Drawn to You Read online

  “It’s really a big walk up here. People didn’t say,” Peter offered.

  “How the hell did you know I was here?” Max asked. He suddenly needed a drink of water terribly. He wanted to reach into the back of his throat and scratch and scratch at the dry skin. He felt as though if he talked too much, he might talk up a bit of blood.

  A million other questions rose to the surface. Like: Why the hell did you seek me out? Why on earth does it matter where I am? Hasn’t everyone moved along without me? Even Amanda had gotten married the previous year; Christine had never reached out. And Mario? Sure, Peter could say that Mario had been pining for Max. It was in no way represented in the fact that Max had been living like a hermit, in upstate New York.

  He had shelled off the world, and the world had kicked him off, in turn.

  “Rumors. There have been rumors circling around the internet for years,” Peter offered. “People interested in your story. Especially people watching to see if Mario would ever track you down. Sometimes he would get rip-roaring drunk in Paris, and you could just tell he was aching for you.”

  Peter cackled sadly. He turned his eyes to the ground. “Course, he never did. I don’t know if it’s because he’s too much of a pussy, or he’s too stupid to find you, or what.”

  “Did you come all the way here to insult Mario?” Max asked. He remained stony-faced, gazing at this man. All the bells in the back of his head were ringing, telling him not to trust him. This man who “used to” date his daughter. Who had dumped who? Had he come here to plea to get Christine back,

  Peter continued, his eyes still lowered. “Some kid in the village near here said he sees you every three weeks. You always buy a newspaper and a chocolate bar and eat it slowly, getting the chocolate all over the sides of the paper. It’s those attention to details that really makes the internet something special, don’t you think?”

  Max wasn’t entirely sure which boy it had been. Everyone was a bit of a blur to him, someone he could have known if he’d bothered to pay attention long enough. As it stood, he was just as unfamiliar to the world as the world was to him.

  “He didn’t report on it until about six months after you started in, when you apparently forgot to give him a tip. You can’t trust people, eh, old man?” Peter continued.

  “So. You did it. You tracked me down. You still haven’t told me why,” Max blared. When his anxiety reared its ugly head, it normally displayed itself as a kind of horrific, evil persona.

  Peter’s eyes twinkled at this, seemingly knowing something Max didn’t.

  “She always said your anger scared her,” Peter said.

  At this, Max burst forward, drawing his fist back. With all his might, he shoved his hand toward Peter’s skull, with every meaning to blast him through his skull. Peter shot to the right, narrowly missing. He clucked his tongue, then dotted his finger atop his nose. “Look at that!” he said. “You’ve still got that anger, don’t you? All this time in the woods. I figured you’d be all meditative. Maybe taken up Buddhism.”

  “If you don’t tell me why you’re here, I will literally tear you to shreds,” Max boomed.

  It was too much for Max. It was the first mention of Mario, of Christine, that anyone had made to him in years. He ached, realizing that Mario had been bumbling about Paris — that he’d completely thrown Venice to the side and fallen into whatever crater Paris presented. When Mario had whispered tales of his Parisian days, Max had felt unable to breathe. The parties; the drugs; the volatility. It had filled him with unease, and also gratefulness. At the time, he’d been grateful that Mario had shucked that Parisian lifestyle away, choosing instead to live at Max’s side.

  What a fool he’d been.

  “All right. All right,” Peter sighed. He kicked at his backpack, making it fall to the corner. He shot his hand toward the cabinet, at the whiskey that caught the light from the window. “Pour me a glass. Then I can get started.”

  Max supposed he didn’t have a choice, if he was truly going to get a sense for what the hell was going on. He thrust the whiskey bottle onto the table, along with a coffee mug.

  “Are you looking for instructions?” he asked Peter.

  “A good man never lets another drink alone,” Peter offered.”

  “Who said I thought you were good?

  “Who said I thought YOU were?” Peter demanded.

  At this, surging with anger, with adrenaline, Max grabbed a second coffee mug and watched, seething, as Peter poured them both drinks. Peter tucked himself in at the other dining table, batting his long lashes at Max. He waited for Max to sit before he shot his glass forward, seemingly wanting to clink. To cheers.

  Max didn’t do as he was told.

  “I imagined you a bit differently,” Peter began. “A bit more…regal, if you must know. I know your history. You’re regarded as quite the architect, you know. A man of mystery and mastery. A man not to be fucked with. Very much the sort of man I would have wanted to count amongst my friends, had you been a wee bit younger — and, of course, not the father of my girlfriend.”

  “Ex-girlfriend,” Max said, his voice cutting.

  “Yes. That’s right,” Peter said. At this, he seemed to stumble, his nostrils flaring out. “I didn’t think it would come to that. Ordinarily, well. I have to say, before Christine, I was a bit of a player. I hadn’t a care in the world. I treated women like… Well, a bit like you treated your ex-wife.”

  The fact that this horrific man might have any sort of clue of how Max treated Amanda caused another wave of terror to flush through him. He tucked the rest of the whiskey down his throat, then poured himself yet another glass.

  “Christine though, she was different. It became apparent after the first month or so. After Mario arrived in Paris. You see, I respect Mario more than I respect almost any other man in the world. And the way he handled Christine — it was like this god-like thing. He wanted to protect her. He wouldn’t let her party like the others. He wouldn’t let her stay out too late. He began to…to really oversee her art career, even sometimes above his own. I couldn’t figure it out. Sometimes, I grew so jealous of their connection, but I knew it wasn’t romance. Christine, she loved me as well as she could, for as long as she could. But I think… I think she outgrew me.”

  Max peered at Peter, marveling at how different the man looked, now that he’d revealed such elements of his actual personality. Wrinkles formed beneath his eyes; he looked haggard and frightened. He sucked down the rest of his whiskey as well, then filled it clear to the brim.

  “You have to be careful with that stuff,” Max offered. “It’ll ruin you.”

  “Christine, she’s pretty fucked up,” Peter continued. His shoulders shook with the panic of what he’d just said. “She’s…she’s not okay.”

  Max’s heart beat ramped up. “Wait, you just told me. You just said that my daughter is fine. She’s in good hands…”

  “Mario is doing his best, yeah. Jesus, they both suffer from the same goddamn complex.”

  “What is that?” Max demanded.

  Peter blinked at Max, tossing his eyes back, as if to make fun of him. “Come on. You can’t be this stupid. I came all the way here for a reason.”

  Max stretched his hands over his heart, feeling it patter. He felt as though he was preparing to have a stroke. “You came here to tell me you’re worried about Christine…”

  “The way she talked about you, Max. The way she and Mario would whisper about you. They’re… they’re terrified for you. They’re also unable to move forward, all because you won’t rejoin life. They blame themselves for chasing you away. Christine stays up nights crying because she’s terrified they’re going to find you dead.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell her where I was, then?” Max demanded, lowering his eyebrows. “Why did you have to make this dramatic trek by yourself?”

  “She would never come to you,” Peter said, flaring his nostrils. “She’s far too proud. Mario, too. They’re just makin
g art in Paris, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for you to join them, maybe. They’ve all but kicked me out of their lives…”

  “And you hoped that if you were the one to bring me back, Christine might reconsider dumping you,” Max sighed. He stretched his nails over his cheeks, digging them into the skin.

  Peter didn’t answer. He sucked down the rest of his whiskey, seemingly toying with several different answers. He shrugged, batting his long lashes. “Honestly, I used to be a very different kind of person, before I met Christine. I held the biggest parties. I did the most drugs. I didn’t care a lick about Christine, until she…well. She showed me that something else mattered. And Max, I’m not saying that it DOES matter, because I know better than to think that. I’m just saying, I wanted to go the extra mile, this time, as you Americans say. And maybe do something for her, for a change. Even if I never get to see her again.”

  ***

  Max took pity on the poor asshole. He certainly didn’t want to. He slotted him up in his trundle bed, swiping a sheet over his bulky, muscular body and watching as his lips parted in sleep. Max huffed, grunting to himself, feeling every bit the older man he was. He returned to his bottle of whiskey and poured another glass for himself, before falling out onto the front porch and cranking back and forth in the swing . It was something he’d added to the house that early spring, for evenings such as this.

  He’d just been given a straight-shot back to the life he so craved. The one he dreamed about.

  He’d been given a glimpse of the two most important people in his life. The people he’d abandoned, because he thought they’d abandoned him.

  He now understood what they’d been up to the previous two years.

  And the fact that maybe, just maybe, they needed him just as much as he needed them.

  What the hell did he have to lose?

  His brain felt foggy. He snuck still more whiskey down his throat, feeling it burn. He whistled slowly, an old country western song his father used to sing. His feet found the porch floorboards and pushed the swing still higher. The evening wind whooshed past his ears. Inside, Peter had begun to snore. Max wished he could shake the kid awake again, demand even more information. Now that Christine was twenty-one years old, what was she like? Had she softened? Had she learned how to do the dishes, to clean her room? He chuckled, sensing that those were the sorts of things she wouldn’t remember about herself, now. How quickly everyone grew up.

  “Daddy issues.” These were the words Peter had used to describe what Christine was going through. “Abandonment issues.” Those, too. In the later part of their conversation, Peter had described how Amanda had come to Paris to try to console Christine, to convince her to come back to Chicago whilst her and Peter’s relationship was crumbling. Christine insisted she had to stay in Paris. She’d admitted to Peter later that it was the only place she could be, as Mario was there with her. “We need each other. We did a horrible thing to Dad.”

  Max didn’t sleep much that night. When Peter curled out of the trundle bed, scraping his fingers across his temples, he blinked up at the fully-packed Max, awaiting him at the cabin table. Peter scrambled up from bed, his chest bare, with a vague red rash, perhaps from Peter scratching at himself through the night. Oh, the woes of rock stars. “We’re just people too,” Max imagined.

  “So you’re coming?” Peter demanded, his voice cloudy.

  “I have no other choice,” Max said. “You told me my daughter needs me. How could I do anything else?”

  A smile stretched over Peter’s face. Max imagined a similar rueful smile on Peter, one from various other times, other occasions that involved far less innocent substances or conversations. Something about Peter was snake-like, untrustworthy.

  Peter didn’t speak again until after he’d stuffed the rest of his things into his backpack, until after the two had mounted into Max’s truck and begun to curl the truck tires over the rickety and crumbling path down the mountain. Max put the windows down on either side of him, allowing the wind to whoosh past their ears and faces, drying out their eyes. Peter turned up the radio, and the two men began to sing an old pop track from 1998. How was it possible that both knew every single word?

  Nostalgia was a uniting force. How strange it was that they’d both been on the earth so long, that they’d both been in the brilliant presence of Christine? How fascinating was it to love the same people, to know the various facets of them, the various poisons of them, and to keep on loving them, anyway?

  Chapter Eighteen

  Mario

  Christine was crumpled up on Mario’s studio apartment couch, moaning a bit as she slept. Outside it was a drizzly day in August. One of those bleak, gray, Parisian days during which the sun never yanked its head from the clouds. Mario shivered, drawing his cardigan tighter over his shoulders. He drew painted-covered fingers over Christine’s shoulders, trying to wake her. She just mumbled to herself, her nostrils flared. “Just let me sleep.”

  Christine had officially sliced through the last of her and Peter’s relationship the week before, becoming what the media had said was the “first woman to ever break Peter Eclaire’s heart.” Mario had seen Peter through countless relationships, with models from Scandinavia, from Rome, from Asia. Yet none had hollowed out Peter’s eyes like this.

  “He says I changed his life,” Christine had murmured, tears dripping down her cheeks. “And the truth is, he changed mine, too. I just. I’m only twenty-one, Mario. I can’t commit my entire life to someone, yet. It’s what my parents did with one another. And they were absolutely miserable till the very end…”

  Mario had never truly warmed his heart to Peter in the wake of his second move to Paris. He’d attended the parties like a dutiful friend, watching with eagle-eyes to ensure that Christine didn’t partake in too much drink. He saw himself as a sort of father figure or an uncle, or just a guardian angel. Throughout numerous evenings, he’d caught Peter reprimanding her, or telling her something wasn’t quite right with her appearance, or how she’d reacted to something someone famous—or famous in Peter’s eyes—had said. Mario had groomed Christine to have a thicker backbone, to declare that she was far more worthy of respect and honesty and love than Peter was willing to give.

  Of course, as with any other breakup, this one had cut Christine in two. She’d spent the majority of the previous weeks aching — unable to eat, tossing back and forth either in Mario’s guest bedroom or atop his couch. Her other friends in Paris were largely linked to Peter, and she told Mario she “just couldn’t deal with them.” He was her only friend, just then. And due to Mario’s supreme loneliness, and his allegiance to ensuring she was all right, he allowed it.

  “I’m going to the bakery,” Mario told her, his voice low. “You really need to eat something.”

  Christine’s eyelashes fluttered like butterfly wings. “YOU need to eat something. You’re too skinny these days, Mario. What…” She paused for a moment, drawing her tongue across her lips. “What on earth are you going to do with yourself, huh? You…you haven’t even tried. Tried to be with anyone. Are you really going to be hung up on him forever?”

  Mario felt the words like acid, dripping through his ears. He patted her back again, murmuring, “I’ll be back. You really do need to eat.”

  “None of my friends do,” Christine murmured.

  “Just because you live in Paris, doesn’t mean you need to destroy yourself,” Mario returned.

  Mario slipped his rain coat over his shoulders, shivering. Christine closed her eyes again and snuck her blanket over her face. She dove back into slumber immediately, seemingly able to draw darkness back into her soul immediately. Mario wondered if this would be her mental state forever, or if she would find a way to burst beyond the torments of this Peter breakup.

  As he cantered down the steps, Mario half-prayed for a future in which Christine could find someone better for her. Someone not Peter. Although it was terribly true that Peter had changed a great deal for her �
�� that he’d, in a sense, found a “soul” within himself in the wake of falling for her, he was still every bit the wild-eyed party boy he’d always been. “I just need to grow up a little bit more,” Christine had murmured, her eyes heavy with tears. “I can’t do it anymore.”

  Outside, the rain drizzled down Mario’s face, cutting in between the two buildings above and casting a river down the tight alleyway. He opened the umbrella over his head and darted out toward the nearby bakery. His flat in the Marais was located just a fifteen-minute walk from Peter’s place, as he’d wanted to remain close to Christine after he’d decided to make Paris his permanent place. He’d grown accustomed to life in Paris all over again, had gradually filled his closet with somber black sweaters and turtlenecks and tight little shoes. He dressed the part of a somber Parisian, lacking all the color and vitality of an Italian. And in some sense, he lost the color in his own self. Perhaps that was due to Paris, or perhaps it was due to something else.

  This “other” wasn’t something Mario necessarily liked to discuss, although he knew it was all related back to two years ago. When everything in Mario’s life had simultaneously begun and ended.

  Mario marched to the end of the canal and peeked out, tracing his eyes across the busy road. People pitched forward, walking with their noses toward the ground, their shoes splashing through the puddles. The bakery was only three minutes’ walk away, and he could spot it — the foggy windows, illustrating the warmth within. It was a strangely chilly August, a day that brought yearning for sweaters and tight scarves and hot cocoa.

  In the days since Christine had left Peter, it had been rumored that Peter had skipped out of the city — on some sort of expedition. Mario had been too afraid to ask too many questions, unsure what sort of thing Peter might have gotten himself into in the wake of Christine’s “ruin” of him. Mario wished he could dart back to that particularly wild evening, his first in Paris, nearly two years ago. Wished he could have ended the Peter and Christine affair before it had truly begun. He’d watched it sprout and grow and build texture, and then he’d watched as Christine’s eyes had begun to fade, as the elusive and wild and famous Peter Eclaire had no longer fit her “bill” for life.