All Stories Are Love Stories (7 page)

Javi licked her thumb and wiped a smudge off Vashti's face as their mother used to do, breaking both their hearts all over again, though they were growing used to the constant cleaving and opening of their hearts breaking multiple times a day now, the muscles developing the seeds of defense that would later grow into Javi's inability to love anything but her work and Vashti's inability to stop loving the boy who would sew her heart back together. “It's just chocolate,” she said. “You can at least eat chocolate, can't you?” She reached one of her own fingers into the bucket as if showing her the food was not poison by trying it herself, willing to do that for her sister.

Vashti watched her eat. And as she did, the chocolate made its way down her throat and into her belly, triggering a surge of primal, burning hunger. Vashti filled her palms greedily, the burst of silky, chalky sweetness ricocheting through her mouth, spurting out again with her tears. It was, she was surprised to find, so good. So, so good. Vashti rested her head against her sister's and cried, tears mixed with chocolate choking her until Javi had to pound her on the back and their tears turned to laughter. In the dark and alone but together, they ate.

Remembering, Vashti turned the lever off and stood dripping, wondering if this was the moment she thought it was, the moment when enough was enough, when for some minor reason in the collection of reasons she'd been building over
the past several months she found herself willing—if not ready—to take action.

Was it as simple as all that? It wasn't.

But could it be?

Quickly, she dressed. Then changed. Then changed again and, hating what she was wearing, grabbed her still wet coat and a dry umbrella and headed back out into the rain.

Forty minutes that seemed like five later, she was standing outside the doors of the Nob Hill Masonic Center. Not for the first time, she wondered what had brought the Max she'd once known here, into an executive position with an office under the protection of this intimidating three-story glass entry. She knew he'd switched his focus from music to management when they'd found out she was pregnant, going for a business degree while teaching on the side, and then, she gathered, full-bore into the world of work, but she had always assumed that he would go back to music once she left the picture. It was part of the consolation she'd offered herself all these years, and she wasn't quite willing to let it go.

Inside, the grand entry felt monkish, despite the colorful two-story mural ahead; everything hushed and airy and solemn. The marble floor was empty of people, and her shoes echoed on it. The security guard at the front desk didn't look up until she was right in front of him.

Her voice barely came to her in time. “Max Fleurent, please.”

The guard looked up, suspicion in his job description. “Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

“So he's not expecting you, then?”

For a split second, she wondered if she could just turn around and run away. But she knew that if she did after getting this far, she would never return, would race back down Nob Hill and across the city and into her bed and never get out. The prospect of no Javi or no Max was bad enough; the idea was unbearable that they might both slip away when she'd barely worked up enough courage to send the barest of smoke signals out to them.

“He knows who I am,” she blurted out.

“Your name?”

She told him.

“He's not here,” the guard told her after calling up.

She wasn't sure she could find a way to ask if he would be back, but then she did.

“Think so. Pretty sure. He just walked out, probably to lunch.”

Was he with anyone? How did he look? How long were his lunches? Did this man know anything that could tether her to that pivotal spot that had taken all her courage to reach?

“OK,” she said.

“Do you want me to let him know you were here?”

She shook her head and told him she'd be back later. “Is there a good place nearby to wait, get a cup of coffee?”

“Peet's is across the street,” the guard told her. “It's in the basement of Grace.”

OK. She could do that. Hide under a church and drink coffee.

As she crossed the street the sun came out, offering a glimpse of the breathtaking sweep of land and ocean to the east, the Bay Bridge bookended between grand hotels, and, farther down California Street, the many-storied, glass-fronted buildings of downtown. She felt suddenly seen. Maybe it was the light, maybe it was the saying of her name and her purpose, maybe it was what she had already done to drag the ongoing affliction of those relentless dreams into the daylight to either burn or clear up.

And then Max was walking up the street.

He had his head bent down to listen to his mother by his side, his hand under her elbow, helping her along. Vashti strained to see his face, but all her view offered was his smooth forehead, the tightly cropped russet curls. Her heart thudded, suddenly remembering his face, his hands, the first time he touched her. The removal of all her clothes, piece by piece, until she stopped him, breathless.
Do you not want me to?
he had asked, one long finger still resting on the crest of her hip, the way someone might hold their place to look up from a treasured book. She shook her head. No, it wasn't that. It was that she hadn't realized how close she was to being without clothes already. She had spent most of her public life covering up her body—to be unpeeled like this and not even notice! It was the first of many new wonders, one of the only times she would ever feel freed by love.

Now there he was, more than fourteen years and how many opportunities to erase all his memories of her later. Her eyes darted to his mother. She had become so old! When had she become so old? Once upon a time, she'd been
a petite, ropy woman who was kind but intimidatingly capable. Age had softened her beyond recognition, or was it time? Vashti felt suddenly, dizzyingly disoriented. If his mother had changed this much, would Max have, too? Panic spread across the back of her neck, prickling.
Look up, look up
, she thought, concentrating on Max, his face infuriatingly close but concealed. But then she wondered what would happen if he did look up. The cable car was coming and he was still in a moment with his mother, unknowing. A taxi honked lightly to get her out of the street. Helplessly, she glanced up at Grace Cathedral and its imposing iron windows, each with so much presence that she thought fleetingly that they might just respond to the silent prayer she was offering. As she watched, she could have sworn the glass was startled into a rattle. She was losing her mind. Church windows didn't rattle, or if they did, they certainly didn't for the haphazard prayers of a half-crazed woman, moored to the middle of the street by her own leaden heart.

Venim h[oc] cupidi, multo magis ire cupimus,

set retinet nostras illa puella pedes

We came here full of longing

now we long to leave

but that girl holds back our feet.

—
GRAFFITI ON THE WALLS OF POMPEII

Max glanced down at his watch: 3:50. A little thrill surged through him as he realized that the workday, which had flown by, was almost over.

He glanced over his quarterly budget update for the Masons one more time. He knew no one was likely ever to read such a thing, but still, he could never quite bring himself to cut corners at work. The Masons had taken him in when he was lost and broken and, perhaps because he was still a little lost and maybe even a lot broken, he had never stopped feeling obligated to them. Still, a rehearsal day was a rehearsal day, and if he kept this up any longer, he'd be late. Stretching his neck and shoulders, Max closed the file and hit Send.

He'd scheduled the first spring meeting of the San Francisco Children's Choir for this afternoon intentionally, as a sort of birthday treat for himself. Sometimes he still couldn't quite believe his luck at having been appointed to the job of directing them. It helped to have a guardian angel, though sometimes he wished the circumstances that led him to need one in the first place had never come to pass.

He straightened the two birthday cards on his desk, smiling affectionately at the formal gilded one:
Every year is a rebirth
,
every birthday a day to begin anew
. The only two people left in his life who sent him paper cards were his mother
and Mrs. Levi-Ward—Mrs. Marilyn “Minnie” Levi-Ward, the widowed socialite responsible for his current position, as well as approximately 60 percent of San Francisco's musical philanthropy (and the woman whose approval or disapproval determined who got to fund the other 40 percent to great acclaim and who had to skulk back to New York or Boston or,
God forbid!
, Portland), had taken a shine to Max when he came to apply for an entry-level administrative position with the Masonic Center. Somehow the shine had never faded, though in recent years it had come with a matchmaking desperation that rivaled his mother's. Well, maybe by this time next year, both women would lay that hatchet to rest. He was pleasantly surprised to find that he was still excited by that morning's surge of optimism. Usually such romantic resolutions faded quickly. Maybe his father's reaching out had been just the kick in the pants he needed to stop nursing old wounds. Mrs. Levi-Ward would certainly agree, that much was sure. She'd wanted him to move on from the moment she met him.

Mrs. Levi-Ward had written a board membership and hiring say into her financial support for the notoriously fraternal Masonic, and they'd agreed to both requests. It was the first time Max had really understood how influential a deep pocketbook could be; until then, he'd only ever been poor, with the blandly unwavering powerlessness that came along with it. But for some reason, that regal-faced, long-necked woman had taken pity on the fresh-faced boy barely in his twenties, equal parts sad and earnest, ready to leave his own ideals—wet though they still were with fresh ink—for the
sort of job a young man would take who was stricken by the mistaken belief that a woman who'd left for emotional reasons would return for financial ones.

“But what would you
really
like to do, young man?” Mrs. Levi-Ward smelled of powder and leather and wore pearls that were faintly incandescent even inside, away from direct light. Her eyes, as blue and frank as a child's, despite her wrinkles and puckered lips, held his gaze.

“You're asking about the music.”

“I wasn't,” she said, unflinching. “I just want the truth, so if music is part of your truth, tell me. If not, I couldn't care less. But don't give me the answer you think I want. I'm bored to tears by insincerity, and I get it all the live long day. Tell me what drives you, Max Fleurent.” She adopted a perfect stillness as she waited for an answer. Her face was painted within an inch of its life with expensive cosmetics, but the bones underneath, the jawline and nose, were strong and straightforward.

“I don't want to be a musician, even though I probably could be.” Only Vashti and his mother—and his father, for what it was worth—knew that he had become a musician in the first place accidentally, because his grandfather had left a trumpet behind that he picked up one day. He loved that instrument, a Yamaha from the twenties. It wasn't his intention to turn it into a purpose.

“But trumpeters, well, they're lonely,” he found himself saying, “all that time on the road.” No—being on the road, leaving as his father had, was the last thing he wanted. “I used to think I'd like to teach at a school, maybe conduct.”

“
Used
to, my boy?” Her pearls clicked together when she sat up to rifle through his papers. “What are you, twenty-one?”

“Twenty-three,” he said, hoping he didn't look as defensive as he sounded.

“Mmm,” she said, clearly unimpressed by the additional two years. “So,” she said after a tense moment between them, “you go after an MBA and teach privately to fund it and then that's it? No more music for you?”

“No,” Max said quickly. The trumpet was as much a part of him as any pet might have been for another boy: a lesser member of the family, but dearer in a sense because of its diminished expectations. And he remembered the way the instrument soothed him when people could not, on those many frustrating afternoons waiting for his father to come home from a cross-country haul that should have taken a week and was taking ten days or more. Max would blow his anger and grief and a little bit of hope into the horn, calling as long and hard and clearly as he wanted because no one was home to stop him. By the time he was nine, his mother had taken a job—teaching home economics at the Learning Annex—because “Well, Max, you never know. It's good for a woman to have a job she can fall back on.” So Max was home alone in the afternoons, blowing on his horn like a bugle boy drafted to a war he couldn't understand. The practice was addictive, his own piercing fear and pain eventually transforming into beautiful sounds.

“Someone break your heart?”

He looked away, forgetting Mrs. Levi-Ward for a moment.
When he looked at her again, his face told her she'd guessed correctly. Also that he wished she hadn't.

“Doesn't matter. None of my business. But I will say this: I hope that one day you find your way back to whomever it is you think you can't be right now. I like that boy—pardon me,
young man
—far better than the one you're trying to be, and I wish I were interviewing him for the conservatory. But no matter. Perhaps another day. For now, the job is yours if you still want it.”

She'd never really pushed after that day of guessing his true reasons for being there, but she took a shine to him—as if in exposing his heart so incisively, she'd struck a rare note of tenderness in her own—and when Mrs. Levi-Ward took a shine to you, all musical doors swung open. Including the opportunity to direct the San Francisco Children's Choir, one of her pet projects and a way to get “darling Max”—her moniker for him since he'd played at one of her private parties right after meeting her, refusing all subsequent requests to do the same for her friends—back onstage. As much as he protested the favoritism implied in the offer to direct the choir, he did not put up much of a fight. In recent years, it had been hard to make time for practice when other things demanded and music only called.

Unexpectedly, Max found his optimism doubling, fueled by some unforeseen force.
Maybe
, he thought,
this birthday could bring more than one renewal
. Maybe a call to Mrs. Levi-Ward—she expected to be thanked for the card, after all, and she loved it when he called—might be one in which
to discuss the potential for the children's choir to become more than a part-time gig. She'd love that, wouldn't she? Her pet young man spearheading the latest thing in her pet field. And it was timely, wasn't it? It was a different world, a different future they were all facing. People wanted,
needed
, more music in their lives, and children who could make such music. He'd be willing to bet that a San Francisco full of people laboring under global warming and liberal guilt would be more than happy to funnel money into a nonprofit that promoted singing children.

He leaned back in his chair, his gaze drifting to his window and the view of Grace Cathedral across the street. A little sun came out, coaxing color back into the stained-glass windows. It was a beautiful church, the sort of church people came from other cities, other countries, to see. You could find everything in San Francisco. You could find love. A good job, then a better one. Looking out at the church, Max felt pretty sure that you could even find God in San Francisco.

But his father hadn't. It was probably for the best that his mother had decided not to bring the letter to their lunch. “It's not going anywhere, Max,” she'd cut him off when he'd asked, “so let's just enjoy your birthday.”

Staring out into the sunlit rain, Max thought of how disoriented he had been when his father first left, as if his departure had been the mental equivalent of turning someone else around in so many circles that when Max opened his eyes, he would be too dizzy to track another's movements or to move himself.

Even the anticipatory excitement about their new home
had felt strange, like it was something he and his mother and father were holding on to temporarily, or borrowing. There was a lot of strange levity around the packing and planning, a lot of noise. His parents told each other enthusiastic things in other people's voices. Who wouldn't be thrilled by the offer of a full-time clergy position, no matter the pay? Wouldn't it be better than living a trucker's workweek and a small-time pastor's weekend? Wouldn't it mean more time with the family, wouldn't it mean a better life, a more purposeful life, a sunnier life? Everyone they met told them that they would love San Francisco, as though strangers were in on the odd charade. But that never felt right. How could any place be a place that everyone loves?

And then California had been everything home was not. Home—or at least the closest thing to it, a series of small New York towns near the Canadian border—was lush hills and yawning fields; charcoal trees and bare winters followed by pale green rebirth; quiet, heady summer days and bracingly cool Octobers. It was a modest, meditative part of the world, and even though they had never stayed in one place for very long, the area itself held the familiar feel of home.

Nothing seemed familiar in California. To begin with, it didn't even have seasons, it had dramatic scenes: rain so sudden and so hard that the earth ran downhill in places, preferring to collapse under bad weather than absorb it; heat so oppressive that the ground was known to burst into flame beneath it and, he quickly learned, frequently did. Like a jewel rising out of the pressurized earth, the city of San Francisco had all this and more: hulking fog coming in over the
mountains like a prehistoric beast; winds so aggressive, they stung; weeks of endlessly sun-filled days, every iota of the light seeming to contribute to great vistas of mountain and sea and rock-studded beauty. How could anyone call a place like that home? It was a movie set, a Brigadoon, a strange, shape-shifting city that was much more interested in cultivating its wild beauty than offering the far more modest and relatable comforts Max associated with home.

Even the food was different. He had never tasted a burrito before leaving New York, and now they were served every Tuesday and Thursday for the school's free hot lunch. Avocado tasted like the inside of something that had been recently alive, cilantro like a punch to the nose. And there were flowers everywhere! The whole city was riddled with blossoms whose colors he had not known could be found in nature: fuchsias and limes and golds.

As the realization of his father's departure set in, it was all Max could do to keep from tearing those flowers out, run screaming and shouting his grief into the unbearable newness, but there was nowhere to run. His mother spent her nights not sleeping in their perpetually fog-chilled and damp apartment deep in the Sunset, her days working two jobs. He couldn't leave her.

Though there were times when the urge to do just that had been almost irresistible. As the months passed endlessly with no sign whatsoever of his father, his mother became as much of a burden as a comfort to him. Both of them were beginning to realize what it meant to be just the two of them for good. It seemed to Max that his father's departure had
unmasked her, removing the solid front of motherhood and revealing her fuzzier borders, the softer woman underneath. He did not realize that this happens to most boys when they're about sixteen—or he didn't until much later, when it no longer mattered as much. At the time, he incorporated the changes he saw in her to his growing understanding that you can never lose only one parent.

It was as if she were encouraging him to notice that her seams were showing. She no longer hid the occasional pack of cigarettes or the fact that she'd been crying. She'd taken two jobs so she could support them on her own, but when she got home at night, she sat in front of the television for hours, not even trying to go to bed. When Max asked her if she was all right, sometimes she didn't answer. And even though she vowed to protect him, the fact that she was unprotected herself made him feel just as vulnerable, if not more so.

But then, that summer, he discovered the buses. Thank God for the buses, for the thickets of strangers who would simply surround him, unknowingly meeting that urge to run and scream and hemming it in, the bus soothing them all into miles of circuitous riding, up and through and around, always moving, always something to look at, always a glass window, at least, to press your face against. He felt like he was getting away with something, getting to see and leave so many things in the same instant.

At first he stayed close to their apartment, going up and down the dinosaur-scaled hills of the hushed Outer Sunset, the 66 and 48 buses attached by only their crowns to electric wires overhead that silenced them completely when they
came to a stop; no exhaust, no engine, no nothing, just a hovering at the top of the world.