Page 69 of Come Back To Me

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Shielding you.”

“From what?” I already know what but I want to hear him say it.

“Sex slavery, harassment, the mafia…”

I laugh and he smiles at me, it’s genuine right down to his eyes.

Our shoulders are touching, so are our thighs. I lean my elbows on the table as the bartender comes to take our drink order. Beer for both of us. We hold the glasses between our palms and stare at the empty seats in front of us.

“Petra is complicated. She loves me and has given me a lot of room to be myself.”

“Who is yourself?”

“I guess I don’t really know anymore. I’m half wrapped up in grief, half wrapped up in music. She mostly gets that.”

“But she loves you, she stays.” There’s a catch in my voice, but I’m just stating the obvious, the truth.

“Yeah,” he says. “She knows I’m here, but she didn’t want me to come.”

I nod. “I wouldn’t have either.” We take a sip of our beer to kill the awkwardness.

“Why did you come?” I ask.

“I wanted to look at you.”

“And so you have. You’ve looked at me in England, and you’ve looked at me in France. Why do you need to look anymore? Give me the goddamn papers and let me sign them!”

“I haven’t made up my mind,” he said.

“About what, David?What?”

He looks startled. I see the bartender peep out from behind a wall and then quickly retreat. I quiet my voice, but it’s still angry.

“You thought you’d come here and hate me? You thought you’d feel relieved that I walked out and you can pretend it was all for the best? Or did you think you’d take one look and know that you’re no longer in love with me? So tell me, David. Do you feel those things, or is it still me you’ll write songs for?”

This time he is silent.

“I came because I love you,” he says. “Still, after all these years.”

“How can you still love me after what I did?” I ask him.

His chin is dipped down to his chest and he seems to be in deep thought after having confessed that to me.

“I never loved you for what you did or didn’t do,” he says. “That’s not what love is.”

I don’t quite know what he means and he doesn’t explain further. My hands are trembling around my beer, which has warmed to room temperature, but I can’t seem to let it go. It’s a sad day when beer becomes your anchor.

“I never went looking for love,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was missing. I had women who I thought I loved, who I spent time with, who I made love to. It all felt good until you came along. Then those encounters didn’t feel good anymore. It’s like living by a lake your whole life and then being taken to the ocean.”

I stare at him, not sure how to process what he’s saying. It’s a compliment no doubt, coming from the husband I abandoned six weeks after our wedding.

“But then the ocean shipwrecked you,” I say. He is an artist and I am a dose of reality.

“All that beauty and power turned against me,” he agrees.

It feels better to speak in metaphor, easier. It’s saying the truth without actually saying the truth. You could only speak to an artist this way. No one else would get it.

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