Page 55 of Exquisite Things

How do you describe the decline of life? Of Love? Of happiness? I can only explain through music, which allows a means of

communication beyond words. Music is our only tool for capturing the intangible, the unseen, the true mysteries of life. In

my darkest moods, I stopped playing entirely. Now I’ve started up again with the help of my gay therapist. I’ve even tried

medicines but always stopped because of the side effects. It’s a process. I’m changing. So are my tastes. I’ve lost my interest

in the romantic melodies I used to favor. Gone are Schubert and Chopin. Gone are the optimistic synth sounds that welcomed

me to London.

Bram walks into our bedroom on the last day of this wretched year. A year of loss and fear. I sit in bed, synth on my lap,

Changeling curled up by my side. My hair is longer than it’s ever been, due to laziness, not stylistic choice. I’ve grown

a beard. Bram hates it. Says it itches when we kiss. But we don’t kiss like we used to, so it makes no never mind. Perhaps

I grew the beard as a wall between us. We all build walls, don’t we? As individuals. As groups. As countries. Walls to keep

the enemy out.

“ Vertigo ?” Bram asks, recognizing the melody I’m playing on my synth from the Hitchcock film we both love.

I nod. I play the evocative melody that accompanies Kim Novak as she sits in a museum, staring at a portrait of a woman named Carlotta who we think is possessing Kim.

The story of the film is a web of deceit and mirrors.

Jimmy Stewart plays a detective with a debilitating fear of heights, who is investigating Kim’s strange behavior.

When her character jumps from a bell tower and dies, his fear of heights stops him from saving her.

He blames himself. Wanders the world sadly.

His friend plays him Bach and Mozart to soothe him, but it doesn’t work.

There’s only so much even the most beautiful music can do to soothe a plagued psyche.

Eventually, Jimmy sees a woman who looks just like Kim.

Different hair. Different voice. Same face.

Same soul. He transforms her into the Kim that preoccupies him.

Dyes her hair the same shade of icy blond.

Dresses her in identical clothes to the ones the dead version of her once wore.

Tries desperately to re-create the past as he knew it.

He hasn’t lived long enough to know you can never recapture the magic of the past. That’s what gives nostalgia its strange power over us.

“It’s New Year’s Eve. Play something brighter.” Bram leaps into bed. Kisses my neck. “?‘Don’t You Want Me’?”

I raise my shoulder to gently push him away. “Not right now. Maybe next year.”

He smiles. “I meant the song. Play it for me?” He leaps onto our bed and dances. Tries to make me smile by making a fool of

himself. Sings off-key. “ Don’t you want me, baby? Don’t you want me, oh-oh-oh-oh? ”

I could pull out the most hurtful lyrics of that song and fling them at Bram like an arrow to his heart. The lyrics about

moving on from someone you’ve loved after the good times. But I don’t want to hurt him. I only want him to hear the song that’s

playing in my head.

“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” he asks. “All the superstars that have already come from the Blitz. ‘Don’t You Want Me’ is the bestselling song of the year.”

“The Blitz used to belong to us,” I say. “Now it belongs to the world.” I look at his eyes, fascinated by their unshakable

optimism. His seemingly unkillable defiance. “Do you remember what you told me when I arrived in London?”

“What part of it?” he asks. “The part where I told you how I love you, and will never stop loving you?”

I manage a small smile. “No, that was the only true part. The rest, though, was a lie.” He doesn’t say a word. Waits for me

to go on. “You said... there are spaces for us.” I keep playing the Vertigo theme as I speak. Scoring the movie of my dizzying life. “You said we didn’t need a whole city. Just a block here, a bar

there.”

He sits next to me. Runs a hand through my unwashed locks of hair. “Oliver...”

“The Blitz is gone.”

Closed three months ago. It went out with a bash. A few hours of hedonism and connection. And then blackness.

“Pearl’s shebeen is gone.”

Closed after the Brixton Uprising changed our neighborhood. At first with an eruption. And then more slowly. Bit by bit, street

life disappeared. Trust between people eroded. Something was achieved, no doubt. Even a government as vile as Thatcher’s had

to listen to a crescendo like the one that was heard that weekend. A report was commissioned. Lord Scarman, the ancient white

man put in charge, unsurprisingly claimed not to find any evidence of institutional racism. To admit to such a thing would be to put the institutions at risk. But Scarman did find evidence of racial disadvantage and police bias. A fire had been lit that could not be ignored.

“Pearl is going to open a café,” Bram argues. “She’s not giving up and neither should you.” He curls my hair around his fingers.

“Let me cut your hair. Tomorrow is a new year. A new beginning.”

“Do you promise it will be better than this year?” I ask snidely.

“How about I promise that next year will be the worst year of our lives?” He smiles. “Since my promises seem to have a way

of not coming true.” He leaps out of bed. Fishes our secret journal from beneath the floorboard. Writes on the next blank

line, Next year will be abysmal and atrocious and simply harrowing. I promise.

I run my hand on the smooth, thick paper of the journal. Paper. The very thing that transformed me into whatever I am now.

I read his last few notes in the journal. They’re full of love and hope. Still. I don’t know how he doesn’t see what’s happening

as I do. It’s a skill few have, perhaps. To feel the direction of history before it’s become clear to others. Then again, I don’t feel it exactly. It’s more like I hear it. Like a film score playing in my head. The composer is Fate herself.

I place my fingers back on the synth. Play Vertigo again. Changeling meows. “Do you know how the score to the movie captures the lead character’s decline so brilliantly?” I

ask.

He shrugs. “You know I don’t understand music like you do.”

I take his fingers and lead them to the keys. I guide him in playing the score. “The easy answer to capturing a decline would

be to descend in pitch. Down, down, down, right?”

“I suppose,” he says quietly. There’s an eeriness to his voice. He doesn’t like where I’m taking him.

“But that’s not how decline happens, is it?”

“I—” He tries to pull away from the keyboard, but I won’t let him. I move his finger up now. Ascending.

“This is how declines happen.” I close my eyes. I don’t need sight to play music. It’s all instinct. I hear better with my

eyes closed. “You fall, yes. But then you get back up, a little weaker. Like us, wouldn’t you say?”

“No,” he says. “No, we’re stronger. With each challenge we survive—”

“Then you fall again. And you’re weaker still.”

“Stronger,” he insists.

“Listen to the melody. This is the genius of Bernard Herrmann’s score.” I make his finger play again. “You see what he’s doing,

don’t you? He descends four pitches, then ascends two. Again and again. It gives you the sensation that you’re free-falling,

and then getting back up. But when you get back up, you don’t rise as high as you were before. And so each time, you find

yourself plunging lower and lower into the depths of—”

“It’s just a score.”

“It’s madness itself. Melancholy itself. Music is never just music. Just as poetry is never just poetry. You should know that by now. The music is telling us something.”

“Maybe we’re not meant to be listening,” he asserts. I turn to him, intrigued. “Maybe the whole point of life is to live free

of these kind of premonitions of the future.”

“It’s not a premonition,” I insist. “It’s happening. The Blitz is gone. Pearl’s is gone. Thatcher is in power here. Reagan

is in power back home. Gay boys are still disappearing from the streets of London and no one cares. There’s a war on our people.

Our time is not now.”

“You’re being too dramatic.”

“Gay men are dropping dead.”

“In New York!” he blurts out. “In San Francisco! That’s across the pond. It could be something about the environment there.

The air.”

“Do straight people in New York not breathe the air?” I ask. “It’s about us .” In the back of our journal, I’ve collected clippings.

I pull one out from July. The New York Times .

July 3, 1981. One day before Independence Day.

Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals . Next to the thin and alarming article, sheet music for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Above the music, the words SING OUT ON THE 4TH!

Exclamation point and all. The most poetic juxtaposition I can think of.

On one side... “ Doctors in new York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men... ”

On the other... “ And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air .”

On one side... “ No apparent danger to nonhomosexuals from contagion .”

On the other... “ the land of the free and the home of the brave .”

I pull out another article. From just a few weeks ago. December 13, 1981. First UK death from mysterious gay illness . “There you go,” I say. “You can ignore the warnings all you want. Perhaps it’s just a prelude now. An overture.”

“The man who died in Brompton had just returned from the United States,” Bram says with the kind of authority that might convince

anyone but me. “All we need to do is avoid the United States. There’s a whole world where gay men are not dying. Besides, we won’t die.”

I shake my head incredulously. “You’re insufferable,” I say. “It’s not my own death I’m concerned with. It’s that I can’t—I

already lost a generation of loved ones. I can’t lose another so soon.”

“Right.” He contemplates this. He hasn’t lost anyone he’s loved yet. “Please. Let me cut your hair.”