Susi was already waiting for me at Ian’s, and there was just enough time to shower and put on a clean shirt. So I forgot about creeps for a while.
She sat primly on Ian’s sofa, looking at a trout-fishing book from the table, not even taking the opportunity to prowl the three hundred CDs on the north and east walls of the living room. She always has more self-control than I could ever aspire to.
“Where shall we go?” I sat down beside her and felt her move away, holding herself aloof.
“Did you make a reservation? It’s Friday. All the cafés will be full.”
Like, did I know not to cross the street against the light? I had not assigned my love life to Martha to take care of as I had everything else, so of course it hadn’t occurred to me to make a reservation.
“It’s early and I know a place in Belltown,” I said, making myself sound like Mr. Savoir-faire, when in fact I’m the guy who has to look around and find his ass in order to save it. Then I couldn’t figure how to start a conversation on the trip downtown, and Susi pretended that she was too busy navigating traffic to help out.
She likes me. I know she does, even though I don’t know how to get her to admit it and I don’t have any evidence to offer as proof, except she sang with us all week. We walked into a hip restaurant in Belltown, so awkward with each other that people couldn’t tell we were fated to be together and had already enjoyed the bliss of consummation. We just didn’t know how to talk to each other at the moment.
Johnnie, an acquaintance who played in a nouveau bash&stun band that owed more to John Doe than Dave Grohl, was waiting tables. I stepped back to ask him to seat us where we wouldn’t be observed and to keep people away. I gave him a bill for it, which we both knew I didn’t need to do, but he plays in a band, and I couldn’t ask a favor without returning what I had that he didn’t.
“I can put you in my section, Jason. Sit on the north side by the window so the boss lady can’t see you. Nadine came down on Dominique’s side. I don’t know if she’d serve you.”
“You know that’s all a lie.”
“Yeah, but I can’t say that to my boss, can I? Nadine is a piranha and swims in the same pool as your wife.”
“Ex.”
“Are they ever really ex?”
“God only knows. Johnnie, do you have a standing gig?”
“We folded last month. My brother’s girlfriend made him get a job, and Michael quit to work in a cover band. I’m auditioning all over.”
“Can I borrow you on drums for a couple of weeks for session work?”
“Sure. Where?”
“Temple Bell. Mornings.”
He was gracious with Susi, though for such a modest person, she seemed to accept that treatment as natural. When Johnnie left, she leaned over the table.
“Are you independently wealthy? I know it’s rude to ask, but I can’t help myself. I’m curious.”
“No. I’ve worked for every dollar I ever had. Why?”
“You gave the waiter a hundred-dollar bill. That’s not the kind of tipping that I thought bar musicians did.”
Busted. I scrambled, trying to make my brain work, because I still wanted to be just Jason Taylor, ordinary guy, in her eyes. “I owed him.”
“What for?”
I reached for a lame excuse. “From a card game.”
“You gamble?”
“No. Just when we need to kill time on the road.” Lying wasn’t where I wanted to go and, if I was forced to persist, I would have to end the pleasant interlude of being me without the hype. A crowd of people entered the restaurant, including Quentin Henderson with yet another incarnation of Dating Woman dressed in basic black. Then the hostess seated Ephraim and Dominique behind Susi.
I put on my Yankees hat and sun glasses and hunkered over the menu.
“The polenta sounds good,” Susi said.
“Can’t be as good as yours. You’ve ruined me for second best.” As I spoke, she looked up at me and I couldn’t read her expression, so I took a flying leap. “In more ways than one.”
She studied her menu. “Please stop. I don’t enjoy being pursued.”
Nadine came over to kiss Dominique hello, and I twisted away to study the menu while looking out the window. After Nadine disappeared, the background music switched to Woman at the Well, I suppose in Dominique’s honor (though the two words form an oxymoron).
Johnnie passed by, and Susi reached out to stop him.
“Can you please turn down the volume on this music?”
He made a helpless gesture with his hands, while avowing that he’d check. By this time Ephraim had seen me and dipped his head into his menu, laughing. Within a moment the volume of the music dropped, then rose even higher. Johnnie was arguing with Nadine at the front.
Susi stood up. “Let’s go.”
Quentin wanted to grab my attention in mid-departure. I had to put him off in order to catch up with Susi. “I’ll call you this week, man.”
Outside, Susi hurried down the street, so I had to scramble after her.
“What was that about?”
“Someone sitting by us was wearing too much perfume. And I just can’t stand that pop diva trivia that passes for singing. It’s like fingernails on a blackboard. In fact, I prefer the blackboard.”
“You little snob.”
“I am not a snob, Jason.” She must have missed the smug satisfaction that settled over me as I listened to her savage my former wife. She protested in earnest. “It’s just irritating. You get irritated when anyone fails to keep the beat you want. Can’t I be irritated when I have to be subjected in a public place to bad phrasing and poor breath control? Or a wobble that tries to pass itself off as vibrato? What are these women thinking? What kind of exhibitionist would stand up in public and subject the world to that inefficient sound production?”
“Different people have different tastes,” I said, thrill-chills running down my spine. I wanted to kiss her, but that was still off limits.
“Even a child could tell they used pitch correction in the recording.”
I stopped. “How do you know?”
“Anyone with half an ear can hear it. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Jason. I may not know anything about pop music, but I know about vocal recording techniques. They went in with a computer to erase that singer’s flubs and paste in corrections, for which they should all be ashamed.”
“I wish they were.”
“Don’t try to appease me when I’m angry. At least my students voted down that song.”
“What’s wrong with that song?”
“The lyrics are fine, I suppose, though I can’t stand to listen closely enough to be sure. I let my students nominate songs to analyze for influences. One student brought that song, but only one other person voted for it. Thank heavens. If it had won, I would have had to listen to that woman’s computer-corrected vocal habits a dozen times while we analyzed the influences on the song.”
“Hank Williams, the Maddox Brothers and Rose, the White Album.”
“Oh, you’re good. My father would admire your abilities. One of the kids in my class said one other name. What was it?”
“I’m sure that’s all.”
“No, it was the vocals. They said the male voice was imitating the Lost Sons, but I don’t know their music, and I can’t stand listening to that woman enough to hear the other voices. That woman’s voice is so cold. It reminds me of Turandot.”
Beautiful analogy. I wanted to fall at her feet in worship. The opera of the little slave girl whose love saved the secret prince from the cruel death that the ice-princess Turandot consigned him to. Like most listeners, I especially love the solo by the slave girl Liù.
“You’re a delightful snob, Susi.”
“I am not. However, I wish you wouldn’t wear a hat indoors. I know it’s what men do now, but I just haven’t been able to adapt to the idea.” She stopped and turned around. “I’m sorry, Jason, I never should have said that. I let my irritations ru
n wild. Do whatever you want.”
~
She didn’t mean that, when she said, “Do whatever I want.”
We found dinner at The Agora Shop on Fifteenth Avenue East. Nikos poured white wine for Susi and mineral water for me, and chatted while we chose food, which made up for the difficulties Susi and I had starting a conversation. While we ate fried halloumi and salads, we managed to converse about music—what we’d been singing the past week and where that music was headed. Gradually our exchange was warm and almost intimate. At one point I tricked her into talking about teaching. For a while she dropped her guard and enjoyed herself, but then she touched my hand as she gestured in the middle of a story, and it was if she’d taken a full hit from a stun gun. She stopped talking and folded in on herself—I’d seen her do that before—and no topic would draw her out again.
So we learned that talk is good and touch is bad. If she had only one other experience with a man, and since I knew for a fact that what she enjoyed with me had been good, then the enemy of our mutual happiness was her ex-husband.
She left me at Ian’s and went home alone. However, she kissed me on the cheek. A guy can keep hoping.
46 ~ “Give Back the Key to My Heart”
SUSI
SATURDAY I SPENT MOST of the day in the garden, turning soil and planting vegetables that didn’t require warmer temperatures. Lettuces and peas. Spinach. After half an hour, I realized that I’d foolishly forgotten gloves, but by then, I liked the feel of soil on my bare hands so much that I didn’t stop. Because the soil was too rocky, one patch hadn’t been planted for years. So after lunch, I listened to Celtic music on the radio playing from the deck while I screened rocks out of the soil. It made for a hypnotic afternoon, shoveling soil onto the screen, rubbing it through to catch out the stones, carting the debris to a pile that I would use to make a path later. For this work I wore gloves, and in fact almost wore them out. Then by midafternoon, I felt worn out.
After a shower, I sat down to tea and grading papers. It took more than a half an hour to repair the damage I’d done to my nails, but that work was calming too. After grocery shopping, I made bread and several containers of food for the coming week’s dinners.
Why am I collecting the detritus of daily life in this notebook, like nail parings? It’s too excruciating to write what I can’t think about.
I couldn’t sleep last night. It’s my own fault. At times like this, a thinking woman turns to Anthony Trollope to make it through the night, to keep the mind thoroughly engaged without creating enough warmth to lead to the temptation to touch oneself for comfort. Yet Trollope didn’t help. I thought I’d developed a higher degree of self-discipline, both for my mind and my body. It turns out I just developed a higher degree of self-deception, the foundation sin for the agony I endured in previous years. My mind tells me to run away, and my body wants me to stay. Isn’t that the same dilemma that kept me with Logan, years after I should have gone on my way? The “call me” messages that Logan leaves on my answering machine every other day should be enough to remind me to be scrupulous about my personal associations. No more staying with bad boys because of sex.
What was I thinking last week, to let Jason and his friends invade my home and steal my time? I had resolved to stay away from him, and then spent every night in the throes of ecstasy with him, even if we never went to bed after that first mistake. This is not how a self-aware woman conducts her personal life.
What was I thinking after those chance encounters—I still believe in chance, just not in luck—to have gone on a date with him? It would have been better if we’d just played music on Friday evening, like every other night. He told me what he was: a rock-and-roll musician. So why should I be surprised by women in red leather and street urchins kissing him? Isn’t that what young men play in rock-and-roll bands for? To get all the sex they can find?
How could I have acted all week in such an unsuitable fashion, just because I mistook him for a friend and allowed situations to occur where he made me breathe far more deeply than is healthful?
~
I delayed my dinner and instead went for a long roving run along Lake Washington, hoping that pounding pavement would serve to pound sense back into my brain. It seemed to work, though walking the last leg of the trip up the hill to my house, I found myself singing aloud again.
On my front step, I found Jason.
“Hey, Susi.”
“Don’t you ever call? You have a phone with you all the time. Can’t you use it?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think of it.”
My heart was thumping from my long run, and the walk up the hill made me breathe deeply.
“Are you going to invite me in, Susi?”
I couldn’t make the key work, but he just stood there with his pack in his hands, waiting. Even my brother would have tried to take the key away and do it himself, since it took me so long.
“Look what I brought.” He started unpacking take-out food from his bag on my kitchen counter. “We ate all your food and didn’t contribute anything nobler than a pizza. I don’t want you to think I’m an insensitive slob. I’m thoughtful and considerate. If I take a minute to remember.”
“I already made my dinner.”
“Maybe we can have this for lunch tomorrow. It’s getting a bit cool in here with the sunset. Go shower before you catch a chill, Susi.”
“Don’t sit down. You aren’t staying.”
“But I don’t want to go out. We didn’t have any fun last night. I know girls like to go out on Saturday night, but I want to stay home. Please?”
“You aren’t staying here. I want you to go.”
“Why? I didn’t do anything bad.”
“I need time to myself, Jason. I haven’t been alone since we met. I have papers to grade and lesson plans to finish. I want to finish my chores, clean my house, do my laundry.”
“Susi, I have my own business to take care of. I’ll just be in the corner with my computer and headphones. I won’t say a word. When you’re done being alone, you can just take me off pause.”
“I need to be alone, without distractions.”
“I promise not to be distracting.”
“You will be though. If I see you sitting there, I know you’ll be thinking about how to get me to go to bed with you. So I won’t be alone at all.”
“We can just agree now that when you finish being alone, we’ll go to bed. So you won’t have to worry about what’s on my mind.”
“Jason, go home.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Maybe that’s why you don’t understand how I feel. I need to be in my own house, doing things that make me feel stable and sure of myself.”
“Then you should understand why I want to be here with you. Also, it will be good practice. When we’re married, we’ll have to learn how to create solitude while we’re together.”
“We aren’t getting married.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t like it last time. There is no reason why I would ever like it.”
“You stayed married a long time for not liking it.”
“Maybe I managed it because I had plenty of time to be alone.”
“Then maybe you retreated too much.”
“Maybe that was the problem with your marriage and not mine. Stop quarreling and go home.”
“Cynthia is back, so they don’t want me there tonight.”
“Go stay in a hotel. Or find one of your card-playing friends. I’m not providing free room and board for you.”
“OK, I’ll go stay at Zak’s. He asked me over and his mom said it was fine. Though it will be like being in the eighth grade. We’ll have to go to the garage to play music. Can I use your phone to call a taxi? I think my cell phone battery is dead.”
“Jason—”
“See, you don’t want me at the mercy of Gwyneth. You’re jealous. You want me with you, so you can keep your eye on me.”
“I have never been
jealous in my life.”
“You’re shivering. You need a hot shower. I’ll set the table while you get warmed up and dressed. Then we’ll talk about how you can be alone.”
He took charge, and I couldn’t keep saying that I wanted him to go without telling an outright lie. When we had dinner, he exclaimed over the stuffed grape leaves and made me take the first bite from his fingers when I said that I hadn’t yet sampled my own cooking. So thirty minutes after I tried to shoo him away, I was licking garlicky oil from his fingertips.
He chattered the whole time he did the dishes, about how he would give me all the time in the world to grade papers, but didn’t we want to play music tonight, too? First it was the guitar, and then piano, which he plays much better than I do. Then he left me alone for ten minutes, when I agreed he could borrow some of the musicology texts from the library. This kept him quiet—he could only stuff a few into his pack—until he unearthed my oboe from the cabinet and began coaxing me to play it.
My entire oboe repertoire consists of pieces from Volume One of the Suzuki books, because after six months, my teacher decided that my talents lay elsewhere and I never returned to the oboe, except for idle recreation. The one Suzuki piece that most lends itself to the oriental tones of the oboe is Chant Arabe. I could still play it, but no less pathetically than I had for my last recital.
He took the oboe away, and when he did, he touched me, his long fingers curling around and stroking mine, though he was just being careful of the instrument, so that it wouldn’t fall when he took it. He licked his lips and wetted the reed again, where I had just been playing it myself.
Then he played, but he knew the Schumann and a Mozart piece from Volume Two.
“That is almost all I can do,” he said. “I never could practice enough because it makes my lips numb. Aren’t yours numb, too?”
He brushed his thumb over my lower lip.
47 ~ “Fool’s Paradise”
JASON
SHE STARTED IT. I SWEAR. I’m giving her anything she wants, or not giving her anything she doesn’t want, because it’s worth it to me, no matter what.
Nine Volt Heart Page 17