No Past Land

The first time Fletcher buys him dinner, he’s just blacked out on a city sidewalk after a killer performance, so it’s not so much a favor as an emergency health measure. And as such, it doesn’t start off with nice dinners. Next thing he knows, he’s parked on a sticky vinyl seat, and all his various aches and pains are swelling back into focus without the adrenaline rush of approval to take the edge off. It’s hard for him to enjoy the taste of his black beans and rice when Fletcher is glowering at him over the mica-specked tabletop like an interrogator, daring him to complain. The hole-in-the-wall 24-hour vegetarian restaurant just happens to be what’s nearest, and evidently Fletcher’s none too hungry because he goes through about three cups of coffee just watching Andrew eat.

By the time the server comes back around with the astonishingly small bill Andrew’s alert and well enough to feel around in his pockets for his wallet. But Fletcher reaches for the bill first, and pays in cash, ignoring Andrew’s protests. It’s just dinner, it’s just black beans and rice at an unholy hour while the life slowly seeps back into his body.

He’s still blistered, and the blisters are fresh. Afterward Fletcher blots Andrew’s hands off on the recycled-pulp paper towels from the men’s room and doesn’t even scold him. Neiman bleeds a little, keenly aware of what Fletcher’s hands can do besides wrap around his own with unexplainable delicacy, and waits for the other shoe to drop.

*

The nice dinners come as more of a surprise. At first, when Fletcher takes him out it’s because he wants an audience – someone who’ll see what he sees and hear what he hears, someone who’ll be receptive to the needle-sharp line of critique he keeps up from the taxi there to the bar afterward. They’re on a wavelength now.

There’s CDs Fletcher wants him to listen to, because of course for him all recordings come on some kind of disc and he can’t just send him a YouTube link like any other person. The cases start to stack up on Andrew’s bedside table, like a monument to Fletcher’s prolonged interest in him even after mutual sabotage. Less excusably, there’s steak dinners. One time Fletcher comments on his ragged sneakers, and two days later an upgraded pair show up at his doorstep with an irritable note.

Somewhere in between, Andrew begins to wonder if he’s Fletcher’s student or his mistress. It isn’t the suggestion of sex that’s the tipping point, it’s the sensation that he comes with a price tag – up until this point his continued connection with Fletcher has been bought in blood, and now it’s repaid in unsolicited favors. Fletcher never dotes on him. He never presses him to take anything he doesn’t want. So take it, or don’t; he doesn’t really give a shit. Andrew doesn’t really give a shit, but it’s nice to be well-funded.

Before long it’s dinner, cab fare, new shoes and a new suit jacket that isn’t cataclysmically dyed in panic-sweat and blood. He keeps the old one from Dunellen still, for nostalgia’s sake, and sometimes lets Fletcher see him in it. Fletcher seems more pleased than anything.

*

There are terms on Andrew’s side of things, relating more or less directly to his performance abilities like an old-fashioned morality clause. When they’re together, Andrew won’t drink (easy) or smoke (easy) or get high. The last one’s a little harder, when at Shaffer he’s learned to have a slightly more generous interpretation of what prescription drugs are for. In high school he’d smoked a joint or two out of passive curiosity in the presence of the kind of band kid who really needs to get baked to unwind. Andrew can’t unwind any more, and usually when he’s using he’s looking for the opposite – he needs to be quicker on the draw, needs to play harder or stay awake longer. Easing off of that state of mind is harder than remembering he’s not supposed to get high in the first place – the two of them are resting in an uneasy lull, where Neiman has ostensibly proven himself and Fletcher hasn’t yet determined where he’s going to move the goalposts next. Some day Fletcher will decide he wants something else from him and everything in Andrew’s world will be forcibly rearranged at his command. But it’s much, much easier being Fletcher’s pet than his student.

He can’t bring him back to the apartment his dad pays for. He can hardly go home there himself; Jim keeps saying he just needs to chip in the bills when he can with that tightness in his eyes that says he’s happy just to have him alive, like Andrew’s totaled the car again. Andrew goes to work every day as more of a gesture than a real effort, and his nights and weekends are spent doing what he’d be doing anyway. Practicing, playing, tagging along at Fletcher’s heels.

Maybe some day Fletcher will spring for his rent and he’ll graduate to full-on freaky protege status. Fletcher himself lives modestly. Andrew gets the impression he’s always lived well within his means, no raging heroin problem for him. His gifts don’t come with a price tag, and since Andrew hardly buys anything for himself at all he can’t even get a feel for how the various services should be adding up – if this is too much, if this is a decent recompense for a semester and a half of Fletcher calling him a retard and throwing a chair at his head, or what.

*

When the whole thing’s scrupulously planned minute by minute, and Fletcher’s dictating where he’ll be and what he’ll say and what he’ll wear, it doesn’t necessarily end in sex. For all he knows, Fletcher could have done without it, so long as he had Andrew on a tight rein. Andrew can’t. Once he’s had a taste of it, sickly as it is, he can’t do without. The sex is hurried; after the prolonged build-up of going where Fletcher goes and basking in his tolerance and being awkwardly indulged, it ought to be a disappointment, and it isn’t. It’s some rite, something grueling and strange and necessary.

The club’s 21-plus, and Neiman is still deficient on that score, no matter how effectively Fletcher’s influence has transformed him into a prematurely middle-aged misanthrope who actually enjoys steak dinner and serious conversations. Tonight’s performance itself is not one Andrew wants to miss, but the sudden proliferation of objects in his life after the thaw of Fletcher’s temper is becoming an obstacle. After taking out the trash back at Shaffer, he could have counted on his fingers the number of garments he owned that might have held a misplaced wallet.

“What, you don’t have a fake ID? I thought Shaffer handed them out at orientation.” His tone is light, but body language betrays his impatience, as Neiman goes through the pockets of his coat like one will spontaneously materialize there next to his Band-Aid wrappers and his bus pass. Not for the first time it occurs to Andrew that he must have hated those kids back at Shaffer. He didn’t seem to actually like young people in any way, which makes their continued association all the more mystifying. Maybe it would be easier if he did, if he’d scooped Andrew up out of the mists of mediocrity, as the cool laid-back professor who got along well with the new blood, and then fucked him. That would have made more sense than somebody who hates young people and apparently hates young musicians most of all seizing on him like this even when he’s not performing.

“I didn’t have much of a social life when I was there. They don’t really check that kind of thing, though,” Andrew says with misplaced confidence, as if he’s a regular frequenter of bars. “And they know you there, right?”

“You expect me to just stroll in there with an unaccompanied minor on my arm and vouch for you?” Strictly speaking, Andrew will be far from unaccompanied, but Fletcher doesn’t take the whole concept of in loco parentis all that seriously. “How do you think that’d look?”

“Act like I’m your nephew, then,” Andrew says, and regrets it instantly when Fletcher wheels on him with his heavy blue eyes on fucking fire. That flame is familiar, even a little exciting.

“Fat fucking chance, Neiman. You think we look related? Do you think that’s plausible?”

“Well, we could be.”

“You are making this worse than it has to be.”

Andrew levels his gaze on him, feels his face go stiff and his eyes go hard. The challenge is clear.

“I don’t care how it looks. That’s your problem, not mine.” Their problem, not ours.

The only thing better on a cosmic scale than Fletcher planning this from the get-go is the emergent fact that Fletcher doesn’t know what he wants from him now at all. Andrew’s the one who knows what he wants, and he can just luxuriate in that until the end of time.

(They end up skipping the club and in a men’s room at 3 AM, Fletcher is sucking him off, Neiman can feel the cold tile edge of the wall reaching through the back of his jacket like an iron bar down his spine and Fletcher’s mouth on him is unreal, the distracting power of his body bent low.

Afterward he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand as if to say, well?, and Andrew’s too half-stunned with exquisite weakness to talk back.)

*

Fletcher’s drum set is an ancient dusty Yamaha and a testament to the saintlike tolerance of his neighbors. The broken stick clatters from Andrew’s hand; he doesn’t doesn’t realize he’s at the very least split one of his calluses until he’s successfully flicked a palmful of blood all up and down his shirt. A graceful arc is marked out in red like a parabola, or the bowl of a question mark, but he doesn’t have long to dwell on that before perspiration renders it just a blotch of copper-red.

He steps out when he’s finished to hunt down a couple Band-Aids and not for the first time, Fletcher is there in the hallway – grim as a statue, trying to pretend he wasn’t just listening in on him.

“Were you just listening in on me?” Andrew is laughing, before Fletcher’s touch halts him where he stands.

“Nicely done, dipshit. You look like a crime scene. Come here.”

This is not, as such, a denial that Fletcher has been listening in on him. He’d be well within his rights to walk right in there and watch him if he wanted to; it’s not like this didn’t all start with Fletcher bursting in on a practice room to issue a few demands and leave.

Fletcher pulls his tee shirt off of him, just peels it off over his head, and Andrew is too stunned by the occurrence to put up more than a token protest – his newly bared skin is smarting, and the flush of exertion that runs down to his collarbone looks halfway post-coital if not for the smudge of blood.

He drags him into the living room by the upper arm and disappears off to some unseen receptacle for laundry. Upon his return, Fletcher tosses a folded clean shirt at him and Andrew flinches fast to catch it. It’s one of his tee shirts, one of Fletcher’s own – which somehow manages to be both too roomy and too snug at the same time as it slides over his torso. The cloth hugs him tightly across the shoulders and around his biceps but won’t extend quite so graciously to cover his stomach. He feels like a kid wearing an older sibling’s clothes by mistake, but it’s good enough to cover the yellowing love bite Fletcher left in the soft part of his shoulder like a signature, an annotation on the body.

Afterward, he rinses his hands in Fletcher’s empty little kitchen, and Fletcher watches the water go from red to orange to brown. Somebody has to look after him.

(“Take that off,” Fletcher grumbles when he catches him wearing it a second time, weeks later – arms raised above his head in a exaggerated stretch, resulting in the sturdy hem rising to somewhere around his navel. His fingers find the bare place exposed along Andrew’s vulnerable belly. “You look ridiculous.”

But it’s not Andrew’s fault that he doesn’t wear such inexplicably high-waisted slacks, or that he’s more muscular than anyone over 45 has a right to be while Andrew has perfected his athletic state for drumming and drumming alone. Fletcher presses his mouth to Andrew’s shoulder, gingerly like it hurts him. Andrew puts back a hand to rest on the back of his neck.

No matter how many times Andrew wears it, it’ll remain Fletcher’s shirt, a part of him and a thing of Andrew’s own at the same time. He lives out his life decorated in little cut-out parts of Fletcher’s vision for himself. Did Fletcher have someone like this, someone to show him the ropes?)

*

When they’re not together, all day long, Neiman thinks about the times where they are. Fletcher might as well be living with him – never once have they shared a bed for anything other than a quick excruciating hotel-room fuck. Fletcher has never actually seen where he sleeps and when Neiman imagines him there it’s the vicious taskmaster from the practice room and the concert hall, not the tasteful trim older man who takes him to museums and lets him hold his coat. Unreal. It is unreal.

Andrew doesn’t sleep. He listens to CDs and taps out the time signatures on the stack of plastic cases that litter his bedside.

*

Fletcher takes him out. They’re at some party – they have been at some party for several hours, when Fletcher must see somebody he recognizes. He doesn’t even excuse himself when he cuts across the open lobby to greet the couple. A red-haired woman in a blue dress, old enough and vulpine enough to be Ryan Connolly’s mother, and her unremarkable date – husband? boyfriend? The other man is at least a decade her junior, but he still has a couple decades on Andrew, so it’s probably not his place to act scandalized.

The boyfriend keeps his distance, but the woman waltzes right up to Fletcher and embraces him, glass in hand – she might even kiss him on the cheek, though the view is obscured through the curtain of her hair.

Fletcher introduces them both by name, a matched pair with wine glasses and chilly smiles. The names themselves don’t stick. The blood’s already a white-noise roar in Neiman’s ears, and he doesn’t know where to look – the woman’s face, her date’s face, her hands, Fletcher’s hands, Fletcher’s back.

And the next words send his stomach plummeting, Fletcher gestures toward him without even glancing his way – “And you already know this guy. Say hello, Andrew.”

“I’m Andrew Neiman. I –” I play in Terence Fletcher’s band, I hate this party and everything about it except the piped-in mood music, I only came tonight because I might get laid– “It’s really great to meet you. What a great evening.”

The woman in blue extends a hand to him. Andrew’s hands are a sweating mess; her hands are bone-dry. “And you know Terence from his time at Shaffer. There’s been a lot of buzz about you, Andrew.”

(Neiman can feel his face begin to go hot, the humiliated prickle of flush making headway from his cheeks to the tops of his ears, before he realizes she means his performances. He tries to place her somewhere relative to whole sequence of events at Carnegie Hall. Any given student dropping out of conservatory isn’t newsworthy, and if she’s that touchy-feely with Fletcher she can’t be too scandalized by the terms on which he left Shaffer. But a performance like that – people remember it.)

But he smiles, and she smiles, and the conversation goes on. Fletcher steers the four of them to a rickety table out of the way of all the accursed mingling going on. Neiman doesn’t want to mingle with any of these people, half of them know fuck-all about music and none of them have anything approaching taste. To hear Fletcher’s narration of Andrew’s achievements, he’s been practically a non-presence in them. Their association is only by coincidence. Whether this is an omission of blame or some skillful showmanship, Andrew doesn’t know, but being shown off is painful and when the topic of discussion shifts to the days of Fletcher’s own unlikely youth it’s almost a relief.

Is this what old people talk about? It’s like dinner at his aunt’s house, except Fletcher is right there in the middle of it martialing the whole push and pull of the conversation – vicious, sharp, this awful sharp heavy object like a landmine and yet they’re laughing and chatting. The woman in blue is laughing. Andrew is laughing and sitting patiently in his expensive suit jacket like this is all normal. Andrew’s mouth is moving but he hardly knows what words are coming out. He doesn’t know where to look. He doesn’t know what to do with his eyes.

Fletcher’s hand rests against his shoulder, the loosely curled fingers pressing lightly between his shoulder blades. It sends an electric jolt of what once would have been fear directly to the pit of Andrew’s groin – the regular residence of what Fletcher inspires in him now, some unmanageable cocktail of desperate hunger for approval and some species of sexual desire. He keeps thinking of this woman’s lips on Fletcher’s cheek, she’s a beautiful woman and he’s ugly as sin – whether she made actual contact between skin and lipsticked skin or if it was as genteel and sexless as a handshake.

Some part of him, some gnawing worm wants to posit that the two of them used to fuck. It explains her consort’s squirrely unease and his complete lack of regard for Andrew; it explains why she’s as calmly vicious as Fletcher is after the introductions have passed, and why she calls him Terry, and why his eyes draw slow lines between the two of them as if it’s only polite – to make a comparison between youth and experience. Neiman’s not a witty person at the best of times. His only conversational skills lie in shocking rudeness, and this is not the time to be shockingly rude or Fletcher will shove him on the next train back to his old apartment before you can say not my tempo. He’ll go home to jerk off and cry without even the dubious consolation of a Fletcher-style send-off. His silence is worse. His indifference is worse.

Somewhere in between the anecdotes about shared time at the Philharmonic and polite small talk about the quality of the drinks at the open bar, Neiman’s hand finds Fletcher’s leg under the table and slips into his lap. His thigh is warm and solid under his hand; the hard muscle is not entirely unfamiliar to him and the cloth fits in close folds against his calluses. Andrew is keenly poised for the low-level crackle of disdain that’ll leap into a live wire the moment they’re alone here, the moment these intruders have left. He expects a sharp glance, or a sharp word. But Fletcher’s face is diabolically free of expression, its lines and crags unreadable.

Frosty eyes, tranquil bloodless lips, the bearing of a professional. The three of them are the professionals here, Andrew is just the novice. This woman doesn’t really care what he did at JVC, no more than she really cares what he did at Dunellen, she cares because Fletcher cares. Andrew cares because Fletcher remembers. Fletcher has seen what he can do and he’s liked what he’s seen.

Andrew presses cautiously with his thumb, shifts up his grasp to be more of a caress than a death-grip. He’s still on the outside of this looking in. It could be fifteen minutes, it could be another hour, and by the end of it Andrew’s tired eyes are beginning to lose focus. The adults all talk, they have drinks with their little appetizers – which Jim Neiman could have made at home, and better – and Andrew’s hand is in Fletcher’s lap six inches or less from his dick, and nobody says anything about that. When he finally has to remove it, his palm aches. There’s more embraces and handshakes on parting, and Andrew feels the genteel dryness of the older woman’s skin on the palm of his right hand long after they’ve parted grasps.

Neiman doesn’t get to see the rest of the party, let alone what’s supposed to be announced there or performed or dedicated. Fletcher takes him out front beneath the dripping awning presumably reserved for miserable smokers. In reality, it’s more like dragging him out, since the moment they’re out of view he’s got him by the collar and slings him back against the bricks. The chilly night air burns, and for the first time Neiman has the sense that he may be a lousy date.

“What the hell was that about?”

“This stuff isn’t as interesting for me as it is for you.” And like Fletcher never made his own fun. He couldn’t have actually liked those people, any of them.

“You can’t sit still for ten minutes?”

“While you all revisit old times. Jesus, I feel like a kid, I thought they’d never shut up–”

“Don’t be a shit, Andrew. Why do I bother to take you anywhere? As soon as the attention’s not on little old you, you shrivel up and die.”

“Yeah, when I could be gagging to spend my Friday night where I’m the only person there under 40. I do have a life.”

In the history of lies, this one’s pretty noteworthy. Andrew reaches out, half-stumbling – to feel the cloth of his shirt, to grab ahold and wrench himself forward, he doesn’t know – and Fletcher catches him by the wrist. Not all that hard hard, not even all that fast, God knows he sure telegraphed that move from far enough away. Not gently – deliberately would have to be the word, as he presses back the palm of Andrew’s hand and Andrew brings up the pads of his fingers to trace down his chest, the hard ledge of his collarbone and the sinewy muscle of his chest.

He could slap him in the face. That occurs to him here in the rainy smoke-stained dark – that Fletcher would recognize the weird symmetry of it, though he can’t imagine he’d appreciate it.

“Jesus Christ,” Fletcher says, and he just sounds tired. “Pretty sure we’re done here. Go the fuck to bed, all right?”

He’s done zoning out now. Andrew falls against him in a teeth-chipping sucking kiss, and he tastes wine. Anyone could see them out here – luckless passersby, the guy who stands out there and holds the door, strangers in taxis. Fletcher grabs hold of him by both elbows, and Andrew is strung-out enough to expect a rough shake. He expects some jolt or some slur screamed four inches away from his face. But Fletcher just holds him there, supremely resigned.

“Can we just go on a normal date some time, with nobody trying to talk shop?”

“Like you’d know about normal. If you wanted normal you’d be taking some freshman from Columbia to the movies. You might even get to second base. If you want normal, go home. Get tanked, take the weekend off. Watch Star Wars, I don’t fucking care.” Fletcher shrugs into his suit jacket. It’s almost a defensive gesture, and Andrew feels the muscles of his own back strain to mirror it.

“I like this. I care about this. I just want to go home with you. This is killing me. You drag me around all night, and then you don’t even take me home, it’s – preposterous. It’s fucking stupid.”

“I’m not going to fuck you, if that’s what you’re hoping for. You look like shit. Don’t think I didn’t notice.” Fletcher’s thumb works through the soft hair at Andrew’s temple, just outside his field of vision. Andrew’s wrists ache where they’re braced against his sides.

“I feel like shit.”

“Yeah, you do. Ready to call it a night?”

This is a test, like dragging him to the practice room three hours early just to fuck with him, way back in the beginning. This is Fletcher testing his mettle, or trying to fuck with his head, or both. This is something where if he says yes, he’s a quitter. This is none of those things, and it’s time to go home.

*

He wakes up on the couch, curled up so tight his knees are sore and still sticking off the edge of the cushions. Fletcher’s blazer is spread out over him like a blanket; its lining slips against his cheek when he turns his head. The past twelve months have caught up with him, all in one night, hard. Fatigue presses down on him like a hand, and he lies blinking in the dark, counting breaths.

Fletcher’s living room isn’t all that large, supporting the thesis that he doesn’t entertain much, but it contains enough music-related ephemera to look like the high-end version of Andrew’s dorm room at Shaffer, heaps of books like paper cut-outs in the electric pre-dawn half-light and framed photos of the greats. One of Fletcher’s hats is on the shelf, lurking in the dark like a housecat.

Fletcher himself is asleep in his chair, face in deep shadow, having removed coat and shoes but nothing else. Black cotton undershirt, black socks, strong arms slack. He’s more or less upright, like he fell asleep watching, but why wait up? After hustling him home he didn’t even fucking bother to go to bed. Neither did Fletcher carry him to bed and spoon him all night long, but it’s a start. He’s never actually seen him sleep before. Andrew could laugh.

Andrew doesn’t laugh. He lies very still and very quiet, sucking in Fletcher’s cologne from the silk weave of his coat lining and listening to the wheeze of his nearby breath. He lies waiting to drop off again, waiting for the sun to come up, whichever comes first.