Nine Volt Heart (27 page)

JASON

“W
HERE IS EVERYONE?”

Susi came late, so late that I thought I’d expire from
dread. I’d worked myself into a racehorse lather of anxiety combined with an
adrenalin rush of hope, so that I had to strip off one shirt and settle for a
sleeveless t-shirt in order to pretend to be cool and calm when she arrived. My
hands were as damp as Arlo’s, and I washed them a half dozen times, grateful
that Ian wasn’t around to harangue me for being the obsessive jerk that I am.
When she came, I could hardly look at her, knowing she’d see the fear in my
eyes.

“Everyone had an excuse for taking the night off,” I said. If
they didn’t have an excuse to begin with, I had assigned one to each of them.
“It’s just us rehearsing new songs tonight. Do you mind?”

“No,” she said, stepping back as if I were the Big Bad Wolf
instead of the patient Little Prince.

I took a breath and went ahead, as if I were brave.

“Susi, I want you to listen to something.”

“More of your music?”

“No, some female vocalists. I burned this CD for you today.
I still can’t understand how you missed the whole last half of the twentieth
century.”

“I was busy doing other things.”

My parents’ whole generation got the idea from rock music
that you could beg for love and maybe get it, which must have bred a phalanx of
stalkers incapable of believing that no means no. I was hoping I hadn’t
inherited it, because I was about to beg her for even more than love.

“Never mind. Please just listen, Susi.”

I played each song without comment. We listened to Janis
giving away another piece of her heart, Lucinda changing the locks on her door,
Emmylou saying goodbye on
Wrecking Ball
. By the time Marianne
Faithfull was begging to hear it said in broken English, Susi held up her hand,
distressed. She started to speak a couple of times and stopped. She fidgeted
and twisted her hands, then switched off the music.

“The last one is too painful to bear, Jason.”

“Do you have any patience left? I want you to hear some of
my music.”

“Like what we’ve been working on? That would be a
consolation after hearing this.”

“No. This is different. Ian and the others are working with
me on this new piece. Here are the lyrics.”

I couldn’t be more obvious about what I was asking her. I
couldn’t expose my soul in a more naked way than this, playing an unfinished
piece of music for her, when I wanted her to take me for what I am.

When the music ended, and after a roar of silence for a long
moment, she said, “You want me to sing this.”

“Please consider it.”

She stared at the lyrics without looking at me.

Still nervous, I spoke to fill the silence. “This feels like
asking someone to try an unusual sexual practice. I’m sorry. I put you on the
spot.”

“No, I’m not afraid of the challenge. I just don’t know how
to listen to this music. Can I keep those songs on the other disc? I need to
understand better what you want.”

“Will you try to sing this? Can we start now?” I couldn’t
keep either the eagerness or the anxiety from my voice.

“Yes, but could you put your shirt on, please? I’m not used
to rehearsing with men clothed in their underwear.”

SUSI

I
T TAKES ME A MOMENT each
night to force myself to not look at that patch of hair he left on his chin.
I’m not so divorced from the modern world that I don’t know it’s in style, but
on Jason it seems such a startling declaration. Secondary sex characteristics
advertising the presence of that much testosterone interfered with my ability
to breathe. When I forced myself to look past that, my mind wandered through a
series of speculations about what had happened to the well-groomed man I had
first met, who often forgot to shave and now appeared in his undershirt. Then I
mastered myself and listened to what he was saying, instead of staring at his
chin, trying not to look farther down, at the hair escaping from the top of his
t-shirt, trying not to remember the well-defined, taut muscles across his chest
and shoulders, along his forearms.

The first voice he forced on me was too deep for me to
emulate, others were too southern, and the last singer was in more pain than I
could bear to be reminded of. Although I was getting some idea of what he
wanted from me, I couldn’t render it by emulating any of the samples on that CD.

“Play your music again, Jason. I want to hear the other
instruments.”

I followed along with the written lyrics this time, trying
to hear the empty places that still remained between the different instruments,
no longer so distracted as I had been by how he looked in a sleeveless t-shirt,
though he hadn’t buttoned up his shirt, and he rolled back the cuffs, drawing
even more attention to the hair on his arms.

“Again.”

This time I sang the words as he’d written them, in the way
I thought he wanted a human voice to thread its way among the other
instruments’ voices.

“Again, please.”

He hadn’t made any move to correct me, or betrayed any
response in his expression, but he always critiqued or corrected when he was
unsatisfied, so I believed we were making progress toward what he wanted. As the
instruments died away on my third attempt, I hung onto the final A note so it
died away like twilight taking forever to fade in St. Petersburg.

He sat with his face in his hands. I wanted to provoke a
response, to gauge his reaction, to see if I was giving what he wanted.

“The first time I had to sing in Croatian was easier than
this.”

He grasped my wrist and kissed my fingers, and then snatched
his hand away again, picking up his guitar.

“It will never be a hit. Hits have to be in a major key. We
will likely never make a dime off it.” He laughed in a rueful sort of way.

“There is more to be had from music than money.”

He looked up. “I have to believe that’s true. Can we record
you this time? Do you want to rehearse more?”

“If you’re happy with it, I can repeat what we just did.”

“Then let’s go.”

Perhaps because of my previous work experiences and the last
few weeks spent rehearsing with him, whenever I found what he wanted, I could
return it to him again a second or third or fourth time as faithfully as he
needed. So without the other musicians, he didn’t demand repeated attempts
while we taped.

“Another go?” I asked.

“That’s fine. That is more than fine. Susi, do you have any
idea how good you are?”

“So we don’t have to do it over and over? Are there other
songs we can work on? Or is that the only one I get to sing tonight?”

~

He had two other songs. One was close in form to the Anglo-Celtic
ballads we first played together, with a middle part that churned up passion,
and drove to an ending that resembled the pyric release of great opera.

“It’s pretentious,” he said. It was easy to sing, and we
spent no more than an hour making it sound the way he wanted.

The second began like a mountain song—a sort of “Pretty Saro”
mourning hymn—but he had planned this long instrumental interlude, and then the
song went off in another direction, more like the raging part of deep mourning,
where you hate the loved one for ever existing since the result is to be left
in so much pain. I said as much, and he nodded.

“My uncle Beau died last year. This is for him.”

“You should use the steel guitar for the middle part, Jason.
And you need the voice to come back in sooner.”

“I don’t hear that. The guitar and mandolin need to finish
what they have to say.”

“If you do it that way, they finish too much of the story.
The voice at the end just sounds like a tantrum howling in the night. An
after-thought.”

“OK. We will do it with just the guitar. Show me what you
mean, Susi.”

It took two hours to achieve something we were both happy
with, pausing in the middle so that Jason could take notes on how he would change
the instrumentation in the middle part. Toward the end, when we were both
nodding that we had what we wanted, I felt the beginning of that place, where
the music in your chest, at your solar plexus, in your head, even in your nose,
is in complete harmony—with what? The music of the spheres? With some vibration
that you can feel if you exhaust all the usual, human ways to breathe, like a
runner getting a second wind. I wanted to go on. I would beg and plead for it,
but before I could speak after the end of our final recording, Jason said,
“Let’s do the first one again, but just you and me, guitar and voice.”

He turned on the tape, and we breathed together through that
twenty-first century paean to joy that transcends loneliness and loss.

When I could speak again after a few moments of silence, I
said, “That final A left me with a twilight blue behind the bridge of my nose,
where you can’t tell the difference between blue and grey and yellow.”

I was standing too close to him and uttering complete nonsense,
as if I had hyperventilated myself into hysteria.

He set the guitar on its stand in that methodical way he
handles his instruments, and then took my hand in his, tracing the lifeline in
my palm.

“Oh god, it’s two a.m. I’ll be late for work yet again. I
have to go.”

“Don’t go. Please stay, Susi. If you don’t want sex, all
right. But how can you go after this? How can you not think we belong
together?”

He stood so close that “not think” was all I was capable of.
His shirt was damp—I suppose mine was, too—from our exertions. I could smell
everything I’d been avoiding. Clean sweat. The soap and starch in his
now-wilting shirt. Whatever it was that caught in the small hairs across his
sternum together with the sensation in my nose that threatened to lure me into
hell-fire. He spoke in my ear.

“When I close my eyes, I still see all the colors and the
shape and form of your voice. It vibrates on my fingertips like the strings of
my guitar.”

He touched me, putting his fingers on the side of my face
where it tickles, and I couldn’t speak to stop him. He turned my face up and
kissed me in a rather chaste way, and I know it was me who opened my mouth and
responded as if to devour him. Then I managed to stop myself.

“Please keep your distance.” I pushed away from him. “You
are doing everything to confuse and distract me.”

“What? I’m not.”

“You have all this hair on your body.”

Oh god, I said it out loud.

JASON

S
HE STARED AT MY WRIST, and I
turned my hand over, trying to see what it was that offended her.

“What can I do about that? Take it all off like a swimmer
who—”

Yikes, she had nudged herself so close to me that I could
feel her pulse, which felt like a frightened cat. I sat down and pulled her
along with me, half holding her on my knee like you do a child. For everything
she said about keeping my distance, she didn’t resist.

“Susi, I think it’s time we tell each other our secrets.”

“No. I don’t want to hear yours. I don’t want to tell mine.”

“I think you’re punishing me for something your ex did.”

“No, I did it myself. I let sex blind me, when that was all
there was in the relationship.”

“Between us there’s so much more than sex. For one, there’s
music. Or is my ego as big as the moon? Two weeks ago you sang my music for the
first time, but things changed tonight, so it’s our music now, not just mine.”

She dropped her head against my chest. I couldn’t tell
whether it was surrender or emotion or simple exhaustion from how hard we
pushed ourselves working. The sole emotion I had in reserve was the day’s last
dregs of self-will, the energy I use to propel myself through life. I picked
her up and carried her down to my room, moving as gracefully as I could. The
most gallant part of the maneuver came in managing not to break her head on the
door frame or lose my footing on the steep stairs. I laid her down on my bed
and pulled the coverlet over her, then curled up beside her, with one arm as
her pillow and the other wrapped around her waist, holding her close to me,
feeling her heart beating far too hard. I whispered into her hair.

“I don’t need consummation as much as I need comfort. Please
let me put my arms around you just for that.”

Burrowing up against me, she nestled her head into the crook
of my arm, so that I could smell the essence of her and feel her lithe body
relax under my hand, until her breathing became even and her heart quit
thundering and she fell asleep, lightening in my arms as she did.

~

Mentally I wanted only comfort. The rest of me wouldn’t
cooperate. By four in the morning, I’d spent a couple of hours pondering
whether I’d most like to murder her ex or Mr. Levi who, if he’d spent two hours
in a pair of his jeans with an unrelenting erection, might have modified his
design. Or perhaps that’s why adolescent boys prefer their jeans four sizes too
big; they learned a lesson the rest of us with unfulfilling lovers still have
to master. I eased my arm out from under her so as to not disturb her, and then
cast off the garment of torture and crawled between the sheets, making myself
want nothing more than to watch her sleep.

She had wakened, and grey eyes regarded me under that look
of perpetual surprise her eyebrows framed. She smiled at me the way she first
did weeks before, the smile she gave more freely to others than to me.

“I have to get to work on time today,” she murmured.

I turned over and buried myself under the covers, trying not
to show my dismay, trying not to call out, ‘What about me?’ like a blooming
idiot. Other men knew how to turn situations like this to their advantage.
Where had I missed the lessons everyone else got? It had to have been a day
when I cut Health-Ed class to finish my calculus homework.

Then I felt her slight weight on the bed again and her hand
on my arm—where all that offending hair grows—and she curled around my body as
I had done with her earlier, but I could feel even through my t-shirt that she
was naked, and she put her hand between my thighs instead of around my waist.
Everything I had done to ease my discomfort was canceled, and she took matters
firmly in hand.

“No teasing,” I breathed. “No stopping in the middle and
making me go home.”

“We’re at your house.”

“Still. Don’t stop, Susi.”

“I can’t anymore.”

The next part I won’t post on even the most anonymous blog
(I can’t post the previous part either, since it doesn’t reflect well on my
prowess as a lover that, after two hours in bed with the woman I love, all I
had achieved was a great deal of discomfort), but she ducked her head under the
covers and tended to the part that her hand couldn’t attend to while stroking
so confidently. In some unfamiliar but artful gesture—for I had no previous
experience with her commandeering my body and overruling any choices I might
make—she had turned me and thrown off the oppressive weight of the blankets,
exposing me so that one hand tenderly cupped and tugged at my balls, while the
other grasped the base of my cock as she tasted and tickled the head, tracing
the curves and edges with her tongue and lips, and pressing the hard tip of her
tongue into the slit.

“Susi—”

“Hmm?” Her hum threatened to send me into delirium, as she
stretched the skin around my scrotum more tightly, holding my balls and my life
in her palm.

Then, after she pulled it all so tight there was no room to
throb, she demonstrated open-throated production of sound. Except I was the
only one singing.

“Susi, stop,” I whispered. “You’ll make me come.” I urged
her head up, and she looked at me, questioning, blinking.

“So? You can do that more than once in a night.”

Then she had both hands working my shaft while holding my
balls in her mouth and instead of humming, she moaned, while having doubled herself
up to mash the wetness of her vulva against my knee. When there was no
possibility for me to hold back any longer, she must have felt it too, for in a
heartbeat she had her mouth off my balls and pressed hard with her thumb
against the base of my cock while she buried the length of it deep in her
throat.

All right, yes, I held her head down, but it was an
involuntary reflex, since my hands had become entranced with stroking and
pulling her boyish hair. She could have stopped, but she didn’t until she made
me let go.

My fingers stayed trussed in her hair, even after she let me
be and rested her head on my belly, her hand now satisfying itself by twirling
in the hair there, making it tickle, making me shiver.

“Oh geez.” My brain found itself able to do the work it is
supposed to. “We’re supposed to use a condom for that too.”

“Why? I can’t get pregnant from swallowing.”

“STD protection.”

“Where would either of us get a sexually transmitted
disease? I haven’t been near anyone since the last time the doctors worked over
every cell of my body.”

“You do it to protect yourself, Susi.”

“Why would I need to protect myself from you? Cynthia said—”

“Cynthia said what?” I flipped her over and pinned her with
my knees. “Why are you talking to Cynthia about me?”

“She and Ian are on a crusade to convince me to be in love
with you. I think they want their basement back.”

“What did Cynthia say?”

“That you haven’t been with anyone since you found out your
wife was unfaithful. That instead of being broken hearted, you just went to a
doctor. She wanted to make sure I didn’t think you were unsafe.”

“Cynthia doesn’t know everything I do.”

“Doesn’t she?”

“Oh geez, I have such good friends. What does she say to
make you be in love with me?”

“That you aren’t as much of an asshole as some men.”

She wiggled away from under me and tried to get out of bed.

“Where are you going?” I pulled her inelegantly back to me.

“For mouthwash. I read that most men are fastidious about
not tasting themselves, and you are more fastidious than most men.”

“Not about that. It goes with being less of an asshole than some
men.”

“That is so romantic. Take off your t-shirt so I can see
your body.”

We tried romantic kisses then, this time in utter silence,
with no ravishing Puccini opera or humping rock music playing in the
background, just those sounds almost beyond the range of human hearing—of
breath across the hairs on the back of your hand, or under the soft skin at the
base of your earlobe, or the rasp of early-morning beard across a lily-smooth
belly. With such exquisite pleasure, I couldn’t believe it when my brain began
interfering, hoping against hope that she could tell how I feel from how I kiss
her fingers. That my lips touching the tiny scars on her lips revealed
existential mysteries. That my eyelashes fluttering against her small breasts
reassured her that pain now lay only in the past and that we could rise from
this destroyed bed as partners. My sentimental brain won out over animal
instinct just before she again took me in hand, coaxing me more erect and
guiding me toward her innermost secrets. I’d like to have strangled both reason
and emotion, but they won out and my tongue spoke, even as my body wanted to do
nothing more than sigh and bury itself deep inside her.

“Susi, I’m too far gone to do this if you aren’t in love
with me. I can’t just fuck you. If that’s all you want, you have to at least
lie and make me think you love me.”

“I do.” Her voice broke, which broke the other half of my
heart. I wanted her to mean it, so I shouldn’t have invited her to lie.

“Yet not so much that you can say it out loud? What kind of
plausible lie do you offer as proof?”

“I’m learning to sing the way you want me to.”

At this point, she made that mysterious move again, where
she overruled choice and forced me to do what I wanted to. With a condom.

I’m saving myself for marriage.