David & the Steed
You can't be friends with your boss.
I sensed it from the start; the moment you stepped through those doors, I felt your presence — how could I not? — and I’m sure you know what I mean by presence: not some chest-puffing swagger or ego; an elegant and unified state of here-ness. I felt it — so strongly I felt it — perhaps because I knew I didn’t have it. Your resumé, outstanding as I’m sure it was, I haven’t the faintest memory of. It simply was not important. You had the job not a moment beyond your desire for it — maybe earlier.
It wasn’t until your first day in the office that I noticed your clothes (superficial, I know now, but this was before; before I learned not to be so superficial, so stuffy; before I met you). Cheap! I knew they were cheap; they looked cheap. The navy blue suit jacket shone in the light — polyester, as I’d one day be able to verify — made all the worse by that horrid flickering light that hung over your cubicle (I’d tried many times to have this fixed for you — oh, how I tried! — but it is the great tragedy of this world that even I have superiors to appease). And yet — cheapness, tangible, palpable cheapness aside — it worked. It hung gloriously from your frame, draping creaseless down, the bottom of the jacket cutting the space between your collar and the carpet perfectly in half. The collar was snug around your neck, the lapels flat and with not a hint of buckling across the chest. Your pants (your pants!) — again, cheap — and yet totally, unequivocally beautiful. The cuffs — without collecting at your feet — kissed the tops of your dress shoes (which — I need not say — were the perfect dark brown, imbuing in your style a hint more flare than would a standard black, while carefully avoiding a toffee colour, which — apart from abjectly crossing and spitting on the line between country and city dress — would just be a lurid diversion from the upper half of your suit, which must always serve the purpose of staging your face). Who had cut such a (it can’t be emphasised enough) dirt-cheap ensemble of rags so precisely, so artfully to fit its wearer?
But I knew it wasn’t — could not have been — tailored. No; the truth — the far more intriguing, disturbing truth — was that you had bought this suit from the store (it was probably on sale!), and it just fit. As if your body was the tailored thing, the suit your lucky wearer.
I had to ask you out to lunch.
I took you — silly, in retrospect; stupid me, I know — to my favourite restaurant (how typical, how utterly boring!), La Réjouissance, where they played classical music, and served multi-hundred–dollar bottles of wine, and had dress codes and whose clientele’s darkest sexual fantasies were of Emily Post speaking with her mouth full. You hated it — I know you did — even if you had perfect manners about the whole horrid thing (Emily Post’s own fantasy, I’m sure); I felt your discomfort, and could only conclude it was the environment. Not that I had the presence of mind to do anything about it.
“Are you enjoying the bread?”
“Yes. It’s very good.”
Oh, how you spoke! You had a way of making every word you uttered feel like it was ultimately and singularly important. Nothing to waste. Perfect. Not long, nor bumbling, nor tangential like the kind of drivel one’s ears must endure at the cocktail parties and soirées hosted by my superiors, which seem to work like torture devices, operated by the world’s most lexically up-themselves torturers — veritable dictionaries, thesauri and usage guides all wrapped up into one obnoxious vocabulary per head, with not a single dash of substance between them — and accompanied by chamber orchestra.
“Just you wait for the oysters to come,” I leant in — so desperate, so obvious, not like you in your cool, almost withdrawn repose — “They’re shucked right in front of you. That means they’re technically still alive when you eat them.”
We waited in silence for the shucker.
It tore me up inside — this whole senseless faux pas of mine, taking you to a place of such cold hostility and arrogance and fake niceties and everything I was taught to be and everything your particular appeal functions at odds with — and while I’d have been eager to learn it was only in my head, that all-in-all you’d had a fine time and bore me no ill will, I could not in good conscience avail myself of such fantasies when I saw you — a whole week later — still slouching miserably in your squeaky-wheeled chair (this, too, I’d tried to amend), having typed four words in the last hour.
Your lack of productivity — completely my fault, as you and I both knew — even caught the attention of my superiors; it took all my cocktail party–trained, soirée-tested lexical might to convince them it was only a temporary dip in performance.
I asked you, again, to join me for a social outing, this time — rather cleverly, I thought — allowing you to choose the venue.
You took me to the Pub, where they apparently hosted a weekly “open-mic” night. Just as we arrived, a woman took the stage — a short woman with messy hair and ugly, sleepless rings circling her eyes — and began singing. Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart: originally written by Roger Greenaway and Roger Cook in 1967, popularised by Gene Pitney in the same year. An interesting choice — I see that now more than I did — and you seemed completely enthralled, your face brandishing by far the biggest, dumbest smile I’d seen it wear.
After the performance (and the subsequent, probably overzealous applause), you informed me that the singer was your girlfriend, and I must admit it hurt. I wanted you to know how much better — how much smarter, nicer, sexier — you could have done than her. Watching you kiss was an insult to your perfection. Nevertheless, it was your night, and I figured for it to go smoothly I would have to swallow my discomfort and engage with your culture, sans interference.
And smoothly it went! I loosened up, we laughed, we drank; you danced with your woman and I danced alongside.
And yet, when time came to pass and I saw you the following week, it was all the worse. What before you’d typed in an hour now took you two, or three.
How could I have been so naïve? Of course the night had not gone as I thought. I should have learned by then that I should never trust my gut, especially when it bears good news. I replayed it all, over and over again. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there; a moment, a word, a face; perhaps I allowed myself a look askance at that girl who hung pathetically from your shoulder all evening. If only I could hang like that, cling to your perfectly fitting suit jacket and be taught by observance; taught how to act, how to talk, how to be. I know you must have felt something of the connection that I felt — perceptive young man you were — I know it wasn’t nothing; and yet, it seemed, I could not for the life of me do the right thing — be the right thing — for you.
And I knew now that only further peril lay in wait for our relationship. I knew, because my superiors notified me.
Gently — how gently! — I gave you the news. But it didn’t matter. I knew it didn’t matter. You took it — oh, how you took it! — so well, with such elegance, such class. Not a yell, nor a cry; not even a word. You turned and left the room. The pain, I can’t imagine. Cut, burned, by a friend. I had to fix it; I had to fix us.
I guessed you’d be where you always were on open-mic night.
As I stepped out of the shadows and approached the microphone stand, I looked over to where I already knew you were sitting — with her, of course — and gestured for the pianist I hired to begin when ready, and cue me in.
I sang Ständchen (or Serenade in English): composed by Franz Schubert to words by Ludwig Rellstab, from Schubert’s larger collection, Schwanengesang (Swan Song), published posthumously in 1829. As I sang, I watched you. I was as much audience as you, keeping steadily aware of every change and every suspension in your expression. I learnt nothing from it. I delivered the final sombre note, and the pianist brought the piece to a close, and I waited, breathless and sweaty and passionate.
You got up, and approached me from the opposite side of the microphone. “I never want to see you again.”
And of course! What had I been thinking? That a song — of precisely the type that would be played at my superiors’ soirées — could fix this, heal this — this unfixable unhealable injury between us — and that all could remain as it was, that we could remain friends, that it was not too painful to move on. There were no paths forward from here. You couldn’t go on! You were too hurt, too betrayed! Our connection had been sullied, perverted, warped into something cold, and hostile, and fake. We both knew this. We knew that as you spat those words at me you wept inside. That what you meant was that you couldn’t bear to see me again, to see anyone again, that you couldn’t bear to stand upon our life’s freshly broken feet. That when you turned away you paused, for you knew what was to come and you welcomed it, that our fate was not only inevitable but to be met with open arms!
And so I ate you up. I ate you where you stood, before the tactless eyes of voyeurs, these bystanders, these non-people who thought themselves a part of your life but they were not! Not like I was! Not like you had been of mine.
I tasted the blood and the polyester.
Damn me! Shuck me! Pry the tortured brain from in its shell! Pull me all asunder, crack me open, lay me dead and bare and press my heart between the silver walls before the court of God! And in my remains may they find my love, the boy, my swan — you, for whom I cast myself to Hell — and may they tell me they would not have done the same. May they tell me you are not where you belong, that you are not where you were destined to be — where, surely, in the deepest creases of those many little smiles you gave me, you must also have wanted, needed to be — may they tell me now or tell me centuries hence, when they have had the time to think up all their lies, and we will see if they convince me. May they come and try.
I’ll be waiting in the corner of the Pub, where on I’ll watch where once we danced, where on I’ll hear where once we sang.
Or, on weekdays, at the office.
Music
Handel, George Frideric. (1749). “La Réjouissance.” No. 4 of Music for the Royal Fireworks (HWV 351). Performed by August Wenzinger (conductor) and the Ensemble of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. (1962). https://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ReverseLookup/464535.
Schubert, Franz. (1828). “Ständchen.” No. 4 of Schwanengesang (D 957). Performed by Mark Padmore (voice) and Jonathan Biss (piano). (Unknown). https://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ReverseLookup/482406.