“Yo, Adam. Where’s Bryn?”
I put on my glasses, speed up, though it’s too late for that. I stop walking and step out on to Ninth Avenue, which is clogged with taxis. Mia just keeps walking down the block, yapping away into her cell phone. The old Mia hated cell phones, hated people who talked on them in public, who dismissed one person’s company to take a phone call from someone else. The old Mia would never have uttered the phrase unbearably rude.
I wonder if I should let her keep going. The thought of just jumping into a cab and being back at my hotel by the time she figures out I’m not behind her anymore gives me a certain gritty satisfaction. Let her do the wondering for a change.
But the cabs are all occupied, and, as if the scent of my distress has suddenly reached her, Mia swivels back around to see me, to see the photographer approaching me, brandishing his cameras like machetes. She looks back on to Ninth Avenue at the sea of cars. Just go on, go on ahead, I silently tell her. Get your picture taken with me and your life becomes fodder for the mill. Just keep moving.
But Mia’s striding toward me, grabbing me by the wrist and, even though she’s a foot shorter and sixty pounds lighter than me, I suddenly feel safe, safer in her custody than I do in any bouncer’s. She walks right into the crowded avenue, stopping traffic just by holding up her other hand. A path opens for us, like we’re the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. As soon as we’re on the opposite curb, that opening disappears as the cabs all roar toward a green light, leaving my paparazzo stalker on the other side of the street. “It’s near impossible to get a cab now,” Mia tells me. “All the Broadway shows just let out.”
“I’ve got about two minutes on that guy. Even if I get into a cab, he’s gonna follow on foot in this traffic.”
“Don’t worry. He can’t follow where we’re going.”
She jogs through the crowds, down the avenue, simultaneously pushing me ahead of her and shielding me like a defensive linebacker. She turns off on to a dark street full of tenement buildings. About halfway down the block, the cityscape of brick apartments abruptly gives way to a low area full of trees that’s surrounded by a tall iron fence with a heavy-duty lock for which Mia magically produces the key. With a clank, the lock pops open. “In you go,” she tells me, pointing to a hedge and a gazebo behind it. “Duck in the gazebo. I’ll lock up.”
I do as she says and a minute later she’s back at my side. It’s dark in here, the only light the soft glow of a nearby street lamp. Mia puts a finger to her lips and motions for me to crouch down.
“Where the hell did he go?” I hear someone call from the street.
“He went this way,” says a woman, her voice thick with a New York accent. “I swear to ya.”
“Well then, where is he?”
“What about that park?” the woman asks.
The clatter of the gate echoes through the garden.
“It’s locked,” he says. In the darkness, I see Mia grin.
“Maybe he jumped over.”
“It’s like ten feet high,” the guy replies. “You don’t just leap over something like that.”
“D’ya think he has superhuman strength?” the woman replies. “Ya could go inside and check for him.”
“And rip my new Armani pants on the fence? A man has his limits. And it looks empty in there. He probably caught a cab. Which we should do. I got sources texting that Timberlake’s at the Breslin.”
I hear the sound of footsteps retreating and stay quiet for a while longer just to be safe. Mia breaks the silence.
“D’ya think he has superhuman strength?” she asks in a pitch-perfect imitation. Then she starts to laugh.
“I’m not gonna rip my new Armani pants,” I reply.
“A man has his limits.”
Mia laughs even harder. The tension in my gut eases.
I almost smile.
After her laughter dies down, she stands up, wipes the dirt from her backside, and sits down on the bench in the gazebo. I do the same. “That must happen to you all the time.”
I shrug. “It’s worse in New York and L.A. And London.
But it’s everywhere now. Even fans sell their pics to the tabloids.”
“Everyone’s in on the game, huh?” she says. Now this sounds more like the Mia I once knew, not like a Classical Cellist with a lofty vocabulary and one of those panEuro accents like Madonna’s.
“Everyone wants their cut,” I say. “You get used to it.”
“You get used to a lot of things,” Mia acknowledges.
I nod in the darkness. My eyes have adjusted so I can see that the garden is pretty big, an expanse of grass bisected by brick paths and ringed by flower beds. Every now and then, a tiny light flashes in the air. “Are those fireflies?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“In the middle of the city?”
“Right. It used to amaze me, too. But if there’s a patch of green, those little guys will find it and light it up. They only come for a few weeks a year. I always wonder where they go the rest of the time.”
I ponder that. “Maybe they’re still here, but just don’t have anything to light up about.”
“Could be. The insect version of seasonal affective disorder, though the buggers should try living in Ore gon if they really want to know what a depressing winter is like.”
“How’d you get the key to this place?” I ask. “Do you have to live around here?”
Mia shakes her head, then nods. “Yes, you do have to live in the area to get a key, but I don’t. The key belongs to Ernesto Castorel. Or did belong to. When he was a guest conductor at the Philharmonic, he lived nearby and the garden key came with his sublet. I was having roommate issues at the time, which is a repeating theme in my life, so I wound up crashing at his place a lot, and after he left, I ‘accidentally’ took the key.”
I don’t know why I should feel so sucker-punched.
You’ve been with so many girls since Mia you’ve lost count, I reason with myself. It’s not like you’ve been languishing in celibacy. You think she has?
“Have you ever seen him conduct?” she asks me. “He always reminded me of you.”
Except for tonight, I haven’t so much as listened to classical music since you left. “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
“Castorel? Oh, he’s incredible. He came from the slums of Venezuela, and through this program that helps street kids by teaching them to play musical instruments, he wound up becoming a conductor at sixteen. He was the conductor of the Prague Philharmonic at twenty four, and now he’s the artistic director for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and runs that very same program in Venezuela that gave him his start. He sort of breathes music. Same as you.”
Who says I breathe music? Who says I even breathe?
“Wow,” I say, trying to push back against the jealousy I have no right to.
Mia looks up, suddenly embarrassed. “Sorry. I forget sometimes that the entire world isn’t up on the minutiae of classical music. He’s pretty famous in our world.”
Yeah, well my girlfriend is really famous in the rest of the world, I think. But does she even know about Bryn and me? You’d have to have your head buried beneath a mountain not to have heard about us. Or you’d have to intentionally be avoiding any news of me. Or maybe you’d just have to be a classical cellist who doesn’t read tabloids. “He sounds swell,” I say.
Even Mia doesn’t miss the sarcasm. “Not famous, like you, I mean,” she says, her gushiness petering into awkwardness.
I don’t answer. For a few seconds there’s no sound, save for the river of traffic on the street. And then Mia’s stomach gurgles again, reminding us that we’ve been waylaid in this garden. That we’re actually on our way someplace else.
SEVEN