The Man I Love (32 page)

Miles called Erik one night in late summer of 1998, full of gossip and intrigue. The technical theater director at Brockport State had just resigned in disgrace, in a scandal involving not one, but two freshmen girls, and a boatload of video tapes.

“Video,” Erik said, eyebrows raised. “Impressive. Did you see any of it?”

“No, goddammit.”

The college was desperate to distance itself, sweep out the closet before any skeletons could take residence. They needed to regroup and replace as soon as humanly possible.

“And, let me guess,” Erik said. “Distract everyone’s attention away from the video tape to a big main stage production.”

“Big,” Miles said. “Big-ass, I believe was the expression used.”

Big-ass productions required big-ass stagecraft, but big-ass applicants were proving hard to find. “So I said I knew this guy down in Brockport,” Miles said. “No formal teaching experience—”

“Try no experience,” Erik said.

“But he’s good. A natural with kids—”

“Kids. Not college students. Kids.”

“And a born leader.”

“Miles, are you saying my ass is big?”

“I’m saying, is your resume up to date?”

“I’m incredibly flattered. Thank you for thinking of me, Miles. You’re a prince. And they will never give me the job.”

“Come up,” Miles said. “Come up and visit us. Janey misses you. And go interview for the hell of it. Chance of a lifetime, Fish. What’s the worst that could happen? They say ‘Thanks but no thanks,’ and you go back to Geneseo.”

He went for the hell of it. And he got the job.

“I got the part,” he said. This was the theater, after all.

“Someone must have liked your ass,” Miles said.

Packing his possessions into a jumble of boxes, duffel bags and laundry baskets, Erik felt a new man. After a year of intensive therapy he was seeing Diane just once a month. His regular doctor had been dialing down the dosage of the antidepressants. He was nearly off them and any episodes of anxiety were few and far between. He was feeling good. Head shrunk, almost med-free and shit together. Things were interesting again. Food tasted good, sleep was a friend. He was back in shape and ready for a change.

He still felt woefully underqualified for the position, but as he toured the performing arts complex and got to know his colleagues, he couldn’t help but feel a rejuvenated excitement. People were happy he was there. Grateful he was there. Miles and Janey fussed around, helping him get settled. He had an office. And a business card, for crying out loud:
Erik Fiskare, Adjunct Professor of Technical Theater.

“So now it’s Professor Asshole,” Miles said, as they went for a run in Corbett Park.

“Adjunct asshole. Sounds kind of sexy.”

“Sounds like a medical condition I wouldn’t want.”

Brockport is a village in the town of Sweden. Erik got an ancestral kick out of that. He liked the feel of the place. Beautiful Victorian houses nestled on tree-lined streets and the stately Erie Canal gave Brockport its old world charm and quaint village air. State College brought a buzzing modern energy to downtown, where Erik had his apartment on Apple Street.

He moved from Geneseo in a hurry, dove straight into the new job and never completely unpacked. He didn’t hang any pictures or buy himself mugs or a bathmat. A skeleton kitchen was good enough. He made sure the windows facing the street were decently covered and hooked up the stereo and TV. The rest was just floors and walls and a drafting table.

The fall semester was a blur of activity. The theater director pitched
Noises Off
as the main stage production. Erik wasn’t familiar with it. He picked up a copy of the script at the library, took it home to read and blanched. It was a British play-within-a play comedy, dependent on a thousand technical cues and effects. This was no open the curtain, close the curtain affair. He’d have to build a set on a turntable, a set to be viewed from both sides.

“I’m screwed,” he said to Miles on their daily run. “This is way too big an ass.”

“Then you’ll have to build big pants.”

In his small, Spartan apartment, Erik paced, thought and panicked.
What would Leo Graham do?

“He’d get to work,” he said. He talked to himself a lot lately.

He made tea, sat down and read the play again. A thought tapped his shoulder and he reached for a pad of paper. An idea sat in his lap. He filled page after page with notes and sketches. The high of creative flow began to creep through his veins. He touched the groove. Took a careful taste. Put one foot on the bedrock of his own capability and tested it. Then the other foot. His talent felt solid beneath him. He trusted it. He could pull this off.

The shop had been a disaster area when Erik arrived, a disorganized mess with safety violations warranting public floggings under Leo’s regime. Erik cleaned house and began to bring order from chaos. He identified his superstars, his weak links and his filler, and from them he crafted a team. Within a month, he had if not a well-oiled machine, then a respectable jerry-rigged motor humming along with an energetic purpose. The shop came alive. Erik came alive, more alive than he’d been in years.

They pulled it off.
Noises Off
was a smash and kudos rained down on Erik for the set design.

He had arrived.

He collapsed and slept through most of the winter break, reviving for Christmas with his brother. Pete had married at the tender age of twenty-four and had an infant daughter who decided her uncle was a custom-made mattress. Every afternoon Erik napped on the couch with his niece on his chest, her possessive pink fist curled around his finger.

“You’re so her bitch,” Pete said aloud, tossing a blanket over them. He kissed his daughter’s head, then Erik’s head, and tiptoed out of the living room, leaving them to drift off in the light of the Christmas tree.

Refreshed and restored, Erik drove over to Brockport State one January morning, a few days before the student body was due back. He wanted time alone to plan classes and putter around.

He was surprised to find the theater doors open. The work lights were on, throwing a harsh florescent wash on the stage. Someone was in here. A prickling wariness made the hair on his arms stand up and his eyes search for the nearest exit. Caution turned to curiosity when he heard a piano being played: the Bach Prelude in C.

C major, the friendliest key.

Killers didn’t play Bach.

His heart still thumping, he walked down the aisle and up the side steps to the stage. Now a voice was rising over the rolling arpeggios of the piano. The Gounod “Ave Maria” in a rich, clear soprano.

A girl is in here.

The hair on the back of Erik’s neck was up now, but not with fear. Intrigued, he made his way to the stage right wings, where the concert baby grand was kept.

A slim, black woman sat at the keys. Long, cornrowed hair gathered back into a thick ponytail. Her shoulders rolled like waves as she leaned arms and hands into the music. Her head tilted and dipped as she sang, riding the phrases out. Erik stared. And listened. For underneath this woman’s full, sweet voice, he heard another voice speaking to him. A little nudge in the side. A hand pulling at the tail of his shirt.

Who is that?

The woman sang the last “Amen” over the last fluid arpeggio. She lifted her hands, sustained the final note with the pedal and lifted her toe.

Erik let out the breath he had been holding, and a long, slow whistle with it. The woman’s head flicked back over her shoulder. A second of guarded surprise in her face, then a softening. A little bit more of her turned on the bench. Her eyes looked him up and down. Her mouth curved into a smile.

“Hello.”

* * *

By her own admission, Melanie Winter came from nothing. She grew up in the Langfield Homes in one of the poorest parts of Buffalo—“Buffa-low, baby, about as low as you can go.” Her father worked double shifts at the Trico plant, making windshield wipers until he dropped dead of a heart attack when Melanie was ten.

Her mother went out to work driving a bus, leaving Melanie and her sister in the care of their seamstress grandmother. Money was scarce. Discipline was strict. (“Fly swatter, baby, right on the back of the calf—you don’t want to feel it twice.”) The Winter girls were raised on tough love and pride. And music.

“Music saved me,” Melanie said, her hand stroking the keys of the baby grand. Erik leaned on the piano’s lid, chin in hands, listening. They had been talking for half an hour now. “Church choir first. Then Gramma bartered sewing for piano lessons. Recitals, school plays and shows, they saved me.”

Her mother didn’t live to see Melanie graduate from high school and go to the Eastman School of Music on a full scholarship. Her grandmother died shortly after, leaving her life savings to her granddaughters. Melanie’s sister took her money and ran, heading west to Chicago. Melanie, on her own in Rochester, hoarded her nest egg and took nearly eight years to earn her degree while working, keeping both soul and body alive. She gave piano lessons, voice lessons, and supplemented with any other kind of work she could find. She wasn’t too proud to sling hash. Wherever a community theater struggled, or whenever a school play was in need of help, she was there.

Now thirty-two, this position in Brockport’s theater department was her crowning achievement. But like Erik, she was feeling a bit of a fraud. “You know what I mean? How in the hell did I pull this off, and how soon are they going to find out I don’t have a clue how to teach at a university level?”

Erik, just past twenty-seven, knew exactly what she meant. He told her first about his own dubious means of getting the job, his own fears of being exposed as an interloper, and then went on to describe the fall semester and its accomplishments. “You definitely feel like a freshman again,” he said. “You keep looking around for the guy in charge and realizing it’s you. But you know more than you think you do. And if you don’t know it, you make it up.”

“Make it up. Sounds like a plan. I’ll just act like I know what the hell I’m doing. And it’s theater,” Melanie said, shrugging. “We’re in the business of making it up.”

Erik smiled, his eyes sweeping over her smooth, high forehead and her slanting cheekbones. She reminded him of Aisha Johnson, the
Powaqqatsi
queen, gunned down at age twenty. Something was stirring in him, an interest he hadn’t felt in months. Or years? A yearning to touch the energy of someone’s mind. A desire to step out of the dark and into the light of another human.

“Word on the street is they want to do
Oklahoma!
for the spring main stage production,” Melanie said. “To do
Oklahoma!
as my maiden voyage? You know how much vocal work that’s going to take? I think I’m going to be sick.”

“If I can build a set for
Noises Off
out of the gate, you can do
Oklahoma!
And you won’t do it alone.”

She smiled. “Well, I know I’ll like having Miles Kelly in the orchestra pit. And I think I’ll like knowing you’re around to talk me off a ledge.”

Him of all people, talking someone off a ledge. Erik had to smile back. With some reluctance, he took his elbows off the piano lid and straightened up. “I have to go get some stuff done. But it was really nice talking to you.”

“I enjoyed it too. I’m going to just sit and play a while. Will it bother you while you’re working?”

“Not at all.”

She gave a little wave of her hand, and then turned back to the piano. As he puttered around backstage, he listened as she went through an eclectic mix of songs from Broadway shows, old standards, a pop tune or two, and then shifted back to classical music. He was up on the catwalk, pulling lanterns off the upstage bar when she started playing the Bach Prelude in F Minor.

Daisy’s prelude.

His hands froze. His head lifted, tilted toward the music. Out of the past it came, those solemn bass notes underneath the rising chords. Floating up to him on his perch over the stage, not in a painful onslaught but a gentle wisp of smoky memory, wreathing around his head.

Do a triple.

Watch this, Dave.

O mio dio, Margarita, you naughty thing…

He waited for sadness, for anger, for any of the emotions typically attached to those years. They didn’t come. He was being pulled in another direction now. Erik crossed his arms on the railing of the catwalk, leaning out a little to look at Melanie at the piano. The curve of her back, the roll and caress of her hands on the keys.

Her head lifted then, and she saw him. She stopped playing and smiled. “There you are,” she said.

Gazing back, Erik raised the fingers of one hand, showing his palm to her, then slowly let them drop again.

Here I am…

Melanie indiscriminately called everyone “baby.”

Within a week of meeting, Erik was caught up tight in a crush. Crushed to a giddy rubble. The high of being smitten hit his long-sober, intolerant brain like a line of cocaine. He woke with Melanie all over his mind. He drove to work thinking about her vitality and enthusiasm, her terrific, full-throated laugh. Finding ridiculous excuses to pass by her classes in the auditorium or the Black Box, he lurked in the shadows, watching. He admired her teaching and how she kept order—shrouding strict discipline in warm, often self-deprecating humor. From the stories Melanie told him of her childhood, Erik thought he could detect her grandmother’s influence.

“Minus the fly swatter,” he said.

Melanie held up a finger. “I have one in the office. They better not test me, baby, I will use it.”

In their free time, she coaxed him to the piano with her, waving a book of four-hand duets which they picked through. She even got him to sing with her. It was something he’d never feel he was good at, but if it meant his leg and hip could be cozied up to Melanie’s on the piano bench, he’d sing his face off.

When he wasn’t teaching, Erik was driving his team of stagehands in building a myriad of sets for
Oklahoma!
Besides the landscape backdrops, they needed house fronts with working doors, picket fences with workable gates. They built cabin walls, barn walls, a surrey with the fringe on top. They devised trick knife blades and host of other props.

“Be aware,” Miles said privately to Erik. “You’re going to have to rig a gunshot blast in the second act. Aunt Eller fires off a rifle.”

“I saw that,” Erik said, touched by Miles’s forethought. “I’ll be all right.”

He also had to rig up a bit of business for the dream ballet which ended the first act. In the midst of the dancing, to a specific cue in the music, a veil had to fall from the sky. He came up with a mechanism to attach to one of the lighting bars and he picked his most musical stagehand to man it. But the first time they tried it out, the bit of white voile drifted about, floating everywhere except where it needed to be. Hilarity ensued as the dancers tried to catch it.

Melanie suggested fishing weights sewn into the hem of the veil. Those weren’t readily available but Erik got some small washers and Melanie sewed them in place with the swift competence of a well-trained needlewoman. They tried the scene again and this time the veil slammed straight down to the floor.

“Well that ain’t romantic, baby,” Melanie said.

Finally, after much trial and error, the veil was released and floated perfectly into the action below. Wild applause in the theater. Melanie gave a whoop and jumped onto Erik’s back, wrapping him in arms and legs, her full-throated laugh against his ear.

Oklahoma!
was a triumph. Full house after full house, standing ovation after standing ovation.

A few days later, after the stage was struck, the sets broken down, the props stored and the costumes dry-cleaned, Erik and Melanie went out for a drink.

“You mean like a date,” Melanie said to his invitation. “Or just a do?”

“A date,” Erik said.

She looked at him a moment, arms crossed. “I’ve never dated a white man.”

“Neither have I.”

She clucked her tongue, planted her palm square in his chest and pushed him away. “You are adorable. Pick me up at seven.”

Erik whistled as he showered and shaved. It wasn’t until he was tucking in his shirt tails that he realized today was the nineteenth of April. Seven years since the shootings. Where would he have been at this time of the night? Probably in the waiting room of the hospital. Asleep.

He pondered that as he buckled his belt and filled his pockets: cash, wallet, keys. He paused, the flattened penny in the palm of his hand. Troubled, he sighed and jiggled it in his loose fist.

“You know, James,” he said. “I think I’m gonna fly solo tonight.”

He went to his bedside table drawer and took out the blue leather case that held Joe Bianco’s purple heart. He flipped open the cover and lifted out the inset.

“This is the most symbolically wrong place I can think to put you,” he said, laughing as he placed the penny in the bottom of the case. “So do me a favor and keep it entre nous. All right?”

He replaced the inset, covering the penny with the medal. Then he shut the case and left.