Nine Volt Heart (34 page)

SUSI

J
ASON AND I HAD ENOUGH time
Monday morning—we went to bed early, woke early, spent only half an hour in the
shower together—to dawdle over coffee before work. He was eating the last of
the pumpkin empanadas, licking crumbs from his fingers in an obvious, teasing
way while the Delmore Brothers sang in the background. And I was doing what I’d
been doing all weekend: seeking the courage to ask him one more question.

Then he cleared his throat, setting down his coffee cup so
that it rattled and sloshed on its saucer.

“Susi, I’ve been trying to be brave enough to ask you
something since Saturday night. What I’m going to ask is more important to me
than anything in the world.”

“We already discussed marriage. Anything more we say will
make us both unhappy again.”

“I promised I wouldn’t bug you about that. The band has to
go on the road this summer. I thought I could delay it, but we need to go for a
lot of reasons. So I can’t help your institute by teaching. I had meant it as a
promise to you, but I have business obligations I can’t escape.”

“I wasn’t counting on you, Jason.”

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “I wished you could. I swear
this is my sole failure, and it’s only because I had obligations from before we
met.”

“That’s it? That’s what you were afraid to say?”

“No. Please come with us. I thought we were just
experimenting in rehearsal, but now we know the band is going somewhere
important, and we can’t do it without you. The band wants you. I want you.”

“I have plans, Jason. You know that.”

“If we have to play without you, it’ll be like missing a
limb. I’m scared to death that if I go on the road, you’ll slip away.”

“The institute takes more than thirty days out of the middle
of the summer. I can’t commit to anything else.”

“You could start the institute in the fall. I can help then.
So can Ian and Toby. What about Angelia? Is she going to choose your institute
over Toby and the band?”

I hadn’t thought about it, but at the moment, I couldn’t let
Angelia’s fickle loyalties affect my decisions.

“Teaching is my life now,” I said. “I can’t abandon what I
set out to do just to pursue the pleasure of singing. Angelia’s presence isn’t
a required factor in my success.”

“Will you at least think about it, please? I’m begging you,
the way I begged you to listen to my music and sing my songs.”

“Is this why you wanted to buy a microphone for me?”

“Yes.”

“You have a strange knack for deceiving yourself. I don’t
want you to think I’ll change my mind. Starting the institute this summer is
too important to me.”

“Don’t you like to sing with us?”

“I can’t go on tour with you. I can’t rip up the fabric of
what I’m trying to do with my life.”

“Why, Susi? When I hold you, I feel every cell of your body
yearning for the same thing I do. How can you not want to sing with me?”

“I need to ask you something, too. Perhaps our questions are
related.” However I had planned to ask all weekend, I ended up asking in a way
that felt brutal. “Where did you go to school after Prescott?”

“Oh, for crissakes.” He set down his cup with a clatter and
settled back on the bar stool, folding his arms in challenge. The honey-brown
pleading in his eyes from a moment before clouded over to a smoldering,
coffee-brown displeasure. “All over.”

“Like where?”

“My Associate Arts work was done as distance learning,
reading in the back of the van or holed up in a Motel 6 when we could afford
it. Then I went on to do my baccalaureate and masters work on the Internet from
my hotel room at Marriott State or from Starbucks U, wherever they offered a
wireless connection. I did a lot of work as a visiting scholar in the great
libraries on the Continent, in Great Britain, and across the U.S. I spent weeks
at the library in Montreal—”

“You never finished the twelfth grade. You’re a drop-out.”

“The correct term is ‘autodidact.’ Does this matter to you?”

“Yes.”

“Why? How am I deficient in either intelligence or learning?
Why does it matter?’

“It matters because—”

“I can’t wait to hear this. It’s more than ten years past
making any difference in the world. How can it matter? Oh, I know, everything
went on my permanent record, and it’s still following me, right? ‘Mr. Taylor
fails to apply his brilliance to homework he judges to be beneath him. Mr.
Taylor’s attendance is affected by his non-curricular activities. Mr. Taylor
pissed off the choir master once again. Mr. Taylor remains our only A student
with D’s in deportment.’”

“It matters because it’s easy to do. Anyone who understands
American society knows that you graduate from high school to prove you can live
by the basic rules, if nothing else.”

“I don’t need to prove that. I follow Dylan’s basic rule: ‘To
live outside the law you must be honest.’ I’ve done just fine, haven’t I?”

“You let the jazz ensemble down when you left to do your own
thing.”

“Are those rich brats still complaining after all this
time?” He stood up abruptly, knocking over the stool, and then paced as he
talked, his large body filling even more of the space in my tiny house. “Not a
single one of them had it in them to become professional musicians. I know what
became of each one. They’re insurance execs and suburban philanthropists. If
I’m to blame for ending their glory days too soon, I’m sorry. But I wasn’t
going to make a dime at the musical equivalent of a track meet. I made enough
money to live on for a year by going to Europe. And Hector Henderson never had
a single effing thing he could teach me. I stayed in jazz band because I could
play guitar during school hours. Susi, you cannot possibly care about this.”

“I do, though.”

“Just so I understand, you won’t marry me or sing with me
because I’m a high school drop-out?”

“I was in a marriage between unequal partners before. I
won’t do it again. You can’t believe the pain—”

“Oh, I know about unequal relationships. I married a Berklee
graduate who also thought I was a hick who needed help to get ahead in the
world.”

“I don’t think that. Please understand—”

“That you stayed married too long to that cretinous
horn-player, so now you won’t have me—when you know I love you—because I didn’t
graduate from high school? What is that, Susi? Some advanced moral code that
I’m too ill-educated to appreciate?”

“Jason, we had a great weekend. Let’s not spoil it.”

“OK. But you can’t make love like you do, Susi, and then
tell me there isn’t more love now than when we began.” He ran his finger down
my forehead and nose, to my chin. “Even someone as ill-educated as me can see
it.”

The phone rang and I went to answer it, more to excuse
myself from the pain of the moment than to make the phone stop ringing.

JASON

W
HILE SUSI WAS TALKING on the
phone in her bedroom, Ian called on my cell and told me to turn on the radio,
because the deejays on the alternative station at the end of the dial were
talking about the Showbox event. What a way to ruin an already destroyed
morning.

“Yes, I was there,” the woman deejay with the throaty voice
was saying.

“You always had a thing for Jason Taylor. Do you think he
beats up the new singer too?”

“He never did. That’s an ugly rumor. The police dropped the
charges.”

“Guys with dough always get the charges dropped.”

“You’re just dealing in innuendo and rumor. Listen to the
guy’s music. He doesn’t hit women. Let’s go to the phones and hear from others
who were there.”

“Yes, hi, am I on? I was there Saturday night, and if this
is where Jason Taylor is going, people who dig on
Woman at
the Well
are going to crap their pants.”

The woman jock said, “Yeah. I’m a fan of his, but I couldn’t
get into
Woman at the Well
. Way too mainstream.”

“I heard them earlier Saturday at this fundraiser where I
worked as a waiter. I couldn’t believe it when they came on at the Showbox. At
the fundraiser, they did mostly acoustic stuff, with just a little electricity.
Even that beat hell out of the country diva shit he did with his wife.”

“You can’t say that on the radio.”

“Sorry. Anyway, at the Showbox, the singer’s voice just tore
people up. At the start, it sounded like they were doing a quiet ballad, and
she’s like Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies, all shy and hardly looking up. When
they started this hellacious guitar, mandolin, and fiddle part, she came back
on vocals like a banshee on acid.”

The deejay said, “Jason Taylor and Ian Griffith had already
ripped everyone’s head open with their guitars before she let loose.”

“I’ve heard him play for years. He’s playing and writing at
a whole other level. You can hear tapes from Saturday night on the Internet.
They’re trading boots like crazy.”

“Where’s the new singer from? She’s never played in Seattle
before.”

“Jason Taylor’s blog says her name is Susi Neville, and—get
this—she teaches at Prescott Prep. I bet the guys there have a hard time
sitting through their classes. You can get an MP3 of one of the songs there
too.”

My blog? My own effing blog?

SUSI

“
M
ISS NEVILLE?”

“Yes?”

It was the principal of Prescott.

“Can you please come in early this morning for a meeting?”

“Of course. Is there anything I need to bring to be
prepared?” As if I couldn’t guess what this was about.

“We need to discuss your weekend activities. You know that a
fundamental principle for staff is to be above reproach in all quarters of
life.”

“I would be happy to talk with you.”

Actually, I would rather take poison and die.

I went out to say goodbye to Jason and to offer him a ride
as far as Thirty-fourth Avenue, but he had already disappeared. However much
discord remained between us when the telephone disrupted our discomfort, I
couldn’t attend to it at that moment.

At school, Randolph stood in the hallway, prepared to follow
me into me into my early-morning encounter with judgment and condemnation.

“Enjoy the weekend with your drop-out boyfriend?” he
breathed behind me as I knocked on the principal’s office door.

JASON

I
HAVE NEVER PUT on my pants
so fast. Then I took off running across the hill to catch a bus—it’s impossible
to get a cab in this part of town, even though this is supposed to be a major
metropolis. While I sprinted through the alleys, I called the webmaster from my
cell, screaming at him.

“Stop giving people your password,” Chet said calmly.
“Nobody can put anything up there without your password.”

“I’ve never given anyone the password. Take down anything
dated later than the first of May. I haven’t posted anything since then.”

“The customer is always right,” Chet said. “It’ll be gone in
the next ten minutes. But I’m telling you, it didn’t get posted without your
password.”

Dang. As soon as I got to the studio, I spent the morning
posting the information I wanted on the site, about the musical direction for
the new band and the specific roots influences we were pursuing. Nothing about
Susi, nothing about Angelia. I uploaded my own MP3 file, showing off the older
material I had been cleaning up and another of the new band playing roots
material. To calm down, I played back the tapes from the session she and I did
the previous Thursday, but then I began worrying about what it did for future
releases if I posted that MP3. I was in such a boil over it that I wanted to
call Ephraim to ask him what the hell I’m supposed to do.

I stopped listening to the tapes and fell into a deep hole,
the one that’s plagued me since the debacles of the previous year, only this
time I was paying five hundred dollars an hour in studio time to sit in front
of my laptop and read what people said on the Internet.

It’s a hole I fall into every time I go there. I want to
know what people think about the music—not just the casual rap from morning
deejays whose careers require them to be both controversial and placating. Not
from people who called to hear themselves on the radio because they happened to
be at the Showbox when we played. I wanted to know what people who cared to
hear our work thought about it.

I don’t know why I believed this morning, just because I was
agitated, that the blogs would be any different than ever. Four women described
at length how I looked in a dinner jacket and how wonderful that I took it off
because of the heat. One claimed that I looked at her through all of “Rhianna’s
Song.” A fifth caught my pick when I flipped it into the audience at the end of
the Jimmie Rodgers yodel. Two guys argued about the set list, one because he
intended to keep an accurate archive of the set list from every show I ever
played, “for the sake of history,” for crissakes, and now the two gentlemen
were quarreling over whether I said the new song was called “Hymn for a Rusty
Angel” or “Him and a Rustic Angel.” Another woman complained that I must be
lovers with the new singer and that was a bad idea, because the new singer
looked like the kind of woman who’d make me fat and lazy, and a second woman
said that I already looked less gaunt in the pictures from Saturday than I
looked in Glasgow in January.

The pictures? The ones posted on the unofficial fan site,
which included great close-ups of Ian with his shaved head and Susi looking like
a trance singer from an Eighties band playing electric Kool-Aid house music. One
of Susi and me at the market, singing cowboy songs in the early morning. I
called Karl’s office and left a message that he needed to negotiate with the
unofficial site to get the pictures of Susi and Angelia pulled.

“Tell them I’ll give them a personal message to post—an
exclusive that they will very much like—if they’ll pull those pictures.”

As if I could bargain to keep material that popped on the
Internet from having unintended consequences. I should know better.

Two women started a debate on the band’s official blog about
Ian’s shaved head, one complaining it was a travesty, and the other waxing
eloquent about both Ian’s looks and his musical contribution to the band’s new
direction. This was the first post that discussed our music.

However, it didn’t count because I knew it was Cynthia. She’d
been doing it forever, posting messages about Ian’s looks and his music, and
then reading it back to him as if it weren’t her.

Because Ian never reads the posts. Why can’t I make myself
do that?

I couldn’t make myself look away as the conversations unfolded
on the screen while I watched. One woman felt compelled to note that the new
singer should be warned that Jason Taylor is a controlling, abusive person,
while another woman (I know it’s Cynthia) asserted that all the rumors were
unfounded lies, that the public record shows the complaint was false. Then the
discussion drifted off for a moment to an uninformed rant about how the police
contribute to the silent persecution of women caught in the net of domestic
abuse.

At least three guys replied, “Who cares?” and I have to make
myself not answer. When I think about domestic violence, I’m ill at the notion
of people seeing me as a perpetrator, as the embodiment of a far greater evil
than my negligent father ever committed. The angry woman (and Cynthia) engaged
with those guys over the social issues, and Jason Taylor disappeared from the
current discussion for a few moments, while I slipped down the blog threads to
see how people described Saturday’s music.

What I most wanted to know was what people heard and how
they felt about it. Not whether women appreciated how my package looked in silk
trousers versus jeans. Not cute-coy discussions of whether the length of my
fingers indicated anything about my privates. Not whether Ian sticking his
tongue out when he concentrates indicates a penchant for oral sex. (“I’m
certain it does,” his most erstwhile fan replied.)

So I couldn’t help myself from asking.

 Sebastian: Saturday night, Ian and Toby played as master musicians, and the
band was in complete sync, even with so many new members added.

MarkT: We’ll see. You can’t tell from the MP3. It has all the
problems of most board tapes—not enough bass being one problem. For me, it’s
too psychedelic. My favorite period was about three years ago, when the band
was doing true indie country, with all original material. This new stuff is
going to take some getting used to.

Everyone jumped on this “true indie country” assertion,
squabbling about whether the term held any metaphysically precise meaning. Yes
to Wilco, no to Ryan Adams after
Whiskeytown
. Yes to
the Jayhawks, but The Replacements are just Minnesota roots rock. How to
categorize Eighties West Coast rockabilly that has too much of Downey,
California to be country? Could anything from the Pacific Northwest be country,
alt or otherwise? Then, as my impatience grew, the squabble refocused on
whether our new music could bear the indie country label, with more than one
claim that no one who records for Albion Records could be labeled “indie”
anything.

Then a woman posted a screed against labeling that cheered
me up.

 
JTgrrrl: Everyone who posted after the show missed what has happened—since
Woman at the Well, Taylor’s music has gone 180 degrees in another direction. I
have argued before that CD was only an Albion Records interpretation of what
Jason Taylor’s music might sound like in an alternate universe. I don’t think
he produced it, in spite of what it says on the liner notes.

MarkT: You’re saying they lie on the liner notes?

JTgrrrl: It says Co-produced, doesn’t it? I was at the Showbox
Saturday—I haven’t missed a show he has done within 150 miles of where I am in
the last six years, when his first album came out. What he played Saturday was
both incredibly surprising—if you believe that the production of Woman at the
Well was his sole work—and also completely logical if you’ve listened to his
music over time. This is his most exciting work to date. If you don’t love the
board tapes from Saturday or the recent boots, you aren’t going to be a Jason
Taylor fan for long. I just wish they’d post the tour dates for the summer.
Everyone else is posting their summer calendars this week.

So, if Susi won’t marry me, maybe this woman who has seen me
play a thousand times will marry me. One of the set-list curators answered back.

 
MarkT: So you’re arguing that he went mainstream by accident? Now he’s going to
stay there because Albion Records will recognize that he is so good, they won’t
screw up his recordings anymore?

JTgrrrl: No, any time Jason gets close to the brass ring, he
f*cks up his chances by doing something that no record label will gamble with.
I’m confident that you aren’t going to hear any more of his music in elevators.
Woman at the Well was his only shot at that.

Another new name logged on and sent everyone into a flurry.

 
LostSon2: If you don’t think Jason still belongs in indie country, you haven’t
heard the boots from Saturday afternoon. He did Hank Williams and Ralph Stanley
tunes, and SusiQ sang two Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard songs. I put the MP3s
on the trading list, together with some outtakes from recent rehearsals.

MarkT: You have rehearsal tapes? I thought his sessions were
all closed.

LostSon2: We’re like brothers, so I have access. I also posted
some MP3s from Saturday’s sound-board tapes. But you can’t hear Susi on those.
Her voice is missing.

MarkT: How can her voice be missing from the sound board?

LostSon2: I think it’s like how a vampire’s reflection doesn’t
show in a mirror. She is an angel, and you have to do something special to
catch her voice on tape.

MarkT: I heard her Saturday night. She’s from out of this
world, but I don’t know about angel.

LostSon2: She is going to be the angel of indie country. She is
going to be like Emmylou Harris was for Gram Parsons. Except I hope God doesn’t
decide to strike Jason down so young.

Frickin’ hell. I yelled for Martha to find the sound-board
tapes from Saturday night, and then I was on the phone to Karl, hating that the
word ‘estoppels’ had entered my vocabulary, leaving details with Warren, who
answered the phone during lunch hour. While I was shouting a While-You-Were-Out
note about the idiot bastard fan freak whose heart I wanted to rip out with my
teeth, Martha slipped me a note: Ephraim had a radio station manager holding on
another phone line for me.

“I’m grateful that you have time for us, Mr. Taylor.”

“Hi, Ray. Only the IRS calls me Mr. Taylor. Geez, I haven’t
talked to you since you were kind enough to let us visit in July.” My throat
had rasped raw from the morning’s tantrums.

“It was a good session.”

“How’s your boy? Dylan, isn’t it? He must be five by now.”

“He is doing great. ‘Rhianna’s Song’ is one of his
favorites.”

“No kidding? What else do five-year-olds listen to?”

“Los Lobos, Beach Boys, Beatles. Stoneway.”

“You are shining me on, Ray. Tell me more tonight?”

“The show is at ten. If you want, you can come a little
earlier.”

“Yes. I’ll bring my partner. We’re happy to play if you’ll
have us.”

The guy was effusive in his thanks, and I would make him
wait until tonight to let him know that in the world of music, “partner” still
meant Ian Griffith, not the mysterious angel who sang with us on Saturday.