Nine Volt Heart (13 page)

SUSI

“I
HAVEN’T SUNG IN public
since the accident.”

After what had happened, singing with Jason, I felt I had to
be honest.

“I need to hear what my voice can do before people see my
face, and—oh, I can’t consider it.”

“Sure you can, Susi. We could do it together. I can help you
keep from feeling nervous.”

“Nervous? That’s not it. Terrified in the pit of my soul is
more like it.”

“Are you afraid people won’t like it? Or they won’t like
you? Neither is possible.”

“I’m more afraid of pity.”

“Pity? Yes, that’s worse,” he said. “I know what you mean.”

“You can’t possibly. It is not a mental exercise. It’s a
feeling down deep in my stomach.”

“Do you know how much I value what you did tonight, Susi?
Letting me hear you and sing with you?”

“It’s funny—I was afraid to do it, since I consider it
private. But then, it felt so natural to trust you.”

He leaned back and yodeled, which made me laugh.

“You brought me along because you trust me? Is that true,
Susi?”

“It’s true. Yes, I trust you. And you? Do you trust me?”

“I could put my life in your hands, Susi. Like today. You
couldn’t have made a better day if the gods in heaven gave you the agenda.”

“You enjoyed yourself?”

“Except for lunch. Playing with Zak made up for that.”

“When you’re playing music, you’re another person. Like—”

I stopped. The look was like a man making love. I’d seen him
several times that day with an expression of pure ecstasy, lost to everything
else in the world. “Jason, you said your ex-wife led you in the wrong
direction. To me it’s obvious what your career should be. I’m sorry I doubted
you when we talked on the beach. Clearly, music would come out your pores if
you didn’t play.”

By then we were at the door to my house, and I was fumbling
with the key. Fumbling, because we would be alone there, together.

“Lord, I’m starving,” I said. “Are you hungry, too? We
missed dinner, except for the peanut butter.”

As we stepped inside the house, he put his arm around me,
tipping my head up so that he could kiss me. Not wild and wet like at the
beach. Just profoundly, as deeply as I have ever been kissed. The only way he
touched me was to stroke my face with the calloused tip of his finger.

“I would trust you with the keeping of my soul,” he
whispered in my ear. “And yes, I’m starving.”

JASON

“S
USI, COME HERE A MINUTE.”

She had been pretending to be busy tidying the kitchen after
our meal. Though I had already done most of the dishes, she was straining to find
yet another chore. When I asked, she sat down beside me, stiff and distant, but
I put my arm around her. Gently, lightly, not wanting to spook her. She
accepted it like a child being admonished.

“Don’t we want to sleep together?”

She sighed—no, there has to be another word for the sharp
intake and release of breath, as if startled but then not afraid after all.
When I looked closely, her eyes shifted warily, but when I took her hand, she
lost focus and I could feel her first stiffen and then relax as I held her
lightly.

“I want to pretend that sigh was a wishful yes. So why don’t
we? That’s not a romantic way to say it, and I don’t mean to sound so
practical. You must know I’m falling in love with you.”

“I’m not ready to be in a relationship. It’s too soon—”

“Susi, people in ‘relationships’ don’t meet like this. Talk
like this. Feel this way. When it’s this good, it’s not a relationship. You
can’t get ready for it. It’s here, right now. Let’s admit what’s happening
between us.”

“I admit something is happening and—”

“What?”

“I’m not ready.”

“Me either. You can’t get ready for a freight train to run
over you.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Make love to me, Susi. Trust me. Everything you heard about
me is wrong. I have never hurt a woman in my life. I couldn’t ever hurt you.”

“I don’t sleep with people.”

“I’m not people. I’m the man you are supposed to be with.”

She kissed me. She let me start again what she’d stopped on
the beach, though now I knew to go slow, to restrain the need to touch her bare
skin.

“It is not romantic, but I have to ask sooner rather than
later. What do you have for protection?”

“I still have an IUD. My husband didn’t want children.”

“And the other kind?’

“What?”

“I know that in 1955, or wherever you come from, hip young
women understood ‘protection’ meant birth control. In my century, we also worry
about STD.”

She flushed. “Of course. I know that. I don’t have condoms.
I didn’t have a plan to sleep with anyone.”

“Due to what my uncle taught me, I always have a couple with
me. We can get more tomorrow—I mean, if it turns out you like me.”

“What if I don’t like you?”

“You can put me on the curb in the morning with the
recycling. Isn’t Seattle famous for recycling what it discards?”

“Are you going to make me laugh the whole night?”

“I was thinking more that I wanted to make you sigh, and
maybe shriek. Laughing is OK at first. Can you take this dress off? It’s scary
and I’m afraid to touch it.”

“How can you be scared of a dress?”

“I’m just plain scared, Susi.”

“That’s not reassuring. Why?”

“Because it’s been so long. I’ll come too soon and embarrass
myself.”

“You can come too soon if I can cry the first time. I’m sure
that’s how I’ll embarrass myself.”

“Maybe you could cry when I come too soon, and we could get
all that done and over with right away.”

SUSI

H
E FOLDS HIS CLOTHES when he
takes them off.

He has long toes as well as long fingers.

He has that line from the Andrew Marvell poem—
Had we but world enough, and time
—tattooed in a circle
around his left bicep and
No Surrender
tattooed in
uncial lettering on his right forearm.

The hair on his clavicle tickles my lips, especially after
the coarseness of his beard rubbed my lips raw. In bed, he turns his head the
same way he does when he is singing, savoring every moment as if it were
ecstasy.

It’s cool and damp amid the fine hairs at the base of his
spine, which you can feel when he stops moving.

What else do you want to know?

JASON

“S
USI.”

I whispered her name when the rain began to pour at dawn,
and she slithered her leg over me, wrapping her arms around me and then sitting
on my groin.

“I love you,” I said. “Let’s stay together.”

Half-lidded, her eyes lost focus as I moved, and she moaned
softly, her lips parting.

“Don’t tease,” she said, barely able to voice the words.

“You like this, don’t you?” I touched her in the way that
caused such a cataclysm the night before, and it worked as instantly in the
morning light. “Is this how you always are?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only ever been with my husband. I don’t
remember anything like this.”

The near-exclusivity thrilled me in a way that should be
embarrassing for a hip young man such as myself.

Her face glowed, the makeup worn away after our hard night,
so that she appeared luminous, like a golden dawn before the sun rises. The
stiffness and web of scarring that she worked to hide seemed like a tissue-thin
mask, tenuously covering the ardor that wanted to break loose. She incarnated
two beings at the same time, an assured and controlled person wrapped around
the most passionate woman I had ever touched.

“I mean it,” I said, understanding for the first time in my
life that this was where I was supposed to be and this was who I was supposed
to be with. “Let’s stay together.”

“I can’t go away with you. I have my work and—”

“You don’t have to change anything, Susi. I’m staying here
with you. There is nothing else I want to do but play music and be with you.”

“Don’t be foolish.”

“I have been foolish before, and it didn’t feel like this.”

She scarcely listened. Her eyes fluttered in a way that I
hoped would become familiar and that I lusted for as much as I did for her body
and soul.

~

“How can you get out of bed at a time like this, Susi? You
are heartless.”

“Believe me, I’m feeling far from that.”

“I read in a magazine that I found at the airport that most
women want to cuddle and linger in the afterglow. So why do you have to jump up
and bruise my heart?”

“You should have come to Seattle last week. It was spring
break and I could have lazed around with you all day. As it is, I have a job
and I have to go to it.”

“Will you marry me, Susi? We could sing together every
night. Have children. We could get an old Ford pickup and roam from town to
town with our family band.”

“Are you insane?”

“Being in love with you is the sanest I have ever been.”

“Marry a guitarist in a bar band?” She was teasing, and I
loved that she had relaxed enough with me that she could do it with that
particular smile on her face.

“I make a living. I don’t have a car or a place to live at
the moment, but I can support you in the style to which you are accustomed.”

“I’m not accustomed to being supported, Jason. I don’t need
another rich boy bugging me to marry him out of pity, or whatever it is.”

“Pity you? What sort of fool am I competing with? Because he
might as well learn that he won’t win.”

“No one could compete with you, Jason.”

“That Randolph guy can’t be rich enough to buy a clue, if
he’s the competition. Anyway, if we start now, do you think we’d we have our
first child by Christmas?” I counted on my fingers. “Shoot, it’s April already
isn’t it?”

“Will you stop teasing?”

“OK. Let’s set more immediate goals. Call in sick and come
back to bed with me.”

“You have a unique style, but I’m not persuaded, Jason. I
have certain responsibilities.”

In the shower she sang “Angel Band,” her voice even more
open than it had been the night before, and I flattered myself that I had
helped her relax. I longed to record it. I wanted my laptop, so I could capture
the previous day’s sensations. Yet I found a modicum of self-restraint, pulled
on my jeans, and went to start the coffee.

I could taste her on my lips and smell her on my fingers
over the burnt odor of coffee. My fingers and toes still throbbed faintly,
where twenty minutes before I hadn’t been able to distinguish her pulse from my
own.

One important piece of business demanded attention early in
the day.

~

“Hey guy. What’s up? Dominique and her attorney are coming at
ten. Will you be here?”

“No. I want you to finish it, Karl. Get me out as fast as
you can. Let her have the stupid condo. Give her everything she wants, as long
as it doesn’t hurt the band. Let her share rights to the songs I wrote when we
were together, if that’s what’s keeping the whole thing from ending.”

“From the fax they sent this morning, I think Dominique
wants to take the band name.”

“No, she doesn’t. She just wants to burn me. Give her the
songs and tell her how deeply she has hurt me, and she will let it go. Listen,
I’m with someone. Finish the business with Dominique as soon as possible.”

“Is this one taking you for another ride to the tabloids?
Excuse me for playing skeptic. You let one woman screw you up, but it was a
royal screw.”

“No, this woman is falling in love with me.”

“They all do. It’s the three-and-a-half million copies of a
single album. Plus the Grammy nomination is a real babe magnet.”

“No, she is falling in love with the real me.”

“The real you has a pocket full of money. Get her to sign—”

“She’s going to marry me, not sue me.”

“Call me a romantic fool, Jason, but I’m going to work on
the pre-nups, for when she sues you later.”

“Geez, Karl, you’re jaded.”

“I made too much money off your first mistake. I don’t know
if it’s the last. Perhaps I should plan to add a couple of rooms to my house
now that you are dating again.”

“Oh, stuff it, man. I will bet double your retainer that she
marries me, and the only work for you is re-drafting my will. You might as well
start on that now.”

“OK, I’ll get right on that. What’s her name?”

“Susi.”

“I mean her whole name.”

“Shoot.”

“Seriously?”

“Shoot, I don’t know her last name. I didn’t ask. She told
me her husband’s name, but it was something ridiculous that I forgot.”

“I’m calling my architect. Why settle for two rooms when I
could add a whole wing? Even if I’m never home to enjoy it.”

~

I was picking notes on her daddy’s Martin guitar, trying to
hear whether the sounds racing around my brain made up a melody, when Susi came
into the kitchen. She was dressed for work in a pleated skirt and starched
shirt, singing “Take Me in Your Lifeboat.” In her work clothes, she looked like
Audrey Hepburn as Eliza—dancing with the professor, I mean, not selling violets
in Covent Gardens.

“Someone tried to take a bite out of this guitar, Susi.”

“That was me. I was three. I suppose I wanted attention,
because I sure got it.”

“It’s charming. It might even add to the tone. Is it
hereditary? Will our children try to eat my guitars? I’m rather tetchy about
them.”

She was grilling toast and scrambling tofu with roasted
peppers, and I was in love with how my teasing caused her to bend her head when
she smiled, trying to keep me from seeing it and failing every time. She set
plates out for us and poured coffee, and I set aside the Martin to join her,
catching her hand to kiss her fingers.

“Here’s jam for your toast. It’s the last of the
blackberries from summer. There won’t be anything but honey until the
strawberries are ripe.”

“I already know your honey is sweet, Susi. I just want
another spoonful. Did you make this jam back in 1955 when women still did that,
and then brought it with you into the future?”

“It’s from that mass of vines in the alley. If you’re here
in July, you can help pick berries for next year’s jam.”

“Why wouldn’t I be here in July?”

“You will be back at work and—”

“I’ll be working here. And I’ll be teaching in your
institute, remember?”

“Jason, stop teasing for a minute.”

“I’m not teasing. I’m enjoying myself immensely. I intend to
be here in July, eating breakfast and picking berries with you. However, if
we’re going to have a serious relationship, you need a good Internet
connection.”

“That borders on more commitment than I can consider.”

“You’ll have to chase me off with a stick if you don’t want
me around, Susi. But you do want me, or you wouldn’t curl around my hand and
purr like that when I touch you. I have to tell the office to forward my mail
to heaven, since that’s where I am.”

She sobered, looking at me seriously.

“Jason, don’t tell your cousin about this yet. I know you
tell her everything, but please wait until we understand what’s happening
between us.”

Before I could answer, her phone rang and she disappeared
into the bedroom to answer it.

The only other man she’s ever known was her ex. Yet she
didn’t know me either.

I don’t have a cousin.