©Nora Quick 2013
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I think I fell in love with John the first time I heard him. I'd walked into the Green Mill like so many others, tired after a long day of work. I'd wanted good music, good drinks, and the atmosphere of the old jazz club in Chicago's Uptown. It was a daily ritual after work, have two stiff drinks then go for dinner with friends or go home or to the gym. But always first a relaxing drink to ease me out of the stiff world of business.
I'd walked in from the late spring rain soaked, my dress plastered to me, and could only smile as the pianist was playing a jazzy arrangement of Al Stewart's "Year of the Cat." I'd entered just at the line about the woman's dress running like a water color in the rain.
The bar was half filled at the early hour, the lights low. The messy stage, always ready to change to suit the act of the night was filled with the stage presence of the pianist. His only backup was a drummer but the pianist owned the stage, his voice haunting as he sang the sad tune.
I took a seat at the bar where I usually sat and didn't even have to tell Steve the bartender what I wanted. He knew my drive from Northbrook into the city was a long one and my first order never changed. He brought my straight whiskey as I smoothed my long wet hair back and tried to ignore my reflection in the mirror behind the bar, lit softly with greenish light. Thanking him, I turned to the pianist.
He had the kind of voice that reached inside you and touched your soul, a beautiful tenor. His hands danced over the keys lightly, fascinating me. I'd always had a thing for men's hands. Don't get me wrong, the penis is a wonder of nature that I love dearly, but a man's hands could raise such delicious sensations that I often found myself on the train staring at strangers' hands and wondering what they might feel like on my body.
His were long fingered and dexterous, and I felt my body heat just watching him play. It was an odd selection to hear at the club, but one of my favorite songs and I had to admit he did it justice. He played the piano like I'd never seen, like his hands were caressing the keys, cajoling the notes from them rather than commanding.
Unlike I usually did I ended up staying through his set, longer than my usual two drinks. For the first time in my life I turned off my phone and blew off my best friend Beth and her boyfriend Jaques who were expecting me at dinner. I let myself sway on the stool to the music and joined in the applause when the pianist left the stage.
I introduced myself and bought him a drink and we talked. We got dinner from the taco shop next door. He was funny and sweet. When he spoke those hands, long, tapers, masculine, moved as he spoke about everything with a passion that was foreign in my world.
John was thoroughly average in looks. A few inches under six feet he was lean with the kind of body that had probably never been inside the gym nor a buffet. His coloring told me he was a mutt and his smile was crooked but endearing. His shaggy dark hair needed a cut but suited him. His eyes were dark and his face pleasing but basic. The only things about him that were spectacular were those hands and his voice. Even when speaking it was melodic and rich, a voice you could feel.
Three years later I loved him no less but things had changed. It had been an easy relationship. He was sweet, romantic, moody, all the things a musician should be. He was also forgetful, unreliable, and often scatterbrained. My mother had been a musician and I knew to expect this, but it didn't make it easy. She'd given it up when I was little and molded into the perfect north shore hausfrau and no longer showed much emption of any kind.
I'm sure I wasn't the best girlfriend. He often seemed embarrassed to explain to his friends I was an insurance claims adjustor for Allstate. Oh, he enjoyed my salary and the nice uptown loft it got us, the grand piano it paid for that sat in the middle of the loft like a stage of its own. He enjoyed his clothes, the food, all of it, but he was deeply embarrassed that it was all mine.
However I thought in black and white, numbers and math. He thought in dreams and tasted the world in colors. The differences between us had first seemed exciting but they began to drag as time went on. Still, the sex had always been perfect and I supposed that's why we lingered longer than we should have. The sex was in fact the best in my life, if it was a bit more slow and gentle than I was used to.
What finally made me wake up and realize it couldn't go on was his music. John was a gifted pianist and singer, but as a songwriter he was a train wreck. He'd never go anywhere in his career like that and most of the time I suspected he'd be homeless if not for me. I didn't mind carrying him, but like most people if I was going to care for him and pay all the bills I wanted it on my terms, and anyone who's ever tried to saddle an artist knows how impossible that is.
I'd asked him to stick to the jazzy arrangements of folk tunes he was so good at but he wanted to play and sing his own compositions which were at best mediocre and often kept him from repeat performances at the same club. He'd rail and rage when dropped from a club and ask rhetorically why, and I could never bring myself to bluntly tell him composition wasn't in his blood. So he never seemed to grow as an artist and it often felt like he was running in place.
Again, I was no better. Like most people I was aging and wanted kids, stability, a mortgage and car payments and day care fees. I spent a lot of the time at the gym trying to help my German genes triumph over the Italian which threatened to turn my love of pasta into a large ass. John had spent some of his college scholarship money on a vasectomy and still had nightmares of a bad childhood.
My friends played racquetball and golfed, his friends did body shots and partied until five a.m. on a Tuesday. I jogged two miles a day and John barely moved from the piano bench and had to be reminded to eat. My parents threw garden parties on the north shore where I'd grown up in privilege and his father was in jail, his mother in rehab, again. My brothers were partners in dad's law firm, his sister was a whore back in Detroit. We were just night and day.
But every night it didn't seem to matter. He'd play the piano after dinner and if he liked what I'd cooked he'd take requests. I'd sit in the chair listening until the throb deep inside was too much, then I'd take him by the hand and lead him to the bed up the ladder. Those marvelous hands were always so gentle and attentive and for the first time in my life every time felt like making love. For that alone I treasured the past three years.
But then things changed, and it was like waking from a dream. Somehow he'd been recruited by students at Columbia to cut an album in their studio. The recording students did this in teams, competing for the best album before graduation. Quite a few artists who'd participated had gone on to some measure of success.
It was a June night, the air promising rain, when his album had won. I had to admit it stunned me. I felt like an asshole for not having faith in him, but in all fairness he thought my job and family money made me "the man" and I was frankly sick of hearing how much he hated my money, even though it paid for the clothes on his back and the roof over our head.
He was right, I knew deep down inside. My family was stiff, formal. We didn't laugh, we didn't have passion. Sometimes I wondered how my very Germanic father had bled the natural passion of my Italian-American mother, but he had. We Walbergs lived for math and reason. Still, it was those abilities that told me John was setting himself up for major heartbreak and failure with his album.
We returned from the small party to celebrate his win dressed well. He was in a suit and had looked itchy all night. As love does, he'd become quite handsome to me, but I had to admit in the suit other women seemed to notice it well. His confidence on stage had grown and it was spilling over into his daily life.
The second we were through the door he pulled off his coat and tie, kicked off his shoes and rolled his sleeves up, unbuttoning three buttons at the collar. His hair was even longer, to his shoulders now, and it made him look so much younger. His crooked smile was endearing and his eyes sparkled with excitement and victory. I was twenty -nine and he was just twenty-six, but right then he stood on the threshold of great things while I felt it was time to make the closing deals on my life.
"Why don't I grab some champagne?"
