Merry-Go-Round (Sequel to 'Carousel')

Chapter 6 - Control

"Will you practise after breakfast?" I asked between my first and second bread roll.
"Sing the coffee off my voice, you mean?" He brought the cup to his lips, drained it and chuckled. The empty hollow produced a small echo. "No, not today. Today I'm all yours."
"Oh, what did I do to deserve that?" My fork went straight through two dices of peeled mango instead of just one. I ate the first and let the piece of cutlery with the other sway from left to right between my fingers.
"What can I say? It's Christmas!" It was a joke, and he stuck out the tip of his tongue to emphasize the fact lest it be misunderstood. But I knew for him acknowledging Christmas even in a joke was already pushing it.

It didn't feel like Christmas morning at all as I looked passed Michael through the alcove window of the breakfast room. Without any decorations or even as much as a hint at Christmas, it was just an ordinary day. The sun was nowhere to be seen. I thought about how surprisingly quickly all those Christmas spirits that were so strongly cultivated in my normal life had drained from my system – an odd process that had started already on the previous day on my way from L.A. to the Neverland Ranch. As if I hadn't just been moving from A to B but had also moved through time – away from the Holiday Season to some nowhere land lost between the years.

If being intimate only shortly before coming to breakfast had left a glow in my cheeks, it had installed an amiable and relaxed confidence in Michael. And if having been a Jehovah's Witness still left him with a deeply rooted mistrust towards celebrations such as Christmas, it no longer locked him away from the events of the world, an interest in which had been forbidden to him by his church for most of his life. A doubtlessly remarkable year was drawing to a close, and he was animated when talking about the incredibility of the end of the Cold War, the Gulf War over Kuwait and the impact of the freeing of Nelson Mandela from a South African prison. At the same time he was attentive to the chef with a flowing ease, praised the bread rolls and the jam, even had the jar brought to the table to study the label and asked where it had been bought.

I watched him – the way the open collar of his shirt brushed against his neck when he turned his head; the way the fabric tightened on his upper arm giving a hint of the muscle underneath when he reached for the coffee pot to refill his cup, or how the cuff rode up his arm exposing his wiry wrist when he brought it to his mouth. How the soft cloth lay on his chest, rising and falling rhythmically with his breathing, unaffected by talk or eating. In its subdued colours the soft shirt looked warm and like an evening in front of a fireplace with a blanket and Irish Coffee. I thought of having his arm around me. It wasn't that I wanted to peel him out of the shirt – it was more the fact that I knew I could that thrilled me. Nobody else could get past those buttons. For everybody but me the world ended at his shirt front – at its soft, checked fabric.
"I like your shirt," I said.
Michael looked at me and then down at himself, and then he asked me if that was a joke. I assured him it wasn't. "I don't know," I said smiling at my plate. "It makes me want to hug you."

"So, Bill Bray's coming round today?" I asked over my cup of hot coffee, picking up on what Bray had said upon leaving the previous day.
"Oh, yes! I was going to tell you over dinner last night, but then that didn't happen."
I smiled. No, indeed, that hadn't happened. "It's not too late to tell me now."
Michael put his bread role down. "I'm sorry. Yes. Actually, I'm afraid it is kinda late. It's Christmas today..."
I watched him through the rising steam. His appearance was casual. He had run an electric shaver along his chin but he hadn't made a very good job of it.
"There's a party I have been invited to. I want to go there with you. It's at a friend's cabin up in the California mountains about 2 hours and a half from here. It's a nice place – I've been there before. I want to take you there. I don't want you to miss out on Christmas because of me."

It came out flat. Not, 'would you like to go', but 'I want to go there with you'. Maybe his shirt did look like a cabin. I put the cup down. "I knew you weren't celebrating Christmas before I decided to come."
"No, I don't."
"And I'm not a child anymore. I'm not waiting for Christmas all year long, and now that I'm here with you I'm bilked of it. I came to visit you. I don't want you to feel like you have to change your life because of me. I'm okay with not celebrating Christmas."
Michael's expression was calm and serious. "I was raised not to ever celebrate. Can you imagine living your life never celebrating Christmas again? Because that's what it's like to be with me."
It caught me unprepared. I hadn't thought about it that way. "'Never again' is a very long time frame, Michael..."
He looked at me, unmoving, waiting.
"I mean, you did sing a Christmas song, once." The only Jehovah's Witness I had ever met was a girl who kept one arm-length safety distance from Christmas wrapping paper. In that light, singing a Christmas song was certainly something.
"I was a child, then," he said in a tone that was almost warm. "Nobody asked me if I wanted to sing it. Maybe Motown asked Joe, but I'm not even sure of that. I was just given the song to sing and that was it."
"Did you mind singing it?"
He nodded. "Yes. Yes, I did. That's what I was taught. But it wasn't for me to decide. It wasn't something I chose to do. I had to do it, so I did. It was business."
Whenever it came to his career, I was oddly lost for words. I was too aware of how little I knew about it.