Nine Volt Heart (20 page)

SUSI

S
ATURDAY I SPENT MOST of the
day in the garden, turning soil and planting vegetables that didn’t require
warmer temperatures. Lettuces and peas. Spinach. After half an hour, I realized
that I’d foolishly forgotten gloves, but by then, I liked the feel of soil on
my bare hands so much that I didn’t stop. Because the soil was too rocky, one
patch hadn’t been planted for years. So after lunch, I listened to Celtic music
on the radio playing from the deck while I screened rocks out of the soil. It
made for a hypnotic afternoon, shoveling soil onto the screen, rubbing it
through to catch out the stones, carting the debris to a pile that I would use
to make a path later. For this work I wore gloves, and in fact almost wore them
out. Then by midafternoon, I felt worn out.

After a shower, I sat down to tea and grading papers. It
took more than a half an hour to repair the damage I’d done to my nails, but
that work was calming too. After grocery shopping, I made bread and several
containers of food for the coming week’s dinners.

Why am I collecting the detritus of daily life in this
notebook, like nail parings? It’s too excruciating to write what I can’t think
about.

I couldn’t sleep last night. It’s my own fault. At times
like this, a thinking woman turns to Anthony Trollope to make it through the
night, to keep the mind thoroughly engaged without creating enough warmth to
lead to the temptation to touch oneself for comfort. Yet Trollope didn’t help.
I thought I’d developed a higher degree of self-discipline, both for my mind
and my body. It turns out I just developed a higher degree of self-deception,
the foundation sin for the agony I endured in previous years. My mind tells me
to run away, and my body wants me to stay. Isn’t that the same dilemma that
kept me with Logan, years after I should have gone on my way? The “call me”
messages that Logan leaves on my answering machine every other day should be
enough to remind me to be scrupulous about my personal associations. No more
staying with bad boys because of sex.

What was I thinking last week, to let Jason and his friends
invade my home and steal my time? I had resolved to stay away from him, and
then spent every night in the throes of ecstasy with him, even if we never went
to bed after that first mistake. This is not how a self-aware woman conducts
her personal life.

What was I thinking after those chance encounters—I still
believe in chance, just not in luck—to have gone on a date with him? It would
have been better if we’d just played music on Friday evening, like every other
night. He told me what he was: a rock-and-roll musician. So why should I be
surprised by women in red leather and street urchins kissing him? Isn’t that
what young men play in rock-and-roll bands for? To get all the sex they can
find?

How could I have acted all week in such an unsuitable fashion,
just because I mistook him for a friend and allowed situations to occur where
he made me breathe far more deeply than is healthful?

~

I delayed my dinner and instead went for a long roving run
along Lake Washington, hoping that pounding pavement would serve to pound sense
back into my brain. It seemed to work, though walking the last leg of the trip
up the hill to my house, I found myself singing aloud again.

On my front step, I found Jason.

“Hey, Susi.”

“Don’t you ever call? You have a phone with you all the
time. Can’t you use it?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think of it.”

My heart was thumping from my long run, and the walk up the
hill made me breathe deeply.

“Are you going to invite me in, Susi?”

I couldn’t make the key work, but he just stood there with his
pack in his hands, waiting. Even my brother would have tried to take the key
away and do it himself, since it took me so long.

“Look what I brought.” He started unpacking take-out food
from his bag on my kitchen counter. “We ate all your food and didn’t contribute
anything nobler than a pizza. I don’t want you to think I’m an insensitive
slob. I’m thoughtful and considerate. If I take a minute to remember.”

“I already made my dinner.”

“Maybe we can have this for lunch tomorrow. It’s getting a
bit cool in here with the sunset. Go shower before you catch a chill, Susi.”

“Don’t sit down. You aren’t staying.”

“But I don’t want to go out. We didn’t have any fun last
night. I know girls like to go out on Saturday night, but I want to stay home.
Please?”

“You aren’t staying here. I want you to go.”

“Why? I didn’t do anything bad.”

“I need time to myself, Jason. I haven’t been alone since we
met. I have papers to grade and lesson plans to finish. I want to finish my
chores, clean my house, do my laundry.”

“Susi, I have my own business to take care of. I’ll just be
in the corner with my computer and headphones. I won’t say a word. When you’re
done being alone, you can just take me off pause.”

“I need to be alone, without distractions.”

“I promise not to be distracting.”

“You will be though. If I see you sitting there, I know
you’ll be thinking about how to get me to go to bed with you. So I won’t be alone
at all.”

“We can just agree now that when you finish being alone,
we’ll go to bed. So you won’t have to worry about what’s on my mind.”

“Jason, go home.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Maybe that’s why you don’t understand how I feel. I need to
be in my own house, doing things that make me feel stable and sure of myself.”

“Then you should understand why I want to be here with you.
Also, it will be good practice. When we’re married, we’ll have to learn how to
create solitude while we’re together.”

“We aren’t getting married.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t like it last time. There is no reason why I would
ever like it.”

“You stayed married a long time for not liking it.”

“Maybe I managed it because I had plenty of time to be
alone.”

“Then maybe you retreated too much.”

“Maybe that was the problem with your marriage and not mine.
Stop quarreling and go home.”

“Cynthia is back, so they don’t want me there tonight.”

“Go stay in a hotel. Or find one of your card-playing
friends. I’m not providing free room and board for you.”

“OK, I’ll go stay at Zak’s. He asked me over and his mom
said it was fine. Though it will be like being in the eighth grade. We’ll have
to go to the garage to play music. Can I use your phone to call a taxi? I think
my cell phone battery is dead.”

“Jason—”

“See, you don’t want me at the mercy of Gwyneth. You’re
jealous. You want me with you, so you can keep your eye on me.”

“I have never been jealous in my life.”

“You’re shivering. You need a hot shower. I’ll set the table
while you get warmed up and dressed. Then we’ll talk about how you can be
alone.”

He took charge, and I couldn’t keep saying that I wanted him
to go without telling an outright lie. When we had dinner, he exclaimed over
the stuffed grape leaves and made me take the first bite from his fingers when
I said that I hadn’t yet sampled my own cooking. So thirty minutes after I
tried to shoo him away, I was licking garlicky oil from his fingertips.

He chattered the whole time he did the dishes, about how he
would give me all the time in the world to grade papers, but didn’t we want to
play music tonight, too? First it was the guitar, and then piano, which he plays
much better than I do. Then he left me alone for ten minutes, when I agreed he
could borrow some of the musicology texts from the library. This kept him
quiet—he could only stuff a few into his pack—until he unearthed my oboe from
the cabinet and began coaxing me to play it.

My entire oboe repertoire consists of pieces from Volume One
of the Suzuki books, because after six months, my teacher decided that my
talents lay elsewhere and I never returned to the oboe, except for idle
recreation. The one Suzuki piece that most lends itself to the oriental tones
of the oboe is
Chant Arabe
. I could still play it,
but no less pathetically than I had for my last recital.

He took the oboe away, and when he did, he touched me, his
long fingers curling around and stroking mine, though he was just being careful
of the instrument, so that it wouldn’t fall when he took it. He licked his lips
and wetted the reed again, where I had just been playing it myself.

Then he played, but he knew the Schumann and a Mozart piece
from Volume Two.

“That is almost all I can do,” he said. “I never could
practice enough because it makes my lips numb. Aren’t yours numb, too?”

He brushed his thumb over my lower lip.

JASON

S
HE STARTED IT. I SWEAR. I’m
giving her anything she wants, or not giving her anything she doesn’t want,
because it’s worth it to me, no matter what.

I went to put on that copy of
Turandot
I saw on her shelf, because I’d been hearing it in my head ever since she
rendered me helpless with admiration on the streets of Belltown the night
before. Susi would have none of it. So we agreed on
Madama
Butterfly
, though the story of a woman spurned by a cad didn’t seem a
good candidate for make-out-and-hope-to-get-lucky music. I’d decided when she
sang scat on Thursday that I’d wait as long as it took, so I could afford a
couple of hours with—what was it Susi called it that first day?—the
Slave-to-Romance theme.

She sat beside me when I motioned for her to come, but she
left enough distance that we could have been strangers waiting on the same
bench in a dental office. I confess that I sprawled a little more than I do at
the dentist’s, but she touched me first. She’s the one who elected to have
oversized furniture. If she didn’t sit back and get comfortable, she’d have to
perch at the edge in that ramrod way she has. At one point I could be
comfortable only by stretching my arms across the back of the sofa, and then
she let her shoulder and thigh touch me, but it was a long time after that—all
the way through
Un bel di
—before my hand slipped down
to her shoulder. She did not shrug it off.

Lord help me, I was waiting for the faintest signal to stop,
since I wasn’t going to end up married to her as quickly as I wished if I
failed to notice the traffic signals.

Her shoulders didn’t rise up. On the contrary, she moved
more closely, and it was all I could do to keep from calling notice to how well
we fit together and how much more comfortable her sofa was when she had me to
lean on.

So instead I said, “How could a woman be so blind as to
spend years lusting after a total cad? That’s the tragedy, isn’t it? Everyone
else can see it, while Madama is walking around blind.”

Which seemed to douse any hope-to-get-lucky fires that might
have been smoldering. She didn’t move away from under my arm, but I could feel
her turn small and tight under my touch.

I could have said, “Tell me what happened to you,” and would
have spent the night trouncing through the gardens of lost love, or maybe she’d
have said, “Tell me the same,” and I’d have to struggle to invent a more
flattering history for myself. At the time I didn’t consider either of those
alternatives. Instead, I blurted like a fool more than I’d ever told anyone. I murmured
that my mother was another Madama, waiting forever for my cad of a father to
come back to her, never rebuilding another life or finding another love, for
reasons I never knew, because she died before I was old enough or bold enough
to ask her to answer all the “whys”—why she abandoned her own career as a
singer in favor of typing in a law office, why she never told me anything about
my father until my Uncle Beau showed up and offered to help her, why she sealed
up her feelings and let no one else into her life.

“What she couldn’t tell me, I had to find out after she was
gone. The story of my father’s life was a series of Pinkerton-type adventures
with one Butterfly after another, or as many at one time as would listen to his
story about being a lost and lonely man.”

“How did you find this out, Jason?”

“Uncle Beau left me all their papers when he died. I read
all I could stand of my father’s correspondence and then put the letters away.”

She closed her eyes, listening to
Addio
fiorito asil
. I blurted, “I think this translates as
I’m
a flaming asshole, but it’s too late to do anything about it now
.” I
didn’t mean it as autobiography. I just resented what faithless men leave
behind for the rest of us to deal with.

She said, “I never understood the unrequited love theme. My
lack of understanding makes it impossible for me to listen to
Werther
, for example. I have to forget what the words mean
and just listen to the sound.”

“Susi,” I whispered while Madama Butterfly was getting ready
to die. “I spent a lot of time making myself into the man my father wasn’t. I
want to be that man for you. I want to take care of you. Please love me.”

“I don’t want you to take care of me, Jason.”

“What do you want, Susi? Tell me. I’ll give it to you. I’ll
be that man.”

That’s when she jumped me. I swear I did not start it.

Her hand went up my shirt, her tongue darted into my mouth.
I was still setting my biological programming to the idea that it might take a
month or two, or even six, when she stretched me out on her sofa, her pelvis
jammed up against mine, her knee pressed against my thigh.

I’m expressing surprise here, but I maintained considerable
élan at the moment, and I didn’t refuse the advance. When she let my mouth free
enough to speak, I asked the question.

“Are you sure this is what you want?”

She thumbed my nipple and twisted her fingers in the hair on
my chest, so that it almost hurt, and I assumed that meant I should do what I did,
which was to make up for not having kissed her during the past hundred and
thirty hours of deprivation. I was making decent progress against that goal—in
fact, I was out of my head in bliss—when she unzipped my fly and took me in
hand.

“Are you sure this is what you want?” I asked again, though
I had already slipped over to the more feeble side of self-control.

There is no use describing the nature of her affirmative
reply in detail, but in the midst of all that affirmation, we rolled over so
that I was part way on top, trying to figure how I could reach a condom and get
out of my jeans without letting go of her, when she said:

“Don’t. Please stop.”

It took several moments for me to form articulate sounds.

“Stop?”

“Please.”

“All right.” I could have choked to death, swallowing the
words. It took me a moment to catch my breath and achieve any sort of dignified
posture. I had to zip up without calling attention to what it took to avoid
hurting myself. Then I stood with as much poise as I could manage.

“Where are you going?”

“Susi, the whole evening, you’ve been touching me while
acting like you didn’t know you were doing it.”

“I don’t think so.”

“When you let me hold you, I tried to keep the brakes on.
But you kept writhing against me, driving me effing nuts. Now your pupils are
dilated, your skin is flushed and every other sign indicates an aroused woman.
I asked twice—didn’t I? Then you tell me to stop, even though you started it.
Do I get a medal for valor here?”

“I don’t feel ready.”

“Masters and Johnson could use you as a textbook example of
ready.”

“I mean I’m not ready for a relationship like this.”

“This is like high school. This is like dating Sunday-school
girls.”

“Where are you going? Are you mad at me?”

“No, I’m taking myself out of the game. My internal coach is
sending me to the showers.”