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“Huh? I wasn’t.”
“Yeah, okay. But you were. Which you do when you’re cooking a new song in that noggin.” He rapped lightly at the top of my head. “It’ll make its way out eventually. Maybe it’ll be for me, maybe not. But it’s all still in there, bro. It hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just whattayacallit, when you let the ribs sit in the barbecue sauce.”
“Marinating.”
“Marinating, right. So it’ll be that much tastier when you throw that fucker on the fire. Hmmm.”
“You’re hungry, aren’t you?”
“Fuck, now that you mention it, I could definitely eat.”
* * *
—
What I didn’t tell Rhys was that with every late-night phone conversation with Theo, it became harder and harder to imagine letting him go. I loved his stories, and I was intrigued by his weird brain and the way he would get furiously mad about some small thing and then get over it immediately, moving on to the next. I liked how he had something to say about everything, and had strong opinions about the mildest of things.
“I love cucumbers,” he’d mused a few days ago, at about three in the morning.
“Dude, that is a hell of a lot of feeling for a vegetable that tastes like nothing.”
“They don’t taste like nothing! They taste green. They taste like green water. I love them. If your cucumbers taste like nothing, you’ve just been growing them too long. Did you read that article I sent?”
Theo had become invested in my garden, and would text me factoids and suggestions that he came across. Once, when he came over, he brought me a zine on installing your own irrigation system using empty soda bottles and hose. When I asked where he’d gotten it, he shrugged self-consciously and said, “I read.” The idea of him seeking out materials on projects I could do charmed me.
He also, I learned that night, loved oatmeal and moss, loathed khaki and pens with blue ink, and believed that there was a special corner of hell for people who used public bathrooms and didn’t put the new toilet paper roll on the holder.
“It’s right there. All you have to do is stick it on the damn thing. Like, really, are you in that much of a hurry after you take a shit that you have to just grab your toilet paper and rush out of the stall, leaving the roll sitting on top where it could fall onto the ground? Or you just don’t care? Seriously, go die.”
I related to the way he found inspiration for songs in everything, and was constantly pausing things or interrupting himself to scribble lyrics or chord progressions or bits of a tune in the notebook he carried around, or sending himself memos on his phone. I respected it.
I’d had to admit that, yeah, I’d brought a lot of assumptions to the table about what kind of musician Theo was simply because he was the front man of a popular rock band. Even once I’d seen how good he and his bandmates were, I still had a bit of the attitude that all the other musicians I knew who weren’t famous had: if you hit it that big, either you cared more about being famous than the music, so you compromised your music to appeal to the masses, or it was shit to begin with, because most people have terrible taste.
After his perceived slight at the Lion’s Share show—well, and after we’d woken up from fucking each other cockeyed—Theo had confessed that he was self-conscious about that. About people thinking he didn’t have chops.
“I actually can play a lot,” he said. “Of instruments, I mean.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said, distracted because I was running a hand over his round ass and between his taut thighs.
And he told me how he’d begun taking piano lessons as a kid, at his parents’ urging.
“I played for years, all through high school. Did the whole recital and competition thing. And I did pretty well.”
I pressed at that, and got him to admit that he’d won or placed in the National Piano Association Competition five years in a row, which I was pretty sure made him hella good by anyone’s measure.
“When I was in middle school, I taught myself other stuff. Guitar, bass, fucking banjo, because there was one lying around in the music room. Violin. I played that in orchestra in high school since they already had enough people on keys.”
His expression turned wistful as he spoke.
“So, what happened?”
“I didn’t love the music. Classical stuff…I learned a lot from it, but it never really felt quite like my thing. So learning guitar was cool because I could write songs on it. Couldn’t have a piano with me all the time.” He sighed and I let my fingers creep into his hair, untangling the unruly strands as I waited for him to go on. “Piano, though,” he said finally. “I loved piano. The…the fucking piano-ness of it. The feel of the keys, the resonance of the body, the—god, the sound of it. That combination of rhythm and tune, and how your hands can be in concert or contrast…”
