Nine Volt Heart

by Annie Pearson

  Dan and Pete coaxed more from her—“Life’s Railway to Heaven,” “Take Me in Your Lifeboat,” “Farther Along,” “Angel Band.”

  “Give her a rest, boys,” Jimmy the banjo player said. “Jason, seems like you’re holding back. Did God give you any special talent you can share while Susi gets her breath?”

  “I can yodel,” I said. “Though I don’t know any yodeling hymns.” And I never do it in public. The two times I have, someone came up after to tell me how much I sound like Jesse Rufus, and both times occurred before Dominique let the world know all about my parentage.

  Pete suggested a Hank Williams or a Lost Sons song. I chose Hank, and the guys kindly helped me through “Long Gone Lonesome Blues.”

  Then Susi begged to sing again, and Pete said only one more, because his wife was waiting at home, so we did “I Am a Pilgrim,” with Susi asking for a key so that she could sing a tone lower, getting that same warm sunshine into her voice as Maybelle Carter.

  In the end, they sang “Goodnight, Irene,” with their arms around each other’s shoulders. The guys who angled themselves into position with their arms around Susi’s waist made her laugh and made love to her with each chorus. After, Dan was talking to Susi about her father’s health and maybe getting together with him. I returned the borrowed guitar to Pete.

  “I hope you won’t mind,” Pete said, offering me a sheet of music ledger paper and a pen. “My son isn’t going to believe I was playing with you if I don’t bring home proof. Would you be so kind as to sign this?”

  I scratched notation for the first line of the Lost Sons song Pete had suggested earlier that I sing.

  “Will you be back to play again?” he said.

  “I’d be honored if you’d have me.”

  “It’ll be fun, Jason. You are almost a match for Susi. Few of us dare try.”

  “Scared the heck out of me. I hadn’t heard her sing before tonight.”

  “You don’t need to be modest. You sound just like your father on the high notes. Takes me back thirty years, when listening to the Lost Sons got me started playing roots music.”

  We shook hands again, and I went to join Susi. I almost slipped my arm around her waist, a possessive gesture I have never made toward a woman in my life. I clasped my hands behind my own back, nervous again.

  Dan said, “We are going up to the Hopvine for a beer, those of us who can stay out late. You coming, Susi? Jason?”

  She looked to me for an answer, but then spoke before I could.

  “Not this time,” she said. “I have to be at work in the morning.”

  I tried not to gloat about getting her to myself again as we got into the car. She stopped before turning on the engine and turned to me.

  “Don’t tell anyone about this, Jason. I don’t want others to know.”

  “You don’t want your friends to know that you got hillbilly religion?”

  “It’s not the religion. It’s the singing. I want this to be a private experience, outside the rest of my life. You must appreciate what I feel.”

  “It will be all over the Internet before tomorrow,” I said. “Bootleg tapes of Susi in concert. They will trade them on eBay. Someone will open a whole new forum to trade Susi’s collected works.”

  “What do you mean?” She sounded terrified.

  “It was a joke, Susi. Do you know about bootleg concert recordings?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And you know people trade them on the Internet?”

  “I suppose. Yes, I do. But what did you mean?”

  “I didn’t mean anything. Do I have to explain the entire twenty-first century for time travelers, so you can understand my jokes? Or am I simply not funny?”

  From the look on her face, the answer was clear: I’m not funny.

  “Susi, the world should hear you. You are—”

  She wasn’t listening to me.

  26 ~ “Carry That Weight”

  SUSI

  “I HAVEN’T SUNG IN public since the accident.”

  After what had happened, singing with Jason, I felt I had to be honest.

  “I need to hear what my voice can do before people see my face, and—oh, I can’t consider it.”

  “Sure you can, Susi. We could do it together. I can help you keep from feeling nervous.”

  “Nervous? That’s not it. Terrified in the pit of my soul is more like it.”

  “Are you afraid people won’t like it? Or they won’t like you? Neither is possible.”

  “I’m more afraid of pity.”

  “Pity? Yes, that’s worse,” he said. “I know what you mean.”

  “You can’t possibly. It is not a mental exercise. It’s a feeling down deep in my stomach.”

  “Do you know how much I value what you did tonight, Susi? Letting me hear you and sing with you?”

  “It’s funny—I was afraid to do it, since I consider it private. But then, it felt so natural to trust you.”

  He leaned back and yodeled, which made me laugh.

  “You brought me along because you trust me? Is that true, Susi?”

  “It’s true. Yes, I trust you. And you? Do you trust me?”

  “I could put my life in your hands, Susi. Like today. You couldn’t have made a better day if the gods in heaven gave you the agenda.”

  “You enjoyed yourself?”

  “Except for lunch. Playing with Zak made up for that.”

  “When you’re playing music, you’re another person. Like—”

  I stopped. The look was like a man making love. I’d seen him several times that day with an expression of pure ecstasy, lost to everything else in the world. “Jason, you said your ex-wife led you in the wrong direction. To me it’s obvious what your career should be. I’m sorry I doubted you when we talked on the beach. Clearly, music would come out your pores if you didn’t play.”

  By then we were at the door to my house, and I was fumbling with the key. Fumbling, because we would be alone there, together.

  “Lord, I’m starving,” I said. “Are you hungry, too? We missed dinner, except for the peanut butter.”

  As we stepped inside the house, he put his arm around me, tipping my head up so that he could kiss me. Not wild and wet like at the beach. Just profoundly, as deeply as I have ever been kissed. The only way he touched me was to stroke my face with the calloused tip of his finger.

  “I would trust you with the keeping of my soul,” he whispered in my ear. “And yes, I’m starving.”

  27 ~ “That’s Why God Made You”

  JASON

  “SUSI, COME HERE A MINUTE.”

  She had been pretending to be busy tidying the kitchen after our meal. Though I had already done most of the dishes, she was straining to find yet another chore. When I asked, she sat down beside me, stiff and distant, but I put my arm around her. Gently, lightly, not wanting to spook her. She accepted it like a child being admonished.

  “Don’t we want to sleep together?”

  She sighed—no, there has to be another word for the sharp intake and release of breath, as if startled but then not afraid after all. When I looked closely, her eyes shifted warily, but when I took her hand, she lost focus and I could feel her first stiffen and then relax as I held her lightly.

  “I want to pretend that sigh was a wishful yes. So why don’t we? That’s not a romantic way to say it, and I don’t mean to sound so practical. You must know I’m falling in love with you.”

  “I’m not ready to be in a relationship. It’s too soon—”

  “Susi, people in ‘relationships’ don’t meet like this. Talk like this. Feel this way. When it’s this good, it’s not a relationship. You can’t get ready for it. It’s here, right now. Let’s admit what’s happening between us.”

  “I admit something is happening and—”

  “What?”

  “I’m not ready.”

  “Me either. You can’t get ready for a freight train to run over you.”

  “I don’
t know what to do.”

  “Make love to me, Susi. Trust me. Everything you heard about me is wrong. I have never hurt a woman in my life. I couldn’t ever hurt you.”

  “I don’t sleep with people.”

  “I’m not people. I’m the man you are supposed to be with.”

  She kissed me. She let me start again what she’d stopped on the beach, though now I knew to go slow, to restrain the need to touch her bare skin.

  “It is not romantic, but I have to ask sooner rather than later. What do you have for protection?”

  “I still have an IUD. My husband didn’t want children.”

  “And the other kind?’

  “What?”

  “I know that in 1955, or wherever you come from, hip young women understood ‘protection’ meant birth control. In my century, we also worry about STD.”

  She flushed. “Of course. I know that. I don’t have condoms. I didn’t have a plan to sleep with anyone.”

  “Due to what my uncle taught me, I always have a couple with me. We can get more tomorrow—I mean, if it turns out you like me.”

  “What if I don’t like you?”

  “You can put me on the curb in the morning with the recycling. Isn’t Seattle famous for recycling what it discards?”

  “Are you going to make me laugh the whole night?”

  “I was thinking more that I wanted to make you sigh, and maybe shriek. Laughing is OK at first. Can you take this dress off? It’s scary and I’m afraid to touch it.”

  “How can you be scared of a dress?”

  “I’m just plain scared, Susi.”

  “That’s not reassuring. Why?”

  “Because it’s been so long. I’ll come too soon and embarrass myself.”

  “You can come too soon if I can cry the first time. I’m sure that’s how I’ll embarrass myself.”

  “Maybe you could cry when I come too soon, and we could get all that done and over with right away.”

  28 ~ “Ring of Fire”

  SUSI

  HE FOLDS HIS CLOTHES when he takes them off.

  He has long toes as well as long fingers.

  He has that line from the Andrew Marvell poem—Had we but world enough, and time—tattooed in a circle around his left bicep and No Surrender tattooed in uncial lettering on his right forearm.

  The hair on his clavicle tickles my lips, especially after the coarseness of his beard rubbed my lips raw. In bed, he turns his head the same way he does when he is singing, savoring every moment as if it were ecstasy.

  It’s cool and damp amid the fine hairs at the base of his spine, which you can feel when he stops moving.

  What else do you want to know?

  29 ~ “Wake Up, Little Susi”

  JASON

  “SUSI.”

  I whispered her name when the rain began to pour at dawn, and she slithered her leg over me, wrapping her arms around me and then sitting on my groin.

  “I love you,” I said. “Let’s stay together.”

  Half-lidded, her eyes lost focus as I moved, and she moaned softly, her lips parting.

  “Don’t tease,” she said, barely able to voice the words.

  “You like this, don’t you?” I touched her in the way that caused such a cataclysm the night before, and it worked as instantly in the morning light. “Is this how you always are?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve only ever been with my husband. I don’t remember anything like this.”

  The near-exclusivity thrilled me in a way that should be embarrassing for a hip young man such as myself.

  Her face glowed, the makeup worn away after our hard night, so that she appeared luminous, like a golden dawn before the sun rises. The stiffness and web of scarring that she worked to hide seemed like a tissue-thin mask, tenuously covering the ardor that wanted to break loose. She incarnated two beings at the same time, an assured and controlled person wrapped around the most passionate woman I had ever touched.

  “I mean it,” I said, understanding for the first time in my life that this was where I was supposed to be and this was who I was supposed to be with. “Let’s stay together.”

  “I can’t go away with you. I have my work and—”

  “You don’t have to change anything, Susi. I’m staying here with you. There is nothing else I want to do but play music and be with you.”

  “Don’t be foolish.”

  “I have been foolish before, and it didn’t feel like this.”

  She scarcely listened. Her eyes fluttered in a way that I hoped would become familiar and that I lusted for as much as I did for her body and soul.

  ~

  “How can you get out of bed at a time like this, Susi? You are heartless.”

  “Believe me, I’m feeling far from that.”

  “I read in a magazine that I found at the airport that most women want to cuddle and linger in the afterglow. So why do you have to jump up and bruise my heart?”

  “You should have come to Seattle last week. It was spring break and I could have lazed around with you all day. As it is, I have a job and I have to go to it.”

  “Will you marry me, Susi? We could sing together every night. Have children. We could get an old Ford pickup and roam from town to town with our family band.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “Being in love with you is the sanest I have ever been.”

  “Marry a guitarist in a bar band?” She was teasing, and I loved that she had relaxed enough with me that she could do it with that particular smile on her face.

  “I make a living. I don’t have a car or a place to live at the moment, but I can support you in the style to which you are accustomed.”

  “I’m not accustomed to being supported, Jason. I don’t need another rich boy bugging me to marry him out of pity, or whatever it is.”

  “Pity you? What sort of fool am I competing with? Because he might as well learn that he won’t win.”

  “No one could compete with you, Jason.”

  “That Randolph guy can’t be rich enough to buy a clue, if he’s the competition. Anyway, if we start now, do you think we’d we have our first child by Christmas?” I counted on my fingers. “Shoot, it’s April already isn’t it?”

  “Will you stop teasing?”

  “OK. Let’s set more immediate goals. Call in sick and come back to bed with me.”

  “You have a unique style, but I’m not persuaded, Jason. I have certain responsibilities.”

  In the shower she sang “Angel Band,” her voice even more open than it had been the night before, and I flattered myself that I had helped her relax. I longed to record it. I wanted my laptop, so I could capture the previous day’s sensations. Yet I found a modicum of self-restraint, pulled on my jeans, and went to start the coffee.

  I could taste her on my lips and smell her on my fingers over the burnt odor of coffee. My fingers and toes still throbbed faintly, where twenty minutes before I hadn’t been able to distinguish her pulse from my own.

  One important piece of business demanded attention early in the day.

  ~

  “Hey guy. What’s up? Dominique and her attorney are coming at ten. Will you be here?”

  “No. I want you to finish it, Karl. Get me out as fast as you can. Let her have the stupid condo. Give her everything she wants, as long as it doesn’t hurt the band. Let her share rights to the songs I wrote when we were together, if that’s what’s keeping the whole thing from ending.”

  “From the fax they sent this morning, I think Dominique wants to take the band name.”

  “No, she doesn’t. She just wants to burn me. Give her the songs and tell her how deeply she has hurt me, and she will let it go. Listen, I’m with someone. Finish the business with Dominique as soon as possible.”

  “Is this one taking you for another ride to the tabloids? Excuse me for playing skeptic. You let one woman screw you up, but it was a royal screw.”

  “No, this woman is falling in love with me.”


  “They all do. It’s the three-and-a-half million copies of a single album. Plus the Grammy nomination is a real babe magnet.”

  “No, she is falling in love with the real me.”

  “The real you has a pocket full of money. Get her to sign—”

  “She’s going to marry me, not sue me.”

  “Call me a romantic fool, Jason, but I’m going to work on the pre-nups, for when she sues you later.”

  “Geez, Karl, you’re jaded.”

  “I made too much money off your first mistake. I don’t know if it’s the last. Perhaps I should plan to add a couple of rooms to my house now that you are dating again.”

  “Oh, stuff it, man. I will bet double your retainer that she marries me, and the only work for you is re-drafting my will. You might as well start on that now.”

  “OK, I’ll get right on that. What’s her name?”

  “Susi.”

  “I mean her whole name.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Shoot, I don’t know her last name. I didn’t ask. She told me her husband’s name, but it was something ridiculous that I forgot.”

  “I’m calling my architect. Why settle for two rooms when I could add a whole wing? Even if I’m never home to enjoy it.”

  ~

  I was picking notes on her daddy’s Martin guitar, trying to hear whether the sounds racing around my brain made up a melody, when Susi came into the kitchen. She was dressed for work in a pleated skirt and starched shirt, singing “Take Me in Your Lifeboat.” In her work clothes, she looked like Audrey Hepburn as Eliza—dancing with the professor, I mean, not selling violets in Covent Gardens.

  “Someone tried to take a bite out of this guitar, Susi.”

  “That was me. I was three. I suppose I wanted attention, because I sure got it.”

  “It’s charming. It might even add to the tone. Is it hereditary? Will our children try to eat my guitars? I’m rather tetchy about them.”