Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

“People I know , Drew.” His face stilled itself long enough to shoot me one of his complicated, devastating looks: part annoyance, part sarcasm, part glee that he’d caught me saying what I really thought. “I’ll do it, if you don’t think I’d embarrass you.”

And so the die was cast.

He walked out with Dr. Zeller’s business card in his pocket and both of our leftovers in Styrofoam boxes. He was eating plenty despite his meager paycheck because he got free food at the dinner theater, but every night he had to choose between chicken à la king and Lake Superior whitefish.

I stayed behind to pay the bill, and as I waited for the busboy to come back I pressed my cheek to the dirty, cold glass of the window beside me. I felt like I needed to wake myself up. I had just risked my career on his ability to be Peter again, to jump back into himself, and I strongly doubted he could do it.

The next time we met for dinner was before the Art Institute event. I had more important things to do, but I’d been in earlier to see that my interns were on task, and I wanted to make sure Peter was ready and calm. The Berghoff was right around the corner, and I knew neither of us would get a chance to eat the shrimp and strawberries at the reception. He’d been down two weeks earlier to record at the studio, and I’d been relieved how good he was, at least without an audience. I’d invited him over then for dinner with Carlos, who was still hanging around to see what further damage he could inflict on my psyche, but Peter had an audition in Milwaukee with the Kinnikinnick Players for Night of January 16th . He hadn’t gotten the part.

Tonight Peter looked skinnier and pale and had a soft stubble he might have been growing for insulation, the way he sat there in his coat and hat, his jaw shaking against the cold. To put it delicately, he looked like a few friends I had in the early 1990s who are not with us anymore. I got the waitress to bring us some tea as soon as we sat down. He held the cup, letting it warm his hands, but didn’t drink any. It was all over the news that the Berghoff would be closing in a couple of months. We’d stood outside in the cold for forty minutes just to get a table. People around us were taking pictures, touching the menus as if they were the faces of dying lovers.

“I went to your shrink,” he said. “Twice. You didn’t tell me she was beautiful. Like Juliette Binoche. And we’re very hopeful.” He was warming up enough to lay his woolly hat on the table.

“Great,” I said. I couldn’t keep from staring at his brow and cheekbones, which stuck out sharply from his face, his skin stretched over them, shiny and translucent. He went on and on about the therapy, about opening himself up to pain, about locating his core. I barely listened.

There’s one thing I still remember him saying, though. At one point he put down his fork and he leaned across to me, as if I had all the answers. “I mean, why do I even feel this need to act ? It’s weird, right? We’re living in this terrible world with wars and broken hearts and starvation, but some of us are compelled to make art, like that’s supposed to help anything. It’s a disease, Drew. Don’t you remember how it felt, when we were sitting there obsessed with finding ourselves in the orchestra? It was awful. Only you grew out of it, and I didn’t. Or maybe I just finally did, last year. Like I was cured and cursed all in one moment. I mean, what if the universe decided it was done using me?”

I shook my head. “I can’t imagine you as anything other than an actor.”

“Right. Right. I know. But how can it be who I am if it’s not what I do?”

We left it rhetorical and continued eating.

“So, how’s Carlos?” he asked once we’d ordered dessert.

It was too late in the meal, and he was too far behind on the story. “Not great, but you know,” I said, confident he didn’t care enough to press further. “He’s gotten into jazz lately.” To be safe, though, I changed the subject. “So, I had a dream about the Berghoff last night. I was running around downtown, trying to give everyone vitamin shots because of this disease I’d exposed them to. For some reason it was a battle zone, with tanks in the streets, and wild animals. And if people didn’t get these shots they were going to die. I had to find everyone I ever slept with and get them to come to the Berghoff to get this shot. So I’m knocking on doors, but people have moved, and by the time I find Carlos he tells me he won’t take the shot, he’d rather die. He’s lying there in the snow, dying, and he goes, ‘You can’t save them all, Drew.’ And I woke up screaming. I mean, what the hell is that?”

“Dreams don’t mean anything,” he said. “I used to believe they did, but they really don’t. Random synapses.” As I signed the bill, he dug into his apple tart like someone just rescued from the wilderness, his eyes wide with the wonder of sugar and crust. He chewed so fast it looked like his teeth were chattering. He gestured behind me with a jerk of his eyes, and I turned to look at the next table, pretending to get something out of my jacket pocket. I assumed he meant the teenage girl with a roll of fat hanging over the back of her low jeans. She was with her parents. “What would you do?” he said. His mouth was full of tart.

Sometime after high school, the game had evolved away from musicians and actors, and we (or at least Peter) had begun obsessing about leaping into regular people’s lives, about how to fool their families. I was tired of it after twenty years, but this wasn’t the day to put him in a bad mood. “Okay. Pretend to get sick so I don’t have to go to school, and spend the whole time doing aerobics. I could get fifteen pounds off, at least. Do I get to be myself again after?”

“Presumably.”

“Then I finish reading Proust.”

Peter took a sip from his root beer bottle, and I noticed his hand shaking. I wondered briefly if it was Parkinson’s, if the whole personality shift was that easy to explain — but Peter was such a hypochondriac, he’d have thought of it already. “You’re so fucking boring,” he said. “I’d run that ass into the street right now and see if I could stop traffic. I’d see how many laws I could break.”

“You could do it anyway,” I said. “You could run out there and just ruin your life. Nothing stopping you.”

He put his napkin on his plate and stood up. “I thought that’s what the museum was for.”

As we headed through the front doors of the Art Institute, the last regular museum visitors of the night were bundling past the stone lions and out into the cold. “Did you ever read that book when you were a kid?” Peter said as we walked through the emptying halls. “The one where the kids run away and live in the Met?”

“And they bathe in the fountain,” I said.

“That’s my new plan. I want to camp out under some dinosaur bones and just…” He let his sentence trail off, as if the suits of armor we were passing would explain the rest. I imagined them as a hundred failed geniuses, hiding behind the glass, starved down to thin, steel exoskeletons. They knew what he meant.

We stopped at the Chagall windows, stood for a minute in the warmth of their thick blue light, then headed into the special exhibit hall. I left Peter staring at a messy Klee while I talked to Lauren, my boss, who’d hated the idea of this event from the time I brought it up two years before and was waiting for everything to fall apart. Her over-plucked little eyebrows arched up her forehead as she asked me why half the writers weren’t there yet. I went to check on the champagne, and once the evening started moving I lost track of Peter among the tablecloths and microphones and whining interns, and finally among the rush of people and coats. Half were Art Institute supporters with vintage bracelets or Frank Lloyd Wright neckties, and half were NPR junkies with professor haircuts. Some might have been both, bless them.