Some Verses
SOME VERSES
Usually, coming back from his morning jog, John doesn’t try to be stealthy, just explodes through the front door, panting and exhilarated. Some mornings he’s noisier, when he’s had the road to himself and the air is sharp and clear, cool energy brushing over him when he runs. Spring mornings are the best, with the maples and birches waking up, and they’re close enough to the ocean for the breeze to smell of salt.
He doesn’t try for it this time, either - he gave up a month ago, when it became clear Rodney is, at least in this, too smart for him. Instead, he shoulders his way in the door, grabs the bottle of water he keeps on the table next to it, takes one more step inside and stops.
The piano crouches in a corner of their living room, their we-can-barely-afford-to-live-here living room, on the edge of the worst of the sun. It had appeared one day while John had been out, just appeared - fwish! insta-piano - and Rodney’s never said anything about it. It’s simply, or not-so-simply, been there, and John, mostly because they don’t talk about these things, hasn’t said anything either, beyond hey, there’s a piano in the living room that Rodney pretended to ignore.
He might say something today, and Rodney might too, but then Rodney’s motor mouth never says much of anything, and maybe it doesn’t need to, because he’s sitting at the piano now, fingers skillful and hypnotic, bare feet on the pedals. John can see the flex and give of ankles, the line of tendon disappearing into the muscle of Rodney’s calf.
And John, suddenly, doesn’t feel like saying much of anything.
Rodney, in blue t-shirt and ridiculous boxers, barefoot, playing something John doesn’t know. And he’s caught, caught, by the utter stillness, Rodney who’s always moving a million miles an hour even when he’s standing still, unfamiliar now, methodical and slow. The concentration, at least, John knows - the fine line in Rodney’s brow as he stares at, through, beyond the music in front of his eyes, into some Rodney-dimension John’s never quite been able to get to.
John wonders a moment how much of this stumbling-in is chance and how much is Rodney, but Rodney’s shoulders, tension pulling them taut, the flicker of hesitation before he reaches for the next notes, tell the story.
“Hey,” he says, to say anything.
Rodney stops playing, fingertips resting with improbable delicacy on the keyboard.
“Hey.” He glances up at John briefly, mouth pulled crooked with embarrassment and the self-deprecation Rodney’s surprisingly good at sometimes.
“That was good.” God, he’s holding onto the water bottle for dear life. He makes himself dangle it between his fingers, casual. Rodney's watching him, and John knows he’s not pulling off casual well at all. “What is it?”
“Huh?” Rodney blinks, then glances at the music on the stand. “Michael Sokolowski. You wouldn’t know him.” The last bit is trademark superciliousness, for John’s benefit, mostly. Maybe some for Rodney’s.
“Pretty cool.” The sun comes soft through their window, falling short of where Rodney’s sitting, though fringes of it catch his hair, making it tawny and copper. Through their window, they can, if they want, watch the land run down to the harbor, and the whitecaps out in the ocean beyond the sentry lighthouse.
“Thanks.” Rodney’s right hand traces the keys distractedly. “Um, I should make coffee. Haven’t had any yet.”
“I got it,” John says, before Rodney can get up. Rodney looks like he might get up anyway, body half-braced to do it. “Just…” Just what? Keep playing? Pretend I’m not here? His fingers tighten around the neck of the water bottle.
Rodney tells him he’s strangling it, to lighten up already, peering at John like peeling back his skull to poke around his grey matter. John flees for the kitchen.
The coffee maker is the most high-tech piece of equipment in their house, out of place next to worn wood and the simple lines of New England architecture. It makes him feel like an idiot, sleek and black with mysterious buttons. It can do lattes and espressos, and split the atom. He manages to put the coffee in where it should go, remembers the filter, and presses “Start,” half-expecting the machine to take off.
He stares out the kitchen window, a different view of the harbor, mostly sea grass until the docks and the bobbing triangles of sails.
Tentative notes come from the living room, and should I stay or should I go, John has no idea. He settles for hovering unobtrusively in the doorway, watching. Rodney’s shoulders are still tense, mouth gone lopsided again, a mix of unhappiness and determination.
Why now, why today, is what John wants to know, but Rodney works in mysterious ways, and he’s learned not to ask.
John’s never actually seen Rodney play, has only seen that the music changes occasionally - a page turned over, annotations crammed into the margins, Mozart changed out for a contemporary composer John doesn’t know. The only person who's used it, so far as John can tell, is the cat, because sun coming through the window pools on the bench.
He’s pretty sure, though, that Rodney’s made sure to play while John’s out on errands or a run, but it’s like he has some kind of sixth sense, maybe super-hearing, or a surveillance system, that he knows the second John’s feet hit the clamshell driveway, because by the time John gets inside he’s making coffee or playing equations like fugues on his laptop. And so the routine is this: John will wander in, dripping sweat and kiss Rodney, who will, somehow, complain and kiss John back at the same time, mouth tasting of coffee but shading slowly into sweat and then the two of them.
“I’m having a midlife crisis,” Rodney tells him now. A note thunks discordantly and Rodney winces, the dammit soft and fervent. He plays the measure again, and the note plays true this time. He nods in satisfaction.
“Of course you are, dear.” John sidles along the wall, letting it hold him up. His legs ache a bit from running in the cold, but the house is warm and Rodney is still sleep-ruffled, self-conscious. “Cheaper than a Porsche, at least.” A Porsche. John sighs.
“Oh, my God.” Rodney shakes his head. “I don’t want the world to think I’m with a man who’s compensating for something.” He plays on, over the distracted rant on sports cars, John, sports cars with reference to John, etc. Somehow, this segues into “I used to play, you know. Ages ago. I quit for a while. Like, thirty years a while.”
“Yeah.” Rodney’s let a few things slip over the years. “Why?”
Rodney shrugs, fake-carelessly, and that’s all the answer John’s going to get. Nothing and a lot all at once, and what rides beneath the gesture makes John a little sad.
“Can you keep playing?” he asks from the sidelines. The molding on the doorframe digs into his shoulder. Original plaster, he remembers, restored. Rodney goes tense and his hands freeze a moment.
Then music Rodney’s been playing shifts into something else, a blues riff, then classical, something played from memory. Meditative, shaping sunlight and a Nantucket Sunday morning into stillness.
John slides onto the bench next to Rodney, who doesn’t complain about John’s sweat, slides so they’re shoulder to shoulder, his body pressed alongside Rodney’s, Rodney who is still and solid and warm, and his left hand traces down Rodney's spine to his hip.
In the kitchen, the super-coffee maker beeps.
“Coffee,” Rodney says absently, all music now, but John doesn’t move, stays to feel the music play silent up Rodney’s arms, nod of his head in time with the beat, smile happy-crooked now, fingers moving smooth and quiet over the keys, which are worn, second-hand, the way they move over John’s body at night.
-end