Bellweather Rhapsody (9 page)

“Kirk’s in a coma,” he tells Jess. “Heart attack. He’s been replaced with a sub this year.”

“That’s awful. Oh, Hastings, I’m sorry. I know you really liked him. I hope he pulls through.”

“Me too.” He can hear a voice in the background. Voices. Who else is there? Who is with his wife? “What’s that sound?” he asks.

“I’ve got company, but first—you said there were two things on your mind. What’s the second?”

“This girl.” Her face has already vanished from his mind. Her face is gone. How can her face be gone when the gut-deep feeling he knows her, he knows her, how does he know her, is stronger than ever. “You ever get déjà vu?”

Jess laughs. “Only when I’m talking to you,” she says.

6

R
ABBIT’S PARENTS,
lapsed Protestants, had managed to pass along the big-ticket ideas of Christianity, but practically speaking, Rabbit had learned Judeo-Christian history from the school of Indiana Jones. Bambi’s mother taught him about loss, and he was too in love with dinosaurs to entertain the idea of a literal seven-day Creation schedule. Charlie Brown (or rather, Linus) told him the Christmas story;
Jesus Christ Superstar
covered the crucifixion. He did not regret his secular education. He may have been baptized Presbyterian, but music was his true religion.

In his earliest memories he was sitting on the floor in the family room, in front of the giant stereo his parents had bought themselves as a wedding present, his face pressed into the padded fabric of one speaker. The fabric was prickly against his forehead but his nose fit perfectly into a little groove, and he could feel music spilling like molten gold through his entire body. He’d sit back on his heels when the song was over and his father, an accountant and amateur drummer whose (still-unrealized) dream was to open a jazz club and coffee house, would say “Order up!” and put another record on the turntable. Rabbit’s favorite albums were by Earth, Wind & Fire (syncopation made his brain feel like it was laughing) and
Also sprach Zarathustra,
its opening rumbling like an earthquake. And he loved
The White Album,
and when his mother played ABBA on the piano and they’d sing together (though Alice couldn’t do it without being a total showoff), and the
Star Wars
soundtrack, and of
course
Zeppelin. For six months in 1984, he had asked his parents to play “Stairway to Heaven” instead of a bedtime story.

Rabbit and Disney’s
Fantasia
turned ten and fifty, respectively, in the same year. Rabbit had only seen pieces of it on TV—the Disney Channel liked to play “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and the dopey Beethoven scene as filler between shows—but it was his father’s favorite movie of all time. His father had first seen it in a theater in college (high as a kite, he said, with a hushed
don’t tell your mother
) and had been waiting twenty-one years for it to return to the big screen. It had changed him, he said. It had opened him to music in new ways. So when it was rereleased for its half-century anniversary, his father skipped work, pulled Rabbit and Alice out of school, and bought them all tickets on opening day.

Rabbit had never seen him in such a state of excitement. His father’s eyes blinked furiously behind his glasses, and his smile was so broad and wide Rabbit wondered if his lips ached. Except for a few hassled-looking parents with very young children, they were the only people in the theater—it was a Friday matinee on a school day, after all—and Alice, typically, wouldn’t shut up about how amazing this was going to be, how magical, because she knew what their father wanted to hear more than anything was how very much like
him
his children were. Alice was always good at knowing what people wanted to hear and giving it to them in symphonic stereo.

Rabbit was less enthused. It was exciting to be out of school, but he was suddenly worried about his dad. What if the movie wasn’t as incredible as he remembered—and how could it be, after twenty years? Not in college, not on drugs? The parts Rabbit had already seen weren’t exactly mind-blowing; those silly flying horses were for little kids, and he found the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice acutely frustrating (if Mickey Mouse was stupid enough to mess with the magician’s hat, he deserved all the trouble he got). Rabbit’s stomach soured in anticipation of having to pretend, first to enjoy the movie, and then not to notice his father’s disappointment.

The toddlers in the theater fussed and Alice knocked over her soda at the end of “The Nutcracker Suite,” because, she whispered theatrically, she was so caught up she forgot where her foot was. During the Beethoven segment, with its dippy fauns and centaurs and baby unicorns, Rabbit dared to glance at his father. The wide smile was still there, the blinking eyes—and then they were gone, and so was all the light streaming back at them from the screen. A child shrieked in the sudden dark and people began to rustle, but Rabbit’s father grabbed his hand quickly, gently, and whispered, “Don’t worry, it must be the light in the projector, the music’s still there”—and Rabbit really, truly heard Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony for the first time. His eyes stung from the blackness, so he shut them and felt the music sweep him up faster and higher than he’d ever flown with his head mashed into the stereo speaker. He soared on the breeze of a brilliant spring day. The sun poured warm honey on his shoulder blades and he ran ahead up a small hill, bare feet tickled by springy new grass, and rolled down the other side, laughing. When the rain came, he shivered and ducked for cover, but it was gone soon enough, and what it left behind was a sense of the perfect rightness of this time and this place. Of himself—perfectly right, perfectly at peace with his family in the dark. He laid his head back contentedly and let out a long breath.

His father squeezed his hand. Alice was muttering something but Rabbit couldn’t make it out, and didn’t care to. His father squeezed his hand again and Rabbit knew then that he needn’t have worried, that his father couldn’t possibly have been disappointed in the moment he’d dreamed of for decades. The wait, in fact, had been necessary, because what he’d been waiting so long to experience was the joy of sharing something so sublime with his children.

Rabbit had never understood music before as an agent of connection, as a way for people not only to feel within themselves but to feel
among
themselves, a language that brought common souls into conversation. Beethoven could talk to him and could talk to his father, and he and his father could talk Beethoven to each other. Rabbit was a very shy child, more often spoken to than with. A recurring theme of parent-teacher conferences, beyond his academic excellence, was concern over his apparently self-imposed isolation. But on the day that Rabbit felt the Pastoral Symphony vaporize his body and plug his soul directly into his father’s, he realized he had found his native tongue.

He had just started fourth grade at Ruby Falls Elementary, old for his year despite how young he looked; he was eligible to sign up for lessons on an instrument of his choosing. Uncharacteristically for Rabbit, he didn’t worry that no such instrument existed. He trusted that it was out there, and that he would find it when it was ready to be found, and that through it, Rabbit Hatmaker would be able to talk. To his family, to his teachers, to people he’d never met. To animals. To the universe. Maybe to God.

That was the second of two revelations in his tenth year on earth. The first had already occurred that summer, at the swimming lessons his mother had been forcing on him and Alice since they could walk, when he got his first crush on a boy. On Mattie DeLuca, who was bused to the community swimming pool from his house in the city of Syracuse, who was eleven but just as short as Rabbit, who had olive-colored skin that glowed like a perpetual tan and the tilted-head cool of Ralph Macchio.

Nothing happened, yet everything had: Rabbit discovered something fundamental about himself without understanding what it meant. And he felt instinctively that it was something he didn’t want to talk about. It was secret and safe inside his mind, and he would keep it there, in a sacred part of himself, until he knew what to do with it.

As Rabbit grew older, he felt the world become unfriendly. He began to worry, more than he had ever worried before, about what he was and what he wanted, and what it meant his life would be. It didn’t stop him from knowing, but he worried that it would be the only thing anyone would ever see about him—that if he told his father or his mother he was gay, they would never see anything else. “Here is our gay son,” they would say. “Here is our gay son who plays music and is kind, but did we mention that he is gay? Because he is. Gay.”

And if the only thing the world saw about him was his gayness, how could anyone ever fall in love with
him?
Would he
have
to go to parades and wear rainbow-striped buttons? Would he
have
to love Barbra Streisand? Would
all
his friends have to be gay, not that he had ever met another gay person (that he knew of)? Would he ever be able to
not
have this secret?

Rabbit worried about all of these things. He also worried about graduation and about college, and whether he would know his own mind if Alice went to a different school (or, maybe worse, he worried that he would love his independence so much, he’d never want her around again). He worried that his sister was setting herself up to be disappointed by real life, and, Pastoral Symphony notwithstanding, he worried that his father was already disappointed, would never open up that coffee house he dreamed of, would never be truly happy. Rabbit worried himself into a hole for the people he loved, for the world at large, and if he hadn’t felt that organized religion had no love for men who loved other men, he probably would have become a priest. He worshiped and found peace, at the age of seventeen, the only way he knew how: in the temple of Beethoven and Debussy, of David Bowie and Led Zeppelin. They filled his secret heart and made it less afraid.

Alice will not shut up. This is not a new phenomenon. Rabbit thinks by now he should have developed a survival mutation, a sub-chamber of his brain like an overflow tank that siphons off and contains his sister’s endless talking. Less than five minutes after Rabbit checked into his room after that first rehearsal, Alice was at his door. About half an hour has passed since then—Rabbit has unpacked all his clothing, set up his toiletries in the bathroom, taken a quick shower, and changed into a crisp new shirt; they have left his room, walked the long creepy hallway, and are waiting for an elevator to take them down to the grand ballroom, to dinner—and he is certain his sister has not stopped speaking for longer than three seconds, which is the amount of time necessary for her to take a breath. He has gleaned that her roommate is famous and crazy, and her roommate’s mother is even crazier and a total bitch.

Rabbit knows when to nod and when to raise his eyebrows, when to say
Are you kidding?
and when to say
She did
not.
He does it seamlessly, thoughtlessly, as though he were actually engaged in the conversation and not silently overwhelmed by the events of his own afternoon. As it went on, his first rehearsal did not exactly improve. The flautist’s storming out was definitely the most dramatic moment. But then they had to sight-read
Afternoon of a Faun
without the key soloist, stumbling from measure to measure, losing count and coming in at the wrong places. He heard the trumpets and trombones muttering mutinously behind him. Even mild-mannered bassoonist Kimmy on his right couldn’t wipe the scowl from her face. Through it all, Fisher Brodie yelled and pinwheeled his arms and lobbed Scottish insults like lawn darts. But he didn’t pick on any one person again; that dubious honor would forever be Rabbit Hatmaker’s.

The elevator opens at the fourth floor and more students get on. Alice doesn’t stop talking. In fact, one of the new riders is in the chorus, so Alice, renewed, starts talking with her about
their
rehearsal, and how incredibly tacky their conductor is. “Did you see her pants? God, she dresses like my mom—it’s like my mom is conducting the chorus. Can you imagine? The whole program would be Barbra Streisand and Celine Dion. The whole thing!”

Rabbit frowns at his sister. They both know their mother would make a great conductor. Does he really need dinner? Can’t he grab a packet of peanut M&M’s from the vending machine on his floor and call it a night? Because this, he now sees, is what he can expect for the next three days. This elevator is the weekend in miniature, with his sister talking to people she’s only just met as though they’re her dearest friends—this is what Statewide is. It isn’t about music, it isn’t about beauty and art and life and death, about connecting to others, soul to soul. It’s about
nothing.
It’s about air passing through lungs and metal and wood and plastic, making sounds, making noise. His heart deflates. There is no way he can tell Alice he’s gay when he cannot even tell her to shut up.

The elevator doors open on the lobby. He hears singing in the distance. Kids practicing, he thinks. Dinner, according to the festival itinerary, is a buffet set up in the grand ballroom in the east wing of the hotel. He follows his sister and her new friend, who he’s figured out is named Chrissy. Chrissy tosses flirty little eye flicks in his direction that Rabbit doesn’t have the energy to feel guilty about. The east wing is in slightly better shape, newer and more anonymous-looking than the rest of the Bellweather. Rabbit is surprised he notices this much, because he feels he’s being pulled along by a tremendous tide, a bit of flotsam who wouldn’t be able to fight his own drowning.

The singing is louder now. The singing is not practicing, Rabbit slowly realizes. It’s a performance, and it’s coming from a handful of young men in matching black T-shirts and jeans standing to the right of the grand ballroom’s open double doors.

Rabbit’s feet stop working. His back straightens. His pupils dilate, his lungs expand, his cheeks flush. Every part of him pops, juiced. They are singing that song, he doesn’t know what it’s called, about wanting to use your love toniiiiiight, they are singing it
a cappella,
and the man in front, the man singing the solo, bears more than a passing resemblance to a college-age Ralph Macchio. They sort of dance, the singers, but it doesn’t feel dorky; they have an innate cool, a casualness and a swagger, that makes them charming. Their throats and faces are wide open and they are smiling into a horseshoe of onlookers, which the soloist, a full, bright tenor, is working shamelessly. His eyes are brown. His hair is dark. When he sings that he doesn’t want to lose your love tonight, his eyes crinkle and his lips curl up in a smile.