I watch Gustav build his helicopter until daylight disappears.
“You’re a good friend to sit here with me all day watching me build something you can’t even see,” he says.
“I’m only here so we can watch Amadeus when you’re done,” I say. “I’m a selfish friend who doesn’t own the movie herself.” Mama and Pop don’t like me watching sad things.
You must understand, Amadeus is the most tragic love story. It’s a love story between the composer Wolfgang Mozart and his wife, Stanzi. It’s a love story between Mozart and his disapproving father. It’s a love story, most of all, between Mozart and his music. And it’s tragic because it’s a story of jealousy, waste, and the contempt for genius. It’s tragic because nothing has changed, really.
Gustav is mocked for building a helicopter with his own hands. I want to stick up for him. Shut up! Shut up! Can’t you see he’s a national treasure? Can’t you see his light?
They’ll understand one day as we fly overhead. They’ll be out on the athletic field enduring more drills. The administration will move the entire school outside once the weather warms. Desks, chairs, the poster of the periodic table of elements. They will vote to blow the school up as a prophylactic to bomb threats. They will vote for anything so long as they don’t have to find out why it’s happening.
Gustav finishes a twelve-hour Saturday of work and stops in the bathroom to wash the grease off his hands. The grease is never invisible. He walks to the kitchen, which is behind the sunken den where we will watch Amadeus. I follow him and keep my hands in the pockets of my lab coat.
“I’m going to make popcorn,” Gustav says. “Do you want more lemonade?”
“Sure.”
“If I give you a quarter, will you go get some?”
I walk down the empty sidewalk and when I get to the lemonade stand, the bush man is still there. The sign now reads NO ROOFIES COSTS EXTRA. There is a small bit of impossibly long blond hair poking out from under his Thuja orientalis bush.
I ask him how much for no roofies.
“A hundred dollars,” he answers.
I hand him what I have, a quarter, and I ask for a pitcher of pink lemonade with no roofies.
As he pours he says, “It’s like a lottery, sweet cheeks. Do you trust me?”
“No.”
“But you want the lemonade?”
“Well, good luck with this,” he says, handing me the pitcher.
I don’t know what to say to Gustav when I return. I want to warn him, but I don’t want to sound like an alarmist.
I say nothing.
We set up the movie and Gustav brings popcorn with butter and a little bit of salt and we eat it from the same bowl and watch as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart unfolds on the screen in front of us.
We watch as he plays for the emperor as a prodigy.
We watch as he meets Stanzi and tackles her and kisses her and I blush but Gustav can’t see it because he is too busy eating popcorn and hiding the rise in his pants because Stanzi Mozart’s breasts are fantastic in those 1700s dresses she wears.
We watch as Mozart is told his music has too many notes.
We watch as he is slowly psychologically poisoned by Antonio Salieri, a rival composer who is split in two like I am. He loves Mozart. He loves his talent. He knows Wolfgang is drenched with gift. But, oh, he hates him. He hates him for being so talented now. Why now? Why wasn’t Mozart born after Salieri had his chance to shine? Why is he secretly known as the eccentric genius while Salieri maintains mediocrity?
Jealousy is the tragedy of this movie.
And I have been jealous.
And though Lansdale Cruise keeps her secrets from me, I can see in her eyes that she will have the perfect life while I remain obscure and big-boned.
Go ahead. Name me the scientists who’ve cured diseases. Name me the scientists who discovered the medications that may be helping you right now as you read this. You can’t, can you? You can’t name the titles of their published academic papers. You can’t even tell me how they discovered what they discovered.
But I guarantee you can name me twenty talentless people who got famous for doing nothing.
That will be Lansdale Cruise.
And part of me isn’t jealous about it. And part of me hates her already for it.
Part of me wants to brush her hair. Part of me wants to chop it all off in uneven stabs.
“Don’t you like the lemonade?” Gustav asks.
“Not really,” I say.
“Do you want something else?” he asks.
Then his father walks in and turns up the dimmer switch so we are both blinded by the den’s recessed lighting.
“What are you two doing in here?” he asks. “Gustav, why aren’t you reading the flight manuals I brought you yesterday?”
“I’m taking a break,” Gustav says. “I’m seventeen. I do require breaks sometimes.”
“Don’t get snippy,” Gustav’s father says. Then he turns to me. “Hello, Stanzi,” he says. “What are you watching?”
When we tell him, he rolls his eyes and says, “I don’t know why you’re wasting your time on that rot.”
Gustav’s father doesn’t understand love.
Gustav’s father doesn’t understand biology.
Gustav’s father kills his own daffodil bulbs by mowing them too early and doesn’t care about whether they grow again next year or not. Gustav’s father likes grass. In his eyes, watching Amadeus for two and a half hours is akin to letting clover and dandelions infest the whole lawn.
When he leaves, Gustav has to get up and dim the lights again. When he sits down next to me, he’s closer. I can feel his hip. We balance the popcorn bowl in the valley made by our touching outer thighs.
The movie ends and dead Mozart is dumped into a common pauper’s grave with a dusting of lime. Gustav presses the button on the remote to turn the TV off. We sit for a minute in the dimmed room and are silent. He moves the empty popcorn bowl from between us to the coffee table. He fidgets. If I were to guess what he’s doing, I’d guess he’s getting ready to kiss me.
I get up, straighten my lab coat down my hips. I say, “I’m going on a drive tomorrow with my parents. I’ll see you at school Monday.”
Everything freezes for a too-long second.
“Have a nice time,” he says. “You’re very lucky that your parents take you on so many trips.”
I’ve never told Gustav where we go. He’s never seen my snow globes. He’s never received the postcards I never send him. He thinks we go to see elaborate gardens or state parks because that’s where I tell him we go.
“Yes. I’m very lucky,” I say.
“I’ll be stuck here reading flight manuals.”
“It’s not so bad,” I say. “Soon you’ll know how to fly. That’s really something, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
I want to ask him where we’re really going in the helicopter, but I’m tired and I think this is a good place to leave the conversation.
As I walk down the road to my house, I walk on the other side of the street from the bush man’s lair. I’m not in the mood. I don’t want to see Lansdale if she’s still there. When I pass, he pokes his head out and smiles. There is no blond hair. Just him. Naked again, I bet. I scowl at him from across the road.
As I near my house, half a block away, I hear him call out to me.
I can’t help that the world is upside down! I can’t do anything to change it!