Page 38 of Playing By Ear

Jamie pulled open a deep drawer in the nearest side table. There were pens, along with a collection of spectacles and a…what the hell was this?

He pulled out a contraption that looked like a cross between night-vision goggles and a snorkeling mask. Each lens was translucent apart from a tiny clear porthole in the center.

Jamie slipped it on. “Fucking hell.” It was like looking through a straw made of tissue paper.

He stood up, tightening the strap at the back of his head. As he moved toward the hall, he instinctively held his hands to the side to replace his peripheral vision. Even so, his knuckles banged against the doorpost. “Ow.”

Jamie took a step into the hall, then stopped short. Everything had gone murky, though he knew there was light spilling in behind him from the living room. Feeling unmoored, he angled to the left to keep one hand on the wall.

“Ah, you found them.”

Jamie jumped, then turned his head. Perry stood a few feet away. “Is this what it’s like, having RP?”

“Sort of. Imagine that open spot in the middle is far fuzzier.” Perry’s voice had turned flinty, as though he was armoring himself against Jamie’s reaction. “The mask approximates the experience for sighted people.”

“It’s definitely an eye opener.” Jamie winced. “Sorry, no pun intended.”

Perry snorted. “I can hear a figure of speech without taking offense.”

Jamie waved a hand at his own two o’clock and saw barely a shadow. No wonder Perry was always turning and angling his head like a bird.

He decided to keep this last observation to himself.

Perry walked ahead of him, beer bottles clinking. “Do you need me to guide you back to the couch?”

“No, I can find my—ow!” This time Jamie’s elbow struck the doorpost. He took off the mask, squinting up at the chandelier. “I never knew how much light perception depends on peripheral vision.”

“That’s where most of the rods are.” Perry sat on the couch again, his posture stiffer than before. “You know about the two sorts of photoreceptors?”

“Aye, rods help you see in low light, and cones help you see color.” Jamie examined the lenses, which weren’t translucent like tissue paper after all, but more like the safety glass of a smashed windscreen. “I always thought the tunnel you see through was solid black—that’s what pictures on the internet show—but it’s not, is it? That’s why these lenses have this frosty coating?”

“The tunnel walls are darker, but not solid, because the rods die in patches rather than evenly throughout the retina.” Perry crossed his legs. “Maybe someday I’ll show you a computer image of my eyeball.” He waggled his foot. “If you play your cards right.”

“That gives me something to work for.” Jamie put the mask back in the drawer, then made his chord-progression note with a pen he found there.

Finally he picked up his guitar again. The space between them had chilled a bit, but he sensed it wasn’t terminal, that if he chose the right song, he could soften Perry up.

One couldn’t go wrong with Paolo Nutini’s “Better Man.” The opening line made Perry’s lips curve into a half smile that became the full thing at the first chorus. Jamie didn’t change all the shes to hes and the girls to guys, but he didn’t need to. The message was clear. Perry made him want to be a better man, in the purest, hardest way.

Perry cheered softly at the end. “I promised never to write about you, but…” He ran a flirtatious finger along the seam of the couch cushion. “Shall I tell you what I would write about you? Starting with, ‘the guitar virtuosity of Nick Drake and the vocal elasticity of Jeff Buckley’?”

Jamie’s face warmed. Others had made the comparisons, but it felt twice as good coming from Perry. “Didn’t someone once say, ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture’?”

“Yes, and someone else said dancing is inherently about architecture. Bodies moving in spaces.”

Jamie was keen to see Perry’s body moving in space. Preferably naked, stretched out above him. “On you go, then. Dance about Victorian architecture.”

“What, now? Without music?”

“I know loads of Victorian songs.” He strummed an F chord. “Of course, they’re all Christmas carols.”

Perry gaped at him, then set down his beer. “Challenge accepted.”

Perry collapsed back onto the couch, relieved he’d not pulled a muscle while trying to represent turrets and wrap-around porches to the tune of “We Three Kings.”

Jamie was still laughing. “If there’s ever a Charades Olympics, my money’s on you. Your interpretation of finials alone would win the gold.”

He went back to playing covers then. Perry sipped his beer and listened, hoping his fathomless infatuation didn’t show on his face. With each song, Jamie wove a web Perry might never get out of, might never want out of.