For All of Her Life (19 page)

For all of their lives, there had been something there. They’d met so young. He’d known he wanted her with him from the very first time he had seen her. To touch, kiss, protect, talk with, walk with...

It was all insane. Perhaps he should have let the dead remain buried. Let them all go on with their lives.

Or maybe he should just walk over to the main house, wrench her out of bed, and flatten Muscleman. Once, he would have reacted on instinct. He hadn’t always controlled his temper, and he had physically plucked up his wife and taken her away upon occasion. They’d fought, they’d made love, they’d made up. But she wasn’t his wife anymore, and she might be sleeping with Muscleman, who, though he obviously did have some kind of a relationship with Kathy, seemed to be a decent enough person.

He forced himself to lie down. Stared at the ceiling. Cast an arm over his eyes, creating a greater darkness. He still couldn’t sleep, or even cause the restlessness in him to abate. By Sunday, the others would be coming in. His dad, Sally. Shelley, Miles, Derrick, and Judy. Mr. and Mrs. Larry Haley—Jordan hadn’t met the most recent Mrs. Haley as of yet. By Monday they’d start with some intense jam sessions, see if they could bring the old magic back—just for a night. He had a strange faith that it would happen. No matter what else was going on.

And even if Keith wasn’t with them.

He’d known Keith almost as long as he’d known Kathy. They’d met in their first year of high school. He could always remember the day he’d met Keith because when he’d seen him, Keith had been playing the drums. Jordan had come back into the band room for his guitar, and Keith had been there. He was playing a set of beat-up school drums, but in all of his life, Jordan had never heard anyone play with such an ease and natural feel for percussion. Keith didn’t see him, and for once in his life, Jordan had been barely aware of Kathy at his side, her hand in his. He stood, watching Keith. Watching him move, watching his body, his hands, listening to the passion and perfection of rhythm. When Keith finally stopped, he looked at them, but his eyes were soon riveted on Kathy. She smiled. “You’re good.”

“You’re great,” Jordan corrected, walking to him, a hand outstretched. “I’m Jordan—”

“Treveryan, everyone knows you.” Keith looked at him suspiciously for a minute. He’d been a good-looking kid with handsome, aesthetic features, gray eyes, dark hair. He was slim, and shy in those days.

“You’re the football player, right?”

Jordan shook his head. “I’m not playing.”

Keith frowned. “Why? I heard they wanted you—a sophomore—on varsity.”

“It takes too much time to play football. I study music. My dad’s a musician. He says if you love it, you give it your time.”

“Yeah?” Keith regarded him, both suspicious and impressed. Then he took the outstretched hand. “I’m Keith Duncan. And my dad wishes he could make me play football. He hates my drumming.”

“You can drum at my house,” Jordan told him.

“And mine. I’m Kathy—”

“Connoly. I know,” Keith said. He flushed, watching her, and shrugged. “Everyone knows you. They say you’re the prettiest and the nicest girl in the class. You’re quite a couple, aren’t you?”

“Well, we went through junior high and grade school together,” Kathy said, glancing Jordan’s way. “We’ve just been together... forever.” She’d already had those smiles back then. Great smiles. The kind that said a hundred different things, and could be so damned special, so damned intimate. “But I’m not a great musician, and you are—”

“I’m a kid banging on drums,” Keith said humbly.

“You’re a kid doing a great job banging on drums,” Jordan said. “We’ve got to see what we can do together.”

“Yeah, we should.”

They did.

They became the best of friends, all three of them. Hanging around together. Working together, jamming together. By their junior year, they began to get gigs doing parties. In their senior year, there were more parties. Keith wanted to move forward. He’d had some offers from a few of the places where they went, and he’d heard some of the solid groups beginning to take flight, like the Image and the Place. They imitated John Lennon, wearing granny glasses, guru jackets, and bell bottoms.

Keith met all manner of roadies around the groups. He wanted out of school; he was convinced they could pick up a few more players and go out on the road professionally. They probably could have. Jordan was insistent that they work harder on their own music first. “And we go to college.”

“Where?”

“Juilliard.”

“I’ll never get in.”

“You will.”

“I don’t need to.”

“I do. I don’t want to play for a few years and become a has-been. I want to play and write and create and do it forever. I want to know everything I can about music, old music, new music, classic music.”

“He’s right, you know,” Kathy said.

Keith took a look at Kathy. “Is that what you think?”

She nodded. “Keith, take a look at some of the groups who are really good. Not just popular.
Good.
There’s Queen. All trained musicians. Then there’s Yes—”

“Then there’s the Beatles, who played in pubs in Liverpool and Germany. They seemed to do all right.”

“Keith, we’re talking about our lives,” Kathy told him seriously. “The rest of our lives. Doing what we love best for a living. Forever. We need to give it everything. Besides which, you guys have to stay in school.” The week before, one of her cousins had been killed in Vietnam. Sally had gone to stay with her sister and the entire family remained in grief and shock. “You have to stay in school—or go to war.”

Keith had kissed her hand then. Jordan could relive that image awake or sleep, in or out of his dreams, forever. The way Keith looked at Kathy... the way the argument was over.

“My folks aren’t going to help me any, you know. They think we all belong in Vietnam. If I died a hero, it would be better than having a rock ’n’ roll drummer for a son.”

“We’ll get by without your folks. You’re good enough for a scholarship, and we’ll get enough gigs. First of all, we’ve got to get in.”

They did get in. Keith was accepted by Juilliard before either Jordan or Kathy. His audition piece was so filled with passion, emotion, and control that there was no question of his talent.

Kathy, afraid that she hadn’t the talent or the strength to gain entry, managed to get in too. She did an a cappella rendition of a song she had written herself. It would, eventually, become Blue Heron’s first hit—their first in the top ten of the music charts.

In the end, the three of them were accepted. Soon after they started college, they met up with Derrick Flanaghan, and his soon-to-be wife, Judy. The five of them started playing their way through school, and the summer after their twenty-first birthdays, Jordan and Kathy were married. Shelley Thompson, whom they had found soon after Derrick, had joined them. She was Kathy’s maid of honor, while Keith was best man. Kathy’s father had given her away; she’d looked elegant in a medieval-style white gown with delicate flowers and satin ribbons threaded within the bodice, sleeves, and hem. Friends from voice classes sang the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun,” while other friends created what surely had to be one of the most fantastic musical ensembles for a wedding ever. The organist was joined by flutists, guitarists, harpists, and violinists. Kathy wore a crown of fresh daisies in her hair, and a trail of them down the length of her back. He’d never forget her walking down the aisle, never forget the promises to love and cherish for all of their lives.

While memories came to him, Jordan slept, yet the memories continued to recur. He tossed and turned, suddenly caught in a nightmare realm, seeing the years unwind.

After their marriage, it seemed that the world was theirs. They lived in newlywed bliss. She burned food one night, created fantastic culinary masterpieces another. He worried about finances, juggling their earnings, their scholarships, and the help their parents sent—as much as they could. Keith never complained about college anymore. Right and left, their friends were being sent to Vietnam.

He and Jordan shared many classes and Jordan often thought they were like a pair of sponges, Keith perhaps even more so than he, hungering for all that could be learned. It occurred to Jordan then that perhaps the greatest gift was not being able to play music, to create it, but to love it. To feel it, have it in the blood, sense it, taste it.

But college came to an end. They threw their caps into the air. Keith’s parents came along with his younger sister and brother. His father was a tradesman who had knuckled down for everything he’d ever gotten. He wasn’t quite the taskmaster his son had made him out to be, he simply had no dreams left in him. But there was pride in his eyes at that graduation, and something special between him and Keith when they hugged one another.

For Kathy and Jordan, it was another celebration, another goal achieved in their dream of the perfect life. The folks suggested that college was over, it was time for grandchildren. Kathy and Jordan tolerantly promised that they’d have kids in good time, but back home the jobs started coming. Weddings, anniversaries. Then club dates. They had their group together solidly working, with Judy to supervise, to tell them what was good, what was great, and what wasn’t fit for mourning dogs. They cut their first single, then their first album.

They made it to the charts, Kathy’s song the one to do it for them.

The dream was soaring along on golden wings. But then it was nearly crushed by their draft notices.

They had bought a home on Key Biscayne at the time. It had been built in the fifties, and nothing had been done to it since then, but they loved it. It wasn’t on the water, however, the property gave them access to a private beach and provided plenty of space in which to work. Their neighbors were tolerant of the sound systems, which they kept down as much as possible. They worked hard, but the work was good. Indeed, theirs was a charmed life.

Jordan had picked up the mail en route to the beach for an early picnic dinner. It was around five, and the sun had just lost its real heat, the kind that beat down so mercilessly there. An evening breeze was just coming in off the water as he sat on the sand, feeling it sink between his toes as he saw the official insignia of the United States Army.

He’d been expecting the letter. The draft had become a lottery, and his number was high. Still, as he sat there, feeling the water against his flesh, the balmy warmth of the falling sun, the sweetness of the breeze, a shudder of denial swept through him. He didn’t want to die. The war had been raging a long time, and the reports on it were shocking. The images on the nightly news were horrifying. He had a home, a wife, a career, a future. Dying in a godforsaken rice field thousands and thousands of miles from home seemed unthinkable.

But possible. He was to report immediately for a physical.

He hadn’t wanted to go. Blue Heron was just testing its wings. They’d had their first taste of success. And even those who’d first thought the war protestors cowardly draft dodgers were becoming appalled by the loss of American lives with no victory, or end, in sight.

But neither did he want to run to Canada—or find himself arrested and in jail.

He stood, no longer aware of the water lapping at his toes. He watched the sun dipping into the horizon, magenta into blue, creating sweeping ripples of fire just above it. He started to walk. He heard Kathy calling him, but kept walking, then started running over the sand. She called out his name again and again. Finally she caught him. Breathless he fell to the sand with her.

“Damn you Jordan! What is it?”

He reached out. Touched her hair. Studied the amber in her eyes, the beauty of her face. Her skin was warm from the sun. He couldn’t bear to leave her. Selfish, but he couldn’t bear the thought of her leaving him, of finding companionship, solace... love... with anyone else.

He didn’t answer her. Angrily she pushed away from him and rose. Found the discarded notice in the sand, the bills from the Southeast Mortgage Company and Florida Power and Light. She cried out, buckling down into the sand. He went to her. She was instantly adamant.

“We’re going to Canada.”

“We’re not.”

“You’re not going.”

“I’m not going to jail, and I’m not spending my life running.”

“You are becoming famous, you can pull some strings—”

“Kathy, I’m far from famous, and even Elvis went into the service,” he reminded her. “Besides, I don’t want to pull strings.”

“I don’t want you to die!”

“I don’t plan on doing that.”

“Who the hell does?”

“Kathy—”

“I guarantee you I won’t be killed.”

“How can you guarantee me that?”

“Because I love you. Because I’ll love you for all of your life. Hell, I don’t want to go, but I want a life when it’s over!”

He held her both tenderly and possessively. Kissed her. She responded. Then pushed him away, jumped up, and ran home.

He watched the sun go all the way down. When he came home at last, she was sitting in the darkness. Stiff, silent. She didn’t speak to him; he didn’t try to speak to her. But he knelt before her and took her into his arms. She suddenly threw her arms around him in turn, sobbing softly. Still no words were exchanged. He carried her into their bedroom. They made love with a furious intensity. Eventually, they slept. Silent, wet tears still streaked her face.

Keith Duncan received his draft notice the same week. He and Jordan were to report for physicals on the same day. They did so. Jordan had suspected his friend might try the Canada route. But Keith showed up. The two were lined up together in their B.V.D.s as the doctors went by. Keith hacked and wheezed through the physical. He’d never been heavy or even large, but in the few weeks since they had received their notices, he had managed to drop enough weight to appear in sad condition. He was given a deferment.

“How the hell did you manage that?” Jordan asked him, proclaimed fit as a fiddle himself.

Keith, his black hair recently down to his shoulders but cut neatly into something close to a buzz for the physical, grinned. “Gotta know the right stuff to take for a history of asthma. I could have helped you out.”