December 2005
The wedding is white, and that is all Sheva will claim to remember. The lights bright as day, like seeing a vision. But what Sheva will not tell anyone is how visions have preludes, like how genius compositions have beginnings so often dissimilar to their means. Sheva can pick his composer of choice for this, this long walk down the corridor, him in his impeccable, pressed, fucking Armani, carpeted to his neck, walking down this aisle. Walking down the aisle - Sheva can almost laugh - so he picks Artemovsky for the sheer hell of it.
When he steps into Kaká’s room, the Artemovsky music hits a crescendo, but Sheva realises Kaká is only sitting there, wide, bathetic lips turning cartwheels around Sheva’s head like a pulled-open, abysmal cartoon. Door shuts. Sheva leans heavily, clicks down the volume to a soundtrack of near silence. How trite, he nearly says. They’re playing our song.
“Bastard,” Kaká says.
“You stole my line,” Sheva replies, the both of them, staring, standing, sitting, knowing that Kaká was, for the past hour, expecting him.
Kaká the river. Kaká undulating beneath his eyes. Kaká, uncatchable, unable to be seized. Kaká the Kafka, surreal only to himself, painted into Sheva’s mind: warm, brilliant, understandable only without words. Kaká the Kafka with the fuck taken out of him - no, Sheva realises a split second later, that is a lie. He stops, begins again. Kaká the river, Kaká -
“I’m happy for you,” says Sheva. He smiles, they both smile. The air hangs and sways between.
“It’s your big day,” he tries again, then later, sterner, “Say something.”
Kaká makes that face, the one half-smiling.
“How do I put a touch into words?” Kaká says.
God, thinks Sheva. Sheva thinks, Kaká the river.
How he longs to swim in him, jump in. Kaká will be cold but as the summer passes become warmer, hot to the touch under sun, cool where the wind blows. He evaporates off strands in your hair, but clings when you drench yourself in him. Sheva pulls against his water, the water pools on him, his collarbones, neck, back, arched tight. The physicality of the swimmer steeped in a summer spring. Kaká’s words ring true, how could Sheva put anything into words? How could Sheva.
“If I couldn’t put a touch into words,” Sheva says, almost seriously, “I don’t know how I managed to ever talk to you.”
Kaká smiles, Sheva bites his lip. Possibly the worst pickup line he has ever heard, not that he has said many in his lifetime. They make him laugh, pickup lines. Pick up the bride. Pick up and put down. But now is the time to put down, put down the phone, truncate a call, know that Kaká calls back immediately whenever you hang up on him, asking, Why did you do that?, plaintive, wanting. You, wanting to hear that voice, pliant that way, but not saying a word, silence revealing words unsaid. Hanging up on you is like turning my eyes away as I watch you from a distance, across the pitch, watching your feet and the dirt riding onto your hips when you fall.
Then Kaká turns up his face to the light, blinks twice. That time you asked me and I did it. Now I am going to ask you to do it too. One last time, Sheva. Kiss me like you want more than that.
So Sheva steps forward into the near circle of light, remembers the song he sang. Stoyit' yavir nad vodoyu, a maple tree stands over the river, but still far away, not close enough. Stands over, stands over. Sheva stands over Kaká, puts both hands on his face.
“Be happy,” he says, and though it is altogether everything that he wants to say, Sheva can never say enough. He doesn’t try.
“The wedding will be white,” Kaká tells him, and when he reaches up, to catch on Sheva’s collar, Sheva moves, smiles, leaves.
*
But this is Kaká’s version:
Kaká has sat in the same place for the past two hours, unmoving, staring at the point between his eyes in the mirror like some degenerative superhero that just won’t see through skin into the drip of brain coming down between. Kaká sniffs, some grey matter is preserved from making a snail’s trail down his nostrils, but Kaká can only withhold so much.
He’s warm in that suit, he can barely think, function, only alternate between two states of sudden nervousness or excitement and the long haul of dread. He’s twenty-three, he has to keep reminding himself, and he is already marrying a beautiful person.
So perhaps he is lucky, even though he can’t imagine sleeping with a soft body. All he pictures is the gust of her dress as they shot them earlier this morning, and how they will look, imprisoned in time, her telling him a joke, him with his million dollar smile. How his parents will flip through the photographs when he is older and remember this day with fondness. Kaká could weep; he doesn’t.
And Kaká thinks all this, his fingers drumming, heart pounding, eyes vacant, when the door tenses and springs open like a shot.
“You shocked me,” Kaká says. He has his ready grin. “Bastard.”
“You stole my line,” Sheva replies.
“There isn’t any way I could have,” Kaká says. “Shocked you. I never even moved.”
And there’s something about the way Sheva stands, stock still, that concerns him, makes Kaká want to suddenly stretch open his arms and ask if he is fine, but Sheva is always fine, always will be fine no matter how unwell he is, makes himself fine like that. It is something Kaká accepts, this sick sort of tenacity.
“I’m happy for you,” says Sheva. “It’s your big day; you should say something.”
“Come closer,” Kaká says.
“I can’t talk to you,” says Sheva.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kaká says.
It is the angle of light, maybe, that makes Sheva so pale, ornate in the doe eyes droll on his face, the flat ears, the sandy hair, cobbled together in a way that makes Kaká indulge, consciously, and ache, unaware, and yet acutely aware of how the turn of his face makes Kaká so involutarily smile, think, how beautiful. And Kaká turns up his face to the same light, is blinded, blinks twice, and by the time his vision clears he sees the face, the line sharp between the eyes, the sap of him sopping from the brow.
“Be happy,” Sheva says, and in that instant, Kaká is so touched he could weep. He doesn’t.
The paleness of Sheva’s face ghosts over him.
“The wedding will be white,” Kaká tells him, and blinks into the light. But by the time his vision clears, Sheva is gone, and Kaká can’t remember now if he dreamed him.
Notes: Semyon Gulak Artemovsky was born in Horodyshche, a city in present-day Ukraine. He was a composer, whose life-long friendship with Taras Shevchenko began in the fall of 1838. Artemovsky dedicated to him his song, A Maple Tree Stands Over the River, and died at the age of sixty, in Moscow.