“But the lies, Ephraim, the lies.”
“It’s a way she covers for weakness. I like to think she feels safer with me, less threatened. She has less need to lie to me.”
“I never threatened her.”
“There are many ways to make people feel unsafe, Jason.”
“I promise to wish you luck when I don’t feel so threatened myself.”
“You know, Stanley Donan and Gene Kelly worked together for years after Kelly took Donan’s wife. Tell me, if you’re so unhappy with her now, what did you once see in her?”
“She came after me like I was God’s own child. It wasn’t until later that I realized I was God’s own foot stool.”
“Dominique is young—what was she when you first found her, Jason? Twenty-two?”
“She found me, Ephraim. I didn’t go looking for her.”
“No one ever taught her how to behave. She was a spoiled rich girl at the start, and not much better when you left. But she’s learning. I like to think that she needs an older, steadying influence. I rather enjoy the job.”
The two women came up the hallway on a parallel path, unaware of each other. One tall, in a long red leather coat and high-heeled boots, attracting everyone’s attention, the other as anonymous as lilies in the field, her pale face luminous in the hall’s dim light.
“Keep her away from me, Ephraim. And watch your phone bills. Check your back every now and again, to be sure she hasn’t knifed you.”
I turned away, toward the light.
18 ~ “The Night’s Too Long”
JASON
SUSI TOUCHED MY ARM and said my name as she came up. Lord help me, when I turned around I wanted to just put my arms around her and run from the building, to have her to myself, to finish what we had started in the afternoon, to flee from the world. She led me as if I were half-blind to join the playboy vice-principal from our earlier meeting where he stood with an older couple, a stooped giant of a gentleman and a tiny grand dame with immense dignity.
God alone knows how I made it through that part of the evening, shaking hands with people I had never met and would never see again. Feeling that I needed to protect Susi from something, but not seeing what. Wanting to poke Randolph in the nose, just for the pleasure of it. Smiling the whole while, charming the grandmother who seemed to be my assigned seat partner. Randolph worked out the arrangements, so Susi sat as far from me as possible. While I conquered the adrenalin rush from not being close enough to protect her, the grandmother chatted about Schubert and dying young being such a tragedy.
Then, just as the lights dimmed and we applauded the concert master, everyone stirred and Susi took the seat beside me because, the grandmother said, Susi couldn’t sit by someone wearing too much perfume.
I had almost calmed down by the time the orchestra made it through the Schubert piece, knowing I was sublimating the residue of feelings from speaking with Ephraim, and projecting all my flight-of-fear emotions onto Susi, who was about as safe as a person could be, with the grandfather chatting in her ear as soon as the lights came up. The sole threat to her well-being was the overchilled air from the HVAC system. I saw the tiny frisson of a shiver shimmying up her spine and, without even considering another alternative, I draped my jacket around her shoulders as Randolph and his kin huddled beside her during the break, longing for her attention. Everyone is in love with Susi.
When the lights dimmed again and the chorale took their seats for the Requiem, she murmured a thank-you to me as she drew the jacket close and fixed her gaze on the stage.
Thirty seconds into the Kyrie, I glanced over and found her subvocalizing the words.
I missed the entire rest of the program, seeing the director’s hands occasionally while trying to understand what Susi saw from her seat, finally realizing—like an effing fool—that this was the career she had been forced to leave behind. Yet from her speaking voice, she could never have had the proper range for it. A poor teacher had led her down a garden path, telling her she was capable when it wasn’t right for her.
During the applause, I had to stand up, for we were sitting so close to the stage that it would be rude not to stand while everyone applauded the performers. Susi stood beside me, gently swaying. I put my hand at the small of her back to steady her. The grandfather noticed too.
“My goodness, child, are you well?”
“I’m fine,” she said. Tears glistened in her eyes. “The music is just so very beautiful.”
Then Randolph was at her side, having aced out his grandfather in the role of solicitous Randolph kin.
“Susi, I never should have brought you here.”
“You didn’t bring me, Randolph. I came on my own.”
“This was a poor choice. Let me take you home.”
“I’m fine. I have my own car here and a guest to take care of.”
“Susi, I should insist.”
“Please don’t, Randolph. I’m fine. However, I must decline your kind offer of a late dinner.”
The admonishments continued, until I could get her out of there.
On the street, I was steaming. “Didn’t his mother teach him how to act right? Why wouldn’t he leave you alone when you asked him to?”
As we walked to the parking lot, musicians fleeing the building called out to her, and she greeted them in return, her voice sounding warm and golden, but her expression strained. At the car, she handed me the keys.
“Could you drive, please?” she asked.
“No, actually.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know how.” For the first time, it felt like admitting a weakness.
She managed the thinnest smile, shaking her head.
On the ride home, I commandeered the radio, finding the Blues Time Machine on KPLU, thinking we had endured enough classical depression for the night. Susi was silent, and Alice Stuart soothed us on the trip up Yesler Way and across the neighborhoods to her house. In her carport, Susi grabbed the keys out of the ignition and ran into the house, closing herself into her bedroom, so I had to satisfy myself with washing my hands and brushing my teeth in the kitchen sink, though I wanted another shower.
I sat up late into the night writing and listening to her music through headphones. My friend Chas launched an instant-messaging conversation about guitar steels, which diverted me from brooding.
Chas1933: You play music, right? I’m researching the equipment the old blues guys used, especially the rural musicians who first developed the bottleneck sound.
Sebastian: How many of them used real bottlenecks?
Chas1933: Don’t know. The notes I’ve found say some of the old guys often used a comb or a pocket knife. What do you think?
Sebastian: I’m clueless. I’m also spoiled. I use commercial steels.
Chas1933: Look, I’m old as shoe leather and I can’t play anymore. Can you tell me what it’s like, playing with a comb or a pocket knife? In those days, it would have been a steel comb.
Sebastian: Yeah, you made me curious. I’ll try it. Can’t do it tonight though.
Chas1933: I’m in no rush. At my age, I’m going nowhere fast.
Sebastian: You sure have talked me into some weird experiments in the past year. Do you suppose that they used the pocket knife with the blade open or closed?
Chas1933: You’re pulling my ancient leg now. You plan to experiment both ways? You don’t want to use guitar strings for the tourniquet.
Late in the night I uploaded the last of my notes from London onto a couple of different blogs on the Internet, but I still couldn’t tell what to do with the last two days’ notes, so I mailed those to myself again. When that was done, I began pillaging Susi’s library. For most of the time, she sobbed her heart out behind the closed bedroom door.
It was like being married again, but without the guilt and remorse.
19 ~ “Chains of This Town”
SUSI
LORD, I DIDN’T WANT to leave my room on Sunday morning. It couldn’t
offer anything more than another opportunity to humiliate myself.
So I sneaked out for a run, rising early. Jason lay sprawled on the sofa and didn’t move, though he was dressed this time, thank the gods, since I do not like the idea of him being in my house naked. The run helped pound my thoughts in place, after falling apart the night before.
I live on the hillside above Leschi, which was a vacation village a few generations ago. Now it’s expensive water-view property, but a few of the old fishermen’s shacks like mine are still nestled into the hillside, surrounded by Douglas fir, cedar, and madrona trees, offering a false sense of woodsy isolation amid the postmodern villas and remodeled Craftsman bungalows. When I came back here, when my father took me in after the accident, Leschi felt like home. I could walk the steep, meandering streets under the trees, admire others’ gardens, or run along the lake. Men still come out to fish from the wooden piers in the morning mist, the old woman down the block still walks her Pug at seven a.m., and kids still ride bikes through blackberry-lined alleys, just as I did twenty years ago.
After the accident, when I was well again physically, all that remained was music and long walks in Leschi. I took this job teaching before I had finished mourning my lost life—Angelia led me to it, since she was also making a career shift. What saved me from drowning in grief was creating a curriculum I was proud of and working with kids who love music.
I’ve come to see the past as just one kind of a life, where I had inappropriately loaded all my hopes. Yes, it was a grander world than the simple one I live in now, but I never fit anyway. Maybe I would have pushed myself to the next level, but maybe that last wonderful year was a fluke and I would have had to make a career out of being third on the left in the chorus. I never planned to teach, because I had only the Juilliard model as a reference, and I’d never have fit in that world either. I don’t think I’m afraid of competition at the university level. In my former life, I scrapped hard to end up where I did. Those aspirations have been replaced by helping others to find how music fits in their lives.
What I miss: the singing. And the applause.
That is what made me cry for the first time in months, when the audience shouted “Bravo!” for the chorus. Through the whole program, I felt happy enough to be sitting in the audience. I witnessed it in the same mode as one would listen to a CD, letting the music carry me away. I was fine. After the intermission, I even lost the sense of that man sitting so close that I could hear him breathe and feel the heat from his body. It was my first venture hearing live music, other than what my students perform, and I enjoyed it. I let the music rule my response and sensibilities.
Then the applause came, like I will never hear again. Grieving for lost worlds, I fell apart again as Randolph’s grandfather patted my shoulder.
I’d rationalized all of it by the time I came back to the house from my morning run, though I dreaded facing Jason, since he must have heard me the night before. Though, bless him, he hadn’t said a word or tried to comfort me. Good god, but I hate it when people try to comfort me. Arms around me feel like steel bands.
Whispered condolences feel like they want to suck what is left of the breath from my lungs.
~
When I came in after my run, Jason was cooking breakfast, as if he lived there. Sons of the Pioneers played on the stereo, and he was singing along, matching the harmony, as if he lived there, too.
I finished my shower and joined him. He turned down the volume on the stereo, but still sang “Rye Whiskey” while he served up French toast and coffee. He continued his teasing banter, as if neither the concert nor the debacle on the beach had occurred, which was comforting.
“Who are we begging today, Susi, besides our luncheon with that barracuda from the board of trustees?”
“There is a teacher at Cornish who says he remembers you from Prescott. He represents a collective of teachers and musicians who promised to contribute. Then there’s the luncheon. Late in the afternoon there’s a benefit concert our students are putting on. You can skip that.”
“I wouldn’t miss it. I said I’d help, didn’t I?”
He kept me rapt in conversation over the curriculum, which he spread out on the kitchen counter, asking me questions about the directions in each segment, making me explain choices against alternatives he presented, as if this were my master’s thesis and he was the committee against which I had to defend it.
“Susi, it’s like you stopped at Haydn when considering influences on modern symphonic music. You ignore certain folk traditions, and you have nothing from the Northwest except songs Woody Guthrie maybe wrote here during the Depression.”
“Like what?”
“Local folk music. The Sonics. The Wailers. The Screaming Trees. Isaac Scott. Jo Miller and Ranch Romance. The Melvins. Bing Crosby.”
“Bing Crosby?”
“He’s from Tacoma. Went to Gonzaga. You can hear the influences when Eddie Vedder does mellow stuff.”
“Who is Eddie Vedder?”
“Never mind. I was exaggerating.”
“Someone else will teach that part.”
“You already convinced me to do it, Susi. I won’t back out now.”
There wasn’t time in that discussion to be distracted by anything, except he hadn’t shaved, so by the end of our friendly discourse, I couldn’t look at his mouth without thinking about testosterone.
20 ~ “Get Rhythm”
JASON
PAUL HARRIS. I COULDN’T believe it when Susi drove us over to the Cornish campus, parked in a back alley, and dragged me into the gamelan shed. Paul looked up when we entered, flashing as much surprise as I felt.
“Jason.” He grabbed my forearm in one of those grown-up versions of a hippie handshake. Susi retreated to the sidelines, where she sat with a notebook, oblivious to everything else while we talked. “I misunderstood what Susi was asking me. She is the sort of woman you have to give whatever she asks, so perhaps I didn’t listen closely. I thought it was just about money. But I’m pleased to see you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Harris.”
“It’s Paul. I’m not your teacher now. Hardly was at the time, was I?”
“Actually, I owe you a great deal. You were one of the few sane voices at the time. And you had plenty to teach me.”
“Do you want to sit in with us this morning?”
“May I? You know percussion wasn’t my strong point.”
“Your weakest points beat most everyone else’s finest. Sit by Jane and just feel through the first round,” Paul said. “Here’s the notation, so you can follow along. We will play the whole set over when it’s your turn to take up the mallet.”
A gamelan is an orchestra of instruments invented in Bali and Java. The notation for gamelan looks like space writing, like Mr. Spock’s annotations in the ship’s log. Yet after ten minutes of listening and watching, I think I got it. I could join them only in the most humble way, but the ringing of the gong and the joyousness of Balinese gamelan drew me in, irresistibly.
What can I say? I lost three hours in the gamelan shed, and the only intrusion of so-called reality was seeing Susi on the sidelines with her notebook. And hearing the rain pound on the roof. Otherwise, we were lost to rhythm and tone and that finest of all sensations, finding music with your whole body in the midst of an orchestra of other musicians. I was drenched and exhilarated when Susi came up during a pause in our playing.
“We have to go. You have to shower and change before our luncheon at Gwyneth’s.”
I said goodbye to Paul, intending to return when I could, and followed Susi to the car. The thought of breaking bread with Gwyneth—who secretly longed to savage Susi for being more beautiful—would have been a damper, but I was far too high from the music.
“That made up for the sex I didn’t get last night.” I blurt these things to her and, Lord help me, she must think I do it on purpose.
“All the more reason to shower,” she said.
Which was the
actual moment when I gave up and decided to go ahead and be in love with her.
She said, “When I asked to bring you around, Paul was rather vague about remembering you, but you seem like old friends.”
“It’s more than ten years. I almost feel like I could work with him as an equal now. Except the gamelan part. That will take me another ten years. I suppose he’ll be ten more years ahead of me by then.”
~
The trip to Susi’s house proved too short to shake the sensations cascading over me like rain. I felt like a runner who had been made to stop before cooling off. Isn’t that how people have heart attacks? I was on the verge of at least a minor coronary, but she insisted that I shower as soon as we came into her house.
Maybe my life could be reborn in Seattle, mixing with people like Susi and Paul. It felt like moving to a town I had never visited. I shaved and dressed as the man in black again, including the necktie. Susi didn’t give me a second glance when she brushed past to close herself up in the bedroom and dress.
While waiting, I turned on my laptop to make notes. I wanted to share what I was feeling with a real person, so I logged on line and went in search of my instant-messenger friends.
[email protected] was right there for me.
Sebastian: Ever play in a gamelan orchestra?
Chas1933: That’s what I like about you. I can be sitting here, minding my business. Then you show up and knock me around a bit. I never had the pleasure. Pentatonic scale, isn’t it?
Sebastian: Not all are, but I played in one this morning that used the five-tone scale.
Chas1933: You always come up with something that makes me wish I was young and roaming again. I’ve heard recordings but never seen one live.
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