“I mean, you shouldn’t have come, Logan. I don’t want to see you.”
“It smells delicious in here. You must be in one of your high-energy relaxation moods.”
“In fact, I’m busy getting ready for the coming week. I have an engagement this evening. What did you want to see me about?”
“Let’s sit down and talk. You look fantastic.”
“I prefer not to sit. You may stay for a moment, if it pleases you, Logan, but I shall stand.”
“Please don’t be obstreperous, Susi. This is hard enough for me.”
“I wouldn’t want things to be difficult for you.”
“You didn’t used to be sardonic.”
“It’s funny how people change. What do you want?”
“I want to make amends to you.”
“Oh no, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.” He held out his hands, helpless, whining with a gesture.
“I mean that I won’t stand for you coming here and saying that. There is no possible way you can make amends. If you were working your program the way you should, you’d know that, too.”
“You can’t preach to me about how to work the program.”
“I can if you choose to come into my home to indulge in some piety that’s supposed to help you but will do nothing for me.”
“Susi, we have to get past this.”
“I have gotten past everything that it’s humanly possible to do. It is not possible for me to allow you to work out your issues at my expense. I have neither patience nor time.”
“You have to accept some responsibility, Susi. We were married too long for you not to accept your piece in what happened.”
“Is that little speech designed to create a scene you can hash over in your club meeting tomorrow? I had rather a higher opinion of Narcotics Anonymous than I do at this moment.”
“I’m not doing NA. I wasn’t comfortable with all those junkies. I’m much more at ease at AA meetings. I met a really, warm sweet woman there who has helped me a lot. We have a saying—”
“Yes, I know about your sayings. I have a new acquaintance who stays alive through NA. He has a saying, too. He says, ‘A fucker is a fucker. No way around it.’”
“Susi!”
“Listen, you never came to see me once while I was in the hospital. If you want to make amends, spend as much time volunteering in a burn ward as I spent there.”
“I was in rehab.”
“You were in rehab less than half the time I lay in that ward. Go see what the little children go through. Give something of yourself to someone. Just once in your life.”
“I have been hoping you would forgive me.”
“You also believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy far too long. Just get in your car and drive away, Logan.”
“I came in a cab.”
“You said you were traveling. You always rent a car.
“Except I can’t rent a car without a license.”
“You don’t have a license?”
“There was a little backsliding episode a few months ago that resulted in a DUI. Because of everything else, I lost my license for ninety days.”
“Call another cab. There’s the phone.”
“Actually, my plane leaves in two hours. You know how slow the cab companies can be. I was hoping you’d be kind enough to give me a ride.”
I didn’t murder him, for which I hope to receive full credit when final judgment is laid down on all our souls.
“Get in the car, Logan. I have just enough time to take you to the airport and then make a standing date. This does not endear you to me, so I would appreciate silence while we’re driving.”
“Come on, Susanna. You are being as unreasonable as you ever were.”
“I’m happy to hear that’s true. Please don’t call me by that name.”
55 ~ “Maybe I’m Amazed”
JASON
AFTER IAN AND TOBY begged off working on Sunday afternoon, I put on shorts and a t-shirt, stuffed my pack with jeans and a real shirt, and ran over to Susi’s house from Wallingford, which is a clean ten miles. I went around the hills instead of over them, so it wasn’t a particular feat, just a pleasant sort of trance work.
As I walked up her alley way, still cooling down from the run, she came out of her house with a man who stuffed his suitcase in the back seat of her car. Then they both got in and drove off down the alley. A blond beach-boy son of a bitch with too much of a sun tan, which indicated he wasn’t from around here, or else spent a lot of time away. He was talking a mile a minute, as they so tritely describe it, as they drove away.
I sat on Susi’s front steps, checking the time on my cell. Perhaps I’d gotten it wrong, and we were supposed to meet at the church. Or not meet at all. I went around to the back, crawled up on her deck where no one can see, and changed into jeans and a clean shirt. When I sat on the edge of the deck, Sonny slipped in beside me.
“Figured this was where you were headed. I wasn’t going to break my ass running after you.”
“Hi, Sonny. What are you doing here?”
“I pulled Sunday watch for you. Damn, this lady has a great garden. Her early peas are weeks ahead of mine.”
“Do you know who she’s with?”
“Someone she didn’t want to see. She pushed him out fast, while ragging him to shut up when they drove past me. If you want my guess, it’s her ex. You could see him stepping into her space like he thought he had a right, not noticing she didn’t want him close anymore.”
“Rats. I missed the chance to pound him.”
“Want to play music while we wait to see if she’s coming back? I have a guitar in my car.”
“I have a mouth harp.”
So we played. When we paused, Sonny said, “I heard you were Jesse Rufus’s kid. I didn’t know he had one. You know, we opened for those dudes back in the Seventies. Then I played a few weeks for him myself, right before he croaked himself.”
“What was he like?”
“Self-destructive as hell. Even I had to hold my breath sometimes.”
“Yes, I guessed that,” I said. “I spent a lot of time worrying that I might be like him.”
“You have more going on. Your songs are better. Your voice is stronger. Your guitar work—man, you had to be standing in the front of the bus when God handed out talent.”
“Thank you for saying so.”
“You look and sound like him. I’m guessing you aren’t too happy about that situation.”
“He was a drunk. He ruined my mom’s life. He ruined his own life. He didn’t even come into mine. I can’t forgive him, Sonny.”
“You feel that way about me, too?”
“My business wasn’t mixed up with yours in the past. There is nothing between us to either forgive or forget.”
“You think my kid should forgive me?”
“I didn’t know you had a kid.”
“Knocked up his old lady when I was nineteen. That means he’s, what, twenty-five now. Almost as old as you.”
“Do you talk to him about it?”
“Long hours in the past year. It’s unforgivable, the stuff I did.” Sonny paused. “But he’s talking to me.”
“I didn’t have that privilege. I just talk to my father in my head. We’ve been conversing since I was thirteen.”
“How’s that conversation progressing?”
“He’s still a bastard and I’m still one ticked off son of a bastard.”
“If you want to talk with my kid, I can ask him to call you.”
“No, it wouldn’t be the same. He at least knows you.”
“Maybe I could answer for Jesse.”
“Too weird.”
“Nah. One fucker is the same as another. I can make as good a guess as any. What do you say to him in your head, Jason?”
“You had everything going for you, man, and you drank it all away. What’s that about?”
“I bet Jesse would say what I’d have to say: ‘I honestl
y don’t know.’”
“That doesn’t help me much, Sonny.”
“Try another question.”
“OK. Here’s what else I say over and over: Your brother Beau grew up the same as you. He went through the same shit on the road and had a lot of the same problems. Yet he came to see me. Tried to help. Didn’t get drunk and kill himself.”
“Maybe Beau hurt, too, but we just weren’t wired the same.”
We sat, keeping quiet, for a while. Sonny poked me with his elbow. “Ask the question you really have. Let me try what Jesse would say.”
“How could you screw my mother and not accept the consequences?”
Sonny shook his head. “That’s what my son asked. Here’s what I told him: ‘Can’t say I thought about you all the time, but I stayed away because of you. I’m such a complete fucker, I didn’t want you to have any of it.’”
“But I wanted my father there.”
Sonny laughed, but not because it was funny. “The devil is smoking my tail all the time. I didn’t want him getting a chance to light on my kid too.”
We had to stop at that one.
“Frickin’ hell, Sonny. I guess there isn’t much more to say.”
“Except that answer only makes sense if he knew about you, Jason.”
I said, “Beau came around. To me, that says Jesse knew.”
“Then, like I told you, a fucker is just a fucker.”
“So, want to play music for a while?”
“It’s what you pay me for.”
~
When the modest afternoon sun disappeared, Sonny gave me a ride to the church on Capitol Hill—said he could take church just fine, but he got enough bluegrass in the studio. I arrived just as the service started and took a place in the back, looking for Susi, even though I remembered from the first time that she often missed the liturgical part. I did a fair job of engaging in the music with the rest of the congregation, though my eyes were on the door and not the altar. When the worshippers left, abandoning me to just the true musicians, I greeted them as friends, which I wished they were, and I didn’t make an excuse for Susi’s absence.
“She never misses,” Dan said. “Hope she’s well.”
At four o’clock she’d been plenty healthy. Why not at ten o’clock? I didn’t ask that question aloud. We played without her, which seemed to create a preference for lonely cowboy songs and enough high-lonesome hymnifying to make my nose bleed, even though my voice is peculiarly suited to that music. I’d spent Saturday and Sunday composing and playing music intended to blast me out of self-pity mode. However, I’d come there to get high singing with her, without being the director or the leader—or imperial dictator, as Dominique calls me—just as her partner. Here I was harmonizing with tenors and baritones.
She didn’t show, and at the end I was trading phone numbers with everyone, and the preacher Pete was at me about promises and real intensions that we play together soon, in other venues. I liked the idea of these guys wanting to stand up in public with me, but I was talking to myself too loudly about Susi to hear everything we promised each other.
“There’s a little benefit Saturday afternoon,” Pete said. “It’s just our folkie friends. Why not join us?”
I agreed. There’s nothing else to do the whole day long but play music.
Then I walked back across the Madison Valley, up Madrona ridge, and down to her house in Leschi. I should have gone home. I turned a half dozen times to find the bus line, knowing I should go back to Wallingford and crawl under my rock. Instead, I sat on her neighbor’s cement wall in the alley, shivering in my shirt.
She came home just before midnight, riding in a BMW with a Johnny Depp-pretty guy, but blond. I hate guys like that, because they are so used to getting by on their faces that you can’t trust a damn thing they say. She kept him inside forever, and then he kissed her goodbye at her door. His car’s headlights cast my shadow on the cement wall in the alley. The sight of my shadow looming eight-foot tall on rotten concrete caused me to see myself as the stalker I had become.
There was no sign of Sonny anywhere, and it was too late to catch a bus, so I hiked over to a convenience store on Twenty-Third Avenue, the kind that makes its gross sales in malt liquor and cigarettes. I called a cab and waited, talking with the clerk about whether you can legitimately call a woman faithless if she hasn’t made any promises.
~
“So I’m not deluded, right, Ian? I have a high tolerance for ambiguity, but this is driving me nuts. She lets me lead when we’re rehearse, doesn’t she? She never complains.”
“Yeah. She never argues or complains. If you ask me, she’s not the same species as Dominique. Or the same planet. What’s she like in bed?”
“Geez, Ian. I’m not telling you that. Anyway, she won’t do anything I want except in rehearsal.”
“You are never anywhere but in rehearsal or in bed, man. So you’re saying that—”
“I mean in real life. I want to take care of her. I can make all the things happen for her that she wants. Karl could help me find the money she needs for her music institute.”
“That idea is too strange—summer camp to teach roots music to kids. Why can’t kids today learn music in garages like God intended? That’s where rock-and-roll school is, in the garage. You need more than one hundred eighty credit hours to graduate.”
“I want her to marry me.”
“You’re still married to someone else. Meanwhile, she sings like an angel, and she comes every night to sing with you. Why not be satisfied with what you got?”
“Why did she go off with one guy and then come home with yet another man, when she could be singing with me?”
“Why don’t you ask her, Jason? I swear this is like high school. ‘She looked at this guy by the lockers. What do you think it means?’ Call her up and ask. Then maybe we can get some sleep.”
“I can’t ask her who those men are. She’ll think I’m a stalker.”
“You are an effing stalker. If you can’t sleep, at least shut up and stay downstairs in your cave. I need more sack time than you allow anyone.”
56 ~ “Price to Pay”
SUSI
LOGAN MADE HIS PLANE with time to spare, so he wasted my time trying to kiss me goodbye, complimenting me once again about how nice my face looks. I had gone as far from the airport as the feeder road that goes to I-405 when my car lost power and stopped working.
When you are trying to force a car to the side of the road without power steering you forget everything else you were thinking of, instead just hoping you aren’t killed by another vehicle. A roadside hero—an off-duty cop—stopped to help, and then called AAA for me when she couldn’t. She waited for the tow truck with me, and only cautioned that a person shouldn’t be wandering the highways alone without a cell phone.
The tow driver fished—mostly steelhead, and mostly standing under bridges between Monroe and Carnation, just to watch the river flow.
“Like Bob Dylan says,” he joked.
I know who Bob Dylan is, though I don’t know that song.
At the repair shop on Stone Way, he left me and waved goodbye. I called my brother Steven for a ride home, all the while trying to not think. I needed to find the same mental and spiritual space I found when I left the burn ward, where I no longer hated Logan with each breath I took.
Ashes. There is nothing left from that fire but the ashes to sweep away. I thought it had all been swept clean, and I didn’t like learning that it was still possible for Logan to open the door and let the ashes blow back in. While waiting for my brother, I stood at the edge of the car lot, singing so that I wouldn’t waste time thinking about my lost afternoon, and then slipped into singing one of Jason’s songs, but turning it into a wail instead of a thoughtful folksong.
I thought of walking over to Ian and Cynthia’s house, but I hadn’t been invited and changing plans would just create a problem for Steven. It was well past too late to go to the church on Capitol Hill. When
Steven appeared, he insisted on taking me to dinner after hearing that I hadn’t eaten since noon.
“You should never have given him a ride, Susi. You should have called me then. You are tough enough to say no.”
“Steven, please don’t lecture me.”
“You scared the hell out of me when you called and said you’d been with Logan. You aren’t letting that snake back into your life, are you?”
“No. I gave him a ride to get rid of him. Twenty minutes to the airport would be faster than thirty minutes waiting for a cab.”
“Promise me you aren’t thinking of starting up a relationship with him again. Too many people return to destructive relationships.”
“Steven, in all honesty, I don’t think I was in a relationship with him for the last four years we were married. Something slimy tried to crawl into my house today. I think he’s either still using or on the edge of falling back.”
“Just so you aren’t involved. I don’t care if Logan flushes himself down the toilet.”
I took a large breath to change the subject from the unbearable to the unreportable.
“I’m sort of involved with someone else.”
True to his usual self, Steven didn’t probe or beg for more details, but just sat quietly, waiting for me to reveal more.
“He’s a musician. I met him by accident, thinking he was Angelia’s cousin. One thing led to another and we’ve been—” I couldn’t make myself say it straight out. “Listen, promise you won’t tell Dad. This is bound to upset him.”
“We must be talking about a different father. Don’t tell me what you’ve been up to if it’s too intimate.”
“It feels like such a secret, I have to tell you. We sing together.”
He took it about as badly as I expected our father would, his spoon clattering on his plate. He grasped his hands together, trying to look cool.
“So, what do you sing?” His voice cracked. His nervousness seemed to have the reverse effect on me, however, and I felt free to speak.
“We started with bluegrass—he has a beautiful, smoky tenor. Then we played traditional music and cowboy material. Old hillbilly swing, like Dad has in his library.” I took a breath again. “And songs he writes.”
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