Nine Volt Heart (32 page)

SUSI

B
EAUTIFUL, ERSTWHILE JASON,
THE modest romantic, could stand in front of strangers and play devil, hero,
and lovelorn cowboy. He had no qualms about seducing women into ecstasy or
driving grown men to shout out and hug their girlfriends. For the second time
in thirty days, I found that I didn’t know the man I’d gone to bed with.

I hardly knew the band I’d sung with almost every night in
Cynthia’s futon-lined parlor, trying to get the sound balanced so that no instrument
overpowered another. I didn’t know that we could fill a modest concert hall
with a huge, round, driving sound that left people shouting for us after three
encores.

The furtive Jason whom I saw duck for cover whenever we went
anywhere in public was another figment of my imagination. This Jason stood for
almost an hour after the show, chatting with anyone who came to ask for autographs,
wondering when the band would tour, and begging for a new album.

A spiritual twin of Arlo’s, if not a clone, asked Jason to
sign his shirt. “Far out, man. I used to come see Stoneway all the time. Before
you sold out.”

“How far back do you go?” Jason asked, as if the person
hadn’t just insulted him.

“I’ve seen your shows for nine years, man.”

“See that guy over there, by the girl with orange hair? He
saw us play when we were in high school. He has you beat.”

“No way. You guys should put out a CD of old stuff. This new
stuff is cool, too. It’s the middle that sucks. Good to see you back on track.”

“Thanks, man.” Jason shook his hand. “It means something
that you’d say that. We don’t want to lose your respect.”

While Jason was being nice to people who insulted him, a
host of women asked him to sign parts of their body or shirts, all of them
hanging on his every word. Then, the house managers insisted we all needed to
be out of the building so the clean-up crew could go home.

Jason caught my eye at that point.

“Hey, Susi. How you doing?” he said, stepping by my side.

“That man insulted you,” I whispered, gesturing to the
wild-haired gentleman bopping away from us. “Yet you smiled and shook his
hand.”

“No, he didn’t mean any insult. He’s listened to our music
so much that he thinks he knows me personally. He’s giving me advice because he
cares.” Jason smiled in a dreamy way, though maybe it was left over from how he
smiled at the show. “Sonny and Karl are going to the 5 Point for breakfast.
Want to come?”

“Thanks, but I think I’ll just go home.”

He touched my lips with his thumb. “You were fantastic,
Susi. Thank you. I’m sorry I doubted you.”

“Please come home with me.”

I blurted it before I could guard myself against saying what
I thought, just because he touched my mouth. He didn’t give me a quarter of a second
to reconsider.

In the car on the way home, he couldn’t stop talking or
leave a breath of silence for me to reconsider, or reframe, what had happened
that night. “Zak was one hundred percent on. Everything I said about him is
turning out to be true. And Toby! My god, could you believe it tonight? He and
Angelia have something huge going between them—I don’t mean about being in
love, but that their music is so tight together.”

He paused for a breath just as we turned onto Madrona Drive,
and in that slim moment of silence, he turned fretful.

“You don’t think they’ll strike out on their own, do you? I
mean, I’d never stop them. But lord, it feels so good, I hope they stay. And
Sonny!”

This thought propelled him back into his enthusiasms.

“Do you think he’ll stay with us? Or do you think he’s just
doing this out of charity, sort of a misguided payback?”

I said, “He doesn’t seem eager to go elsewhere.”

“Everyone is so good right now. I’m getting nervous about
holding on to people. They have every reason to find other gigs. I couldn’t
blame them. I can’t offer anything long term.”

“Jason, it’s you that makes the band good.” I was stating
the obvious.

“What a nice thing to say. But it’s not me. It’s
synchronicity. Each little bit just seemed to come together at this time and
this place.”

“I’m grateful you invited me to join you. This was one of
the most incredible nights I’ve ever known.”

He was grinning. “You forced yourself on us. Remember?”

As I parked in the carport, he curved his hand over mine.

“I’m not forcing myself on you, Susi. You want to do this,
don’t you?” Which left me so confused that I couldn’t think of an answer before
he said, “Singing with the band, I mean. Playing with all of us.”

JASON

“W
ERE YOU NERVOUS?”

Susi seemed so distracted that she couldn’t get the key in
the lock, and I had a feeling we were headed for another train wreck. I took
the key from her hand and asked again, trying not to spook her.

“If you were nervous, it didn’t show.”

She shook her head. “It never makes me nervous. I don’t know
what stage fright means, except I’ve seen how it makes other people ill.”

I unlocked the door and held it open for her. “Then you saw
what a mess I was right up to when we started playing.”

I was a mess again at that moment, trying to figure out how
to bridge the gulf that had opened between us since leaving my bedroom a couple
of mornings earlier. The idea I had was to apply the same moxie as on stage. I crooked
a finger under the silver belt that cinched her waist and pulled her toward me.

“Let’s take a shower. I wanted to unhook that belt since I
first saw it.”

She began unbuckling mine, and my relief matched how it felt
as each show started that day, when people didn’t throw stones. I shrugged out
of my t-shirt and then pulled her close so that I could get at the zipper of
her dress, pulling it down and then tugging the dress over her head. She stood
there in just a bra and those outlandish cowboy boots.

“Good lord, Susi, you don’t have any underwear on.”

“I haven’t ever figured out what to wear with this dress so
the line doesn’t show through.”

“You stood in front of all those people with no skivvies.”

“The skirt is long. It’s not as if anyone could see.”

“I couldn’t have sung a note if I’d known.” I started to
pull off my pants, not able to take my eyes off her, and then half fell over as
it occurred to me. “You didn’t have any underwear on for Mozart either.”

“Mozart didn’t care.”

We made it to the shower, which we needed after the night’s
work, and I pulled her in with me, where the space was small enough to press us
together in the way I wanted. She tried pulling that stunt on me again,
touching me in ways that threatened to make me lose control, starting when she
soaped my pecs and played in the hair that she’d complained about a few days
before.

She took me in her hands again and soaped me half way to
delirium, and then dipped down to cup and tug at my balls.

“Lord, that feels good. ‘
Nothing compares
to you
.’”

“It’s nothing you can’t do yourself.”

“Hmm. I don’t think so.”

She began kissing my nipples, rubbing her face in the soapy
hair on my chest, which I couldn’t do myself.

I soaped her too, starting low while she steadied herself,
first with her hands on my shoulders and then twining her fingers in my hair. I
moved higher, pausing with my hands on her breasts while I nuzzled the soapy
sweetness of her bush, making her laugh. Then I soaped her arms and back and
neck.

When I held her again, both of us dripping lather while the
shower drummed against her back and splashed onto my face, she began ducking
away and hiding herself. There was nowhere in the shower for her to hide, and
we weren’t doing anything but playing. Then I realized it was her unmade-up
face she tried to hide. I turned her face toward me, feeling her want to slip
away under my soapy hand.

“Susi, I love you. I hate that this happened to you, but
it’s the only face I’ve known. You’re beautiful. Please don’t hide from me.”

“I don’t, honestly. It makes people uncomfortable to see
it.”

“Not me. I think you are both brave and beautiful.”

I traced my soapy thumb over the web-like veil along the
left side of her face, and she shuddered, moving close to me.

“It tickles when you do that.”

~

Surfeit. People died of it in the Middle Ages.

More than enough of everything.

A sunny spring Sunday that I will remember until I die.
Enough sleep. Enough food. Enough time in warm spring air to breathe and move
as if the whole day were one long tai-chi form. Enough time to explore every
continent, stream, mountain, and valley of a beautiful, beloved woman’s body.
Long hours of peace where the music was provided by the junco that scolded us
for lingering on the deck with our coffee when her nest was nearby. The
percussion-only compositions we invented, with the sounds of our bared bodies
in collision as the major motif. The woodwinds’ part was the reedy rasp of our
breathing as we practiced coming together, when it didn’t seem possible that
consummation could feel this intensely, wildly, passionately good.

She got up after the first time and made pancakes because I
was starving. If there is such a thing as afterglow, I think the light comes
from a small woman in a green silk kimono, her short hair uncharacteristically
awry, flipping pancakes, singing “Angel Band” and stopping every few moments to
bite the mound at the base of my thumb.

If there is taste that can be ascribed to the special
permissiveness between devoted lovers, then I would say it is maple syrup and
butter: the most fastidious woman in Seattle allowed me to kiss her breasts
with my mouth still sticky and oily from our five a.m. feast. I will always
think her breasts taste like the honey-dew of Paradise. When I hear the trite
cliché of talkative women keeping satiated men from the embrace of Morpheus, I will
counter with my own archetypal experience of a peaceful woman’s fingers at my
temples, my neck, my shoulders, pulling me with her into sleep, atomizing and becoming
one with the molecules of water in a tumbling brook, drifting in the gentling
breeze shooshing through the top branches of cedar trees outside the open
window.

She loves me. I know she does. She feeds me, rocks me to the
bottom of my battered soul, and then curls in the crook of my arm to sleep as
if she has abandoned herself to safety with me.

When I awoke, I found her coolly assessing my naked body
from the end of the bed.

“Your body hair no longer frightens me,” she said, and then
she dropped the green kimono and did some of things she does that still scare
the hell out of me.

SUSI

“B
OYS WANT SEX IN THE
MORNING.” Jason’s breath brushed my ear the same way the breeze wafted over the
curtains.

“Girls do too, but it’s not morning.”

“It’s a line from a song. Uncle Bonsai.”

“I don’t think I know that one.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“You’ll need another condom.”

“Yes. I’ve retained a certain wisdom my uncle left me.
Though I’m not sure how we’ll ever have children the way we’re going about it.”

“There isn’t a plan for that.”

“That’s how to make things happen, Susi, by having a plan.
You don’t have to marry me right this minute, but we still need a plan. I want
to make you happy. And safe. I want to make babies with you.”

“Just make me come one more time and then make breakfast.
No, better just make the coffee and I’ll make breakfast.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“I find the concept of you taking care of me amusing. You
don’t have a car or a house or anything else that grownups have. Judging from
how you behave, if I didn’t bring the other half of my dinner to Ian’s every
night, you’d starve because you’re the dependent vegetarian child in a meat-eating
household.”

“Don’t talk anymore, Susi. Ephraim rips them off. Your
brother Steven wants to crush them. I can’t afford you turning them blue again.
Stop talking and do those nice things you do.”

“Who is Ephraim?”

“He’s a music industry person that I have business with. I
don’t want him in bed with us. Boys want sex in the morning, not a trip to the existential
abyss.”

“You are the one who started talking about babies. Who’s
leading whom to the existential abyss?”

~

We slept till noon, and could have slept the whole day away,
as if both of us had been deprived of sleep for weeks. Jason is usually like an
Irish setter that can’t sit still for a moment, but Sunday he lazed around like
an overfed Newfoundland dog. (I’m not afraid of all that hair as a secondary
sex characteristic now, but I’m no less aware of it.) However, it was a
beautiful Sunday outside, and I wanted to be in the sunshine. It took me
changing into jeans and heading for the door on my own to get him up, dressed,
and out for a walk. Once we were sauntering down the alley, smelling spring
with the sun shining full on our faces, he was happy to be there. Ever since we
left the club the night before, any little thing seemed to bring him exquisite
joy. Just the look of stupefied bliss on his face made me laugh too, but then I
gulped a big breath of the local blossoms and began coughing.

“Are you all right, Susi?”

“Lilacs make my throat hurt when I pass them on the street.
The odor and some other essence are too strong for me. I used to love spring,
but now the lilacs leave me feeling like I might cry.”

The lilacs reminded me of the pain again. Which made me
think that I had to tell him about it, though I still didn’t want to. I’d
rather take bad-tasting medicine, endure another “procedure,” or dodge more
phone messages from Logan. If I believed in praying for silly, selfish things,
I’d pray that I never have to tell Jason how I got to be like this.

“Let’s cross the street,” Jason said. “If we stay out of the
alleys, you won’t have to walk close to a lilac.”

The essence of Jason: practical solutions to existential
problems.

“How about lavender?” he asked. “Or the magnolias and
forget-me-nots? Do they make you want to cry? Do we have to walk down the
middle of the street?”

“No, just lilacs right now. The only lavender in bloom now
is Russian sage. It doesn’t have that sticky, long-distance scent of English
lavenders.”

“Russian sage has a sort of provocative blossom, don’t you
think? It reminds me of you.”

I didn’t answer. I think he was teasing so that I would
respond with my usual naïveté. After how we had spent the night and part of the
morning, I didn’t feel naïve. Instead, I needed to be distracted. I wanted to
ask him one more question, but I didn’t want to have to tell him anything in
return. He gave me permission to do both, so why should I wrack myself with
guilt and doubt?

Fortunately, Jason’s ebullient mood offered more than
sufficient distraction. While we walked through the neighborhood and down to
the lake, he pointed out minutiae as if there were meaning to behold. The bleeding
hearts were in bloom. The cherry blossoms had all gone, leaving a scattered
snowfall of pink-and-white tissue, pasted to the ground by the last rainfall.
The dogwoods unfolded their bloom-like leaves, each tree a reverse sun rise,
with the blossoms richest at the top where the tree first received morning sun,
fading at the bottom where the sun might never reach.

As we waited to cross Lake Washington Boulevard, a VW
convertible passed and then swung around to pull into the gravel beside us.
Music blared from the car, but one of the passengers was fumbling with the
controls, turning down the sound.

“Hi, Miss Neville!” It was the same four girls from Prescott
who had come up to say hello after the show the night before. We had silently
agreed to say nothing about how they came to be in the twenty-one-and-older
part of an all-ages nightclub.

“Hello—did you meet Jason last night?”

With all the rush around the band after the show, I didn’t
see everyone who spoke with Jason. I’d stayed with Sonny and tried to follow
Jason’s instruction not to talk to the press and not to tell people my full
name if I didn’t want to see it in the newspapers.

“Hi, Jason!” a couple of them said in unison. They were embarrassed
and ready to burst out giggling. I realized that it was because they concluded
the obvious, having seen me with him at one o’clock in the morning and then
again at one o’clock the following afternoon.

“I remember you,” Jason said. “You made me sign your arm.
But now you’re wearing a long-sleeve shirt. Have you repented already?”

The girl giggled—it was Jamie Clayton, who was in my
fourth-period voice class.

“No, we have to meet our parents for a Mother’s Day brunch
at our club house. And we’re late.”

They drove off giggling, their music turned up loud as soon
as they peeled out of the gravel.

“Mother’s Day, huh?” Jason said after they disappeared. “You
are so conscientious and caring when you speak of your father and brother that
I am guessing you lost your mother.”

“Yes. A few years ago. Just before my accident. She had
heart trouble and passed in the night.”

Angling down through the grass toward the lake, we took the
path close by the water, near the rushes and away from traffic on the
boulevard.

“How did you lose your mother?” I asked.

“Why do you think she’s lost?”

I wracked my brain. The folder Randolph dropped on my desk led
me to form the idea of “orphan.” Plus Jason’s story from the night before.

“When you told me about your uncle last night,” I said, not
quite telling an outright lie. “You said he took you in when your mother died.”

“She had cancer.”

“Was it quick? I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have asked such a
stupid question. I know enough people who lost their parents that I know there
are no good answers to anything.”

“It’s OK, Susi. Ask me anything you want. She’s been gone a
long time. Half the years I knew her, she spent dying. It wasn’t quick. It was
a long series of hope-against-hope, with every win followed by a new defeat.”

“What was she like?”

“Maybe I don’t know anymore. When I was a child, she was
perfection. She had a beautiful singing voice and infinite patience—she was my
first music teacher. When I moved on to adolescence, she was a puzzle and a set
of frustrations. I found out that she’d been a performing musician and then
abandoned it. Since music was all I cared about, I pestered her about it,
because I never understood her answer: ‘I found bigger things in the world than
music.’ I just couldn’t imagine what could be bigger than music.”

“Did she quit to take care of you? Music doesn’t always pay enough
to live on.”

“That must have been it. I know enough guys who abandoned
the life after they had a kid or two. There was just the two of us.”

We walked in silence, because I couldn’t say anything
meaningful. Jason whacked at the rushes by the trail with his hand.

“Dammit. It didn’t need to be that way. Her family had
money. My father could have helped her. She was beautiful and talented. They
let her die without ever helping her to do anything with her talent.”

One more whack of his hand roused a family of ducklings,
paddling away from the bank, squeaking out pleas to their mother to wait for
them.

“Don’t do it, Susi. Don’t let anything stop you. You’re
beautiful and talented. It’s possible for you to have everything you ever
wanted.”

I turned my head so that he couldn’t see that he nearly made
me cry.

It wasn’t possible. It was long past that time.

~

We paused amid a small riot of retriever-type dogs in ecstasy
over fetching sticks from Lake Washington, because Jason wanted to point out
two flickers courting on an exposed Doug-fir branch.

“Reminds me of us,” he said. “The guy performs a ridiculous,
arrhythmic ritual, trying to get her attention. She only looks for a second and
then turns away. Which just makes him do it more—sort of like me, going to
ridiculous lengths to get your attention.”

The birds looked silly, forced by their hormones to act out
an ancient script embedded in their DNA that made them dance together.

I said. “We have free will.”

“Do we? I suppose,” Jason said, speaking softly, wrapping
his arms around me. “At least I don’t say ‘I love you’ just to get you go to
bed with me like that poor bird up there.”

“You say it when you’re already in bed with me. I thought it
was a habit, like yodeling in the shower.”

“Please don’t laugh at me. I want you to marry me.”

“Jason, please.”

“I just don’t understand, Susi. I know what it feels like
when you let me hold you. I’m not imaging how you respond when I touch you.
Explain it to me, please. Explain why I can’t find you next to me every morning
for the rest of my life.”

“It didn’t work before. I have no faith it could ever work.”

“Ever?” His beautiful smoky voice cracked as he said it.

“My grandmother told me not to go to bed with anyone I
wouldn’t think of marrying. She gave the same advice to my mother. So I did
what my mother did and married the only person I’d ever gone to bed with.
Although my mother had good judgment, I don’t. I can’t trust the entire fabric
of my life to my poor judgment.”

“You can trust me. How do I convince you of that?”

“Please stop asking me to marry you.”

“All right then. It goes against everything I believe in to
ask this. It’s a complete betrayal of my moral code to even think it, but if
you won’t marry me, will you live with me? I feel incomplete and half-ill when
you aren’t with me. We get on so well together.”

“Except when you ask me to do what I can’t. There are a
million reasons why we can’t live together—it would threaten my job, I need my
privacy, Cynthia says you’re impossible to live with, and—”

“What?”

“It goes against my moral code, too.”

“OK, Susi. If you change your mind, tell me. I won’t be
changing mine. Can we go home now? I’m hungry and I want to listen to some of
your father’s music.”