“You must care about me,” he tried again, “or you’d let me fall. But you have to understand. I’ll die if I stay up here. From exposure or hunger.”
Cloud Harriet gazed at him with a blind look of desperate concern, then spun away, dropped her slender legs over the side of the bed. She cast a sly, beckoning glance over her shoulder and nodded out across the cloud, to point his attention to what waited there.
A palace of cloud, like something from the Arabian Nights, loomed beyond: a soaring mass of minarets and arches, courtyards and walls, staircases and ramps. The magnificent structure swelled high into the sky, dazzling in the early-morning light, as opalescent as a pearl (the pearl!). It had sprung up overnight and crowded around the towering dome at the center of his floating island.
He rose to follow her and staggered and nearly went to one knee. He was weak, felt as light as a cloud himself. He was a long way from starvation—that would take weeks—but his hunger left him dazed, and when he moved too quickly, his head swam.
She took his hand, and soon they came to a moat. His heart lunged. A ring of open sky encircled the castle. He could see folds of green earth a couple miles below, ravines and shadowed, fir-covered slopes. She tugged his arm and led him across a wide drawbridge of smoke and through the palace gates.
When they were on the other side, he pulled his hand free and turned in a slow circle, taking it all in. They had entered a grand hall, with lofty arched ceilings the color of snow. It was like standing beneath a giant’s wedding dress.
He got so dizzy turning around and around that he almost fell again. Harriet caught his elbow and steadied him, then guided him to an immense white throne. He sat, grateful to be off his wobbly legs, and she sank into his lap, all cool, slender waist and round hips. He shut his eyes and rested his head on her chill, comforting shoulder. It was a relief anyway, to be held.
But when he opened his eyes, he discovered he was holding a cello of cloud. Her smooth, perfect ass, slender waist, and pale bosom had become the body of the instrument.
His Harriet of the troposphere now sat a yard away, in a silky pale gown, watching him with the adoration of a dog regarding a man holding a hamburger.
Aubrey reached into the cloud at his feet and drew a bow, whip thin and the translucent white of a fish bone. He was hungry and from the first stroke played the music of hunger: Mahler, Symphony no. 5, the third part, a meditation on doing without, on realizing what wasn’t and couldn’t be. A cloud cello did not sound like a wooden cello. It had the low, haunting sound of the wind beneath the eaves, of a gale blowing across the spout of an empty jug, but for all that the song was distinct.
Sky Harriet rose from her stool and swayed and turned. He thought of a sea frond pulled by the tide, and when he swallowed, his throat clicked.
She revolved like a ballerina in a music box, a stem of a girl, with a complexion of unearthly smoothness. It was as if he spun her himself, as if she were a lathe powered by song. She lifted from the cloud beneath her feet and rose on spreading wings of hallucinatory beauty and began to sail in circles above him.
He was so entranced he forgot to play. It didn’t matter. The cello played on without him, standing before his knees while the bow floated there, stroking strings he’d been able to feel but not quite see.
The sight of her drew Aubrey to his feet. He reeled, reaching for her. He wanted to be held—to fly.
She dipped, caught his hand, pulled him into the great heights beneath the palace roof. He left his stomach behind. Air whistled, and the cello yearned, and he cried out and seized her to him, her hips to his. They fell, swooped, rose again, his blood heavy and his head light. He was already hard.
His Harriet of the mists carried him to a landing at the top of a dizzying staircase. They collapsed there together. Wings became honeymoon sheets, and he took her again, while the cello played a lewd, strutting cabaret number below.
15
JUNE GOT BETTER, JUNE GOT WORSE. There was one good month when she was getting around on aluminum crutches, her head wrapped in a scarf, and she was talking about adjusting to her new reality. Then she stopped talking about adjusting and took a bed in the cancer ward. Aubrey brought her a ukulele, but it never moved from its spot between the spider plants on her windowsill.
One day when Aubrey and June were alone together—Harriet and June’s brothers had gone down to the gift shop to get candy bars—June said, “When we’re all done here, I want you to move on, as quickly as possible.”
“Why don’t you let me worry about how to deal with my feelings?” Aubrey said. “This may come as a surprise to you, but I can’t just . . . be done with you without a thought. Like you’re an umbrella I left at a hotel.”
“I’m not talking about me, dummy,” June said. “I expect you to grieve for me for at least a decade. I want a prolonged period of grim desolation and at least a little unmanly crying in public.”
“So what are you—”
“Her. Harriet. It’s not happening, dude. You played in our shitty band for almost two years hoping to tap that.”
“It already happened.”
June looked away, past her dusty ukulele, out the window at the parking lot. Rain pricked at the glass.
“Oh. That.” June sighed. “I wouldn’t make too much of that, Aubrey. She was having a really bad week, and you were safe.”
“Why was I safe?”
June looked at him blankly, as if the answer were glaringly obvious. And maybe it was. “You were going away for six months. You don’t start a relationship with someone who has his suitcases packed and one foot out the door. You were safe, and she knew there was nothing she could ever do that would make you hate her.”
Ever since June was first diagnosed with lymphoma, she’d been parceling out nuggets of gentle wisdom, pretending she was Judi Dench or Whoopi Goldberg playing the tragic mentor in a heart-affirming movie about what really matters in life. It wore on him.
“Maybe you should try to sleep,” he said.
“I was pissed off at her, you know,” June told him, as if he hadn’t spoken.
“Because we got drunk and fooled around?”
“No! Not because of that. Because of everything before that. All those nights she put her head in your lap on long, dark rides. Introducing you to people as her love muppet. You can’t do things like that to people. They might fall in love with you.”
“Okay,” he said, in a tone that meant it wasn’t.
“No, it’s not,” she said. “It was very unfair to you.”
“I’ve had some of the best and most important conversations of my life with Harriet.”
“Of your life. Not hers. You wrote that song about wearing each other’s favorite sweaters and she sang it, but Aubrey—Aubrey. Those were your lyrics. Not hers. She was just singing the words you wrote for her. You need to break up.”
“We’re not together.”