We Will Love Each Other: A Terror in Three Parts (Part 2)

To tell you all that happened between that summer and the next time I found myself in Pine Grove Mills, Pennsylvania would take time I don’t have and patience I can’t learn, but it can be summarized in saying that I got everything I wanted and I was the most miserable fuck in the world for it.

Following in my father’s footsteps and pandering to Dan’s profession, I attended one semester of college at Boston University. There, I drank lots of beer and made temporary friends and had sex with girls and even smoked pot from time to time in the name of nostalgia. The gay rumor, thankfully, didn’t follow me past high school, and I think I was at my happiest in those seven months between graduating and dropping out to join an orchestra in Mystic, Connecticut. Because it was Mystic, the orchestra was tragically nautical and the money was tight and there were days I woke up and considered getting into my car and driving right back to Boston, but it wasn’t long before I was noticed for my individual abilities (rightfully, it was fucking Mystic) and a nightclub owner approached me about becoming her lapdog pianist down in New York City.

The second I stepped foot into that nightclub (ritzy, trendy, roaring twenties) the city began to adhere itself to me, and it would be a number of years before I could tear myself away. Not that I was ungrateful. I began in a shoebox with police lights pouring constantly through cemented-shut ground level windows and slowly ascended to a NYC-decent place with roommates above a deli, to a proper apartment smack in the middle of a skyscraper, to my first penthouse at the age of twenty-one. There, I’d host Gatsby parties with martinis for shit-eating New Yorkers - which were just like working except I played the grand piano in the center of my living room at no hourly wage and they tipped me exclusively in handfed mouthfuls of their vile glasses of vermouth and gin and fucking olive juice as I played for them.

I owe most of my success to Nadine Yeun. Though she annoyed the living shit out of me most days, Nadine is one of the hardest working people I’ve ever met and my father’s affinity for this quality has garnered her a lot of my respect. Nadine came sniffing around the nightclub with a fresh ID (she’d just turned twenty-one the previous week) two months after I started there, and approached me after my allotted time frame with a manuscript and a sort of gumption that’s hard to deny. She outlasted my every attempt to deter her, and the promised salary of her parent’s money combined with the endless vodka crans she slipped me, smiling, eventually softened my resistance to reluctant consideration, which was the same as a yes in Nadine’s eyes. Had she not been so bent on writing a musical, she would have made for an excellent journalist. I do not mean this as a compliment.

This isn’t to say I don’t owe Nadine my career. She had all the songs preconceptualized in her tone deaf little head; she just needed them put to music. In many ways, I had the easiest job of all the people she hunted down, but it was my name pasted alongside hers on every off-Broadway flier and, eventually, the Broadway superscreens advertising the show to all of Time Square. Yeun, Jackson-Eaton. We became synonymous, recognizable, and I do appreciate Nadine every bit as much as I can’t stand her. I feel sure this sentiment is one of the only things the two of us have in common.

The show itself was not of particular interest to me. I found it convoluted, difficult to understand - Nadine said this was because I was a typical, small-minded man - but people caught onto it quickly and propelled it into the public eye with the same passion Nadine had spent years pouring into it. Coming from an old money Manhattan family certainly helped, but the true success of Remoulade (yes, that was the show’s actual name) came from critical reviews and audience ravings. Most women left crying, and most men left admittedly less bored than they’d expected to be, and our hearty hometown cast was slowly replaced with bigger names, better actors, and I couldn’t admit that Nadine had been right until the night of Remoulade’s Broadway debut. We sat in the eaves, watching the audience file out in clumps of teary eyes and clinging arms, a bottle of champagne cooling in a metal bucket between our criss-crossed legs.

“Nadine,” I started.

“Arion.” She insisted on calling me by my full name, infuriating.

“Good work.”

She popped the champagne and took a long swig before passing it to me, leaving a waxy sheen of medicated lip balm on its mouth. “You too.”

I was twenty then, and Remoulade had associated my name with the reinvigorated sensibility for classical music spreading across New York City. I had no days off. Every morning was filled with meetings, recording sessions, more meetings, odd jobs playing at brunches and boozy luncheons and birthday parties for people with heavy wallets and light, happy lives. Every night was Remolaude, followed by after parties and rubbing elbows with some of my modern musical idols, from which I would awaken hungover and wonder if the whole thing was a dream.

It was late August when Allen Watts stepped off the front cover of Pitchfork and wandered in to “peek” into one of our after parties. I could have recognized him anywhere. He walked arm-in-arm with one of the most beautiful women I’d seen in my life, his bald head glowing under the string lights of the top-floor bar we rented out, his genius hands tucked into his pants pockets with a certain delicateness. We locked eyes and he pointed to me, and my heart leapt up to my throat.

“Jackson-Eaton,” he said.

“Allen Watts,” I said with all the nervous glee of a fan. Allen Watts knew my name.

“I caught your second act tonight,” he said. His voice was dry and papery, too old for his face. “You wrote the score yourself, I’ve heard?”

“I did, sir.”

“Well, that’s just gorgeous.”

Gorgeous. Allen Watts would never in my life call me by my first name - I’m not convinced he ever learned it. I was always either Jackson-Eaton or Gorgeous, but it didn’t bother me the way it did when Nadine called me Arion. I would have let Allen Watts call me Fuckface if he wanted to.

Nadine Yeun, enemy of goodness, glared from down the bar. She never said it, but I got the sense her three year age advantage over me gave her a feeling of protectiveness. I resented it.

She got up to come talk to us and of course she didn’t respect Allen Watts. She barely looked at him as she shook his hand, briskly, too hard. To my horror, Allen Watts took the hint and nodded to the woman on his arm, who smiled with numb cheeks from me, to Nadine, back to Allen.

“I’m sure I’ll be seeing you,” he said before walking right back out of the party.

I’d been drinking, so my anger overboiled and I called Nadine a bitch, and she smacked the back of my neck hard enough to make it stiff the next morning and leaned in to hiss that the company of Allen Watts was not something that would ever benefit me. I scoffed, wanting to know how that could possibly be true, and she leaned in closer with her scowl and her yellowed horse teeth and her corny artist blouse and said, simply:

“He’s bad news.”

I left the party early to go sulk in my middle-of-the-building apartment, drunk and spiteful and wanting to quit Remaolade just to fuck up Nadine’s month, not knowing that she was, insufferably, right - Allen Watts was bad news.

He would be the first person to ever give me cocaine.