Free Milk by Emily Hammond Page A

was married when I saw you last—I know that’s what you’re trying to figure out. Jackson and I had been married about a year. We were having problems at the time.” At the time? When didn’t we have problems?
    â€œI gotta go,” Gregg says, standing. The other band members are milling around on stage, waiting for him. Time for the next set.
    In any case his piano playing has the usual mesmerizing effect on me—electric piano tonight—this band, one of many he’s in, being of a jazz-fusion strain, as far as I can tell. Maybe because I’m not a musician and know so little about music, it’s never mattered to me what kind of music Gregg plays. It’s his playing I like, his soul. I drink it in like a cocktail, an espresso. A drug, a cigarette. I watch his hands, his mouth … I think about what we might do later tonight, if things aren’t sabotaged beyond repair, that is. As Gregg said last night, I really am free. Little does he know I don’t even have to worry about birth control, although somehow this isn’t a cheering thought.
    The set’s over and I don’t leave. The bar empties out, and still I don’t leave. Last call, I order another seltzer. Gregg and the band are breaking down equipment, carrying it out to their cars; he keeps looking at me over his shoulder.
    A late bloomer, Gregg always called himself.
    In college he did two things well: play music and make love. I could never figure out how Gregg, who couldn’t change a tire, who couldn’t catch a football or even a pillow if you handed it to him, who couldn’t dance, who couldn’t talk to people except other musicians, who couldn’t pour a cup of coffee without spilling—how someone so lacking in normal everyday skills and most social graces could know so instinctively how to please a woman. And it wasn’t that he’d had a lot of experience, like me. He was practically a virgin. He was a virgin, he finally admitted to me our first time together, as if it were something to be ashamed of.
    â€œThings,” he said, “didn’t work out the other times.” I gathered he meant his erection, which looked fine to me, all the better once he admitted his virginity.
    If I was a first for him, he was for me, too. The first man with whom I’d had an orgasm. Which made me a virgin of a different sort, I liked to think.
    In college, aside from playing music or making love, everything else Gregg did was a mild ongoing seizure, nerve-wracking to watch. He fidgeted, he grimaced, he smiled, he frowned; he ran a hand through his hair, then on down his spine until an audible crack was heard; he burped, he sighed; he lit one cigarette to another; he pushed his glasses back up onto his nose; he squinted; wrenched his shoulders up and down. He crossed his arms, his legs, his ankles, his feet, simultaneously, twisting them in and out—basket weaving, it looked like.
    He was fascinating, embarrassing, annoying. Stoned, I saw him as a god, the Indian god Shiva, the one with all the arms.
    Straight, he drove me crazy. “Can’t you sit still?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œSit still.”
    I disliked being in social situations with him, although others didn’t find him irritating—just nervous and rather lovable, and amazing, which he was. I mean, how could he go from knocking over a bowl of dip, stepping in it, and tracking it across the floor—all without noticing—to sitting down at the piano, boom, a complete transformation, every movement sure and smooth, timed and sexual. He loved to perform, but only at the piano. Anything else, except sex, made him uncomfortable. People, conversation, talk, human interaction (unless somehow paired with music), made the parts of his body appear mismatched, clanking and tangling together like a wind chime in a gale.
    Never mind. Everybody liked him. Correction—adored him. Women thought he was cute;