“Everything okay?” Jasper asks in a voice carefully shorn of concern.
Toby slams a bookcase with his open hand, and Jasper’s collection of European history texts rattles.
“Don’t touch me,” Toby whispers as his lover reaches for his arm.
The kid was his merry self this morning, but evidently this morning was a different universe. He loses contact with his own skin, gets so he can’t stand the lightest caress. His guitar is propped against the chair, but the metal stand has capsized and lies skeletal on the rug.
“What’s happening, baby?” Jasper asks.
“I don’t know,” Toby says. His face is flushed. “You tell me.”
“Is the practising not going well?”
“Blame music,” snaps Toby. “Blame the guitar competition.”
“I’m not blaming anything. I just want to find out what’s wrong.”
“You can’t help.”
“Then I won’t try.” This is something Jasper has learned — not to get pulled in where he’s not welcome. Besides, he has things to do, especially since it’s clear nothing has been done about supper, and he should call his sister out in Victoria who is turning forty today.
Toby tags along as Jasper moves into the kitchen, and then the story emerges, as Jasper knew it would.
“Who the hell do I think I am, going back to competition after all this time? Someone will be there who saw me nosedive in Paris. I couldn’t stand that, Jazz.”
Jasper peers in the fridge, finds the pot of soup nearly a week old, and sets it on the stove to heat up. He feels the boy press in and reaches back to clasp one of his hands, those pebbly, callused fingertips. Touch never fails; it’s what Toby needs to be reminded of.
“Are you afraid?” Jasper asks.
“Of course.”
“Because you don’t have to do it.”
“I sent in my application.”
“Un-send it. No shame in a change of mind.” Jasper hears the encouragement in his voice.
“Put my engine in reverse? Is that what you’re suggesting?”
The men face each other, and pretty soon Toby’s hands are sliding all over him, popping open Jasper’s shirt, burrowing between his legs, and they collapse to the ground in a slow-motion dance. The carpet that tattoos their knees is a fake kilim, courtesy of Klaus. If the old man could see them now.
They untangle to the sound of a kettle whistling in the apartment above. Jill calls, “All set,” and Miranda’s feet clatter across the floor. There is a long sigh of water pouring into a teapot. That rhythmic thump is the dog’s tail hitting the wall.
Jasper eyes his lover, who now lies on his back, naked and breathing evenly. Though he is nearly thirty, Toby has a face as unlined as a child’s and shaves no more than twice a week. Jasper rubs his own bristly chin: night and day.
Toby’s eyes flicker open, and he asks lazily, “Don’t you get tired of looking at me?”
“Never.”
Toby smiles and lifts himself to his feet all in one move, no creaking joints. Fourteen years younger; it makes a difference. Then he tosses his head, a gesture going back to a time when he wore dreadlocks. Upstairs, cutlery clinks against china and someone turns on the stereo: Edith Piaf, the little sparrow.
“Your soup is burning,” Toby says, stretching his arms so his fingertips tickle the low ceiling.
“Shit!” Jasper rises carefully, mindful of his lower back, and heads for the stove.
“I haven’t decided on my free choice,” Toby says, watching the soup rescue.
“What free choice?”
“After playing the required program, we get to choose a piece from our repertoire,” Toby says. “The kids go for flashy. I might be different.”
Jasper stirs thoughtfully. He understands that sex has changed nothing. “Tell me why you want to do this.”
Toby plucks a T-shirt and a pair of jeans from the dresser. “It’s an experiment, dropping baking powder into a glass of vinegar to see what happens.”
“I can tell you what happens, Toby.”
“But I need to see for myself.” Tugging his shirt over his lean torso, Toby says, “You understand that, Jazz.” There is a plea in his voice.
In those early days Toby played a Karl Honderich instrument, such a jewel, he’ll claim, but left somewhere on the Paris Metro during that explosive week. The luthier’s dead now, Toby likes to remind him, and many of the old boys are gone for good; Segovia’s ancient history and Bream’s too old to play in public.
Toby still can’t believe it might be over for him, too.
Jasper tastes the soup, a trifle charred. He grabs his own clothes off the floor and dresses, minus underwear. Upstairs the women croon along to “La Vie en rose” as if they were in some Left Bank dive — picture the bearded poet in the corner, cranked on absinthe.
“We haven’t had this conversation in years,” Jasper says. “I thought we were out of the woods.”
Toby bristles. “I’m getting old.”
Now Jasper laughs. “You’re twenty-nine.” And I’m forty-three, he might add, but doesn’t. “I saw this coming.”
Toby blinks. “Saw what coming?”
“Your need to prove yourself.”
“Really?” Toby likes to discuss his motivations.
“Remember how you felt after cleaning out Klaus’s house?” Toby’s face freezes, and Jasper understands that he’s onto something. “His carefully contained life scared hell out of you.”
Klaus recently moved himself to Lakeview Terrace. He may be a senior citizen with a touch of Parkinson’s plus the diabetes, but he’s managing well. The move is a great mystery to his son and Jasper.
“It sure as hell depressed me,” Toby says.
“Perhaps by entering the competition you’re proving you aren’t Klaus, or anything like him.”
“That’s a theory.”
Encouraged, Jasper continues. “You’d be up against some of the best musicians in the world.”
Toby offers a smile. “Perhaps I’m one of the best in the world.”
It is so tempting to offer the damning word were. You were among the best, Toby, as we all were something else.
After supper Toby flees outside for a smoke, though last week he claimed he’d quit for good. Jasper lifts the blind and sees the boy perching on the top step at the same time as one of the medics pops open the clinic’s rear door, heading for her own break. Pushing down her mask, she searches in her pocket for a light, cigarette already dangling from her lips. Where Jasper works, all guests and clients who enter the building must don masks and latex gloves, but once upstairs and cleared of obvious symptoms, they remove the paraphernalia — the risk of infection is still low. Tourists are keeping a wide berth of the city, and who can blame them, given media hysterics? The latest Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is packing up, and Wagner’s Ring Cycle played to half-empty houses. Yet the casualty list is still under thirty.
Jasper catches a glimpse of Toby’s jaw grinding molars to dental dust. The medic is speaking with animated gestures and sucks at her cigarette, then holds out her pack to Toby. Can he use another?
You bet.
Her