The Stars That Tremble (5 page)

Mike tried to school his features—the laughter was almost as much humor as nerves at this point—and he had to sip his water to stop. “Emma has been teasing me for days, claiming that because you asked me to call you by your first name, you must
like
me.”

“She may have been onto something,” Gio said, chuckling.

“Yeah?”

“Is that so surprising?”

“I guess not.” Mike found himself smiling. It was certainly a relief to know for sure that Gio was gay, at least. There was also something kind of new and interesting about this situation. Gio had been playing on his mind for days, and now it turned out the feeling was mutual. “Of course, in her little teenage mind, I’m sure she imagines us making eyes at each other and, like, passing notes in study hall.”

Gio smirked. “What would your note say?”

Mike considered. He felt giddy as he thought about what to say. “You’re hot. I like you.”

Gio laughed. “If only it were that simple, eh?”

“Maybe it is. We’re having lunch now, aren’t we?”

“That’s what I like about being an adult. There’s a lot less
stronzate
. I teach teenagers. I see the drama these kids drag themselves through.”

“Yeah. Emma and her best friend Isobel have been having a lot of very serious conversations about boys lately. I tell her she should ask for my advice. I know a few things about men, since I am one and I’ve been dating them for twenty years, but she says, ‘No,
Dad
, you don’t know what it’s like.’” Mike rolled his eyes.

Gio shook his head. “I can’t even imagine what it’s like to raise a girl.”

“She’s a great kid, but it’s not always easy.”

Gio got up a few minutes later and went up to the counter to order them sandwiches. Before he left, he asked Mike if they should have wine as well. “Rain check,” Mike said, because he had a sudden vision of an elegant evening sipping wine with this Italian gentleman and wanted to reserve that for the future. “I have to be back on the job after this.”

“I will hold you to that,” Gio said.

Mike hoped he would.

“Tell me your sob story,” said Gio once he sat back down with their sandwiches.

Mike had no idea what to say. “What do you mean?”

Gio smiled and looked right at Mike. “If you have a teenage daughter but a young face, I imagine your age must be close to mine. Late thirties?”

“I’m thirty-seven.”

“Ah. As am I. In my experience, no one gets to be our age without a little tragedy and drama. So I’m asking, what’s yours? Also, sometimes you get this look on your face like you’re remembering something really sad.”

“I do?” Mike couldn’t imagine how Gio had seen that in him. It was there, certainly, but Mike didn’t like to show that side of himself, especially not to strangers.

“Here, I’ll tell you mine.” Gio smiled and folded his hands on the table. He leaned forward a little. “It went like this: I’d had a sore throat for a couple of days, but I kept singing anyway, because that was what you did. You drank tea with honey and the show went on. I was starring as Calaf in a production of
Turandot
in Beijing, and it was like every one of my dreams coming true.”

Gio sat back a little and slid his arms off the table.

“Nessun Dorma,” he said. “It is famous for a reason, you know. That aria, that was half the reason I began to sing opera at all. So there I was on stage, building up to the climax of the song. Calaf sings,
Vincerò
! It means ‘I will win.’ He sings it three times, and the third is this tremendous note of triumph. Calaf is confident he will win this ridiculous contest with Princess Turandot. So there I am on stage, singing the lead up to that note:
vincerò, vincerò
.” He said the words like a chant.

Mike’s heart ached at the realization that Gio rasped the words because he could no longer sing them.

“In the middle of the third
vincerò
,” Gio said, “my voice cracked and then died. ‘I will win,’ I was singing, but I lost.” He looked at the table. “There were polyps on my vocal chords I didn’t know about. What I thought was an oncoming cold turned out to be a bigger problem. It might have been fine, but my doctor called my profession ‘chronic overuse of the vocal folds,’ or something like that. They did surgery and discovered that, although the polyps were healing, they left behind scars. So now I can’t sing anymore.”

Gio’s story was delivered with the casual affect of someone discussing a trip to the beach, but the watery look in his eyes conveyed a much greater pain. Mike’s sympathy was like a fist around his heart, and the emotion that caught in his throat might as well have been a softball because he couldn’t form words or make sounds. For his part, Gio looked at the table, stared at his sandwich, and shook his head like he didn’t want to speak anymore.

Mike took a deep breath. “I know what that’s like,” he said. “To have the rug pulled out from under you. To have your whole life planned out for you until someone says you can’t have your plan anymore.”

“Tell me,” Gio said, looking up with a softness around his eyes that hadn’t been there before.

So Mike told his story. He explained about how he’d finished high school knowing he wasn’t college material. Not that he wasn’t smart—he knew he had some brains colliding around up there—but studying and tests were not where he would excel. He and Sandy had decided together to join the army. Shortly after they finished basic training, they were shipped off to Saudi Arabia. It was there they’d met another young private named Evan. Mike and Sandy and Evan became a trio almost immediately, the greatest of friends. In one of those odd twists of fate, Mike and Evan had been alone on a patrol together one night during a week in which half the platoon was down with the flu. During a lull, Evan turned to Mike, confessed his feelings, and kissed him. Mike had likewise been harboring a crush on Evan for weeks and was delighted. They were a couple from that day forward.

“We got caught,” Mike told Gio as he picked cheese off his sandwich, nervous now instead of hungry. “Before that, we’d been so goddamn discreet the CIA could have gotten tips from us, but one day we were fooling around in what we thought was an empty office and our commanding officer walked right in on us. The CO was a dick about it and invoked Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. And that was the end of my army career. After we were discharged, Evan and I wound up back here in New York.”

Evan had decided to make the most of his military training and went to the police academy. Law enforcement had felt like his calling. Then, a few years into his career in the NYPD and five years into Mike and Evan’s romantic relationship, they decided they wanted a whole mess of kids. They set the adoption process in motion.

“The counselor we worked with at the agency told us that because we were gay, it could be years, and that was what we expected,” Mike explained. He couldn’t look at Gio, who must have known by now what was coming. He couldn’t just cut to the chase, either. He needed Gio to know the whole story, for some reason. “I was really young at the time. I wasn’t ready to be a father, but Evan was really gung ho about it, and I thought, what the hell? Let’s put our names in the hat. By the time we get a child, I’ll be ready. Then this teenage girl in the Bronx saw our profile and decided her baby just had to go to a gay couple. It was crazy, but bless her, wherever she is. She gave us Emma, and I will never stop being grateful to her.” Mike took another deep breath. “It was an open adoption. The birth mom was supposed to stay in touch, but she disappeared shortly after she turned eighteen. Just dropped right off the radar. Stopped returning my e-mails or phone calls. I hope she’s all right.”

“But this is your story, not hers.”

Mike nodded. “It happened when Emma was three.” He knew his voice had grown quiet. Gio leaned forward, probably to hear better. But Mike couldn’t say the words any louder. “Evan was on a pretty routine shift when he and his partner got called to a disturbance at a bodega. At first he thought it was a robbery, but then he saw a man screaming at a young girl. The girl was in tears. Evan’s partner tried to talk the man down, but then the guy drew a gun.” This was where things always got hard for Mike. He blinked to keep from showing too much on his face. “The guy was going to shoot the girl. Evan got between the girl and the bullet.”

Gio put a hand to his mouth. “
Dio mio
.”

Mike sat back. “When the dust settled, I was a single dad raising a toddler in a city. So that’s my sob story.”

“I am so sorry, Mike.”

“It’s been eleven years. That kind of thing… it doesn’t go away, exactly, and I still think about Evan pretty frequently, but it’s not… it doesn’t dominate my life the way it once did, I guess.” What Mike didn’t say, couldn’t say, was that the only thing that got him out of bed in those days after Evan’s death was Emma. If not for her, he would have had nothing to live for. He had to take care of a very young girl who had no idea what was happening, who kept asking why she couldn’t see Daddy Evan anymore. He and Emma had been crucial to each other’s survival.

After a long moment of silence, Mike said, “Look, my daughter is the most important thing in my life. I would do anything to make sure she’s healthy and happy. I’ve never seen her as happy as she is when she’s singing or talking about music. So maybe I’m a little uncouth and uncultured, but this is what she wants, so I’ll see to it I do everything in my power to make this happen for her.” He realized what he was saying as he was saying it. “Well, not
everything
. I hope you realize I didn’t agree to lunch because—”

“No, I understand.” Gio smiled.

“Good. Because I do like you, Gio. But that’s separate from what I want for Emma.” Mike looked at his watch. He had to get back to work and needed to get out of this room that was suddenly flooded with memories. He felt raw and vulnerable, a bad place to be with a man who was still a relative stranger. “I don’t want to cut this short, but I’ve got a kitchen waiting for me.”

“Yes, of course. I don’t mean to keep you.”

Mike smirked. “Well, maybe you do.”

Gio laughed. “A little, yes.”

Well, that was something. Mike supposed he wouldn’t have torn his chest open and exposed his heart to just anyone, and there was something intriguing about Gio. If nothing else, they understood each other in a strange way.

There was a tussle when Mike tried to give Gio money for the lunch and Gio refused, but then they went outside. It was a sunny day, warm but not too hot. Mike paused for a moment to let the light wash over his face. Then he looked at Gio.

“Thank you for lunch,” said Mike.

Gio nodded slowly. “You’re welcome.” He sighed and looked at something up the block. “Well, I feel like I’ve made myself clear. I like you, Mike, now even more than I did before lunch. I’d like to see you again. Part of me wants to say that perhaps, for the sake of propriety, we should wait before really jumping into anything. At least until the workshop is over.”

“Oh.” That was disappointing. It had felt like they were fumbling toward something all through lunch, and now Gio was putting the brakes on it. Mike got it—at least he’d been clear that he wasn’t having lunch and contemplating sleeping with Gio just to get his daughter ahead—but it still made him a little sad to walk away.

The feeling was apparently mutual, because Gio was doing that weird staring-unfocused thing again, this time glaring at something in the vicinity of the buttons on Mike’s shirt.

“Hey, Gio?”

Gio looked up.

Mike took a chance. He stepped forward as he met Gio’s gaze. Then he gently cupped Gio’s cheek. Gio didn’t flinch or move away, so Mike didn’t think it would be so bad if he pressed his lips against Gio’s. When he did, he was met with a tiny whimper in the back of Gio’s throat and then the full force of a kiss, a strong one tasting a little of balsamic vinegar, openmouthed but no tongues… not yet. But it would be so easy to sink into this one, to get lost in Gio’s mouth, in his arms, in his skin. It would be so wonderful to let desire and instinct take over, to keep moving in search of the dazed, zippy feeling in Mike’s head, to keep the blood rushing in his veins.

Mike pulled away slowly. “Something to look forward to.”

M
IKE
was itchy.

He didn’t like the feeling. His skin felt inflamed, a remnant of wanting and a lack of satisfaction. He felt uneasy but couldn’t put a finger on why. He did know that he’d rather be anywhere other than the kitchen of one of his wealthy patrons.

He made some adjustments and then slid out from under the sink. His nervous client, Elaine Hutchinson, stood there wringing her hands.

“Everything looks like it should, Mrs. Hutchinson.” He stood up and pulled the walkie-talkie off his belt. “Hey, Sandy? Turn the water back on.”

“You got it, boss” came the crackling response.

Mike waited a moment and then turned the handle on the new faucet. It burbled and sputtered but soon was pouring out clean water. “What do you think?” he asked Mrs. Hutchinson after he turned off the faucet.