Nine Volt Heart (11 page)

JASON

T
YPING FURIOUSLY TO CAPTURE
new notes from the library, I worked to forget Ephraim and recapture sensations
from the morning in the gamelan shed. The rhythm of typing got me rushing again
over those feelings until I had to just put the laptop away and use that sheaf
of music manuscript paper from my pack to write down what I’d heard. As I
pondered what the notation should be for a particular sound that makes one’s
wrist bones go into a harmonious vibration, she came out of the bedroom.

More than my wrist bones were vibrating.

“You look like an Italian opera star. Maria Callas going to
a tea party.”

She seemed startled, but what else could I say? People in
Seattle don’t dress that way. She wore a spring-flowered dress that must be
worth as much on eBay as everything else in her house together. Silky and
substantial at the same time, it had a flared skirt and tight shimmery green
bodice that showed all her swimmer’s power. She wore a drama-inducing bra,
rather than none, as she had at the beach. Although the high-collared bodice
covered her neck and arms, that covering made the body under it even more
enticing than uncovering it.

I’m focusing on the dress, because the total effect created
an image that I could hardly stand. I mean, I was once married to a beautiful
woman and maybe that altered my susceptibility, but this is the first time I
had looked at a woman and had this particular visceral response. The sole
thought I could form was,
This is way out of your reach,
beyond anything you can have.
Her boyish blond hair was moussed into place,
and she had done her makeup to enhance her eyes. She wore strappy high heels
and still moved with a fluid ease that I was becoming familiar with. Katherine
Hepburn for the trustees meeting, Audrey Hepburn for Sunday luncheon.

“We’re late,” she said, grabbing her keys and bag.

In the car, she kicked off her high heels to drive, where I
noticed she was barefoot and her toenails were painted. I couldn’t shake off
the sensations she created, even as intimidated as I felt.

“So this is for Gwyneth, right?” I said. “You’re dressed
like that so she can’t out-do you.”

“No, it’s for her father-in-law. He considers himself a
patron of the arts, and I intend to get everything I can from him. I know how
he likes to be titillated, and I intend to please him today.”

“I can’t believe you would prostitute yourself, Susi.”

“I’m not going to catch any diseases flirting with a
seventy-five-year-old man. Do you know what? I want this institute so bad I
will do anything for it. Within the bounds of human decency.”

“Dressing so an old man can leer at you, that’s decent?”

“What’s wrong with it? Women do it all the time.”

“You seem pretty comfortable in that.”

“When a dress costs this much, it’s comfortable.”

That wasn’t what I meant.

“So how far would you go, Susi? Would you sleep with a rich
man to get his money?”

“That is a definite no.”

“Would you change your curriculum for a generous donor?”

“Add something, perhaps. For my work, it would have to be an
idea that deepened what I’m trying to do.”

“Would you sell the rights to your project just to get the
teaching part of the gig?”

“I don’t know.” She bit her lip, thinking. “It depends on
what I lost and what I gained.”

We were in the driveway of a house on Capitol Hill. It
wasn’t particularly ostentatious on the outside, except that the surrounding
grounds took up half a city block.

“This is a bad idea, Susi. I’ll just give you all the money
you need.”

“That’s a kind thought, but you saw how much I need from the
financials we reviewed.”

Actually I only had enough spare change for the first year
of her plan. I figured I could find more money after that. I need to save my
capital in order to gamble with my own business.

“I’ll prostitute myself, Susi. Better me than you. I’m used
to it.”

“Jason, I hope you’re being kind, and not teasing.”

“I don’t like you having to do this.”

“Not relevant. I can take care of my own business. It’s no
different than wearing a suit to a board meeting and observing common
conventions of business etiquette. It’s how this kind of work is done.”

“You asked me to help you—”

“But not to tell me how to behave or what to do, Jason.”

I am old enough not to seethe and pout like a jealous
fourteen-year-old. Only just barely. I grabbed a leather strip from my pack and
tied my hair back, and then took a different earring from my wallet.

“What are you doing, Jason?”

“If I have to pimp someone, it’s going to be me. Our hostess
bumped into me enough yesterday that I’m sure she’s in the market.”

SUSI

G
WYNETH TOUCHED HIS BOTTOM
when she greeted us at the door, giving Jason one of those New Age hugs and
then resting her hand right on his tight rear end while introducing him to
Freeman Lukas.

“You look like the divine incarnation of a pop star,” she
said, gazing up at him with her seven-thousand-dollar, capped-tooth smile. She
was wearing Prada casual pajamas, and her midriff peeked through whenever she
moved. Like when she put her hand on Jason’s bottom.

“I hear that’s why I make big money, because of my looks,”
he said. She pretended that he was witty. With her hand still on his bottom.

While she chatted him up, Jason nodded. That silly dangling
silver cross he had in his ear shook, so that I scarcely heard Freeman greeting
me.

“Oh, you darling girl,” he said. “You are looking so well,
one could hardly know.”

He had his arm around me as he led me over to sit by him on
the sofa in the living room. The western wall, all glass, opened out to let in
the light and view from the backyard woodlands. A dogwood with just the tips of
its branches turning a dusty pink served as the focal point in the view, with
cherry trees glimmering white among the cedars and magnolias in the background.
Freeman patted my knee through the skirts of my dress, consoling me as if I
were still struggling with recovery. I was trying to convince him that things
were fine now, truly, when Gwyneth and Jason joined us from the hallway. She
had her finger in the belt-loop of his jeans.

She chirped—well, that’s what it sounded like to me when she
spoke, and I’m disappointed in myself for thinking the things about her that I did—saying,
“The Simmones canceled. They are so sorry not to see you again, Susi, but his
father is ill. And Bill is at a conference in San Diego.” Bill is her husband,
whom I have never met and who could be a fictitious person, although I have
seen his picture in the paper occasionally. “So it’s just us, but that’s cozy,
don’t you think?”

She got all cozy with Jason on the other sofa, so that I had
to see them in a tête-à-tête any time I looked up to glance out the window. Whatever
he was saying, she listened with wide-eyed, breathless attention, crossing her
legs so that her calf rested against his. He asked about the collection of
ethnic music instruments decorating her walls, wanting to take one down and
play it, but she thought he was joking.

Freeman wanted to hear about what we had come there to
discuss, but he wanted my personal narrative. I did what I came to do, focusing
all my attention on Freeman, telling him about teaching music theory with a twist
on folk and Americana. After my story about how much I enjoy teaching
teenagers, Freeman was again shaking his head and patting my knee.

“You have a brave heart, my girl. I know whatever you put
your head to, it will succeed. I’d be proud to help you in any way I can.” He
was saying what I wanted to hear. “I would want to help you no matter what,
because I feel so sorry for you.”

Which I have so hated hearing. However, that’s what I was
prostituting myself to, a pity party to raise funds for music education.

After the single most important chat of the day dwindled to
a trite discussion of how music could lead to world peace, Gwyneth invited us
to the table. I excused myself to wash my hands.

In the hallway, before I could open the powder room door,
Jason’s arm came around me from behind, blocking the way, and he leaned over
me. Heat emanated from his body, which I sensed as cloying as perfume. I couldn’t
possibly smell him. He had showered only an hour before. Yet I had the distinct
sensation of being trapped by a large animal.

“What are we doing here, Susi?”

“We’re raising funds for music education.”

“I mean what are we doing, you and me? Don’t give me that
bullshit line you did yesterday. When I stand this close to you, when you look
over at me, it’s as if—” Jason stopped mid-sentence. “I’m sorry. My imagination
runs away with me at times. I’m famous for it.”

“They’re waiting for us.”

“I hate sucking up to the rich and powerful.”

“I thought you did it for a living, Jason.”

“Touché. For a nice girl, you know how to cut deep. But that
guy treats you like an invalid or a child who needs coddling.”

“He’s giving me a half million dollars this year and a
promise for more later. What will you get from Gwyneth?”

“If I follow her lead, herpes and late-night, teary phone
calls. Maybe a public remonstrance about my unfaithful heart. You win, Susi.
You are much better at this than I am.” He traced his hand down my cheek and
lifted my chin. “Still, it would be worth a million bucks not to see that guy’s
hand on your knee.”

Gwyneth chirped from the other room. “Are you lost?”

“In more ways than one,” Jason called back to her.

I turned away, and Jason whispered after me.

“I hate your effing ex-husband. This is all his fault.”

~

Shamelessly, I used the telephone in the powder room to dial
long distance, hoping that Angelia had her cell phone turned on, even if they
are the invention of the devil. Wherever I found her, it was noisy with the
clatter of china and dinnerware and multiple voices.

“Angelia, did you tell Jason about Logan?”

“He knows you were married once.”

“You know what I mean. Did you tell him?”

Her silence was telling.

“Angelia, how could you?”

“May I ask what is happening that it matters?”

“Nothing is happening. We are talking to donors and raising
funds.”

“Then why do you sound like Lady Macbeth after the murders?”

“He just walked away saying it was all Logan’s fault.”

“It was Logan’s fault.”

“I don’t want Jason to feel sorry for me. I wish he didn’t
know about Logan. It’s so humiliating.”

“Are you sure it’s Jason we are talking about?”

“Definitely. He has Gwyneth wrapped around his artistic
fingers, just as you predicted. Though she hasn’t volunteered her own money
yet. However, because Jason is so persuasive, she and the trustees agreed to
let us use the school this summer.”

“If that’s all my cousin does for us, it’s plenty. Did he
make his big move on you yet?”

“We decided that this isn’t a good time for either of us to
pursue anything personal.”

“Oh brother. I hope you’re lying.”

“What I’m not doing, Angelia, is telling him any of your
secrets the way you told mine.”

“I don’t have secrets. Life will go more smoothly if you
stop thinking that you do. None of it was your fault.”

~

After the accident, I blamed myself for a long time. Before
the accident, I was hardly ever home, since the way I earned opportunities to
perform was to be in the cities where any production wanted me. My career rose
faster than Logan’s. I tried to be sympathetic about how he felt, but we both
knew that I was more talented. I suspect that I’m smarter, but my judgment
remains clouded. While we were together, I thought it was smarter to have
finished school as I did, rather than leaving a year short as Logan did, taking
the first orchestra position offered him.

Long before the accident, I had talked myself into being
satisfied with my handsome Peter Pan husband. Just before the accident, I was
blaming myself for how distant and uncaring we had become with each other. When
the accident happened, and I had to face certain truths, I assumed it was my
fault. I didn’t listen to what my father said, or what my friends told me, and
I couldn’t understand what the paid counselors were saying. When the health
insurance money ran out, I was at bottom and went to an Al-Anon meeting for
junkies’ partners. Maybe going to that meeting was the step I had to take, but
at last I heard what everyone was saying: Logan was just a junkie. It wasn’t my
fault.

He wasn’t the second trombone in the village band. He was
second trumpet in a reputable civic symphony. He wasn’t ever going to be first
chair, and I’m not going to bother to understand at this late date whether that
had anything to do with being a junkie. Back then, before the accident, I
thought like most everyone else with a comfortable home and a good job, that
junkies are those other people who live on the margin. Bikers and
public-housing rejects, street people and pop singers, and super models without
sufficient brains to know better. Not the guy wearing a five-hundred-dollar
dinner jacket, sitting at a table with friends in a nice restaurant, stepping
into the men’s room for a moment and coming back in a different and better
mood.

What I still worry about is how I managed to turn a blind
eye to what was wrong. Yes, I was hardly ever home, so I wasn’t aware of how
his personal habits had changed. Besides, the last couple of months when I
lived in Seattle, rehearsals took every waking moment.

Then after the accident, there was no opportunity to ask
questions and learn what had happened. He was gone—first to rehab, and then to
a job in another state. So I’m still arguing with myself over this. It is not
my fault he was a junkie, but it was my fault that I didn’t notice.

I’m now awakening from that nightmare. I’m not hiding away
so much, though I still worry that I don’t understand people well enough to be
close. I’m not sure how it works with getting to know men, because I never
dated before: Logan and I married our sophomore year—yes, I married the first
person I had any kind of relationship with. I don’t know what it takes to be
intimate. It is enough right now to be enjoying life with my old friends and
making new friends.

Perhaps I should have left Seattle, left my entire story
behind, found a place to work and live where I could be anonymous, where no one
would ever come up and ask, “Aren’t you Susanna Childs? I’m so sorry for you.”

Because it is excruciatingly painful that a new friend
should view me with the same pity as my old friends.

~

At the luncheon table, Freeman served food for me while
Gwyneth tempted Jason with morsels of catered designer food, and then her lap
dogs came in, pestering at my feet. I neither enjoy dining on animals nor
dining with them. Freeman kindly remembered what he knew of me in former years
and only put things on my plate that I could eat. Jason’s own attendant put a
piece of dead chicken on his plate. He smiled when she did, and I could see in
that look the practiced predator Angelia described.

“What have you been out to hear of late?” Freeman asked.

“We took in Mozart’s
Requiem
just
last night,” I said.

“Ah. We went on Thursday. People applauded the Chorale as
the true stars.”

“Indeed.”

Gwyneth fluted concern over a missing condiment and left the
table for the kitchen. As Freeman bent his head toward mine for a private
exchange, Jason’s chicken slipped from his plate to the dogs at his feet. At
the same moment a clatter of noise arose from below stairs—which would be Zak,
her son, practicing his music.

“Oh, that boy!” Gwyneth exclaimed as she returned with more
hollandaise. “The worst thing his father ever did was give Zak those drums.”

By this time, I knew Jason well enough that I recognized a
defining moment. He ceased playing with Gwyneth. In fact, she scarcely got
another polite word out of him. After a few moments, he stood.

“Will you excuse me, please?”

A door opened and the sounds from downstairs echoed more
loudly in the hallway for a second.

Gwyneth said, “I tell you what, Susi. If you let Zak into
your program, and if you can keep him in school until he graduates, I will
pitch two hundred thousand into your little plan. His father has been after him
about college, but neither of us can get through to that boy.”

“I too have been trying,” Freeman said. “I made it clear to
him what the value of his education will be.”

“Zak can’t see anything except music,” Gwyneth said. “He’s
so delayed in looking at girls that his father is worried.”

“I’ll take your offer, Gwyneth. Zak is one of my best students.”
When he shows up for class. I didn’t mention that.

“I’ll triple it for next year if you can persuade him to go
to college. If anyone can do it, you can, my girl.” Freeman squeezed my knee.