Contents
Cover
ONE: Allegro
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
26. 27. 28. 29.
TWO: Adagio
30. 31. 32. 33. 34.
35. 36. 37. 38. 39.
40. 41. 42. 43. 44.
45. 46. 47. 48.
THREE: Scherzo
49. 50. 51. 52. 53.
54. 55. 56. 57. 58.
59. 60. 61. 62. 63.
64. 65. 66. 67. 68.
69. 70. 71. 72. 73.
74.
FOUR: Rondo
75. 76. 77. 78. 79.
80. 81. 82. 83. 84.
85. 86. 87. 88. 89.
90. 91. 92. 93. 94.
95. 96. 97. 98. 99.
100. 101.
About the Author
About Nine Volt Heart
Acknowledgments
Copyright
From Jugum Press
About Nine Volt Heart
He said, “I love you.” She said, “You don’t even know the real me.” He said, “Great title for a song. Key of G? Can you sing the high parts? Close harmony?”
Two musicians meet by accident in Seattle: Jason, the now infamous singer-songwriter, and Susi, a music teacher whose previous life came off the rails. Quickly their separate worlds and professional desires become entwined in unexpected ways.
Nine Volt Heart takes you on a roller-coaster ride through the backstreets of Seattle, where tourists never go. Where both karma and sunshine can be so unpredictable in April.
~
Reviewers say …
Get some sleep aids before you start reading Nine Volt Heart, Annie Pearson’s riveting, rock music romance about unlikely lovers and a cyber-stalker in Seattle's indie music scene.
— Emily Warn, Shadow Architect
ONE: Allegro
1 ~ “Lonesome Whistle”
JASON
SEATTLE LURKED JUST OUTSIDE the doors of my perception, waiting to beat me with a stick.
In better times, flying into Seattle felt like stepping into a safe haven to escape a storm. To start, to escape jet lag, I always run from Leschi to Seward Park, taking the dirt path by the water. After that, my compadre Ian drags me out to play music in that Fremont after-hours basement club, and then we scarf down huevos rancheros at The 5 Point Cafe with wasted loners left from the night before and baristas preparing for their morning shifts. Then I read while rain pings the windows.
“Mr. Taylor?” The flight attendant had a London accent, fluting two notes above Middle C. “I hate to wake you, but we’re about to land.”
I wasn’t sleeping, just listening to Hank Williams with my eyes closed. Gotta feelin’ called the blu-ues—
“Thanks, Shannon. I appreciate it.”
“How did you know my name?” Her head tilted in inquiry as I opened my eyes.
“You were kind to me when I flew the other direction last fall.”
She smiled, a genuine rather than professional smile. “I remember that you had a frightful head cold then, and we were short of vegetarian meals.” She gestured for me to return my seat to the fully upright and locked position. “Do you require an escort at the gate?”
“No, I don’t need anything special. I’m meeting a driver at baggage pickup. Thank you, though.”
“Of course, Mr. Taylor.” She hesitated. “We used to come hear Stoneway play when I was an exchange student. It was the best of times.”
“Really? Nice.” I ran the math in my head. Seven years ago? Nine? “It was the best of times for me, too.”
As I flipped open the window shade to see how close we were to SeaTac, she blurted, “I don’t believe what they say,” and then covered her mouth, embarrassed.
I whispered, “Thank you. It isn’t true.”
We swooped over the patchwork of cozy homes built for Boeing engineers, Pony League ball fields, and miniature glacier-carved lakes littered with rowboats and sailboards, the plane’s wing flaps unfolded. I felt my stomach knot. Alder and cottonwood trees waved fingers of fresh green, either beckoning or scolding. Puget Sound glittered in the west, reflecting the afternoon April sun. When I’d left this town, big-leaf maples were shedding dead leaves on muddied side-streets and the Sound sloshed like molten lead between Elliott Bay and the Kitsap Peninsula. As BA0049 touched down, the air whistled and screamed, resisting the plane’s entry. Gotta feelin’ called trepidation, weighing down deep in my soul.
Seattle, karma lurking, waited to beat on me, body and mind.
Tail winds deposited us at SeaTac twenty minutes early and, for what must be the first time in the twenty-first century, we taxied directly to the gate, as if the plane couldn’t wait to toss me out.
Then I couldn’t raise anyone by phone to find my ride. I loitered on the airfield side of the security gates.
Can’t find my own way back home.
“Um, hi, do you mind signing this? My mom is a big fan.”
—buying peanuts to tide me till dinner—
“Are you Jason Taylor? I bet my buddy twenty bucks it’s you.”
—brushing my teeth in the john—
“Asshole!”
—having aural hallucinations, perhaps.
Too bad coming back here won’t be like meeting that baritone folkie in a Dublin pub, the one who played Celtic punk on a cittern. He declared I was the very likeness of his lost brother and made his city home for us during the week that Ian and I performed there. Or the luthier in London with a shop near my Pimlico hotel, who let me watch him work for three days, talking up a storm about tonewoods and fretboards, and who showed me how to do abalone inlays and then invited me home to eat bangers-and-mash with his wife (who went to a great deal of trouble with an apple-betty when she discovered I couldn’t eat the sausages).
Here, in the town where I was born, if your friends don’t like you anymore, they won’t pretend they do.
2 ~ “Un Bel Di”
SUSI
“MISS NEVILLE! MISS NEVILLE!”
Someone called my name as bags crashed down the carrel, flapping bar-coded tags for NWA33 (Schiphol, if I recall) and BA0049 (from Heathrow, I was certain). One suitcase flaunted a tag from a previous flight to FNO. Rome Fiumicino Airport. In former times, I rushed through SeaTac, excited because I’d be walking into FNO fifteen hours later. Now—
The only woman in the line, I stood amidst a phalanx of limo drivers, each a foot taller and double my weight, all of us holding up placards to find strangers. They were doing a job. I was seeking my best friend’s cousin. I needed him to come change the course of my life.
While there was still time.
“Miss Neville!”
Craning to peek around the flank of fullback chauffeurs surrounding me, I spied a blond girl waving from the in-coming escalator.
Ashley, a second soprano from fourth-period choir. Her mother had insisted that I was forcing her daughter to sing alto just because the choir had too many sopranos. She believed in her heart that Ashley was born a soprano. I failed to convince the woman that I hadn’t compromised artistic values, only done what was right for Ashley. Then the principal summoned me, and I failed to prevent bureaucratic compromises. So Ashley sings second soprano, out of her register. Now choir isn’t fun for her; it’s just work at which she cannot excel. Fortunately, Ashley wants to be an actress, not a singer. Or maybe an attorney working for social justice. Or the corporate art agent for Microsoft.
“There’s tons of time to find my calling and pursue my dreams,” she said in our midterm counseling session.
Tons of time for some people, I thought, but did not say.
As other people’s baggage creaked along the conveyor, Ashley breathlessly described spring break in Amsterdam. Out of the last eight days, she’d spent thirty hours on planes and in airports.
“Schiphol is so far out!” she said, her speaking voice in appropriate range. It took me a second to realize that she was not referring to how far the airport is from the city. “It’s like shopping heaven. I could live there. You can find everything that’s on Kalverstraat without tripping on those wobbly cobblestone streets.”
Ashley’s parents appeared, and I thrust the placard with Jason’s name behind my back while we shook hands. Ashley’s parents also towered over me, but I’m five-foot-four, so I’m used to that. They were too engaged in fetching their child to attend to her choir teacher, which was fine. At the school where I teach, people have money.
I don’t, but I’m used to that. Now.
As much as I’ve learned to love teaching in the past year, I need to be doing more: reaching deeper, extending instruction and opportunity beyond the confines of a high school curriculum, even beyond what I can do at Prescott, the liberal arts academy where I teach.
Drivers were beginning to depart with their charges. The two nearest to me resumed their discussion of the Mariner lineup. It was April, after all, so hope springs once more.
“Will the Mariners ever again go one sixteen and forty-six for the season?” I asked the driver standing next to me, just to be friendly.
“How old were you that season? Five?” another driver asked, teasing.
“That’s blatant ageism. There ought to be a law,” I said, which made him laugh. His guess was almost in the ballpark, and I look uncommonly young for my age if viewed under poor light. Up close though, people can see the damage done. If I’d never kidded myself into believing I was in love, that damage would not have occurred. I wouldn’t be standing here, stuck in Seattle. I’d be headed for FNO and another adventure.
My chauffeur-companions all departed, faring better than me, and a new battalion of drivers appeared, like a changing of the guard. I shifted from foot to foot, after an eon of waiting for the archmagus to appear who would help usher in a new era.
I’m Susi Neville, I would say. My life is in your hands.
No, I was feeling too nervous about meeting him and needing his help, and I’m too shy to say things like that these days. Maybe I’d just smile and say how do you do, as one is taught in deportment classes. I’d had good teachers, and I believe in the value of solid teaching. Everything I needed to know to succeed, I’d learned in school or from strong tutors.
Up until that bad break, two years ago.
With time and boredom, my nervousness receded and I sank into daydreams as people greeted each other and hauled away their baggage. I’d spent spring break in my garden and working on the new curriculum, so I felt happy—happier than any time in the last couple of years. The weather was good, so I’d sifted rocks out of a new patch of soil and turned over the compost pile. I took my father to see Tartuffe at Seattle U and watched him laugh till he cried. I’d polished the curriculum outline and grant request to be sent to that arts foundation. In my mind, the proposal was now burnished so that it shined like a semiprecious stone—say, aventurine, the stone that’s supposed to calm a troubled spirit.
3 ~ “We Can Talk”
JASON
“WE’LL DO OUR BEST, Mr. Taylor. Ninety-nine percent of the time, we deliver straying luggage within twenty-four hours.”
Since my bags resisted returning to Seattle, there was nothing to do while waiting but get back to business, so I again tried to call Toby. He picked up on the third ring, and I plunged right into begging.
“Come back to Seattle, Toby. Stoneway needs your mandolin.”
“Jason, I can’t hear you. Are you on a cell phone in a tube station again?”
“I’m at SeaTac Lost Baggage. They made me check that National Steel guitar of Uncle Beau’s. Then they lost it.”
“You’re calling me to complain?”
“No, Toby. We need to talk about our recording schedule.”
“Call back later when it’s more private.”
“What’s private anymore, Toby? In the next hour you can check the Internet to learn what I ate and how many times I used the john on the flight from London. I’ve been hit on four times since the plane landed.”
“Why don’t you just stay out of public like I do?”
“That’s what I tried to do all winter.”
“You went to the Grammy Awards with your ex-wife. Why the hell would you want to be caught on camera accepting an award for Woman at the Well?”
“My attorney thought I should go, to limit what Dominique says about me in interviews.”
“Karl makes you date your own personal Jezebel?”
“Mostly I don’t date at all. Contrary to the gossip on the Internet, I’m the indie American Morrissey. Celibate as a stone.”
“Our fans don’t care about Dominique’s lies. They, like me, can’t tolerate country schmaltz like Woman at the Well, especially if it’s supposed to be Stoneway’s music. Too bad your own personal Yoko Ono had to screw up our music.”
“It was good music when we first recorded it.” I looked over at the baggage clerk, who appeared to be absorbed in studying her computer screen rather than listening to Toby chastise me.
Toby’s voice crackled over the cell connection. “Thing is, Yoko never jilted John for George Martin.”
“Dominique wanted to cross over to mainstream, and she used Ephraim Vance to do it.” That didn’t hurt my feelings. She had already finished using me. “A country diva needs a producer more than she needs a guitarist.” I prepared to admit what bugged me most. “‘I never should have been in love.’”
“The wake-up call came when Dominique started whining that our music is too ‘alternative.’”
“Thanks for the beating, Toby. I get the same poke in the eye with a sharp stick every time I'm online.”
“Crap, man, it burns my ass that she assaulted your soul and battered the band along the way. Have you seen her new video? Lap-dancing to your solo guitar in expensive panties.”
“Listen, Toby. Ian and I worked together all winter. You’ll join us again—right, amigo? Hold on, I have to give them Ian’s address so they can send my bags over. If they ever find them.”
“Jason, hang up and call me back.”
“No, Toby. I’ve been calling you for two weeks. Will you be in Seattle by Monday?”
“Are you asking me or the lady at Lost Baggage?”
“Come on, Toby. Our contract requires one more album. If we don’t have it by early June, we’ll all pay through the nose.”
“My name will not appear on another album with Dominique. Get one of those Nashville studio guys to play and let her smother it with boring vocals in the final production.”
“She won’t be there, Toby. Karl fixed it so we just lay down tracks and send them to Ephraim. We can do what we want once we deliver these tracks. When Ian and I played in Europe this winter, something new happened. You’ll like it. We need you back.”
“Ian is closer to you than your own shadow. He’ll always do what you want. Did you add back the twang and buzz? Who’s counting beats?”
“We have buzz. And volume. But you are the twang, Toby. I’m checking out a possible drummer tonight.”
“No Hollywood strings with Phil Specter wannabes? Don’t let Ephraim drown our music with the Dragon Lady’s crappy computer-enhanced vocals until it sucks so bad it blows.”
“We will produce ourselves, like we used to.”
“No divas with egos bigger than the Mississippi at flood time?”
“Karl promises to keep her away, Toby.”
“And you—no falling for divas who play you for a sucker later?”
“My uncle Beau said every man fucks himself at least once.” The woman at Lost Bags raised her eyebrows. I stepped further away.
Toby said, “Beau was stating common wis
dom, not suggesting your next action.”
“I’m not the only guy in the world who found out he didn’t know the person he married. I woke up one morning and she was someone else. Angry all the time, unpredictable. Hating my work, hating me.”
“Jason, you have never been with a woman who could work at your level. No divas this time, OK?”
“If you check the fan blogs, my level is judged to be pretty low. Toby, I got us into this nightmare and I’ll get us out. My attorney—”
“Screw that, man. Karl can’t save you out in the wild. Where are we recording? Temple Bell?”
“Yes, and rehearsing at Ian and Cynthia’s house. I’ll be sleeping in their basement for the duration.”
“Not at your place on the water?”
“That’s still tied up in court like everything else—except my guitars, which the effing Port of Seattle is holding hostage.”
“OK, I’ll see you on Monday. But if you can’t deliver twang and buzz, I’m heading right back to Mendocino.”
“I owe you, Toby. Thanks for giving me another chance.”
“Could never have done otherwise. I love you like a brother. Me and Ian, we’ll keep you safe. Just call us if you start thinking you’re in love.”
“I’m not going anywhere but the studio and Ian’s basement. What trouble can I possibly get into?”
4 ~ “Where Shall I Go?”
SUSI
FRUSTRATED, I SWIPED MY card in the slot in the phone booth and punched the number for that hotel in New York. “It’s Susi Neville,” I said to the voice that answered in Angelia’s room.
Reflected in the phone’s chrome plating, my face seemed pale and doleful. I hate looking pathetic.
“Pronto.” Angelia always says this, though she’s never lived in Italy.
“I can’t find Jason.”
“Where are you calling from, Susi?”
“A phone booth at SeaTac. I had him paged six times in the last two hours. How am I supposed to find him?”
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