Roomies

“I can completely see how that would happen, though.” It’s like me with the book, I think. I expect the idea to sprout tomorrow, next week, in a month. And here I am, two years out of graduate school with nothing written.

“So, I suppose what I mean is that this is so obviously worth it to me. Whether we are only friends or . . . you know. I want this marriage to be worth it to you,” he says gently, “and I’m not quite sure how to make that happen.”

Whether we are only friends or . . . you know.

Whether we are only friends or . . . you know?

My brain is on a loop, barricaded from working past what he’s just said in order to help assuage the guilt I can tell he’s feeling. The reply We could start having regular sex is so close to the surface. So close.

I take a few deep gulps of wine and wipe my hand indelicately across my mouth. “Please don’t worry about that.”

“I could help you think about your book?”

I get that sinking feeling in my stomach that I always get when I imagine opening my laptop and working.

We could have sex tonight.

I take another deep drink of wine.

“I’ll try to think of something,” he says quietly.

seventeen

Calvin and Ramón’s first performance is on a Friday.

When I find him tying his tie in front of my bedroom mirror, he looks calm and rested—but I know it’s a sham, because I heard him pacing most of last night.

“You ready?”

He nods with his bottom lip trapped savagely between his teeth. Smoothing the tie down his chest, he says, “What do you think? Do you think I’m ready?”

He’s said my favorite word of his—tink—twice in one sentence, as if I need to be further charmed.

“I tink you’re going to be amazing.”

He meets my eyes in the mirror. “You tink you can give me shit for my accent?”

“I tink you sort of like it.”

He turns, and for ten seconds, we stand there like this, staring at each other. We’re maybe a foot apart; I can see his hands shaking. He’s been waiting his entire life for this moment.

“Tell me something I need to remember tonight.”

He seems to need something to focus on, some advice to loop through so that he doesn’t spiral downward in nerves for the next two hours. I reach out, fidgeting with his tie. “Don’t rush through the bridge in ‘Only Once in My Life.’ Make sure to breathe in the opening solo of ‘I Didn’t Expect You,’ because you hold your breath sometimes, and I think the notes come out looser when you remember to breathe.” I think for a few seconds in his absorbed silence. “Trust your hands during ‘Lost to Me.’ Don’t be afraid to close your eyes and feel the notes. When you do that, it comes out like water easily moving over a stone.”

I slide my hands from his tie, over his chest. I can feel his heart pounding.

Calvin lets out a long, slow breath. “You should see the way you glow when you’re talking about music. You just—”

I laugh, interrupting him. “We’re talking about you right now.”

He tilts his head, bending his arms so that he can capture my hands in his. “Are we?”

I blaze over this. “You’re ready, Calvin. No question.”

He glances at my mouth, and a fire seems to start low in my belly. It feels like the kind of scene where I step forward, he steps forward, a kiss happens, something sweet and slow, born of feelings that have been building for months.

But oops, that’s just me. We’ve been fake married for just over three weeks, which means we only have eleven months left of the charade. We’ve managed to find an easy balance. No use complicating things.

Even three hours before the performance, the theater is mobbed outside, and we slip in the side entrance. I looked earlier on StubHub, and tickets to see Ramón tonight were over six hundred dollars for the far-back balcony seats. Calvin is doing a good job looking relaxed, but even his calm facade has cracks in it: he keeps fidgeting with his tie.

Backstage is all motion and bustle. Calvin looks for his new buddy, but Ramón is in for makeup and able to offer only a final smile of support before Calvin is tugged away by a stagehand.

I give him a tight hug, a kiss on his smooth cheek, and then he’s out of my sight. I won’t see him until after the show. Instead, I’ll be up front for most of the night, selling T-shirts. Sad trombone.

But I do get to sneak away and watch from the back. As I slip in, I wonder whether, in ten years, I’ll hear a riff or an opening chord to one of the songs and be transported back immediately to this time in my life. It makes the shadow thought follow—what will I feel when I think of these times? Will I think, Wow, those were the hardest days, trying to figure out who I was? Or will I think, Those days were so easy and free, with so little responsibility?

I’ve had the thought almost without realizing it—the encroaching awareness that I feel settled but in truth can’t see my future at all. I have a temporary job, a temporary marriage. Will anything ever be permanent? What the hell am I going to do with my life? I only get one shot at this, and right now, I’m finding my value only in being valuable to others. How do I find value for me?

Calvin told me to do something with my brain, but how? Threads of ideas appear on the edge and are gone as soon as my fingers settle on the keys. There’s no connective tissue to string them together, no skeleton to hold them up. I want to live my life with the intensity I see on the stage up there, want to feel passionate about something in that same way. But what if it never happens for me?

My train of thought is derailed when the skyscraper set is shifted into place, the lights dim, and Ramón steps into a spotlight, center stage. He’s already a giant in person, but on the stage he is towering. His dark hair is combed back from his face. His eyes are nearly black, but luminous all the way to the far reaches of the theater. I can tell his chest is rising and falling in excitement, and from nearly every body in my immediate vicinity I sense the vibration of static, the urgency of anticipation.

I suck in a deep breath; my heart is in my throat.

I can’t see Calvin, but I hear the second he strums the opening chord of “Lost to Me”—one of the biggest hits from the soundtrack. Without having to see him, I know he’s taken my advice and closed his eyes. The warm, honeyed melody rolls up the aisle like a wave of light.

It is sublime.

The crowd shifts in unison; a spontaneous smattering of applause breaks out and then it grows: For a few moments, the audience is thunderous with surprise and approval. For Calvin, for Ramón, for the risk and beauty of the guitar and the salty richness of Ramón’s baritone lifting the weight of the music up over his shoulders and launching it to the depths of the theater. My vision wavers, spotted with vibrating dots of light. I don’t know what it is about Calvin’s playing; listening to this feels so different from listening to Seth. And not just because of the instrument. Calvin’s music gives an aching sense of time passing, the pain of finding love twice in a lifetime, of losing it in intervening years. It’s exactly the way the story needs to unfold through music. It feels nostalgic . . . I’m already regretting the end.

When the final curtain falls, there isn’t just a standing ovation, there’s a stomping one. I have the sense of light fixtures shaking, dust trickling from cracks in the walls. I have to rush back out to the lobby—we sell out of T-shirts tonight for the first time—but before I do I swear I catch Calvin’s eye as he stands to take his bow.