Nine Volt Heart

by Annie Pearson

  “Seven years.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Excellent choice of words for the ending, if not the rest of the time.”

  “What would be the word for that, Susi?”

  “Boring. Like this conversation. Let’s climb up the bank and walk on the train tracks.”

  It was cold enough on the beach that we couldn’t idle around. At the end of the sand spit, I led him up through the rocks to the train tracks. At one point, he slipped and nearly collided with me before grabbing a branch to stop himself. His knee touched me, however. As we walked along the railroad tracks, he took a harmonica from his pocket and played, bending notes like the old blues gentlemen on my father’s recordings.

  “You play a song,” he said, handing me the harmonica.

  “Oh, I couldn’t.”

  “You’re a music teacher. Of course you can. You’re just lazy.”

  I didn’t want to put my mouth where his had been. He thrust it on me. All I could think of was a cowboy song my father taught me years ago. Something I could play automatically, while I removed my mind from the wetness where he had—

  Oh damn. I so don’t want to think that way about him.

  He followed me up the track, balancing as we walked along one rail. A quarter-mile along, we could feel the vibration of a north-bound train.

  “Jason, there’s a train coming.”

  “We have lots of time.” He grabbed my hand, pulling me alongside him as he hopped the ties.

  “No, we don’t.”

  He delayed as much as possible, teasing me. Since I have a brother, I knew that showing impatience or fear would only make him tease more. As the train approached, we were far too close for my comfort.

  “I will save you,” he said, leaping off the tracks with me in his arms, dragging us both into a pile of boulders and holding me much too close while the train thundered past, so close that my ear against his chest heard the rattle of the train as if it were his heartbeat. He kept us there while the echo of the train faded as it made its way to Canada or Montana or wherever it was headed.

  When I stirred, pressing against his chest so I could stand up, he pressed back, holding me down briefly. Then he released me. When I stood and dusted my jeans, I stumbled on a rock, falling against him. His hands lingered as he righted me, steadying me with his arms, breathing in my ear, the sound a rasp that vibrated with the last echoes of the departing train.

  We clambered down the boulders to the beach, kicking at the flotsam along the tide line, picking up limpet shells.

  “What used to be important, Susi? What’s important now?”

  “Music, as an answer to both. Only then it was classical. Americana and older influences are new to me.”

  “Why does it not surprise me that what’s old is new to you? What dragged you away from Schubert and Puccini?”

  “My dad needed me to help go through his things when he moved to assisted living—he’s older and has arthritis. While I worked, he dragged me through graduate-level studies in folk music. He taught me guitar, though he couldn’t make more of me than a Sixties folkie with a five-chord repertoire. I used his impromptu lectures while creating the new curriculum for this year’s classes. And for the Institute.”

  However, my father’s greatest success was to apply roots music as therapy, moving my mental focus away from grief. When I think about it, I can feel Dad’s hand guiding mine, wrapped around the neck of that old guitar to show me the fingerings. That’s what I understand about “healing touch.” I know it must have cost him, as much as arthritis pains him, to have showed me how to feel music in your fingers, after the old ways of feeling music were lost.

  “Susi absorbs music through her fingers as well as her ears. That’s a good thing,” Jason said.

  We found the sandy beach deserted and, without discussing it, hunkered down in a driftwood shelter and listened to the water and another train echoing across the Sound.

  “The wind in the sea grass,” he murmured near my ear, making an inventory of everything we could hear. Surf birds. A murder of crows descending in late afternoon into the trees in the hills above the beach.

  Then he said, “How long, Susi?”

  “Since when?”

  “Since you sat beside a man like this?”

  “More than two years.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “I was unhappy. It’s better to finish that kind of business alone.”

  “Are you still unhappy, Susi?”

  “No. I didn’t realize it until a little while ago, but no, I’m not unhappy anymore. I rather like my life now.”

  “Still staying alone? Though that’s the same tack I took. I’ve been trying to get over feeling betrayed—you must know that about me, Susi.”

  “I don’t actually. We agreed that we’re strangers, right?”

  He grinned, and we listened to echoes across the Sound until he began singing that song from Anchor’s Away.

  “‘If you knew Susie, like I know Susie, oh, oh—’”

  “Only my brother can sing that song to me. You must stop now.”

  “I was planning to.” He tossed pebbles toward the water. “I want to stop doing what I did all last year. I intend to follow my own ideas about music, wherever it takes me.”

  “Give up your current work?”

  “I have to. Last year’s work just left me feeling like I had sold out to the corporations and prostituted myself.”

  “How will you live?”

  “I can afford to do what I want, if I’m careful about it.”

  “That must be nice.” I hoped my voice didn’t hold any bitterness.

  “I have to be immersed in creative work, or I get so depressed that you have to scrape me off the floor,” he said. “Now I know exactly what music I want to make.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “If it were a painting, it would be by Caravaggio.”

  “Dark and violent?”

  “No. Why is that what everyone thinks? I mean illuminating common people, so they become like gods. Animated, so you see movement, even in the shadows.”

  As he spoke, his fingers lingered along the lines of my face, brushing my cheek with his fingertips.

  “I wish you would let me kiss you, Susi.”

  I don’t believe that my longing carried me out to sea. I’m certain that I gave him a secret sign of assent when I felt his hand hovering over mine, as if the energy from his palms would levitate me like a magician’s assistant. He was so near that I could smell that scent of man caught amid the web of hairs at his throat. It might be that the irresistible pull of my own longing is what drew his face closer to mine. Yet it was he who kissed me. So lightly at first that it felt the same as his breath on my lips, a ghost, an echo that carried across the water from far away. He traced the edges of my lips with his own and lingered over my eyelids. Then he nipped at my lower lip, urging my mouth open and his tongue slipped inside, the hard point of it pressing against the tip of mine, as he brought me closer, wrapping me in an embrace. I could feel the heat radiating from his hands, even with my shirt between his hot palm and my skin.

  We kissed for a thousand years, while nations rose, struggled, and fell again, and we came to live in a more philosophical era, where sin faded from concern, and we forgot about remorse and caution. With each new breath, I slid down from the driftwood bench, into the cold sand with his hip against mine. I had a singular longing, to feel his weight on top of me, as if it would answer the riddle of why we are here on this earth and what it all means.

  He whispered, and the rasp of his breath fell on my ear like music, or affection. “Susi, you are the most incredible creature on God’s earth.”

  Then he shifted us both in the sand, settling his weight against me. Through both his layer of denim and mine, I could feel him throbbing, leading me to wiggle against him. He moved his hand up under my shirt, responding to my unspoken wishes, and his hand cupped my breast, gently pressing.
/>   “This feels like it wants to be more,” he murmured, “but you have to say so. Tell me you want me to touch you.”

  The rational world clattered down around me, like the claxon of a boat’s horn, shattering across the water. He was asking me to say aloud what I wanted. However, it was desire like this that led to the destruction of my old world.

  “Please,” I said. I took two breaths, to say what I must. “No. Please don’t. Please stop.”

  He rolled off me and sat back against our driftwood shelter, shaking his hair, as if to clear his head. I sat up beside him, trying to breathe, feeling a hideous need to explain myself.

  “I got married for the wrong reasons. I still don’t trust my judgment.”

  He didn’t answer. I felt a hideous need to fill the silence.

  “Can we pretend this didn’t happen?”

  “All right, Susi. We’ll pretend I’m a frog, and whenever you’re ready, you can kiss me.”

  “I’ve heard what you’re like, Jason, and I don’t want that.”

  “My reputation is vastly exaggerated.”

  “I want your friendship much more than I want—that.”

  “My friendship?”

  “It will be embarrassing when we see each other later if we just go on in the way they say you do. We’re having a good time together. Can’t we continue as friends?”

  “I can if you can.” He stood up. “I’m hungry. Can we get food before we go to this concert?”

  And that is the story of my sinful beach fling at the end of spring break.

  17 ~ “I Ain’t Ever Satisfied”

  JASON

  “STOP AT FRED MEYERS, SUSI, so I can get clothes for tonight. I can’t wear these everywhere. Your rich friends will think I’m a loser.”

  “I’m going to wait in the car.”

  The cashier and three young women in the store recognized me, but this was Fremont, and everyone was nice about it. I signed for one of the women who wanted my autograph—it was a receipt for a Fleet Foxes CD, so I’m not sure what she will tell her kids twenty years from now.

  When I joined Susi again, Shostakovich played on the car radio for spring time cheer, and she didn’t have anything to say on the ride back to her house, where she made yakisoba with tofu, snowpeas, and shiitake mushrooms while I changed. Then she left me to eat my noodles alone while she changed.

  I went to the trouble of getting a tie when I was in Fred’s, ripping black jeans and a black shirt off the hangers and sprinting for the cashier, thinking I would look respectable enough for Seattle, though I wasn’t sure what would make me look respectable enough to be seen with Susi. I had met the two versions of the Brooks Brothers girl, the one in jeans and the one dressed for success, and I had seen the compact athlete in damp t-shirt. Now I met the artist that her classical training had created, wearing a long black sheath with a high turtleneck. The sole ornament she affected was a wide cinch belt, so it looked like I was escorting the second violinist or the harpist.

  By this time, I was getting used to Susi taking me wherever she wanted me to go—to Benaroya Hall for Mozart’s Requiem in this case, where we swapped roles and I could forget all the paranoia I have about being recognized. When we came into the hall, everyone knew Susi, starting with the gentlemen taking tickets at the door. The woman selling annual subscriptions called Susi’s name and came over to speak with her. Same story with the ponytailed guy tending the wine bar beneath the giant Rauschenberg mural. Susi refused my offer to buy her a glass of wine, and I don’t drink, so we both had seltzer water and walked up to the second-tier gallery to wait for Randolph. An older woman dressed in dark green linen came over, giving Susi a hug and kissing her cheek.

  “I saw your father just the other day, Susi. He said you were doing so much better. It’s so nice to see you out and about again.”

  Susi had the knack some people do of turning a conversation around on the spot, and in a flash she had the woman talking about her dog and her grandchildren. When the woman drifted away, Susi said, “I have something in my eye. Wait for me here,” and she handed me her drink and departed down the hall.

  “Cute girl,” a voice breathed in my ear. “Does she sing?”

  “Ephraim.”

  He looks like Bruno Ganz as the angel in Wings of Desire, in black silk and leather trench coat, his hair pulled into a tight ponytail. He’s ten years older than me and likes to lord the extra years as being meaningful.

  “The same. This gives us a great opportunity to chat, Jason.”

  “No, it just proves my luck still sucks. Every time I turn around I run into you or hear from you.”

  “It’s because our fates are bound together.”

  “Is Dominique here?”

  “She’s in the women’s room with your girlfriend.”

  “Oh geez. Say what you want, Ephraim. You will, no matter how I try to dodge it. It can’t be good, or Karl would have already told me.”

  “All I want from you, Jason, is a small set of reassurances.”

  “I can offer a profound assurance that I’m still pissed off about what you did to my music.”

  “I won’t forget that. The situation will not occur again if you stay and complete the work yourself this time. You were supposed to deliver last month. I pulled every trick I could to delay and still get a new album in stores this summer.”

  “Thank you. You are such a great friend.”

  “Jason, reassure me that you are professionally committed. Otherwise, there is no use holding an expensive charade. I will just work in a friendly way with Karl on how you pay your way out of the contract. And I will make sure no major label ever gambles on you again.”

  “I’m here to do the work, and I’m committed to deliver what I owe, as quickly as possible.”

  “Beautiful. And you will do all the work necessary to make this next album as successful as the last.”

  I wanted to curl into a ball and rock like a child until I felt safe.

  “Jason, you need to do the interviews, make the videos, and appear in public. Sixty or eighty minutes of tracks aren’t much better than dead air if you won’t promote it.”

  “You have the beautiful Dominique to do that. She loves it. Point a camera or a microphone in her direction, and she’ll get you all the publicity you could want from an artist.”

  “For true success, you need to do the same, Jason.”

  “Her last video was quite popular.”

  “That isn’t the video that first sold people on Woman at the Well. It was the earlier concert videos that you did—both your soulful acoustic number and that rocking piece with the whole band. Best live-action video of the year.”

  “Second place only.”

  “You’re quite photogenic, Jason. The camera loves you, and women of all ages appreciate it. At least women over seventeen. Younger girls find you too masculine, but our market studies show that men aren’t put off by your brand of masculinity. Albion Records couldn’t hope for a product that tests better in both markets.”

  “You did a market study on my effing face? I’m a product?”

  “You’ve been in the business too long to be naïve about this.”

  “OK. Your request for small assurances is proving to be a real bundle. Let’s see if I have it: turn in a marketable album.”

  “On time. Finished tracks no later than the second of June.”

  “I can do that.”

  “You are one of the few in the industry who could turn tracks around that fast, Jason. I’ve got production and distribution lined up to get to market in support of your effort.”

  “Do radio, TV, and video, with my best side turned toward the camera.”

  “With your face, you don’t have to worry about the best side.”

  “I can tell where the rest of this is headed. Tour. I have to play on stage with Dominique.”

  “Even you have to admit that logic is inescapable. The first date is June twenty-seventh in L.A. I gave Karl a list of all
dates yesterday.”

  “Escaping Dominique is all I care about, Ephraim. You can’t force me back into everyday life with her.”

  “After you finish rehearsing for the road, you’ll see her only a couple of hours every second or third day. The monitors and rest of the stage gear should help you keep a distance.”

  “What else, Ephraim? If you’re going to wrap your hands around my balls and squeeze, let’s get done with it.”

  “Sign another contract to record with me.”

  “Are you insane? After I get Dominique to let go of me, I won’t come near either of you.”

  “Not with Dominique. She needs to find her own band. It is too hard to adapt your material to her voice. Just you. I want you and whatever musicians are working with you. Ian, I assume, will never go away. I hope Toby will stay. Who else have you gathered?”

  “I can’t believe your effing gall, Ephraim. I spent the winter approving more than a million dollars in charge-backs from your recording company. I had to pay for half of Dominique’s tits-and-ass video and all the publicist’s fees. What was that about? I could have Cynthia and her cousin do publicity and booking, like we always did before, and not pay a quarter of a million bucks for it.”

  “You never sold three million CDs with Cynthia doing your publicity.”

  “So you want the rights to all my future work, in addition to walking off with my wife.”

  “You didn’t want her by the time she went walking with me.”

  “I don’t know what you see in her. It makes me think less of you.”

  “Because you were glad to see her go, you believe that she’s worthless to others?”

  “She interviewed three replacements before she chose you, Ephraim. They were all richer and more famous than either of us. Whatever else you think, you have to acknowledge that Dominique is an accomplished liar. You saw for yourself how ugly she could be in the studio before you got involved with her.”

  “She’s beautiful. I like her voice.”

  “You are joking.”

  “Different people have different tastes. Perhaps my tastes are more plebian than yours.”