The Cloisters(38)

I still struggled to get a bead on when Leo was kidding and when he was being serious; I suspected it was often a combination of the two.

“I don’t know who I’m looking for,” I said after a minute, both to fill the silence and because it was true.

“Let me warn you away from artists, you know. They can be assholes. Real jerks, psychologically, you know.” He pointed at himself. The way he sat in the plastic chair, making it flex and tilt with every movement of his tall, lanky frame. He was never not moving, jiggling his leg or tipping back in his seat. But despite the frenetic energy, he was watchful; he eyed the way I ate, the edges of my eyes, my lips.

“I guess it’s good you’re just a gardener then,” I said.

“I knew I was right about you,” Leo said, blowing out a thin stream of smoke. “And I’m a playwright, if that’s what you were asking. I write plays. And play pickup bass in a punk band in my spare time.”

“So you don’t want to be a musician?” It felt like every time I pinned down a fact about Leo, the landscape shifted. I liked that, the feeling of being off balance.

“No,” he inhaled. “Must be a relief, huh?”

“I don’t have anything against musicians.”

“But how many of them do you know? Personally?”

“None,” I admitted. “You’re the only playwright I know, too.”

“That’s because there aren’t many of us left.”

We ordered another round and I asked him how he got into playwriting: college. And why he loved it so much: the structure, the pacing. We talked about our college experiences, him at NYU, me at Whitman. He was five years older than I was, and I wondered how many more years it would take me to give up on my dream and go home, try something else. More than five, at least.

“Do people ever ask you what you’ll do if it doesn’t work out?” I asked.

He paused. “What will you do if it doesn’t work out?”

“What?”

“Museums, academia.” The way he said it, drawing out the word, thinning it through his teeth, was a dare, a tease.

“It hasn’t worked out,” I said. “I was the orphan Patrick adopted, remember?”

“Yeah,” he said, exhaling cigarette smoke and studying the fringe on the umbrella above my head. “Rachel always told me that if it doesn’t work out, I should just convert everything to screenplays.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Because I believe in the integrity of the process.”

“So Rachel knows you’re a playwright,” I said, sipping my beer. I wanted to sound nonchalant, but I couldn’t help but wonder about the number of conversations they’d had, if they’d been to this bar before, and why she hadn’t told me.

Leo nodded.

“Has she seen you play?”

“Are we going to talk about Rachel all night? I could have just invited her.”

It was hurtful, and he knew it, because a second later, he reached across the table for my hand, and although I tried to wrestle it back into my lap, he held on to it, his long fingers wrapped around mine, exerting the same kind of pressure he did on everything. A little too hard, but easy to respect in its conviction.

“Were you two together?”

I don’t know why I asked, but I did. I asked because I needed to know.

“No,” he said, pushing his hair behind his ear. “Not my type. Plus, as far as I know—as far as everyone knows—she and Patrick have been doing something for a while.”

I didn’t want to push it further; it was, after all, the answer I wanted.

“Am I your type?” I asked, emboldened by the two beers I had drunk and the fact he was still holding my wrist, running his thumb across my skin, across its soft blue veins.

He didn’t answer, but leaned across the table and kissed me. Not gently, not the way you do at first, but big and hard, his hand in my hair. And it was that I couldn’t resist about Leo: the urgency, the disorder, the chaos, his unabashed enthusiasm for doing things differently. Not just differently from everyone around us, but differently from what I had always known: the timid advances of boys, the clammy hands in the car, the unanswered texts. It was like Leo’s attraction to me was expansive and hungry, like it might eat the table, the bar, my life. I wanted it to.

I watched him play that night, from the wings of the stage. The sound so loud, it transformed into noise—a banging and an aching. In the crowd, bodies collided frantically, but I barely spared a glance for what was happening in the dark of the room, fixated as I was on the way Leo’s hair fell into his eyes, the way a slow trickle of sweat spread down the front of his chest. And despite all that had happened that summer, that year, the devastating months around my father’s death, I thought of none of it in that moment. I thought only of Leo. Of his long torso and his meanness. Of the energy from the crowd and how my body was moving on its own, independent of me, to the sound.

Afterward, we crammed into the guitarist’s apartment, where the light was yellow and the air smoky. He had a balcony that overlooked the water and a tiny girlfriend, Mia, with wild, curly hair that she claimed she hadn’t brushed in six years. A claim I believed. When I went out on the balcony to escape the crush of people, the stale smell of cigarettes and liquor, Leo joined me, pushing his body against mine.