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Three Days Early in May

By Alex Gardener

David wasn't expecting much when he stepped down to the curb from the transport van. The venue wasn't huge, it didn't bear comparison to the memory of places like the Met, back before throat surgery and fatherhood and the heavy squalls of divorce had weathered his voice down to something so different from what it had been when his name was still bolded on playbills for Faust or Il Barbiere di Siviglia or La Traviata.

He would have been willing to lay odds, before stepping inside, that the acoustics here weren't the finest he'd been privy to. Six hours northwest in Detroit he'd played once, at twenty-two, to a standing room only audience in Orchestra Hall, where despite the run-down bathrooms and the quarter-mile trek from dressing room through dank underground tunnels to the stage one building over, he'd felt, as he'd begun to sing, some magical sense that every seat and wall and gilt cornice his voice washed over co-conspired; that the domed lid of the theater was hinged and had been thrown back, his instrument made part of sky and stars and winter dark, a system of cosmic amplification explainable only through shaping by a greater hand.

David was in Cincinnati, and the weekend's shows included a Saturday matinee, part of a subscription series he suspected Midwestern mothers signed up for to give their children exposure to The Arts, the sort where attendance invariably waned mid-season after October's ubiquitous Night on Bald Mountain, falling prey to the competition of karate practice and Cub Scouts and the demands of orthodontia. He knew better than to expect more than a smattering of blunt faces occupying the velvet seats. He was already steeling himself toward the added effort of making his sound fill the crevices.

So when he stepped down to the curb from the transport van, he really wasn't expecting much. He had his head bent over a Starbucks with a splash of milk in, because there was no one around to chide him these days about what he drank before performances. But once inside, his eyes were immediately drawn up, pulled by invisible cantilever to chandeliers of glass that seemed to flutter like bird's wing arrested in flight, their colors so bright and fine, the wrought iron interstices nearly weightless, insubstantial. He followed their path, one grand structure after another, strung from the lobby's vaulted ceiling and into the grand hall. He was drawn forward, heedless, until the colors went dark, until he reached the first chandelier that still hung grime-enshrouded and silenced, and there David's sneakered feet abutted the foot of scaffolding flagged with soiled rags that reeked of solvent, and it was there that he met Alex.

Alex was tall and lean, and the quiet presence he radiated should not have been possible in a vessel as slight as his.. He restored glass, as his father had before him; stained glass windows, mosaics, chandeliers like the ones that had led David to his feet. He told David, over the sandwich wrapped in wax paper he offered to share, that he'd been working at this theater since he was twenty-five, still puffed up and eager from grad school, and would be there for years to come, probably.

David couldn't imagine that life, being tied to something so precise, so practical, to chase so pedantic a muse. Did the glass ever crack and fall, he wondered? Splinter into something ugly, accusatory shards at Alex's feet? He looked for commonality between his life and the life of this stranger because the foreignness filled him with unease. How would it be? Could it be? Wanting to wake up in the same place, morning after morning after month after year and do the same thing over and over? To know each day in advance? But when Alex said it might take years to finish the chandeliers, he'd said it quietly, like prayer, like there was nothing that would make him happier.

Alex took him home after the show that night. There was no fumbled seduction. He had simply shown up outside David's dressing room door in the same splattered pants he'd worked in earlier, dust and plaster in his wild curls, stubble shadowing his angular cheeks. "Do you want to come home with me?" he'd asked. And rather than nodding, David had said, "Yes," aloud, because something in Alex's manner had demanded his honesty from the first moment of their acquaintance, and to nod would have been somehow passive, somehow less than the truth.

It was not the best sex of David's life, though it was far from the worst. But afterwards they'd taken blankets and pillows up to the roof and spread them underfoot to lie beneath the stars. The heat from the day that still lingered in the old tar roof leached its gift of warmth through their blankets. They talked until morning tracked her own blanket of salt-water taffy colors over the sleeping buildings clumped at the foot of the river. As the light reached across the water, David thought about boundaries and their arbitrariness. About definitions. Kentucky looked much the same as Ohio. Here, in the company of a recent stranger, David talked himself hoarse. About Julia and the divorce. About success and failure. It was, in the end, simply a matter of what man chose to call a thing. The world would say he was free now.

Later they padded inside barefoot, shivering under blankets turned capes. Alex made tea for David's throat in a grease-splattered kettle that howled in the early-morning silence. Then they found each other, not again, but for the first time, and David was surprised that this second time they laid down together on Alex's mattress propped on cinderblocks that he was already unwilling to name what they did— slowly, deliberately, their eyes open— as fucking.

During the matinee that afternoon, for the first time in months, David sang without counting empty seats, closing his eyes instead and imagining the notes as a stream that ran from his mouth across the theater to rifle the gills of the concert hall, their melody a breeze on which chandelier birds glided.

When the curtain fell on Saturday's final show he wasn't surprised to find Alex once again in the hall outside his door. David would have been disappointed not to find him there. This time Alex was dressed in street clothes, a jangle of bracelets at his wrist that tinkled like silver bells as they walked to dinner. They ate a meal which David suspected neither tasted, and then walked the few blocks to Alex's apartment, past old brick building still wet from the afternoon's rainfall. David looked down, guiding his feet around puddles. Alex splashed straight through them.

Sunday morning found them hungry enough to venture out. Sipping coffee, sitting quietly across the tiny table, David told Alex that he had a flight to keep. Alex's smile waned, but only later, at the hotel, as David gathered his things, did Alex shake his head and say, "Why does it feel like you have to do this?"

David wasn't sure that he understood the question, was certain only that his answers lacked. He started talking and couldn't stop the flow of words. Reservations and contracts and the strata of obligation that layered like silt; the kind of obligations that never got written down on paper. They were clothes that fit another man— someone he'd been once or thought he might be again someday. But none of his ramblings constituted an answer.

He said goodbye to Alex in front of the hotel cab stand. He watched Alex grow smaller in the rearview mirror because that was only honest. He went to Chicago and then Fort Wayne, and then Boulder, and then other places too, until in September he flew back over southern Ohio, and from the window against which he leaned, tiredly, the river between Covington and Cincinnati was a sleeping black serpent, mad eyes shining with moonlight. The distance between the man he'd wanted to be and the man he'd become stood in stark relief.

When the plane landed in New York he took a cab to an office and rescinded the signature he'd shaped on a piece of paper so many years earlier. He called his son, who was still too young for meaningful words, and told him secrets to serve as place markers.

Later that night, alone in a dressing room, David shaved his head bare. Careful, he left only a single nick above his right ear. He bought one more plane ticket, this time— for the first time— with his own money, not expensed. He went home, and when he finally got there, he stayed there, and it was everything he never dreamed it could be.