Heartbreak Town

by Marsha Moyer

  "It got so I didn't know who to believe. On the one hand, I had a couple good records that did okay, got some good press.

  And the live shows always went great, lots of folks coming out and having a big time, rocking the joint, singing along.

  "But at the same time I felt like Arcadia was—I guess the word is 'disappointed.' Not that they said it, not in those words. There was just this sense of, of their not being in my corner anymore, of my having let them down. Because, for whatever reason—maybe I wore my hair parted wrong, maybe Tim McGraw or some other top dog put out a record the same day—I hadn't met their expectations. I went up there thinking I was gonna be the next big thing, and instead I turned out to be just—well, a pretty good songwriter with two good records and a few thousand fans."

  "But that's something, isn't it? Isn't that how you build a career?"

  "You'd think so, wouldn't you? That they'd take a chance on a new guy, bring him along, give him a chance to learn the ropes? And maybe in the old days, they used to. But it's not like that anymore. Now they want you to come roaring right out of the chute with the songs, the looks, the buzz… If you ain't got it, there's twenty guys right behind you who do, and one of them might be the one. It's not personal. Hell, it's not about you at all. It's about—" He pantomimed pulling the handle of an old-fashioned cash register.

  "But look how much you accomplished!" I said. "Don't you know how many folks try to do what you did and don't have one-tenth that kind of success?"

  "I didn't want one-tenth the success," he said. "You know me-—I'm an all-or-nothing kind of guy."

  "Why didn't you tell me?" I asked. "How was I supposed to know what was going on without your talking to me about it?

  "You remember when we were just starting out, you and me, how I used to tell you it didn't matter whether you had the guts to do something, just so long as you could play the part? That acting like a thing's a fact is the first step toward making it come true?"

  I nodded. "I just couldn't stand for you to know how far off track I'd gotten. Here I'd up and yanked you and Jude up by the roots and dragged you to Tennessee… It got so it was hard for me to be home after a while. Seeing you so sad, so homesick—don't try to tell me you weren't. Every time I walked in the door you had the phone glued to your ear, talking to your aunt or your sister-in-law. It just seemed like the harder I tried to figure out where I'd screwed up, the further from the truth I got."

  We stood quiet for a while, listening to the wind in the trees, the sound of a powerboat on the lake across the highway.

  "So you've decided to hang it all up?" I said. "To let go of everything you worked so hard to build up all these years?"

  "I just don't think I've got what it takes anymore."

  "Are you talking about the desire? Or the gift? Because the gift is still there, Ash. A bunch of assholes in suits can't take that away from you." He just shook his head and wouldn't look at me. "You know, this isn't like you at all. You've always been the most single-minded person I know. You set your sights on something and you went after it hell-bent. How can you let something like this knock you all the way off track? How did you get so cynical?"

  "Have you heard one goddamn thing I've said? I feel like Tony ripped my guts out and left me twisting in the wind! Don't you think I'm allowed to feel a little bit cynical?" He bit down hard on the word, spat it out.

  I didn't have an answer for him, though I knew what he meant. I remembered how I'd felt right after Mitchell died, how I'd gone through the early days of widowhood feeling like two people, like one of me was floating up near the ceiling and watching the other, a shadow of her old self, washing dishes, making beds, going through the motions down below. I'd felt it again when I'd left Ash in Nashville and come home to Mooney, waking up sometimes in the middle of the night with my head spinning, wondering, How did I get here? Where did my old, good life go? I never had Ash's grand ambition, but I knew how it was to feel adrift, all the usual touchstones gone.

  The front door of the restaurant opened, and a couple came out with their arms draped around each other's waists, their voices low and laughing as they made their way toward a blue sedan.

  I heard Ash's breath hitch, and without thinking twice about it, I turned toward him and put my hand to his face, cupping his jaw, feeling the chafe of week-old beard against my palm. I smelled the clean cotton of his T-shirt, the soap he'd showered with, his breath warm and whiskey-sweet, even though I hadn't seen him drink anything but beer.

  His palm slid down the length of my arm, brushed my hip. A car pulled into the parking lot, its headlights capturing us briefly in its glare, and we stepped apart. I felt dizzy, whether from longing or relief or the champagne I'd drunk earlier, I didn't know.

  "Don't ask me to go back in there, Lucy," he said. "I can't do it. I just can't."

  "Wait here," I told him. "I'll get Denny and Will."

  I woke that night in Jude's bed from a wisp of some forgotten dream, muddleheaded and cotton-mouthed, not sure at first where I was, and sat up, groping around in the dark, banging my hand against the nightstand as I reached for something, anything, familiar. It was Jude's smell that finally brought me back to earth, and I managed to locate the glowing face of the Big Ben clock beside his bed. A quarter to twelve; I'd only been asleep for an hour or so, after getting Denny and Will settled in my room. I'd drifted off still wearing my going-out dress, and could feel my hair tangled around my shoulders, eye makeup gluey under my eyes. I sat at the edge of the mattress for a minute, trying to remember what had woken me, but whatever it had been, real or imagined, it was gone.

  I got up, letting the stiffness work slowly out of my joints, and moved into the kitchen without bothering to put on a light. I turned on the tap and ran cold, clear well water into my hand, drinking from my cupped palm, patting the last drops against my cheeks. Outside the window, the moon was hidden behind gossamer clouds, the trailer a pale shape against the dark woods. The thought of Ash, footsteps away but lost to me in some way I couldn't understand, made my chest ache. Why, I wondered, didn't we fight harder to hold on to the things that mattered? We tossed away human beings as casually as we threw out old newspapers, replaced them just as casually with the next day's version. How did our heart's desire, along with everything else, get to be so disposable?

  Beyond the window, something moved. I blinked, lost it, then found it again—a ribbon of white, floating in the silvery light. My heart stuttered for a second. Just down the road from our house was an ancient cemetery, a tiny, fenced-in plot of tumbledown headstones more than a hundred years old, and even though Ash and Denny claimed to love it there, communing with spirits, the notion of one slipping over the fence and rambling around our property at midnight never failed to fill me with dread. It wasn't that I didn't believe in their right to coexist with the living; I just didn't particularly want to entertain one in my own backyard.

  I made my way on tiptoe down the back hall and eased open the door. From inside the screen, I held my breath as I watched the white-clad shape move to and fro across the yard. As my eyes adjusted to the dark and I recognized the shape, it crossed my mind that it might have been easier dealing with a ghost than with the specter of who my living, breathing husband had become.

  I pushed open the screen door and walked barefoot down the steps.

  "Ash."

  He turned at the sound of my voice, faceless above his white undershirt.

  "I'm lost." His voice seemed to come from some hollowed-out place inside him.

  "Lost?"

  "I want to go home."

  I moved closer, near enough to catch the smell of him, sweat and liquor and fear. "But you are home," I said. "This is where you come from. Right here."

  "I can't feel myself, Lucy." He stretched one hand in front of him. "See this? I know it's mine, my hand, right there. But it doesn't feel like it belongs to me."

  "Don't be silly. Of course it's yours."

  "Yeah? How do you know for sure? I
mean, did you ever wonder sometimes if maybe you died and you just don't know it? Maybe this is heaven, right here, right now."

  I stepped toward him, took his hand in both of mine. It felt cold and stiff, and something flipped over inside me, like what he'd just said, crazy as it sounded, might be true.

  "I don't know what to do. I want so bad to get back home, but I can't see the way. Everything's dark. It's so dark."

  He bowed his head over our clasped hands, pressed them to his face, his tears running between our fingers, into my palms. The only time I'd ever seen Ash cry was when Jude was born, and never like this, like something huge and terrifying was coming up out of him, wave after wave, knees bent, shoulders heaving.

  "Ash," I said. "Look at me." I took his face in my hands and tried to lift it, but his head, his pain, was too heavy. "Look at me."

  Slowly he straightened, throwing back his head. This face— eyes swollen, grooves as deep as plow tracks at the corners of his mouth—wasn't the Ash I d married, the handsome devil I d watched grinning into spotlights from stages all over the country. But what hit me hard wasn't the strangeness of it, or the awfulness, but the blunt, unexpected truth, the realization that I was seeing past the surface to the real Ash, one I knew in some deep and unexplainable part of me, in my blood and my bones.

  I looked into his eyes and felt something opening up in me, a channel of light, blooming in my chest and traveling down my spine, into my arms and legs, fingers and toes. He stretched out his hands toward me the way a child might reach for something irresistible, magical. Could he see it, the light in me? His hands settled lightly on my hips, and I slid my arms around his waist and let him pull me close, wrapping his arms around me as I pressed my face against his throat, breathing in the scent of him, feeling his breath in my hair.

  Then my arms were around his neck and I raised my face to his and he was kissing me and I was kissing him back, our mouths closed at first and then open, tongues twining and teeth clacking against each other's as what had been forgotten became familiar again. I wasn't sure I trusted myself, if what I was feeling was pity or forgiveness or the pure intoxication of skin on skin.

  We pulled out of the kiss for a second, looked at each other, then fell back into it, greedily this time, like conspirators who know exactly what they're up against, what's at stake. He drew me against him, the full length of our bodies pressed thigh to thigh as he ran his hands down my back in my dress, over my hips and my arms, his pelvis arched hard against mine. He seemed breakable, I thought, the bones in his face sharp, shoulder blades jutting beneath the taut casing of his skin. But the core of him felt as real, as solid, as it ever had. Ash had his own convoluted needs, things that were greater and part of a wider world than I could ever hope to understand. But this, for me, was the center of the universe. How had I forgotten that? How could I have let it go?

  We stumbled backward in a clumsy lockstep, landing against the side of the pickup, my back against the wheel well and the hem of my dress rucked up over my hips as Ash leaned into me with all his weight and I pushed against him with all of mine. The scrape of his beard against my face and my neck was raw and thrilling, the familiar coarseness of his palms and calloused fingertips as he ran them up the insides of my thighs. A thousand warring thoughts flew through my mind, but none of them was able to penetrate the web of pure desire that spun itself around us, a tight-woven lattice of limbs and mouths, heat and breath, my legs coiling around Ash's hips as he hoisted me into his arms and carried me, in a matter of seconds, up the cinder blocks to the trailer, through the front door, and down the hall to the bedroom.

  We fell onto the bare mattress, reaching inside clothes to wrangle with hooks and zippers. I was conscious of nothing but urgency, momentum, that to lose it would break the spell, and I willed myself to stay inside the feeling, to let go and take what I needed, to take Ash back to me. I managed finally to get my dress over my head, and lay back in bra and panties against the mattress as Ash moved over me, running his mouth from my jaw to my collarbone and the tops of my breasts, lifting them in his palms. With one thumb he hooked a bra strap off my shoulder and rolled the nipple free of its cup, bending to touch its hard tip with his tongue, sending a bolt of electricity through all my nerve endings; I made an animal sound deep in my throat, and pulled his head to me with both hands, holding it there, the ends of his hair sweeping my breasts as he nipped and sucked. It had been more months than I could count since Ash and I had made love, and I couldn't even remember the last time we'd been together this way, without any remnants of our messy history working its way in, just giving ourselves over to sensation, our bodies meshing together like ghost dancers who'd been doing this particular two-step since the beginning of time.

  He sat up to skin his T-shirt over his head and peel off his jeans, then lay back beside me. I bent over him, kissing my way from his chest to his stomach, letting my hands roam his skin the way I had the first time I'd ever touched him, when, after fourteen years of marriage to a shy and modest man, such brazen nakedness was still a marvel to me.

  He reached for me and hoisted me over him to straddle him, his hips arching under me, against the thin membrane of my panties. I sat up tall, tossing back my head, unhooking my bra and letting it drop beside the mattress. Pewter light streamed through the window, and in it I saw myself, breasts thrust out proudly, my hair falling loose around my shoulders and down my back. I looked, I thought, like some Nordic goddess on the prow of a ship. The thought made me laugh out of pure, foolish joy.

  "What?" Ash asked, looking up at me.

  "Juicy Lucy," I said, and laughed again at finding what I'd thought was a memory instead still real and alive, just waiting to be resurrected.

  He smiled and slipped one finger, then another, inside the elastic of my panties, into the wet warmth there. "Ah," he murmured, pulling my face back to his with his free hand. And he kissed me again, his tongue in my mouth, his fingers moving inside me with the rhythm of his hips, gently at first, then more determined.

  "Ash," I whispered, pulling back. "Wait, we— This isn't going to work."

  "Baby, everything's working just exactly the way God meant it to."

  "You know what I'm talking about."

  He groaned, his head dropping back against the mattress. "Look, they gave me every test in the book when I checked into rehab. I'm as clean as a whistle, I swear."

  "It's not that," I said. "It's—I don't want to get pregnant. We can't take the chance."

  He sighed and rolled out from under me, off the mattress and onto the floor. A lump rose in my throat as I stared at the hard knobs of his spine, the beautiful twin dimples in his lower back as he knelt facing the window in a wash of light. I knew in my head that regret was a waste of time, but my heart wanted nothing so much but to go back, back before marriage and Jude and Nashville, to when what Ash and I needed from each other was so straightforward, the future nothing but a sweet, diaphanous weave of possibility. This, when you got right down to it, was the big difference between us; I liked my dreams safely contained, like lightning bugs in a Mason jar, where I could sit and muse through the glass on their teasing, winking light, whereas Ash never could wait to unscrew the lid on that jar, turning his dreams loose in the world, running after them full tilt as they flew off into the night. How had I let myself believe that we could just pick up where we'd left off years before, leaving our troubles like muddy boots at the door? No matter how bad we wanted to believe it or how hard we tried, we weren't those people anymore.

  Then he turned back toward me, a small cardboard box lying across his outstretched palm. I knew what Trojans were, even if the last time I'd seen one had been in the backseat of Tommy Rupp's Firebird when I was sixteen. But if Ash was living the whistle-clean life he claimed, what was he doing with these?

  "Now, don't go getting all bent out of shape on me. I bought these the other night at the Pak 'n' Sak. After the crawfish boil at Dove's, when you asked me to follow you home. Look here," he
said, tearing open the box and removing one of the foil-wrapped packets. "It's got your name on it. See?" He held it up. "'Exclusive property of Lucy Hatch. Use by any unlicensed party is strictly prohibited.'"

  "Farrell," I said, snatching the packet from his hand. "Speaking of licenses, my name is Farrell."

  "Believe me, I haven't forgotten."

  "You're too much, you know that?" I said as he sprawled beside me on the mattress. "I don't know what I'm doing with the likes of you."

  "Yeah, you do," Ash said, sliding down the length of me. He touched his lips lightly to my right instep, then ran his beard up the inside of the corresponding calf, knee, thigh. "You know exactly what you're doing."

  It was everything I remembered and so much I'd forgotten, a path we'd traveled who knew how many times together over the years. We seemed to keep losing, then finding, then losing our rhythm again, like a radio that keeps going in and out of tune. I could still recall the song, though, that was the main thing; it still played in me with a steady beat as I pulled him down on top of me. I bit the inside of my lip, tasting blood and salt as Ash thrust himself inside me, too quick, the angle wrong at first, painful. He heard me gasp and lifted his head, but I clasped my legs around his hips, pushing myself upward against him like I could climb right through him, and with a small, sudden cry he slid deeply and fully into me, our pelvic bones grinding against each other's like two flints trying to make a flame.

  We raked at each other's bodies, bit and tasted each other's flesh, breaking skin, leaving marks. He rolled onto his back, pulling me on top of him, plunging up into me as I rose and fell to meet him, throwing back my hair as I sat back on my heels and watched us move together in the gauzy light. My climax felt like a slippery thing, darting close and then away again, just out of reach as Ash moved beneath me in a single-minded rhythm, his eyes fixed on mine, black and burning. It scared me a little, the look in his eyes, the way our bodies banged and bruised together. The air was ripe with our sweat and breath, mingled with those of all the strangers whose lives had played out before us between these walls. How many people had done just what we were doing, in this sad little room? How much love and rage and pent-up hunger had been spilled out on this broken-down mattress? It seemed fitting, somehow, that this was how Ash and I would find each other again, much like the way we'd come together the first time, in a narrow iron bed in a tiny rent house, the springs sagging and the floorboards groaning underneath us at the slightest motion. We'd had no idea why we were doing what we were doing then, and we had no idea now—only that it had been and still seemed necessary, a way to save our own lives.