Nine Volt Heart

by Annie Pearson

  73 ~ “Boys Want Sex in the Morning”

  SUSI

  “BOYS WANT SEX IN THE MORNING.” Jason’s breath brushed my ear the same way the breeze wafted over the curtains.

  “Girls do too, but it’s not morning.”

  “It’s a line from a song. Uncle Bonsai.”

  “I don’t think I know that one.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “You’ll need another condom.”

  “Yes. I’ve retained a certain wisdom my uncle left me. Though I’m not sure how we’ll ever have children the way we’re going about it.”

  “There isn’t a plan for that.”

  “That’s how to make things happen, Susi, by having a plan. You don’t have to marry me right this minute, but we still need a plan. I want to make you happy. And safe. I want to make babies with you.”

  “Just make me come one more time and then make breakfast. No, better just make the coffee and I’ll make breakfast.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “I find the concept of you taking care of me amusing. You don’t have a car or a house or anything else that grownups have. Judging from how you behave, if I didn’t bring the other half of my dinner to Ian’s every night, you’d starve because you’re the dependent vegetarian child in a meat-eating household.”

  “Don’t talk anymore, Susi. Ephraim rips them off. Your brother Steven wants to crush them. I can’t afford you turning them blue again. Stop talking and do those nice things you do.”

  “Who is Ephraim?”

  “He’s a music industry person that I have business with. I don’t want him in bed with us. Boys want sex in the morning, not a trip to the existential abyss.”

  “You are the one who started talking about babies. Who’s leading whom to the existential abyss?”

  ~

  We slept till noon, and could have slept the whole day away, as if both of us had been deprived of sleep for weeks. Jason is usually like an Irish setter that can’t sit still for a moment, but Sunday he lazed around like an overfed Newfoundland dog. (I’m not afraid of all that hair as a secondary sex characteristic now, but I’m no less aware of it.) However, it was a beautiful Sunday outside, and I wanted to be in the sunshine. It took me changing into jeans and heading for the door on my own to get him up, dressed, and out for a walk. Once we were sauntering down the alley, smelling spring with the sun shining full on our faces, he was happy to be there. Ever since we left the club the night before, any little thing seemed to bring him exquisite joy. Just the look of stupefied bliss on his face made me laugh too, but then I gulped a big breath of the local blossoms and began coughing.

  “Are you all right, Susi?”

  “Lilacs make my throat hurt when I pass them on the street. The odor and some other essence are too strong for me. I used to love spring, but now the lilacs leave me feeling like I might cry.”

  The lilacs reminded me of the pain again. Which made me think that I had to tell him about it, though I still didn’t want to. I’d rather take bad-tasting medicine, endure another “procedure,” or dodge more phone messages from Logan. If I believed in praying for silly, selfish things, I’d pray that I never have to tell Jason how I got to be like this.

  “Let’s cross the street,” Jason said. “If we stay out of the alleys, you won’t have to walk close to a lilac.”

  The essence of Jason: practical solutions to existential problems.

  “How about lavender?” he asked. “Or the magnolias and forget-me-nots? Do they make you want to cry? Do we have to walk down the middle of the street?”

  “No, just lilacs right now. The only lavender in bloom now is Russian sage. It doesn’t have that sticky, long-distance scent of English lavenders.”

  “Russian sage has a sort of provocative blossom, don’t you think? It reminds me of you.”

  I didn’t answer. I think he was teasing so that I would respond with my usual naïveté. After how we had spent the night and part of the morning, I didn’t feel naïve. Instead, I needed to be distracted. I wanted to ask him one more question, but I didn’t want to have to tell him anything in return. He gave me permission to do both, so why should I wrack myself with guilt and doubt?

  Fortunately, Jason’s ebullient mood offered more than sufficient distraction. While we walked through the neighborhood and down to the lake, he pointed out minutiae as if there were meaning to behold. The bleeding hearts were in bloom. The cherry blossoms had all gone, leaving a scattered snowfall of pink-and-white tissue, pasted to the ground by the last rainfall. The dogwoods unfolded their bloom-like leaves, each tree a reverse sun rise, with the blossoms richest at the top where the tree first received morning sun, fading at the bottom where the sun might never reach.

  As we waited to cross Lake Washington Boulevard, a VW convertible passed and then swung around to pull into the gravel beside us. Music blared from the car, but one of the passengers was fumbling with the controls, turning down the sound.

  “Hi, Miss Neville!” It was the same four girls from Prescott who had come up to say hello after the show the night before. We had silently agreed to say nothing about how they came to be in the twenty-one-and-older part of an all-ages nightclub.

  “Hello—did you meet Jason last night?”

  With all the rush around the band after the show, I didn’t see everyone who spoke with Jason. I’d stayed with Sonny and tried to follow Jason’s instruction not to talk to the press and not to tell people my full name if I didn’t want to see it in the newspapers.

  “Hi, Jason!” a couple of them said in unison. They were embarrassed and ready to burst out giggling. I realized that it was because they concluded the obvious, having seen me with him at one o’clock in the morning and then again at one o’clock the following afternoon.

  “I remember you,” Jason said. “You made me sign your arm. But now you’re wearing a long-sleeve shirt. Have you repented already?”

  The girl giggled—it was Jamie Clayton, who was in my fourth-period voice class.

  “No, we have to meet our parents for a Mother’s Day brunch at our club house. And we’re late.”

  They drove off giggling, their music turned up loud as soon as they peeled out of the gravel.

  “Mother’s Day, huh?” Jason said after they disappeared. “You are so conscientious and caring when you speak of your father and brother that I am guessing you lost your mother.”

  “Yes. A few years ago. Just before my accident. She had heart trouble and passed in the night.”

  Angling down through the grass toward the lake, we took the path close by the water, near the rushes and away from traffic on the boulevard.

  “How did you lose your mother?” I asked.

  “Why do you think she’s lost?”

  I wracked my brain. The folder Randolph dropped on my desk led me to form the idea of “orphan.” Plus Jason’s story from the night before.

  “When you told me about your uncle last night,” I said, not quite telling an outright lie. “You said he took you in when your mother died.”

  “She had cancer.”

  “Was it quick? I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have asked such a stupid question. I know enough people who lost their parents that I know there are no good answers to anything.”

  “It’s OK, Susi. Ask me anything you want. She’s been gone a long time. Half the years I knew her, she spent dying. It wasn’t quick. It was a long series of hope-against-hope, with every win followed by a new defeat.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Maybe I don’t know anymore. When I was a child, she was perfection. She had a beautiful singing voice and infinite patience—she was my first music teacher. When I moved on to adolescence, she was a puzzle and a set of frustrations. I found out that she’d been a performing musician and then abandoned it. Since music was all I cared about, I pestered her about it, because I never understood her answer: ‘I found bigger things in the world than music.’ I just couldn’t imagine what coul
d be bigger than music.”

  “Did she quit to take care of you? Music doesn’t always pay enough to live on.”

  “That must have been it. I know enough guys who abandoned the life after they had a kid or two. There was just the two of us.”

  We walked in silence, because I couldn’t say anything meaningful. Jason whacked at the rushes by the trail with his hand.

  “Dammit. It didn’t need to be that way. Her family had money. My father could have helped her. She was beautiful and talented. They let her die without ever helping her to do anything with her talent.”

  One more whack of his hand roused a family of ducklings, paddling away from the bank, squeaking out pleas to their mother to wait for them.

  “Don’t do it, Susi. Don’t let anything stop you. You’re beautiful and talented. It’s possible for you to have everything you ever wanted.”

  I turned my head so that he couldn’t see that he nearly made me cry.

  It wasn’t possible. It was long past that time.

  ~

  We paused amid a small riot of retriever-type dogs in ecstasy over fetching sticks from Lake Washington, because Jason wanted to point out two flickers courting on an exposed Doug-fir branch.

  “Reminds me of us,” he said. “The guy performs a ridiculous, arrhythmic ritual, trying to get her attention. She only looks for a second and then turns away. Which just makes him do it more—sort of like me, going to ridiculous lengths to get your attention.”

  The birds looked silly, forced by their hormones to act out an ancient script embedded in their DNA that made them dance together.

  I said. “We have free will.”

  “Do we? I suppose,” Jason said, speaking softly, wrapping his arms around me. “At least I don’t say ‘I love you’ just to get you go to bed with me like that poor bird up there.”

  “You say it when you’re already in bed with me. I thought it was a habit, like yodeling in the shower.”

  “Please don’t laugh at me. I want you to marry me.”

  “Jason, please.”

  “I just don’t understand, Susi. I know what it feels like when you let me hold you. I’m not imaging how you respond when I touch you. Explain it to me, please. Explain why I can’t find you next to me every morning for the rest of my life.”

  “It didn’t work before. I have no faith it could ever work.”

  “Ever?” His beautiful smoky voice cracked as he said it.

  “My grandmother told me not to go to bed with anyone I wouldn’t think of marrying. She gave the same advice to my mother. So I did what my mother did and married the only person I’d ever gone to bed with. Although my mother had good judgment, I don’t. I can’t trust the entire fabric of my life to my poor judgment.”

  “You can trust me. How do I convince you of that?”

  “Please stop asking me to marry you.”

  “All right then. It goes against everything I believe in to ask this. It’s a complete betrayal of my moral code to even think it, but if you won’t marry me, will you live with me? I feel incomplete and half-ill when you aren’t with me. We get on so well together.”

  “Except when you ask me to do what I can’t. There are a million reasons why we can’t live together—it would threaten my job, I need my privacy, Cynthia says you’re impossible to live with, and—”

  “What?”

  “It goes against my moral code, too.”

  “OK, Susi. If you change your mind, tell me. I won’t be changing mine. Can we go home now? I’m hungry and I want to listen to some of your father’s music.”

  74 ~ “Nothin’ Without You”

  JASON

  “MY BROTHER INSISTS ON anchovies.”

  “I’ll pass unless you want some.”

  “No anchovies then. The red chilies hurt my throat, so I’ll take out part for me and then add the chilies for you.”

  After we returned to her house, Susi put us both to work making an early supper. The homely tasks of chopping garlic and pitting kalamata olives seemed to restore peace between us. We were making puttanesca, and Susi forced us to take a long time, since the bread had to bake first. It beats me when she found time to make the dough, leaving it to rise while we walked. While I was in the shower? After she had worn me into a half-conscious pile of humanoid flesh and left me to simper in her bed?

  When I finished chopping the olives, she added them to the garlic and capers simmering in olive oil and butter.

  “Where’s a can of tomatoes, Susi? I’ll open it for you.”

  She frowned. “If I used canned tomatoes, then it would truly be whore’s spaghetti.”

  “Susi, such talk.”

  “That’s what puttanesca means. It’s a working girl’s quick meal.”

  “Then why isn’t it quick when you cook it? I’m starving.”

  “I’ll chop the tomatoes. There’s fresh parsley in the garden. Do you think you can recognize what to harvest?” She handed me kitchen shears and sent me out back to her garden, where I proved so adept at the hunter-gather role that I got a kiss when I returned. I did such a good job of that, and pretended to be so patient while waiting for the bread to bake, that she let me make love to her on the Mission sofa.

  “She let me” is a figure of speech.

  I get so lost with her in these situations that I can’t keep track of who is in control. I think she trusts me enough now that she lets me start. After we quarreled on the walk—was it a quarrel?—it had taken some time to be comfortable with each other again, but I think it was me who first had the courage to touch more than fingertips. I was kissing her, and I think my tongue found hers first. When her tongue responded, I pulled her closer and let my hands glide over her shoulder blades. Under her shirt. It was my thigh that nudged between her knees, allowing me to press up against where she had been so silky and hot that morning. She didn’t resist, and I carried her over to the sofa and—I can’t remember the part where her jeans came off. I was so hungry that my teeth might have played a part. She was being helpful and cooperative by unzipping my jeans, though I was still in control at that point. Between tearing open the condom and the timer announcing the baked bread, she made that move again and I wasn’t in charge at all. I’m losing any faith I have that it’s me who knows how to make her come five times. By the time we’re done, it’s me who is desperate, begging, ready to scream.

  She loves me. I know she does. I can feel it in how her heart beats when my hand rests on her breast.

  I just don’t get it. How can she not want it to be like this every day?

  FOUR: Rondo

  75 ~ “Knockin’ on Your Door”

  JASON

  WE WERE WASHING THE dishes and seeing if there was any garlic and olive oil left on each other’s lips, and I was asking whether there might be chocolate hidden anywhere in her kitchen when Ian called.

  On Susi’s land line. Asking for me.

  “Perry Webb thinks he has your stolen guitar, Jason. He’s been out of town, but tonight he was in his store looking over what his guys picked up the last couple of weeks.”

  “Can we get it first thing tomorrow?”

  “Tonight. He invited us to come over right away.”

  “Is he at the shop on Roosevelt?”

  “Yeah—come get me so I can ride along. Cynthia has one car and Arlo has the other.”

  I hung up excited, and then realized that I expected Susi would drive me over there, which brought on a severe attack of embarrassment and self-condemnation.

  “What is it, Jason? You sounded so excited on the phone, but now you look confused.”

  “Some creep stole my Uncle Beau’s guitar a month ago, but a friend maybe found it. He said we could pick it up tonight.”

  “What fantastic news. Let’s go.”

  “You don’t mind? I don’t want to take advantage of our friendship.”

  “We’ll both fall asleep from too much food and sun if we just hang around here.”

  “We have to p
ick up Ian on the way. When are you ever going to get your own car back, Susi? This one just doesn’t look like you.”

  “You can’t be half as frustrated about how long it’s taking as I am.”

  It turns out we had to pick up Ian because Perry told him about a couple of other interesting instruments he had.

  “Don’t let Cynthia know about this,” Ian said when we entered Perry’s shop. “A man has to have at least one vice.”

  “What is Jason’s vice?” Susi asked.

  “Washing his hands too often and being more perfect than other people can abide.”

  I’m not so perfect that I can hide disappointment.

  It wasn’t Beau’s guitar.

  “Although it is a beautiful instrument,” I said, when I saw my disappointment mirrored on Perry’s face. I wanted to do the right thing by him, since he’d tried to be helpful. “I’ll buy it from you as a replacement. I’ve been playing Ian’s, but he is so cheap, he’s charging me rent. By the note.”

  Ian had already settled into making love to a twelve-string Rickenbacker Deluxe someone famous played, supposedly. I won’t name names; it wasn’t either George Harrison or Roger McGuinn. Else, the price would have had three more zeroes beyond what Perry was asking.

  “I really want this,” Ian said.

  “Get it.”

  “Cynthia will kill me.”

  “I’ll buy it and you can pay me over time.”

  “She’d find out.”

  “Geez, Ian. Tell her it’s a tax-deductible business expense.”

  “That didn’t work the last three times.”

  I shook my head. “Perry, you always have great mics. I want to find one for Susi. Everything we have is for male voices. Do you have something that can handle a woman’s sibilance with more grace than my gear?”

  “I don’t need a microphone,” Susi said.

  “You were uncomfortable last night with the stand-up mic at the hotel and the handheld at the club. You use your entire body to sing. So let’s find something hands-free that you’ll be comfortable with.”