When the World Tips Over, page 25
She nods. “We’re all named after our missing father’s favorite jazz trumpeters, only they’re all men and Black and we’re white and I’m a girl and Wynton’s the only one who plays an instrument. Dizzy Gillespie is me. He’s already dead. Wynton Marsalis is Wynton. And the boy who just skated by that you couldn’t stop staring at is Miles, named after Miles Davis.”
“I wasn’t staring at him.”
“Everyone stares at him.”
“Where did your other brother go? Wynton?”
She shrugs and hands me the plastic spoon. When our hands touch, we both look up and our eyes hold for a moment and before I know what I’m doing, I touch her nose – bop – and she laughs, surprised, then does it back.
I sink the spoon into the soufflé. Steam escapes and, with it, a chocolate scent so rich and thick, it makes me want to gulp at the air. The texture surprises me, light but spongy, an edible cloud. It melts the moment it finds my tongue, filling my whole mouth, my whole existence, with delight. I take another bite and I’m unable to keep the moan in. I feel my eyes rolling back in my head.
Violin music shatters the gustatory (adj. concerned with tasting) ambrosial (adj. of or relating to food of the gods) swoon I’m in, and I glance upward at the source of the music.
On the roof of a nearby building is you. I see the lopsided smile even from this distance and think about one of my mother’s stories: In a faraway land in the time of forever, there was a lightning bolt who became a boy. Your bow’s pointed right at my heart, and I know exactly what you’re thinking as you hold my gaze because I am too. Since you’re the first person I laid eyes on after biting into the soufflé: I will love you for the rest of my life.
“You will marry me now,” you yell. “Right?”
“I will,” I yell as I get back in Sadie, soufflé in hand, happiness unbreaking my broken heart for a moment. You smile and start playing again. I listen to your music as we drive away.
But I hear it for years. I still hear it. I hear it right this minute as I sit by your side in this hospital room, Wynton.
But back then, Mom and I pass the soufflé back and forth – I notice she looks in the mirror after her first bite, but I don’t mention to her what that might mean – as we follow the signs for Hidden Highway, aiming to get as far away as possible from The Town.
If I’m being honest, Wynton, I couldn’t get you out of my head for, well, forever, after that day. I haven’t been able to forget you. Silly, I know, to think about this marriage proposal because we were just kids. But then the other night, you asked me again! Did I dream that moment with you in the moonlight? Our dance? I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life. Have you?
This is a secret: Every time I get close to a guy, I hear your violin so loud and clear, I turn around half expecting you to be standing behind me.
Each and every time.
Wynton
You played an instrument that could do anything, make a rose bloom in someone’s hand, a bomb detonate in their heart, a staircase reach all the way to a star.
But most important: Violin music was the map that would lead to your father.
If you got good enough. If your fingers flew faster over the strings, with more dexterity, more precision.
If he read about you in the paper or online. If he saw you on YouTube, heard you on the radio.
Every time you played, no matter how large the crowd, there was only one man in a cowboy hat sitting in the audience.
Every tonal pattern you found alone in your room was an imaginary conversation with him, an imaginary reunion with him.
But music was the map that led to you too.
You thought in music, breathed in music, dreamed in music, loved in music, fought in music, lived in music.
No, that’s not right.
You heard that Miles Davis once pointed to a woman stumbling in the street and said to his band, “Play that.”
You played that. All the thats and thises. And you played them hard.
Music was never a noun for you, it was always a verb. The only verb. You music-ed through the days and nights of your life.
But you will never again, and it is excruciating.
You thought you needed a body to feel pain. You don’t.
You’re free of it only when Cassidy’s beside you smelling like a garden, telling her story in that magnificent cave of a voice.
It’s like she’s introducing you to every last bit of her.
Are stories prayers? Invitations? Mirrors? Storms?
Or maybe they’re homes.
Listening to her, sitting with her back-to-back in the meadow, swaying with her in your arms in the moonlight, are the only times you’ve ever felt like yourself without a violin and bow in your hands.
Miles
They were headed north on Hidden Highway on the way to the hot springs where Cassidy worked when Sandro started in. The dog was rolled up contentedly on the floor between Felix, who was driving, and Miles, who was trying not to fall in love with the driver. Sandro’s snout rested on his paw, his eyes focused upward on Miles.
I, for one, love a big dog, if you know what I mean, Miles.
Stop. He says he’s unavailable. But, fuck yeah, definitely know what you mean.
Sascrotch, human dude, Sascrotch.
Don’t be bigdickulous, doggo.
Oh no, it’s the cockapocalypse.
Cockasaurus-rex.
The baloney pony that broke the dick-ter-scale.
Miles tried not to laugh, gently pressing his foot on Sandro’s paw in commiseration, grateful there was a creature on earth with whom he could be this goofy. Miles had been pretty surprised when Felix said he was bi, then hella thrilled – everything in his mind had started gleaming – until the unavailable comment. But still, the ease and comfort with which he’d told Miles had made an impression, even if Felix didn’t like Miles that way, which was fine, totally fine.
Ugh, so not fine.
But Felix seemed to want to be friends with Miles and Miles really wanted to be friends with Felix. He’d just have to avoid eye contact, and eye-mouth contact, eye-abs contact, eye-ass contact. Except then it occurred to Miles that maybe Felix had a crush on Cassidy and that was why he so readily agreed to the road trip, saying only that he needed to be back for his shift at the restaurant in a few days, assuming it reopened. Was that why he was unavailable?
Who knew?
Still, Miles was stoked that he was going to be in this cab barely a foot away from Felix for five straight hours. He’d just have to get used to Felix releasing the wheel to rapturously exclaim and point at clouds, redwoods, the dilapidated bridges poised high above the river, as the three of them traversed switchback after switchback up the first of many mountains on this drive to Whispering River, the northern town where Cassidy lived.
So, when you’re bi, you’re equally into girls as you are boys? Or are some people more like 80/20? I don’t get it.
No clue. We dogs aren’t label-fluent, human dude. Why don’t you ask him?
You ask him.
It had taken them a while to get on the road. First Miles had needed to go to the Bell Ranch next door to see if Rory Bell, who for as long as Miles could remember referred to Miles as Sandro’s co-parent, would let him kidnap the dog for a day or two. He knew he’d never hear the end of it from Sandro if he didn’t take him on the pilgrimage to find Cassidy. He told Rory Bell this, and it made the solitary, windswept ranch woman, a decade or two older than his mother, laugh before she agreed to part with the pooch.
After that, he and Felix had trekked to Miles’s place through the pinot noir vineyard to pick up the camper truck. They’d popped grapes into their mouths as they walked along in the golden light, letting the warm tart juice sluice down their throats, an experience Miles had regularly, but sent Felix into paroxysms of joy, which ended in him borrowing Miles’s pocket pad to write a recipe for a stilton and sour grape galette. A dish, Miles was pretty sure, his mom had already invented, but he kept that to himself as Felix said ten thousand times, “It’s going to be epic, man!”
At Miles’s house, Felix had walked around like he was in a museum, peering into photos, immediately discerning the faint blue, green, and purple stripes that were visible under the faded white paint of Miles’s bedroom walls. (No matter how many times they painted his room, those three colors still broke through – it was bizarre.) For Miles, being home made him feel ill. When glancing into Wynton’s room, eyeing the piles of sheet music, the stand, the amps, his knees buckled, and he staggered into the bathroom to wait out a tsunami of nausea and dread.
Did he really believe Cassidy would be able to wake Wynton from the coma?
As irrational as it might be, he kind of did.
Next, they’d gone to the youth hostel where Felix was staying until he found a roommate situation, maybe with other staff from The Blue Spoonful. Felix hadn’t yet had to share the room at the hostel, which was good because it was barely big enough for the bunk bed and desk that filled it. One small cob-webbed window looked out onto the creek. Miles noted that Felix had traveled the thousand miles from Colorado with a Larousse, the French cooking encyclopedia, as well as Tu Casa Mi Casa by Enrique Olvera, plus a memoir by Auguste Escoffier (Felix’s dream-grandfather, he’d said), all books that sat on Miles’s mother’s kitchen bookshelf as well. No wonder Felix had been hired.
Miles leaned against the desk, eyed the bunk bed, and oh hello perfect scenario: Sorry, you two are going to have to share a room, only one left. “Tell me about the trip down with Cassidy,” Miles said to distract himself from the X-rated moment beginning to live-stream in his head. The porn marathon in the hospital supply closet had surely warped him. Though now he wanted those other things with Felix too: laughing fits, looking at the sky in silence, all the talking. He watched as Felix threw some wildly inappropriate things for a road trip into a backpack: a purple-and-yellow-striped shirt, another pair of striped pants, a checkered vest, more suspenders (!), a fedora (!!), other wingtip shoes (!!!).
“We had fun. Super cool girl,” Felix said.
“And?”
Felix lowered his sunglasses. Damn those eyes. “And she’s writing about you guys.”
“Wait, what? Who guys?”
“Your family.” He twirled his mustache with his thumb and index finger, a habit that was growing on Miles. Way too much about Felix was growing on Miles. “For college, a paper or whatever. On California history, the wine families of Paradise Springs or something, and she’s focusing on yours but from way back, starting with the European settlers. The de Fallas. She said she might even write a novella.”
“Wait, de Fallas? That’s us? Really? A novella? About Alonso and Maria? Why didn’t she tell me? Why didn’t you tell me? And we weren’t always Falls?” Is this why Felix had said in the hospital lobby he’d just heard all about Alonso Fall? From Cassidy? Must be.
“I am telling you. Not just Alonso and Maria. There was Alonso’s evil brother Hector and his even more evil father, um, what was his name, oh yeah Diego and his mother who was in love with some penniless poet whose amazing scent attached itself to her after he died. And there’s a family curse. Oh and Sebastian, of course. And everyone who came after them. Like you, dude. She told the stories in this weird way, kind of like fairy tales. Though I nodded off after a while, so I think I missed a bunch.”
Miles was baffled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Seriously, I don’t know who any of those people are. Who are they?” Miles sat down on the bottom bunk, which was covered in an itchy green army blanket. “So that’s why she was parked on the property that day? She was doing research?” He remembered there’d been several books on California history on the seat. He’d read some of one at the swimming hole. When he raised his head to say so, he saw that Felix was unbuttoning his shirt. Oh no, no, no, because: Oh yes. Hot AF Hercules is right. Felix was half-turned toward the window so Miles could watch uninhibitedly as Felix undid the last button and slipped the shirt off one shoulder, then the other. He was broad, lean, and tan, and, oh man, with his dark loose tousled hair hanging past his shoulders, not to mention the misty eyes, he really and truly was Jericho Blane. A giant bisexual Jericho Blane! A Jericho Blane who liked guys. He’d won the effing lottery.
Except he was unavailable.
Deep breath.
Just leave the sunglasses on, Miles psychically begged, and as if in response, Felix turned, lifted them, and smiled at Miles. “Whatever should I wear?” he said, throwing up his arms. Ack – and that was adorable. How would he survive a road trip?
He’d been attracted to unavailable, i.e., straight, guys at school, of course, like every one of them, or most of them anyway, his body reacting to, reveling in the smallest most carefree gestures: Conner Foley reaching up to grab his hat in his locker before practice, Hot AP English Teacher Mr. Gelman tilting his head exposing his neck while he read aloud to the class, Rhett Clemens kicking his legs up on his desk like he owned the air. He collected these moments, then relived them safely, constantly, privately when he ran, when he read, when he showered, when he breathed.
Felix pulled a plain black T-shirt out of his duffel, and thank the Lord, his sunglasses fell back down over his eyes like a curtain. “These are prescription by the way,” he said to Miles, pointing to the shades. “Have eye issues. Don’t want you to think I’m pretentious.”
Miles nodded. He didn’t think Felix was pretentious. He thought he was amazing and unlike anyone he’d ever met – funny, smart, weird, warm, mysterious and open at the same time, hot. Miles sighed, studied his hands in detail trying to unthink the Hot AF Hercules part. He was unavailable. Maybe he broke up with the girlfriend because he now had a boyfriend? Or another girlfriend? Maybe Cassidy? Or maybe he wanted to be single? Or wasn’t attracted to Miles? Maybe it had turned him off that Miles had gotten in the truck with Rod? Maybe he thought Miles was, well, a slut. He wanted to blurt out that he’d never done anything like that before. He also wanted to ask him a thousand questions about why he ran away and what it was like to be bisexual and if he laughed like that and laid on forest floors with everyone. Maybe he made everyone feel the same fizzy way he was making Miles feel?
“Hey, you okay?” Felix’s hand landed in the crevice between Miles’s shoulder and neck. His neck. Miles lifted his head. “You must be really worried about your brother,” Felix said to him, having misinterpreted Miles’s expression.
Felix’s shades were up again and his absolutely gorgeous eyes – let’s just be honest – were gazing down at Miles sympathetically, causing the blood in Miles’s body to switch directions. Was it normal for an unavailable guy to touch an available guy like this? This felt even less platonic than the shoulder tap in the woods. Further, Felix hadn’t yet put on the T-shirt, and the tan swath of his stomach was so close, Miles could place the flat of his palm on it, so close he could run his finger under the waistband of Felix’s pants, so close he could see the Calvin Klein logo on the briefs. Miles breathed in, smelled sweat. The light in the room was shadowy, the music of the river loud and secluding. They were alone. So alone. This was so much better than being in a restaurant walk-in refrigerator. Miles closed his eyes.
Fuck it. He let himself imagine it all: How he’d stand and place his palms on Felix’s stomach, his chest, his arms, feeling the heat of Felix’s skin under his hands. He imagined Felix’s arms closing around him, the two of them falling back onto the lower bunk, their bodies entwining. Their hands traveling. His heart began to race.
This wasn’t good.
Miles flicked Felix’s fingers off his shoulder more brusquely than he’d intended, saw Felix’s expression become confused, then embarrassed. “I need some air,” Miles said, pivoting as he stood so Felix couldn’t see his erection.
Miles got himself marginally sorted through a talk with Sandro, who was waiting outside (no pets in the hostel), and when he returned to the room, Felix was dressed and sitting on the bed, his bag packed. He looked upset.
“Sorry, I…” Miles didn’t know how to finish the sentence. Sorry I was in a porn video before while you were just being a nice guy.
Felix shook his head. “No way. Don’t apologize. I can’t imagine what you’re going through with your brother. Even if—”
“That’s the thing,” Miles said, relieved the misunderstanding was still in play. “It’s just hard to suddenly stop hating someone, you know? I mean, how do you do that?”
“You try to understand them,” Felix said matter-of-factly.
“Why are you like so, I don’t know, mature or something?”
“Therapy.”
This shut Miles up.
They’d gone to the hospital then. His mother had seemed happy that Miles and Felix, her new sauté cook, had somehow become friends, but hadn’t understood the point of their driving a third of the state in search of Cassidy. Ultimately, she gave in, telling Miles that it was probably healthy for him to take a break from the hospital. She said she’d text if there was news. Then she’d held Miles’s face in her hands and said quietly so only he could hear, “I always seem to forget I need to worry about you too. I’m so sorry, honey.”
And now here they were at dusk, Miles, Felix, and Sandro cruising up Hidden Highway, heading deep into the forest, past Jeremiah Falls, where he and Cassidy had floated in the pool on their backs like two water lilies. The sun was setting over the mountain, filling the road with ghostly shapes as the river raced by them, like time.
From Bernadette’s Notebook of Unsent Letters:
Miles,
The sun walks beside you, always has, like it did your father.
When you were little, people would line up behind me wherever we were to catch a glimpse of you in the stroller. “Can stop the heart, beauty like his,” they’d say.
Beauty inside and out.
But now I know there is a lost boy hiding inside my boy, and it is him I need to find.
Mom
