Onebody

I’ve spent the last month-and-a-bit working on a new rock musical called Onebody, based on Conversations with God, by Neale Donald Walsch.  It’s a sort of new-age-new-thought-spirituality thing, you know the type, The Secret, Eckhart Tolle, all that.  Pretty cool, all in all…I wish, of course, that I had been writing more faithfully throughout the journey (or even writing at *all*…), because there is simply too much catching up to do on it all now.  So, the abridged version…

We spent three weeks rehearsing in Fresno.  Those of us not local to Fresno were housed in a three-room suite in the dorms at Cal State Fresno, and it was amazing.  My roommates were called Sharyn (we call her Shar), Sean, Steven, and Rocky; Shar and I, being the only girls (in the whole show, actually, except the producer’s partner who doesn’t quite count), shared a room and became very close very quickly.  Sean and Steven and the two of us hung out constantly until our first weekend on tour, in Sacramento, when things went suddenly and horribly wrong with Steven and we lost him.  Rocky we all adore, but he was never really quite part of the group.  So now it’s Sean and Shar and me, and that works just fine.  We do miss Steven, though.

The other important people in the show, from my perspective, are the band.  I am the only member of the company who is a cross-over performer between band and cast — I sing and act, and occasionally leave the pit, and play the flute and keyboard.  The rest of the band stay in the pit and play their instruments.  The band spent the first three days of rehearsal (and these are 10-hour days) in a room by ourselves working the music, and in that kind of pressure-cooker situation you either become very close very fast or shut off completely.  We became close.  The rest of the band actually already knew each other, very very well — they’ve worked together and toured together and recorded together before, and most of them went to high school and college together — so it was more like, they’re all best friends and had to choose whether or not to adopt me.  Thankfully, they chose to adopt me.  The band: Allan, who is our music director and plays keyboard; Colin, bass; Randy, drums; David, guitar.  David, guitar.  David.

The show itself is…good.  It could be better, there are cuts and adjustments that have to be made, but overall it’s good.  Certainly watchable, and we have been very well-received.  The music is hard.  My role is exciting.  I am called The Muse, and I get to be Maire Nesbitt.  For anyone who doesn’t know her, look her up on YouTube; if there are no videos under that name, look up Celtic Women Violin.  And watch her.  She has been my inspiration.  But anyway.  I have no dialogue and only a few vocal solos, but I am active in every scene, mostly from my chair in the pit.  It has been a very interesting acting excercise for me, being involved and active in every scene, with no blocking and no dialogue, just sitting in a chair.  Sometimes I feel like I’m chained to my keyboard, and at various places in the show, I actually play that, as though I literally cannot leave the pit.  But when I can leave the pit, I’m this sort of child-spirit-musician.  The band guys say I’m a wood nymph.  It’s fun.

I don’t even know how to go back and cover all the important or wonderful things that happened…we had nights in the dorm just the five of us, nights with Allan, nights with the band…one of the very best nights we had, Colin, Randy and David came over, and Randy brought a drum and Dave brought his guitar, and Sean had his guitar, and the guys passed the instruments around and made music into the small hours.  We turned out the lights and set a candle on the floor and set chairs all around, and they played and we sang…they did some of Sean’s own music, and some of their other favorites.  David played his version of Radiohead’s "Idioteque."  I don’t know the original, but appartently it’s lots of drums and white noise and stuff.  David brought it right in, made it so small and so personal, closed his eyes and rested his chin on his accoustic and sang as though there were no one there to hear him.  I think I will carry that picture of him forever.

On one day we had off (pretty much *the* one day we had off), the four of us — Sean, Steven, Shar and myself — went up to a lake in the woods about an hour north of Fresno, Shaver Lake, and swam and hung out in the sun all day.  It was quiet and peaceful…we stayed long enough to watch the sun go down and the stars come out.  I read tarot for everybody, read it well.  Sean opened himself to us for the first time.  We finally settled into real friendship, the four of us.  I recited Where the Wild Things Are as we lay cuddled together on a blanket and watched the shooting stars.  Wonderful, wonderful day.

The band are exceptional and overwhelming.  They do not do things by halves.  They are all truly excellent musicians.  They are rockers, though, a new breed for me…I know musicians, I have lots of experience with musicians, but not ones like these.  They are all drinkers, smokers, partiers.  They stay up until 4:00 and sleep until noon.  I love them all and I don’t quite know what to do with them.  They don’t quite know what to do with me, either, I think.  But we manage to have fun.

And then there’s David.  So much of my last month has been about David.  First trying to decide whether I even liked him, whether he even liked me, whether or not we got along at all.  I don’t even know how to begin to write about David.  I wish I had been writing about him daily, I wish the slow evolution of our relationship and my feelings were already recorded, so I didn’t have to try to backtrack through all of it, things that were so long ago they hardly seem relevant at all anymore but which I do not wish to forget…  What can I even say about David?  How can I hope to put him into words?  We are a mismatch and we fell against our wills.  The first time we were alone even for minutes was in Sacramento, after we had known each other three weeks, and he held me very tightly in an elevator and said it’s tough, it’s tough, I don’t know what to do with this, I didn’t sign up for this.  The first night we spent together was that night, the Econo-Lodge in Sacramento, with Allan asleep in the next bed, trying not to wake him, trying to learn each other, trying to learn us.  In his daily life, he goes back and forth between wild and young and noisy and boyish with the band, and intense and demanding and curious with me.  But when it is just us, on the rare occasions it is just us, he becomes so gentle, so vulnerable, so open and truthful it hurts.  So truthful that it demands equal truth from me.  He has always done that, actually, from our earliest semi-private conversations…demanded the truth of me.  He asked me once, in the second week I think, to drop my self-protective behaviors with him.  "I don’t want you to change the way you are with the world," he said,

"I don’t want you to unshield yourself with everyone.  Just with me.  Just be real with me."  That was the same night he finally walked me back to the dorm at 2:30 in the morning, waited as I found my key, then said "An embrace will suffice," hugged me hard, and walked away without looking back.  The first night he kissed me was Thursday of week three, the same night he put out his cigarette on his arm, and said "Are you going to save me from that?" when I tried to stop him.  He still has the marks.

To understand, you have to hear his music.  Because the David in his music is not the same as the David in anecdotes.  It is not possible to sum him up.  At all.  But it is not possible even to approximate him without music.  He writes the most intense, beautiful…his songs are perfect.  I could fall in love with him just for his music.  If it weren’t for the way he looks at me, the way he demands truth from me, the way he examines the world, the way he challenges, the way he laughs, the way he touches me, the way he explores…I could still love him just for his music.

It feels very early to use a word like "love," and it feels dishonest not to.  I’ve been coming up against this the last couple of days.  Our situation is odd because we only see each other on the weekends, and for performances…our time together is limited and weird and to get to the real him after the show I first have to go through the him that parties until 3:00 AM.  We are going to have problems over this.  We may already be having problems over this.  He told me on Sunday night that I was an embarassment to him on Friday night, at the small party in a hotel room…I’m not even sure why.  Because I wasn’t drinking?  Because I don’t smoke pot?  Because I was tired and didn’t want to dance?  Because because because.  I don’t know.  We do not have long-term potential.

And yet I cannot walk away.  Sunday morning we sat together in the lobby of the hotel and talked for an hour and a half.  About people, what people are like, how people work.  How we work, but mostly how the world works.  It didn’t strike me as a remarkable conversation.  A good one, certainly, and I was very glad to have had it with him…I knew he was capable of such conversations, but still, it was very good to have that confirmed.  But Sunday night, he told me that it had been five years since he’d had that sort of conversation, that he avoids them…something about having had them all before, with many different people, and always coming out disappointed.  Yet I did not disappoint him.  And he did not disappoint me.  It was good.  He calls me Rosalyn, my middle name…he hasn’t called me Stephanie in weeks, before Sunday night.

Sunday we all swam in the pool for hours after our matinee, as it got dark, until they threw us out.  In the short time we spent together away from the mass of people, he interupted me mid-sentence to pull me underwater and kiss me.  He was unhappy when I wanted to go back to my own room and shower and read tarot for Carol Anne before coming to his room, he wanted me there right away.  At the party in his room, he was suddenly very hands-on with me, unusual, he is normally somewhat distant in company.  And then, from nowhere, he’s saying, this is unfair, this is so unfair to say to you here, with all these people, but I must, I must…I like you, I like you a lot, and I want to be close to you and get to know you and be vulnerable with you and call you Rosalyn, Stephanie, I want to do that, but I cannot see myself, I cannot imagine, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever having a physical relationship with you.  Says, and I thought that, you know, since we’ve spent a couple of nights together…  I don’t remember what he said then.  And he asked me if this was OK.  Is it OK?  What am I going to do?  Say "no," and take you outside and rape you?  Of course it’s OK, if that’s what it is.  Saddening, but OK.  And we did step outside, to try to talk in private…lost cause, because no one knew what conversation was happening, and they kept coming out to try to get us to come back in and dance.  And he had already had quite a lot to drink, and I had had some too, not nearly enough to be drunk, but enough to be easier in honesty than usual.  I don’t know how long we sat outside the door to that room and I wish I could remember everything that was said because it was all important, every word of it.

What it boils down to — and this is going to get very explicit and very raw, so I will forgive anyone who bows out here — is that he’s terrified that I’m a virgin.  We had that conversation the first night, back in Sacramento, a million years ago.  Kendra, a friend from Shakespeare at Play, told me around this time last year, October actually, that once you get to be about my age, while there’s nothing wrong with being a virgin in and of itself, it makes it harder, because it’s too much pressure and can scare people away.  And now I’ve run up against this.  And I wish I’d lasted long enough to sleep with Tyler, I wish I’d slept with Eric, I wish I wish I wish, except I don’t really, or I don’t know.  I wish this weren’t an issue.  I wish he were less worried, except I don’t because his worry comes with how much he cares.  One of those things where I wish I’d asked if this was coming from a place of "I’m just not that into you" or a place of "I’m a little too into you."  Except I don’t, because I know the answer, and it’s the good answer, it’s the second answer, the hard answer.  Nothing about this is easy.

He sat with me and told me that he had lost his virginity at 15.  15.  That makes him, what, a freshman in high school?  And it makes me, in his eyes, 8 years behind.  Add the fact that he’s 5 years older than me…he had his first time 13 years ago.  One thing that’s wonderful about who he is and who we are together is that I totally trust him not to be lying to me, about anything, except about the things about which he is lying to himself, or the things for which he doesn’t know his own answers.  So I trust everything he says to be the truth as he knows it, no manipulation, no placation, nothing to try to make it easier.  I value that immensley, especially after Tyler.  He said my first time needs to be with someone I’m in love with, it needs to be this beautiful thing, and that he’s not that guy.  And after he’d said this a couple of times, I burst with the question I had to ask and said "what makes you sure you’re not that guy?" and he said, crux of the issue, that I deserve so much more than him.  As if there is such a thing as more than him.  Different, certainly, but not more.  He said no one deserves it more than me, no one in the world, and he likes me so much, and he can talk to me in ways he hasn’t talked to anyone in five years and it felt so right, and the nights he spent with me felt so right, except when we strayed into more dangerous sexual territory, and then it stopped feeling right.  Because there we

re boundaries, and there shouldn’t be boundaries.  I knew something was wrong when he didn’t come all the way up to the boundaries I set him last week.  I asked him, if I weren’t a virgin, what then?  And he said, then something would happen…it’s just that, just that one thing.  He says he wants to go on spending time with me, and he wants to be the guy I can talk to about the guy I do find, but that it isn’t him.  He leans back and fills up with despair, I could see it fill him up, and says, god, are you still going to talk to me?  You’re never going to talk to me again, are you.  Not a question.  And I said, David, I want to.  If we get to next week and I’m not looking at you and not talking to you, you need to look at me and talk to me and make it safe, and then I will.  And I’m just beginning to accept all this, when suddenly he leans over and kisses me.  And I think it’s a goodbye kiss, and that I can handle and understand, but he doesn’t stop.  And he says sorry, sorry, sorry I can’t do this now, and something else I can’t remember that implied that maybe with time.   And I said, wait, is it never ever ever, or maybe with time?  And he said, what does never ever even mean, I don’t know what that means.  And then we were interrupted and lost that oh-so-important thread.

You don’t understand, he says.  You’ve never had this.  You need someone in the same place as you are.  (As if I’m likely to find another 23-year-old virgin.)  Your body makes a promise, he says.  Your body makes a promise.  You don’t understand.  And of course he’s right.  I don’t understand.

What he doesn’t understand is that I’m not 15.  I may be a virgin, but I am not a child.  Have you ever had your heart broken?, he asks.  And I said yes, oh yes, and he looked at me as if he doubted, and I said, no, you don’t understand, yes I have.  And he said all right.  The conversation could have gone on, should have gone on, but we were dragged back inside at the last.  He kissed me again before going in, more goodbye I thought.  But then when we were inside, he came up to dance with me, held me close, and began to kiss me more.  And I pushed him away and said no, no, you cannot do that.  You cannot tell me we’re done and then go on kissing me.  And he said, you’re right, I’m sorry, that’s not fair, and he started to walk away.  And I grabbed his arm and said no, don’t go, I’ve changed my mind, but he said no, you’re right, and went outside.  And I went to Shar to try to begin telling her what had happened, and we talked for a few moments, not long, and she said, you have to go out on the balcony, go see him out on the balcony, and eventually I agreed, and I went outside where a bunch of the guys were standing.  And there was Sean, and Logan, and Randy’s random friend Matt, but no Dave.  And I look over railing, and there he is, dangling from the balcony.  Like, from his fingertips, scene from a movie, doesn’t-happen-in-real-life stuff.  Third floor, concrete below.  And Sean is saying, go inside Stephanie, it’ll be fine, go inside, go inside.  And I went back inside, past Colin asking what was wrong, and ran out the room barefoot down the corridor, Shar following me, and we got back to our room and I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed…  I mean, hanging off the balcony.  I don’t think I have ever seen anything so scary.  I will carry that picture of him dangling by his fingers until the day I die and I don’t know if I will ever forgive him for scaring me so badly.  After about 15 minutes we went back and Sean had pulled him up and he was fine.  But oh my God.  Oh my God.

And there was a message on my phone from him, hey, where are you, not fair, you can’t just leave.  Without saying goodbye.  After that conversation.  Not fair.  So come back.  Hung up without signing off, just "come back, fly with it," click.  And he was angry at me for running out and I was angry at him for nearly dying and it was hard and awkward.  And the guys, all drunk, decided to jump the fence into the golf course next door and commit debauchery.  And Shar asked if I wanted to go or if I wanted to just go to bed, and I said, god, I jut want to go to bed, but I can’t walk out now, I have to see the evening through or things will never be right with him.  So we went out to the golf course, and Sean and Dave and Logan (lighting designer, aged 19) and random friend Matt broke onto the golf course, and I sat with Shar and Colin and sobbed some more.  And Colin tried to reassure me, said he’d never seen him do something like that before — oh wait, not true, there was one time when he decided it would be a good idea to jump onto the subway tracks in New York right when a train was coming.  But other than that.  Am I to be calmed by this?  Only once before, a suicidal stunt like that?  I did calm down after a little while, in good time before the boys climbed back over the fence (with difficulty) and we all went back inside.  4:00 AM.  Everyone going to bed.  Colin and Shar decided to stay together (Shar’s married, Colin’s in a relationship, no scandal, just comfort and touch), leaving David with no one else in his room.  I went back over there with everyone, everyone picks up their own stuff, shuffles off to their own rooms, I’m standing outside with Dave and Matt, Matt is showing signs of wanting to stay, Dave eventually tells him point blank to go away — very, very unlike him, he’d scolded me for doing that same thing earlier in the evening — and then holds open the door for me.  "Is that an invitation?" I ask, just to make sure.  "Not for him," he says, and I go in.  Help him clean up a little.  He asks me why I’d freaked out about them breaking onto the golf course.  Not about that, I say, I don’t care about that, about you nearly killing yourself off the balcony.  That was just fun, he says, just enjoying life.  Third floor? I say.  Concrete?  Shall I turn off the lights for bed, he asks, or do you want to go back to your room and do bathroom stuff?  (Which is what I always do, he knows this by now…)  So I go back to my own room, wash my face, change into pyjamas, ask Colin if I’m completely insane, he says no.  And go back to David.

The door to his room is ajar, the lights on, music blaring.  He is sitting in his sleep clothes, bent over his guitar, playing along.  I come and sit beside him, very close, and he plays the song for me.  Goes and turns down the ipod when it finishes — too loud, he says, and he’s right — and sits back beside me, one arm behind me, the other holding his guitar, and says, I’m going to play you my third favorite song.  Getting vulnerable here, my third favorite song in the world.  Stands back up, messes with the ipod, sits back down, buries his face in my hair, whispers in my ear, this is number one.  My favorite favorite song.  Plays along with one hand, the other behind me, his lips at my ear, sings along as sofly as he can here and there.  I catch only a handful of lyrics.  Th

e song is beautiful, melancholy of course, sounds a lot like his stuff and yet not.  When the song finishes, I say thank you, he says you’re welcome.  Not thanks for what, not some joke mocking me, which I had expected, but an acknowledgment on both sides of the gift he had given me.  I asked him who it was, he wouldn’t tell me, said it would have to be a surprise for the next time he played it for me.  We lie down in the other bed, my head on his chest as always, he kisses me.  Asked me, as he did the first night, to take off my bra.  The first night I refused, the second night I kept it on for him to take off and he never went that far.  The third night, no hesitation, no question, of course I took it off for him.  I’m not going to try anything, he said.  I know, I said.  And I did know, and he didn’t do anything, and he could have but I guess it would have been wrong for him.  And when I lay back down with him, he said, good, tonight, for the first time, you are all mine.  And I said, does that mean that you are all mine as well?  And he said of course, that’s how it works.  And in a weird way he was right…somehow it was the first time I was fully comfortable.  The tension went out of my shoulders finally, and he felt it and said ah, finally.  And he kissed me on the eyes and I sang that line from the Fantasticks, "To be the kind of girl designed to be kissed upon the eyes…"  And he said, sing more, it’s so beautiful, sing to me.  So I sang him the rest of the song, and he asked if I had ever been kissed on the eyes before, and I said no, and he was so pleased.  And "More," he says, "sing more."  So I sang more, I sang Danny Boy, and Tum Balalaika, and Yerushalayim Shel Zahav of all things.  I want to fall asleep to you singing, he said.  So I sang until I could feel he was asleep, the rhythm of his breath, almost but not quite a snore.  And I lay with my head on his chest and watched the sky get light outside…

Maybe two hours later I got a text from Shar saying she was going downstairs for tea, and I realized that what I wanted, more than anything in the world, was tea.  So I left David a note saying where I had gone and thanking him for asking me to stay, and I met Shar and we went down for breakfast.  Later on in the day, she and I and Sean went back to the room to survey the damage from the party the previous night — surprisingly little damage, in fact — and when they left David asked me to stay a couple of minutes.  And I sat down with him, and he asked me if we were OK, and I said yes, we’re fine, I’m confused but we’re fine.  What are we doing?  And neither of us knew or could answer, and I said, why do we have to know what we’re doing?  Why can’t we just be, just live it, just be?  And he agreed, and we changed the subject for a bit, and when it was time for me to go, he gave a little wave, as if of dismissal, and I thought really?  You’re going to wave goodbye to me?  And then he touched his lips with one finger and leaned towards me and I kissed him, and hugged him goodbye, and said, "we’ll figure it out."  And he said yes.  And I left.

What does it mean when he says we’re done and then kisses me and holds me all night?  I don’t understand.  Except that I do, and what it means is that he cares about me too much and I care about him too much and we’re both scared and yet we can’t walk away.  Before we went to sleep, he asked me if there was anything I wanted to say to him.  And I said, I don’t want sex from you right now.  Somewhere down the line, who knows, I don’t know about someday, I only know about now, and right now sex is not what I want from you.  All I want from you is you.  And I don’t remember what he said, but it was something that meant that it had been the right thing to say.  Not too much to say, as I had feared, but right.

I told Sean about this in the car on the way home, and he said he was glad, because it took the pressure off him to tell me to stop seeing David.  Because he lives by extremes, and he’s the kind of guy who hangs off balconies at 3 in the morning, and that’s not going to change.  And Sean is right.  I know he’s right.  But I also know that I can’t walk away just now.  I can’t give this up.  Not yet.  Not yet.

And the amazing thing, the beautiful thing, the hardest thing of all…is that I do want to sleep with him.  I don’t want to wait for the next guy, or for marriage, or for some indeterminate time in the future when I’m "ready."  I had never really expected, really and truly, to actually want to sleep with anybody.  But I want that intimacy with him.  I have been touched by him and I respond in a way I never have before, a way I was afraid I actually couldn’t.  The man drinks and smokes and smokes pot, he causes trouble and breaks things and challenges everyone’s assumptions and is hard, hard to deal with.  But oh my god I may be in love with him, and I want that promise, that promise he says your body makes.  With him.  Not today, not this week, not this month, but soon.  Not indeterminately far in the future, but soon.  I want this.  For the first time in my life I want this.  Up until now, all I’ve really wanted was exactly what I have with David — kisses and cuddles and nights together, emotional intimacy and a sense that we are special in each other’s lives.  But I have this with him and I love it and it isn’t enough.  I want more.  I want all of him and I want to give him all of me.  And…he doesn’t want all of me.  Or else he does, he really does, but he’s afraid to take it.

I guess we need time.  Between "I can’t see myself ever ever ever sleeping with you" and kissing me again after all, he told me he wanted to go on hanging out with me, September 1st when he moves back to LA, he wants me to come to his apartment and watch a movie, he wants to go to the Getty with me, something we agreed weeks ago.  We’re not done.  Clearly we’re not done.  I just wish I knew what we were doing.

~Stephanie