Music for Wartime

PETER TORRELLI, FALLING APART

When Carlos asked why I would risk my whole career for Peter Torrelli, I told him he had to understand that in those last three years of high school, Peter and I were the only two gay boys in Chicago. Because I really believed it, back then, and twenty-five years of experience proving otherwise was nothing in the face of that original muscle memory: me and Peter side by side on the hard pew during chapel, not listening, washed blind by the sun from the high windows, breathing in sync. It didn’t matter that we weren’t close anymore, I told Carlos. The point was, he’d been my first love. I’d never actually loved him, but still, listen, believe me, there’s another kind of first love.

It was during one of those long lectures or concerts or assemblies that Peter and I had discovered our common neurosis: the fear of magically switching bodies with the speaker or singer or priest and then having to improvise an exit. I would slide toward Peter on the pew, open a hymnal, and above “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” scribble in pencil: “Tuba player?” Peter would look up to the stage to watch the fat sophomore from Winnetka puff his cheeks like a blowfish and write back: “Stop playing — no one misses a tuba.” “1st Violin?” I wrote. “Feign a swoon,” he’d write back. And then he’d mouth it to me, relishing the “oooo” of “swoon.” We joked about this fear, but really I think it bothered us both — this idea that we might suddenly be thrust in front of our peers and examined. It doesn’t take a psychotherapist to figure out why. Peter later claimed the whole reason he became an actor was that the only way he could enjoy a show was from the inside.

Everyone else knew it was his looks. I hadn’t understood until we were sixteen what it meant to turn heads. I’d considered it a figurative expression. But when we stood in line for pizza slices, or walked down Dearborn toward the bus, he was a human magnet. He was the North Pole. The girls at school would feel his sweater and tug his necktie. He said he had a girlfriend back east, that she was Miss Teenage Delaware, and everyone believed it. How could he not be onstage with that dark, sad face, that ocean of black hair, those sarcastic eyes? By the time we graduated, he’d done two seasons of professional summer stock. I was the varsity soccer goalie, and he was a movie star walking among us. When we sat together in chapel we looked like the kings of the school, and nobody knew any different.

And then the next day we were thirty-six years old, and Peter fell to pieces. During a matinee of Richard III, right in the middle, my friend abruptly and forever lost the ability to act. He said later it was something about the phrase “jolly thriving wooer,” the strangeness of those words as they left his mouth, the pause a second too long before Ratcliffe entered. Since Peter told me all this, I’ve read the page ten times in my Signet Classic — which is how I know that Peter’s next line, as Richard, was “Good or bad news, that thou com’st in so bluntly?” It was a line he’d have made lewd jokes about backstage. “And I said it,” he told me. “But it came out in this voice, like all the costumes had fallen away, like I was some kid in eighth-grade English and I had to read my poem out loud. It was just me, and there was no character, no play, just these words I had to say. You know our whole thing about leapfrogging into someone else’s body? It was like that, but like I suddenly leapfrogged into myself.” He said he could see each face in the audience, every one of them at once, smell what they ate for lunch. He could feel every pore of his own skin, and the ridiculous hump strapped to his back. Backstage, they knew something was wrong even before he started to shake. By the end of the next scene, the understudy was dressing.

Peter told me this the next week over lunch. Actually, he told me many times, over many lunches in the following year, as if through the retelling he could undo something. We met every other Thursday at the Berghoff, where he’d have root beer and I’d have two pale ales and we’d both eat enormous plates of bratwurst and chicken schnitzel and noodles with butter sauce. We had set these lunches up two years earlier, quite formally. We’d been in and out of touch for ages when we found ourselves alone on the living room futon of a boring party in Hyde Park, drunk, wondering aloud if knowing each other when we had acne was the reason we’d never dated as adults. We had kissed just once, sophomore year, after a SADD meeting when we stayed behind to pick up the leftover fliers. I didn’t know he was gay. I hardly knew I was. He came over with the green fliers in a stack as if to hand them to me, but when I took hold of the papers he pulled them back and me with them. The only person I’d ever kissed before was a girl named Julie Gleason. Afterward he said, “You’re pretty dense, aren’t you?” That was it. We didn’t talk for two weeks, and then we were best friends again, before the paper cuts on my palm had even fully healed.

I had looked at him that night at the party — beautiful and grown-up, a beer bottle sweating against the leg of his jeans — and said, “I never see you anymore.”

“Yes, I’m slowly becoming invisible.” Peter was the kind of guy who would try for any joke, any chance to flash his perfect teeth. Even when it wasn’t funny, you had to appreciate the showmanship. And then he looked at me seriously, which was rare at the time. “We should get together and talk. I mean regularly, because I miss you. It would be like therapy.” I should have known I would always be the therapist. I told him once that he was the Gatsby to my Nick Carraway. He said, “Yes, but I throw much wilder parties.”

And like stupid little Nick, I ended up trying to fix things. If I hadn’t spent American Lit distracted by Zach Moretti and his amazing forearms, I might have registered that these stories never end well.

Let me say, Peter had been brilliant. Chicago breeds its own stage stars, who stay local even if they’re good enough to go to New York, and he was one of them. When I saw his Hamlet at Chicago Shakespeare, all memories of Mel and Lord Larry vanished in a celluloid fog. He was the right age, the right build, and those eyes could turn like lighting from irony to terror. I wonder how that colored our friendship, that I saw him simultaneously as both Peter and Hamlet. If nothing else, it made me more tolerant of his ramblings.

After the day he froze (“The Day of Which We Shall Not Speak,” he called it whenever he spoke of it, which was constantly), he took sick leave for a week, then tried again. If anything, he was worse. He quit before they could fire him, and spent the next two months looking for work. He walked into each audition knowing everyone in the room had heard about his big dry-up. His agent dropped him, and so did his boyfriend.

A few months later, Peter moved near Milwaukee and took a job doing dinner theater, and our lunches became less frequent. In late November 2005, almost a year after The Day of Which We Tended to Speak Obsessively, we sat by a window in the Berghoff and watched the year’s first snow collect in the street. He told me about his new role as Bob Cratchit in something called Let’s Sing a Christmas Carol! The director wanted British accents from everyone. Peter could do a perfect one, of course, but not without sinking further into the hollow cadences, the glazed eyes, the strangling sense of the ridiculous.

“Most of them sound southern, it’s terrible,” he said. He was on caffeine today or something worse. He was literally bouncing on the springy seat of the booth. “The eleven o’clock number is, I shit you not, called ‘God Bless Us Every One.’ Jesus Christ, you should hear it, it sounds like Scrooge drops by Tara for pecan pie.” Every time I saw him he talked faster, as if he were running out of time. He still flashed the smile, but perfunctorily, as if displaying his incisors for the dentist.

When our food came, he finally asked me a question so he could stop talking and eat his schnitzel. “How’s life in phone-a-thon land? Are you giving away thousands of tote bags?”

I was the special events coordinator for Chicago Public Radio, and for several years before we officially reconnected, Peter and I would run into each other in the restaurants of the monstrous tourist trap on Navy Pier where Chicago Shakespeare and WBEZ both live. Once, after we’d drifted apart for a few months, our lunch parties at Riva joined together, and when someone introduced us and said we might hit it off, we started laughing so hard Peter dropped his wineglass.

“We’re doing better than last year,” I answered.

“I’ve been telling everyone in the Land of Moo about the Republicans trying to shut you down. I’m going to assemble an army of cheeseheads for your defense.”

“Thanks, Peter. That’s thoughtful.”

He started mixing all the food on his plate: schnitzel, potato, creamed spinach, kraut.

“So, what about trying my shrink?” I said. “She’s good. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

The old Peter would have cued up his German psychiatrist impersonation, drawing the attention of everyone around, but the new Peter just stared at his mixed-up food. “She might be good, but how far is she from Kenosha, Wisconsin, the epicenter of the theatrical world?”

“She’s here in the Loop, and that would be good for you.”

He agreed to call her and then told me about his great-uncle, who, after undergoing electroshock, became obsessed with licking copper objects. I wanted him to ask about me, to ask about Carlos, who was moving out of my apartment in gradual increments and breaking my heart in painful slow motion, leaving me for the jazz singer we used to go see every few weekends at the Back Room until I finally realized the guy’s bedroom eyes were directed not at the whole room but at the seat next to mine in particular. I’d have to find someone else to complain to.

“Listen, though,” said Peter, “I’m on the mend. If I had more serious roles again, that might do it. I mean, I was never a comedian, and that’s what they’re asking me to do.”

As much as I didn’t believe his optimism, I was glad he wasn’t giving up. I constantly pictured him hanging himself from the closet rod of his cold little apartment, or drinking something medieval and poisonous. Maybe I’d just watched his Romeo too many times.

“I’ve got an offer for you,” I said. I’d thought about it in the car on the way there, and decided I couldn’t ask him. I decided it several times, in fact, but now here it was, coming out of my mouth. “I want you to do some work for me.” He nodded, eyes wide, as he mashed his food and listened to me explain the project: In cooperation with the Art Institute, we’d commissioned twenty local poets and authors to write short works relating to the museum’s crown jewels — a mystery writer casting Van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles as a crime scene, a Pulitzer-winning poet extolling Picasso’s man with the blue guitar in sonnet. Richmond Barthé’s sculpture The Boxer got a prose poem that shattered my heart, one I wanted to frame and wear around my neck. The writing would hang beside the art, and my job was to find actors to read a few of the pieces aloud at the gala opening and then record them all for NPR and for the museum audio tour that people could rent with headphones. My brilliant idea had launched a yearlong nightmare of collaboration with a hateful little man I’d come to call Institute Steve, the only unlovely person on the entire museum staff. “It’s December thirtieth, if your show is done. The thing is,” I said, grabbing for the only available out, “the other actors might be people you knew.”

“People I know, Drew.” His face stilled itself long enough to shoot me one of his complicated, devastating looks: part annoyance, part sarcasm, part glee that he’d caught me saying what I really thought. “I’ll do it, if you don’t think I’d embarrass you.”

And so the die was cast.

He walked out with Dr. Zeller’s business card in his pocket and both of our leftovers in Styrofoam boxes. He was eating plenty despite his meager paycheck because he got free food at the dinner theater, but every night he had to choose between chicken à la king and Lake Superior whitefish.

I stayed behind to pay the bill, and as I waited for the busboy to come back I pressed my cheek to the dirty, cold glass of the window beside me. I felt like I needed to wake myself up. I had just risked my career on his ability to be Peter again, to jump back into himself, and I strongly doubted he could do it.

The next time we met for dinner was before the Art Institute event. I had more important things to do, but I’d been in earlier to see that my interns were on task, and I wanted to make sure Peter was ready and calm. The Berghoff was right around the corner, and I knew neither of us would get a chance to eat the shrimp and strawberries at the reception. He’d been down two weeks earlier to record at the studio, and I’d been relieved how good he was, at least without an audience. I’d invited him over then for dinner with Carlos, who was still hanging around to see what further damage he could inflict on my psyche, but Peter had an audition in Milwaukee with the Kinnikinnick Players for Night of January 16th. He hadn’t gotten the part.

Tonight Peter looked skinnier and pale and had a soft stubble he might have been growing for insulation, the way he sat there in his coat and hat, his jaw shaking against the cold. To put it delicately, he looked like a few friends I had in the early 1990s who are not with us anymore. I got the waitress to bring us some tea as soon as we sat down. He held the cup, letting it warm his hands, but didn’t drink any. It was all over the news that the Berghoff would be closing in a couple of months. We’d stood outside in the cold for forty minutes just to get a table. People around us were taking pictures, touching the menus as if they were the faces of dying lovers.

“I went to your shrink,” he said. “Twice. You didn’t tell me she was beautiful. Like Juliette Binoche. And we’re very hopeful.” He was warming up enough to lay his woolly hat on the table.

“Great,” I said. I couldn’t keep from staring at his brow and cheekbones, which stuck out sharply from his face, his skin stretched over them, shiny and translucent. He went on and on about the therapy, about opening himself up to pain, about locating his core. I barely listened.

There’s one thing I still remember him saying, though. At one point he put down his fork and he leaned across to me, as if I had all the answers. “I mean, why do I even feel this need to act? It’s weird, right? We’re living in this terrible world with wars and broken hearts and starvation, but some of us are compelled to make art, like that’s supposed to help anything. It’s a disease, Drew. Don’t you remember how it felt, when we were sitting there obsessed with finding ourselves in the orchestra? It was awful. Only you grew out of it, and I didn’t. Or maybe I just finally did, last year. Like I was cured and cursed all in one moment. I mean, what if the universe decided it was done using me?”

I shook my head. “I can’t imagine you as anything other than an actor.”

“Right. Right. I know. But how can it be who I am if it’s not what I do?”

We left it rhetorical and continued eating.

“So, how’s Carlos?” he asked once we’d ordered dessert.

It was too late in the meal, and he was too far behind on the story. “Not great, but you know,” I said, confident he didn’t care enough to press further. “He’s gotten into jazz lately.” To be safe, though, I changed the subject. “So, I had a dream about the Berghoff last night. I was running around downtown, trying to give everyone vitamin shots because of this disease I’d exposed them to. For some reason it was a battle zone, with tanks in the streets, and wild animals. And if people didn’t get these shots they were going to die. I had to find everyone I ever slept with and get them to come to the Berghoff to get this shot. So I’m knocking on doors, but people have moved, and by the time I find Carlos he tells me he won’t take the shot, he’d rather die. He’s lying there in the snow, dying, and he goes, ‘You can’t save them all, Drew.’ And I woke up screaming. I mean, what the hell is that?”

“Dreams don’t mean anything,” he said. “I used to believe they did, but they really don’t. Random synapses.” As I signed the bill, he dug into his apple tart like someone just rescued from the wilderness, his eyes wide with the wonder of sugar and crust. He chewed so fast it looked like his teeth were chattering. He gestured behind me with a jerk of his eyes, and I turned to look at the next table, pretending to get something out of my jacket pocket. I assumed he meant the teenage girl with a roll of fat hanging over the back of her low jeans. She was with her parents. “What would you do?” he said. His mouth was full of tart.

Sometime after high school, the game had evolved away from musicians and actors, and we (or at least Peter) had begun obsessing about leaping into regular people’s lives, about how to fool their families. I was tired of it after twenty years, but this wasn’t the day to put him in a bad mood. “Okay. Pretend to get sick so I don’t have to go to school, and spend the whole time doing aerobics. I could get fifteen pounds off, at least. Do I get to be myself again after?”

“Presumably.”

“Then I finish reading Proust.”

Peter took a sip from his root beer bottle, and I noticed his hand shaking. I wondered briefly if it was Parkinson’s, if the whole personality shift was that easy to explain — but Peter was such a hypochondriac, he’d have thought of it already. “You’re so fucking boring,” he said. “I’d run that ass into the street right now and see if I could stop traffic. I’d see how many laws I could break.”

“You could do it anyway,” I said. “You could run out there and just ruin your life. Nothing stopping you.”

He put his napkin on his plate and stood up. “I thought that’s what the museum was for.”

As we headed through the front doors of the Art Institute, the last regular museum visitors of the night were bundling past the stone lions and out into the cold. “Did you ever read that book when you were a kid?” Peter said as we walked through the emptying halls. “The one where the kids run away and live in the Met?”

“And they bathe in the fountain,” I said.

“That’s my new plan. I want to camp out under some dinosaur bones and just…” He let his sentence trail off, as if the suits of armor we were passing would explain the rest. I imagined them as a hundred failed geniuses, hiding behind the glass, starved down to thin, steel exoskeletons. They knew what he meant.

We stopped at the Chagall windows, stood for a minute in the warmth of their thick blue light, then headed into the special exhibit hall. I left Peter staring at a messy Klee while I talked to Lauren, my boss, who’d hated the idea of this event from the time I brought it up two years before and was waiting for everything to fall apart. Her over-plucked little eyebrows arched up her forehead as she asked me why half the writers weren’t there yet. I went to check on the champagne, and once the evening started moving I lost track of Peter among the tablecloths and microphones and whining interns, and finally among the rush of people and coats. Half were Art Institute supporters with vintage bracelets or Frank Lloyd Wright neckties, and half were NPR junkies with professor haircuts. Some might have been both, bless them.

I knew I should have introduced Peter to the other actors, told him where to be, but leaving him alone was my small way of shaking him by the shoulders, of telling him to grow up. When I saw him again, he was talking to one of the actresses he knew from Chicago Shakespeare, a woman who’d just returned from off-Broadway and chopped her hair short. She was laughing at something he’d said, and he was teetering back and forth as if he might at any second lose a lifelong battle with gravity. He was laughing, too, but the way his skin stretched across his jaws, he looked deathly.

I took the microphone and welcomed everyone. My voice could never command a room; people milled and talked and jostled for position. I introduced the five actors, and it wasn’t until they came and stood beside me that I noticed Peter still had his puffy green coat on, his hands shoved down in its pockets. I wondered if he was punishing me for leaving him alone, or if he was so thin under there that he didn’t want to frighten people. In high school, he would take his shirt off at every opportunity, claiming it was hot out at sixty degrees. I’d assumed back then that his dark skin was from Italian genes, but now I saw it must have been the sun.

The two other men were dressed in sleek sweaters, and the two women wore silk blouses and pants. Audition outfits, like Peter used to have dozens of. He looked now as if we’d grabbed him off the street.

We started with the first painting, Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day, and the short-haired actress read a brief Stuart Dybek story called “Rainy Day Chicago.” When she finished, the crowd moved across the gallery to a tiny Picasso, where one of the men read a poem called “Triangle Woman.” We’d pulled a miracle, getting the Art Institute to move so many of its own crowd-pleasers into one exhibit. Even so, there were certain works they wouldn’t let us use. We’d asked the writers to e-mail us their wish lists, and Nighthawks topped almost every one. It must have been something about the loneliness, the coffee, the silence — everyone wanted to lay private claim to that one desolate corner of the universe. In the end, no one got it because it was on loan in New York. How could this one object embody loneliness, I wondered, when people crowded shoulder-to-shoulder around it, shared it, traded it, paraded it? If Hopper’s little coffee counter was lonely, it was in the way a prostitute was lonely. Or an actor.

I had a hard time paying attention, and I stood there thinking how flat the readers all were, how little grace they showed compared to Peter in his prime. He played Edgar in Lear one summer up in Evanston, in the park by the beach. He was beautiful in a red shirt, and his voice made every line sound like something you’d been on the verge of remembering, if you’d only had time.

Peter’s first reading was for my least favorite story, as well as my least favorite painting in the entire museum. A very young, way-too-hip fiction writer from Bucktown named Sam Demarr had e-mailed us that the only painting he felt like writing on was “the one with the giant gum.” I’d actually loved it as a child — that enormous pack of gum floating over the city skyline. Now I hated how the gum hovered there, out of proportion. It had nothing to do with the city below it, no shared color palette, the garish green wrapper rendering the brown skyline drab and uniform. On one of our first dates, Carlos and I had stood there joking that it was based on a true story, the Giant Gum Crash of ’72. Since then, I’d always thought of the gum as about to land, to flatten the unsuspecting workers below, so I’d found it particularly funny that the story Sam Demarr had submitted was called “The Gum Flew Away.” Demarr himself was standing at the side of the room in dirty khakis, smirking into his wineglass.

Peter pulled a tube of papers from his coat pocket and unrolled it so he could read the top one. The other actors held theirs in the black folders we’d sent them in. “First, all the gum flew off,” he read, “leaving Chicago in its spearmint dust. Then the department stores floated away.” Aside from the fact that his papers were visibly shaking, Peter sounded like himself, strong-voiced and in full command of the English language. This story suited his flat, ironic delivery. I’d chosen it for him specifically because it was monochromatic and free of dialogue. “The hot dog stands were next,” I heard him say. For all my daydreaming about finding myself stranded onstage, this was the closest I’d come to feeling as if it were my own energy propelling an actor, as if when I stopped focusing, the whole thing would fall apart. Peter was gesturing around now, with the still-shaking papers, backing toward the wall and away from the old ladies in the front row. Even his legs were bouncing, and it finally occurred to me that maybe it was drugs making his limbs and voice and eyes jump around like that. It didn’t seem like something he’d do, but who was I, anymore, to say what Peter would do?

And then, as he read the line about the mayor launching himself off the Hancock tower, Peter actually put the back of his hand against the painting and swept it up the canvas. The gasp from the crowd was so loud and so high that I couldn’t tell where it stopped and the alarm started. A security guard I’d barely noticed trotted from the room, and another stepped forward, speaking into a radio. Peter froze, and I could feel his stomach flip. I could feel the sweat sticking the papers to his hand. The alarm turned off, and people started talking quietly.

“And this is why we didn’t broadcast live,” Lauren whispered beside me. She was glaring like I’d done it myself. The Institute coordinators talked in a cluster while two more guards and a woman in a suit rushed in, asking Peter to step aside so they could inspect the painting for damage.

The crowd just looked embarrassed, touching their faces and chatting a bit but waiting politely for the reading to resume. Sam Demarr seemed to find the whole thing hilarious. Peter had stepped aside, but he was still up there in front of everyone, the only movement coming from his eyes, which jumped around liquidly, looking for their chance to leap free from his face once and for all. One of the guards talked with him in what should have been a whisper, but everyone could hear. He asked for his name, his driver’s license, copied everything down on a big clipboard.

And I thought, maybe that’s what I would have done, if I’d leapfrogged up there into Peter’s body, if I needed to get away before anyone realized I was a fraud: I’d hit the painting and make the show stop. But I didn’t think he’d done it on purpose. Or at least not consciously.

It was a good five minutes before the woman in the suit stepped away from the painting and signaled that we could continue. She stayed there, though, in the corner of the room, frowning. I assumed she’d have a long night of paperwork now. I felt bad for her.

I took the mike again and said, with a big fund-raising grin, “Now you’ve seen what fine security your contributions support!” Lauren was at the front of the crowd, shaking her head to show how disappointed she was, as if I hadn’t gotten the message yet. “We’re going to try that one again.” I waited for a meek laugh from the audience and then turned to the actors. Peter looked at me with those blank, jumpy eyes like he didn’t even recognize me, like I was just another blurred member of his audience, watching and breathing and waiting for him to fail. I’m still not sure what I felt, standing there. Maybe I felt my heart break, or maybe I felt Peter’s heart break. When you’ve known someone that long, when you formed yourself around his personality back when you were just a fourteen-year-old lump of clay, isn’t it really the same thing? Aren’t his heart and your own somehow conjoined? Perhaps that’s what I could never explain to Carlos: Ours was a kind of first love that wasn’t aimed at each other, but somehow out at the world. We We were forever side by side on the chapel bench, watching the show.

Peter whispered something to the short-haired actress and handed her his papers. He held up his open hands to the audience in apology, ten pale, bony fingers, then walked around the people and out of the exhibit.

“The Gum Flew Away,” the woman read, the clarity of her voice a reassurance, a wiping clean. “By Sam Demarr. First, all the gum flew off, leaving Chicago in its spearmint dust. Then the department stores floated away.”

I thought of following Peter out. I’d done it so many times before, chasing him down as he stormed from a party, calling his name five times until he finally turned to look at me, tear-streaked or red-faced on the wet sidewalk. “He didn’t mean it,” I’d usually say, or “You’re just drunk,” or “We all love you.” I never said that I did. Just all of us, meaning everyone at the party, everyone he’d ever met, everyone who’d ever seen him from across the street. It wasn’t true anymore; the world didn’t love him, just I did, and I had the feeling that even if I could say that, it wouldn’t be enough. And if it were, then what? What would I do with that responsibility? And now Lauren, who was still my boss if I was lucky, was finally shooting me a look of conspiratorial relief. “Actors,” said her face. “I know,” said mine.

It hit me like cold water that I wouldn’t see Peter again, that he’d avoid my calls until he drifted to another city to try again and fail. Someone would hire him at a third-tier regional theater on the basis of his résumé, and he’d last one show, if that. He probably wouldn’t know how to give up.

After the readings, I propped myself up at the microphone and said my bit about membership and shortening the pledge drive with early donations, and Institute Steve said something I couldn’t follow in his nasal little whine, and I got a drink in my hand. It was cold enough outside that I wanted to drink just so I wouldn’t feel the bone chill on the way home. I chatted up as many people as I could stomach over the wine and shrimp. People didn’t want to talk to me, though. What they wanted was to meet the actors. “I saw you in Phèdre at the Court,” a woman said to one of the actresses, who smiled graciously. “It was just gorgeous. You wore that red dress. Tell me your name again.”

Another woman asked the actor who’d read the Stuart Dybek piece to sign her program. She didn’t seem to notice Dybek himself standing a few feet away, laughing with a friend and wiping his glasses on his tie. If the actor found the request strange he didn’t show it, signing his name on the margin of the paper. Peter would have written something like “Peter Torrelli is fabulous. Love and kisses, Pablo P.” Or the old Peter would have, the one who knew magic.

I felt the wine go to my head, and I felt relief that the whole thing was over. I drank more to shut out the suspicion that I was glad Peter had left. I got through the next hour and walked out into the cold, relieved to be drunk and half-expecting to find Peter there on the sidewalk, eighteen years old and scribbling in ballpoint pen on the knee of his khakis. He was gone, and there were just people waiting for buses and people waiting for taxis, everybody waiting to leave.

It was like that after our kiss sophomore year, the way I’d stood frozen thirty seconds and then ran after him into the cold night, one of my duck boots untied, my left palm bleeding in parallel paper-cut stripes. He was gone, and I stayed under the school’s archway entrance looking for his breath in the air, thinking it would tell me which way he’d gone. I thought, If he ran back inside I’ll follow him, and I’ll kiss him again. If he got a cab, there’s nothing I can do.

He had found a cab that night, as he probably had now. Or maybe he’d slouched all the way down Adams, his parka blurring him into the frozen crowd, the crowd sweeping him onto the train, the train shooting him up north and off the face of my earth.

This is the way it happens: First, my friend floats away, leaving Chicago in his dust. Then he leaves me — no breath above the concrete, no voice in the air to catch and hold. Then the Berghoff closes, and the radio stations all shut down. The school chapel folds its benches and windows and flies away. The frozen sidewalks peel up like strips of gum. The skyscrapers drift like icebergs into the lake, up the Saint Lawrence and out to sea. The citizens grab for things to rescue, but everything’s too cold to touch. Mayor Daley holds a press conference. “We can’t save it all,” he says.

In a month, they’ve all forgotten. Standing in the empty streets of their empty city, the people look up and say to no one in particular, “Something used to be here, something beautiful and towering that overshadowed us all, and it seemed so important at the time. And now look: I can’t even remember its name.”