“I’m like Ian. I can’t afford to spend money I don’t have.”
“Please let me give you a present.” I could see obstinacy settling over her. “All right, Susi. I’m buying one for my own gear collection tonight. I’ll have it available for any woman who comes to sing with us. Why don’t you work with Perry to help make the selection? My singing isn’t the best test, is it? Sibilance isn’t a problem for my voice.”
“It isn’t for mine either,” she said, with great indignation. In the end she went off with Perry to his sound room.
Ian was putting the twelve-string back on its stand, wiping away any fingerprints with a soft cloth.
“I know you need money to take care of your people, Ian.” I had put off for a week talking to him about business.
“Oh crap. It better not be Karl who said anything. There is such a thing as attorney-client privilege, isn’t there?”
“Why didn’t you say something? When I ask whether people want to tour or go into the studio with Dominique, you just say, ‘Whatever you want.’ I’ve been too focused on my hassles.”
“It’s my own problem. I mean, you’re the one stuck married to the Dragon Woman. I was lucky enough to cash in on the sales. I played the same as I would if she wasn’t there. Which she wouldn’t have been if you had listened to me.”
“You and Beau were both right,” I said. “Though I don’t know how you could recognize a poison lover when I couldn’t. You’ve been with one woman forever. Do you have warnings about Susi?”
“Yeah. If you lose her, we will all be dicked. Don’t screw up this time, jerk-face. We need her as much as you do.”
“Yikes, Ephraim is in the sound room with Susi.”
Ian looked down, not at the sound room. “You should talk to him.”
“You knew he’d be here? You are my effing best friend. How—”
“Talk to him. I don’t know the business, Jason. I always just did whatever Beau told us to do. We need someone to take Beau’s place.”
“Frickin’ hell, Ian—”
“I’ll help Susi choose a mic. Though I don’t think she was even using one more than half the time on Saturday. Still, I’ll help.”
“Thanks. You are such a swell friend.”
~
“I have been blind, Jason. I didn’t see it until last night.”
I scowled. Ephraim in his black leather trench coat stood in my personal space. He didn’t shake my hand, though. He said, “I thought the whole problem between us came from you being pissed at Dominique, which she earned. But you’re pissed at me personally, aren’t you?”
“I thought you understood where I was going with Woman at the Well. Then you dampened Beau’s bass line and Toby’s mandolin. You took out the fuzz and twang. Because Dominique wanted to be mainstream. You knew better. You knew what I was trying to do.”
“You left. You abandoned the project, Jason. Dominique stayed. I had to choose between you, and that time Dominique won. It’s your turn this time, if you’re staying and buckling down to do the work.”
“What makes you think I don’t have a work ethic?”
“I’ve heard about it. In fact, that’s why I first sought you out. However, my experience to date is that you abandoned a project. I did what was right for those who stayed behind.”
“I thought you were my friend.” Geez, I couldn’t believe I said that.
“Jason, you’ve been in this business a long time. You need friends, and you need people to do business for you. Don’t confuse the two.” He kept on me, the way Beau used to, and that ticked me off even more.
“I refuse to believe that. We did fine with Beau and other friends tending to business. The hurt didn’t come until Dominique pulled us into the pool with sharks like you.”
“Until two years ago, you were all broke. You had to beg radio stations to play your little homemade EPs. You had to perform three hundred nights out of each year just to buy food.”
“We made enough to pay taxes and buy guitars.”
“Now there’s a real hallmark of success.”
“It’s more confusing to argue with you each time we meet, Ephraim. You say you want to help me to succeed, and then insult me at every turn. Can I go now, or do you want to explain some more about how you screwed up my music to help me?”
“Jason, I’ve gone to the line for you. I have other things to do, but I committed to Albion Records to stay with you through this second album, since you signed on the condition that I remain as your key man.”
“You mean, I can leave Albion if you do? Screw it, Ephraim. Go do what you want and leave me free.”
“It doesn’t work that way. I have a commitment to the label that I must fulfill. In fact, I spent the winter arguing with my bosses that you were sunk in grief over a death in the family. I pushed out deadlines for you. I rearranged public appearances or fixed it so you could phone in interviews from Europe. I kept the whole story out of the papers as much as possible. I got everyone to buy the excuses I made without ever explaining that Beau was your last relative in the world.”
“Explained to your bosses? Your boss is your father.”
“Who needs artists to live up to their contracts in order to stay in business. Now, how do you and I do business together without Beau and Dominique coming between us?”
“Make her stop hassling with Karl so the divorce closes.”
“All right, as much as I can make her do anything. Karl scheduled a conference for Thursday. Finish the music for her part of the new album by then. Have the complete recording masters ready by June second. We need the new CD on shelves when Stoneway goes on the road.”
“And then you’ll stop popping up like a gremlin everywhere I go, because we’ll have no further business with each other.”
“If you choose to do it that way, yes. However, I’m begging you to stay in business with me. Wherever you want to go next, I can help you succeed.”
76 ~ “Hard Hearted”
SUSI
JASON AND I HAD ENOUGH time Monday morning—we went to bed early, woke early, spent only half an hour in the shower together—to dawdle over coffee before work. He was eating the last of the pumpkin empanadas, licking crumbs from his fingers in an obvious, teasing way while the Delmore Brothers sang in the background. And I was doing what I’d been doing all weekend: seeking the courage to ask him one more question.
Then he cleared his throat, setting down his coffee cup so that it rattled and sloshed on its saucer.
“Susi, I’ve been trying to be brave enough to ask you something since Saturday night. What I’m going to ask is more important to me than anything in the world.”
“We already discussed marriage. Anything more we say will make us both unhappy again.”
“I promised I wouldn’t bug you about that. The band has to go on the road this summer. I thought I could delay it, but we need to go for a lot of reasons. So I can’t help your institute by teaching. I had meant it as a promise to you, but I have business obligations I can’t escape.”
“I wasn’t counting on you, Jason.”
“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “I wished you could. I swear this is my sole failure, and it’s only because I had obligations from before we met.”
“That’s it? That’s what you were afraid to say?”
“No. Please come with us. I thought we were just experimenting in rehearsal, but now we know the band is going somewhere important, and we can’t do it without you. The band wants you. I want you.”
“I have plans, Jason. You know that.”
“If we have to play without you, it’ll be like missing a limb. I’m scared to death that if I go on the road, you’ll slip away.”
“The institute takes more than thirty days out of the middle of the summer. I can’t commit to anything else.”
“You could start the institute in the fall. I can help then. So can Ian and Toby. What about Angelia? Is she going to choose your institute over Toby and the band
?”
I hadn’t thought about it, but at the moment, I couldn’t let Angelia’s fickle loyalties affect my decisions.
“Teaching is my life now,” I said. “I can’t abandon what I set out to do just to pursue the pleasure of singing. Angelia’s presence isn’t a required factor in my success.”
“Will you at least think about it, please? I’m begging you, the way I begged you to listen to my music and sing my songs.”
“Is this why you wanted to buy a microphone for me?”
“Yes.”
“You have a strange knack for deceiving yourself. I don’t want you to think I’ll change my mind. Starting the institute this summer is too important to me.”
“Don’t you like to sing with us?”
“I can’t go on tour with you. I can’t rip up the fabric of what I’m trying to do with my life.”
“Why, Susi? When I hold you, I feel every cell of your body yearning for the same thing I do. How can you not want to sing with me?”
“I need to ask you something, too. Perhaps our questions are related.” However I had planned to ask all weekend, I ended up asking in a way that felt brutal. “Where did you go to school after Prescott?”
“Oh, for crissakes.” He set down his cup with a clatter and settled back on the bar stool, folding his arms in challenge. The honey-brown pleading in his eyes from a moment before clouded over to a smoldering, coffee-brown displeasure. “All over.”
“Like where?”
“My Associate Arts work was done as distance learning, reading in the back of the van or holed up in a Motel 6 when we could afford it. Then I went on to do my baccalaureate and masters work on the Internet from my hotel room at Marriott State or from Starbucks U, wherever they offered a wireless connection. I did a lot of work as a visiting scholar in the great libraries on the Continent, in Great Britain, and across the U.S. I spent weeks at the library in Montreal—”
“You never finished the twelfth grade. You’re a drop-out.”
“The correct term is ‘autodidact.’ Does this matter to you?”
“Yes.”
“Why? How am I deficient in either intelligence or learning? Why does it matter?’
“It matters because—”
“I can’t wait to hear this. It’s more than ten years past making any difference in the world. How can it matter? Oh, I know, everything went on my permanent record, and it’s still following me, right? ‘Mr. Taylor fails to apply his brilliance to homework he judges to be beneath him. Mr. Taylor’s attendance is affected by his non-curricular activities. Mr. Taylor pissed off the choir master once again. Mr. Taylor remains our only A student with D’s in deportment.’”
“It matters because it’s easy to do. Anyone who understands American society knows that you graduate from high school to prove you can live by the basic rules, if nothing else.”
“I don’t need to prove that. I follow Dylan’s basic rule: ‘To live outside the law you must be honest.’ I’ve done just fine, haven’t I?”
“You let the jazz ensemble down when you left to do your own thing.”
“Are those rich brats still complaining after all this time?” He stood up abruptly, knocking over the stool, and then paced as he talked, his large body filling even more of the space in my tiny house. “Not a single one of them had it in them to become professional musicians. I know what became of each one. They’re insurance execs and suburban philanthropists. If I’m to blame for ending their glory days too soon, I’m sorry. But I wasn’t going to make a dime at the musical equivalent of a track meet. I made enough money to live on for a year by going to Europe. And Hector Henderson never had a single effing thing he could teach me. I stayed in jazz band because I could play guitar during school hours. Susi, you cannot possibly care about this.”
“I do, though.”
“Just so I understand, you won’t marry me or sing with me because I’m a high school drop-out?”
“I was in a marriage between unequal partners before. I won’t do it again. You can’t believe the pain—”
“Oh, I know about unequal relationships. I married a Berklee graduate who also thought I was a hick who needed help to get ahead in the world.”
“I don’t think that. Please understand—”
“That you stayed married too long to that cretinous horn-player, so now you won’t have me—when you know I love you—because I didn’t graduate from high school? What is that, Susi? Some advanced moral code that I’m too ill-educated to appreciate?”
“Jason, we had a great weekend. Let’s not spoil it.”
“OK. But you can’t make love like you do, Susi, and then tell me there isn’t more love now than when we began.” He ran his finger down my forehead and nose, to my chin. “Even someone as ill-educated as me can see it.”
The phone rang and I went to answer it, more to excuse myself from the pain of the moment than to make the phone stop ringing.
77 ~ “Tears of Rage”
JASON
WHILE SUSI WAS TALKING on the phone in her bedroom, Ian called on my cell and told me to turn on the radio, because the deejays on the alternative station at the end of the dial were talking about the Showbox event. What a way to ruin an already destroyed morning.
“Yes, I was there,” the woman deejay with the throaty voice was saying.
“You always had a thing for Jason Taylor. Do you think he beats up the new singer too?”
“He never did. That’s an ugly rumor. The police dropped the charges.”
“Guys with dough always get the charges dropped.”
“You’re just dealing in innuendo and rumor. Listen to the guy’s music. He doesn’t hit women. Let’s go to the phones and hear from others who were there.”
“Yes, hi, am I on? I was there Saturday night, and if this is where Jason Taylor is going, people who dig on Woman at the Well are going to crap their pants.”
The woman jock said, “Yeah. I’m a fan of his, but I couldn’t get into Woman at the Well. Way too mainstream.”
“I heard them earlier Saturday at this fundraiser where I worked as a waiter. I couldn’t believe it when they came on at the Showbox. At the fundraiser, they did mostly acoustic stuff, with just a little electricity. Even that beat hell out of the country diva shit he did with his wife.”
“You can’t say that on the radio.”
“Sorry. Anyway, at the Showbox, the singer’s voice just tore people up. At the start, it sounded like they were doing a quiet ballad, and she’s like Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies, all shy and hardly looking up. When they started this hellacious guitar, mandolin, and fiddle part, she came back on vocals like a banshee on acid.”
The deejay said, “Jason Taylor and Ian Griffith had already ripped everyone’s head open with their guitars before she let loose.”
“I’ve heard him play for years. He’s playing and writing at a whole other level. You can hear tapes from Saturday night on the Internet. They’re trading boots like crazy.”
“Where’s the new singer from? She’s never played in Seattle before.”
“Jason Taylor’s blog says her name is Susi Neville, and—get this—she teaches at Prescott Prep. I bet the guys there have a hard time sitting through their classes. You can get an MP3 of one of the songs there too.”
My blog? My own effing blog?
78 ~ “Instant Karma”
SUSI
“MISS NEVILLE?”
“Yes?”
It was the principal of Prescott.
“Can you please come in early this morning for a meeting?”
“Of course. Is there anything I need to bring to be prepared?” As if I couldn’t guess what this was about.
“We need to discuss your weekend activities. You know that a fundamental principle for staff is to be above reproach in all quarters of life.”
“I would be happy to talk with you.”
Actually, I would rather take poison and die.
I went out to say g
oodbye to Jason and to offer him a ride as far as Thirty-fourth Avenue, but he had already disappeared. However much discord remained between us when the telephone disrupted our discomfort, I couldn’t attend to it at that moment.
At school, Randolph stood in the hallway, prepared to follow me into me into my early-morning encounter with judgment and condemnation.
“Enjoy the weekend with your drop-out boyfriend?” he breathed behind me as I knocked on the principal’s office door.
79 ~ “Box Full of Letters”
JASON
I HAVE NEVER PUT on my pants so fast. Then I took off running across the hill to catch a bus—it’s impossible to get a cab in this part of town, even though this is supposed to be a major metropolis. While I sprinted through the alleys, I called the webmaster from my cell, screaming at him.
“Stop giving people your password,” Chet said calmly. “Nobody can put anything up there without your password.”
“I’ve never given anyone the password. Take down anything dated later than the first of May. I haven’t posted anything since then.”
“The customer is always right,” Chet said. “It’ll be gone in the next ten minutes. But I’m telling you, it didn’t get posted without your password.”
Dang. As soon as I got to the studio, I spent the morning posting the information I wanted on the site, about the musical direction for the new band and the specific roots influences we were pursuing. Nothing about Susi, nothing about Angelia. I uploaded my own MP3 file, showing off the older material I had been cleaning up and another of the new band playing roots material. To calm down, I played back the tapes from the session she and I did the previous Thursday, but then I began worrying about what it did for future releases if I posted that MP3. I was in such a boil over it that I wanted to call Ephraim to ask him what the hell I’m supposed to do.
I stopped listening to the tapes and fell into a deep hole, the one that’s plagued me since the debacles of the previous year, only this time I was paying five hundred dollars an hour in studio time to sit in front of my laptop and read what people said on the Internet.
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