Palouse - 33. Chapter 33

Chapter 33

Boccherini – May 1995

Two Months Later

There comes a time you discover things, step out into life … step away and become yourself. You can’t bring anyone else to those moments.

– A Map of the Harbor Islands, by J.G. Hayes

The room had darkened as night fell outside. The low light near the table provided the only interior illumination; other light came from the streetlights that filtered slowly through the curtained windows and glowed across the polished floor. The result was that the dark wood around the window frames stood stark against the soft gray of the interior flat walls, like the geometry in a painting by Franz Kline. The planks of the hardwood floor were outlined from the low light that crept in obliquely from outside.

Micah reached into his backpack and took out a CD. He walked across the room and inserted it into David’s player and pushed the play button. Micah moved out onto the open space in the apartment and spread his arms, facing a bewildered and bemused David. Boccherini’s joyous Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid began to emerge from the speakers, at first slowly and then building to the dance.[See footnote:[1] ] Micah’s feet began to slide-step-slide across the floor as he held his arms wide, bent at the elbow with his hands up. His movements took him to the fabrics that divided the room along the cord that crossed the room. He removed them one-by-one and with bullfighter-style flourishes let them swirl as he threw them on David’s roommate’s bed against the far wall – all in time with the music. The room quickly was opened to reveal the full, gleaming hardwood floor that covered the second floor from David’s to his roommate’s bed. With the space opened, the whole of the room looked far larger than twice the half that the fabric curtain had left for David.

David was grinning.

“Come dance,” Micah said. “To this piece. I ordered a cello and violin transcription for us. Listen and then dance with me. I want it to mean something between us.” He stepped to the edge of the shiny hardwood floor. There he met and interlaced his left arm with David’s right, and the two of them slide-walked slowly across the floor to the window as if approaching the altar at a wedding.

He beckoned David to stand across from him but near and open his arms wide as Micah was doing. “Pretend that we’ve been transported to the Spanish court in the 18th Century.” Micah started them both off with a step sideways toward the Victorian-era windows. At first surprised, David began to follow. Micah guided David – step-slide-step, step-slide-step – the two of them moving across the room eyes locked on each other. Then, Micah took David’s hand in his, and side by side, Micah’s head held proud, they danced back across the room. By the time they neared the kitchen, David had figured out the basic movements; he’d seen enough elaborate dances in movies to fake it, at least. He managed to make a graceful turnaround, switching hands with Micah as though 18^th Century formal court dances were the most common thing in the world to do on a Saturday night in Walla Walla, Washington.

In the Boccherini minuet, when the cello comes in, the play of the theme strengthens. Micah took this cue to lead David more spiritedly across the floor, with a vigor that amused David. In the middle of the piece the music turns to a violin trill; Micah broke the hand hold, leaving David standing still in the middle of the floor. Micah began circling him in a courtship rite, maintaining full eye contact as he danced, interrupted only momentarily as he moved from one side of David’s back to another, bobbing with the strums of the stringed instruments. Micah’s flirting eyes shone in the dim light of the room – this court of his imagining.

When the strings began strumming the opening theme again, Micah took David’s hand, and they resumed their gallant dance back and forth across the floor. The smiles got wider as their comfort in dancing rose – step-slide-step, step-slide-step.

Near the end of the piece, the violin trill reappears, and Micah dropped David’s hand again and circled him with his solo dance. The minuet comes to a sharp crescendo before ceasing abruptly. At that point, Micah spun himself around to end in a face-to-face stance with David, stopping stock still on the final beat and looking intently into David’s eyes, his lips only inches away from David’s.

The two young men gazed at each other for a full minute. Tension and energy shone in their eyes and expressions. Micah had to restrain himself from kissing David; doing so would ruin his plan, so he just touched a finger to David’s lips.

Then Micah grinned mischievously and broke the mood: “I need to get back to the dorm.” He took the CD out of the changer and put it back in its case, picked up his coat, checked to see that his car keys were in the pocket, thanked David for the dinner and was down the stairs and at the door.

“You choreographed this whole evening, didn’t you?”

“Moi?’

“You’re crazy, you know,” David said with a grin as Micah was closing the door.

Micah hesitated, turned and blew him a kiss and a wave as he went out the door.

David stood still, mesmerized, his emotions left hanging and his eyes staring at the staircase that Micah had just descended. Something had changed in their relationship, and David didn’t know quite what it was. The week before, he had been thinking that Micah’s relationship to him might go too far – that is, if he approached it from Micah’s perspective – even though that would sadden him. Their relationship had been built, he believed, on Micah’s gratitude for David’s help in getting him back to his music. He knew that permanent relationships couldn’t be built on one-sided gratitude – gratitude that might prove to be fragile. Eventually the reason for their relationship would recede too far into the past. He didn’t want to see Micah hurt, and he had been thinking about how to extricate himself from a relationship if Micah became too dependent on him. He wanted them to be equals.

Tonight – actually, over the last few days – something had changed – in a subtle way. What had changed was exemplified by the dance: in it, Micah had taken charge; he had dominated and made it his own. No, Micah had become self-confident in more than the dance, and that realization affected David deeply. He wanted the Micah he’d known as a teenager back, independent and confident, with the two of them as equals. Maybe, it was happening.

Though he his realization warmed him, he felt a related emptiness, a void, from Micah’s departure. He realized that Micah had ended the evening deliberately in the way that he did – with an approach and nearness and temptation designed to do just what it was doing: make David long for Micah’s presence, make David long for Micah.

David was fearful and joyful at the same time – fearful that what Micah did was but a brief flash of heat lightning over the mountains, but joyful that perhaps it wasn’t – that the relationship might grow into something more than David had expected only the day before.

Outside, Micah grinned to himself as he climbed into his pickup. He knew he had caused a divine mischief. He had accomplished what he had intended to do: to change their relationship from David-dominated to something closer to peer to peer. He had asserted himself – positively. He had broken the existing mold of their relationship, discarding the pieces into the past. The shape of their interaction would forever be changed. That much he drew from the tone of those last words of David – from David’s recognition that the choreographing of their relationship had caused a change.

Micah felt he had taken charge of his own life. For the first time, Micah had set a goal for his personal life – for himself – and not because someone was pushing him. He was no longer a person adrift in the stream of someone else’s dream. The realization that he had set his own goal was an elixir. He had set goals for his music life, but in his personal life, he had let the events and people around him take the lead. Now he had a goal for his personal life.

True, he’d had Amelia, Greg and his high-school friends and teammates in his life – but he realized now that they he had been a spectator to what was happening. And in Idaho, his life was led by a strict school environment that toughened him but did not allow him his own direction – except maybe to lead and help Casey. With Casey, he found he could take charge, gently, to help another human being who would be rebuffed in so many parts of the world. Though Casey had grown during the year in Idaho, time had run out. Casey never fully developed into his own independent person – at least strong enough to overcome the blows that hit him after Idanha. Perhaps that was why Micah was so shaken up by Casey’s death, because he once feared he also might not strong enough to be his own person.

Micah’s brush with suicide – though he wasn’t sure he would have gone through with it – was the low point, but also a turning point. He had asked for help, and help had come, unquestioning – from the man on a beautiful white horse.

David was the one he had turned to when his world had fallen apart, and David was the one he wanted beside him for the rest of his life. He wanted David; he wanted David to want him.

Micah realized that he hadn’t once thought to turn to his family when he was feeling low. He knew that his relationship with his parents – his other significant others – was still unmended. He thought he knew why. They still saw him as if he was a 13- or 17-year-old rebel teenager who lived on a farm outside Endicott; they never really saw him as an independent adult. And until recent weeks, he probably provided ample ammunition for them to think that way. But he had changed; his relationship with David was changing him. At some time in the near future, the part of his life that was now becoming stable would have to deal with the part of his life that was his past. He was discovering things, stepping out into life. He felt he had stepped away from his past and was becoming what he wanted to be in life.

Micah had seen also that David was recognizing the change in him and therefore a change in their relationship, which would grow closer slowly over the rest of the term.

The rest of the spring term saw Micah and David becoming more comfortable with each other. Summer jobs caused a short hiatus in their developing relationship. David spent it in Spokane and Micah at his family farm, but they were able to get together for a few weekends. Separately, both counted the days until the fall term.