Music for Wartime (11 page)

I don’t understand, she says again.

All he can say is, This is his shirt. He holds out an arm so she can see the gaping sleeve.

She says, What have you done with him? She has a calm voice and wet brown eyes. He feels he has seen her before, in the streets of the old city. Perhaps he served her a meal, a bottle of wine. Perhaps, in another lifetime, she was the center of his universe.

This is his beard, he says.

She begins to cry into the handkerchief. She says, Then he is dead. He sees now from the quiet of her voice that she must have known this long ago. She has come here only to confirm.

He feels the floor of the post office move beneath him, and he tries to turn his eyes from her, to ground his gaze in something solid: postbox, ceiling tile, door. He finds he cannot look away. She is a force of gravity in her long gray dress.

No, he says. No, no, no, no, no, I am right here.

Of course he does not believe it, but he knows that if he had time, he could prove it. And he must, because he is the only piece of the professor left alive. The woman does not see how she is murdering her husband, right here in the post office lobby. He whispers to her: Let me go home with you. I’ll be a father to your son, and I’ll warm your bed, and I’ll keep you safe.

He wraps his hands around her small, cold wrists, but she pulls loose. She might be the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.

As if from miles away, he hears her call to the postmaster to send for the police.

His head is light, and he thinks he might float away from the post office forever. It is an act of will not to fly off, but to hold tight to the earth and wait. If the police aren’t too busy to come, he feels confident he can prove to them that he is the professor. He has the papers, after all—and in the havoc of war, what else will they have time to look for?

She is backing away from him on steady feet, and he feels it like a peeling off of skin.

If not the police, perhaps he’ll convince a city judge. The witnesses who would denounce him are mostly gone or killed, and the others would fear to come before the law.

If the city judge will not listen, he can prove it to the high court. One day he might convince the professor’s own child. He feels certain that somewhere down the line, someone will believe him.

W
hen Carlos asked why I would risk my whole career for Peter Torrelli, I told him he had to understand that in those last three years of high school, Peter and I were the only two gay boys in Chicago. Because I really believed it, back then, and twenty-five years of experience proving otherwise was nothing in the face of that original muscle memory: me and Peter side by side on the hard pew during chapel, not listening, washed blind by the sun from the high windows, breathing in sync. It didn’t matter that we weren’t close anymore, I told Carlos. The point was, he’d been my first love. I’d never actually loved him, but still, listen, believe me, there’s another kind of first love.

It was during one of those long lectures or concerts or assemblies that Peter and I had discovered our common neurosis: the fear of magically switching bodies with the speaker or singer or priest and then having to improvise an exit. I would slide toward Peter on the pew, open a hymnal, and above “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” scribble in pencil: “Tuba player?” Peter would look up to the stage to watch the fat sophomore from Winnetka puff his cheeks like a blowfish and write back: “Stop playing—no one misses a tuba.” “1st Violin?” I wrote. “Feign a swoon,” he’d write back. And then he’d mouth it to me, relishing the “oooo” of “swoon.” We joked about this fear, but really I think it bothered us both—this idea that we might suddenly be thrust in front of our peers and examined. It doesn’t take a psychotherapist to figure out why. Peter later claimed the whole reason he became an actor was that the only way he could enjoy a show was from the inside.

Everyone else knew it was his looks. I hadn’t understood until we were sixteen what it meant to turn heads. I’d considered it a figurative expression. But when we stood in line for pizza slices, or walked down Dearborn toward the bus, he was a human magnet. He was the North Pole. The girls at school would feel his sweater and tug his necktie. He said he had a girlfriend back east, that she was Miss Teenage Delaware, and everyone believed it. How could he
not
be onstage with that dark, sad face, that ocean of black hair, those sarcastic eyes? By the time we graduated, he’d done two seasons of professional summer stock. I was the varsity soccer goalie, and he was a movie star walking among us. When we sat together in chapel we looked like the kings of the school, and nobody knew any different.

And then the next day we were thirty-six years old, and Peter fell to pieces. During a matinee of
Richard III
, right in the middle, my friend abruptly and forever lost the ability to act. He said later it was something about the phrase “jolly thriving wooer,” the strangeness of those words as they left his mouth, the pause a second too long before Ratcliffe entered. Since Peter told me all this, I’ve read the page ten times in my Signet Classic—which is how I know that Peter’s next line, as Richard, was “Good or bad news, that thou com’st in so bluntly?” It was a line he’d have made lewd jokes about backstage. “And I said it,” he told me. “But it came out in this
voice
, like all the costumes had fallen away, like I was some kid in eighth-grade English and I had to read my poem out loud. It was just
me
, and there was no character, no play, just these words I had to say. You know our whole thing about leapfrogging into someone else’s body? It was like that, but like I suddenly leapfrogged into myself.” He said he could see each face in the audience, every one of them at once, smell what they ate for lunch. He could feel every pore of his own skin, and the ridiculous hump strapped to his back. Backstage, they knew something was wrong even before he started to shake. By the end of the next scene, the understudy was dressing.

Peter told me this the next week over lunch. Actually, he told me many times, over many lunches in the following year, as if through the retelling he could undo something. We met every other Thursday at the Berghoff, where he’d have root beer and I’d have two pale ales and we’d both eat enormous plates of bratwurst and chicken schnitzel and noodles with butter sauce. We had set these lunches up two years earlier, quite formally. We’d been in and out of touch for ages when we found ourselves alone on the living room futon of a boring party in Hyde Park, drunk, wondering aloud if knowing each other when we had acne was the reason we’d never dated as adults. We had kissed just once, sophomore year, after a SADD meeting when we stayed behind to pick up the leftover fliers. I didn’t know he was gay. I hardly knew
I
was. He came over with the green fliers in a stack as if to hand them to me, but when I took hold of the papers he pulled them back and me with them. The only person I’d ever kissed before was a girl named Julie Gleason. Afterward he said, “You’re pretty dense, aren’t you?” That was it. We didn’t talk for two weeks, and then we were best friends again, before the paper cuts on my palm had even fully healed.

I had looked at him that night at the party—beautiful and grown-up, a beer bottle sweating against the leg of his jeans—and said, “I never see you anymore.”

“Yes, I’m slowly becoming invisible.” Peter was the kind of guy who would try for any joke, any chance to flash his perfect teeth. Even when it wasn’t funny, you had to appreciate the showmanship. And then he looked at me seriously, which was rare at the time. “We
should
get together and talk. I mean regularly, because I miss you. It would be like therapy.” I should have known I would always be the therapist. I told him once that he was the Gatsby to my Nick Carraway. He said, “Yes, but I throw
much
wilder parties.”

And like stupid little Nick, I ended up trying to fix things. If I hadn’t spent American Lit distracted by Zach Moretti and his amazing forearms, I might have registered that these stories never end well.

Let me say, Peter had been brilliant. Chicago breeds its own stage stars, who stay local even if they’re good enough to go to New York, and he was one of them. When I saw his Hamlet at Chicago Shakespeare, all memories of Mel and Lord Larry vanished in a celluloid fog. He was the right age, the right build, and those eyes could turn like lighting from irony to terror. I wonder how that colored our friendship, that I saw him simultaneously as both Peter and Hamlet. If nothing else, it made me more tolerant of his ramblings.

After the day he froze (“The Day of Which We Shall Not Speak,” he called it whenever he spoke of it, which was constantly), he took sick leave for a week, then tried again. If anything, he was worse. He quit before they could fire him, and spent the next two months looking for work. He walked into each audition knowing everyone in the room had heard about his big dry-up. His agent dropped him, and so did his boyfriend.

A few months later, Peter moved near Milwaukee and took a job doing dinner theater, and our lunches became less frequent. In late November 2005, almost a year after The Day of Which We Tended to Speak Obsessively, we sat by a window in the Berghoff and watched the year’s first snow collect in the street. He told me about his new role as Bob Cratchit in something called
Let’s Sing a Christmas Carol!
The director wanted British accents from everyone. Peter could do a perfect one, of course, but not without sinking further into the hollow cadences, the glazed eyes, the strangling sense of the ridiculous.

“Most of them sound southern, it’s terrible,” he said. He was on caffeine today or something worse. He was literally bouncing on the springy seat of the booth. “The eleven o’clock number is, I shit you not, called ‘God Bless Us Every One.’ Jesus Christ, you should hear it, it sounds like Scrooge drops by Tara for pecan pie.” Every time I saw him he talked faster, as if he were running out of time. He still flashed the smile, but perfunctorily, as if displaying his incisors for the dentist.

When our food came, he finally asked me a question so he could stop talking and eat his schnitzel. “How’s life in phone-a-thon land? Are you giving away thousands of tote bags?”

I was the special events coordinator for Chicago Public Radio, and for several years before we officially reconnected, Peter and I would run into each other in the restaurants of the monstrous tourist trap on Navy Pier where Chicago Shakespeare and WBEZ both live. Once, after we’d drifted apart for a few months, our lunch parties at Riva joined together, and when someone introduced us and said we might hit it off, we started laughing so hard Peter dropped his wineglass.

“We’re doing better than last year,” I answered.

“I’ve been telling everyone in the Land of Moo about the Republicans trying to shut you down. I’m going to assemble an army of cheeseheads for your defense.”

“Thanks, Peter. That’s thoughtful.”

He started mixing all the food on his plate: schnitzel, potato, creamed spinach, kraut.

“So, what about trying my shrink?” I said. “She’s good. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

The old Peter would have cued up his German psychiatrist impersonation, drawing the attention of everyone around, but the new Peter just stared at his mixed-up food. “She might be good, but how far is she from Kenosha, Wisconsin, the epicenter of the theatrical world?”

“She’s here in the Loop, and that would be good for you.”

He agreed to call her and then told me about his great-uncle, who, after undergoing electroshock, became obsessed with licking copper objects. I wanted him to ask about me, to ask about Carlos, who was moving out of my apartment in gradual increments and breaking my heart in painful slow motion, leaving me for the jazz singer we used to go see every few weekends at the Back Room until I finally realized the guy’s bedroom eyes were directed not at the whole room but at the seat next to mine in particular. I’d have to find someone else to complain to.

“Listen, though,” said Peter, “I’m on the mend. If I had more serious roles again, that might do it. I mean, I was never a comedian, and that’s what they’re asking me to do.”

As much as I didn’t believe his optimism, I was glad he wasn’t giving up. I constantly pictured him hanging himself from the closet rod of his cold little apartment, or drinking something medieval and poisonous. Maybe I’d just watched his Romeo too many times.

“I’ve got an offer for you,” I said. I’d thought about it in the car on the way there, and decided I couldn’t ask him. I decided it several times, in fact, but now here it was, coming out of my mouth. “I want you to do some work for me.” He nodded, eyes wide, as he mashed his food and listened to me explain the project: In cooperation with the Art Institute, we’d commissioned twenty local poets and authors to write short works relating to the museum’s crown jewels—a mystery writer casting Van Gogh’s
Bedroom at Arles
as a crime scene, a Pulitzer-winning poet extolling Picasso’s man with the blue guitar in sonnet. Richmond Barthé’s sculpture
The Boxer
got a prose poem that shattered my heart, one I wanted to frame and wear around my neck. The writing would hang beside the art, and my job was to find actors to read a few of the pieces aloud at the gala opening and then record them all for NPR and for the museum audio tour that people could rent with headphones. My brilliant idea had launched a yearlong nightmare of collaboration with a hateful little man I’d come to call Institute Steve, the only unlovely person on the entire museum staff. “It’s December thirtieth, if your show is done. The thing is,” I said, grabbing for the only available out, “the other actors might be people you knew.”

“People I
know
, Drew.” His face stilled itself long enough to shoot me one of his complicated, devastating looks: part annoyance, part sarcasm, part glee that he’d caught me saying what I really thought. “I’ll do it, if you don’t think I’d embarrass you.”

And so the die was cast.

He walked out with Dr. Zeller’s business card in his pocket and both of our leftovers in Styrofoam boxes. He was eating plenty despite his meager paycheck because he got free food at the dinner theater, but every night he had to choose between chicken à la king and Lake Superior whitefish.

I stayed behind to pay the bill, and as I waited for the busboy to come back I pressed my cheek to the dirty, cold glass of the window beside me. I felt like I needed to wake myself up. I had just risked my career on his ability to be Peter again, to jump back into himself, and I strongly doubted he could do it.