Work Text:
Give your heart and soul to me
And life will always be…
Their faucet dripped, the paint in the bathroom was peeling. Withering flowers sat in a dusty vase. The curve of Jack’s profile fit perfectly in the crook of Davey’s neck. Some things were simply meant to be.
“Dance with me,” Jack offers his hand. Davey almost bats the hand away in playful annoyance, “This article isn’t going to write itself!” , but he closes his eyes instead. Feels the warmth of Jack’s palm seep into his skin. Suddenly, he’s flying.
There’s a slight melody playing in the distance, blown in through their open window with the clean, bright muslin curtains dancing in the breeze. There is always some sort of music playing- it’s Paris and the world has stopped fighting long enough to listen to its song. Davey and Jack were young boys long ago, and now they are blessed to be alive. Visions of army fatigues and a physician’s coat blooming with scarlet still tiptoed through their dreams, haunted their quiet moments and tore through their loud ones. A bullet was still lost somewhere in Jack’s left leg. Davey still secretly poured over medical journals that promised to fix him.
Right now, however, they felt young again. An old spirit possessed them, one that sounded of a brazened young woman looking her father straight in the eye, a hundred wizened children buzzing for attention, the leather footsteps of boots on cobblestone. They didn’t talk about their youth anymore- too painful, too much of it stolen by men who would never know that death has a lingering, burning stench. The acrid taste woke Jack up in the middle of the night, and Davey would spoon-feed him honey like a child. Jack had cried the first time, Jack never had a mother to gently kiss his forehead in search of fever, Jack had Davey and a handful of memories that couldn’t be explained in simpler terms.
Davey had grown up with a mother and a father, a sister and a brother, but he only said their names in prayer. Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha'olam. Protect my sister, bless my brother, love my parents. He wished, sometimes, that he had followed Les into the battlefield with his scalpel and sutures. His brother had died on a rainy April day from a disease Davey knew how to prevent. They told him after a particularly difficult amputation, one that required a steady hand and sound mind, and Davey’s first thought was back to when Les was a mere three years old. He had been so small that Davey and Sarah watched, enraptured by everything he did, toddling down the street, gripping at toys with his pudgy fists, putting just about anything he could in his mouth. They swore to protect him.
Jack was drafted seven days after Les had enlisted, Sarah ran far from her problems, and Esther collapsed with grief. Davey and Mayer buried the letter that had arrived at the Jacobs’ doorstep in their mother’s flower garden, and with the spring came a bought of daisies that bloomed right over the words We’re sorry to inform you…
Jack came home. Others did not.
Jack buried seven of the long-gone newsboys, he buried them alone with what little money he had, and Davey didn’t even bother offering his help. He had lasted fourteen months before he aged out of selling newspapers and their enticing headlines; Jack was raised in the dark alleys and echoing hallways of a lodging house. Each boy’s grave was marked with a stone spattered in paint and a nickname. Jack didn’t even know Racetrack’s real name, he would admit years later, wrapped in the dark quilt of night. All those years spent together. It hadn’t felt important at the time.
They sold what little they had and bought a bungalow in Paris, where the sun rose golden and the streets were paved in a different shade of gray. Davey wrote letter after letter in search of his twin sister, older than him by four-seven seconds, and prayed that she would appear on their doorstep. Jack had once asked if maybe, possibly, she was… Before he could finish the wheedling question, Davey stopped him. I would know, he had said. I knew her in birth, and I’ll know her in death. She’s out there.
Still, they were happy. Jack painted the eiffel tower at night, decorated with the electric lights that illuminated the roses people threw at its iron feet. He sold his works to wealthier couples, ones that oohed and ahhed over the homegrown talent only a natural genius could bear. Davey learned to bake bread and drink tea instead of coffee, he scoured the shops for antique teacups and old, frail copies of books no one had ever read. They spent the days in a compatible routine, and at night they drank French wines and let themselves dream of a different life- maybe not a happier one, but different all the same.
“Les would still live with my parents,” Davey would laugh. “That boy would take a wife and still crave Mamma’s latkes. And I’d be some perfectly fine surgeon who lost patients all the same, with a simple little wife to make me a brandy when I arrived home.” He would hold Jack’s hand a little tighter, possibly with relief, never with regret.
“Kathy woulda said yes when we were eighteen,” they would both grimace at the memory. “We’d have some fancy mansion and I’d be her adoring, deadbeat husban’ who met with ‘is best friend more n’ he should. Probably kids.” Jack’s eyes would cloud over for a moment, lost in a future he couldn’t have. “Def’nitely kids.”
Davey’s hand travels across the great expanse of Jack’s broad, flat back. The two men sway gently to the trumpet, roaring on in the distance. They were older now, older than they ever meant to be, and the days felt like sand slipping through a timepiece. Davey would always murmur, “There’s so much I haven’t done.”
Jack would always placate him. “But look at what we have .”
Give your heart and soul to me,
And life will always be,
La vie en rose.