrycloth robe he’d taken from the closet—anything to delay the moment when he would have to read the note and know for sure that Val was gone forever. When he couldn’t put it off any longer, he walked to the desk and turned on the lamp.

Ed—,
said the letter.

That one word was enough. He shut off the light.

Over the next few hours, as Henry waited for the sun to make its way back to the city, he replayed the night. It hadn’t occurred to him that Val would doubt what she’d seen. Her body had understood. He felt sure of that, and he thought it would be enough. But all those drinks—once she sobered up even a little it must have been easy for her to write the whole thing off as an alcoholic delusion.

He opened the curtains and sat on the bed. The room had a beautiful view of the park. Its glowing lamps looked cheerful, but they only made Henry feel lonelier. He could hear a garbage truck crunching its way down the block.

Given enough time, he would move past all this. Henry knew that. Like a few of his other worst memories, it would be regrettable but ultimately meaningless. But how would Val interpret this night? What would it mean to her?

The letter.

He couldn’t bring himself to read past
Ed
before, but now he crossed to the desk and lifted the pad, brought it close to the window so that the paper reflected the iridescent purple of the bright city sky.

Again Henry sorted through his memories of Val. This time, a vertiginous moment came and lingered, and he felt a strange crackling deep in his skull as his knowledge of the world rearranged itself. He lay down on the bed, covered his head with the cool sheets, and grinned wide.

There were many more memories to examine than he’d expected. New memories. Of Val as a woman. And of Gabe. Then, surprisingly, of someone else.

G
abe stepped off
the A train and onto the platform. The early-December chill had permeated the subway tunnels by then, robbing them of the heat they’d banked over the long summer and fall. As he bounded up the steps and onto the street, his body tensed in preparation for the more acute cold of the outdoors. It was worse now that his head was shaved clean. He had yet to adjust to that sensation, a kind of nakedness that was altogether new. Val still didn’t know. They’d spoken every day since he’d taken it all off, but he had wanted it to be a surprise. Now that he was getting closer to her place he doubted the wisdom of that. If she didn’t like it, would she be able to hide it?

His anxiety went far beyond the haircut. Val had persisted in bringing up Henry. She even mentioned her one-night stand a couple times. Gabe knew she was right to be concerned about how closed off they were being, but he had no desire to talk about the pain that had brought them together and kept them close. His avoidance only validated her point, of course, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that they could forget it—all of it—if Val would only allow it. They could be free.

It was a childish wish, he knew, maybe even a dangerous one given all that was at stake. But no more dangerous than the alternative. Up until weeks before, he’d been hallucinating a whole human being. And the music—the never-ending racket of all things—it still lingered in his ears, giving no indication that it would ever leave him alone. So Val might have the luxury of confronting head-on all the strangeness of the past few months—it might even be good for her, Gabe could see that. But he didn’t think the same was true for himself. If he admitted any of what had happened to him since their first night together, she’d force him to get help. She’d have to. She’d be right to. And after that? Whatever romance they’d shared would be as good as dead.

He couldn’t tell her—not then, not ever. He’d dug in, and if he wanted to preserve what being with Val had given him, his only choice was to dig deeper.

A couple of blocks from Val’s apartment Gabe slowed his pace. He wanted to enjoy the neighborhood, this particular flavor of New York that he’d never known before. There were no numbers on the street signs in the West Village, and navigating the quaint labyrinth had confounded him at first. But recently Gabe had taken pride in his ability to understand the meaning of august-sounding combinations such as Bleecker and Barrow, Bedford and Morton, Hudson and Christopher. The trees without their leaves framed rich red brick and sculpted iron. He willed the beauty of the neighborhood to spirit away some of his anxiety. It worked for a few moments, but the closer he got, the more his tension grew.

Gabe signed in at security and took the elevator to Val’s floor. Despite all that he was feeling, the anticipation of seeing her took over. He smiled uncontrollably. When the doors opened he stepped into the empty hallway and skipped to her door. He imagined the security guard downstairs, watching this jubilance on a black-and-white screen, thinking,
That kid’s about to get laid.

Gabe knocked. Silence. He knocked again. The door opened a couple of inches.

“Hello?” he sang. “Can I come in?” There was no answer. He pushed the door with the tips of his fingers and stepped inside. Val was right next to him, he saw, leaning against the wall in tears, her face compressed in agony. As soon as Gabe closed the door she let out a little wail and he threw his arms around her. She slumped, her face in her hands, until they were both on the floor.

“What’s wrong?”

She didn’t answer.

He held her and spoke question after question until the meaning of his words grew vaporous. When finally it was just sound, Gabe stopped asking. He pulled her upright and led her through the kitchen and onto the couch in the living room. He waited, assuming that she would reach a state of exhausted resignation, but fifteen minutes later she seemed no closer to calming down than when he’d first walked in.

“Val,” he said. “Stop crying. You need to tell me what’s going on.”

He placed his fingers on the back of her neck and tilted her face toward his own.

“Now,” he said. “Just say it.”

Val lifted her eyes. Her lips trembled and curled, just barely under her control. She seemed to fight with impossible effort to shape the sound of her voice into words. “I’m pregnant,” she said. And then she went back to whimpering.

Gabe was actually relieved. He wasn’t sure what evil he’d been expecting, but a pregnancy? It didn’t seem so bad.

“Okay. It’ll be okay,” he said, though he wasn’t sure what, exactly, the
it
was that he was referring to. “It’ll be okay. Okay? No matter what you decide.”

Val cried harder. Gabe examined his own words, questioned whether it was insensitive or valiant to leave the decision to her.

“What
we
decide?” he said. He hadn’t meant it to be a question.

Val shook her head, the meaning unclear. She looked up at him and her grief was momentarily suspended. “Your face,” she said. “Your hair.”

Gabe smiled. “Later,” he said. “It was dumb.”

Val placed a palm on either side of his head and brought his face close, kissed his cheeks and his mouth with tight lips.

Gabe pushed her back, gently. “What about the ring?” he said, referring to the plastic loop that he sometimes felt when he was inside her. He called it her magical hair tie.

“I guess it didn’t work,” she said. The way she looked at him then made it clear that what Gabe had assumed was the climax of their conversation was only the preamble. His dread returned.

“What?” he said. “What is it?”

She kept her gaze fixed on Gabe. Her glistening eyes moved back and forth, frantic, as if searching his face for something she’d lost. Later, he’d understand. She was trying to fix him in her mind, trying to hold on to the last moment she would have with him before everything changed.

“I have to tell you something,” she said. “I didn’t use a condom. With the man. That night. I got tested after—I thought it was okay. I didn’t
know.
”

Gabe threw her hands off his own and got up from the couch. Inside he was pacing and pounding and yelling at the top of his lungs, but none of that was making its way to his body. He just stood there, staring.

“Please,” said Val.

“Absolutely not. Please
what?
”

“I don’t know what happened that night. I still don’t know.”

“Why is that?” Gabe said, his voice loud in his own ears. “Is it because you were too fucking wasted? Or because your shitty fucking friends were there? Egging you on?”

Val stood, tried to embrace him, but he stepped back. “I’m really sorry you’re so confused, Val. But I don’t actually give a shit.”

“Please—”

“You asked me to accept that you made a mistake and I did—I tried to. And now you tell me this? What am I supposed to say? You want me to feel bad for you? About how confused you were?”

Val sat down, lifted a couch pillow from beside her, and jammed it over her face. Gabe could see her shaking. It pleased him. It hurt him. He hated himself. He hated her.

“We’re all fucking confused,” he said. “You think I’m not confused? You think I don’t care that Henry is gone? Of course I do. But I don’t go around trying to fuck my way out of it.”

Val slammed the pillow back down on the couch. “God, Gabe! That’s what—I don’t know what happened. Yes, I was drunk, I told you that. I don’t know why we didn’t use protection, it didn’t occur—” She stopped, as if surprised by her own words. “Jesus, what’s
wrong
with me?”

“Don’t do that. Okay? You don’t get to pity yourself right now. I’m not going to console you. That’s not fucking fair.” But he wanted to. It was the only way to keep her. But he wanted to run away, too. He backed up and lowered himself to the floor, then leaned against the radiator. “Just—I don’t get it.”

“I thought it was Henry,” said Val.

The words came out so fast that Gabe almost didn’t understand them. Then they registered and he felt like he was cresting a hill at high speed, his intestines hitting some inner wall.

“I saw this guy,” she said. It seemed like her body was fighting to prevent her from saying more, and her voice went from mezzo piano to fortissimo as her diaphragm forced all the air from her lungs. “We were dancing, I didn’t even see him at first, actually—I was just really drunk, and all of a sudden I was dancing with him. My mind was playing tricks or something—I can’t explain—I looked at him and I just felt like I knew him. And then I tried to figure out how and without ever actually saying it to myself, I just
knew
it was Henry.” Val took a deep breath in. “This isn’t supposed to help. It’s not an excuse. If anything it’s whatever the opposite of an excuse is. I’m fucked up. I’m scared, okay?”

Gabe considered it. Questioned whether it was possible—

“Then we left and walked through the park, like some dark wilderness, then this bright, opulent hotel. It was like it wasn’t really happening. Like something out of a movie. A place that didn’t really exist at all. Then I sobered up a little—maybe that was the problem. I thought I was okay, like I was thinking clearly, even though now that seems absurd.”

Gabe felt a cold horror spreading out from the space between his shoulder blades.

“He told me to look at his face and I did. We didn’t say anything. I just saw him and I thought—I didn’t really think it, I just…I saw something there. I saw Henry again. I didn’t
say
it, I never
said
it out loud. It was a trick of—I just thought I didn’t need to say it. Like he understood.”

“I have to go.”

“What?” Val sat up, so fast that her hair whipped up over her head and landed in the shape of a haphazard crown. “No, Gabe, please don’t. Just talk to me. I don’t care what you say, just stay.”

“You don’t want to hear what I have to say right now.”

“I do,” she said.

“You don’t,” he said, and he stood.

“Please, Gabe, just say whatever you want to say.”

“And what am I supposed to say, exactly? The facts are worse than anything I might have to say about them. I mean, you tell me about this guy weeks ago and I forgive you, I try to forget it. But then you come out with this?”

“
This?
”
she said. “The fact that I’m
pregnant
is not a
this.
I love you, I want you to stay. I could have just kept this to myself, made you think this…that I’m pregnant because of you. I’m telling you because I want to be honest.”

“If you’d wanted to be honest you would have told me before. But if you’d told me then? That you hadn’t used any protection, that you’d fucked him because he looked like
Henry?
Jesus, Val—I might not have comforted you, right?”

Val looked down and folded her arms in front of her chest.

“And
now
you stop crying?” he screamed.

“Don’t leave,” she said.

It didn’t stop him from walking toward the door.

The overlit hallway, sterile and nondescript. Each door a carbon copy of the one before. A hall of mirrors.

The elevator, the whir and dings, the feeling of falling.

The blast of cold air when he left the front door of the building.

The calm, quiet streets of Greenwich Village giving way to the rush of Seventh Avenue and then Sixth.

Gabe’s senses detected each detail, but there was no cohesive picture. He was walking through a dream. Then, an hour later, he was on the train again. He felt like he was always on the train. He wanted to return to her. He should never have left. The fact that he did would be hard for either of them to forget. His phone hadn’t chimed. The screen hadn’t told him that Val was trying to reach him. Finally, he wrote a text.

I’m sorry. I need to think. I love you.

He erased it.

I need to think.

He sent it.

The rhythm of the train on the seams of the tracks formed the familiar backbone. Screeching. Footsteps down the aisle. The reverberation of the words he’d spoken to Val sat atop that clunking foundation.
Secaucus Junction. Newark.
The stations passed like dim apparitions; landscapes blew by without leaving any impression at all.
Elizabeth
.
Linden.
Rahway
.
The conductor’s voice a familiar punctuation, egging the music on, pushing it closer to some gruesome climax. When the train stopped in Metropark, Gabe realized he hadn’t been fully conscious since the last stop. Maybe it was sleep. It didn’t seem like it, but that was the only thing it resembled. Really, it was more like a trance. He was so tired of the song, the incessant fevered refrain. He got up and stood in the entranceway to the train car. The quaint central Jersey suburbs rolled by.

I can survive this,
he told himself.
I can even be a father if I have to be.

It sounded like what it was: an empty reassurance. Above all else, he thought, he was a hypocrite. He’d spent hours talking to a man he thought was Henry. He’d been seduced, just as Val had, by the idea that there was a way back to how things used to be. They were both wrong, but equally so. No, not equally. Gabe’s fantasy hadn’t lasted a few hours—it had lasted months. It had lasted so long that still, in the aftermath of Val’s revelation, he had an insistent little voice inside him saying that perhaps Val hadn’t been confused at all, that she’d seen Henry just as he had. He stood with his eyes closed and the music swelled and burst open, a relentless chantey, a storm of sound. Gabe didn’t have the will to fight it anymore. It painted vivid pictures of the losses he’d experienced and the pain that was still to come. He surrendered more completely than ever before, and his body swayed with the movement of the train, his forehead resting on the window. The world streaked past in wintry striations of slate and brown.

Metuchen
.

Edison
.

Finally, thank God,
New Brunswick
.

Gabe stepped off the train and ran the length of the platform, his footsteps clumsy and forced, then down the steps. He grabbed the banister as he descended, the steel so cold that it felt like flame. Past the Burger King and the college bookstore, past Old Man Rafferty’s, the booth he always shared with Val, past all the chicken joints and pizza joints and bagel joints and sandwich joints. The smell of fried miscellany. The laminated photographs in the windows, close-ups of the greasy food, larger than life and oversaturated. The back of Gabe’s throat burned with bile that he imagined was the color and consistency of tar. Finally he made it off the main strip and onto the residential Hamilton Street, where he slowed his pace. The relative calm shaped the music from jack-in-the-box frantic to moody and sweeping. He would have to call Val when he got home. He dreaded it, but he desired her voice, needed it to counteract the noise. This time he would be completely honest. He’d tell her about the music and the Henry he’d known. They’d have to make some kind of decision about the pregnancy, and he couldn’t let her go through that without knowing the whole truth. That he might be sick too, or worse, there might be another Henry haunting their world. In either case, something was deeply wrong.