Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire

by Paula Guran

  “My father doesn’t want me to put any excess strain on my heart before school starts.” She turned up the radio, which was supposed to end the conversation.

  “But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said, raising my voice to talk over Elvis. “Your mother’s a nurse, she could tell him—”

  “No, she can’t,” Kathy said. “She can’t, and we can’t. Nobody can tell him anything.”

  After that, she didn’t want to talk about anything anymore, but I was getting tired of that and all her neurotic shit. Her and her mother and her weirdo father—by far, the only sensible one seemed to be Barbara, and I was starting to wonder about her.

  “I think this year you ought to do something with your singing,” I told her abruptly, reaching over to turn Elvis down. “Get involved with the Glee Club and the choir. They’ll probably make you a soloist. Looks good on your transcript when you apply to college.”

  “Oh, I plan to do something with my singing,” she said, giving me this sideways look.

  “What?” I asked her.

  “You’ll see.”

  “Come on, Kathy, what.”

  “You’ ll see.” Suddenly she smiled. “You will.” She turned up the radio again and was happy for all of fifteen seconds. Her father materialized on the porch like a magic trick. He snapped off the radio, then picked it up, yanked the batteries out of the compartment in the bottom, and put them in his pocket.

  “Trash,” he said, glaring at Kathy. “You know what kind of people listen to that trash, don’t you?” His gaze moved to me. ”Don’t you, Katherine? Answer me.”

  She ducked her head and I thought I heard her whisper, Yes, Daddy.

  “People like her.” He jerked his thumb toward the sidewalk. “Hit the road, trash. I don’t want you near my daughters, any of them. The next time one of those horny young apes you go around with gets a yen for some, you take him to the whores you live with. Do I make myself clear to you?”

  It all came out in such a quiet, calm voice, I wasn’t sure that I’d actually heard what I heard. And then Kathy whispered, Go. Please. Get out of here.

  I was so shocked, that was just what I did. Maybe her father had blown some kind of gasket in his brain, I thought. I’d have to ask Kathy when I saw her at school, even though she would probably be embarrassed to death over it. Because she lived on Summer Street; in my neighborhood, I’d have just figured him for yet another guy who got mean when he got drunk.

  Actually, it was the last time I saw Kathy for years. The week before school started, she ran away. Without the wheelchair.

  High school was hell anyway, but without Kathy, it was even more rotten. I was so mad at her for leaving me to face it alone, after we’d stuck together for so long. At the same time. I couldn’t blame her. What wasn’t boring was incomprehensible or embarrassing. I fell into my radio and stayed there.

  Not the local stations, which were all easy listening or countrywestern or yak-yak-yak, but the ones from Boston and Worcester, where everything seemed to be faster, happier, better. I loved to sit alone and listen after school. In Worcester, the kids called in requests every afternoon, and it sounded like they all knew each other. I daydreamed about getting out, finding my way to some place like that. Maybe that was what Kathy had done, gone off to find some better place to be, where her parents couldn’t keep her in a wheelchair, and as soon as she was sure it really was a better place, she’d let me know. Somehow, she’d send me a message to come join her without giving it away to her parents or anyone else.

  I hung on to that for a while, even though I knew it was a complete fantasy. But as long as it was a complete fantasy, I pulled out all the stops and imagined that her message would come in the music. Like we were spies or secret agents in hostile country, trying to get home.

  So fourteen and fifteen is a little old to be playing Spy. It was better than playing with Eddie Gibbs. He’d gone on to become high school aristocracy, and, as near as I could tell, he’d forgotten all about Kathy and me. I gave him a dirty look every time I saw him; he would stare right through me, like he didn’t see me at all.

  Yeah, well, like I should have expected more out of a fourteenyear-old guy.

  I spent my junior year sleeping with Jasper Townshend. It was the next best thing to getting out.

  Every night of the week, I could drift off to sleep at the sound of Jasper’s low, velvety voice urging me to believe in the power of my own dreams. It didn’t bother me that he said this to everyone who slept with him. I didn’t expect a whole lot of Jasper; all I wanted to do was forget this world for seven or eight hours, and Jasper knew exactly how to help me do that.

  Being so good at what he did, he became a very popular guy, number one in the overnight time slot. All the other radio stations might as well have been off the air. It wasn’t just that he had the best voice in the business, or a lot of great things to say. It was that he really knew how to program the music, and when to shut up.

  You could tell the music meant a lot to him. I think it meant as much to him as it did to me. With Kathy gone, it meant more to me than it ever had. Sometimes I’d even forget that my little fantasy wasn’t real, and I’d listen for Kathy’s voice, the song she would sing to let me know she’d found someplace safe.

  I guess if you listen hard enough for something, you’ll finally hear it.

  The first time I heard it was in a dream, literally. I was back in Kathy’s room and she was singing for me, but it wasn’t the folk song I remembered but something slow called “In My Room.” I seemed to remember some surfer-types singing it and it had sounded pretty lame. But Kathy had stolen it and made it into some kind of hymn to privacy. And why not a hymn? All us good little Catholic girls sang hymns best.

  The song ended and I was captivated all over again. I didn’t want anything to break the silence that fell after that last pure note, I wanted to listen to it echo in my mind, but Kathy’s father suddenly barged in without knocking. I thought he was going to tell me I was trash and throw me out. Instead, he started singing, too.

  Shock woke me up. But Kathy’s father was still singing, and I realized I was hearing the radio. I could feel my emotions going up and down, like a flock of seagulls riding on waves. I mean, I was really glad Kathy’s father wasn’t singing or throwing me out, but I was really sorry the Kathy version of “In My Room” wasn’t available.

  Then I found out I was wrong, and I didn’t know how I felt. I wish you still knew what happened after that—it would make all of this so simple. But I’ve resigned myself to the fact that no one remembers The Voice except me.

  That was what they called her— Billboard, Variety, Hit Parade. Dick-for-chrissakes-Clark. George Martin, too; he’d been trying to get some British group with funny haircuts to smooth out their sound, get respectable. When he heard The Voice, he dropped them and hopped a jet for America. He tracked her down in L.A., and then spent three months wooing her with promises of all kinds.

  I could have told him she’d have been a tough nut to crack. I giggled whenever I thought of some high-powered music promoter or manager or whatever they were coming to me for advice on how to reach The Voice. I’d have told them just not to bother. The Voice couldn’t be bought, wasn’t for sale.

  I didn’t really expect her to think of me, either. She’d run away from all of it years ago, me included. I didn’t know why it included me; I didn’t want to know, either. I was afraid I’d find out that her father had finally brainwashed her into believing I was the trash he said I was. Instead, I went on pretending that she was sending me messages in the music, messages of encouragement. I hung on to the music and hung on to her.

  And what the hell—the miracle came to pass, and I got my ticket out. It was labeled Full Scholarship, State University. One way only, and that was all right with me.

  That was the time that I was really tempted to try to get in touch with her, to show her that I’d done it after all, the way she had always believed I would. I thought maybe she
really might want me to get in touch with her now. She may have been The Voice to the world, but I was the one who had heard The Voice first. Before she had sung for anyone else, she had sung for me.

  I wish you all remembered her world tour. I was at the state university then, majoring in parties and becoming radicalized, when I found out she was going to play that blot on the New England escutcheon we had both escaped. I’d go see her in both places, I decided. I was still going back to see my mother once in a while; I could make an extra trip for Kathy.

  Eddie Gibbs was long gone, as far as I knew. He’d joined the Army right after graduation and been shipped off to somewhere in Southeast Asia. Too bad, I thought, he’d never get a chance to see what he’d missed.

  So I went. She was as thin as ever, maybe even a little thinner. Her hair had grown out long, down past her shoulders. Sometimes, when she moved her head in a certain way, it reminded me of a nun’s veil; I wondered how she was living and with who, if anyone.

  I wondered through her rendition of “Tobacco Road,” and then was startled to hear my name mentioned.

  “This next song I also stole, from four good kids who could probably have a hit single with it, and maybe they will. But not till I’m done with it. This is for my friend who always said she was getting out. I hope she got out.”

  A wave of laughter swept through the audience—I swear, she could have stood up there and castigated everyone and they would all still have loved her. She waited a beat and then launched into “I’m Not There.”

  No one told you about me

  The way I cried . . .

  Nobody told you about me

  How many people cried . . .

  . . . don’t bother trying to find me

  I’m not there . . .

  Very spooky song, and not in a good way. If there was such a thing as being allergic to a song, I was allergic to that one. I couldn’t stand to listen to it, watching her move back and forth across the stage, looking carefully at all the upturned faces.

  I knew she was searching for me, and, suddenly, I didn’t want her to find me. During the break, I pushed through all the people milling around and got outside none too soon. My stomach had been turning over and over. Much to the disapproval of some of the well-muscled group in T-shirts that proclaimed Security front and back, I puked into a garbage can just outside the hall and then went back to my mother’s. I figured that would be the end of it, but I was wrong. Again.

  “It took a while to find you,” she said on the telephone. Her speaking voice, as well as The Voice, sounded just the way I remembered, full and textured.

  “What do you want?” I asked her. “I mean, you seem to have everything.”

  “I’d give it all up just to get some peace of mind.” I thought that was a pretty weird thing to say. I couldn’t think of how to respond her. “There aren’t any easy answers,” she added, as if she had read my mind. “I’m just letting you know how I feel.”

  I switched the receiver to my other ear. “And how do you feel?”

  “Did you stay long enough to hear ‘I’m Not There’?” she asked suddenly. “That’s the song I stole. That’s what they call it when you take a song someone else wrote and change it to fit your own preference. Did you like it?”

  “It was strange,” I said.

  “But did you like it?” There was such an urgent note in her voice, I felt I had to be completely honest.

  “No.”

  She gave a short laugh. “No. You wouldn’t. Because you are there, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. I’m here.” I paused. “You’re the one who left.”

  “No,” she said patiently, “I wasn’t there to begin with. I was never there. Because no one told you about me.”

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “Don’t what—tell you?”

  “You’re not telling me anything, you’re just spooking me. I was hanging on because you were supposed to be there to hang on with me. You believed—”

  “No, you believed,” she said snappishly.

  “And you let me.”

  There was a long pause. “Yes,” she said at last. “I suppose I did.” She paused again. “Is there anything—has there ever been anything—that you’d give it all up for?”

  I laughed. “What have I ever had to give up?”

  “Everything.”

  I laughed some more. “‘Everything.’ Jesus, Kathy, I think you’re getting your ‘everything’ confused with my ‘everything.’ In case you hadn’t noticed, you’ve got a hell of a lot more in your ‘everything’ than I do in mine.”

  “It wasn’t always that way,” she said gravely. I squirmed a little because I had just been thinking something along the same lines.

  “No, but it sure is now, isn’t it?” I sighed. “What did you call for, Kathy? And how did you know to call me here?”

  “I was hoping I’d find you.”

  “You were hoping I’d still be living here?”

  “No. That you’d come back here for the concert.”

  I was annoyed with myself for being so predictable. “Okay. So why did you call?”

  “I wanted to ask you if you thought there was anything in this life that you’d give up everything for?”

  I sighed. “Don’t tell me—you’re top of the charts and suddenly you think you have a calling to become a nun.”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “Answer the question.”

  “I can’t,” I said, annoyed. “It’s your question, not mine. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Another one of those pauses. I couldn’t even hear her breathe. “You’re right. I can’t ask you a question I’m supposed to answer. So let me ask you this: Do you think you could ever forgive me?”

  I hadn’t expected that one at all. “For what? For leaving me to get it all figured out on my own? Build my own life?”

  “Among . . . other things,” she said, a bit hesitant.

  “Yeah, sure. What the hell. Forgiveness is one of the cornerstones of the Church we grew up in. And you can take the girl out of the Church, but you can’t take the Church out of the girl, right?”

  Kathy didn’t laugh. “Oh, you’d be surprised what you can do if you want to badly enough.”

  “I would?”’

  “You will.” Dead line. It was the last thing she ever said to me. In that life.

  “I’m Not There” took off like an epidemic. It was really like that. People got infected with it. I didn’t understand it, it was the world’s biggest downer, and yet it seemed like you couldn’t put on a radio without hearing it five times an hour. The world tour kept adding shows and dates, and it looked like she planned to spend the rest of her life touring and singing “I’m Not There.” Rock groups were fighting each other to open for her, and she couldn’t walk down a street in any city or town without getting mobbed.

  Still, the news about her was either very sparse or very controlled. What interviews she gave were enigmatic at best, and made her sound like a weirdo at worst. Which I guess she was, thanks to her parents.

  I thought about them a lot, wondered if they were touched by Kathy’s good fortune. The house always looked the same on my visits back to Blight City, and there was never anything about her parents or her hometown in the news about her. As if she had x-ed it all out of her life and reinvented herself. She wouldn’t have been the first.

  Ultimately, I couldn’t blame her. Some impulse made me drop into the chapel on campus and light a candle for both Kathy and me. Peace between us, I thought. Or maybe prayed is a better word for it. I hoped that when she called again—if she ever did—we’d be friends.

  My clock radio woke me the next morning with the news of her suicide.

  There was the usual controversy, lots of editorials about how fame, success, and money couldn’t buy happiness. Crowds holding vigils outside the concert hall where she was to have performed that night, prayer services, tributes by various of the roc
k aristocracy.

  I spent that day in a state of shock. Without thinking about it, I threw some clothes and books in a bag, went down to the bus station, and bought a ticket home. I was too much of a zombie to cope with anything more demanding than a bus. I couldn’t even register the passage of time—I got on the bus, then I got off the bus. Then I walked one step after another through a darkness until I saw the lights in the windows and I knew I was at the house.

  Kathy’s mother answered the door. She only looked at me and then turned away, disappearing into the kitchen. Barbara and Sarah were sitting on the couch in the living room. All these years and it was the same couch. Sarah looked as if someone had been threatening her with a beating; she was all but cowering while Barbara sat holding both her hands. Barbara was bigger than she’d been the last time I’d seen her, not fat, just husky, like an athlete.

  Barbara and I gazed at each other for a long moment. Then she flicked a glance at the staircase leading to the second floor. I nodded and went up.

  Her father was in her room, sitting on her bed with his hands on his knees. “What do you want?” he said.

  The room was just as it had been back when she had sung for me, a thousand years ago in this empty house. I went over to her desk and put on her radio.

  “ . . . vigil in London at the Odeon, as well as in cities across America,” a disc jockey was saying solemnly. “At a candlelight service in Manhattan, protest singer Bob Dylan performed a new song he called ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,’ which he says he wrote specifically for—”

  Kathy’s father was at the desk so quickly I flinched. He snapped the radio off. “Lady,” he sneered. “She was no lady. She was just another teenaged whore with hot pants. Like you. She took off because what she was getting here wasn’t enough for her, she had to have them by the dozens—”

  I backed away from him, looking around for something to defend myself with, in case he got violent.

  “I knew you would start bringing them around here for her. I know your kind, I know.”

  Even if there had been anything vaguely like a weapon handy, I don’t think I’d have known how to use it. I felt as if I were shrinking in the face of this creature passing for human. I turned and ran for the door.