I didn’t need the threat. Susi Neville does not sing in a rock-and-roll band. She knows nothing about the genre, or the life, or the people that inhabited that world. It’s not her world, and their cares aren’t her cares. She doesn’t need to fall into a fugue state and sail off the edge of the world just because singing and satiation of appetite seem more important than a sane, rational plan of action.
I kept repeating to the principal (and to myself) that I only wanted a chance to teach and launch this summer’s institute, to prove the value of the ideals in my curriculum, to give my father one more season as a teacher, to help kids who love music have a chance to learn more while playing with experienced musicians.
At three o’clock, I took the first emotional bath of the day. As I prepared once more to cajole Chastity Keller into going to Juilliard, she said breathlessly that she was pregnant and going to live with her aunt in Phoenix after graduation, but I must not tell a soul, because only the aunt knows, and it has to stay a secret, even from her parents.
“You have to tell your mother, Chastity. She’ll want to help.”
She looked at me in surprise. “You don’t know my mother, Miss Neville. Anyway, I don’t have to do anything she says. I’m eighteen now.”
I have no experience or wisdom to share with her. She had kicked away all her moorings, and I didn’t have a compass to lend her. What I wanted to say, I couldn’t. After all, it was her life that she had made a mess of. I have wanted to shake her for the past few months—perhaps ever since she got involved with that boy who would depart in a few short weeks for Sarah Lawrence, deserting her for all time. I thought of how Jason felt about his talented mother never taking her chance. It was all I could do to keep from putting my head down on my desk and weeping for this girl.
Chastity saw the clock and grabbed her books.
“I’m rehearsing a song with the jazz band to perform at graduation. I can’t let them down.”
Nope, can’t let the jazz band down. It’s OK, though, to let God down for having given you an ocean of talent that you will let run out on the sands of Phoenix. She left me alone to think terrible thoughts, wondering if other young women who were afraid of their talents would instead have babies that tethered them to a make-do sort of life. Or if other talented women who were afraid to be alone would tether themselves to the wrong sort of man who could—
Randolph stuck his head around the corner of my door. I had come to loathe the sight of him.
“The principal wants to see you. Gwyneth Lukas is in his office.”
Whom I wanted to see only a little less than I wanted an endodontic procedure without anesthesia. When I walked through the door, Gwyneth slapped me, which I hadn’t experienced since high school.
Then again, this was high school.
“You bitch! You dragged that bastard into Zak’s life, and now it’s all ruined. After everything we planned for him.”
“I’m sorry, Gwyneth. I don’t understand.”
“It’s Zak’s birthday. He celebrated it by packing all of his things into a van, to move in with one of those musicians you got him involved with. He sent a rejection to Berklee weeks ago. It’s your friend who talked him into quitting.”
“Jason Taylor?”
“Zak said you let him out of class for the past month to play in that band. He’s out all hours with that man—a wife beater and a drug user.”
“You didn’t know Zak is playing in a band? How could you not know?”
The principal interrupted at this point. Up to that moment, I’d been rather proud that I hadn’t let Gwyneth’s hysteria affect me, and that I’d stopped myself from slapping that supercilious look from Randolph’s face.
“Miss Neville, is this true—that you excused Zak from class?”
“No. I stopped reporting absences for all seniors. Most teachers have. The kids all have their acceptances. Their diplomas are waiting for them. Missed days have no effect at this point.”
“Zak quit school,” the principal said.
That might have been the point when my reserve weakened.
Gwyneth had gone green with fury under her makeup. “I called the foundation to inform them that the Lukas family was pulling its financial support from your little scam. That’s when I learned who your musician friend is. He failed the foundation’s background check.”
“They were false accusations. Jason Taylor has never been convicted of anything.” I didn’t mention that his name wasn’t supposed to be on the application, because when your world falls apart, the details don’t matter.
“He spent a week in jail for hard drugs. He has a convicted heroin dealer in his band. That is who you sent my child to play with.”
“Miss Neville, we need to have a serious discussion.”
The principal glowered. Gwyneth fumed. Randolph smirked.
I sat down and spoke as calmly as I ever had in my life.
“Let’s begin. But first, that smug bastard and this newly concerned mother who hasn’t got a clue what her adult son is doing with his life will not be part of our professional discussion.”
83 ~ “Everybody Has Been Burned”
JASON
YES, I WANTED TO CRY like Lear in the wilderness when Martha gave me the note.
Couldn’t wait to hear my brother’s work. Don’t worry. I’ll be discrete.
I rocked like an over-wound metronome for long minutes, not wanting to open the box to see what wasn’t in there.
The security guys Karl hired took the finished tapes from last week’s work to a vault on Friday. When I called to have the tapes delivered—Dominique needed to start work this week, and she’d finally agreed to come on Friday—Karl’s security brought the box back to me.
Then Martha found the note at the top of the box.
“They aren’t all gone,” Martha said, and I had just enough self-control to keep from deprecating her weak assurances. She was near to tears herself.
We counted the tapes and then did an inventory in the same methodical way we’d done with the older material the first day Martha came back to work with me.
Twelve tapes were missing, including the essentials. The first acoustic mind-bender that we recorded with Susi. The reworking of that song we discarded in Bergen, which I’d written for Ian, calling him brother and thanking Apollo and the goddess of music for his loyalty. Ten finished tracks that awaited only Dominique’s vocals for the new album, representing over two hundred hours of studio time for Ian, Toby, Sonny, Zak, and Angelia.
No, that was a hysterical over-estimation on my part. I had tapes from earlier rehearsals. We knew how we wanted each of these songs to sound. It wouldn’t take two hundred hours to find it again, but we couldn’t finish by Friday when Dominique was to start recording.
“I’m calling the police,” Martha said.
“Don’t call Karl,” I said. “There isn’t anything he can do.”
“Yes, he can. Karl can negotiate with the record company. It’s not your fault that you’ll miss the deadline.”
Karl wanted to sue whoever caused it, but as Martha read the chain of custody back to me, we couldn’t pin it down. The tapes sat alone with me in the studio for two hours on Friday before anyone showed to take them away. The tapes sat waiting for four hours before being signed into the vault, and sat for thirty minutes waiting for security to bring them back to the studio. Then the box sat for an hour in the studio this morning with people coming and going. Neither Martha nor I could confirm that we hadn’t let the box out of our sight. By this time, Martha was crying, and only my efforts to comfort her kept me from crying myself.
The weather had started out nice that morning, but when I went for a run at noon, it turned cold as a witch’s brass—heart. While I’m looking behind every bush for my stalker, five people stopped me on the street to say something about my personal life and my music. One woman thought I’d changed her life forever and another thought there ought to be a law to keep me off the public airways. So I
stopped at a barber shop on Fremont Avenue and made the guy cut off all my hair. It left me looking nothing like either the concert shots on the Internet or the victim of dementia praecox that appeared in the Seattle Buzz.
Quentin, my own favorite Seattle buzzard, showed up to watch afternoon rehearsals, though I’d forgotten that I’d invited him. Ever faithful, mind-reading Martha tried to keep him diverted and out of our way. At every pause in the music, he was at me with questions about influences, up close and in my face, even if he never could manage to look me in the eye.
When it felt like the day had gone to the dogs and taken me with it, Susi came in.
84 ~ “So Long Baby Goodbye”
SUSI
I HAD TO DRIVE all over the city during rush hour, leaving my brother his car, getting mine back from the repair shop, and then hunting down Jason. No one was home at Ian’s house, except Arlo, who gave me confusing and frustrating directions that caused me to sit through multiple lights on Stone Way and Forty-fifth. I was not calm when I arrived.
“Arlo said I would find you here.”
Jason, surrounded by computers and banks of electronics, looked up in surprise from a task he seemed engrossed in with the thin, severe woman he’d been with that day he was kissing women all over north Seattle. He had cut off his hair, which made him even more dangerously handsome, which further infuriated me.
“Susi, what a surprise. Are you rehearsing with us tonight?”
“Did you advise Zak to quit school?”
“I asked him to play for me during the morning sessions. I didn’t give him advice. Susi, this is Martha Cooper. She’s the genie who keeps our work in order.”
“He quit school because of you, Jason. I spent the afternoon arguing my way out of getting fired. I had to swear that Zak is working in a drug-free environment and that we aren’t all violent drug offenders.”
The Martha person said, “I’m leaving for the day, Jason. Unless you have anything else.”
“No, wait, please. Look, Susi. Zak is an effing genius. Anything that gets in his way, he’ll ride over it. Right now school is in his way.”
“He quit school. Do you know what this means? How could you even presume to give him advice?”
“What difference does it make? His family can buy his way into any school he wants if he changes his mind. It’s not as if he’s boxed in, like some ghetto kid. How have I harmed him?”
“It wasn’t your place to interfere.”
“Susi, this isn’t important right now. I have other problems. Please, could you maybe—”
“He’s a gifted musician. He could have a career as a real musician.”
“We’re not real musicians?”
“You have talent. But a pop musician has a career span of weeks, minutes, and then it’s forgotten.”
“Not when they’re as good as Zak. He needs to be playing here.”
“I’m talking about a young man’s future, and you are talking about needing a morning playmate.”
“I’m talking about Zak’s future, Susi. And Ian’s and Toby’s and Sonny’s. Zak wants to be a professional musician, and he needs experience to do that. I’ve given him more experience in a month than Berklee could in a year.”
“You also destroyed any opportunity for me to get funding this year.”
Martha said, “Jason, I’ll just lock these tapes in the local vault and go.”
“Wait, Martha. Susi, what do you mean?”
“Gwyneth and Freeman Lukas promised to match my grant if I kept Zak in school and talked him into going to college. She pulled her money from the matching grant today.”
“Susi, you had a mercenary concern in whether he graduates. That disqualifies you from arguing whether you know what’s best for him.”
“You meddled where you had no right.”
“I didn’t meddle. When Zak asked me what to do, I told him to talk to you or his parents. You told him never to decide the future because of what someone else wants you to do.”
“That was completely out of context. Where is he? I need to talk him out of quitting school. I called Berklee to ask them to ignore his refusal.”
“He’s staying at Toby’s, but he’ll be at Ian’s tonight. He won’t stop what he’s doing. Even to save your funding.”
“It’s too late. You added your name to the grant as faculty, though I told you not to. Then you failed the background check with the state police. My grant is done for. There is no hope.”
“Susi, if this is about money, I’ll find funding for you. Leave Zak out of it. He wants to play with the band. It’s his life.”
“It’s only pop music.”
“That’s not how Zak sees it. I’ve seen what happens to you, the more you sing. I saw how much you loved the applause, Susi. Your Juilliard crowd can’t give you those thrills, can they? So why dismiss what we do because it’s pop music? Do you think we don’t have standards as high as your symphony buddies? Do you think we don’t work as hard as your Juilliard and Berklee friends?”
“Who do you mean by ‘we’?”
“I mean me. Do you think my work is inferior to what you consider good music? How about you, Susi? How hard did you work to earn the crowd’s applause?”
“Are you implying that I haven’t been working hard?”
“You’ve been enjoying yourself, but you aren’t willing to go to the next level. You won’t stand in front of people night after night. You want only your own pleasure. You allowed yourself one little short, sharp shock in public, and now you want to hide again.”
“You think I’m lazy and cowardly?”
“I think you have great potential, and I wish you’d reach for it, like Zak is reaching for his. Can you choose the harder path in spite of how you feel about me? Or are you afraid to stand in front of an audience?”
“All this time, while saying you love me, you judged me this harshly?”
“No, not you as the person I love, Susi. But you aren’t committed to the band. I have to watch out for everyone else, because I made a mistake before and got us involved with a singer we couldn’t trust. Right now, we can’t rely on you. We love what’s happening to our music, but it looks like you decided to quit.”
“Like you did with the jazz ensemble.”
“I decided to perform as a professional instead of playing with amateurs. You seem to want to preserve your amateur standing, while we need to advance our professional lives.”
“I want to teach. I want my father to have one more season teaching.”
“Are you sure you aren’t teaching because you’re afraid of failing as a performer? I knew those kinds of teachers when I went to school, Susi, and they were the worst. Your father doesn’t want you to compromise your life that way.”
“What do you know about my father?”
“Apparently more than you do.”
“You arrogant—artiste!”
As I started to close the door, I heard Martha’s voice again. “Jason, you’re a nice person, but you hurt people’s feelings when you get mad.”
I stopped to look back. “He hasn’t hurt my feelings at all. It’s not as if he could.”
However falsely I spoke, it allowed me to see him looking as if he’d lost his last friend, which was a small, sinful pleasure that I confess to having enjoyed for a brief moment.
That friend of Arlo’s from the market, Quentin, stood in the foyer and didn’t have sufficient motherwit to get out of my way. He’d cut his hair too, though the result wasn’t as attractive. Perhaps it was a communicable disease attacking men in their late twenties in Seattle, causing them to chop their hair to nothing. Quentin snapped a picture as I opened the door to let him join Jason, and Jason roared in rage as the flash discharged.
85 ~ “I Shall Be Released”
JASON
THURSDAY MORNING’S WEATHER COULD have descended on the city any season of the year—indiscriminately cold and rainy—and I didn’t wear a warm enough shirt or bring a jacket for t
he bus ride downtown. I’d been shivering and shaking before I left Ian’s house, after being up most of the night. Once I got to Karl’s office, I found the coffee had cooked to the consistency and flavor of shellac, and there was nothing to eat.
It wouldn’t be a good morning, and it held no promise of transmuting to a better day. While waiting for the tardy Lady D and Ephraim, Karl sat in the conference room reading aloud from Quentin’s review in the Seattle Buzz, the one with the picture from before I cut my hair.
“‘The new singer’s control of phrasing and her big, big voice perfectly match Taylor’s guitar and song-writing skills, helping one to forget his detour into ordinariness on Woman at the Well.’”
“Quentin never was a fan of Dominique’s,” I said.
In fact, Quentin’s incisiveness cheered me momentarily, but the afore-referenced Lady D appeared in the doorway, so we managed to infuriate her even before the meeting began. Fine. It was National Whip Jason for What He Didn’t Do Week. So I let Dominique lay on the cat-o-nine-tails.
“What crap did you bring me here for?” she fumed.
“Hello, Dominique. You’re looking well. I’m glad you could make it back to Seattle for this meeting.”
“This had better not be a waste of my time, Jason. I’m tired of playing games with you.”
Karl said, “We have a final proposal here. If we can all agree, I’ll file the papers today, and then you are both done with this process.”
“I’m not giving up—” Dominique began.
“Anything at all,” I finished for her, “since compromise is not in your vocabulary. I believe the final issues have to do with Stoneway. Here is what I suggest. We tour together, but as separate acts. Dominique can sing under the band name for this tour. After that, no one uses the Stoneway name anymore.”
Dominique’s eyes brightened, but right away she turned greedy again. “Then you have to open, Jason. I’m the top bill. Ephraim, tell him that I’m top bill.”
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