Allegro
Pierre and Nadja were meant to be together. He was sure of it. Or at least he meant them to be. From Nadja’s perspective, she was meant to be various and conflicting things.
Nadja believed her life was destined to be written about. In her car, driving him back to his dorm at night in late March, she’d told Pierre this. She confessed to him, hair still mussed and limbs still loose, that she often daydreamed of her life’s events being described in a chapter of her art history textbook, Gardner’s Art through the Ages: The Western Perspective, Volume I, 14th Edition. Nadja spent hours in high school in used bookstores thumbing anthologies, or online in Wiki rabbit trails, or watching documentaries, finding out more about the backgrounds of the artists she admired. She liked the details of their madnesses, the trails of addictions and poor decisions, almost—no, definitely—more than the art itself, if she were to be honest. And, she smiled toward Pierre, she could be honest with him, right?
“Of course,” Pierre said.
“Peachy.” She zoomed through a yellow light. (Her car took the downtown potholes like a covered wagon, Pierre thought.) First Nadja’d found Françoise Gilot, with her illustrious and tumultuous marriages to both Picasso and the inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk. Then there was the quotable Andy Warhol, who elevated drag queens and claimed to be a virgin and barely escaped being murdered by a radical. From him Nadja rose to Basquiat, that boyish, addicted charmer who’d said in an early interview, “I can really paint, you know.” And Francis Bacon had been a revelation to her as a teenager, of course, as he must have been to everyone, right? (Pierre nodded, though he was imagining a man in a ruffled collar, some distant mention of the scientific method.) The David Sylvester interviews and BBC documentary about him had lit a fire in her. Bacon’s screaming brushstrokes were compelling, but the violence in his personal life, the illicit and dangerous affairs, and the masochism and transactional relationships with those around him, and furthermore the endless discussion and narration around his life and its consequences in his art—these inspired in Nadja a strong desire to be loud and crash through life, and to tell everybody all about it. She wanted what she lived to be something worth telling.
“Goodness,” Pierre said from the passenger seat. He poked a curl from her ear. As a vocal performance major, he wasn’t sure of the details she was mentioning, but he liked the sound of that, crashing, like waves under the sea. “What would the chapter be called, if you wrote it?”
Nadja thought. “Something long and involved,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not sure.”
Pierre nodded and steepled his fingers. “Long titles make you seem very serious.”
“I don’t know that I’m serious, but I’m definitely involved,” Nadja said. Her mouth was wry but turned away from Pierre. She pulled into the parking space slowly, looking up over the steering wheel at the curb, which she crunched. “Whoops.”
“‘Whoops’ isn’t a title,” Pierre said. He reached into the backseat for the textbook but couldn’t reach it.
“No, ‘Whoops’ might be great, actually,” Nadja said. “Sums up the bulk of my involvements.”
Pierre opened the car door to get out but shut it and came back instead, and they kissed a while more. Pierre’s elbow squeaked against the plastic as he leaned on the car’s old center console.
Nadja still suggested titles for the chapter on her life when they paused to take a breath. “We could go historical? Or academic-sounding? ‘Embroidery in Early Millennium Narratives,’” she said. “Or, ‘Mysterious Happenings in the Rib Vaults.’”
“Interesting,” Pierre said, then looked impish.
“What interesting?”
“Those both sound like love.”
Nadja blinked, then fluttered, her eyelids. “That was fast,” she said.
Freely
Bret and Nadja had been meant to be together—or at least Bret had meant them to be, starting at the moment when he swore to her he would forego his dalliances with fellow musicians (and others) and be faithful to her. From Nadja’s perspective, even taking into account the various charms and virtues of Bret, she was conflicted about being his “thing,” even if she was his main thing. She wanted her own life of artful histories.
In her downtown apartment one evening—sprawled out in an armchair with Pierre’s head in her lap, while they watched a movie called Goodbye, Please, whose plot they were both halfheartedly trying to determine by the characters’ actions, since the movie was more interesting on mute—Nadja explained to Pierre her history with Bret. Pierre listened, himself in muted pain and envy, because when a girl he loved at first sight spoke, he listened, if it was about an ex or a current:
There were Bret’s virtues. He remembered her name and used it often in that first conversation—like a salesman, she supposed, now that she said it aloud. But there was a reason that worked. He’d say, “Well, Nadja, as an art history major, you surely must know that.” “What do you think of musical history, Nadja? Is that an interest of yours?”
Musical history wasn’t at first an interest of hers—musicians expected everyone to be interested in what they did, she said—but his solicitude was. Bret was good at seeming invested. He asked people for things, facts, bits of personal history, and then remembered them later, which made him a good flirt and a good gossip. He knew how Nadja had a preternatural sense of direction (“like a goddamn Garmin”) and what her favorite noodle was (rice) and how her older brother had died (car accident). What’s more, he asked about these things in the first place. And if he blabbed about them to his friends, he didn’t tell her.
As a consequence of this same knack for getting the details, he was also able to grant Nadja backstage access to his and the music department’s own world of artistic knottings and uncouplings and rivalries, so that it felt, as she further fell for him, as if he was expanding her world. Pierre, of course, was a part of this same world—he was a baritone and Bret a tenor—but he was also somehow apart from it. Pierre had such a reduced awareness, compared to Bret or to anyone else really. Pierre was charming, but he was also the kind of person who’d lived in his current dorm room for months without knowing until Nadja’d pointed it out that one of the walls was blue. Unless he was the one involved in the gossip and entanglements, no one thought to inform him. Pierre was never, then, breaking news to Nadja—which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, she added—but Bret was. He bought her a first poke bowl, the bitter rawness of which she ate with disgusted gusto. He brought her to her first clarinet DMA recital, of whose accompanying string section he had dated two members. He sang her her first serenade, “Non di scordar di me,” a sweet Napolese love song, in the pumpkin patch in a November crepuscule. He named the first joints of all her fingers, before pulling her hands toward him.
“And if it weren’t for Bret,” Pierre pointed out, raising his head from her lap, “you would never have met me.”
“Yeah,” Nadja agreed. “I should have mentioned that first.”
But despite his virtues, she continued, what began to stoke Nadja’s displeasure was when Bret started more and more often to use that term for Nadja, called her my thing. He squeezed her behind her knee when he said that, and she convulsed reflexively. She was inanimate to him, she supposed, but also useful to romantic practice, like an easel or a metronome. She was less animated than an opera singer like him, she had to admit, but who wasn’t? She liked his great connectedness, and how he opened bottles for her, and what his hair looked like brushed to the side, but she wasn’t fond of being unpersoned, the verbal stinger of it—and besides, her knees were sensitive.
Once in February, months into their relationship, she and Bret had been at Slow Bert’s Frozen Yogurt, making their way through a pile of their Dirt ‘n’ Worms, when his friend Sal walked in. Sal was a brisk musicology major, eyes vantablack, with a pretentious pair of brown driving gloves he always wore. He peeled one off for a handshake as he straddled a plastic bench opposite them.
“Who are you?” he said to Nadja.
She shook his hand.
Bret said nothing but slurped a gummy worm from Nadja’s bowl and flipped cookie crumbs onto her scarf.
He probably was asking for her name, but Nadja felt compelled to qualify herself. “I’m an art history major—Nadja,” she said. “I’m interested in the lives of the major artists—and minor artists, I guess. It’s probably not far off from musicology. You’re a musicology major, right? Bret’s talked about you.”
Sal’s smile indulged her. “Sure,” he said.
He and Bret made eye contact.
“Where’d you two meet?” Sal asked. With his gloves off, his hands were out now and looked white and squirmy, two prehensile cod filets.
“Around,” Bret said. He wiped his lips with a napkin and sat up.
The discomfort of this question, of the seedy circumstances of their meeting, always shamed her. Last semester she had lived with a French horn player Bret had been seeing. The horn player had left Nadja and Bret alone for a few hours one night while she went to rehearsal (for the Shit Pit). Nadja had sat at her desk doing her homework for biology. Bret had leaned over the desk as she annotated an article about Typhoid Mary, rolling up his sleeves and asking his questions, poking her with a pencil eraser, until they’d found their way into one of the bunk beds. Two weeks later, the French horn major found out. She was upset only with Nadja (“You know how Bret is,” she said. “Everyone does.”) and demanded she move out—and pitched her horn’s new silver-plated mouthpiece at Nadja, which caromed off the thick fire-rated door. Nadja found herself an apartment downtown instead. Bret never apologized, of course. Whenever she brought it up, he smoldered and flexed and evaded the subject. All that moving and arranging, all that mouthpiece-dodging, only now to get Oreo crumbs on Nadja’s dry-clean-only scarf.
To Sal, Nadja said, “He knows my old roommate.”
“Knows,” Sal said, snickering. He turned his fishy hands and face to Bret for a paired laugh at Nadja’s expense, but Bret shook his head.
“Knew,” Bret said. “Nadja’s my main thing now, Sal.” He smiled at Nadja and squeezed her hand, the squeeze as halfhearted as his defense.
After Sal left, Nadja tried bringing this term up with Bret. She wasn’t, in fact, a thing of his, main or secondary. Did he care that that upset her? What were his thoughts on her thoughts, if any? Didn’t he ever wonder what she felt? Wasn’t he worried about her perception of him? No, no, no, no. He dismissed her questions and began to fast-walk back to Durant as she struggled alongside him. What was maddening was that he seemed unbothered by this conversation. He was obstinately assured of Nadja’s presence and placidity. Whatever her feelings toward him, she would continue to go about her quaint ways while he captured the music department. His assuredness was enough to verge on indifference, or at least that’s often what it felt like. The months passed, and she began to be ignored in their dynamic, taken as a given. She continued to follow him, to the dorm, to Durant. Of course she would accompany him to the ASOE concert, and of course after to the North Bottoms party.
At first Nadja did nothing to buck these assumptions of his. She gave up her study time and gave up socializing with the art history department (“Socializing with the art history department?” Pierre said. “You must have missed some scintillating plinth talk.” “Patina palaver,” Nadja said, poking his head.), gave up her afternoon naps to continue dating him (“No,” Pierre corrected, “accommodating.”). Though there was—she realized at the North Bottoms party where she and Pierre first found themselves drunk together on a porch—something positive about this preposterous assuredness.
It left her, to a certain degree, free.
As she saw it, she was now off the romantic hook. If Bret had kept up his end of the relationship and evinced more concern for her aside from her thingness, she would have owed him something of her fealty. If he’d just been respectful to her, was the thing. If he had held the door open for her ever, or if he had replied to her texts within a day, or if he hadn’t once, right in front of her, tried to chop an onion with a butter knife, as if that was perfectly normal (Pierre snorted, pretending to know what was wrong with that), then she would have stayed at his side. She would have, now that she thought of it, become less of herself and more of him.
“Not good,” Pierre said into her thigh, which he kissed. “In fact—bad.”
These kinds of developments between Nadja and Bret, along with a certain baritone’s guileless charm, led her to her current state, enmeshed with Pierre and watching Goodbye, Please. The lead actor was yelling at the lead actress, who walked over to the enormous Christmas tree in their luxurious living room and kicked it over and walked out the door.
“Ain’t that the truth,” Nadja said.
Con moto
Pierre knew that he and Nadja were meant to be together—or at least he meant them to be—when he finally understood Nadja’s perspective. She didn’t know about him, she said one day while they were exercising, but she’d always believed that she was meant to be various, conflicting things.
“To be?” Pierre said. “What do you mean?”
“That is the question,” Nadja huffed. They were in her apartment’s small workout room, side by side on ellipticals. Nadja liked the elliptical, the sustained, purposeless roll of it, especially when she was thinking. She said the perpetual motion made her feel like a dipping bird. Even the equipment’s name described a planetary boomerang, eternal return, which, she told Pierre, was how her life felt recently. She turned over to him as he sweated through a Pinocchio t-shirt. “You don’t want to be anything? Really?”
“I want to do things,” Pierre said, “not be things. I want to sing, I want to perform, and I want to have fun. I don’t care about anything else.”
“Eh. Do, be,” Nadja said. “Same thing. You are what you do.”
“Is that true?” Pierre said.
“Sure it is.”
“You are a performance, then?” Pierre said.
“You are a singer,” Nadja said.
Pierre couldn’t argue with that.
Since she was a kid, Nadja said, she had quested after what—or who—she wanted to be. The question never caught her off guard. When she was eight, after watching a TV special on Duchamp, she’d begged her mother for her own urinal. In seventh grade, after reading about J. M. W. Turner lashing himself to a ship’s mast during a blizzard to paint Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, she’d forced Amanda Klenke to tie her to the tetherball pole. In high school, she gave an oral book report on Dalí while wearing a diving helmet (“Really more of a diving cap,” she confessed). Art history was a puzzling procession of people who somehow had both no idea who they were and utter conviction about who they were, a series of moves and gestures ventured or appropriated, relationships crossed and twisted. After all, who was anyone but a series of stunts and motions?
“Sounds good,” Pierre said. It sounded better than staying on the elliptical any longer. He leapt off its pedals and hand grips as if he were dismounting the pommel horse and sprung onto the mat to stand and stretch before the mirror. He stared at his reflection and heard a blank, warm whole note in his temples, low and droning, buzz buzz. After workouts his mind was nice and calm. Nadja, stopping her elliptical, swung off, and came to stand beside him and stretched as well. Pierre looked at her, her hair darkened past red at her temples with sweat. He reached and touched her left cheek with his thumb as she smiled at him, and it was always so much softer than the rest of her face. Back and forth, across the cheek’s apple. Her talk was sometimes too much for Pierre. This was where he lived, in looks and silent exchanges, where his charm worked most. No talking. She grabbed his forearm, held her face open up to his. He noticed her: she stirred: the air opened up around her.
A tempo
Pierre and Nadja meant to be together all the time now—at least, when they could. This meant several things. One of them was that Pierre needed to cancel his various, conflicting obligations.
He stopped showing up to rehearsals and classes and lessons whenever they infringed on the time Nadja was free. Sometimes this meant emailing Gerald ahead of time, and sometimes it didn’t. Nadja could carve out only a few hours a week in which to see him, spread out among three or four days, so they had to coordinate their schedules to break off and briefly paw at one another. Nadja herself had four classes to attend, an honors senior project to complete, two weeknights on duty as an RA in her dorm, and weekend shifts slicing bagels and scouring the urinals—real ones, not fountains—at Enfilade, a socialist cafe near campus.
On top of all this, Nadja and Pierre needed to know when Bret was busy in order to avoid running into him. When he was free and in a good mood, Bret wanted to see his “main thing,” of course. Fortunately for Pierre and Nadja, however, Bret was busy much of the time, practicing or rehearsing or auditioning or meeting visiting professors for chai lattes. Nadja kept a detailed schedule of his whereabouts in her notes app and often texted Pierre seconds after Bret left her apartment. the tenor has flown, she’d text, or, the duke has abandoned me, or when she was tired simply, come over.
This went on for as long as it could, their hectic scheduling and sneaking. Pierre knew as well as Nadja did that there was a limit to how long they could keep up such a frantic tempo. This past Wednesday, as late afternoon slipped into evening, the two of them worked up an appetite and drove together to get fried pickles and soft pretzels. The restaurant, a boutique sports bar called Triple P’s (for Pickles, Pretzels, and Pickleball, which they had courts for in the back) was next to Slow Bert’s Frozen Yogurt, and it was a favorite spot of Nadja’s.
“Do you even like pickles?” Nadja said, her mouth sideways over her lemon water. She looked over the lay of the bar, a massive knot of students at one entrance crowded around a TV, a rag pulled out of a waiter’s apron to mop up squelching pickle juice, the rotating stand of salted, soft, hot pretzels, the enormous spread of twelve varieties of her favorite condiment, mustard, arrayed in shades from lemon to saffron to taupe, and the pocks and thwacks from the back of frats taking out their aggression with glorified table tennis. All this and her mouth still went sideways.
Pierre, as usual, looked dreamy-eyed and smiley, his gray irises in bloom above an off-white polo shirt. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll like whatever.”
“You’re cute,” Nadja said. She poked at the ice cubes in her water with her straw, drowned them one by one. “How are rehearsals going?”
“Rehearsals?”
“With Austin? For your recital?” Nadja looked up at him out of the tops of her eyes.
“Ah,” Pierre said, as if he’d forgotten about the idea. “I’ve been putting them off a bit, I guess. We were supposed to have one tonight.”
“I’m sorry,” Nadja said. “That’s my fault.”
“Don’t be.” Pierre reached out for her hand.
The waiter arrived with a steaming pile of fried pickles. This was the kind of place where waiters drew on the table coverings in crayon, and the black crayon where the waiter’d written his name smeared as he set down the hot plate. Pierre caught his attention.
“Could we have two Coke floats?” Pierre said.
When the waiter left to fetch them, Nadja said, “You like Coke floats?” She cocked an eyebrow.
Pierre laughed and drooped a little. “I mean, sometimes.”
Nadja sighed. She squeezed his hand once, twice, in short pulses, Morse code palmistry. “Pierre, I want to go back.”
“Oh? Like, back to lemon water,” Pierre said, and raised his eyebrows, “or back to your apartment?”
“Back to the way it was, I mean,” Nadja said. “Between me and you, and me and Bret. A return to tempo.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t like not knowing what we are,” Nadja said.
“Oh.”
“And I feel dishonest,” Nadja said. She tapped with her fingernail on the pickle plate in the center of the table, more codes for him. “I still like you.”
“Oh.”
“But this feels,” Nadja said, “like not the real thing for me. Like a reproduction. Like a put-on.”
“We did it, though,” Pierre said, childlike. He buttoned the top button of his polo shirt and unbuttoned it again. “You are what you do, no?”
“Not always,” Nadja said, wincing, hedging, sucking at her lip. “Sometimes you are who you are.”
“I am someone who likes you,” Pierre said. “We were meant to be together. You know it. You’ve said it.”
“I think I’m meant to be various things,” Nadja said, “at various, conflicting times. This time has come to an end, I think. But we can still see each other. I still like you, I said.”
“Your Coke floats,” the waiter said, beaming, plunking them down.
“But my ship sinks,” Pierre said, looking glum. He could have prevented this. He knew she loved him. She needed more persuading. He could get a gift. Why, he thought, had he not gotten root beer floats instead?
He didn’t have time to answer his question. There was a change in the air right in that moment, a drastic one, as if ten dogs had burst into the room. Everything turned even more horrific. First the waiter smiled, simpering in confusion at Pierre’s remark, and bent down to write in black crayon on the tablecloth, “Thanks for getting in a pickle with us at Triple P’s!” Then Nadja and Pierre, who had stopped holding hands across the table and now retracted their arms to both put them in their respective laps, looked up at the waiter, as if he might be able to help them out of this, and he frowned, as if to say, I’m just being polite to you, what do you expect, I’m a waiter, and took his tray and pickle rag away back toward the kitchen. But before Pierre could taste one sip of his Coke float or turn his head, as the waiter’s body moved out of the way, he and Nadja saw in the window facing the street, strolling downtown with his stupid brown leather driving gloves in one hand—Sal.
They had forgotten about Sal. As a musicology major, Sal’s schedule was different from Bret’s, and he didn’t have rehearsal in the evening. Instead, he was walking from the library after a long afternoon spent studying to reward himself with a Dirt n Worms at Slow Bert’s. As soon as Pierre and Nadja made eye contact with him, a wolfish smile dawned on Sal’s lips. He stopped before the window, waved, and backtracked toward the entrance, where he began to push through the crowd. The ambient athletic pocks and thwacks of the pickleballers seemed to sync with his footsteps as he closed in.
Later, Pierre would ask himself why they didn’t stay put. They hadn’t even been holding hands when Sal saw them. They could have told Sal they were having an innocent fried pickle between colleagues at Triple P’s. But they didn’t. Instead, they fled as fast as they could. Pierre panicked and left an enormous cash tip, all the bills in his wallet, on the table. Nadja abandoned all pretense of secrecy and sprinted out the front door, soon followed by Pierre at a fast walk, and they beat Sal out the other door and booked it down the block in the opposite direction. As they crossed the doorframe, they could hear the waiter, delighted by his tip, call out after them, “Come back soon!”
From Pierre’s perspective, this was a sign. He and Nadja were meant to be together. Or, at least, someone meant them to be. From Nadja’s perspective, all this meant a bundle of various and conflicting consequences.
Pierre didn’t hear from Nadja for the next two days. She wouldn’t reply to his texts. He lay in his dorm bunk—still not going to class—watching movies on his phone. He found a free illegal stream of Goodbye, Please and watched it again, this time with the sound on. It turned out the characters were British and spoke in posh accents, which undercut the drama for him. It turned out the woman who kicked over the Christmas tree said as she walked out, “Brilliant. Just brilliant, then. How’s that for an exciting life?” Pierre paused the stream and clicked his phone off and stared up into the dark.
On Saturday Nadja texted him. She gave no explanation for her absence, none of the specifics of what had transpired over the past two days. She said only, bret’s gone.
Pierre frog-kicked in his bunk in delight. He hopped up and grabbed his coat and corduroys, ready for action. She must want to see him now, either at her apartment or for dinner at Triple P’s. That cash tip had bankrupted him for the week, but he could ask his parents for a loan on the way over. They could ask for the same waiter again, and maybe they could get away with not tipping this time. He stopped himself, midway through the left leg of his corduroys. If there was a chance she’d broken up with her long-term boyfriend, he thought, she might not be in a good mood. Good thinking. Smooth—and frugal.
how are you holding up, he texted, lying back on his bed in his one pant leg and feeling suave. He even added, ?
Nadja’s icon showed three dots, an ellipsis as she typed, then nothing, then three dots, then nothing. Nothing for an hour. Pierre didn’t move from his position in bed. He stared at his phone, waiting, on hold, unheld. Then:
you made my life pretty hard since wednesday, Nadja texted. since sal saw us
im sorry, Pierre texted, not sorry. That would patch things up. what happened
according to our last convo, Nadja texted, and paused. Then she typed the words that would torpedo Pierre into a stratosphere of optimism, sever the tether he’d put on his hope, get him to leap back out of bed: we’re on a break.
You are what you do. Nadja was right, and he saw branching before him the options of how to respond. The universe had overtipped him, shown him his prospects, the golden chances that could pass him by, that were bubbling up like a Coke float. He thought of their previous conversation about what she wanted in life, about what great artists had. He pressed that button.
you had an affair at a pickle bar and sprinted to outrun the spy for your boyfriend. you left your anthology in my dorm room. youve always wanted a life worth writing about and now you have it. its madness. dont you like it
Nadja paused for what seemed like forever.
