The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(85)

Our Bodies Remember


SUNY Geneseo accepted him. He guessed his application essay had clinched it—the one and only time he would play the Lancaster shooting card. He wrote of being a survivor, of second chances, the memory of those killed being the motivation for what he wanted to achieve in life. It was humble, moving and brilliant. And he meant none of it.

He shied from dorm life, and took a small apartment off campus. Alone. He wasn’t there to make friends. The less people knew about him, the better. He erased Lancaster from his resume and if asked, told people he had transferred from Buffalo State.

The tuition was less here than at Lancaster. By living frugally and working hard, he could spread the last of his grandfather’s money across this semester, and into the fall if necessary. The courses he needed to graduate were mostly general education credits. His schedule was a mongrel of math and science, plus the advanced stagecraft required for a BA in theater arts. And for his aching soul, he enrolled in both piano and classical guitar.

Which was how he met Miles and Janey Kelly.

Miles was a professor of piano and voice at Geneseo. Janey was a clinical psychologist at the college’s counseling center. She also played piano and sang, and both she and Miles were active at the Geneseo Playhouse.

The relationship worked perfectly—this childless musical theater couple in their fifties and this withdrawn young man with no interest in the party life of college. The Kellys took him in and Miles became Erik’s new mentor. Not a Leo Graham by any means, nor did he possess any of Kees’s flamboyant style. Yet his edges lined up against Erik’s with a satisfying click. They collaborated seamlessly at the playhouse. They ran together almost every night, shot baskets on the weekend, went for beers and talked themselves dry. Despite the thirty-year age difference, they got along like brothers, and Erik felt at home in Miles’s undemanding company.

The Kellys also gave music back to Erik. Janey was avidly social and a superb cook. The doors of the spacious brick house on Ivy Street were always open on weekends, the living room and kitchen filled with their theater friends. Drinks and dinner gave way to long jam sessions: guitars, upright basses, ukuleles, harmonicas, someone showed up with a banjo once. Erik was usually the youngest guest present, but he stayed all night, playing, absorbing, learning, losing himself in the keys and the strings.

Sometimes the parties had a slightly younger demographic, which gave him the opportunity to get laid. As a twenty-three-year-old emerging from a stretch of self-inflicted celibacy, he was dying for it. But he was wary of encounters with girls his age. They were looking for love. He wanted none of that—the idea of opening himself to another relationship and leaning into its joy alternately terrified and exhausted him. He felt no pride in his blunt quests to blow a load and hit the road, but such were the hard facts of life.

And who could I love now anyway?

Women of a certain age suited his needs better. His most regular and reliable booty call was a married friend of Janey’s. Not his finest moment, either, but it allowed him physical connection while avoiding the peril of becoming emotionally invested. He didn’t have to look for an excuse to leave after sex. He was the excuse.

They liked him though, those older women. They shivered and moaned under him. They were lavish with their praise, letting him know in no uncertain terms what he was doing to them. He was wild. They swore they never had it so good in their lives.

He didn’t care.

Sex remained an unpredictable pleasure. Sometimes he was fine, other times, too many for his liking, the horrible anxiety flooded him when it was over. He wanted sex, outright jonesed for it, but he hated when the wolves came afterward. He hated even more being in the throes of the act and struck with a wicked compulsion to scratch his partner’s skin or pull hard on her hair. To have “hurt me” on the tip of his tongue. To want the bit of pain nestled gently in his teeth, clamping down just hard enough.

He kissed differently, he noticed. No slow, gentle buildup with fingertips caressing the woman’s mouth. He got straight to it and, frankly, past it as soon as possible. Just a checkpoint. First base. He didn’t want to kiss. It was too intimate, his mouth a vulnerable gateway to the depths of his wounded, shivering soul.

The mindless, heartless coupling was his sole vice. He didn’t smoke anymore—cigarettes only reminded him of Daisy. He couldn’t afford coke and even if he could, he wanted nothing more to do with her cruel high. He would forever equate cocaine as a wintry bitch, cloaked in wanton destruction, full of empty promises she could make everything all right.



*



His mother had sold the house and moved in with Fred, so Erik stayed in Geneseo the summer of 1994, working at the playhouse and coaching basketball at the Y’s summer camps.

Daisy’s calls had tapered off while he was still living at home, and she began writing instead. Simple postcard bulletins. The missives then followed him to Geneseo—Christine must have given her his address. Sometimes he read them, sometimes he didn’t, depending on what kind of mental state he was in. The Philadelphia postmark let him know she was still with the Pennsylvania Ballet—just enough information to process. Opened or not, he threw out the letters afterward. To spare himself the pain of lingering over and dissecting her words, he saved nothing.

Then one night she left a message on his machine. His mind nowhere near a good state, he stopped the playback after hearing, “Erik, it’s Daisy,” and deleted it. Then he called his mother and chewed her out for giving Daisy his phone number.