Nine Volt Heart

by Annie Pearson

  He sat with his face in his hands. I wanted to provoke a response, to gauge his reaction, to see if I was giving what he wanted.

  “The first time I had to sing in Croatian was easier than this.”

  He grasped my wrist and kissed my fingers, and then snatched his hand away again, picking up his guitar.

  “It will never be a hit. Hits have to be in a major key. We will likely never make a dime off it.” He laughed in a rueful sort of way.

  “There is more to be had from music than money.”

  He looked up. “I have to believe that’s true. Can we record you this time? Do you want to rehearse more?”

  “If you’re happy with it, I can repeat what we just did.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  Perhaps because of my previous work experiences and the last few weeks spent rehearsing with him, whenever I found what he wanted, I could return it to him again a second or third or fourth time as faithfully as he needed. So without the other musicians, he didn’t demand repeated attempts while we taped.

  “Another go?” I asked.

  “That’s fine. That is more than fine. Susi, do you have any idea how good you are?”

  “So we don’t have to do it over and over? Are there other songs we can work on? Or is that the only one I get to sing tonight?”

  ~

  He had two other songs. One was close in form to the Anglo-Celtic ballads we first played together, with a middle part that churned up passion, and drove to an ending that resembled the pyric release of great opera.

  “It’s pretentious,” he said. It was easy to sing, and we spent no more than an hour making it sound the way he wanted.

  The second began like a mountain song—a sort of “Pretty Saro” mourning hymn—but he had planned this long instrumental interlude, and then the song went off in another direction, more like the raging part of deep mourning, where you hate the loved one for ever existing since the result is to be left in so much pain. I said as much, and he nodded.

  “My uncle Beau died last year. This is for him.”

  “You should use the steel guitar for the middle part, Jason. And you need the voice to come back in sooner.”

  “I don’t hear that. The guitar and mandolin need to finish what they have to say.”

  “If you do it that way, they finish too much of the story. The voice at the end just sounds like a tantrum howling in the night. An after-thought.”

  “OK. We will do it with just the guitar. Show me what you mean, Susi.”

  It took two hours to achieve something we were both happy with, pausing in the middle so that Jason could take notes on how he would change the instrumentation in the middle part. Toward the end, when we were both nodding that we had what we wanted, I felt the beginning of that place, where the music in your chest, at your solar plexus, in your head, even in your nose, is in complete harmony—with what? The music of the spheres? With some vibration that you can feel if you exhaust all the usual, human ways to breathe, like a runner getting a second wind. I wanted to go on. I would beg and plead for it, but before I could speak after the end of our final recording, Jason said, “Let’s do the first one again, but just you and me, guitar and voice.”

  He turned on the tape, and we breathed together through that twenty-first century paean to joy that transcends loneliness and loss.

  When I could speak again after a few moments of silence, I said, “That final A left me with a twilight blue behind the bridge of my nose, where you can’t tell the difference between blue and grey and yellow.”

  I was standing too close to him and uttering complete nonsense, as if I had hyperventilated myself into hysteria.

  He set the guitar on its stand in that methodical way he handles his instruments, and then took my hand in his, tracing the lifeline in my palm.

  “Oh god, it’s two a.m. I’ll be late for work yet again. I have to go.”

  “Don’t go. Please stay, Susi. If you don’t want sex, all right. But how can you go after this? How can you not think we belong together?”

  He stood so close that “not think” was all I was capable of. His shirt was damp—I suppose mine was, too—from our exertions. I could smell everything I’d been avoiding. Clean sweat. The soap and starch in his now-wilting shirt. Whatever it was that caught in the small hairs across his sternum together with the sensation in my nose that threatened to lure me into hell-fire. He spoke in my ear.

  “When I close my eyes, I still see all the colors and the shape and form of your voice. It vibrates on my fingertips like the strings of my guitar.”

  He touched me, putting his fingers on the side of my face where it tickles, and I couldn’t speak to stop him. He turned my face up and kissed me in a rather chaste way, and I know it was me who opened my mouth and responded as if to devour him. Then I managed to stop myself.

  “Please keep your distance.” I pushed away from him. “You are doing everything to confuse and distract me.”

  “What? I’m not.”

  “You have all this hair on your body.”

  Oh god, I said it out loud.

  62 ~ “Go Slow Down”

  JASON

  SHE STARED AT MY WRIST, and I turned my hand over, trying to see what it was that offended her.

  “What can I do about that? Take it all off like a swimmer who—”

  Yikes, she had nudged herself so close to me that I could feel her pulse, which felt like a frightened cat. I sat down and pulled her along with me, half holding her on my knee like you do a child. For everything she said about keeping my distance, she didn’t resist.

  “Susi, I think it’s time we tell each other our secrets.”

  “No. I don’t want to hear yours. I don’t want to tell mine.”

  “I think you’re punishing me for something your ex did.”

  “No, I did it myself. I let sex blind me, when that was all there was in the relationship.”

  “Between us there’s so much more than sex. For one, there’s music. Or is my ego as big as the moon? Two weeks ago you sang my music for the first time, but things changed tonight, so it’s our music now, not just mine.”

  She dropped her head against my chest. I couldn’t tell whether it was surrender or emotion or simple exhaustion from how hard we pushed ourselves working. The sole emotion I had in reserve was the day’s last dregs of self-will, the energy I use to propel myself through life. I picked her up and carried her down to my room, moving as gracefully as I could. The most gallant part of the maneuver came in managing not to break her head on the door frame or lose my footing on the steep stairs. I laid her down on my bed and pulled the coverlet over her, then curled up beside her, with one arm as her pillow and the other wrapped around her waist, holding her close to me, feeling her heart beating far too hard. I whispered into her hair.

  “I don’t need consummation as much as I need comfort. Please let me put my arms around you just for that.”

  Burrowing up against me, she nestled her head into the crook of my arm, so that I could smell the essence of her and feel her lithe body relax under my hand, until her breathing became even and her heart quit thundering and she fell asleep, lightening in my arms as she did.

  ~

  Mentally I wanted only comfort. The rest of me wouldn’t cooperate. By four in the morning, I’d spent a couple of hours pondering whether I’d most like to murder her ex or Mr. Levi who, if he’d spent two hours in a pair of his jeans with an unrelenting erection, might have modified his design. Or perhaps that’s why adolescent boys prefer their jeans four sizes too big; they learned a lesson the rest of us with unfulfilling lovers still have to master. I eased my arm out from under her so as to not disturb her, and then cast off the garment of torture and crawled between the sheets, making myself want nothing more than to watch her sleep.

  She had wakened, and grey eyes regarded me under that look of perpetual surprise her eyebrows framed. She smiled at me the way she first did weeks before, the smile she gave more fr
eely to others than to me.

  “I have to get to work on time today,” she murmured.

  I turned over and buried myself under the covers, trying not to show my dismay, trying not to call out, ‘What about me?’ like a blooming idiot. Other men knew how to turn situations like this to their advantage. Where had I missed the lessons everyone else got? It had to have been a day when I cut Health-Ed class to finish my calculus homework.

  Then I felt her slight weight on the bed again and her hand on my arm—where all that offending hair grows—and she curled around my body as I had done with her earlier, but I could feel even through my t-shirt that she was naked, and she put her hand between my thighs instead of around my waist. Everything I had done to ease my discomfort was canceled, and she took matters firmly in hand.

  “No teasing,” I breathed. “No stopping in the middle and making me go home.”

  “We’re at your house.”

  “Still. Don’t stop, Susi.”

  “I can’t anymore.”

  The next part I won’t post on even the most anonymous blog (I can’t post the previous part either, since it doesn’t reflect well on my prowess as a lover that, after two hours in bed with the woman I love, all I had achieved was a great deal of discomfort), but she ducked her head under the covers and tended to the part that her hand couldn’t attend to while stroking so confidently. In some unfamiliar but artful gesture—for I had no previous experience with her commandeering my body and overruling any choices I might make—she had turned me and thrown off the oppressive weight of the blankets, exposing me so that one hand tenderly cupped and tugged at my balls, while the other grasped the base of my cock as she tasted and tickled the head, tracing the curves and edges with her tongue and lips, and pressing the hard tip of her tongue into the slit.

  “Susi—”

  “Hmm?” Her hum threatened to send me into delirium, as she stretched the skin around my scrotum more tightly, holding my balls and my life in her palm.

  Then, after she pulled it all so tight there was no room to throb, she demonstrated open-throated production of sound. Except I was the only one singing.

  “Susi, stop,” I whispered. “You’ll make me come.” I urged her head up, and she looked at me, questioning, blinking.

  “So? You can do that more than once in a night.”

  Then she had both hands working my shaft while holding my balls in her mouth and instead of humming, she moaned, while having doubled herself up to mash the wetness of her vulva against my knee. When there was no possibility for me to hold back any longer, she must have felt it too, for in a heartbeat she had her mouth off my balls and pressed hard with her thumb against the base of my cock while she buried the length of it deep in her throat.

  All right, yes, I held her head down, but it was an involuntary reflex, since my hands had become entranced with stroking and pulling her boyish hair. She could have stopped, but she didn’t until she made me let go.

  My fingers stayed trussed in her hair, even after she let me be and rested her head on my belly, her hand now satisfying itself by twirling in the hair there, making it tickle, making me shiver.

  “Oh geez.” My brain found itself able to do the work it is supposed to. “We’re supposed to use a condom for that too.”

  “Why? I can’t get pregnant from swallowing.”

  “STD protection.”

  “Where would either of us get a sexually transmitted disease? I haven’t been near anyone since the last time the doctors worked over every cell of my body.”

  “You do it to protect yourself, Susi.”

  “Why would I need to protect myself from you? Cynthia said—”

  “Cynthia said what?” I flipped her over and pinned her with my knees. “Why are you talking to Cynthia about me?”

  “She and Ian are on a crusade to convince me to be in love with you. I think they want their basement back.”

  “What did Cynthia say?”

  “That you haven’t been with anyone since you found out your wife was unfaithful. That instead of being broken hearted, you just went to a doctor. She wanted to make sure I didn’t think you were unsafe.”

  “Cynthia doesn’t know everything I do.”

  “Doesn’t she?”

  “Oh geez, I have such good friends. What does she say to make you be in love with me?”

  “That you aren’t as much of an asshole as some men.”

  She wiggled away from under me and tried to get out of bed.

  “Where are you going?” I pulled her inelegantly back to me.

  “For mouthwash. I read that most men are fastidious about not tasting themselves, and you are more fastidious than most men.”

  “Not about that. It goes with being less of an asshole than some men.”

  “That is so romantic. Take off your t-shirt so I can see your body.”

  We tried romantic kisses then, this time in utter silence, with no ravishing Puccini opera or humping rock music playing in the background, just those sounds almost beyond the range of human hearing—of breath across the hairs on the back of your hand, or under the soft skin at the base of your earlobe, or the rasp of early-morning beard across a lily-smooth belly. With such exquisite pleasure, I couldn’t believe it when my brain began interfering, hoping against hope that she could tell how I feel from how I kiss her fingers. That my lips touching the tiny scars on her lips revealed existential mysteries. That my eyelashes fluttering against her small breasts reassured her that pain now lay only in the past and that we could rise from this destroyed bed as partners. My sentimental brain won out over animal instinct just before she again took me in hand, coaxing me more erect and guiding me toward her innermost secrets. I’d like to have strangled both reason and emotion, but they won out and my tongue spoke, even as my body wanted to do nothing more than sigh and bury itself deep inside her.

  “Susi, I’m too far gone to do this if you aren’t in love with me. I can’t just fuck you. If that’s all you want, you have to at least lie and make me think you love me.”

  “I do.” Her voice broke, which broke the other half of my heart. I wanted her to mean it, so I shouldn’t have invited her to lie.

  “Yet not so much that you can say it out loud? What kind of plausible lie do you offer as proof?”

  “I’m learning to sing the way you want me to.”

  At this point, she made that mysterious move again, where she overruled choice and forced me to do what I wanted to. With a condom.

  I’m saving myself for marriage.

  63 ~ “Brilliant Disguise”

  JASON

  BEING THE SUPERIOR-TO-SOME-ASSHOLES guy that I am, I did not snivel, whine, or beg when she had to go to work. I got up and went to work myself. Besides, there’s no coffee in Ian’s house before nine. Whereas at the studio, even though it was only seven-thirty, Martha had hot coffee, fruit, protein bars, and hard-boiled eggs.

  While I ate breakfast, I made Martha listen to the recording Susi and I had made the night before. “Just the last two songs,” I said, realizing in the middle of the second that it would take some getting used to, letting others hear these sounds. If I succeeded in convincing Susi to sing live with me, we’d have to make this music in front of other people. I buried myself in email, pretending I wasn’t watching Martha’s reaction.

  She didn’t respond when I kept looking over. When the music ended, she sat back down at her own laptop to finish whatever business I had interrupted. The third time I encountered her eyes, she bent her head over a pad of paper with her pen. Then she held up the paper: 9.5.

  “The point-five represents my unfamiliarity with the form. However, you don’t need reassurance. You know it’s good. By the way, Zak called at seven and said he won’t be here until eight-thirty.”

  I settled down to work. We had hit on something the night before. I started singing an old Hank Williams piece and then transmuted it to something of my father’s, to show Susi where the song was going. It reminded me of
a piece I’d read in a thesis or lecture I borrowed from Susi’s house. I found the lecture notes and copied a portion of the text into email I was sending to my select little group of Americana musicology friends, thinking to prove this deeper line about Hank Williams’ influences on the Lost Sons. Also, I was thinking about the fox and the Little Prince, and accidentally clicked Send before typing the attribution for the quote I used.

  My little fox sat in the sun as I crept closer and closer, and then—what? The fox turned out to be a friendly she-wolf? Where else could I go with the analogy that would make compelling lyrics? Chinese medieval poets speak of she-foxes that hide in the tall grass, waiting to suck a man’s soul dry, like succubae. Definitely not those little foxes in this case. Though after thinking about onomatopoeia and the word succubus, I had to stop remembering the previous night to keep from embarrassing myself.

  Before I could pull myself together to start new email to attribute the quote in the last email I sent, the instant messenger light popped on.

  Chas1933: What city are you in?

  Sebastian: Seattle.

  Chas1933: I think that’s my library you’re browsing. Are you sleeping with my daughter?

  What can one say in such a situation—besides ‘oh shit’? I pondered that and answered, as truthfully as possible.

  Sebastian: Not at this moment, sir.

  Chas1933: The last one was a fool. I’ve been hoping it wouldn’t be a pattern.

  Flipping to the book plate at the front of the text, I understood that my friend Chas1933@jugum.com was Charles Neville—not the saxophone player from New Orleans, but a local music professor who wrote multiple treatises on the effect of Anglo-Celtic ballads on the music of Appalachia and the Acadia musical influences on early jazz and rock. I had embarrassed myself before a scholar I admire. Just like starting on the wrong foot with his daughter by being the incorrect Jason.