Free Voice of Our Shadow by Jonathan Carroll Page B

Chianti and listened to the Joseph Lennox Golden Oldies Hit Parade of records. Everything was very honorable and aboveboard, and I ended up feeling a bit blue afterward. Since my relationship with the two of them had deepened, my initial desire for India had dwindled, but after she left my apartment that night, I looked at my hands and knew that I would have made love to her in a second if the right situation had come up. I felt like a shit and an A-prime betrayer for thinking that, but, Christ, who says no to an India Tate? Eunuchs, madmen, or saints. None of the above being me.
    I didn’t see her the next day, although we talked for a long time over the phone. She was going to the opera with some friends and kept telling me how much she liked Mahler’s The Three Pintos . I wanted to tell her before we hung up how disappointed I was that I wouldn’t be seeing her that day, but I didn’t.
    Something very strange and almost more intimate than sex happened the next day. How it happened is so utterly ludicrous I’m embarrassed to explain. India later said it was a great scene out of a bad movie, but I still felt it was the worst kind of corn.
    It was Saturday night; she was cooking dinner for us at their apartment. While she moved around her kitchen cutting and chopping and stirring, I started singing. She joined in, and we went through “Camelot.” “Yesterday,” and “Guess Who I Saw Today, My Dear?” So far, so good. She was still cutting and chopping; I had my arms behind my head, looking at the ceiling and feeling warm and content. When we finished “He Loves and She Loves,” I waited a few seconds to see if she was going to volunteer one. When she didn’t, I sang the first few bars of “Once Upon a Time.” Why that song I still don’t know, because it usually surfaces only when I’m depressed or sad. She had a nice high voice that reminded me of light blue. She could also move it around mine and do some lovely harmonizing. It made me feel about a hundred times more musical than I was, so long as I stayed on my notes.
    We got three quarters of the way through the song, but then the end loomed up. If you don’t know the tune, I should tell you that the end is very sad; I always stop singing before I get there. This time I’d arrived, but because she was there with me, I decided to mumble my way through to the finish. It did no good, because she dropped off too, and we were stuck out there in space with nowhere to go. All of a sudden I felt sad and full of tired echoes, and my eyes filled with tears. I knew I would start crying if I didn’t think of something fast. Here I was in my friends’ warm kitchen, the man of her house for a few hours. Something I had wanted for years but had never been able to find. There had been women before — deer and mice and lions. There had been moments when I was sure — but they weren’t. Or they’d been convinced, but I wasn’t … and it was never simple or good. What it boiled down to was being alone — particularly alone — in Vienna in the middle of my twenties and, worst of all, growing used to it.
    My eyes were stuck on the ceiling while the black silence honked its horn, but I knew I would have to look at her soon. Steeling myself, I blinked three or four times against the tears and slowly brought my scared eyes down. She was leaning against a counter and had both hands in her pants pockets. She’d held nothing back, and although she was crying, she looked at me with a grave, loving stare.
    She walked over and sat down on my knee. Putting her long arms around my neck, she hugged me tightly. When I returned the embrace — tentatively and light with fear — she spoke into my neck.
    “Sometimes in the middle of everything I get so sad .”
    I nodded and began rocking us back and forth in the chair. A father and his scared child.
    “Oh, Joe, I just get so spooked.”
    “Of what? You want to talk?”
    “Of nothing. Everything. Getting old, knowing