Nine Volt Heart

by Annie Pearson

  “Hey, bro. You doing all right?”

  “Just spaced. Have you seen Susi?”

  “Toby and Sonny have the girls inside.”

  “They are women, not girls,” I said, reflexively.

  “Yeah, sure. Hey, Jason. You aren’t going to fuck it up, are you?”

  “I’m trying not to, but which ‘it’ do you mean?”

  “Susi. She’s going to sing with us, isn’t she? We can’t lose her now.”

  I just looked at him, because I didn’t know the answer. I didn’t know how to not fuck up, and I didn’t know how to keep her with us. With me.

  Ian, of course, can read my face like a book, one he has read over and again. He blanched.

  “Crap, Jason. You have to get this right. No one else can do it for you.”

  Right. I couldn’t ask Martha to take care of it, or hire some of Sonny’s friends, or call Karl for estoppels. Or bitch until Cynthia gave up and took care of it for me. I didn’t know where to go to buy a clue.

  Then I found her again, standing at the side, out of the way of equipment hassles, with that luminescent lily look that she has when wearing her black concert clothes. The wide silver belt cinching her waist showed off the bones of her hips and, even with her swimmer’s shoulders, she looked small and oh so vulnerable. Then she saw me and turned on that smile she first felled me with.

  So vulnerable. She could crush me with a single word. It would annihilate any ability to make it through everyday life if she said no.

  70 ~ “Iko Iko”

  SUSI

  “HEY, SUSI. CAN YOU handle the air in here?”

  “I think so. We won’t be here long, will we, Jason?”

  “Don’t know. If they boo us off the stage, we’ll be gone right away. If you stand here until it’s time to sing, the ventilation should help. Here’s the set list.”

  “I remember it. I don’t need notes.”

  He wanted the set to begin with four songs that the crowd would recognize (even though I didn’t), followed by two cover songs that, Jason said, would help people transition to the band’s new work. Then I would join them.

  Jason pushed my hair back, looking at my ears. “It’s going to be loud. I want you to use my earphones. They don’t fit you, but you won’t like it without them. You’ll hear what we’re playing without being overwhelmed.”

  “If I use yours, what will you use?”

  “One short night won’t give me tinnitus. We will get some made for you—if you are going to keep singing with us.”

  His finger lingered on my earlobe after he fitted the earphones, the first gentle touch we had shared since I left his house the morning before. What had I been thinking, letting Randolph inject his nastiness into how I understood Jason?

  “Please,” he said, though I had to read his lips with the earphones in place, and I had forgotten what he was asking in the midst of my own regret. What I heard through the earphones came from the stage monitors. The emcee seemed to be negotiating with the crowd, announcing that the band they expected to see wouldn’t appear, then playing up excitement for the replacement, and finally calling Jason’s name.

  The night before, he whispered, “Who are you and what have you done with my lover?” I could have said the same, as I watched Jason master that audience. He’d kept his hair tied back all day, but now it was unbound and wild. The same person who hesitated during our picnic by the lake, and who adopted a shy posture at MOHAI in the afternoon, walked out on stage at eleven o’clock and stood in a suggestive pose before the microphone. In the most seductive voice I’ve ever heard, he said, “Oh, Seattle, you don’t know how we missed you.”

  He struck a long note on his guitar, pulling it up to his shoulder and turning his head in the same way he did when—when he was alone with me, in bed. As he struck a second note, the rest of the band came in with a clash of sound that sorted itself into a pattern, while the crowd contributed to the cacophony. Then the melody asserted itself. Jason began to sing, his voice muted in my earphone monitors, as if he were singing just to me.

  Through all that we’d sung together, I had heard only hints of this. Since I don’t know rock-and-roll, I don’t know how to describe it. Tuneful rant? Rhythmic exhortation? He danced across the stage, sliding over to Ian, where they both shouted into the microphone, which was so loud through the earphones that the sound must have been overwhelming to the people in front of the stage, where that reporter friend of Arlo’s stood writing notes, lost and oblivious to the throng around him. When the song finished, those people seemed to be shouting right back, filtered through the earphones as a distant roar. Jason and Ian both had huge smiles. Jason stripped off his dinner jacket, throwing it to the crowd, as he shouted, “Damn, it’s good to be home!”

  Then he pulled his bolo tie loose as he counted one, two, three, four, and they banged their way into another song, followed by two more. Then Sonny stepped up with Jason and they sang together, something I recognized: “I Walk the Line,” because my father always played Johnny Cash when he worked in the garage or in the yard. Sonny’s bass voice wasn’t steady and reliable, but the wobble offset Jason’s honey-smooth tenor. They followed with a Jimmie Rodgers yodeling song, different from the modest version Jason had done earlier at the museum benefit.

  While I watched from the side, Jason made love to the crowd, dancing across the stage, his shirt soaked with sweat, while he moved in ways that I associated with those two precious nights when we had—

  He tore his tuxedo shirt open, stripped it off his wet torso, and threw it into the crowd, the bolo tie still swinging from his neck. “We’re going to switch gears now and introduce a new singer. SusiQ, come meet Seattle.”

  We started with “Tio’s Fury,” which we’d practiced for the past month, but I hadn’t heard the rich layer of texturing, with everyone on the same stage, instead of Zak down the hall and Sonny half way to the front porch. Everyone turned up loud. Holding a microphone bothered me—performing with a microphone always bothers me—and I tried not to think I was competing with the strings and percussion, just to balance it in the way that Jason had hounded us to do in rehearsal.

  A slow, moody version of “Hymn for a Rusty Angel” calmed the crowd that had been restless and demanding when I first walked out. Then he introduced the next song, saying the title—”Mon Oncle, le Troubadour”—so quietly that the audience fell silent, and he played the first steel guitar chords to begin the duet with my voice. This time, it wasn’t the acoustic song we’d first practiced at my house.

  I watched his hands, far too conscious of his long fingers and how confidently he touched the strings. As we reached the instrumental portion of the song, we watched each other as the rest of the band took turns with virtuoso solos, with each adding to the tension that built in the course of the song. He played the single note that brought my voice back into the knit-together sounds, long bars of grievous, lonesome scat singing before the final chorus, when we wove his guitar and my voice into the final shriek of loss and pain. And we both carried the final note long enough to otherwise silence the room. A deep indigo blue bloomed in my chest and filled my head.

  It had been such a long, long time since I saw an audience swoon.

  71 ~ “Still I Long for Your Kiss”

  SUSI

  BEAUTIFUL, ERSTWHILE JASON, THE modest romantic, could stand in front of strangers and play devil, hero, and lovelorn cowboy. He had no qualms about seducing women into ecstasy or driving grown men to shout out and hug their girlfriends. For the second time in thirty days, I found that I didn’t know the man I’d gone to bed with.

  I hardly knew the band I’d sung with almost every night in Cynthia’s futon-lined parlor, trying to get the sound balanced so that no instrument overpowered another. I didn’t know that we could fill a modest concert hall with a huge, round, driving sound that left people shouting for us after three encores.

  The furtive Jason whom I saw duck for cover whenever we went anywhere in publ
ic was another figment of my imagination. This Jason stood for almost an hour after the show, chatting with anyone who came to ask for autographs, wondering when the band would tour, and begging for a new album.

  A spiritual twin of Arlo’s, if not a clone, asked Jason to sign his shirt. “Far out, man. I used to come see Stoneway all the time. Before you sold out.”

  “How far back do you go?” Jason asked, as if the person hadn’t just insulted him.

  “I’ve seen your shows for nine years, man.”

  “See that guy over there, by the girl with orange hair? He saw us play when we were in high school. He has you beat.”

  “No way. You guys should put out a CD of old stuff. This new stuff is cool, too. It’s the middle that sucks. Good to see you back on track.”

  “Thanks, man.” Jason shook his hand. “It means something that you’d say that. We don’t want to lose your respect.”

  While Jason was being nice to people who insulted him, a host of women asked him to sign parts of their body or shirts, all of them hanging on his every word. Then, the house managers insisted we all needed to be out of the building so the clean-up crew could go home.

  Jason caught my eye at that point.

  “Hey, Susi. How you doing?” he said, stepping by my side.

  “That man insulted you,” I whispered, gesturing to the wild-haired gentleman bopping away from us. “Yet you smiled and shook his hand.”

  “No, he didn’t mean any insult. He’s listened to our music so much that he thinks he knows me personally. He’s giving me advice because he cares.” Jason smiled in a dreamy way, though maybe it was left over from how he smiled at the show. “Sonny and Karl are going to the 5 Point for breakfast. Want to come?”

  “Thanks, but I think I’ll just go home.”

  He touched my lips with his thumb. “You were fantastic, Susi. Thank you. I’m sorry I doubted you.”

  “Please come home with me.”

  I blurted it before I could guard myself against saying what I thought, just because he touched my mouth. He didn’t give me a quarter of a second to reconsider.

  In the car on the way home, he couldn’t stop talking or leave a breath of silence for me to reconsider, or reframe, what had happened that night. “Zak was one hundred percent on. Everything I said about him is turning out to be true. And Toby! My god, could you believe it tonight? He and Angelia have something huge going between them—I don’t mean about being in love, but that their music is so tight together.”

  He paused for a breath just as we turned onto Madrona Drive, and in that slim moment of silence, he turned fretful.

  “You don’t think they’ll strike out on their own, do you? I mean, I’d never stop them. But lord, it feels so good, I hope they stay. And Sonny!”

  This thought propelled him back into his enthusiasms.

  “Do you think he’ll stay with us? Or do you think he’s just doing this out of charity, sort of a misguided payback?”

  I said, “He doesn’t seem eager to go elsewhere.”

  “Everyone is so good right now. I’m getting nervous about holding on to people. They have every reason to find other gigs. I couldn’t blame them. I can’t offer anything long term.”

  “Jason, it’s you that makes the band good.” I was stating the obvious.

  “What a nice thing to say. But it’s not me. It’s synchronicity. Each little bit just seemed to come together at this time and this place.”

  “I’m grateful you invited me to join you. This was one of the most incredible nights I’ve ever known.”

  He was grinning. “You forced yourself on us. Remember?”

  As I parked in the carport, he curved his hand over mine.

  “I’m not forcing myself on you, Susi. You want to do this, don’t you?” Which left me so confused that I couldn’t think of an answer before he said, “Singing with the band, I mean. Playing with all of us.”

  72 ~ “Come Together”

  JASON

  “WERE YOU NERVOUS?”

  Susi seemed so distracted that she couldn’t get the key in the lock, and I had a feeling we were headed for another train wreck. I took the key from her hand and asked again, trying not to spook her.

  “If you were nervous, it didn’t show.”

  She shook her head. “It never makes me nervous. I don’t know what stage fright means, except I’ve seen how it makes other people ill.”

  I unlocked the door and held it open for her. “Then you saw what a mess I was right up to when we started playing.”

  I was a mess again at that moment, trying to figure out how to bridge the gulf that had opened between us since leaving my bedroom a couple of mornings earlier. The idea I had was to apply the same moxie as on stage. I crooked a finger under the silver belt that cinched her waist and pulled her toward me.

  “Let’s take a shower. I wanted to unhook that belt since I first saw it.”

  She began unbuckling mine, and my relief matched how it felt as each show started that day, when people didn’t throw stones. I shrugged out of my t-shirt and then pulled her close so that I could get at the zipper of her dress, pulling it down and then tugging the dress over her head. She stood there in just a bra and those outlandish cowboy boots.

  “Good lord, Susi, you don’t have any underwear on.”

  “I haven’t ever figured out what to wear with this dress so the line doesn’t show through.”

  “You stood in front of all those people with no skivvies.”

  “The skirt is long. It’s not as if anyone could see.”

  “I couldn’t have sung a note if I’d known.” I started to pull off my pants, not able to take my eyes off her, and then half fell over as it occurred to me. “You didn’t have any underwear on for Mozart either.”

  “Mozart didn’t care.”

  We made it to the shower, which we needed after the night’s work, and I pulled her in with me, where the space was small enough to press us together in the way I wanted. She tried pulling that stunt on me again, touching me in ways that threatened to make me lose control, starting when she soaped my pecs and played in the hair that she’d complained about a few days before.

  She took me in her hands again and soaped me half way to delirium, and then dipped down to cup and tug at my balls.

  “Lord, that feels good. ‘Nothing compares to you.’”

  “It’s nothing you can’t do yourself.”

  “Hmm. I don’t think so.”

  She began kissing my nipples, rubbing her face in the soapy hair on my chest, which I couldn’t do myself.

  I soaped her too, starting low while she steadied herself, first with her hands on my shoulders and then twining her fingers in my hair. I moved higher, pausing with my hands on her breasts while I nuzzled the soapy sweetness of her bush, making her laugh. Then I soaped her arms and back and neck.

  When I held her again, both of us dripping lather while the shower drummed against her back and splashed onto my face, she began ducking away and hiding herself. There was nowhere in the shower for her to hide, and we weren’t doing anything but playing. Then I realized it was her unmade-up face she tried to hide. I turned her face toward me, feeling her want to slip away under my soapy hand.

  “Susi, I love you. I hate that this happened to you, but it’s the only face I’ve known. You’re beautiful. Please don’t hide from me.”

  “I don’t, honestly. It makes people uncomfortable to see it.”

  “Not me. I think you are both brave and beautiful.”

  I traced my soapy thumb over the web-like veil along the left side of her face, and she shuddered, moving close to me.

  “It tickles when you do that.”

  ~

  Surfeit. People died of it in the Middle Ages.

  More than enough of everything.

  A sunny spring Sunday that I will remember until I die. Enough sleep. Enough food. Enough time in warm spring air to breathe and move as if the whole day were one long tai-chi form.
Enough time to explore every continent, stream, mountain, and valley of a beautiful, beloved woman’s body. Long hours of peace where the music was provided by the junco that scolded us for lingering on the deck with our coffee when her nest was nearby. The percussion-only compositions we invented, with the sounds of our bared bodies in collision as the major motif. The woodwinds’ part was the reedy rasp of our breathing as we practiced coming together, when it didn’t seem possible that consummation could feel this intensely, wildly, passionately good.

  She got up after the first time and made pancakes because I was starving. If there is such a thing as afterglow, I think the light comes from a small woman in a green silk kimono, her short hair uncharacteristically awry, flipping pancakes, singing “Angel Band” and stopping every few moments to bite the mound at the base of my thumb.

  If there is taste that can be ascribed to the special permissiveness between devoted lovers, then I would say it is maple syrup and butter: the most fastidious woman in Seattle allowed me to kiss her breasts with my mouth still sticky and oily from our five a.m. feast. I will always think her breasts taste like the honey-dew of Paradise. When I hear the trite cliché of talkative women keeping satiated men from the embrace of Morpheus, I will counter with my own archetypal experience of a peaceful woman’s fingers at my temples, my neck, my shoulders, pulling me with her into sleep, atomizing and becoming one with the molecules of water in a tumbling brook, drifting in the gentling breeze shooshing through the top branches of cedar trees outside the open window.

  She loves me. I know she does. She feeds me, rocks me to the bottom of my battered soul, and then curls in the crook of my arm to sleep as if she has abandoned herself to safety with me.

  When I awoke, I found her coolly assessing my naked body from the end of the bed.

  “Your body hair no longer frightens me,” she said, and then she dropped the green kimono and did some of things she does that still scare the hell out of me.