A Thing Of My Love

I.

This isn’t a habit of his. This isn’t his method. Fletcher has seen enough acne-scabbed sweaty little ingrates to turn off even the most dedicated chickenhawk, and it’s hard to imagine wanting to fuck anyone who wouldn’t know the correct tempo from a hole in the ground.

His mouth finds the soft part of Neiman’s spindly little neck, and he bites. The kid gasps so sweetly, and responds so strongly, that what follows is only natural.

The first time they’d fucked, in retrospect Andrew must have been high, or he’d never have gone through with it. It’s Fletcher’s business to make sure that’s never the case again. He may be an evil old bastard who hates everyone and everything, but he’s not an extortionist, in this arena he does not use force. It certainly complicates things – and it may complicate them for Neiman too, not having the excuse of someone else’s negligence for his own bad choices, knowing that he went into this headlong. He’s young and he’s strong and it’s been so long since Fletcher has fucked anyone that it’s a natural enough transition from fucking him over. No more stunts.

(One of the first times, Fletcher asks him, out of a kind of morbid curiosity: “How’d you hurt your neck?”

“What? Oh –” He rubs at the scars sheepishly; they stand out white against a pink field. Cute. But he never answers. Fletcher will remember that.)

*

Under his tutelage Andrew is achieving his fullest potential. He is burning as brightly as it is possible for him to burn. Andrew under him is only giving up what he wants to give.

His face is buried against the bed, inclined against the crook of his bent arm; one scabby white hand is bent back to splay against the back of his neck. His back is surprisingly broad; all his strength runs through it, all his muscle mass is in his upper body, and the result is an endearing mismatch; wiry arms, sturdy chest, soft middle and soft legs. His ankles are crossed, and his gawky feet stick out.

Neiman has always been an open book. There’s nothing he can hide for long, and it’s Fletcher’s responsibility to make something of that candor. Fletcher just wishes he could see his face.

“What are you doing this week?” It’s an idle question, as idle as any of his questions ever are; he is probing, making a sweep. Fletcher rests his head against Andrew’s back, and tries not to count his breaths.

“Thought I’d probably see a movie some time tomorrow. I’m booked or practicing every other day this week, and I’ve got a cutting session Wednesday night.”

“What are you doing about dinner?”

The kid will get out of there at an ungodly hour, half-dead. It will be up to Fletcher to steer him home and make sure he showers and gets fed. These are their plans, as far as plans go. This is what passes for affectionate company between them.

II.

He isn’t a monster. He doesn’t hurt him, but he doesn’t coddle him either, he doesn’t start handling him with kid gloves just because they’re friendlier now outside of performances. For a while it’s pleasant, if not comfortable. So of course he cleans up the blood. Andrew’s a clumsy little asshole with an attitude problem, God only knew what he did in the early morning to make such a mess, and Fletcher is too busy going over the morning’s rehearsal in his head to do anything more than scrub and scrape and wipe down with bleach water. He’ll get the rest of it later; it isn’t the first time he’s had to mop up somebody else’s blood. One of those tasks that’s really better to delegate as soon as you can. Where hasn’t Andrew bled? There’s a scuff of rust-orange running up his wrist, acquired some time last night, that he scrubs away in a public restroom before heading back to work.

(The lamp had been ugly anyway; what a drama queen. The remains are whisked up into a dustpan and sits in the trash, contently nestled underneath a wad of bloody paper towels that reek of chlorine bleach.)

Terence doesn’t think at the time that this will incriminate him. He’s been cleaning up blood all his life, and he has no reason to think this mess is any different.

III.

When Andrew is gone, the world shrinks back into something smaller. Every second that ticks away steals something. Fletcher is excruciatingly aware of the passage of time, even when he’d rather not be, and he grows more irritated with himself and his absent protégé every minute. The only thing Neiman needed protection from was his own stupidity.

He starts retracing his steps, like he’s misplaced his star student, like he’ll find him behind a Dumpster or in the pockets of an old coat. He stops by the movie theater where Neiman and his father used to go. Neiman had met some girl here, just some girl, and from his stumbling closed-lippedness Fletcher feels confident in assuming that he asked her on a date. Whether she took him up on it or not can’t be said, but given that Neiman has all the suave charm of a garden implement, it probably didn’t go too well.

The old-fashioned marquee advertises North By Northwest. If he turns his head he can just about see down the hall to the concessions; a girl with light brown hair stands behind the counter. He catches her staring at him, as he glides by like a bald nun on his way to his seat, and he pauses there to buy a Coke. She may be cute, but she doesn’t look too smart. He snaps at her without thinking as he sorts out his change.

The movie’s all right; there are worse ways to kill time. Neiman would have liked it.

The next day, the other musicians are restless. A young crowd, but professional, and Fletcher notices a couple faces in the crowd he’ll want to keep an eye on. They keep giving it five more minutes, and five more, Andrew will be there, Andrew will make it, and Fletcher half-expects to see him come through the door. Neiman might be late, he might be bleeding, but he wouldn’t miss a session like this. Once it becomes clear that their drummer’s not going to show, the atmosphere in the room alters a little. Fletcher’s presence is unwelcome there, and he slouches off like he’s got something more important to do.

Not long after that, Fletcher receives a telephone call from the police. It’s not the first time Fletcher talks to the cops and it’s not likely to be the last, but it’s clear he’s the last person they’ve sought out to talk to. They’ve put it off in the hopes that he’s their missing piece – or they’ve blown through the list of people who regularly interact with Andrew so fast that they’ve got no choice.

IV.

The next time, things are a little more blunt. They mistake his annoyance with the missing person in question for indignation at being questioned, and as a result they press harder.

(“He’s a grown adult. He can make his own choices. Let him go where he wants, for fuck’s sake, he can take care of himself.”

“When did the two of you begin your relationship?”

“Professionally?”

“Right now we’re focusing on the sexual relationship.”)

They know, and what’s more they’ve drawn their own conclusions. Andrew wouldn’t have told anyone on pain of torture. Or maybe there’s just something about the conjunction of youth and expertise that makes people jump to conclusions.

Fletcher has nothing to be ashamed of. He’s done nothing wrong; he hasn’t shamed himself or somehow damaged Andrew just by giving him what he wants. He comes home to an empty apartment and an empty mirror and he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

*

Meetings with the police escalate from the affable exploratory sessions of story-checking he’s come to love so well to all but accusations. It wouldn’t be so bad if you did kill him, some medically tranquilized NYPD douchefuck tells him in as many words in an attempt to massage out a confession with only insipid sympathy as incentive; it wouldn’t be so bad if you lost your temper. Sounds like he was a difficult guy to like. Fletcher knows this game and it makes him sick. He’s already got one charge pinned on him from the way he left Shaffer, the last fucking thing he needs is some workplace drone claiming to understand the mitigating circumstances that might result in the rape and murder of a nineteen-year-old.

Andrew had tried to kill him, for fuck’s sake. Andrew’s the violent one here. Neiman came on to him. There was no murder and there certainly wasn’t any rape.

He gets a phone call from his ex-wife that starts, heard you lost another one, and he slams the phone down so hard the plastic casing cracks.

*

Jim Neiman is in communication with the police almost daily. He is very worried about his son, the tag-team of cops stresses heavily, and anything Fletcher can tell them helps. Neiman senior can fuck himself, frankly, and Fletcher lives in mortal dread of seeing the portly gray-haired figure of his teenage boyfriend’s father weaving down some precinct hallway to accost him.

“If we’re assuming that I did hurt him – where would I stash a body in New York City?”

“We’re working on that.”

“It’s not some little co-ed we’re talking about here. Healthy young man, solid six-foot, not shy about using his fists. Are you suggesting I dragged him off somewhere? Neiman tried to kill himself; how the fuck am I supposed to know where he went to finish the job?”

Little Andy Neiman’s floating around in the Hudson with all the other garbage.

V.

Sophie is a brisk woman of the kind that make Fletcher wildly uncomfortable under other circumstances. She’s a little less than half his age, little and dark and always in high heels. They get along well. She seems to enjoy her job, and he appreciates her services as an assistant; they’ve worked together for seven years, and she knows his habits better than anyone.

She hands in her resignation in person, without looking him in the eye. Even his own secretary thinks he’s done something criminal.

(He isn’t teaching any more. What the hell does he need an assistant for? Organizing his fabulous jam-packed social calendar?)

*

Fletcher is finally becoming anathema and he can feel it. You can’t carry on in life the way he has – whether that’s boldly and with integrity or snarling and spitting like a damn animal, making enemies with anyone in his path – without the irritation and contempt you’ve elicited reaching critical mass at some point, and now it’s ballasted with genuine fear. It’s like playing out a messy divorce in front of a crowd of mutual friends – everybody in New York with an ear for jazz knows Fletcher, and anybody with an ear for meteoric new talent has noticed Andrew Neiman. Not a few have noticed their conjunction. When Andrew had been alive and well, present and accounted for, it had been the kind of thing for people to joke about – the two of them as a force to be reckoned with, two perfectionistic pig-headed assholes ready to take the world by storm. Now, it elicits pity more than anything short of disgust. People from whom he would never have expected pity, let alone accepted it, have extended their sympathies, in some cases their premature condolences. Their earnest concerns have Fletcher ready to spit. None of them knew Andrew, they’d heard him play or heard about him playing, and they treat it like Fletcher’s had an inbred show poodle run off and get hit by a car. Their sympathy is an offense; he wards it off by putting forward like nothing’s changed. Let them think he’s cold if they want, let them think he’s careless and losing his professional edge; he can’t help how they think, as if he gives a fuck. Andrew will be back within the week.

VI.

“The two of you had been drinking. His blood and semen are all over your apartment. He left his shoes behind. Where do you think he might have gone that evening, Dr. Fletcher?”

Some hard-nosed bitch who thinks of herself as a spiritual successor to Clarice Starling and not a shitty big-city detective. She, too, is a fraction of Fletcher’s age. Det. Eklund is unimpressed.

Fletcher’s indifference is a pose that irritates her, all the more reason to lay it on thickly. He shrugs a little. “He wouldn’t have gotten far, would he? Don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to put that together.”

Where the fuck would he have gotten a ride at that hour? He couldn’t have called a friend, even if he did find a public phone; Andrew doesn’t have friends. Where would he have walked?

*

He’s never been more glad that Neiman isn’t underage. He isn’t a monster, he’s a fucking professional. He admires talent. He doesn’t know what he’d have done if that obsessive unquenchable chemical fire had attached itself to a different set of traits – it’s hard to imagine what would look worse than this. A girl, maybe. Andrew as a girl is disconcertingly easy to picture; he’d never have gotten away with it with a female student. The sharper part of his brain, the part that’s running whether he likes it or not, says you’ve got to have a softer touch with girls, that there just has to be a more insidious point of entry to break them down without leaving an outward scratch, but he doesn’t mean it – if his genius drummer had been some long-armed freak of a girl, he’d have treated her no differently, it’d have been sink or swim for her too, he’d have smacked her around in front of her new bandmates, all of them too petrified into indifference to flinch. He’d have pushed her too. He is not expressing a preference for anything other than talent.

He probably wouldn’t have fucked her, this imaginary girl.

He has destroyed something very precious to him. Neiman never made him a recording. Fletcher is a little ashamed of how many times he’s played the CD Casey had left for him in its flimsy plastic shell, signed in permanent marker. He’d set out to commit it to memory, to identify the idiosyncrasies of the performance and maybe in the hopes that repetition would dull him to the animal pain it evoked in him – evokes in him now – without fail.

Andrew never made him a recording. If one exists, he’ll have to hunt it down, and humbling himself that way is the last thing he’s inclined to do right now. He’ll never hear him play.

If Andrew is alive and hiding, then he wants nothing to do with him. If Andrew is alive and locked in some latter-day Jeffrey Dahmer’s sex basement (and wouldn’t that be a change) he’ll never play again. If Andrew is dead – Andrew’s as dead as Sean Casey and he will wake up every morning knowing that, knowing that he caused this and that if it looks like he did the deed personally it’s only because he has.

Andrew did not die in Fletcher’s apartment. If he’d done this to spite him, he’d have stuck around and given him something to wake up to besides a mess. If he’d wanted to OD or to hang himself – the words make something in him hitch horribly, the feeling is too ugly and unbearable to name – if he’d really wanted to off himself he’d have done it, and God help him if he didn’t get it right in one try. It’s easy to think, maybe that had been it – he’d botched it the first time around and even bleeding like a stuck pig had the presence of mind not to bawl about it, to escort himself out and finish the job. He’d been more scared of Fletcher’s anger (undeniably justified, in this case, Fletcher would have tanned his hide for even thinking about kicking the bucket while under his roof) than dying barefoot in New York while still too young to buy liquor.

Fletcher lives with death in the same way as any man of a certain age; he’s quit smoking on his doctor’s advice, he doesn’t trawl around in seedy bars after dark or play with guns, he’s buried more friends than he has left. All that’s left for him, awfully cliche as it is to say it, are death and art. Andrew had been fearless in the face of death. (Andrew is fearless. Andrew is, until they can show him a body.) Andrew would have done anything.

VII.

Three weeks and Fletcher is one of the living dead. He keeps forgetting to shave and half the time he forgets to shower. He’s living out of another, shittier rented room for the time being and every inch of it is offensive to the eye. He keeps thinking he needs to call his lawyer but he doesn’t, like he can argue his way out of this himself, and the whole load of good it did him last time is further incentive to miss out on his appointments and hang up on calls. Last time. How the hell has he been living his life that there’s even been a last time? His nerves are fraying fast, and maintaining absolute silence in his present state is near-impossible.

He can’t listen to music any more without thinking of him. He can’t get a drink at a bar without people looking at him like they fucking know. They no longer see a decent man of a certain age or a college professor or a professional musician. They see something ugly.

In a way, it’s good to be freed from his responsibilities. In between interrogations and avoiding every remaining form of print journalism, in the off chance he has become interesting enough for a scandal, he’s getting more reading done. In a few months, when they’ve recovered and identified Andrew’s body, he might compose something in his honor. It’s a little macabre, but he’s got nothing better to do.

When he thinks about his own death in the midst of all of this it’s with something like envy.

VIII.

“Did you know he was planning to leave?”

“That’s his prerogative.” Fletcher almost says problem. He shifts in the rickety office chair and shrugs again. “I wasn’t about to go after him.”

When his own sainted mother had decided to up and leave, she’d done the decent thing and had her sister drive out and pick her up. Who knew how long she’d been working on that one; she’d never really been a long-term planner or she’d never have been dumb enough to marry his father. When his ex-wife had packed up and left, she’d been well-heeled enough to take a cab. That’s women’s lib for you.

He hadn’t known, and the thought stings him. Neiman would never have really left; he’d never have had anywhere to go. Anywhere else would have been a steep demotion.

*

A month and a week after, Fletcher goes back to the movie theater and there’s no girl behind the counter, just a dead-eyed zit-faced boy who tries to shill him a diet soda. The film playing is Laura. Somewhere around the inevitable film noir denouement, Fletcher has to step outside. Terribly rude, he knows.

His eyes are watering. Out in the street, he sucks a couple of harsh breaths against his balled fists and wishes more than anything that he had a cigarette.

His phone begins to ring in his pocket.

IX.

Neiman’s setting him up. Neiman is setting him up. This is such a bizarre fucking posture, it’s so unbelievably sick and stupid that he has to laugh – Neiman can’t even do it right, he can’t even think like a killer would, he thinks like a kid who’s seen too many movies. Neiman is setting him up. They’re standing around in the fucking chapel like a couple of assholes, and Fletcher’s eyes are watering. There’s nothing left for them to say.

Andrew flings his arms around him with a strength that makes him flinch. He’s testing him. Fletcher can’t push him away. Any moment now some criminally underpaid nurse will stroll in looking for her absconded patient and Fletcher will be lucky if he doesn’t leave in a cop car.

They’re going to lock Andrew up for this either way. He never killed anybody, let alone himself, and they’re going to stick him in some psych ward until he feels better and he never will. The scariest prospect of all: maybe Neiman’s not a genius, maybe he’s not ready to rise to the ranks of the greats, maybe he’s just a fucking nutcase. And what does that leave Fletcher?

Neiman hugs him so tightly that it almost throws him off balance. For a sickly suicidal runaway he hasn’t lost any of the strength in his arms, and Terence doesn’t believe for a second that he’s stopped playing in the interim. His arms lock around him with punishing tightness and Fletcher is at a loss for where to put his hands. He ends up settling for the back of Andrew’s downy neck.

His hair’s gotten long, and he smells like the hospital.

Fletcher is predictably shitty at being comforting, if that’s what this is supposed to be. Nobody has ever left Fletcher and come back again of their own volition. Andrew is the only one who’s had multiple chances to get out, to get out of New York and get out of the business altogether, and he’s the only one to come back to him of his own volition. Andrew Neiman is a liar and a faker and for his own part Terence is well-known as enough of a grade-A cunt to give ample fuel to any accusation the kid could have flung his way. It’s a miracle it wasn’t anything worse. Domineering, psychologically abusive perfectionist beats convicted murderer, any day.

When Andrew breaks away, it’s with a sleepy smile on his face. “Would you mind wheeling me out of here?”

*

Neiman improvises. If he’d been better at improvising in the first place they wouldn’t be here. His account, as delivered to the same fine officers, Eklund and Brauer, is a little on the spare side. Abstract, considering he’s doped to the gills, but he’ll tough it out. The setlist is as follows: Neiman is last seen stressed and disoriented, acting uncharacteristically. Neiman disappears, conscious but with no idea of his name or where he lives. He wanders and is recovered somewhere upstate, with no identifying information. A fugue state might be less spicy than a murder, but it’s plausible, and Neiman’s dreamy-eyed confusion sells it. The last things he can remember aren’t flattering, but are suitably exculpatory:

“He wanted me to quit using, and I got pissed off about it and left. I don’t know where I wanted to go, I just went.”

“So the two of you did have a fight.” Brauer watches him arrhythmically knock a knuckle against the tabletop. He’s the junior of the pair, not that far north of Andrew’s age. This case fascinates him.

“An argument, yeah.”

“And he threw a lamp at you.”

Andrew’s mouth quirks in a smile, his deep dark eyes are suspiciously shiny and Jesus Christ, does this kid ever have brass balls. “That’s Fletcher for you. I just didn’t dodge fast enough. There’s no hard feelings or anything; he likes to keep us on our toes. That must have been where the blood came from – I guess I made a bigger mess trying to clean up.”

Open body language, self-consciously neutral set of mouth. Brauer knows he’s dealing with a mental case, either way, and feels bad about it. “Fletcher told us that it was him who cleaned up at the apartment.”

“I didn’t do that good of a job, probably. I don’t really remember it – he didn’t get me that hard. Back last winter I got a concussion in a car wreck, this wasn’t anywhere near that bad. He was just trying to wake me up.”

Unprovoked, a dissociative fugue could last for hours, or days, or weeks. Unheralded, unbidden, ignored. A fugue is also a compositional style, though not one of Fletcher’s favorites, which makes Andrew’s choice of dropping off into one wholly appropriate. It’s still less titillating than a murder, but that’s hardly the greatest of Jim Neiman’s disappointments.

X.

All the pieces have been swept, all the floors have been scrubbed, all the apologies have been grudgingly exchanged and the prescriptions have been written for pills Neiman has no intention, he says fully candidly on the train ride over, of taking. They go back to the half-empty apartment with Neiman’s drum kit sitting in the corner and Neiman’s blood like a ghost in the cracks between the floorboards. It’s the scene of the crime, unless the scene of the crime is an anonymous rehearsal studio or fucking Carnegie Hall. Everything Andrew owns and needs fits in a cardboard box; Fletcher carries it for him without comment, and sets it down in the middle of the floor.

A month and a half. Neiman’s little sabbatical has stolen a month and a half of his life, and now he’s ready to play in his band again, he has deigned to return from exile, but the question stands, what band. Between the stunt at JVC and the violent disappearance of the cocky shitbag responsible, even Fletcher’s most seasoned players have made their excuses. Some of them undoubtedly think the two are connected – whether Neiman’s faux-suicide was the closing act of some primitive psychodrama kicked off by a drum solo that could make angels cry, or whether Fletcher beating him to death (with what? his bare hands?) was revenge. But either way, he’s in no position to give Andrew what he promised him in the hospital. They’ll start over together. A romantic notion, except neither of them wants to.

“You had plenty of time to find a replacement drummer.” Andrew’s eyes are dark mistrustful slashes, and he is still too pale. He turns to brush past him on his way out of the bathroom (that bathroom, where a crime had nearly been committed) and Fletcher shifts his mass to catch him.

“Oh, was that what this disappearing act of yours was all about? I assumed you just wanted attention. Go ahead and prove me wrong.”

“When we met you had Carl Tanner. Then you had me, then you had Ryan Connolly. Who’s going to be the new Ryan Connolly?”

“Listen, those guys meant nothing to me. They were my means of securing you.” They’ve discussed this before. If there’s anything Andrew’s sure of, it should be this, that Fletcher would never have settled for a Ryan Connolly when he could have had this.

“You would have gotten bored eventually.”

“Did you think you could just leave? What the hell gave you that idea, genius?”

“I couldn’t possibly have, you know, wanted to die–”

“Like you’re the only guy in New York who ever wanted to kill himself. Jump in front of a train next time, you cowardly faggot. I own you, Neiman. You’re stuck with me. You don’t get to off yourself without my permission.”

He is being the bad teacher, the full-bore predator. It is within the realm of possibility that hurting Andrew excites him. Andrew’s unconquered arrogance excites him even now. Neiman won’t be leaving him, dead or alive. He will never leave him again.

Neiman does not answer. His eyes are on Fletcher, but they are dead and uncomprehending.

He thinks he’s smart, he thinks this was a good move, he thinks Fletcher will be so grateful to have him back that he’ll just forget. It’s stupid, and it’s cheap.

 

“You thought you could do this to me, you little cocksucker–”

He backhands him hard, shoves him back with his arm against his throat. Andrew’s head cracks against the wall; the collision rattles the light fixtures. Andrew’s pulse kicks against his wrist.

“Yeah, because I’m your little cocksucker. You only liked me when I was performing, so I had to come up with a performance.”

Fletcher’s incredulous expression must really be something, because Neiman’s throat is trembling with unvocalized laughter. Andrew is laughing at him with his chin stuck out. His scars stand out; they show up as white lines. Fletcher could bash his head in right here, and it’d probably feel good.

Fletcher recoils from him and lets him drop. He’s too old for this kind of histrionic bullshit; it’ll kill him. “That’s sick,” he says, dizzily, “that’s sick, Andrew.”

“You made me do it. Everything I do, I do it because you made me.”

He sinks down against him; he is tired of this and of everything. Andrew grabs him by the chin, a real tight grown-up you’ll look at me when I’m talking to you squeeze, and forces up his face. The anger that flares in his gut isn’t even worth responding to.

Fletcher presses his mouth to the scabbed web of Andrew’s palm and Andrew digs in against him harder, he lifts his hips against him and forces flesh between his teeth. For a long moment there they lock together, and Fletcher just shakes.

This is the kind of violently unprofessional psycho bullshit he’s signed on for, and he can’t settle for anything less. Andrew kisses him on the mouth, and Fletcher tastes blood.

One day Andrew Neiman will die a fucking junkie death and Fletcher won’t be there for it. Or he’ll jump in front of a train, or he’ll tie a slippery noose out of a belt in his own shitty apartment and choke himself out of the world that killed Charlie Parker just as surely and just as soon. One day Fletcher will die too. They’re in this for the long haul.