Incongruity

Part 12 of 12: Fade to Black

Summary: PostRENT. When Mark’s film goes wrong with Maureen along for the ride, Roger and Mark face each other’s worst fears. Joanne and Benny are torn between families; Mimi’s a jump ahead of her addiction; and Collins is a jump ahead of the law.

Disclaimer: Rent and its characters and situations were created by the late, lamented Jonathan Larson. I’m just playing, not making a profit.

Thank you: Abby, zorabet, and I Dream of Peace for reviewing last chapter even though it had no Mark/Roger gooiness!

Despite the perfectly reasonable fear of being violently attacked, Collins liked the streets of the city in the early hours of the morning. He walked quickly, nonetheless; the others were going to worry if they found him gone. Their concern was what made this week bearable. They gave him the sweet to go with the bitter.

Nonetheless, all he wanted right now was to be alone. He wanted to decide how he felt before throwing himself back into the pit of melodrama his closest friends liked to create. He knew he would have little time to himself once the day started. They had planned in small doses, through quiet mutterings, both a morning trip to Angel’s final resting place and an afternoon Halloween party that might well last twelve to fourteen hours. Mimi had insisted, quite rightly, that Halloween had been Angel’s favorite holiday. That last thing that Angel would have wanted was for her friends to stop celebrating it because they were busy choking on their grief.

In keeping with Angel’s generous spirit, then, they had invited everyone they knew and encouraged those people to invite everyone they knew. All of the neighbors had been duly notified, and interesting people they met on the street or in the store were summoned as well.

It was a perfect combination of ludicrousness and tribute:

Private visit to the grave of Angel Dumott Schunard, 11:00. Party at Mimi’s apartment to follow.

A year.

A year.

A year.

Angel had been gone for a year now. Collins had only known him for ten months, and now he had been gone for a year. Angel’s memory wasn’t fading yet—the fact that it someday might petrified him—and the passing of the months seemed surreal. It had been fitting that Angel had died just as a cold, dark winter had set in. Somehow, the irrational part of his mind believed that when the spring thaw came, so would a release from pain. Someone would tell him that it had all been a mistake and Angel was just fine, dancing around the room in a dress made from curtains (because Scarlett O’Hara had nothing on Angel). Or he would suddenly realize that since Angel would always be with him in spirit, he needn’t feel the knife in his gut on a daily basis because he wanted to tell Angel something and would not be able to.

Spring, summer, autumn again. He still missed Angel, it still hurt, and that was that.

The whole year had been taken one day at a time. There were days when he wanted to hide in a bottle, and so he did. There were days when he wanted to do nothing, and so he did. There were days spent fussing over sick friends with Angel’s memory not-quite in the room. There were days when he was so busy getting arrested or doing something to get himself arrested that he hardly noticed the pain.

The pain wasn’t ever going to stop. He was going to work around it and manage it; he had to. There were revolutions to plan and young minds to corrupt. There were arguments with Joanne about whether a society could ever govern itself by its own laws. There were hours spent talking with Maureen about the history of the social injustice she was protesting. There were moments when Benny smiled and it was all he could do not to knock the boy on his head and tell him to come back to himself. There was the sight of Mimi dashing into a room in a suggestive costume that she, like Angel, could turn into a work of art. There were nights with Mark, Roger, a joint, and what always seemed like very important questions.

There was always a reason to stay one more day without Angel.

But the pain wasn’t ever going to stop.

In graduate school, he had memorized dozens of different philosophers’ views on grief. None of them seemed relevant. Grief existed and there was no way to change that. The most he could hope for was that time would make the instants that he thought he saw Angel out of the corner of his eye fewer and fewer.

That was one of the reasons he wanted to walk when the street was empty. There was no one to have footsteps that sounded like Angel’s, or a smell that reminded him of something Angel wore, or to carry a white pickle tub.

Even without that, he had to question whether Angel had ever looked at a waxing moon quite like this one; and whether Angel had hopped over these cracks in the sidewalk as a child; and whether Angel would have liked the scarecrow someone had hung on a door.

Celebrating his solitude naturally brought about its end. Almost before he could perceive something speeding toward him, he was grabbed around the legs. He steeled himself for a mugging. It would only be fitting, considering that a mugging had brought him to Angel to in the first place. Almost two years ago. This Christmas Eve, I won’t be able to say “this time last year, I was meeting Angel.” This Valentine’s Day, I won’t be able to say “this time last year, we got that suite at the Ritz.”

His assailant clung so weakly that he was about to break the cardinal rule and fight back when he heard his own name. “Collins!” The voice was the high-pitched voice of a child, and a child he knew.

“Asia!” he managed. She was one of the students he had worked with daily during summer school. He still saw her once a week, although that would end, along with his punishment, at Thanksgiving.

It occurred to Collins that Asia was seven years old, the street was dangerous, and dawn hadn’t yet broken. He knelt down to look at her. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“We’re going to visit my cousin! We’re going to go trick-or-treating, but we had to get up early. My cousin lives far away.”

“What are you going to dress up as?” For some reason, he genuinely wanted to know, and this question slipped out of his mouth ahead of the far more reasonable where the hell are your parents?

“I want to wear my brother’s baseball uniform!”

“Doesn’t your brother want to wear it?”

“He can be a ghost.” Asia had it all figured out.

“Where is your mother?” he asked. Finally.

Asia pointed at a small cluster of children, presumably siblings, huddled in a doorway. As he watched, a grown woman stood up from among them. “ASIA!”

“MAMA!” she shouted back obediently. “I FOUND—”

Her mother fairly flew to the street and jerked Asia away from Collins hard enough to make her cry out. “I told you not to talk to strangers!”

“I know Collins,” retorted Asia. “He works on math with me.”

“Yes,” Collins agreed. He tried to make himself look harmless, but that was no mean feat for a tall black man wearing ragged clothing and wandering the streets in the night. “I, uh, volunteer at her school.” Pointing out that the volunteering was in lieu of prison time would probably earn him that beating he’d been concerned about earlier. “But Asia hasn’t missed an addition problem in weeks, so we play Memory.”

The woman softened slightly. “She’s mentioned you. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I always enjoy working with Asia.”

It wasn’t a lie. He had gone to her school unwillingly, but he liked the kid. And in the second where he first became aware of that, it didn’t occur to him to think about how Angel would have liked her, too.

Asia’s mother thanked him again and pulled her daughter away. Asia was a busy girl with promises to keep. Collins had promises to keep, as well.

He quickened his steps. There were still hours before dawn, but he didn’t want to be alone anymore. He wanted to be with the best the world had to offer, and they just happened to be in a frigid loft above what had once been a music publishing factory.

When the building came into view, he found that he was not the only early-morning arrival. Maureen was flinging herself at the front door like a thing possessed. Her shoulder bag had caught on a chunk of railing that jutted out from the dirty wall, and her body continued to jerk without even attempting to disentangle itself. She shrieked, obviously from frustration rather than fear.

The chuckle was wet in his throat, but good all the same. “I like a woman on a mission. What’s the rush?”

X

Maureen gulped. What she’d really been planning to do was give Mark a well-deserved tongue-lashing, and not the kind he enjoyed. Under the circumstances, though, she couldn’t very well tell that to Collins. She had a reputation as a ditz, a hick; but even she knew what the priorities were today.

She tried to think while Collins untangled her bag and put it back on her shoulder. She was unsuccessful.

“What’s the hurry?” he repeated.

“I, um, I’m cold,” she decided. Maybe I’ll thaw out all over Mark’s camera. Then he’ll know what it’s like to lose something he cares about because someone else wasn’t careful.

For a man who was grieving the love of his life, Collins seemed to find Maureen’s (alleged) physical distress amusing. He leaned against the wall with his arms folded across his chest. “And you decided to get up at, oh, 5:30 in the morning and come across town to a building with no heat to get warm?” he asked with polite curiosity.

Maureen slapped the door with her open hand, not knowing whether her irritation was real or imagined. “Just open the door, will you?” she demanded, remembering too late that she had decided not to yell at, about, or near Collins today. She and Joanne had had a screaming match at Angel’s funeral. If Angel was watching, she would have liked for him to think she had learned something in the last year.

Collins opened the door without further comment and gestured that Maureen should precede him inside and up the stairs. She opened the sliding door to the loft without knocking and tossed herself into a chair.

She bided her time as Mark, Roger, and Mimi awoke, quiet and subdued. She doubted that any of them had slept much that night. She and Joanne hadn’t, not just because they’d been talking, but because it was Halloween.

When Collins went to take a shower, she seized her opportunity. “All right, Asshole,” she addressed Mark. “What made you think it was okay to tell Joanne I thought I was pregnant?”

Mark blinked. “I never told Joanne anything. The longest conversation I’ve had with Joanne since we got back was the day we got back, in the airport.”

“Maybe, but you and Asshole Two over there,” she jerked her head at Roger, who looked up bleakly from a notebook “had an in-depth conversation about me where Joanne could hear it! I’ve been wondering how she figured it out. I thought she guessed, or she saw a test, or saw me go into the doctor’s office or something. But guess what she told me last night? She told me that she came over here to talk to Mimi and heard you telling that one that I wasn’t pregnant! Why were you even telling Roger?”

“It’s Halloween,” said Mark quietly.

“I know that. That’s why I waited until Collins couldn’t hear to tell you what a LOSER YOU ARE!”

Mark set down the book he’d been pretending to read with a supremely annoying gesture of long-suffering. “Fine, if we’re going to do this, let’s do this. I never said anything to Joanne. If Joanne found out the wrong way, it’s your fault for not telling her when it happened.”

“Maybe, but that didn’t make her your girlfriend to tell.”

“I didn’t!”

“You and Roger probably staged it so that she’d overhear, and she’d leave me and you could have me back! I mean, how many dates have you even had since I left you?”

Roger dropped his notebook on the floor and took Maureen by the arm. “Look, we talked about it twice. Once when he said you might be and once when he said you weren’t. The second time, we were in our loft with the door shut and in my room with the door shut. We didn’t even think Mimi was home, let alone that Joanne was listening at the door—”

Maureen wrenched away from Roger. He was making sense, for once, and she wasn’t done yelling yet. Mark had screwed up. She deserved a little yelling. “Let go of me and let the scumbag speak for himself,” she told Roger.

Mark pointed at the fire escape. “Let’s go outside.”

Haughtily, Maureen stomped through the window and down half a flight of creaking metal stairs. Mark followed, looking less like a puppy than she would have preferred. She gave him an extra glare. It had little effect.

“I’m sorry, Maureen,” he said when the window was closed behind them.

“Well, that helps.” Drips of sarcasm spattered on the crumbling sidewalk below.

“I told Roger because I was freaked out. You sprang it on me—I’m not saying you shouldn’t have—and it wasn’t like I could talk to you.”

“Since when do you need to talk to anyone besides your camera?”

“Did you want this recorded for posterity?”

“Right. You probably would have shown it to Joanne when you had one of your little bitch sessions about how awful I am.”

“I told you, the last real conversation I had with Joanne was probably last March.”

Some of Maureen’s anger was ebbing in the face of Mark’s refusal to shout back or be cowed. “Did she happen to mention what it would take to make her take me back after something like this?”

“Not specifically, but my guess is a little more time.”

“How much more? How much do we have?” Maureen looked at the street below and remembered Angel twirling herself across it.

“It’ll be soon. You said you were talking last night. And she hasn’t thrown you out.”

“She’s been threatening every day. ‘Good morning, Maureen. You look sexy. I’ll probably throw you out when I get home from work.’”

“If she’s calling you sexy—”

“Everybody calls me sexy. Even the people who don’t say it out loud are thinking it, so I just fill in the blanks.”

“Right.”

“And even as sexy as I am, she hasn’t taken me back yet. Should I get ‘property of Joanne Jefferson’ tattooed on my forehead? Should I follow her around all day, bowing and scraping and never talking except to say how wonderful she is?”

“That sounds good to me,” Joanne’s voice interrupted. Maureen turned to stare. They were going to a funeral—well, the anniversary of a funeral—but it was still worth noticing that Joanne looked great. “Give us some space, will you, Mark?” asked Joanne, not unkindly.

Mark smiled softly and vanished back into the loft.

“You’re early,” Maureen observed when she and Joanne were alone.

“I was driving myself crazy waiting for whatever time we said. And I was lonely without you,” Joanne admitted honestly.

“I’ve been lonely without you for months.”

Joanne had had a whole speech planned for this reconciliation. She had planned to tell Maureen how terrified she had been all summer, and how she had been afraid that she loved Maureen so much that she was losing herself, and how she understood what had happened and Maureen was still all she wanted.

The speech died in her throat, and she held her arms open. Maureen climbed up two steps into them.

“I’m sorry,” they said in unison.

“Is this over now?” Maureen asked.

Joanne decided to simplify her abandoned speech as much as possible. “Yes. You were right. I over-reacted.”

Maureen swung her upper body over the fire escape railing, shaking her head back and forth.

“What?” Joanne wanted to know

“In, like, the last ten minutes, you and Mark have both apologized and admitted I was right.”

Joanne prickled unwillingly. There was no practical way of getting around forgiving Mark, but that didn’t mean she wanted his name arising in her reunion. “Can we leave Mark out of this?”

“When has he ever been out of it? For the first two months of our relationship, I was cheating on him. You flipped out, didn’t want him around me even though he’s the only one who can really run my performance equipment, and then from the minute you actually met him, you and he formed this recovering-Maureen-aholics club to talk about how awful I am.”

“That’s not what we talk about.” Joanne sighed. Well, not the only thing. It’s been a while, anyway. And obviously we aren’t going to do it again.

“What else could the two of you possibly talk about?”

“What do you talk to Collins about?”

“Lots of stuff.” Maureen shook her head again. “But Collins isn’t your first love. Do you get how weird it is to have the only two people who ever made you feel… who ever made it worth the risk bonding over how difficult you are? And then when I thought I was pregnant, you threw me out and he went whining to Roger.”

“I didn’t throw you out.”

“You threatened.”

“After I found out you weren’t—I said I was sorry.”

“I know.”

Alison’s words of the month before slipped back into Joanne’s mind. You know why she did it, so you know it won’t happen again, so you don’t have to worry. “Do you want to know why?”

“Why what?”

“Why I was so hard on you?”

A slight, un-Maureen-like hesitation. “Okay.”

“When you were gone, I realized how much I changed since I met you.” She pointed up at the apartment. “I care about everyone in there. But they’re . . . different from everything I grew up with, and everything I was. So I jumped to the conclusion that I was losing you and losing me, and I needed to figure out that I hadn’t lost me. I told myself that I had to stay away from you a little longer to make a point, and make you make a decision between me and everyone else you might hypothetically like to sleep with—”

“I made that choice.”

“I know.”

Maureen closed the short distance between them and sealed it with a kiss. “I wouldn’t let you get lost, Pookie. I wouldn’t want you to.” The next kiss was more passionate. Joanne felt Maureen smile against her mouth. “You know, I’ve had to change, too! There are so many things I want to do that I don’t because of you.” The vulnerability seemed to be gone, and Joanne guessed that Maureen wasn’t serious.

“Is this about getting your nipples pierced again?”

“Yes,” said Maureen innocently.

At once, they burst into laughter.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.” Hand in hand, they turned back toward the loft’s window.

Mimi, who must have been watching for them, helped them push up the window and climb inside. “Are you ready to go?”

X

The six of them ended up leaving for Angel’s grave earlier than they had planned. None of them could concentrate on anything else. Bizarrely, Mimi felt an overwhelming sense of relief as they reached the place she had dreaded.

The headstone looked just as it always had. Angel’s name was there, and the birth and death dates barely more than two decades apart.

They stood and stared. Someone nudged Mimi and told her to go first, that she had known Angel the longest. Obediently, she knelt before the headstone and lay a gaudy necklace before it. She had bought it from a machine outside the grocery store for fifty cents, but Angel knew that price was no measure of love. The necklace was bright and colorful, and Mimi wanted Angel to have it.

Am I supposed to say something? she wondered. Out loud? Or to Angel? She wasn’t used to analyzing these things; usually, she did whatever she felt. “I’m clean for good,” she whispered at last. “And I really did go back to school. I know you weren’t here to see it, but I could never have done it without you.”

She stroked the cold headstone and wished she were stroking Angel’s warm hand. Cemeteries were solemn, cold, and colorless; her angel had been none of these. “I thought I’d be with you by now. I’m glad I didn’t know I’d live a whole year without you when we put you here. I couldn’t have handled it. But some of the days, weeks even, have been really good. So you don’t have to worry, and not about Collins, either. We’ll take care of each other, all of us.”

She stood and backed away as if from a shrine. Roger’s hands came to her waist. He leaned around her to drop a flower on the grave and moved aside with her.

“Okay?” he breathed in her ear.

She swallowed. “Yeah. You?”

“Yeah. I heard what you said.”

“And?”

“I wish I’d been here for you more. You’ve spent most of this year looking out for me.”

“Yeah, I didn’t leave you after I got you so sick you almost died. I’m a real saint.”

Faster than she would have thought possible, he turned her to face him. “That wasn’t your fault. You were barely even conscious, and not even the doctors knew what you had.”

“If I hadn’t run off and gotten sick, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“If I hadn’t run off—”

“I still would have done something stupid. I wasn’t like you. You just quit smack cold turkey one day. I couldn’t.”

“I didn’t help you enough.”

Mimi shook her head vigorously. “It couldn’t be about you. It had to be about me. That’s the bitch of the whole thing. You have to quit for yourself. It doesn’t matter if there’s someone else you love more. You still have to quit for you.”

“Yeah, I know. But I couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t known Mark would catch me during the fall. For months, I saw the inside of that loft and I saw him. That was it. He turned into everything for me until you and your candle showed up. I wanted to do that for you.”

“I’m not like you,” Mimi repeated. “But you’re what I want and what I need.”

He kissed the top of her head, which was as much as was appropriate while standing with a group of mourners beside a year-old grave. “You’re my song.”

Her eyes sparkled with a strange mixture of mischief and tears. “Even if you write better when you get Mark in your bed,” she teased. A year or two before, her jealousy might have been real. Constant exposure to death did wonders for your ability to determine what was and was not important.

“Well . . . you’re my melody. Mark’s my baseline.”

Mimi twisted to look at him. “Oh?”

“The melody is beautiful and memorable and the first thing you think of when you think of a song. You don’t have anything without it. The baseline is more subtle, but if it goes away everything gets screwed up and nothing feels complete.”

She nodded, and watched Maureen balance a miniature pumpkin atop the stone. He led her toward the others, silently clapping a hand on Collins’ shoulder as they left the graveyard.

X

When they arrived at the corner of 11th Street and Avenue B, voices got louder and talk shifted to the party. Mimi’s apartment had been decorated the day before, but most of the food and music was upstairs. Mark and Roger’s strides automatically matched each other as they methodically transported cases of beer from one apartment to the other. Mark shoved Roger sharply on the shoulder. “Benny might come and he might bring Alison. If he does, do not call her ‘Muffy’ to her face.”

“But what else would I call Muffy?” Roger protested. “That’s her name.”

“Alison,” Mark repeated. Roger couldn’t keep the smile from his face. It was common knowledge that at one point in his life, Roger could not have survived without Mark’s grown-up tendencies. Now, though, the attempt to make Roger behave himself was just amusing.

“Shouldn’t you be worrying about actually having a date and not about what I call Muffy?”

Mark prickled. He hadn’t ever had a long dry spell until after Maureen, and that had been prompted more by his fear of losing everyone he cared about than anything else. Still, Roger’s vote of no-confidence was hardly needed. “I’ve had dates before.”

“And if they’d gone well, you wouldn’t be going on one today. I, on the other hand—”

“Please. Drunken groupies throwing themselves at you followed by Mimi throwing herself at you doesn’t count as dating.”

“Are you actually going to wear that?”

“MIMI!” Mark shouted as he slammed inside and dumped his burden on a table. “Roger’s being mean to me!”

“Roger, be nice to your baseline!” Mimi shouted back.

“His what?”

Mimi bounced into view. “Roger says that I’m his melody and you’re his baseline,” she told Mark. “The whole song falls apart without a baseline.”

Mark cringed, not moved, except to nausea, by the metaphor. Roger chose to spend his time writing songs that were, in fact, love poems rather than working a job that would have provided heat and food on a more regular basis. This latest comment was not a surprise. Still, his baseline? Revolting, except for how it was actually kind of touching. “I think I’m gonna throw up.”

“Have a beer,” Mimi proposed. Mark followed her suggestion, having long believed that beer was a cure for most things.

“You had to repeat that?” Roger asked.

“You shouldn’t have been teasing him about Mari—whatever her name is.”

“Mariko,” Mark informed around his drink. “Do you think we should leave the rest of the beer up there until the party gets rolling? We don’t really have the budget to buy more, and we’ve been inviting people off the street. We don’t know how big the party’s going to get or what kind of people will be here.”

“Okay, but remember to bring it down later.” Mimi flashed a grin that made her look about fourteen years old. “I’m not going to dishonor Angel’s memory by throwing a bad party on her favorite holiday.”

X

Benny really wasn’t sure that this was a good idea. Every time he came into Alphabet City, he remembered less and less how he had managed to live there. Alison could never have handled living there at all. This world was far more painful for her in the best of times than her world was for him at the worst of times.

He could hear the party from the street. The music threatened to shake the rickety foundations of the building, and the shouts of what looked to be at least a hundred guests carried over it all the same.

He was glad to see Mark standing near the entrance to the building next to a pretty woman Benny hadn’t seen before. Mark would be a less imposing first hurdle than most of the rest of the party’s hosts. He didn’t want Alison to have to talk to Mimi at all; Roger and Maureen were notoriously short on tact; and Collins did not deserve to be put in the position of playing referee tonight. Poor Collins.

When they reached Mark, he greeted them and introduced the woman as Mariko.

“Is Collins doing all right?” Benny asked when the small talk was over and they were all moving closer to the heart of the party.

“I don’t think he slept at all last night. He was out walking around. Maybe he managed to wear himself out enough to get his mind off of everything.”

“It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since the funeral.” It was even harder to believe that he was taking Alison to a party like this. Hell, it was hard to believe that he was at a party like this at all; country club networking evenings were more his speed lately. Even the party “Professor Collins” had thrown for him and Mark so long ago had been wilder than any get-together he had attended in the past three years.

That was an interesting way to mark time: in Collins-sponsored parties attended in company with a man he only knew because freshman room assignments at Brown University had largely depended on last names and alphabetical order.

“Wait a second,” Alison was saying. “You’re celebrating the anniversary of a funeral?” Benny had meant to mention that. He must have forgotten while cautioning himself not to tell Alison that Angel had killed her dog.

“We’re celebrating his life,” Mark corrected. “We’re celebrating because it’s been a great year.”

“It’s been a great year?” Benny couldn’t help but repeat. “Roger and Mimi were in and out of the hospital, Collins almost ended up in prison, and I assume you haven’t forgotten that you got kidnapped and ransomed?”

Mark cocked his head with amusement. “Maureen got ransomed. I’m not sure if I was in the deal or not.”

Benny spread his hands as far apart as he could without hitting anyone. “Here is the point. Here is you.”

“It was a great year because there were no funerals,” he said in a matter-of-fact way that didn’t leave Benny feeling like scum.

“I guess that’s a good way to measure.” It made more sense than measuring in parties, he supposed.

Mark shrugged. “Angel said he measured in love. But I don’t know how much love you can have if everyone dies.”

“That’s morbid,” said Alison, and Benny steeled himself to defend his wife from Mark’s sometimes-sharp tongue.

“True,” Mark agreed with a small laugh. His eyes drifted across the room. “Enjoy the party. I really don’t want Roger to break that,” he added, and disappeared in pursuit of his roommate, who had somehow taken possession of Mark’s camera. Mariko followed.

“We don’t have to stay long,” Benny assured Alison, who was looking at the whole room as if it might give her a horrible disease. “We don’t have to stay at all, we said ‘hi’ to Mark.”

“I want to stay,” she said shakily.

He knew it wasn’t true, but he appreciated the thought. It struck him that perhaps, possibly, he wouldn’t have to trade his friends’ affection for Alison’s on a permanent basis. It might be that in the year after an awful death. life had reshaped itself so that he was part of this family again and part of Alison’s, too. That idea felt nice.

Maybe Angel had been on to something.

The End

Yeah, that’s it! Thank you again for playing with me these past few months. I only had two real goals for this fic: to finish it, and to use all seven surviving main characters. I think I did okay with both… if there is a next time, I’ll set my standards higher!

Edited on 8/1/06 to correct spelling errors (although I'm sure some remain). No changes to content.

I hope you got some enjoyment out of reading.

I also hope you will review. Please?