Submit (Songs of Submission #3)(3)

Things between us hadn’t been perfect before I left. I had no idea it was as clear to him as it had been to me. I opened the case. My viola was in there, exactly as I’d left it, with the bow tucked in the lid and a pocket with extra strings and a pick I liked to use when I was feeling experimental. “Those last few months,” I said, “I was very lonely. I could have used this.”

He sat on a box. “I think hiding it was a mistake.”

I should have been angry. I should have smacked the case across his face and run out with my instrument. But I couldn’t. It all seemed so long ago. I touched the wood, running my finger over the curves. The gut core strings were dried out and would probably snap before I finished a song, and the fingerboard still had little grease spots from my hours playing.

“That was really dickish of you, Kevin.” I pulled the viola from the case. “You’re an unscrupulous ass.”

“Is that why you left me?”

I felt a sinkhole open in my diaphragm. I didn’t want to discuss it. I had just wanted to break up with him, so I did. How did I get manipulated into going to his studio just to discuss an eighteen-month-old hurt?

Because I’d done it wrong. I’d done what was right for me, telling myself I’d just do without all the discussing and crying. I was just going to avoid all the emotional illness, but there were two of us, and Kevin hadn’t been part of the decision.

I popped the bow from the clasps. The case was cheap, student-grade. The viola, however, was professional quality, purchased at a West Hollywood pawn shop for my fifteenth birthday by my father, who approved of me.

I tucked the viola under my chin and ran my fingers over the strings. They were loose. I tightened a couple of pegs, but the sound would only be barely acceptable. Barely. “I left you because I needed you,” I said.

“That makes no sense.”

I drew the bow over the strings and adjusted the tension, waiting for one to break in a snapping curlicue, but it didn’t happen. I got the tension close and played something he’d know, dragging that first note across the bow as if summoning it from our collective past.

“You weren’t capable of being needed.” I played the next note.

“Don’t.” His whisper came out husky, as if the command had caught in his throat.

I didn’t listen to him, but played the song my mind would never have recalled but my body knew.

Kevin didn’t sleep well. Unlike workaholics and TV addicts, he wanted desperately to sleep a full night, and unlike most insomniacs, he fell soundly to sleep at a decent hour. But about four times a week, he awoke in the early hours of the morning with a pounding, anxious pain in his chest. I woke up when he shifted. I held him, stroked his hair, hummed, but nothing put him back to sleep except me playing the viola. We had a tune we shared, a lullaby I wrote for him with my fingers and arm. I never wrote it down because it became as real as the bond between us, and it ceased to exist when that bond broke.

So I played it for him in that first0draft installation that looked more like a storage room than a homage to a breakup. And he watched me with his butt leaning on the table, and his ankles and arms crossed. I let the last note drift off. The song had no end; I’d always just played it until his breathing became level and regular.

“Sounds like shit,” I said.

“I don’t know what you were doing, playing that.”

“Maybe you can tell me what you were doing putting my shit in a museum without telling me.”

“I was scared.”

I laid the instrument in its case. “Of?”

“The piece was happening, and I wasn’t fighting about it.”

“I want my jeans back.” This was ridiculous. I didn’t give a rat’s ass about my f**king jeans. I just wanted to provide him with the exact thing he didn’t want. I wanted to fight him.

“The whole thing is sold. Even the books and catalogs are sold out. You’d be after me and some collector on a Spanish island. Our lawyers would have lawyers.”

“This is not fair,” I whispered, stroking the brittle strings of my lost viola.

“I know. None of it was.”

I knew he didn’t just mean his piece. He meant everything from the minute we met to the moment I finished playing our lullaby. I felt emotionally dehydrated and raw at the edges.

“I should go.” I snapped my case shut. “Thanks for not putting this in the piece.”

I turned to walk out, and like a cat, he jumped in front of me, putting his hands on my cheeks. “You’re happy? With this new guy?”

“Jonathan. You know his name.”

“Are you happy?”

“It’s casual.”

“You? Tweety Bird? I don’t believe it.”

I’d forgotten that. He called me his canary when he was feeling warm and affectionate. How convenient for me to overlook that when he felt confronted in the slightest, or distant, or overwhelmed, he called me Tweety Bird. I never knew if he even realized the name he used for me said more about him than it did about me.

“Take your hands off my face,” I said. His fingers fell off my cheeks as if they melted away. “I don’t mean to be callous, Kevin. I don’t want to fall into life unintentionally any more. Jonathan has a purpose.” His eyebrows went up half a tick. That had to be answered. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”