Nine Volt Heart

by Annie Pearson

  “I do not choose to stand up in front of people and perform. It’s not part of my life. I have become a teacher, and that’s where my future lies.”

  “Susi, however displeased you are with me, you can’t walk away from your talent. You can’t choose the lower path.”

  “Teaching is lower than performing? And you call me a snob?”

  “I don’t mean in general. I mean for you. Susi, you are so powerful a singer, so incredible, you can’t—”

  “You can’t presume to decide what’s best for me.”

  “Someone has to. You can’t do what my mother did—settle for less, muddle through life without people knowing what God gave you. That’s what I came over here to talk to you about tonight. I learned things about my mother and my uncle that left me confused. I feel worse about that because of all the misunderstandings between us, Susi.”

  “We aren’t going to share secrets tonight. We aren’t going to talk about what you think I should do with my life based on what your mother did. Or didn’t do.”

  “You say it’s just pop music and you don’t want to perform. But if you choose to do the work, you could have the same effect on audiences as any of the great singers. The same as—”

  It occurred to me where I had last experienced the same kind of power as she had, and I flung open her music cabinet searching for it.

  “Listen to this. It’s disciplined, brilliant music, the kind snobs approve of. I swear when you sang Saturday, it had the same effect on people.”

  I slipped the disc in and punched through cuts to get where I wanted, guessing, trying to remember Turandot well enough to judge where that song would be. Liù the slave girl, singing about her devoted love to the secret prince, willing to die for him.

  “I heard this in Seattle two years ago, and it’s the same level of intensity that you are capable of.”

  Tu che di gel sei cinta.

  I had the volume too high, so that Liù’s lament filled the room, the singer’s notes burning through my chest. I closed my eyes, and the impact of the singer’s lustrous voice turned the world blue behind my closed eyes. The singer who rendered Liù’s essence through song had the same breath control and power as Susi, the same absolute control of phrasing. Each note filled the holes in my soul in a human voice so familiar—

  I opened my eyes to find Susi watching me. I strangled on my own words.

  “Susi, this is you.”

  Only the color and timbre had been destroyed. Or altered. Transformed into the rusty angel’s voice that I knew. She had said that she didn’t care about the web of scarring on her face, for that destruction was insignificant compared to what she’d truly lost. I hadn’t listened closely enough to hear what she was saying.

  “It’s the best role I had in the U.S. They liked me much better in Europe, directors and audiences both. That’s all over now. Still, I do not want to be condescended to about whether I know how to work hard.”

  “Oh god, Susi—”

  “Back then, I also thought that hard work alone would take me to the next level. When I listen now, with all my ambitions removed, I don’t I hear it—true greatness, I mean. I would have been disappointed when my ambition couldn’t make up for deficient talent. We will never know now, and there is no use thinking about it.”

  She switched off the music. Because she’s the bravest woman I’d ever met, she held my gaze as she told the secrets she’d been refusing to share.

  “One night I lost the chance to find out what I could be. The fire Logan started—he was smoking cocaine when I came home unexpectedly. The fire ruined any chance of work for me, and destroyed everything else that he hadn’t already wasted or sold. I’d left our finances to Logan because I was too busy working. My bills didn’t run out before my health insurance did. My dad mortgaged this house to—oh, never mind. Everything here is Dad’s, since I ended up with nothing.”

  “I am so sorry. If I had known—”

  “I didn’t tell you, because I’m sick to death of pity. I wanted to get to know you without pity being part of the relationship.”

  “All this time, when I have been praising your voice, it must have felt like I was sticking daggers in you.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it does. I said I’d never hurt a woman, and yet I hurt you out of my own arrogance. I’m humbled by your suffering.”

  “I think it would be best if we didn’t see each other. I need to take care of my own business, and I have let myself drift into your world far too long, just because I’m physically attracted to you.”

  “No, Susi. Please don’t.”

  “You already knew I stayed married when I shouldn’t have. I stayed married for sex, not love. I can’t believe that the strong attraction I feel now is a healthy impulse. It is just what led me once before to lie to myself, to make bad choices, to destroy my future.

  “You’re letting the past rule your future. I’m not that man. You can’t say goodbye. You can’t walk away.”

  “Yes, I can. I have to. We are unsuited to each other’s worlds. Because of you, I jeopardized my job and all the work I’ve done to replace my old dreams. It’s too much to risk just to go to bed with you.”

  “I’m begging you, Susi. Separate how you feel about me from singing with the band. You can’t prefer being alone to singing.”

  “You need to go now.”

  “But the music—”

  “I’m sure you’ll find another woman to sing for you. Please go.”

  All the will power that I use to move through the world dissipated.

  “OK. I won’t force myself on you again. But, Susi, I know your voice. I understand it, the beautiful way it is now. If you won’t be with me, I can still write songs that are perfect for you to sing.”

  “Please go. Take your shirt and toothbrush away. And take this. I don’t want this sordid stuff in my life. Tell your ex-wife to leave me alone, please.”

  She thrust an envelope into my hands, piled the other things in my arms, and pushed me out into the cold night.

  Where a Seattle City patrol car cruised down the alley.

  92 ~ “Goin’ Down This Road Feeling Bad”

  JASON

  I COULDN’T FACE MY CAVE at Ian’s, so I went to Glo’s Diner and ordered a plate of eggs amidst Seattle people in flannels and black jeans kicking off the morning. While I ate, I read the contents of the envelop Susi shoved into my hands. It wasn’t the illuminating love poetry Chas found in Beau’s letters to my mother. It didn’t provide an answer to the existential questions about life in an unpredictable universe.

  However, it did explain why Dominique hated me and despised Beau, and perhaps why Susi thinks I’m an ill-educated heathen.

  My erstwhile fake brother, the stalker, had sent Dominique pages of screed, beginning just after the nightmarish fortnight during which her infidelities had been thrust in my face while I was trying to confront how undisciplined and contrary she proved to be in the studio. The same week that Beau came back from the doctor with a short-term death sentence. The dates of the letters were simultaneous with the deeper changes in Dominique that I experienced, when she became not just difficult but malicious. The things my stalker wrote to her—tagged with phrases like “As Beau says,” or “Even Ian can see,” or “Toby has always said”—would have turned a saint against all of us, but especially against me. The most evil of thoughts were attributed to Beau in those emails.

  Dominique has no hope of becoming a candidate for sainthood, but I would never have said such things to her. No one in the band had ever voiced such outrageous thoughts. At least, not until my days as a guest in the Pierce County Jail, and then after Woman at the Well.

  My stalker brother agrees with me that Susi is a saint and that where she walks, the avatars rain blessings. He’s been telling her so in daily emails, repeating words from songs I’d written years before or stealing bad poetry from untalented songwriters who—

  I shouldn’t criticiz
e other songwriters because their taste doesn’t match my own. However, Susi didn’t know enough about the last thirty years’ popular music to recognize any of the plagiarisms, and my stalker had done as he did with Dominique: he pretended to be me. I pulled my cell phone out a half dozen times while I read, wanting to call Susi to say that I didn’t write this maudlin tripe. That I’m so sorry she thought I could write such cruel, demeaning insults as Dominique had received.

  Officer Page came into the diner, when the scum had dried on my second plate of eggs and hash browns that I’d ordered as rent for my table. He signaled to his partner that he’d catch up and then dropped into a chair at my table.

  “Hello, Officer.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Taylor.”

  The scene from earlier, and the pile of screed on the table in front of me, added up to a very poor story.

  “I’m embarrassed.”

  “It wasn’t your fault the first time, Mr. Taylor, and I sort of understand what happened tonight. But you can’t let your feelings get you into trouble.”

  “I know. I screwed up.”

  “We stretched procedure, letting you stay. That’s why we came back by a few times.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate you caring for her safety.”

  “I won’t ask if you made peace, since you wouldn’t be sitting here if you had. What are you going to do?”

  “Beats me. I wrote one song that I thought made her fall in love with me. I guess I should try writing another.”

  “You can’t make a person love you. That’s what my wife says anyway.”

  “Can I use that line in a song? Will your wife sue me?”

  He laughed. “Naw, she was lying anyway. She went out of her way to make me fall in love with her, and she tries it again every year or two.”

  “I wish I had that wife.”

  “Mine is taken. You’ll have to get your own.”

  ~

  Karl is always at work by seven-thirty, and so I met him at the elevator on his way up from the parking garage. We ate breakfast bars while the coffee brewed. When he offered to pour, I managed to hold my cup out, hardly shaking, acting like life could go on as it always had.

  “I need you—”

  “No lover in the world has said that to me as often as you have, Jason.”

  “I’m not in great shape this morning, Karl. We’ll have to take this slowly. I’m about to see Ephraim and cave on every last thing. Before that, you need to do the paperwork to donate all the royalties for songs I share with Dominique.”

  “Not the Musicians’ Aid trick again.”

  “No, I did a bad thing—it didn’t start as bad, but it had unforeseen and unpleasant consequences—and I owe restitution.”

  “Someone is about to sue you?”

  “It is not that kind of obligation, Karl. You have all the papers for Susi’s Troubadours Institute. That’s the entity getting the royalties. Steven Neville is the financial administrator, so please do all the work with him.”

  “You’ll end up like that guy from Credence, with no right to play your own songs without paying royalties.”

  “John Fogerty. I’m selling the rights to the Lost Sons catalog to Charles Neville. Can you do that paperwork this morning?”

  “I can’t believe the old guy has that kind of money.”

  “It costs him one dollar. If he hasn’t got it, please lend it to him.”

  “Damn it, Jason. I can’t let you do this. You’re giving away both your income and your assets.”

  “I can make more money. Yet I have no idea how else to take care of my obligations. I don’t want anything back from Chas except Beau’s personal correspondence. Can you work out with Chas to get facsimiles made so I can have the originals?”

  “You finally saw what’s in those letters?”

  “Yes, I did. And yes, I should have listened to you. And I should have listened to Ephraim. Can you come to the meeting with Ephraim? I need you there, and I don’t want to move the meeting.”

  “Will you listen to me about protection from your stalker, too? Did you see what he posted last night?”

  Karl handed me a folder thick with print-outs.

  LostSon2: My brother should die for what he did to that angel. Humiliation and pain should be his, as he deals them to others.

  “Yikes.”

  “There’s more.”

  LostSon2: The angel of death, having passed over, will leave no evil son alive. As the Lord visited unto Jesse, so shall the angel of death visit until his son for the evil he has done.

  “Are these on my blog or the fan site? Are they out there still?”

  “They were on your site, but the webmaster took them down. I called Cynthia early this morning, and she’s serving as majordomo now, not letting anything post that doesn’t look right. I called and asked the fan site to do the same. They seem willing to work with you.”

  “They’re all good guys, so I’m not surprised. I better write pieces for both sites. Should I placate him? Or what?”

  “I have a call into a guy from the Seattle Police to get advice. I don’t think you should do anything until we hear what the best action to take might be.”

  The receptionist came in just then. “Karl, he’s here.”

  “Wouldn’t you know, the one day he’s on time. I’ll be right there. Jason, can you excuse me for a minute?”

  I was too agitated to say yes, but I managed to nod and then to amuse myself while Karl was gone by reading the Troubadours Institute folder on his desk. He had researched all the officers of the nonprofit—Angelia, Steven, Susi. He had unearthed a photo of Susi as the slave Liù. A close-up, so you could see how breathtakingly beautiful she had been, with a thick, luxurious mane of honey-blond hair, her grey eyes softer, her gaze more muted than piercing.

  “You knew,” I said when Karl came back.

  “Their social security numbers were in the papers you sent over. I was more than idly curious about where your money was about to disappear.”

  He sat down at his desk, his face in his hands. “Damn, I fucking hate that. I’m not cut out to be part of the ruling class.”

  “Karl, what’s wrong?”

  “I had to fire somebody. Wish I could fix it, but I can’t run a social service agency and a law office at the same time. I just hate being the bad guy with my own people.”

  “Yeah, it bites big time. I fired a drummer last week.”

  “The work the guy left is a mess. It’ll take a week to straighten it out.”

  “Do you need Martha back? She has everything so organized at the studio that I could use a different temp for a while.”

  “Yes, indeed I do. Dammit, I hate being the boss. I feel like closing this whole shop down. Maybe I should give up law and be your guitar tech. Except my wife already is about to quit me.”

  “You were lousy at that job. We had a whole season of broken-string dramas in every set. You have been much more useful handling my business. Please be there when I meet Ephraim at ten.”

  “Anything else you want me to give away first? Perhaps your nuts encased in solid brass?”

  “No, but can I use your shower and sleep on your sofa until then?”

  “Your girlfriend didn’t let you get any sleep last night?”

  “There is no girlfriend. It was a figment of my over-active imagination. There is no new singer in the band. There is no—”

  “What happened?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I’m an effing asshole.”

  “True. Can you cite concrete details?”

  “I’m the most self-righteous fool ever made since God first breathed life into a lump of clay.”

  “Go sleep while I do your paper work.”

  93 ~ “Lonelier Than This”

  JASON

  “BEFORE WE START WITH business, Dominique, I want to offer you the humblest of apologies.”

  “It is about time.”

  “First, I didn’t write these.” I laid down the sheaf of trave
sties I’d carried away from Susi’s house. “These came from the same stalker who has been plaguing me. I apologize for them only because some fan’s misplaced loyalty subjected you to this vileness.”

  Ephraim said, “I told you it couldn’t be Jason.”

  Dominique didn’t look up. Since I had to get past judging her on thin evidence, I went on with the main course for breakfast: pure crow.

  “What I want to apologize for is my own awfulness to you, Dominique. We have artistic differences, with dissimilar goals and ambitions. I’m so careful to never judge any other musicians in public, and yet in private I castigated your ambition, your work ethic, and your talent in ways I had no right to. I was wrong to judge you, and worse, to do it in ways that hurt you. I won’t ask your forgiveness because I don’t deserve it.”

  I don’t know that I expected a particular reaction. Perhaps complete condemnation would have been preferable, for then we could return to our habitual mean-spirited sparing. She offered no reaction at all. She just stared at me for a moment and then looked out the window. This promised to be the warmest, most intimate working relationship I’d have for the coming summer. I took a breath and finished what I had to do.

  “I am agreeing to do what Ephraim asks, to the best of my abilities,” I said. Karl let out a hissing sigh, which meant he didn’t like this. “To start, I’ll do the production work Ephraim wants, and I’ll do the twenty-two cities as part of Stoneway. Ian will work with me, along with the bass player and drummer who have been rehearsing the new music. If we start now, and if you have other good musicians selected, we can rehearse enough by the end of June to give people their money’s worth.”

  Dominique still wasn’t speaking, but Ephraim had been burning holes in me with his eyes this whole time. Ephraim said, “Thanks, Jason. We’ll start work this afternoon if you’re ready.”

  “Yes. I brought along a CD with most of the material, and a new outline of how the album will work. If you’re ready to discuss it.”

  Ephraim nodded. Dominique, for all I could tell, was mad that I left her with nothing to be mad about.