Contrary Motion Read online

  3

  BACK IN CHICAGO on Saturday, I drop Audrey at Milena’s house and hurry home to my Humboldt Park apartment to tidy up for Cynthia, who is stopping by after a typical weekend day at the office.

  I scoop up some stuffed animals and Polly Pocket pieces and dump them in Audrey’s big plastic toy box. I gather up loose sheets of paper on which she and her best friend, Natalie, have drawn their own board games using the Candy Land model, with places like “The Skunk Pach,” “The Secret Jayl,” and “Dragin Montin,” and I set them on top of the box. I make one pile out of the scattered newspapers, filled with dread-inducing stories about the “surge” in Iraq, and another pile of musical scores. I bag up seven empty Mountain Dew cans, revealing still more square inches of my carpet, which is the dark gray of certain bleach-resistant strains of mold. Around Audrey’s bed, I find several balls of her munchkin socks and a Dora the Explorer nightgown with what looks to be an ice cream stain on it. I throw all that into the laundry hamper.

  From under a thin layer of fresh junk mail on the dining room table, I uncover the letter from the St. Louis Symphony, with its finely embossed letterhead:

  Dear Matthew Grzbc,

  I am pleased to inform you that the Committee has approved your application. You are hereby invited to audition for the Orchestra’s Principal Harp Chair. Please prepare the enclosed repertoire.

  I tack the letter and the repertoire list to the corkboard above the desk in my bedroom, next to pictures of Cynthia: mugging wide-eyed excitement at our table before a Second City show; wrapped in a navy peacoat with a raspberry ski hat featuring a big pom, set to throw a snowball at the picture taker (me). In my favorite, she’s wearing a light blue top and blue dangly earrings, looking right into the camera, tilting her head to the side, her hair swept back behind one ear and straight down on the other side. Her expression is open, eyes pleased, with an undoubtedly natural smile. It’s an expression I haven’t seen so much from her lately.

  We met on the thirty-third floor of the IBM building, where I was playing solo at her firm’s holiday party. She requested any song by Tony Bennett, which made us laugh, and joked about my upcoming set at Hydrate, a well-known gay bar. When I told her I’d never been to Hydrate, she quickly said, “I didn’t mean to stereotype you!” I wasn’t bothered or surprised, since almost every other American harpist I know is either a woman or a gay man, and soon we were exchanging numbers.

  On our first date we went to the Art Institute. It was on a Thursday evening and the museum was free for locals, which may have been Cynthia’s first nod at my relative poverty. She has her BA in art history and answered my questions with joy, confidence, and, sometimes “no idea!” When a picture excited her, she bounced on her toes and leaned into me, which I found extremely affirming. In front of Picasso’s Crazy Woman with Cats, she said dryly, “Ah, that’s me,” and then laughed.

  Afterwards I suggested we go across the street to check out Orchestra Hall.

  “I’ll show you mine and you show me yours,” Cynthia said with a smile.

  Her apparent penchant for awkward sexual innuendo relaxed me by seeming to preempt any awkwardness of my own. But what really lifted the moment was that we both understood what she meant and were proud of the interests we were bringing to each other.

  Then when we reached the entrance, the gold handle on one of the front doors wouldn’t give.

  “Orchestra Hall!” I said loudly, with a flourish of my hand. “They keep it locked when not in use.”

  Still, we had enough momentum to make it through dinner at a steak house on Jackson. Things were going so well, I had to fight the impulse to flee before something went horribly wrong.

  Pushing our luck, we went for a nightcap at a State Street dive frequented by Chicago Symphony players. We became drunk and swapped fragmented personal histories. Cynthia described her difficult decision to give up art history grad school for a more practical legal career, and I commiserated from the starving-musician perspective. Then about fifteen feet from our booth, a fight broke out between a woman and one of the two men with whom she was standing at the bar. Her hands flew at this guy’s face and they tussled and slapped and grabbed each other until she pulled him onto the floor. The other man had to break them up.

  I was unsettled, but Cynthia took it in stride. After the troubled trio left, she pounded a fist on the tabletop and said, “We won’t have full equality until men and women engage in bar fights at the same rate!”

  At the end of the night, I kissed her cheek with aplomb. Not perfect by any means, but given that Milena and I met in college and didn’t really “date,” it’s the greatest pure date I have ever been on.

  Now, before I can finish tidying up, there’s a rapping at my door. She’s here. Cynthia.

  I let her in, a big smile on my face.

  “Cynthia,” I say. “It’s you!”

  “Hey,” she says, a bit subdued. Her eyes are tired and slip quickly from mine. She’s wearing jeans and a turtleneck sweater; her shoulder-length hair is pulled back into a short ponytail. She hugs me. “How are you?” she says.

  “Good, good,” I say.

  She pulls out of our embrace.

  This is the first time I’ve seen her since my father died, and I realize how odd my cheeriness must sound. I’m taken aback myself by how thoroughly my father’s death was out of my mind the moment I opened the door. My desire to please her has pushed away everything else.

  She walks toward the harp and absently touches the column.

  “I’m okay,” I add. “Okay as can be expected. How was work?”

  She gives me a searching glance. “Oh, you know,” she says. “Hey, can I use your bathroom?”

  I bow stiffly and extend a welcoming hand.

  “Thanks, sailor,” she says.

  Parsing Cynthia’s moods is something I still don’t have the hang of. “Sailor” is actually a curious remnant of our first date. The fight we witnessed morphed surprisingly in our couple lore until Cynthia started referring to my propensity for drunken brawls while on shore leave. This was soon followed by the occasional “Hey there, sailor” before she moved in for a kiss. I read on the Internet that couples with pet names for each other have stronger relationships, so overall I take it as affectionate, though it doesn’t sound especially so today.

  Propped against the wall next to the harp is a large square mirror, five feet tall, which I use with my students to work on hand position. Looking through the harp, into the mirror, I see myself in jeans and a black T-shirt. My neck and shoulders are tense like I’m trying to balance an egg on my cube-shaped head. My expression suggests I am a worried robot.

  I turn away and discover Audrey’s plastic, eight-seater Barbie “adventure van,” stuffed with a few plastic mermaids in seashell brassieres, emerging from beneath the coffee table. The mermaids are built on a larger scale and protrude out of the van’s sunroof. I wonder if Cynthia has already noticed the plastic van and if my putting it away now will read as unremarkable or as fussy. Actually, Cynthia doesn’t seem to care how clean things are, has never commented on my sketchy neighborhood, and is apparently unfazed by the existence of my daughter, yet when her mood slips I sometimes start to wonder what she’s not saying. Is she offended that I didn’t invite her to the funeral?

  Now she walks out of the bathroom and, on her way to the kitchen, she takes in the fact that I’m still standing exactly where she left me. I hear her opening cupboard doors and know she’ll have to drink from my last clean glass—the “Call Before You Dig” hotline coffee mug I picked up at the Salvation Army on Milwaukee Avenue. She runs tap water into it and, still drinking, wanders into the dining room. Then she sets the mug on the Formica-topped table, and assesses me as the man who is still where he was.

  “You are a strange person, Matt,” she says, not unkindly.

  “And you’re beautiful,” I say.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Oh, yes, you are.”

  �
�Are you hungry?” she says.

  “For what?”

  “Food. Do they have such a thing on your planet?”

  “I don’t know. It’s after five, isn’t it?”

  “Let’s go to Arturo’s,” she says. “I feel like I haven’t eaten for days.”

  “All right, sure.”

  She’s definitely not happy. Maybe she wants to break up with me, but she can’t right now because my father just died.

  I put on my brown hoodie, and we hop in Cynthia’s green Mini Cooper and tool over to Arturo’s, a Mexican diner, and get an imitation-wood booth by a window with a tiny cactus on the sill. Behind the long counter, an impassive man with a shiny face tongs up the meat that’s sizzling on a huge griddle. We’re the only gringos present. I bobble my head inanely for a few measures to the Mexican Top 40 playing on the jukebox. Something about mujeres encantadas and no puedo nada. A dark-haired waitress takes our orders—a relationship-death burrito for me, a get-me-away-from-this-guy torta milanesa for Cynthia.

  Cynthia’s been quiet since we left the apartment. So after the waitress puts a sangria in front of each of us, I decide to put us out of our misery. “What’s up?” I ask. “You seem worried about something.”

  She sips her drink, sets it down, and smears the condensation on the glass with her forefinger. Without looking up at me, she says, “Work is bad.”

  “Busy?”

  “You know the main partner in my group—Dan Whitaker?”

  “The guy who says, ‘It’s not about the lawyer, it’s about the client’?”

  She snorts a rueful laugh and rubs the center of her forehead. “Yeah.” She pulls a napkin out of the dispenser and starts folding it like she’s making a paper football. Without looking up, she says, “He made a pass at me.”

  “Really?” I say.

  “Tuesday night he came by my office, late.” She folds the napkin, turns it, folds. “Nine o’clock. Pushes my door closed. Tells me what a great job I’m doing. I thank him for being supportive, blah, blah.” Her voice is steady but strained. She finishes what does turn out to be a napkin football and wedges it under her drink. Big exhale. Her eyes look up but seem to bounce off my head like I’m wearing a space helmet.

  “He did some stuff,” she finally goes on. “Kissed me, grabbed my breasts like a twelve-year-old. It was so stupid. I told him to get away. I tried to get out of my chair, but he was pinning the armrests to my desk.”

  “Scum,” I say.

  “I finally shoved his head away from me. He said he was sorry. Can you believe that?” She laughs in disgust. She removes her napkin football, lifts her glass, then puts it down without drinking. She rotates her glass with her hands.

  “The prick,” I say. “I’ll annihilate him. Where does he even fucking live? Does he even have a house? I’ll go there and fucking—”

  “I hate being small,” Cynthia says, ignoring my nutty outburst. She sets her mouth grimly, on her own track of thought.

  “Cynthia, I’m really sorry,” I say. “This is horrible. Are you going to press charges?”

  “In a perfect world, I would do nothing but press charges.” This apparently allows her to finally look me in the eye. “But I’m coming up for partner in the fall, and guess who writes my main review?”

  “So then don’t you have to say something?”

  “I don’t know yet. There’s a compliance committee in the firm that’s supposed to handle harassment things confidentially, but it’s no panacea. I’ve got to figure out what to do.”

  She puts her head in her hands. She holds tensely still for seconds, then she lifts her face again.

  “I just wanted you to know,” she says, “so it’s not another thing coming between us, okay?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “I’m done talking about it now.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thanks, sailor,” she says, and lets herself sip sangria.

  I look down at my menu and pretend to consider it. I’d love to noodle out exactly what she needs right now, but I’m consumed by decoding her reference to another thing coming between us.

  One possible referent is our less-than-outstanding sex life. For most of my romantic life, I’ve been a bit self-conscious in the sack, a bad recipe as everyone knows, and these days, I have to admit, I can barely get hard. The first few times with Cynthia actually weren’t bad. I was so deprived and Cynthia was so attractive that I was pretty close to normal, though sometimes Cynthia got chafed and red. After that she started bringing fruit-flavored lubricants into our bedroom and I started reverting to form. And though now my wambly erections take a noticeable amount of work, neither of us has said anything about them. We just put our heads down and keep going at it.

  I realize that we’ve already ordered, so I put my menu behind the napkin dispenser.

  “All right,” I say. “Okay, then. Well, speaking of stuff not coming between us, I’ve got the St. Louis repertoire, so I might have to—”

  “That’s all right,” she says, waving a hand. “I’m swamped with depositions.”

  Our food shows up and she dives in, which I trust is a good sign.

  “But, yeah,” I say. “I was going to say, I still want to make time for you.”

  “You don’t have to make time for me,” she says sharply, despite a mouthful of food. “Sorry—that came out wrong.”

  I laugh. “No, what I said was totally wrong—I mean, I meant it, but it was one of those dumb things to say, wasn’t it? Like saying ‘I’ll be there for you.’ ”

  “What’s wrong with saying ‘I’ll be there for you’?”

  “Nothing. I mean there’s nothing wrong with meaning it.”

  She sets down her utensils and splays her fingers: “Look, I know how important your music is. I’m rooting for you. You deserve something like this.” Her voice is charged with tension.

  “Well, thanks, but I feel weird about wanting St. Louis in the first place.”

  “You don’t have to say that.”

  As much as I want to win the audition, I periodically glimpse the havoc this would wreak on my relationships. We’ve talked about a firm in St. Louis that does her sort of work, and she seemed game though not thrilled at the prospect. And then there’s moving away from Audrey, a possibility I repress more thoroughly. I fork up refried beans. They’re like pureed lead.

  “We both have to do what we have to do,” she adds, “and it’s going to be fucking okay.”

  4

  TRYING TO POSE as Cynthia’s knight and protector, I get the tab, though I’m making a direct withdrawal from my grocery money.

  We pull up to my two-flat apartment building, which displays a blue “For Peace” sign in the tiny front yard, duly tagged by the Latin Kings, possibly not as a way of endorsing peace in Iraq and Afghanistan. My landlord, T.R., lives upstairs and is a tireless (and fearless) political yard-sign poster. Just over a month ago, Greg Harris, our state representative and a friend of T.R.’s, introduced a bill that would recognize same-sex marriage in Illinois. The sign promoting that bill has been stolen twice and is currently unreplaced.

  T.R. sits outside in a camp chair on the small porch at the top of a wooden staircase that runs up the front of the house to his second-floor apartment. He’s a retired commodities broker whose “buy low, sell high” ethos has put him on gentrification’s bleeding edge. Next to him is a small table strewn with dishes. Charles, his much younger friend, stands at the railing with his shoulders slumped and his arms crossed, smoking a cigarette.

  In a theatrical voice, Cynthia calls, “Hi, T.R.! Is that you, Charles?” Her good cheer seems to have come from nowhere, and I admire her ability to conjure it.

  “Hello,” T.R. drawls in his soft, hoarse, old guy’s voice, like Winnie the Pooh gone to seed.

  Cynthia grins and doesn’t seem to notice that Charles hasn’t responded. His tag for me is “the breeder below.” He might resent that I’ve taken his place in T.R.’s two-flat, the consequence of a
temporary falling-out he had with T.R. They may have been lovers at one point, and could still be lovers, but T.R. seems more of a father figure to Charles, who now has his own apartment a few blocks away.

  T.R. often lets young men crash for days or weeks in the house’s attic—Charles calls this place “T.R.’s Home for Wayward Boys.” Lately, it’s been Max, a tall, thin aspiring actor with short spiked blond hair. Before Max it was Seth, a UIC student whose parents had cut him off, and before Seth it was Rich. One night Rich wandered down to my apartment, told me he was unsure about whether he should have been embodied in this world, asked for a shot of hard liquor “for the road,” and went back upstairs. T.R. always asks me if it’s okay when he brings in someone new, and I always say that it’s his house. Cynthia thinks I’m naïve for imagining T.R.’s motives are paternal rather than sexual, though of course we could both be right. I was just happy to find a cheap place with a harp-tolerant landlord, plus no stairs between my back door and the alley, a rare harp-moving convenience.

  “What’s for dinner?” Cynthia calls up to T.R.

  “Thai, my dear,” T.R. responds.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Charles says. “He’s eaten it all.”

  “Hey, I got the list for St. Louis,” I say. “I’m going all out until the end of May, so let me know if it gets to be too much.”

  “Are you going to play tonight?” T.R. asks without excitement. “Charles and I would love to hear something.”

  “No, we wouldn’t,” Charles says. But he does laugh afterwards.

  “Sounds like someone has had too much coconut milk,” Cynthia says.

  Seeing how happy she is to talk to Charles and T.R., I look at her as if to ask, Should we invite them down for a drink?

  “Don’t invite us down for a drink,” Charles says, as he ashes over the railing. He’s looking over the tops of the two-flats across the street.

  Cynthia laughs. “You’re the best, Charles,” she says, and she takes my hand and squeezes it as we head into my apartment.